The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945

Review | Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism

Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism. By Cara L. Lewis. Cornell University Press, 2020. xi + 314 pp. $55.95 (cloth); $35.99 (ebook).

Reviewed by Monique Rooney, Australian National University

“I have said that modernist form is dynamic—a word from the Greek for power, strength, force. We have both overestimated and underestimated the power of form in modernism, and the real force of form is not quite what we believed” (229). These two sentences conclude Cara L. Lewis’s Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism, bringing to an enigmatic close Lewis’s study of the transformative melding of eclectic media that energizes modernist literature. The power of Dynamic Form lies not only in the persuasiveness of this argument but also in its handling of a set of texts the character of which—in tending to be “overestimated” or “underestimated”—are never “quite what we believed” (229).

In supple prose that unfurls a series of perspicacious readings, Dynamic Form persuades its reader of the force of a form that mutates, migrates, joins forces with other forms, adapts, creates and recreates. As revealed through Lewis’s analysis, sculpture, painting, photography, and cinema brought new energy to literature. Of the five modernist writers discussed, three (Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein) wrote art criticism or published essays about the visual arts, two (Mina Loy and Evelyn Waugh) trained as visual artists, and one (Stein) hosted a Parisian salon where artists and writers networked socially. And, of course, “[t]hey all went to the cinema” (3).

The first half of Dynamic Form is about the plasticity of the texts modernists made through intermedial encounters and approaches. Chapter One is a “sculptural” reading of the golden bowl in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. Lewis first delineates the novel’s analogy between Ovid’s Galatea and Charlotte Stant, who is initially described as being like a “statue unpacked after storage and unwrapped for the viewing pleasure of its owner” (24). Lewis then turns to the novel’s primary sculpted object—the eponymous golden bowl—as emblematic of the plastic form of the novel itself. In this first argument, Lewis introduces concepts that are explored throughout the book. The argument that the modernist novel experiments with plastic or protean form emerges from a sculptural definition of plastic arts as those forms that are susceptible to being molded while simultaneously giving shape (21). She rereads literary critic Joseph Frank’s “spatial-form thesis,” which deemphasized temporal readings of modernist narrative in favor of affirming the “shape” of the novel, that is, its spatial qualities (19). Against this method of reading, which for a time dominated critical readings of the modernist novel, Lewis emphasizes historically-contingent ideas and influential encounters that, in turn, led writers to experiment with form and perspective. This challenge to the spatial-form thesis links to Lewis’s second key concept—“reading in the round”—which she develops from the viewing practices of museum-goers as they walk around an exhibited sculpture so as to see it from various angles or vantage points (23). Walking around a sculpture is a process that “unfolds over time,” and Lewis privileges time-based, multimodal and multiperspectival viewing practices in her reading of James’s novel (21).

The plastic effects of intermedial modernism are further explored in chapter two through Lewis’s detailed reading of the vital importance of still-life painting to Woolf’s engagement with time and death in her “most painting-obsessed” novel To the Lighthouse (56). Surprising metamorphoses are wrought through contemplation of still-life painting in To the Lighthouse, a novel that associates painting not with stasis but with ever-changing ideas about the visual arts that are, in turn, conditioned by the specter of death evoked through paintings of skulls and other memento mori, and vanitas motifs (57). Never still, the still-life paintings of To the Lighthouse are composed through time-based interactions that, in turn, deform and reform the novel form itself. Attention to plastic or protean form continues in chapter three, which couples Mina Loy’s ekphrastic and autobiographical poetry with her engagement with avant-garde conversations about form and abstraction. In addition to arguing for the “protean” erotics of Loy’s poetry, Lewis draws attention to a strain of maximalist abstraction whereby Loy establishes a “dialectic, internal to the art object, between rarefied aestheticism and base material” (107). Loy’s gender politics are briefly touched on in relation to eugenicist ideas influencing Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” which argues for “removing women’s sexuality and childbearing from the discursive and ideological control of the patriarchy” (133). Such scientistic attitudes may make contemporary readers “ill at ease,” Lewis writes, while insisting on the significance of Loy’s “woman-centered procreative ideal” that, when read in combination with Loy’s poetry, provides “a rejoinder to her contemporaries’ ‘masculinist dream of omnipotence’” (133).

The second half of the book turns from creative plasticity to so-called bad formalism. Lewis contrasts Evelyn’s Waugh’s suspicion of new media forms with a surprisingly effective analysis of superficiality in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In chapter four, Lewis studies Evelyn Waugh’s diary entries alongside a selection of his novels and short stories to reveal dissolutions of cinema coupled with “devaluing of the written word” in Waugh’s work (162). “Cinemechanics” is Lewis’s coinage for the “suffocating rigidity” and mechanistic structure of Waugh’s experiment in writing cinema-influenced prose (138). The “formless muddle” that arises from this experiment is also “thanatogenic” (138, 172). In The Loved One, for example, cinema-industrial Los Angeles is ultimately the epicenter of civilization’s “decay,” and this deathly specter signals a “looming formlessness” for literary writing more generally (177).

Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (henceforth The Autobiography) is the subject of the novel’s fifth and final chapter. Here, Lewis contends that Stein endorses rather than laments (as Waugh’s writing does) the effects of artistic experimentation and new technologies that challenge aspects of literary form. Lewis takes seriously a critique of Stein’s participation in emergent artistic movements of her time—including Fauvism, Cubism, Dada and Expressionism—as evidence that The Autobiography is no more than decadent, bohemian “tinsel” (179). By engaging with the insistently “superficial” aspects of Stein’s The Autobiography—gossip, name-dropping and other signs of status-based networking—Lewis reconfigures Stein’s bad-formalist surface as the site of dynamic experiment and encounter (180). With Toklas as the “I” of her book, Stein transforms the autobiography’s singular perspective into an inter-subjective experiment while probing the surface ontology of paintings—the powers of which are diminished when reproduced as photographs contained within the covers of a book.

Dynamic Form convincingly argues that the modernist movement was “exceptionally” dynamic (226). Integral to the “power, strength, force” (229) of this argument is the book’s gentle attention to the shortfalls as well as rewards of a topic that is also a method, a way of reading. “Intermediality makes modernism but also makes it vulnerable,” writes Lewis, alluding to the tendency of dynamic form to breed formless chaos as it proliferates and spreads (229). Of the multimodal forms of perception essential to this dynamism, those of touch and gesture may be particularly generative for future scholarship. A modality of sensory communication that is often subordinated to sight, touch is essential to an understated argument of Lewis’s book. As previously mentioned, Loy’s feminism is briefly discussed, and both feminist and queer criticism crop up in the Stein chapter. While matters of gender are thus relatively absent from Lewis’s argument, they are not absent at the level of form. Three of Dynamic Form’s five chapters address the work of women writers, while various forms that morph throughout the book can be described as feminine. Beginning with James’s Galatean Charlotte Stant and ending with the significance of a photograph of Stein’s handwriting in the opening pages of The Autobiography, Lewis weaves thought about female characters, writers, and artists with discussion of sculpture, handwriting, painting, photography, and cinema—artforms which may be described as feminized insofar as their power operates in inverse relation to the ever-updating technologies that supersede them. Nevertheless, Dynamic Form places center stage women creators of the modernist intermedia that they handled. It is perhaps in the “overestimated and underestimated” (229) force of this modernist form that the real power lies.
 

This page has paths: