BOOK REVIEW: Is the Welfare State a Hegelian Legacy?

 

By Philip Tsang, Colorado State University

Benjamin Kohlmann. British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative States. Oxford UP, 2022. 268 pp. $100.00 hardcover; $87.99 e-book.

 

Benjamin Kohlmann’s new book British Literature and the Life of Institutions enriches the bourgeoning scholarship on the welfare state in two distinct ways. First, it reassesses British literature from 1880 to 1910. For Kohlmann, this period is not one of crisis or decadence, a mere prelude to the high modernism of the 20s and 30s. Rather, the literature of this period evinces a sustained reformist aesthetic that imagines the state as a vital force in social life. Questioning the critical fixation on revolutionary rupture in modernist studies, Kohlmann attends instead to the “slow politics of reform” (2), a shared effort among late Victorian and Edwardian writers to rework and improve state institutions. As such, “the reformist literary mode is Hegelian rather than Marxist insofar as it imagines the gradual transformation of existing social conditions” (5). This is no casual observation, for Kohlmann proceeds to investigate the British reception of Hegel around 1900. His account of how British writers adapted Hegel’s speculative philosophy to reformist ends is his book’s second major contribution. His goal is not simply to trace Hegel’s influence on British literature; rather, he shows how literary texts take Hegel’s philosophy one step further by giving “abstract concepts a degree of experiential concreteness unattainable to philosophical thought alone” (5). For Kohlmann, speculation is no mere conjecture, but an effort of concretization.

British Hegelianism provides the theoretical groundwork for Kohlmann’s book. While previous studies of this loosely formed movement, such as those by Robert Stern and Peter Robbins, have explored British writers’ engagement with Hegel’s metaphysics, what distinguishes Kohlmann’s account is his focus on late Hegel. For Victorian readers, Hegel’s most influential work was neither the Phenomenology of Spirit nor the Science of Logic, but the Philosophy of Right, a book concerned with the role of state institutions. Kohlmann sees the selective reception of Hegel among British intellectuals as an advantage rather than a drawback because it allowed them to articulate a concrete vision of the state without the burden of metaphysics. The Philosophy of Right led those intellectuals, most notably Thomas Hill Green, David George Ritchie, Bernard Bosanquet, and Ernest Belfort Bax, to regard state institutions not as externally imposed structures but as shared forms of life that facilitate the thriving of individuals. Green, for instance, disputes Locke’s theory of individual freedom and instead argues for active citizenship and the common good to counter capitalist fragmentation. Similarly, Ritchie calls for the redistribution of property rights and for more state regulations of the economy. Kohlmann thus offers an important corrective to scholarly accounts of Hegelian philosophy as teleological and totalitarian. Those accounts are reductive because they have ignored how “Hegelianism attracted a wide range of ideological positions to itself, and that it managed to transform these positions in its turn” (36). This variety also characterizes Kohlmann’s literary case studies. In the remainder of his book, he explores how novelists and poets from a broad ideological continuum enfold Hegelian speculation into their responses to such diverse issues as the settlement movement, land ownership, taxation, and national insurance.

Given his investment in speculative thinking, it comes as no surprise that one of the key writers in the book is H. G. Wells. Kohlmann focuses, however, less on Wells’s early works of science fiction than on his lesser-known Edwardian novels, in which the author scales back his futuristic imagination to explore more local, gradualist possibilities of change. In particular, Kohlmann highlights Wells’s engagement with the tax reforms in the 1900s. His 1905 novel A Modern Utopia envisions a distant planet that shares many similarities with Edwardian Britain. The continuity between the two worlds allows for a critique and reimagination of existing governmental systems. Through this Hegelian style of “non-revolutionary reformist thinking,” Wells defends private property but also sees it as fluid and kinetic, amenable to public use through progressive taxation (168). The novel thus redefines utopia as a reformist rather than revolutionary genre: “Wells’s future-directed legislative utopianism entails the aspirational repurposing of the resources of the present, rather than a projection of radical revolutionary alterity” (165). Contrary to his earlier works, A Modern Utopia represents Wells’s “aspirational realism,” which entails a reworking rather than rejection of the status quo (176).

A more surprising choice for Kohlmann’s study is E. M. Forster, who seems to favor the spontaneity of interpersonal connection over any kind of state-level supervision. His 1909 tale “The Machine Stops” attests to his deep skepticism about centralized governance. Yet his 1910 novel Howards End, written in the midst of public debates that would eventually lead to the passing of the National Insurance Act in 1911, is more receptive to the benefits of institutional reform. For Kohlmann, the fact that Leonard Bast initially works as an insurance clerk and later becomes unemployed is not accidental; rather, it “raises broader questions about the social allocation of economic vulnerability and about the promise of publicly funded mechanisms of institutionalized care” (200). Howards End presents a world full of risk and uncertainty, epitomized by the novel’s pivotal event: Mrs. Wilcox’s sudden death. That misfortune teaches Margaret Schlegel that one cannot prepare for every danger and should instead embrace risk in order to live life to the full. Kohlmann, however, detects an irony in Margaret’s warning about the “tragedy of preparedness”—namely, that to live life unplanned and unprepared requires a safety net that provides material assistance during hard times. The Wilcoxes can lead an exciting and reckless life only because they have private insurance. Contrary to Margaret’s suggestion, the real tragedy here is the “tragedy of unpreparedness,” which “shows that life cannot be fully enjoyed unless it is cushioned against the worst kinds of socio-economic risk” (216). This reading exemplifies Kohlmann’s central argument: personal freedom and well-being are not threatened but rather protected and enriched by institutional mediation. Or, to drive home the Hegelian point, individual potential can be actualized only through the state. Kohlmann goes so far as to call Howards End a “welfare state novel” (191), reading its famous epigraph “Only connect…” not as some abstract ideal of interpersonal or interclass connection, but as a concrete reformist proposal for institutionalized care and economic redistribution. 

Throughout Kohlmann’s book, speculation is an ethos, a perspective, and a style that describes not only the literary works in question but also Kohlmann’s reading method. This style, as he puts it succinctly in relation to Ernest Belfort Bax, discloses “how substantive contradictions unfold from within—how they are ‘opened up’ for us by—a given situation” (55). Kohlmann’s speculative style allows for a wide interpretative latitude. In his reading of George Gissing’s 1887 novel Thyrza, he concludes that the protagonist’s uncompromising idealism prevents him from recognizing the possibility of institutional reform. That failure, however, becomes in turn “the very medium through which reformist hopes must be realized” (83). Kohlmann’s speculative reading recasts Gissing’s uneven novel as a polyphonic work in which a wide range of political positions are tested and negated. In a distinctly Hegelian fashion, he patiently shows how contradictions and instabilities within a text can lead to positive and generative outcomes. In the end, it does not matter what positions the authors take regarding taxation or insurance. Whether by supporting, critiquing, or decrying efforts at institutional reform, those writers engage in an act of speculation that is at once diagnostic, aspirational, and reparative. Kohlmann shows us that literary reading, too, can be a speculative act in itself.

