Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 1, April 2005
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Wolf, Philipp, Modernization and the Crisis of Memory: John Donne to Don DeLillo, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2002, 211pp, 90-420-1528-4,
Reviewed by
Northern Michigan University
Crossing cultures, and crossing centuries, from Donne’s seventeenth-century England, to the America of DeLillo’s millennial fictions, the scope of Philipp Wolf’s study is encoded in its title. Like Suzanne Nalbantian, in her recent work, Memory in Literature: Rousseau to Neuroscience (Palgrave, 2003), Wolf seems to have been goaded by his explorations of memory to test the limits of his own recall. Both of these studies of literature and memory cover a vast temporal range, and draw together diverse strands of knowledge. Nalbantian’s book focuses on a predominantly French body of thought, and mixes psychology and neuroscience to explore memory. The foundations of Wolf’s study, by contrast, are largely built on the groundwork of German thinkers (Martin Heidegger, Niklas Luhmann, Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleida and Jan Assmann), and his emphasis is on the interplay between memory and its social and cultural contexts.
The crisis of memory announced by Wolf’s title is sparked by a loss of faith in modern man’s ability to recall a sustaining, coherent, version of the past that could enrich both individual and collective senses of identity. Wolf cites a number of related factors for this crisis in remembering, amongst which are the increasingly relativistic nature of memory as it is dispersed in a communicative context (the more people who discuss a memory, the less stable it becomes); the amnesia wrought by the dislocations of commodity culture (societies fragmented by migration; the “sale” of time); and the increasingly reflexive notion of culture that emerges in the late-eighteenth century. This last point is important to the chronology of Wolf’s study, because he notes that the trigger point of his crisis of memory coincides with the post-1750 rejection of neoclassicism, and “the emergence of the modern discourse of culture in England and Germany.” In this discourse Wolf notes that the signifier “culture” continuously accelerates beyond the signified, and this rift is “the real momentum behind modern culture” and underlies its obsession with novelty and short-lived fashions. The consequent focus on difference and the new disrupts the writer’s relationship to subjects like time and history.
Wolf contends that prior to 1750, history for the early moderns was “a ‘storehouse’ of analogical events” and humans “were not thought to change.” As lineage became less important, however, Wolf detects a radical shift in attitude, which he marks by quoting writers such as Thomas Paine who were reluctant to accept the static order handed down by previous generations and sought “a renovation in the natural order of things.” This reorientation of a culture’s focus (from past traditions to future potential) increased with time, and in the nineteenth century “not only the past in general but also specific communal practices were seen as burdensome.”
Moving forward, Wolf argues that modernist intellectuals saw time as an enemy, and faced with the debilitating acceleration of life “held on to myth, the unconscious, or various inventions of tradition to bolster up the desire for cultural identity.” Chief amongst these inventions was their concentration on the epiphany, a mode of “escapist remembering” that disrupts chronological time. As a representative from the second half of the century, Wolf selects DeLillo, who places “a metaphysical, almost religious, trust in the redemptive and re-presentative power of fiction” and sets this against the power of television and other “agencies of amnesia.”
In order to cover such vast territory (about 300 years of literary and cultural history are surveyed in just 195 pages) Wolf inevitably has to approach his subject selectively, but the extent of much of his research is impressive. When writing about pre-twentieth-century literature, in particular, he moves confidently between major and less well-known writers, shifting from a discussion of Donne to make references to Mark Akenside, and Francis Quarles. Towards the end of the book, however, the range of reference does narrow somewhat. There is less about Proust’s influence than one would expect in a chapter on modernist epiphany and involuntary memory, and the final chapter has the most limited focus, concentrating on Don DeLillo’s fictions abstracted from their literary context. Wolf is, here, a victim of his own success, since such omissions would be less notable in a book whose breadth of reference was less rich in its early chapters. A more serious disadvantage for some readers, however, will be Wolf’s love of jargon, which may deter them in his dense introduction (check whether your critical dictionary includes aisthetic and ekphrasis), and the book does contain a lot of minor typographical or proofreading errors. But while Wolf may not be responsible for the latter, it can be distracting to stumble over missing words, or to discover that a character is consistently given the wrong name (Underworld’s Brian Glassic is renamed Brian Classic). In spite of this, Modernization and the Crisis of Memory is a wide-ranging work of scholarship that tries to acknowledge the multiplicity of factors that shape literary recollections. At times the density of Wolf’s prose will make this a difficult text for less-experienced readers, but the range of reading Wolf brings to bear on modern memory merits scholarly attention.