The New Modernist Novel: Criticism and the Task of Reading. By Elizabeth Pender. Edinburgh University Press, 2024. 241 pp. $120.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paperback); $24.95 (ebook)

Reviewed by Erin G. Carlston, University of Auckland

Elizabeth Pender’s The New Modernist Novel: Criticism and the Task of Reading begins with an apparent inconsistency that actually indicates her central argument. Given the title, I opened the book wondering what a ‘new’ modernist novel is—perhaps fiction written in the twenty-first century that observes the formal conventions of early-twentieth-century canonical modernism? But in Pender’s opening paragraph we find a discussion of the expansions of the canon enacted by the new modernist studies established in the late 1990s, before she introduces the term ‘new modernists’ to refer neither to contemporary writers nor to scholars but to early-twentieth-century writers like the three she focuses on in this volume: Djuna Barnes, John Rodker, and Mina Loy. The argument that emerges from this initially confusing move between critics and artists is that there is—and has been ever since early-twentieth-century artists began to break the boundaries of their genres and then comment on that process of breakage—a symbiosis between modernist creation and criticism that has shaped both in an evolving relationship of interdependence (32).

Thus in Pender’s framework, what makes Barnes’s Nightwood, Rodker’s Adolphe 1920, and Loy’s Insel ‘new’ novels is not their dates of composition but the fact that they were marginal to the canon of high modernist texts developed by prevailing schools of (mostly) British and U.S. criticism in the mid-twentieth century, and were only belatedly rediscovered in the late twentieth century. This move makes ‘newness’, which Ezra Pound famously established as the defining criterion of modernism, a function of critical reception as much as of formal innovation; and so modernism can become new over and over again as critical reading practices and values change, continually co-creating modernist texts alongside their original authors.

While acknowledging that the new modernist studies opened the field to consideration of works by women, people of color, colonized people, literature in non-European languages, and so on, Pender nonetheless wants to make a plea for texts that were excluded from the canon not because of the race, language, or locale of their authors but because of their style. In particular, she claims, early-twentieth-century texts with strong relationships to Decadence and Surrealism tended to drop out of favor with mid-century Anglo-American critics. She chooses, therefore, to slice the vast pie that is modernism along the lines of the well-documented networks of Anglo-European artists who read, edited, published, criticized, and socialized with each other in Paris, London, Berlin, and New York in the 1920s and 30s. This move excludes many of the writers reclaimed by the new modernist studies, and accepts, if only provisionally, a definition of modernism centered in Anglo-Europe between the world wars; in that sense, as Pender admits, her choice of texts “may look decidedly establishment” (1). But she also reminds us that there were many artists deeply involved in what we now consider ‘established’ modernism whose names were subsequently nearly forgotten. Thus, the mid-century critics who invented the modernist ‘establishment’ while simultaneously ignoring so many artists who contributed to modernism are the outliers, their criteria of value different not only to our own but to those of the writers they did canonize. Pound had a far more expansive view of what modernism was than Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era does.

Pender traces a history of Anglo-American criticism of fiction that first started to coalesce around the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the U.K., the Leavises grappled with how to read fiction that sometimes looked more like poetry than prose in its emphasis on passages of dazzling beauty with little obvious relationship to plot. Their effort to establish reading methods that would make a sensible distinction between prose and poetry reminds us of T. S. Eliot’s somewhat tortured insistence, in his preface to Nightwood, that it really is a novel and yet also ‘so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.’ Pender follows the trajectory of this kind of criticism to the United States, where critics like Kenner established a critical vocabulary focused on “point of view, literary reference, correspondences, spatial form, unity, coherence, consistency, and close reading understood as valuing form or style as separate from context” (174), terms Pender believes are badly suited to illuminating novels like Nightwood, Adolphe 1920, and Insel.

Pender also notes how U.S. critics developed “strategies of reading…that then remained bound up in the selections of what writing might best be valued” (13), underlining the circularity involved in arguing that literary value could be judged by adherence to a specific set of formal criteria derived from works that had already been determined to be valuable—notably Eliot’s The Waste Land, Pound’s Cantos, and James Joyce’s Ulysses—so that “the decadent traits of works whose stylistic flair exceeded their formal structure tended to be associated less with literary value than those whose perceived traits of coherence, learnedness and mastery reliably led to coherent, learned and critically interesting readings” (75).

Pender takes us through close readings of her three case studies demonstrating how their “stylistic flair” and “local momentum” (75, 148) thwart those critical expectations. For instance, the uncertain and shifting distance in Nightwood between a narrator’s voice and Matthew O’Connor’s is harder to make sense of than free indirect discourse as we have learned to analyze it in Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Like Joyce, both Rodker and Barnes tend to repeat specific words and figures of speech throughout their novels, but in Pender’s view the meanings of such repeated terms in the latter shift constantly rather than “accreting significance” (117) the way they do in Ulysses. As for Loy’s Insel, Pender counters Helen Vendler’s claim that the novel has ‘no sense of momentum’ by asserting that it has instead a “local liveliness,” evoking comparisons that are witty and vivid, “suited to passing thoughts and impressions” (146).

Pender’s close readings are subtle and evocative, and her overarching premise—that the “tools of critical reading” we have inherited from mid-twentieth-century critics “may need to be adapted for reading a new modernism” (171)—is unexceptionable, though I did sometimes find myself questioning her conclusions in the middle ground between the broader argument and the details she uses to support it. The distinction she draws, for example, between the ‘unity’ critics admired in canonical works like The Waste Land and the disunity she insists on in Nightwood is, in my experience, hard to observe when teaching these works; students encountering Eliot’s poem for the first time are as perplexed by its incoherence as its original readers were, whereas in Nightwood they tend to find the underlying story of a toxic break-up quite recognizable, even when conveyed in Barnes’s baroque language. Similarly, I find that the patterns of repeated words in Barnes and Rodker do accrue meanings that both ramify and cohere over the course of their novels, and that the ‘spatial form’ created by these patterns is indeed comparable to the design of Ulysses—even if Joyce tends to embed such cumulative meaning in concrete objects like Bloom’s potato or Stephen’s ashplant, rather than Rodker’s ‘hearts’ or Barnes’s ‘blood.’

A larger question that Pender’s book raises is whether we have any grounds at all for distinguishing good books from bad ones, if we accept that our standards of value are necessarily generated by the books we read and the way we read them. Thus, Pender writes of Insel that the value of its style “is its capacity to challenge habitual links between legitimacy, coherence and literary value” (169). As someone who loves Loy’s poetry but finds Insel thin and deeply flawed, I do wonder if Pender invariably recognizes incoherence as a literary virtue; surely, she too must encounter novels of which she thinks, as I do of Insel, that they simply needed better editing.

Despite my resistance to some of Pender’s claims in this book, I welcome the valuable contribution it makes to modernist studies in prompting us constantly to review and revise our own reading practices as we work to expand our canon(s). Indeed, as Pender reminds us, altering reading practices is itself a way to revise the canon—for example, by reconsidering now-canonized novels in their original serialized form in little magazines. Furthermore, the critical vocabulary Pender develops to account for the novels she analyses here, including terms like “instability, diffuseness, temporality of reading, inconsequence, local momentum” and so on (173) could usefully be applied to many other modernist works, canonical or not, to generate rich new readings. To take just one example, the concept of ‘local momentum’ seems brilliantly applicable to something like Jean Toomer’s Cane, a text so collaged it cannot really be considered a novel at all. As Pender says in her conclusion, “familiar writing can be read again, and differently” (175); in showing us such interesting ways to do that, The New Modernist Novel encourages us, as readers and critics, to keep making it new.