Subjects without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction (review)

THE COMPAKATIST ideological structures of his totalitarian motherland which couch themselves in lyrical metaphors, and shows how Kundera crosses over to the "realm of 'lightness of being' that dominates the world on the Western side of the border" (144). While Longinovic aptly shows how Kundera's heroes are representative of the "borderline" identity, shifting between loyalty to their homeland and the desire to escape "across the border" to the West, he also reserves some very appropriate, gender-oriented criticism for this author, displaying Kundera's misogyny and a "strong negative coding ofthe feminine element within the Slavic culture" (34). In his essay "Living On: Border Lines," Jacques Derrida says that if we are to approach a text, it must have a border, an edge. Tomislav Longinovic's Borderline Culture—with its own borderlines and edges, not unlike the borderline novels its author analyzes—"unmasks the phantoms of nationaUsm and reUgious fundamentaUsm" (169): it cuts so to speak, both ways. Dragan Kujundzic The University of Georgia, Athens GABRIELE SCHWAB. Subjects without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994. xvi + 280 pp. Over the last years, Gabriele Schwab has allotted considerable inteUectual energy to a very stimulating project. The offspring of these efforts, her book Subjects without Selves, has recently come out in the prestigious "Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature" series. The volume—the first she has pubUshed in EngUsh—is not just a translation of her second book, Entgrenzungen und Entgrenzungsmythen (1987), which carried over the "psychoaesthetic" focus of Samuel Becketts Endspiel mit der Subjektivität: Entwurfeiner Psychoästhetik (1981). Yet at the same time Subjects without Selves is less than a full rewriting of Entgrenzungen, for it actually "adapts" the German edition. This way, as the critic herself acknowledges in the preface, it becomes a linguistic and rhetorical expression ofthe subjects it approaches thematicaUy: the issues of the boundary, its transgression, and the "transitional" space any transgression, transition, or translation (in all senses) occupies. At first glance, Schwab's book is something of an oddity as an exemplar ofacademic discourse, technique, or mode ofinterrogation. Too abstract and theoretical to enthraU an American audience, it is repetitive and obscure simultaneously, attimes exceedingly generous in its assumptions about the reader's knowledge and rather sparing in its use of concrete examples. But neither does Subjects without Selves embody that kind ofGerman scholarship grounded in phenomenology that constitutes perhaps the absolute opposite to American criticism. The book will certainly be perceived as its author herselfironically anticipates: as an Vol. 19 (1995): 149 REVIEWS "alien resident" in a totally different "environment"—to be consistent with Schwab's "ecological" insights. However, as far as I am concerned, this "transgressive" and thereby provocative gesture, its possible shortcomings notwithstanding, functions as a necessary form of alterity within an American discourse sometimes menaced by its own excessive homogeneity. It also audaciously erects a bridge between isolated styles of critical thought and language, encouraging a most welcome cultural dialogue. ThematicaUy, Subjects without Selves aims at a comparative analysis of a series of "transitional texts" which illustrate the critic's conviction that "Uterature is a transitional space of speech whose function consists in continually reshaping the boundaries of language and subjectivity" (vii). SpecificaUy, Schwab deals with representative modern and post-modern epic works like Moby-Dick, The Waves, Finnegans Wake, The Unnamable, and Gravity's Rainbow, focusing on their transgressive and transformative impact on the literary subject. Within a theoretical framework informed chiefly by psychoanalysis, reader-response criticism, and systems theory, the critic explores the "poietic," creative exchange between artistic language and subjectivity. She discusses extensively the ways in which modern, experimental, and postmodern fiction enact this dialogue, which is to say, the perpetual reshaping of the subject's contour through linguistic innovations, innovations which are literary in a large sense. Since "language is the material that produces literary subjectivity" (ix), as Schwab puts it, a work's new morphology—polemically constituted if compared to the préexistent set of conventions—redraws the very map of subjectivity. Nevertheless, one could add that it is a new type—modern, postmodern, etc.—of creative subjectivity that transforms (rewrites) language, thereby exploiting Uterature to encode a specific cultural and...