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Modernism Without the Modernists:

A Response to Walter Benn Michaels

Marjorie Perloff
Published in Modernism/Modernity Vol 3, no. 3 (September 1996): 99-106.
The thesis of Walter Benn Michaelss Our America could hardly be clearer or more forcefully argued. It goes
like this. Whereas the major writers of the Progressive periodLondon, Dreiser, Whartonwere
comparatively indifferent to questions of both racial and national identity, (8) the literature of the post-war,
of the 1920s, is characterized by its particular brand of nativism, that is, its commitment to the notion that
ones identity is defined by racial difference. Whereas the Progressivists believed in the fabled melting pot, in
the possibility of wholesale assimilation into U. S. citizenry, the pluralist 1920s. substituting a faith in
difference for one in the superiority of any one group, wanted to preserve racial purity at all costs.
Accordingly, identity comes to be defined by ones difference from themfrom those whose blood might
contaminate ones own. The fear of miscegenation and of the reproductive family now become powerful; the
homosexual family and the incestuous family thus emerge as parallel technologies in the effort to prevent
half-breeds (49).
Michaels exemplifies this thesis with literally dozens of examples, primarily from the fiction of the period. In
William Faulkners The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compsons desire to convince others that he has
committed incest with his sister Caddy is an attempt through language to substitute the blood ties of family
for the affective and/or legal ties of love and marriage (5). In this respect, Quentin and Jason are really not
all that different; both believe, in their own way, that blood is blood (3). Or again, in F. Scott Fitzgeralds
The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanans aversion to Gatsby has less to do with class than with race. For who is
Gatsby? Is he perhaps a Jew, hanging out as he does with the likes of Meyer Wolfsheim? In any case, he is
not one of us, any more than is Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises. But then that novels hero, Jake Barnes,
functions as Cohns alter ego: Jakes war wound, which has left him impotent, Michaels argues, is again an

emblem of the nativist fear of the reproductive family. In staying single, Jake preserves his racial identity.
And so on. From Willa Cathers The Professors House to Nella Larsens Passing and Quicksand, from Jean
Toomers Cane to Carl Van Vechtens Nigger Heaven, nativism is the engine that drives human behavior, and
in the1920, nativism depends first and last on understanding ones Americanness as racial difference. In
Oliver La Farges Laughing Boy, for example, Slim Girls genealogical ambition is to have children who are
all Navajo (71), even as Nella Larsens Clare learns that passing destroys the purity of her own identity.
One must be true to ones racial self.
Pluralism thus turns out to be the bogey. Whereas Progressivist claims to racial superiority inevitably
involved the appeal to standards that were understood as common to all races . . . . the pluralist can prefer his
own race only on the grounds that it is his (137). The commitment to pluralism is the commitment to the
primacy of identity (140), and thus to what Michaels calls identity essentialism (140). Indeed, there can
be no coherent anti-essentialist account of race (134). For the particular contribution of pluralism to racism
is to make racial identity into its own justification. (137). And when that happensas is, according to
Michaels, the cultural condition todayracism prevails.
But why did this form of nativism occur in the 1920s and recur in the1990s? What about the six decades in
between? And why should miscegenation be such a taboo if the racial Other is considered not inferior but
merely different, as Michaels claims? These issues are avoided by a curious sleight-of-hand. The inevitable
reductionism of Michaelss project (the discussion of Gatsby, for example, must play down the role of Nick
Carraway so as to foreground Tom Buchanans fears) is acknowledged and declared necessary, given the
revisionist aim of Our America, which is to provide, not close readings of specific texts, but a large-scale
reinterpretation of modernism. For American nativism is evidently synonymous with American modernism,
which is, in its turn, synonymous with the American fiction (few works of other genres are included) of
the1920s.
For most literary historians, as for theorists of modernism, the great modernist innovations were in place well
before World War I. In his recent Modernisms, for example, Peter Nicholls characteristically begins with
Charles Baudelaire even as T. J. Clarks earlier The Painting of Modern Life began with Manet. But then
Michaelss modernism is best described as a modernism without the modernists, for the most canonical
American modernist writers Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D. Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes are eliminated
from Michaels American modernist canon, presumably because they lived abroad and took an interest in
non-American persons and places. For example:
the endpoint of the heritage whose origin Pound locates in Jefferson is . . . Benito Mussolini:
The heritage of Jefferson . . . is HERE, NOW in the Italian peninsula at the beginning of the
fascist second decennio, not in Massachusetts or Delaware. This heritage is thus in no way
distinctively American, any more than it is distinctly Italian. Rather, it is disassociated from any
particular nationality and, indeed, from nationality as such, a concept which Pound tended to link
disparagingly with provincialism. And, by the same token, the ancestors to whom Eliot
appeals in Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) not only extend beyond. . . his American
predecessors to the whole of the literature of Europe but beyond Europe as well to all the
poetry that has ever been written. Neither Eliots tradition nor Pounds heritage is in any
sense national. . . . (102)
What this line of reasoning ignores is that the very idea of linking Jefferson to Mussolini is itself a
profoundly nativist theme. It assumes that the desire to transcend ones native grounds, to assert ones
difference from ordinary Americans, again, by the way, on the grounds of racial purity of some sort (e.g.,
true Americans know that their heritage can never just be American!), is a desire that can somehow be
satisfied, even as Quentin thinks that saying he has had incest with Caddy means that it really happened.

