Modernism, Empire, World Literature

In November 1929, Eugene O'Neill wrote George Jean Nathan from overseas to protest the critical response to Strange Interlude in Berlin and The Hairy Ape in Paris. "O'Neill's letter from France," writes Joe Cleary in his eminently readable and consistently intelligent Modernism, Empire, World Literature, "displays how American writers continued to feel that the European intelligentsia persisted in condescending to the United States despite the latter's increasing international importance" (198). The "world literary system," a kind of semiautonomous double of the world capitalist system, with its imperial centers, metropolitan, and colonial peripheries, is the subject of Cleary's book. His analysis of the shifting relationships among European and American empires; their political, economic, and colonial spheres of influence; and the modernist literature that emerged from these shifts provides a fresh and expanded context in which to reconsider the significance of O'Neill's plays.O'Neill is only one of a group of Anglophone and, without exception, male writers in whose work Cleary discerns a complex experience of national belonging, of literary language, and of aesthetic ambition that we continue to call modernism. In a series of chapters anchored by superb, close readings, Cleary examines the work of Henry James, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, O'Neill, and Derek Walcott, tracing their sometimes cautious, sometimes audacious, sometimes triumphalist, sometimes traumatic attempts not only to "find a sanctioned place within stable or destabilized literary systems," but more crucially, "to draw the structures and dynamics of the system into their own forms, to make them an object of aesthetic reflection" (47). So, what is a world literary system?Cleary takes his bearings from two important texts: Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters (1999) and Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (1994). From the first he derives the basic outline of "a world literary system that comes into being by means of international struggles for cultural distinction" (8). Using Arrighi as a guide, Cleary claims—compellingly—that crises shaking the "capitalist world system" from around 1890 to the Cold War effectively transferred the center of that system from Europe to North America. When Ezra Pound writes in 1929, the same year as O'Neill's letter to Nathan, that "we speak a language that was English," Cleary understands him as unambiguously asserting that the new identity and experience of contemporary literature, and indeed of the language in which it takes shape, has been remade by modernist writers not from England but from the United States and Ireland.As an Irish American writer whose posthumous masterpiece premiered at Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre in 1956, O'Neill could be the poster child for Cleary's thesis. Although "O'Neill never quite captured the American popular or modernist imagination with any single work," the author writes, "his real legacy resides . . . in his career-long struggle to create an American high cultural or literary theater, a foundational feat at least as arduous and ambitious as that which Ibsen achieved for Norway, Strindberg for Sweden, or that Yeats, with less success, undertook for Ireland" (203). These are not mere analogies or comparisons. That O'Neill's efforts had actually to pass through Ibsen, Strindberg, Yeats, and others only testifies to the transatlantic exchanges paradoxically necessary for the creation of a modern, and to Cleary's mind at least, modernist American theater. In the context of Cleary's world system, O'Neill appears less "influenced" by these European giants than "indebted" to them—a word Cleary develops into a full-blown concept in his Joyce chapter. One should attend to the echoes of the language of development and dependency at play here. Indebtedness in Joyce, like miserliness, profligacy, or addiction in O'Neill, are indicative of Cleary's thesis that Anglophone, modernist works inscribed the pressures and demands of the world system into their formal procedures. As in the letter to Nathan, aesthetics and economics become discursively and materially inextricable.In his account of Long Day's Journey Into Night, Cleary records many of those debts as acknowledged and repaid with interest, including perhaps a debt to Joyce. A tissue of quotations, some nearly indiscernible, some subtle, others "operatic," O'Neill's reflexive ghost play works its way through the Tyrone family's library of English and European letters to create a portrait of four thwarted artists: two actors, a poet, and a musician. The play, then, chronicles a matrix of economic-aesthetic investments and the subjectivities that form their lived correlatives: miserliness, resentment, addiction, and dissipation. And like Joyce's Ulysses, Long Day's Journey "binds its narrative action to the diurnal movement of the clock over a single day." But unlike Joyce's novel, O'Neill's play lacks any hint