The Death of the Book: Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading. John Lurz. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. iv+199.

Abstract

Lurz nicely exposits Woolf’s drive to depict the important activity of the solitary mind turned toward things and events, yet participating in a community of voices, in the chapter on The Waves. Through three males and three females, we follow the variety of ways characters experience the flow of existence and try to give it some order. Regrettably, Lurz does not mention experiments by the Romantics a hundred years earlier (regardless of whether there may be any direct filiation) when he describes Woolf as envisioning a new kind of hybrid novel that mixes articulated stories and fragmentary pieces. The lead figure Bernard criticizes standard narrative form in his closing monologue as not commensurate with how we experience, in contrast to music, and senses a “deeper, nonlinguistic level of life” (144). The traumatic intrusion of death with the loss of Percival brings “deepened awareness of time’s passing” (152). Just as the friends each previously occupied a distinct temperamental or philosophical position vis-à-vis life, so their awakening to their own materiality and to the world varies. It can eventuate in finding oneself “alone in emptiness” (152), but in the case of Bernard it brings intensified attention to things, with a non-subject-centered account of experience, including influence of other minds and their works, realization of the suffering of others. A dissolution of subjectivity is sensed in changing aspects of the seascape and as a dispersal of self into the human community, while cosmological dimensions, too, impose “radical finitude” (157). A kind of victory occurs insofar as Bernard can split off his narrative consciousness and see himself or a friend as an object and challenge death by his altered attitude, which Lurz correctly sees as analogous to the endings of Recherche and Finnegans Wake.