May/June 2002

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Somewhere in Manhattan, a precocious eight-year-old is asking that question. She's had Adorno and Benjamin for bedtime stories. Mommy teaches Critical Theory at the New School; Daddy's a photographer specializing in corpses. They know what the Right Answer is supposed to be. ("No, pumpkin, of course not: we're all postmodern now.") But they're beginning to have doubts.

No shelf space is available. Atop the heap of recent arrivals in their hallway, books and journals higgledy-piggledy, are two new books on zeppelins: Dr. Eckener's Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel, by Douglas Botting (Holt), and Zeppelin! Germany and the Airship, 1900-1939, by Guillaume de Syon (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press). The mere image of a zeppelin evokes a complex mix of nostalgia and cultural condescension, as you might feel turning the pages of a nineteenth-century photo album.

And there's more of the same in The Ride to Modernity: The Bicycle in Canada, 1869-1900, by Glen Norcliffe (Univ. of Toronto Press). Norcliffe's first chapter is called "Modernity and the Bicycle." Is any further proof needed that we've passed beyond modernity? These comical figures with their velocipedes and long skirts and funny hats: we see them as across a great gulf.

But the style of our own moment, as Hugh Kenner has observed, is invisible to us, and how long will it take before the characteristic artifacts of today seem as quaint as zeppelins? Perhaps there's more continuity between the era of these books and the early twenty-first century than the Postmod Squad would have us believe. We might even learn something about the present from these retrievals.

"Upon receiving news of an airship raid on London," de Syon writes, "Thomas Edison had argued ...