Introduction

Drawing on theories of temporality and anthropology, and focusing in particular on Paul Ricoeur’s notion of ‘retrodiction,’ this Introduction lays out a framework for understanding antipodean transnationalism. It reconsiders the canonical strains of early or ‘high’ modernism through late modernism’s backward trajectory and thus articulates ways in which modernism was always a more belated phenomenon than has generally been recognized. It argues that modernism systematically incorporated retrograde modes of burlesque and buffoonery whose formal perspectives can be understood intellectually as commensurate with their spherical geographic provenance. By reorganizing the time of modernism according to antipodean coordinates, we come to recognize how antipodean modernism’s twisted, recursive properties are integral to the definition of modernism within a global compass.

Antiphonal Arts

This chapter considers how the literary representation of time after World War II was shaped by intersections with music and the visual arts. Taking its title from Djuna Barnes’s verse drama The Antiphon (1958), it argues that an antiphonal quality was implicit within works of canonical modernism, which similarly involve interplays between proposition and response, high and low. It suggests how a similar kind of recursive pattern informs Samuel Beckett’s narratives, organized as they are around a dialectic between nostalgia for the sublime and a cathexis of bathos. In relation to Patrick White’s burlesque styles, it argues that this can be seen not as marginal to constructions of modernism, but as endemic to modernism’s antiphonal arts. It also considers the mutual influences of White and Australian painter Sidney Nolan, while discussing the significance of the latter’s collaboration with Boston poet Robert Lowell.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter takes its title from a book of photographs about Australia published in 1931 by E. O. Hoppé. The cover of The Fifth Continent showed the photographer atop a globe looking back at a map of Australia, and it is this attempt to reconstitute the world in relation to alternative spatial perspectives that provided the impetus for Hoppé’s work. Similarly, to read authors such as Slessor or Dark in parallax with canonical types is not only to correlate relatively neglected figures with modernism’s larger orbit, but also to highlight various neglected aspects of more established writers, the complex ways in which their narratives face backwards as well as forwards. The particular force of backgazing within a sphere of modernism thus lies in the way it resists conventional classifications by projecting not an oppositional but a reversible world, one whose boundaries are rendered enigmatic.

What Time Collects

Arguing that one of the most negative consequences of modernism’s traditional designs has been the way they have tended to marginalize or exclude major writers on the basis of ideological assumptions that are never made explicit, this chapter reads Australian novelist Eleanor Dark and American fiction writer James T. Farrell alongside each other. Both writers interrogated conventional understandings of modernism as a phenomenon predicated upon a rhetoric of liberal progress. Instead, Dark and Farrell both seek aesthetically to track back into the past, and they both adduce in their different ways a collectivist understanding of society, one in which individualism is interwoven in complex ways with communal sympathies. Hence the complex fictions of both writers mediate a heterodox version of temporality, in which the recursive passage from present to past carries as much weight as the existential charge from present to future.

Anamorphosis

This chapter considers how the work of various modernists associated with Bloomsbury during the interwar years—E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Nancy Cunard—engaged with antipodal dimensions that effectively disturbed normative spatiotemporal representation within their narratives. In this way, the heterodox versions of temporality projected more overtly by Australasian writers also associated with Bloomsbury, if more tangentially—Katherine Mansfield, Henry Handel Richardson—appear to be reciprocally mirrored within the Western canon, as if in an anamorphic image. Anamorphosis is a projection giving a distorted image of the subject when seen from a conventional viewpoint but produced in such a way that, if viewed from a particular angle, the distortion will disappear and the image come to appear normal. The term was applied to his own art by Salvador Dalí, but it might be argued that antipodean modernism bears an uncanny, anamorphic relation to Western modernism more generally.

Organicist Time

This chapter traces how an organicist version of time was developed during the interwar period, how it reached its philosophical apogee in the work of Martin Heidegger and was treated sympathetically by American novelist Thomas Wolfe. However, this organicist impulse was kept at a distance by the writing of Theodor Adorno, Thomas Mann, and H. G. Wells, all of whom engage in dialectics with fascism. This chapter also considers how organicist models of temporal sequence inform the fixation on time in William Faulkner’s fiction, and how Sartre’s existentialism attempted to disavow what he saw as Faulkner’s backward-looking nostalgia. This kind of organicist imagination continued to resonate widely even after 1945, as we see from Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels A Dance to the Music of Time, and organicist time formed an integral backbone to many dimensions of modernist culture, even if its visibility became partially suppressed after World War II.

Double Exposures

This chapter examines how the impetus of ‘backgazing,’ as Australian poet R. D. FitzGerald put it in his ‘Essay on Memory,’ becomes a compelling force within the general framework of modernist poetry. It traces how this retrograde vision was developed not only in FitzGerald but also, in different ways, by his fellow Australian poets Kenneth Slessor and A. D. Hope. It also considers how this counterclockwise strand of modernist poetics runs in parallel to the work of canonical modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens, whose interest in various versions of the antipodal has not been so clearly charted.

Retrodynamics

This chapter’s title, ‘Retrodynamics,’ is taken from a term in mechanics when a rotor’s power thrust is generated through inverse and opposite turns, and its general argument is that an analogous kind of backward motion should be seen as integral to the constitution of modernism. This chapter accordingly considers modernism in relation to the science, philosophy, anthropology and geography of the modernist period. It discusses ways in which time is represented ‘inside out’ in the works of Joseph Conrad, Joseph Furphy, and Marcel Proust. It also reads the fiction of James Joyce in relation to the discourses of parallax and empire, arguing that Ulysses brings together different times and places in a global imaginary where past and present, like proximate and distant, creatively interfere with each other.