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  • Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel
  • Jed Esty
Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel. David Adams. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 249. $47.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

David Adams's Colonial Odysseys strikes a fresh chord in colonial discourse studies by frankly engaging the theological dimensions of modernist fictions set in the colonial world. In a sense, Adams outflanks the mainstream of postcolonial studies, now consolidated into a set of closely historicist, materialist, and post-post-structuralist projects, by returning to the idea of a massive, structuring lack in modern European thought. The idea of studying imperialism as a kind of European symptom galvanized some of the metaphysical and existential concerns of writers like Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Octave Mannoni, and Albert Memmi in the 1950s and 1960s. But rather than simply rework the Hegelian and Freudian questions of that generation, Adams turns to the philosophical work of Hans Blumenberg in order to plot imperial fantasies against the broad background of a crisis in western secularization. For the modernists, Adams suggests, the colonial world was a playground for variously styled grabs at totalization, novels shaped by a belated attempt to revive the tropes of the epic journey yet doomed to fail by virtue of their belonging to a world that, à la Lukács, is no longer given to the full immanent meanings of the epic. The book gains its purchase on its canonical material by virtue of a sustained attempt to trace out the consequences, for modernism, of substituting "empire for theology" (5), but it also takes pains to consider more specific political and historical pressures on European writers in the period just after the scramble for Africa.

In framing modernism—and in particular its colonial odysseys—as so many failed attempts to arrogate global meaning to the western mind after the death of God, the book's main theoretical point of reference is Blumenberg's concept of mythic "reoccupation." Adams provides an excellent introduction to Blumenberg and a compelling model for the critical application of his thought. Reoccupation describes both the history and the necessary failure of the project of [End Page 519] secularizing Christian concepts; it insists on the necessity, in other words, of living with, rather than filling in, the "god-shaped hole" in our universe (75). With this in view, Adams's book is not so much a political redress to Eurocentrism as it is a cold bath of therapeutic finitude poured over various modernist concepts of artistic heroism and aesthetic redemption. Indeed, the book that Colonial Odysseys might be said to follow most directly in its basic attitudes is Leo Bersani's The Culture of Redemption. Adams offers a precise and convincing analysis of a specific subset of redemptive modern epics and quasi-epics in a mainly British key, and his analysis raises the immediate possibility of going back to some of Bersani's key writers (Melville, Flaubert, Pynchon, and Joyce) with this specific kind of imperial failure in mind.

In the wide-ranging argument that frames the book, Adams offers illustrative readings of Joyce, Haggard, Tennyson, and Forster, but the heart of the project lies in its sharp and connected readings of Conrad and Woolf. Following the main thesis from Conrad to Forster, we can suddenly see the latter's liberal nostalgia in a harsher light, as the symptom of a bid for worldwide redemption that expresses not just the desire for an impossible crosscultural intimacy, but an attraction to transcendental authority in a world bereft of theological absolutes. Capturing a shared note of fatigue running through late Forster and all of Conrad, Adams manages to coordinate a reading of Marlow's worldweariness and Lord Jim's restless thirst for redemption without referring the entire interpretive problem to an endless ironic pas-de-deux between the tragic old salt and the romantic egoist. With a great deal of assurance and precision, Adams hews to his claim that Conradian fictions—and all of their manifold colonial fantasies—are driven by a specifically Western brand of godlessness. Of course, as Adams himself notes, once we take on board Conrad's fathomless capacity to...

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