Table Of Contenti
Modernism, War,
and Violence
ii
NEW MODERNISMS SERIES
Bloomsbury’s New Modernisms series introduces, explores, and
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Modernism: Evolution of an Idea
Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers
Modernism in a Global Context
Peter J. Kalliney
Modernism, Science, and Technology
Mark S. Morrisson
Modernism’s Print Cultures
Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey
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Modernism and the Law
Robert Spoo
The Environments of Modernism
Alison Lacivita
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Celia Marshik and Allison Pease
iii
Modernism, War,
and Violence
Marina MacKay
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CONTENTS
1 A terrible beauty is born 1
2 Modernism and the Great War 35
3 Modernism and political violence 61
4 Journeys to a war 85
5 Modernism and the Second World War 103
Epilogue: Cold War modernism? 131
Works cited 143
Bibliography 157
Index 163
vi
1
1
A terrible beauty is born
More or less consciously Europe is preparing herself for
a spectacle of much violence and perhaps of an inspiring
nobility of greatness. And there will be nothing of what
she expects.
JOSEPH CONRAD, “Autocracy and War” (83)
“You will be astonished to find how like art is to war, I mean
‘modernist’ art,” announced the writer, artist, and master- publicist
Wyndham Lewis early in Blasting and Bombardiering, his 1937
memoir of his time as a leading modernist agitator and a soldier
and veteran of the First World War. “They talk a lot about how
a war just-fi nished effects art,” Lewis wrote, “[b]u t you will learn
here how a war about to start can do the same thing. I have set out
to show how war, art, civil war, strikes and coup d’états dovetail
into each other” (4, emphasis in original).
The first purpose of this book, Modernism, War, and Violence, is
similar to the one Lewis declares. It sets out to describe the connec-
tions between modernist literary culture and the virtually continu-
ous public violence that shocked the age, although going beyond the
period with which Lewis is concerned—h e begins on the eve of the
First World War and ends with Britain’s General Strike in 1926— in
order to consider anticipations and experiences of conflict in the late
nineteenth century, and moving forward to the early Cold War, the
famous age of anxiety in which modernism found itself institution-
alized. But this book also outlines how critics in more recent decades
2
2 MODERNISM, WAR, AND VIOLENCE
have differently accounted for links between modernism and war,
modernism and violence. Readers of modernism—a nd modernists
themselves, as in the case of Lewis—h ave often sensed connections
between the massive geopolitical shocks and the aesthetic upheav-
als of the first half of the twentieth century. From the coffin-s haking
booms of Thomas Hardy’s anticipatory “Channel Firing,” a poem
he wrote in April 1914 as the Great War approached, to the sus-
penseful dread of Samuel Beckett’s Atomic- Age limbos, many mod-
ernist works have long since been understood by critics as, among
many other things, responses to the world-s hattering conditions of
their times, and as works that enacted the trauma of those times
through their signature transformations of established conven-
tions of representation. Recounting the intertwined and competing
stories that have been told about literary experiment and political
upheaval across the early twentieth century, this book sets out to
describe why so many critics have indeed found that, as Lewis sug-
gested, modernism and war “dovetail into each other.”
Modernism and war, modernism
and violence
So why not just modernism and war? Why modernism, war, and
violence? Violence is of course a precondition of war, and from any
moral point of view, its most important aspect, given what war does
to people (and to nonhuman animals and the environment). But
there were forms of violence in this period that go far beyond tra-
ditional understandings of war, which is by convention and at least
in theory, if only inconsistently in historical fact, bound by formal-
ized rules. For example, war is meant not merely to happen but to
be “declared” by one nation on another, wars are retrospectively
corralled within dates such as 1914– 18 or 1939– 45, but modern-
ists were also often deeply interested by forms of political violence
that observe none of the formalities of war. The terror in terror-
ism, for example, is derived in substantial part from the fact that
it appears to obey no obvious rules of engagement, and is liable to
strike unpredictably: an arbitrariness that may help to explain its
interest for modern writers on both sides of the Atlantic. On the eve
of modernism, the late nineteenth century saw a wave of terrorist
3
A TERRIBLE BEAUTY IS BORN 3
bombings and assassinations in the Britain Isles, the United States,
and across the European continent. Invented in the 1860s (and pat-
ented by Alfred Nobel in 1867), dynamite was “a key development
in the cultural and imaginative history of terror,” particularly in
view of the fact that it emerged alongside the burgeoning of a mass
press that could disseminate far and wide its threat and its damage
(Clymer 6– 7). Dynamite quickly became associated with political
revolutionaries, and especially with anarchists; a newspaper- fuelled
moral panic ensued because, in the words of historian Antony
Taylor, the figure of the dynamitard served as “a metaphor for the
broader dissolution of European society” (46), a sense of dissolu-
tion that could be seen as the heart of literary modernism itself.
Emerging against the background of terroristic violence, mod-
ernism also took its course alongside other forms of violence. In
the interwar years, and right across Europe, the whole idea of gov-
ernment was transformed by the rise of modern totalitarianism,
beginning with the Russian Revolution in 1917, an event abetted
by a utopian and visionary modernist intelligentsia that the politi-
cal revolution then largely disavowed (Stites 6). With consequences
that would shape the rest of the century, Mussolini took power in
Italy in 1922, Stalin in Russia in 1924, and Hitler in Germany in
1933, but the triumph of authoritarian regimes can be seen almost
everywhere in Europe between the wars, from General Pilsudski in
Poland (in 1926) and General Franco in Spain (in 1939) to King
Zog in Albania (in 1928) and King Carol in Romania (in 1938). In
1920, twenty- six of the twenty- eight European states were parlia-
mentary democracies of some kind; by 1939, just twelve of them;
by 1941, there were five (Lee, xi).
While this book is concerned primarily with violence between
states or directed in some form against the state, particular regions
such as the American South were also afflicted with other forms of
violence, in many ways more repugnant and as lastingly damaging.
Nancy Cunard’s pioneering—a nd now much discussed—a nthology
Negro (1934) assembled an extraordinary mixture of writings by
and about “the black race,” and her foreword offered as the book’s
literal starting point the contemporary context of violence against
black Americans:
The reader finds first in this panorama the full violence of the
oppression of the 14 million Negroes in America and the upsurge
