Jesse Matz

The Art of Time, Theory to Practice

A vicious circle shapes much work on the problem of time in postmodern culture. Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and others trace a bad reciprocity between crisis in time and cultural crisis more generally: if postmodernity puts time in crisis, there can be no change, progress, or thinking otherwise; postmodernity redoubles, making more trouble for time. Lyotard, for example, defines “time today” as “controlled time” destructive to thought itself and therefore beyond rethinking, beyond repair (76). When Jameson notes that “the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize past and future into coherent experience,” he too means to locate a certain cultural incoherence beyond our capacities to resolve it (25). The “time-space compression” that defines but obscures postmodernity for Harvey largely has the same effect, which might be said to extend across the ages as well, with origins as early as what Richard Terdiman has called the “memory crisis” of post-revolutionary France and recent iterations as various as Antonio Negri’s critique of “totality without contradiction” (53), Richard Sennett’s account of “short-termism” (9), and James Gleick’s complaint against “the epoch of the nanosecond” and “the consequences of haste in our culture” (6, 13). These time-crisis theorists share the view that time is essentially a diversity of forms fatally vulnerable to the singularities of modernity. Human temporality ought to distinguish strongly but flexibly among past, present, and future, to pattern out all possible durations—to serve as a fully open and varied field of opportunity; but “time today” collapses the temporal manifold, sets only a given pace, and thereby limits possibility. Because it destroys any basis for real recourse—due, that is, to the reciprocity between time-crisis and crises in thought, memory, and experience—timecrisis theory tends to suggest that there is nothing to be done about it. Compare narrative theory: it reverses this vicious circle, arguing all the while that narrative engagement creates human time even as (or just because) modernity would destroy it. As early as Gotthold Lessing’s classification of literature as the “art of time,”

Small College, World Literature

Now that “world literature” has become a theoretical problem as much as a body of texts, the small-college classroom faces new challenges and new opportunities. Resource limitations and other constraints combine with advantages of scale and ethos to make the small college a special proving ground for world-literature pedagogy.

‘Quelque romancier hardi’: The Literary Bergsonist

Bergsons legacy to literature was nothing short of transformative. His theories of duration, memory, intuition, the élan vital, and comedy inspired a wide range of vital literary innovations. Techniques essential to modern literature—stream of consciousness, imagistic precision, time-shift, plotlessness, multiple perspective—can be traced to Bergson, and Bergsonian tendencies—his focus on subjective consciousness, interest in novelty, and critique of materialism—yet determine literature written today. But what made Bergson such a powerful influence on such a diverse array of writers was his theory of the artist: throughout his work, Bergson honors aesthetic insight and grants the artist authority over discoveries central to his philosophy. Writers were indeed inspired by Bergsons theories of duration, memory, and intuition, but they were truly galvanized to pursue Bersgonian ends by the power promised in his account of the artists relationship to reality. Any account of Bergsons literary influence should recognize this distinction. Moreover, we should recognize that this will to power made a significant difference to the way writers interpreted Bergsons theories—especially the theory of time. Bergsons account of duration was transformative not just because it inspired writers to try for new approaches to the representation of time but because it encouraged them to think that they, like Bergson himself, could be times prophets.

Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (review)

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Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in Modernist Fiction (review)

779 creation for manuscripts do not record the mental processes that went into the writing, but capture the result of those processes in material form. The differences between Walton Litz and Stallworthy on the one hand and Van Hulle on the others are obvious. Manuscripts are no longer secondary to the final product, the published work. Even though Van Hulle still insists that manuscripts are in the first place a useful “tool” for literary study, he shows impressively, and with a keen eye for “the smallest textual contingency” (155), that manuscripts are highly worthy of our attention. By focusing on their utility for critical investigation, Van Hulle deliberately leaves many other areas largely untouched, including those of biography, psychology, and even intention, but also those that deal with manuscripts as documents, not simply with the texts they contain. Physical format, provenance, preservation, and so on have a bearing on the reception of the work too and as such on the way we read it. Nonetheless, Van Hulle manages quite successfully to impress his reader with the idea that manuscripts have a function quite their own and may even be appreciated in their own right for their aesthetic intent. With Van Hulle, the study of modern literary manuscripts is finally coming of age.

Henry James and Queer Modernity (review)

To outmaster Henry James, simply attribute his subtleties to sexlessness; read those endless sentences as “verbal hedges” (102) against sexual candor, and call his forays into consciousness evasions of physical passion. If your James is at bottom a repressed, inactive homosexual (as he has been for many of his successors and critics as well as a small host of recent novels), his greatness is a kind of accident, for it is but a lucky by-product of a compulsion to hide the truth about sex. Then, your relative lack of talent or genius is justified and even preferred, since it is the cost anyone would happily pay for an active sex-life. Then, his aesthetic and moral sophistications become but a cautionary precursor to our sexual freedoms. Sublimations, they are tragic tribute to a sexual intensity we now have the courage and privilege to express directly, and we can forget about art, duty, judgment, because James has proven (conclusively because unwittingly) that they are only nervous resistances to the brave way we let physical desire shape personal life and cultural commitment. Since a gay James is too often no James at all, what to make of his queerness is a very tricky question. But Eric Haralson handles it beautifully. Henry James and Queer Modernity is inspired and essential for the way it makes James’s sexuality not only a positive part of his signature aesthetic but a source of trenchant cultural critique beyond what we normally expect from him. Other accounts of James’s queerness might diminish him, but this one enhances our sense of why he matters, and in the process offers up an important theory of the relations among art, sex, and politics. Things begin here with a fresh and compelling connection between Jamesian style and the ambiguity of the word “queer.” Reversing the tired question of when and how “queer” narrowed into what it means for us today, Haralson stresses the fact that the word’s early breadth of meaning made it the operative term in a daring set of cultural refusals; “its very shadowy quality and multireferentiality constituted a latency that lent itself to the gradual elaboration of a signifying linkage” (9). This linkage, ultimately between art, manhood, and sex, would resist the way sex came more and more to enlist exaggerated manhood against art. This powerful redefinition of “queer” becomes a great way to rethink James’s sexuality and indeed his modernity, as Haralson tells us how homosexuality came to be understood as the essence of the queer, and how this one particular homosexual made his supersubtle evocations of that process a powerful cultural critique of modernity itself. The modernity in question is that informed by the “new sexological order and the sociopolitical formations it primarily served” (57), the “rigidifying grids of the modern sex/gender system” (25), those norms of sex and gender that streamlined western identities into types most useful to modern political and economic power. James was on to it from the start, and from the first his fiction took queer aim at normative masculinity, especially when its norms tried to damn the aesthetic by association with male inadequacy. In the queerness of his early male characters, we get “experiments in obscuring the national-cultural specificity of a certain masculinity in order to liberate it, as much as possible from systems of sex regulation that are intricately bound up with national norms and needs” (49). Then a “career-long campaign” ensues, wherein James writes political allegories that are also defenses of art and erotic dispatches—novels (from The American to The Turn of the Screw to The Ambassadors) that are so much more than evasive sublimation, since they make up a “powerful prolepsis” of our queer modernity and its most effective forms of resistance.