Jennifer Wicke
The title of this chapter pays homage to the custom of designating centuries with particularly momentous occurrences at either end “long” centuries, if the 100-year span seems to exclude significant episodes or events that inform the cultural idea of that century or period. This fast and loose play with what seem to be firm designations of time was exemplified by the noteworthy historian and erstwhile literary and cultural critic Eric Hobsbawm, who coined the term “the long nineteenth century” in order to emphasize the momentous historical arc from 1789, the start of the French Revolution and the beginning of the United States under its Constitution, through 1914, the start of the First World War, when Europe came undone. Hobsbawm is equally well known for his final foray into historical date-changing in the third volume of his trilogy The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (1994), which begins in 1914 and ends in 1991, tracing the extreme history of the century in its movement from the First World War, through the Second, on to the Cold War and the latter’s demise along with the fall of the Soviet system. A shorter century is not the same thing as a longer century, yet Hobsbawm’s willingness to divvy up time according to matters of pressing significance, and to offer an interpretation of what matters most in that period, is the presiding spirit for this chapter.
The 1920s for the English novel would be reckoned by any reader or scholar as a decade akin to the commonplace Latin phrase annus mirabilis for a miraculous or wonderful year. The 1920s are not only a “decennium mirabilis,” given the extraordinary flowering of the novel over that ten-year period, but also a “long decade,” in that aspects of this miraculous decade begin to crystallize in the last years of the 1910s, and persist and are prolonged in significance well past 1929. In another way, the decade echoes the sense of “short and extreme” in Hobsbawm’s parlance, since it is near its start, in 1922, that James Joyce’s Ulysses is published, a revolutionary event that marks the literary equivalent of a meteor hitting the earth and leaving a crater behind so immense and impalpable that the very notion of restoring a semblance of order to the “novel in English” afterwards is nearly impossible. The “long 1920s” for the English novel stands for the decade when it stopped being English, or at least easily identifiable as British, opening out to a world and to other literary traditions that far exceed a neat and tidy identity where what “English” means and what the “novel” implies is not open to much question. In the long 1920s, both are blown out the window, or at least are up for grabs. We cannot survey the 1920s as business as usual for the novel in English, because Joyce blows up the novel as a genre, and the pressures of empire, war, and global writing begin to complicate “English” as both a noun and an adjective.
This essay starts its foray into the global and modernist novel of the 1920s with an outlier, Ronald Firbank’s Valmouth, published in 1919, then traverses the seismic decade with interrelated novels by James Joyce, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf that between and among themselves bring the global modernist novel in English into being, and finally argues that the global and modernist flourishing of the 1920s finds its truest endpoint with two novels that saw publication in the mid 1930s: Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935).
Even focusing on the novel alone, within the “long 1920s,” forces us to recognize an abundance too great to last, and a decisive shift in the very terrain of the novel itself. My focus falls, then, on a braided series of novels that comprise an arc over the stretched decade, a double rainbow for focusing on changes in the form of the modernist novel that was so creatively innovative in this period, and the content, or at least the context, of this set of chosen works as they exemplify a global tilt, an expansion to embrace a worldwide purview that will allow us to see the novel emerging in the 1920s as both global and modernist, simultaneously. For the embrace of worldliness is as spectacular a development across the long 1920s as is the innovative experimental form of these disparate but related works, and inseparable from it. The “English” novel, when it becomes modernist, goes global, too.
Making such a choice allows us to break the grip of a commonplace criticism of the modernist novel. The argument goes that modernism declares its lack of interest in the world or society or everyday life, and in turning its back on everything from politics to ordinary life to action in the world, devotes the energies of art to building intricate and insular, and sometimes proudly useless, experimental art palaces out of prose. This argument – and its adherents include those who believe that the best art does ignore the world and turns inward, and those who see modernism as a reaction formation to a terrible and hopeless world, with no role for artists except on a private island of aesthetics – can be a self-fulfilling critical prophecy, and has caused a certain blindness to the ways in which the modernist novel is engaged fully in the world. The experimental form of the modernist novel brings the world into visibility, and into the reality of its readers. The novels in English of the long 1920s are as active and real-world-oriented a form of literature as can be imagined, even with all the formal fireworks they bring along with them. The modernist novel in English sets the stage for the postcolonial novel shortly to follow it, and from many locations around the world as the global anglophone novel emerges, but only if we choose to see it as a global modernism in the first place.
There is another temporal and cultural keystroke that makes the period stand out for the novel in English, a tragic bookending caused by war. The long 1920s makes for an extremely fraught period between the end of one world war and the seeds of another, yet that period was also a decade of possibility in art, one of hope for social transformation that the modernist novel in English tried to write, quite literally, in its pages.The modernist novels of the 1920s did not and could not stop another war, quite obviously, but this group of modernist novels in English was urgently dedicated to the notion of literature as a means to sound an alarm, and also to try to heal the global breaches and scars responsible for it.
Along the time-deckled edges of the long 1920s for the English novel, its before and after, are provocations of style and structure that cut directly to the very word “English” in this Companion’s title. One of the things that makes the decade so striking, so unprecedented and unmanageable in its literary overflowing, is that both structure and style operate in tandem as stealth weapons against a predetermined or socially sanctioned understanding of what it is for something to be English, let alone what the modernist novel might be during this period. An enormous dark trench or scar cut a jagged swath that separated the novelistic innocence of pre-war writing from its 1919 aftermath. At the self-same moment, and, according to many of its interpreters, for a related reason, the “Empire on which the sun never sets” was fraying, under both ethical and economic strain and beset by fierce resistance – externally by colonized peoples, and internally by national movements and political groups that questioned the rationale for the British Empire, and deplored its massive social and ethical costs.
English novels had addressed and reviled and repudiated empire from the end of the nineteenth century, when Joseph Conrad of course set the funereal tone in Heart of Darkness (1899) for an empire that was not only waning, but simply had to disappear on both moral and economic grounds. Heart Of Darkness zeroes in on the appalling personal empire of King Leopold of Belgium in the unnamed but recognizable Belgian Congo, the place where the British seaman Charles Marlow hires on for a contract job that becomes a literal nightmare. The novel ends, however, by squarely placing the “heart of the darkness” in London, the imperial metropolis, as the leisure boat carries Marlow, witness firsthand to “the horror, the horror” he tries to recount, and his listeners, shadowy captains of British banking and industry, along the River Thames: “the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness” (2008, 187).
This strand of the modernist lineage, a voyage into the dark that circles back to embrace “home” as well, itself suffused in a dark ambiguity, comes in many ways to dominate the “long 1920s” for the novel in English. The urgency of unmasking empire was only more strongly impelled by recognition that the First World War had emerged out of the maw of imperialism, with the European imperial powers competing militarily on their own soil, in a war that saw troops from India, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Australia, for example, mobilized to fight on behalf of England. It is crucial to add that Conrad’s modernism dissolved the stable solidity of characters, eliminated the linearity of narrative in favor of a looping structure that moves inward into impressions, fantasies, and fears, and in its highly charged, almost surreal language gave witness, through Marlow’s tale, to the massive violence of imperialism, crystallized in Kurtz’s flash of truth, the postscript to his report on the “civilizing mission” of the Belgians: “Exterminate all the brutes” (155). The unstable valence of the terms “light” and “dark,” and the shifting terrain of self-knowledge as cracks develop between the very words used to construct the world, are carried forward in the modernist novel in English of the 1920s, where Conrad’s slim confidence in the power of the “voice” of his truth-teller, Marlow, faced even stronger pressure in the aftermath of a world war and the fragmentation of voice in a welter of mass media and the global scale of violence.