Similarly, Eliots desire in Tradition and the Individual Talent to place his own poetry in relation to all the
poetry that has ever been written (102), could only have been made by a poet self-consciously American,
and hence self-consciously inserting himself into the European arena where poetry does flourish. Just try to
imagine Marcel Proust or Stphane Mallarm or Paul Valry claiming that theirs was a heritage that
transcended their national identity!
Ironically, a consideration of Pounds or Eliots nativism would have thickened the plot of Michaelss
narrative. Think of Eliots East Coker, with its claim for a racial identity (pure English stock) that
distinguishes the poet from those others who have names like Sweeney or Bleistein. But even if we grant
Michaels his donne, even if we assume that such internationalists as Eliot and Pound, Stein and Barnes are
outside the nativist orbit, how, can we equate nativism with modernism, when Michaels also eliminates
such notable stay-at-homes as Wallace Stevens, whose name does not so much as appear in Michaelss index,
even though Stevenss first great book, Harmonium, appeared in 1923? The answer is not hard to find.
Clearly, if one substitutes for Eliot and Stevens, such texts as Anzia Yezierskas Bread Givers or La Farges
Laughing Boy, novels currently being read precisely on account of their multicultural rather than their literary
interest, then of course one can come up with a reinterpretation of modernism as racially motivated. The
reasoning is patently circular: (1) Modernism has traditionally been defined as X. (2) Minority studies of the
modernist period have unearthed a number of novels that are more properly characterized as Y. Therefore (3)
Modernism should be redefined as Y.
Thus nativism = modernism: such equations occur in Our America because its analytic mode is structuralist
rather than in any sense historical. The identitarian paradigm once introduced recurs with minor variations in
novel after novel: Michaelss synopses and exegeses become as repetitive and interchangeable as do the
characters in The Professors House and The Sun Also Rises. There is a Gotcha! quality to all this, as if to
say, Oh, so you thought Gatsby dealt with the power of human illusion or with the failure of the American
dream and so on, but what the novel is really about is race. The static nature of the analyses is insured by the
curious absence of history. Why was the post-war so different from the Progressivist era? What is it that
happened that made pluralism and its attendant racism so prominent? To explore the changing demographics
or immigration patterns of the1920s, to understand the effect of a world war on the modernist ethos, would
have gone a long way in explaining why Robert Cohn figures so prominently in The Sun Also Rises or why
Tom Buchanan is reading a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires. An historical study, especially of
the war period, would also demonstrate in what ways identity essentialism became important in nations
other than the U. S. In Thomas Manns Buddenbrooks (1903), for example, national identity is still an
attribute one has as a German citizen plain and simple, and the emphasis is on social and economic class. But
for the Mann of The Magic Mountain (1927), racialized identity has become a central concern. The shifting
of national boundaries after the war, the influx of Eastern European Jews into Germany and the West, the
questions of the Sudetenland and Alsace-Lorraine: all these produced a strong emphasis on the need for racial
purity.
Just as literary texts seem to have no historical determinants, so they have, in Michaelss spatialized,
structuralist paradigm, no authors. He makes, for example, no distinction between Ernest Hemingway, an
author who never offers the slightest critique of the anti-Semitism of his central charactersan anti-Semitism
that he obviously shares and Faulkner, whose understanding of the complexities of black as of white people
is of a very different order. Or again, Hart Cranes touching explanation, made in a letter to his patron Otto
Kahn, that he is having difficulties completing his long poem The Bridge, whose aim, so the poet claims, is
nothing short of writing the myth of America, is simply taken at face value: Cranes efforts to capture the
myth, we read, revolve around the figure of Pocahontas (48). But this is to underplay the intense lyric
charge of The Bridge, its inability to produce the myth of America, even as the poet himself is cruelly
anatomized.
History doesnt count, authors dont count, and, perhaps most problematically, the reader doesnt count. No

