The Frame

Modernism and postmodernism as literary and art movements dominate twentieth century cultural history, and much critical ink has been spilled trying to define the two terms individually, in relation to each other, and in relation to the associated but not identical conditions of modernity and postmodernity. Definitions of modernism generally situate it between 1900 or 1910 and 1930, centering it in the 1920s, when T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse were published. Postmodernism is more difficult to locate in history—in the introduction to his essay compilation Modernism/Postmodernism, Peter Brookings points out that “[Frederic] Jameson sees postmodernism as occurring ‘in the late fifties and early sixties,’ whereas Ernest Mandel […] sees a decisive break in 1974-75” and that other commentators view “postmodernism […] as an expression of the disillusionment of Left intellectuals after the defeats of 1968” (23-24).

Postmodernism’s relationship to modernism is similarly disputed, as some critics see it as a rejection, others as a continuation of the modernist project (Waugh 113). The fact that postmodernism has received the level of attention that it has indicates the real cultural and aesthetic shift it represents, but the degree of that shift changes drastically depending on who is evaluating it. Modernism itself is often considered the last breath of the Enlightenment’s grand view of human progress (Waugh 87), yet its literary practitioners explicitly rejected the previous generation of Victorians as well as the even earlier Romantic tradition (Faulkner 22). Each movement, it seems, believes it essential to declare itself at odds with the movement preceding it in order to establish itself as a new and important mode of thinking and behaving. However, close connections exist between modernism and Romanticism, from the emphasis on the individual and the growth of interior space to the rejection of established literary styles. Similarly, postmodernism may not be quite as complete a rejection of modernism as postmodernist critics like Ihab Hassan, who tabulates binary oppositions between the two in a table (Brookings 11), would have us believe. Many modernist writers, like Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf are now being considered by Hassan and others for their postmodern tendencies (Brookings 11, Wilde 19), which either suggests that these authors were particularly ahead of their time in anticipating postmodernism (which has some truth in it, given their constant innovation, yet they are also considered the height of literary modernism), or that modernism itself contains the seeds of postmodernism and the relationship between the two is much more complex than Hassan’s set of dichotomies would indicate.

In order to explore the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, it is necessary to look more closely at the way the two terms are defined and used, especially by the postmodernists who wish to define themselves in opposition to modernism. In the introduction to A Postmodern Reader, Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon define postmodernism based on the large group of essays they have included in the anthology:

[The term is] used to describe a major […] shift away from modernity’s universalizing and totalizing drive—a drive that was first fueled, in the seventeenth century, by Descartes’ foundational ambitions and his faith in reason. […] Postmodern paradox, ambiguity, irony, indeterminacy, and contingency are seen to replace modern closure, unity, order, the absolute, and the rational. (ix)

As Natoli and Hutcheon admit, this definition paints with broad strokes, but they stand by it as depicting the stance taken in the majority of the seminal essays they reproduce. However, as perhaps obliquely indicated in their definition, it is important to distinguish between the cultural conditions of modernity and the aesthetic movement of modernism. Modernity truly is the culmination of the Enlightenment project, which, skeptical towards religion and myth, refocused attention from divine authority onto human autonomy and placed its faith in rationality and human progress—a course of thought leading to scientific positivism, industrialization, and a belief in the perfectibility of mankind. Postmodernism rejects the “universalising and rationalist metanarratives of the Enlightenment” (Waugh 87), and hence one might naturally assume that it also rejects modernism. However, though the human focus of Enlightenment thinking is certainly included in modernism’s focus on individual consciousness and subjectivity, modernism is deeply suspicious of many aspects of modernity and to conflate the modernist movement with the condition of modernity would be to misunderstand modernism and its concerns.

In fact, the very words that Natoli and Hutcheon use in the quote above to define postmodern tendencies—paradox, ambiguity, irony, indeterminacy, contingency—also describe modernist literature, and the words used to define modern tendencies—closure, unity, order, absolute, rational—actually describe what much of what literary modernism rejects. In 1966, when postmodernism was just beginning to become a critical category, Alan Friedman claimed that “a turn” had occurred in the history of the novel in the early twentieth century—he defined this turn as a shift from presenting closed endings to leaving endings open, with a sense that life and experience goes on after the end of the novel (17). He gives examples from Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, in which the heroic myth of the main character continues to expand even after he himself is morally defeated, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, whose ending completes the novel but not the lives of the characters (Friedman 32, 96). Numerous examples of modernism’s open endings could be cited, from Ursula’s ambiguous vision at the end of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) to Conrad’s inconclusive Heart of Darkness, in which Charlie Marlow never even finishes the last sentence of his narrative-within-the-narrative: “It would have been too dark—too dark altogether…” (77). All of these are modernist novels, yet their sense of closure is already being redefined—the postmodernist novel merely takes the tendency toward open endings another step, refusing not only “to be ‘final,’ but [insisting] on its right to be not even ‘satisfying’” (Friedman 105).

