Incredible Modernism: Literature, Trust, and Deception ed. by John Attridge and Rod Rosenquist (review)

Facing an emerging urban, industrial, and mass-oriented age, modernist artists and writers confronted the perceived failure of traditional representations of truth and broke away from conventional forms and techniques. In the forward to François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984), Fredric Jameson identifies “the crisis of representation” as an ongoing issue central to discussions of both modernism and postmodernism. John Attridge and Rod Rosenquist similarly concentrate on the modernist crisis of trust in traditional social and political institutions and focus especially on how examining the issues concerning trust contributes to an understanding of early twentieth-century literary culture. In the “Introduction,” Attridge clarifies that their purpose is to show “the salient ways in which questions of trust intersect with the main lines of modernist culture focusing in particular on language, complexity, sincerity, and fictional truth” (4).

In addition to a useful, contextual “Introduction” and a unifying “Afterword,” Attridge and Rosenquist separate the remaining twelve essays into four sections. The first, “Reading and Trust,” examines both the connection of modernist works to their readers and the methods modernist writers used to establish trust. The second, “After Sincerity,” investigates the stylistic interplay between the traditional and the experimental. The third, “Truth and Narrative,” considers the self-questioning text and the possibility of meaning beyond a factual realism. Finally, “Trust and Society,” explores the individual’s struggle to establish a meaningful relationship within public and collective associations.

The initial section, “Reading and Trust,” opens with Leonard Diepeveen’s “Modernist Proliferation, Modernist Trust,” which gives a valuable overview of how modern technologies, like photography, distance the individual from the original and allow, even encourage, forms of dissimulation leading to the erosion of trust. Next, in “Trusting Personality: Modernist Memoir and its Audience,” Rod Rosenquist investigates the division that emerges between the public’s desire for authorial personality and the impersonal and autonomous nature of modernist literature and art. He argues that 1930s memoirists “played an important role in the crossing of ‘the great divide’ between high modernist authors and artists and a broad, middlebrow readership, as they sought to encourage a belief in the authenticity and sincerity of the modernist figures” (49). Suzanne Hobson’s “Credulous Readers: H.D. and Psychic Research Work” takes a slightly unconventional approach on the question of authenticity in her exploring H.D.’s fascination with the mystical and mythical. Referring to the era’s interest in psychology and incorporating additional critical discussion of W. B. Yeats, Hobson looks into the “re-enchantment” H.D. discovers through psychic science, a discovery allowing the author to move beyond an unreliable realistic reading to arrive at an underlying spiritual truth.

Starting the second main section, “After Sincerity,” Paul Sheehan addresses the urban modernist’s rejection of folk culture as “a quaint, outmoded assortment of arcane practices and superstitious belief” in “Subterranean Folkway Blues: Ralph Ellison’s Mythology of Deception,” an engrossing analysis of Ellison’s artistry in Invisible Man (69). Sheehan asserts that in contrast to both Eliot and Joyce, Ellison successfully incorporates folk culture, especially the trickster figure, into a modernist work that examines the ephemeral nature of trust and the world’s multiplicity of deceptions. Scarlett Baron’s “Counterfeit Masterpieces: Gide, Joyce, and Intertextual Deception” presents an engaging examination of Joyce and Gide and their intentional use of quotation to challenge the question of originality and posit the possibility of a truth beyond original expression. Baron’s examination of both Joyce’s and Gide’s play with allusion and reference suggests that both authors demonstrate that trust need “not be a pivotal criterion of aesthetic worth, or a decisive factor of aesthetic pleasure” (97). Paul Edwards’s essay, “False Bottoms: Wyndham Lewis’s The Revenge for Love and the Incredible Real,” assesses Lewis’s modernist position as presented in his novel The Revenge for Love. Considering the diverse influences of the author’s background as well as the novel’s components, Edwards identifies Lewis’s challenge to...