Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation begins with a bold and broad question: “What does it mean, today, to be a British novelist, or even an English writer?” (1) Walkowitz approaches this problem via each of her chosen authors’ representations of cosmopolitanism, making some key points about the various modes of social critique made possible by modernism.

The guiding theme of this book is cosmopolitanism as a trope of questioning and upheaval, where traditional category distinctions do not hold. Each chapter is on a different author – Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Ishiguro, Rushdie and Sebald are featured – and each deals with a different aspect of this questioning function. Walkowitz claims that “twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers emphasize conditions of limited or suspended agency, and they ask us to consider how conceptions of belonging are bound up in the production, classification, and reception of literary narratives” (4). This theme of belonging is not uniform, as each author uses the cosmopolitan to make the concept of ‘belonging’ problematic in a different way.

The cosmopolitan city is the perfect symbol of globalization, as it complicates “the distinction between global and local” (6), a distinction that Walkowitz (along with many other postcolonial theorists) see as arbitrary and oppressive. Instead of accepting the city as the ‘centre’, Walkowitz claims, the featured authors “approach large-scale international events…by focusing on the trivial or transient episodes of everyday life.” While this micro-focus is the unifying principle of the book, it is also its main difficulty. Is social criticism genuinely possible through a focus on the everyday, rather than on events traditionally deemed ‘important’, such as wars and conquests? When Walkowitz states that she “treats cosmopolitanism not simply as a model of community but as a model of perversity” (13), and claims that it represents an “effort to reassess the definition and temporality of progress” (15), she draws an explicit link between personal practise and political import. Although this link is not always convincingly justified in the following chapters, her argument is certainly provocative.

The rest of the book deals with how separate authors use the city in different ways. Conrad, in The Secret Agent, uses the city to expose the artificiality of national identity, its inherently constructed nature; he “presents the skilful manipulation of social details and local manners as a norm of cosmopolitan London” (38). Conrad exposes the artifice of national identity through dwelling on the “visual propaganda of the city” (44), and claims that “objects achieve meaning through social display” (45); in short, he “represents English culture as a social process” (53). Walkowitz goes on to claim that Conrad cannot accept the implications of his writing: namely, that national identity is merely a socially constructed performance.

Walkowitz’s analysis runs into difficulty, I think, when she attempts to prove conclusively that “domestic culture is full of foreign activities” (43). Analysing Conrad in the manner of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, she focuses on several objects in Conrad’s novel – for example, rubber stamps and marking ink – and draws attention to their foreign origins in India and China respectively, thus claiming that the cosmopolitan is inherently composite. But there is no evidence that Conrad used the products of Empire in this way; he may simply have been using them as props. By loading every object in The Secret Agent with subversive meaning, regardless of how commonplace these objects would have been at the time of writing, Walkowitz runs the risk of anachronism.

Other English authors are given similarly radical interpretations. Joyce, claims Walkowitz, uses triviality in his writing to question authority. Triviality, by refusing to value the colonizer’s culture over others, “reorient[s] attention to an international politics of the everyday” (57). In Portrait of the Artist, Stephen’s dialect speech is the main weapon against the authority represented by the school:

Because he is an Englishman, the dean believes that his use of English is natural, whereas Stephen’s is secondary and perhaps incorrect” (70).

Stephen’s use of triviality, then, thwarts the Dean’s attempt to relegate his language to inferior status. For Walkowitz, Stephen’s trivial and disrespectful speech exposes the links between the colonized territory of Ireland and the centre of England. The chapter on Woolf is perhaps the best in the book, and its central thesis deserves quoting:

Indeed, Woolf will purposefully exclude significant episodes – a suicide, an engagement, the breakup of a relationship, the destruction of bodies during wartime, and the procedures of colonial efficiency – in order to highlight quotidian experiences of unsocialized pleasure. (81)

Woolf’s London becomes a place where alternatives to the dominant social and national norms are both possible and expressible: Clarissa’s ambivalent sexuality and the anti-nationalism of Septimus, for example. In her vision of London, “Woolf marks out the lines of entanglement between the public, official, and faraway spaces where men fight and the small, private, enclosed spaces where women think.” (89)

Although ignoring the personal is damaging, Walkowitz does not spend much time defending Woolf against charges of narcissism, given Woolf’s implicit comparison in Mrs Dalloway of the mass slaughter of WWI with the trials of female middle-class existence. Is Woolf being solipsistic? No, Walkowitz says:

One might find Woolf’s argument uncomfortable, if not impractical, in the face of Hitler’s aggression, but Woolf’s intention is neither comfort nor practicality. (99)

Deftly shifting the blame onto the reader in this manner seems a little pat. Still, the contrast between personal and public space-time is described brilliantly:

The heroic past, captured in marble, is familiar and etched in stone; the momentary past, on the contrary, is “a present, wrapped up”, which one uncovers slowly over time” (93).

Walkowitz offers a skilfull analysis of Woolf’s fluid conception of time, and its corrosive effects on patriarchal order, making this chapter the centrepiece of the book.

The second half of the book deals with modern works by Ishiguro, Rushdie and Sebald. Ishiguro’s cities are revealed as a place from within which ‘treason’ is possible: he “proposes that treason in people, nations, and art is more reliable and sometimes more responsible than absolute or merely dutiful allegiance” (112). Rushdie’s radicalism arrives via more informal means – through wordplay, “Rushdie develops the mix-up as an analytic strategy of social confusion and cultural melange” (135). Focusing on immigrants who feel ‘out of place’ in their new homes, Rushdie rejects any notion of perfect assimilation, instead stressing “an attitude of cosmopolitanism that involves eclecticism, flirtation, courtship, nicknaming, and strategic assimilation” (138).

The final chapter, on Sebald, concludes the author’s study of modern authors. Sebald chooses to destabilize norms a different way – his cosmopolitan spaces refuse to accept the past-ness of the past; he “both extends and disorients the modern experience of place” (161). Collapsing objects from all over the world into the English setting of The Rings of Saturn, he “emphasizes the foreign entanglements both of his own endeavor and of those past endeavors, such as Joseph Conrad’s, whose example he follows and reimagines” (163). The collapse of spatial categories that formerly separated Britain from other entities is termed “panoramic history” (163), allowing the characters to “think globally and locally at the same time” (165). Sebald’s cosmopolitan England, then, is a place that is no longer able to remain separate from the effects of its Empire. Its identity, contingent on other countries, must be acknowledged.

Walkowitz writes crisply, if coolly, and despite her use of several abstruse theorists (e.g. Deleuze), she is always clear. The differences between the writers, in terms of their characterisation of cosmopolitanism, are clearly demarcated, and the overarching point about cosmopolitanism as a figure of destabilisation is well expressed. The only difficulty, as noted above, is one of plausibility: Walkowitz has a tendency (for a sceptic like me, at least) to overstate the political importance of her chosen authors’ intensely personal focus. Despite this quibble, the book is a brilliant illustration of the diverse ways in which authors explore the vital theme of the cosmopolitan.


Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation
(2006)

by Rebecca L Walkowitz
Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231137508
231pp AU$52.95