Post-Victorianism in the Balance

Some years ago, I traveled to Phoenix for the annual conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association. Trained as a scholar of modernism, I was a first-time NAVSA attendee. One of the panels I attended explored the afterlives of Victorian literary culture in the early twentieth century. It's fair to say that the session made for a disconcerting experience. It was the 2010s and modernist studies was having its moment in the sun, but the panelists all referred to that moment in literary history—what graduate school had taught me to call modernism—as Britain's “post-Victorian moment.” What was going on? It seemed that nobody had even heard of modernism. It's true that scholarship in my subfield has long been critical of the modernists’ more confident self-mythologizing—their overblown claims to have “made it new” in the realm of art and beyond. But the “post-Victorian” label cut deeper: These NAVSA panelists seemed to take for granted that modernism was only an afterthought, a stylistic flourish, at the tail end of the long nineteenth century.Reading Paul Stasi's forceful new book reminded me of this experience. The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction shares the radically defamiliarizing impulse I found myself exposed to at NAVSA. Stasi's book requires us to understand modernism not as a “simple rejection” of realism but as informed in complex ways by its realist precursors: “Realist forms are transformed,” rather than just cancelled out, “by modernist works” (9). If, as Stasi reminds us, Theodor Adorno's writings on aesthetics helped to codify the view of modernism as a radical break with realism, we can also turn to Adorno for a description of Stasi's revisionary enterprise. Just because we have the “dubious good fortune to live later,” Adorno notes in Hegel: Three Studies (1963), we are not entitled “sovereignly” to “assign the dead person his place” or to “elevate” ourselves “above him.” Much would be gained, Adorno argues, if the question of appreciation were reversed: We should learn to ask “what the present means in the face of the past” (1). According to Adorno's line of thought, this dialectical inversion makes it possible to think of modernism not as a break with a now defunct past but as a process whereby modernism itself is reconfigured in terms that may seem anachronistic and alien to it.Stasi's book traces this dialectic—or several distinctive versions of it—through rich case studies of authors ranging from Henry James, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf to Samuel Beckett and Ralph Ellison. Modernism looks different in light of these readings, as does realism itself. On the one hand, realism now appears “as formally complex as the modernism that followed it” (15); on the other, modernism no longer appears as a blanket rejection of realist mimesis but rather “as a kind of determinate negation of specific formal structures” (26), including the plotlines of the domestic novel, the structures of sympathetic identification that are characteristic of the industrial novel, and the ties of social determination that bind the protagonists of the realist novel to their environment.Much work in modernist studies over the past two decades has been dedicated precisely to revising the reductive understanding of modernism as an absolute artistico-cultural break. Instead of perpetuating the self-image propagated by certain modernists, this new scholarship has drawn attention to modernism's complex links to Victorian and Edwardian writing, to middlebrow literary production, and to popular culture. Some scholars of modernism may accordingly feel that Stasi's tendency to associate modernism with the rendering of subjective consciousness, with artistic autonomy, and with the concept of epiphany isn't always entirely up to date with these particular debates in modernist studies. Indeed, Stasi's account possesses some family resemblances to other attempts to probe or debunk modernists’ self-mythologizing. Andrew Goldstone's Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to De Man (2013), for example, similarly shows that figures such as James Joyce and Djuna Barnes were committed to an “aesthetic practice” that is only “relatively autonomous” insofar as it gives us glimpses of the economic relations and social pressures that underpin it (132). Other scholars have followed the lead of revisionary thinkers, such as Jacques Rancière, who have sought to replace altogether the stark bifurcation of the literary-artistic field into realism and modernism. The “aesthetic regime of art,” as Rancière understands it, offers a capacious alternative that subsumes both labels: it refers not to a set of styles but to a democratization of the artistic space across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It makes sense that Stasi has no time for Rancière's account. After all, Stasi is not interested in explaining away the tension between realism and modernism but in exploring the fraught dialectical relationship that binds the two terms together.The terms realism and modernism can easily appear unflexible or rigid, their analytic vitality exhausted after more than a century of critical debate. As Joe Cleary has explained, this situation was exacerbated by the geopolitical antagonisms of the Cold War, as Moscow took ownership of realism and “modernism was taken into custodianship by New York (with generous backing from Washington)”; it was during the 1950s and 1960s that “‘realism’ and ‘modernism’ were produced at once as reified categories and as the obvious termini of modern ‘world literature’” (263). It is a testimony to the remarkable intellectual energy of Stasi's book that it manages to make these categories dialectical again. Instead of setting itself up outside or against realism, modernism inherits realism's ambition to register a social totality: “Modernism reflects on its realist inheritance as a way of examining culture's entanglement with the social order that determines it. Time and again, discourses that seem to resist social determination—the aesthetic, the abstract subject, ties of affection—are shown to be mediated with sociality through and through” (30–31).The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction begins with an incisive account of Henry James's late fiction. In Stasi's account, James's “fabled distance from action and incident becomes . . . a reflection on autonomy itself, as he grapples with the ways his art can and cannot represent the determining pressure of an absent past and the abstract structures governing capitalist modernity's perpetual present” (41). James's narrators (and characters) often seem to contemplate an absent cause that is mysteriously hidden from view—yet as Stasi points out, this cause is not some abstract or otherwise unknowable force but the veiled social relations of