of "comedy," much less optimism. For Cleary it is "one of the most extreme examples," along with Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, of a turn from all "bourgeois solaces . . . that would set modernism on a path of negation of progress and affirmation that it would have to follow through to its bitter post-World War II completion" (236). According to Cleary, with Mary Tyrone's final "threnody," O'Neill rejects the redemptive powers of art, religion, and even the religion of art many, like David Savran, have accused him of cultivating and to which many of his modernist contemporaries clung, as if to an opiate. The brashness of 1929 was long gone. And yet, in perhaps a terrible irony, O'Neill's plays become an essential fund of the cultural currency turning the United States from a debtor to creditor nation of the world literary system.In many ways O'Neill is an outlier in Cleary's procession of male modernist luminaries. The playwright never posed as a theorist of either modern drama or modern letters, and he certainly left behind no substantial body of criticism, setting him apart from figures like James, Pound, and Eliot. And although like Joyce and later Walcott, many of his works unfold within, even as they displace, classical models, they never overburden those models with forms of erudition or compete with them in construction.What O'Neill does offer Cleary, however, is a crucial sensitivity to modernist time. His O'Neill chapter, devoted exclusively to Long Day's Journey Into Night, concludes by placing the dramatist's masterpiece under the sign of "lateness" (241). If the Irish and Americans were, as Pound averred, successful in restructuring the world literary system, they were nevertheless "latecomers to the canons of world literature. The modernist masterworks that won them entry to these canons disclose in their forms, morbidly and magnificently maybe, the distress of that lateness" (241). It is the Irish American O'Neill who registers this belatedness most sublimely. "Time" is, or perhaps gets, the last word in Long Day's Journey. And it marks a moment when modernism recognizes itself as neither origin nor end, break nor fulfillment, but as anxious supplement. With its running time of nearly four hours, Long Day's Journey enacts modernism's time made palpable in Mary Tyrone's final sentences: "That was the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time." In Cleary's capable reading, we are meant to hear that "Yes, I remember" somewhere between Joycean ecstasy and Clement Greenberg's 1955 triumphalism: "Literature—yes, we know we have done some great things in that line; the English and French have told us so. Now they can begin to tell us the same about our painting" (240). Between Molly's breathlessness and abstract expressionism, what O'Neill offered up was the critical experience and challenge of time that formed the very substance of his theater.Are there problems with Cleary's book? Yes, of course. Here I will list three. First, his reliance, especially in the early chapters, upon René Girard and Harold Bloom in order to grasp the literary or "mimetic" rivalries among authors for dominance in the world system substitutes a speculative anthropology (Girard) or an Oedipal model (Bloom) of explanation in place of a more material and historically thick examination. Cleary asserts the importance of criticism, of the formation of canons of taste and authorial "consecration," but he examines critical discourse very little. The same goes for the role of magazines, reviews, and the publishing (and translation) industries more generally. Despite his avowed "materialism," then, he does not explore the material channels and discourses through which the world system is produced and so produces its unequal effects. Second and relatedly, the outsize place of Girard and Bloom as theoretical touchstones seems, at least in part, responsible for the exclusively male cast of characters in Cleary's story. By framing the competition of literary empires or nations as the "mimetic rivalries" of male American and Irish modernists with their literary antecedents, Cleary sometimes obscures rather than illuminates the dense and indeed gendered historical and discursive textures through which modernism wove itself. Third, the O'Neill chapter betrays a remarkable lack of interest in O'Neill scholarship. But this can be partly excused, I think, because of the ways in which Cleary's thesis recontextualizes and revitalizes an appreciation of O'Neill's literary struggles and accomplishments.Finally, and more positively, the last chapter on Derek Walcott, which I found very interesting, places the Caribbean writer within the context of the rise of American writing programs as critical infrastructure and crucible of writerly subjectivity in the newly configured world literary system. The centrality of the university system to the literary ascendancy of the United States cannot be overstated. The contemporary convulsing of that system might have formed the subject of an apt epilogue for this fine book.