matter that 99% of Faulkners readers are entranced precisely by the differences between Jason and Quentin
(and Quentin and , and Quentin and Caddy) rather than the obvious similarities of the Compson siblings. No
matter that no one outside the American Studies classroom would so much as read the many minor ethnic
novels that provide Michaels with his exempla. In fact, the weight of evidence, the endless plot summarizing
and teasing out of nativist themes becomes quite tedious, even in this short book. Tedious, that is, until the
last ten or so pages, when the books polemic thrust is spelled out, when Michaels unleashes his critique of
our own identitarian moment, a moment in which, all too often, the American past is understood as the
Native American past, the African American past, the Jewish American past, and so on. (p. 128)
Why, asks Michaels plaintively, does it matter who we are? For the real question . . . is not which past
should count as ours but why any past should count as ours. . . . the history we study is never our own; it is
always the history of people who were in some respects like us and in other respects different. When,
however, we claim it as ours, we commit ourselves to the ontology of the Negro, to the identity of we and
they and the primacy of race (128). Thus, instead of who we are being constituted by what we do, what
we do is justified by who we are (140; my emphasis). Such pluralism or identity-essentialism, Michaels
believes, is itself the thinly veiled racism we now practice.
But to what extent is who we are determined by what we do? As the Austrian and German Jews found
out by 1932 or 33, what they didwhich was pretty much what all other Germans didcut no ice with the
Nazis, no matter how well-educated, assimilated, baptized, church-going, or blond and blue-eyed they might
have been. And what about Bosnia, where the Serbs have brutally murdered and raped women identified
simply by the signifier of gender as women, never mind what these women had said or done? In an imperfect
world, as the history of our brutal century has taught us, identity is largely a question of how others perceive
us. And that perception depends, in turn, on a host of psychological, political, and cultural factors, with each
case being slightly different.
It is this sense of difference that brings us backor it should bring us backto the question of the literary.
What is literature anyway and why should we study it? On the last page of Our America, we read:
. . . nativist modernism invented a new form of racism and produced a new model not only of
American identity but of the other identitities that would now be available in America. . . .
Because that conception of culture found its fullest expression as a literary phenomenon and
(not, in my view, coincidentally) because the decade of the 20s produced a great number of
exceptionally interesting literary works, I have focused most of my attention on American
literary modernism. Whether or not the privileged position of literature as the carrier of cultural
heritage is enviable, it is real and, even though it would certainly be useful to deal with a range
of phenomena wider than I have attempted, I believe that any account of nativist modernism
would end up making American literary history central (141-42).
The assumptions behind this eloquent conclusion deserve to be unpacked. Why, to begin with, should
literature be the privileged carrier of cultural heritage? Why not music or the visual arts or
historiography? More important: the notion of literature as a carrier (it sounds like a vaccine!) implies
that it dispenses something outside and above literature that is real and can be accessed by means of a
verbal conduit. But what and where is this really real that the literary vaccine injects?
The decade of the 20s, Michaels insists, produced a great number of exceptionally interesting literary
works. A strange statement, this, coming from an anti-aestheticist like Michaels. For what is it that makes
literary works interesting? And what is it that makes interesting works literary? Since Michaels refuses
all qualitative criteria, confuting, as the dust jacket of Our America puts it, the canonical, the popular, and
the less familiar, we can only conclude that what makes certain literary works of the 1920s exceptionally
interesting is that they exemplify the nativism that is Michaelss subject. Those works of the 1920s that

