The 1930s: transitional late

modernism, anti-novels, metafiction

Erika Mihálycsa, PhD
 1930s late modernism: darkening freedom – reopening the
modernist enclosure of form to the work’s social/political
environs
• Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,

Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,

Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said,

"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;

Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;

"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me. […]
(W.H. Auden, Refugee Blues, 1939)
 “the keynote of the post-war writers would
be ‘tragic sense of life’”
…It will be seen that once again I am speaking of these people as though they were not artists, as though they were
merely propagandists putting a ‘message’ across. And once again it is obvious that all of them are more than that. It
would be absurd, for instance, to look on Ulysses as merely a show-up of the horror of modern life, the ‘dirty Daily
Mail era’, as Pound put it. Joyce actually is more of a ‘pure artist’ than most writers. But Ulysses could not have been
written by someone who was merely dabbling with word-patterns; it is the product of a special vision of life, the vision
of a Catholic who has lost his faith. What Joyce is saying is ‘Here is life without God. Just look at it!’ and his technical
innovations, important though they are, are primarily to serve this purpose.
But what is noticeable about all these writers is that what ‘purpose’ they have is very much up in the air. There is no
attention to the urgent problems of the moment, above all no politics in the narrower sense. Our eyes are directed to
Rome, to Byzantium, to Montparnasse, to Mexico, to the Etruscans, to the Subconscious, to the solar plexus — to
everywhere except the places where things are actually happening. When one looks back at the twenties, nothing is
queerer than the way in which every important event in Europe escaped the notice of the English intelligentsia. The
Russian Revolution, for instance, all but vanishes from the English consciousness between the death of Lenin and the
Ukraine famine — about ten years. Throughout those years Russia means Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, and exiled counts
driving taxi-cabs. Italy means picture-galleries, ruins, churches, and museums — but not Black-shirts. Germany means
films, nudism, and psychoanalysis — but not Hitler, of whom hardly anyone had heard till 1931. In ‘cultured’ circles art-
for-art's-saking extended practically to a worship of the meaningless. Literature was supposed to consist solely in the
manipulation of words. To judge a book by its subject matter was the unforgivable sin, and even to be aware of its
subject matter was looked on as a lapse of a taste. About 1928, in one of the three genuinely funny jokes that Punch has
produced since the Great War, an intolerable youth is pictured informing his aunt that he intends to ‘write’. ‘And what
are you going to write about, dear?’ asks the aunt. ‘My dear aunt,’ says the youth crushingly, ‘one doesn't
write about anything, one just writes.’ (George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” 1940)
…The best writers of the twenties did not subscribe to this doctrine, their ‘purpose’ is in most cases fairly overt, but it is
usually ‘purpose’ along moral-religious-cultural lines. Also, when translatable into political terms, it is in no case ‘left’.
In one way or another the tendency of all the writers in this group is conservative. Lewis, for instance, spent years in
frenzied witch-smellings after ‘Bolshevism’, which he was able to detect in very unlikely places. Recently he has
changed some of his views, perhaps influenced by Hitler's treatment of artists, but it is safe to bet that he will not go
very far leftward. Pound seems to have plumped definitely for Fascism, at any rate the Italian variety. Eliot has
remained aloof, but if forced at the pistol's point to choose between Fascism and some more democratic form of
socialism, would probably choose Fascism. Huxley starts off with the usual despair-of-life, then, under the influence of
Lawrence's ‘dark abdomen’, tries something called Life-Worship, and finally arrives at pacifism — a tenable position,
and at this moment an honourable one, but probably in the long run involving rejection of socialism. It is also
noticeable that most of the writers in this group have a certain tenderness for the Catholic Church, though not usually
of a kind that an orthodox Catholic would accept.
The mental connexion between pessimism and a reactionary outlook is no doubt obvious enough. What is perhaps less
obvious is just why the leading writers of the twenties were predominantly pessimistic. Why always the sense of
decadence, the skulls and cactuses, the yearning after lost faith and impossible civilizations? Was it not, after
all, because these people were writing in an exceptionally comfortable epoch? It is just in such times that ‘cosmic
despair’ can flourish. People with empty bellies never despair of the universe, nor even think about the universe, for
that matter. The whole period 1910-30 was a prosperous one, and even the war years were physically tolerable if one
happened to be a non-combatant in one of the Allied countries. As for the twenties, they were the golden age of
the rentier-intellectual, a period of irresponsibility such as the world had never before seen. The war was over, the new
totalitarian states had not arisen, moral and religious taboos of all descriptions had vanished, and the cash was rolling
in. ‘Disillusionment’ was all the fashion. Everyone with a safe £500 a year turned highbrow and began training himself
in taedium vitae. (George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” 1940)
 1930s: late modernist experimentation
• …much of what we call “modernism” consists precisely in the
attempt to eat the cultural cake and be it (that is, embody its most
radical potentialities), or to keep postulating an ideal museum –
from Homer to the present, according to Eliot or Pound – a
synthetic and mobile museum in which the modernist will appoint
himself as sole curator. This double postulation no doubt raises the
stakes for the artist, increases the responsibilities and the “great
labor” awaiting whoever wishes to “make it all new,” despite a
paralyzing awareness of secondarity. Any would-be “author” will
return to the medieval dilemma: under what conditions can he or
she “add” (augere) to the already constituted tradition? The
“author” will have to turn into a modernist museum curator. (Jean-
Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity, 1996)
• “The function of the artist, from [end-
19th c.] on, is no longer to produce good
forms, new forms, but on the contrary to
deconstruct them systematically and to
accelerate their obsolescence...The
function of art has become to discomfort
rather than comfort its audience.”

