Modernism Singular Plural

Timothy Christensen

Studies in the Novel, Volume 41, Numbers 2, Summer 2009, pp. 241-252
(Article)
Published by University of North Texas
DOI: 10.1353/sdn.0.0047

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ESSAY-REVIEW:
MODERNISM SINGULAR PLURAL
TIMOTHY CHRISTENSEN
Damon Franke. Modernist Heresies: British Literary History 1883-1924.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. 258 pp. $47.95.
Alissa G. Karl. Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and
Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen. New York:
Routledge, 2008. 183 pp. $95.00.
Gabrielle McIntire. Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and
Virginia Woolf. New York: Cambridge UP, 2008. 274 pp. $95.00.
Michael Valdez Moses and Richard Begam, Eds. Modernism and
Colonialism: British and Irish Literature 1899-1939. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007. 344 pp. $24.95.

In Modernist Heresies: British Literary History, 1883-1924, Damon
Franke scrupulously documents the influence of the Cambridge Heretics
Society on literary and intellectual culture during the late Victorian and early
modernist period. Franke traces the relationships among participants of this
debate society and details its effects on intellectual culture, with a focus on its
connections to other contemporary groups for intellectual exchange (notably
Bloomsbury), and its influence, both direct and indirect, on a host of canonized
modernist writers including T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, and Virginia
Woolf. While Frankes scholarship achieves an admirable degree of empirical
richness, the anemic fashion in which he conceptualizes modernist aesthetics
and historiographyconceptualizations that go largely unexamined from the
beginning of the book to the endseverely limits his ability to offer critical
insight into the history that he documents.

Studies in the Novel, Volume 41, number 2 (Summer 2009). Copyright 2009 by the
University of North Texas. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

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Franke begins Modernist Heresies with the task of questioning traditional
ways that scholars periodize and categorize twentieth-century literary history,
focusing on the tendency to make firm distinctions between late Victorians,
Edwardians, and modernists, and arguing that the tendency to periodize in this
way begins with the canonized modernists themselves. Franke cites Virginia
Woolfs claim in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown that a radical epistemic break
in December 1910 marks the beginning of modern literature as an influential
example of a modernist tendency to posit a historical rupture between the
Edwardian and the modern periods. Against this modernist elision of
antecedents that does a disservice to an understanding of the fluid processes
of history (14), Franke posits the heretical discourses characteristic of the
synthetic character of Edwardian thought, which provide a new historical
perspective for understanding the particular continuities and discontinuities of
late Victorian and modernist literature and culture (18). Focusing on the effect
of the Cambridge Heretics Society in exposing numerous modernist writers,
historians, philosophers, classicists, critics, and theologians to an Edwardian
synthetic approach to religious and cultural questions, Franke argues that the
vital and formative influence the Heretics had on modernist thought may be
one of the more glaring omissions in our understanding of twentieth-century
intellectual history (25).

Interrogating assumptions regarding periodization can provoke us to
question our critical presuppositions, and several authors in Modernism and
Colonialism, discussed below, successfully undertake such an interrogation.
Franke, however, fails to seriously consider the complexity or variety of
modernist conceptualizations of history, memory, language, identity, or
anything else that makes so many of the authors he covers compelling. By
reducing modernism to a point of singularity, Franke is able to sustain a
series of unproblematic binary oppositions based on a distinction between
Edwardian heretical discourses, which still teach us the need and reward for
encouraging and defending dissent, tolerance, and diversity (xiii), and the
modernist development of works of art which were putatively self-contained
wholes (xiv), and which he casually suggests display fascist tendencies
(19). We are given an Edwardian pluralism verses a modernist elitism, an
Edwardian belief in reconciliation and synthesis (19) in opposition to the
didactic modernist manifestoes [that] abound with self-satisfaction and decree
(20), an Edwardian attempt to harmonize beliefs set against the modernist
proclivity for exclusion (54). Stating his intent to destabilize an ahistorical
opposition between modernism and its antecedents, Franke reiteratively
discovers a set of binary oppositions between modernist and Edwardian
intellectual principles that would seem to be deeper and more fundamental than
anyone has previously believed. Frankes presumed contribution is therefore
reduced to suggesting that there is not a clear chronological rupture between
the two periods, that Edwardian tendencies continue to linger into the 1930s,

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and that they are discernible in some writers, such as Joyce, who are classified
as modernists, while leaving the essential opposition between Edwardians and
modernists intact.

