Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After (review)

REVIEWS as well as his previous and subsequent dramatic works, suggest that he shared much with the literary pundits working toward a fascist France. Witt makes a very convincing case that Anouilh never intended Antigone to be interpreted as a play advocating resistance. Her readings ofthis play and others by Anouilh are brilliantly sensitive to the nuances ofthe scripts and to their place in the contemporary theatrical context. Yet, having stripped Anouilh of intent, Witt finds that the audience's response is less connected to the play than to the conditions under which its performance was perceived: "It is surely time to dispel once and forall the notion that Antigone represents the collaborationist government, or rather that particular response should be seen as a reading ofspectators conditioned by highly charged circumstances ofreception" (229). Inher introduction, Witt wisely cautions that her exploration ofthe connections between fascist aesthetics and culture does not aim to label an author or a play as "fascist." While fascist critics extolled specific plays, they never found a dramatic work that fully embodied their criteria for "true" tragedy. (In the case ofAnouilh's Antigone, for example, collabo critics noted that the dialogue, written in a conversational idiomatic prose, was not sufficiently elevated for true tragedy.) Witt's focus, then, in this fascinating and wonderfully readable book, is on the search and on its tragic implications. A modem tragedy, which many proclaimed was so necessary for the spiritual rebirth ofmodem "man," was inevitably unattainable. Kenneth Krauss7Ae College ofSaint Rose MARCEL CORNIS-POPE. Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era andAfter. New York: Palgrave, 2001. xvi + 304 pp. Marcel Comis-Pope's book hardly requires a subtitle, but if it did, then it ought to be something like, "A Defense of Postmodem Fiction." From whom does postmodem fiction need defending? From whom does it not, might be a better question. On the Right, neoconservative critics hold postmodem innovation responsible for exacerbating our ongoing "crisis ofauthority, power, identity, and values" (36; the quotation is from Henry Giroux, who decidedly does not endorse this view). On the Left, neo-Marxist critics regard postmodern innovation as, at worst, culpably complicit with late-capitalist culture, at best "self-indulgent formalism" (6), fiddling while the world bums. Among feminists, mistrust of"mere" formal experimentation persists (82). To the neoconservative charges, Comis-Pope can only plead guilty on his client's behalf, but he adds by way of extenuation that postmodem innovative fiction doesn'tjust i/econstruct but also reconstructs, that it doesn'tjust««write but also rewrites (though its reconstructions and rewritings are unlikely to mollify neocons). In reply to the Left critique, Comis-Pope observes that everything a neo-Marxist like Fredric Jameson says he hopes for from a progressive art ofthe future—such as "global cognitive mapping" and "transcodings" among the disparate systems of late-capitalist culture can actually already be found in postmodem innovative fiction. And in response to the feminist suspicion of innovation, Comis-Pope makes the case for "formal revision" as a tool offeminist critique (83). Neoconservative and Marxist critiques alike, Comis-Pope writes provocatively (and he might have added feminist critiques as well), "illustrate our guilty conscience about artistic innovation" (10). VcH. 27 (2003): 172 THE COMPARATIST If one aims to exorcize this guilty conscience, one needs to be able to say exactly what postmodem innovation is goodfor. Comis-Pope has an answer to this: it is good for helping us to imagine alternatives to the polarized thinking that was a legacy ofthe Cold War world-view. Now that the Cold War's bipolar arrangements have been dismantled, as symbolized by the fall ofthe Berlin Wall in 1989, the opportunity arises to imagine new, different arrangements; Comis-Pope quotes Arjun Appadurai to the effect that "imagination has now acquired a singular new power in social life" (4). Postmodem innovative fiction allows us to practice exercising that power. It "create[s] an imaginative breach in the Cold War narratives ofcontainment" (22), notjust the narratives ofcontaining communism abroad, but also the domestic narratives of (re)containment that sent women back to the kitchen, blacks back to second-class citizenship, and kept gays and lesbians fearfully in the closet...