British Novels Without End

BOOK REVIEWS Finally, the organization and structure of Radio Corpse exhibit a baroque redundancy. One chapter is seventy pages long; another, eighty. Within those chapters, Tiffany's argument proceeds in a repetitive, swirling manner that entails multiple visits to the same textual sites. Thus, the final chapter, which is ostensibly devoted to Pound's radio broadcasts, contains lengthy flashbacks (253-72) to discussions of his earlier writings in preceding chapters. These redundancies are offered in support of Tiffany's assertion that there is a significant connection between Imagism and the radio broadcasts, but the mere repetition of the earlier material does not constitute an adequate demonstration of the point. The connection between the two phases of Pound's career, central to Tiffany's thesis, is never persuasively substantiated. The term "baroque," then, fits several aspects of the rhetorical mode of Radio Corpse: its lively obsession with death, its energetic deployment of arresting ornamentation, its abundant use of overstatement, and its reliance upon repetition rather than logical demonstration. Whereas baroque casuistry wooed worshippers by appealing to emotion rather than reason, the new casuistry of much "cultural criticism in the humanities" solicits belief in linguistic formulations unchecked by empirical verification or probability. If "objectivity" is a matter of "discourse ," as Tiffany contends (12), the mere statement of a concept may constitute its own validation. Any idea that can be articulated has as much claim to credibility as any other. Thus, Tiffany can seriously argue that Pound wanted Gaudier-Brzeska to die: Indeed, soon after their first meeting, Pound began to take control of Gaudier 's death. One could even go so far as to say that Pound staged, telepathically , Gaudier's death. . . . Ultimately, Pound's reading of "Altaforte" cast a spell over Gaudier's life that was destined to be broken only on June 5,1915, the day he was killed in battle. (265-67) At such moments, Tiffany's language loses contact with everything but itself, and sophistication turns into sophistry. Hugh Witemeyer _______________ University of New Mexico British Novels Without End Lynette Felber. Gender and Genre in Novels Without End: The British Roman-Fleuve. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995. xiii + 205 pp. $39.95 NEVERAGAIN need readers think of those notorious, wandering, British multi-volume novels as the profligate offspring of legitimate 95 ELT 40 : 1 1997 literary lineages. Lynette Felber's Gender and Genre in Novels Without End redeems such wayward narratives by ensconcing them within a distinct generic category: the roman-fleuve, or sequence novel. Distinguishing the roman-fleuve from the serial or long novel, this "first theoretical study of the roman-fleuve as a genre" finds the fullest flowering of the form in Dorothy Richardson's thirteen-book, transitionperiod narrative, Pilgrimage (1915-1967). Felber has made it possible to understand the signature modernist innovation of stream-of-consciousness narrative in terms of a Victorian inheritance exemplified by Trollope's six-book Palliser novels (1864-1880), and in terms of a postmodern legacy exemplified by Anthony Powell's twelve-book A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975). Creating new theoretical, historical, and ideological contexts for analysis of novels by Richardson, Trollope, and Powell, Felber proves a valuable guide through these daunting narratives and through the thorny questions about the meanings and functions of gender that feminist criticism has placed at the center of discussions about them. One of Felber's stated goals is to give these baggiest of "baggy monsters" their critical due. She acknowledges the practical and aesthetic difficulties that the roman-fleuve poses to readers, who must bravely confront novels of massive length with bewildering spatial and temporal gaps between volumes and problematic (or nonexistent) forms of closure. Still, she matches the ambition of her ambitious subjects by attempting to expose and thus cut through the paradox at the heart of the marginal acceptance of the roman-fleuve: "on the one hand, it seems too difficult and esoteric to appeal to the average reader; on the other hand, it resembles popular genres disparaged by serious critics." The benefits of Felber's more generous approach to the roman-fleuve are displayed in a first chapter that provides a brief history and theoretical definition of...