I want to close with two questions. One is simply why British literature’s reformist imagination was so short-lived. According to Kohlmann, Edward Carpenter’s preoccupation with land reform in the 1880s gave way to an immersion in Hindu philosophy in the next decade; Wells’s ambitious agenda for redistributive taxation in A Modern Utopia gave way to a “claustrophobic vision of parliamentary infighting” in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli (187); Forster followed Howards End with Arctic Summer, his “most sustained attempt to enter imaginatively into the reformist literary mode,” but he eventually abandoned the project (217). Like Wells’s A Modern Utopia, the reformist aesthetic’s all-too-short trajectory seems to be a narrative of “undeveloped possibilities” cut short by the advent of modernism. In Kohlmann’s account, interwar modernism signals a decisive break with the reformist aesthetic (69). Yet, in light of his speculative method, one wonders whether high modernism, despite its longstanding association with rupture and novelty, might share more continuity with the reformist imagination than Kohlmann presents here. Might war, revolution, and imperial decline have invigorated new styles of speculative institutionalism from Bloomsbury to Bengal?

My second question concerns the role of literature in state institutions. If, as Kohlmann powerfully shows, literature was the medium through which to cultivate the ethos of sharing and caring, might one make a stronger case for literature as a fundamental aspect of the state on par with taxation and insurance? One might recall that Leonard Bast is not just an insurance clerk but also an avid reader, though his primary goal is self-improvement. Yet if the Wilcoxes’ private insurance can buttress Howards End’s advocacy for national insurance, perhaps it is not too far-fetched to regard the ostensibly private act of reading as serving an institutional function toward the common good. What modes, practices, and pedagogies of reading are best suited to that end? This might be Kohlmann’s biggest provocation yet.

 

Philip Tsang teaches modernist and postcolonial literature at Colorado State University. He is the author of The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature, which traces an aesthetic of frustrated attachment in the context of imperial decline.

 

The Devil Is in the Details: A Review

 By Yael Levin, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Johan Adam Warodell. Conrad’s Decentered Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2022. 290 pp. $99.99 hardback or ebook.

Johan Warodell’s Conrad’s Decentered Fiction is like no other book of Conrad criticism. It is, rather, a cabinet of curiosities: a collection of details that Conradians have consistently overlooked. The reason for this is double. First, such details resist sweeping generalizations and theoretical agendas; they are always in excess of meaning. Second, peripheral and secondary, they tend to congregate in the critic’s blind spot. The two points are contradictory: either we see them and cannot answer for their multiplicity, or we do not see them at all, as they are not consequential enough to draw our attention. Like other contradictions offered in this study, the two possibilities live together happily without need for synthesis. Regardless of its underlying cause, Warodell views the critic’s failure to account for these details as evidence of a significant gap between the critic’s output and the reading experience. This is an interesting point of departure for the book, as it harbors the promise of a different Conradian experience, one that will be more attuned to the stuff of the fiction than the ideological agendas an interpreter might foist upon it. An interpretation will always have to rely on given categories, forms of understanding that are outside the text and must be artificially imposed on it in the course of the hermeneutic process. Warodell will have none of that. As he notes: “by shifting our interest to the details, and decentering our gaze, we can pay more attention to the content of books rather than, say, entertain an idea about an overarching and superseding argument” (8).

A helpful conceptual hinge for the project is offered in the term “eclectic” —a word whose history rests precisely on the difference between an ideologically-motivated selection and a random collection of objects. The materials Warodell brings together are just that: catalogues of, inter alia, Conradian animals, hats and unpublished marginalia. The monograph sets out to prioritize detail above the thematic, categorical, topical and conceptual. This is an interesting experiment, even when it fails to do what it promises and reverts back to the very critical practice it warns against. In suggesting that “Conrad’s authorship is unified by its eclecticism” (11), Warodell shows he is not immune to the critic’s urge to center, to unify, to interpret. We are asked to consider doing things differently, but the book occasionally yields the suspicion that this is very hard to do. Though it shows the urge to unify or interpret might be difficult to overcome, it does offer methodological alternatives. Definitive arguments or interpretations are often dropped for speculation and an open-ended critical probing. What is lost in the exchange are the conclusions we often look for in a book of criticism. Perhaps this is precisely the point. Whether or not we are convinced by these new methods or accept this resistance to clear-cut claims, the invitation to do things differently is valuable. The experiment raises important questions about our contemporary critical methods and their limitations.  

The experiment raises important questions about our contemporary critical methods and their limitations.

The first part of the book is devoted to Conrad’s marginalia: doodles, maps, and drawings that accompany the writing process. The chapter on maps offers a panoply of cartographic possibilities: real, imaginative; stage maps and stage directions. All are read as attempts to represent the story world outside language. Warodell treats these interchangeably; he is not interested in their ontological coordinates but in their relationship to the text. The investigation is speculative, as there is an attempt to describe a connection between the author’s creative process (as represented by the maps) and the artistic output (the work itself). Such a connection might be mimetic, inspirational, or operational. And these questions lead to others — is the connection between the two too intimate to be accessed by an audience of readers or critical thinkers? The chapter offers a survey of ways of thinking the maps with the work. Many connections are drawn, none are presented as definitive.

The following chapter offers a similar probing of the drawings attached to the writing of the unfinished novel The Sisters. The reading here is more programmatic. The attempt to date extant drawings so as to ascribe them to moments in the writing process brings genetic criticism in aid of a dismantling of critical dismissals of the work. Warodell wonders whether we can use Conrad’s drawings as a method to unravel Conrad’s interest in or engagement with the theme of the aspiring artist. In doing so he undermines previous devaluations of the work, critiques that hinge on an assumption of Conrad’s ignorance of the artform. Richard Curle’s statement that Conrad had no interest in visual art is one such example. The chapter works against this early critical response and its culmination in Zdzislaw Najder’s claim that The Sisters is a lesser work because it is not rooted in personal experience. By calling on biographical detail and the sketches themselves, the chapter tries to establish Conrad’s familiarity with, and interest in, the visual arts. It is surprising, then, that the argument concludes with the comment that “Regarding The Sisters and its autobiographical ingredients, the question about whether Conrad liked, practiced and understood painting should, perhaps, not be overemphasized” (59). 

An even more surprising conclusion awaits the reader in the second part of the book where Warodell researches the flying sticks in Heart of Darkness. “Published Texts: Working Method and Philosophy,” may well be the most rewarding section of the study. It opens with a reading of Bertrand Russel’s logical atomism as a philosophic “justification” for Conrad’s work. Such framing of the chapter might be grating to literary critics who feel this is an unnecessary resurrection of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature. A more helpful critical reasoning behind the juxtaposition is soon provided. The challenge is not disciplinary but theoretical; Warodell’s turn to Russell is an invitation to look at Conrad’s art not through the prism of artistic impressionism but through the findings of analytic philosophy. This is not an obvious theoretical turn in a work devoted to Conrad’s details. Impressionism is an artistic style that is attuned to the very stuff of experience. In an early association of Conrad’s work with impressionism, Harold Davis discusses the revisions to The Secret Agent and their investment in detail. The “enlargement and clarification of the mood and background” is achieved “by rendering the details exactly instead of reporting them, the basic tenet of literary impressionism as Ford, James, and Crane defined it” (245). Warodell does not dispute these readings and their culmination in John G. Peters’s Conrad and Impressionism (2001). Rather, he presents Russell’s logical atomism as a method to complement the discussion: “by discussing the analytic philosophy of Bertrand Russell, the picture of Conrad’s writing and his impressionism is more explicitly tied to sensory detail than in Conrad and Impressionism, where expansive discussion of literary impressionism included ‘the gamut of objects of consciousness: physical objects, human subjects, events, ideas, space, and time’” (72). 

