Bullock & Stallybrass's Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought

Bullock & Stallybrass's 'Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought'

From Jagger, Mick to Jehovah's Witnesses is a long way except alphabetically. Reading the whole of this large compendium (4000 key terms defined in 400,000 words, 140 contributors toiling for six years) is a curious and chastening experience. It is rather like being trapped inside the head of a well-informed lunatic. Everything is there but nothing relates to anything else. Still, lunatic or not, this is our culture, pluralistic with a vengeance, and most of us would like to come to terms with more of it.

Such guilt-feelings are exploited remorselessly on the cover, which demands in the hectoring tones of a self-improvement manual 'Can you really define axiomatics?' The implication follows that the full panorama of modern thought is to be found within. This, of course, is highly misleading. What we have here is not an inclusive survey of Thought, but of its terminology; or, to put it more bluntly, of its catchphrases and jargon.

The limits of the dictionary are wide; so wide, indeed, that it is hard to see precisely where they have been drawn. The lower limit for 'modern' appears to be 1900, but linkages with the past follow no coherent principle. The artistic movements of Aestheticism and Pre-Raphaelitism both contributed to Art Noveau, but the first is included and the second isn't. As for the upper limit, this must have been the day of printing. No attempt is made to distinguish the intellectual durables from the transiently trendy. Gilbert and George (the 'living sculptures' of a few years back) are there alongside GNP. This policy of determined contemporaneity leads to some peculiar emphases and omissions. The long respectful article on obscure aspects of jazz contrast strongly with the summary justice meted out to Dylan, Bob who is mentioned only in an entry on Greenwich Village. If the utterly trendy Future Shock is found, why not Biofeedback? If Macrobiotics, why not Hare Krishna? In all the talk of Close Encounters, why not UFO? Where are Clone, Neutron Bomb, or Pocket Calculator?

The dictionary has no entries under people's names, but only under the notions or movements they originated, or devices they invented. Certainly this indexing system produces some grimly apposite effects ('Brezhnev: see under Forced Labour') but it also has two evil consequences. The first is that it panders to the originators of fashionable cliches at the expense of more systematic figures. Thus, so expert a cultural diagnostician as George Steiner, whose work is indubitably part of modern thought, is not mentioned even in passing precisely because he is too meticulous in his language to employ capsule phrases. This tendency reaches the height of absurdity when we read the entry on a pretentious neologism, Geneticism, coined by P.B. Medawar, only to discover at the end that the entry is written by - Medawar!

The second consequence is that there are entries on creative artists only when they have invented critical phrases or (a totally arbitrary rule, this) when their names have been transformed into an adjective or noun. Lawrentian and Joycean at least bring to notice that these writers have influence, and are even items in, modern thought; but there is no such entry as Yeatsian. Indeed, the question of whether artists may be said to have contributed to modern thought has obviously not been thought out by the editors (it is mentioned in the preface, but immediately side-stepped). Yet by what logic can Korea be judged to be a key item of thought and the label denied Eliot's Waste Land?

The editors' main task in coordinating the work of many hands must be to impose some consistency in the level at which the information is pitched. There are failures here: the contributor of Vietnam which starts 'a country in SE Asia' must have someone incurious in mind. Those biologists who already know what a Pheridophyte is are unlikely to find useful the rather basic article Alternations of Generations in which it occurs. There is a very silly article on Culture, admittedly a difficult concept, but not more so than Truth, and Anthony Quinton takes that on in half a column of extraordinary compression and lucidity.

Whatever the dictionary's failings as an informational tool, it can be a great source of amusement to the browser. Christianity, for instance, rates 13 lines; Inflation nearly ten times that, which must tell us something of their relative importance in our cultural psyche. It might be objected that Christianity is not a Thought of contemporary origin, but then neither is Marxism, and that rates two and a half columns.

Chopping up 'Thought' into handy units and christening them 'key terms' is supplying a substitute for thought, not an adjunct to it. For all that, or (to be cynical) because of it, this work is already a bestseller in the university bookshops.