Questioning History: The Postmodern Turn to the Eighteenth Century (review)

Abstract

506 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:4 The remaining four novels receive close readings that reflect, in more or less focused applications, the Hogarthian model outlined above, though, of course, in ways that respond to profound differences in the works. The model, at the very least, offers a salutary exercise in reorienting the reader's expectations ofnarrative order (or disorder) in each of Smollett's novels. Beasley's success in recuperating the less frequently read novels, Peregrine Pickle, FerdinandCountFathom, and Sir Launcelot Greaves, rests, as he candidly acknowledges, on their individual weaknesses , limitations, and sometimes on hitherto unrecognized strengths. Humphry Clinker, ofcourse, receives all the analysis and laudatory response thatit deserves, but the chapter reserved for it inevitably covers material that through its very familiarity is less responsive to a fresh reading. Close readings of five such very different novels may inevitably tend to produce a somewhat diffuse operation— a justified criticism of the general effect of Beasley's book. On the other hand, Beasley's unfailingly candid and sympathetic approach to Smollett's disorderly world, both in its triumphs and failures, and his respectful and sensitive employment of theoretical models and significant current critical opinion on Smollett's works, make this an invaluable new study of Smollett. Edward Copeland Pomona College, Claremont, California Greg Clingham, ed. Questioning History: The Postmodern Turn to the Eighteenth Century. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 1998. 196pp. US$24.00 ISBN 0-8387-5383-3. Questioning History strangely mirrors its two major theoretical preoccupations: first, the multivalent and continuous nature ofthe European enlightenmentculture; and second, the postmodern fascination with the superficial, the inauthentic, and the pastiche. This book celebrates pluralism and continuity by offering eight different essays, using eight different methodologies, purportedly to examine a number of common issues. How do postmodern fictions revisit and ventriloquize eighteenth-century works? What are the similarities, differences, and tensions between the postmodern moment and its enlightenmentprecursor? In other words, as Clingham succinctly puts it in his introduction, "the eighteenth century ... needs to be seen as a site for some of postmodernism's crucial insights and ideals, the most relevant of which is the structure of historical consciousness, and the place of the fictive in the production of the real, the true, and the historical" (p. 14). The "historical" emerges in this proposal, not simply as a distant mirror, but as a two-way intellectual street—a theoretical conduit, as it were, that allows multiple intermixtures among pasts and presents which in turn participate in a neverending historical (and historicizing) dialectic. Unfortunately for this admirable project, the editor may be willing but many of his contributors are conspicuously weak. Whereas a few of these essays are engaging, informative, and sometimes REVIEWS 507 brilliant, most are at best superficial, unhappily inauthentic, merely a pastiche of many surfaces. By far the three most engrossing essays are Julie C. Hayes's "Fictions of Enlightenment: Sontag, Siiskind, Norfolk, Kurzweil"; Clingham's "Winterson's Fiction and EnlightenmentHistoriography"; and the long, meandering, fascinating essay by Philip E. Baruth and Nancy M. West, "The History of 'The Moving Image' : Rethinking Movement in the Eighteenth-Century Print Tradition and the Early Years ofPhotography and Film." Each ofthese arguments successfully meets the central mandate of the project: to examine how and why postmodern works might be used, initially, to reveal within the various cultures of the Enlightenment itself both patterns ofmeaning and strategies of creation which, in turn, contradict the stereotype of the Enlightenment as a hegemonic, absolute, monolithic Other to contemporary world cultures. To adapt Linda Hutcheon (whose essay on historiographie metafiction is ubiquitous throughoutthe book), the projectis to deploy the findings ofpostmodernity in order to identify the internal ironies of the Enlightenment, ironies that attest to a multivalent, self-reflexive, sceptical, and anything-but-cool-calm-and-rational series of multiple cultures. Lest this seem to beat a dead horse (Clingham's claim that Horkheimer's and Adorno's stereotype still survives is a moot point), it must be noted that these three essays superbly tease out revealing crossovers between the Enlightenment and postmodern moments. Hayes, in particular, in a beautifully written study offour postmodern historical narratives, reclaims systematicity (especially collecting, taxonomy, and classification ) as representative...