Responses to Modernity

Responses to Modernity collects nineteen reviews and essays that the late Joseph Frank originally published between 1954 and 2007. To say that this volume warrants attention because its chapters are always insightful, often engaging, refreshingly lucid, and sometimes quite exceptional is to tell the comparatist nothing about a volume of Frank's work that she will not know in advance. A useful evaluation therefore depends in part on the question of whether it offers something more than the sum of its sometimes-disparate parts.To a certain extent, the division of the included writings into three categories suggests an organizational logic. The first section of the book, “France,” includes pieces on Paul Valéry, Jacques Maritain, Albert Camus, André Malraux, Yves Bonnefoy, Jean Racine, Nicola Chiaromonte, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as a more general consideration of French intellectuals between the wars (in a 1984 review of Herbert Lottman's The Left Bank). Frank suggests at one point, with reference to the degree of international political commitment and awareness among “French intellectuals before 1930,” that any critical project will fail if its arguments tend “to blur rather than to illuminate” the complexities and subtleties of European politics and intellectual attitudes during the twentieth century (97). No such accusations could be brought against Frank here, for one cumulative effect of the essays on French literature is a sense of deep familiarity with the numerous and not always compatible concerns of the nation's thinkers, particularly as they shaped or were shaped by what he calls, in his introductory remarks, “the major issues of our time, beginning with the Russian Revolution, the rise of Fascism, and the problems arising in the aftermath of the Second World War” (1). Frank's long experience as a student and critic of literature in relation to the cultural climate (he mentions hearing Malraux “speak in New York during a tour in 1937”) is supplemented by his sometimes close relations with the subjects of his remarks: Bonnefoy is “an old and dear friend,” and Chiaromonte “an old friend” (45, 61, 86). For these reasons, Frank's pieces offer something of a blend of literary criticism, political reflection, and memoir that not only avoids the sort of oversimplifications that can plague intellectual histories, but allows for a rare fullness in authorial portraits, from which emerge the enthusiasms and shortcomings not only of the works but also of the men who stand behind them.The second, and shortest, section of the text offers a title that promises a more directly comparative approach, “Germany and Romania.” The pieces on German writers, including Ernst Juenger, Gottfried Benn, and Erich Kahler, are impassioned commentaries that often slide into judgments of political conviction—not entirely inappropriate for remarks on figures working during or in the wake of the Second World War. Again, readers will benefit from Frank's personal connections with some of his subjects, as Kahler is read in part as “the man as I came to know him in his later years” (133). The greatest disappointment of Frank's book is the brevity of his remarks on Romanian intellectuals. As with the Germans, his consideration of Mircea Eliade, E. M. Cioran, and Eugène Ionesco is shaped in part by their political sympathies, in this case especially with regard to Antonescu and the Iron Guard. While the arguments concerning German writers are reinforced by Frank's expertise with regard to Germany's literary and intellectual traditions, the needed context for the remarks on Romanian authors could be more fully developed. That they are all treated in the space of one essay does little to help matters. This shortcoming is doubtless due to the fact that this volume collects earlier publications, but readers to whom the Romanian tradition is foreign may not find this book much help. The result disappoints in two ways: the comparison between German and Romanian thinkers emerges less fully than one would wish, and one must reach to other authors for the needed background. The erudition on this front of a Virgil Nemoianu or Mihai Spariosu would be welcome.The final section of Frank's book is less clearly integrated with the first two than they are with each other. While the vicissitudes of political commitments shape the first two sections of Responses to Modernity, the sociopolitical cedes more to the aesthetic in the final section, “Critics and Criticism.” This is not to say that the pieces here—on T. S. Eliot, theories and histories of the novel, and R. P. Blackmur—are therefore a disappointment, for this is perhaps the most illuminating part of the whole. Here, we see Frank assessing other critics in terms that it is hard to avoid applying to his own work in this volume. He finds Eliot's To Criticize the Critic “a mixed bag of lectures on literary and socio-cultural topics,” and Blackmur the author of a “considerable corpus of writings that he turned out over the years with unremitting regularity” (157, 177). Frank's strongest praise is reserved for moments of the same kind of thoughtful humanism he practices himself.As this brief evaluative overview of chapters makes evident, the organization of Responses to Modernity dictates some relation among its parts. More valuable, however, might be a reading that ignores the given arrangement in preference for alternate schemas, ones that adopt the organizational logic of questions or problems rather than that of nationality. Such a reading could mingle the encounters with different national literatures and intersperse as well the grapplings with particular critical values, doubtless foregrounding certain connections that otherwise remain subordinate. As one instance, consider the degree to which the 1954 pieces concerned with politically conflicted German authors would be enriched by closer pairings with those on such anti-Fascist Frenchmen as Malraux or, alternately, the anti-Semitism of Racine. Likewise, I am tempted to propose a chronological reading, for such an approach would allow one to trace the development of Frank's critical acumen. In this manner, the text could serve as something of a portrait of the critic, demonstrating for others how the literary meditations of a careful reader and exceptional writer can move with few missteps from youthful enthusiasms to experienced reflections across the decades of a long and distinguished career.Responses to Modernity offers no single piece equal to “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” nor does it approach the magisterial (how rarely does one feel comfortable using this word?) rank of the Dostoevsky biography. It should nevertheless be read by any interested in twentieth-century European literature, and all seeking a model for consistently humane literary study

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