15
What Was High About Modernism? The American Novel and Modernity
By this point in the early twenty-first century, students of culture rarely encounter terms like “modern,” “modernist,” and “modernity” without a familiar prefix: “postmodern,” “postmodernist,” “postmodernity.” We’ve grown accustomed to thinking of our own era as decidedly postmodernist, regardless of whether we view its principal effects as liberating or licentious, playful or decadent, connective or isolating, empowering or oppressive. The “post” in such characterizations of the present suggests the degree to which they depend on a conceptualization of the period that preceded ours, and it is the case that efforts to come to terms with the forceful emergence of new economic, social, political, and cultural practices in the 1950s and 1960s stimulated investigation into what had made the first half of the century “modern,” if the second half was granted to be its “post.” For some scholars the line of demarcation showed up most brightly in the cultural sphere. John McGowan observes that the “term ‘postmodernism’ was used in reference to architecture as early as 1947,” and then was taken up by literary critics to distinguish the contemporary fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, and Donald Barthelme from their “high modernist” predecessors (leading examples would be James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner) (McGowan 2005: 1).
Ihab Hassan was among the first literary scholars to attempt a taxonomy of postmodernist features, in an essay entitled “POSTFACE 1982: Toward Postmodernism,” the epilogue to his influential study of twentieth-century writers (Hassan 1971/1982). Hassan decides that the way to get at postmodernism is to chart its “schematic differences from modernism” (p. 267). As he considers what more recent American novelists of the 1960s and 1970s like Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and William Burroughs have in common with each other, as well as with writers of their generation from other national traditions like Vladimir Nabokov and Borges, with artists in other media, even with then-emerging “poststructuralist” theorists in various analytical discourses like philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, Hassan begins to construct a system of dichotomies. The elements he identifies as defining postmodernism find their opposite numbers in modernism: so if postmodernist artistic works exhibit “open” form, “disjunctive” components, and a sense of “play” and “chance,” modernist works are “conjunctive,” “closed,” and marked by “purpose” and “design.” Hassan’s usefully suggestive list runs to more than 30 attributes, although the neatness of the oppositions leads him to be as skeptical about their firmness as we should be. Still, even a loose aptness in such differentiating traits not only suggests that the term “postmodernism” does point to a wide-ranging shift in mentality and expressive practices beginning as early as the 1950s, but also demonstrates that it was the manifestation of postmodernism that compelled a more searching investigation into the nature and limits of modernism. We learned more about modernism in the process of defining postmodernism.
Hassan remarks that prominent American champions of modernist literature began lamenting the passing of its classic phase by the 1960s. He mentions Irving Howe and Harry Levin, and we might add Lionel Trilling as perhaps the most influential of such celebrants of modernism. Contemplating the sea-change that would amount to postmodernism, Howe touted the achievement of modernism as he felt it drawing to an end. Like Hassan, Howe largely restricts his analysis to the formal features of the work of art. Modern art, including literature, made its mark by being difficult, by deliberately being hard to understand; its formal inventiveness and inscrutability constituted a revolt against the recipient’s familiar expectations, against comfortable habits of art consumption. Modern artists aimed to offend bourgeois society, to strip away habitual beliefs and values, and to demand acts of self-scrutiny and metaphysical exploration. Howe finds an impatience with reason in modern art, and a corresponding abandonment to preconscious, primitive, or other modes of more authentic experience.
Such views also exemplify a common inclination to present the history of artistic periods as a succession of styles, aesthetic convictions, and quests for imaginative originality. There’s something like internal cultural history at work in accounts like these, and in studies of modernism and postmodernism, their results reveal a rich tradition of artists speaking to one another through acts of fierce concentration on the work of art itself. Christopher Butler’s (1994) study of early modernism in music, painting, and literature, for example, chooses to focus on “the mental world” of the artists he discusses, under the conviction that “philosophical concerns” were the chief stimulants of modernist innovation. From Butler’s standpoint, modernism developed as a rebellion against a tradition of realism that more and more failed to maintain the difference between art and other forms of representation like journalism or photography. Similarly, questions of aesthetic language organize Peter Nicholls’s (1995) examination of the efforts of various modernists to purify expressive resources sullied by everyday use or outworn literary conventions, and to make new things of and with words. Philip Weinstein (2005) identifies the purposes of modernist fiction as dismantling a long-dominant epistemology associated with Enlightenment rationality; in his view, works of experimental modernism challenged long-standing confidence in empiricism, logic, unified selfhood, a knowable environment, and truth-bearing narrative.
However, as even my sketchy summaries may suggest, such accounts also display some awareness that cultural history is not exclusively a self-enclosed procession of fashions in style and form. Not only must we see the primarily aesthetic projects outlined above as necessarily in tension with social, political, and economic contexts, but a closer look at the project of modernism reveals that the very notion of an “autonomous” work of art, one that holds itself to be above “contamination” by mass culture, pervasive commoditization, monopoly capitalism, political and scientific discourse, technological production of goods and extensions of communication – in a word, all that we associate with the historical event of modernization – derives from a particular solution to the degrading effects of modernity favored by modernist artists. The most trenchant attack on modernism’s desire to rise above the reality of modernization came from the Marxist critic Georg Lukács (1963), who complained even in the heyday of modernist writing that the new art was excessively psychological, passively apolitical, and weakly negative. A work like The Sound and the Fury (1929), Lukács argued, failed to render the totality of historical circumstances that confined the protagonists to their states of individual confused alienation. Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness technique, however brilliant in rendering subjectivity, amounted only to a reinforcement of the futility of historical knowledge. The novel’s immersion in eccentric mentalities contributed to “an attenuation of reality” endemic to other modernist works, most influentially Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Modernist texts may carry charges of discomfort with modernity, Lukács acknowledged, but they are feeble and diffuse. Lukács remained an advocate of realism, and, even if his more doctrinal version of socialist realism eventually faltered itself, his criticism of modernism’s tendencies to flee historical reality for the indifference of high art set the terms for much subsequent debate.
Theodor Adorno, a member with Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and other luminaries of the Frankfurt School of critical thought from the 1920s through the late 1930s (until as Jews many of them were driven from Germany by the Nazis), counters Lukács’s critique by developing a more sympathetic understanding of art’s capacity for negation. For Lukács, as we have seen, modernist works protested too meekly against the realities of exploitation and social injustice produced by modern capitalism, with all its attendant technological, speculative, and administrative incursions into social life and private consciousness. Adorno, on the other hand, saw how the demands of difficult modern art might jam the smooth hum of market exchange and commercial culture-consumption. In their intractabilities, he believed, certain forms of modern art, like certain forms of critical philosophical reflection, might block and reverse the rush toward ever-increasing instrumental rationalism, abstract thinking, and political coercion (eventuating in fascism, Nazism, and finally the unimaginable barbarism of genocide).
