Mortal Form

This chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). It diverges from the critical commonplace that aligns the form of To the Lighthouse with Lily Briscoe's painting and claims instead that the novel unfolds the iconographic implications of a still-life composition. The carefully arranged dish of fruit and a seashell on the Ramsays' table signals the novel's interest in minor, everyday objects and also establishes a vanitas motif—a reminder of mortality and the impermanence of human life. Woolf's still life metamorphoses into various vanitas forms throughout the novel, precipitating later turns of the plot and linking up with the novel's elegiac project. All these vanitas motifs are thus mortal forms that help to determine the shape and flow of the narrative, which is itself a mortal form—hopelessly entangled with human emotion, fated to reckon with mortality, and challenged to mourn the dead. In this way Woolf, like James, requires one to modify the notion that the modernist novel is best approached as a spatial form.

Bad Formalism

This chapter examines a wide range of work by Evelyn Waugh—the novels Vile Bodies (1930) and The Loved One (1948) and the stories “The Balance” (1926) and “Excursion in Reality” (1932)—in order to show how Waugh develops an overarching narrative aesthetic out of his relationship with film. Engaging with the epistemology of the camera eye and the complexities of film viewing, this broader film writing constantly oscillates between two poles of formal extremism, sometimes risking a mechanical, formulaic rigidity and at other times courting a dissolution into chaotic formlessness. Waugh's aesthetics can therefore be described as bad formalism: one side of this dialectic develops too much form, while the other establishes too little. Neither manages just the right amount of formal production to count as “good” modernist formal innovation. Taken together, these extreme forms attest to the extent to which Waugh's work consistently allegorizes the condition of the late modernist writer struggling to survive a changed media ecology dominated by the cinema, as Waugh's satires take the form of—or rather deform—the Künstlerroman, twisting its narrative into a different shape with a less than heroic end.

Plastic Form

This chapter discusses Henry James's The Golden Bowl (1904). It shows how James's sculptural aesthetics, elaborated through a series of ornate metaphors, encompasses not only sculptural objects but also the viewing practices and temporalities associated with sculpture. Such viewing in the round, with its frequent retreading of old ground, creates the surface texture of James's, at times, almost impenetrable prose. Viewing in the round also activates a narrative temporality that renders the novel as a dynamic form to be processed over time, revisited, and reviewed. The Golden Bowl thus helps one to see that novelistic engagement with the fine arts does not produce self-contained, static, spatial form. Instead, shifts in perspective and point of view as James's characters circle sculptural objects—and as readers make their way around the novel—reinvent the novel as an experiment in plastic form.

Epilogue

This epilogue looks at the challenge posed by modernism's constituent forms, addressing the question about form's ability to console. As the proliferating, ever-extending relations of modernism attest, form is exceptionally dynamic in the first half of the twentieth century. As intermediality makes modernism, it also makes modernism vulnerable. But it does not follow that all modernists' formal efforts are attempts to shore fragments against ruins. Modernist form is not nearly so brittle, and there lies some strength in its flexibility: “In its apparent fixity, form is all about change. In its fixity, form is all about the relationship of change to continuance, even when the continuance is itself precarious.” Modernism's forms matter because they demonstrate the possibility of this precarious continuance, even when continuance ultimately fails. Their consolation is not to provide the shelter of a crystalline structure but rather to help one cope with change by giving shape to it.