Roger Ebbatson, Heidegger's Bicycle: Interfering with Victorian Texts (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 2006). x and 172, pp. ISBN 1–84519-105-6

The theoretical premise of Roger Ebbatson’s latest book is designedly a disorientating one: to read works of various canonical Victorian writers – Collins, Hardy, Tennyson, Stevenson, Hopkins, Conan Doyle, - for moments where their imaginative scenarios echo or prefigure the cultural preoccupations of some of the most formidable and austere of twentieth-century Germanic thinkers. Adorno, Heidegger, and Benjamin are the presiding spirits of Heidegger’s Bicycle, but other European figures (in particular Gadamer, Arendt, Derrida and de Man), are less overt but important influences throughout. Such a description could not, though, capture the singular and radical thrust of a book that takes these familiar literary texts not as illustrations of later modes of reading but as exemplary anticipations, works which encompass later conceptual routes or paths, and which are ever-full of all kinds of strange historical intimation. Ebbatson’s aim, in the process, is to hammer open the false identity-effects, ‘the marmoreally institutionalized’ surfaces, of these texts, ‘in a strategy of critical “interference” based mainly in German critical thinking.’ As John Schad puts it in his scintillating foreword, this is a book in which ‘Victorian England’ can turn ‘quite bizarrely, into twentieth-century Germany’.

Accordingly, the reader can appear to find him/herself in a disconcerting looking-glass world, or between worlds: for instance, when ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ is read as a paradigm of a genre of nineteenth-century shipwreck poetry whose proper historical perspective would appear to be located in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer. Ebbatson takes Hopkins’s text as a proleptic kind of double-poem, one that combines a critique of capitalist materialism and modernity with a dwindling, evaporating, sense of spiritual redemption. John Schad probes the furthest historical horizon of this logic, when he suggests that the wrecks of ‘twentieth-century Deutschland’, and ‘the thought of twentieth-century Deutschland’ can be heard in Hopkins’s poem. By such modes of reading texts through and with other texts, as Ebbatson says, ‘the poem or novel becomes alien to itself’, though one could add that it becomes also from one aspect identical with something else entirely, as if it were echoing uncannily in advance. So, ‘Sherlock Holmes’s forensic skills on an English moorside ineluctably call up and foreshadow the evil of the Final Solution’, or ‘the passage-ways, turrets and crypts of Hardy’s Somerset castle [in A Laodicean] implicates seminal isssues of middle-European modernism’. Another chapter deal with Stevenson’s prophetic vision of imperial criminality and disintegration in The Ebb-Tide, and another digs up a homosocial subtextual network – personal and linguistic – in Tennyson’s ‘In the Garden at Swainston.’

Audacious though the book may sound, and is, it is perpetually stimulating, invigorating, and revealing to read, and its untimely procedures certainly fulfill Ebbatson’s aim of making the two traditions of writing mutually illuminating. Ebbatson is also the most congenial companion one could wish for, at once lucid and knowledgeable in his command of a huge range of texts and contexts, and ludic in his awareness of the risks he takes. At times, I confess, I found the densely connective texture of some of the discussions challenging, but Ebbatson’s rhizomatic pursuit of uncanny correspondences and transfers is an index of the book’s openness to the power of literature to confound logic and history, and to mean more than it might seem to say.

John Hughes (University of Gloucestershire)

For more details, see the Sussex University Press website.