Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction.

Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. By AMY J. ELIAS. (Parallax: Re-Visions of Culture and Society) Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. xxviii + 320 pp. 29.50 [pounds sterling]. ISBN: 0-8018-6733-9

Rereading After Theory. By VALENTINE CUNNINGHAM. (Blackwell Manifestos) Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. 2001. 194 pp. 45 [pounds sterling]; $56.95 (pbk 12.99 [pounds sterling]; $21.95). ISBN: 0-631-22167-0 (pbk 0-631-22168-9).

Both books are on 'theory', one using Lyotard, Hayden White, and Foucault and postmodernism, especially theories of the novel developed by Linda Hutcheon. The other assaults 'theory'. Amy Elias's study of novels by Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marcon Silko, Jeanette Winterson, Julian Barnes, John Steffler, Francis Sherwood, Allen Kurzweil, J. M. Coetzee, Peter Ackroyd, Patrick Suskind, Brian O'Doherty, John Fowles, Susan Sontag, and Barry Unsworth engages most with their use of time and of space. About all she has something interesting to say, and she finishes with a splendid coda discussing reactionary tendencies in The Sot-Weed Factor and the radical politics of Mason and Dixon, which contains interesting material on presentday studies of cartography, using especially William Boelhower, with his idea that 'America is the European cartographic revolution' (p. 239). 'Mapping' and 'unpacking', spatial images, she sees as dominant terms for criticism in the 1990s (p. 105). She works with the argument that postmodernism, which she theorizes in detail in her introduction, is the attempt to escape linear-time narration as an ideology laid down in the Enlightenment and she sees postmodernism as an interrogation of the Enlightenment. She calls these texts 'metahistorical romances', which contrasts with the historical novels of Scott, heir to the Enlightenment, whom she reads as not making problematic the category of history ('Scott clearly wrote with an idea in his mind about what history was', she says (p. 11)). This, however, means that she forecloses on the study of Scott, and when she discusses him, she looks not at his texts, but at background materials. Postmodernism, in contrast, interrogates history while it writes. Romance, Elias takes as the prime postmodern genre (p. 21), and the point has implications for American romance in the nineteenth century. Working with the postmodern as the post-traumatic, for which she uses Dominick LaCapra, she quotes Bill readings approvingly on Lyotard, that 'we have to write a history that will testify to the unpresentable horror without representing it [...]. History, like literature, becomes the site of the recognition that there is something that cannot be said' (p. 29). This brings in the Lyotardian sense of the postmodern as the sublime, an awareness of a knowledge which is outside, Other to, modernity. She sees history writing as necessarily anachronistic, postmodern narrative as paratactic, and postmodernism as against 'scientific rationalism'.

These arguments are well stated and clear, and Elias's book is worth consulting. What limits it is a repeated fascination with taxonomy (the author is never so happy as when she is compiling a list of the distinctive features of one sub-set of postmodern texts) and aligned with that an attention to structural features of texts which de-historicize their impact and make them and her analysis oddly abstract. The book might have gained a little more from what Valentine Cunnningham calls 'so-called Cultural Studies' (p. 79), for it lacks an address to contemporary politics or society though its material is to do with both; so it never gains the momentum that would take it from a series of articles to a sustained argument; and which would distinguish the novels discussed so that attention was paid not just to their structures but to their engagement with culture (this is where the material on Barth and Pynchon reads so differently and so well).

Valentine Cunningham's book is one in a new Blackwell series where the blurb says 'major critics make timely interventions to address important concepts'--no Nietzschean 'untimely meditations', unfortunately. Starting as a deceptive discussion of the benefits of 'theory', some of it entertaining, halfway through, the gloves come off: 'Theory is, all too often, bad for texts, not only because its models of their being, their ontology, their essence, their nature, are driven by a huge negativity and despair [this is Cunningham's self-professed Christianity (p. 142) talking], but because of how it promotes a view of text and so of readings of texts which plays fast and loose with the idea and then also the praxis of a demanding textual thereness. Theory is variously careless of the texts which it keeps asserting it cares about' (pp. 69-70). Cunningham then discusses several 'misreadings' of texts, from Paul de Man and others, such as William A. Cohen, in Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), discussed on pages 99-105. But are Cohen's faults, if admitted, due to his adherence to Theory? Which 'theorists' would have to say of Cohen 'this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine'? Cohen's piece on Great Expectations first appeared in ELH: hardly a locus for theory. Cunningham takes the places where some 'theoretical' terms appear in diluted or parasitic form as the voice of 'Theory'. In attacking Hillis Miller on Hardy, since he only paraphrases Miller, he makes it impossible to assess who is right; but in any case, was not criticism, long before 'Theory', always attacking other readings as impercipient?

Cunningham's book, like this review, needs to be longer to make a case. I can only assert that he reductively lumps disparate 'theorists' into a single, monologic, and monolithic Theory and mischaracterizes several as when he finds Foucault (p. 34) or Greenblatt (p. 36) Marxist, or calls Lacan a psychiatrist (p. 16). Not noticing Deleuze, or Blanchot, or Kristeva, his version of 'theory' is imbalanced, and fails to differentiate strands of thought in it: from Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud. The absence of discussion of provenance (of history), damages, for example, Cunningham's brief discussions of deconstruction, which goes athwart these different strands, and it means that he cannot see that 'Theory' may not be read univocally; nor theorists assumed to be all saying the same thing. Much of what he says applies more to cultural studies (much of which is 'post'- or 'anti-theory') than to the theory he thinks he attacks and which, unlike some cultural studies, is fascinated by texts. It would have been a sharper book if he had decided what really angers him. Growing irritation makes him unsubtle and pious: 'I utterly share and endorse' Christopher Ricks's 'anger' he says (p. 179), while overstating an argument about Beckett and language (p. 119). It makes him name a select church of non-apostate 'readers' whom he approves of (p. 167), while admitting that move to be invidious (p. 183). It will surprise some 'theorists' to find that Frank Kermode was once considered a fellow-traveller (pp. 167-69). Incest nowhere in Wuthering Heights p. 87)? Even Q. D. Leavis speculated that Heathcliff and Cathy were originally supposed to be brother and sister. Cunningham stands for critical tact (p. 155) but what of the tactics of saying that 'Theory means reduction' (p. 127)? Reduction is Cunningham's short way with 'theory' throughout.

JEREMY TAMBLING

UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG