The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature (review)

358Philosophy and Literature "in a way"? Simply because it is hard to believe, initiaUy, diat we could ever be satisfied with a "metaphorical" solution to die problem of mind. David Morris spoke ofthe languages ofpain and noted that "We have entered a time when pain threatens to become — outside die private languages of medicine — entirely drained of meaning" (p. 96). In search of a language to articulate pain he echoes again the familiar cry: "What our words often reveal is the impossibUity of finding words adequate to our experience" (p. 91). In die camp ofmetaphor-makers we have D. N. Perkins, who does his best to locate creativity in relationship to three models of inteUigence. He tries out the metaphorical waters with the idea that creativity could be thought of as "InteUigence with an accent" (p. 113), an idea which he elaborates in an interesting (but not unabashedly metaphorical) fashion. Then Doris Grumbach considers the problem of creativity and fearlessly plunges in with the statement diat "the mind is a compost heap" (p. 122) and expands upon diis theme with delight. She explains her confidence by quoting Flaubert: "Everydiing you invent is true; you can be sure of diat" (p. 126). FinaUy, Maxine Greene notes the relationship between metaphor and the development of mind. Citing Wordsworth, Joyce, and Alice Walker she notes how these audiors presented young people "thinking in terms of increasingly complex metaphors mat aUow diem to find new patterns ... of significance in their own experience as diey grow. . . . Each [audior] confirms die notion diat metaphormaking and imagining are integral to die growth of mind" (p. 141). To sum up: I enjoyed this book much more than I expected on first noticing diat it was another example of"interdisciplinary ferment." Indeed it is becoming increasingly clear that finding the "adequate, powerful metaphor" to increase our understanding of mind is a task in which we can use help from every quarter. University of OtagoDavid Ward The Myth ofModernism and Twentieth Century Literature, by Bernard Bergonzi; xviii & 216 pp. New York: St. Martin 's Press, 1986, $27.50. Readers ofcriticism by Bernard Bergonzi have become accustomed to writing that is inteUigent, temperate, judiciously constrained by common sense, and generous toward those whom he dislikes or disagrees with. They wiU not be disappointed by this book, which is a coUection ofsome ofhis reviews and essays from die past fifteen years. AU are worthy ofhaving been rescued from obscurity Reviews359 in sundryjournals. The essays/reviews range from a firm and sensible rejection ofdie nostalgia ofdie Bloomsbury cult in "The Bloomsbury Pastoral" to a gende but highly effective attack on the English Marxist critic, Terry Eagleton. Odier essays deal more directly with modernism and English literature. There are essays on Arnold Bennett, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound's fascism, Pound and Donald Davie, Davie and PhUip Larkin, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis and Eliot, George Steiner, an essay on Bernard Spencer, Alun Lewis, and G. S. Fraser, three minor poets of the 1940s, and an essay on the sad decline and faU of die Cadiolic novel. There is no essay on "die myth" of "modernism." Bergonzi underwrites his tide and educes die unity of die essays in a short introduction in which he describes "the ahistorical myth of modernism ... as a total revolution, a oncefor -aU transformation." Modernism is now recognized as a closed historical period, although there is no agreement on when it began and ended. Bergonzi is not much interested in debates about periodization; it suffices diat die modern in literature began some time between the end ofdie nineteenui century and the beginning of die First World War and petered out some time in tiie 1930s. The important thing is to combat die self-serving myui of modernism. With the perspective provided by hindsight we now understand several important aspects of modernism diat were not understood clearly during its rampancy. The stridency of die modernist rejection of die recent past togetiier widi die Poundian insistence diat the writer must "make it new" obscured various of the dependencies on die past which were maintained and even cultivated by aU die modernists, even the most "futurist" writers such as Mayakovsky and Marinetti. Eliot...