Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (review)

110 the minnesota review once those who remember a generation are dead the forensic examination of that generation should be buried along with it. Literature, fortunately, is not reducible to a body of hospital reports, although we should not necessarily exclude the literary value of the latter. In addition to an irresistible narratological polyphony not unlike that of Gide's Counterfeiters, the amateur of modern French fiction will find in 7"Ae Conspiracy a thematic and ideological watershed for our mid-century. Nizan's ambivalence from within the Communist Party anticipates similar debates, albeit less well-informed, in Sartre's Roads to Freedom and Dirty Hands. Psychoanalytic categories , which with few exceptions (one being Sartre's "Childhood of a Boss" published in 1939) almost never found their way into French fiction before WWII, are invoked by the narrative voice in order to describe Rosenthal's dreams and Laforgue's septicemic delirium. Nizan's complicity with an array of his own creatures, one of whom plays out a role imposed by others, recalls Rimbaud's cries of the decentered subject. This schizoid self-projection along with Nizan's fascination with betrayal became the hallmarks of Jean Genet's fiction and theater. Inevitably, Nizan's work and legacy are linked with and often subordinated to Sartre. However, the reader familiar with the latter's corpus will find much in 7"Ae Conspiracy indicating , to the contrary, Sartre's indebtedness to his old school buddy. Just as an example, whoever has pondered that bizarre final chapter of Being and Nothingness on the viscous will recognize "Sartrean" imagery for the in-itself in this description of the world: "how heavy and flaccid [it] is, [...] how it resembles a headless and tailless gelatinous heap, a kind of great jellyfish with well-concealed organs." Perhaps less to either Sartre or Nizan's credit, 7"Ae Conspiracy could be the focus of a study of mid-century French intellectuals' attitudes toward women through the literary imagination. The translation of such a pivotal work as 7"Ae Conspiracy could have been less stilted, less literal. While perfectly accurate, Quintin Hoare's work quite often comes across with a franglais accent and syntax. However, the apparatus that Hoare has included in the volume are extremely helpful and absolutely indispensable. He precedes Nizan's novel with a note sketching out the contours of the French political landscape in the late 1920's and explaining the Ecole Normale SupÇrieure, its students and their place within the French education system. In his endnotes he clarifies meticulously and with exactitude countless historical references found throughout 7"Ae Conspiracy, many of which would be totally obscure today even for the French reader. ROBERT HARVEY Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 19101945 by Cary Nelson. Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1989. pp. 336. $24.95 (cloth). When the history of twentieth-century U.S. poetry is finally written in response to authentic cultural achievement, rather than ideological constraints of institutionalized cultural elites, Cary Nelson's new challenge to the canonized version of modern poetry is likely to be vindicated as a prophetic work. Indeed, even at present. Repression and Recovery ought to be heralded as a major sign-post, a courageous gesture toward the liberation of culture from the academy's class, gender, and race-bound orthodoxies of the past fifty years. Despite its brevity, Repression and Recovery is a major reformulation of the aims and objectives of committed literary scholarship based on impressive new primary research combined with a complex and for the most part persuasive theoretical apparatus. While Nelson's aim is ostensibly to demolish the assumptions underlying the naturalized myth that the course of twentieth-century poetry was qualitatively transformed by a relatively small number of canonical modernist texts, the implications of his research and theoretical acuity extend to virtually every area of literary-cultural practice. Indeed, the most cogent parts of his argument cohere around the theme that struggles over literary value and history are indissolubly linked to the broader effor to forge an egalitarian, non-racist, and non-sexist social order. Less satisfying is the highly self-conscious, self-reflexive post-modernist literary form...