Shaw as Postmodernist

Jean Reynolds. Pygmalion's Wordplay: The Postmodern Shaw. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. xiii+153 pp. Index. $49.95.

This is a wonderful book in a full sense of wonder-full, if only because it is charged with a sense of discovery. For seasoned Shavians much of it may not be new, but the enthusiasm, intelligence, and probing spirit of the writer can keep even wizened ones reading with continuing doses of interest and pleasure. The work is not perfect: it is not completely unified, it makes some interpretive missteps, and it starts out stronger than it ends. But Shaw studies need more of what it represents: a bright student discovering Shaw, relating him to contemporary literary studies, actually reading him in depth and persisting in tilling and harvesting. In a few cases, Hegel's observation that we learn from history that men never learn anything from history may not be fair.

As it is, Pygmalion's Wordplay has apparently been fathered/mothered by happenstance. Quite to her surprise, it seems, Jean Reynolds discovered Shaw's modern relevance in a seminar offered by R. F. Dietrich at the University of South Florida. Inspired, she plunged into the subject at about the time the University Press was planning its Florida Bernard Shaw Series. Hence this offspring of her inspiration. Forwarding her book, series editor Dietrich observes that it focuses on ways in which Shaw's interest in language anticipated primary concerns of Jacques Derrida and other postmodernists. This aptly suits the series' aim "to launch Shaw criticism and scholarship into the twenty-first century in a way that will stimulate a renewal of interest in the subject." Moreover, he asks, may Shaw's pulling back from postmodernist extremes provide any clue as to where me may be headed after postmodernism?"

Some readers may surmise that "after" is already here. I recall the job interview of a frantically wired graduate student at an MLA convention about seven years ago. Instinctively the young man deconstructed each sentence he had previously uttered, until he retreated out the door catatonic and beaten, having utterly deconstructed himself. Since then, word has drifted northward from the University of California's hip Irvine English department (where Derrida deconstructs on a retainer) that Hillis Miller laments the Yale years he deconstructed on deconstruction; and in Lingua Franca, Frank Lentriccia has confessed that whereas he has chosen to publish on critical theory, in the classroom (as a closet New Critic) he far prefers literature itself. Meanwhile the topic listings for endless section and group meetings at a recent MLA convention included nary a word about deconstruction, and a few cynics have sloughed off Derridada for post-postmodernism, at least until postpostpostmodernism (a.k.a. new New Criticism) becomes more fashionable than New Historicism (a.k.a. old historicism with fewer footnotes) and Culture Studies about the uncultured.

Against such shifting tides, Jean Reynolds skillfully skirts obsolescence by drawing a line in the sand for deconstruction and by giving it fresh air by relating it to Shaw more fully than others have done. Reynolds's springboard is Henry Higgins's bubbling speech to his mother in Pygmalion's third act about his training of Eliza, about taking a human being and changing her "into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her."

Moving outward from this, Reynolds declares Shaw's efforts to create a world of quite different human beings through "new speech" the subject of her book. Accordingly, she focuses on linguistic aspects of Pygmalion, Shaw's prefaces (especially those to Major Barbara, Man and Superman, and Saint Joan), The Quintessence of Ibsenism, his debt to Marx, G.B.S. as a role he deliberately played, his psychology, and his rhetorical strategies, all as touchstones that anticipate aspects of Derrida and postmodernism. In addition to these, she laces her argument with an extraordinary number and variety of other references, especially to scholars, critics, literary theorists, and...