The Second World War finished off the British Empire for good and all, with a few straggler colonies remaining into the 1970s and beyond, but the English novel in the 1920s was preternaturally alert to the problems and sounded the warning of the unsustainability of empire just as it registered the traumas of the war. Its disenchantment with the rigid authority, the deadening hierarchies of race, class, and gender, and the extremes of inequality characterizing empire, can be read as a strategic textual encounter with the literary languages of “English,” and its total demolition of business as usual in the literary genre of the novel, as aspects of the urgency to write in a new way, one written from the margins in every sense of the word.
Ushering in the long 1920s as an assault on the nature of Englishness and a daring approach to what a novel may contain is Valmouth, a 1919 novel by Ronald Firbank that uses artifice and masquerade to strike fresh ground, borrowing from the late-nineteenth-century aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, who had declared: “The only Truth is the truth of Masks” (2008, 1244). Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank, the grandson of an illiterate railway worker who became a titan of industry, and whose father was knighted and served as an aristocratic peer in parliament, dropped out of Cambridge University and died in Rome in 1926 at the age of 40, after a peripatetic life spent wandering to Spain, the Caribbean, North Africa, Italy, and the Middle East, while writing the eight novels, numerous poems, and several plays for which he is known. Firbank’s reputation as an aesthete who outlived his Wildean moment, despite his very short life, has obscured the ways he melded his world travel and aesthetic concerns with his inclusion of many openly gay characters, characters of multiple races and ethnicities, and unusual textual experiments that blend prose with drama and poetry, often in an arch and subversive style, and always as an affront to the rigid divisions that obtained in British society, if not always in its literature.
Valmouth is filled with improbabilities. Among other things, it recounts the adventures of a group of people who seem staid until we find that they are mostly centenarians, living in a spa resort on the west coast of England. Some of the characters are old enough to date back to the seventeenth century and the reign of Charles II. The plot is neither linear nor really the matter at hand, since the realist marriage plot is being put through a global modernist wringer in Valmouth, where two of these staggeringly old ladies try to marry off the heir to a local estate, Captain Dick Thoroughfare. The captain, away at sea, is already engaged to a black woman, the “negress” Niri-Esther, the niece of the immigrant masseuse Mrs. Yaj, and, it appears, is also a member of one of the sea-going marriages between men that were often solemnized among sailors, and considered “legal” during the voyage. As he says of his “chum” Lieutenant Jack Whorwood, “that little lad, on a cruise, is, to me, what Patroclus was to Achilles, and even more” (1949, 160). Firbank’s friend the poet and writer Osbert Sitwell noted in a posthumous introduction to his work that the First World War forced Firbank to write: “He felt himself totally out of place in a khaki-clad, war-mad world, where there was no music, no gaiety, and in which one could no longer travel except about the business of death” (1949, xii). Firbank’s writing is so successfully audacious that its seriousness tends to disappear behind the curtain of witticisms, and even a supporter and fellow gay man, E. M. Forster, worried that Firbank wasn’t concerned enough with ethics, and the “right and wrong” of the soul. But Firbank is in another camp on this matter. Oscar Wilde developed an argument for the importance of truth as style, and of “taste” as the basis for human culture, rather than “ethics”: “Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change” (2008, 1058). Firbank brings this sensibility into the novel, where it becomes an ethics after all, and a global one.
Firbank’s ideal pastoral realm in Valmouth is a paradise for racial, sexual, and global coexistence, at a time when the empire still raged, the war was barely over, homosexuality was a crime in Britain, and women did not have the vote. Captain Thoroughfare is able to have it both ways. He marries Niri-Esther, but without repudiating his affection for Jack; the latter finds other fish to fry in Valmouth’s temple of desire, expressing his interest in someone of the Gypsy persuasion; the ancient ladies pursue their matchmaking just as they enjoy a utopian space for female desire far beyond male authority. The pain of exclusion, of violence, of all the insistence on essences and the “natural” truth of the superiority of rich, white, British, straight men is capsized in a flurry of ruffles and saintliness. The experimental mood of Firbank’s novel might be described as the flip side of Empire, almost as a queer counter-Empire presided over by elderly women, gay people, and persons of color who find themselves not at the battlefront and not brandishing guns at one another, but instead offering a novelistic version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). In Wilde’s drama, Algernon pretends to visit an ill friend named Bunbury as a cover for pursuits that are never named but fall outside the rigid rules of British propriety; as others too start pursuing their secret life of bunburying, each becomes a Bunburyist in solidarity. In Valmouth such bunburying is out in the open, and its characters offer a refuge from the hierarchies and exclusions and the rampant violence of the war-torn world of the British Empire. This makes the experience of reading the novel, in its mixture of realist dialogue and description, delivered by characters chatting over tea who are likely to be women of color, pirates, or more than 100 years old – or all three – uncannily like watching a novel gone Wilde and global. It sets the stage for the amalgam of aesthetic experimentation and global awareness of the long 1920s.
Virginia Woolf was singlehandedly responsible for a major part of the history of the novel in English in the 1920s in each of these trajectories – as a formal experimenter and as a global modernist in the range and intent of her work. Woolf had begun writing before this decade, and in The Voyage Out (1915) she produced a novel that could be called a transitional one in each of the two senses. In a very explicit reworking of Heart of Darkness as a female Bildungsroman, Woolf’s central character Rachel Vinrace finds herself on a colonial voyage to British Guyana. Among the passengers on board the ship her father captains are the satirically drawn Richard and Clarissa Dalloway. Unlike Marlow, who returns as a kind of human shell, Rachel does not survive her own voyage into imperial darkness, succumbing to a fever that meshes with the lack of possibilities for a young woman eager to escape the social definition of marriage, and the social domination of empire, expiring in a still somewhat realist ending that points the way toward the dark absences of Woolf’s modernist style.
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) returns to Clarissa in the aftermath of Woolf’s own encounter with Ulysses, but Woolf truly enters the modernist aesthetic fray with her First World War novel Jacob’s Room (1922), a book that writes its main character Jacob Flanders into the thoughts, dreams, memories, impressions, and desires of those who surround him in his short life, a victim as were so many of the war, who vanishes from the novel as suddenly as he does from the room that encases all that is materially left of him after his death. This room is the space at the very end of the novel where a reader has to infer Jacob’s death in the war, when his mother Betty Flanders and Ralph Bonamy, his university friend and a “bon ami,” who has loved Jacob without its being openly declared, come together to gather up his things in the aftermath of a death that is never described or pinpointed, although it is as piercing as shrapnel.
