The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma by Russell A. Berman (review)

76Rocky Mountain Review Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks — a fiery Medusa who turns his penis to stone — and wanders the banks of the Thames, a voyeur of slimy rats' bellies, cigarette ends, horny London traffic, typists scarcely forced" (60). By the end of "The Fire Sermon," the protagonist has had enough of the Waste Land, and his "story advances to his election of asceticism" (155). In "Death by Water" he "fantasizes a death that is utter, a complete reducing back of the natural and psychical creature into nothingness" (160), in preparation for the ascent of the mountain in "What the Thunder Said." Finally, in his response to the voice of the thunder, the protagonist has "attained to an altitude where every speech knows its relation to God" (197). Bedient sees the protagonist as Eliot's version of Conrad's Kurtz, "a man who had gone to the end of abjection" (206) but who, unlike Kurtz, is able to go beyond "the horror" to a recognition "that reality (for must there not somewhere be a reality?) is purely metaphysical" (207). Any "new" reading of a much-read literary work must explain why its insights were missed by previous commentators. Bedient proposes that "Skepticism still rules the criticism of this fundamentally unskeptical poem" (216) because Eliot's protagonist, like Hieronymo, has constructed "an elaborate trap for those inimical to his purpose" in order to avoid being "easily found out" by unbelieving readers: "What he will not say out directly and betrayingly is that he believes — more, that his God is the Unnameable, and that he would forsake the whole earth for a single drop from the clouds huddling near the Absolute" (215). Bedient overstates the originality of his interpretation. He is certainly not the first to see The Waste Land, especially at the end, as reaching beyond despair toward some kind of religious faith. Nor is the hypothesis of a single unifying protagonist new. In addition to Stanley Sultan (whose work Beident acknowledges), both James E. Miller, Jr., and Anne C. Bolgan have developed extended arguments for a single, autobiographical protagonist. Although Bedient draws upon the insights of Bakhtin, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, and Ricoeur, among others, he is an old-fashioned formalist at heart, sharing the New-Critical urge to make everything fit, to find the single point of reference that can draw the diverse elements of the work into a unity. His book is not likely to revolutionize the criticism of The Waste Land, but it is an intelligent study, worth reading for the range of its reference and for the opportunity its very detail affords to test one's own reading of particular passages against Bedient's. EDWARD A. GEARY Brigham Young University RUSSELL A. BERMAN. The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. 311 p. This study interprets the modern German novel in the light of socioeconomic and political factors but, with its key concepts of commodification and the charismatic leader, it does not treat novels as mere "illustrations of historical phenomena," or interventions in the social crisis (v). At the outset, Berman combines a socioeconomic approach with an institutional one. For instance, in the initial chapter, "The Geography of Wilhelmine Culture," he examines the Book Reviews77 Bismarckian vision of a unified nation and its parallels in literature, as well as the literary separation of north and south Germany and the corollary rift between the industrial, capitalist Prussia holding political power and the traditional south as the home of art and of a national collectivity. The literary corollary to mid-nineteenth-century capitalism is Gustav Freytag 's Bildungsroman Soll und Haben. Realism taught the reader "to love the world more than thought, or commodities more than reason" (75). While Wilhelm Meister's development in Goethe's novel was based on aesthetic experience, the hero in Soll und Haben has a realistic understanding of the world of commodities which take on an aesthetic glow. Stifter's Nachsommer contains the critique of modern commodities and of nineteenth-century capitalism , as well as of subjectivism and bureaucracy, while Fontane's Irrungen, Wirrungen depicts the limits of communication and the impossibility of achieving individual happiness...