PROUST, JOYCE, MANN IN MODERNIST CONTEXT

Comparative Literature, Fall 2004 by Nemoianu, Virgil

PROUST, JOYCE, MANN IN MODERNIST CONTEXT. By Gerald Gillespie. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2003. 324 p.

Gerald Gillespie belongs to an endangered scholarly species: that of the real comparatists. The high point of this distinguished category was in the 1950s and 1960s, when Wellek, Spitzer, Ziolkowski, and a score of others were at the peak of their creative activity. True, the comparatism of those days was somewhat limited in scope: West European literatures. Since then, we can notice clear gains in breadth (Eastern European literatures were first added to the mix, and then those of South America, Asia, and Africa), but unfortunately also losses in depth. The aggressive interference of sometimes faddish preoccupations, usually aspiring to the status of theory (poststructuralist and feminist first, but also multicultural, materialist, and a spate ofothers) did not help. Actual comparatism-the endeavor to find commonalities of writing and reading across borders of languages, literatures, and cultures-tended to be lost. That books such as Gillespie's are still brought out by a few responsible and dutiful academic presses is a reason for applause and encouragement.

This study on three figures of High-Modernism writing in three languages is rather original, even unexpected, above all in its structure and methodology. It stubbornly resists even the most modest temptation toward generalization, theoretical system, strict classification. It defiantly proclaims as its need and purpose the pleasure of reading, as if harking back to Susan Son tag's warning of four decades ago that we need not a hermeneutics but an erotics of literature. This sharply distinguishes Gillespie's study from the vast body of criticism based upon hate and adversity as key controlling concepts, which seems to have dominated the publishing industry in recent years, and shows up the author not only as a faithful comparatist, but also as a true devotee of literature.

The first half of the volume ("Modernist Moments and Spaces") is comprised of gentle and sly circular approaches and introductions, and despite Gillespie's determined resistance against any such admissions, it contains the general idea of the book: that HighModernism is much better integrated in the general flow of Western literature than its avant-garde positionings and generally accepted readings would suggest, and that the true roots of High-Modernism, even those of an "iconoclast" like Joyce, are to be found hundreds of years ago, at least as far back as the Renaissance, probably earlier yet. Chapters 4 and 5 are particularly eloquent in this respect. Gillespie convincingly demonstrates the Hamletian and Goethean descent of Stephen Bloom (pp. 151-67), indeed of Joyce himself, and at the same time refers to Faust as a kind of "melting pot" of traditions that foreshadowed the procedures of many key Modernists. (Personally I would argue that Wilhelm Meister II supersedes, or at least equals, Faust as an early signpost.)

Another introductory section turns to the more recent domain of early cinema (pp. 117-28). While Gillespie deals here mostly with the way in which the new art was absorbed and used by novelists, he also alludes to the ways in which early cinema (and photography) continued seamlessly the work and thematics of prior art and literature within a new medium.

Perhaps even more important are chapters 1, 2, and 3 on the conspicuous and powerful presence of religion and nature in the roots and stems of the High-Modernists. This is important because these domains are often ignored whenever critical readings focus exclusively on aesthetics and ideologies. As a matter of fact, Gillespie points out, the "cathedral window light" is ever-present (of course many a page of Kafka's prose has its place here), and nature, while not glorified as it was by the Romantics, is treated in original ways by Modernists.

All this does not mean that aesthetics and ideologies are entirely absent from these successive layers of introduction. A substantial and inspired reference to Walter Pater (p. 69) indicates very well the defenses of the aesthetic that were much on the minds of the typical high-modernist figures, at least when they started their work. As to the political, it is well known that chiding Modernism for right-wing inclinations, temptations, or even activities has grown of late into a flourishing cottage industry. Obviously, even the most ingeniously malevolent critics find it somewhat difficult to apply their overly righteous categories to Proust, Mann, and Joyce, all the while freely chastising Eliot, Yeats, and others too numerous to cite here. Gillespie is erudite and intelligent enough to cut down to size such dubious constructions and to calm their agitated rhetoric. An additional argument he might have used is that a certain intensity was simply part of the momentum of modernity. And more often than not this discursive need for "going overboard" was leftward rather than rightward. Substantial and exhaustive books (Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims, Oxford University Press, 1981, for example) offer plenty of information in this respect to those inclined to ignore the posturings and panderings of Picasso and Aragon, Malraux and Eluard, Brecht and Doblin, Auden and his circle, Sartre and Hemingway, and dozens of similar luminaries.