dont so exemplifysay Stevenss The Snow Man or Cranes Voyages, or Steins portrait of Czanne
are evidently not exceptionally interesting. And evidently they are not literary either since they are not
privileged carriers of the nativist message.
I believe, writes Michaels, that any account of nativist modernism would end up making American
literary history central. Here is the salvage operation by which Michaelss brand of cultural studies would
like to save literature, to preserve it as a field of study. But it will not do. For why do we need to study
literature in order to learn about the identity politics of the1920s? Surely there are more informative and
efficient ways than to read dozens of what are largely undistinguished novels. What, in other words, can
literature teach us that the study of American history, culture, and politics cant? Indeed, I would posit that
if literature has no other function than to be the privileged carrier of cultural heritage, its study will soon be
an anachronism. If we can offer our students nothing better than the moral imperative to read the novels of
Nella Larsen and Jean Toomer and Willa Cather because they will teach us about the cultural heritage that
they carry, the response is likely to be a collective and extended yawn. What nineteen-year old will be
impelled to read lesser novels written seventy years ago on that argument?
The study of literature, modernist or otherwise, needs better justification than Michaels gives it. The
fascination exerted by, say, The Sound and the Fury is that it is at once utterly specific and documentary (one
can go to Oxford, Mississipi and photograph the buildings that people Faulkners universe) and yet entirely
imaginary, mythological, and fantastic. Insofar as the novel embodies nativist notions of miscegenation and
reproductive marriage, it resembles the work of any number of lesser novelists, as Michaels points out. But if
we regard the glass as half full rather than half empty, we would have to go further and say, yes but look at
the astonishing subtlety of Faulkners treatment of the nativist theme. Again, if the nativist project were all,
why the astonishing linguistic invention that characterizes The Sound and the Fury? Why not just substitute a
Cliff-Notes prcis for the novel? Surely the ideas remain intact. And at the ideological level, it may well be
the case that Faulkners novel is no more interesting than La Farges Laughing Boy, which dates from the
same year (1929).
Ironically, then, Michaels contention that the notion of a racialized identity will emerge as the crucial
feature of modernism (p. 141), is itself nothing if not an essentialist, indeed an inadvertently racist, claim.
For modernism does not, cannot belong to the United States alone, much less to any segment of U. S. culture
or decade of U. S. writing. Modernism, as I noted above, goes back at least as far as Baudelaire and Manet in
France and includes the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky and fiction of Andrey Bely at least as much as it
includes the fiction of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. To cordon off American modernism, not to mention the
fiction of the American1920s, from the larger world in which it functioned is to assume the existence of a
national (and hence also racial) purity, an ethos that separates us from them.
But even if we could define American modernism according to its time frame, nationality, and set of family
resemblances, it is impossible to assert that it has one crucial feature. Michaels knows this well enough,
knows that his discussion of nativist modernism has less to do with the 1920s than with what he perceives to
be the regressive identity politics of our own day. But in insisting that nativism, with its attendant racism is
the crucial feature of American modernism, Michaels is doing no more than perpetuating a narrow
stereotype of Americanness. Broaden the base, substitute Gertrude Steins Geography and Plays (1922) for
Carl Van Vechtens Nigger Heaven, or Djuna Barness Greenwich Village sketches and short stories for
Sherwood Andersons Dark Laughter (1925) and watch the map of American modernism change its shape.
Paradoxically, Our America will thus be of interest chiefly to those already committed to the racialized
identity politics Michaels claims to be critiquing. Its prerequisite is a familiarity with the ethnic literature of
the 1920s a literature that stakes its claim precisely on racial and cultural grounds. But for those of us who
are not racial purists and who do not subscribe to the cultural heritage theory of literary texts, Our America
is not so much wrong-headed as it is tautological. Race is always and only race. But then what? The

difference, as Gertrude Stein (and, by the way, just what was her racial identity?) put it in Tender Buttons,
is spreading. [1]

FOOTNOTES
[1]
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York:
Vintage, 1990), p. 461.
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