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Review Author(s): Paul Bishop Review by: Paul Bishop Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 102, No. 2 (Apr., 2007), pp. 590-591Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20467398Accessed: 30-03-2015 07:27 UTC

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590 Reviews

their viewers to think of the Nazis, Hillman suggests that, when they appear in German films of the I970S and early i980s, the pieces are always marked by the legacy of the Third Reich. The attempts of Syberberg and Kluge to reconnect with the

German cultural tradition abused for propaganda purposes are thus always inhibited by the historical associations they cannot shake off, and so, although it is essential to rehabilitate German culture, in the 1970s this was 'still historically impossible' (p. 8 i).

Hillman has found some interesting information about the music used in the films he discusses, spotting, for instance, that the music played on the glockenspiel in the opening sequence of Herzog's Woyzeck is an arrangement of the second movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 26, Op. 8ia, 'Les Adieux'. His unpacking of cultural resonances can also be illuminating. For instance, he argues that when, in the film In a Year with Thirteen Moons, which tells the story of the transsexual Erwin/Elvira, Fassbinder combines Mahler's Fifth Symphony with images of an exaggeratedly ugly Frankfurt, it is an ironic comment on Visconti's more picturesque combination of Mahler, Venice, and the non-heterosexual in Death in Venice. In general, however, the book is disappointing because its method does not fit the argument it hopes to

make. It wants to elucidate cultural resonances, but it does not offer a differentiated, contextualizing account of the way German films during and since the Third Reich deployed existing pieces of classical music. In fact, the book has surprisingly little to say about German culture prior to, or contemporary with, the films from the I970s and I980s that it discusses in detail. One consequence of this virtual absence of an account of context is that the argument depends on a very simplistic version of propaganda during the Third Reich, assuming that culture under the Nazis means only Beethoven's Ninth Symphony being performed on Hitler's birthday. It does not seem useful to assume that culture under the Nazis was uniform or synonymous only with the larger spectacles, nor that the habits and assumptions manipulated during the Third Reich are not to be found before I933 or after I945. A brief comment

made by Hillman suggests a different path. He mentions a film from the Nazi era, Detlev Sierck/Douglas Sirk's Final Chord (I936), which features a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and does not easily fit the model of propaganda he otherwise employs. To investigate how Beethoven is used in Sierck's film and to compare this treatment with that of later films, or with the use of music by other composers in films of the Third Reich, such as that of Bach in Carl Fr6hlich's Heimat (I938) or in Traugott Muller's Friedemann Bach (I941), might establish a framework that would also have allowed Hillman to make better sense of his material. As it is, the chapter on Herzog can establish only that Herzog uses Wagner in a different way from Syberberg, but has no way of understanding this difference because the conceptual framework is so limited, and if a film-maker is not supposedly directly grappling with the legacy of concerts for the Fiihrer, Hillman has little to say.

WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD BEN MORGAN

Remapping Reality: Chaos and Creativity in Science and Literature (Goethe Nietzsche- Grass). By JOHN A. MCCARTHY. (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 97) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2oo6. 373 pp. ?75; $94. ISBN 978-90-420-I8I8-I.

The cover artwork of Remapping Reality depicts an egg, a mythical symbol of the 'embryonic source of life' and of 'genetic coding and promise of future development', fracturing in the embrace of a serpent, 'Biblical icon of forbidden knowledge' and 'malleable phallic symbol', the 'harbinger of change'. 'Do all principles of reality ul timately derive from the unity of opposites-convergence and divergence, inner and

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MLR, I02.2, 2007 59I

outer spaces, matter (egg) and mind (serpent=knowledge)?' asks John A. McCarthy in the frontmatter-such is the order of question with which the reader is confronted before reaching even the first chapter.

Chaos-creativity-science--literature: Remapping Reality is an avowedly inter disciplinary work, and McCarthy adopts the 'biophilia hypothesis' ('the recurrent need of modern urban humans to return to nature') as a sign of 'the interconnect edness of the so-called two cultures of science and the humanities', 'the biological basis of behavior and of human consciousness-matter and mind' (p. 26). To these McCarthy adds a 'third culture', arising out of the interaction of the other two (pp. 29, 323, 33I). A metaphor for the tension of mind and matter is 'the seemingly chaotic yet regulated whirl of movement deep within the molecular structure and organization of our bodies and of the universe' (p. 3 I), and McCarthy's book shares this principle of implicit regulation amid seeming chaos. Part I is a whirl of scientific information, where the talk is of 'metathinking' and string theory, hypercycles and cytoskeletons, solitons and wave-packets, mimesis and Mandelbrot sets, and much else. Amid this scientific discourse, the names of Goethe and Schiller, Leibniz and Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche are some of the more familiar ones to emerge in the discussion, alongside those of George Smoot, Johannes von Buttlar, and Bernulf Kanitscheider (figures associated with the 'new physics' and contemporary theories of creativity).

