Janine Utell

Virtue in Scraps, Mysterium in Fragments: Robert Graves, Hugh Kenner, and Ezra Pound

What do Robert Graves and Hugh Kenner have in common? Papyrus. This is not a riddle, but an odd moment of convergence in the confusion surrounding defi nitions and delineations of what we now term “modernism.” Papyrus, that marker of writing through history and of history, signifying scraps and fragments of a literary past. Papyrus is also, strangely, a spot of minor signifi cance in the history of modernism:

The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in England, 1914–60 (review)

829 The remaining essays—by Astradur Eysteinsson and Eysteinn Thorvaldsson, Leonore Gerstein, Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan, Stefano Maria Casella, Lihui Liu, and Shunichi Takayanagi—share a focus on historical contexts. While some are more theoretical than others, as a group they offer a distinct fascination by framing Eliot in specific literary histories. Eysteinsson and Thorvaldson on Iceland, like Gerstein on Israel, demonstrate Eliot’s reception and influence on tradition and modernity. Casella, on the other hand, combines literary history with comparative modernism by defining Montale’s and Luzi’s “Dantesque line” (125) of Italian poetry and using it to illuminate Eliot as well as his Italian fellow poets. Similarly, Guerrero-Strachan uses the writings of key Spanish authors to examine Eliot as well as his influence on Spanish poetry. Liu on China and Takayanagi on Japan combine chronological accounts of Eliot’s early profound influence with cultural analyses of later gaps during war and political disruption; both give illuminating accounts of Eliot’s work, despite periods of exclusion, as a voice for the desolation and waste of their own countries in periods of violence and destruction. While this collection inevitably varies in its theoretical and critical emphases, the quality remains high, and it is well edited. Given the diversity of topics, it would have helped to have a somewhat more developed introduction, but the essays do raise new questions. For example, Trehearne’s claim that extensive borrowing from a single poet can be a form of “impersonality” (209) calls for another, longer study. Though his historic and archival work is detailed and illuminating, J. H. Copley’s personalization of the break between Eliot and Curtius leads to the odd claim that Curtius attacks Eliot by calling English a “Germanic dialect swamped by the foreign influences of Romance and Latin” (253). This raises unanswered questions about the history of English—given that Anglo-Saxon is, in fact, a Germanic language that did later merge with French—and why this would be a personal attack at all, while Eliot’s quoted statement in 1940 that he “does not like” Germans is not seen as an attack on Curtius “personally” (254, 259). It is worth noting this emphasis since it seems a problematic distinction in contrast to the article’s significant historical material. Däumer’s compelling argument for the importance of Eva Hesse raises important questions about how one should evaluate a more free and open translation. And the absence of any women authors other than Hesse suggests gaps to be filled. But given the originality of this project and the value of its many voices, these are challenges for individual readers: they call for more study in the directions laid out. This book is an essential resource for all Eliot scholars; it adds to the reconsideration of Eliot as a more complicated figure than much traditional Anglo-American reading made of him.

Before Modernism Was: Modern History and the Constituency of Writing (review)

515 useful to divide it, as some authors analyzing similar broad notions and terms have done, into a discussion of the notion and a discussion of the term. Or, perhaps, in our reading of the book’s title and its contents, we really should not focus our attention on “experience” more than on “songs.” As in Blake’s cycle which begins with an Introduction and then goes on to Tyger and A Little Girl Lost, so we should perhaps regard Jay’s chapters and subchapters as intertwined but also relatively independent essays (songs) on a common theme. From such a viewpoint, the book offers a series of readings only related to experience: such as a reconsideration of Benjamin’s notion of aura, of Bataille and Foucault, and of insightful discussions of Burke and Dewey. From this perspective, the greatest merit of this book would be not so much in offering a thorough and systematic critical overview of the notion of experience in many (but not all among the relevant) authors of the past three centuries, but in presenting us with interrelated essays which are brought together equally by their common theme as they are by the interested approach and choice of the book’s author. The choice of authors discussed in Songs of Experience is obviously a personal one, with the personal approach culminating in the eighth and the ninth chapters. At the same time, the historical explanatory line of “experience” winds through thinkers who are, in spite of their differences, philosophically related more than it appears at first sight—which helps also explain the mentioned omissions. In this respect, Jay’s most recent book brings us back to his affinities revealed in his 1973 and 1993 books which, although different, represent two force fields inherent to his approach and to his choice of thinkers.