A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism

Christopher Bush

One of the most memorable passages in Benedict Anderson’s classic account of nationalism, Imagined Communities, is his reading of the scene in José Rizal’s Noli me tangere (1887) in which our protagonist, Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra y Magsalin, having returned from a seven-year stay in Europe, experiences an uncanny disidentification with the gardens of his native Manila. Anderson returns to this scene fifteen years later in a collection of essays whose title, The Spectre of Comparisons, is taken from the very same passage in Rizal’s novel, in which the gardens are, for Juan Crisóstomo, “shadowed automatically . . . inescapably by images of their sister gardens in Europe. He can no longer matter-of-factly experience them, but sees them simultaneously close up and from afar. The novelist arrestingly names the agent of this incurable vision el demonio de la comparaciones” (Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons, 2).¹

Texts such as Rizal’s make explicit the extent to which the spectral dislocation of the local has been a constitutive experience of modern life. It is telling that the most influential theorist of nationalism of the last thirty years should repeatedly return to a scene in which the experience of national belonging is defined not by the centripetal imagining of community but by the spectral presence of other, distant nations—or, rather, other nations at once near and far.

How does one read such a text in its historical context? In so many ways, any credible reading of a loosely autobiographical novel about life under colonialism, a novel that has since come to be treated as the defining literary work of the world’s twelfth most populous nation, knowledge of which in the West is generally thin, demands such contextualization. Yet the novel’s power as a literary work, even its status as a national classic, derives from the fact that its “own” historical context was not entirely its own. Is it, then, right or even desirable to render close, only close, what had seemed at once near and far, to cure, with our hindsight and in the name of historical fidelity, the text’s “incurable vision” and thus reanimate, with wounds healed, a work that had, after all, greeted us “noli me tangere”?2

The global turn puts conflicting methodological pressures on modernist studies’ desire for context. On the one hand, it reinforces (albeit with an extra political charge) the field’s dominant tendency to valorize historical context against that aesthetic autonomy said to have been valued in the bad old days. On the other hand, the very idea of the global implies new conceptions of history so unimaginably vast and complex that we can hardly rely on them to perform their traditional function of explanatory, clarifying, context. Thinking about modernism more globally should require not simply multiplying the number of contexts (Spain for the Spanish, Korea for the Koreans) but also considering the dynamic interactions between these various contexts and, ultimately, confronting “the world” as the context of interpretation. This can be discouraging because whatever else it has been or may become, “the world” will always remain something you can be accused of not having fully taken into account. “Context” thus comes to function less as the recovered slipper for Cinderella’s foot and more as the inadequately singular name of an ever-receding horizon, a problem rather than a solution.

If thinking globally required first knowing the whole of the world and then reading any given text in relation to that knowledge, we would indeed be in trouble. But the global need not be understood as the sum total of all that is knowable about the world. The challenge of reading modernism more globally is often more a question of how we know than of how much. That is, we might frame the global not as a problem of inclusivity or scale but rather as a perpetual challenge to the comforting connotations of con-text, of what we put with what, and why. The world is not a pregiven unity waiting to become an object of more or less accurate knowledge, not a completed fact that lifts the scales of the national from our eyes, but an interpretive attitude that initiates new dialectics of insight and blindness.3 For better and worse, this means anyone studying “the world” participates in (or, if you prefer, is complicit in) its realization.

Such an interpretive attitude is historically justified if we believe that the impossible horizon of the global already haunted modernism. Indeed, I began with Rizal to suggest how the global might be understood in this way, as a qualitative problem at the heart of (for example) everyday, ostensibly national, modernity. It is perhaps unsurprising that an anticolonial text would be self-reflexive about its “peripheral” location in the world.⁴ But what happens at the “center,” where one might assume the specter of comparisons is more easily kept out of the magic circle of the here and now? Consider, for example, as a kind of asymmetrical pendant to Rizal, the near-contemporaneous but differently doubled public garden in an oft-quoted passage in Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” (1889), in which the character Vivian explains that the Japanese aesthetic sensibility so prized by his japoniste contemporaries is not local to Japan at all. “In fact,” he explains,

if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio [sic]. On the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.

