Subject of Modernism

ELT 39:1 1996 reading to good advantage. My only remaining criticism, apart from the couple of reservations that I have already mentioned, concerns an element that, unfortunately, one almost begins to take for granted in contemporary criticism: a too readily assumed contempt for Western civilization. At one point Friedman observes, almost in passing, that "Western civilization . . . has defined itself in history largely through acts of conquest, genocide, slavery...." Happily, however, the frame of mind suggested by this sort of gratuitous smear is belied by Friedman's sedulous, regardful explication of some of the greatest literary works Western civilization has produced. Chapters on Greene, Durrell, and death in the postmodern world conclude the book. Friedman argues, in his last chapter, that for various reasons, including the "plague" of AIDS, we are in the midst of a postmodernist "renaissance" of death: "modernism begins with a shift to denial from the familial, climactic death central to Victorian life and letters; and ends with death's emergence from the closet and clinic into the light of academic study, media event, cultural phenomenon, casual conversation." Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise constitutes , especially for those with an interest in modernism, a valuable and significant contribution to this ongoing debate. Jim Barloon ______________ The University of Kansas Subject of Modernism Tony E. Jackson. The Subject of Modernism: Narrative Alterations in the Fiction of Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. 209 pp. $39.50 TONY E. JACKSON'S BOOK, unlike the one in the old saw, can indeed be told from its cover. The subject is not modernism so much as the modernist rendering, in both senses, of the Subject. With the help of French theorist Jacques Lacan, the reader discovers once again the answer that the subject is always in question. But one is still compelled to ask, with modernist Gertrude Stein, What is the question? This uncertainty puts the reader quite far from the complacent "subject of certainty" that is for Jackson the bane of the West since René Descartes's seventeenth century. But the subtitle, in a sly way, may tell more about the book than the main title does. We are in the presence, finally, of a series of readings, illustrative of a generic family romance. It is not for nothing that Lukács's Theory of the Novel is so strategic to 80 Book reviews the first chapter. Jackson has centered his attentions exclusively upon English prose narrative. Since Jackson's story is both metaphysical and generic (a tale with a split subject, as it were), summary is awkward. Nevertheless, roughly speaking, the book traces a course from a world where God provides authorization for the individual's life; through the attempt, after Descartes , to chart an empirical course for subjective desire that can attain self-certainty by securing its proper social role (in the form of realism's "spiral-return" narrative); to a sundering of this hopeful story first by naturalism (which turns the spiral's happy ending into a sad one) and then most crucially by modernism (which locates the resistance to the happy ending, and indeed to the very pleasure principle itself, within the Subject as much as outside it). Thus does modernism become what Jackson, following Lacan, would call "the analytic Other to realism." As in Sanford Schwartz's Matrix of Modernism, which he cites, Jackson sees the systematization of the Unconscious as modernism's signal advance. It is also a pleasant contrast to some other histories of modernist narrative that Jackson actually takes pains to demonstrate the world views to which modernism was replying, rather than allowing them solely to play Old Testament to modernism's Good (i.e., Bad) News. Indeed, his analysis of George Eliotf s late novel Daniel Deronda is perhaps the best thing in the book, for its lucidity and for its portrayal of the eponymous hero as a rough draft of the anti-Cartesian self, "a hypothetical alternative to ... the Cartesian subject." The need to posit self-certainty, if not in the hero then at least in someone, is seen as Eliot's version of the "spiral return" necessity-realist novelists tend to obey. In...