Modernism’s Two Versions of Selfhood

Abstract

I Do I Undo I Redo: Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves in Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf by Finn Fordham Oxford University Press. 2010. 281 pages It has become a commonplace of literary history, and part of a by-now commonsensical understanding of modernist novel, to refer to fluidity and instability of modern character, in sense of twentieth-century representations of personhood. With disintegration of moral and biographical integrity of discrete human form which subtended novel throughout nineteenth century--a disintegration wrought by work of figures as diverse as Darwin, Marx, Flaubert, Nietzsche, William James, and Freud, and whose story is so well known as to need no recapitulation here--it is beyond doubt that a different conception of character informs modernist novel. Whether we look at disembodied and interpenetrating voices comprising Waves, or dislocated and unknowable depths intimated in Heart of Darkness, we find a widespread skepticism directed toward self. Terms such as flux, process, absence, and indeterminacy come to replace stability, essence, presence, and epistemological certainty which formed, for instance, assumptions upon which an essentially Victorian project such as Dictionary of National Biography was founded in 1881. However, if this has come to be standard story of modernist representation of personhood, then story of modernist expression of personhood is, curiously, exact opposite. While modernist character undergoes a process of dissolution, modernist writer, according to another supposed commonplace of literary history, grows wholly rooted in a position of unique self-presence, driven toward a ruthlessly personal expression of that self. We can see this sense of modernist authorial self-hood instantiated in sites ranging from T. S. Eliot's notion of the talent to Wyndham Lewis's fiercely self-fashioning politics, from Edmund Wilson's characterization of era as a renewal of Romantic self-assertion to Richard Ellnmann and Charles Feidelson's 1965 defini-tion of modernist consciousness as one in which life at its most intense is personal and private, wholly individual (685). This is modernist self against which Fredric Jameson posits postniodernist of subject, writing: The great rnodernisnis were ... predicated on invention of a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own body. But this means that modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to conception of a unique self and private identity, a Unmquc personality and individuality (33). Yeet if postniodernisnl proclaims modernist self dead, it is a death modernist self has already undergone so far as its textual representations are concerned. I begin with this well-known tension within modernist conceptions of selfhood because it is a tension to which Finn Fordham is very Much attuned in his excellently researched and sensitively argued study of modernist selves, I Do I Undo I Redo. This tension is inherent even in Fordham's title, insofar as it invites an understanding of selfhood as a continuous process that can maintain within its continuum positions both of dissolution and agency; of activity and repose. Fordham himself covers this terrain in his history of critical engagement with modernist selfhood, cogently and accurately tracing not only place of self within modernist studies, but also place of modernist studies within philosophical histories of self. He traces way in which modernist self presents a kind of apotheosis of subjective inwardness, in sense that never before had writers been so preoccupied with inner life and with subjective origin of experience, while at same time it undermines self's reign as seat of knowledge, participating in decentering of subject (45) in whose intellectual climate we still largely operate. …