Little Magazine, World Form

“Network (n.): a piece of work having the form or construction of a net; an arrangement or structure with intersecting lines and interstices resembling those of a net.”¹ I begin with a simple definition of network, and it is one that functions by way of metaphor. A net is a material object, of course, but a network suggests something more abstract, a resemblance rather than the thing itself. Like all words, the network has a history, and in the dictionaries charting its development, it is one whose origins go back to the sixteenth century, when it was first used to describe reticulated structures, before getting modified in the nineteenth century to identify the layout of railway lines, roads, and canals. By the twentieth century, network was associated as well with the infrastructures being put in place to broadcast sound, transmit voices from one place to another, and standardize timetables.

The formation and organization of literary networks at the beginning of the twentieth century were no doubt influenced by the arrival of these new technologies for communication. Being in the network would often involve engaging with the materiality of the network itself. Writers, of course, existed long before the telephone, telegraph, and radio were invented, but it’s also the case that these same technologies came to influence not just how they imagined who they were (in relation to other writers and their audiences), but also where they were (including how they fit in and did not with trends, movements, across the globe), and not even a writer like Proust in his cork-lined room could free himself entirely from the increased burden of connectivity. This burden of connectivity is what I focus on in this chapter. More specifically, I explore how the network as a concept and literary networking as a process influenced how people imagined literary production and circulation on a global scale. Clusters, cadres, and schools are some of the categories we use to organize literary history, but in the twentieth century, it was also the presence of an ever-expanding network that shaped not only the materiality of literary production but also the contingent fantasies around which connection and communication were being built.

None of this networking would have been possible on such a scale without the little magazine. The little magazine is to the modernist network what the wires are to the radio, telephone, and telegraph, and that connection, I think, goes some way toward explaining why the two terms continue to get thrown together so frequently nowadays. PRELIA (Petites revues de littérature et d’art), for instance, a website collecting digital reproductions of French revues published between 1870 and 1940, refers to a now defunct “international network of little magazines,” and it is one that Beatriz Colomina identifies as a precursor for the “networks of tittle [architectural] magazines” that popped up in the 1960s and ’70s.² Faith Binckes describes little magazines as “a set of volatile intersecting networks”; Celia Aijmer Rydsjö and AnnKatrin Jonsson believe that “the little magazine networks form an exciting cultural map of modernism, spreading out across European borders and overseas”; Aránzazu Ascunce Arenas focuses on the “multiple social networks” operating through the little magazines published in Barcelona and Madrid in the first half of the twentieth century; and using Jean Toomer’s Cane as a single case study, Eurie Dahn sets out to “highlight the possibilities of periodical studies in illuminating global networks that magazines and individual works of literature construct and engage with.”³

Network has become one more keyword in the literary lexicon, associated as much with the formation of a globally conceived modernism as it is with the medium that made it. The widespread acceptance of this association has, no doubt, been bolstered by the arrival of digital technologies (network analysis programs like Gephi) that make it possible for us to visualize the once hidden dynamics of the literary field on a macro scale using large data sets and social scientific methods. In every case, there is an emphasis on circulation and connectivity, accompanied by the hope of decoding lost linkages that were once formed through the physical exchange of letters, books, and other printed matter. Six degrees of literary separation is part of the new critical rubric, one that critics from so many different fields are using to revisit questions about how ideas, texts, and people circulate, all of them hoping to disrupt the more conventional paradigms already in place.⁴

At the moment, there are various collaborative projects under way to help demystify avant-garde and modernist networks by generating big data about the number of titles, their locations, and routes of circulation. “Global Literary Networks” is one of the more ambitious examples promising to deframe “traditional literary categories” like “influence and dissemination” by applying methods of network analysis. To get started, Richard So and Hoyt Long have used publication data (“who published when and where,” as the say) from little magazines first printed in the United States, Japan, and China in order to generate network diagrams that can reveal the makeup of more abstract social relationships and structures.⁵ For them, little magazines are like nodes and edges with poems, novels, and essays that generate data sets, and the relationship between all of these parts can be converted into potato-shaped “visualizations” with the power to reveal what words, magazines, texts, or authors were in vogue in any given month, year, or decade. Part of their goal for recovering these lost linkages involves figuring out “what the poets themselves seem to have felt was happening around them, even if they could not rise up into the air and discern the overall shape of the literary field.”⁶

As exciting as it may be to arrive at a data-driven bird’s-eye view, it’s worth taking a step back to ask ourselves what, in fact, is at stake in thinking about the literary field as a network in the first place. In this instance, the two terms are elided, but they don’t necessarily mean the same thing. Literary field is a sociological category, and it is one that understands the relationship between writers, patrons, markets, and audiences in the context of social, economic, and political forces. Network, on the other hand, is more commonly linked with computing processes and the kinds of social interaction that different media interfaces allow. I bring this distinction up if only to emphasize the need to think historically about the category of the network and, in doing so, to bring these invisible political, social, and economic forces into the way we think about how modernism itself happened within little magazines that were getting published around the globe.

To do so, we should not lose sight of the fact that networks, then and now, are as much a concrete reality as they are a fantasy about the structure of a world that modernists and avant-gardists alike wanted to see. To understand what they are and how they work, then, it’s necessary to examine how the materiality itself plays into the fantasy and vice versa. In doing so, it will then become possible to see the network less as an empirical fact and more as a concept that had a profound impact on what so many little magazines would look like, where they would or could go, with whom they would connect and disconnect, and how. My goal, however, is not to try and imagine the network as the modernists themselves did or map out all of the edges, nodes, and clusters (which would be one way of ensuring that we were not seeing it as the modernists themselves did). Rather, by going back to a few of these earlier attempts to visualize the little magazine network, we can figure out what they missed and in doing so recover some sense not only of how a network of print and paper functioned during modernism but also how it might guide future attempts to give the little magazine network, in particular, a digital afterlife.⁷

What follows, then, is a prehistory of the little magazine network before the software was available to organize the information and the technician-scholars arrived to visualize, sift through, and interpret it. In-stead of diagramming, graphing, or mining magazines, though, I go back to some of the modernists and avant-gardists who tried to figure out how they could trace the contours of a network that somehow managed to elude them all. Examples I draw from include a map on the cover of the Polish Constructivist little magazine Blok identifying its global destinations, another by L’esprit nouveau locating subscribers, and a geometrical equation in La gaceta literaria describing the domestic hierarchy of little magazines in Spain. Made within a few years of each other (1922, 1925, 1928), these visualizations were attempts to represent how the process of literary distribution through little magazines worked, each one a snapshot of the network from a specific location and point in time. All of them fail to capture the full complexity of a global magazine network, but taken together, they are a compelling reminder of what was really at stake in trying to imagine the little magazine in the world in the first place. Is tracing distribution really the most effective way to describe a global process for literary consumption? Does being in the network necessarily involve moving through the world?

