‘The Strange High Singing of Some Aeroplane Overhead’: War, Utopia and the Everyday in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction

Abstract

Does modernist fiction lend itself to utopian thought? To the extent that this question has been answered in the affirmative, most influentially by Fredric Jameson, the answer would seem to lie in modernism’s aesthetics of fragmentation. In Jameson’s reading of Conrad’s pre-war fiction in The Political Unconscious, moments of heightened sensory immediacy abstracted from the temporal flow of the narrative at once resist, and at another level reproduce, the dynamic of capitalist reification. This account of the politics of modernist form as lodged within ‘extreme moments of intensity’ figures the aesthetic as a resistant symptom of utopia (Jameson, 2002, p. 219). Yet shifting the periodizing lens to the second phase of intense experimental avant-garde activity, between 1918 and 1925, allows the question to be posed in different terms. To what extent does the modernist figuration of the everyday itself imply the production of a new kind of collective, anonymous and potentially utopian urban subject by the trauma of the recently ended war? Focusing on the fiction of Virginia Woolf, and taking my cue from Jay Winter’s observation of the dialectic between the ravages of war and the promises of social transformation which so often follow in their wake, and from his nomination of the Paris Peace Conference, in 1919, as itself, in however compromised a form, one of the key utopian moments of the last century (see Winter, 2006).