(82)

The unlikeliness of this juxtaposition of Rizal and Wilde—the engagé and the aesthete—says a lot about what we talk about when we talk about context. Rizal’s novel was published just two years before Wilde’s essay. During the intervening year Rizal spent several months in Japan, whose modernization he imagined as a possible alternative to Euro-American hegemony.⁵ Rizal then traveled throughout the United States and on to Europe, where he would spend ten months at the British Museum reading room working on his second novel, El filibusterismo (1891), precisely when Wilde was writing his essay.⁶

Now, I do not wish to suggest any direct connection between Rizal and Wilde (although, who knows?)7 but simply to point out how selective conventional notions of historical context are and that this selectivity has conceptual consequences. Vivian’s remark is of course meant to debunk naive notions about the truth-value of the “imitative arts,” but in doing so it acknowledges the role Japanese art was playing in the aesthetic education of modern Europe. Wilde no doubt had seen Japanese effects in Piccadilly, and this was the work of (an admittedly rather benign) specter of comparison as surely as that moment in the garden in Manila was a European effect.

Fredric Jameson’s “Modernism and Imperialism” famously links modernist formal innovation to the increasing importance of imperial networks: “daily life and existential experience in the metropolis—which is necessarily the very content of national literature itself, can now no longer be grasped immanently; it no longer has its meaning, its deeper reason for being, within itself” (51). In the age of high imperialism (whose consolidation Jameson links to the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference), the real economic and political foundations of social life become something modern metropolitan experience itself “constitutively lacks”: no matter how much one learns, travels, or empathizes, these foundations remain “an outside like the other face of a mirror.” This constitutive absence is, according to Jameson, “the dilemma, the formal contradiction, that modernism seeks to solve.” Or, “better still,” he quickly specifies, “it is only that new kind of art which reflexively perceives this problem and lives this formal dilemma that can be called modernism in the first place” (51). Although predating “modernism” in the narrow sense, the juxtaposition of Rizal and Wilde (with the mediator Japan) restages the formal dilemma Jameson describes as central to thinking about literary modernism in more global terms: should metropolitan and colonial experience be understood as completely unrelated, as two sides of the same mirror, or in yet some other way? Figuring their relationship as two faces of the same mirror has the advantage of suggesting their simultaneity and interdependence but has the clear disadvantage of reifying their separation, suggesting two things that cannot know each other and cannot be known at the same time.

The similar and related figures of dislocation in Rizal and Wilde show not a clear opposition between representations of the naked truth of exploitation in the colonies and the always unconscious, essentially unknowable effect of the colonial in the metropolis but rather different configurations of the immanence and absence of “the world” in any given place. Rizal’s and Wilde’s perhaps parallel-seeming universes were, I have suggested, empirically more proximate, even interconnected, than might first appear. Such a claim does not, however, exclude the formal dimensions of modernism as defined by Jameson but rather transforms a large opposition (metropolis/colony) into a series of graduated, local oppositions. Modifying Jameson’s argument in this way allows us to take more seriously the rich empirical knowledge of, and complex aesthetic engagement with, the colonial that is often explicitly present in the corpus of metropolitan modernisms and, at the same time, to allow for the possibility of “modernism” (even on Jameson’s terms) on the periphery. Rather than thinking of colony and metropolis as the other of each other, they might more productively be thought of as each other’s context. Or, more carefully, as both other and context. What does it mean, then, to study a modernist work in its historical context?

Its?

Eric Hayot’s claim that “no one is really a New Historicist any more” (“Against Periodization,” 742) because everyone is de facto a New Historicist seems especially apt with respect to modernist studies, a field that defined itself as a break from a broadly New Critical consensus toward a New Historicist consensus, bridging the Great Divide of low and high cultures and sending scholars to the archives of the BBC, the FBI, and 1920s Vogue.8 There is a particularly strong temptation, then, for modernist studies to approach the problem of context in rather binary terms: one either reduces or restores a text to its historical context. In many respects the study of literary modernism went straight from New Criticism to a kind of thinned-out New Historicism that often bypasses the cultural-anthropological density and the debates about the nature of historical evidence that had characterized New Historicist studies of early modern literature (see Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism).⁹

Any claim to read a text in terms of its context is a claim to reveal or restore a preexisting propriety, in opposition to the inaccuracy, even violent dispossession, of not reading in this way. Yet the effects of this seemingly descriptive possessive pronoun can be no less violent, as when someone is told to sit down in “his” seat or a woman is told that she should know “her” place. The very fact that propriety needs to be asserted is often an indicator that things might be, perhaps already are, not so. Assertions of contextual priority are at least as performative as constative and should, accordingly, be understood not just in terms of how well they (re)align text and context but also in terms of what allows them to be efficacious in the first place: who speaks, to whom, how, and (ahem!) in what context. There are therefore legitimate concerns about the potential for “context” to be wielded as a blunt instrument that effaces the specificity of any given text, especially when context is assumed to be something already known and easily looked up in a history book, as when literature is used to illustrate, represent, or reflect a context but, by contrast, the context explains the literature.

Jameson’s essay suggests an alternative sense of context at once sophisticated and dissatisfying in ways that will be familiar to most literary scholars. The essay’s claim that modernism emerged most forcefully in areas defined by uneven development is undeniably insightful: Joyce’s Dublin, Musil’s Vienna, and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County come immediately to mind. It is not too difficult to extend this model beyond the modernist canon when considering works whose geopolitically “peripheral” status compels them to describe their “own” context extensively and whose very emphasis on the local reveals an other-directedness: even in a straightforwardly sociological sense, such works are in part intended for cosmopolitan audiences that are and are not “theirs.”10 (Moretti’s concluding Modern Epic with a reading of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is a paradigmatic example of such an extension of Jameson’s method.)

Yet to the extent that one accepts the argument that peripherality is constitutive of modernism in general, the lessons of uneven, peripheral, and colonial/postcolonial literatures should redound upon the modernism of the metropolis, recalling the specters of comparison that haunts, for example, the London not only of Heart of Darkness but also of Mrs. Dalloway. The crucial point is that thinking globally about the “context” of a work in terms of any geopolitical plotting requires abandoning the prioritization of the local and the simultaneous. This is not to abandon the solid ground of history for speculative freefall but to acknowledge that the ground of history itself is ever shifting and still remains largely unmapped.

Historical?

Invocations of the priority of context are almost always implicitly about historical context, and historical context is almost always by default national-historical (if not more spatially localized): things that happened at the same time and close by are treated as mattering more than those that happened at another time or at a distance. The reductio ad absurdum of this tendency is to imagine as the ideal interpretive model a Google Glass mounted on the author’s face.11 Correspondingly, critiques of contextualization often question the value of the national as a spatial limit and of simultaneity as the ideal historical horizon.¹² Yet even if one wants to prioritize national context, any serious consideration of the nation reveals it to be more than a geographically bounded space (even in those rare instances where a nation-state has a relatively longstanding spatial continuity). Not only did the valorization of the national emerge in an international context,¹³ but even the internal logic of the national is not governed by simultaneity, instead invoking pasts and futures with which it can claim some identity. Anderson famously discusses the importance of imagined simultaneities for a sense of national belonging, but he also emphasizes the pull of other times: that “reverse teleology” (The Spectre of Comparisons, 257) that, as in Michelet, “claim[s] to speak for generation after generation of dead ‘French’ men and women who did not know themselves to be such” as well as that drive to become “the forefathers of the race of the future,” a future of which we like to imagine, as Max Weber wrote in 1895, that, if “we could rise from the grave thousands of years from now,” we would find that “the future recognizes in our nature the nature of its own ancestors” (in The Spectre of Comparisons, 361; emphases added). An essential feature of national identity is that it does not happen all at once: it claims to speak to and for the unborn and the dead. This is something other than historical context in the conventional sense, then, in that it takes seriously the often very real effects of how things really were not.

The national subject must project not only simultaneity and a common future but should also, like the ideal poet in T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), live “in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past” (Selected Essays, 11). While this most canonical formulation of the canonical would seem quite remote from the concerns of a globalizing modernist studies, especially one informed by colonial literatures and postcolonial theory, the homology of Eliot’s essay with the structure of national time merits closer scrutiny. Eliot asserts that “the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” (4). To be truly modern, poets should write not only with a distinct sense of the present but also “with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country” are essential contexts of the present, contexts whose “simultaneous existence . . . composes a simultaneous order” (4; emphases added). Poets should, therefore, be “set . . . for contrast and comparison, among the dead” (4), but it should be emphasized that these (European, national) dead populate the “simultaneous” past of the poet’s present as surely as do the crowds flowing over London Bridge. Eliot famously ends with the assertion that the poet must live “in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past,” must be “conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living” (11).14

This would seem a profoundly conservative position, and in many respects it is. Any fair reading of Eliot should, of course, acknowledge the extent to which for him the past is something that can, indeed must, change if it is to endure: “the past . . . [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (5). But however strong an emphasis we might choose to put on the dynamic elements of Eliot’s sense of tradition, the present remains, for him, defined by its relationship to the past. What weighs on a poet with a sense of tradition (that is, any poet who is truly a poet) are the “great difficulties and responsibilities” of the past, even if that past is unusually present, even changeable. The essay has little to say about the future, which might also fairly be said to present “great difficulties and responsibilities” and indeed might more obviously be altered by the present.¹⁵ Indeed, it is tempting to read Eliot’s essay as a calculated inversion of the logic of the avant-garde: a call to usher new pasts into the world through aesthetic innovations guided by a strong ethical commitment to those possible pasts.

