American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge: Innovative Writing in the Age of Epistemology by Ronald E. Martin (review)

228 CanadianReview of American Studies to get the better of a poem by exposing "the point at which the ideology of ... poetry undermines itself' (138). Like Bloom, Leggett treats all texts as contests in which only the most self-conscious survive. To win favour, poet and critic must constantly confess the fictionalityof their own positions. This auto-criticism is oddly ascetic-an ironic situation inviewof Nietzsche's contempt for moral and intellectual asceticism. While I admire the skill with which Leggett deploys his forces, I worry about a systemthat leaves so little room for shared understanding and appreciation, Jon Kertzer Universityof Calgary + + + + + + Ronald E. Martin. American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge: Innovative Writing in the Age of Epistemology. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Pp. 391. The postmodernizing of the past continues apace, hyperscholarship meeting -or, inventing-hyperreality avant la lettre.Not that, in and of itself, this is a bad thing. In the case, for instance of No Man's Land, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar reveal the modernists' story of modernism to have been gender restrictive. In their re-vision, reading the canon (not to mention reading and the canon) gets altered if not "contaminated." Ronald E. Martin's apocalyptically titled American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge is similarly ambitious without being similarly--or even differently-transgressive. For this reason the book is somewhat disappointing. Erudite, readable and wide-ranging, Martin's work, finally, retells American modernism's oft-told story, albeit from the point ofview of epistemological doubt. With short preliminary chapters of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson , who are treated as precursors, American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge provides readings of major modern American literary figures from Stephen Crane and Robert Frost to William Carlos Williams and John Dos Passos. For Martin, the writers he treats are "knowledge destroyers [who]knew or suspected that language was not just a simple and absolute medium for the representation of ... " (xii). Along with what might be called a Wittgensteinian deidealizing of philosophy, these writers, according to Martin, were responding to an Einsteinian relativizing of science. Moreover, they had dadaists, cubists, futurists, and a salmagundi of others "ists" in the visual arts as fellow avant-garde modernists and proto-deconstructors: "a common denominator of nearly all of [the modernist visual BookReviews 229 artists]is the destruction of conventions, of forms and perspectives, even of the regnant ideas of art's nature and function" (150). As with Robert Nadeau's Readings from the New Book on Nature (University ofMassachusetts Press, 1981), Martin's book is a post-modernizing of the present in terms of post-Einsteinian physics; however, Martin uses too static a model to producehis narrative. That narrative itself more or less followsthe standard tale of literacy modernism in the United States. Epistemological inquiryand distrust are, for Martin,the "new'' element in the story. Uncritiqued are the seamlessness of epistemologicalresistance and the cultural/practical waysscience and philosophy influence literature and art. Also, because Martin's scope is vast, he can do no more than sketchvarious writers' tactics of epistemological scepticism; they thus remain the same "Pound" and "Stevens," for example, that other critics, without an epistemologicalframing , have produced. The limitations of Martin's approach can be illustrated by a slightly more extended look at two of his "knowledge destroyers,'' Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway.For Martin, "no writer did more in the business of knowledge destructionthat Gertrude Stein" (179); as for Hemingway, he is "the most famous knowledgedestroyer of them all" (216). Stein's experiments with form and language, Martinavers, were conducted solely "for reasons of epistemology'' (179). This Stein 1s, asever, the medical student, admirer of William James and, with her brother Leo, thediscoverer of Pablo Picasso. She is also the one who disrupts most intransigently "thestandard devices of coherence-syntax, logic, time sequence and so forth-by whicha piece of writing customarily made meaning" (183). Martin's overview and hisclose readings (of a bit of Pink Melon Day and "Jean Cocteau") do not produce asharply delineated or incisivelygrasped Stein. Similarly, an understanding of Hemingway is not augmented by his writings beingexamined in terms of his resistance to the congruence of words and world. His minimalism...