Though the feet of the Polish Constructivist Henryk Berlewi were firmly planted on the ground, the strange presence of an ineffable network was one of the things that he felt in 1922 when visiting the first International Exhibition of Modern Art in Düsseldorf. Walking through a collection of works by Cubists, Neo-Impressionists, Italian Futurists, Constructivists, Expressionists, and Dadaists, he concluded that a critical moment in the history of modern art had arrived, and it was enabled, in part, by the emergence of “a worldwide network of periodicals.”⁸ This netwerk, as the editors of Het Overzicht dubbed it a few years later, was a particularly effective term for describing an emerging international configuration of avant-garde movements that never existed before on such a scale.⁹ The question, though, is not who or what was circulating in and between them but how any of this was happening at all. How, in other words, did the net work? And is it really a concept that should be reserved only for the avant-garde magazines instead of being applied more widely to include an expansive modernist structure that was emerging simultaneously?

Berlewi, after all, may have been thinking specifically about avant-garde connectivity, but his observation applies to a “worldwide network of periodicals” that would have to include so many titles that he would never know printed in places he had probably never even heard of. This worldwide network (like the worldwide web) abstracts the space of the globe so that the destinations within it are defined not by geographical location but through these invisible threads (whether webs or nets) that exist in between. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of network that I mentioned earlier is useful in this regard: “a piece of work having the form or construction of a net; a collection or arrangement (of some thing or things) resembling a net.” The net is a form above all but is one, Bruno Latour reminds us, “made first of all of empty space.”¹⁰ Not everyone in the net gets caught or connected, in other words, and what makes the OED definition so striking is its emphasis on construction. The network is not already in place when the avant-gardes and the modernists arrive on the scene: it is an “arrangement” that gets made by them. In the context of Berlewi’s observation, you might even say that this network was made to function differently from the ones preceding it, in large part, because the technologies for print production were more widely available, international travel (including exile and emigration) easier, and literary culture and its production through print media capable of generating conversations between cities, regions, and towns that were previously isolated or deliberately cut off from one another.

Even if Berlewi and his fellow Constructivists were convinced that network was the best term for describing this new artistic universe, they were still imagining it in cartographic terms. The cover of the tenth issue of Blok (April 1925), where Berlewi was one of the editors, is a case in point (figure 1.1). At the top of the page, above the editorial information, date, title, and design by Kazimir Malevich, is a crudely drawn sketch of the world with the words “Dokad Dociera Blok” (Where Blok reaches) beneath it. This image is there on the cover as testimony of Blok’s global influence, and the editors want their readers to know that if issues can reach Vladivostok, Tokyo, San Francisco, and Buenos Aires, then there’s no saying how far the magazine might go.

Another map from Le Corbusier’s L’esprit nouveau identifying the global coordinates of its “abonnés” in 1922 provides an interesting point of comparison (figure 1.2). Printed on the back cover of issue 17, it was intended to attract advertisers with a group of potential clients, compliment readers on their cosmopolitan taste, and reassure the editors of the magazine’s global appeal. Le Corbusier’s map has sharper outlines that make the individual countries and cities easier to recognize, but there’s one important exception: Europe and Africa have been offset to the left, leaving a vast and empty Pacific Ocean prominently displayed in the middle, partially eclipsed by two enlargements located at the bottom. This particular orientation of the map has a way of emphasizing that Europe occupies only one of many positions, and its relative smallness has a way of making the rest of the world seem much bigger. Indeed, there are blank spaces on this map as well, but no continent has been missed as L’esprit nouveau makes its monthly journey from Paris to Egypt, Sydney, Algiers, Johannesburg, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Honolulu, and beyond.

The enlargements, though, are the most striking detail. This map could have conveyed the same message just as well without them, but Le Corbusier, for whatever reason, decided to include them. It’s almost as if by decentering Europe, he felt compelled to overcompensate by reminding viewers where the greatest concentration of subscribers was located. If the blank space on the Blok map signified a form of Eurocentric repression, then this dark space, you could say, is symptomatic of a latent anxiety about a global cultural experience that was increasingly common to little magazines at the time. L’esprit nouveau may be able to document where it goes, but with every new subscriber from a different town, city, country, or continent, the network expands further. As much as the prospect of a global readership can be thrilling for little magazine makers, it also has the potential to inspire more troubling thoughts as the magazine travels to zones far from the location where it was produced. Perhaps that’s why this particular map looks more like a document tracking the spread of infectious diseases, the point being that global distribution may have shrunk the world, but it subsequently allowed for more intimate degrees of contact with so many “foreign” others, inspiring the realization that the more L’esprit nouveau traveled, the less could be known about where it was ending up, how it was being read, and by whom.

The fear and loathing of global distribution: that’s one potential side effect of this worldwide network. It might all sound a bit paranoid, but this response is not so different from the one Franz Kafka had that same year when he was thinking about the potentially alienating social implications of the postal system. “How on earth,” he wrote, “did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter?”¹¹ Friedrich Kittler has argued that the postal system that Kafka found so unnerving was also responsible for the formation of a modernist discourse network, the same one through which magazines like Blok and L’esprit nouveau circulated.¹² Indeed, Kafka was one of the many individuals to benefit from the postal system’s relative speed and efficiency, but he was not blind to the fact that it also facilitated a mode of communication that privileged the physical distance between individuals. With little magazines and their readers/subscribers, the same was true: the global reach of literary production continued to reduce the distance between consumers and producers, but it also ensured anonymous contact. Readers, no matter how isolated, were never really alone, and while the very idea of an imagined global community could be thrilling for some, it was troubling for others because it had the potential to invite contamination.

All too often, the global reach (and proximity) enabled by technologies of modernization gets characterized positively as if there could never be a dark side. But with little magazines, in particular, there is a way that this opening up to new readers and landing in foreign destinations expanded the coordinates of the network but forced little magazines into new relationships with local literary cultures, some more congenial to their arrival than others. Blok, for instance, may have landed in Buenos Aires in April 1925, but it was then in the company of Proa, Martín Fierro, and Inicial. And what did the Polish Constructivists know about these magazines and vice versa? Chances are, very little. Landing on foreign soil did not automatically trigger dialogue or interaction, and though some magazines preferred to establish long-distance relationships organized through exchanges, it was just as common to find geographical contiguity without contact. This particular aspect of the little magazine network is not what tends to elicit critical attention, but it played an equally formative role in the way that little magazines would and could function within an increasingly global literary and critical culture. The more interconnected the world became and the more that there was an infrastructure in place to allow for the increased distribution of individual titles, the more unsettling it all could be, requiring the creation of maps like these to try and organize what was otherwise so disorienting. Maps can be a way to exercise control, in part, by cordoning off what is unknowable, but these examples reveal something else: an awareness of global communication’s limits and the recognition that if there was indeed a network emerging in the 1920s, it was filled with gaps and impossible to conceptualize without relying on more traditional modes of cartographic representation.