Yet 'chaos is a system' (p. 2I): our immersion in such 'complementaristic', or 'holistic', thinking serves to prepare us for McCarthy's account of 'linkages previ ously unsuspected' (p. 7I) between three major works of literature: Goethe's Faust, Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra, and Grass's Die Blechtrommel. Faust, McCarthy argues, is 'a kind of novel of the universe, one marked by large-scale, nonlinear interac tion in the mapping of reality' (p. I 74), and an anticipation of Nietzsche's world-view (P. 229). Zarathustra promotes and enacts Nietzsche's conception of philosophy as dance, an exercise in 'strategies of iteration and perspectival shifts in the naming of chaos' (p. 264). And, 'full of the paradoxes and grotesqueness of an anchorless era' (p. 267), Die Blechtrommel is a novel in which 'the structure of time and space',

McCarthy suggests, 'bears an uncanny resemblance to the function of the genetic code' (p. 317). The similarity of all three works is said to reside in 'their creative interweaving of history and myth into a new seamless fabric of momentous import'; each can be seen as an attempt 'at consilience, at representing a new "integral cultural epoch" that began to emerge about three hundred years ago' (p. 266). Within the scope of a short review, it is hard to do justice to the vivacity and ef

fervescence of McCarthy's study. At the end the reader will be exhausted, exhilarated, and-especially if she is a Goethe, Nietzsche, or Grass specialist-sorely provoked. The net is cast broadly-'too broadly, some readers will undoubtedly conclude'-yet McCarthy, citing Emerson's 'Circles' and Goethe's Farbenlehre, insists his own work is 'all about horizons, about perceiving what presents itself on those horizons, and about the inevitable intrusion of the perceiving eye into the reality being explored' (p. 324). Books are, according to Lessing,fermenta cognitionis, 'mental energy spewed out and setting other minds on fire' (p. 258). Readers should take appropriate pre cautions when reading this book, for they might just find their enthusiasm set alight.

UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW PAUL BISHOP

Geschichte(n) erzahlen: Konstruktionen von Vergangenheit in literarischen Werken deutschsprachiger Autorinnen seit dem i8. Yahrhundert. Ed. by MARIANNE HENN, IRMELA VON DER LiUHE, and ANITA RUNGE. Gottingen: Wallstein. 2005. 303 pp.

E28. ISBN 978-3-89244-8I3-6. This collection of papers has resulted from a conference held at the University of G6ttingen in 2002. It seeks to make a new contribution to the growing body of re

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Article Contentsp. 590p. 591

