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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 374-379 Gerald Gillespie, Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003; xiii+324 pp.; ISBN: 0813213509 (hbk.); LC call no.: PN3499.G55; $64.95 Anyone who has written a scholarly book has gone through a painful and inescapable experience: dealing with the key balance between "Utile e dulci." More precisely, being instructive, clear, well informed and at the same time remaining pleasurable, charming, even mesmerizing to the reader. Gerald Gillespie's highly insightful book overcomes by far this challenging tension. Its author makes himself clear about this, from the very beginning: I have not written this book with the aim of imposing yet another theory of modernism: rather its chapters grown from the pleasures of reading key authors and my interest in principal themes they developed. (vii) Since Gerald Gillespie repeatedly refers to his book as to a "critical meta-narrative," any professional comment on it is entitled to claim in its turn the status of a "secondary meta-narrative." Unfortunately, in my meta-meta-narrative about his book only a few markers will stand for the numerous and eclectic literary texts analyzed by the author, belonging to the Three Great Ones — Proust, Mann, Joyce — as well as to many others. A careful cross section of the book promptly reveals that the apparently even-tempered stroll of the critic in the labyrinth of literature steadily follows an Ariadna's thread: the pattern of the spatial and temporal continuity of culture, ideally embodied by the works of such authors as Proust, Mann and Joyce, is able to reconstitute meaning and possessing evolved standards for measuring values. In this respect, the key words of Gerald Gillespie are highly insightful for his cornerstone options. Instead of breaking points, disjunctions, fashion leaders etc. he seems mainly interested in profusion, in the deeper rhythms and deeper logic of culture, in pre-texts and contexts, in the felt reality of literature and in the beneficent humanistic codes. Gillespie confesses his addiction to modernist authors such as Proust, Joyce and Mann who exhibit a will for totalizing or universality that can be traced back to Renaissance and baroque antecedents such as Rabelais and Cervantes and to their proto-romantic followers such as Sterne. [end page 374] Nonetheless, he is surprisingly able to enjoy authors currently identified as "postmodernist" and yet ignore in their texts the sense of "disjuncture" proclaimed by their worshipers. Far from being wearisome, dull and uneventful, the pattern of continuity subtly drawn up by Gerald Gillespie displays a series of significant bridges and thresholds. "Threshold" is one of the basic categories manipulated by the critic in all his pre-texts, context and post-texts, in order to underline the meeting points, the connections, the implicit and the explicit junctures and mediations set off by literary creation since its very beginnings. Some of these thresholds may be books; some others may be authors or periods, literary genres, key literary characters, faces of cultural creativity (such as music) or prominent cultural figures. In order to give more depth and breadth to the historical framework of the relevant phenomena analyzed in his book, Gerald Gillespie identifies Tristram Shandy as one of these foundational texts. According to him, almost everything mentioned as Modern or Postmodern can be found in Tristram. The Romantic authors coming after Sterne are also acknowledged as forerunners in all possible respects. To take just one example, he sees "the modernist project of dismantling the self as one of the inevitable repercussions of romanticism" (275). In the following paragraphs, I will briefly focus on two of these cultural interceders, selected almost randomly among others: Goethe and Wagner. In a series of substantial analyses dedicated to Death in Venice, Gerald Gillespie insists on the catalytic function of both Goethe and Wagner in Thomas Mann's work, providing his reader with highly refined exegetic and hermeneutic tools. The American scholar seizes this opportunity to amend the particular hypothesis of a previous German commentator of Mann (James Northcote-Bade, Die Wagner-Mythern in Fruhwerk Thomas Manns [1975]) regarding an allegedly clear cut opposition between the two master figures dominating Mann's cultural options. According to Gillespie this relationship is drenched in ironic ambivalence: Mann (not only has Nietzsche in mind, but) is working out his own Wagner crisis through this figure (Aschenbach's figure). It is indeed important to recognize the haunting presence of Wagner in the novella. But it is inaccurate to conclude, as James Northcote-Bade does, that this veiled connection reveals a straightforward turning away from Wagner, anticipated in the 1909 essay Geist und Kunst and an affirmation of Goethe and classicism. (207) If it is true that, as Gillespie maintains, Mann explores the ambivalent task of the modern artist and intellectual through Aschenbach, we could add to [end page 375] it another case in point: Adrian Leverkuhn. "Es war ein Kunstler Leben!" — "It was an Artist's destiny" — insists Serenus at a certain point in Doktor Faustus, a later novel that shows Mann engaged in a sophisticated balance between the two great cultural mediators: Goethe and Wagner. Thomas Mann had been constantly obsessed with the attitude the authors of archetypal works have towards cultural memory. The novel Doktor Faustus is the result of his attempt to find a new expression in this field. His formula practically neutralizes the contradiction between the Wagner solution — the solemn recollection — and the Goethe solution — the parodic recollection. The entire novel is nothing but a lesson on successorship in art and on the resuscitation, the processing and the circulation of archetypal characters. In a famous lecture on Wagner, Thomas Mann discusses the existence of two ways of processing cultural memory and particularly mythology: the Goethean and the Wagnerian one. Wagner celebrates the models of tradition, while Goethe mocks them, treating them with an affectionate familiarity. It would be useless to look for the slightest pathetic or tragic accents in the immensity of the Goethean vision. The German novelist notices that in a light, spiritual manner, Goethe extracts from the myth images whose precision does not remind us of the sublime, but of the comedy, and even of the mild parody. Mann was constantly interested in the reinterpretation of the relationship between the predecessor and the successor, between the original and the copy. In a lecture about the Ring of the Nibelungs, the