While Franke engages in some insightful analyses of individual texts,
including A Passage to India and Joyces short story Clay, the limitations
of his conceptual apparatus become conspicuous in his discussion of Woolf
in chapter three. He discovers in Woolf both a passionate engagement with
progressive political issues and a characteristically modernist fascination with
the idea of self-contained aesthetic wholes (88). This alignment of interests,
however, does not disturb Frankes strict opposition between an Edwardian
discursive and political openness and a modernist demand for aesthetic totalities
and fascist politics. Rather than work toward a more complex formulation of the
relationship between modernist aesthetic theories and political values, Franke
weakly suggests that, to her grand credit, Woolf evolved from her early
fetishization of the text to a more capacious understanding of the political
dimension of art (88-89). Even in an author for whom modernist aesthetic
values coexist with liberal political principles, it seems that Franke must
rigidly separate the two. We encounter the limitations of this simple and unitary
idea of modernist aesthetics again in his analysis of The Waste Land, where
Franke similarly discovers an impermeable boundary between Edwardian
heresy and modernist orthodoxy. He maintains this dichotomy first by eliding
the incongruity of Eliots poetry with his prose, and then by declaring the
continuity of Eliots career as unflinchingly sectarian and orthodox from
beginning to end (191). In his reading of The Waste Land, the poems surface
tension of diverse, fragmented languages and apparent syncretism becomes
a form of duplicity, concealing Eliots agenda of resolving these fragments
into an orthodox Christian worldview (191). Modernism, defined as a form of
orthodoxy, cannot accommodate such fragmentation, and can only respond
to it with an attempt at a totalizing resolution. Even Eliots apparent heresies are
therefore nothing more than an ingenius disguise for a totalizing agenda (191).
In this way, Franke reduces Eliots modernist bricolage to a deceptive strategy
for the appropriation of heretical discoursesby orthodoxy (192). Frankes
categorization of Eliot and Woolfwriters who obsessively reconfigure their
understandings of the relation of the present to the pastas unproblematically
ahistorical in their thinking requires a similar process of elision and reduction.
(The fact that others have done the same does not constitute an excuse for such
oversimplification.) It seems that there is no allowance for the possibility of
difference or growth within the confines of Frankes conception of modernism.

These examples point toward the conceptual excision that allows Frankes
binaries to persist in their puritanical form: the absence of any discussion
of the very different ways that modernists think about aesthetic totality. For
Franke, there must be either an unbounded discursive openness in a work of
art (heresy), or an ahistorical, exclusionary, and totalitarian self-sufficiency

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(orthodoxy). This presupposition can only be sustained by the exclusion of

the majority of modernist aesthetic thought and practice. By utilizing the
poststructuralist lens that Franke banishes from his text on the grounds of its
kinship with modernism (both, it seems, inconveniently blur the distinction
between orthodoxy and heresy [197]), I might state my objection to Modernist
Heresies succinctly: the constitutive exclusion of Frankes study of modernism
is, well, modernism itself.

There are, of course, many ways of beginning the conversation on
aesthetics that Franke excises in order to construct his discourse on modernism.
We might distinguish the consistently negative ontology of, say, Conrad and
Eliot from the fascination with organic social totalities and aesthetic wholes
that dominates the theory and practice of writers such as Lawrence, and, on
occasion, Woolf. If we were to do so, the opposition between exclusionary
aesthetic totalities and a pluralistic discursive openness that structures much
of Frankes argument would be exposed as meaningless. This false opposition
would have to be discarded in favor of a discussion of the myriad conceptions
of the relationship between an aesthetic or social totality and its constituent
elements. In the case of The Waste Land, we would probably decide to ditch
the melodrama of the orthodox Eliot putting on the guise of heresy with
sinister intent. Instead, we might consider Eliots strategies of formulating and
addressing what he understood to be the aporetic structure of poetic language.
Through the different ways he approaches this problem, Eliot sometimes
implies and at other times explicitly articulates different possibilities of the
relationship of an aesthetic whole to its parts, a poem to the world, and a writer
to a broader culture. Because Frankes casual alignment of aesthetic theory and
political belief would become untenable within such a context, we might hope
to achieve something of the nuance, in considering the link between Eliots
reactionary politics and his literary practice (and, more generally, modernist
aesthetics and political beliefs) that Terry Eagleton is able to provide in the
space of a three thousand-word book review.

