Confirmed at the same time as arrangements for the first Armistice Day were announced, Albert Einstein’s theories indicate that the 1920s were marked not only by stringent temporalities, but also by reactions against them and by alternative ways of conceptualising time. In the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust and others, this often took the form of a retreat from the social world into inner consciousness – into the minds of characters whose memories facilitated narrative structures evading everyday chronology in favour of freely following thoughts from the present into the past. Priorities involved can be compared with the work of recent and contemporary thinkers, including Henri Bergson as well as Einstein. Wyndham Lewis can be seen as an interesting if unreliable commentator on processes and possible influences involved, also providing an instructive counter-example in his own fiction. Modernist fiction itself, however, is far from comprehensively anachronic, but instead includes a strong element of conventional chronology as part of the complex interplay of contemporary temporalities its imagination seeks to contain.
Existential concerns and narrative techniques in the novels of Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Wools and Aldous Huxley