Breaking Down Space & Time: Modernism

BOOK REVIEWS Hardy's symbolic imagery, and the language of the ending are all fractured , counterpoised, viewed from various perspectives or irreducible to a coherent reference point. The implications of this reading are important , for it places Tess on the vanguard of the modernist aesthetic. Understanding Hardy's aesthetic, actually, is the implicit or explicit subject of several of these essays (and it has long been an annoying preoccupation for readers and critics). Shires's claim that Hardy admired modern painters who "distorted reality in order to bring out specifics" has a lot in common with Norman Page's argument that Hardy's aesthetic sensibility is linked to those Victorian radicals who turned away from classical ideas of beauty towards the gothic and the grotesque. Dennis Taylor's essay on Hardy's poetry examines "the theme of interrupted meditation" throughout Hardy's career, and Peter Widdowson points out Hardy's antagonism toward realism at the beginning of his interesting overview of Hardy and critical theory. In fact, Widdowson concludes his essay with an important aesthetic question, one that, he claims, is seldom asked by Hardy's most sophisticated critics: "Is Hardy in control of the text? Does he intend his effects and utterances?" Hardy's stories are so compelling, his characters so vivid and psychologically true, and his vision of the modern world so moving, that issues of craft, language, and style sometimes get short shrift. But, as Taylor points out, Hardy "is signally the poet of the OED, and the era of new philological insight into the history of English." The various experts who contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy remind us to pay attention to artistic intention, to the words on the page, as well as to the contexts—biographical, intellectual, social—that inform the texts of a still provocative writer. Annette Federico ------------------------------ James Madison University Breaking Down Space & Time: Modernism Thomas Vargish & DeIo E. Mook. Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. xii + 185 pp. $30.00 INSIDE MODERNISM is a book about which it may be said that the more one reads it, the better it gets. The book begins with the unlikely goal of providing a general definition of modernism—unlikely given the vast diversity of projects (from Dada to the Bauhaus) comprising the modernist lexicon, not to mention the many uses which "modernism " has acquired as a term of art. It ends more modestly by staking its 467 ELT 43 : 4 2000 case for a "definition" (a set of shared features) common to the modernist examples it considers, while hinting that other examples might admit other kinds of definitions. On first impression the book seems to do little more than restate commonplaces about the examples it considers; however , by its end, these examples have been revisited in a most unusual way. Written by a physicist and a literary scholar, the book moves from obvious analogies between modern physics, analytic cubism and "the modernist novel" (its domain of examples) into an intriguing and original analysis. Well worth reading, Inside Modernism will reward the seasoned reader with fresh perspectives. It is to the question of perspective, more precisely to the relation between observer and reality, that this book directs itself. What is argued is that common to the theories of special and general relativity, the analytic cubism of Picasso and Braque, and the narrative strategies of James, Proust, Woolf and Faulkner, are shared ways of breaking down conventional representations of space and time—in each case with profound and disturbing implications for human subjectivity. These are taken to define their property of being modernist. Newton postulated that space and time are infinite containers in which action takes place. So (it is argued) the pre-modernist novel places character and action within a pre-given space-time setting (called "reality") which is independent of both and, of course, identified with authorial perspective. Similarly realist painting constructed a space within which figure and action are set, and which is in no way identical with either. What defines modernist physics, painting and literature are their projects of breaking down distinctions between conventionally given reality and the perspectives of those inside reality. Modernism is on...