Issue Table of ContentsThe Modern Language Review, Vol. 102, No. 2 (Apr., 2007) pp. i-x, 311-620Front MatterThe Secret Life of the Della Cruscan Sonnet: William Gifford's "Baviad" and "Maeviad" [pp. 311-325]Carlyle through Nietzsche: Reading "Sartor Resartus" [pp. 326-340]'Laughing at the laugh': Unhappy Consciousness in Nathanael West's "The Dream Life of Balso Snell" [pp. 341-362]Synonymity and Semantic Variability in Medieval French and Middle English [pp. 363-380]Unpicking Female Exemplarity; Or, the Usefulness of Body Stories: Reassessing Female Communal Identity in Two Early Modern French Texts [pp. 381-396]Ariosto the Traveller [pp. 397-409]Paradigms of Peripheral Modernity in Lorca and Yeats [pp. 410-426]In the Bard's Shadow: Shakespearian Affinities as an Obstacle to the Reception of Schiller's Plays in Britain, 1945-2005 [pp. 427-439]'Bloss aus lemberg gebrtig': Detlev Spinell, the Austrian Jewish Aesthete in Thomas Mann's "Tristan" [pp. 440-450]Russian Orthodoxy: A User's Manual. Church Advice Literature as a Reflection of Present-Day Reality [pp. 451-465]ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 466-466]Review: untitled [pp. 467-468]Review: untitled [pp. 468-469]Review: untitled [pp. 469-470]Review: untitled [pp. 470-471]Review: untitled [pp. 471-472]Review: untitled [pp. 472-473]Review: untitled [pp. 473-475]Review: untitled [pp. 475-476]Review: untitled [pp. 476-477]Review: untitled [pp. 477-478]Review: untitled [pp. 478-479]Review: untitled [pp. 479-480]Review: untitled [pp. 480-481]Review: untitled [pp. 481-482]Review: untitled [pp. 482-483]Review: untitled [pp. 483-484]Review: untitled [pp. 484-485]Review: untitled [pp. 485-486]Review: untitled [pp. 486-487]Review: untitled [pp. 487-488]Review: untitled [pp. 488-489]Review: untitled [pp. 489-490]Review: untitled [pp. 490-491]Review: untitled [pp. 491-492]Review: untitled [pp. 492-493]Review: untitled [pp. 494-495]Review: untitled [pp. 495-496]Review: untitled [pp. 496-497]Review: untitled [pp. 497-498]Review: untitled [pp. 498-499]Review: untitled [pp. 499-500]Review: untitled [pp. 500-502]Review: untitled [pp. 502-503]Review: untitled [pp. 503-504]Review: untitled [pp. 504-505]Review: untitled [pp. 505-506]Review: untitled [pp. 506-507]Review: untitled [pp. 507-508]Review: untitled [pp. 508-509]Review: untitled [pp. 509-509]Review: untitled [pp. 510-510]Review: untitled [pp. 511-511]Review: untitled [pp. 511-512]Review: untitled [pp. 512-513]Review: untitled [pp. 513-514]Review: untitled [pp. 514-515]Review: untitled [pp. 515-516]Review: untitled [pp. 516-517]Review: untitled [pp. 517-518]Review: untitled [pp. 518-519]Review: untitled [pp. 519-520]Review: untitled [pp. 520-521]Review: untitled [pp. 521-522]Review: untitled [pp. 522-523]Review: untitled [pp. 523-524]Review: untitled [pp. 524-526]Review: untitled [pp. 526-527]Review: untitled [pp. 527-528]Review: untitled [pp. 528-529]Review: untitled [pp. 529-530]Review: untitled [pp. 530-531]Review: untitled [pp. 531-532]Review: untitled [pp. 532-533]Review: untitled [pp. 533-534]Review: untitled [pp. 534-535]Review: untitled [pp. 536-537]Review: untitled [pp. 537-538]Review: untitled [pp. 538-540]Review: untitled [pp. 540-541]Review: untitled [pp. 541-545]Review: untitled [pp. 545-546]Review: untitled [pp. 546-547]Review: untitled [pp. 547-547]Review: untitled [pp. 548-549]Review: untitled [pp. 549-550]Review: untitled [pp. 550-551]Review: untitled [pp. 551-552]Review: untitled [pp. 552-553]Review: untitled [pp. 553-555]Review: untitled [pp. 555-556]Review: untitled [pp. 556-557]Review: untitled [pp. 558-560]Review: untitled [pp. 560-561]Review: untitled [pp. 562-563]Review: untitled [pp. 563-564]Review: untitled [pp. 564-565]Review: untitled [pp. 565-567]Review: untitled [pp. 567-568]Review: untitled [pp. 568-569]Review: untitled [pp. 569-570]Review: untitled [pp. 570-571]Review: untitled [pp. 571-572]Review: untitled [pp. 572-573]Review: untitled [pp. 573-574]Review: untitled [pp. 574-576]Review: untitled [pp. 576-577]Review: untitled [pp. 577-579]Review: untitled [pp. 579-580]Review: untitled [pp. 580-581]Review: untitled [pp. 581-582]Review: untitled [pp. 582-583]Review: untitled [pp. 583-584]Review: untitled [pp. 584-585]Review: untitled [pp. 585-586]Review: untitled [pp. 587-588]Review: untitled [pp. 588-589]Review: untitled [pp. 589-590]Review: untitled [pp. 590-591]Review: untitled [pp. 591-592]Review: untitled [pp. 592-594]Review: untitled [pp. 594-596]Review: untitled [pp. 596-597]Review: untitled [pp. 597-598]Review: untitled [pp. 598-599]Review: untitled [pp. 599-600]Review: untitled [pp. 600-602]Review: untitled [pp. 602-603]Review: untitled [pp. 603-604]Review: untitled [pp. 604-606]Review: untitled [pp. 606-607]Review: untitled [pp. 607-608]Review: untitled [pp. 608-609]Review: untitled [pp. 609-610]Review: untitled [pp. 610-612]Review: untitled [pp. 612-613]Review: untitled [pp. 613-614]Review: untitled [pp. 614-616]Review: untitled [pp. 616-617]Review: untitled [pp. 617-618]

Abstracts [pp. 619-620]Back Matter