Jacob’s very name inscribes this death, since it was in Flanders that the British troops experienced some of their greatest losses of the war, with almost a quarter of a million men buried there. His name has a nimbus of cultural associations that make Jacob as much an icon as a character in the nineteenth-century novel’s sense of a “well-rounded” construction of a person, and he is only known in the novel from the outside, from stray encounters or scraps of conversation or in the absent spaces left by his passage through the world. In Jacob’s Room the boundaries between words and their referents, the supposedly solid things underlying language, dissolve and even disappear, leaving empty space, an aspect of Woolf’s style first deployed in this novel about a loss so enormous it cannot be spoken. If society commonly assumes that words are authoritative, whole, and contain only one unambiguous meaning or referent, Woolf’s writing displays the opposite: she shows the permeability of words to one another, the fluidity and even evasiveness of referent or meaning alike, and opens up the rich silence hovering around the often flattened or eroded words of social discourse, the clichés and conventional phrases of course, but also the preposterous lack of meaning that haunts such words as “I” and “you.” Jacob’s Room is an empty room full of the traces of Jacob Flanders, just as all people in some sense occupy empty rooms of selfhood where the words used to define them or name them are less meaningful than the silent spaces surrounding them. The novel merges the claim for the unknowability of the individual person, unknowable even to that very person her- or himself, with the vast mystery of collective death in war.
Jacob had gone from his middle-class home to be educated at Cambridge University as the flower of the British elite. His education consisted primarily of an immersion in the Greek and Latin classics, seen as appropriate for that elite class of educated men, and this molding of young men – Woolf’s novel is sharp and bitter on the exclusion of women from higher education, as she herself had been excluded – is another form of cultural shaping for a purpose that turns out to be death, mass death in a war that is inexplicable. Like so many students at Oxbridge at the time, who were overwhelmingly wealthy, male, white, and good English “gentlemen,” Jacob is driven to experience Greece firsthand, and travels there hoping to capture the grandeur and majesty of the classical texts of Ancient Greece he has read as if they were his cultural birthright. This means, in essence, that he is traveling to visit a set of ruins and tombs, since classical Greece is long gone, and modern Greece holds no meaning for the elite student traveler seeking to channel the immortal past. Visiting the Acropolis by moonlight, Jacob had hoped for a poetic encounter with this fabled remnant, but he is instead distracted by the tourist trappings and the real life surrounding the vista, and annoyed by a middle-aged woman who has the nerve, as he sees it, to be taking photographs of the temple, a kind of modern female agency that displaces the presumed centrality of his own knowing male gaze on the monument. He is further distracted erotically by another woman who shocks him by expressing her sexual interest in him first, rather than the other way around. The cultural imaginary of Athenian wisdom that was supposed to be in his possession as an educated, elite British male – in short, the experience of the fabled ancient Greece he felt entitled to perceive beneath the modern tourism and graffiti, the presence of women and other marginal people like the actual Greeks laboring nearby – has vanished entirely. Jacob was viewed as a rare and superior being, an English gentleman whose sense of self is built from words that imply his superiority as if it sprang in a direct line from Greek and Roman cultural forbears. Woolf’s novel does not blame or judge Jacob for this entitlement, but rather shows how fragile and even self-imprisoning are the words that construct us, even those who, like Jacob, are groomed as civilization’s flower.
A crucial scene in the novel adopts a collage-like motif as multiple characters we will never meet again walk through a London park where an official memorial to the dead of the FirstWorld War has been erected. The bureaucratic, official words carved into the monument are stone craters of nothingness, vacant words that cannot capture the grief, loss, or reality of so much death without any reason for it. In questioning the national ideology of patriotism surrounding the war, Woolf’s novel shows that, underneath the rigid surface distinctions of words etched into monuments, there lies another kind of evanescent knowledge, one where Jacob is alluded to as if he were a vanished god. The mourning, the shock, the ruin that the war leaves in its wake is exemplified by the evanescence of Jacob as a living young man, and scored into us by the terrifying and sudden absence his death, one of so many, magnifies. There is another example of how to mourn on display in that park; it comes in the form of one of Woolf’s female crone figures (another appears in a park in Mrs. Dalloway) who sings a song to herself:
Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp-stool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith’s Bank, clasping a brown mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart … (1998, 50–51)
The words of the song are not given to the reader, but this song is the gift of elegy, a gift because it is truly sung for all the world, the living and the dead and the dog included, by a woman without any authority, without expectation of reward or attention, and without any division or exclusion, except of the marginal woman who sings.
Left gaping open in his mother’s hands at the end of the novel are Jacob’s now useless shoes, a mute analogy for his empty yet word-filled being, shoes whose leather outlines once encased his feet and now trace two tomb-like spaces within which there is seemingly nothing. The novel has boldly written itself around a character who in a sense does not exist, or exists only in his absences. The words used to describe him across the novel take flight, embroider empty spaces, and reveal the outlines of the tomb-like definitions of the words that set him (and all others like him) apart from the world, apart from others deemed lesser, in a hierarchy that did nothing to prevent or protect him from early death:
In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this – and much more than this is true – why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us – why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him. Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love. (54)
The aesthetic styles of his room – found in the eighteenth-century patterned wallpaper and the fine moldings around a mirror where his reflection will nevermore appear – speak to his final absence, since they now frame nothing at all, and one can argue that these are also reminders of an earlier form of the novel, whose confident descriptions of what is real are no longer operative in modernity. Bereft, gallant Betty Flanders holds up those shoes for a last inspection, asking the other person in the room who loved Jacob without really knowing him: “What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?” Thus are the conditions of our love, and our mourning, made manifest.
The same two strands of the long 1920s – experimental form and global awareness – are also brought to the fore in James Joyce’s Ulysses. This was a novel that could not be imitated, but in its very singularity it called forth constant imitation in its aftermath – as we will note, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway bows to its power by being similarly shaped around one single day, as does Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and E. M. Forster imitates the performativity of language in Ulysses by the emphasis throughout A Passage to India on how language stages and performs individual and colonial identity.
Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (2014) describes Joyce’s novel as “most dangerous” because it was revolutionary, and understood by authorities and courts in Europe, Britain, Ireland, and the United States, as well as globally, to be so. The “battle” it outlines, one that has been traced before in works on the publication history of Ulysses, involves the sheer difficulty of getting it into print without censorship or confiscation, whether in the little magazines that bravely published excerpts from it as it was being composed, or in the legal battles that first banned the book outright and then subjected it to protracted trials on the grounds of obscenity. The fierce struggles over the social danger posed by Ulysses and the initially successful bans of the book that made it contraband in most Western nations, subjected to literal book burning as when 500 copies were set afire by authorities in Folkestone, England, smuggled across the border as the prohibited menace it was proclaimed to be, and denied as a work of literary value are not ancillary to its importance, or evidence of a quaint conservatism that came out right in the end. Ulysses was and is revolutionary, and appreciating that fact alters its place in the “long 1920s” just as in our reading of it today, when its revolutionary cutting edge is not blunted by its having by this time been judged by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. How a book made up of other books, a modern epic that goes back to Homer’s Odyssey for its formal architecture and dallies with Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, along with Bunyan, Richardson, Wilde, Ibsen, Edgeworth, Flaubert, Dickens, Cummins, James, and a myriad of poets, a book that is so difficult to read in the first place that it called for a guidebook and a “skeleton key” to its mysteries and allusions, how that exquisitely literary book can be deemed revolutionary – mad, bad, and dangerous to read – is in fact why this excursion into English as a literary language is so often left out of accounts of the English novel. The double rainbow we have been following of formal innovation and global embeddedness is knocked out of the sky by Ulysses, or maybe one could say redoubled, and yet understanding why it is at the heart of a genealogy in the novel initiated by another outsider, the Polish Joseph Conrad, is crucial.