In this regard, I agree with Latour that it is more productive to use the term network to “designate a mode of inquiry” capable of identifying the attributes through which it becomes visible at any given moment in time as it produces a “complex ecology of tributaries, allies, accomplices and helpers.”¹³ Latour’s reference to allies and accomplices should not be confused with sympathizers. It is just as necessary to account for the detractors, isolatoes, and hecklers, who become visible precisely by refusing to inhabit the lines, or tributaries, that the others travel. The cartographic representations I’ve discussed so far are suggestive because they fail to represent the actual and virtual relationships the little magazine network encoded and blocked. Blok and L’esprit nouveau may want to position themselves in the network, but they can do so only cartographically using the miniaturized backdrop of the world to mask the relative isolation of their own location. As a result, their global relevance comes from the where but not the who. Who else, these images inadvertently ask, is out there, and how can they be represented alone and together if not on a map?

In 1928, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, the editor of the Madrid-based La gaceta literaria, came up with another idea. He decided to represent the literary network of little magazines across Spain in the form of a geometrical equation, which he titled “Teorema de la nueva literatura española por Gecé” (figure 1.3). This “theorem” was his attempt to justify why Madrid was at the center of this new literary scene, with Barcelona, Andalusia, and Galicia straggling behind. The Iberian Peninsula here takes the shape of a pentagon with five triangles distributed therein, and each one contains the first letters of the most influential periodicals published in the regions to which they corresponded. Greek letters (alpha, beta, gamma, delta) were added to each triangle/region, and above the delta (Catalonia/Valencia), Caballero placed a funnel indicating where influences from abroad could pour in. In the attached key to his theorem, Caballero explains that Spanish magazines were “el núcleo donde se insertar numeradores y denominadores” (the absolute nucleus where numerators and denominators can be found), and he hoped that a united literary culture in Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish languages could eventually be mobilized through them. For Aránzazu Ascunce Arenas, Caballero may have been eager to link these cultures within Spain and Portugal, but he failed to emphasize the actual interconnections that existed between them. In addition, she explains, his desire to abstract the geography through this geometrical equation made the network seem more decentralized than it actually was. If you were to revise the diagram today, she believes that it would resemble “a telephone map from the late 1920s” with a few centers and clusters scattered across Spain.¹⁴

That, however, was not Caballero’s point. Eager to literalize the diagram, Arenas misses out on the fact that the theorem translated into a telephone map would actually alter the message. Caballero had found a way to describe the abstract relationships that existed between little magazines, and he deliberately used the geometrical shapes in order to downplay the influence of geography. The actual distances between locations, in other words, were less significant than their position within these hidden cultural processes. Indeed, his geometrical shapes still corresponded with the location of cities, but it’s clear that he was trying to find a way not to represent connectivity, as Arenas would have it, but disconnectivity. For as much as there was actual communication among some of these little magazines, Caballero was also trying to account for the fact that they existed within the same national space without establishing direct contact. In this way, the theorem is itself one attempt to imagine the network as a space of disconnection and not as a geographical container in which all of the locations near and far were within reach of one another. Unlike the other images, though, this one is strictly national, free of any ambition to trace global influence through consumption. That in itself is a way for La gaceta literaria to describe how networking, both as connection and disconnection, could not be stripped from the location of its production. Seen another way, production itself was one of the categories through which little magazines worldwide could be seen in relation to one another: that is, it lets us imagine the global network by taking into account the production of little magazines, not where the little magazine reaches but where it begins.

Indeed, distribution is certainly part of a much bigger, messier puzzle involving the little magazine, but all too often there is the temptation to conflate degrees of globality with the kinds of empirical data that can be compiled about reception. However valuable this information may be for letting us trace points of contact between little magazines (on their own or in clusters), it still does not explain what they shared in common with other titles in the countries and on the continents they never reached. Martín Fierro, for instance, may have appeared in Buenos Aires between 1923 and 1925, picking up readers in countries throughout Central and South America, but how do we even begin to talk about it in relation to Kallol in India, Mavo in Japan, or L’esprit nouveau in France? If distribution is our guide, then we don’t. None of these titles actually crossed paths with one another, traveled similar routes, or shared readerships, and there was never a chance that Mavo, let’s say, would end up someplace like France except as a curiosity.¹⁵

More recently, Susan Stanford Friedman has argued that circulation is precisely what should guide comparative approaches to modernism in the future, though she warns that in the process of tracing these “global networks,” critics should not end up ignoring “local knowledge.”¹⁶ She is not alone. Her arguments about global modernism have been shaped by a world literature debate that has not been directly concerned with modernism or its little magazines. The positions for and against world literature are all based on the assumption that circulation, and with it translation (both formal and linguistic), is what enables us to study the process by which texts (not print media like books or magazines) move through the world. Except when they don’t. For us, the difficulty involves figuring out what sustained the network if it was not a coherent set of linkages in and between magazine cultures around the globe. And if it’s not distribution that defines the network, then what does? Moreover, what makes it possible for us to analyze the network without using the rubric of a connectivity that has been all too literally understood?

In République mondiale des lettres, Pascale Casanova has provided a sociological model for thinking more generally about a “circulatory network of literature” in the twentieth century, one organized hierarchically with critics, translators, publishers, and editors at the top deciding who gains access to an international book market and readership in the West.¹⁷ These mediators are more like border guards between East and West, center and periphery, with the power to decide who will receive literary consecration and who will not. Though other cities will have cultural capital, Paris, in Casanova’s model at least, is at the center of the network, the place where writers have to pass through if they have any ambitions of becoming international and, by extension, universal. Casanova has been widely criticized for her Francophilia and for falsely conflating national literature with the periphery and an international, denationalized literature with the center. Still, her transnational approach, which adapts concepts from Pierre Bourdieu’s nation-based literary sociology, was immensely effective in getting critics from a wide variety of fields to think about the structure of this abstract literary world system and the way that it has been shaped over the centuries by concrete structures of power. The literary universe, she reminded us, may be vast, but it is also separate and unequal; some Western readers, though they may pick up books from “foreign authors,” are very much at the mercy of translators and publishers responsible for deciding what texts will see the light of day.

Though Casanova traces the conditions for literary inequality across four centuries, République mondiale des lettres is ultimately a tale about modernism, modernity, and the globalization of the literary field in the twentieth century. But with the exception of a few references to the Nouvelle revue française, it is the medium of the book, and not the little magazine, that dominates her discussion. That, in fact, presents a problem.¹⁸ If modernism was made in and through its magazines, then why look only to the book and an unfair capitalist marketplace for answers about its globality, especially when the marketplace itself was so rigidly divided along national lines and hampered by high tariffs and international copyright laws?¹⁹ The little magazine, though it certainly had problems (censors and postal officials among them), just didn’t function this way, and the network it generated was organized according to a different set of rules and defined by a different set of power relations. First and foremost, this had to do with the fact that the little magazine was not a commercial medium. Therefore, it was not designed as a commodity for a marketplace where the accumulation of capital, and profit, mattered. Second, because there was no marketplace in which magazines were traded, a centralized power structure of editors, critics, and translators didn’t exist. Translations and critical appraisals, book exchanges, and reviews were still happening in and between different magazine clusters (and their respective satellites), but they were not overseen by an organized band of border guards. Third, the network of little magazines did not have a metropolitan capital through which anyone or anything had to move. As a result, there was never a single city responsible for controlling the national and/or international circulation of writers and critics.

