The Evolutions of Modernist Epic by Václav Paris

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Evolutions of Modernist Epic by Václav Paris Derek Hand (bio) THE EVOLUTIONS OF MODERNIST EPIC, by Václav Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. vi + 215 pp. $80.00 cloth, ebook. Václav Paris's critical study brings together what appears to be a collection of unlikely literary bedfellows. Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, James Joyce's Ulysses, Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma are considered side-by-side as a means of demonstrating [End Page 733] new ways of comparing modernist novels from disparate places, times, and cultures.1 Each text, in its way, is unorthodox or marginal, certainly experimental in form and theme. They can also be judged to adopt the epic form in relation to how they are consciously concerned with national narratives and themes. The breadth of the critical engagement is impressive, ranging as it does between Ireland, Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Czechoslovakia. The choice of less canonical texts is also interesting because, as is always the case, in discovering less well-known authors and texts that have fallen between the cracks of critical appraisal, our appreciation of any given issue or theoretical concept is deepened and made more complete. The basic thesis, though, underpinning the engagement with these diverse texts, is simplicity itself. Each of these writers and texts is deeply concerned with ideas of evolution that are dominated by Charles Darwin's theory in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Their concern with this theory is not just confined to the realm of biology, but the way it underlines much thinking about evolution in numerous areas such as linguistics, national and communal development, and, importantly, literature. Paris contends that each author under consideration challenges and breaks down numerous monolithic concepts linked to Darwinian discourse at work in our usual approaches to modernist literature in the twentieth century. The genre of epic itself needs to be re-evaluated within this dominant frame of progression and development. T. S. Eliot's often-cited analysis of Joyce's Ulysses—that Joyce's utilization of the Homeric scaffolding gave shape and order to his novel—has had far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the use of epic in modernist literature.2 In one way, its prevalence suggests a pretty straightforward relationship between the past and the present, with the traditional epic form giving the semblance of coherence to the fragmentations of contemporary experience. That coherence—from Eliot's perspective—is something longed for rather than actually achieved. Thus, just as it gives some sense of shape, the epic's presence also simultaneously pinpoints the absence of a unitary culture in the modern moment. Coupled with György Lukács assertion that epic is an impossibility in the modern world because historical totality is no longer accessible or representable,3 the conclusion to be drawn is that epic is simply out of place, or time, in the twentieth century. Its appearance, then, only signifies a degeneration from the heroic past to the less-than-heroic present day. Paris's thesis works against such a reductive and simplifying perception, exposing the occurrence of epic in modern literature to an analysis that complicates and broadens our assessment of its workings in a variety of novels from a variety of locations. This last point is central to the overall argument made in The Evolution of Modernist Epic. The present study further develops the [End Page 734] hypothesis that the traditional approach to modernism that configured it as a solely metropolitan event is biased and misses the point that, in reality, what we have are modernisms that engage and interact with other modernisms. Thus the novels examined confront that metropolitan bias that in Darwinian terms positions them forever on the periphery, underdeveloped and outside typical ideas of progression. This critique of imperialism and its deployment of applied Darwinism is a very useful touchstone in this respect and opens up its singular dominance to a plurality of approaches and interpretations that undermines that dominance. Of particular interest is how this approach is applied to the work of Joyce...