Adorno and Horkheimer famously wrote about the degradations of modern commercial culture in their essay “The Culture Industry,” and about the violent tendencies intrinsic to Enlightenment rationalism in their piece on anti-Semitism (both reprinted in Horkheimer and Adorno 1994). Andreas Huyssen argues that Adorno conceived of the difference between serious art and debased industrial culture (like Hollywood movies or commercial jazz) as a “Great Divide.” Huyssen proposes this term to measure the “categorical distinction between high art and mass culture” in Adorno’s thinking (Huyssen 1986: viii). Writing in 1944, after a stint in Hollywood imposed by their flight from Germany during World War II, Adorno and Horkheimer condemn from up close what they call “the culture industry.” Formulaic plots, simplistic styles, sappy sentimentality, and overly administered effects of pleasure all contribute to mass culture’s disciplinary homogenization of its audiences. According to Huyssen, Adorno’s faith in modernism had everything to do with its power to negate the reification of culture (that is, the reduction of culture to objects of mass production and profit): “It indeed never occurred to Adorno to see modernism as anything other than a reaction formation to mass culture and commodification” (p. 24). In this interpretation, modernist art for Adorno is high art: “Adorno’s modernism theory relies on certain strategies of exclusion which relegate realism, naturalism, reportage literature and political art to an inferior realm” (p. 25).
Yet for all the modernist work’s yearning to vault above debased culture, Adorno’s model insists on the necessary contact between the realms on either side of the Great Divide. Adorno understands that the work’s autonomy is achieved only in dialectical struggle with its opposite. His model of the high modernist work’s autonomy is dynamic, not static: “Adorno makes the even stronger claim that in capitalist society high art is always already permeated by the textures of that mass culture from which it seeks autonomy” (Huyssen 1986: 35). The recognition of mutual constitution and conflict across the divide distinguishes Adorno’s subtle and productive version of modernist autonomy from that of the American New Critics. Reactionary American (and particularly Southern) enthusiasts of modern poetry like John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate fled to modernist literature as a sanctuary from modernity (they called their short-lived journal of new poetry The Fugitive). But that sort of highness – a bastion of disdain and obliviousness – differs from the sort of vital engagement Adorno imagines as the transfigurative potential of modern art, even if he shares their dim view of modern vulgarity. On the other hand, liberal intellectuals like Lionel Trilling advocated modernist literature especially as the bulwark of the sanctity of the individual threatened by homogenized bureaucratic and mass culture, and touted the indispensability of the oppositional imagination for liberal democratic societies.
For the Frankfurt School critics, it is because high modernist art challenges mass culture, with the aim of creating art that functions as negation of social and cultural norms, that it reanimates the revolutionary motives of earlier avant-garde movements. Those projects from the first decades of the twentieth century – like Dada, Surrealism, Futurism – assaulted the institutions of artistic legitimation (Burger 1984), with the intent of incorporating exhilarating novelties of modernity like technology into artistic practice. The fading of avant-gardism around World War I (1914–18) opens up social and cultural divides that modernism accepts and tries to negotiate, though certainly with less utopian or progressivist confidence. You can see the persistence of such enthusiasm – however guarded – for the possibilities of modern technology applied to culture in Walter Benjamin’s (1969) hugely influential essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The drift of Benjamin’s meditation on what it means for cinema to succeed drama, and photography painting, tends toward regret over the loss of uniqueness possessed by any individually crafted piece of art. Yet Benjamin also grasps how cinema allows multiple points of view to be represented simultaneously, creating new kinds of perceptual and conceptual totalities, and how altered filming velocities and camera movement “see” things normally undetectable in social life.
The purported menace of mass culture serves as a front for more widespread and profound changes associated with the onset of modernity. Huyssen expands the significance of mass culture to encompass several sorts of social uprising, all of them represented by the empowerment of women: “In the age of nascent socialism and the first major women’s movement in Europe, the masses knocking at the gate were also women, knocking at the gate of a male-dominated culture” (Huyssen 1986: 47). Mass culture, Huyssen observes, is “obsessively” gendered female as a result of the host of threats perceived by white male ruling class privilege (p. 47). Modernism, in other words, settles in to adversarial friction with modernization, in a broad spectrum of manifestations. These more concrete or material conditions of modernity anchor David Harvey’s (1992) account of what modernism (and postmodernism) does.
Like Hassan (1982), Harvey also employs a comparative strategy of differentiation, but he is interested in the material bases of the transformations that distinguish successive socioeconomic regimes: modernity and postmodernity (not the cultural responses to each that materialized respectively as modernism and postmodernism). For Harvey, modernity centers on new modes of production, particularly of goods, described as Fordism (after the American automobile pioneer Henry Ford). Fordism reorganizes the factory around mass production, the assignment of workers to single tasks, and the more efficient circulation of manufactured objects rather than laborers; it cultivates a better-paid laboring force as a new consuming class; it encourages the growth of urbanization – with its key sensations of the ephemeral and chaotic; it favors discreet state intervention to stabilize market unpredictability; it expands toward international quests for cheap labor and resources, along with new markets for its goods; and it develops sophisticated new techniques of credit, capital investment, and profit-taking.
Harvey sees that modernist art attempted early on to capture and resist the degrading effects of modernity; later in its career, though, modernism became less adversarial, partly as the result of its canonization in the curricula of schools and universities following World War II, where, especially in the US, it was treated apolitically under prevailing New Critical methods of formalist analysis. That’s the stage Harvey considers to be “high modernism” – “high” indicating less the autonomy of art above everyday life, as it did for Adorno, and more the official sanctioning of cultural value. It can be compared with “High Church”: ceremonial, hierarchical, formally ornate. When the modernist art work reaches this stage of authorization, its features rigidify into formal protocols. Huyssen offers the following list of hallmarks:
If these traits represent what the modernist work of art “has become as a result of successive canonizations” (p. 53), not only do they caricature the volatile exchange between cultural realms described by Adorno, they also exclude many other kinds of artistic engagement with the vast enterprises of modernity. By contrast, once we take modernism more broadly as a set of imaginative responses to the grounds of modernity, numerous other kinds of modernism, or numerous other modernisms, come to light.
In an important consideration of modernism and imperialism, Fredric Jameson (1990) enumerates some of the central features of modernity that modernist literature may treat. In the following sentences you’ll see that the key claim of his argument appears first: Jameson will contend in this piece that works of British modernism (exemplified here by E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End) figure out how to evade the reality of modern colonialism (in the instance of Forster’s novel by offering distracting visions of a harmonious English countryside), while a work like Ulysses, written from the position of colonial subjugation, manifests the bruising reality of exploitation, and forces the issue of coherence by resorting to mythological parallels, which provide only a partial answer. In the latter part of the passage, Jameson identifies several other major elements of the modern:
I want in fact to suggest that the structure of imperialism also makes its mark on the inner forms and structures of that new mutation in literary and artistic language to which the term modernism is loosely applied. This last has of course multiple social determinants: any general theory of the modern – assuming one to be possible in the first place – would also wish to register the informing presence of a range of other historically novel phenomena: modernization and technology; commodity reification; monetary abstraction and its effects on the sign system; the social dialectic of reading publics; the emergence of mass culture; the embodiment of new forms of the psychic subject on the physical sensorium.
