Brief Notices
Richard Macksey
Note: Appearance among these brief mentions of recent publications that arrived too late for inclusion or failed to find an appropriate reviewer in this issue does not preclude more detailed review in a later issue of M L N.
David Ellison, Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xiv + 290 pages.
David Ellison is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Miami (Florida), where he chairs the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. He is the author of critical works, including a pioneer study on The Reading of Proust (1964) as well as Understanding Camus (1990) and Of Words and the World: Referential Anxiety in Contemporary French Fiction (1993).
In the present volume Ellison chooses a very large canvas indeed: "an investigation into the historical origins and textual practice of European literary Modernism." The book proposes to trace the origins of Modernism (in France, England, and Germany) to the emergence of the early German Romantics and their roots in Kant's Critical thought. Rejecting purely aesthetic, formal, and epistemological accounts, Ellison claims that the passage from Romanticism to what came to be known as High Modernism can be best understood in terms of a gradual transition from "the sublime" to "the uncanny." He argues that the Modernist text is characterized by "the intersection, overlapping, and crossing of aesthetic and ethical issues." He sees this engagement as one of "antagonists struggling for dominance within the related fields of philosophy and theory on the one hand and imaginative literature on the other." The development of his thesis is supported by nuanced readings of Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud in the first instance, and of Baudelaire, Proust, Alain-Fournier, Gide, Conrad, Woolf, and Kafka in the second. His concluding chapter, "Narrative and Music in Kafka and Blanchot," is one of the most sustained and effectively interwoven readings in the book; its account of "the disappearance of music" and "the unweaving of narrative" in Kafka's "Josefine" is a lovely piece of legerdemain.
René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. 2001. xxiv + 199 pages.
This is an eminently readable translation by James G. Williams of Girard's Je vois Satan tomber comme l'éclair (1999), which acquired best-seller status in France. The translator is a well known scholar of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Testament, who has written a substantial book on the impact of Girard's thought on Biblical studies (The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred, 1991).
It is not unusual to see theories of literary interpretation resurface, retailored and often after a considerable passage of time, in other disciplines. (Witness the resurrection of New Critical speculations about "intention," when jurisprudentialists concerned themselves with "the intent of the framers," the enlistment of narratological theory by historians, or the recent impact of Derridian thought on architecture and the law.) What is unusual about the case of René Girard is that, after his first two remarkable books of "literary criticism" (Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque and Dostoïevsky: du double à l'unité), he himself, armed only with strong theories of mimetic desire, violence, and victimage, began to venture—boldly—into the fields that would normally have had to wait for second-generation colonization by practitioners of these other disciplines (anthropology, psychology, philosophy, sociology, theology and scriptural studies). Equally significantly, these ventures into other domains, beginning with La Violence et le sacré (1972), allowed his own thought and models to continue to evolve in response to the encounters. By the time that Des Choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde captured an enormous general audience in France, the disciplinary barons of the other fields were, if not subdued, at least mortally engaged.
Girard is a writer of considerable panache (much of which comes through in the present translation) and, as a long-ago scholar of the École des Chartes, fully aware of the scandalon of his raids on alien turf. In an interview published in "To Double Business Bound"—his readings, inter alia, of Dante, Nietzsche, Lévi-Strauss, and Freud—he makes this point succinctly and forcefully: "My claims are scandalously out of proportion with the general temper of the times and my literary background, which must be regarded by almost everybody as the worst possible recommendation for the type of research that interests me."
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, as its allusion to Luke 10:18 suggests, extends Girard's earlier readings of the Gospels, which as he and Simone Weil have claimed are "a theory of humankind even before they are a theory of God." The author addresses with economy, clarity, and from yet another perspective by now familiar topics—scandal, the cycle of mimetic violence, sacrifice, the scapegoat, the founding murder, and the connection between his general theory of mythology and "the uniqueness of the Gospels." His "non-sacrificial" reading of the Gospels will no doubt continue to be controversial among the scriptural scholars, but Professor Williams supplies for the benefit of his [Begin Page 1153] colleagues and the general public a lucid foreword introducing Girard's basic concepts and vocabulary (presented in catechetical form). Toward the end of the volume (in chapters 13 and 14) the author demonstrates the contemporaneity of readings with two powerful excurses on "The Modern Concern for Victims" and "The Twofold Nietzschean Heritage." This book is an accessible introduction to an important concern of one of the prophets of our time, a time not notably rich in prophets.
Haun Saussy,Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xi + 289 pages.
The author teaches Chinese literature and literary theory at Stanford, where he also has chaired the departments of Asian Languages and Comparative literature. He has published The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic and, with Kang-I Sun Chang, Chinese Women Poets: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism from Ancient Times to 1911. He has also written widely on Chinese, classical Greek, and contemporary French critical issues.
