Edward P. Comentale, Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 261 pp. (+x) ISBN 0521835895

Greenberg, Jonathan

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature
Volume 5
Number 2 Winter 2006 Article 5
Winter 2006
Review of Edward P. Comentale, Modernism,
Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde.
Jonathan Greenberg
Montclair State University
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Recommended Citation
Greenberg, Jonathan (2006). Review of "Review of Edward P. Comentale, Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-
Garde.," Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature: Vol. 5 : No. 2
Available at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/vol5/iss2/5
  
BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, Volume 5 , Number 2 (Winter 2006) 
 
Edward P. Comentale, Modernism, Cultural 
Production, and the British Avant-Garde. New York and 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 261 pp. (+x) ISBN 
0521835895. 
Reviewed by Jonathan Greenberg  
Montclair State University 
How does Marxist theory understand literary modernism? From modernism's 
beginnings, the question has famously provoked debate. Lukács rejected 
modernism as a decadent replication of the social atomization caused by 
capitalism, while Brecht upheld it as a critique of that atomization capable of 
mobilizing critical judgment. Some eighty years later, this question of 
whether modernism challenges or supports the existing order still sparks 
debate both within Marxist theory and without. Fueled by the notoriously 
illiberal politics of Pound, Eliot and Company, stoked by provocative titles 
and subtitles (John Harrison's The Reactionaries, Fredric Jameson's The 
Modernist as Fascist), it continues to generate heat within the current 
renaissance of modernist studies. And while Edward P. Comentale's 
forcefully argued Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-
Garde may not answer the question once and for all, it will surely render 
discussion of the topic more complex and intelligent. 
Combining high-flying theory with carefully grounded historicism, 
Comentale offers fresh and surprising readings of major modernist figures at 
every dialectical turn. As part of a still vigorous trend toward thick 
description of the social background to modernist aesthetics, Comentale's 
book assembles details of Edwardian liberalism, wartime labor, and 
suffragist activism to portray an early twentieth-century Britain caught in a 
whirl of ceaseless and meaningless creating, selling, buying, and consuming. 
This hyperproductive and repetitive economic system was buttressed, 
Comentale argues, by a bourgeois ideology that (expressing its internal 
contradictions) monotonously demanded newness. Yet despite this 
oppressive order, it remained possible for experimental writers, thinkers and 
artists to apprehend, analyze and even denounce such an ideology, even if 
they by no means did so consistently. In the end, then, Comentale offers 
neither a blanket apology for, nor a wholesale condemnation of, the British 
avant-garde, discovering within it both radical and reactionary tendencies. Or 
perhaps it's better to say that he offers both apology and condemnation, for 
he minces no words: he extends enthusiastic praise for those artists in whose 
work he finds progressive potential (Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, H.D.) and 
sharp-tongued scorn for those whom he sees as covert champions of 
the status quo (Eliot, Woolf, Owen). 
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BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, Volume 5 , Number 2 (Winter 2006) 
 
