Desperate Storytelling: Post-Romantic Elaborations of the Mock-Heroic Mode by Roger Salomon (review)

Book Reviews95 its Russian analogues, but nonetheless avant-gardist in its typographical and syntactic innovations. Pound, despite his hostility to the aggressive nationalism of the Futurists, did absorb their aesthetic doctrines in his concept of vortex and in the basic terms — energy, force, dynamism, simultaneity — of his poetic/ collagiste prosody. Perloff sums up: "Much of the poetry of the avant-guerre, whether Pound's or Khlebnikov's or Cendrars's, was 'not so much a collection of poems' as the creation of a new poetic field or energy discharge" (192). The final chapter, "Deus Ex Machina: Some Futurist Legacies," brings the book full circle with Roland Barthes' meditation on the Eiffel Tower. Both Cendrars and Barthes see the tower as embodying the myth of power and conquest and as an emblem of sexual duality, but whereas Cendrars' interest, typical of his time, was in the aesthetic properties of the New Technology, Barthes, equally typical of his time, situates the aesthetic in the larger realm of semiotics and hermeneutics. Perloff explores a similar exposition of the emblematic role played by everyday sites in the modern world in Robert Smithson's "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey," a Futurist collage of travel narrative, critical essay, and poetic fiction. Perloff concludes that the contemporary dissolution of the boundaries between art and science, between literature and theory, between the separate genres and media, and the increasing role played by "performance art," visual poetry, and intermedia works are all developments of what might be called a "disillusioned" or "cool" Futurism: "Cool, in that postmodernism has little of the enthusiasm and exuberance that characterizes the 'Futurist moment' " (195). Abundantly researched, full of irresistible illustrations, Perloff's study addresses the informed general public as well as specialists, and is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of and renewed interest in a period that has often been disdainfully overlooked. PATRICIA HOPKINS Texas Tech University ROGER SALOMON. Desperate Storytelling: Post-Romantic Elaborations ofthe Mock-Heroic Mode. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. 302 p. Roger Salomon borrows his title from the following line in Finnegans Wake: "Desperate story telling, one caps another to reproduce a rambling mockheroic tale." For Salomon, the line speaks both to the condition of the postRomantic writer and the structure of much post-Romantic fiction. All of the writers discussed in the book are depicted as victims of cultural ruptures. Longingly, they look back to a recently bygone era when heroic values were freely enabled by heroic environs. Reluctantly, they look out upon a relentlessly banal actuality, hostile to heroism and vision alike. Undeterred, the writers of mock-heroic, like the questers they create, strike out to reproduce rambling tales of futile, but ardent skirmishes with reality. Each of the book's ten chapters focuses on a mock-heroic writer, beginning with the prototypical Cervantes, concluding with Saul Bellow, including intermediate stops at Stendhal, Byron, Lewis Carroll, Twain, Joyce, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Nabokov. In each chapter-long study of these various post-Romantic writers, Salomon comments insightfully on many, if not 96Rocky Mountain Review all, of their major works. In every case, his reading is informed by his definition of the mock-heroic genre, which I would summarize, and inevitably oversimplify, as a series of anticlimactic adventures, featuring an exiled, frequently mad protagonist, whose tale parodies the truly heroic and the all too quotidian alike; the final impression created by this irresolvably dualistic mode is one of ambivalence. Salomon uses the criteria for mock-heroic literature deftly to highlight sometimes overlooked features of the texts he treats. While one might anticipate much of what Salomon has to say about, say, Portrait of the Artist, his use of the genre in reference to Finnegans Wake yields more surprising results. Not all of Salomon's readers are going to be satisfied, however, with his definition of the mock-heroic or his discussion of the theory of genre criticism. In particular, Salomon's argument is strongly marked by a "representational bias." That is, he sees his criteria as objective features of texts, which represent objective features of reality, and he largely ignores the potential of genre schemes to create meaning in texts...