(Jameson 1990: 44)
Writing in 1988, Jameson anticipates many of the projects that eventually comprised the so-called New Modernist Studies movement over the next two decades. In a wide range of efforts to look behind (or below) the modernist work’s assumed pretense to absolute autonomy, scholars of modernism have investigated almost every conceivable sector of modern life to see how the period’s literature responded to its truly seismic upheavals. (See Mao and Walkowitz 2008 for a summary of the movement’s defining features.)
The ultimate consequence of such projects has been to challenge earlier views of modernism as oppositional to dominant bourgeois culture. Anthony Appiah maintained that “a rough consensus about the structure of the modern-postmodern dichotomy” had been reached on the basis of the contrasting sociological functions of art in each period (Appiah 1992: 142), a distinction best articulated by Jameson:
high modernism, whatever its overt political content, was oppositional and marginal within a middle-class Victorian or philistine or gilded age culture. Although postmodernism is equally offensive in all the respects enumerated (think of punk rock or pornography), it is no longer at all “oppositional” in that sense; indeed, it constitutes the very dominant or hegemonic aesthetic of consumer society itself.
(Jameson 1988: 196, quoted in Appiah 1992: 142)
Postmodernism emerges within this “waning” of the “dialectical opposition” between high modernism and mass culture. Jameson sees the sociological distinction as a solution to the problem that modernist and postmodernist works of art cannot in fact be distinguished formally, on the basis of their aesthetic techniques or style, or even their subjects.
But the careful study of modernism’s engagement with social, economic, and cultural discourses it presumably opposed, ends up suggesting that modernist works reproduced as much as resisted the features of their habitat. Perhaps the most influential assault on the oppositional status of modern American fiction has been Walter Benn Michaels’ Our America (1995), a book arguing that principal novelists of the period like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wharton, and Faulkner accepted assumptions of white racial purity and the ideology of blood even as they refined or ignored the more vulgar varieties of such thought. Investigations of modernist texts’ saturation with other contemporary ideas and language has cast doubts on the more heroic versions of modernism espoused by Adorno or Trilling. Newer studies of modernism suggest how it absorbed modernity rather than uniformly negating it.
Jameson’s first category – modernization and technology – reflects a common view that unprecedented mechanical innovations in communication, manufacture, and transportation from the 1870s through the 1910s (the telephone, phonograph, conveyer belt, automobile, airplane, etc.) constituted the leading edge of revolutionary modernity. Raymond Williams (1989) cautioned some time ago that technology on its own never determined social change, since any invention gets adapted and creates effects as the result of its interface with established social and economic institutions and practices. Still, the modern age was presented with numerous novelties – many of them with profound implications for conceptualizations of space and time, the human body, labor, creative media, and so on. Studies by Tichi (1987), Steinman (1987), and Knapp (1988), for example, took up the effects of modern technology on literary themes and even style. (Knapp, for instance, argues that some modernist poets incorporated a taste for efficiency and streamlining into their minimalist verse.) This line of inquiry does have a precedent in Hugh Kenner’s (1975) musings on how literature was affected by the new sensations of air flight, or the effects of composition at the typewriter to the poetic line, but Kenner’s interests are exclusively formal, as opposed to thematic or political. Taussig (1993) explores the consequences of prosthetic extensions of the body (including those of the mechanically reproduced and transmitted voice); Armstrong (1998) looks at a variety of modern semiscientific discourses designed to improve the body and their reflection in modern American fiction around the turn of the twentieth century.
We might consider more sophisticated systems of production and administration as modern technological apparatuses too. Institutions of capitalism grew stronger and more complex beginning with the era of incorporation following the Civil War. Studies like two by Richard Godden (1990, 1997) examine how modernist writers such as Fitzgerald, Allen Tate, and Faulkner, among others, reflect critically on modernity as shaped by late capitalism: the universalizing commodification of goods; the establishment of an exclusive money economy; the rise of a culture of consumption; and the transformation of laborers into a waged class. Walter Benn Michaels’ book on literary engagements with the controversy over the gold standard (1988) suggests how debates about the modern economy found their way into turn-of-the-century naturalist writing, where they produced parallel anxieties about the grounds of truthful depiction versus the proliferation of mere representation.
The modern American state bulked up to perform duties required to ease injuries inflicted by the roaring engines of capitalism: to suppress labor insurgency, and to supplement the social wage when companies failed to cover it (most conspicuously in the New Deal’s springing up to save capitalism from its inherent contradictions by devising props for weakened businesses, payments for unemployed workers, new social services for longer-term casualties, etc.). Patricia Chu (2007) has written recently about the various imaginative modes resorted to by early twentieth-century novelists and filmmakers as they sought to imagine the individual’s refashioned relations to the augmented modern state. She argues that modernism ought to include a raft of creative subgenres, used in certain ways, once excluded by the restrictive criteria of “high” modernism: the sentimental, melodrama, the Gothic (in this case White Zombies, a movie set in Haiti that probes the costs of citizens’ voluntary affiliation to the modern state). Pericles Lewis (2000) conducts a similar study of Anglo-European modernists, arguing that a writer like Joyce, for example, detects the failure of the English Victorian state to ensure the rights of colonial subjects under the sanction of progressive liberalism, and instead imagines another kind of security for individual self-realization in mythical ethnic solidarities like Irishness. Chu makes a similar claim about Griffith’s displacement of state authority by racial brotherhood in The Birth of a Nation. Michael Szalay (2000) suggests how the emergence of the modern welfare state insinuated itself into national mentalities, showing up, say, as attitudes toward risk and chance even in the remote corners of poetry by Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams.
When Jameson speaks of “the social dialectic of reading publics” above, he may be thinking of sociological accounts of modernism like those of Pierre Bourdieu. In his influential book Distinction, Bourdieu (1984) describes how modernist writers and publishers evolved a strategy to deal with the rise of mass commercial literature. By crafting intellectually demanding and formally challenging works for a small appreciative coterie, such producers deliberately renounced popularity. They gambled instead that discerning readers in the present, as well as in the future, would pick their work out of the dross surrounding it, and that they, and their publishers, eventually would win (permanent canonized reputation) by losing (immediate mass sales). The dialectic involved in such high modernist strategies can be illustrated by Michael North’s paradigm-shifting work on the relations between folk and popular culture, on one side of the divide, and “serious” writers, on the other. In Dialect of Modernism, for example, North (1994) demonstrates how poets like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot mined (and mimed) African-American folk culture and other forms of contemporary popular culture in order to absorb it into an art that simultaneously incorporated allusions to high traditions of art, religion, mythology, philosophy – globally. The result was what North considers a special, exclusive language of modernism: a kind of dialect. North emphasizes the rejuvenating effects of such “lower” forms, though he also allows that such material was handled carefully by its purveyors lest the significance of, say, African-American folk culture as a repository of slave experience blow up in their faces.
