Rites of Spring: the Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

"This is a really interesting book. It’s deeply flawed, in many ways, but what it does is it views the war as a cultural phenomenon, rather than a military phenomenon. He’s a cultural historian who thinks in terms of literature, music, plastic arts, and so on. He sees the war as being important and interesting primarily because it heralds or helps to bring in modernism. In his view, the First World War plays a major part in changing the mindset of artists, enabling the Virginia Woolfs and T. S. Eliots to flourish. The anomie and uncertainty and apparent irrationality of events all feed into surrealism. Essentially, he says the world changes—or begins to change—with the performance of The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky in Paris in 1913. It’s an interesting thesis, but it’s wrong. You don’t have to be much of a cultural historian to know that modernism is often seen to pre-date that by quite a long way. People like Debussy and Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde are often seen as modernists in some sense. He also conflates modernism and modernity in a way that is not terribly helpful. He talks about this tiny coterie of avant-garde artists as if that’s what everyone in the country thought. That’s inevitably not true. But the questions that the book is asking, about the connection between these literally earth-shaking events and the impact they have on individuals, and how that feeds through into the way that people perceive the world around them and interact with it—whether that’s artistically or just in terms of their everyday life—I think are really, really interesting. I’m not sure it does terribly. Inevitably, he’s cherry picking from a huge number of sources and then trying to drag them together into this broader thesis about the modern world. It doesn’t work, but I think that’s the nature of the project. If you go and look at 100 different artists, you’ll get 100 different responses to the war. They can’t be generalized about in that way. But it’s a brave attempt."