Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Timothy Christensen
Studies in the Novel, Volume 41, Numbers 2, Summer 2009, pp. 241-252
(Article)
Published by University of North Texas
DOI: 10.1353/sdn.0.0047
ESSAY-REVIEW:
MODERNISM SINGULAR PLURAL
TIMOTHY CHRISTENSEN
Damon Franke. Modernist Heresies: British Literary History 1883-1924.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. 258 pp. $47.95.
Alissa G. Karl. Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and
Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen. New York:
Routledge, 2008. 183 pp. $95.00.
Gabrielle McIntire. Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and
Virginia Woolf. New York: Cambridge UP, 2008. 274 pp. $95.00.
Michael Valdez Moses and Richard Begam, Eds. Modernism and
Colonialism: British and Irish Literature 1899-1939. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007. 344 pp. $24.95.
In Modernist Heresies: British Literary History, 1883-1924, Damon
Franke scrupulously documents the influence of the Cambridge Heretics
Society on literary and intellectual culture during the late Victorian and early
modernist period. Franke traces the relationships among participants of this
debate society and details its effects on intellectual culture, with a focus on its
connections to other contemporary groups for intellectual exchange (notably
Bloomsbury), and its influence, both direct and indirect, on a host of canonized
modernist writers including T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, and Virginia
Woolf. While Frankes scholarship achieves an admirable degree of empirical
richness, the anemic fashion in which he conceptualizes modernist aesthetics
and historiographyconceptualizations that go largely unexamined from the
beginning of the book to the endseverely limits his ability to offer critical
insight into the history that he documents.
Studies in the Novel, Volume 41, number 2 (Summer 2009). Copyright 2009 by the
University of North Texas. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
242
/ CHRISTENSEN
Franke begins Modernist Heresies with the task of questioning traditional
ways that scholars periodize and categorize twentieth-century literary history,
focusing on the tendency to make firm distinctions between late Victorians,
Edwardians, and modernists, and arguing that the tendency to periodize in this
way begins with the canonized modernists themselves. Franke cites Virginia
Woolfs claim in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown that a radical epistemic break
in December 1910 marks the beginning of modern literature as an influential
example of a modernist tendency to posit a historical rupture between the
Edwardian and the modern periods. Against this modernist elision of
antecedents that does a disservice to an understanding of the fluid processes
of history (14), Franke posits the heretical discourses characteristic of the
synthetic character of Edwardian thought, which provide a new historical
perspective for understanding the particular continuities and discontinuities of
late Victorian and modernist literature and culture (18). Focusing on the effect
of the Cambridge Heretics Society in exposing numerous modernist writers,
historians, philosophers, classicists, critics, and theologians to an Edwardian
synthetic approach to religious and cultural questions, Franke argues that the
vital and formative influence the Heretics had on modernist thought may be
one of the more glaring omissions in our understanding of twentieth-century
intellectual history (25).
Interrogating assumptions regarding periodization can provoke us to
question our critical presuppositions, and several authors in Modernism and
Colonialism, discussed below, successfully undertake such an interrogation.
Franke, however, fails to seriously consider the complexity or variety of
modernist conceptualizations of history, memory, language, identity, or
anything else that makes so many of the authors he covers compelling. By
reducing modernism to a point of singularity, Franke is able to sustain a
series of unproblematic binary oppositions based on a distinction between
Edwardian heretical discourses, which still teach us the need and reward for
encouraging and defending dissent, tolerance, and diversity (xiii), and the
modernist development of works of art which were putatively self-contained
wholes (xiv), and which he casually suggests display fascist tendencies
(19). We are given an Edwardian pluralism verses a modernist elitism, an
Edwardian belief in reconciliation and synthesis (19) in opposition to the
didactic modernist manifestoes [that] abound with self-satisfaction and decree
(20), an Edwardian attempt to harmonize beliefs set against the modernist
proclivity for exclusion (54). Stating his intent to destabilize an ahistorical
opposition between modernism and its antecedents, Franke reiteratively
discovers a set of binary oppositions between modernist and Edwardian
intellectual principles that would seem to be deeper and more fundamental than
anyone has previously believed. Frankes presumed contribution is therefore
reduced to suggesting that there is not a clear chronological rupture between
the two periods, that Edwardian tendencies continue to linger into the 1930s,
ESSAY-REVIEW /
243
and that they are discernible in some writers, such as Joyce, who are classified
as modernists, while leaving the essential opposition between Edwardians and
modernists intact.
