C�line, Gadda, Beckett: Experimental Writings of the 1930s by Norma Bouchard (review)

Joyce's attempts to reconcile himself to his Irish heritage parallelsmodernism's vexed relationshipwith history.Specifically,it is interestingto see the ways in which Joyce acknowledges his own Catholic heritage so as to enable him to reject that heritageso emphaticallyin his fiction.This echoes the experience of all but the most nostalgic,conservativemodernists,findingin their oppositionto orthodoxvisions of literarytraditionsome way by which to orient themselveswithin twentieth-century culture. Unfortunately, Potts here stops short of a discussion of Finnegans Wake, Joyce's final published work. Like many similar studies,JoyceandtheTwoIrelands does not position the Wakeas the author's crowning achievement; it is not even treated here tangentially.Taking place in the 'allspace'and 'notime' of the dream, that text falls outside the parameters of this study. But the Irish night of HCE's dream is as IrishasJoyce's day, and one has to conclude that a readingof that novel would have extended the thematic thrustof Potts'swork significantly. UNIVERSITYOF LETHBRIDGE,CANADA CRAIG MONK Celine, Gadda, Beckett: Experimental Writings of the I93os. By NORMA BOUCHARD. (Crosscurrents)Gainesville, Tallahassee, and Tampa: University Press of Florida. 2000. xiii + 232 pp. $49.95. ISBN:0-8130I-8I8-8. The initial thought behind this ambitious and broadly-basedstudy of the pre-war novels of Celine (Voyage auboutdela nuit,Morta credit), the diaries,essays,and fiction of Carlo Emilio Gadda, and the early English-languagefiction of Samuel Beckett (up to and includingMurphy) is primarily,its author explains, a polemical one. The aim, Norma Bouchard puts it, is to take issue with what she terms, surely rather narrowly, 'the prevalent account of the I930s as the decade of engaged novelistic practice'.To this end, she undertakesto rereadthe workof three influentialwriters, one French, one Italian, one Irish, who usuallyfigure in twentieth-centuryliterary history as tardy or belated modernists,in order to demonstratenot only that their early work is already at odds with contemporary orthodoxies, but also that each in his own way in the I930s was alreadyexploring territorythat in hindsightmight be seen to belong to the later twentieth century,to what Bouchard calls the 'undifferentiated ,open-ended process of postmodern semiosis'.This is a book, then, that promises much: a remapping of the I930s, a rereading of the early writings of three majorEuropeanauthors,and a rethinkingof the relationshipbetween modernism and postmodernism. These are impressive goals. But it is hard to see how Bouchard'sstudyproperlygets to gripwith any of them. First,there is littledetailed discussion of the relationship between writing and politics in the 1930s and Bouchard'sgrip on historicaldetail is at times uncertain (Kojeve, for instance, did not lectureat the Sorbonne in the 1930O but pursuedhis readingof the Phenomenology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes,nor is Andre Breton'sLesVases communicants a novel, nor did Lacan in fact publish his famous paper on the mirrorstage in the International Journalof Psychoanalysis in I937). Then there is the fact that Bouchard's own discussion of the texts she considers is disappointingly routine, even superficial. Readers familiar with the extensive secondary literature on these authors or on modernism and postmodernism will find little here that is apt to challenge the current critical consensus. Moreover, Bouchard'sown theoreticalposition is oddly eclectic; not often in contemporarycriticism does one find Lukacs and Auerbach rubbing shoulderswith Benjamin, Lyotard,and Derrida. Finally,most damagingly Joyce's attempts to reconcile himself to his Irish heritage parallelsmodernism's vexed relationshipwith history.Specifically,it is interestingto see the ways in which Joyce acknowledges his own Catholic heritage so as to enable him to reject that heritageso emphaticallyin his fiction.This echoes the experience of all but the most nostalgic,conservativemodernists,findingin their oppositionto orthodoxvisions of literarytraditionsome way by which to orient themselveswithin twentieth-century culture. Unfortunately, Potts here stops short of a discussion of Finnegans Wake, Joyce's final published work. Like many similar studies,JoyceandtheTwoIrelands does not position the Wakeas the author's crowning achievement; it is not even treated here tangentially.Taking place in the 'allspace'and 'notime' of the dream, that text falls outside the parameters of this study. But the Irish night of HCE's dream is as IrishasJoyce's day, and one has to conclude that a readingof that novel would have extended the thematic...

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