This section of the book is particularly rewarding where it challenges Ian Watt’s long-accepted principle of delayed decoding. For Warodell, Watt’s concept is too teleologically oriented to be squared with a novella that values multiple meanings and openness. Instead of Watt’s suggestion of the either/or of the process of perception (we perceive the stimuli correctly as arrows or misperceive them as sticks) Warodell suggests a “tripartite transition” that can fit into “an endless chain of nonhierarchical observations” (80). This is an interesting alternative to a term all Conrad scholars have come to see as foundational for the author’s art. It provides a welcome rereading of a familiar Conradian strategy. If I do not wholeheartedly accept this tripartite transition, it is because it does not quite work with the text. Warodell is right to draw out the ambiguity and multivalence of Heart of Darkness. However, it is precisely in those moments of delayed decoding that ambiguity is dropped. There is a right and a wrong way of understanding the originally confusing sensory data — whether these are sticks flying through the air or carved ivory balls on sticks. Marlow’s realization that the company is under arrow attack, his epiphany on the nature of the ornamentations around Kurtz’s hut — these moments of comprehension are necessary and unambiguous. They are moments that the novella offers as anchors of orientation in a wealth of confusing and figurative detail that is otherwise opaque. It is because of this, one would imagine, that the critics Warodell mentions (for example, Andrew Michael Roberts) support Watt’s reading. One critic who is not mentioned here but offers an important gloss on the limitation of Watt’s term is Hugh Epstein. In Hardy, Conrad and the Senses (2020), Epstein suggests that delayed decoding “implies a destination for experience in the mind which, once reached, does away with the original phenomena of the experience by intellectual dematerialization into mental terms” (34). This is perhaps a more immediate way of pinpointing how the principle of decoding does away with the truth of sensory experience. 

Much like the presentation of these sticks and ornaments in the novella, Warodell’s chapter ends with its own surprise revelation. Conrad’s arrows are not quite like the arrows of Victorian literature; they do not make the sounds “traditionally” expected. His conclusion is that “on the basis of decoding that covers textual analysis and historical context (to illustrate how arrows were perceived), it is difficult to see how the sticks could be arrows” (92). Marlow, it transpires, may have well gotten it wrong. 

The following chapter rereads the major novels as books of distraction. Not distracted narrative, but narratives about distraction. Moments of or indications of distraction are brought out in readings of The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. Such rereadings are particularly welcome, as they offer a defamiliarizing return to well-known novels and the well-established critical tradition that accompanies them.

“Patterns and Preoccupations: Marginal Voices and Characters” closes the study with a collection of odds and ends — the voices of social outcasts in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’ hats in Nostromo, “The Secret Sharer” and The Secret Agent, and a catalogue of Conradian animals as they appear throughout the fiction. These irreconcilable details are entirely Warodell’s own; they have become a trademark of his critical work. And not without merit. This part of the book perhaps speaks for the project in its entirety: it is a book of details and facts and the lists that collect them. It is a book of speculation on those details and their relation to the author and his creative life. Here too we see that, even as he warns against overinterpretation and biographical interpretation, Warodell occasionally falls into these very traps. The call to avoid abstractions and deeper meanings is not easily realized. On hats, for example, Warodell states: “Conrad leaves us with the idea that while we may think that we wear hats, hats are clothed in meaning and may even wear us; there is no clear boundary between object and person; an everyday material object can be a key to understanding a complex individual and vice versa” (16). 

In Conrad’s Decentered Fiction Warodell brings the leftovers, trivia, objects, animals, and marginalia into a meaningful if neglected center of meaning and coherence. This is not an obvious argument to make in a book devoted to decentering — but the urge to unify here is still present and real. Warodell’s comment about Conrad’s doodles in The Shadow Line may well be true of much of the critical work offered throughout the study: “what exists at the margin may be highly telling about the central message” (24). The dissonance arising from the pairing of the title and this ultimate message notwithstanding, there is value in bringing the disparate parts of the Conradverse together. The book draws our attention to the imaginative and creative work invested in the novels beyond the words on the page, those details that escape our notice and fail to attract our interest. The compelling takeaway is that writing is more than the sum of the words we read, and often more than the sum of the words that are finally published or are ever encountered.

Warodell suggests we rethink Conrad through his eclecticism, that we introduce into Conrad scholarship terms that could be coined only by reading his fiction differently; delayed miscoding, unreality effect, unprofessional narrator, distracted reading, and in medias distractionis — these are some of the newly minted terms one will find in the course of the reading. The book issues from the understanding that it is only by reading the details that we do justice to Conrad’s ideology and poetics. As Warodell concludes, “Conrad was fiercely and philosophically opposed to overreliance on generalizations and theoretical abstractions, and this outlook affected his writing” (185). 

Works Cited 

Davis, Harold E. “Conrad’s Revisions of The Secret Agent: A Study in Literary Impressionism.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 19, 1958, pp. 244–54. 

Epstein, Hugh. Hardy, Conrad and the Senses. Edinburgh UP, 2020.

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Yael Levin is an associate professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, president of the Joseph Conrad Society of America and associate provost of the Rothberg International School. She is currently working on “The Evolution of Attention in Modern and Contemporary Culture” at the Mandel Scholion Research Center. Her monographs include Joseph Conrad: Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad's Novels (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism (Oxford UP, 2020). Her work on modernism, postmodernism, narratology, the subject, and disability has appeared in journals and volumes including: The Conradian, Conradiana, Partial Answers, Twentieth-Century Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, and Journal of Beckett Studies.

Book Review: Humor as Anti-Didactic

By Rachel Trousdale, Framingham State University

Carrie Conners. Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetics. UP of Mississippi, 2022. 162 pp. $99.00 hardcover; $25.00 paper.

In Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Carrie Conners examines the ways that poets writing between about 1960 and 2001 use humor—particularly humor based in deviations from the expectations of genre—to make non-didactic political critiques of real-world practices and power structures. She focuses her discussion primarily on four poets—Marilyn Hacker, Harryette Mullen, Ed Dorn, and Russell Edson—although she places each of these poets briefly in dialogue with another—R. S. Gwynn, Terrance Hayes, Derek Walcott, and Anne Carson, respectively. 

Laugh Lines opens with a brief introduction in which Conners sets up her primary assertion that “humor is integral to the character of contemporary American poetry” (3) and explains her temporal focus: she begins in the sixties for the era’s distinctive countercultural currents, and ends in 2001 because of the “marked shift in the political climate” that followed 9/11 (6). Conners asks why critics who are interested in the playful and comic tendencies of postmodern fiction have largely ignored humor in the era’s poetry. One answer, she suggests, may be the primacy of a prescriptive understanding of lyric poetry that typecasts it as by definition a humorless examination of the speaker’s subjectivity. Conners selects poets working in a variety of genres—formal lyric, prose poetry, epic—to cut against this definition, while arguing that “poetic genres recall the societal constructs that the poets ridicule” (9). 