Comentale frames his reading of the British avant-garde within an old 
opposition, that of romanticism versus classicism, but he transforms this 
dichotomy into something beyond the familiar textbook debate. Although he 
has little interest in rehabilitating the romantic version of modernism (which 
he sees as aggrandizing the ego and separating the artist from the material 
world), he gives classicism a thorough critical refurbishing. By and large, 
literary scholars, following Pound's distinction between hard and soft, or 
Eliot's between tradition and individual talent, have understood classicism as 
objective and disciplined, and romanticism as subjective and decadent. But 
Comentale, reading dialectically, sees both poles as symptomatic of a single 
bourgeois ideology, and seeks to recover a "living classicism" that can 
mediate between and ultimately supercede them. As realized by certain 
members of the avant-garde, this living classicism "exposes the necessary 
tensions within an always changing and somewhat hostile environment" 
(19). It ceaselessly negotiates between subject and object, artist and material, 
and makes visible the (non-alienated) labor necessary to artistic creation. 
The prime exemplar of such classicism for Comentale is Wyndham Lewis, 
who occupies pride of place in his introduction. (Indeed, the centrality of 
Lewis not only to this work, but to recent studies by Douglas Mao, Tyrus 
Miller, and Paul Peppis, among others, indicates that it may be time to 
rechristen this period of literary history "The Lewis Era.") Lewis offers a 
theory of art that "both resists and incorporates its opposite, life," that 
"neither fully escapes nor fully reproduces the ideological forces of its 
making, but always signals those forces and their potential transformation" 
(11). In Comentale's reading, moreover, Lewis puts his theory into practice 
in the drama, Enemy of the Stars, whose very syntax unravels the 
construction of a heroic, artistic subjectivity. For Comentale, it is the 
dynamic quality of Lewis's vorticism, rather than merely its oft-discussed 
static objectivity, that offers a model for an attack on the bourgeois 
valorization of individual selfhood. 
If the book as a whole gives the aesthetics of classicism an extreme 
makeover, so the first half of the book, called "Critique," presents familiar 
modernist figures in striking new garb. For example, when standing in the 
company of F.T. Marinetti, Roger Fry looks very different from the forward-
looking champion of European post-impressionism we thought we knew; the 
violent fascism of the Futurists and the genteel liberalism of Bloomsbury are 
alike for Comentale in that they offer only the empty gestures of rebellion: 
"Like Marinetti, Fry does little more than adapt the principles of bourgeois 
aestheticism to the productive imperative of bourgeois culture" (55). A 
made-over Virginia Woolf will also turn heads with her new look; although 
Comentale judges her a better materialist than Fry, he argues that her work is 
shot through with "class fears and bourgeois values" (57), and that it fully 
attends only to the suffering of upper-class women. And old, reliable T.S. 
Eliot, although still the Christian conservative we met in college, is regarded 
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BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, Volume 5 , Number 2 (Winter 2006) 
 
anew through the lens of Max Weber's Protestant work ethic, a lens with 
which Comentale adeptly brings into focus seemingly disparate elements of 
the life and work: Eliot's New England Protestant heritage, his career as a 
banker, his ironic and masochistic self-scrutiny, his fondness for metaphors 
of profit and loss. One startling result is a reading of The Waste Land as an 
example of a Marcusean affirmative culture that valorizes sacrifice, redeems 
suffering, and offers the reader no critical tools by which she might mediate 
"between an acute particularity and an incoherent totality" (94). Who knew 
that what the thunder really said was, "Don't Worry, Be Happy?" 
If these re-readings tend toward the Lukácsian in their critique, the second 
half of the book, "Construction," might be called Brechtian in its emphasis 
on the positive side of modernist experiment. A short chapter on T.E. Hulme 
-- who is here valued as a poet in his own right and not simply a guru for 
Pound and Eliot -- decouples his classicism from his religious conservatism, 
thus freeing classicist aesthetics for more progressive ends. A particularly 
impressive chapter on the Great War combines readings of letters from 
British soldiers in the trenches, an acute application of Freud to the 
narcissistic masochism of Wilfred Owen's war poetry, and interpretation of 
Gaudier-Brzeska's sculptural practice that relates it to his own experience on 
the front. Throughout this chapter, Comentale does exactly the kind of 
mediation between the particular and general that he asks modernist art to 
do: the liberally quoted letters from infantrymen speak with enormous 
affective power, yet he never forgets to use such testimony to theorize the 
relation between wartime experience and the socioeconomic system of the 
era. In his careful reading, not only did the meaningless digging, building 
and hauling of trench warfare seem, for the working class, only to extend the 
drudgery of home-front labor, but the random violence of the war 
encouraged a resigned surrender to the cruelties of an existing order. The war 
thus brought about no promised or hoped-for release, but rather effected 
"both at home and at the front, a greater conformity of man to machine, a 
more complete proletarianization of society as a whole" (160). At the end of 
the chapter Gaudier-Brzeska (partly as rendered through Ezra Pound's 
memoir) emerges as one of the book's true heroes: respectful of the 
resistance that his material provides, open and polymorphous in his sexual 
desire, intellectually critical of Rodin's bogus affectivity, and 
temperamentally immune to the stodgy morals and prejudices of the British 
bourgeoisie. 
Comentale concludes with a reading of various feminisms of the era, which 
in his view partake of classicism's critique of the market economy. As in the 
previous chapter, Comentale begins not with literary texts but with the 
ground-level details of lived experience -- in this case the militant wing of 
the suffragist movement. Refusing to be co-opted by reformism, the militant 
suffragists enacted political protests (breaking shop windows, paralyzing 
traffic, hunger-striking) that were at once both words and deeds, articulations 
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BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, Volume 5 , Number 2 (Winter 2006) 
 
