modernist by last name

I think my favourite question to ask is whether or not a text is modernist. So…is Growing modernist? I don’t think so but I shall suggest modernist elements other than those already talked about. I feel that the modernist impulse in Woolf has less to do with consciouness (as in the other Woolf) and instead more with narrative and representation.

I thought a very strong modernist gesture lay in the way Woolf would constantly take little sidetrips out of the narrative and tell us little anecdotes about various people. For instance, he relates Dutton’s naivety in sexual matters by way of an “example”, which comes in the form of a little story within a story. This serves to fragment the narrative in a sense, such that while narrative continuity is maintained, the notion of a single, overarching and totalitarian narrative is reduced. The same example is also similar to what Auerbach – remember him?! – describes as “excurses, whose relations in time to the occurrence which frames them seem to be entirely different” (537). Of course, the only occurrence that takes place here is the act of narration; nonetheless, these ‘excurses’ break up the temporal continuity of the narrative into two discontinuous narrative sequences.

These anecdotes also give the text an impressionistic quality – we learn about characters like Dutton through the impressions that Woolf gives us, rather than straightforward description. The most obvious – and funniest example I can think of is his encounter with Mrs Dutton:

“…perhaps owing to the overpowering smell of clean linen, it gave me the feeling of unmitigated chastity…”

Such suggestiveness even though he never really tells the readers what it is that makes her so miserable! However, my point is that impressionism makes the reader acutely aware of the mediating presence of the author/narrator, along with the realisation that the evocative images we are given are subjective impressions of a non-omniscient, non-objective narrator.

(299 words, excluding quote)