Next Stop: Modernism

ELT 45 : 1 2002 fuller than I/ Had willed and meted me the tears I shed"). What happens comes about through the agency of "Crass Casualty" (i.e. chance) and "dicing Time" (i.e. luck-governed temporal contingency). The assumption of conscious malignity makes a nonsense of what the poem actually says. A similar casualness with textual specifics mars Persoon's discussion of "The Impercipient," in which he assumes that "the impercipient" refers to the "bright believing band" of worshippers rather than the first-person onlooker excluded from their visionary apprehensions. Given how reliant Persoon's discussion is on attempted close reading of the texts, such approximateness crucially undermines critical authority . But the problems with this book are finally as much rhetorical as conceptual or analytical. There is, for example, nothing inherently problematic with trying to argue that "the early poems ... are actually revisions done in the last thirty years or so of Hardy's life" and that the evidence of Hardy's pre-1898 poetic skills "does not suggest an early gift for poetry." But to be of any use to an informed reader of Hardy's poetry, this claim has to be founded in more than an unsubstantiated hunch. Revisionist honours are not going to be won by on the one hand asserting (without elaboration) that Dennis Taylor—one of the subtlest and most learned scholars of Hardy's poetry—"accepts rather uncritically . . . Hardy's dating of the earliest poems" while on the other hand advancing, as a possible explanation for the destruction of nearly all early manuscripts , the following bathetic surmise: "Hardy, like many writers, felt his children were raised and sent out into the world. Though he continued to pay attention to their reception and refinements, he no longer needed their red-faced baby pictures." Persoon has an undeniable enthusiasm for his subject and pursues his thesis with great energy and earnestness. But his insights need to be disciplined into an analytical medium that does much more than attempt to prod into argumentative life a shuffling parade of aged straw men. Keith Wilson ______________ University of Ottawa Next Stop: Modernism Rosemary Sumner. A Route to Modernism: Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. xiv + 208 pp. $59.95. A ROUTE to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner's study of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, draws its title from a meta100 BOOK REVIEWS phor in a letter Virginia Woolf wrote to Ethel Smythe in 1931. In this letter Woolf remarked on the fact that her "contemporaries" were "doing the same thing on another railway line," "distracting" her by "flashing past the wrong way." Woolf 's description of literary modernism(s), both provocative and characteristically demanding, challenges us to puzzle out how her contemporaries were doing the "same thing" as she while going "the wrong way." However, this is not the task of Sumner's book, which focuses on one "railway line" or "route to modernism": the Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf route. Her analysis of the writings of these three authors "show[s] that there is a route to modernism," the origins of which are found in Hardy and fulfilled in Lawrence and Woolf. The introduction expounds the distinguishing features of the specific strain of modernism Sumner finds characteristic of these three writers. Following are five chapters on Hardy's writings, some of which provide close readings of lesser-known works like Two on a Tower and The WellBeloved . The remaining half of Sumner's study discusses the writers individually or in different permutations. A chapter each is devoted to Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love; other chapters compare Hardy and Lawrence or Lawrence and Woolf. Central to Sumner's argument is that the work of Hardy, Lawrence, and Woolf expands "the boundaries of the novel" by attempting to represent two ultimately mysterious worlds: "the world beyond the human" (e.g., the earth devoid of people fantasized by Birkin in Women in Love) and the unconscious. Their attempts to apprehend such elusive realms lead in turn to formal innovations, which Sumner sees in their shift of focus away from plot, use of language and imagery to convey "experiences which the conscious mind cannot...