Decommercialized, decentralized, decapitalized, disconnected: these are the terms that best describe modernism’s little magazine network on a global scale. But before going any further, I want to refine them a bit more. Capital cities were frequently the places with the greatest concentration of little magazines, and they often had the power to pull in others from center and periphery alike. It was also the case that a few of them even managed to assume the coveted role of international cultural arbiter. Nouvelle revue française, for example, was one of the brighter beacons in the sea of English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian magazines and was as much a source of inspiration for content (who to read and translate) as it was the model for critical sophistication (how to write). The same was true in Spain for Gasset’s Revista de occidente, in England with Eliot’s Criterion, in the United States with Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson’s Dial, in Italy with Alberto Carocci’s Solaria, in Russia with Vladimir Mayakovsky and Osip Brik’s Lef, in Argentina with Jorge Luis Borges’s Proa, and in Japan with Yasunari Kawabata’s and Yokomitsu Riichi’s Bungei jidai.²⁰ All of them assumed a dominant role within their respective nation-based literary cultures, and all of them were foundational in the creation of international critical standards throughout the 1920s. What I’m describing here, however, is different. Though positioned in cities such as Madrid, London, New York City, St. Petersburg, Florence, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo, none of these titles actually occupied a position in the center of any system. They were part of a network, the kind of rhizomatic configuration described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari that is nonhierarchical, acentered, and nonsystematic with the capacity to resist unification and control. Instead of a few avant-garde threads, no matter how stretched, torn, or frayed, there was a mass of them in other directions around the world, each one with the potential to weave multiple patterns that did not necessarily connect.²¹ And though decentralized, this magazine network also had “multiple central hosts, each with its own set of satellite nodes,” so that a title like Actual No. 1 from Mexico City could connect with a central host in Buenos Aires and another in New York City, while still maintaining regional affiliations closer to home and ignoring, or being ignored by, the others established elsewhere.²²

Disconnection was the name of the game in the magazine network. No matter how influential a single title could be, there were always limits (linguistic, economic, geographical) to its influence and/or capacity for control. Moreover, there was the added fact that disconnection, which can be defined partly by the inability or refusal to exchange issues, offer reviews, and circulate texts for translation, could generate nonverbal modes of communication. In fact, because language was such a major impediment to a global magazine culture, this disconnected mode of communication depended a great deal on the protocol of print. “If networks are the structures that connect organisms and machines,” Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker argue, “then protocols are the rules that make sure the connections actually work.”²³ Though nowadays protocol is associated more with computer-to-computer interaction and the formatting, addressing, and routing of data across the Internet, it also describes an earlier print practice that was developing within little magazines. Titles that were, in reality, geographically distant from one another came up with ways to communicate by design; this kind of long-distance communication was made possible by the fact that there were protocols being put in place, and they had the power, as Galloway explains in relation to computer networks, to “regulate flows, direct netscape, code relationships, and connect life-forms.”²⁴ The Italian Futurists, whom I discuss more fully in chapter 6, provide one of the more obvious examples. They developed an advanced form of this practice using an identifiable typographical style to signal affiliation and in the process created a feedback loop reaffirming the illusion of Futurism’s status as a centralized movement no matter how scattered its individual members and titles were. At the same time, there was the popular practice of affiliation by design in avant-garde and modernist circles alike, and it was most evident on covers, in page layouts, and through printing techniques and the choice of materials.

In practical terms, print protocol affected some of the most basic aspects of little magazine production around the globe, including the one thing for which it is most celebrated: typographical experimentation. The Italian Futurists claimed this practice for themselves with their parole in libertà, and later the Dadaists, guilty, as El Lissitzky put it, “of crimes of typo-graphic disobedience,” modified it for their own ends.²⁵ Futurists and Dadaists alike conducted their experiments on the little magazine, and it was the one print medium that traveled farther than any single piece of content. After first encountering a Dada publication, for instance, the Japanese poet Takahashi Shinkichi remembers being floored by the overall composition: “the vertical and horizontal typographical arrangements were mixed. There are sometimes even diagonal arrangements.”²⁶ As part of an initiation into Dadaizumu, a number of Japanese writers started their own little magazines, including GE.GJMGJGAM.PRRR.GJMGEM, (abbreviation GGPG, Selling shame, scandalous sentences) Bachi shūbun, and Kyomu shisō (Nihilism). This act of tapping into an expansive global network “out there” was determined by print protocol above all else, and it could work concretely through a mode of exchange encoded by design. And the range of protocols could change depending on the kinds of magazines with which one wanted to connect—and for that there were more subtle signals that could be transmitted through the most mundane details: font selection (serif or sans serif), page size, length, layout (symmetrical or asymmetrical or diagonal), paper (handmade or mass-produced, pulp or deluxe), and the organization of content.

The Dada grid provides a particularly compelling example. Not long after World War I ended and members of the movement continued to spread outward from Zurich and Berlin, the grid began appearing on the back cover of dozens of avant-garde magazines. There are a variety of different designs, though all of them share a single goal: to organize the titles and locations of like-minded magazines. It’s difficult to pinpoint who is responsible for bringing the grid into the magazine: it appears as much in Constructivist and Russian Futurist magazines as it does in the neo-Dada offspring. During this period, there is also a great deal of cross-fertilization between movements, with individual artists and graphic designers like El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, Theo van Doesburg, and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy collaborating on everything from cover design to organization and page layout. The grid, however, does not belong to any single movement. The shape itself, with a history that goes back to the Paleolithic brick of ancient Mesopotamia and looks ahead to the abstract representations of the World Wide Web, surfaced with a vengeance at the beginning of the twentieth century, when visual artists began experimenting with flat, geometric shapes. The structure of the grid was reimagined as a symbol of modernity itself, the rationalized design that could be endlessly reproduced.²⁷ The grid’s two-dimensionality and the resistance to any representational claims made it, as Rosalind Kraus explains, “antinatural, antimimetic, antireal.” And this turn away from representationality in the grid marked a major shift in the history of modern art. The grid is, as Krauss puts it, “what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.”²⁸

When the grid begins appearing in the back pages of little magazines, the avant-garde is not turning its back on nature: it is holding a mirror up to the network. The grid, after all, functions like a global positioning system in print form, letting the magazines identify where they are and with whom they are connected. Theo von Doesburg’s redesigned De Stijl was one of the first magazines to apply the grid in such a way. On the back cover of issue 5 (1922), black bars (one red) divide the page neatly into two sections (figure 1.4). None of the bars are touching, and this composition as a whole resembles the cross section of two buildings positioned side by side. In this early version (with only four magazines listed), Constructivist rationalism is combined with Dada-inspired typography to produce a condensed image of a design, and a network, that was in the process of being built. Distribution lists, of course, were not new to magazines little or big, but this particular design was. And what is so striking about the grid is how quickly it becomes part of a design vernacular in avant-garde magazines. The grid was there to organize information, but it was also an expression of being in the network, a way for magazines to identify their connections with and disconnections from one another.