Conners opens her examination of the intersection of poetic form and political protest with Marilyn Hacker. The chapter concentrates on what Conners describes as Hacker’s hedonism, by which she means Hacker’s valorization of pleasure—particularly the multifaceted physical and intellectual pleasure of an affair between an older and a younger woman in Hacker’s sonnet sequence Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons. The poet’s choice of received form (in this case, the sonnet) is also “a hedonistic act and consequently a political performance” (34). The political agenda, however, is saved from being “preachy or priggish, Conners asserts,” by Hacker’s “humorous delivery” (42). It might have been interesting for Conners to have elaborated this connection between hedonism and humor, and the ways in which humor is part of the pleasure the poems seek, create, and celebrate, but Conners concentrates primarily on the ways that Hacker “offers a critique of those who label her life as bad or immoral” by “representing a pleasurable, and therefore good, life of a lesbian feminist” (44).

The second chapter concentrates on Harryette Mullen’s use of “nonnarrative word play” in Sleeping with the Dictionary (45). Conners argues that Oulipo techniques allow Mullen to expose the ways that capitalism reifies the individual and language itself. Mullen’s verbal games, Conners suggests, critique the ways that “reified thought can transform words into commodities” (54), in the process codifying racism and sexism. Here, humor plays a double role: racist jokes may give jokers and audiences plausible deniability, allowing them “to gloss over the violence” of offensive terms (55), while Mullen’s challenging playfulness—structuring poems around anagrams or sound associations based racist terms, for example— “encourages the reader to interrogate the text” (61). Conners contends that “[a]lthough Mullen uses humor to show how these racist and violent terms are a part of American cultural consciousness, she also reveals that humor can be manipulated to help package and sell these terms.” (57)

Conners continues her examination of how poets use humor to critique capitalism when she turns to Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger. Conners situates Dorn’s text against President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning in his 1961 farewell address that the “military-industrial complex” undergirding American politics and economics may become too powerful (85). She argues that the poem mocks the capitalist-heroic figure of Howard Hughes, whom Dorn selects as a “paragon of capitalism” (79), in part because Hughes and his equivalents “mock”—in the sense of reductively imitating—the workers they exploit (81). Dorn’s mockery, by contrast, is meant to “encourage […] readers to analyze the [capitalist] system for themselves”; this will help readers avoid being “described,” or reduced to a single, branded identity (102): such description is dangerous, Conners suggests, because it encourages people (within the poem and beyond it) to conceive of themselves and of others in prescriptive, reductive terms.  

Russell Edson’s prose poems in The Very Thing That Happens, inspired by a medieval bestiary, comically subvert such reductive descriptions. Conners argues that Edson’s absurdist treatment of animals—and of humans as animal-like—implies that “we should turn our attention to our anthropocentric tendencies” and engage in a posthuman self-critique (107), with the goal of “debunk[ing] the assumption that the realms of human, animal, and inanimate are separate” (119). Of the four chapters, this one contains perhaps the most ambitious argument. It lays out not just critique (of homophobia, of capitalism) but a sustained suggestion of an alternative framework of values: “Edson’s work suggests that our world will continue to be violent unless we confront our need to elevate the status of our species and intelligence and cease to define ourselves at the expense of others” (130). 

Conners’s examination of political humor draws on a variety of theoretical sources, varying her approach productively as she treats each poet. The book consistently draws an interesting connection between formal constraint and humor, both because form raises expectations that poets can comically confound, and because, as Conners contends, form’s sometimes arbitrary limits can mimic the social and political rules these poets contest or rebel against. It would be have been helpful, though, for Conners to have had a more articulated central through-line beyond the assertion that humor helps poets avoid limited or didactic political critique. We may already know that “capitalism enables racial and gender discrimination” (79). It would be interesting to explore in more detail how genre-twisting humor casts light on that fact. If the humorous revelation of incongruity makes readers interrogate the subject matter, does it direct that interrogation? If humorous adaptations of genre help us recognize the artificiality of political constructs, what does it suggest we do about those constructs—how should we reconceive them, or are there core truths with which we could replace them? If humor is a starting point, does it suggest a direction in which we could proceed? The answers to those questions will of course vary depending on which poets we consider, but following up on the questions Conners raises may lead us to a deeper understanding not just of the political phenomena she examines but of an important difference between mockery and substantive critique.

Rachel Trousdale (www.rachelvtrousdale.com) is a professor of English at Framingham State University. She is the author of Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry; Humor in Modern American Poetry; and Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination.

Close Reading the Wordless Novel: A Review

 By Daniel Worden, Rochester Institute of Technology

Grant F. Scott. Lynd Ward’s Wordless Novels, 1929-1937: Visual Narrative, Cultural Politics, Homoeroticism. Routledge, 2022. 244 pp. $170.00 hardcover; $48.95 e-book.

The woodcut artist Lynd Ward has become a fixture of modern comics history. Ward is one of the major practitioners of a “path not taken” in the multidisciplinary practice of comics art in the twentieth century. The artist created and published 6 woodcut novels between 1929 and 1937, a flurry of artistic activity that fizzled out quickly. As Grant F. Scott notes, “Ward’s novels were soon forgotten and remained out of print and largely unknown until the late 1960s,” which means that Ward’s early graphic novels (to use an anachronism that nonetheless describes Ward’s novels quite well) began to recirculate just as American comics artists such as Art Spiegelman were beginning to reevaluate the aesthetics of the medium (2). Writing in the introduction to the 2010 Library of America edition of Lynd Ward’s woodcut novels, Spiegelman recalls that “it was Ward’s audacity and confidence in wrestling with a new narrative language that won my serious admiration as a young cartoonist” (Spiegelman xiii). 

While Ward’s wordless, single-image-per-page woodcut novels do not look or read like contemporary comics, they register as an aesthetically ambitious precedent for the visual narratives now classified as comics and/or graphic novels. Influenced by European artists like Frans Masereel and Otto Nückel, whose woodcut novels he encountered while studying graphic arts in Leipzig, Lynd Ward’s woodcut novels have long been appreciated, though mainly as anomalies that are not quite literature, not quite fine art, not quite illustration, but some hybrid form evolving out of all three. In Scott’s summation, Ward “stands before the tradition of the graphic novel as a public statue that everyone admires but no one looks at very carefully” (2). 

Scott’s Lynd Ward’s Wordless Novels, 1929-1937 is the first book-length study devoted to the artist and his visual narratives. In it, Scott develops careful and contextual close readings of Ward’s woodcut narratives, most of which are collected in the Library of America edition of Ward’s novels. Indeed, Scott’s book could even serve as a critical companion to the Library of America’s Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcut (2010); this could be an exceptionally generative pairing for a graduate seminar on comics history or modernism. Scott’s book is organized into an introductory chapter about Ward’s biography and critical reception, chapters about each of Ward’s 6 complete woodcut novels as well as the unfinished Hymn for the Night, and an epilogue about another unfinished work, published in a small edition in 2001 as Dance of the Hours; or, Lynd Ward’s Last Unfinished Wordless Novel. 

Each chapter’s title signals the themes identified in each work, moving from the first biographical chapter into formal considerations, historical commentary, racial and sexual imagery, allegorical interpretation, and symbolic structures. Scott’s prose is scholarly and grounded in Ward’s texts, so much so that I was compelled to re-read each of Ward’s woodcut novels after reading its respective chapter in Scott’s book. His close attention to visual detail made Ward’s works so much richer and full of meanings than I had ever stopped to consider before. Scott’s study is valuable not just for its clear analysis and contextualization of Ward’s woodcut novels, but also because it is a reminder of what close attention to a text can accomplish. It is a comfort to read Ward’s woodcut novels slowly, which Scott’s book encouraged me to do. 

