Solitude and its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction.

Solitude and its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction. By EDWARD ENGELBERG. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2001. 223 pp. 35 [pounds sterling]. ISBN: 0-312-23947-5.

Edward Engelberg's recent book offers an overview of the development of the theme of solitude in fiction from Defoe to the modernists. Working from Robinson Crusoe to Beckett's 1972 novella The Lost Ones, Engelberg demonstrates the centrality of what he describes as the 'problematic' of solitude in the history of fiction. This problematic is focused, for Engelberg, on the ambiguous treatment of solitude as both that which is most feared, and that which is most desired. Solitude is simultaneously a pathology, and a becoming of the soul. In Nietzsche's phrase, 'Solitude can be the escape of the sick; solitude can also be the escape from the sick' (p. 99).

This ambiguity, Engelberg argues, is central to the concept, and an inescapable effect, of solitude. Despite this constancy, however, Engelberg argues that the way in which such ambiguity is represented passes through a number of transformations in the trajectory from Defoe to Beckett. Crusoe is an exemplary eighteenth-century solitary, in that he is able to reason out the contradictions inherent in the condition of solitude, and as a consequence is able both to protect and to derive his selfhood from his isolation. But Crusoe and Defoe have to hand, in 1719, the intellectual and cultural capacity to use solitude to refine a sense of self and of community. As we move from the eighteenth to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, this capacity can be seen gradually to diminish. The solitary is no longer engaged in an intense relationship with nature, and thus with God, but rather becomes involved in the more secular relationship with his or her self. In the Romantic period, this deterioration manifests itself in the image of the ungrounded subject, trembling before a sublime nature which refuses to yield to the gaze, but which may be only a reflection of the disinherited self.

It is as we move into the modernist period, however, that the agonizing ecstasy of solitude as a condition of our being reaches its critical point. At least the Romantics had a nature to reflect upon, and to partially reflect themselves within, but modernist solitude becomes, increasingly, an inescapable confrontation with the naked self, a confrontation which is structurally incapable of escaping solitude's double bind. The modernist subject is compelled to seek itself out as a form of company; but the only condition in which the subject can discover itself is in perfect solitude. Engelberg traces this predicament as it manifests itself in exemplary works by Woolf, Mann, Sartre, and Camus. As we move towards Beckett, however, situated as he apparently is on the boundary between modernism and postmodernism, a further shift in the figuration of solitude can be discerned. In pushing the modernist dilemma to its absolute limit, Beckett has forced it into a new shape, taken solitude past the contradictoriness of Woolf and Mann towards a new kind of accommodation. The double bind that provides the energy that drives modernism forward has lost some of its bite, as we no longer vacillate between the need for solitude and the urge for company. In Beckett's writing, aloneness becomes the very condition under which we live, less in fear and trembling than with a new kind of happy-go-lucky despair. Modernist solitude is refigured in the boundary land of Beckett's prose, in order to usher in a new era, in which the 'contingencies of Modernism have become the enabling--even the empowering--mechanisms of postmodernism' (p. 164).

Engelberg's argument is compelling in places, and it combines close reading of exemplary texts with a broad historical perspective. It is perhaps the comfort that Engelberg evidently feels with his version of literary history, however, that opens onto one of the weaknesses of the book. A capacious literary heritage, drawn to some extent from Bloom and Leavis, threatens to look a little wooden and prescriptive here. Slotting Woolf, Mann, and Beckett into a teleological history risks overlooking the ways in which all these writers evince an irreducibility to prefab developmental narratives, that might unsettle the happy trajectory that forms the thread of this account. Engelberg's confident tone tends to take the edge off the predicament that he is approaching, and to foreclose on the difficulty and aporetic impossibility that is held up as its defining quality. This is not much of a criticism: Engelberg is working consciously within a literary critical mode that owes more to Wayne C. Booth and Martin Esslin than to Blanchot and Deleuze. It is merely to say that, in seeking out ambiguities in his subject matter, Engelberg has rather too completely ironed out the ambiguities that are implicit in his own approach.

PETER BOXALL

UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX