Summary

At issue in this volume of ten essays is fictional world-building that evokes “the feel of experience,” a sense of life that extends beyond merely registering the real or self-recognition. In particular, modernist literature – as well as literary works imbued with the modernist aesthetic – experiments with form, style and method, searching for ways to make “the accent [fall] a little differently” (Woolf, “Modern Fiction”). This was done to emphasize the hidden or the marginalized, in order to, in Virginia Woolf’s words, invent “a different outline of form,” that is challenging to understand, “difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predecessors.”

Woolf’s influential essay “Modern Fiction” (1925) anticipates the conceptual vocabulary of contemporary literary scholars in its concern with stories as mental territories where life itself is not merely reflected but intensely felt and is a potential other world to dwell in, to move in, to perceive in as a sentient, experiencing being.

As this essay collection seeks to demonstrate, the major modernist writers – alongside Woolf herself, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot – as well as those anticipating or extending their aesthetic, including George Eliot, James Agee, Walter Evans, and Hilary Mantel, probed what contemporary narratologists now see as a basic element of narrative: experientiality. This was done to project and enhance an existential feeling, what David Herman has also, in a more global definition, called the “consciousness factor,” which is “narrative’s capacity to emulate through its temporal and perspectival configuration the what-it's-like dimension of conscious awareness itself” (Basic Elements of Narrative, 2009). If in fact, as Herman seems to suggest, and likewise Monika Fludernik asserts in her seminal book, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996), experientiality constitutes narrativity as the ontological ground for narrative. As such, the common ambition among the scholars in this volume is to investigate the ability of modernist (and modernist inflected) literature to manipulate these ‘narratemes’, which is to say the intrinsic elements of storyworlds, and in the process implicitly argue with Woolf that the interest of the texts under scrutiny in embodied cognition enables the sensation that Life itself is at stake. Like the readers of a biography, she finds exemplary James Boswell’s Life of Johnson: “[we] may sit, even with the great and good over the table and talk” (“The New Biography”).

Background

Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness in Modernist Storyworlds: The Feel of Experience taps into the rather recent cognitive turn in literary studies, which is particularly marked by research on narrative. David Herman, one of the most avid proponents of, as he phrases it, the explorations of “the nexus of narrative and mind,” places this research within post-classical narratology, which is to say the work builds on (mostly) the French structuralists – Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Algirdas J. Greimas and Tzvetan Todorov. This context enriches these analysts’ concepts “with research on human intelligence either ignored by or inaccessible to the classical narratologists, in an effort to throw light on mental capacities and dispositions that provide ground for – or are grounded in – narrative experiences” (“Exploring the Nexus of Narrative and Mind,” 2012). Herman’s own work is exemplary for this shift in theoretical vantage point where not only conceptual renewal occurs but also expansive metanarratological observations which “reassess the terms in which questions about narrative have been formulated until now.” Thus, the idea of “narrative worldmaking” is at the center of Herman’s reconsiderations, a conception which goes beyond structuralist codifications to “encompass the referential dimension of narrative, its capacity to evoke worlds in which interpreters can, with more or less ease or difficulty, take up imaginative residence.” These last words, that I have marked in italics, seem to speak directly to Woolf’s critical essays and the modernist artist’s pleas to fellow writers to experiment not only with form but also with the constructions of worlds that draw on real readers’ life experiences – concrete, referential, embodied textual spaces.

Indeed, Herman’s interdisciplinary interests describe an approach to literature benefiting from diverse “research developments across multiple fields, including discourse analysis, philosophy, psychology, and narrative theory itself”. This enables him to raise new questions about “the fictional minds of modernism,” and to suggest that instead of the longstanding critical view of the inwardness of modernist psychological fiction, the experimental writing of Woolf, Lawrence, Joyce and Mansfield (all foregrounded in this volume) among others reveals that consciousness “at once [shapes] and [is) shaped by larger experiential environments, via the particular affordances or opportunities for action that those environments provide” (“Re-minding Modernism,” 2011).

The essays in The Feel of Experience also approach the modernist mind within this renewed interdisciplinary context, casting light on the felt life of the text, via perimeters that belong to both the storymind and the interpreters’ embodied existence. Sharing a scholarly interest in the “nexus of narrative and mind,” the authors investigate textual patterns and strategies that enhance the understanding of how the phenomena of cognition, emotion and consciousness function as entrance points to the vitality of storyworlds. In the process, recent developments in cognitive literary studies such as cognitive narratology and affect theory are utilized as well as foundational disciplines, that continue to afford meaningful analyses of minds in fiction – classical narrative theory, literary aesthetics and phenomenology.

