Was
1925 Literary Modernism’s Most Important Year?
By Ben Libman
“An illiterate, underbred book it seems
to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing
they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking & ultimately nauseating.”
So goes Virginia Woolf’s well-known complaint about “Ulysses,” scribbled into her diary before she had
finished reading it. Her disparagement is catnip to those many critics who like
to view “Mrs. Dalloway” — that other uber-famous, if more lapidary, modernist
novel that spans the course of a single day — as Woolf’s rejoinder to Joyce.
More than that, though, it tells us something important about our literary
history. Nineteen twenty-two, the year of “Ulysses,” may well be ground zero
for the explosion of modernism in literature. But the resultant shock wave is
better captured by another year: 1925, that of “Mrs. Dalloway” and several
other works, all now in the spotlight in 2021, as they emerge from under copyright.
If many an English-majored ear perks up
at the sound of “1922,” it’s mostly because of the two somewhat ornery men who
published their masterpieces that year: Joyce and T. S. Eliot. “Ulysses” and
“The Waste Land” are taught everywhere and almost without exception as
“signifying a definitive break in literary history,” to quote the critic
Michael North from his book “Reading 1922.” Both the novel and the poem are
notoriously challenging, obscurely allusive and highly uneasy about their
modern time and the rubble of tradition astride which it stood. Both are also
often distressing, egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and (depending on one’s
mood) ultimately nauseating. And it is precisely these qualities that account for
their hold on our literary imagination. They represent everything that literary
modernism is meant to: rupture, difficulty and, of course, making it new.
Yet 1925 is arguably the more important
date in modernism’s development, the year that it went mainstream, as embodied
by four books whose influence continues to shape fiction today: Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” Ernest Hemingway’s debut story collection,
“In Our Time,” John Dos Passos’ “Manhattan Transfer” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” Compared with the masterpieces of
1922, these books — all slated for reissue in new editions this year — entered
our culture in relatively unspectacular fashion. But it’s precisely their
unassuming guise that allowed them, by osmosis rather than disruption, to
diffuse their modernist conceits throughout the literary field, ensuring their
widespread adoption.
In
her 1919 essay, “Modern Fiction,” Woolf rebukes the popular novels of her time:
“Is life like this? … Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being
‘like this.’ Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind
receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent or engraved with
the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of
innumerable atoms. … Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged;
life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the
beginning of consciousness to the end.”
It’s commonplace to call Woolf an
impressionist in this peculiar sense, and yet it nails her novelistic craft.
She is an inhabitant of minds. And the mind, in “Mrs. Dalloway” and later, in a
more extreme sense, in “The Waves” (1931), is a kind of nebulous antenna tuning
in and out of life’s frequencies, ever enveloped in its luminous halo. As the
critic J. Hillis Miller once put it, the reader most often finds that she is
“plunged within an individual mind which is being understood from inside by an
ubiquitous, all-knowing mind.”
This is evident to us not from the
novel’s immortal opening line — “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers
herself” — but from the one immediately following, which serves as a kind of
mirror to the first, tipping us off that we must reread it as something other
than objective assertion: “For Lucy had her work cut out for her.” Suddenly,
with the lightly colloquial “cut out for her,” we are in the mind not of an
omniscient narrator but of a character — Clarissa Dalloway, as the succeeding
lines make clear. The reader ceases to think that she is being told what Mrs.
Dalloway said about getting the flowers, and begins to think instead that Mrs.
Dalloway is just remarking on that fact, as if to herself. And that changes
everything.
This narrative technique, known as
free-indirect speech, was part of Woolf’s quiet revolution. Though she did not
invent it — arguably Austen, Flaubert and Edith Wharton got there first — Woolf
perfected this mode, coloring it with the anxiety of modern subjectivity. Open
any novel of the past 50 years, and you will find the narrator reporting
thoughts that, for reasons of diction and tense, can only be those of a
character. With varying degrees of indebtedness, each of these is an heir to
Woolf and her narrators, who enter the world of their fictions as Clarissa
Dalloway enters the world of her relations, “being laid out like a mist between
the people she knew best.” That a narrator need not fiddle with chess pieces
from on high but might linger like a cloud among foggy minds is a feature of
modernism that has, as it were, contaminated literature ever since.
Opposed to the singularity of a work
like “Ulysses” or “The Waste Land,” we have in “Mrs. Dalloway” the innovation
of an enduring, deep structure — something like geometric perspective in
painting, that contributes to the development of technique, rather than driving
it up a dead end. So it is with “In Our Time,” “Manhattan Transfer” and “The
Great Gatsby.” With “Big Two-Hearted River,” the last story in Hemingway’s collection,
writers on either side of the Atlantic learned about the power of economy in
writing. As if by revelation, it became clear that the solution to the problem
of representing a collective trauma like World War I was not blabbering
effusion, but its opposite.
“I
always try to write on the principle of the iceberg,” Hemingway told The Paris
Review in 1958. The “iceberg” technique became the calling card not only of
postwar American writers like Raymond Carver and Cormac McCarthy, but also of
the influential cadre of French existentialist novelists, including Céline,
Malraux, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Most important, though, Hemingway became an
exemplary stylist for the M.F.A. programs that sprang up across America after the
war, and through which many of our canonized poets and novelists have since
passed. As the scholar Mark McGurl puts it in his book “The Program Era,” “It
would be hard to overestimate the influence of Hemingway on postwar writers,
and … too easy to forget that the medium of his influence has been the school.”
The legacy of John Dos Passos is less
distinct, though no less potent. You do not hear his name much now, but in his
day Dos Passos was among the most celebrated novelists writing in English. To
Sartre, he was “the greatest writer of our time”; there was none other “in
which the art is greater or better hidden.” Perhaps this is because novels like
“Manhattan Transfer” were among the first to try to recreate the seamless
artifice that cinema appeared to lend to its fictions. Dos Passos’ novel takes
as its protagonist not a character but New York City itself, and makes liberal
use of literary jump-cuts and montage against a backdrop of action-filled narration
that moves at a relentless clip. His is a multimedia literature, a modernist
twist on the flabby forms of social realism that stitches a collage of
press-clippings, newsreels and radio announcers’ voices into the narrative
fabric.
With Fitzgerald, by contrast, we have
the inverted alternative to Dos Passos’ realist modernism. In “The Great
Gatsby” Fitzgerald — just as Eliot would do in fits and starts throughout his
career — seeks the preservation of Symbolism in modern American literature.
That a writer could opt not to deploy a literalist account of the consequences
of American greed but instead vie to refine a handful of supercharged moments
of signification, which might bloom as an epiphany in the reader’s imagination,
was this novel’s reverberating testament. Gatsby is but a symbol of himself, a dream
that outstrips the reality to which it refers. Until he is not. And the lasting
gift of the novel — which has echoes in the late-modernist pastiches of Ralph
Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid conspiracies of signs and
the biblical symbology of Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” — is to
demonstrate the difference between the magic when it is on and the magic when
it is gone.
It
is fitting that “The Great Gatsby” sold few copies when it first appeared. Like
the other great works of 1925, it did not announce itself with the bombast of
“Ulysses.” Yet, like those other works, it has quietly endured, living on like
a mist in our literary unconscious, spawning and shaping successive generations
of writers and readers.
Ben Libman is a Ph.D. candidate
in English at Stanford University.