While Joyce was writing Ulysses – a task of seven years from 1914 to 1921, carried out primarily in Trieste, Paris, and Zurich during a self-imposed exile, ending the final proofreading on his fortieth birthday in February 2, 1922, with publication coming shortly thereafter in France by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris – Ireland did not yet exist as the nation it became in January of 1922. An independent Irish Free State had been proclaimed by a coalition of Irish freedom fighters in 1919, followed by the Anglo-Irish war of independence as Britain continued its long fight to keep Ireland in its colonial orbit. The resulting compromise agreed to by Michael Collins – that Britain would still have a say in Ireland’s self-determination, and that it would be considered part of a British “dominion,” led to the assassination of Collins and a civil war between Irish factions who had so recently been united in their revolutionary efforts.
This volatile frame surrounds the writing of Ulysses, since its incendiary literary form wages a nonviolent revolution in words that also insists on freedom and parallels this to Irish self-determination. Famously, Ulysses is often described as the first full-fledged novelistic experiment in “stream of consciousness,” since it begins lodged in the mind of Stephen Dedalus, whose thoughts flow in that “blooming, buzzing confusion” William James attributed to a baby first making sense of the world, carried over into our fragmentary, free-associative internal theater of words as adults. Leopold Bloom cuts in on the stream of consciousness when his very different mode of internal dialogue emerges in Chapter 4; where Stephen’s flow of thoughts is constantly impelled by the flotsam and jetsam of his reading in philosophy, literature, and theology, so that the log of “ineluctable modality of the visible” floats through his inner stream with ease, Bloom’s psychic liquid is made up of fewer high cultural quotes and allusions and more borrowings from common wisdom, mass culture, or urban folklore. A few chapters beyond that and these “streams” will be intercut by cultural forms and discourses that give shape to collective thought as well, as in the “Aeolus” chapter and its intersection with the idioms of newspapers, advertisements, and tabloid entertainment, or in “Ithaca,” which melds the style of the Catholic catechism with the pattern of scientific theorems. The final chapter returns to the earlier mode in Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated stream of consciousness, as this puts into play a female, doubly colonized thinking subject. Molly’s mother, long since dead, hailed from Gibraltar and may have been a “gypsy” or perhaps a North African Jew, who met Molly’s father, Major Tweedy, when he was on military duty there on behalf of the British Empire. Molly’s famous affirmation that ends the novel with “yes I said yes I will Yes” (1986, 644) finally puts a period to her chapter and to the book as a whole without submission to the grammar of domination. That “Yes” reverberates into a future where the word “No,” however omnipresent in real life, has been written out, or written past.
The delirious “Circe” chapter of Ulysses, set in the “night-town” world of Dublin’s red-light district, patrolled by British soldiers who frequent the area’s prostitutes as they enforce colonial order, operates with a surreal dream logic that makes it the “night world” of the novel as a whole, as if the book had gone to sleep and dreamed itself. The entire chapter is structured like a play, complete with stage directions that are increasingly improbable to fulfill in any known universe, since they include Bloom being reduced to a mute, carbonized life form, giving birth to eight children who spring up full-grown, Stephen shattering “all time and space” with his ashplant, and then an italicized direction that Dublin is burning, as if Goethe’s Faust had been superimposed upon the Irish city. Not only the characters but also the important objects, sounds, and signs reappear and offer either dialogue or vigorous accompaniment to the spectacle, and, just as in our dreams, it is possible for a bar of soap to sing and for the nymph in an advertising picture to come to life. During the chapter, in which Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus finally encounter one another as Bloom rescues Stephen, lying drunk and proudly disorderly in the street, from being truncheoned by the British soldiers, Bloom undergoes a trial of sorts in the dreamspace or, as has often been proposed, the subconscious of the book. One can also look at this textual terrain as the place where every facet of life as a colonial subject is performed by the entire ensemble of people, things, ideas, and affects or emotions that might comprise this global phenomenon in the Irish instance. Accosted by a British soldier who demands his name and his papers, Bloom gives a series of wildly divergent answers that momentarily are enacted but that give way to a courtroom where he is on trial for his very being. Accused by a number of women for his impure thoughts and actions, including by a nude female statue whose anatomical form he had gazed at rather too intimately earlier in the day at the National Library, by trial’s end Bloom has taken on many identities including being named Lord Mayor of Dublin, and then morphs into a social prophet and something of a revolutionary. He declares his political program:
I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile … Tuberculosis, lunacy, war, and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked license, bonuses for all, Esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood … Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state. (399)
Esperanto, of course, really existed as a modern attempt to get past the divisions caused by language difference by generating a single world language that could move human cultures beyond the Tower of Babel curse. What Joyce seems to have realized about Esperanto is that it is a dream language, a supposedly utopian and nonpolitical universal language that relies on a fusion of imperial tongues. Ulysses is a book that invents a global modernist tongue that relies on complexity and difference to articulate its political and personal dreams. Bloom’s revolutionary announcement has comic overtones, since he is in the dock in a manner of speaking, but upon closer inspection his plan is one endorsed in a deeper way by Ulysses as a whole, not as a flat wafer of political jargon, but instead as its animating and genuinely global revolutionary method. The “union of all” in a “free lay state” where all are laypersons and no group is singled out for subjugation, violent suppression, condemnation, or exclusion is brought into being by taking the very words that would enforce or justify or rationalize such inequities and throwing them into motion, creating a literary free zone which depicts what has gone wrong in the world such that insanity, total war, and the dire poverty of the many is let stand, and performs its overturning, the necessary shattering of cultural norms that abase women, denigrate Others, repress freedom, and extirpate joy.
Every chapter of Ulysses recapitulates in some way an event from the Odyssey, where Leopold Bloom the humble advertising canvasser undertakes during his day and his travels around Dublin adventures that correspond to those of Odysseus in his epic journey of 20 years trying to return to Ithaca after the Trojan War, a trajectory that includes long stays with Circe and Calypso, encounters with the Sirens, the Cyclops, and other challenges, until in his nostos or homecoming he revenges himself against the suitors, restores his marriage to Penelope, and establishes his son Telemachus as his heir to the kingdom. Bloom is not a king like Odysseus, rather he is ruled as a colonial subject by a British king and the English nation, in an arrangement of 700 years’ duration. In his own home he has lost his infant son Rudy to death, his teenage daughter Milly to the exigencies of earning her living as a teenage seaside photo booth girl, and his wife Molly, at least on the day in question, June 16, 1904, to a far more dashing and virile suitor, Blazes Boylan, with whom she will sleep in their own bed.
Stephen Dedalus is a Telemachus without portfolio, also a colonized subject without any patrimony to receive, since his father Simon resents him and has impoverished the family, his mother’s death from cancer has brought him back from studies in Paris, and his commitment to being an artist appears dubious in a culture under the dominion of Britain. Stephen’s literary patrimony in this respect is borrowed from the language of his colonizers, and making art out of the scraps and leavings permitted to Ireland seems an impossible task, especially if it involves adopting a backward-looking idealization of Celtic legend and lore, which is Stephen’s stance on the medieval stylings of the movement known as the Celtic Twilight, privileging a mythic past and a language, Gaelic – unknown to Stephen just as to James Joyce – whose use had been criminalized in the nineteenth century. Homecoming is a fraught subject when one does not have a national home to call one’s own, when every kind of knowledge, of labor, of creation is hemmed in by what has already been named by those who rule you and set the standards of value and meaning, under the sign of both symbolic and outright violence.
