Realism, Late Modernist Abstraction, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's Fictions of Impersonality
TL;DR: In fact, it was this same subversion of authorial subjectivity which assumed a radically new guise for late modernist women writers of the 1930s and 1940s such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, when they redressed novelistic experiment to find pragmatic and uncompromising ways of effecting an urgently needed historicizing critique of developing Fascism in Europe as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: "As the photographer does," asserted Storm Jameson in 1937, "so the writer must keep himself out of the picture while working ceaselessly to present the fact." It was this same subversion of authorial subjectivity which assumed a radically new guise for late modernist women writers of the 1930s and 1940s such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, when they redressed novelistic experiment to find pragmatic and uncompromising ways of effecting an urgently needed historicizing critique of developing Fascism in Europe. Expanding the creative and critical efficacy of "realist" fiction itself as another world war loomed, it was Warner who actively engaged with the stylization of documentary and externalism by re-envisioning narrative impersonality.
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27 Aug 2012TL;DR: In this article, contemporary fiction and the promise of modernism are discussed. But the focus is on the inherited path and not the new in Milan Kundera and Philip Roth.
Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction: contemporary fiction and the promise of modernism 1. 'Advancing along the inherited path': making it traditionally new in Milan Kundera and Philip Roth 2. 'The perfect state for a novel': Michael Ondaatje's Cubist imagination 3. 'Spare prose and a spare, thrifty world': J. M. Coetzee's politics of minimalism 4. 'The dead hand of modernism': Ian McEwan, reluctant impressionist 5. 'License to strut': Toni Morrison and the ethics of virtuosity Notes.
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TL;DR: In this paper, Wallace adopts a self-reflexive new book, leading us from Georgette Heyer's swashbuckling fantasies to Jeanette Winterson's parodistic metafiction, all the while addressing us in a manner that is at once generous and convivial, but without simply being uncritically affirmative toward the marginalized authors she redeems.
Abstract: As a generic term, “Historical Fiction” is somewhat of a chameleon. It has a tendency to assume various guises, heralding a whole spectrum of associations. And though often subject to baffling levels of critical neglect, women writers across the twentieth century have, as Diana Wallace’s vital study reveals, sought to displace assumptions of historical fiction as middlebrow diversion confined to the frivolous conventions of domestic romance by pushing back the stylistic boundaries to enhance it as a medium for political critique. So multifarious has this intervention by women writers been, in fact, that the task today of retrospectively mapping the historical novel’s journey from one end of the last century to the other demands a formidable range of interpretative strategies. This is the challenge Wallace invites and relishes in her highly self-reflexive new book, leading us from Georgette Heyer’s swashbuckling fantasies to Jeanette Winterson’s parodistic metafiction, all the while addressing us in a manner that is at once generous and convivial, but without simply being uncritically affirmative toward the marginalized authors she redeems. Aware that many readers are likely to encounter several faces for the first time, Wallace adopts a style that remains conceptually dexterous yet approachable in its capacious exposition of material between periods—an exposition in which countless women writers hitherto marginalized by neglect are retrieved as we shift nimbly between survey and textual analysis. Throughout, indeed, one detects an undertone of genuine personal investment in the revisionary impulse of the project in its entirety, with Wallace tracing twin “uses of history” between her selected practitioners: principally, how the thematization of “escape” is articulated through immediate forms of polemical engagement (2). This in turn is a catalyst for an assessment of how the women’s historical novel has both complicated and enhanced our “understanding,” to borrow her estimation of Daphne du Maurier, “of the ways in which the past is constructed as a space to which the reader can escape” (88). Wallace is suitably dissatisfied with the parochialism of Lukács’s paradigm for historical realism, and turns instead to Umberto Eco’s typology which divides historical fiction into “the male adventure story . . . and the female-centered romance” (22), though querying here the complacency with which these two key generic formats have traditionally been bifurcated along gendered lines. Later in the book, it is this same rhetorical doubleness which becomes a subversive resource: as Wallace shows, by inheriting Heyer’s satirical reformulation of perspective and persona through the vocabulary of masquerade, many women novelists have capitalized upon the ambiguities of narrative voice to scrutinize the cultural mediation of embodiment. “Given the need to be ‘circumspect’ when writing about men,” asserts Wallace, “the historical novel offers women the opportunity of carrying out a double ventriloquism—a male voice from the past—with impunity” (23). And while tracing such affinities across successive decades, neither does Wallace prevaricate over the always problematic question of selection and omission. A corpus for a study of this scope will necessarily be representative, and the crucial task it faces is in tracing formal trends across an epoch of such momentous sociopolitical change without compromising the particularity of each writer’s aesthetic concerns. Wallace succeeds in retaining this imperative, proceeding chronologically by decade after discovering in Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783) a striking antecedent to many of the preoccupations to which women writers returned in the interwar years.1 Lee’s multiperspectival work emblematizes this study’s insight into the “handling of narrative point of view.” For in The Recess the “use of a view from below or the side of conventional histories is one of Lee’s most important
16 citations
TL;DR: The Lolly Willowes (1926) by Sylvia Townsend Warner as discussed by the authors is a classic example of a modernist novel with a protagonist who is a spinster who does not think.
