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Modernism/Modernity 8.3 (2001) 540-541



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Book Review

Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel


Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel. Pericles Lewis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 241. $59.95.

Modernism, nationalism, and the novel: those big words that make us so unhappy. As critics and literary historians, we cannot do without them, yet there is so little agreement about what we should be doing with them. They are such blunt tools to cut with. In his concise and often illuminating book, Pericles Lewis confidently shoulders the task of trying to bring these three unwieldy terms into relation with one another, of showing how the Novel (or rather, a few particular novels) written under the aegis of Modernism (or of a few of its instantiations) both responded to and helped shape (some of) the discourses of Nationalism in the early twentieth century.

Modernism is here represented by James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and Gabriele D'Annunzio. Lewis notes in passing the gender imbalance in his selection, but explores it no further than to say that the discourses under discussion are "clearly . . . 'gendered'" (3). Each of his four writers is in turn represented primarily by one novel: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,Heart of Darkness,À la recherche du temps perdu, and Il Notturno. In broad terms, Lewis's goal is to demonstrate how these difficult texts struggle to connect "the novelist's personal lived experience with the forging of a national consciousness" (ibid.). He claims that critics have largely ignored the extent to which these novels engage with issues of nationalism and national character--which is not exactly true. Those issues are right on the surface of each text, impossible to miss or dismiss. But he is right to point out that national identity is often seen simply as the thing that gets in the way, the thing that a Stephen Dedalus or a Marcel (or, in a negative example, a Kurtz) needs to transcend in order to become himself. Lewis instead wants to put the familiar modernist narrative of self-fashioning back into the context of modern discourses of nation and race.

This move is itself familiar enough in contemporary criticism. What distinguishes Lewis's work is the intelligence and care with which he establishes his historical context. In what is in many respects the most successful chapter of his book, "The Crisis of National Liberalism," he offers a lucid account of post-Enlightenment theorizing on nationality. That theorizing, he suggests, rewrites in political terms a philosophical problem found most notably in Kant. Kant's [End Page 540] distinction between pure and practical reason, Lewis contends, makes vivid "the conflict between the individual as subject of historical processes, as legislator for an imagined 'kingdom of ends,' and the individual as object of those processes" (212). For theorists of nationality--the primary coordinates here are Edmund Burke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Ernest Renan, Maurice Barrès, and, rather unexpectedly, Leslie Stephen--that conflict is still operative, only now at the level of the community. Is a nation the result of repeated collective acts of will--Renan's "daily plebiscite"--or is it the expression of the unchanging character of a particular group of people, as Burke argued in the language of organicism and Barrès in the language of racialism? And what is the role, if any, of individual agency here? Are we makers or are we made?

Lewis shows each novelist responding in complex ways to the "fact" of his national identity, and attempting through the novel to articulate a personal identity that is mediated but not determined by a national consciousness. He offers as paradigmatic Stephen Dedalus's famous diary entry at the end of Portrait: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." 1 The "and" in that sentence joins impulses that are usually taken as incommensurate. Stephen's determination to fly by the nets of family, religion, and country seems, on the face...

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