Bourdieu also speculates that because high modernist writing occupies a position of subordination to popular works, it has a tendency to sympathize with those in positions of social subordination. Leftist inclinations among serious writers may have been more typical of the French cultural scene, with its long-standing commitment to Marxist socialism, but in the US, the possibility may be illustrated by the example of James Agee, a Harvard-educated Tennessean, an enormously talented journalist and film critic for Fortune and Time Magazine, and a stylist beyond compare, whose assignment to report on the lives of several Alabama tenant farm families in 1934 spun out into a vast reverie upon impoverishment, in super-Faulknerian prose, published as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Studies such as Ann Douglas’s (1995) and Michael Denning’s (1996) expand the category of modernist art to include a wide array of takes on the social ills of modernization, particularly as they affect dominated classes, races, and sexual minorities. Douglas surveys a vibrantly heterogeneous cultural scene in Manhattan – one that ranged from Edith Wharton to the Cotton Club in Harlem. Denning argues that the leftist tradition in modern American culture has to include more than just doctrinal communist proletarian writers of the sort Foley (1993) writes about; for him, many artists qualify as members of the so-called cultural front that emerged in the 1930s. Seminal works by Houston Baker (e.g., Baker 1987) insisted that a black modernism had to be acknowledged as well, and Baker makes the case for seeing even a relatively conservative thinker like Booker T. Washington as devising a distinct version of modernist style to engage what W. E. B. Du Bois had defined as the problem of the twentieth century: the national color line dividing black from white under both lawful Southern and practical Northern forms of segregation. More recently, Paul Gilroy (1993) has challenged the national boundaries of modernist practices, suggesting that the art of modern diasporic Africans must be understand as a function of the century’s waves of anticolonialism. Brent Edwards (2003) zeroes in yet more specifically on the connections between worldwide anticolonial activism in the 1920s and the modernist sensibilities of the Harlem Renaissance, recast by Edwards as an international phenomenon.
A number of recent books have taken up the question of how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature engages more broadly with the rise of US imperialism. Amy Kaplan (2002) finds anarchy as the desired condition for the exercise of authority both abroad and in the private domestic sphere in the 1890s. John Carlos Rowe (2000) examines the interplay between foreign and domestic domination at selected historical moments from Poe to Hurston. Du Bois’s own vehement opposition to the acquisition of foreign territories in the so-called Spanish–American War (1898), which brought the Philippines and Cuba under US control, stemmed from what he had learned about racism and colonialism in his study of the African slave trade (the subject of his doctoral dissertation in history); from his experience of state racism in the South under Jim Crow law; from his theoretical grasp of labor exploitation and racism in his reading of Marx. The essays published in Darkwater (1920) leave no doubt that Du Bois takes the central task of modern culture to be the acknowledgment and rectification of American racism (with its history in the nation’s origins as plantation colonies, especially, but not exclusively, in the Southern regions). That American fruit and coffee companies were busy establishing Southern-style plantations throughout Latin America, or that the US sent troops to Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the interwar years and modeled its occupation on lessons learned during federal reconstruction of the US South after the Civil War, exemplify the contact points between the South’s plantation past and the nation’s imperial future.
It’s at this juncture that I’d like to return to Jameson’s interest in the relation between modernism and colonialism. Jameson contends that modern writers’ explicit consideration of British imperialism (as in Conrad) itself finesses or hides the more brutal practices of outright colonialism that underwrite the mission of enlightenment, Christianization, and civilization attributed to the ideal of imperialism. But Jameson is also sensitive to the formal devices by which the refusal to represent England’s material relations to its enriching colonies is smoothed over rather than allowed to create puzzling gaps or effects of incoherence. In the second section of my essay I want to demonstrate how a number of modern American novels confront the tradition of silence about the national history of plantation colonialism and racism at the very point the US is emerging as a neo-imperial power, poised to create the so-called American Century. My idea is that a surprising number of modern novels bring the problem of racial colonialism into problematic visibility. They present isolated images or fragmentary narratives that identify the problem without being able to integrate it entirely into a new narrative of national confession and restitution. Rather, we might say, following Malcolm Bull (2000), that the issue of racial colonialism is brought into hiding – from the status of being entirely out of mind to one in which it is registered as an absence, felt as hidden.
There aren’t many novels published before the first part of the twentieth century that look closely and critically at the way the historical project of plantation colonialism was the foundation of US prosperity. There were, of course, plenty of well-known works that entered the fray over the related questions of abolition, slaveholding, and Southern secession that led up to the Civil War. It could be that the most famous of all American novels is Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), but its portrait of plantation life understands it as a sectional anomaly and a national offense, not as the culmination of hemispheric Anglo-European plantation colonialism descending from the sixteenth century. Almost from the beginning of the early republic’s determination to define its political essence in terms of Enlightenment ideals centered in personal liberty, the contradictions of a democracy practicing racial chattel slavery had to be solved. As Jennifer Rae Greeson (1999) demonstrates, strategies of disassociation began to take the form of pretending that such unenlightened ways of life were peculiar to the region of “the South,” a place unlike the rest of the nation: feudal, decadent, racist, and violent. One could argue that there’s been an exceptional capacity for denial in the North about its dependency on slaveholding and slave-trading economies – the commerce in black bodies and plantation staples that enriched those in the New England sea trade, for example, or the northern textile industry that drew its raw materials from southern producers.
As Susan Donaldson proposes in her essay in this volume, we may be able to trace the origins of what came to be understood as experimental modernist narrative in the US at least in part to the revolutionary (and ultimately modern) transformations overtaking the South following the end of Reconstruction in the mid-1870s. Perhaps one phase of the struggle with modernity that provokes modernist reaction in the US has to do with the painful acknowledgment of guilt at the moment a traditional way of life – and the technologies of disavowal upholding it – are passing from the scene. David Harvey thinks such a situation endemic to modernism generally, and speculates that the US failed to develop much of an avant-garde movement because “the very lack of ‘traditionalist’ (feudal and aristocratic) resistance, and the parallel popular acceptance of broadly modernist sentiments … made the works of artists and intellectuals rather less important as the avant-garde cutting edge of social change” (Harvey 1992: 27). Harvey means the United States as a whole, but as is typical, he is thinking of the North; he knows Chicago ought to have been the “catalyst for modernism after 1870 or so” (p. 27), for example, but was not; hence the hypothesis about a lack of traditionalist resistance.
