Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse by William D. Melaney (review)

William D. Melaney's Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse, a comparative study of Modernist prose and poetry, attempts to place modern literature at the juncture of two evolving philosophical movements that will later develop into Deconstruction and Critical Theory. The author adopts a double-pronged approach to Modernism, emphasizing the productive tension between two different hermeneutic approaches that are often regarded as irreconcilable. It is the convergence of these critical discourses, and the use of the interpretive tools they offer, that illuminate the ways in which Modernist art appears predisposed to allegorical completion in its aspiration to break with historical continuity and its simultaneous acknowledgement of tradition. The main argument of the book, a powerful and compelling claim, is the notion that formalist and historicist approaches to literature, which evolve from fundamentally different philosophical traditions with roots in idealism and materialism, display structurally relevant points of contact and can therefore be utilized as complementary critical tools. Melaney constructs the theoretical backbone of his argument by emphasizing the critical relationship between Peter Bürger and Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Derrida. Rather than emphasizing the divergences of these theoreticians, Melaney looks for parallels and common ground. He further conducts an analysis of allegorical prose and allegorical poetry thanks to case studies of Joyce, Kafka, Malraux and Andric on the one hand, Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Williams and Stevens on the other. Two final sections on the semiotics of reading and Modernism and material difference conclude this twelve-chapter study.

Melaney begins to interrogate the theoretical compatibility of the two hermeneutic paradigms by contrasting the historicist foundation of Bürger's Theory of the Avant-garde with the critical materialism of Benjamin's work on Modernism. Bürger's theory rests upon an evolutionary and linear historicism, in which artistic invention cannot produce a complete rupture since its production depends upon its very own socio-historic circumstances. Benjamin, instead, regards historical reality as a discontinuous field of virtual writing that remains open to interpretive exigencies. Melaney continues to trace these traditions by comparing Adorno to Derrida, claiming that the opposition between their speculative systems is merely conventional. Since in Adorno the materiality of the artwork resists Hegelian Aufhebung, i.e., the sublation resulting from the dialectical movement of the Spirit, the work of art can produce a counter-history that opposes teleological progression. Melaney couples Adorno's unorthodox reading of Hegel with Derrida's discussion of the trace as an ideality that resists metaphysics. Allegorical modernism represents, according to the author, the textual site of convergence of these two movements.

The author presents eight case studies as substantive evidence of his claims. Indeed, the great merit of this truly comparative endeavor is the attempt of combining a theoretical discussion on materiality and allegory with the analysis of authors writing in a variety of different languages. Melaney discusses James Joyce's aesthetics of displacement in the "Oxen of the Sun" episode in Ulysses, underlining the tension between the mythographic effort of the novel and the genealogical presentation exhibited in this particular chapter. The critical importance of the essay "Ulysses, Order and Myth" elegantly prefigures the deferred chapter on T.S. Eliot, where the author argues for the possibility of an autobiographical approach to a founding figure of New Criticism. A discussion of Augustine and the role of autobiography in the conceptualization of time help Melaney in his provocative interpretation of the "autobiographical trace" in the reading of The Four Quartets. Franz Kafka's novels and short stories are presented through the non-historical aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy. For the author, Kafka's exposure of the ironic fallacies of a language that is indeterminate and thus fails to record traumatic memory constitutes the promise of a potentially ethical future, free of the pronouncements of the past. André Malraux's novel La condition humaine suggests the possibility of a dialectical resolution of political conflict, but at the same time frustrates expectations...