My point, then, is not to contrast a present defined by what actually was with a present defined by what is actually going to happen but to note two differently dynamic senses of the present as haunted by the “already living” of some other age. What, then, is the historical context of Eliot’s essay? Is Eliot an American contemporary of Winesburg, Ohio or a European contemporary of La symphonie pastorale? Is it mere provocation to note the essay was published the same year as Les champs magnétiques (think of the importance of the chemical metaphor in Eliot’s account of impersonality) and “In the Penal Colony” (think of the importance of impersonality and tradition)? In what sense is Eliot’s essay contemporaneous with Broken Blossoms, Felix the Cat, or the founding of Bauhaus? If we value the work’s historical context (rather than our contemporary tastes), then shouldn’t we view Eliot as belonging to the age of Carl Spitteler (the Swiss winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature that year)? These are all interesting and I think legitimate questions, but none expands the map of modernism very far. And most of them, correspondingly, consider “Eliot’s” context to be defined by what we today most often remember about the period.

What was happening in world history in 1919? What futures animated the present of that year? Hitler’s first speech to the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei and the founding of the Italian fascist movement loom large in retrospect, but at the time few could have known they would have a greater impact on the future than the Sparticist uprising in Berlin, the founding of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, or Tragic Week in Argentina. What of the enormous futures suggested by the outbreak of the Turkish war of independence, the Egyptian revolution, the March First independence movement in Korea, and the May Fourth movement in China? Are we certain that none of this is relevant to the thoughts of a well-read man sitting down to reflect on tradition in 1919?16

This list of events might do more than simply add new information to the histories we already tell. For example, 1919 might be understood not as a date primarily “between the wars” but as a watershed year in the history of nationalist revolutions and anticolonial wars (the British alone saw the start of the Anglo-Irish War and the third Anglo-Afghan War), conflicts fueled, precisely, by the failures of the most obvious world-historical events of 1919: the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the formation of the League of Nations. The Second World War then becomes less the parenthesis that closes the “inter war” period and more the immediate precursor of the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and the wave of anticolonial wars of the 1950s.

In this context, we might think of Eliot’s essay neither as a singular instance of modernist innovation nor as particularly reactionary but rather as an example of global debates about tradition during that period. Within a European context, Valéry and Benjamin come to mind, but we might also think of Eliot as a contemporary of Hu Shi or Mohammed Iqbal. Indeed, viewed in relation to this period’s anti-Western questioning of the universality of “modernity,” Eliot’s Eurocentrism might be understood not as an affirmation of but precisely a regionalist resistance to universalist modernity. This allies Eliot with right-wing cultural pessimism, of course, but also with many anticolonial thinkers.¹⁷ Even this hasty sketch suggests how geographical and historical horizons are interwoven, how different pasts and futures within the present of 1919 recede and jut forth as we expand and contract the map on which we locate it.

Confirmation of such an idea can be found on the other side of the mirror, as it were, in a major work of postcolonial theory that links the critique of historicism to futurity in ways that have implications for modernist historiography, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. Chakrabarty offers a complex and nuanced critique of historicism of which I will here foreground one specific aspect, namely his Heidegger-derived claim that “All our pasts . . . are futural in orientation” (250).18

While the (new) historicist critique of New Criticism (so indebted to Eliot) presented itself as undoing the violence of decontextualization by restoring lost and silenced worlds, the work of Chakrabarty (and many other postcolonial critics) foregrounds the violence of historicization, which tells non-Westerners that “contrary to whatever they themselves may have thought and however they may have organized their memories, the historian has the capacity to put them into a time we are all supposed to have shared, consciously or not” (74; emphases added). The language here closely parallels Anderson’s account of Michelet, quoted above, but Chakrabarty’s work affirms the extent to which historicization can be not a restitution of context (or even a reduction to context, as some antihistoricist critics would have it) but the imposition of previously alien interpretive values (not least among which is the value of “historical context” itself).

For Chakrabarty, “historical” evidence is “produced by our capacity to see something that is contemporaneous with us . . . as a relic of another time or place. The person gifted with historical consciousness sees these objects as things that once belonged to their historical context and now exist in the observer’s time as a ‘bit’ of that past” (238). In colonial contexts, then, historicism can entail not so much respect for historical difference as an often violent means of asserting the distance between, and the interpretive irrelevance of, for example, things that are historically simultaneous and even spatially proximate. History puts the “peoples without history” in their place.