In 1923, Merz provided a model of the grid that quickly became something of a standard: its fourth issue included an arrangement of boxes in bold black lines containing information about other Zeitschriften, subscription rates, distribution sites, and a few book titles (figure 1.5).²⁹ Concrete distribution numbers are impossible to come by here, but if we believe the countries and currencies listed at the bottom of the page, readers could be found as far afield as Germany, Japan, Mexico, the United States, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and England. By Merz issues 8/9, the form and function of the grid came together seamlessly (figure 1.6). In this symmetrical arrangement of blue and red lines, information about the “eingesandte zeitschriften” (identified by title and city) are placed vertically in the middle of the page and flanked by a list of back issues and book advertisements. At the top is a list of cities, mainly within Germany, where Merz can be purchased and a table of converted subscription rates (in four currencies) to the left.

As these two examples reveal, Merz, an abbreviated form of the word commerz, is indeed self-conscious about the system of international circulation and exchange of which it is a part. There are four different currencies for subscriptions, but not all of them correspond with the geographical locations of the magazines listed: Zenit (Yugoslavia), Zwrotnika and Blok (Poland), Contimpuranol (Hungary), and Inicial (Argentina) are the most obvious examples. They are in the grid, but they are still outside the economic system that would make them easily convertible from one currency to another, from one bookshop or newsstand to another, from one subscriber to another. That disconnect between the real and imagined, however, is precisely why the grid could be such an effective device for avant-garde magazines around the world: it provided the visual architecture for an abstract concept, a way to try and imagine what an avant-garde “movement” might even look like at any given time. And in a decentralized network such as this one, that was the challenge since links between magazines were not organized hierarchically and there was no center for regulation or standardized routes for transmission.

The grid is rhizomatic. It is the symbol, par excellence, of the decentralized disorganization that characterized Dada and neo-Dada movements in the early 1920s. It is both a map of the avant-garde print world and a ticket intended to affirm inclusion. Writing “Kablepoema za okean” (Cablepoem abroad, 1920-1921), the Ukrainian Panfuturist Mykhail Semenko understood the grid’s capacity to represent communication and transport simultaneously (figure 1.7). The title itself is a clear reference to Guillaume Apollinaire’s Lettre-océan (1916), the poem in which he tried to reproduce on paper the transoceanic movement of a wireless transmission between himself and his brother. In this instance, however, the world has been flattened out into six separate boxes on the left, each one corresponding with an individual line of free-verse poetry on the right. In this minimalist cablepoem, one that begins in America and ends in Oceania, each box is at once a relay in the wireless transmission and a passenger ticket for travel.

What Semenko did in a single poem is what magazines like L’esprit nouveau, Noi, G., De Stijl, Merz, Het Overzicht, Ma, and Mavo did for entire print runs: they incorporated the grid to communicate with one another—a complicated process when you consider the wide variety of languages involved (including Italian, Japanese, German, Danish, Hungarian, and French). The grid did not establish an open channel for content to pour in (though exchanges between editors were frequently arranged). Rather, it was there to identify each magazine’s location (indicated by city or town), along with its web of interconnections around the globe. Connectivity was the message, in this case, not the content of communication, and though the grid was organized around geographical points, it did not ever claim to centralize them.

These boxes, which do not correspond to any cartographic logic, are in no particular order. They can be read from left to right, bottom to top, or diagonally, and the absence of any hierarchy or clear direction reaffirms the idea that the network is not here or there in a sequence: it is everywhere, spanning the globe, all at once. The network of little magazines expanded largely because different strains of the Dada virus continued to spread. The grid, then, was an expression of the avant-garde’s global circulation, an attempt for various subgroups to see their own reflection in the mirror. Print provided the infrastructure necessary for this kind of connectivity, but not because the magazines themselves were physically moving between readers, writers, and editors in Tokyo, Zagreb, Budapest, and Rome. Rather, global communication was being conceptualized on the page, and at the time, putting foreign titles and addresses in the grid was the equivalent of “friending” someone on a social networking site.

Alliances were formed inside the grid itself (figure 1.8a-e). With one exception, these five titles name one another, providing nothing more than a title and a place. From issue to issue, titles will be added and dropped, lines of influence invited and denied, but this activity demonstrates just how the grid was more than an empty flourish. It was put into the magazine so that readers and writers alike could know who else was out there. Indeed, the enterprising reader in Tokyo, Zagreb, Rome, or Antwerp could use the information for a subscription, but that was not its raison d’etre. The grid was a place for readers to see the magazine moving in the world, each box a ticket providing access to a conversation that was ongoing and membership to a community of avant-gardists around the globe. Though it may not be surprising to find the grid in so many avant-garde magazines influenced by Constructivism, it is surprising to see this design used again and again to contain the same kind of information. The titles and locations of magazines within this structure functioned symbolically, and they were there to identify a frequency on which they would communicate in a little magazine universe that extended far beyond them. Once the avant-garde print network breaks down around 1926, the grid disappears.³⁰

Critics interested in Japanese modanizumu have tended to emphasize a unidirectional model for literary influence: modernism and its magazines arrive from the West, get adapted in the 1920s, and then are rejected in the mid-1930s during Japan’s hypernationalized, militaristic phase. But what happens if we try to imagine the process in reverse? How might we even begin to think about the relationship between the print practices used by the Surrealists in countries like France and Belgium and the ones adopted by their Japanese counterparts?³¹ Central and western European avant-gardes eventually came to play a significant role in Japanese magazine design and production, but in the earlier stages, especially (1890-1910), Japan’s influences came more from China, Korea, and Russia than anywhere else. In addition, it should be added, the magazine as a technology was a late arrival in Japan because of the censorship laws imposed by the Tokugawa Bakufu effectively blocking the spread of Western ideas and controlling the flow of information vis-à-vis print. The first Japanese-language newspaper, for example, didn’t appear until 1862, but with the collapse of the Bakufu in 1868, which was followed by the restoration of the Meiji emperor, the conflagration of print began, dominated at first by block printing before giving way to moveable lead type and the rotary press at the end of the century.³²

During the Meiji period (1868-1912), Japanese society began to modernize more rapidly, and so too did its literature and the technologies for reproduction. By 1885, the first Japanese literary magazine appeared in Tokyo, Garakuta bunko (Miscellanea). The first eight issues were produced as single handwritten copies on rice paper, before the magazine’s creators switched over to the handpress and expanded their print runs. James Morita sees the late arrival of this medium and its shoddy quality as a reflection of “Japan’s world of letters” in these years, arguing that Garakuta bunko was more like a throwback to the Tokugawa era than a leap for-ward.³³ Throwback or not, it embodied all of the contradictions of that particular moment in Japan’s history: Japanese literature was, in fact, beginning to modernize, and the magazine, though newly arrived, was a residual technology caught between the past and the present. Over the next few decades, these printed dōjin zasshi (also known as dōjinshi) continued to flourish. They were noncommercial magazines with a circulation of around two hundred copies catering to small groups of like-minded writers and critics.