The book’s introduction provides a concise yet nuanced account of Lynd Ward’s life, as well as the major aesthetic and historical contexts that informed his work. Scott draws from Ward’s own published writings for this material—especially the collection Storyteller Without Words: The Wood Engravings of Lynd Ward (1974)—as well as archival materials from a range of libraries and art museums. Drawing on this wealth of material, Scott accounts for Ward’s aesthetic and political ideas, as well as how those ideas inform race, gender, and sexuality in Ward’s novels. Ward’s writings about woodcutting emphasize how important the tactile act of cutting into the wood is to his artwork, and with that interest in physicality and feeling, he developed a political sense of what woodcut novels could achieve as “a new kind of proletarian fiction, a handmade book for the masses” (9). 

Ward’s first book-length work, Gods’ Man (1929) tells the story of an artist’s Faustian bargain with modernity, and Scott’s analysis situates this narrative within rich artistic contexts. Linking the text’s narrative and visual style to silent film and Romantic portraiture, respectively, Scott explicates “the kinetic ambition of Gods’ Man, its desire to transcend the medial slowness and perceived anachronism of the woodcut form and represent the dynamism of the modern” (42). Scott illuminates the wordless images in Ward’s novel, making it clear how a page that depicts the novel’s artist-hero journeying to the city in Figure 1 “represents a turning point in his life, the moment of transition between the slow time of the portrait and the rapid time of the cinema, between a Romantic and a Modern form of consciousness” (44). 

Figure 1. Lynd Ward, Gods’ Man, Chapter 1, page 6.
Courtesy of the Library of America.

While Gods’ Man seems to be directly inspired by silent film and the European aesthetics that Ward encountered as an art student, his next work Madman’s Drum (1930) “aspires to the verbal density of a novel by Conrad or Faulkner” (62). In the book’s second chapter, focused on Madman’s Drum, Scott’s reading of the colonialist and racial imagery in this work acknowledges how Ward’s own political consciousness shifts alongside his aesthetic ambitions. And in Chapter 3, Scott develops these themes further by reading Wild Pilgrimage (1932) as an extension of Ward’s key themes into the context of the Great Depression and the labor struggle. In Wild Pilgrimage, lynching and exploitation under capitalism are linked, in Scott’s analysis, though the work is ultimately concerned with “a crisis of masculinity brought on by the brutish and robotic conditions of factory work” (117). 

In Chapter 4, Scott turns to Ward’s shortest woodcut novel, Prelude to a Million Years (1933), a loosely structured set of images that the critic reads in relation to William Blake’s illustrated poems. Scott also considers Ward’s illustrations for a 1934 edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as further evidence of the artist’s interest in monstrous or violent masculinity. Chapter 5 shifts to Ward’s Song Without Words (1936) and, briefly, his unfinished Hymn for the Night (ca. 1940), wherein Ward depicts a female protagonist struggling to escape the allegorical meanings and social norms that surround her. 

Scott’s final full-length chapter interprets Vertigo (1937), Ward’s long and conceptually ambitious novel about the Great Depression. A wordless novel that nonetheless features much more language in its images than Ward’s earlier works, Vertigo “far surpasses any of his other woodcut novels. We might think of it as Ward’s project for the Works Progress Administration, equivalent to the photographic studies of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, his own bold attempt to represent and document the effects of the Great Depression” (188).  

In the study’s epilogue, Scott closes with a reading of Ward’s unfinished work Dance of the Hours, published in 2001 in a small edition of 125 copies by Rutgers University Libraries. This small edition publication is in keeping with Ward’s own interest in fine art bookbinding and his struggle to balance the mass potential of print with its more elite and expensive milieu in twentieth-century fine art. The epilogue provides many reasons for Ward’s move away from the woodcut novel form after 1937. Ward worked on both WPA and war-related projects in the 1930s and 1940s that took up much of his professional life, and the market for woodcut novels also seemed to vanish after the Great Depression and never recover. Comic books, film, and television turned woodcut novels into “quaint anachronisms” (216). 

Yet as Scott notes in his closing paragraph, Ward’s woodcut novels continue to inspire readers and to promise something of a “liberating and spiritual narrative journey” (224). This sense of self-discovery and self-exploration runs as a theme throughout Ward’s woodcut novels, and it seemed to inform not just his own images but also his larger arts practice, from woodcut illustration to artisanal printing. As Ward noted in an essay about his Equinox Press, there were aesthetic, political, and spiritual meanings to his practice, “a reaffirmation of handiwork, a somewhat mystical belief that to touch directly the materials and processes of the making of a book would result in a better book. It was, in a sense, an extension into the twentieth century of that ancient Greek myth wherein the giant Antæus defeated all opponents because every time he touched the earth he gained fresh strength” (Ward 646). 

The Library of Congress holds some of Ward’s engraving tools in its collection, like the spatula in Figure 2. Ward’s interest in tactility and materiality and his commitment to an anachronistic art form that nonetheless can open up new ways of telling stories and visualizing struggles makes him a compelling artist for both artists and teachers alike today, evidence of how older technologies persist as fine art media. 

Figure 2. Lynd Ward, Wood Engraving Tool, Spatula. Between 1927 and 1965.
Photograph. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/item/2005677298.

Lynd Ward’s Wordless Novels, 1929-1937 is a valuable contribution to the growing scholarly interest in Lynd Ward. Scott’s close reading approach relies on many tools common to literary studies, and the author’s close attention to imagery, narrative, and symbol develops illuminating connections within Ward’s works. Ward’s woodcut novels exist both as narrative texts and as art objects in and of themselves, therefore meaning something as material forms as well as texts. As comics studies scholar David M. Ball argues, “Ward’s novels in woodcuts illuminate for us the intersections between comics and literary and art historical modernism, affording us an angle for more thorough and thoughtful study than the critical tradition has yet provided” (Ball 129). Scott’s book is a welcome development in this critical tradition. It offers sustained close readings of Ward’s early graphic novels and a timely critical assessment of the work’s lasting importance. 

Works Cited

Ball, David M. “Lynd Ward’s Modernist ‘Novels in Woodcuts’: Graphic Narratives Lost Between Art History and Literature.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 39, no. 2, Winter 2016, pp. 126-43.

Spiegelman, Art. “Reading Pictures.” Lynd Ward: God’s Man, Madman’s Drum, Wild Pilgrimage. Edited by Art Spiegelman. Library of America, 2010, pp. ix-xxv.

Ward, Lynd. “The Equinox Idea.” Lynd Ward: Prelude to Million Years, Song Without Words, Vertigo. Edited by Art Spiegelman. Library of America, 2010, pp. 645-47. 

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Daniel Worden (dxwind@rit.edu) is an associate professor of art at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches comics, print, and visual culture. He is the author of Neoliberal Nonfictions: The Documentary Aesthetic from Joan Didion to Jay-Z (2020), the editor of The Comics of R. Crumb: Underground in the Art Museum (2021), and the co-editor with Jesse W. Schwartz of New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture (2022). Worden is currently at work on a book about American comics and fossil fuels. 

The Emergences of Media Ecology and the Modern American Poetry Event

 BY DANIEL T. O'HARA

Temple University

Review of

Edward Allen. Modernist Invention: Media Technology and American Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 2020. 281 pp. $99.99 hardcover.