That place is most often the nation, but such nations are themselves often uncertain, haunted places. As already suggested above, despite the fact that the classic Andersonian account of nationalism emphasizes the ways in which nations create relative unity out of diversity, his work also emphasizes the extent to which producing this unity requires exclusions and even internal divisions, separating offwhat truly is or is not of the present. While all nations are torn between these centripetal and centrifugal pulls, for those understood to be “belated” or “peripheral” there are additional challenges. The imagining of these communities requires not only unifying their local space and time into a national history but also negotiating their uncanny sameness and irksome difference compared to the unmarked (not peripheral, not belated, that is, European/North American) nations. If the belated nation differs too much, then it is not yet modern, perhaps not even yet a nation; if it is too similar, then it has merely succeeded in becoming a copy, unreal, doomed to be haunted by the specter of comparisons.

That is, not only does historicism impose contexts unknown to those on “the periphery” to whom those contexts supposedly belong, but it also helps block from view, for those in “the center,” the ways in which their “own” time and place is connected to others, “stop[ping] the subject from seeing his or her own present as discontinuous with itself” (Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 239). Historicism sorts the elements of any period according to what truly belongs to it and what merely happened to exist or occur at the same time. This distribution of contemporaneity is in many ways what Jameson’s essay seeks to account for, portraying geopolitically peripheral literatures as defined by the violence of uneven development and metropolitan modernism (precisely to the extent it is “modernism”) as defined by an experiential fragmentation whose geopolitical causes must remain unknowable as such.

I have already argued that Jameson’s essay reifies the distinction between the colonial and the metropolitan, rendering the former essential to the latter but also banishing it off stage. Overstating the unknowability of the periphery predetermines history beyond the national and the metropolitan as detectable only in the mode of form-structuring absence. However insightful it is in other respects, this model obscures the “actually existing cosmopolitanisms of the past” (in the metropolis and elsewhere) while at the same time barring the colonial or even peripheral from full participation in modernity: if modernism is defined by the impossibility of any direct experience or knowledge of the colonial, then the colonial can never be modernist.19 “Modernism” is thus defined by the repression or ignorance of its full historical context, and any literature that recognizes, much less thematizes, that context is by definition not modernism.

Such an account is clearly troublesome for the agenda of “global modernism.” Rather than opposing the directness of colonial geopolitical experience to the (aesthetically rich) alienation of the modernist metropolitan, we should respect the dialectical tensions structuring both. Just as the metropolis did not have an entirely unconscious relationship to the periphery, so too peripheral experience was itself defined by elsewheres at once unknowable and inescapable. It is useful to recognize the referential geopolitical consciousness of “modernism” and right to recognize the geopolitical unconscious of the colonial.

For Jameson, all literature under capitalism is necessarily formally constituted by what it cannot represent, its “political unconscious.”20 What is specific to modernism, in his account, is that what is there unrepresentable is the tendentially global basis of social life. This is “unrepresentable” in at least two distinct senses: it is subject to a system of ideological prohibitions and distortions, to be sure, but it is also unrepresentable because of its sheer scale and complexity. That is, confronting the global character of modernism requires a recognition of facts but also a coming to terms with a perhaps genuinely irresolvable problem of representation. While in many respects the globalization of modernist studies represents an affirmation and extension of the field’s overwhelmingly (new) historicist values, it should then also be understood as a challenge to those values. The global turn should encourage reflection on context as such.

Context?

“Restoring” some putatively original context can be an effective means of shaming alternative readings; however, claiming that a text is a perfect expression of “its context” is but another way of saying one is incapable of learning anything from it. Ironically, such restorations regularly contradict what we can know about authorial intent. To the extent we understand “modernism” as precisely a form of literature that does not seek to reflect its “context” in any immediate way, we are often going against authorial intent when we prioritize the local and immediate whereas, strangely enough, the very refusal of proximate context determinacy can be understood as a kind of fidelity, even a kind of historicism. “Historical context” need not valorize the alignment of a text to what was contiguous or synchronous.

Conversely, critiques of contextualism, whatever they might explicitly claim, involve less a denial of the value of context as such than the proposal, more or less explicit, of alternative contexts. Most such critiques are simply opposed to granting primacy to contemporaneous historical factors, preferring instead a history of genre, the psychological profile of an author, or affinities with a philosophical text, for example. These too reduce. Not all reductions are equal, of course, but an abstract charge of “reduction” in some absolute sense is meaningless because interpretation is never a question of reducing or restoring as such but of what is brought to bear and what is not: a composite of inclusions and exclusions, so no hermeneutic or ethical preference can be given a priori to either.