Abstract: Sylvia Townsend Warner is one of the most curious literary figures to rise to prominence in England in the 1920s. A prolific writer, Warner wrote seven novels, hundreds of short stories, thousands of letters, and kept an extensive diary for most of her adult life. Lolly Willowes (1926), her first novel, became a bestseller and the first selection of the "Book-of-the-Month" Club. (1) She remains, nonetheless, a peripheral figure for literary studies of the period, which tend to focus on more easily recognizable modernist formal experiments. For Gillian Beer, Warner "abuts the Modernist" by virtue of her use of "surreal appositions, nonsense, narrative fractures, and shifting scales" (77). The most significant "surreal apposition" of Lolly Willowes is that the first half reads much like a realist novel concerned with a timely issue. Laura Willowes, upon the death of her father, is taken in by her brother and his family whom she lives with as a spinster (aunt "Lolly") for many years. The novel explores the familial and societal forces that prevent Laura from determining the course of her life, a social problem of particular concern at the time of its writing, when the Great War left a decimated male population imbalanced by the number of unmarried or widowed women. But the latter half of Lolly Willowes has more in common with the "fantasy" novel that enjoyed a surge of popularity in the 1920s. (2) Decades later, during middle age, Laura decides abruptly to move to a remote village in the country. She realizes that she is a witch and makes a pact with Satan, who makes a number of appearances within the novel. But as Jane Marcus observes, albeit ironically, "everything that happens in Lolly Willowes can be explained naturally, if the mind is so inclined" (157). While critics have uniformly seen the apparent generic shift as the most noticeable feature of Lolly Willowes, there has been little consensus about whether to call the novel literal or fantastic, realist or modernist. (3) I want to turn away from the generic shift for a while and suggest another route by which we can approach Warner's position among the categories of literary comprehensibility. In what follows, I will argue that one of the most experimental yet underexplored features of Lolly Willowes is that the protagonist frequently and markedly does not think. (4) The plot of the novel hinges on the mental actions of Laura's deciding to move and realizing she is a witch. Yet in passages describing her mental life, Laura often has a blank mind, minimal sensation, or only an occasional word or phrase in her head. The peculiarly "thoughtless" Laura stands apart from the murky inwardness so frequently attributed to the modernist protagonist. The "critical orthodoxy" surrounding modernist fiction, Patricia Waugh has recently written, sees it "almost exclusively identified with the defensive and deceptive, the unreliable and darkly inconceivable, the introspective plumbing of unconscious depths, the probing of self-deceptions, desires and obscure drives and the self dramatizations that hide characters from themselves and their best-laid plans" (85). But emerging approaches under the umbrella term of "cognitive literary studies" are beginning to rethink the reliance on such tropes for understanding literary minds, even minds at their least transparent. (5) As Waugh suggests, "we need a better account of the modernist mind" (85). Reading Lolly Willowes for its depiction of thinking provides not just a new vantage on Warner's novel but also a connection to the modernist experimentation from which she might otherwise seem to stand apart. Rather than abutting the traditionally modernist, Lolly Willowes provides a new way of understanding modernism's "inwardness" starting at the lowest thresholds of cognition--thinking in a narrow band of time. The novel's cognitive minimalism forms the basis of an account of the modernist mind informed by the cognitive sciences and centered on literary renderings of simple mental functions, rather than obscure recesses. …
7 citations
TL;DR: Lollys Willowes as mentioned in this paper is a character who is possessed by the devil, but in a way that frees her from the demands of living according to the expectations of English Christian society.
