Impure Naiveté: On Beckett’s Backward Modernism

Reviewed by: Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel by Adam Grener Krista Rascoe Adam Grener. Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel. Ohio State UP, 2020. 198p. From the fractals gracing the cover to the methodical statistical analysis of chance and coincidence within the works of key nineteenth century artists, Adam Grener’s Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel reveals a new method for understanding realism in fiction by demonstrating the shift to social and historical aspects of probability that underpin the period’s use of chance, coincidence, and statistical anomalies within the novel. Grener approaches his argument regarding narrative probability through close reading of notable works by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy. He interprets those evidentiary texts through application of philosophical contexts of the emerging statistical theories of that century, which create subjective states of knowing, or objective analysis of frequencies of causal events in the lives of the characters and plots discussed. Furthermore, he traces the denotative transformation of “chance” and “probability” from their originally synonymous meanings at the beginning of the nineteenth century to incongruous terms that stand in opposition to one another by the century’s close. To demonstrate this epistemic metamorphosis and its influence on nineteenth century realism, Grener draws connections between the artistic works of his study and the scientific discourse of the period to conclude that the realist novel’s fascination with coincidence, chance, and the improbable stems from the shifts in the [End Page 116] foundations of probability that resulted from scientific progress. In turn, Grener provides the field a much-needed corrective lens for criticism and examination of causality in the nineteenth century novel. Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel finds its strength in the grounding of its historical contexts that support the author’s aim. As it traces the development of statistical philosophies beginning with the influences of Aristotle’s Poetics to Laplace’s Probabilities and Venn’s Logic of Chance, each chapter carefully substantiates how scientific probability develops alongside the realist novel as a means for representing the causal effects of human affairs. Grener rightly demonstrates that chance in terms of meetings or events within realist fiction reinforces the interconnectedness of social existence as he explicates Charles Dicken’s Martin Chuzzlewit in the third chapter. Yet, his strongest arguments are made in chapters 4 and 5, where he proves how emerging laws of statistical probability infiltrate the works of Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy respectively. Grener points to the ideas of representation and sampling, as well as Darwinian theories of variation and determination prevalent during the nineteenth century. By drawing attention to the manner in which characters are defined by their social status and spatial location, Grener establishes that the characters’ actions and the events executed through plot are due to conditioned behavior more so than ratios of probable outcomes that control the characters’ choices. Cloaked by these artists as incidents of “chance,” “coincidence,” and “risk,” the author proves that realist fictional narratives use probability to engage in political reform, social identity, and cultural representation. With regard to the shortcomings of the work, Grener reveals one in the second chapter’s discussion on the link between cultural representation and Otherness. The reader may encounter some difficulty eschewing the logical connections Grener attempts within the chapter as he explores Sir Walter Scott’s “The Two Drovers” as a reading of chance that illustrates historical/cultural otherness, pointing directly to causal ambiguity as the primary driver of his premise. In the story, Robin Oig receives a detailed prophecy from Janet warning him that if he goes south into England, he will kill an Englishman and face execution. Grener accurately draws the conclusion that Robin’s Scottish identity stands in opposition with the English legal code, creating the sense of otherness that is tied to that identity as a Scottish [End Page 117] Highlander during his fateful conflict with the Englishman Harry. Grener’s argument regarding causal ambiguity deteriorates due to his assumption that the causal relationship is ambiguous. Understanding the cultural/historical, but more importantly, the political contexts surrounding Scott’s fictional work actually creates a direct...

Nineteenth-century realism is often associated with a mimetic representation of socio-historical reality in the narrative form of the novel. However, a closer look at the wealth of new genres and literary forms that were created by writers and artists within the various factions of realism offers a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of realist art based on new communicative, creative and social challenges and opportunities. In this chapter, we want to explore and analyze different aspects of the simultaneous preoccupation of writers with the new social reality and its changes, tensions and classes on the one hand, and with an ongoing search for literary forms to express these new experiences of reality and convey them to a diverse readership on the other. Taking our point of departure in the notions of ‘composition’ and ‘self-reflexiveness,’ our aim will be to detail the disruptive innovative force of realist writing across literary and non-literary texts as well as across verbal and visual media, both in nineteenth-century realism and into the twentieth and twenty-first century. Over the past one hundred and twenty years, activist and interventionist strategies in various avant-garde movements contribute to redefine realism through literary forms that point both to readers’ literary and social commitment, and this kind of dialogic exchange – an exchange that underpins all contemporary realist practice – becomes a means to transform social reality itself.

Adam Grener. <i>Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel</i>.