Great Walls of Discourse is framed by a provocative introduction ("Group Tours and Swimming with Schools") and a brief but equally provocative conclusion ("The Difficult Inch"). He begins with some familiar dualisms—"China" and "the West," "us" and "them," the "subject" and the "non-subject"—that furnish China watchers, both inside and outside China, with a "pervasive, ready-made set of definitions immune to empirical disproof." He asks what does this language of essential difference accomplish? The six studies of interpretations of China are an attempt to cut short the recitation of differences and to answer this question.
Saussey examines the ways in which the networks of assumption and consensus that make communication possible within a discipline affect collective thinking about the object of study. Among other topics, these essays offer an historical and historiographic introduction to the problem of comparison and deal with translation, religious proselytization, semiotics, linguistics, cultural bilingualism, writing systems, the career of postmodernism in China, and the role of China as an imaginary model for postmodernity in the West. Against the reigning simplifications, these essays seek to restore the interpretation of China to the complexity and impurity of the historical situations in which it is always caught. The book is a seductively engaging read, but it is supported by 89 pages of detailed notes and bibliography. (An earlier version of chapter 7 appeared in this journal.)
Sunka Simon, Mail-Orders: The Fiction of Letters in Postmodern Culture. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. xv + 333 pages.
The author teaches in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Swarthmore. She is a scholarly historian of epistolary narrative, but Mail-Orders escapes disciplinary boundaries and received genres to examine how profoundly recent changes in the technology of communication have transformed the social and cultural practices of letter-writing. She addresses her topic with a ready wit, an ample store of apt illustrations (from the 18th to the 21st centuries), and a sharp eye for recognizing relevant connections between the often hermetic discourses of cultural studies, literary studies, and film/media studies.
While the advent and structure of electronic mail has been discussed in web caucuses, newspapers, and conferences on hypertext and communication theory, its significance has not previously been considered fully in conjunction with epistolary scenarios in film, art, and literature. Addressing this gap, Mail-Orders explores the contemporary status of the epistolary form and its connections to feminist criticism, literary experiment, and various flavors of postmodernism. In her explorations Simon offersin a section entitled "Chain Mail," lively readings of works by Barth (LETTERS), Derrida (Carte postale), and Jonathan Levi (A Guide for the Perplexed); in another section, "Mail-Art: Einsteckalbum," she presents three less academically familiar "inserts": Nick Bantock's Griffin and Sabine, Karl Schaper's "Post Office of Thanatos," and Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz's Amnesis Art. She dedicates a chapter to the postmodern version of the romantic letter, centering the discussion on Peter Handke's Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied as a sustained performance of "narrative in structural suspense." Throughout the book the author agilely plays with the tensions between the traditional literary monograph and the intercepted forms of electronic communication that is her topic. And by considering the connections with earlier, canonical fictions she widens the debate on the announced "death of letters" in our cyber-culture.
Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002. xi + 447 pages.
Susan Stewart is the Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a MacArthur Fellow. She has published three volumes of poetry distinguished by its keen intelligence and emotional precision: Yellow Stars and Ice (1981), The Hive (1987), and The Forest (1995). Writing about literature and art, she has also published three earlier volumes of prose marked by the same rare and original qualities: Nonesense (1979), On Longing (1979), and Crimes of Writing (1994). In Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, a project of ten years' work with students of poetics, aesthetics, and the history [Begin Page 1155] of the lyric, she brings together the two aspects of her career as teacher and poet.
At the outset, the author suggests quite simply the range of her exploration of poiesis: "This is a book about poetic making of all kinds, and particularly about such making by means of measured language." In outline she then relates the role of the senses to the creation and reception of poetry: "My method has been to explain to myself and to the reader a general theory of poetic forms—forms arising out of sense experience and producing, as they make sense experience intelligible to others, intersubjective meaning." Concluding, she then explains why her close discussions of individual poems form such an important part of the fabric of the book: "I have addressed several broad developments in the history of art, but I have wanted as well to engage individual works phenomenologically as a way of sharing their intentions and furthering their reception." (Her readings, which also include significant encounters with the philosophers, encompass works by poets as various as Caedmon, Crashaw, and Traherne (in prose and verse) to Keats, Hopkins, Hardy, Stevens, and Bishop.)
This is an extraordinary, at times unruly, book whose governing emphasis
on the ordinariness of "common human experiences of the senses,
facial expression, vocalization of sounds, motion, and rhythm directs
the theoretical part [of the argument] toward, if universality, a
kind of formalism that is meant to reach across various historical and
cultural contexts." It is the work of a practicing poet and critic of
the first order.
