Biological Modernism. The New Human in Weimar Culture by Carl Gelderloos (review)

Abstract

810 Parts two and three explore war time zones and ruin temporalities respectively. In the case of the former, Pong begins with a fascinating historical account of the complex time zone shifts that occurred around the Second World War as these shifts were embroiled in questions of national politics. Chapters four and five look beyond Britain to the temporal politics of neutral Ireland, through close attention to works by Bowen and Green, and occupied France, drawing on Storm Jameson. The tensions between “temporal heterogeneity and temporal homogeneity” in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1935–42) form the subject of chapter six and Pong invokes an ecological paradigm in this discussion (163). I have reservations about the necessity of this paradigm to an understanding of “temporal diversity” in these works; at the same time, it allows Pong to bring questions of space to bear on ideas of time and this results in compelling readings, especially in relation to the “entanglement of temporalities” in Eliot’s poetry (162, 173). In keeping with the striking visuality of wartime ruinscapes, the chapters of part three are more eclectic in scope in terms of the kinds of materials that are foregrounded. Chapter seven is partly devoted to artistic portrayals of ruin archaeology while chapter eight spotlights cinematic approaches. These chapters pivot on representations of childhood and young adulthood with a view to possible post-war futures. The book culminates, in chapter nine, with an analysis of Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950), what Pong classifies as a “delinquent Bildungsroman” in its dual expression of the “disillusionment and collapse of a way of national self-perception, and the material, sociological effects that this would have on that nation’s future generations” (239). British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime is replete with startling historical details—for example, the tactical time zone alignments that took place in war-torn Europe or the archaeological revelations of the Blitz—but it also attends to the bigger question of how we conceive of time itself. Pong incorporates perspectives both on the ancient past and on the prospect of a “post-human future,” while honing in on the temporal paradoxes that shaped wartime experiences at this crucial historical juncture (264). As such, this illuminating study, grounded in thorough and careful research, represents an important intervention, not just in the field of midcentury studies but in the area of war studies more broadly. Arriving in the middle of a pandemic that has entailed forms of dreadful suspension on a global scale, it speaks to the chronophobic peculiarities of our own moment too. This is a book that is “timely” in more ways than one.