Reviewed by: Animals and Other People: Literary Form and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century by Heather Keenleyside Amanda Weldy Boyd Heather Keenleyside. Animals and Other People: Literary Form and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania, 2016. Pp. viii + 272. $69.95. Are animals people? If you are looking for the definitive answer, you have picked up the wrong book, although its title certainly indicates an opinion. Ms. Keenleyside offers a microscopic picture of the issue rather than a bird's-eye view—although much is made of birds' eyes in the text. Animals and Other People is not, she wisely warns readers, an investigation of trends in how animals were perceived by the general population throughout the period. This book's achievement, instead, is to demonstrate the power of figurative language within several notable eighteenth-century works to participate in and shape perceptions of what constitutes the animal. "Rhetorical devices make real-world claims," Ms. Keenleyside contends, rejecting a tendency of literary critics to dismiss personification, especially, as purely figurative and often unsophisticated. Each of the five chapters in Animals and Other People pairs a philosopher with a work of fiction, placing emphasis on genre or form; after all, the subtitle of the book, Literary Forms and Living Beings, endows those two categories with the same emphasis. Befitting a book heavily invested in the taxonomic, the organization of Animals and Other People impressively manifests itself in periodicity, text, genre, and overarching theme. Chronologically organized, the chapters are demarcated by author, main literary text, and genre, focusing respectively on The Seasons (poetry), Robinson Crusoe (novel), Gulliver's Travels (novel and fable), Tristram Shandy (life narrative) and, among related examples, Barbauld's Lessons for Children (children's stories, especially fables). Despite its mischievous title and whimsical cover art, Animals and Other People is a serious work of literary philosophy or philosophical literature, depending on one's preferred view. Of course, whether animals are people cannot be debated without invoking philosophy, and Ms. Keenleyside's pairings of text and philosopher are more than justified by close readings that show the literary author echoing, expanding, or contesting the philosophical take on what is and is not an animal. Although the generic and thematic organization might suggest that readers could selectively peruse sections of their own interest, her chapters are heavily interrelated, particularly her argument about the centrality of the first-person perspective, which is initiated in chapter 2 but arrives in full [End Page 91] force during chapter 4; similarly, discussion of Gulliver's misapprehension of fable returns in chapter 5. Moreover, the philosophy introduced in each chapter is accretive, and later chapters place their philosophers in conversation with earlier philosophers. Fans (and detractors) of Locke will be delighted at his many cameos. With all this interplay among philosophers, literary texts, scholarly tradition, and Ms. Keenleyside herself, the (implied) main question—are animals people?—periodically falls out of sight. She suggests that all the texts under consideration are menaced by a more pressing question—are people animals? She tips her hand once again by offering in her chapter titles a progression from "The Person" to "The Creature" to "The Human" to "The Animal" to "The Child"; this mix of terms we might think of as "us" and "not us" is certainly intentional. In the first chapter, Ms. Keenleyside carefully isolates personification in The Seasons to suggest that the agency characteristic of "people" might be modeled on animal motion, and correspondingly, that animal motion is not, as Descartes believed, unthinkingly mechanical. Readers will be gratified to see a rehabilitation of Thomson's poem (and of personification, which she despairingly notes fell out of vogue as the century went on) as "neither mechanical nor trite." Thus, animals are people, at least in The Seasons. In chapter 2, Ms. Keenleyside applies Locke's political person as defined by the capacity for speech and the ownership of property (in this case, demonstrated by who gets to speak and what can be eaten) to Robinson Crusoe and the various animals he encounters on his otherwise "unpeopled" island. Locke's separation of animal and man is not as clear as one might wish...

Literature is the art of language, so in the light of the profound influence of linguistic transformation on the development of modem Chinese literary forms it is appropriate to present the history of the development of modern Chinese literature as the art of language. Modern Chinese literature starts with the linguistic transformation of the May Fourth Movement’s rejection of classical Chinese and promotion of the vernacular. This language revolution and the transformation of literary language during each subsequent historical period have exerted a profound inf1uence on the overall development of modern Chinese literature, including literary forms, and hence have become an inner source of the development and evolution of modern Chinese literary forms and of the shaping of their main characteristics. An in-depth discussion of the interaction between linguistic transformation and the development of modern Chinese literary forms as well as the rules governing this process will not only disclose the universal linguistic context of literary creation created by the transformation of language but will also enable us to find the historical sources of the phenomena of literary genres and forms, writers’ choice of literary styles, the formal characteristics of literary works, etc., and will offer a correct explanation and evaluation of the May Fourth vernacular movement and the subsequent series of new literary forms and styles. This is instrumental to achieving a better summation of the experience and lessons of the development of modern Chinese literary forms and to finding historical clues to the development of our present-day literary forms.