Every dazzling page of Ulysses enters into this perplexity: the entire literary tradition in English must be taken apart and revitalized so that it can belong to the new voices speaking through it, which explains the experimental fireworks of the novel, so huge is the task. Writing “as usual” – in the form of a realist novel that takes for granted the shared worldview communicated by its narrative – would not work when the challenge is to disrupt the illusion of a transparent reality and to trouble the smooth surface of language itself, showing the dark underside of its signification, revealing the gaps and silences and differing associations that compel words viewed from the other side of things. There is a famous moment in Joyce’s earlier work featuring Stephen Dedalus, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): Stephen has been called in to talk to the English Dean of Studies of his college, and thinks “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine!” (2008, 132). So much for Esperanto: here is a savage hierarchy, a regime of difference and a gulf of power brought about and maintained in the shared language of English. What Ulysses is doing, then, is making English global in spite of itself, using all its linguistic powers and possibilities to enlarge and embrace and finally say “Yes” to making it a global home for all who live within it.
E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India is among the most remarkable novels of the 1920s by any measure. To place it on a continuum of experimental modernist form and the concomitant enlargement of modernism to a global horizon requires a fresh consideration of Forster’s achievement. This was Forster’s last novel published in his lifetime, which stretched on to 1970 and a very different world that he had helped to make back in the long 1920s with this touchstone book. Forster has never made it to the accepted and hallowed circle of modernists; his work is often, though not always, seen as exceptionally important but a kind of holdover of realism, as if Thomas Hardy or George Meredith or a less prolix George Eliot were still writing marvelous and ethically subtle novels right through to the 1920s. Although it was so early in his own long life, Forster’s fiction has a belated quality, as if he had outlived the period of his own peers. And fair enough, we readers do not see language virtually standing up on the page as it does in Joyce’s Ulysses, nor a narrative voice that almost telekinetically moves inside and outside a whole set of characters inside of a mere paragraph, as his friend Virginia Woolf’s tensile narrator defies rules of time and space to burrow into the silences behind words and pass straight through the supposedly firm walls between human selves. Instead, the failure to recognize Forster’s modernity arises because the global has not usually been seen as a primary endeavor of modernism, so strong is the prejudice in favor of viewing modernist writing as turning away from the world, insular and self-enclosed, autonomous and proud of it, circling the drain in textual solitude.
The moment we instead look for the global signature informing the shape-shifting forms of the modernist novel, going back of course to Heart of Darkness, it is discernible just how much modernism’s experimental form and style is the result of its entry in a world that the official cultural ideology had walled off with its narrative illusions of “progress,” imperial domination by right, and its insistence in the simplest sense that the world was not worth knowing. The modernist novel in most of its valences is a repudiation of that, a rejoinder to it, and the construction in aesthetic form of a world that will allow the global to become visible. That is not a straightforward proposition, as if a revived realism could have done the job better, since realism is as far from reality as any other mode. What is so special about A Passage to India is how this novel pretends to be something it is not – that is, pretends to be readily accessible, pretends to partake in the realist currency of “full, round” and thus knowable characters, alludes to the linear, plotted passage of time, and avoids appearing to alight on those internal moments of duration – stream of consciousness in Joyce, or the interpenetration of subjective moments in Woolf – that have been viewed as the hallmark of modernist writing. Its modernist experimentalism is there, hiding in plain sight. This is stealth global modernism, and the reasons for Forster’s sleight of hand are global ones. The experimentalism of A Passage to India derives from the same urgency to give a modern shape to revolution and freedom as does Ulysses, and the same drive to unmask and dissolve the cruel inequities that underwrite power and knowledge that animates Woolf’s novels.
A conscientious objector in the First World War, Forster volunteered with the International Red Cross and served as an ambulance driver in Alexandria, Egypt, one of the many theaters of war in the colonies or protectorates of the European powers, as Egypt was largely under the control of Great Britain at that time. By 1914 all but one of his novels had been published. In the early 1920s he was briefly the private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas, among those Indian elites permitted to exercise a limited form of local power in their regions by the British Raj, and it was after this stint that A Passage to India was written, along with an important non-fiction account, The Hill of Devi (1953). In the 1930s and 1940s Forster was a broadcaster for the BBC with a crucial role in organizing programs that gave a voice to artists, activists, and political leaders from the British colonies, and became a public political and cultural figure in the Union of Ethical Societies.
A Passage to India takes its title from Walt Whitman’s poem. For Whitman, this was a passage of the soul, an embrace of what his poem calls “the earth to be spann’d, connected by network, The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, The oceans to be cross’d, the distance brought near, The lands to be welded together” (2005, 429). The thrust, then, is connection, a crossing on both sides to enable a welding together, and Forster, as the author of the famous admonition “only connect,” the epigraph of his novel Howards End (1910), was without doubt alert to that resonance of the poem, written in part out of Whitman’s excitement at the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, which the poet envisioned as making possible the embrace of worlds “ancient and new.” By 1924 the spiritual opportunity Whitman sang of for the connection of East and West in an inclusive whole drawing its strength from all the disparate truths and cultures welded together had long given way to a merciless hegemony of West over East, and in India, a colonial control that was predicated on denigrating Indian myths, truths, religions, and its peoples as inferior, inadequate, uncivilized, without truth.
Forster writes to be read and read widely by those who believe not in connection, but the virtues of colonial disconnection. A Passage to India straddles those cultural expectations of superiority, self-justification, and cultural dominance by reversing the passage, for benefit of those who can only imagine it going one way. The novel “looks” English, has British characters who intermingle with a variety of Indian ones, and unfolds with what appears to be a plot or narrative in place. The spaces within which the novel takes its form are spaces of alterity: the book’s three sections are “Mosque,” Caves,” and “Temple,” none of which has an immediate spatial analog in the domestic and public spaces of the novel in English, where homes or courts or gardens or prisons or churches predominated. Yet from its opening pages the novel starts on the Indian side of things, with versions of Indian truth, soul, and spirit taken as the baseline for value.
The history of Western literature, and not only the novel as a much later invention, has circled around the notion that literature “imitates” real life. Plato argued that mimesis was a grave problem, since art could only ever be a copy or imitation of what was already a copy – the world of appearances that hides Truth from us. Jumping ahead a few thousand years, the question of mimesis or imitation had become the default explanation of what a literary work, especially a novel, was engaged in: “imitating” the real. When reality is under pressure in modernity – when what is “real” is no longer that easy a question to answer – modernist literature is part of what destroys the consensus about the nature of reality. Forster’s fiction – and especially this last book – understands that cultural reality is always a consensus provided by scripts and narratives that shape what seems blindingly obvious and therefore “real.” What makes A Passage to India so very modernist, then, is how it pulls at the thread binding one of the most accepted cultural scripts of its time: that is, the script that authorized the British Empire as the result of British superiority and even righteousness in extending its benefits to pathetically inferior cultures, whose subjugation was a small price to pay for being ruled by the mightiest culture on earth. Forster’s novel is in the broadest sense about how British colonialism has been staged, as if it were an ongoing and arduous performance with life-and-death consequences for its actors, many of whom on the Anglo-Indian side are only dimly aware of being part of a vast shadow play, while those they unthinkingly dominate have a keen understanding of the roles and parts that have been assigned, and the nightmarish reprisals meted out if one fails to play the designated part.