Any reader wanting to trace the parallels between modern American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century and the emergence of new media technology —telephone, radio, phonograph, and sound (musical) film documentary (such as Black Magic: A Pictorial History of The African-American in the Performing Arts [1967] and Black Nativity: Gospel on Broadway [1962])— will find Edward Allen’s Modernist Invention useful, informative, and fluent in communication and critical analysis as well as in theories of literary and cultural import. A good example is the reading of Wallace Stevens’s late poem “The Sick Man” (1950; pp.126-130). Allen parallels each poet he samples to an emergent media technology; Stevens’s media muse is the radio. 

After establishing the general media climate or ecology at the time, here via a rehearsal of Stevens’s correspondence with his friends the Churches—especially the widow Barbara Church, in which the poet’s reluctant but finally full-throated love affair with the radio becomes clear— Allen reads the selected example in this specific media context. At first glance, “The Sick Man” does not automatically register as a sick man’s experience of tuning and listening to his radio during the middle of the night. Instead, the poem, as Allen cites it, does make the visible a little harder literally to see, if more imaginatively suggestive for meditation: 

Bands of black men seem to be drifting in the air,
In the South, bands of thousands of black men, 
Playing mouth-organs in the night, or, now, guitars.
Here in the North, late, late, there are voices of men,
Voices in chorus, singing without words, remote and deep,
Drifting choirs, long movements and turnings of sounds.
And in a bed in one room, alone, a listener
Waits for the unison of the music of the drifting bands
And the dissolving chorals . . . (Stevens qtd. in 127)

Allen fills in the most likely context as being the old ill poet listening to and tuning his radio, and first hearing drifting along the air waves bands of black men playing their harmonicas and guitars, and then men—as if being white is the full human state—sounding their wordless chorals dissolving in the air. These massive constitutive American opposite symbols form, for the sick man, “the unison of the music” he creatively imagines and eloquently articulates:

The words of winter in which these two will come together, In the ceiling of the distant room, in which he lies, The listener, listening in the shadows, seeing them, Choosing out of himself, out of everything within him. Speech for the quiet, good hail of himself, good hail, good hail, The peaceful, blissful words, well-tuned, well-sung, well-spoken. (Stevens qtd. in 129)

Allen resourcefully illuminates these late allusions to Stevens’s own earlier poems, themes, figures, favorite tropes—including the figure of the listener, the winter climate, the well-tuned guitar-accompanied words. Even as we see the new addition, the explicitly self-hailing practice of poetic composition that Stevens joins—and would fully exemplify as he eventually faces the ultimate quiet coming ever closer. Like his poetic father, Walt Whitman, Stevens conceives all his poems as songs of the self, ever courting and yet holding off, the final dark embrace. The only vision of unison held open yet together, at the end. 

With Frost, Allen reads the long narrative dialogue “Snow” from Mountain Interval (1917). Frost stages strategically the use of the telephone, in which a couple listening to their party line discloses what they do not see, another couple’s poignant domestic crisis that Frost reveals wryly for the observant reader via this new media device . Similarly, Allen traces Marianne Moore’s engagements with recording her poetry, especially in connection with Caedmon Records after WWII. But it is the last chapter, on Langston Hughes and how his early and continuing study of cinematic techniques, especially montage, leads him not only to develop documentaries of Black musicals but also to expand the limits of lyric poetry, including his own most celebrated lyric, as in the epic late poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). 

Modernist Invention is most successful in integrating its media technology and American poetry halves in an inventive way every bit worthy of the title adjective modernist in this final chapter on Hughes. While entertaining the established critiques of this late experiment Montage of a Dream Deferred—its repetitive nature, its often-lame colloquial expressions, its epic ambitions overshooting the poet’s own lyrical moments of creativity—Allen instead demonstrates this poem’s self-conscious, even self-parodic intentionality, startling its creator by sudden imaginative surprises in the course of pursuing a jazz improvisational method. Allen devotes nine pages to its analysis, which is why I will conclude with an example from the end of the Hughes chapter. The brief obscure lyric “Advice to Cullud Movie Actors” ends the chapter, as its self-parodic depiction of tinsel-town Black actors’ required method of dramatic portrayal:

If you’ve got to play a native
Play a native good—
Play him like
Your Uncle Tom would.
. . . .
If you’ve got to be a Porgy
Be a Porgy in full
And give Mr. Goldwyn
Plenty of bull.
. . . .
Why I say all this
(You ought to know, son)
Is I’m just mad ‘cause
I didn’t get none (Hughes qtd. in 247-248)

Allen masterfully concludes: “It’s an unforgiving poem, but one that should leave us in no doubt that Goldwyn’s industry had got well and truly under the poet’s skin” (248). This conclusion is fitting all around. 

Framing the book’s analyses is a long Introduction (pp.1-36) and a half the size Coda (pp. 249-261 entitled “Synchronicity.” Allen launches his book under the flagship 1987 paper by Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?” The established account of modernism in Anglo-American literary history is punctuated by sacred dates, none more important than the miraculous year 1922, when Ulysses and The Waste Land were published in book form. Modernism tends in this perspective to be represented as a post-WWI development, or better, reaction. The literary innovations of modernism are seen thereby as rather simply reactions to the catastrophe of war and its aftermath. 

Williams’s point, however, is to underscore how modernism is first of all broader than any one or two national bases and also a historical happening with many different moments. In fact, as Williams suggests, modernism was a historical socio-political emergence or series of emergences not limited in time or place, except in the broadest possible terms, and not only associated with literature and the other arts, but widespread in popular forms as well as transnational, global in its impact, and associated with objects and practices we have only begun to plumb (in 1987). 

Allen’s book plows in this field. But unlike the developmental logic of established cultural histories, it would bring together in synchronous fashion the art-forms, elite and popular, American and international, attached less to these elite forms and more to the popular practices and techniques, which blossom as new inventions to shape and reshape the modernist world, moment by moment. Such emergences of this universal modernist event form the ambitious horizon still beckoning, as we leave Allen’s view of Hughes in the throes of his quick-cut montages, thereby suggesting the equally fine books to come.

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Daniel T. O’Hara, emeritus professor of English and humanities at Temple University, is the author of nine books, including Virginia Woolf and The Modern Sublime: Invisible Tribunal (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2015), and editor or co-editor of six collections, most recently Humanistic Criticism: A William V. Spanos Reader (Northwestern UP, 2015). 

“Ineluctable visuality”: Philip Sicker’s Ulysses, Film and Visual Culture

Review by
Katharina Rajabi
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich)

Philip Sicker. Ulysses, Film and Visual Culture. Cambridge UP, 2018. x, 276 pp. $105 hardback. $84 ebook.

Joyce’s weak eyesight and lifelong eye troubles are well known and consistently invoked to constitute the analytical framing in scholarly works on visuality in his texts (and this review is no exemption). This research into visual perception and media, steadily increasing since the “visual turn,” has repeatedly interpreted the previous relative lack thereof in the vast field of Joyce studies in the light of a possible misconception that Joyce’s poor sight resulted in the privileging of the acoustic over the visual in his writing. In contrast, scholars underlining the importance of the visual invert this conclusion, suggesting instead that Joyce’s ocular ailments indeed caused a preoccupation with perception and visuality that is undeniably present in his works.

