Modernist Conjectures

Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 workings of memory: beginning with the assertion that it is "Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, who not only is restored to prominence in the late nineteenth century but indeed becomes the muse for large numbers of writers," he concludes that his chosen autobiographers "share with Proust and Freud that obsession to understand and to recover a personal past, and they appreciate the past in terms of collective and incorporative theories of the workings of memory." One is left wondering, however, whether the restoration of Mnemosyne did not occur somewhat earlier, leaving the end of the nineteenth century to complete a process initiated by the beginning. Samuel Rogers's very popular The Pleasures of Memory, for instance, appeared as early as 1792. Norman Page University of Nottingham MODERNIST CONJECTURES Douwe Fokkema and Elrud Ibsch. Modernist Conjectures: A Mainstream in European Literature 1910-1940. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. $29.95 THIS IS THE LATEST output of two collaborators—comparatists at Amsterdam and Utrecht universities—who have produced volumes on twentieth-century theories of literature and on Postmodernism. The period established for their account of modern European writing is the between-the-wars heroic era of experiment and fulfillment, extended by a decade at the start so as to emphasize the initiators. In preference to an encyclopedic survey, the focus rests on ten major figures (Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Larbaud, Proust, Gide, Svevo, Musil, Du Perron, and Mann), and includes a summary of each career, detailed commentary on key texts, and excerpts from contemporary reception. All this may sound like yet another student-and-general-reader survey of a literary period, but Modernist Conjectures is an exemplary book in its way, important not as much for its achievement, perhaps, as for its promising methodology and industrious first steps in a worthwhile direction. The authors have marshalled not only a large fund of Continental scholarship, largely ignored in Anglo-Saxon criticism, but also the semiotic studies that have only superficially penetrated those quarters. For the general problem of characterizing literary periods and the specific problem of conceptualizing Modernism , they offer distinct and verifiable criteria for broad definitions and individual assessments. 487 Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 We have had our doses of avant-gardist assault on the "High Modernist" orthodoxy (beginning with the mid-'seventies books of Peter Ackroyd and Ihab Hassan), and also our portion of Humanist defenses, on the Harry Levin model, like the recent one by Ricardo J. Quiñones. The best ideas that historical scholarship has been able to muster are the indeed well-informed distinctions in Matei Calinescu's Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch. It is time that sharper critical tools were requisitioned to raise the level of discourse above ideological bantering and intellectual-context cocooning. Recent work on postmodernism—by Christopher Nash, Brian McHaIe, and Linda Hutcheon—has begun to display the narratological rigor required for this larger project. Basing their selection of objects for examination and of terminology on a wide range of semioticians and linguists, Fokkema and Ibsch establish a "Modernist code" divided into syntactic and semantic components. As an alternative to broadly generalizing about Modernism as a "world view inclined towards intellectual investigation, preferring hypothetical conjectures to dogmatic opinions," they propose to examine it as a "particular selection from a wide range of linguistic and literary options. The syntax of Modernist texts shows signs of epistemological uncertainty and metalingual criticism [i.e., explicit self-referentiality]; Modernist semantics is characterised by a preference for notions such as consciousness, detachment and observation . . ." (318; I cite a concluding summary, but the key discussion is at 30ff). In literary practice, the syntactic component features some well-known forms and traits: e.g., dialogues of intellectual argument, multiple perspectives, unreliable narrators, open endings, and reduced emphasis on internal coherence (39ff). As for the semantic component , it favors expressions including: "intelligent," "subtle," "experiment ," "hypothesis," "adventure," and "depersonalization" (44-45; references to the authors who use such terms and listings of their positive connotations—e.g., "[ + detachment]"—follow each item). While these criteria of Modernism are applied to many (but, surprisingly, not all) of the authors studied, they are not the...