SubStance

Pity the academic book reviewer! Inflation in the language of review is akin to what has happened to letters of recommendation: as a colleague recently observed, hiring and promotion committees are reduced to gauging the true warmth of a letter by counting the number of times the word "brilliant" figures in it. When it comes to reviews, few new books, it seems, lack stunning orginality, nor do most escape the prospect of forever changing their fields; a foregone conclusion insists that the author(s) treated will never again be read in the same way. It is therefore with some caution that I take up the challenge of reviewing Elissa Marder's Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake ofModernity(Baudelaire and Flaubert). I do not wish to suggest that the book's originality fails to stun, nor do I imagine that it hasn't already shown signs of modifying the very terms in which we approach the subject(s) at hand. In fact, several years ago, even before Marder's study had appeared in volume form, I witnessed a speaker at a Nineteenth-Century French Studies conference spark an unusually animated discussion merely by citing some of the key points of what was to become chapter four of Dead Time: "Trauma, Addiction, and Temporal Bulimia in Madame Bovary," at the time an article in Diacritics. The problem lies not with Marder's book, but rather with the paucity of a critical vocabulary which offers few avenues for true evaluation.

Dead Time is not, certainly, without its flaws. I would say that it has its fair share of these, and furthermore that they begin with the title(s). It sports not the usual two but rather three: taking the familiar oracularly metaphoric title-colon-explanatory metonymic subtitle formula into even more cumbersome territory by adding a further parenthetical specification, Marder manages to do herself, or rather her potential readers, a disservice. Baudelaire and Flaubert are, it is true, the focus of the book, and these authors do, as it happens, not only serve as pretexts for her discussions of the ways in which modernity and postmodernity have paradoxically been configured around terms unwittingly defined by those progress-spurning authors. The latter are also the focus of careful, nuanced, and (dare I say) remarkably original close readings of some of the most amply discussed texts of these highly canonical writers. But the already crowded titular apparatus of this book in fact leaves out one of its most salient elements: Dead Time, in its first chapters, is at least as much about Walter Benjamin as about either Baudelaire or Flaubert. As Marder herself recognizes in her introduction, the "level of interest [End Page 194] generated by the cultural insights that Benjamin derives from Baudelaire's poetry arguably outstrips general interest in Baudelaire's poems" (6), with the result that she might well have added another line, parenthetical or otherwise, to her title. As she also remarks, this time in an endnote to her first chapter, "my specific project in this chapter is to read Benjamin through Baudelaire rather than Baudelaire through Benjamin" (195 n.18). This seems to be true of the first half of the book as a whole: the substantive introduction and first two chapters (of five) are to a great extent "really" "about" Benjamin. I say this not to quarrel with Marder's definition of her own project but to suggest that it would truly be a shame if the book's readership were to confine itself to scholars of mid-nineteenth-century French literature.

Dead Time is in many ways a model of how theory and close reading can be combined to the enhancement of both.The introduction and first chapter concern themselves primarily with Baudelaire as read through and with Benjamin. Marder not only examines the ways in which the "shock of modern life" both produces and is characterized by an inability to assimilate time itself; she also, in the process of...