novelist pretends that Wagner intended to prolong his regression beyond the reputedly original legendary stock of the Nibelungen saga. Wagner is therefore an artist, who like Leverkuhn, takes a leap back, doubting the authenticity of unanimously accepted models. The German novelist knows better than both Wagner and his fictitious composer Adrian Leverkuhn. He knows that no regression can be so radical as to reach absolute zero grounding. Such a beginning of all beginnings can only be hypothetical. Anyone who aims that far will be forced to completely reinvent art and rewrite its history. That is why Wagner, the musician-poet, should not have written a mythical music, but should have reinvented the very myth of music. Leverkuhn's aesthetic melancholy emerges as a reaction to Beethoven's ascendance. It is the ethos of an artist who knows he is a descendant and attempts, like Wagner, a breakthrough (Durchbruch) into the creative eternal return: Thomas Mann himself proves it in a famous lecture given at Goethe's centenary (Goethe als Representant des Burgerlischen Zeitalters). There, any form of return to the sources is called nobility: [end page 376] The conscience of succession — says the novelist quoting Goethe — certifies the nobility of the artist's soul. Any descend, any awareness of our spiritual ascendance has an aristocratic origin. An artist must have ancestors, to know where he comes from. Thus spoke Goethe. Gerald Gillespie is not only keen on the deep continuity hidden beneath the chameleonic appearances of literature but also avowedly aware of the fact that the main outcome of this is a self-mirroring intertextuality. He knows that every simple reading is in fact a rereading, just because every simple text reads, re-reads and rewrites another one. Every encounter between a literary text and its reader should be placed under the sign of recognition and of recollection. Every single literary text is a mere link in the endless chain of Repetition, where writing, reading, rereading, rewriting are synonyms of the same creative act. It is precisely for this reason that the sample of authors selected by the American scholar — not only Proust, Mann and Joyce but also Kafka, Hesse, Butor, Beckett, Borges, Virginia Woolf, John Barth and so on — turn these self -reflective cross-fertilizations into a main theme of their fictions. One of the finest illustrations of this great chain of (re)reading that we can select from Gerald Gillespie's books is Chapter 8, Afterthoughts of Hamlet: Goethe's Wilhelm, Joyce's Stephen, where the Irish novelist is reading Goethe's reading of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Instead of persistently looking back at who Hamlet is in Ulysses, Gillespie shifts his perspective and emphasizes the defective view associated with particular speakers in Joyce's novel as textual variants that emanate from the Hamletic condition of the Western mind: Joyce knew, of course that the nineteenth century had been fixated on Hamlet, as he was himself, all his life, and he made good use of that widely felt and pondered cultural reality; our reading of Ulysses thus prolongs the European obsession with Hamlet in some manner. (157) Gillespie suggests that we insert an essential link in the great chain of reading between Joyce and Shakespeare: Goethe. Gerald Gillespie's Joyce is reading Hamlet, but a Hamlet already read by Goethe in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. As Joyce does later in the "Scylla and Charybdis" chapter, Goethe pulls together the deeper plot line of the educational protagonist's pathway and the question of the "tragedy" of existence raised in Hamlet. [end page 377] Like Joyce, Goethe leads us toward an ironic resolution, toward maturation and practical maturity for Wilhelm. (165) For the American scholar the key issue is not the well-known process of the infinite textual regression, in which Joyce will embrace all the avatars of Hamlet including Wilhelm. This mechanism has already been perfectly dismantled by literary theorists such as Gerard Genette. Beyond this type of technical devices Gillespie goes even deeper to draw our attention to the phenomenological implications of overtly edited palimpsests, of successorship, of cultural anamnesis, etc.: the mirroring process implied by it or in his own terms "our face in the mirroring text." Transgressing gaps, avoiding breaking points and disjuncture in favor of profusion and of intertextual anamnesis is not an easy task and the ways in which the author copes with all these are worth noticing. The method devised by Gillespie favors a special kind of stubborn flexibility. It strongly opposes doctrinaire commitments, rigid norms and worshipping attitudes — even when a conceptual banner such as Postmodernism is involved, in a moment when academic or popular studies, high art or consumerist products are expected to somehow display this quasi-magic utterance. Apart from conceptual pluralism and methodological tolerance the American scholar displays a particular ability to shift his perspectives of reading between contemporary remakes and Nietzschean paradigms on the one hand, and the Erasmian-Rablesian paradigm perspective on the other, no matter who are the authors under scrutiny. The sophisticated structure of his book as a whole is not innocent, it bears meaning and it fulfills specific functions. We cannot ignore its elaborate symmetries involving the general introduction and the selective synthesizing coda; the game of multiplied pre-texts, contexts and post-texts; the bracket opened by the first chapter and then closed in the last and so on. All these are the pillars and the vaults of a noble cathedral. In fact, Proust, one of the main figures in the book, was obsessed with the cathedral-like pattern, be it in his novel or in his essays on Ruskin. Literature as an endless cathedral is one of the essential motifs of Gillespie's book as well. Following the self-mirroring logic defended by the American scholar, on closer inspection, his critical enterprise also has a cathedral-like structure. A special kind of music is performed in this cathedral: a choral hymn to the beauty of the work of art and to the triumph of value over time. In this highly symbolic edifice, architecture and architexture join their forces and enhance one another. I will not end this brief comment on Gerald Gillespie's recent book before underlining how amazingly readable it is — in spite of its rich [end page 378] information and tight argument. I would go further and venture to say that maybe Gerald Gillespie himself embodies the virtual ideal reader that all the authors discussed by him might have dreamed of.
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