Had Harvey looked south, though, he might have noticed the very feudal and aristocratic elite missing elsewhere in the modernizing nation. Catalysts for modernism do turn up in places like Virginia and Mississippi. It is not a coincidence that the dynamic of resistance to modernity and the rebelliousness of modernism plays out most prominently in the South, and that the nation’s pre-eminent modernists are almost all Southerners or at least have significant Southern ties: Faulkner, most obviously, but also T. S. Eliot, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Anne Porter, Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, and so on. That American modernism was Southern modernism may be the result of the region’s more intense and violent experience of modernization. And if we grant that the emergence of US neo-imperialism was a pivotal component of such modernization – as numerous historians of the American century have established, and as we have seen Jameson assume more broadly in taking British imperialism as a key to Anglo-modernity – then the matter of plantation colonialism becomes central rather than incidental to the modern American novel. It becomes a force precisely because it threatens to break through the systems of disavowal that kept it at bay for so long.
Let me illustrate how the colonial plantation South’s problematic status may spur the emergence of modern American fiction by turning to Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918), a work that bids to locate the origins of national greatness in the plains of the Midwest. In My Ántonia, Cather acknowledges the plantation South only as an apparent anomaly of national history, dealt with by being both written into and written out of her reverential epic. The novel’s vision of national destiny rests on the confidence that the sacrifice of past generations is justified by the country’s modern ascendancy. The narrator, Jim Burden, a legal representative for one of the railways spanning the continent, surveys the improvements that have transformed the Nebraska of his youth: “The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea … all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility” (Cather 1918/1995: 197). Jim takes as exemplary the fate of his childhood immigrant friend Ántonia; he wants to believe that the future redeems the damage her Bohemian family has sustained by uprooting from Europe and resettling in frontier America, and projects the heartland’s “vitality” onto her. Ántonia embodies the ideological fantasy warranting Jim’s epic of national development.
The euphemistic phrase “human effort,” though, hardly covers the millions of obscure lives that have been hurled into the machinery of American progress (like that of a tramp who kills himself by jumping into a thresher, or of Ántonia’s father, who commits suicide out of homesickness, or even of Ántonia herself, who joins the novel’s numerous women in sacrificing their interests for what Jim considers the land’s “fortunate issue”). Jim’s fantastic accounting lets him act as if he does not know otherwise. He never wonders that he alone is destined to rise, having “forgotten” that his grandparents arrived in Nebraska from Virginia already advantaged with social capital unavailable to foreign immigrants.
In a generally episodic narrative – Jim insists “it has n’t any form” (p. 244) – one seemingly anomalous incident underscores the story’s tendency to conceal unwanted knowledge in plain view. Jim recalls an evening from his youth during which a touring black piano player performs “barbarously” wonderful music. This sightless prodigy, known as Blind d’Arnault, immediately makes Jim think of his native South, but in a register of surprising racial stereotype:
It was the soft, amiable Negro voice, like those I remembered from early childhood, with the note of docile subservience in it. He had the Negro head, too; almost no head at all; nothing behind the ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool. He would have been repulsive if his face had not been so kindly and happy. It was the happiest face I had seen since I left Virginia.
(Cather 1918/1995: 118)
What’s hard to account for here is the eruption of disgust. Jim’s recourse to harsh stereotype betrays anxious ambivalence: the comfortable New Yorker is both attracted to and repulsed by this shade of the past. On the one hand, as d’Arnault plays, he becomes a “glistening African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood” (p. 123). He embodies all that Jim Burden lacks, the prosperous capitalist having fulfilled his ambitions via an ethic of Protestant self-denial. On the other, Jim resists this historical revenant of Africans in Virginia who toiled on the farms of the nation’s first frontier. The novel gapes open here briefly to record d’Arnault’s history as the product of slaveholder miscegenation and racial abuse – a history implicit in the plantation songs he circulates on the plains.
The magisterial equanimity of Jim’s national mythmaking is nearly blindsided by this challenge to his faith that the American epic redeems “all the human effort” that has gone into it. The American slave is given no place in Jim’s story. It is one thing to fuse the stories of European immigrants, another to integrate the barbarity of plantation slavery. D’Arnault may be “an African god of pleasure,” but Jim will not follow the implications of this episode either to the African origins of the South, or to the Southern origins of national greatness. For him plantation Virginia will always be what he calls, with the force of denial, the “Far South” (p. 119). Jim confines d’Arnault’s visitation to an isolated episode never welcomed into the novel’s plot. By cauterizing the memory of commandeered land and coerced labor, Jim is free to fetishize the later-arriving European immigrant as the figure of national destiny, harmony, and productivity.
Jean Toomer wants to explore Southern origins that Cather barely makes room for. Toomer’s Cane (1922) reflects the effort by a black artist from the urban North to discover his Southern roots. Toomer himself left Washington DC, where he had been raised by his mother and her parents, to investigate the place in Georgia where his father, a descendant of slaves, had been rumored to return when he abandoned his family. Toomer’s extraordinary book comes out of that stay, and another in South Carolina, during which he reimagined rural black folk culture and its relations to modern black metropolitan life in the 1920s. Toomer’s portraits of modern Southern life are moved by his sense that forms of expression descending from slave culture were dying out. Cane captures the bruised beauty of folk ways – the crude eloquence of its work songs, the powerful prophetic visions of racial emancipation – but it also acknowledges the fruits held out by modernization: education, economic opportunity, a better chance to define your own racial identity and escape the terror of Jim Crow segregation. The deeper anxiety of Cane stems from Toomer’s suspicion that the modern age has prepared forms of neo-slavery for black people in the Americas, that the color line represents the modernized future of racism. In a way, then, Cane may be understood as an antiplantation novel, a kind of Cubist, collage-like, multigeneric challenge to popular fantasies of white mastery.
Cane’s South, though, is not just the Georgia of its ostensible setting (however deeply Toomer drew on local history for inspiration). I want to suggest that it is also a kind of floating island of plantation history. Benitez-Rojo speaks of the New World colonial plantation system as essentially a floating island – machines of production that replicate themselves throughout the hemisphere, oblivious to local communities, customs, and values. The indistinctness of Toomer’s South creates the impression that Cane’s could be scenes from plantation life anywhere: the hallucinatory repetitiveness of racial violence and slave labor suggests how the modern South has reimposed the assumptions of a plantation regime throughout the post-Civil War South, and has also reinspired racial discrimination in the North. But Toomer also suggests that the “Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa” (1922/1988: 12), and one character enters a trance that creates a “visioned African” who suggests the immediacy in the South of a long history of Western slave trade: “An while he was agazin at th heavens, heart filled up with th Lord, some little white-ant biddies came an tied his feet to chains. They led him t th coast, they led him t th sea, they led him across th ocean an they didn’t set him free” (pp. 22–3). The stories of cane/Cane oscillate between rural Souths, Chicago, and Washington DC, as if to suggest a modern national network of peripheral production, Northern industry, and state administration. At one point, a young son of the South looks out over Chicago’s South Side:
Paul follows the sun, over the stock-yards where a fresh stench is just arising, across wheat lands that are still waving above their stubble, into the sun. Paul follows the sun to a pine-matted hillock in Georgia. He sees the slanting roofs of gray unpainted cabins tinted lavender. A Negress chants a lullaby beneath the mate-eyes of a Southern planter.
(Toomer 1922/1988: 73)
This subvision of Toomer’s modernist novel culminates in a figure even more enigmatic than Cather’s Blind d’Arnault. In the last section of Cane, a drama called “Kabnis,” members of a black community struggle with their obligations to racial uplift. The work’s conclusion pictures a blind black elder known as Father John, long silent, who finally delivers himself of an oracular truth. The lesson of his experience, Father John reveals, is that white people have perverted the Bible to authorize racial crime. The pronouncement feels anticlimactic given the absence of much attention to matters of traditional religious life in the South, and hardly news at that. But the iconography of the scene points to a highly relevant embedded history. Father John has been sleeping in a cellar known as “The Hole” below a wheelwright’s shop; the space evokes the tight quarters and nether regions of the middle passage. The old man is lifted from this pit to issue his pronouncement, and Kabnis makes its import explicit as he addresses John: “An do y think you’ll ever see th light of day again, even if you wasn’t blind? Do y think youre out of slavery? Huh? Youre where they used t throw th worked-out, no-count slaves” (p. 115). Toomer bears witness to the persistence of American plantations and neo-plantations, not to mention the modern nation-state rising above them.
Suppose, then, that another sense of “high” – in addition to referring to the modernist work’s desired autonomy, and to its eventual canonization – might be “above,” in a geopolitical and economic sense. In an influential analysis of what he called “the southern question” in Italian politics, Antonio Gramsci (1926/1978) showed how the country’s southern agricultural region had been treated like a colony by its northern industrial part, leading to a geopolitics of territorial and intellectual domination. Taking up this suggestive formulation, I wonder if we might think of high modernism as related to imaginative work typically consumed within the controlling spheres or regions of modernity (the global North), but engaging a new mindfulness of the global colonial South. From this perspective, we might notice how a number of other novels associated with high modernism represent, as do Cather and Toomer, the colonialist foundation of the nation in the figures of black male bodies that abrupt anomalously on stories that (cannot quite) contain them.
Such a character appears in E. E. Cummings’s novel about his detention in France during World War I, The Enormous Room (1922). The aim of this lightly fictionalized account is to mock the idiocies of war conduct, particularly the hypocrisies and contradictions that make a shambles of life on the home front. Cummings treats the reader to a series of portraits that savor the vivid characters he encounters in prison. One of the most arresting arrivals is a gigantic black man Cummings calls “Jean Le Nègre.” Jean is first of all a living stereotype: the “divine laugh of a negro” precedes his appearance at the door of the enormous room, and he enters as “a beautiful pillar of black strutting muscle topped with a tremendous display of the whitest teeth on earth” (1922/1999: 204). Cummings and the others first spy this “NIGGER” through a “peep-hole” (p. 204), and Jean gets elaborated in something of a peep-hole narrative: a single chapter, devoted exclusively to him, the fetishized object of Euro-American colonialism, bearing on his very body the traces of a global history of enslavement. Jean speaks French – he is French, but problematically, since he is from the colonies – so his blackness imports the reality of far-flung colonized subjects making their way to the “homeland” and claiming French justice in the national tongue, a regular pattern for 1920s anticolonialists.
Like Aimé Cesaire or Frantz Fanon, who insisted on being subjects of France after starting out subjugated by the French, Jean Le Nègre embodies the contradictions of colonialism come home. He shows up wearing an English officer’s uniform, which he has bought on a whim in a French shop, and is fully bedecked – “not forgetting the Colonial, nor yet the Belgian Cross,” having earlier “sallied importantly forth to capture Paris” (p. 208). As “Le Nègre” Jean bears a derogatory term equivalent to “nigger,” rather than the more polite “le noir” (for “black”). Here is another reversal of colonial fiction; since Jean is called “le noir” only by his enemies, we’re told, he presumably prefers “le nègre” as the more truthful designation of his status as a denigrated colonial subject. Jean gets connected to other points on the colonial map too – jangling the nerves of a fellow prisoner “known as the West Indian Negro” (p. 210) when he mentions the word “Liberté”; being associated in playful doggerel “avec des pickaninee” (p. 209); prompting the indignant “Cummings” once to defend him in explicitly American terms to the authorities: “There are a lot of Jeans where I come from. You heard what he said? He is black, is he not, and gets no justice from you” (p. 216).
Jean Le Nègre functions like the other characters in the novel, as an isolated study; in fact, The Enormous Room is hardly a novel at all, more a collection of character sketches, satirical set pieces, homely fables. Like Blind d’Arnault, then (Jean too is once called “a Samson,” p. 216), Le Nègre serves as a picture of colonial dependency and abuse that never gets attached to a coherent narrative about the making of present-day Europe. Colonial questions were matters of explicit concern in these decades, since the Great War was commonly understood as a conflict of rival imperialist powers over holdings in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. Yet imperialism appears only marginally in The Enormous Room. One way Jean functions as an object of disguised visibility (or felt hiddenness) may be seen in the figurative language used to describe his appearance. Repeatedly we have “Jean’s chocolate-coloured nakedness” (p. 220), Jean as “a chocolate-coloured thing” (p. 221), “the wonderful chocolate carpet of his skin, [as] his whole body glistened with sweat” (p. 215). Here the image of delectable chocolate offers to transfigure toiling black bodies on cocoa and sugar plantations into the very products of their labor (“café sucré” is also mentioned earlier in the chapter), a form of forgetfulness indispensable for metropolitan consumers of colonial spoil. Jean Le Nègre speaks only French, and such restricted intelligibility echoes the expressive blocks on a number of tantalizingly divulgent characters (one named Zulu manages nothing but gibberish). These figures function as the colonial uncanny – familiar but not quite recognized.
