Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation by Sara Crangle (review)

Sara Crangle's book undertakes to explain why four everyday desires are important to James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett. This, it turns out, is difficult, not because it has been done before—different critics can come to disparately interesting conclusions¹—but because one concludes, after reading Prosaic Desires, that most things have been done before. The book proceeds by means of comparisons that occur in a haze of déjà-vu, and literary history emerges as a series of critical or philosophical anticipations arrived at by others. At the same time, any burgeoning interest to be had in the application of philosophy to literature is nipped in the bud, for the philosophers are all terribly similar, when they are not different.

The contribution to scholarship to which the book aspires is the use of Emmanuel Levinas as index to a shift in modernism's focus from self to other: "Levinas's extraordinarily absolute otherness, both as locus of desire and as self-definition, compels a fantastic, productive rethinking of the subject-other dyad" (18). This claim occurs alongside Crangle's wish "explicitly [to] counter . . . recent approaches towards desire" (4-5). Such "recent approaches" seem to be those focusing on sexuality and power—whatever else they are, they are "all-encompassing"; the "counter[ing]" consists in furnishing us with the "myriad longings" we find in the banal and the quotidian (5). For Crangle, modernism's "far more everyday" yearnings accompany a waning of "interest in the autonomous individual," to be "replaced by a productively insatiable desirousness focused on otherness" (5). Otherness and instances of desire are yoked throughout the book, but little develops from there. The topics of each chapter are promising, but their execution is disappointing. The book is confusingly conceived and awkwardly written, from the level of the sentence (no one past college age should be allowed to write "[s]o begins"—128) to the level of thought, mediated by what are at times spectacularly awkward transitions (a critic's "constant mention [sic] of anticipation when discussing laughter brings a salient point to light"—139). Perhaps most glaringly, the question of what the prosaic and the fissuring of a self say to each other overall does not warrant asking. The book's conclusion is that Levinas is like quite a few other writers and that modernists, in writing about or living everyday desires, "imbue mortality with eternality" (191). It is either too difficult or too easy to argue with that.

Arguing primarily by means of comparison engenders an unattractive restlessness, unattractive because it cloaks not adventurousness—even as something adventurous lurks in this book's account of selfhood—but a refusal to work through a claim. Similitudes also kill particulars. Relatedly, rhizomatic busy-ness can engender not staying still long enough to define the author's terms. I longed—or perhaps yearned—to know whether longing was different from yearning. Risibility, at one point (midparagraph, midchapter), is referred to as "usually only implicitly figured in theories of laughter" (114), but even as the chapter vaunts "risibility" and the book's title "laughter," no more of the difference is made. One might assume Crangle meant to say that laughter is a solitary phenomenon and risibility a shared one, given its absorption of both an activity (laughing) and an audience (which may find something funny), and she clearly thinks that Gertrude Stein starts by privileging ones (in Q.E.D.) and moves to twos (in "A Long Gay Book").² Risibility, though, turns out also to encompass the "solitary," just as laughter can be "shared," so that distinction does not hold (119, 122). At times, the fact that risibility means that something causes laughter, while laughter is the product of something risible vanishes altogether; thus "[Martin Armstrong] almost describes a world attending on the next guffaw, keenly anticipating its next risible release" (139). The same issue surrounds any difference that might be construed between waiting and...