The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form by Rachel Murray (review)

Rachel Murray’s The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form provides a valuable contribution to modernist studies because Murray explains how the field of entomology, which rose in popularity as a result of the First World War, informed modernist aesthetics. The study illustrates the benefits of greening modernism, a recent turn that has moved scholars from studying the city and human psyche in modernist texts to focusing on the intersection of modernism and the natural world. However, Murray’s accessible and fascinating study makes it clear that such a move does not ignore human subjects. Instead, it reveals the complex entanglement of humans with the environment. Murray concentrates on Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, H.D., and Samuel Beckett, all of whose experimental work helped to define high Anglomodernism. She claims that “the figure of the exoskeleton (or outer shell) can shed new light on modernism’s linguistic and formal innovations, its engagement with key psychological and socio-political concerns, as well as its questioning of the limits of the human” (3). According to Murray, modernists responded to war, urban modernity, and industrial capitalism by turning to the insect to better understand how humans changed in response to new conditions. Modernists, she claims, began to see humans becoming more and more buglike as they were transformed on the battlefield. In making such an argument, she deftly positions the figure of the insect as integral to understanding not only modernist aesthetics but also the history of modernism in relation to war. Because of the popularity of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), and because it has received so much critical attention, it would seem that very little was left to be said about the insect figure in literature. However, Kafka was only one writer in a long line who employed this figure to suggest “the powerlessness of the modern subject amid an increasingly dehumanising social reality” (5). With the destruction of the First World War, that social reality became far more pronounced; the insect figure moved beyond the realm of metaphor into reality, “as soldiers were strapped into bug-like gas masks and disguised beneath camouf lage uniforms” and as they “crawled through the mud in