Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (review)

Paul Sheehan's Modernism, Narrative and Humanismis a compelling book. Its major theme, which, somewhat surprisingly, does not appear in the title, is in fact the genealogy of antihumanist thought. Sheehan sets out to demonstrate that the reassessment of humanism and the human as a given category, a critique we tend to associate with post-war thinking, has its roots and origins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Furthermore, these earlier developments, Sheehan argues, have been crucial to the efflorescence of antihumanism that has dominated continental theory and criticism in the post-war period.

Sheehan has coined the term "anthropometric" to characterize the reevaluation of the human from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. In this period, Sheehan argues, the human is measured against three major categories, namely the animal, the mechanical and the transcendent. This questioning is inaugurated by the thinking of such post-Kantian philosophers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Darwin and Heidegger, and further developed by modernist novelists like Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf and Beckett.

Alongside Sheehan's analysis of continental philosophy and the modernist novel, runs a discussion on narrative. Since the focus of the study is the reassessment of humanist thought in the "anthoropometric era" (xi), Sheehan's emphasis is on two specific genres of narrative: the Bildungsroman that, through its preoccupation with subjectivity and Bildung, is the most intimately linked to humanist thought, and the "experimental, formally diverse modernist novel" (5), the antagonist of the Bildungsroman.

By its very nature, narrative contains elements of both the human and the inhuman. It consists of what Sheehan calls "a composite of voice and machine" (10). While voice provides the idiosyncratic character of narratives, 'machine' is accountable for their generic code. Machine "is one of the prior conditions for making narrative comprehensible, whereas voice offers the chance for difference, variation and irregularity, pulling against narrative's machinelike precision" (11).

One of the crucial tenets of narrative is its suppression of contingency. All is made to appear purposive, and the end is contained in the beginning. As Sheehan argues, "[t]his formal self-consistency also occurs within our experience of ourselves, in the self-narratives of human beings, linking origins with ends" (12). Sheehan reminds us of Frank Kermode's observation that the essence of such concordances is "the power of form to console." ¹ If narrative masks the contingency of the human, then the modernist novel responds to this by introducing formal irregularities, in other words, by becoming performative: "Brokendown narrative is insidiously disquieting in ways that troubling story-content cannot match" (16). Modernist writing violates the author-reader contract, but in so doing, it promises to "do something to the reader. . . . Modernist narrative suggests that literature can pass beyond the limits of what is representable" (16). It scrutinizes the human where it is most vulnerable: "in the forms and ways of understanding that are exclusive to narrative" (17).

The nineteenth century was the period in which history and narrative flourished, enabling European nations to unite tradition and destiny, and providing them with a sense of teleology. On the other hand, however, the nineteenth century was also the century of the breakdown of causality, witnessed, for instance, in the theory of evolution which defies narration. Darwin reanimalized the human, and in so doing, "took narrative out of nature" (35). For while on the one hand the theory of evolution offers "a pattern of changes that can be made to mean," it also epitomizes pure contingency (38). In natural selection "[b]lind chance replaces meaning, in a series of (natural) law-abiding accidents" (38). This process is "discontinuous, antiprogressive and unpredictable and hence defiant of all the criteria for narrativisation" (41). Whichever view we take of the animal-into-human transformation, we are faced with a leap "from instinct into conscience, from reaction into reflexivity, and from 'presentism' into narrative" (41). This, in turn, opens up a "gap between metaphysics and narration, an indicator...