Phraseology and Style in Subgenres of the Novel: A Synthesis of Corpus and Literary Perspectives

Reviewed by: Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form Siobhan Phillips Judith Brown. Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009. xiv + 199 pp. As modernist studies continues to seek new approaches, it also continues to revise known categories: they are not outmoded labels to be discarded perhaps, so much as potential descriptions to be probed and recontextualized. In Glamour in Six Dimensions, Judith Brown exemplifies this scholarly tack by looking again at the formalism so important to accounts of twentieth-century aesthetics. Her analysis uses the paradoxes of form, freshly situated, to clarify contradictory affinities in modernist culture. Brown does so through her chosen central term, “glamour.” In her book, this word does not chart an artistic history or recognize modernists’ self-description; rather, and more usefully, “glamour” theorizes a set of interests that unites commerce and art of the period. Glamour is both an ideal and a commodity, in Brown’s presentation; it “names [the] interrelation” of “literary form” and “modern mass culture” (8). Glamour indicates an attraction to what is “cold, indifferent, [End Page 663] and deathly,” a drive toward “abstraction,” and a preference for “blankness, the polished surface, the stance of impenetrability” (5): these are evident in the affective results of Hollywood stills, fashion magazines, and industrial plastics as much as in the poetic practices of Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Wallace Stevens. Glamour therefore refuses to separate cultural contexts from artistic methods, refuting old assumptions about modernism’s remove from markets; with these aims, Brown’s study furthers an important trend of scholarship that includes work by Aaron Jaffe, Douglas Mao, Michael North, and Lawrence Rainey, among others. Glamour marks a valuable extension of this strain, however, in its particular argument about form: “glamour emerges with the modernist attention to aesthetic form,” Brown explains, “and subsequently becomes visible, even most familiar, in the worlds of entertainment and mass culture.” “[R]eading glamour” thus “extends the power of the literary—especially in its attention to form—to translate the world around us” (8). This overview might benefit from a clearer characterization of “form” across the different genres that this book cites, though the omission is less troublesome in specific analyses. As they unfold, Brown’s various descriptions of glamour refute any limits to the possible manifestations of a modernist aesthetics—and resist any generalizations about something like a “culture industry” undermining that aesthetics. Glamour does not want its central concept to be “relegated solely to the service of capitalism and its system of commodity production,” as Brown explains. If it were, critics would “lose glamour’s aesthetic power, as well as its range of pleasures” (12). The power and pleasures are dangerous, often cruel. From ads for cigarettes to sentences by Stein, glamour flirts with “the suspicion of the nothing behind it all”—while turning that absence into “something that is seductive, powerful, and often simply gorgeous” (5). Brown’s study thus supports a detached, nihilistic, and antihumanist version of modernist art. To Brown, in fact, glamour offers a type of twentieth-century sublime: sustaining the attractions of negativity while replacing attention to nature with a focus on technology, preference for the infinite with an attraction to the regulated, and endorsement of transcendent reason with an “obliteration of the subject” (33). Yet if glamorous sublimity “courts danger,” in Brown’s words, it also “finds in it powerful creative potential” (13), and Brown shows that a seemingly indifferent or reactionary effect contains unexpected political possibilities as she articulates the breadth of its instantiation. One chapter, for example, relates T. S. Eliot’s theories of individual talent, Woolf’s ideas of character, and Hollywood’s starmaking apparatus; Brown demonstrates that Greta Garbo’s glamour depended on an impersonal personality akin to high-art aims (101). [End Page 664] The actor’s image, Brown argues, as it uses and indicts processes of technology, diagnoses a modern alienation that is sociologically, aesthetically, and commercially produced. Her discussion casts new light on modernist subjectivity as it articulates a specific relation between mass and high culture that is reductive to neither. Another chapter examines the appeal of “primitive glamour”—which could seem...

Race and the Modernist Imagination

By March 2020 most Higher Education institutions across the world had been forced to move all learning and teaching activities onto digital platforms, abandoning face-to-face classroom practices as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic. How did the response to this emergency manifest itself in changes to pedagogy and practice for staff and students in Higher Education? The authors completed a systematic literature review to gain insight into the challenges and pedagogic practices that emerged at this time. To represent the complexities of the ‘activity’, the writers sought a theoretical framework that would help identify the key themes and tensions that the empirical studies had identified. Drawing on the work of Vygotsky, Leont’ev and Engeström, the authors created a theoretical framework to analyse how learning and teaching activities within Higher Education were practised because of COVID-19. In total, 206 papers were reviewed under four categories; theoretical, narrative, empirical and blended (which consists of two or more categories). For example, some articles provided an empirical study alongside their authors’ narrative reflections about their own experiences of handling the challenges that were created by Covid -19 pandemic. Then a more detailed review of 23 papers that met the empirical research criteria were explored for their data with coding categories drawn from the theoretical framework. These papers, in varying degrees, illuminated the tensions and the complexities of how those involved in Higher Education globally, were affected by COVID-19. Confined by the digital knowledge capabilities of both staff and students, universities were challenged to find ways to maintain their programme provision, manage expectations, support students’ wellbeing, and enable staff to balance the challenges as they directly interfaced with students. It is clear that while this emergency offered possibilities for staff and students to harness the productive capabilities of adaptive teaching by moving beyond fixed pedagogical frameworks, many struggled and felt constrained by the complexities of the activities required during the pandemic.