In Jonathan Culler’s quotable formulation, “Meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless.”21 Despite the fact that so much of the pushback against “theory” in general and deconstruction in particular claims to be about a return to context, deconstruction was and remains deeply engaged with the problem of context, challenging readers to take responsibility for deciding which contexts they prioritize in any given . . . context? This responsibility is shirked when the value of reading a text in “its historical context” is claimed to be the nonpartisan restitution of something pregiven. Which history? Whose history? What bounds do we impose on boundlessness when we claim to put a text in “its” context?²²

Moreover, one of the fundamental insights of deconstruction is that the impossibility of fully accounting for context is a necessary precondition of language. That is, it is not the case that context should, ideally, be fully determinable because in fact words can only function if they are not bound to and fully definable by any single context.²³ Any signifying element must be repeatable, indeed in almost every instance must be a repetition: any text fully determined by “its” context would be incomprehensible. In ways specific to their identification as “literature” (however defined), literary texts too are always destined to be reinscribed in “an infinity of new contexts” (Derrida, Limited Inc., 12)—at least with a little luck, since the alternative is oblivion. In this way, the deconstructive problems of iterability and grafting are at the heart of historicism: potentially infinite reinscription is both the precondition of historicism (meaning is context bound) and a challenge to any of its specific claims (context, it turns out, is boundless).

Different fields of literary study have, at different periods in their history, manifested greater or lesser anxiety about the unresolvable problems that structure their methods. At times, these “theoretical” issues are relatively easy to ignore; at other times they become “practical,” even urgent. Although the global turn in modernist studies has largely been driven by historicist values, I would argue that it begs theoretical questions with which the field has never really fully engaged. For despite the literary corpus of modernism being well represented in most forms of literary theory, the field of modernist literary studies itself has never really been defined by a theory moment. “Theory” in general and deconstruction in particular get lumped in with New Criticism for the common sin of insufficiently valuing and understanding context. The effect of this dismissal has been impoverishing not only for “theory” but also, I want to suggest, for the contextualizing, historicizing impulses of modernist studies as it is generally practiced.

I am suggesting not a “return” to theory but a recognition of the profound methodological challenges posed by taking “the global” as a “context,” specifically for the study of the period we call modernism, much of whose literary production was generated by and was about, precisely, an inability to grasp the local and immediate. Recall, for example, Bertolt Brecht’s famous remark (cited several times by Walter Benjamin) that “less than ever does a simple reproduction of reality say anything about that reality. A photograph of the Krupp factory or the AEG reveals next to nothing about these institutions . . . The reification of human relations—the factory, for example—means that they are no longer given. So in fact something must be ‘constructed,’ something ‘artificial,’ ‘posited’” (Brecht, “Der Dreigroschenprozeß,” 161–162). Today, when two-thirds of Krupp’s sales are outside of Germany and the corporation has offices on every continent (including in almost every nation in Africa), the difficulty of representing such an institution might be more quantitatively spectacular or more acutely felt, but it is hardly new.24 The globalization of modernist studies does not represent the imposition of contemporary concerns on an earlier period, but neither is it simply the restitution of how things really were. Hence the unsatisfying because ultimately disingenuous quality of the opposition of “reduction to” and “restoration of” context. The former decries abuse, the latter asserts justice, but both appeal to a knowable original, naturalized textual condition when in fact such a condition is not the real concern of either.

Reading literature globally can involve reading more (it almost certainly does) or bigger (it often does), but accepting these as the only possibilities pushes us to accept the pseudo-opposition of distant and close reading, superficial and deep reading. To read Mrs. Dalloway in the context of twenty modernist city novels from around the world circa 1910–1930 will no doubt produce a different sense of the novel than reading it in the context of twenty contemporaneous novels written in and about England—or reading it in the context of Woolf’s diaries and letters—and there might be good reasons to value the latter approaches over the former. But it is not the case that the former has no sense of historical context while the latter does, that the former is superficial and the latter deep. “Context” has always been ruthlessly selective, a fact to which our familiarity with, even affection for, particular Procrustean beds should not blind us.²⁵ Reading modernism globally need not mean less context any more than it must mean more; it is simply different, and the truth and value of that difference depend entirely on the specifics of any given “global” reading.

