Testimony on Trial: Conrad, James, and the Contest for Modernism by Brian Artese (review)

ARTESE, BRIAN. Testimony on Trial: Conrad, James, and the Contest for Modernism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. 206 pp. $45.00. This book grew out of a Northwestern University dissertation that produced two good articles published by major journals. One of these, on Conrad's disdain for journalism, appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2003, and the other, on James's aversion to sentimentalism, won the Leon Edel Prize for younger scholars and was published by the Henry James Review in 2006. These pieces, reprinted almost verbatim in Brian Artese's book, are interesting, competent works of scholarship and criticism that make small but not insignificant contributions to the conversations about these authors. That is a better result than most dissertations can claim, but the pressure to turn a dissertation into a book is almost irresistible these days (despite cutbacks in university press lists that make this harder and harder to do), and so it is understandable that Artese wanted more than his articles. This was, however, an ill-advised decision. Flaws in his argument that are not especially visible in the articles become magnified in the attempt to provide a theoretical justification for the project, and the need to claim a place in the critical debates results in excessive, implausible assertions about its implications. The clotted, opaque prose of the ten-page introduction is painful reading because the need to theorize results in obscure, abstract formulations, passive constructions, and jargony metaphors (e.g., Conrad's "definitively modernist narrative technique is readily conceived as saturating the deep weave of a given work with any and all colonialist ideologies that modernism has been said to instantiate" [5]). The articles make measured arguments and offer interesting reports about little-noticed texts, but the introduction gets carried away with sweeping claims. His book will correct the "erroneous structural premises" of narratology, for example, that have plagued literary criticism "from Marxism to cosmopolitanism, new historicism to 'new modernism'" (6). Further, to justify the key term in his title, Artese feels compelled to assert that "the very intelligibility of the novel as a cultural artefact is dependent on the question of testimony" (10). Really? Does ignoring "testimony" make the entire genre "unintelligible"? These excesses are no doubt evidence of the pressure younger scholars feel to make an "intervention" that will radically overturn the field. Artese takes on Fredric Jameson, Gerard Genette, Michael McKeon, and Shoshana Felman, among others, and attempts to clear up lamentable confusions caused by their mistakes. This is more than a first book on two novelists can or needs to accomplish. The articles are more persuasive because their ambitions are more modest--limited, constructive contributions to ongoing conversations that aren't so grievously wrong-headed that they need someone to "intervene" and set them back on course. …