While each of the other three books under review addresses the plurality
of modernist thought (Modernism and Colonialism also addresses the diverse
effects of its dissemination in varying contexts), the study that appears
most opposed to Modernist Heresies in its approach is Gabrielle McIntires
Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. As the title
indicates, this entire study takes place within the space of one of Frankes
carefully structured blind spots, the problem of memory and history in the
thought of Eliot and Woolf.

Rejecting the claim of modernisms ahistoricism (Charles Altieri)
and hostility towards history (Hayden White), McIntire argues that for Eliot
and Woolf the past persists in the form of its material and bodily traces, and
that it therefore remains a fundamentally vital, retrievable, reinscribable, and
often pleasurable residue (4-5). The fact that Woolf and Eliot approach the

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past through its material, bodily, and textual traces does not, of course, mean
they believe it can be reduced to an object of empirical study and fully or finally
known. Invoking Lacan in the conclusion, McIntire argues that, for Eliot and
Woolf, the past structures desire in the fashion of an Other that one can never
fully know, but the approach and the Other nonetheless incite the wish to try
again to understand the erotogenesis of alterity (209). The irreducible alterity
of the past, the fact that one can never arrive at an absolute truth of the past,
is not only the condition of historical knowledge, it is also the source of our
desire to know the past. Ones relation to the past is structured like the desire
for (and of) the Other.

Moreover, the past, like the Lacanian Other, must be approached by way
of the other. In McIntires argument, the other takes the form of the Proustian
image or sensation, lost in flight without a place in the present, acting as
the supplement of a perpetual (re)turn that would find in the past an always new
object to confront (7). Desire, within this formulation, names the fragile and
fleeting process through which material fragments of the past re-emerge as
memory (5-6). It names the process by which we approach history through its
material, bodily, and textual traces. Because our approach to the past is always
mediated, and our knowledge of it always partial, like a beloved Other, the
past cannot give itself to us once and for all, no matter how much we might
desire such a fantastic resolution (5-6). Desire names the mismatch between
the expectation that the material traces of the past can provide us access to
history as a self-sufficient totalitythe past as absolute time, the imaginary
Otherand the fact that the past, like the Other, is ultimately irreducible to its
representation.

While McIntire invokes Lacan in the introduction and conclusion, her line
of argument does not adhere to any specific theoretical approach. Instead she
more broadly contextualizes her argument about Eliot and Woolf both in terms
of modernist thinking about the problem of memory (Freud, Bergson, Proust,
and Benjamin all make repeated appearances) and in terms of contemporary
literary theory (Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, de Certeau, Bloom, and
Derrida all receive significant attention). My initial sense was that McIntire
was not sufficiently defining or distinguishing between theories. For instance,
in what sense can one say that Eliot anticipates both a Lacanian notion of
history such as the one explained above and a Foucauldian genealogical
approach? By the end of the book, however, it is clear that McIntires use
of frequent but brief theoretical reference points serves her argumentative
purpose. One can find finer distinctions between ideas about history and
subjectivity in other discussions (see Jameson, A Singular Modernity 76-82)
of modernity and modernism. Because McIntires argument focuses on Woolf
and Eliots thinking about the relation of time to subjectivity, however, noting
the concerns they hold in common with other modernist and poststructuralist
thinkers in this way provides useful intellectual context without diverting the
argument.

