I Do I Undo I Redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves in Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf (review)

Manuscript studies began their escape from the fringes of literary criticism and scholarship after a group of critique génétique scholars in France used models that had been reserved for published works—linguistics, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, sociology, feminist and gender theory—to investigate manuscripts and, with no interest in establishing accurate texts of works, paid more attention to writing processes than to the works that resulted from those processes. In I Do I Undo I Redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves in Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf Finn Fordham takes a major step towards securing genetic criticism's place in the scholarly mainstream by looking at "processes of production and their relation to the making, unmaking, and remaking of identity."

Fordham's goals are extremely ambitious. He offers genetic analyses of works by two poets and four novelists and also considerations of the self in these writers as well as in modernism more generally, contemporary philosophy, and such earlier philosophers as Descartes and Heidegger. Because genetic studies use detailed quotations as illustrations and grow out of an overall understanding of an author's works, an ability to read the author's handwriting, and a good sense of how the author worked, they tend to be single-authored, but I Do I Undo I Redo (the title comes from a Louise Bourgeois sculpture) studies six writers with an overarching aim of demonstrating that "representations of the self and theories of the self issue from the processes behind textuality and they often take their form from processes of composition." Through his range of authors, texts, and methods of genetic analysis, Fordham aims to indicate the wide variety of (as he names his opening chapter) modernist "texts and selves in process."

Three introductory chapters discuss various concepts of the self: general ideas in relation to writing processes; treatments in accounts of modernism and in recent philosophical considerations by Charles Taylor, Paul Ricoeur, Jerrold Seigel; and specific claims in Descartes and Heidegger, both of whom in different ways erased considerations of writing processes in depictions of the thinking self. The book's core follows, with the six writers grouped into three pairs. First, Fordham looks at Gerard Manley Hopkins' writing of "The Windhover" and "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" in relation to "self-compression": rather than seeing the poetry as the expression of an individual mind and body, "the effect of writing may be . . . to cram some substance into an internal space that might previously have been thought to be empty." For William Butler Yeats, in contrast, Fordham moves outward from the writing, but, as with Hopkins, not into an argument for writing as expression. Rather, as Yeats wrote and revised the very early, unpublished poem "Pan," "certain compositional methods and principles used to organize language into, say, a certain kind of poem are transformed into political efforts at organizing people in society."

Fordham next considers aspects of Joseph Conrad's and E.M. Forster's writing of "Heart of Darkness" and A Passage to India, including their revisions to characterization. Conrad's methods in his initial work involve doubling, especially doubling back in speech to create a character's stammer: "Each doubling—linguistic, structural, thematic— can be read as a sign of the processes of reflection which are pronounced in Conrad's acts of adjustment in continuous running textual revision." Forster's revisions involve removing elements of a character's past, a "textual hollowing out" that produces "blurred characters" with "less stably grounded" selves.

James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are the final pair. Fordham discusses Joyce's many revisions to the "Circe" episode of Ulysses in relation to the phenomenon of multiple personality, especially ways in which the characters' personalities are split and multiplied, more and more as Joyce revised and expanded the episode. ("Joyce's Ulysses and Multiple Personalities...