While Franke engages in some insightful analyses of individual texts,
including A Passage to India and Joyces short story Clay, the limitations
of his conceptual apparatus become conspicuous in his discussion of Woolf
in chapter three. He discovers in Woolf both a passionate engagement with
progressive political issues and a characteristically modernist fascination with
the idea of self-contained aesthetic wholes (88). This alignment of interests,
however, does not disturb Frankes strict opposition between an Edwardian
discursive and political openness and a modernist demand for aesthetic totalities
and fascist politics. Rather than work toward a more complex formulation of the
relationship between modernist aesthetic theories and political values, Franke
weakly suggests that, to her grand credit, Woolf evolved from her early
fetishization of the text to a more capacious understanding of the political
dimension of art (88-89). Even in an author for whom modernist aesthetic
values coexist with liberal political principles, it seems that Franke must
rigidly separate the two. We encounter the limitations of this simple and unitary
idea of modernist aesthetics again in his analysis of The Waste Land, where
Franke similarly discovers an impermeable boundary between Edwardian
heresy and modernist orthodoxy. He maintains this dichotomy first by eliding
the incongruity of Eliots poetry with his prose, and then by declaring the
continuity of Eliots career as unflinchingly sectarian and orthodox from
beginning to end (191). In his reading of The Waste Land, the poems surface
tension of diverse, fragmented languages and apparent syncretism becomes
a form of duplicity, concealing Eliots agenda of resolving these fragments
into an orthodox Christian worldview (191). Modernism, defined as a form of
orthodoxy, cannot accommodate such fragmentation, and can only respond
to it with an attempt at a totalizing resolution. Even Eliots apparent heresies are
therefore nothing more than an ingenius disguise for a totalizing agenda (191).
In this way, Franke reduces Eliots modernist bricolage to a deceptive strategy
for the appropriation of heretical discoursesby orthodoxy (192). Frankes
categorization of Eliot and Woolfwriters who obsessively reconfigure their
understandings of the relation of the present to the pastas unproblematically
ahistorical in their thinking requires a similar process of elision and reduction.
(The fact that others have done the same does not constitute an excuse for such
oversimplification.) It seems that there is no allowance for the possibility of
difference or growth within the confines of Frankes conception of modernism.
These examples point toward the conceptual excision that allows Frankes
binaries to persist in their puritanical form: the absence of any discussion
of the very different ways that modernists think about aesthetic totality. For
Franke, there must be either an unbounded discursive openness in a work of
art (heresy), or an ahistorical, exclusionary, and totalitarian self-sufficiency
244
/ CHRISTENSEN
ESSAY-REVIEW /
245
past through its material, bodily, and textual traces does not, of course, mean
they believe it can be reduced to an object of empirical study and fully or finally
known. Invoking Lacan in the conclusion, McIntire argues that, for Eliot and
Woolf, the past structures desire in the fashion of an Other that one can never
fully know, but the approach and the Other nonetheless incite the wish to try
again to understand the erotogenesis of alterity (209). The irreducible alterity
of the past, the fact that one can never arrive at an absolute truth of the past,
is not only the condition of historical knowledge, it is also the source of our
desire to know the past. Ones relation to the past is structured like the desire
for (and of) the Other.
Moreover, the past, like the Lacanian Other, must be approached by way
of the other. In McIntires argument, the other takes the form of the Proustian
image or sensation, lost in flight without a place in the present, acting as
the supplement of a perpetual (re)turn that would find in the past an always new
object to confront (7). Desire, within this formulation, names the fragile and
fleeting process through which material fragments of the past re-emerge as
memory (5-6). It names the process by which we approach history through its
material, bodily, and textual traces. Because our approach to the past is always
mediated, and our knowledge of it always partial, like a beloved Other, the
past cannot give itself to us once and for all, no matter how much we might
desire such a fantastic resolution (5-6). Desire names the mismatch between
the expectation that the material traces of the past can provide us access to
history as a self-sufficient totalitythe past as absolute time, the imaginary
Otherand the fact that the past, like the Other, is ultimately irreducible to its
representation.
While McIntire invokes Lacan in the introduction and conclusion, her line
of argument does not adhere to any specific theoretical approach. Instead she
more broadly contextualizes her argument about Eliot and Woolf both in terms
of modernist thinking about the problem of memory (Freud, Bergson, Proust,
and Benjamin all make repeated appearances) and in terms of contemporary
literary theory (Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, de Certeau, Bloom, and
Derrida all receive significant attention). My initial sense was that McIntire
was not sufficiently defining or distinguishing between theories. For instance,
in what sense can one say that Eliot anticipates both a Lacanian notion of
history such as the one explained above and a Foucauldian genealogical
approach? By the end of the book, however, it is clear that McIntires use
of frequent but brief theoretical reference points serves her argumentative
purpose. One can find finer distinctions between ideas about history and
subjectivity in other discussions (see Jameson, A Singular Modernity 76-82)
of modernity and modernism. Because McIntires argument focuses on Woolf
and Eliots thinking about the relation of time to subjectivity, however, noting
the concerns they hold in common with other modernist and poststructuralist
thinkers in this way provides useful intellectual context without diverting the
argument.
246
/ CHRISTENSEN
This approach works well in McIntires discussion of Eliots approach
to times most existentially charged moments in The Waste Land. In her
analysis of Eliots reference to the awful daring of a moments surrender that
one must undergo in order to approach the problem of how we have existed,
McIntire reveals Eliots acute awareness that the experience of time is mediated
by the act of representation (54). Since this act is irreducible to the field of the
represented that it generatesin terms of either obituaries or, more generally,
memoriesthere exists something terrible, daring, and unpredictable in
ones attempts to approach the past, something that always exceeds what can
be said, written, or even thought about it (54). That the act of representation
supplements and decenters the field of the represented is a problem broadly
perceived among modernists as well as more recent thinkers, a point that is
effectively emphasized by McIntires discussion of the role of memory in The
Waste Land and that might be obscured by theoretical nitpicking at this point
in the argument.
