Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (review)

Philip Weinstein's new book maps the trajectory of a familiar, perhaps too familiar, argument: that something happens in modernist fiction that distinguishes it from the classic realism of the nineteenth century. To understand this shift, Weinstein draws on the fiction of Proust, Kafka, and Faulkner, arguing that modernist fiction embodies the work of "unknowing"—Weinstein's term for the way modernist fiction diverges from, and perhaps critiques, the premises of Enlightenment reason as conceptualized and articulated in the works of Descartes, Newton, Locke, and Kant. The basic premise of Enlightenment reason—the stability of space and time as grounds for knowledge of the subject—is, as Weinstein demonstrates with readings of Defoe and Dostoevsky, the underpinning logic of characterological development in nineteenth-century fiction. In this fiction, the world can be known by the character who inhabits a stable subjectivity and who moves within "lawful" time and space eventually to progress to an understanding of himself: "Coming to know enacts an Enlightenment premise of rational correspondence between the individual and the world. Thanks to the lawfulness of time and space, a subject learns to map the outer world accurately and, thereby, to achieve inner orientation as well" (2). In other words, subjectivity itself, understood as a self-reflective interiority capable of harmonizing the inner and outer worlds, is fully dependent on, just as it is constitutive of, a stable conception of time and space.

Modernist fiction questions the grounds of the Enlightenment project by interrogating the possibility of a world that corresponds to the orienting strategies of the subject, now displaced and disrupted by his experience of a disorienting space and time. Drawing on Freud's conceptions of the uncanny and trauma, Weinstein makes intelligent observations by suggesting that space, now defamiliarized (the key Kafka trope), and time, now working on the principle of Freud's nachtraglichkeit (the key Proustian and Faulknerian tropes), place the traumatized subject in a space and time of shock and disorientation: space cannot be mapped and known, just as time cannot be understood as such. Weinstein's readings of Kafka's The Trial and The Castle, of Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu, and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! (among others) make clear what is modernist fiction's true theme: time. Weinstein argues that characters' understanding of experience is always deferred in modernist fiction (if it occurs at all)—"[t]ime becomes a parenthesis" (139) wherein knowledge becomes a species of what Weinstein terms "after-vision" (132). The traumatized subject, now existing within the curiously doubled time of trauma, and inhabiting space which cannot be mastered, now emerges as the unknowing subject:

In all this we find a sustained rebuke of bourgeois plotting … an undermining of Enlightenment-inspired projecting … that constitutes the main business of European realism for over two hundred years. If human being is, more deeply, something other than res cogitans—if its situation is something other than the epistemological mandate of the realist plot—what might that something other be?

(158)

Weinstein's answer is one that involves a reorientation of notions of the Enlightenment subject. If the Enlightenment subject finds a world readily, objectively, disposed to his needs, a world readily interpreted and thus controlled, the modernist subject finds himself (and Weinstein's subjects are largely male) subjected to a world. Borrowing here from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and especially Levinas, Weinstein sees in the modernist subject a disavowal of the intending subject, the "intentional I" of phenomenology (169). If being is premised on a knowing "I," what happens when that "I" is displaced? This question is of course at the heart of Kafka's texts, which analyze the state of "being otherwise," or being othered. In Kafka, the subject, stripped of identity even before identity can be posited as such, becomes the accused: "Accused, I am no longer I but me … as object of an unknown subject, he has been dispossessed of project, arrested, 'me'd'" (169). And if...