Philip Sicker, too, begins his study by drawing on this correlation, arguing that “Ulysses, composed as Joyce’s vision deteriorated […], is his ultimate act of capturing and preserving the eye’s encounter with reality, a transaction conducted via the gazes of Stephen and Bloom and through a multitude of refractory narrative lenses” (2). His aim, then, is to illustrate the significance of visual perception, recognized as being markedly embodied and mediated, as well as of those visual media themselves and their structures and regimes, showing in detail how Ulysses is informed by optical media techniques and practices. In Joyce’s text, Sicker argues, perception and “technologies of sight” (10) constitute an epistemological mode, a specific way of accessing reality: “Far from alienating subjects from the object world and one another, the perceptual habits shaped by visual technology sometimes enable Bloom and Stephen to organize and penetrate reality more deeply” (19). His analysis of visuality in Ulysses thus focuses on its epistemological, rather than its “socioeconomic” (9) implications – in contrast to preceding studies that considered visual phenomena in context with their examinations of commodity culture in Joyce. 

Each chapter of Ulysses, Film and Visual Culture centers on a different figuration of the visual. Although the title suggests a study primarily on Ulysses and film, Sicker’s monograph provides a much more far-ranging exploration. While film is certainly central to the author’s argument, the two chapters dedicated to film (chapters five and six), based on previous articles, are supplemented and framed with – in effect even more inspiring – in-depth analyses of visual media from the diorama to the stereoscope, of the text’s philosophical reflections on the conditions of vision, and of perceptual figures and constellations from the flaneur to the act of seeing as an intersubjective experience. Building on existing scholarship and incorporating relevant theoretical positions, Sicker thus delivers, for the first time, a comprehensive account of visuality in Ulysses. 

The opening chapter, “Ineluctable Visuality: Stephen’s Ways of Seeing,” analyzes the way visual perception is conceptualized and reflected on in the first three episodes of Ulysses, with reference to optical media including the diorama and the panorama. Focusing, in particular, on “Proteus,” Sicker delineates how the discourse on perception, manifested in optical experiments and meditations on philosophical theories of vision, centering on the subject of vision and the ontological status of the perceived object, is negotiated between idealist and materialist notions. 

The second chapter, “Stephen in the Gaze of Others,” in turn, examines the reflexivity of sight, the “condition of being watched” (15), an experience central to modernist explorations of vision, incorporating the theories of Lacan and Sartre, and the panopticon as a medial figuration of this perceptual constellation, as well as placing this within the context of religion. While Sicker acknowledges that Bloom, too, constantly finds himself in the gaze of others, he does not pursue this aspect further, choosing instead to focus entirely on Stephen. Even if understandable with regard to the structure of his argument, this nonetheless seems like a regrettable omission, since the consideration of Bloom – himself famously ruminating on the gaze of the other and seeing “ourselves as others see us” – would not only be interesting in this context, but would actually support Sicker’s argument regarding the reflexivity of vision. The constellation Bloom – Boylan, especially at the end of “Lestrygonians,” or the perceptual structure of “Cyclops,” for example, would be worth further analysis against this backdrop. 

Chapter three, “Snapshots from the Pavement: Bloom as Modernist Flâneur,” turns to Bloom, reading him, with Benjamin, as figuration of the flaneur. Focusing on flanerie as an “observational practice” (13), Sicker traces its connection to commodity culture and equates it with a form of “photographic perception” (19). The fourth chapter reads “Wandering Rocks” against the backdrop of Futurist aesthetics, demonstrating how the text is influenced by Futurist conceptions of mechanics, simultaneity, perspective (from bird’s eye view to fragmentation and close-ups), movement (photodynamism), and the employment of visual analogies. In doing so, Sicker delivers inspiring new findings, as Ulysses’ connection to Futurism has not really been previously explored. 

Chapter five and six focus on film: While chapter five provides a reading of “Nausicaa” informed by psychoanalytic film theory (Mulvey, Metz) which emphasizes the constellation of gazes, their inherent power structures, and the connection of sight and pleasure with regard to the mutoscope, chapter six traces the influence of George Méliès’s trick cinema with its transformations, continuous references to dreams and its spectacle-like quality on “Circe.” Although this connection has been examined by Joycean scholarship before, Sicker, very interestingly, adds the aspect of self-watching and visual reflexivity as a common thread. The last chapter follows this up by exploring Bloom’s and Stephen’s intersubjective perception in “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca” with reference to phenomenological approaches (Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Lévinas), parting from their shared gaze at Molly’s photograph. Sicker also retrospectively identifies moments of parallel perception earlier in the novel, thus connecting this final chapter of his study to the first one that had focused on Stephen’s gaze and conceptualization of seeing. This clever framing indicates a new accentuation of the question of perception: Instead of thinking about visual perception solely in terms of subject and object of sight, the emphasis on visual reflexivity brings into focus the act of seeing as well as the intersubjective moment. This proves to be a very interesting and productive approach, and, supported by Sicker’s very detailed, thorough, and intent reading and analysis of the text, a major strength of his study.

Because of its admirable all-encompassing conception, however, the study in other regards sometimes tends to remain on the surface and to tie in its observations too neatly with the theory, where at times reading it against the grain would perhaps have resulted in unexpected insights. This becomes especially apparent in Sicker’s analysis of “Nausicaa” where his application of Mulvey’s and Metz’s propositions does not resolve the question of Gerty MacDowell’s agency that he himself had asserted in an earlier reading (see Sickler, “Unveiling Desire”), and instead smooths over the complexity of the optical power structures in the episode. With regard to the gendered aspects of visual media – the commodification of women through pictures and the consequences this entails for desire – following up on the political and economic implications, too, would have been interesting, even if beyond the declared scope of Sicker’s more epistemological approach to the visual. Furthermore, the problem of vagueness arising from a “metaphorical” understanding of optical media that reads them as techniques or practices at times becomes evident, especially in reference to photography. The notion of identifying Bloom with the figure of the flaneur is indeed argued very compellingly, but its subsequent equation with the photographer remains somewhat debatable given the chosen examples from the text. While the mnemonic functionalization of optical impressions and the use of close-up techniques Sicker points out in his analysis provide persuasive evidence, most often it is not clear in what sense exactly Bloom’s perceptions can be termed “pictures.” In the case of photography this is particularly perspicuous, since it does appear in the text explicitly as Sicker himself writes, and so the question arises, why the actual medium is not discussed more thoroughly in this context. Although chapter seven provides a brief analysis of Molly’s photograph, the focus lies more on the act of looking at the picture than on the implications of the medium itself. 

This, however, does not away take from the immense quality of Sicker’s study that, crucially, considers the various visual media in connection with visual perception itself, thus addressing the novel’s examinations of sight in-depth for the first time, emphasizing the “ineluctable” importance of the visual in Ulysses. Identifying the turn of the text’s perceptual discourse away from “static” configurations of the status of subject and object of vision and toward an examination of visual reflexivity and intersubjectivity, is a particularly valuable finding.

Smartly structured and engagingly written, Ulysses, Film and Visual Culture closes a gap in Joyce criticism and brings valuable contributions to modernist studies with its detailed and comprehensive approach. Bringing together and structuring existing findings under the focal point of visual perception, it delivers new insights and inspiring readings of the text and will be the basis for further research into Joyce and visuality.

Works Cited

Sicker, Philip. “Unveiling Desire: Pleasure, Power and Masquerade in Joyce’s ‘Nausicaa’ Episode.” Joyce Studies Annual, vol. 14, 2003, pp. 92-131.

