Modernist Literature

Modernist Literature MMML_PR.inddML_PR.indd i 110/12/20060/12/2006 99:27:03:27:03 AAMM To my students, and to Amanda and Laura MMML_PR.inddML_PR.indd iiii 110/12/20060/12/2006 99:27:03:27:03 AAMM Modernist Literature Challenging Fictions Vicki Mahaffey MMML_PR.inddML_PR.indd iiiiii 110/12/20060/12/2006 99:27:03:27:03 AAMM © 2007 by Vicki Mahaffey BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Vicki Mahaffey to be identifi ed as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2007 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mahaffey, Vicki. Modernist literature : challenging fi ctions / Vicki Mahaffey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-631-21306-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-631-21306-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-631-21307-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-631-21307-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English fi ction—20th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. American fi c t i o n — 2 0 t h c e n t u r y — H i story and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. Modernism (Literature)—English-speaking countries. 4. Fiction—Appreciation—English-speaking countries. 5. Books and reading—English-speaking countries. 6. Authors and readers. 7. Reader-response criticism. I. Title. PR888.M63M35 2007 823′.91209113—dc22 2006022479 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 12 on 13.5 pt Perpetua by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd, Hong Kong Printed and bound in Singapore by Markono Print Media Pte Ltd The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com MMML_PR.inddML_PR.indd iivv 110/12/20060/12/2006 99:27:03:27:03 AAMM Contents Preface vi Acknowledgments xx Part I: Introduction 1 1 Why Read Challenging Literature? 3 Part II: Readings 71 2 Partnering: Holmes and Watson, Author and Reader, Lover and Loved, Man and Wife 73 3 Window Painting: The Art of Blocking Understanding 124 4 Watchman, What of the Night? 169 Conclusion 200 Notes 203 Bibliography 226 Index 231 MMML_PR.inddML_PR.indd v 110/12/20060/12/2006 99:27:19:27:19 AAMM Preface In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus teaches a class on Roman history and Milton’s “Lycidas” on the morning of June 16, 1904. His headmaster predicts that Stephen won’t stay long at the school, remark- ing that he was not born to be a teacher. Stephen agrees, calling himself “a learner rather.”1 This book is addressed to learners, of all ages and backgrounds. Before you begin it, I would encourage you to examine your reaction to the question this book raises: is it important to challenge fi ctions and to be challenged by them in turn? Emerson once wrote, “The secret of Genius is to suffer no fi ction to exist for us.”2 To have a more rewarding literary experience, we must fi rst come to terms with common fi ctions that circulate about literature, all of which contain some truth, but that truth can be misleading because it is incomplete and contingent upon circumstance. Is fi ction primarily entertainment? Does it refl ect the world in which it was produced? Is it created by larger-than-life geniuses who differ in kind as well as degree from the rest of us? Or are authors just social misfi ts who wrote because they were ill suited for more materially productive pursuits? Was the diffi - culty of modern literature designed to make readers feel under educated and inadequate?3 Or does formidable textual terrain promise to renew a reader’s curiosity and intellectual energy? As a reader, do you typically read to fi nd confi rmation of what you already know or to destabilize that knowledge by discovering its limits – or both? If I ask you to scrutinize your own attitudes toward the subject, it seems only fair that I disclose my own. The investment of an author in her subject is sometimes obscured by the scholarly objectivity that aca- MMML_PR.inddML_PR.indd vvii 110/12/20060/12/2006 99:27:49:27:49 AAMM demics strive to project; however, it should be clear that anyone who takes the trouble to learn very much about a topic must have an emo- tional as well as an intellectual investment in it. My commitment to modernist literature arose out of a passionate interest in innovation and learning, and a conviction that modernism embodies and fosters a process of constant self-reinvention that, while diffi cult at the outset, is immensely rewarding in the end. The question to be answered is one proposed in Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love”: “Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?” 4 Modernist literature has defi ned learning in unconventional ways, ways that go beyond those of even the greatest educational institutions. Virginia Woolf, writing on the eve of World War II, asked her readers to concede that “education, the fi nest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it”; rather than “teaching the educated generos- ity and magnanimity, [education] makes them on the contrary so anxious to keep their possessions . in their own hands, that they will use not force but much subtler methods than force when they are asked to share them.” And she asks, “are not force and possessiveness very closely connected with war? Of what use then is a university education in infl uencing people to prevent war?” She proposes that what is needed is a new kind of education that is both experimental and adventurous, that teaches “the arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people’s lives and minds.”5 Modernist literature emerged out of this drive for a freer, less socially conservative form of education. Modernist literature, as I am defi ning it, consists of works written between 1890 and 1940 that trace or inspire what Wallace Stevens in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction calls “freshness of transformation” in per- ception, thought, and feeling.6 Such works stimulate engaged readers to interpret more independently, more sensually, more thoughtfully, more joyfully, less deferentially. In this sense, modernist literature is pedagogi- cal, but without the pretentiousness or superiority associated with pedagogues; it is concrete, experiential, and sometimes disorienting because it operates according to different laws than the ones that most contemporary readers unconsciously expect to govern literary works. Sometimes modernist literary “instruction” begins with the disap- pearance of a textual crutch, such as the omniscient and trustworthy narrator upon whom we rely for guidance through a textual inferno; when, unlike Dante, we lack a Virgil (or narrator) to guide us through Preface vii MMML_PR.inddML_PR.indd vviiii 110/12/20060/12/2006 99:27:49:27:49 AAMM what is unfamiliar, we have to pay more concentrated attention to style, sound, imagery, and form in order to fl esh out and assemble those pat- terns we call “meaning.” Some works offer a different kind of guide, such as Sherlock Holmes, who teaches us to solve puzzles through his example, while exhorting us to sharpen our powers of observation, challenge our initial assumptions, and delay the process of drawing conclusions. In still other instances, we are encouraged to identify with unexpected heroes: a Jew in Dublin; a young black woman in Their Eyes Were Watching God; a hermaphrodite – the Greek prophet Tiresias – who blindly observes the modern war-torn world in The Waste Land. Modernist literature instructs readers in still another way: because it is attuned to the movements of the unconscious mind as well as to con- scious thoughts and intentions, it helps readers learn to hear the undertones of language as well as its conventionally agreed-upon mean- ings. As Finnegans Wake warns, working from an analogy between reading and watching a fi lm, “if you are looking for the bilder [a word that when pronounced evokes the English word “builder,” but when spelled desig- nates the German word for “pictures”] deep your ear on the movietone!”7 The phrase suggests that if you want to get a visual image of what you read (“bilder”), or if you want to hear the voice of the author (the “builder”), you must pay attention not just to what words mean, but more importantly to the way they sound and to what those sounds suggest. Of course, good literature has always engaged different levels of meaning, but the innovations produced by modernist writers work to change the reader’s experience of the text by violating the implied con- tract between writer and reader. In a departure from the usual practice of the nineteenth-century novel, the modernist writer – by making the narrator untrustworthy, fallible, or absent altogether – simultaneously erased himself from the text and scattered himself throughout it.8 The most important difference between modernist literature and what pre- ceded it, though, is not a difference of form.

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