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This approach works well in McIntires discussion of Eliots approach
to times most existentially charged moments in The Waste Land. In her
analysis of Eliots reference to the awful daring of a moments surrender that
one must undergo in order to approach the problem of how we have existed,
McIntire reveals Eliots acute awareness that the experience of time is mediated
by the act of representation (54). Since this act is irreducible to the field of the
represented that it generatesin terms of either obituaries or, more generally,
memoriesthere exists something terrible, daring, and unpredictable in
ones attempts to approach the past, something that always exceeds what can
be said, written, or even thought about it (54). That the act of representation
supplements and decenters the field of the represented is a problem broadly
perceived among modernists as well as more recent thinkers, a point that is
effectively emphasized by McIntires discussion of the role of memory in The
Waste Land and that might be obscured by theoretical nitpicking at this point
in the argument.

Moreover, the distinctions she makes within this discussionfor instance
between the attitudes of Eliot and Yeats toward the lost pasteffectively
delineate important cleavages between modernist theories of and attitudes
toward the past. McIntires comparison of Woolfs moments of being to
Joyces epiphanies and Wordsworths spots of time in order to distinguish
Woolfs idea from Freuds theory of trauma and Lacans notoriously enigmatic
notion of the Real (168) does not always conform with my understanding
of Freudian trauma or Lacanian signification, but is well-grounded in close
reading. In developing these distinctions, McIntire creates a nuanced argument
that, for Woolf, language is no mere echo, transcription, or train of signifiers,
but is necessary to the very condition of being and knowing (166-68).

Perhaps the most interesting chapter of Modernism, Memory, and
Desire is the opening one, which analyzes the relationship of Eliots largely
unknown Columbo and Bolo poems to his published writing. This chapter
holds interest both because of the unfamiliarity of the materialmost of
which remains unpublished, and during Eliots lifetime was circulated only
among a small coterie of male friendsand because it serves as the ground
for McIntires reading of Eliots broader oeuvre. McIntire argues that these
poems, which are bawdy and often homosexual racist doggerel set in the
early stages of the colonization of the Americas, act as a parergon to Eliots
canonized work. Tracing this term through Derrida to Conrad Aiken (one of
the small group among whom the Bolo and Columbo poems were originally
circulated), McIntire explains that the poems are an extra ornamentthat
surprise us by revealing more about what we deem to be central to the text
than the center itself (38). In a Derridian sense, they press against the limit
itself and intervene on the inside only to the extent that the inside is lacking
(38). These poems reveal the erotic and masturbatory qualities of Eliots
encounter with the past (22). Reading these poems against Prufrock, for

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instance, confirms our scandalous suspicions that Prufrocks account of

wandering the streets at dusk, watching lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning
out of windows, resembles the forbidden delights of homosexual cruising
(85). Significantly, this reading shows that the persistent failure of desire that
thematically structures Prufrock is actually a failure of heterosexual desire,
and that Eliots poetic accounts of same-sex encounters reveal something quite
different. McIntires queering of desire in Prufrock exposes the erotics of
an otherwise seemingly austere encounter with the past, and shows us an
Eliot who is more complicated and less resolved in his literary and religious
convictions than we might now think (19).

In Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer
Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen, Alissa G. Karl frames her
discussion of the impact of consumer capitalism in women-authored modernist
texts in terms of a dialectic between individuals and the socialwherein
consumer activities and commodity forms are pivotal to the negotiation of
social subjects (4-5). Karl carefully delineates the ideology of consumerism
that emerges between the World Wars in order to examine how modernist
literary experimentation is conditioned by the problems of agency that arise in
this context, and how modernist womens texts respond to, and in some cases
resist, this ideology.

Karl ably places her argument in terms of Marxist theory and
historiography. She appeals to Georg Lukcss definition of reification in
order to explain how the ideology of the marketplace comes to permeate
consumer consciousness. Lukcs defines reification as the process by which the
workers labor is abstracted from his total personality and presented to him as
an object (7). According to Lukcs, the structure of reification progressively
sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness
of man, because, in Karls words, reification expands beyond the factory
and inscribes itself in all areas of life (8). Karl defines consumerism as
the process through which reification comes to dominate the consciousness
of the imperial metropoles in the 1920s and 1930s. At this historical juncture,
consumer choice becomes the primary disciplinary regime of global capitalism
within the metropole. Following Marxs doctrine of commodity fetishism,
however, the interpellation of subjects through the marketplace is inherently
incomplete, because the market cultivates desires that are by their very nature
infinite, and therefore ultimately incapable of fulfillment. Desire inherently
exceeds its objectthe commoditywithin capitalism.