Abstract: ion. And when she does this, she finds she remembers something important, and her thoughts themselves “slid together . . . like a pack of hounds” to join the hunt for the “clue to the secret country of her mind.” Lolly’s self-discovery occurs through abstraction; and, moreover, she discovers she is both hunter and prey—that she embod-ion; and, moreover, she discovers she is both hunter and prey—that she embodWinick / modernist feminist witchcraft 581 ies a witchy state of powerful passivity. This state of abstraction to which she aspires, furthermore, is marked as witchy just a few pages before the hunting sequence. Lolly, encountering some village women, notes they were “silent and abstracted as usual”; she approves this state and feels drawn toward it: “To-night their demeanour did not strike her as odd. She felt at one with them, an inhabitant like themselves, and she would gladly have gone with them up towards the wood” (118). Though Lolly is an accomplice in her own hunt, Satan reminds her that the ultimate power still rests with him. When Lolly observes that being a witch “all seems so perfectly natural,” he explains, “That is because you are in my power. No servant of mine can feel remorse, or doubt, or surprise. You may be quite easy, Laura: you will never escape me, for you can never wish to” (210). Unlike Murray’s witches, who commit to their religion with “free will,” Lolly can have no will of her own now that she belongs to Satan. Even before she pledged herself to him, she was already a witch-elect, drawn to Great Mop where she realized her long-developing witch identity. Lolly’s witchhood consists of two paradoxes: first, she is possessed by Satan, but in a way that frees her, and second, her primary desire is to be passive, idle, isolated—to be undesiring, a state she can only fully achieve through Satan’s help. She is the devil’s servant now but a content one, with no real duties and a host of freedoms she did not have before. She does not want to choose her own religion like Murray’s witches but only to be allowed to realize the natural inclinations toward the devil that have always been in her. In allying herself with Satan, Lolly emphatically frees herself from the demands of living according to the expectations of English Christian society. But at the same time, she corroborates some of the oldest assumptions of patriarchal Christianity: that women are especially susceptible to the devil, that they are naturally dependent on a stronger masculine figure, and even that they are chattel, the possession of such a figure.48 Lolly Willowes’s witchcraft not only parodies Christianity in its heretical relation to it; it also parodies Murray’s witch cult in order to reject a practice endorsed by both religions: heterosexual sex. The appearance of a figure recognizable as Murray’s witch god at the witches’ sabbath in Lolly Willowes illustrates the novel’s dissatisfaction with this aspect of The Witch-Cult. Like the witch god, this figure is markedly sexualized. His body is “lean, lithe” and “seemed to be scarcely withheld from breaking into a dance” (181). His touch is cold, a detail characteristic of Murray’s god, and he holds and licks Lolly in front of the gathered witches in what may be an attempt at the sexual rite. His sexual, serpentine manner seems to draw both from fertility cult and Christian contexts, as if he is trying too hard to appear to be Satan. Lolly rejects his advance, regarding it as an “affront,” an “odious and petty insult” (182). She stalks off, angry at the witches and at herself for “submitting her good sense to politeness. Hours ago her instinct had told her that she was not going to enjoy herself. . . . But she had stayed on, deferring to a public opinion that was not concerned with whether she stayed or went, stayed on just as she used to stay on at balls” (182). Later Lolly discovers that the masked man was not really Satan, but only a vain young author. Moreover, she learns that Satan and certain other witches may share her “sophisticated dislike for the Sabbath” (217). With this parody of Murray’s fertility cult, Warner emphasizes the very different place M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y 582 of sociability and of heterosexual sex in her version of feminist witchcraft: as a passive witch, Lolly avoids the former and rejects the latter. Notably, the sabbath also features Lolly’s most explicit homosexual experience, with the “young slattern” Emily. When Lolly dances with Emily, “the contact made her tingle from head to foot” (175). But Emily is soon “snatched away” by a male dancer, and Lolly returns for the rest of the novel to solitude and apparent celibacy.49 Lolly responds to the attempted sexual rite in a manner consistent with her general refusal of heterosexuality, as manifested in her “temperamental indifference to the need of getting married” (26). Ultimately, she embraces solitude and celibacy in a clear departure from the sociability and fertility rites central to Murray’s witch religion. In Lolly Willowes, such activities are too reminiscent of the dull obligations of her prewitch existence, when she had to attend balls, entertain suitors, and mind her nieces and nephew. She prefers Satan’s “undesiring and unjudging gaze, his satisfied but profoundly indifferent ownership” (222). Unlike most men, including Murray’s incarnate witch god, Satan does not desire, nor does he impose a heterosexual relation on his witches. Though he “owns” them, he does not demand anything from them. They are free to do as they please, without concern for satisfying or disappointing him. As Gay Wachman notes, the novel ends with an “escape into Satanic celibacy” (Lesbian Empire, 83). By then Lolly has rejected or been denied all other forms of sexuality.50 Celibacy marks the culmination of her long preference for solitude, a preference shared to a large degree by her fellow witches and by Satan himself. But as we have seen, this “escape” is imperfect: while Lolly