The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France (review)

REVIEW ESSAYS censorship) to condemn Spanish colonies and slavery, but to remain silent on French analogues. Writers such as Montesquieu, Diderot, and Crébillon fils offer a "metaleptic reversal between colonial history and Orientalist discourse" (17). The "displacement of the whole problem of slavery" from Western colonies to the Eastern world translates enslavement into political or domestic "servitude." Here may be the place to raise the question why, in a work devoted to gender, colonialism , and eroticism, Dobie focuses almost exclusively on male writers. Had she looked at George Sand's representation of colonialism and slavery in Indiana, the explicit parallelism between forms ofthe Other could have led her to very different arguments about nineteenth-century literary politics. Dobie writes boldly, laying out her claims in an emphatic first person, even where her support may be sketchy. Her style is contestatory, as she narrowly distinguishes her work from that of previous critics such as Richard Terdiman in Discourse/Counter-Discourse, and especially feminists such as Kari Lokke, Marilyn Brown, or Julia Douthwaite in Exotic Women. Her method, she insists, is one of"double reading," somewhat like the "aporias" ofdeconstruction, where a point is both made and red-lined. Political categories ofrace and sex are unstable (23); texts obstruct their own discourse and invite plural interpretations (24). Yet Dobie also repeatedly attacks deconstructive readings of gender and language, arguing that "deconstruction and ethnocentrism go hand in hand" as binaristic modes of social thought (120). Typically she pairs thematic readings oforientalist voyeurism and eroticism with the thesis that the texts she considers deconstruct themselves epistemologically. Her close readings of language point, she suggests, toward Heidegger's concept ofaletheia, or the irreducibility ofrepresentation. It is no surprise that Dobie is fascinated by the figure ofthe mummy to be unwrapped , and by the myth that the act ofunwrapping can bring the woman herself back to life. Perhaps this figure represents the dream ofall critics that their spelling out oftexts can cast a reanimating spell. Margaret R. HigonnetUniversity ofConnecticut REVIEWS MARY ANN FRESE WITT. The Searchfor Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France. Ithaca/London: Cornell UP, 2001. xii + 259 pp. Before and after World War II, at least in the United States, the idea ofmodem tragedy was taken up by left-leaning or egalitarian dramatists. Elmer Rice's prose and Maxwell Anderson's verse dramas aspired to enact the tragedy ofthe common man that, by end ofthe 1940s, was perhaps best realized by the late Eugene O'Neill and the early Arthur Miller. In Europe, however, the effort to create tragedy for the twentieth century was largely the work ofartists with fascist or at least right-wing sympathies. Instead of embracing the depiction of the ordinary and everyday, Italian and French dramatists and theatre critics longed for an elitist dramatic genre with ancient roots, one that would support the ideology of a fascist present. In The SearchforModern Tragedy Mary Ann Frese Witt examines the drama of Gabriele D'Annunzio and Luigi Pirandello under Mussolini and of Henry de Montherlant and Jean Anouilh under the German Occupation. She is also careful VcH. 27 (2003): 170 THE COMPARATIST to show the context, political and critical, in which these plays first appeared, providing many of the ideas about tragedy discussed by pro-fascist critics such as Sylvio D'Amico in Italy and Robert Brasillach and Thierry Maulnier in France. The book is argued clearly and persuasively and offers ample evidence. Witt looks not only to the scripts ofthese dramatists but to their non-dramatic writings for clues to the intent behind their plays. By aligning their public statements with their artistic achievements, she is able to locate ideas that consistently flow through all their works but have remained, to readers and scholars alike, undetected. Thus, D'Annunzio, who has been viewed popularly as the prototypical fascist playwright, appears at times to have been in skeptical opposition to Mussolini, while Pirandello, who after the Second World War was placed in the pantheon ofmodem dramatists, emerges not as an alienated, non- or apolitical intellectual but as an active and even fervent supporter ofthe fascist regime. Indeed, Witt's analysis ofEnrico Quatro, which has been read for decades as...