AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MODERNIST NOVEL

This book is intended as an introduction to the modernist novel, primarily for the students and scholars of the English language and literature. Four major novelists – Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf – have been chosen to exemplify the stylistic features, aesthetic preoccupations and thematic concerns of the works of fiction written in English in the early decades of the twentieth century. The methodological principle used in this study is multilevel. First, these four authors are analysed by referring to their essays, philosophical treatises, prefaces to their novels and other nonfictional works where they define their poetics and their artistic goals in their own terms. After this, since form is such a major concern of the modernist novel, formal innovations and narrative strategies of each of these authors are discussed at some length. Finally, a single novel is chosen to represent each author, and it is analysed in detail. Heart of Darkness, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Mrs Dalloway are widely recognized within the oeuvre of these novelists as some of their greatest artistic achievements. Lawrence’s novella St Mawr is a lesser-known work; however, I would argue that F. R. Leavis’s praise of this short piece as “an astonishing work of genius” still stands. The same as with the other three novels, its inclusion in the study is justified by the valuable insights it provides about the characteristics of modernist fiction and modernist art in general.

Stream of Consciousness

Few terms are more associated with the innovations of modernist fiction—and Virginia Woolf’s novels in particular—than ‘stream of consciousness’, yet the contours of the term often remain vague. This chapter argues that Woolf makes distinctive contributions to the genre that have been underrecognized both because of its gendered association with formlessness, and because stream of consciousness is often simply conflated with interior monologue, which she mostly did not use. Instead, Woolf’s contributions include her use of free indirect discourse to overcome the egotism of the first person, experiments with rendering collective streams of consciousness in Between the Acts, and finally, her use of analogies to evoke the feeling of thinking, which also illuminates unappreciated links to William James, the psychologist who coined the term together, Woolf’s strategies refute the charge of intense individualism that is often levied at stream-of-consciousness writing.

Epiphanic and Everyday Modernisms

The threat to conventional realist pace posed by the lyricism of something like epiphany is the central conflict of this chapter. But it begins by acknowledging another phenomenon: from Flaubert to Hemingway, there has emerged a mode of narration that makes little distinction between scene and summary and also makes little distinction between episodes. Call it interepisodic pacing, a flat refusal to amplify scenes in the service of a dramatic mandate. But then there is Joyce, who begins his career with famously amplified moments of epiphany and then desacralizes them into fleeting moments of consciousness. Between those moments and between the everyday interepisodic events of modernist fiction, a new rhythm and a new pace takes shape. One may see it in Woolf above all. Its deconstruction is envisioned by Mann.

The Burial of the Dead in Mann’s The Magic Mountain

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, readers of modernist literature have often been reminded of the flu epidemic of 1918-1920. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) anatomizes pre-war bourgeois society as represented by the inmates of a tuberculosis asylum in Davos, Switzerland. The novel typifies a concern in modernist fiction with the proper rites for the burial of the dead, which I explored in an earlier study, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. This essay argues that that Mann sees the novel, as a genre, as having a particular ability to represent the process of mourning because of its powers of ironic distancing: it can represent both the public ritual of the funeral service and the private thoughts of the mourner, which may or may not accord with official sentiment. More generally, the modern novel shows how we project our own desires and fears onto the dead.