Literary Modernism and Beyond: The Extended Vision and The Realms of the Text (review)

Richard Lehan’s first forays into book-length criticism produced two admired studies, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction (1966) and Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels (1969). Since those monographs appeared, Lehan has turned his attention to broader subjects, as the titles of several of his later books suggest. (The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History [1998] and Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition [2005]). Now he has further widened his scope (and deepened his insights) with a sweeping study of modernism and postmodernism.

Lehan dates the transition between the two movements to a point somewhere between modernism’s high-water mark just before World War II and the mid-sixties when literary critics began to question the modernist mind set’s suppositions. He traces the philosophical roots of modernism to Heidegger’s search for an ideal in the face of Western decline. The modern temper stressed myth, memory, subjective perception, and the imagination as opposed to the naturalistic faith in an objective reality. Symbolism, spatial form (narrative uncoupled from chronological progression), and other preoccupations replaced the worn shibboleths of realism. Lehan does a fine job of relating modernist literary tactics to developments in painting, sculpture, theater, film, and photography. And his discussions of individual modernist writers are ample and perceptive. Like most observers of literary trends, Lehan struggles to differentiate between modernism and postmodernism, finally settling on postmodernism’s linkage of consciousness and mass culture, culminating in contemplation of the void.

Naturalism, the obvious interest of this journal’s readers, is used by Lehan here as a foil for modernism. The modernists rejected naturalism’s perceived slighting of the inner person, its unquestioning determinism, its penchant for the melodramatic, its artificial partitioning of good and evil, and its claim to objective truth. Lehan makes another useful distinction between the two “isms,” citing naturalism’s mechanistic and modernism’s symbolic theories of reality. He credits Bergson with providing a crucial critique of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which the French philosopher thought robbed the universe of mythic potential and human existence of creative freedom. Saussure’s structuralism supplied a further break with the past, driving a wedge between language and reality and severing the basic relationship between narrative and Nature. The literary naturalists, who had interpreted the new urban-industrial world using realist assumptions that blew away the remnants of romanticism, were supplanted in turn by modernists questing after the beautiful through art, stripping time of linearity, and other pursuits removed from naturalism’s depressing stress on heredity and environment. Naturalism was eclipsed, in form if not ultimately in its gloomy take on existence. Modernist texts tend to share naturalistic assumptions about inevitable human disillusionment, but without the deterministic context and obsession.

Lehan sees the modernists’ deeper delving into reality as a prelude to postmodernisms’ encounter with cosmic emptiness, exemplified in America by writers like Pynchon and DeLillo. They could also find philosophical underpinnings for their work in Derrida’s endorsement of God’s Nietzschean death, language’s sieve-like porosity and its dead signs, as well as intellectual support provided by Foucault and others. For the postmodernist, meaning is merely a defensive human construct against uncertainty and death. In the postmodernist view, we are creatures imprisoned by our culture and language. Despite their jaundiced look at their world, modernists had at least believed it could be redeemed, by poetry or other means. Not so the postmodernists. And their successors (Lehan believes we have moved beyond the postmodern) have only thickened the gloom.

Lehan’s new book provides an indispensable overview of literary creation and criticism over the past one-hundred-plus years. It’s an engrossing read as well as a useful research tool, its index directing the reader to enlightening looks at particular writers and concepts in the context of their time and its tendencies. Lehan’s occasional interjection...