The Novel in England, 1900-1950: History and Theory (review)

The Novel in England, 1900-1950: History and Theory. By Robert L. Caserio. New York: Twayne, 1999. xii + 441 pp.

The Novel in England, 1900-1950, the title of Robert L. Caserio's comprehensive study of British modernism, is unassuming, almost generic. Only the subtitle, which couples the two current orthodoxies of literary study--history and theory--gestures toward imposing critical terrain, but in the terse idiom of the card catalog. Even the book jacket, on which the title is highlighted against a block of sober green, seems designed to convey the impression of solidity devoid of passionate advocacy or interpretive daring.

Never has it been more foolhardy to judge a book by its cover. Caserio's magisterial study joins a host of recent works that seek to reevaluate, at times rehabilitate, modernist writings, but only his, to my mind, recasts the very terms of critical debate on the modernist achievement. Caserio does so by conscientiously enlarging, without loss of focus, the frame through which we view modernism's varied, still ambiguous accomplishments. His critical sights are directed at a "constellation" of works that he recovers for us in all their irreducible distinctness of form and idiosyncrasy of authorship. The reader making his way through Caserio's modernist universe will encounter Conrad, Lawrence, and Woolf, but primarily as they expressed themselves in little-discussed works like Chance, The Lost Girl, and The Years. Caserio maps a richly diverse, populous literary galaxy, so that not only these supernovas but luminaries like Kipling, Bennett, Galsworthy, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, David Garnett, Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, Mary Webb, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Somerset Maugham, Christopher Isherwood, Henry Green, and Graham Greene are allotted their rightful place in the history of the novel in England. Reputations are resuscitated or otherwise remade. Caserio reminds us why such eccentric writers as Ronald Firbank and John Powys, who have intermittently enjoyed an avid but notably unacademic following for years, deserve our attention. He devotes riveting pages to the disturbingly original writing of Powys, who has languished in unhappy obscurity despite the determined efforts of G. Wilson Knight to explicate his "masturbatory" doctrine. Powys is among a tribe of nonconforming modernists who challenged the ruling dogmas of their times. Indeed, one of the ironies Caserio explores, with stunning results, is that today's general suspicion of grand, totalizing narratives "seems only to have caught up with modernism" (81). As he convincingly demonstrates, distrust of what lies behind intellectual systems, the pursuit of anticanonical impulses, and the search for inspiriting, provisional, negotiable, and noncoercive images of tradition originate within, not subsequent to, the modernist age.

Caserio thus begins by taking his argument into the camp of the disparagers and skeptics. "If we accept modernist assumptions," he writes, "it is with irony, self-contradiction, or embarrassment that we will speak about modernism as a cultural phenomenon whose unified characteristics are identifiable" (3). Unafraid of irony, embracing contradiction, admitting, when necessary, to embarrassment, Caserio examines the interplay between chance (which, borrowing from the pragmatic vocabulary of C. S. Peirce, he calls tychisms) and totality in modernist interpretations and "mirrorings" of reality. He opens with a lucid and resonant survey of original thinkers who dominated the intellectual culture of modernism: William James, Saussure, Freud, Lenin, and Trotsky. The impact of the Russian formalists on our understanding of the autotelic dimensions of fiction is given equal attention, contributing to the book's subtle balancing of aesthetic and ideological concerns and to its unexpected, fresh look at the relations between the abstractions of theory and the concrete particulars of the novel. Caserio constantly reminds us how self-aware the modernists were of the limits of their art, but also how determined they were that history should not unfold unopposed by utopian imaginative and social energies.

Like other canon transformers and revisionists, Caserio insists that modernism was not a monolithic movement but...