 Chapters in Focus

My own essay, “The Ethical Chronotope in Modernist Prose: The Example of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’,” initiates the volume and the first section, “The Modernist Short Form.” The larger concern here is with the modernist epiphany as a cognitive event that can profitably be approached via Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, a time-space compound, both “a formally constitutive category of literature” and an “indispensable form of any cognition.”. In order to historicize the concept by grounding its epiphanic presentations in the modernist aesthetic, I analyze Lawrence’s short story “The Odour of Chrysanthemums” as prototypical for threshold chronotopes in the modernist short form in particular (novella, short story and poem), transformative textual moments that open unto not only a character’s heightened awareness of life and death, but also the rapture of the creative imagination itself in its active encounter with the ethical immanence of literary language.

The second essay in this section on the modernist short form, Arzu Kumbaroglu’s “A Genettian Analysis of the Unfamiliar in James Joyce’s ‘Eveline’,” probes consciousness in Joyce’s story from Dubliners, making a case also, as my discussion does, for the cognitive valence of time-space thinking, albeit from the theoretical vantage point of Gerard Genette’s work with narrative discourse. The Genettian analysis of how memory works affectively to retouch and even to falsify the past. This highlights consciousness in Joyce’s story as a central, dynamic event; it further facilitates a view of Joyce’s narrative method in an early work, where experiments with thought representation as flows of associations anticipate the fully accomplished stream-of-consciousness style in Ulysses.

Following Kumbaroglu’s essay and concluding this section is Liu Huiming’s “T. S. Eliot and the Avant-garde: Sense, Energy and Gender,” an examination of two of Eliot’s early poems, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes,” first published in the Vorticist magazine Blast in 1915. Huiming’s chapter adds a study of poetry to the collection, leaving no doubt that symbolic lyrics also build fictional worlds, embodied spaces inhabited by cogitating personas. Even if published in one of the Vorticist organs and referring to avant-garde sensibilities, Eliot’s poems stake out a mental landscape saturated with feminine sensuality and the senses of touch, smell and taste, thereby undercutting the binary truisms about the superiority of the detached male gaze.

The modernist novel, especially the work of Virginia Woolf, is the topic of three chapters in the second section. Alexander Venetis’ “The Exaltation of Otherworldliness: Bloomsbury Aesthetes on Consciousness, Form and Affect” provides a helpful historical context to Woolf’s writings about the novel, discussing in some detail Edwardian social realism, pitting Woolf’s modernist agenda against H. G Wells’ pragmatic vision, as articulated in his essay “The Contemporary Novel” (1912) in particular. Even if Woolf´s conception of the “stuff of fiction” is at odds with the Edwardian novelists’ practice and even if she eclipses (what she calls) “the cotton wool of daily life” from her major aesthetic preoccupations, Venetis notes that the ordinary and extraordinary are intertwined in her fiction, and that the real is manipulated “in pursuit of the rims and edges of the experiential horizon, which is a quest for the beyond of the pictorial and imagistic.”

The following two chapters, including readings of Mrs Dalloway, The Waves and an autobiographical piece, “A Sketch of the Past,” can be seen to implicitly confirm Venetis’ statement here about Woolf’s epistemological ambitions. Deepening our appreciation for the Woolfian storyworld, Chunhui Lu draws on contemporary affect theory as well as on Fredric Jameson’s thought in The Antinomies of Realism (2013) to argue for the power of the social critique in Mrs Dalloway. Critics’ assumptions about mimetic representations being the proper vehicle for social and critical awareness are exposed as participating in the kind of essentialist thinking which Woolf dismantles in Mrs Dalloway. Outlining the composition of structural intensity in Woolf’s novel, Hu telescopes the complexity of “aesthetic emotion,” how Woolf’s writing comes close to impressionistic art in her evocations of life itself “through affective materiality.”