This novel seems in many ways conventional, with something of a plot taking place in a hill station for British colonial administration, with comprehensible characters, even if a few of them are regrettably “Other,” and with events that seem to unfold in a linear way, without stream of consciousness or strange jumps in style to get in the way, and yet all of this is a ruse, since every scene can and finally must be read to reveal the fragile, threadbare stagecraft that, while it is still capable of ruling with ruthless power, is dissolved in the novel by the very forces that were altering all the notions of what was real and natural underlying it.
To read A Passage to India is to find yourself lodged in the difficulties, thoughts, and desires of young Dr. Aziz, who is perfectly aware of the contempt in which he and other Indians are held, and who has to strategize about how to make it through each day without antagonizing his British medical superior at the hospital – for example, by keeping to a script of self-effacement, false humility, and docility, and the pretense that all that is British is best, whether an inept play “Cousin Kate” performed for the community, or the ignorant and hostile remarks directed, in Dr. Aziz’s case, against his Muslim religion and against the literature and knowledge of that tradition in Indian thought and art. This is effectively like giving an actor the wrong script at a reading, but on purpose. The vast majority of the audience for Forster’s novel was English-speaking and likely to be British citizens rather than colonial subjects of whatever region, yet the novel uses every section – Mosque, Caves, Temple – and most scenes to expose the scripted nature of imperialism, right down to the nonspeaking parts, such as that played by the Indian punkah-puller who pulls on the fan cooling the courtroom. In the scene that brings this fateful script, Dr. Aziz is on trial for allegedly having raped Adela Quested in a Marabar Cave, thus confirming the narrative of Indian bestiality attacking British righteousness and purity. Miss Quested herself is brought up to testify – to play her part – and to give a display of her wronged white womanhood in an outcome that is a foregone conclusion for the British audience to the trial. Adela has been mulling over what has happened since her agonizing break or mental split during the moment she spent inside one of the caves with Dr. Aziz, while Mrs. Moore waited outside, a moment when she “lost herself” and went off script as a dutiful British fiancée to the colonial administrator Ronnie Heaslop, Mrs. Moore’s son, running headlong out of the cave as a perplexed Aziz watches her tumble in her haste down the dusty hill.
Adela had already alienated the Anglo-Indian women at Chandrapore, first by her respectful ardor to “know India,” which disgusts them as much for its suspicious intellectual independence in a woman, who shouldn’t want to know more than what her husband or father has laid out for her, as it does for wanting to “know” something – colonized India – she should be able to see is repellent, subhuman, and inferior. She is gripped by a moment of exposure to the limitless reflective “nothingness” inside the cave, a glimpse of a liberating abyss or freefall into the space between the lines of her all too scripted part. Once back at the station under the now tender ministrations of the British women who had spurned her previously, Adela’s empty inner space is temporarily colonized by a longstanding narrative of the British empire in India, one going back to the traumatic aftereffects of the 1857 Mutiny, in which conscripted Indian troops rebelled against their British masters and, in the wave of suppression of their rebellion with executions and massacres, led one themselves that involved the rape and murder of women and the killing of their children. It seems Forster had a more recent incident in mind, perhaps, something characteristic of the searing realism of the novel in depicting empire. Amritsar, India, in 1919 was the site of sustained political resistance to the deportation of several Indians agitating for independence; riots broke out, and in the course of extreme violence on both sides of the struggle, a British woman who had lived in India for many years and who was riding her bicycle down an alley was knocked down and beaten, although she was rescued and recovered later from her serious injuries. Brigadier-General Dyer declared martial law; in the turmoil that followed, with 20 000 Indians gathering to protest, the crowd was fired upon and at least 400 Indians were killed outright. In addition to what was seen as a massacre that crystallized resistance to British rule, according to Gandhi, Dyer infamously declared the alley where Miss Sherwood had been attacked as a “crawling alley,” where Indians were forced to enter and crawl its width, being flogged as they went along. In A Passage to India that inflammatory approach is mentioned by, among others, Mrs. Turton, who feels that a similar “crawling” posture should be mandated for all Indians after Aziz’s offense. Adela becomes a new version of the outraged white woman, the affront to whose chastity and goodness would be avenged by the trial of Aziz, with his punishment made an example against any thought of resistance.
In A Passage to India Aziz is acquitted when Adela takes the stand and says he did nothing. This leads to the collapse of her engagement and her swift departure from India. What Forster’s novel then stages is an extraordinary shift to the global voice. The educator Cyril Fielding has prided himself on the Enlightenment universality of his own stance. When he comes back to India well after the trial it is during a temple ceremony in a distant province, where Fielding’s notion of universalism is cast aside by the emphasis on the polyglot multiplicity of that event, one that gathers together Dr. Aziz and Professor Godbole in their Muslim and Hindu diversity as manifestations of unity in difference. A misprint in one of the festival signs serves as a slogan for this vibrant union based on sight: “God si Love.”
One spark animating Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Untouchable – written in its first version supposedly over the course of a weekend at a desk in the reading room of the British Museum, and subsequently revised in part (this too may be somewhat apocryphal) on the basis of a stern review of the manuscript by Gandhi, whose advice Anand had gone to seek in India – was to offer a reply in fiction, and ultimately beyond fiction in political action, to what Anand regarded as the pessimism of Forster’s ending in A Passage to India, where Fielding and Aziz are unable to regain their active friendship, even though, as Fielding says to Aziz “It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” (2005, 362). But the horses they are riding swerve apart, and following that sign “the temples, the tank, the jail, the palaces, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House … they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there’” (2005, 306). Untouchable rewrites this not by proposing that Indian independence will come about as a result of the British colonizers making friends with their Indian colonial subjects, of course, but by giving an example in fiction of how a mostly illiterate, uneducated, and poverty-stricken young Indian man can nonetheless be inspired for awakening to an awareness of himself in the world, and to how that world can be transformed.
Untouchable pairs with A Passage to India, despite the eleven years between them, both because E. M. Forster was a supporter of Anand’s creative writing and of his pro-Indian independence activism, and also because it was Forster’s offer to write a preface for the novel that allowed Untouchable, which had received so many rejections from British publishers that Anand despaired of its ever being published, to go out into the world wearing a British press imprint, and a book jacket referencing E. M. Forster’s foreword inside its covers. The reference to costume and the “clothing” of the book is a deliberate metaphor, since the controversy over the manuscript of Untouchable centered on whether it was an “authentic” work or a version of Bloomsbury modernism in ill-fitting Indian garb, a weak copy or a mere imitation of a modernist English novel. Anand saw his novel from its inception as in dialogue with Forster’s A Passage to India, set squarely on the subcontinent and in the context of British empire, yet it is also inspired in its literary modernism by Joyce, whose style of “scrupulous meanness” in Dubliners is grafted by Anand onto aspects of Joyce’s later style and narrative structure of Ulysses in being set on one single day in the life of Bakha, and being filtered through his consciousness. Anand daringly uses that modernist technique to render a character who would be seen by many as lacking consciousness at all – for the British, a colonial Indian subject of Bakha’s status bordered on being subhuman, while for the upper-caste Hindus in colonial India, Bakha is also beyond a boundary. The novel was banned by Britain’s colonial government in India owing to the recognition that its focus on the “untouchable” character of its title – the young man Bakha of the so-called sweeping caste, a group now referred to as Dalit, whose relegation to the removal of human and other waste from the streets and homes rendered their presence or touch “contaminating” to those of a higher Brahmin caste – was also profoundly directed toward the independence struggle.