Moreover, the distinctions she makes within this discussionfor instance
between the attitudes of Eliot and Yeats toward the lost pasteffectively
delineate important cleavages between modernist theories of and attitudes
toward the past. McIntires comparison of Woolfs moments of being to
Joyces epiphanies and Wordsworths spots of time in order to distinguish
Woolfs idea from Freuds theory of trauma and Lacans notoriously enigmatic
notion of the Real (168) does not always conform with my understanding
of Freudian trauma or Lacanian signification, but is well-grounded in close
reading. In developing these distinctions, McIntire creates a nuanced argument
that, for Woolf, language is no mere echo, transcription, or train of signifiers,
but is necessary to the very condition of being and knowing (166-68).
Perhaps the most interesting chapter of Modernism, Memory, and
Desire is the opening one, which analyzes the relationship of Eliots largely
unknown Columbo and Bolo poems to his published writing. This chapter
holds interest both because of the unfamiliarity of the materialmost of
which remains unpublished, and during Eliots lifetime was circulated only
among a small coterie of male friendsand because it serves as the ground
for McIntires reading of Eliots broader oeuvre. McIntire argues that these
poems, which are bawdy and often homosexual racist doggerel set in the
early stages of the colonization of the Americas, act as a parergon to Eliots
canonized work. Tracing this term through Derrida to Conrad Aiken (one of
the small group among whom the Bolo and Columbo poems were originally
circulated), McIntire explains that the poems are an extra ornamentthat
surprise us by revealing more about what we deem to be central to the text
than the center itself (38). In a Derridian sense, they press against the limit
itself and intervene on the inside only to the extent that the inside is lacking
(38). These poems reveal the erotic and masturbatory qualities of Eliots
encounter with the past (22). Reading these poems against Prufrock, for
ESSAY-REVIEW /
247
248
/ CHRISTENSEN
ESSAY-REVIEW /
249
250
/ CHRISTENSEN
The syncretic texture of postcolonial societies, identities, and texts means that
postcolonial uses of such literary strategies tendto be more exuberant than
elegiac (297). We see an example of the very different affective structure
attached to similar literary techniques when we compare Walcotts syncretism
with Eliots Eurocentric lament over decline and dissipation (297).
My primary criticism of the collection as a whole is that the thought of the
previous generation of postcolonial critics and theorists is often oversimplified.
Michael Valdez Moses provides an example of this problem when he claims
that the crux of Saids argument, in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism,
is that a recalcitrant colonized world has been subjugated to the scientific
and epistemological categories ofomnipotent and omniscient European
intelligence (45). Brian May similarly refers to Saids totalizing imperative
(156). Saids archaeology of Orientalist discourse is obviously much more
complex than either characterization allows. Moreover, if Saids arguments
are so simple, why not bypass them and begin with something else? It would
certainly be more meaningful to refute an argument (such as Homi Bhabhas
analysis of the constitutive ambivalence of colonial discourse) that criticizes
Western constructions of the racial/ethnic other without assuming that they
are totalizing or uniform. Arguing against the worst imaginable case of your
perceived antagonist has little value.
Mosess summary of Chinua Achebes famous essay, An Image of
Africa: Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness is slightly less dismissive, yet
Moses still fails to engage Achebes argument on a serious level. In what has
become a clich of Conrad criticism, Moses presumes that Achebes charge of
racism can be understood in an essentially humanist way: Conrad denies the
complexity and richness of African peoples and their cultures. At the core of
Achebes charge of racism, however, is an explicitly psychoanalytic definition
of the term.
In this article, Achebe calls for an analysis of race in Heart of Darkness
in light of the insights provided by the profoundly important work done by
Franz Fanon in the psychiatric hospitals of French Algeria (14), and states
that the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the
Western mind lies in the following quote from the novel: What thrilled you
was just the thought of their humanitylike yoursUgly (Achebe 6). Here
Achebe identifies the African body, within Conrads racial discourse, as the
site to which whites look for a foundational difference that will affirm their
own identities as white, modern, and civilized. Conrads racism is defined in
terms of his fascination with the failure of difference at this foundational site of
racial identity. Conrad recognizes that the racial self cannot be totalized, that it
cannot be antiseptically quarantined from the racial other, and that any attempt
ESSAY-REVIEW /
251
252
/ CHRISTENSEN
WORKS CITED
Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness. Hopes and
Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1989. 2-16.
Eagleton, Terry. Nudge-Winking. Rev. of The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical
Networks in Interwar Britain by Jason Harding. London Review of Books (19 Sept. 2002):
n.p. <http//:lrb.co.uk/v24/n18/eagl01_.html>
Jameson, Fredric. Modernism and Imperialism. Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. 43-66.
. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso, 2002.
Lacan, Jacques. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. crits: A Selection. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2002. 3-9.