Tragedy and the Modernist Novel by Manya Lempert

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tragedy and the Modernist Novel by Manya Lempert Gabriel Hankins Manya Lempert. Tragedy and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge UP, 2020. ix + 241 pp. Manya Lempert begins her study with the admirably clear double question: "why did modern European novelists value ancient tragedy" (1) and why do we now? Her answer ranges over both ancient and contemporary philosophical and literary ground. On the philosophical side, she moves from Aristotle and Plato to Nietzsche, Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, and Simon Critchley; and on the literary side, she takes in a wide range of different modernists, from Thomas Hardy to Virginia Woolf to Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett. Her thinking is exemplary in seriously considering both the philosophical treatments of ancient tragedy in modernist and contemporary literature, and the historical reception of ancient tragedy by the modernists themselves. Ancient tragedy itself is a highly contested and historically contingent term, both in the modernist period and now. The term might refer to the Sophoclean tragedies, which are concerned with the tragic fall of an exemplary culture hero, as in the Oedipus myth that has generated one modernist line of thought. It might mean the tragedy that features the other Oedipus, at Colonus, who, though elderly and blinded, pronounces that "all is well" (113), a remark that Albert Camus takes as his own. Or it might refer to the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, which are concerned with collective grief, lamentation, and the response to atrocity. Lempert is primarily concerned with the latter strain of collective tragedy, a mode not invested in the reaffirmation or resolution of the individual or culture in the face of a divine cosmos ruled by chance and tuchê (luck), but in modernist fiction's sense of "tragic sociality" (28). Lempert's treatment of Hardy and Woolf offers convincing readings of the transformation of received notions about tragedy in British fiction around the turn of the century, a moment when Greek tragedy was both highly valued and antithetical to much of its surrounding political culture. Lempert resists ascribing the Christian framework of individual guilt to the tragedies of Tess and Sue (in Hardy). Christian interpretive schemata work both within Hardy's texts and outside them to condemn fallen women for what was done to them, an individualizing view that arises in part out of Aristotle's own misreading, for Lempert. Against this individualization of guilt, Hardy arranges the crushing force of inhuman Nature. Woolf sees Hardy as "the greatest tragic writer among English novelists" (5) and registers his characteristic settings of individual life within a vast natural chaos in her fiction, along with the influence of Janet Case and Jane Ellen Harrison, whose Themis (1912) is an important text here. Lempert registers an important critical debate: does tragedy "promote individualism and authorize patriarchal violence" (66), on [End Page 381] the view of Harrison (and perhaps of Jacob's Room), or does it allow women's political voices and protests to be newly heard? Woolf's thinking changes on this question, perhaps. The best source for her early engagement with masculinist (and imperialist) uses of Greece, in Jacob's Room, receives little treatment here. The fourth chapter engages a wide range of debates on the use of tragedy in Camus's thought and fiction, centering on the contemporary debates between Camus and Sartre over committed politics, the colonial occupation of Algeria, and the role of tragic rebellion or indifference. Camus's Oedipus is that of Colonus, pronouncing that "all is well" (113); Camus determines that his hero Sisyphus "too concludes that all is well" and that "we must imagine Sisyphus happy" (114). A wide range of Camus's tragic heroes are read as tragic counterpoints in a larger renovation of tragic fiction, from his first heroine Janine to Clamence in The Fall to Meursault in The Stranger. Lempert contends that Camus sees Meursault's famously motiveless killing of the Arab as an indictment of modern nihilism, not as an enactment of a colonialist abstraction. Meursault is a bad nihilist, not aware of the limits imposed on action in a tragic conception of life. Blinded by the "absurd Algerian sunlight" (143), Meursault kills, unable to shed the "second light" of the...