an all-dominating money culture. Ranging from The Sacred Fount (1901) and “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) to The Golden Bowl (1904), Stasi's masterful account of James's late fiction shows that these texts invite us to see how “vulgar economic relations are transformed into refined affective ones, money into Princes, darkness into light, realism into modernism” (64–65).If James's late fiction acts as a hinge between realism and modernism, Joyce's writings allow Stasi to show how the “determinate negation of specific formal structures” proceeds across a series of canonical high-modernist texts. Reading Ulysses alongside mid-nineteenth-century industrial fiction, Stasi demonstrates that Joyce's book is not a text that neglects, or simply rejects, sympathy in favor of formal abstraction and stylistic play. Instead, Joyce's 1922 novel “uses sympathy in quite specific ways, asking how and when sympathy is extended and when it is not and connecting it directly to the question of national unity” (81). Like the novels by Elizabeth Gaskell that serve as Stasi's “realist” point of comparison, Joyce's texts remain deeply and self-consciously invested in the affective powers of sympathy. Sympathy, in Joyce, thus “persists even through its ironization” (99). Stasi deftly shows where Joyce's own (political) sympathies lie: “When the question of sympathy concerns abstractions such as nation or race, Joyce is indifferent or hostile, countering fictions of purity with moments of hybridity. When the question is poverty as it is in Gaskell's industrial novels, the message is, in part, clearer: sympathy for the dispossessed” (97).Stasi's third chapter turns to Virginia Woolf's The Years. It is significant that Woolf's novel situates its (“modernist”) gestures toward formal abstraction in relation to a profound commitment to represent the social structures that make such gestures possible in the first place. The Years, writes Stasi, “rigorously withholds nearly all content that we might name political or public while continuously gesturing towards its presence” (119). Drawing on social reproduction theory, Stasi shows that in Woolf's novel “gender is not . . . epiphenomenal or super-structural, but central, tied to the most basic processes of social reproduction” (119). If The Years obscures the social reality of gendered exploitation and unremunerated (household) labor, it does so in ways that are analogous to James's fiction; like James's later fiction, Woolf's novel offers us glimpses of the social reality that lies outside the purview of modernism's cherished fables of autonomy. In a brilliant account of Woolf's intellectual debts to Sophocles's Antigone, Stasi demonstrates that these intertextual echoes help to support a vision of non-nuclear and non-heterosexual kinship that is central to Woolf's novelistic enterprise more broadly.Stasi's exploration of Samuel Beckett in chapter 4 returns us once more to the overarching question of sympathy. This time, structures of sympathy are explored via a discussion of the beggar/bourgeois encounter, which Stasi traces—with some help from Celeste Langan's Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (1995)—to the writings of William Wordsworth and other Romantic-era writers. On Stasi's reading, Beckett's plays and fictional texts—from Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932) up to, and including, The Unnamable (1953)—offer multiple variations on this foundational cross-class “encounter.” As Stasi shows, the basic parameters of the encounter make it possible for Beckett to “explore the structure of sympathy” as such, notably “its always mediated nature” (153). Like Joyce, Beckett's fellow Irishman-in-exile, Beckett invites us to feel sympathy for his characters, even as he remains wary of sympathy's reach and political efficacy. Beckett's writings thus entail simultaneously a utilization and critique of sympathy: “On the one hand, the continual expression of suffering; on the other hand, a relentless attack on sentimental pieties” (139).Chapter 5 reopens the question of social determination that Stasi's introduction had identified as a key building block of the realist novel. Turning to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Stasi asks how Ellison's well-documented disapproval of naturalism translated into a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between humans and their environment. Seeking to distinguish his own artistic vision from the outspokenly interventionist writing of Richard Wright, Ellison declared that he wanted “to ‘explore the full range of American Negro humanity,’ for, as he famously argued, a people cannot ‘live and develop for over three hundred years simply by reacting’” (180). Stasi traces the various fault lines that mark Invisible Man's ambivalent engagement with questions of determination and individuation. The novel's dual generic affiliations—with the bildungsroman and the picaresque; with realism and surrealism—work to dissect America's naturalization of race. The novel, Stasi shows, is deeply ambivalent about Invisible's search for his true self—an ambivalence that also acts as a symptom of his subjection to the country's racial imaginary. The chapter culminates (as does Ellison's novel) with an account of a race riot. As Stasi argues, this strike—like the novel as a whole—is characterized by a surplus that is at once economic and aesthetic: “The excess often seen to be characteristic of the riot is tied to the surplus populations who engage in them, populations thrown out of their normal social relations by developments in capitalism. The riot, then, is the form of struggle of those masterless men seen to be at the origin of the picaresque, even as it also emerges as a ‘new phase of racialized struggle’ in the contemporary United States after the end of the Great Migration” (199).In the conclusion, Stasi helpfully reminds his readers of the powerful political charge that his literary-historical argument carries. The (“modernist”) utopia of autonomy, as Stasi describes it, is complexly interwoven with the (“realist”) recognition that all our actions are socially determined: “Autonomy, in other words, is the thought that things could be otherwise . . . , while social determination provides the field of action within which we try to realize this utopian hope under conditions which we cannot choose” (214). The literary field that Stasi's book so eloquently and convincingly reconstructs looks different in the light of his readings. Adding a theoretically sophisticated voice to a rapidly growing body of scholarship, Stasi's book reveals important common ground for Victorianists and scholars of modernist literature. The boundary between realism and modernism no longer appears impermeable. Stasi's book is good news for scholars working on either side of this ostensible literary-historical divide.