While after Indian independence Anand was regarded as a crucial founder of modern Indian literature, his complicated involvement with modernist writing in English led to contradictory evaluations of Untouchable, either that it was “merely” a social realist novel and thus not modernist at all, which would mean it could not actually be a literary source for Indian postcolonial writing by Salman Rushdie and others, or else that it was implicated in an act of colonial mimicry, in which Anand’s novel was a desperate attempt to imitate British modernism. Instead, Untouchable is a capstone of this chapter on the long 1920s for the novel in English because Anand’s novel can only be seen on its own terms as very much a part of the global modernist novel in English. Untouchable, for all the seeming exoticism of its Indian setting and its non-British protagonist Bakha, does not stand outside the perimeter of the novel in English, but instead within it, fully modernist and part of fashioning global modernism itself. Treating Anand’s novel as if it were an outlier denies the multiple sources, locations, and exchanges that engender modernist writing, and with his fluencies in English, Urdu and Punjabi, French and Russian, Anand is no less “English” a writer than Joseph Conrad, who came to English as his third or fourth language, or than James Joyce, whose Hibernian English had a shadow partner, Gaelic, which Joyce did not speak, and who, unlike Anand, never lived in England.
One common feature of all modernist literature is its self-reflexivity. A modernist novel always includes a reflection on itself as an artifact, as something made, created out of language – which by its very nature can never be wholly original. The modernist moment of self-reflexivity in Untouchable extends across its length in Bakha’s fascination with fashion, something he calls “fashun” after hearing it in English. For him clothing can only be fashun, or fashionable and thus desirable, if it is an item worn by British soldiers:
He had felt that to put on their clothes made one a sahib too. So he tried to copy them in everything, to copy them as well as he could in the exigencies of his peculiarly Indian circumstances … Ever since he was a child he had walked past the wooden stall on which lay heaped the scarlet and khaki uniforms discarded or pawned by the Tommies … And he had hungered for the touch of them. (1990, 11)
Bakha tries to collect enough thrown-away or used items to be able to make a whole uniform, something he imagines would magically transform him if he could wear it just once. The self-reflexivity of Untouchable as a globally modernist novel lies in putting the imitation of literary style at its own heart, boldly recognizing that for many readers Anand’s novel would be judged as a copy of modernist literary fashion. Instead, Untouchable builds on the ways that all people, writers included, borrow from or imitate others in acts that ultimately create something new from the pieces, allowing Bakha in the course of the novel’s day of action to move beyond his desire to simply copy in clothing a military fashun that can never give him an identity nor the power to join with others, to his realization that he has created something new:
With this and other strange and exotic items of dress he had built up a new world, which was commendable, if for nothing else, because it represented a change from the old ossified order and the staggering conventions of the life to which he was born. He was a pioneer in his own way … (78)
This is a harrowing novel because of its unsparing depiction of the daily life of a person who has internalized a sense of abject inferiority that he gets from the presence of the British rulers around him, and from his own people, where he is seen as without value. The grueling round of his daily life is shot through with violence, with rejection, and with the abysmal waste of his potential as he goes about the endless and lifelong labor of sweeping away human and other waste. Yet these constructions of his lack of worth are also subject to being undone, or to being altered by how he experiences himself in language, and reciprocally, by how he and others like him come into the language of literature. Bakha is filled with yearning, with a desire to know more, with a love for beauty that coexists with his abasement. The shimmering modernist style of the novel as Bakha’s thoughts and hopes intersect with grim events allows for a shared and global sense of hope or at least possibility to come into being. The “not yet” of A Passage to India could refer to the importance of having the announcement that the time for undoing British colonialism has arrived come from the voice of those who have been voiceless – the unspeakable or as yet unspoken as much as the untouchable. Untouchable was published a full decade before Indian independence was achieved in August of 1947, and it is pervaded by the moment-to-moment uncertainties of how that might be achieved. Yet at the close of the long day and in a nightfall where “a handful of stars throbbed in the heart of the sky,” Bakha experiences a shift in things and the novel seems to blend Stephen Dedalus and his ashplant in “Circe” with Bloom’s return to his home as a newly needed father figure, as:
a sudden impulse shot through the transformations of space and time, and gathered all the elements that were dispersed in the stream of his soul into a tentative decision: “I shall go home and tell father all that Gandhi said about us,” he whispered to himself, “and all that that poet said” … And he proceeded homewards. (157)
This homecoming has resonance for all with ears to hear, and eyes to read.
A Passage to India also crosses over with Ulysses in Virginia Woolf’s pivotal Mrs. Dalloway, as her global modernist novel registers the deep scars of gender in speaking to the modern world. Woolf melds the one-day structure of Ulysses with the explicitly imperial context of her friend Forster’s final novel, although she brings the heart of darkness back from the colony and situates it in the heart of imperial London. The modernist novel in English can emanate from the periphery, as with Joyce’s Ulysses, a relaying back from the colony guised in the language of the center, and as we have seen in Anand. Virginia Woolf’s work also occupies this skewed location, since the formulation of difference between center and margin slips so perilously and resoundingly also into the language of sexual difference. This points to how acutely her works enmesh the crisis in feminine representation in an analogous social crisis, the waning of imperial ideology without a viable expression of global solidarity to replace it. Where the tendency within some modernism is to hyperbolize and foreground the feminine, by analogy to a dark continent of unfathomable desires, Woolf’s texts connect the mystification to the circumstances of powers, both domestic and historical. This is accomplished in Woolf’s work by a sustained engagement with the circumstances of empire and the dislocations, both linguistic and social, it produces, and Mrs. Dalloway is a novel where the impact of that dislocation on everyone it has touched enters into the very narrative style. The narration moves between and among characters and across and through time and space with quicksilver speed. The telekinetic narration also serves to gather the inchoate subjectivities of ordinary crowds or groups and show – by telling – how they are joined together in mysteries of power that also divide them. This makes for the overarching patterns of loneliness and estrangement that cut through the novel: Septimus Smith the First World War veteran, with his clerkly aims at cultivated status, dying by suicide at the hands of medical condescension when the doctors summoned by his worried wife interpret his shellshock – or post-traumatic stress syndrome – as un-English weakness that needs only a dose of Proportion (enforced hospitalization) to cure it, Clarissa Dalloway stuck wondering what those in the social sphere just above hers actually think of her and her parties, as she tries to recover from the grief and shock of the war – the book is shot through with desire, memory, global history and national tradition, sex, loss, and acts of shopping that bring the characters together in front of London’s gleaming shop windows, bereft or lost or alienated though they may be. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” is the first sentence of the novel, set off by itself as if to emphasize the solitary nature of the shopping trip for one of life’s most necessary luxuries. The words that follow as Clarissa sets forth are affectively ecstatic – “What a lark! What a plunge!” (2005, 3) – yet are also terms for how the narrative will dart like a swallow back and forth through characters who will become porous nets, and also head down into the depths, the “wedge-shaped core of darkness” (Woolf 1989, 62) that exists in those narrative perforations.