Conclusion

As modernist studies attempts to globalize it can embrace the apparent contradictions of a twofold approach. On the one hand, we can respect conventionally formulated claims about historical context and engage in empirical research about what modernism was. Modernism was global in ways that can be known through relatively straightforward historicization, and we should not underestimate the extent to which a less myopic sense of historical context can transform the ways we read even the most familiar texts. On the other hand, modernism’s global context was and remains something that cannot be fully grasped through knowledge saturation. We need theoretical, even speculative models of what modernism was, is, or might still become, even when the facts have not yet caught up.26 The very impossibility of the global as context can encourage a vigorous reconsideration of the more positivistic ways in which “context” has been deployed as a hermeneutic tool and as value. After all, grasping the importance of race in Stein or empire in Joyce surely required both an assertion of verifiable historical facts and some theoretical imagination. The former was not a reduction to context but an end to the refusal to consider clearly relevant facts; the latter was not mere cleverness but the development of the critical tools necessary to disclose a modernism that is historically grounded even if it might have been quite unrecognizable to Stein or Joyce themselves. It is not inconsistent to think we might both need to know more and to have better ideas.

“We can’t do everything,” they sigh. Certainly not, but must we therefore keep doing the same things? A truly global study of modernism is no doubt impossible, but shouldn’t the degree to which modernist studies has been so utterly possible be a source not of pride but embarrassment? Much of the world has been living this impossibility for some time, forced to experience and to understand itself as part of “the world.”²⁷ If today the gardens of Europe themselves can no longer be experienced matter-of-factly, are at once near and far, is it because the specter of comparisons has just escaped the tomb of context—or was it empty all along?

Notes

1. In Harold Augenbraum’s recent translation, the passage reads: “The botanical garden drove away these delightful memories [of childhood] and the devilry of comparison placed him back in front of the botanical gardens of Europe, in those countries in which one needs a great deal of will and even more gold to bring forth a leaf and make a flower open its calyx . . . Ibarra looked away, to the right, and there saw Old Manila, surrounded still by its walls and moats, like an anemic young girl wrapped in a dress left over from the grandmother’s salad days” (Rizal, Noli me tangere, 54). The edited volume Grounds of Comparison (2003) includes several discussions of how demonio ought to be translated, including a concession from Anderson himself that the choice of “specter” was “a real mistake.” Noting that the Spanish word has crossed over into Tagalog, he writes that the correct connotation is rather “pest”: “Comparisons are like that, they buzz, and buzz, and refuse to go away or to be quiet. Irritating and distracting, but not spectral” (Anderson, Grounds of Comparison, 245n1).

2. In addition to being the statement from the resurrected Jesus to Mary Magdalene (John 20:17) that became a common subject of European painting, noli me tangere is also a medical term for cancer of the eyelid, an otherwise obscure term that, as numerous critics point out, was known to Rizal, an ophthalmologist. One of the English translations of the novel renders the title as The Social Cancer.

3. As Sanjay Krishnan writes, “a central task for literary or cultural analysis that seeks to understand globalization as a historical process is exploration of the formal struggles and textual strategies through which the global is instituted as a perspective” (Reading the Global, 2). For an important recent study of literary world making, see Hayot, On Literary Worlds.

4. On literary historiography in relation to the problem of “the periphery,” see especially Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas.

5. On Japan as a model for late nineteenth-century alternative modernities, see Bush, The Floating World.

6. Researched in London and written in Spanish, this second novel of “the first Filipino” would be published in Belgium (the first had been published in Berlin). On his ship to the United States, Rizal met the Japanese activist and novelist Shigeyasu ‘Tetcho’ Suehiro (1849–1896), an important figure in Japan’s Freedom and People’s Rights Movement and a major writer in the genre of the political novel. The two traveled together on and off throughout the United States and on to Europe. When Suehiro returned to Japan he would publish two political novels set in the Philippines, Nankai no daiharan (South Sea typhoon, 1891) and O-Unabara (The great ocean, 1894), both modeled on (some say almost plagiarizing) Rizal’s novels. See Hayase, “Japan and the Philippines”; and Saniel, “José Rizal and Suehiro Tetcho.”

7. See, for example, Hill, “Crossed Geographies: Endo and Fanon in Lyon”: “Figures of international repute pass each other unnoticed if the conventions under which we labor don’t allow a meeting” (93).

8. I here use “modernist studies” to refer broadly to the interdisciplinary ways of studying literary modernism identified with the Modernist Studies Association and the journal Modernism/modernity over the past fifteen to twenty years. For brief overviews of changes in the field over this time, see Mao and Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies”; and, more recently, James and Seshagiri, “Metamodernism.”

9. Consider, for example, the relative absence of such major New Historicist touchstones as Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, and Michel Foucault in modernist studies. Who are the major theorists of modernist New Historicism?