Here we have modernism’s chicken-and-egg story all over again. Does modern and modernist literature arrive first and then the magazine, or is it the reverse? In Japan’s case, literary modanizumu, which reached its high point in the 1920s, was enabled by the evolution of the dōjinshi that first began appearing in the 1890s.³⁴ Free from the demands of a commercial marketplace, these coteries began to experiment with colloquial Japanese (genbun itchi) and different poetic and novelistic forms, including the I-novel.³⁵ In a story first published in Kōdō, Funahashi Seiichi described the coteries this way: “What did they care about being recognized by the established leaders in the world of letters? Insofar as they were able to generate a steady stream of their own highly original works, their own productivity gave sufficient meaning to their lives. That was what mattered.”³⁶ You could imagine these same lines getting inserted into every narrative about modernism around the globe. But as generic as they may sound, it’s necessary to remember that these are Japanese writers described here, the ones forced to eke out their existence through a medium that, when these lines were written, had become an indispensable part of an underground, noncommercial literary culture.

The dōjinshi that began appearing in the early 1900s were part of a more widespread tendency in Japan to treat literature as a “linguistic art.”³⁷ Shirakaba, which was founded by a group of wealthy samurai aristocrats and members of the Kyoto nobility reacting against a Naturalism that was very much in vogue at the time, was one of the most influential titles in the 1910s, and it brought together poetry, reviews, and criticism, with a special interest in Leo Tolstoy and Maurice Materlinck.³⁸ For the anarchist poet Osugi Sakae, Shirakaba was the only title out there with a “freshness, depth, and strength” that none of the others (Waseda bungaku, Mita bungaku, and Teikoku bungaku) could match.³⁹ Other dōjinshi continued to appear throughout the 1910s, and they catered to this swift rise of modern Japanese poetry and prose. That said, the medium itself was still not a site for any formal experimentation, and it was similar in form to the prototypes that preceded it. The more radical experiments with material, layout, spacing, and typography were delayed until 1924, four years after Futurism and Dada began to inspire splinter groups in Japan.⁴⁰

It was the 1923 Kantō Earthquake in Tokyo and Yokohama, not World War I, that helped trigger this change, and in the world of dōjinshi, it was an opportunity to begin experimenting with a technology that was still developing.⁴¹ If you factor in the ensuing aftershocks and fires, the Kantō Earthquake killed more than one hundred thousand people, and Seiji Lippit has argued that this natural disaster had a profound psychological impact on Japanese culture, forcing some people to second-guess the modernization process and others the stability of the national institutions that were formed during the Taisho democracy (1912-1926).⁴² And still there were others for whom the earthquake was an opportunity for radical change, a huge leap forward into a future that “intensified the sense of distancing from the past.”⁴³ The magazine was one place where this “distancing” was explicit. If, as Lippit claims, the earthquake “signaled the end” of older titles like Shirakaba, it marked the beginning of something else, the arrival of new ones that adapted printing practices used by the Futurists, Constructivists, and Dadaists⁴⁴—the same kinds of typographical experimentation in Europe that emerged during World War I, a style that critics have associated with the desire to capture in visual form both the speed and excitement of modernity and its potential for destruction and annihilation.⁴⁵

The process was under way with the publication of Aka to kuro in January 1923, an anarchist dōjinshi that appeared with a manifesto on the cover declaring, “Poetry is a bomb! A poet is a dark criminal who throws a bomb against the fortified walls of a prison!”⁴⁶ With the reconstruction under way and Japanese society still reeling from the disaster, the bombs continued to drop with Mavo (July 1924), Damudamu (November 1924), GE.GJMGJGAM.PRRR.GJMGEM, A, and Baichi shūbun. All of these dōjinshi adapted avant-garde printing strategies that relied on asymmetrical layouts, mixed media, collage, disjointed typography, and innovative spacing. Of particular interest, however, is the way that each of them was the product of a compromise between foreign graphic design practices and a local print history and culture.⁴⁷ The increased influence of Western literature, though immediately apparent in the number of translations coming into Japan, was also happening through the reconfiguration of this medium. Writers, editors, and printers, who were eager to modernize, were coming up with ways to try and make the magazine format reflect a Japanese literary culture very much in flux. Mavo was one of the most radical examples. Its editor, Tomoyoshi Murayama, had lived in Berlin for a brief period (attending the same International Art Exhibition in Dusseldorf as Berlewi) and, upon his return, continued to follow the Constructivists and Dadaists through their magazines.⁴⁸ Mavo, well oversized by dōjinshi standards, was a tribute to this Western design revolution, and it remained a singular creation, mixing together formal elements that reflected all at once a Dada love of anarchy, a Bauhaus adherence to rationalization, and a Japanese adoration for and suspicion of them both.

And it was all happening materially with the typography and layout. In a book-length study of the Mavo movement, Gennifer Weisenfeld argues that this group of artists was quick to incorporate Constructivist grids and bold black lines, while also making sure that the “standardized, mechanistic-looking typography was juxtaposed with more organic, free-flowing letters and characters.”⁴⁹ This juxtaposition made each issue look both mass-produced and handmade, a modernized dōjinshi still dependent on older printing techniques, reminiscent of the early Futurist experiments on the letterpress. This same kind of tension between old and new, mass-produced and handmade, was visible in the materials as well. Every issue had a unique linocut cover design and was printed on different colored paper (sometimes newspaper) with black-and-white photographs and a variety of random objects glued or taped on by hand.⁵⁰ Mavo was one of the first, and arguably the last, dōjinshi to attach itself so forcefully to a “foreign” avant-garde scene, and it did so less through direct communication than by design and structure, even going so far as to adopt the Western mode of opening from right to left for the first four of its seven issues. Sure, there were magazine exchanges between Murayama and editors in the West, but it was the production of the magazine above all else that let Mavo mark out a position within the Japanese cultural scene, while finding points of identification in the network elsewhere. In Dada au Japon, Marc Dachy makes a compelling case that Mavo, knowing that so few of its Western readers would actually know how to read Japanese, developed tactics for communicating by way of cover design. Details like the mechanical wheel on the back cover of issue 4 adapts the cover image from Theo van Doesburg’s Mécano, and there is a nod to Lajos Kassák’s MA in issues 5 and 6 with the capitalization of Mavo’s first two letters.⁵¹

At this point, however, I want to bring the example of Mavo to bear on the questions I raised earlier about decentralization, print protocol, and the formation of a worldwide network of little magazines. For it should be clear by now that a magazine network never emerged spontaneously out of the avant-garde ether. It was part of a more gradual process that included moments of cultural lag (in the case of typographical experiments), with some developments taking root and others not. In any case, though, Japanese writers didn’t import the little magazine from the West. The dōjinshi already existed, and it was particularly well suited for the coterie of groups that continued to pop up after the 1910s. The most obvious clash of these print cultures, however, involved the importation of avant-garde graphic design practices after 1923. Mavo forced the dōjinshi to undergo a makeover, adapting strategies that effectively transformed it into a communication device and an objet d’art. But it’s also worth noting that this particular kind of radical experimentation was short-lived in Japan and never fed into a more expansive magazine culture that continued to flourish there throughout the 1920s with Kaizō, Shi to shiron (changed to Bungaku after 1932), Dora, Shōbi•majutsu•gakusetsu, and Bungei jidai, the latter of which published the New Sensationalists. These were all major sites for what is generally considered modernist literary production in Japan, but none of them used avant-garde graphic design tactics, preferring instead a style that was modern by virtue of its typographical restraint, decluttered simplicity, and unabashed littleness.

