Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 12 Number 1, April 2011
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Paul Sheehan. Modernism, Narrative and Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 234/ $92.99 (cloth); $32.99 (paper); $64 (e-book).
Reviewed by
St. Francis College (NY)
Paul Sheehan’s complex, challenging, yet rewarding book posits how modernism is an evaluation of humanism, humanistic thought, and the category of the human. Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett, according to Sheehan, disfigure narrative to such an extent that the “inhuman” becomes the focus. Recalling such books as Michael Levenson’s A Genealogy of Modernism (though not cited), Sheehan meticulously charts, analyzes, and classifies the philosophical strains (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bergson) that come to bear on modern intellectual thought and literary output. The book is stimulating and intriguing, adding new dimensions to our understanding of some of the origins of modern writing. However, readers should note that Sheehan admittedly spreads more ink on more sheaves of paper in his philosophical delineations than he does in his literary analysis. In many ways, this important book functions as an intellectual history of movements through the modern period, while noting how such changes affected the course of writing and reading narratives and novels.
The inhuman for the moderns is important since it helps them understand the human; this development in thought, beginning with the Renaissance, grows out of massive social, industrial, and intellectual changes of the late nineteenth century. Over the course of several hundred years there is a movement away from the human as a given to the human as a problem – i.e., “a turn away from narrative” (181). Sheehan calls this “critical engagement” with the question of what is human “anthropometric” (x). Sheehan says that the writers at the center of his study repudiate any “congenital human-humanism connection” (xi). For Sheehan, the anthropometric is an era that spans 1850-1950 and includes categories such as animal, mechanical (Conrad), and transcendent (Lawrence); narrative becomes “deformed” as a “human problematic” is developed (xi-xii). Much of Sheehan’s focus is on the Bildungsroman – the link between Renaissance humanism (human potential) and the narrative form. Sheehan works hard to demonstrate how the novel of growth/education, in its gradual emphasis on subjectivity, reaches its full decline in the estranged monologues of Beckett (182). Sheehan traces the Bildungsroman: through the Enlightenment tackling Cartesian dualism, the res cogitans and the res extensa, it grapples with tensions between individual agency and social circumstances; it moves through the narrativistic Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) to the novelistic The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer). The difference between the pre-modern and the modern is a “difference between the plot of resolution and the plot of revelation” – unraveling compared with displaying (14).
Although we encounter the names of the authors at the center of this study in the Introduction, the discussion of them does not begin in earnest until about page seventy-two: much of the discussion invokes German philosophy. Nevertheless, there is an important key question Sheehan raises (and subsequently addresses): “What are the ways in which the modernist novel imagines the human?” (17). Whereas Conrad employs mechanical “patterns” of “repetition,” Lawrence uses a “narrative disjunction” of transcendence; Woolf displays a “mutable consciousness” where there is an attachment to the nonhuman, while Beckett demonstrates how “productions of the mind” are fallible (16). The “narrative breakdown” in modernist novels is connected with trends in European philosophy struggling with “time and language, subjectivity and desire, voice and machine” (23). Experience for Conrad reveals “a sense of defeat . . .”; Lawrence “treats experience with restless frenzy . . .”; Woof is “more serene . . .” but “aware of the dangers to mental stability . . .”; and Beckett’s exploration of inner experience is “anything . . . but liberating” (22). For the modernist, there is no Bildungsroman but, rather, a much more limited narration.
In Chapter 1, there is a discussion, among many other things, of evolution and narration; Sheehan knows the history of philosophy from Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre. The reading can be slow and difficult; while the ideas are complex and layered, note that we are not reading the prose of Will Durant or Frederick Copleston. Evolution (and its interpretation by philosophers) comes to us in a narrative form, that hence affects narrative form, and it is a story of “doubt, uncertainty and contingency . . .” where the enabling ennoblement of Descartes’s thinking person becomes the instinctual animal of Nietzsche. Simply put, the movement is from metaphysics to “immediacy” (50).
In the Conrad chapter, Sheehan wants to show a “mediating influence of the mechanical . . .” (59); the machine posits agency where unintentional “consequences are . . . inevitable . . .” (61). Much of the discussion (not getting to Lord Jim and Nostromo for another ten pages) draws from the image of the knitting machine Conrad explores in a letter. Yet Sheehan offers a cogent and quite readable discussion of Schopenhauer’s philosophy (universal will, compassion, quieting the will). Schopenhauer’s novelistic World as Will impacts many novelists, and hence the so-called philosophy of pessimism sinks into the modern mind, along with Schopenhauer’s notion that a novelist ought not to narrate great events but focus on that which is trifling – i.e., within – giving rise to the modernist’s ultimate concern with consciousness (67).
With Lawrence, the chapter begins abstractly (Sheehan’s notion of transcendence), moving to a discussion of Lawrence and Heidegger (drawing from Spengler), who both see a cause-effect relationship between democracy and Western decline, a fall, which begs for apocalypse (91). The discussion covers Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love. Lawrence connects to Heidegger in the recognition of humankind’s “dispossession” of itself – the metaphysical has become diminished (107). Whereas Sons and Lovers (an unfulfilled quest by the hero) is inimical to the Bildungsroman, The Rainbow operates from metaphors of generation, but moving through a process to a fall; Women in Love takes the fall as a fact. For Lawrence, frustrated by “human frailty and limitation . . .” (120), the human has allowed itself to become mechanical and has thus “stunted its ontological development” (115). While Conrad and Lawrence offer realist narratives, their writing is filled with “existentialist tragedy and posthumanist transcendence . . .” (182).
The Woolf chapter is, perhaps, the easiest to grasp, drawing links between Bergson (his notions of time – durée) and Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Bergson moves away from quantifying (dehumanizing) time, away from the overpowering, public clock-face of Big Ben to something more intimate and internal. Sheehan reminds us that opposed to the objective, tactile, stable, concrete present of Wyndham Lewis(anti-Bergson), Woolf offers a fluid mind without boundaries and yet having something particular about it (125-128). In his discussion of Mrs. Dalloway, Sheehan draws some connections (mechanical technology and the fall) between Birkin (Women in Love) and Septimus Smith.
The Beckett chapter culminates the discussion with the metaphors of doubt and perhaps. Bergson (laughter) is key to Beckett since laughter begins in the human (social) but ends in the inhuman (disengagement). Beckett presents an anti-Bildungsroman where the over-educated characters are in decay, “intellectual atrophy” (160). Apparently Beckett knew well the work of Descartes, but the voice of the philosopher has been “excised” and replaced by “void” and “speculation” (169).
Sheehan’s book offers a new look at narrative in the modern period.