Encounters in narrative form

Abstract

The defining feature of the modernist novel is its formal innovation of the representation of human consciousness. The specifically modernist mind, moreover, is often viewed as a product of its historical context. Georg Simmel, for instance, famously theorized about the “metropolitan type,” whose affect has been blunted and who encounters others with mutual “strangeness and repulsion.” Modernist aesthetics, according to the critical consensus, developed in response to these historical conditions and sought to reflect the fragmentation and chaos of modernity. The present study argues instead that Joseph Conrad’s and Virginia Woolf’s formal innovations resulted from their desires to both reflect the reality of how nonfictional everyday minds relate to one another and to renegotiate normative narrative procedures they perceived as ethically problematic. I open by framing Conrad and Woolf as writers who weaved the perilous and auspicious natures of their own pursuits of nonfictional people—Almayer (A Personal Record) and “Mrs. Brown” (“Character in Fiction”)—into their characters’ fictional pursuits of other minds. Conrad and Woolf break radically with novelistic convention by creating narrativizing characters—characters who impose the form of a narrative onto a narration of another character’s life-events in an attempt to account for the other’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires. Ultimately, Conrad and Woolf are preoccupied both with exploring the singular opportunities available to us as we seek to interpret other minds and with the ethical risks inherent in such endeavors. Located at the intersection of several recent critical turns (or returns), namely the narrative, cognitive, affective, and ethical turns, this study examines Conrad’s and Woolf’s narrativizing characters and how they function to instantiate the ethical possibilities and risks inherent in narrativizing other minds at the level of form. This project is located within the emerging field of cognitive narratology and offers new insights into the representation of consciousness and modernist narrative forms.