Both Chinese and foreign writers cast their eyes on China during the early twentieth-century, when China was at an intersection of feudalism and modernism. They depicted and recorded this complex period from their own perspectives in different literary forms. Among them, Mao Dun and Maugham present the 1920s and 1930s China from different angles through their literary works Midnight and On a Chinese Screen, respectively. There are lots of research analyzing the two works from various perspectives, but few put them together by doing comparative studies of the early twentieth-century Chinese society and people. Therefore, this essay aims to analyze the two works together from a comparative perspective and offer a more comprehensive view through the analysis. Besides official historical records, literary and visual arts are also chroniclers of history. Fictional works might also provide the real world, even with detailed social contradictions, and even the inner world of people under specific writing purposes, like what Mao Dun and Maugham held. This comparative research focuses on the depiction of China from both domestic and foreign perspectives and analyzes the narrative of the two literary works from the fictional realism in characters as well as social and natural environments. Since the two writers held different viewpoints with diverse social backgrounds, their understanding of Chinese society and people varied accordingly. Through the comparative analysis, this research explores a great deal of the historical value of these two literary works that offer a more enlightened way to link the real historical events and the fictional characters, as well as a fuller picture of China at that time.

This engaging work of ecocriticism offers a much needed reading of ‘atmosphere’ in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British fiction. Jesse Oak Taylor analyses ‘atmosphere’ as ‘literal, in the meteorological sense’ as well as ideologically and symbolically charged (p. 6). He coins a new term, the ‘abnatural’, to indicate ‘nature’s absence and its uncanny persistence’ in literature (p. 5). Specifically, the book analyses how fiction represents the adaptation of organisms under artificial and ‘abnatural’ atmospheric conditions (p. 5). The monograph consists of three parts: ‘The Novel as Climate Model’, ‘Abnatural Supernaturalism’, and ‘Climatic Modernism’. These sections address the Victorian realist novel, fin-de-siècle Gothic fiction, and modernist fiction in turn. By following this historical progression and treating different literary genres, Oak Taylor can show how writers perceived both urban and domestic environments changing around them. In the first part, Oak Taylor analyses works by Charles Dickens and George Eliot to demonstrate that the nineteenth-century realist novel models climate conditions and climate change. He argues that narrative functions as an especially apt ‘mechanism for understanding’ climate because climate itself can only be ‘apprehended through time’ (p. 14). Chapters on Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, and Daniel Deronda analyse different man-made, artificial atmospheres. These include glass houses, the Crystal Palace, and domestic spaces polluted by the coal-burning hearth. Oak Taylor connects these artificial environments to the ways in which each novel depicts economic and social relationships: for example, how coal consumption creates hierarchical social classes and power relationships, or how characters transmit affect and emotion within the smoky drawing room. Some of this section’s most suggestive observations are about the connection between atmosphere and literary form. For example, the argument that ‘metonymy is atmospheric’ because it ‘operates by proximity’ encourages readers to reread and perhaps look differently at the interstitial ‘spaces between’ within these novels (p. 28).