So, on one hand, consumer choice names a largely unconscious process
of interpellation, according to which (under ideal conditions) the consumer
is likely to experience the process of purchasing commodities as a form of
freedom, of unfettered self-definition. On the other hand, the disciplinary
regime of the market produces its own form of limitation and resistance: the fact
that desire is irreducible to its object means that the marketplace frequently

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exceeds its own disciplinary effects (16-17). This argument is strongly

derivative of Fredric Jameson, and, to her credit, Karl acknowledges Jamesons
influence and carefully places a significant portion of her argument in relation
to his work (rather than making space for her argument by oversimplifying
Jamesons approach to modernism, as some contributors to Modernism and
Colonialism do). Specifically, she engages Jamesons claim from Modernism
and Imperialism that the concern of literary modernists with the limits of
representation is a formal dilemma predicated on the fact that between the
World Wars the axis of otherness of a generalized imperial subject and its
various others or objects is displaced; a relationship between First World
powers comes to repress the more basic axis of otherness between First
and Third World subjects (Karl 44).

Accepting this premise, Karl investigates the ways that consumerist tropes
in Woolfs novels provide access to this displaced axis of otherness, arguing
that a close examination of the economic tropes and practices within imperial
frameworks may perhaps fill in some of modernisms geopolitical blind
spots (44). Karl examines how the consumption and display of commodities
mediates the relationship of the English bourgeoisie to their racial and colonial
others, redeploying theories of commodity spectacle as developed by Anne
McClintock and Mark Wollaeger. This argument frames compelling readings
of The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway in which Karl suggests that these
distant and unimaginable othersare brought under the purview of the
imperial consumer-spectator via the commodity (76).

Framing her argument in terms of the ways that otherness is mediated by
the commodity allows Karl to fill in one of Jamesons blind spots in her analysis
of Helga Crane, the protagonist of Nella Larsens Quicksand. Jamesons
argument presupposes white writers and characters, and seems quite oblivious
to, or at least unconcerned with, the effects of the regime of representation
he describes on black subjects. Karl contends that [c]ommodified as she
is, Larsens protagonist Helga Crane becomes imperial capitalisms ideal
representation of that far-off, unknown and unimaginable subject of imperial
power to which Jameson refers (135). Helga is faced with the dilemma of
negotiating her identity in terms of exotic images of racial otherness, an act
of self-definition that she must perform through consumer choice and display.
Yet, what does it mean to embody that which is unrepresentable? Helgas
situation anticipates the dilemma of Ellisons invisible man, whose dark skin
paradoxically becomes the mark of his invisibility. To be marked as racially
different means, in this context, to be both highly visible and to embody an
irreducible illegibility inherent in imperial identity. Karl examines the role of
commodity exchange in generating this paradox of racial otherness.

Karls approach provides necessary context for the problem of agency
within modernist writing. It allows Karl to distinguish between writers such
as Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach, who often embrace modernist textual

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indeterminacy as an expression of (the fantasy of) the unfettered freedom of

the market, and writers who, like Nella Larsen, are acutely aware of the role
that the disciplinary regime of race plays in conditioning such choices. It also
exposes a specific inadequacy of the critical tendency to transcendentalize the
free market of ideas. Franke exhibits this tendency when he creates a binary
opposition between the free exchange of ideas and a modernist totalitarian
exclusion. This paradigm allows him to sidestep an examination of the structure
of power within which free choices between ideas, as well as commodities,
are made. Against such a critical tendency Karl argues that privileging
choice in and of itself as a means of emancipationfails to acknowledge
how choices are crafted by certain supervisory regimes of capital. In doing
so, one succumbs to one of the tantalizing narratives of consumer capitalism
itselfthat more is always better (20).

To arrive at any single verdict regarding Modernism and Colonialism:
British and Irish Literature, 1899-1939 is more difficult, in part because, to the
credit of the editors, it contains a wide variety of critical approaches, attitudes,
opinions, and judgments regarding modernism and canonized modernist
authors. Let me begin by stating, then, that I recommend this book, and that it
contains articles on Conrad (Michael Valdez Moses), Woolf (Jed Esty), Eliot
(Vincent Sherry), and Forster (Brian May) that are very good, despite my
reservations discussed below. Also, I agree with the editors, who claim that it
is an important complement to the collection Modernism and Empire (2000),
which focuses on non-canonized modernist writing.

