Phosphorescent Modernism

THE WORD "LATENESS" in this elegant, wide-ranging study has numerous nuanced connotations. Some of the most important ones are decadence, décadisme (Anatole Baju), decline, degeneration, belatedness, lassitude, lastness, eschatology, Spätstil ("late style"), Spätling ("latecomer"), embarrassment (Paul Valéry), hollowing out (Theodor Adorno), epigonism, neurasthenia, cultural exhaustion, fin de siècle, myth (T. S. Eliot), Menschheitsdämmerung ("twilight of humanity"), and even—or rather inevitably—carpe diem.

I list these terms and expressions (in no particular order) to provide some idea of the multilingual, multicultural, and multinational flavor of Lateness and Modern European Literature, a work that impresses not only by its all-encompassing analyses, but also by its clarity of expression (never to be taken for granted). Indeed, to that list let me add another. Here are some of the writers mustered by Ben Hutchinson to illustrate his thesis that modern European literature "repeatedly defines itself through its responses to a sense of lateness, and that indeed this lateness can be understood as an expression of the modern's continuing quest for legitimacy": Adorno, Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Gottfried Benn, Hermann Broch, Chateaubriand (in his Mémoires d'outre-tombe), Eliot, Freud, Gautier, Goethe, Hegel, Huysmans, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Musset, Nietzsche (a recurring touchstone), Désiré Nisard (an unfamiliar name perhaps, but an important nineteenth-century critic), Pater, and Valéry—and these are only the most prominent among the many, many playwrights, novelists, poets, critics, and essayists whose works are either mentioned, summarized, or analyzed in this comprehensive study.

The sheer breadth of authors and literatures under scrutiny evinces Hutchinson's astonishing familiarity with European critical and philosophical currents, socio-literary movements, and cultural worldviews: in short, with the broad sweep of European intellectual thought from, roughly, the 1820s to the 1920s. To produce such an intricately woven tapestry must have been a mammoth undertaking—and the results are impressive.

Lateness and Modern European Literature, which seeks to "reinterpret literary modernity . . . as that which is late" in order to show that "lateness simultaneously defines and undermines the 'modern,'" is vast in scope yet replete with examples. The book is divided into three parts: From Late to Post-Romanticism ("twilight struggling to reach a new dawn"), Decadence (with its "tendency to self-reflexivity"), and Modernism ("an attempt to overcome [lateness], rather than to embrace it"). And after providing myriad illustrations and quotations—most of the translations from French, German, and Italian are his—Hutchinson concludes that "Lateness, conceived as a hermeneutic proposition, becomes a synonym for modernity; modern literature becomes a version of late style;. . . modern lateness culminates in late modernism;. . . [and] European modernity emerges not as a sense of beginning, but as a sense of ending." In this regard, he quotes the famous bon mot of Roland Barthes: "Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die." Lateness and Modern European Literature splendidly illustrates Barthes's analogy.

The exemplary index is a vade mecum that directs readers not only to names and works, but also to the rubrics that underpin the book's themes and thesis: aesthetic, apocalypse, avant-garde, consciousness, decadence, degeneration, epigone, eschatological, lastness, lateness, late style, modernism, modernity, self-consciousness—and many more. Moreover, their subheadings are commendably (at times arrestingly) thorough: 66 for "decadence," 81 for "modernity," and 139 for "lateness"! The bibliography, handily divided into "primary" and "secondary" texts, will be indispensable to researchers, and the hundreds of notes are not to be skipped, as they provide not only sources but also the origins of some key terms as well as brief references to (and often explanations about) numerous works and authors not dealt with in the book. Insights abound even here.

Ben Hutchinson has built on his previous books, among them Modernism and Style (2011), to produce this masterful study. Students and scholars of comparative literature and of European studies—indeed, anyone invested in global humanities—will value Lateness and Modern European Literature for its inclusiveness: as an encyclopedic survey of a...