The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience

Reviewed by: Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 Rebecca L. Walkowitz Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945. Mark Wollaeger . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xxv + 335. $35.00 (cloth). As befits a study of propaganda, the subtitle of Mark Wollaeger's intricate book underplays its significance. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda concerns not only the ways that modernist novels and short stories responded to new communication technologies and to the state-sponsored use of those technologies for imperialist and patriotic persuasion. It focuses also on the ways that emergent narrative media such as film competed with fiction to control how early twentieth-century information—distributed faster and more intensively than ever before—would be analyzed and understood. The effort to define and manipulate information, and to find narrative strategies to achieve these effects both in literary fiction and in a range of nonfiction media, is central to Wollaeger's account of modernism's history and modernism's legacy today. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda approaches and holds together its eponymous terms in three principal ways, each of which builds upon and complicates the next. First, it brings to our attention the many, often unnoticed artifacts of propaganda within major works of modernist fiction and film: a military recruitment poster that Leopold Bloom passes in the Dublin streets of Ulysses; the infamous report on "Savage Customs" authored by Kurtz and edited by Marlow in Heart of Darkness; the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst shown in the fictional newsreels of Citizen Kane. Second, it observes that the engagement of modernist artists with propaganda was not limited to diegetic representation, nor was their response to propaganda exclusively negative. Wollaeger's chapters tell of modernist writers and filmmakers who created, alongside and separate from their elite works of art, journalistic essays and documentary films which they designed to promote various state-sponsored political causes. We learn of Joseph Conrad's wartime publicity for the Mercantile Navy in 1916, of Ford Madox Ford's anti-German writings conceived for the War Propaganda Bureau, and of Alfred Hitchcock's short films produced for the war effort but released for the first time in 1994. Third, it sees the proximity of modernist art and propaganda in this period not as contradiction, or even as hypocrisy, but rather as the outcome of a new "media environment," in which artists and agents of the state, who were sometimes also artists, looked for new ways to process the scale and quantity of what Ford called the "white spray of facts" (145). Modernism and propaganda thus become, in Wollaeger's view, "interrelated languages of the new information age" (xiii). The debate about art's relationship to propaganda is an old one. But Wollaeger gives it new purchase by stressing the emergence of modern propaganda, with its "techniques of saturation and multiple media channels" (xiii), and by showing how the last century's propaganda outlets served as both a testing ground and a target, a model and a spur, for modernist innovation. Wollaeger's book is part of a strain of "new modernist studies" that has urged us to see how elite artworks were enmeshed in mass culture rather than simply critical of it. More specifically, Wollaeger joins scholars who have focused on the media environments of literary modernism: on the one hand, the older media such as little magazines and publishing houses through which artworks were disseminated and promoted; on the other hand, the new media such as radio and [End Page 193] cinema that accompanied and shaped the production of literature in the period. In the past two years alone, one thinks of Lawrence Rainey's Revisiting the Waste Land, Suzanne Churchill's The Little Magazines and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry, and Aaron Jaffe's Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity in the first group; and Michael North's Camera Works and Todd Avery's Radio Modernism in the second. But Wollaeger's book is also interested in what we might call the other lives of modernists, and in this sense it shares with Melba Cuddy-Keane's Virginia Woolf and the Public Intellectual a belief that the history...

