Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Reading the modernists in calamitous times

Clockwise from top left: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Zora Neale Hurston, Franz Kafka

The new semester starts on Monday with a seminar I haven’t taught for several years, called Modern Fiction. Here is the laconic course description: “An exploration of modern fiction as it developed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including such writers as Dostoevsky, Joyce, Lawrence, Kafka, and Hemingway.” My syllabus is a tad ambitious. In the order we’ll be reading:

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

• Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, “In the Penal Colony,” “A Hunger Artist,” other shorter works

• James Joyce, stories from Dubliners, all of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, bits of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

• D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow

• Nell Larsen, Passing

• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

• Ernest Hemingway, stories from In Our Time

• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

I have a swelling sense of my own hubris as I reread this list. Los Angeles is on fire. A convicted felon, sex offender, and would-be dictator is ten days from assuming the Presidency for the second time. And word on the street is that people, particularly young people, don’t read any more—don’t and in many cases can’t. What do I think I’m doing, asking a group of GenZ-ers to read as many as six novels, one of them quite long, plus a bunch of famously confusing short stories? Especially when most of those novels are more preoccupied by the representation of individual consciousness than they are in the social and political issues of the day? Who do I think I am—and who do I think my students are?

Now, reports of the death of reading are no doubt exaggerated, particularly in the Lake Forest College English Department; our majors still read, and many of them aspire to write books of their own. When I ask them what their favorite books are, some of them cite YA, middle-grade stuff, but by no means all of them. And it was not so long ago that I taught a successful seminar on Proust, Woolf, Joyce, and Beckett— probably the single most pleasurable and exciting literature course I’ve ever taught. The students in that course more than rose to the occasion, with one of them proclaiming afterward that Proust was now her favorite author. So I won’t underestimate my students now.

And yet—not so long ago in this case means six years ago, practically a micro-generation nowadays, with the wall of COVID lockdowns between now and then. Consciousnesses have changed. The rush away from old-fashioned literacy toward the new video-orality continues to accelerate, which makes the modernists, with their complex syntax, their streams of consciousness, and their expectations of a shared cultural framework with their readers, seem less modern than ever. So why the modernists, now?

Woolf, Joyce, and the rest wrote in a period of radical change and experienced intense cognitive dissonance. New technologies were transforming the world, even as the first global, high-tech war devastated an entire generation of young people (the airplane spied in the skies over London by Mrs. Dalloway is an ominous signifier of both), with the 1918 flu epidemic as grisly footnote. Migration and a burgeoning multiculturalism was disrupting society, even as the Great Migration from the rural South to northern cities led to the astonishing cultural flowering that was the Harlem Renaissance. Cycles of economic boom and bust destabilized governments and empowered authoritarian populists who made use of new technologies such as radio to spread their message with inconceivable rapidity. The Dust Bowl demonstrated industrial society’s capacity to devastate the earth and erase the conditions of life as people knew it. The newspapers were full of salacious articles lamenting the ignorance and decadence of young people, memorably disparaged by Gertrude Stein as a Lost Generation (OK, Boomer). Plus ça change…

Still, my students will probably find modernist fiction more alien than familiar. The realist English novel of the nineteenth century achieves its classic form by balancing social comedy with character interiority in something like a 1.5:1 ratio. As the century went on, the balance began to shift to something more like 1:1 (in, say, Middlemarch) and then to favor interiority (as in post-The Portrait of a Lady Henry James). The great disruption comes with Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man; Dostoyevsky manages to generate an entire novel (okay, a novella) out of the frustrated interiority of a single man who can find no adequate means of expression on the social stage. A nobody who wants to be a somebody, an incel avant la lettre, the Underground Man’s seething ressentiment paves the path of alienation that will follow divergent courses in the works of the modernists that follow. Sometimes that alienation seems to stem from a racial and religious identity (Kafka, Joyce) or a gender/sexual identity (Hemingway, Lawrence, Woolf) or intersections of these (Larsen, Hurston), with class and national identity very much in the mix. This part may seem quite current to my students and the crypto-socialist realism they claim to favor. But the style by which those identities get expressed—that’s something else.