The dōjinshi in Japan tell us a story about the little magazine network that we don’t often hear, and it’s one that involves extended spells of disconnection. Modern (and modernist) Japanese literature was seldom exported to other parts of the world through this medium. It stayed put in cities like Tokyo and Yokohama because it was intended for national consumption. Modern Japanese writers went on to import and adapt Western themes and techniques, but the dōjinshi continued to assume a shape and a size from the early 1900s that remained the same, even after the explosive intrusion of Mavo and its fellow avant-garde sympathizers. Perhaps this consistent littleness and the simplicity of the design on the page were a reaction against a modernization process that came to be identified too closely with a Western avant-garde that fell out of fashion almost as quickly as it appeared, but it’s also possible that the little magazine’s modernity in Japan was already found in this size and could be expressed more effectively on the page instead of through bold typographical experiments. Japanese modernism didn’t need to import the little magazine in order to happen: it was already there. And this particular example challenges the assumption we often make about global literary production at the beginning of the twentieth century. For it’s clear that this is not a case of a foreign form getting imported and adapted for local material. In fact, it follows the pattern of a local form adapting elements of a foreign one before reassuming the shape it had before. Making the dōjinshi new, then, was paradoxically connected with keeping it older, tied to a national coterie tradition in print dating back to the end of the nineteenth century, when modern Japanese literature first began to emerge.

And there’s a way in which this narrative about the dōjinshi in Japan can productively estrange how we imagine the beginning, middle, and end of little magazines in the West. Take a look, for example, at an image from the January 1931 issue of Shin bungaku kenkyū: it’s the reproduction of a page, left untranslated, from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Joyce’s Ulysses, and it’s positioned immediately after the cover (figure 1.9). It was a subtle design choice intended to show readers, who would not expect to find anything there, just how strange modernist Western literature could be, and not because of what the words say or as a result of asymmetrical typographical fireworks: it’s how they look, their arrangement on the page, a thick block of roman text in a sequence of lines moving from left to right, top to bottom. Ulysses, in this case, is distinguished from the rest of the pages that surround it, the quintessential modernist text represented for another audience in the same medium where parts of it originally appeared. And the point to make here is that modernism itself was always bound up with the production of literature that would, at the time it was consumed, seem strange, shocking, unfamiliar. In this case, however, the strangeness didn’t need experimental typography or design and was, most likely, not something that would come from any reading of the words: it was generated simply by reprinting one paragraphless page. By the late 1920s and into the early 1930s, many of the major works of Anglo-American modernism were arriving in dōjinshi like Shi to shiron, its editors keen to create a rigorous critical platform for evaluating modern Japanese poetry within an international context. In Japan at this time, publishing like a modernist was not tied explicitly to the medium that made modernism in the West. It was still a practice that belonged to Japan’s own modern literary past, and there is a way in which this opening up to Western modernism and the European avant-gardes effectively validated what so many other writers (in Japan and elsewhere) were already up to.

The situation I’m describing here is not unlike the one Pound was in when he first began using Ernest Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” to justify his own poetic experiments with Imagism in 1913. For Pound, this essay affirmed the legitimacy of a mode of poetic writing with a non-Western origin. In doing so, he came to believe that his own modern literary practice had roots deeply embedded in the poetic traditions of the Far East, and this discovery did not lead to the kinds of false elision between East and West that would erase their differences. Instead, it foregrounded a shared uniqueness, the same kind that we can also learn to appreciate between the dōjinshi and the little magazine once we begin realize that seeing them together within the network also requires learning to appreciate them apart.

Pound wasn’t the only one to change his mind. Back in Calcutta, an equally critical reassessment of Tagore was under way, and it came to involve questions about his continued relevance within an India that was beginning to imagine the possibility of a decolonized future. The nature of this confrontation between Tagore and a younger generation of Bengali writers has been well documented, but what interests me, in particular, is the way the little magazine was caught in the middle—a technology that arrived in India with the British Empire, got picked up by a British-educated Indian upper class (including the Young Bengal movement of the 1830s and Tagore), and was adapted by a post-Tagore generation searching for a literary (and soon political) independence that was synonymous with an anticolonial internationalism.⁵⁴

The trajectory I’ve just sketched out here looks like one more case of a colonized culture dismantling the master’s house with the master’s tools, but it involves the complicated question about the relationship between modern Bengali literature and the West and between Tagore and this modernist generation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Tagore had successfully helped to build a bridge between India and the West, but it was one that this younger generation, all of them raised on his writing, didn’t want to cross with him as their guide.⁵⁵ This resistance had less to do with any complete rejection of Tagore (which it was not) or their disinterest in literary developments abroad (which they emphatically were not) and more with the fact that they were waiting for a new literature to develop, one capable of capturing their experience in a Calcutta that continued to modernize. And even though Tagore and his detractors accused one another of aping the West—Tagore by relying on British and European writers as models, his opposition by importing Western ideas like Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis—neither of them seemed concerned that the medium they were using to stage their debates was borrowed, a medium inherited from the British Empire that was effectively changing the direction of modern Bengali literature.⁵⁶

For magazines to get made, of course, there needed to be printing presses. As was true of so many other colonized countries, it was the Christian missionaries who first brought this technology to Calcutta.⁵⁷ The Serampore Mission Press was founded in 1800, and it didn’t take long before the formation of the so-called Native Press, with many of the compositors and pressmen trained by the missionaries, was under the watchful eye of an anxious British government. In India, printing and surveillanc e went hand in hand, and numerous attempts were made over the course of the nineteenth century to catalogue, classify, and, in general, regulate everything that was published.⁵⁸ In reality, the surveillance, which increased with the appointment of a British Raj, was ineffectual because the government simply couldn’t keep up with the amount of printed material coming out in India’s cities and suburbs. By 1911, and with ninety-nine presses up and running, printing was the second-biggest industry in Calcutta.⁵⁹ It is a statistic that goes some way toward explaining the low cost, accessibility, and ease with which little magazines and other printed matter could be made during this period.

