Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life by Omri Moses (review)

At first sight this book seems to be out of tune with the new modernism studies and its agenda of both recalibrating what we understand by “modernism” (a radically expanded field) and our methods of reading modernist texts (reading “badly”) (see Mao and Walkowitz). Moses deals with canonical modernist authors who share a commitment to the intricacies of psychology (23). He moves from the late prose of Henry James (The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl), past Gertrude Stein (“Melanctha” from Three Lives [1903] and the chapter on Henry James in the late Four in America [1933]) to the early poems of T. S. Eliot. His focus on “character” and its relation to ethics returns us to one of the classic themes in literary criticism. But of course Out of Character is a wayward title, signaling that the book wants to move away from the well-trodden paths. The feat of this study is that it constructs a complex story of dynamic continuities—between different authors, between realism and modernism, classic and vanguard ways of reading, individual and community, the intimate and the public—that accentuates rather than downplays the innovative agendas of modernist writing. In engaging perceptively with vitalism, furthermore, Moses makes an important contribution to recent work in modernism studies that is reconsidering vitalist thought as a fruitful intellectual context (see Burwick and Douglass; Jones; Ardoin, Gontarski, and Mattison).

Moses’s path “out of character” leads him via George Eliot’s, Joseph Conrad’s, and Herman Melville’s approaches to character into the “psychic life” explored by James, Stein, and Eliot. He argues that where, in realist fiction, character was grounded in an overt (Eliot) or mysterious (Conrad) consistent system, Melville’s poetic of inconsistency paved the way for modernist experiment with agile, adjusting [End Page E-1] selves. Where Melville veers toward a sterile inconsistency, however, the modernists’ fascination with continuous change over time—inspired by, according to Moses, primarily Darwin, William James, and Bergson—enables them to invent new modes of relationality: interest for James, habit for Stein, and voice for Eliot. Moses’s stress on the self as category and his attention to the question of how the exploration of affective constellations by both authors and readers relates to a communal endeavor align his project with other recent work in both affect studies and literary criticism (see, for example, Ngai; also Izenberg).

In the first chapter, before embarking on the case studies, Moses tackles “personhood beyond personality.” Here he positions his approach to a dynamic modernist self in relation to a range of other disciplines and methodologies, calling for a critical perspective that brings to light frictions in modernist thinking rather than staging a critical version of the radical modernist “make it new” story. He argues, for example, that the modernist discourse around impersonality has often been understood in too-rigid terms. Rather than an attempt to erase a self, the concept of impersonality should be seen as part of a complex psychological enterprise, with authors relating different psychological templates from ego psychology to behaviorism. On the questions of psychology and ethics (how does individual life relate to the good life?) and of self and history (how determining is context?) Moses repeats this gesture of moving beyond an either/or logic. Concerning the former, for example, he suggests we understand ethical life analogously to an artistic or aesthetic project, with creativity and the ability to change and adapt as inherent to the process. Fictional ethical life is important to our “real” ethical deliberations, furthermore, not because it promotes useful identification through exemplarity but rather because its very fictionality enables us to deal with decision-making on another level. Fiction, and the real emotions that it elicits, makes it possible for us to access a mode of reflection that stands apart from efficient or productive living.

Moses’s dynamic stance and his attention to non-instrumental modes of reflection are informed by the vitalist framework he uses. In the introduction he...