The most spectacular example of William Faulkner’s imagining of the plantation South – and also a signature work of high modernism – is Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner’s novel is a culmination of a slow recognition in his early writing of the colonial residues of New World slavery especially legible in the New Orleans he knew so well, portal to the deep South’s overlooked affiliations with Caribbean slave culture and commerce. The most accomplished of modern American novelists, Faulkner assays Southern history in a series of boldly experimental novels as he edges toward a full-scale retelling of the region’s plantation origins. The Sound and the Fury (1929) represents in a fragmentary narrative the splintering of the Compson family, members of the declined plantation elite – the helter-skelter story reflecting the break-up of master narratives, the commitment to stream-of-consciousness technique indicating Faulkner’s sympathy for the raw incoherence of broken mentalities. As I Lay Dying (1930) extends Faulkner’s modernist phase by counterpointing the South’s subjugation as a kind of colony to the North with domestic permutations of male domination over women’s lives, another kind of colonization the novel registers. Perhaps the most distinctive element in Faulkner’s telling of the story of the South by the time he is ready to tell it whole in Absalom involves its colonial New World bearings. Though it takes a long while for the storytellers to get to that inaugural phase of Thomas Sutpen’s career, we do eventually learn how Sutpen’s rise to the planter elite of the Mississippi frontier first takes him to Haiti in the 1820s.
Native of Appalachian western Virginia, born about 1807, the dirt-poor teenager Sutpen heads toward the coast and sets his sights on the West Indies, to which a schoolteacher has told him white men go to get rich. He lands in the country of Haiti, already by the 1820s a place soaked in centuries of racial bloodshed, the whole island a theatre of past rebellions and massacres, with the stage now set for another imminent insurrection. Yet Thomas Sutpen in his ignorance of New World history remains oblivious to the very ground beneath his feet, “not knowing that what he rode upon was a volcano” (Faulkner 1936/1990: 202). One narrator reminds us of what the novice plantation overseer who was there never fathoms: that the fields of sugar cane rise from “soil manured with black blood from two hundred years of oppression and exploitation” (p. 202), soil compacted of “the planting of men too: the yet intact bones and brains in which the old unsleeping blood that had vanished into the earth they trod still cried out for vengeance” (p. 202). And not only “the torn limbs and outraged hearts” of African slaves are to be recounted, but also the corpses of French plantation masters executed during Haiti’s slave revolution two decades earlier, the island still “breathed over by the winds in which the doomed ships had fled in vain, out of which the last tatter of sail had sunk into the blue sea, along which the last vain despairing cry of woman or child had blown away” (p. 202).
The ruinous social and moral consequences of much New World colonial history are evoked by these images: its very cradle, on an island named Hispaniola by Christopher Columbus, where the native Arawak people became the first victims of New World enslavement; the acts of revolt by the island’s next enslaved population, the Africans first imported in the early seventeenth century when the Indians had died out, and their establishment of the New World’s first black republic in 1804 (promising to end those “two hundred years” of exploitation); the tremors of slave rebellion felt in the antebellum US plantation South for half a century; and, during the time Faulkner was writing the novel, the just-ended US military occupation of both states on the island, Haiti and Santo Domingo, the troops deployed to provide security for American investors (much of it still in sugar agriculture). After witnessing the misery caused by the plantation system – for everyone it touched – one of its participants concludes that in the Civil War “the South would realize that it was now paying the price for having erected its economic edifice not on the rock of stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage” (p. 209). In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner imagines how the initial insult of reducing human beings to instruments of labor and commodities of exchange dooms a society to concussions of brutality, domination, and revenge. Those offenses coalesce in another enigmatic figure of plantation racial bondage: Charles Bon, the mixed-race Haitian son whom Sutpen repudiates. Bon is called the “curious one” (p. 74), and his status, origins, ancestry, and purposes never really do get resolved. He is an even more insistent version of the anomalous black body that is refused a place in the narrative of region and nation.
In her novel Nightwood (1937) Djuna Barnes imagines a yet more advanced historical stage of the metropolitan black body as the marker of modern imperialism. Barnes’s book is a brilliant meditation on the ruined state of European culture between the world wars; it is a pageant of grotesques living out stories of raging desire, morbid decline, and sardonic disillusionment. The principal voice of the novel belongs to an expatriate Irish American who pontificates ceaselessly about the vanity of life. In an early scene Dr Matthew O’Connor finds himself at a party presided over by a number of men “looking as if they were deciding the fate of a nation” (Barnes 1937/1961: 14). With their “parliamentary attitudes,” the group keys us to Barnes’s intense conviction that political urgencies in postwar Europe penetrate the most private of spaces. Nightwood is a stunningly perceptive study of the increasingly violent enforcement of bourgeois discipline in 1930s Germany and Austria. Barnes connects the psychic contortions and injuries caused by the extreme rigidity of heterosexual “norms,” ethnic “purity,” and cultural “superiority.” Women fall in love with each but cannot shed their senses of guilt or restlessness; European Jews struggle desperately to invent ancestries and “intermarry” so as to assimilate; the nations defeated in the Great War share their conquerors’ suspicion that the European hostilities have been nothing but a catastrophic invalidation of the entire course of Western progress. Barnes – or more exactly O’Connor – comes up with a flamboyant character who epitomizes the desecration perpetrated in the name of European civilization.
O’Connor begins a riff that conjures up the recollection of “Nikka, the nigger who used to fight the bear in the Cirque de Paris” (p. 16). Nikka performs “crouching all over the arena without a stitch on, except an ill-concealed loin cloth all abulge,” so he enters the imaginative register of the novel like Blind d’Arnault and Jean Le Nègre, in the trappings of stereotype: bestial, primitive, sexually rampant. Tellingly, though, Nikka functions less as a reminder of premodern naturalness, and more as the text of modernity itself: his entire body is covered with elaborate tattoos that become legible as the record of imperial domination. One faded inscription is rumored to spell out “Desdemona,” a name that not only denotes the tragic racialization of love, but also evokes the crucible of European colonial trade in Venice. Among the extensive intricacies of Nikka’s inscriptions appear on his chest “beneath a beautiful caravel in full sail, two clasped hands, the wrist bones fretted with point lace” (p. 16). So implausible a tribute to Elizabethan seafaring gets doubled by a single infamous word – a profanity – uttered once by a member of English Tudor royalty that was “so wholly epigrammatic and in no way befitting the great and noble British Empire that [O’Connor] was brought up with a start” (p. 16). Nikka winds vine work about his legs, “topped by the swart ramble rose copied from the coping of the Hamburg house of Rothschild” (p. 17), while – as the pièce de resistance – he has incised “Garde tout!” [“Look out!”] over his anus. O’Connor admits to curiosity about “why all this barbarity,” and Nikka answers perversely that he “loved beauty and would have it about him” (p. 17).