Katharina Rajabi (katharina.rajabi@germanistik.uni-muenchen.de) is a PhD candidate in comparative literature and research associate at the University of Munich. Her dissertation project examines the writing of photography in literary modernism, with a special emphasis on James Joyce.

Shame’s Voices in Shelly Brivic’s Stealing: A Novel in Dreams

By Janina Levin

The stereotype that literary critics write bad novels does not apply to Joyce critic and JML advisory editor Shelly Brivic, who just published his first work of literary fiction, Stealing: A Novel in Dreams, after a fifty-plus year career in academia. Both the critical and the creative force of these years enabled him to develop the subject of human freedom through the medium of art while transcending literary criticism’s trends and fads. A sampling of his titles from 1985 to 2017 shows how his thinking would link art with revolution more and more strongly, moving from Joyce the Creator (1985) to Tears of Rage (2008) and Revolutionary Damnation (2017). Although Brivic is well known for having engaged the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan for a good part of his career, and although he has written two book-length treatments linking Lacanian themes to the works of James Joyce (Veil of Signs in 1991 and Joyce through Lacan and Zizek in 2008), these are not arcane analyses, and they are still in print. His engagement with Lacan has honed his understanding of the psychological struggles of ordinary people. I first heard him talk about the novel in his graduate seminar on Joyce in 2001, and was struck by his ability to move easily from criticism to the stuff of life that fuels good art and good criticism.

 Stealing can be read as a realistic novel about a dysfunctional family and as a work of experimental fiction in the modernist tradition, elevating the trials of ordinary people into a narrative about freedom and consciousness through art. Its realist narrative offers a familiar portrait of eastern European Jewish immigrants – the parents with their mishegas overfeeding and overvaluing their only asset – their kids. Readers will recognize these ambitious kids burdened with their parents’ high hopes in many post-war Jewish novels.

 The novel opens with an ordinary dinner in the Glogover family home. The mom, Judith, peels carrots onto old newspaper in the kitchen sink while talking to her dead sister in Yiddish about her “mismarriage” (1). She thinks her sons don’t understand her plaints, but they do. Her husband Joel enters the scene after a hard day’s work ready for a fight, accusing her – and the two sons she uses as both a solace and a weapon – of being in “cahoots” to destroy his authority (8). The family row that follows is both typical and highly individualized. It is a scene of mundane domestic misery: the older brother defends the mom and stalks out, the parents pick at each others’ faults, the younger brother tries to negotiate the ruckus. Yet the voice of each family member expresses an individual version of what David Foster Wallace has called “the day to day trenches of existence,” without anyone stealing the show. It’s a family chorus of misery and misunderstanding.

 The narrative follows the different fates of the two sensitive sons, Ira and Marc, who struggle to come to grips with their difficult upbringing. Ira’s is a story of a troubled downward path toward suicide. Marc’s, on the other hand, is more difficult to define in a single narrative strand, since he often holds, in his mind, the double voice of Ira and Marc as an entity itself. But Marc’s story does approach a wisdom narrative by way of a study of Western literature. You don’t have to be Jewish or have grown up in mid-twentieth century America to sympathize with Ira’s rages or Marc’s quest for meaning through psychoanalysis and literature. Stealing explores the way the dead haunt the living in families dealing with suicide, thus contributing to a larger conversation in contemporary fiction about this mental health epidemic. Yet while Stealing offers a thoughtful reflection on the motives of Ira’s suicide and its effects on his family, the novel strives to go beyond considering grief coping strategies, for it also uses experimental techniques. The novel focuses more on what Brivic considers core thematic concerns of modernism, themes that he tackled repeatedly during his career as a literary critic.

 Although both Ira and Marc aspire to become writers, and only one of them reaches this goal, Stealing is not Marc’s story but encompasses both brothers’ voices. Brivic accomplishes this through an experimental technique of presenting about 1/3 of the story in two columns, the left column for Ira and the right one for Marc, a technique that appropriately tracks Ira and Marc’s lived experiences and their intimacy. Although using two columns in a narrative does pose technical difficulties, a second reading gives a sense that as you are obliged to go back and flip the pages to compare Marc’s life with Ira’s, you are returning to the same moment in time that made both brothers suffer such different fates.

Shame—a topic Brivic explores in depth in “Ulysses’ ‘Circe’: Dealing in Shame” (2008)—is also an important theme in his novel, one that structures the entire plot of Stealing. The Glogover family is saturated with typical sources of shame: dirt, cheapness, excretion (the book revels in bathroom humor). The parents reflect the way shame and pride are often distributed along gender lines (“Dealing in Shame” 146). Judith is “shame’s voice,” a voice historically associated with femininity (143). She represents shame as the internal dissatisfactions of the self, linked to how people are kept in their place and stay there, believing they deserve their fate (143). Joel reflects how men hide their shame by reversing it, becoming proud of what would normally be devalued. In the opening chapter, Judith associates her husband with “the wrong end.” Ira remembers him singing in the bathroom, his voice mixing with his farts (Stealing 5). Ira later recalls being forced to witness his father giving himself an enema: “This was the first time I was upset by a rear end. I was told that I should be man enough to accept it” (115).

Brivic has stated that “shame is where the action is” in modern literature, since shame exposes and modernism lays bare structures of power to clear a path and begin anew (“Dealing in Shame” 144). In a critical discussion of Joyce’s Ulysses, Brivic summed up the affective resonance of the book by noting “In most situations in life, people strive to avoid shame and maintain pride…. Joyce as an artist reverses these strivings” (144). This same reversal is at the core of Stealing. But the book’s focus on shame is not a simple reversal, like the father’s bullying, making his sons figuratively eat his shit/shame. Shame in Stealing becomes cathartic because it gives characters the ability to see beyond their current situation. In a climactic scene, after Ira returns home from a mental hospital and refuses any of the food his parents give him, the whole family suddenly breaks down in tears, starting with the father, Joel, who finds himself unable to complain that his eldest son is a waste of resources. Ira’s illness is bigger than all of them, and their collective crying accomplishes a powerful leveling: “They all had an inkling that their problems would’ve been solved if only they could have gone on crying forever” (133). The father’s shame initiates a chain reaction, emptying out all that is inessential. As Brivic suggests, refusing shame as unbearable and masking it with pride leads to paralysis; shame should carve a space for change (“Dealing in Shame” 157).

 One can see the two brothers moving along the gender lines of shame. Ira follows the father in finding shame unbearable; the time period leading up to his suicide portrays the awfulness of being a family burden. Marc, like his mother, learns to compromise and develops a tolerance for all the abuse he encountered at home. As he gets older, he even begins to understand how much his parents enjoy taunting each other. But as Brivic has argued, the opposition between shame and pride along gender lines blurs the route to freedom; historically, we have witnessed a deeper level of understanding in the realms of art and religion, which favor abjection of the self via shame, cultivating a practice of self-emptying that cleanses the self rather than divides it along gender lines (“Dealing in Shame” 145). Stealing favors art as the medium that accomplishes this cleansing.

Works Cited 

Brivic, Shelly. Stealing: A Novel in Dreams. Frayed Edge Press, 2018.

---. “Ulysses’ ‘Circe’: Dealing in Shame.” Joyce Through Lacan and Žižek. Palgrave, 2008, pp. 143-160.

Wallace, David Foster. “This is Water: Commencement Speech (2005).” YouTube, 19 May 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

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Janina Levin is a lecturer at University of the Sciences, Department of Writing and Rhetoric.