Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust by Colleen Lamos (review)

Abstract

YES,31, 200 YES,31, 200 Establishing no close theoretic relationship between science and the visual or literary, they can propose only applications or parallels, at best an analogy. To model is not to integrate. Our view of Cubism is not altered by setting it in the vicinity of Relativity theory on the grounds that each emerged between 1905 and 1915 (surelyin Newtonian time). That Cubism 'valorizednot the subjectitselfbut the observationand representationof the subject',is an objection to Cubism, not a description of it. That Dilsey in TheSoundandtheFuryis an external observer of events is true,but trivial.When the authorsarguethat TheGolden Bowlis a narrative about narratives,and that such reflexivityis a value, the problem becomes clearer. Vargish and Mook take characteristicsof art and literaryproduction, and call them values. Since these values are 'recognizable across traditional disciplinary boundaries', the science-art-literatureconspectusemerges. But epistemic traumais not a value; nor is the appearance of observer-charactersin fiction;nor is it a value that the figuresin LesDemoiselles d'Avignon occupy a 'field'of observation.These are descriptorsonly;and the interdisciplinaryargumentfails. This is a time-book that has dropped out of time. It is bewilderingto be referred to Herbert Read, Clement Greenberg,and EdwardFryon art;to Ian Wattand the drab Bradbury-McFarlaneModernism of 1976; or to be given the impression that Structuralismis an activitygoing on today. The authorsreferpersistentlyto studies published in the I98os, notably to Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth'sRealism andConsensus in theEnglishNovel(1983) and N. Katherine Hayles's TheCosmicWeb:Scientific Field ModelsandLiterary Strategies intheTwentieth Century ( 984). Where, indeed, is Hey and Walters'Einstein's Mirror of I997, with its chapteron science fiction?Inside Modernism will certainlybenefit non-scientists. Otherwise, it is an excellent description of the criticalsituationas it existedfifteenyearsago. UNIVERSITY OF PLYMOUTH ALAN MUNTON Deviant Modernism. Sexual andTextual Errancy in T.S.Eliot,JamesJoyce,andMarcel Proust. By COLLEEN LAMOS.Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. I998. x + 269 pp. ?35. Colleen Lamos'sstudycontinues the projectof readingever greaterdiversitywithin the modern canon. DeviantModernism sets about to prove that the works of Eliot, Joyce, and Proustare riddledwith inconsistencies.She tracesin some of theirmost important texts errant elements that betray in each case the author's explicitly stated intentions by revealinggender anxieties and unresolvedconflictsover sexual desire. These contradictionsare useful to scholarsinterestedin the early twentieth century because they expose a great deal about the attitudes that shaped an important reconsideration of gender and desire at that time. Lamos chooses to emphasize the extent to which these unresolved and frequently unacknowledged struggles in canonical texts can be read as mistakes that argue against the very existence of a modern canon clear of inconsistency and impregnable to any acknowledgementof the diversitythatyieldsa broaderpictureof modern literature. Any consideration of errorin twentieth-centurywriting must concern itselfwith the work ofJames Joyce. In his final novel, Joyce embraced the idea that mistakes have a creativefunction;he cherishedSamuel Beckett'sdictation errorsin Finnegans Wake.While printer errors in Ulysseshave given rise to a great deal of critical discourse,Lamos concentrateshere upon errorscommitted by the charactersin the text. She also seesJoyce's representationsof the feminine and of the homoerotic in the novel as a challenge to the established social norms of the day. In this sense, Establishing no close theoretic relationship between science and the visual or literary, they can propose only applications or parallels, at best an analogy. To model is not to integrate. Our view of Cubism is not altered by setting it in the vicinity of Relativity theory on the grounds that each emerged between 1905 and 1915 (surelyin Newtonian time). That Cubism 'valorizednot the subjectitselfbut the observationand representationof the subject',is an objection to Cubism, not a description of it. That Dilsey in TheSoundandtheFuryis an external observer of events is true,but trivial.When the authorsarguethat TheGolden Bowlis a narrative about narratives,and that such reflexivityis a value, the problem becomes clearer. Vargish and Mook take characteristicsof art and literaryproduction, and call them values. Since these values are 'recognizable across traditional disciplinary boundaries', the science-art-literatureconspectusemerges. But epistemic traumais not a value; nor is the appearance of observer-charactersin fiction;nor is it a value that the figuresin LesDemoiselles d'Avignon occupy a 'field'of observation.These are descriptorsonly;and the interdisciplinaryargumentfails...