In India, the little magazine came of age with Empire, but it was not always adapted for the same ends. Tagore and his contemporaries had used it to create a Bengali literature that was distinct from a British literary tradition yet still connected through shared critical values and borrowed genres and styles. For the generation that followed, however, the magazine was more of an anticolonial device that would allow them not only to break with Tagore but also to provide examples of a modern Bengali literature that was not so clearly based on British models. And this distinction is absolutely critical if we want to understand just what the literary production of the little magazine means in a city like Calcutta at the beginning of the twentieth century: it is a strategy for independence, a way in which the very category of the literary could be modified and expanded. Understanding that this colonial context shapes what a magazine can do in India is very much what Rajat Neogy had in mind when he observed that “literary magazines in Africa are faced with burdens and responsibilities that their counterparts in other countries do not have to shoulder.”⁶⁰

To develop this point further, I need to backtrack a little to show how Tagore fit into all of this. He started out modestly enough as someone dependent on Calcutta’s lively magazine culture in the 1890s, including the ones he edited, like Sadhana (Enterprise, 1891), Pradip (1897), Bharati (Indian muse, 1898), and Bangadarsan (1901). He may have managed to attract a large Western audience, but it was not because any of these magazines traveled. In fact, Tagore was a writer who arrived in translation quickly circumscribed by the essays and reviews written by “foreign” critics. This situation is not unlike the one I described with Japan, where an entire nation-based magazine culture was largely cut off from any significant contact with a Western magazine network.

Once the magazine arrived in a country such as India, it underwent a process of assimilation and adaptation. But I’m not thinking here, in this instance, about design, style, and structure (although that certainly factors into it). Rather, I have in mind the way that the little magazine is at first a place to absorb Western models before an indigenous literature can emerge. In the case of Calcutta, this emergence involved the break with an inherited imperial tradition and the discovery of a modern, national one that was both new, in the history of Bengali literature, and cosmopolitan. By way of an example, I want to focus on Kallol (Rippling current, 1923-1929), a Bengali little magazine started by Gokulchandra Nag (born in 1895) and Dineshranjan Das (born in 1888) and widely considered one of the first modernist magazines to appear in India.⁶¹ Unlike Mavo, the “modernist” designation has very little to do with format, design, or structure, and though used to describe formal experimentation, it is not the kind associated with the high modernism of Joyce, Woolf, and Pound. Rather, “modernism,” in this case, defines the self-conscious posturing of its young editors and contributors as they set out to define a modern Bengali literature that could engage with contemporary Western ideas while still maintaining its focus on the demands of an increasingly restless and still unrealized nation, whose desires were being communicated, in part, through the noncooperation movement (1920-1922) of Mahatma Gandhi.

“I am the wave, rudderless, tumultuous, chasing sleep away,” was the slogan printed on the cover of the first issue, and it was there to signal Kallol’s youthful impatience with the past, which, in this particular case, regularly involved propping up Tagore as a punching bag. Even though Tagore had begun as a nationalist himself, supporting Home Rule for India and using his international status to criticize the more egregious displays of power by the British in India, his political engagement faded significantly after 1909, giving way to a mysticism that many of his detractors identified with an unchecked Anglophilia.⁶² To make matters worse, they claimed, Tagore was willfully disengaged from the social realities of modern Calcutta.⁶³ Kallol, then, was driven by the desire less to look outward from India than to look inward, and in order to do so, it actively fashioned a new optics that would bring “the world of the lower middle classes,” including “the coal mines,…slums, pavements into the neighborhoods of those who were rejected and deceived.”⁶⁴ Another contributor, particularly perturbed by Tagore’s pure and immaculate heroes and heroines, elaborated further: “In their troubles, they are still bereft of muddiness or filth. But it could be that in the very mud that Tagore avoids, there reside sparks of a person’s true nature…. Tagore searches for truth in beauty and has never been tempted to descend into the dirt to search for the great truths that may be hidden there.”⁶⁵

Kallol may have had an explicit social agenda, but its literary politics were visible, ironically enough, in the relative absence of English writers. Kris Manjapra points out, in fact, that in its six-year run, there were thirty-one different modernist writers who appeared in its pages, and with the exception of six, all of them were from Norway, Japan, Russia, and the defeated nations of postwar Europe. This particular detail reveals that Kallol’s unspoken editorial program involved finding contemporary writers from countries outside the British Empire, and in doing so, it could imagine itself within a world literary scene without having to move across the English Channel. With Kallol’s literary politics in mind, then, it will come as no surprise to discover that the term world literature, which gets picked up from the English and translated into Bengali (Visva Sāhitya), was one of the critical keywords employed by those who were involved with the magazine, carrying with it an anticolonial valence that Manjapra reads as a desire “to delimit zones for artistic and political life that opposed literary forms of classic English literature and impugned the moral claims of the British imperial order.”⁶⁶ Kallol was actively asserting itself into an international magazine network by establishing its distance from England. In fact, you could argue that it provided a model for the modernist Bengali magazines that followed—Kalikalam (1926), Pragati (1927), Parichay (1931), and Kabita (1935)—none of them looking for links abroad to legitimize what they were doing at home. This leaves us, finally, with one more example of the network as a site for production that worked through disconnection. Kallol’s internationalism was defined by its relative isolation, refusing to measure its worldliness against what was happening in the metropolitan centers of the West.

Berlewi’s worldwide network of periodicals remains a dynamic cultural formation for literary historical analysis even if it continues to elude any comprehensive attempts to explain how it functioned in the welt. Indeed, we may have the digital archives, the computational data, and the algorithms under construction, but we still need the critical methods that will make it possible to think comparatively about little magazines on a global scale and identify the connections as much as the disconnections (deliberate and accidental), the dispatches and the design. The modernist histories of the Japanese dōjinshi and Bengali patrika make it clear that the categorical definitions of the medium itself are so entrenched in local, national contexts that it’s impossible to ignore the effects of specific print cultures, histories, and political climates on production and their influence on where each title could fit, and not, in the network. If network analysis is ever going to bring us closer to an understanding of little magazines worldwide, it will invariably have to confront the materiality itself, acknowledging that even if magazines can be abstracted for their data and visualized on the screen, they are and remain a medium first and foremost. Together they generated a national and international system for communication that had the power to make writers and critics alike feel as if a network was out there somewhere, even if they were not exactly sure how to map it or where they fit in.

It’s tempting to consider the network as a postnational paradigm for modernism and its magazines, an imagined community that the technology of today is moving far beyond the nation. And yet, as I’ve tried to explain, doing so, we risk losing out on that transnational friction and locational specificity so crucial to little magazine production, communication, and disconnection. When describing the “global aspect” of Fluxus in the 1960s, George Brecht believed that the movement was more “anational” than “international” because all the points could proliferate “at any place on earth where there is life.”⁶⁷ Little magazines played a critical role in the global proliferation of Fluxus but not because the members or their media were somehow “anational.” They derived their force from production at a specific address within the borders of a specific nation, using the world post as a convenient transport system that could connect individuals, leaving traces along the way. In that way, I guess you could say, they were postnational, the addresses and stamps that appeared on the magazines, postcards, and letters marks of a global journey, reaffirming the idea that a network, which could never be seen in its entirety, was, in fact, working.