Perhaps the best feature of the collection as a whole is the way that it
chronologically frames modernism, with the apparent intent of destabilizing
any attempt to strictly periodize this cultural phenomenon. Nicholas Daly
argues not only that Britains colonial imaginary during the pre-World War
II period is largely modeled by popular Victorian colonial romances, but that
authors including Stevenson, Haggard, and Kipling also anticipate particular
narrative strategies for representing racial and colonial otherness that are often
seen as the hallmark of modernists such as Conrad (36). Dalys case hinges
on the interesting but unconvincing argument that anxiety regarding racial
otherness primarily expresses a displaced concern with the literary mass market.
On the other end of modernism, Jahan Ramazani argues against postcolonial
criticism that has sometime represented the relation between postcolonialism
and Euro-modernism as adversarial (289). Focusing on specific instances,
such as T. S. Eliots influence on Derek Walcott, Ramazani both argues that
postcolonial writers employ modernist literary techniques to articulate hybrid
identities and oppositional voices, and subtly distinguishes postcolonial from
Euro-modernist bricolage. Euro-modernist poets, Ramazani argues,
occasionally import a subaltern text or artifact or genre and embed it within a
Western literary universe. Since the postcolonial writer inhabits the multiple

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cultural worlds forcibly conjoined by empire, hybridityis not an aspect but

the basic fabric of the postcolonial poem. (293)

The syncretic texture of postcolonial societies, identities, and texts means that
postcolonial uses of such literary strategies tendto be more exuberant than
elegiac (297). We see an example of the very different affective structure
attached to similar literary techniques when we compare Walcotts syncretism
with Eliots Eurocentric lament over decline and dissipation (297).

My primary criticism of the collection as a whole is that the thought of the
previous generation of postcolonial critics and theorists is often oversimplified.
Michael Valdez Moses provides an example of this problem when he claims
that the crux of Saids argument, in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism,
is that a recalcitrant colonized world has been subjugated to the scientific
and epistemological categories ofomnipotent and omniscient European
intelligence (45). Brian May similarly refers to Saids totalizing imperative
(156). Saids archaeology of Orientalist discourse is obviously much more
complex than either characterization allows. Moreover, if Saids arguments
are so simple, why not bypass them and begin with something else? It would
certainly be more meaningful to refute an argument (such as Homi Bhabhas
analysis of the constitutive ambivalence of colonial discourse) that criticizes
Western constructions of the racial/ethnic other without assuming that they
are totalizing or uniform. Arguing against the worst imaginable case of your
perceived antagonist has little value.

Mosess summary of Chinua Achebes famous essay, An Image of
Africa: Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness is slightly less dismissive, yet
Moses still fails to engage Achebes argument on a serious level. In what has
become a clich of Conrad criticism, Moses presumes that Achebes charge of
racism can be understood in an essentially humanist way: Conrad denies the
complexity and richness of African peoples and their cultures. At the core of
Achebes charge of racism, however, is an explicitly psychoanalytic definition
of the term.

In this article, Achebe calls for an analysis of race in Heart of Darkness
in light of the insights provided by the profoundly important work done by
Franz Fanon in the psychiatric hospitals of French Algeria (14), and states
that the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the
Western mind lies in the following quote from the novel: What thrilled you
was just the thought of their humanitylike yoursUgly (Achebe 6). Here
Achebe identifies the African body, within Conrads racial discourse, as the
site to which whites look for a foundational difference that will affirm their
own identities as white, modern, and civilized. Conrads racism is defined in
terms of his fascination with the failure of difference at this foundational site of
racial identity. Conrad recognizes that the racial self cannot be totalized, that it
cannot be antiseptically quarantined from the racial other, and that any attempt

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to do so will fail. Achebe argues that it is Conrads response to the recognition

of this failure of a totalized racial self that defines his racism. If Moses were
to address Achebes argument seriously, it would provide precisely the sort of
starting point that he criticizes Said for failing to provide.