Nikka inscribes the marks of European imperialist fancy on his very body, in mute acknowledgment of but also protest against the barbarity forced on people like him. He converts the maiming brought by such uses of his body – trained to perform in the rings set up in metropolitan capitals – into a form of beauty, but also a warning: Garde tout! Treated like shit, eliminated as the waste of imperial modes of production, the colonial subject wants the scandal of his status (like the anus, something “you mustn’t mention,” p. 17) plainly visible. Barnes’s prescience deepens Nikka’s significance, moreover; he’s not just the representative of far-flung dark-skinned peoples subject to foreign imperialism, he’s also a version of domestic aggression against hated internal minorities. O’Connor thinks of Nikka just after an exchange about Jews; the Irish-American doctor considers them “a lost nation” because they know how “to keep humor in the family,” and an Austrian Duchess immediately shouts her assent in German. There’s doubtless something anti-Semitic in the idea of Jews directing humor at themselves, to begin with, but Barnes goes far beyond such a minor observation and develops a grasp of European hatred toward assimilated Jews that corresponds to the nearly contemporary speculations of Adorno and Horkheimer on the inherence of anti-Semitism to Enlightenment modernity. Their argument is that anti-Semitism flourished in ruined postwar societies like Germany’s and Austria’s because Jews became objects of resentment and envy to the suffering working classes. While international captains of finance and industry reaped profits from the war and even its aftermath, the condition of workers worsened. But rather than see through to the structural exploitation of labor by capitalism, the working class had Jews dangled before them by elites as substitute figures of resentment. Traditionally confined to occupations like money-changing, but also prominent in intellectual circles, Jews appeared as infuriating objects of working-class envy: prosperous to the point of luxury, yet content in their powerlessness. Adorno and Horkheimer contend that European Jews became the scapegoats of modern capitalism – the economic development of which was everywhere intertwined with colonialism. With anti-Semitism as the touchstone, Nightwood elaborates an intricate web of violent domination in numerous spheres of private life. Barnes’s text proves modernist in the sense I’m suggesting by bringing the historical residue and imminent consequences of imperialism into hiding. Nikka’s tattoos inscribe his history as a colonial subject even as they obscure and morselize it. It’s all as plain as the skin on your … whatever, though no one’s translating.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934), a new kind of empire comes into view, one we might associate with postmodernity. A Hollywood movie starlet vacationing on the Riviera, and enjoying her first serious crush on a married man, encounters a blot on her bliss: she returns to her hotel room one afternoon to discover a strange black man in her bed, dead. The dazzling Dr Dick Diver with whom she’s enamored comes to the panicked teenager’s rescue, saving Rosemary’s innocence – the ingenue’s most valuable commodity – from the taint of scandal. Fitzgerald’s sprawlingly ambitious novel attempts nothing less than a survey of brand new cultural technologies reorganizing modern postwar life. Tender is the Night explores the popular spread of psychoanalysis, the onset of a culture of consumption, the birth of a nation of moviegoers, and the formation of an international (or perhaps transnational) plutocracy. Wealth rules in Fitzgerald’s world, and the power accruing to owners of real estate, resources, and inventions extends to those possessing ideas, systems of production, and means of publicity. American expatriates discovering how much they can buy in postwar France and Italy signal what the century of American hegemony will look like. Rosemary’s brush with an out-of-place black casualty, however, suggests the presence of hidden stories troubling the otherwise oblivious beneficiaries of US prosperity in the 1920s. The Divers, riding high on Nicole Warren Diver’s family money (a Chicago meat-packing fortune), construct their magnificent Villa Diana on a hillside above Cannes, the novel barely pausing to note that “peasant dwellings” had been combined to create the house, and others destroyed to make the gardens (p. 26). The villa sits near the “ancient hill village of Tarmes,” a repressed reminder of Roman empire that returns in the form of the last film project we see Rosemary involved with, a movie entitled The Grandeur that was Rome. The Divers know that the magical effects conjured by their wealth depend on keeping the taint of labor out of mind: servants must be as unnoticed as those former peasants have become, and the Divers spend a good deal of time congratulating themselves and their kind on their “essential” difference from those who lack taste (which really means money plus the discretion not to flaunt it).
That distinction takes an ethnic form, to be sure, with cuddly Jews like Abe North tolerated (though eventually sacrificed, a suicide to dissoluteness and lost confidence), but Aryan blondes like Rosemary (who’s once cautioned by her new friends to be careful about sunburn in the bright heat of the Riviera: you’ve got “important skin,” they insist) are the ones who matter. Such class narcissism eventuates – given Fitzgerald’s withering mockery of it – in the act of literal incest at the heart of the book – the capitalist magnate Devereux Warren taking his daughter Nicole to bed when the child’s mother, his wife, dies. Such self-love knows no bounds, seems Fitzgerald’s point, but the idea that money is the basis for a new kind is also augured by so monstrous an act. The Divers once arrive at the beach, “her white suit and his white trunks very white against the color of their bodies” (p. 280). Late in the novel Nicole leaves Dick, to take up with a swarthy Frenchman named Tommy Barban. His name and dusky complexion notwithstanding, he’s enchanted with Nicole’s nearly inhuman whiteness: she even has “new white eyes” (p. 294), though she insists they are her grandfather’s crook’s eyes. Whiteness isn’t what you are, it’s what you wear, how you see – with willful innocence and a limitless capacity for desire.
That realization is one Dick Diver fails to grasp. His father born and buried in Virginia, Dick unwittingly carries forward old-fashioned racial prejudices, recoiling from dark-skinned people as if they were all Southern Negroes. He dismisses the corpse in Rosemary’s bed as “only some nigger scrap” (p. 110), and erupts jealously over one of Rosemary’s movie lovers, Nicotera – “He’s a spic!” (p. 218). Diver’s most damning error of this sort shadows his whole slow collapse into self-embarrassment: visiting an old friend who has recently remarried a native of India, Dick mistakes his host Hosain’s sisters for domestic servants, precipitating a drunken confrontation in which he refers to Mary’s husband too as a “spic,” then “a smoke.” The novel has already noticed that Hosain would be “not quite light enough to travel in a Pullman south of the Mason-Dixon” (p. 258), and that his union with Mary North (the Jewish Abe North’s widow) makes her the stepmother of “two very tan children” (p. 259). Such racial hypersensitivity arises I believe precisely as the meaning of race begins to fade on the stage of global capital. Hosain is an avatar of a transnational elite; he’s functionally white because he owns untold mineral resources and has been made a count by the government of Italy in recognition of his wealth. Out of a command of the science of consciousness, entertainment media, technologies of production and consumption, and the wealth consequent to them, a new elite forms. The irony for Dick is that the Negro in Rosemary’s bed isn’t at all what the Southerner takes him to be; Jules Peterson is a Scandinavian businessman who actually gets murdered as the result of his effort to stand up for Abe North, who has been victimized by a “Negro” thief. According to the narrator, Peterson is “a small respectable Negro, on the suave model that heels the Republican party in the border States” (p. 106). If he’s offensive to Dick in this additional way, it’s because he represents the fading of color before the power of money. Tender is the Night anxiously feels its way toward a nearly unimaginable state of affairs – the very substance of postmodern reality, under which everything is commodified – in which the significance of racial difference has yielded to the question of financial means. Wealth is the new white.
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