In “‘Even a Tea Party Means Apprehension’: Virginia Woolf’s Apprehensive Storyworlds,” Chen Rupeng also explores the aesthetic potential of affective structures in Woolf’s fiction, grounding analysis of expressions, scenes and characters in “A Sketch of the Past,” The Waves and Mrs Dalloway. This exploration is made using the conception of apprehension, defined in ontology, epistemology and psychopathology as both a cognitive resource (a mental grasp of circumstances) and psychic unrest, which is to say fear, anguish and anxiety. Significantly, the psychological origin for, what Rupeng refers to as, Woolf’s “theory of writing,” involving her reflections on “moments of being,” is explored in the chapter from the perspective of D. W. Winnicott’s clinical work on the “original breakdown” and on simulations of this in the psychoanalytic situation. Woolf anticipates Winnicott’s ideas in her “faith in writing” as in its spontaneous rhythms, “she can come to terms with the unexperienced devastation that is also an absolutely private part of herself.”

The last section, “Modernist Inflections,” goes beyond historical periodization and investigates fictional minds in texts that both anticipate and extend Woolf’s “new outline of form.” Two chapters are devoted to George Eliot’s novels, Adam Bede and Silas Marner. Karam Nayehpour’s “The Tragedy of an Unsympathetic Mind in George Eliot’s Adam Bede” employs concepts from cognitive narratology, especially from the works of Monika Fludernik, David Herman and Alan Palmer, to consider the tragic trajectory of Hetty Sorrel, one of four protagonists in Eliot’s novel, whose self-enclosed, asocial mindset disables her as a member of the small rural community, precipitating her disastrous fate in the narrative. Employing Alan Palmer’s notion of “embedded narrative,” Nayehpour delves into Hetty’s “unsympathetic mind,” which is static, unyielding and set in stark contrast to the social mind itself that, however erroneously, interacts dynamically and is susceptible to change and even regeneration.

In the following chapter, Naghmeh Varghaiyan’s “Metamorphosis of the Social and Individual Minds in George Eliot’s Silas Marner,” similar topics surface, although here a reverse process takes place as the collective mind seems at first the epitome of self-serving bias, blind to the reality behind appearances. By productively employing Palmer’s distinctions between “intramental” and “intermental” narrative cognition, Varghaiyan traces patterns of regeneration, revealing – to use Fludernik’s conception – the experientiality, the felt experience of embodied narrative agents as they undergo “emotional and cognitive rebirth and change.”

A valuable intervention into this volume’s concern with the modernist aesthetic is Russel F. Mayo’s “‘The cruel radiance of what is’; Modernism, Documentary, and Anti-Theatricality in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Concerned with James Agee’s and Walker Evan’s photojournalistic work commissioned by Fortune magazine during depression-era North America but not published until 1941, Mayo’s chapter provides a transatlantic cultural and intellectual context to many of the issues raised among the authors of the collection. Mayo problematizes previous “cultural consciousness” arguments of commentators such as Susan Hegeman, reassessing Agee’s and Evans’ documentary in the light of modernist formalism as developed by the aesthetician Michael Fried and literary theorist Walter Benn Michaels. Mayo’s chapter confirms the view that modernist storyworlds delineate problems of representation, disrupting conventional mimesis against the grain of dominant forms, even in the established one of documentary reportage.

Aptly concluding the volume, Michael Winkelman’s “‘Richly Textured Scenes’: Woolf Hall, Thomas Cromwell, and Cognitive Narratology” could be seen implicitly to gesture toward the aesthetic ambition of the moderns to engage readers in the “luminous halo” of Life as the chapter primarily examines the narrative techniques of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of historical novels – Woolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light – in order to access the vital power behind the “reality effect” of images, scenes and characters. The “richly textured scenes” Winkelman adumbrates have Thomas Cromwell, the protagonist, at their centre, and in order to get closer to the uncanny power of literary character, the chapter draws on narratological work by Blakey Vermeule and Liza Zunshine among others as well as on cognitive scientists interested in a theory of mind. Noting the interest within cognitive literary studies in reading as co-creation of text, this last chapter draws attention to our own embodied participation in the world-building of the stories we treasure.

Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her major areas of research interests are British modernism, the contemporary novel, literary theory and philosophical approaches to literature. Among her publications are articles and book chapters on D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Graham Swift and Peter Ackroyd. She is also the author of Dwelling in Language: Character, Psychoanalysis and Literary Consolations (2013) and co-editor of Ethics and Poetics: Ethical Recognitions and Social Reconfigurations in Modern Narratives (2014).

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