Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism ed. by Paul Ardoin et al (review)

The interest in Henri Bergson as one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century was spurred by Gilles Deleuze’s work in the 1980s and has flourished ever since.¹ More recently, Bergson’s philosophies of time, perception, memory, and intuition have become instrumental for rethinking the meaning of modern art and aesthetics, and this book further contributes to these lines of inquiry. What are the key issues at work in Bergson? How does his philosophy converge with, and diverge from, modernism? How does one define the key terms in his opus? The three parts of this book speak respectively to each of these questions. In Part I, “Conceptualizing Bergson,” six critics explain, revisit, and elaborate upon the classical loci of Bergson’s work—time, space, memory, laughter, and virtuality—through an examination of Bergson’s own texts. Part II addresses the problem of aesthetics, and Part III features a glossary of thirty-two key terms in Bergson’s philosophy.

The central notion of Part II is that Bergsonian modernism is not simply reacting to the changed conditions of modernity but rather engaging these conditions to create the “new”—something fully visible in the vitalism of modernist experimentation. As Paul Douglass affirms in his essay “Bergson, Vitalism, and Modernist Literature,” the idea of life as a constant process of renewal, energy, chance, and flow is at work in all the major figures of modernism: from Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Charles Le Corbusier, and Éric Satie to T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murray (who later rejected Bergsonism), T. E. Hulme, Jacques Maritain, and Nikos Kazantzakis, who instead “tried to elaborate in literature a concept of divinity derived from the élan vital” (113). Other essays concentrate on the Bergsonism of Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, and Richard Wright. Douglass’s essay is important because it maps the spreading of Bergson’s ideas in twentieth-century aesthetics. The critical suggestiveness of his study characterizes the rest of the book, and this suggestiveness constitutes one of its strengths and one of its weaknesses at the same time. On the one hand, Bergson, modernist literature, and art are truly explained in detail by the contributors; on the other, textuality itself remains their focus of attention, but perhaps more could have been done to assess the social-historical—even political—implications of Bergsonism via its embodiment in literature.

James Joyce’s work, mentioned in a number of the essays in Part II, is the choice terrain upon which the tenets of Bergson’s thought can be best explored. Dustin Anderson dedicates a full essay to the Wake entitled “Joyce’s Matter and Memory: Perception and Memory-Events in Finnegans Wake,” in which he affirms that the text is “the search for authentic and original memory” at a time when this is no longer possible (177). Hence Joyce poses memory as manufactured or as “forgeries” (177). Leona Toker examines Joyce’s and Vladimir Nabokov’s work in the light of Bergson’s ideas and focuses on the subliminal consciousness and flow that she recognizes in the work of both authors.

The most thought-provoking essay in Part II is Claire Colebrook’s “The Joys of Atavism,” where she claims, by referring to Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence among others, that “[m]odernism—against notions of revivification and the vitalist critique of technology—can be considered as a profound attention to the force of the dead” (286). Colebrook finds an example of this in Joyce’s use of “the dead voice,” which is represented by “newspaper lines, malapropisms, clichés, and mechanical voices” so that vitalism is pitched against “points of inertia to be overcome by the life of writing” (286). Examples of this inertia are found in Dubliners, where the productive flow of banter and conversation is, in Colebrook’s reading, the very site of paralysis. “By contrast,” she concludes, “it...