• “This deconstructing activity is a truly

radical critical activity, for it does not deal
with the signifieds of things, but with
their plastic organization, their signifying
organization. It shows that the problem is
not so much that of knowing what a given
discourse says, but rather how it is
disposed.” (J-F Lyotard, Driftworks, 1984)
• “A vast market was ready and waiting. Compulsory education
had produced millions of semi-literates, who were partial to
‘a good read’. So it must be a big book, weighing at least two-
and-a-half pounds. We must give them length without depth,
splendour without style. Existing works would be plundered
wholesale for material, and the ingredients of the saga would
be mainly violence, patriotism, sex, religion, politics and the
pursuit of money and power. Children of Destiny would be the
precursor of a new literary movement, the first masterpiece
of the Ready-Made or Reach-Me-Down School.” (project for the
corporately produced “Great Irish Novel,” Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien, Niall
Sheridan et al., 1934)
 “laying bare the conventions and narrative
strategies of fiction” (Victor Shklovsky, 1921)
• Modernist mimesis: “We wanted the Reader to forget the Writer – to forget that
he was reading. We wished him to be hypnotized into thinking that he was living
what he read or, at least, into the conviction that he was listening to a simple and in
no way brilliant narrator who was telling – not writing – a true story.” (Ford Madox
Ford, Thus to Revisit)
• Modernist self-reflectiveness: “Put a novelist into the novel. He justifies aesthetic
generalizations… He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate
other possible ways of telling a story.” (Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point)
• Postmodern self-reflexiveness: “If art is not a reflection of reality, then the last
reflection to get rid of is self-reflection. The fate of Narcissus is to drown in
contemplation of himself. The way out of the dilemma of Narcissus lies in the work
of art as artifice. As artifice the work of art is a conscious tautology in which there is
always an implicit (and sometimes explicit) reference to its own nature as artefact –
self-reflexive, not self-reflective.” (Donald Sukenick, “Thirteen Digressions”, 1976)
 (late) modernism and heteroglossia
• What are the salient features of this novelization of other
genres suggested to us above? They become more free
and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating
extraliterary heteroglossia and the “novelistic” layers of
literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with
laughter, irony, humour, elements of self-parody and
finally – this is the most important thing – the novel
inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain
semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished,
still-evolving contemporary reality (the opened present).
(M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 1934-40, 1st publ. 1975)
• My bedroom was small and indifferently lighted but it contained most of
the things I deemed essential for existence - my bed, a chair which was
rarely used, a table and a washstand. The washstand had a ledge upon
which I had arranged a number of books. Each of them was generally
recognized as indispensable to all who aspire to an appreciation of the
nature of contemporary literature and my small collection contained
works ranging from those of Mr. Joyce to the widely-read books of Mr. A.
Huxley, the eminent English writer. In my bedroom also were certain
porcelain articles related more to utility than ornament... The mantelpiece
contained forty buckskin volumes comprising a Conspectus of the Arts and
Natural Sciences. They were published in 1854 by a reputable Bath house
for a guinea the volume. They bore their years bravely and retained in their
interior the kindly seed of knowledge intact and without decay. (Flann
O’Brien [Brian O’Nolan], At Swim-Two-Birds, 1939)
Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928)
Put a novelist into the novel. He justifies
aesthetic generalizations… He also justifies
experiment. Specimens of his work may
illustrate other possible or impossible ways
of telling a story… But why draw the line at
one novelist inside your novel? Why not a
second inside his? And a third inside the
novel of the second? And so on to infinity,
like those advertisements of Quaker Oats
where there’s a quaker holding a box of
oats, on which is a picture of another
quaker holding another box of oats, on
which etc., etc. At about the tenth remove
you might have a novelist telling your story
in algebraic symbols or in terms of
variations in blood-pressure, pulse,
secretion of ductless glands and reaction
times.
Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928)
 James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
• —Did I kill him, says he, or what?
• And he shouting to the bloody dog:
•  —After him, Garry! After him, boy!
And the last we saw was the bloody car rounding the corner and old sheepsface on it
gesticulating and the bloody mongrel after it with his lugs back for all he was bloody
well worth to tear him limb from limb. Hundred to five! Jesus, he took the value of it
out of him, I promise you.
When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot
wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed
upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon
and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him. And there came a voice out
of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And He answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai!
And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to
the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe's in Little
Green street like a shot off a shovel. (James Joyce, Ulysses, ‘Cyclops’)
 (post-)Modernist Ulysses?