of ideas and performances of rituals. They sought not to modify the capitalist 
system but to reimagine it, and Comentale suggests that the movement's 
greatest achievement was not the expansion of the franchise but the creation 
of new discursive models of femaleness. Comentale next turns to the 
anthropologist Jane Ellen Harrison, in whose scholarship on ancient Greece 
he finds strong parallels to the pre-war political moment. Harrison, like other 
radical suffragettes, valued ritual, performance, and restraint, and 
reconstructed a model pre-Homeric culture in which intellect and emotion, 
male and female, the individual and the social, had not yet been torn apart. 
Finally, Comentale's extensive reading of H.D.'s work challenges a trend in 
modernist studies to valorize feminist modernism for pure "otherness." He 
argues that true resistance comes not through otherness -- which "can only 
reinforce the very logic upon which modernity's […] oppression is founded" 
(220) -- but through a negotiation between self and other. As in the pages on 
Eliot, Hulme, and Owen, Comentale brings a sensitive ear for tone to his 
readings of poetry, mapping for the reader the often elusive currents of 
desire, deferral and disappointment in H.D.'s spare lyrics. She, like the other 
feminists of the chapter, emerges (despite mystical or romantic tendencies) 
as a poet who fuses word and deed through ritual. She thus maintains a 
tension between clarifying stasis and productive dynamism, critical 
reflection and passionate engagement. 
It should be noted that while Comentale, as might be clear by now, adheres 
to Marxist principles, he also makes use of non-Marxist thinkers such as 
Arendt and Merleau-Ponty. Moreover, his dialectical method generally 
functions as a tactic for pushing forward critical analysis rather than a 
Procrustean grand narrative that provides answers in advance. To cite only 
one example, in his reading of fascism, Comentale hits upon two widespread 
but seemingly contradictory theses: first, that "[i]ts emphasis on order, 
hygiene, and efficiency serves to counter the decadent flux of the modern 
world," and second, that "[i]ts anarchic will to power breaks down the 
gridlock of modern rationalism, protective tariffs, and political reformism" 
(38). Rather than choosing only one formulation to explain the appeal of 
fascism, Comentale interprets these opposites as two sides of a single coin, 
and finds the fascist ideology to be "itself a contradictory order that serves to 
objectify flow and thus mimics the organized chaos of the marketplace" (38). 
With arguments such as this, Comentale consistently integrates, rather than 
ignoring or belittling, positions that superficially seem to contradict or 
complicate his own. His Marxism may be a fairly orthodox one, but it is also 
supple and canny. 
Thus it is that my lone, perhaps obligatory, complaint about the book -- that 
it tends to lump the avant-gardistes into good guys and bad guys, reminding 
us a bit too often how beastly the bourgeois is -- seems a problem that might 
easily have been avoided. For surely this very critical polarization of the 
British modernist scene (replicated in the theoretical split between Lukács 
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BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, Volume 5 , Number 2 (Winter 2006) 
 
and Brecht), might, to the dialectician, indicate some larger contradiction. 
Indeed, the proximity of Hulme's poetics to Eliot's, or Lewis's postures to 
Marinetti's, or the activism of the militant suffragettes to an unchecked 
romanticization of violence, suggests how tightly these "good" and "bad" 
strands of modernism were intertwined. Although we surely must account 
for important but subtle differences in poetics and politics among different 
modernisms, we can also begin to recognize how necessary these different 
modernisms were to one another's creation. That said, it is only fair to 
acknowledge that this insight itself is of the sort that Comentale's fine book 
helps us to see. For Comentale not only reminds us that we should 
relentlessly question the categories through which we have interpreted 
modernism, he also, even more valuably, provides us with a working model 
of how such a questioning might proceed. 
 
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