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Perhaps one of modernism’s ironies of ironies is that while
celebrating discontinuity and fragmentation, it engendered a
discourse of grand coherence and totality, emulating in
monumentality the protean breadth of the modernist
aspiration for perfection. Building on Adorno’s negative
dialectics and the seminal meta-texts of modernism,
Modernism and Coherence sets out to formulate a negative
aesthetics posited as the artwork’s ”resistance to the
imposition of meaning” (12). In close readings of both
poetic texts and the poetics of Anglo-American modernism,
Durão embarks upon a radical interrogation of high theory
and artistic truth, in an attempt to recuperate the
authority of the text against the backdrop of the lavish
proliferation of signs in the society of the visual (10). In
contradistinction with poetic negativity, negative
aesthetics is thus foregrounded as the self-authorising,
irreducible principle that empowers works of art to elude
conceptualisation, and restore their illocutionary force.
Certainly one of the greatest merits of the study
lies in the effort to revalorise the experiential and
referential constitutive of the hermeneutic function in the
face of the invasive semiotic overproduction in capitalism.
Informed by a salient consideration of Christoph Menke’s
critique of the negative aesthetic of Adorno and Derrida,
Durão undertakes the daunting task of grappling with the
commodification of acts of language to expose the illusion
behind the weight of the discourse on gestures, as in
themselves subject to reification, tending “to be solidified
by time and institutions into monuments” (10).
In the final analysis, Modernism and Coherence
articulates itself as an attempt “to salvage the
signifier ‘literature’ as something greater than what is
said about it” (10). In so doing it raises unsettling
questions about the legitimacy, indeed the limits, of the
theoretical enquiry, for the larger part taken for granted
since the ‘theoretical turn’. Durão’s book offers a
long-overdue evaluation of the dissemination of Theory into
theories of variegated genealogies, gradually ossified into
reading methodologies. Amid the inflation of the
meta-languages in circulation, theory defeats its own
purpose, its status becoming subject to various modes of
derivativeness. Although by implication and outside the main
scope of the investigation, Durão’s theses on negative
aesthetics break through at the level of dispelling the
infallible aura of theory as a body of knowledges governing
the process of reading, calling attention to the dangers in
the wholesale, indiscriminate adoption of theory as a set of
“congealed prototypes” pre-empting the reading experience.
The return to a defining moment of artistic truth is not
confined however to a relapse into the debate on the primacy
of the literary text versus the ‘secondariness’ of the
critical/theoretical act. Rather, Durão envisions an ethical
stance that continues to distinguish between the truth in
reading and the purpose of theorising:
That Theory
should only come post-factum, almost as a consequence of
what happened in reading, is but a consequence of the
primacy of experience, a borderline concept that has a long
philosophical and sociological tradition behind itself in
German speaking countries, starting with Kant and informing
the whole idealism. (12)
In insightful readings of Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost,
Durão refines Harold Bloom’s notion of the anxiety of
influence, illustrating the capacity of strong works to
welcome and withstand in one and the same gesture the
“pressure of reality” (80), pointing to what he sees as the
disparities between the ingenious complexities of
temporality in Bloom’s theoretical construct and the
simplifying linear structuring of his textual
interpretations.
Undoubtedly the chapter that marks the most
significant contribution of the study, is that devoted to
Ulysses, a lucid and scintillating critique of the
relativism, politicisation and textual rhetoric heaped upon
the Joycean text by generations of exegetes, critical
writers and adept thinkers. Exemplary for the anxiety
exerted by the great books of modernism, the catalyst of
“Joyce as a field” (118), this icon of classic modernity, in
its rare capacity for accommodating virtually every
known theoretical fashion, would seem to endorse the precept
that a text can be made to mean anything. In analysing what
he identifies as four figures of coherence performed by
Ulysses as “a small laboratory of Theory” (118), Durão
demonstrates that, permeable, at times congenial to
reception models as unlikely as subalternity and trauma
theory though it may be, the novel does foreground its own
pattern of significance. Among the astute statements Durão
advances here, is his dismissal of the reader-response
cliché about the enriching of literary works with every
newly added interpretive layer, showing how hypertrophic
inscriptions can drain the life of a text, producing
impoverishing effects. It follows with refreshing clarity
that texts make sense at different levels of coherence,
independent of all manner of imposed meanings, else the
contemporary reader would be contemplating the enormity of
the spectacle of meaning multiplying itself ad infinitum
parodically represented in postmodern narratives.
As well as providing an invaluable reconsideration
of posthumanities textual scholarship, Durão’s enquiries
heighten the awareness of negativity as precluding total
closure, deploring the disjunction between overarching
arguments and close readings, and in the process making a
convincing case for the need to rethink the sovereignty of
art. Ultimately, Modernism and Coherence is a major
contribution to the philosophical dimension of modern
theory, doing justice to both Adorno’s aesthetic
theory and the modernist Anglo-American canon, speaking with
authority, charisma and eloquence, in an endeavour to
deliver literary discourse from a despotic “empire of
semiotic noise” (9).
ADRIANA NEAGU
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca |
