Novelistic Style and the Disappearance of Breakfast

Abstract

This chapter takes up modernism fiction, focusing on Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, and Virginia Woolf. The key distinction here is between Joyce and Kafka. James Joyce is to be understood as a transitional figure. He belongs more in the Victorian era than the modernism because of his sense of language’s positivistic relationship to the real. Joyce believed language could describe not only the outward world as the nineteenth-century realists did. He also believes it can fully describe the inward world, which he develops in Ulysses. The dividing line here between Victorian and modernist fiction is the attitude toward language and mimesis that Kafka and Beckett develop. Language is a structure that cannot in principle describe all that is there, especially in inward reality. This attitude toward the language problem—which is also the problem of mimesis and style—distinguishes Kafka and Beckett from Joyce and Woolf. It is a pattern that also holds for the upcoming chapters on painting and music. This chapter concludes with a discussion of Virginia Woolf and the concept of art as festive, which can be considered as a nonrepresentational way of thinking about mimesis.