I want to begin with the rather simple statement that Mark Twain's autobiographies—and here I am referring mostly to Life on the Mississippi and the text we now call the Autobiography—hold open the past as a resource for slowing down time. In itself this isn't a highly provocative claim; I imagine that many would agree that we find in Twain's work a desire to hold off futurity. I think, too, that it is fair to say that his continual return to the materials of the past is in part motivated by modernity's culture of planned obsolescence. Obsolescence becomes an issue when the speed of “progress” requires a diminishing of the present in addition to the past. Temporality, under modernity, is organized into the past, present, and a horizon of expectation known as the future. The future increasingly encroaches on the present by directing our thinking and desires forward; Twain well understood the risks and anxiety of this minimized present through the market logic of investment. Planned obsolesce exploits such anxieties through the introduction of looming future dates of expiration. While ancient, dead forms of culture were of no interest to Twain, those still-working elements of the past had some attraction. The ability to use these elements, to repeat certain experiences, to laugh twice at the same joke: these are what he understands to be threatened by obsolescence.1While we recognize the extent to which narrative has broken down in his Autobiography—it is precisely this feature that has made this text's reputation—we might not immediately link this formal feature to Twain's anxious response to modernity. If we carefully consider how individual moments of breakdown are framed and what they might contribute to any possible larger narrative structure and authorial strategy, we expose what I would like to suggest we recognize as narrative leftovers or remainders. These originate in, and are signifiers of, a failure to fall into line with the requirements of a certain temporal regime—specifically the inability to master the fantasy of a unified present tense associated with modernity in which temporality is constructing as a flowing of the past into the present leading to the future.My argument here is that Twain produces spaces of temporal possibility within his autobiographies through the telling of short and partial, yet by necessity linked narratives, anecdotes, and that in so doing, he comes to the surprising realization that he can mine his own past as part of an effort to resist the aforementioned logic of planned obsolescence. Further, as a prolific and practiced deployer of anecdotes, it is my hunch that Twain might be able to help us answer the question of why a previous generation of critics, the new historicists, so devalued the genre of autobiography.What many are coming to call the “temporal turn” in American studies troubles many of the assumptions that have for the past three decades provided critics with stable tools and methodologies through which they could situate their objects of interest.2 Like its spatial analogue, the transnational turn, the temporal turn unsettles what was once taken for granted, that our authors and their readers participated in a shared single and even temporality. It is in literature, that much diminished thing of the new historicist period, that recent critics like Lloyd Pratt find evidence or disclosures of the multiple and competing temporalities that composed the author's milieu. Pratt argues that literature—insofar as it depends on narrative ordering—“refracts its readers' understanding of time,” and thereby engages in what he refers to as a mutually constrictive double-hermeneutic.3 This refracting renders literary texts an “archive of time” that both reveals the temporal complexity of its moment of composition and wraps up and delivers new configurations of time for readers. Even in the smallest of literary archives that Twain scatters throughout his autobiographies, we can unfold complex temporalities.The existence of these multiple and competing orders of time are made possible by certain formal features that increasingly become visible in what comes to be the dominant mode of autobiographical writing at the moment in which Twain and others of his generation begin to write of themselves. When this generation, the one referred to as “the generation of 1870” by Henry Adams, attempted to return to narrate their lives that began with an antebellum childhood, they had to cross at least one rupture that resulted in difficulties in reconciling that past with their present moment of composition. Jay Martin observes that the formal changes in autobiography were related to new conceptions of consciousness: “Even more than [Henry] Adams's, Twain's book marks a new stage in the autobiographical form. This has gone too long unrecognized. The post–Civil War generation was the first to truly feel the new conditions of consciousness that would come to restructure mental process and shape the modern mind.”4 In attempting to record the prehistory of what Martin describes as a consciousness formed on the other side of this restructuring, this generation required a new literary form that could accommodate temporal incommensurability and that would provide some resistance to obsolescence.The literary forms selected by Twain are important. He uses form as a response to the changing times in his Autobiography, and from a close reading of this text we can extract certain signature moves that are also visible in his earlier work. When, in this text, Twain jokingly claims that he “writes autobiographies for a living,” we might want to, despite the very real possibility that we are being played, take him at his word.5 For almost all of his work might very well be construed as autobiography. Certainly doing so can make texts like the Autobiography seem a little less strange and others such as Life on the Mississippi, a little more so. His project to find a better form with which to write his autobiography was a lifelong interest and in his final years, it became all consuming. For any reader who dares to crack open any one of the several editions of Twain's heavy volume that have appeared since his death will no doubt quickly notice that his meta-discursive meditations, his struggle with the writing of Autobiography seems so much more interesting to him than the project of writing about his own past.6 Short, almost celebratory, notes on this topic appear several times and Twain revels in the multiple discoveries of what he proposes to be a more perfect form to narrate his life. And thus, like any amateur theorist, Twain's enthusiastic response to these newly found conceptualizations refused to be contained and he interrupts himself to broadly apply his new understanding, rendering the Autobiography a dizzying read.The first textual fragment to appear in the most recent edition—the heavily annotated first volume of the University of California Press's planned three-volume printing of the Autobiography—is typical of these methodological revelations. Under the strangely mistitled heading “An Early Attempt”—for this was in fact a rather late attempt in his almost forty-year project and composed in 1906—Twain launches into yet another complaint regarding the norms of this highly structured and “old, old, old, inflexible, and difficult” narrative form that “starts you out at the cradle and drives you straight for the grave, with no side-excursions permitted on the way.” “Whereas,” he continues, “the side-excursions are the life of our life-voyage, and should be, also, of its history” (203). We find in this passage his major critique of linear and progressive history: Twain