As readers we are still stepping off the curb to buy the flowers in the early morning air, but what follows disconcerts us, as the plunge takes us back in time to the eighteen-year-old Clarissa in the pristine morning air of her girlhood home, Bourton, where she stands at an open window conversing with Peter Walsh. It is not until she folds up her reminiscence of Peter like the pocketknife he always carries that we are returned to the pavement and “She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass.” As she crosses the street under the invisible leaden circles of Big Ben’s chime she contemplates her investment in life: “For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it up round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh” (4). The reverie on life is also a comment on consciousness and its powers of creation, a self-reflexive interval that is matched by another kind of textual moment, one where the powers of making also give way to structures of power that hold everyone, even the narrator, in thrall. In Mrs. Dalloway that moment comes early on as a mysterious automobile – possibly driving the prime minister or a royal personage anonymously through London – wends through the streets and in its passage summons and seizes any form of agency:
For in all the hat shops and tailor’s shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. In a public house on a back street a Colonial insulted the House of Windsor, which led to words, broken beer glasses, and a general shindy, which echoed strangely across the way in the ears of girls buying white underlinen threaded with pure white ribbon for their weddings. For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound. (18)
Everyone is affected by the current of power that shapes their common life. What the novel searches for is a way to generate instead a commons, a space where the values are shared, and dislocation recedes.
Mrs. Dalloway is centered by the pastoral greensward of Regent’s Park, public ground that echoes this notion of a commons the novel itself aspires to become, the swath across which on this day of Clarissa’s party all the major characters cut their path and intersect: Clarissa herself, her old friend Peter Walsh, returning from years in India, the mad Septimus Warren Smith trailing his Italian bride Rezia, Richard Dalloway plunged in the serious thoughts of a civil servant and bureaucrat, a country servant girl come to London to try her luck, an ancient woman who sings a primordial British melody. This green world is sliced and scored by the irresolvable divisions and distinctions that march across it. The park becomes a virtual parade ground for these incommensurabilities created by world war, empire, class war, and the striations of the gender hierarchy that initiate and perpetuate its ravages. The impossibility of covering over the effects of the First World War, the difficulty of assimilating the rural and the colonial in flux, the intractability of the problem of the urban underclass: all these converge in an outburst of group creativity, as the vaporous puffs of sky-written letters above the park draw all and sundry into a collective act of reading. As the antic letters begin to spell out something in the sky, words still have their mystic powers, almost as if they were runes or smoky oracles rising up. While the message is ultimately a commercial one – Glaxo-Creemo Toffees are being advertised in an airspace colonized by candy – the mobilization of a commons around the desire to know and to imagine a new message together is of a piece with the hopes of the party Clarissa will give. It too will involve crass motives and divisiveness of all kinds, and yet sounding the bass-note underneath it is Septimus Smith’s death, a sacrifice that has the power to dislodge business as usual with the eruption of real feeling. The death of a person seen by the various powers that be in the official British state as a political inconvenience, a working-class weakling, a lunatic Other, or a valueless being, becomes through the alchemy of fiction a gift capable of bringing a commons into imaginative being:
A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop everyday in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone … (184)
As Clarissa turns from the dark window where she has seen the reflection of an old woman mounting the stairs, she exults anew at his gift: “She felt somehow very like him – the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away.” His expenditure allows her, and the novel, to answer his call. As Clarissa puts it, “She must assemble” (186). If only for a moment, there is revelation of what exists beyond the strictures that make us strangers to one another. She takes on the “terror and ecstasy” of delivering such revelation in her own being, as the novel ends with an opening into a common space beyond location or dislocation: “For there she was” (190).
To close with a pendant novel of the long 1920s, Voyage in the Dark (1934) punctuates this lineage of the global modernist novel in English. Jean Rhys makes reference in her title to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and to Woolf’s The Voyage Out, which her novel reverses, since its voyage in the dark heads toward an England that is figured as a dark, cold deathworld in contrast to the life-exuding Caribbean island, a British colony, that its protagonist Anna Morgan has been forced to leave. The geographic valences of colonialism are flipped for Rhys, as are the cultural values that underlie the British Empire, where Great Britain is culturally superior in all ways, the source of truth, value, knowledge, and power. The reverse narrative starts in Anna Morgan’s own story, since Anna’s dead mother was from a long-time Creole family, and her British father had come to the island as so many did to establish families based on their Creole wives’ land and possessions. Once her mother has died, her father remarries a British woman, and on his death Mr. Morgan’s widow inherits the land, rather than its being passed on to Anna. Her British stepmother promptly sells Anna’s legacy, cashes out the profits, and returns to England, leaving Anna with no choice but to leave her home and make her own way in an England that is entirely foreign to her. Anna finds the only job an uneducated young woman can as a bit player in touring theatricals, a position that is assumed to be a prelude to prostitution. The British gentlemen who prey on Anna’s vulnerability see her as exotic because of her Caribbean birth, and rape her with impunity since she is a “rum little devil” in their eyes. At the same time they assume she feels lucky to be in civilized England, and away from a place they associate with savagery.
For Anna, it is England that is savage, predicated on an unquestioned white masculine hierarchy that belies her own experience of a tropical motherland, and her own identification since childhood with the black majority population of her island. She begins to realize she has been assumed to be a prostitute all along by the gentleman who promised to marry her, and when she becomes pregnant is thrown back on the help of fellow actresses-cum-sex workers in procuring an abortion. Her traversal of England on an increasingly desperate and lonely voyage into the dark of exploitation, where the stark hierarchies of empire converge on her very identity, despite her ostensibly British background, is modernist throughout in being written as a dream. Her childhood home and everything about it is dreamlike and fantasmatic, just as her present circumstances in England are a dream with fluid contours that blur past and present, self and other, death and life. She begins to identity with a long-dead female slave whose name she had found in nineteenth-century records of the plantation estate; the terse entry “Maillotte Boyd, aged 18” (1994, 53), her own age as she is sent in exile to England, becomes a trace or scrap of identity she clings to in her mind at moments of extremity, when it is clear that no one knows her or can even imagine who she is in the world. Maillotte Boyd, aged eighteen, was lost to the world except for the accident of being entered as property in a logbook, yet those few words create a short narrative of a person who vanished in history, and with whom Anna Morgan, across boundaries of time and space and race, can nonetheless find kinship.
While not a slave, of course, Anna has been translated into money or labeled in fiscal terms by everyone in her life, starting with her father. The unreality of her existence as a tissue of tropes is echoed by the novel’s bursts of flashback memories and its pastiche of quotes from British literature. Just as Mrs. Dalloway uses a line from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline to ironize and underscore its global dimensions – “Fear no more the heat of the sun” is a constant internal refrain for Clarissa, with its linguistic adjacency to the proud claim of Empire about “mad dogs and Englishmen under the noonday sun” – so too does Voyage in the Dark deploy Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” and its line in a new key: “The harlots cry from street to street shall weave old England’s winding sheet” (Blake 1997, 492). Jean Rhys begins the book as Anna sets foot in England for the first time: “It was almost like being born again.” As the book ends, Anna is being treated for the self-induced abortion that has nearly killed her by a doctor who declares cynically “She’ll be all right … Ready to start all over again in no time, I’ve no doubt” (Rhys 1994, 187). The book offers a global modernist dream to deflect that judgment in its final lines as Anna sees a ray of light under the door. “I lay and watched it and thought about starting all over again. And about being new and fresh. And about mornings, and misty days, when anything might happen. And about starting all over again, all over again …” (188). That ellipsis speaks volumes: in the open-ended space of the last sentence the world’s hope waits.