successfully avoids the demands of English Christian womanhood as a witch in Great Mop, the tradition of witchcraft that she embraces defines itself against Christianity and cannot escape its logic. Receptive and Reflective Reading Lolly Willowes models a practice of reading that moves from receptivity to critical reflection. Lolly herself figures this approach when she first makes her pact with Satan implicitly, without full consciousness, only to recognize and embrace it afterward. The Witch-Cult, by contrast, models a reading practice that begins in reflection and ends in receptivity. It demands, as the experience of the Dial reviewer attests, a critical, conscious choice to accept its account of the witches before immersing oneself in the fantastical possibilities their history suggests. The witches themselves figure this approach in their purposeful commitment to the witch religion in advance of their participation in its ecstasies. While The Witch-Cult enables a critically framed belief in the historical reality of the witch religion, then, Lolly Willowes offers the possibility of finding or creating new realities through the experience of giving in.51 The pattern evident in Lolly’s pact with Satan, a model of a certain mode of readerly engagement with the text and with the imagination in general, also stretches out in more detail over a sequence of related events in the novel. Before leaving Lady Place, Lolly has not yet embraced full receptivity. While visiting her mother’s grave, “she Winick / modernist feminist witchcraft 583 half yielded her mind to the fancy that the dead mother whose grave she tended was sitting a little apart in the shade, presently to rise and to come and meet her” (38). But this does not happen, and Lolly soon leaves the graveyard for the last time, moving, unhappily, to London. There, her imagination becomes more vivid and she becomes increasingly abstracted in daydreams and reading. By the time she has settled in Great Mop, her abstraction is so complete she often forgets herself. Thinking of the fables of the henwife as she helps her neighbor with his chickens, she “almost forgot where she was and who she was, so completely had she merged her personality into the henwife’s. She walked back along the rutted track and down the steep lane as obliviously as though she were flitting home on a broomstick” (134). This transformation is just a figurative one, but as we have seen, the figurative has a way of becoming literal in this novel. Indeed, shortly after the henwife episode, Lolly feels substantially altered: “She was changed, and knew it. She was humbler, more simple” (136). The change depends in part on maintaining forgetfulness: thinking of her relatives, she reflects that “all she could do was to go on forgetting them. But now she was able to forget them without flouting them by her forgetfulness” (136). To forget without flouting is Lolly’s new witchy mode, one that has “changed” her. Reflecting on this abstraction, she recognizes its effects without disrupting them. Such reflection simply confirms the new state in which she now exists—the new reality attained through forgetfulness. In the months succeeding this realization, “she lived in perfect idleness and contentment” (136). Thus Lolly moves from a state of “half yield[ing]” (38) to a full “yield[ing of] herself” (123). And while the effects of half yielding are limited to changes in daydreams, the effects of a fuller yielding lead to changes in Lolly’s reality. The final change comes when her nephew Titus visits. Driven to distraction by Titus, Lolly makes her silent pledge with Satan. Post-pledge, her “mind was almost a blank. She had forgotten Titus; she had forgotten the long afternoon of frenzy and bewilderment” (152). Her pledge results immediately in witchy forgetfulness. Soon after, with the arrival of her kitten familiar, a strong if almost unconscious certainty supplements her forgetfulness: “Not for a moment did she
2 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that by responding to the formal experiments of the early modernists without subscribing entirely to their aesthetic aims, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock serves as an exemplary instance of late modernism, offering an account of criminal subjectivity that blends the modernist critique of identity with the narrative conventions of twentieth-century crime and detective fiction.
Abstract: This essay argues that by responding to the formal experiments of the early modernists without subscribing entirely to their aesthetic aims, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock serves as an exemplary instance of late modernism, offering an account of criminal subjectivity that blends the modernist critique of identity with the narrative conventions of twentieth-century crime and detective fiction. Utilizing the form of the psychological case study to articulate how a career criminal views his identity largely in terms of the conventions of crime fiction, Greene illustrates how late modernism reaffirms the value of a critically maligned popular genre while grappling with the aesthetic paradigms of early modernism.
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TL;DR: In this article, the notions such as equality, humanity, and law were dismissed as specious Textual Practice, and the concepts such as "equality", "humanity", and "law" were rejected.
Abstract: ions such as ‘equality’, ‘humanity’ and ‘law’ were dismissed as specious Textual Practice
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01 Jan 1989
TL;DR: In this paper, a novel that mixes legend and history, in tracing the disappearance of Don Juan, was published, mirroring the author's concern with the background to the Spanish Civil War.
Abstract: Published in 1938, mirroring the author's concern with the background to the Spanish Civil War, this novel mixes legend and history, in tracing the disappearance of Don Juan.
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