Modernism and the Materiality of Texts by Eyal Amiran (review)

Modernism and the Materiality of Texts is not the book its title might lead one to expect. "Materiality," as most literary scholars understand it, has little role in this study. Amiran is not concerned with the physical elements of modernist works in the conventional sense: neither the paper on which they are written or printed, nor the specific conditions of cultural production or circulation. Indeed, one might be tempted to say Amiran is baiting the reader by offering as material/cultural studies the one approach that is generally categorized as anything but—that is, a highly theoretical and psychoanalytical study of the breaking down of language in the writing of his chosen authors. While the final chapter of the book, on George Herriman's Krazy Kat comics, does take up ideas of color and ink and the ways in which the representation of race both obscures and inscribes ideas about race, even this discussion has more to do with theoretical analysis than with the actual material components of the work. Consequently, Modernism and the Materiality of Texts feels far more in line with the sort of heady theoretical work all but synonymous with the UC-Irvine Department of English where Amiran teaches than with the cultural studies and material criticism he claims a stake in.

Precisely because his authors are writing in a culture defined by psychoanalysis, Amiran maintains, psychoanalysis is enacted in their work. In other words, he is not making a claim for how literature works but rather for how, specifically, modernist literature works. Certain elements are necessarily repressed, visible only to one willing to do the decoding work he has undertaken. What Amiran calls "nonsense" writing (xi)—that is, elements or aspects of the text that seem meaningless on the surface—in fact, he argues, reveal otherwise invisible anxieties and concerns harbored by the author. These nonsense elements are not intentionally hidden by the author as Easter eggs for the attentive reader; rather, according to Amiran, they emerge independently of the author's intentions or knowledge. Often, they have to do with the body of the writer and the author's accompanying anxieties about race and sexuality. Ultimately, Amiran asserts, this return of the repressed is definitive of modernism itself.

The claim is big and provocative. It is also impossible to prove. That being said, many of the readings here are persuasive. It appears highly plausible that the writers in Amiran's study have anxieties about gender, sexuality, and race that emerge unwittingly in their writings. Many of the readings reinforce facts about authors or their works that we know to be true. For example, Woolf's well-documented anxieties about marriage and the threatened loss of her own autonomy provide the support for Amiran's textual claim rather than the reverse. Other arguments lead to readings that are in and of themselves revealing, apart from any inference concerning authorial intent. But like all psychoanalytical readings they are impossible to confirm, except insofar as one feels that something previously unseen but assuredly true has been revealed.

An introductory chapter describes (and rejects) what Amiran believes to be modernist writers' mistaken belief that language can be purely functional and without superfluous elements that interfere with the author's conscious intentions: "Modernists imagine materiality as a necessary, nonsignifying quality of language. … As I show in this study, the modernist investment in a nonsignifying materiality produces instead a psychoanalytic proto-theory of text" (1). The next chapter turns to the works of Virginia Woolf. Amiran's arguments in this first author-focused chapter largely hinge on the premise that Woolf reveals anxieties through the unconscious inclusion or exclusion of alphabetical letters in her writing. For example, he asserts that Woolf's split identity as the autonomous Miss Stephens and the married wife of Leonard Woolf is reflected in the repetition of her own initials (V, W, S) in various relevant passages in her novels dealing with matters that evoke this division. This first chapter is perhaps...