The modernists turned away from the scheme of the realist novel, which tends to culminate in either the comic reconciliation of the hero or heroine with their society (in the form of marriage), or to tragic disintegration as the protagonist is crushed or assimilated, Borg-style (Edith Wharton and Thomas Hardy come first to mind). The modernist hero or heroine is rarely subjected to the demands of a marriage plot, or launches themselves on a bourgeois quest for power and prominence. Instead of a comedy of manners, modernist fiction presents us with the comedy of disproportion between a character’s actions and their aims. This comedy can be savage, as when Kafka’s characters squirm in the pincers of petty bureaucratic norms, or gentle, as when Mrs. Dalloway resolves to buy the flowers for her party herself. These characters best express or are most themselves when their quests are quotidian, creating openings for (sometimes subconscious) thought: Tom Brangwen works in his fields while meditating on the mysteries of marriage; Leopold Bloom runs errands in Dublin while doing much the same; Nick Adams goes fishing as therapy for his PTSD. Even a sensation-seeking character like Hurston’s Janie Crawford seems to discover herself less through dramatic action than through ecstatic explorations of her own consciousness in the presence of some stray stimulus, like the famous pear tree from early in the novel:

It was a spring afternoon in West Florida. Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days. That was to say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously. How? Why? It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep. It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh. Now they emerged and quested about her consciousness.

This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. There is a transparent but ineradicable envelope between Janey Crawford and the world: what matters most to her is not what happens to her but how what happens resonates as it falls down the bottomless well of consciousness into unconsciousness and back up again, changed. This is the glory and uniqueness of modernist literature, its concern, I would even say its reverence, for the interior landscapes of human beings, whether rendered as interior monologue, stream of consciousness, or in some other way.¹

Put differently, modernist fiction is fundamentally un- or anti-dramatic. The realist novel takes the interiority of the Shakespearean soliloquy and presents it to the reader as thought rather than speech, but there is still plenty of dramatic action to hold their interest. This is not to say that modernist fiction is lacking in dialogue and action—Their Eyes Were Watching God is packed with sex and murder and hurricanes—but that its primary interest lies in what goes on behind the characters’ eyes. I think of the famous first line of Hemingway’s “In Another Country”: “In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.” The literal meaning is plain: the narrator is a wounded soldier, recuperating with other wounded soldiers. But there is a metafictional meaning as well: it is not the war but its consequences that preoccupies Hemingway. E.M. Forster distinguishes “story” from “plot” by the latter’s focus on consequences rather than incidents: not “The king died, then the queen died” but “The king died, then the queen died of grief.” It is that emotional consequence—of grief—that preoccupies the modernists, often at the expense of the dramatic incidents that earlier novelists dilated on. Why else would Woolf locate all of World War I, and the tragically early death of Mrs. Ramsay, in the parentheses of “Time Passes” in her greatest novel, To the Lighthouse?

I can hear the objections now, and maybe some of them will come from my students. Is it not terrifically indulgent to focus on the emotional consequences of incidents to the individual when those incidents—call them history, if you like—are so vast, so incomprehnsible, so overwhelming? The incidents are social and happen to people; the consequences, in my terms, are individual. Is modernist fiction irredeemably individualist, bourgeois? Isn’t that part of the logic that got us into this mess?

Maybe so. Aside from lacking in social utility, the fiction of interiority lacks much of a marketplace these days. The pendulum has swung in the direction of incident; the centrality of consequences requires a consciousness of time that our presentist, post-literate culture can scarcely manage. AI slop makes a mockery of the very idea of interiority as anything other than an effect, a vibe. Most contemporary novels read like screenplays (only that’s an insult to screenplays, because the terse expressiveness of a good screenplay is more like a sonnet than a novel). Will my students, in their encounters with Kafka’s K, Joyce’s Molly Bloom, or Lawrence’s Anna Brangwen be able to recognize lost pieces of themselves? Will these books help them feel, as they’ve helped me feel, less alone and more alive? And does that feeling in turn have any sort of social value in returning us to our senses and ourselves?

Fiction doesn’t fight fires or reduce carbon emissions. Fiction won’t stop the obscenity of a racist being inaugurated on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. Sometimes I worry that I’ve buried my head in the sand of literature, that I’m perfectly happy letting Rome burn as long as I have my own personal fiddle to play. I’m glad I have students to hold me accountable. It all begins again next week.²

1. Let me add here that in spite of their moniker, many of the modernists write wondrously about the natural world, and seem to suggest a power of continuity between the human and the nonhuman with enormous resonance for our age of environmental collapse. Lawrence writes movingly of the English landscape encroached on by coal mining; Joyce with his weak eyes returns us continually to the earthiness of touch and smell; Hemingway’s characters convulse between aggression and supplication toward nature.

2. Also coming next week is the next chapter of my dystopian sci-fi novel Concord (read Chapter 1), which is much more in the mode of realism than anything else I’ve written. It’s about the consequences of libertarian fantasy, but it’s also crammed with dramatic incident. Is genre fiction the new realism? Food for a future post.