“To map Ulysses literary-historically is to describe the relation between [2 disparate geophysical]
terrains, and between the plates on which they ride – between... the modernist poetics of its
‘normal’ half and the postmodernist poetics of its ‘other’ half. This relation... is one of excess and
parody: the poetics of the postmodernist chapters exceed the modernist poetics of the ‘normal’
chapters, and the postmodernist chapters parody modernist poetics.” (Brian McHale, 1992)

• EXPRESSIVE FORM > EXCESSIVE FORM (Kevin Dettmar, 1992)

• mobile world – parallax of discourses: “when the mobility which Joyce’s strategies
secured for consciousness comes to contaminate the world outside consciousness,
then consciousness itself threatens to vanish from sight in a general fluidity of
world and mind alike…In certain chapters of Ulysses…(fictional) reality itself has
become fluid, metamorphic, not merely a function of the consciousness impinging
upon it… but in its own right…The parallax of discourses… dissolves the Ulysses
world into a plurality of incommensurable worlds.” (Brian McHale).
 Brian O’Nolan (1911-1966), aka Flann O’Brien, Myles
na gCopaleen, Brother Barnabas, Count O’Blather, etc.

At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
The Third Policeman
(1940, publ. posth. 1967)
An Béal Bocht (1941)
The Hard Life (1961)
The Dalkey Archive (1964)
Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-1989)

Whoroscope (1930)
Dream of Fair to Middling Women
(1932, publ. 1992)
More Pricks Than Kicks (1934)
Murphy (1938)
Watt (1941-45, publ. 1953)

Molloy (1951/1955)
Malone Meurt/Malone Dies
(1951/1956)
L’Innommable/The Unnamable
(1953/1958)
The sense that there was no one much to read the work these writers were producing ate
its way into the tone and structure of the work itself. Their books did not come from the
world, their books became the world; in the beginning was the word, but there was often
nothing except the word and its hollow echoes, and this gave their playful spirits an edge
that was often melancholy, often manic … Yet out of the emptiness, out of the non-
sacramental, at the heart of where they were, the three writers found words and literary
forms, old ones and hybrid ones, fascinating. Some dream impelled them towards work,
towards producing work which would eventually make them famous.
The idea for them of what lay between the old and the hybrid, however, was a problem; a
great tradition in fiction in which characters had choices and chances and possessions, and
destinies to fulfil, was for them a great joke, a locomotive in a siding whose engine was all
rust. They began by dismantling the escape routes and then removing the wheels. For them
the notion of character, and even identity, was to be undermined, or driven over. Then they
set out to undermine not only choice and chance and destiny, but the idea of time and
indeed space – infinity and eternity would fascinate them – and the idea of form. (Colm
Tóibín, “Flann O’Brien’s Lies”, London Review of Books, 2012: Flann O’Brien, J.-L. Borges, F.
Pessoa)
 Late modernist anti-mimeticism: Beckett’s
early fiction
• “The procédé that seems all falsity, that of Balzac, for example… consists of
dealing with the vicissitudes, or absence of vicissitudes, of character in this
backwash, as though they were the whole story. Whereas, in reality, this is so
little the story, this nervous recoil into composure, this has so little to do with the
story that one must be excessively concerned with a total precision to allude to it
at all... To read Balzac is to receive the impression of a chloroformed world. He
is absolute master of his material, he can do what he likes with it, he can
foresee and calculate its least vicissitude, he can write the end of his book
before he has finished the first paragraph, because he has turned all his
creatures into clockwork cabbages and can rely on their staying put wherever
needed or staying going at whatever speed in whatever direction he chooses.
The whole thing, from beginning to end, takes place in a spellbound backwash.
We all love and lick up Balzac, we lap it up and say it is wonderful, but why call
this distillation of Euclid and Perrault Scenes from Life?” (Samuel Beckett, Dream
of Fair to Middling Women)
 Beckett on Murphy
• I suddenly see that Murphy is a break down between [Geulincx’s] ubi
nihil vales ibi nihil velis (positive) and Malraux’s Il est difficile a celui
qui vit hors du monde de ne pas recherché les siens (negative). (S.
Beckett, letter to McGreevy, 1936)