understands that any theory that forces history into a narrative of progression that leads to an outcome already known in advance, will leave much of the “life” of “life” abandoned, as it were, on shore. But there is, to be sure, tension in Twain's conception of the life narrative: while he wants to focus on experience that has often been rendered silent, as not contributing to the official story, he clearly argues that one cannot deny the eventual movement toward the conclusion and thus death.The exact tension might even be said to be his signature style. If we consider Twain primarily a humorist and understand the logic of the joke as always involved in a form of belated re-cognition, we can link his need to insert a slowdown, a temporal delay, as linked to the temporality of the joke.7 That final moment of recognition, as the great cosmic joke unfolds, however, must always, as Twain surely knows, elude us. He therefore attempts to hold off this inventible future and punch line for as long as he can. His theory of composition for the Autobiography lays out some of his understanding of a complex temporality that takes part in a similar logic to the joke; he plans to repeatedly stage temporal irruptions with no thought toward a progressive synthesis: “I intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future biographies … because of its form and method—a form and method whereby the past and present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along like contact of flint with steel.” This works in manner similar to how Bruce Michelson argues the witty epigrams function in Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar for 1894: these chaotic and disconnected textual fragments interrupt the supposed scheme of calendric and narrative ordering. Twain's autobiographical form, even though it is not particularly witty or humorous, takes part in both the slowing down of temporality and the moments of collision that he singles out as key to the telling of a good joke. Timing is, as it is well-known, everything.8The economy in which the anecdote functions is one in which the “value” of this short narrative isn't fixed or even exactly a limited resource; thus Twain can deploy the same anecdote again and again. Many of Twain's famous and oft-repeated anecdotes originate in his early childhood experiences. They are a resource for his imagination and enable him, once he has started the telling of one yarn, to switch, as it were, “threads,” delaying or otherwise holding off, for a little while longer, the conclusion that he knows must eventually be reached. The return to childhood memories thus renders apparent a phase of life that is more than just a phase; it can be made alive—to speak to the demands and contingencies of the present—as it was never really dead. In a late passage in Life on the Mississippi we see an example of Twain using an anecdote as supplement to the primary narrative by way of what he frames as an unprocessed past secret: “Upon that text I desire to depart from the direct line of my subject, and make a little excursion. I wish to reveal a secret which I have carried with me nine years, and which has become burdensome” (360). The “text” in this passage is an idea or thought, not a physical, printed text, but a sudden appearance in his mind—the “all at once”—of an old acquaintance, Mr. Brown. His equation of his own past with the creation of a literary text is telling; we know now that we are caught in a complex connection of stories. He uses one of these stories, the occasion of what he represents as the spark of a memory of Mr. Brown to reveal, or to put it another way, to produce another narrative, of a previously uncounted experience. In describing this fragment of his past as a “secret” he marks it as what could have only previously functioned as a gap in the “text” of his extant narrative.Mr. Brown, due to his remarkable faculty of memory, appears earlier in the text in connection with a critique of the art of storytelling. Twain uses him to lampoon and critique the fantasy of perfect memory and the “complete” telling of any narrative. A steamboat pilot, as Twain explains, must have a good memory for geographical landmarks, locations, and other river “facts.” But memory alone is not enough, for the river changes constantly and the ability to modify, on the fly as it were, one's set of stored data and internal map of the river is critical. Furthermore, as Mr. Brown demonstrates for Twain, perfect recall makes one a bore and misses the point of conversation: “Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it, all occurrences are of the same size. As a talker, he is bound to clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himself an insufferable bore. Moreover, he cannot stick to his subject” (118). Twain represents Mr. Brown as lacking the ability to discriminate as he launches into the telling of one story after another. Despite the movement in Twain's text from event to event, he claims that he, unlike Mr. Brown, manages to stick to his subject.Sticking to the subject turns out to involve the continual and selective reworking of the past. This reworking of Twain's autobiographical material undoubtedly can be linked to the growing celebrity culture and one could read, as many have done, Twain's numerous reminiscences as exploiting his advantages as an already large figure within the literary market.9 But it would be a mistake not to read this reworking as part of his continual, career-long attempt to make sense of the outmoded narratives from the past, those that seem no longer functional or otherwise lacking explanatory power, yet remain attractive. Encapsulated within many of the writings that one might characterize as autobiographical sketches, are scenes of type of the “contrasts” that he invoked in his Autobiography. The “sparks” created by the tension between past and present might be thought of as burning holes in the larger frame narratives, producing an alternate association, or path through a linked series of holes. Each of these moments that I am locating at the site of the spark takes the form of a short narrative, or an anecdote.The anecdote, as I have already hinted, contains within it the sort of reserves or resources that enable the continual return to the past in order to slow down narrative time and to complicate any assumption of a unified temporality in which the past can become obsolete. It extends the possibilities of a narrative rather than provide definitive closure. The anecdote is also timely. Jane Gallop turns to the dictionary definition, “a short account of a some interesting or humorous incident,” to argue that for any anecdote to be interesting must mean that it is capable of producing an intervention in critical debates.10 To be interesting means to make something new again or to expose a previously unexposed dimension. The anecdote, of course, has a special status and meaning within the practice of literary criticism: it is one of the definitive tools of the new historicism. Joel Fineman explains that the anecdote has this special status because it can, unlike the literary text itself, provide access to a dimension of what he refers to as the real: The anecdote, let us provisionally remark, as the narration of a singular event, is the literary form or genre that uniquely refers to the real … there is something about the anecdote that exceeds its literary status, and this excess is precisely that which gives the anecdote its pointed referential access to the real; a summary, for example of some portion of a novel, however brief and pointed, is, again, not something anecdotal. These two features, therefore, taken