The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud by Maud Ellmann (review)

If an offhand remark by Buck Mulligan is to be believed, Ulysses begins at the center of the world. There are many Martello towers, he tells Stephen and Haines, but the one the three inhabit "is the omphalos" (U 1.544). In antiquity, several sites claimed the title of world's navel; the most famous of these, Delphi, was home to the celebrated oracle and to the omphalos-stone, "which is hollow in the middle," as Maud Ellmann notes, "and covered with a carving of a knotted net" (4). Ellmann's new book is about "how four modernist writers—[James] Joyce, [Virginia] Woolf, [Henry] James, and [Sigmund] Freud—confront the entangled nature of the self, caught in the nets of intersubjectivity and intertextuality" (1), but it is about the navel as well, the scar that memorializes attachment to the plenitude of the maternal body, evoking both the ineradicable interconnectedness of human beings and the trauma of separation. Among scholars of early-twentieth-century literature, Ellmann is perhaps unsurpassed in demonstrating how deconstructive subversions of the either/or can still yield interpretive riches; it is no surprise, then, that her attention is drawn to a body part that joins to sever or severs joining from itself. But there are at least three reasons, as she argues here, why the navel and its specter of the umbilicus have special pertinence for literary modernism.

One lies in the spectacular expansion, immediately before and during the high-modernist prime, of technologies that link people. The late-nineteenth century was "the period in which the world was 'networked'" (2), and, in succeeding decades, gas, electricity, water systems, telegraph, and telephone, not to mention faster rails and roads, appeared to heighten individuals' sense of entanglement in the realities of others, near and distant.¹ Such technologies lend themselves readily to figures of cords and nets, as in "Proteus," where Stephen is led from thoughts of the "navelcord" that might be in a midwife's bag to the omphalos and thence to a telephonic attempt at nostos: "Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one" (U 3.36, 39-40). A second reason to invoke the navel devolves from Freud,² Ellmann's honorary fourth modernist: in counterpoint to the Freudian fixation on the phallus, "the navel memorializes a pre-symbolic order under the aegis of the nameless mother" (9), and this memorialization plays through texts by Joyce, James, Woolf, and others of the age. "[T]he psychoanalytic concept of castration," Ellmann argues, "fails to account for primal fears encapsulated in the navel, fears of both connectedness and separation. In Joyce's works, the law of the phallus, associated with the name of the father, is constantly subverted by the nameless omphalos" (166).

This last quotation points to the third reason why the navel attracts Ellmann's gaze, which is that it gestures to the lost security of life in utero as well as to the vulnerability of the bodies we inhabit. Plenty of pre-modernist writing concerns itself with humans' enmeshment in networks, as Ellmann acknowledges in an afterword, but in her telling, modernism is distinguished by particularly emphatic (or omphalic) anxieties about this condition, a tendency to perceive interconnectedness itself as a "violation of individual autonomy," an "invasion of the body and the mind" (169). If The Nets of Modernism is about nets and navels, it is also about anxiety and fear—of ties that bind, toils that constrain, tentacles that seize, teeth and talons that puncture or rend.

Among the literary texts on which Ellmann focuses, the nettiest or most omphalic is surely James's The Ambassadors, in which an absent matriarch, trying to reel in her son, casts forth Lambert Strether, one or two less jolly emissaries, and any number of urgent cables.³ Ellmann accordingly devotes substantial attention to the offstage Mrs. Newsome and closes...