This is not to say that Modernism and Colonialism should have a different
focus. I am not arguing that the writers have any sort of obligation to engage
more extensively with postcolonial criticism than they do, a criticism that
is anticipated in the introduction (7). I am arguing that when they do engage
postcolonial criticism, it is more often than not dealt with dismissively and
defensively. I actually do not see why Moses feels the need to refute Said in
order to examine Conrads literary impressionism, but if he does feel this need,
why not do so competently?

Engagements with Fredric Jameson are generally less dismissive.
Jameson looms large in Modernism and Colonialism. He is invoked in the
first paragraph of the introduction as the first critic to give serious thought to
the links between modernism and colonialism (a statement that also, perhaps,
sets the stage for the persistent dismissal of Saids scholarship), and his essay
Modernism and Imperialism is repeatedly addressed throughout the book.
The engagement with Jameson is uneven. It is sometimes substantive, as when
Jed Esty utilizes Jamesons dialectic of romance and reification (from
The Political Unconscious) to develop his analysis of the existential conflict
between the forward momentum of duty and the playful stasis of desire within
the modernist anti-bildungsroman (84). On the other hand, it is sometimes
reductive. This is the case when Michael Valdez Moses and Rita Barnard
(in separate articles) strip Jamesons argument regarding the relationship of
modernism to colonialism of its dialectical properties. This move enables
Barnard to allege that Jameson argues, in Modernism and Imperialism, that
modernist texts exclude representations of those at the margins of the colonial
world (176).

This view is simply wrong. Within this essay, Jameson models the relation
between colonizer and colonized on Lacans mirror stage. Jameson figures the
colonized other as a Lacanian other, an other who conceals the radical otherness
of the self in order to allow one to think of oneself as a totality (Lacan 6)
when he adopts Lacanian language in order to explain that the colonized
act as the marker and substitute of the unrepresentable totality (Jameson,
Modernism and Imperialism 58). It is within this critical framework that
Jameson argues that imperialism is constitutive of Western modernism
(Modernism and Imperialism 64). Because Jameson locates representations
of the colonized at the site of the Lacanian Realor in the place of the face that
looks back at you from the mirror, the site of the primal aporia of the selfthese
representations exceed any reduction to content, just as the self exceeds any
reduction to a mirror image. Images of the colonized must therefore be evaluated
not only in terms of content, but additionally as the formal symptoms that

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structuremodernist texts themselves (Modernism and Imperialism 64).

In this way, Jameson argues for the centrality of the representation of colonized
others to the generation of modernist formal innovations.

This is not an argument either that colonial peoples are not represented,
or that colonial reality is simply, in Mosess terms, occluded (46). As Karl
recognizes, it is rather that these representations are mediated (for Karl, they
are mediated by commodity exchange). And while I think Jamesons argument
has distinct shortcomings (such as the one discussed above), criticism must be
based on a recognition of his actual claims if it is to be meaningful.

I emphasize this aspect of Modernism and Colonialism because the (often
selective) inability to address the dialectical aspect of the thought of Jameson or
other postcolonial thinkersor to address the dialectical properties of modernist
texts, whose authors so frequently obsess over the aporias of language and
identityleads to basic critical shortcomings, both on a global and local level.
On a general theoretical level, it can lead, as in Modernist Heresies, to defining
modernism in terms of a false opposition between totality and multiplicity.
On a local level, it can lead to an evasion of the substantive discussion of race
in Heart of Darkness that Achebes criticisms demand. An acknowledgement
of the dialectical nature of much of modernist and postcolonial thought is
required if these phenomena are to be fairly or adequately understood.
OTTERBEIN COLLEGEWESTERVILLE

WORKS CITED
Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness. Hopes and
Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1989. 2-16.
Eagleton, Terry. Nudge-Winking. Rev. of The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical
Networks in Interwar Britain by Jason Harding. London Review of Books (19 Sept. 2002):
n.p. <http//:lrb.co.uk/v24/n18/eagl01_.html>
Jameson, Fredric. Modernism and Imperialism. Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. 43-66.
. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso, 2002.
Lacan, Jacques. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. crits: A Selection. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2002. 3-9.