Modernism/modernity

Louis MacNeice recalled encountering T. S. Eliot's poems for the first time in 1926, during his final term in high school. To someone his age, MacNeice observed, The Waste Land's literary allusions and sketchy "anthropological symbolism" meant nothing at all. What did help was going to the movies. "The cinema technique of quick cutting, of surprise juxtapositions, of spotting the everyday detail and making it significant, this would naturally intrigue the novelty-mad adolescent and should, like even the most experimental films, soon become easy to grasp."¹ The Waste Land could be read as though it were an experimental film. Was it written like one? After all, the poem's editor had collaborated with Fernand Léger on Ballet mécanique (1923), a film which might conceivably have enlightened the young MacNeice as to its surprise juxtapositions. Léger was eager to credit Pound with one of Ballet méchanique's technical novelties: a prism held over the lens which broke the image up into fragments.

It has always been tempting to suppose that a post-imagist poetic dedicated to the primacy of perception found both a resource and an example in the experimental cinema of the 1920s. Susan McCabe has succumbed to that temptation in her engrossing if erratic study of Gertrude Stein, [End Page 394] William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Marianne Moore. Her aim is to examine the "concourse" between modern poetry and film, with particular reference to its mediation by modernity's "fragmented bodies": the hysteric, the automaton, the bisexual, and so on. McCabe maintains that the body in fragments was not just a figure in the modernist poem or film, but rather a way to conceive and develop the montage techniques upon which both were based. The second hypothesis is the tricky one. It requires that a poem should behave like a film in its articulation of gender and sexuality.

The most substantial chapter in Cinematic Modernism concerns H.D., imagist poet, film critic, and connoisseur of borderlines. In the poems in Sea Garden (1916), "stylized images of slashed or torn bodies" (134) prefigure cinema's montage methods. The poems establish a dialectic between the active imagist principle of the cut and identification with the body thus slashed into pieces, with passivity. In the late 1920s, H.D. wrote extensively about film for Close Up. What film taught her is that the cut, understood as a principle of montage, need not prove destructive; that it could render, as layering or superimposition, the experience of a life lived along a "borderline."

Equally rewarding is the chapter on Marianne Moore's distinctive "fetishist poetics" (16), or "orchestration of multiple fragments" (185). McCabe fruitfully compares what Williams called Moore's "geometric principle of the intersection of loci" with Ballet Mécanique's reverie on the movement of bodies and machines (201). Moore's primary concern, like Léger's, was not so much with the human body as with "anthropomorphic hybrids" (201). In her poems, as in Léger's film, point of view does not stem from a single surveying gaze, but rather "oscillates within the unpredictable collision of the natural and the artificial, the embodied and the mechanistic" (201). Good use is made of Moore's most substantial essay on film, published in Close Up in September 1933.

The reason why these chapters succeed is that they trace with accuracy and verve the trajectory of a writer whose interest in film was both explicit, and formulated in some detail. Such is not quite the case with Williams, whose interest in film remained largely implicit, or with Stein, who did a certain amount of proclaiming on the topic (and met Charlie Chaplin), but had little of consequence to say about it. Here, the relative lack of evidence concerning what a writer actually thought about cinema, or what films she or he had actually seen, exposes the method upon which McCabe relies throughout—to claim that a particular text has been structured "like" a film, or...