together—i.e., first, that the anecdote has something literary about it, but second, that the anecdote, however literary, is nevertheless directly pointed towards or rooted in the real—allows us to think of the anecdote, given its formal if not its actual brevity, as a historeme, i.e., as the smallest minimal unit of the historiographic fact. And the question that the anecdote thus poses is how, compact of both literature and reference, the anecdote possesses its peculiar and eventful narrative force.11 Fineman's conceptualization of anecdote as “historeme” requires the splitting of the anecdote from any possible framing context. As a self-enclosed it can thus on other and objects as the anecdote has so often been within it can as the other for an of The anecdote and when we understand the text and the anecdote as both within the same moment we are able to our objects of But what if we put a little on this understanding of the anecdote by rendering it less of a than what Jane Gallop refers to as an and Twain refers to as It functions as a or a side it both the and through the into a complex temporality that engages with always a The famous first by in of are as much of a as the notice in the of “the that the of the possibility of being and know about me you have read a book by the of The of but that no That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he the was which he but he the Twain and both This form of the anecdote produces a slowing narrative time through the of what could be a supplement to the When a he so in order to more time the that take when he comes on he forces the into their of his narrative. The of an event has been invoked but in being it is made to more than it can to These temporal of the formal feature of the anecdote, the ability to out narrative time and to to past narratives in are linked to Twain's to modernity and his resistance to the of in Life on the Mississippi, at times represents the possibility of an from the found in Twain's and The famous anecdote that the the steamboat as the of a new temporality that a in It a of the of a new that renders all the other that this one the In this which was the first to appear in the of on the Twain describes the of what he understands to be his first The narrative of this of text depends on this with the of the by the Twain's eventual to As a narrative it not unlike a Twain with himself as a and through his of The final moment of this of his the for what could be the his story of return in the of Life on the In this portion of the text, unlike the Twain to thus the that has been through the appearance of the first steamboat into represents this moment of first as a in we know this because he the with which one might characterize this these the was with after the was a dead and only the but the The call that the of this new mode of time comes from “a by Twain as from his and who and this of the quickly coming toward the Twain this as the temporality of and a new mode of an time of This temporality is because Twain and his are in what might be as an between two orders of an earlier mode that he with childhood, and and another mode by the of and the of the in the was toward the appearance of the known and while the introduction of new Twain and his it is a singular desire that takes the form of a call into their new only to the of the Twain represents the of the steamboat as doing more than just life for the of he describes how almost immediately after the first a takes for those who to on the new and new of became an The and the became the became a on a of the and two of the became These new are associated with a of the that new and from As the of a Twain himself within this generation of new The introduction of of produces a in If and the means a in the new it also a sort of a with a That some of these are not to for point to a regarding the possibility of that is also visible in his of the with and This represents the new that were only made possible through modernity as an of enthusiastic but Twain's toward the changes in this of a simple than his antebellum childhood as and Twain uses the figure of the steamboat to the sense of and possibility found within modernity and and archives it into an anecdote of the past with future carefully between his of those of modernity and those that he as and The of these are found in the material that the on the and in the present A short of three brief set on one in both the narrative gap between this and temporal between his on the river and the return to this site that takes in his present moment of composition. In his first Twain how the of his to become a steamboat was short by the War and the and that which in very short time rendered what was his obsolete. While his for and the that with his as a and with his into an the other of final attempts to the previous of his and the for the of Life on the so have I of the that have come and gone since I from the of a us and these that were Twain to close to the subject of the life of the He was to the form of the Mississippi it him a that was and yet The like the anecdotes that much of his autobiographical contains a of both the past and the can always to the Mississippi precisely because it isn't a it isn't but it is also not Life on the Mississippi, for its complex cannot to the moment of It takes up and from the past and to the present of its multiple moments of composition. he marks the moment in which he his narrative as in his present moment and the process of recall associated with his His to the to the of that have the short narrative of the the of this large temporal gap in his narrative. It produces a which through his use of the from the past tense associated with autobiography to the present of the In an autobiographical of the between childhood and to the river as the in which he formed his in an attempt to a in the This as the text itself is Twain's writing of of His of a from that text in Life on the Mississippi produces an between his and his return to the Twain's present need to with a to his return to that site of his the Mississippi after long in order to himself once again from into a similar to the anecdote of the that out for the in his early work on his theory of Twain to the river with “a for and a to take him For Twain, both no doubt in for his desire to the river and his one represents his need as an to experience into art and the other to produce an record of as it of these is a figure for the other one attempts to the They are also, for the and the the two dominant of writing that he has in the past. on the river in under an what he his Twain attempts to We of course, that the and the are already one from the who was once a steamboat Like through the Twain marks his account of his with his of the of and his past, to and This sense of for Twain, in an of planned on the Mississippi, and the first of the text, might be said to both Twain's to a and the of the Twain no question as to the for this the new … the and almost the … the of all the the of the put his into the … and the He and his with the of a form of and the of the steamboat with the Twain “the and of were of the dead and however, not they in to up down the Mississippi, and when he in one holding open Twain's at the His to modernity turns when he on the by the the When, in the final of the text, Twain on all that has he an anecdote from his recent This appears as an of his and He claims in these he has the comes it the to and with its and the and of its you are in this is in his use of and and the sense that this unlike

<i>Modernist Life Histories: Biological Theory and the Experimental Bildungsroman</i>by Daniel Aureliano Newman