The Modernist Self in Twentieth-Century English Literature: A Study in Self-Fragmentation by Dennis Brown (review)

HUMANITIES 131 Dennis Brown. The Modernist Self in Twentieth-Century English Literature: A Study in Self-Fragmentation Macmillan. 206. $88.50 Brown argues in this study that the characteristic feature of modern English texts is a disruption of the self previously unified in literature. His discussion moves from Heart of Darkness, 'Prufrock,' and Portrait of the Artist, which are 'initial attempts to break down the unitary construction of selfhood,' through war texts by Sassoon, Ford, and David Jones, to the 'variety of styles which fully demonstrate the achieved Modern discourse of the self' as they are presented in Ulysses, The Waste Land, and Mrs. Dalloway. Self-deception and self-conflict, variations on the theme of disunification, inhabit Lord Jim, Yeats's later poems, and Ulysses, while The Cantos, Four Quartets, and The Waves are finally invoked to reveal how self-fragmentation occurs as a function of time. The texts are canonical, a choice ostensibly redeemed by Brown's belief that his argumentis radical. It is not, however, but instead an agreeable domestication of insights already long consolidated in the criticism of modern literature. His argument, in fact, so politely meets our expectations about the modem text of disruption (English or otherwise) that it tells us very little, though in an authoritative and persuasive manner. That the self rendered in modern literature is 'neither stable nor naively egoistic,' but instead 'fluxive, dynamic, multiple, changeable and contradictory' is an adjectival performance neutralized by its customary meaning. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a reader upon whom those qualities do not register. Brown manages occasionally to unearth one (for instance C. B. Cox, Joseph Conrad: The Modern Imagination [Dent 1974], or Jon Silkin, Out ofBattle: The Poetry of the Great War [Oxford University Press 1972]), but invariably one whose interpretation does not require debate. Hence, I am not so sure that his study achieves its mandate, 'to help reactivate the revolutionary implications of the Modernist project.' The implications of self-disintegration , interrogated selfhood, absence of coherence, and so on, as they are created by resistance to plot and organic characterization, need little reactivation. Brown seems to sense this and states, somewhat hopefully, that The Modernist Self will be recognized as the product of a 'Poststructuralist ethos.' Not, he hastens to add, that of the 'out-and-out Poststructuralists ,' whose formulations he 'cannot challenge ... directly.' One wishes he could, for his study, which wants to situate itself somewhere between a New Critical reading of modernist texts and a deconstructive one, would then have become very valuable. Instead, he happily asserts that 'common sense, and much Anglo-American philosophy' are the Galahads which lead us out of the perils of deconstruction. His choice of 1)2 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 interpretive principles is ironic, for much Modern literature marshals the philosophy.of its time to challenge the universe common sense has constructed, and in the process creates the texts that generated much contemporary literary theory. The 'out and outs' are periodically named (the usual phalanx of Lacan, Derrida, Benveniste, and so on), and under the guise of inclusion are actually kept out, listening in while common sense chats with Anglo-American philosophy about the radical character of the modern English canon like some eternal biofeedback machine. Although Brown claims, along deconstructive lines, that the self is inextricable from the language that creates it, his writers and their language are still in control of the selfs dissolution, witnessing it from some transcendent vantage point, homogeneous masters of the art of fragmentation. So what we learn about Prufrock is 'not some final truth about his situation in the old terms, but simply that there is no final truth about selfhood, no hidden core, no (disguised) coherent.' The 'old terms' are never defined, but I gather they direct the 'many critics ... who take the notes as a sure guide ... that Tiresias does indeed unite' The Waste Land, when it isactually 'fruitless to look for an allegorical coherence behind the poem.' It is some feat, though, not to be radical in the presence of that homily of unification, and readers like William V. Spanos and Balachandra Rajan, to name but two, have usefully shown how to question the...