Paranoia & Modernism

BOOK REVIEWS and the focus is on how they inherit, assimilate and develop the Paterian model. While the previous generation of imaginary portraits had relied heavily on myth and on the exploitation of remote or historical settings, the works of these later authors appear more often set in the present, privileging tales of alienation and inaction (or even neurosis and madness ), and adopting more marked autobiographical and confessional tones. This emphasis on the autobiographical component of the genre is the most compelling feature of La Mano e l'Anima, and it leads Bizzotto to many original insights, as in her clever rereadings of Pater's short stories "A Prince of Court Painters" and "Emerald Uthwart." Here too, though, as in the cases of Solomon, Wilde and Symons, her discussions could certainly have been taken further with interesting results to include more detailed reflections on these authors' problematisation in their portraits of their complex personal experience of questions of gender and sexuality. STEFANO EVANGELISTA __________________ St Anne's College, Oxford Paranoia & Modernism David Trotter. Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 358 pp. $55.00 ONLY A YEAR AFTER his Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction (2000), David Trotter publishes Paranoid Modernism, another important study that aims, by means of a unified theory, to explain and contain a large body of texts. Not content with applying his theory to four modern writers, namely Conrad, Ford, Lawrence, and Lewis, Trotter finds paranoia in Rousseau, Godwin, Dickens and Collins, and in a good deal of mass-market fiction of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. The sheer sweep of his study is impressive—so impressive that readers may regret that his editors chose the format of footnotes (830 of them), rather than a more helpful list of works cited. A skimpy index provides authors but not subjects, and, among authors, only primary figures, so that one looks in vain for page references to scholars important to the argument (Pierre Bourdieu , Harold Perkin, for example, or Mary Douglas). Trotter's encyclopedic knowledge invites both respect and questioning . His analyses are never less than illuminating, but parts of his study have at best a tangential relation to his hypothesis (the discussion of 315 ELT 46 : 3 2003 Arab-centered novels exhibiting the theme of "state nomadism," for example , in chapter 4, or the excursus on the English drug scene in World War I, with its fascinating details of "needle-dancing" morphia addicts, in chapter 8). In other places, his argument tends to blur the focus on modernism, as when he argues for continuity between the romances of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rider Haggard, on the one hand, and modernist literary experiment, on the other, on the grounds that both opposed the domestic realism of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. Continuity with earlier periods and texts, however, is the mark of this study. Trotter begins with a detailed history of paranoia in the nineteenth century, from its description (as "monomania") in the work of Esquirol to a more exact identification in the work of Krafft-Ebing. By the 1890s paranoia was a widely discussed phenomenon, and in ensuing case studies by Kraepelin, Bleuler, Jaspers, Gaupp, Kretschmer, and Freud, its difference from schizophrenia was established. Schizophrenia ("Dementia Praecox") entailed the loss of the subject's inner unity, with accompanying hallucinations or meaningless mimetic behavior, whereas paranoid delusions made a kind of sense; typically the paranoiac inhabited a parallel universe in which he adjusted the degree of his sense of persecution to the degree of his sense of grandeur. Such "paranoid symmetry," according to Trotter, is increasingly found in democratic societies in which individuals aspire to social identity through professional certification. Fine analyses (in chapter 3) of Rousseau 's Confessions, Caleb Williams, David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend, and The Woman in White provide support for his proposal. In these works expertise serves as symbolic capital for professional men in quest of social recognition, and denial of recognition can lead to paranoia . In Our Mutual Friend, for example, "Dickens spells out the psychic damage done to [Bradley Headstone] by this long drawn-out...