Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society by David Trotter (review)

Abstract

474 Reviews in It', 'desire [. . .] finds open expression in this story,forthe firstand only time in the corpus examined in this book' (p. 257). In 'Daisy Miller', 'the matrix story about the representation of women', the conflict between an 'active heroine' and the 'defining, interpretative, and normative activities that go on around her' (p. 245) results in the high moral sanction and cold comforts of death. 'Mora Maltravers' reverses this plot, butnotwithstandinga fleetingglance in the direction ofthe 'New Woman', the reader is left to conclude that this tale, as the telos of the book as a whole, exemplifies the subordination of the historical and social to the realms of technical and theoretical capriciousness. Portraying the Lady should occupy a seminal place in a crowded pantheon less for the secure architecture of its own argument, then, and much more for unforgettable readings of tales it will certainly move into the centre of James studies. University of the West of England Peter Rawlings Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society . By David Trotter. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. viii + 358pp. ?35. ISBN 0-19-818755-6. A critical subindustry has mobilized around the issue of professionalization in the nineteenth and twentieth centures, focused on the institutional, economic, techno? logical, and social contexts within which writers marketed themselves, sold their products, and sought recognition. David Trotter's Par anoid Modernism relates such concerns to developments in psychiatric and psychoanalytic theories emerging in the same period. The result is a complex book that situates certain modernist trajectories within a range of intersecting cultural discourses, each signalling pressures that writers had to confront in an increasingly rationalized and commodified social world. Literary modernism is explored in relation to issues such as fear of contin? gency and randomness, manifested in anti-mimetic perspectives; questions of identity and subject formation, and the psychological consequences of professionalization; the elaboration of post-liberal politics in response to the spread of democracy; and anxieties about gender evidenced in rhetorics of hyper-masculinity. The key issue is the relation between paranoia and professionalization. Paranoia is understood here as a delusional psychic system in which individuals fantasize that they are of special significance but fear their uniqueness is not recognized. Emphasis on systemis central; paranoia is a perverse structure of feeling in which everything is made to conform to its rigid terms. It is a delusion, but internally consistent, eliminating chance by an anti-mimetic attribution of meaning to haphazard events. Trotter finds close links between this delusional structure of feeling and the emergence of literary modernism, especially those strands (Hulme, Lewis, and bits of Lawrence) committed to abstraction. Two arguments follow: firstly,that the will to abstraction is in some sense paranoid because it is anti-mimetic and in thrall to private fantasy rather than concerned to engage with reality; secondly, that modernist writers were vulnerable to delusion because under a professionalized meritocracy and a commod? ified culture they were forced to accrue symbolic capital 'by the exhibition of ability' (p. 22), which led to 'a psychopathy of expertise' (p. 8). Paranoid modernism is a psychological diagnosis of writers and a textual theory that draws on this diagnosis by explicating literary works in terms of writers' desire to assert their unique identi? ties within a rationalized cultural realm?the 'politics of paranoid narrative' offers'a militant objection to social mimesis' (p. 186). Trotter's emphasis on the link between anti-mimetic aesthetics and a cultural cri? tique of social mimeticism traceable to writers such as Godwin, Mill, Collins, and MLRy 99.2, 2004 475 Dickens is suggestive; the exploration of the consequences for professional identity of a bureaucratized social world is necessary; and assessing writers' reactions to the commodification of culture is valuable. One welcomes Trotter's reflections on these issues, and some of his analyses of texts (Conrad's, Ford's, Lawrence's) perceptively discuss their explorations of psychosis. But there are problems with this book's premisses and arguments, principally in the collocation of 'paranoia' with 'modernism' and the over-psychological reading of writers' responses to professionalization. The collocation of abstraction and paranoia is made to carry a good deal of weight...