• Do [the publishers: Houghton Mifflin] not understand that if the book

is slightly obscure, it is so because it is a compression, and that to
compress it further can only result in making it more obscure? ...
There is no time and no space in such a book for mere relief. The
relief has also to do work and reinforce that from which it relieves.
And of course the narrative is hard to follow, and of course
deliberately so. Am I [...] to crowd the last chapter with oyster kisses
and Murillo brats? (Beckett to Reavey, 1936)
 A text is not a line of words
releasing a ’theological’ meaning
(the message of the Author-God)
but a multi-dimensional space in
which a variety of writings, none of
them original, blend and clash. The
text is a tissue of quotations drawn
from the innumerable centres of
culture... The author’s only power
is to mix his writings, to counter the
ones with the others, in such a way
as to never rest on any one of
them.

(Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’)

Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild (1919)

[At Swim-Two-Birds is] a belly-laugh or high-class literary
pretentious slush, depending on how you look at it. Some people
say it is harder on the head than the worst whiskey, so do not
hesitate to burn the book if you think that’s he right thing to do.
(Flann O’Brien to critic Ethel Mannin, 1939)

- In what manner were you compelled to address Mr Furriskey?

- In guttersnipe dialect, at all times repugnant to the instincts of
gentlemen…It caused considerable mental anguish.
- To what do you attribute your impaired health?
- Malnutrition and insufficient clothing. My inadequate pay and a
luncheon interval of only ten minutes prohibited both the purchase
and consumption of nourishing food. When my employment started, I
was provided with a shirt, boots and socks, and a light uniform of dyed
dowlas, a strong fabric, resembling calico. No underdrawers were
provided and as my employment was protracted into the depths of
winter, I was entirely unprotected from the cold, I contracted asthma,
catarrh and various pulmonary disorders. (At Swim-Two-Birds)
• “democratic fiction” (apud Mr. Furriskey, Lamont, the
Ringsend cowboys, the cow et al. - employees of Mr. Trellis,
author)

• “anti-novels”, “fabulism”, “metafiction”

• “Menippean satires”
• “transitional late modernism”
• “postmodernism” (B. McHale, R. Imhof)
• “postcolonial modernism” - skeptical both of the authoritative gestures of
(Joycean) modernism and partisan claims to cultural authenticity (1920s-30s Ireland)

• “critical utopian form of satire” (P. Bixby)

• The metafictionist makes his reader never forget that he is the ‘Manager of the Performance’,
as Thackeray puts it in the introductory chapter of Vanity Fair, whereas in many modes of
conventional fiction the author – or narrator – remains, like the God of the creation, above
his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, paring his fingernails. The process of laying
bare the conventions of fiction, very frequently, takes on the form of a conversation between
author/narrator and reader. Such conversations, it should be observed, are not a poetological
feature exclusively pertaining to metafiction; they are, naturally, integral constituents of the
novel as a literary form in the eighteenth century. Yet there is a significant difference
between the author-reader conversations in Fielding or Richardson and those in Sterne, or
between the author-reader conversations in the eighteenth-century novel, excepting of
course Tristram Shandy, and those in metafiction. With a few notable exceptions, Fielding
and Richardson communicate with their readers in order to establish mutual agreement
about the actuality of human experience; they talk about life, or the lives depicted by them in
their novel. Sterne and his metafictional successors talk about art, about the workings of art
and the reader-responses to their artefacts. Life, as far as they are concerned, has gone out of
the window, and good riddance to it, they would add. (Rüdiger Imhof, Contemporary
Metafiction: A poetological study of metafiction in English since 1939, 1986)
 devices used in metafiction
(Patricia Waugh, The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, 1984)

• over-intrusive, visibly inventing narrator

• ostentatious typographic experiment
• explicit dramatization of the reader
• Chinese-box structures
• proliferation of incantatory, absurd lists, catalogues
• over-systematized or overtly arbitrarily arranged structural devices
• total breakdown of temporal and spatial organization of narrative
• infinite regress
• dehumanization of character, parodic doubles, obtrusive proper names
• self-reflexive images
• critical discussions of the story within the story
• continuous undermining of specific fictional conventions
• use of popular genres
• explicit parody of previous texts, whether literary or non-literary