Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language by Megan Quigley (review)

Few aesthetic movements better capture the expression and formalization of philosophy than modernism. For scholars of philosophy and literature—and for a century of thinkers concerned with questions of language, textuality, and authenticity—modernism’s innovations and idiosyncrasies have proven irresistible. In recent years, studies of the two have tended to focus, it seems, on the importance of analytical thought—a trend echoed in the more general attention to the practices of reading that offer new kinds of clarity and definition: the turn to cognitive science, for instance, or data analysis. But this trend, as Megan Quigley argues in Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language, risks missing something vital at both the historical and methodological level—namely, vagueness: a problem, as she describes it, “of the imprecise boundaries of concepts” (ix) that is at the heart of both anglo-modernist philosophy and fiction. By restoring this trope to its rightful place, Quigley looks to show how these fields might be both richly confounded and ultimately wedded by their interests in ambiguity. In so doing, she is hopeful that new ways of reading will emerge that refuse the criteria of hard science and embrace the uncertainty and porosity of this era’s richest literature.

The overriding premise of this book is one of “discursive evolution” (10). Disciplinary interests in vagueness, Quigley shows, are not unidirectional, but simultaneous and symbiotic. Part of her effort to correct the overemphasis on modernism and analytic philosophy is to stress the importance of vagueness as a pragmatically valuable concept. In this sense, the project will be of interest to scholars working at the intersection of philosophy and literature more generally; Quigley’s careful tracking of this term is a useful and admirable attempt to show how these forms of discourse not only approach conceptual problems in related ways, but also how they influence and shape each other’s means of doing so. Indeed, essential to this book is the impossibility of distinction: at what point, for instance, do philosophy and fiction become separable and distinguishable categories? Empirically, we might say, the distinction is clear enough. And yet, when asked to define precisely where they diverge and assume an “authentic” form, the task becomes trickier, harder to manage, and ultimately, as Quigley helps us see, paradoxical.

For all that, however, the book—given its interest in close reading and the particular scope of its historicizing—will be of interest principally to those who work in British and US modernism. For it is the authors of this period, as she tells us, who are uniquely interested in how conceptual ambiguities might help them “to examine psychological depth, to depict sexual indeterminacy, or to register disenchantment with the capitalist, bourgeois, and symbolic status quo while still existing within those systems” (6). Much of the book then is devoted to the history of late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth century Anglo-philosophy: charting how “the reinstatement of the vague” engendered analytic and pragmatic thought as two distinct and opposed positions. The former—whose representatives here are Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein—see vagueness as the source of paradox and confusion, a problem to be eliminated through “analytical methods and logical formulae” (2). The latter, pragmatism, takes an altogether different view: finding in language a necessary vagueness, which for Charles Peirce, William James, and the later Wittgenstein, is not a problem to be dispatched but a concept to be celebrated and employed. Quigley’s effort here is laudable, and her success in affording readers a lucid account of this material—however counterintuitive to vagueness, as she notes, it may be—is enough to ensure the book’s significance. But the larger methodological and theoretical claims are often lost in the highly pointed focus of her readings. By providing a comparative framework that pairs philosophers with modernist writers—sustained by close and often brilliant readings—Quigley is effective in showing that the Linguistic Turn is a descriptor as apt to the history...