10. Often further confirmed by, for example, the text’s very genre or language. With Rizal: a novel written in Spanish.

11. Almost no contextualist would endorse this, of course, any more than those advocating a more global approach to literary studies would consider total knowledge of all things on the planet a prerequisite to reading. But the former has been naturalized to such an extent that its limitations and occasional absurdities are accepted as inevitabilities, even virtues.

12. For a range of critical treatments of “context,” see the articles in the 2011 New Literary History special issue on the topic, edited by Felski.

13. See especially Appadurai, Modernity at Large; Chatterjee, The Nation in Fragments; and Hill, National History and the World of Nations.

14. The “already” of the “already living” is here not anticipatory (as in: “tickets go on sale tomorrow and people are already lining up”) but rather asserts the persistence of what might be mistaken for dead and gone (as in: “all of philosophy is already contained in Plato”).

15. A few words substituted, and the poet must live “in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the future.” Such a poet must be “conscious, not of what has not yet been born, but of what is already living”—but here “already” in the anticipatory sense.

16. It was precisely in 1919 that John Dewey traveled to Japan and then China, where he witnessed the emergence of the May Fourth movement and worked with his local advocate Hu Shih, whose name perhaps would remain unknown to Eliot but who, as a matter of principle, would be the object of the attacks in Eliot’s After Strange Gods (40) as one of those in China who had “blazed a path for John Dewey” and thereby undermined the Anglo-Saxon-like continuity of what had previously been “a country of tradition.”

17. On continuities between the European right and anticolonialism, see Bush, The Floating World; Jones, “The End of Europe”; and Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders. For an overview of the May Fourth movement, see Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment.

18. Few of the critics who make passing reference to Chakrabarty’s title as a catchphrase acknowledge his extensive and explicit debt to Heidegger’s critique of historicism.

19. The phrase “actually existing cosmopolitanisms” is from Goodlad, “Cosmopolitanism’s Actually Existing Beyond,” 430. Goodlad has written about how Jameson’s geopolitical models, otherwise so valuable to efforts to rethink her field of Victorian studies more globally, cannot be much interested in realism. Again, a model that in certain obvious ways limits our understanding of literature beyond the metropolis also limits in debatable ways how scholars categorize literature even within the metropolis: what “can be called modernism in the first place.”

20. For a more detailed account of how this is and is not equivalent to an Althusserian “representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” see Jameson, The Political Unconscious.

21. Originally in On Deconstruction (1982), the formulation reappears in Culler’s more recent Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (2011).

22. Far from asserting the autonomy of the text, Derrida’s infamous claim “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (regularly cited in its mistranslation as “there is nothing outside the text”) is precisely what I would describe as a critique of the autonomy of the context: how texts mean is so profoundly determined by context that none of these “contexts” can be treated as if it were not itself also a text, that is: its meaning determined by context. This is the sense is which “there is no hors-texte”: there are no out-texts, no pre-texts, but with-texts, the nature of that “with” always needing to be accounted for since nothing is a priori contextual rather than textual. The line in question is in Of Grammatology (158), but see also especially “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc. Similarly, in what is perhaps Paul de Man’s most well-known formulation of “undecidability,” it is precisely a question of context: we justify reading a passage in one rhetorical mode rather than another based on our understanding of its context, but our understanding of the context is determined by how we read specific passages. See his “Semiology and Rhetoric,” in Allegories of Reading.

23. Language—in the broad sense of any form of signification—requires what Derrida calls a “structural non-saturation” because “communication must be repeatable—iterable—in the absence of the receiver or of any empirically determinable collectivity of receivers” (Signature Event Context, 3, 7). “A written sign,” he continues, “carries with it a force that breaks with its context, that is, with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription” (9)—but not only written signs (cf. Of Grammatology).

24. See here Jameson’s reflections on the modernist city novel in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, a work explicitly about the postmodern period.

25. See Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature”; and Levine, “For World Literature.”

26. “History” is constantly changing, being reinvented or rediscovered, not just for theorists or literary critics but for professional historians. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the emergence of “world history” as an increasingly important field of historical study, one of whose most important consequences has been to provide an enormous amount of empirical evidence to support the idea that “modernity” might be reconceived in less Eurocentric ways. For a recent literature review, see Doyle, “Notes Toward a Dialectical Method.”

27. Hence the relevance to modernist studies of so much postcolonial criticism, a field that has always struggled with the Eurocentric biases of the pseudouniversal categories of modernity. To globalize modernist studies is at the same time to provincialize it. And to provincialize, following Chakrabarty, means not simply to denigrate or to ignore but to recognize the particularity of “universals,” the potential marginality of centers, and the potential reversibility of the near and far.

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