As well as reserving the right to be unsatisfying, postmodernist novels sometimes amplify their ambiguity by including multiple endings or possible narrative paths within the work itself, as in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). However, this step, too, is a progression from modernism, not a reaction against it. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway never completely resolves the ambiguity surrounding Clarissa’s relationship with Peter (why exactly did she not marry him, why is she suddenly thinking about him thirty years later, what sort of relationship will she pursue with him now), with Richard (why did she marry him, does she really love him, and what will Peter’s return mean for their marriage), or even with Sally Seton, whose kiss gave her “the most exquisite moment of her whole life” (52). The very ending is not only open in the sense that the characters lives are not complete when the book finishes, but is ambiguous, refusing to reveal for sure whether Clarissa remains in her comfortable but somewhat boring marriage to Richard or leaves it. The ending is not quite unsatisfying, but it does not provide complete closure, either. There may only be one ending, unlike postmodernism’s more experimental novels, but there are a multitude of possible interpretations of that ending.

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is even more replete with ambiguity—is Kurtz mad, what made him go mad, what are the unspeakable rites, what is Marlow’s relationship to Kurtz, how does Marlow keep from going mad, does Marlow achieve redemption or closure, how will his story affect the other passengers, what is the heart of darkness? Conrad’s unnamed narrator lets the reader know immediately that Marlow’s story will have neither a simple meaning nor an easy ending:

But Marlow was not typical […] and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that, sometimes, are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (5)

In a traditional adventure story, the reader might expect to finally understand what lies behind the heart of darkness and exactly what it is that has driven Kurtz to madness. However, the only clue Kurtz leaves is his final cry “The horror! The horror!” (69). Marlow claims that this statement is a summing up of Kurtz’s experience, but both Peter Brooks and Patrick Whiteley doubt this is actually so (Brooks 380, Whiteley 38). Throughout Heart of Darkness, Marlow consistently characterizes the darkness of the jungle, and by extension, the human soul, as “very quiet” (35), “mute” (65), full of “unspeakable rites” (50) and “unspeakable secrets” (62). Language is not sufficient to penetrate the heart of darkness, for it is silent there. Kurtz’s ambiguous “the horror” has no referent, cannot be fully articulated and thus cannot be fully known.

The inadequacy of language to express what really matters is a common theme in modernist literature; Conrad tends to be less optimistic than other modernist writers, and rather than try to overcome the inadequacy of Kurtz’s final pronouncement, leaves Marlow and the rest of the passengers stranded on the Thames, looking into “the heart of immense darkness” (77). The breakdown of language prompted more optimistic writers like Woolf and Joyce to invent new languages, modern languages, to replace the old, worn-out language (Malamud 6-7). Woolf uses stream of consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse to pour out a deluge of thoughts and sensory images unbounded by reason and logic (Malamud 9). Her language is instead ordered by the fragmentation of perception and memory, as she suggested novels should be: “The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old” (“Modern Fiction” 108). Randy Malamud points out the failure of language as communication in Woolf’s The Years (1937), quoting passages that repeatedly show people speaking things they had not meant to say, or being interrupted in conversation and unable to remember where they left off. Eventually, having given up on conversation, a new, nonsensical language emerges: “Each giving the other a little nudge, they burst into song: Etho passo tanno hai, / Fai donk to tu do, / Mai to, kai to, lai to see / Toh dom to tuh do— […] ‘But it was…’ Eleanor began. […] ‘Beautiful?’” (qtd in Malamud, 43-44). Woolf’s intention is to find beauty in a broken world, and she turns to seemingly meaningless language to do so. Even in her very first novel The Voyage Out (1915), which is generally quite conventional, includes this idea of the beauty of meaning-deprived language: “He shouted out a line of poetry, but the words escaped him, and he stumbled along lines and fragments of lines which had no meaning at all except for the beauty of the words” (191). Both Malamud and Alan Wilde discuss Woolf’s final novel Between the Acts (1941), Malamud claiming it for modernism in its depiction of a new language for a new generation (Malamud 49-50), but Wilde claiming it for postmodernism in its linguistic and ironic ambivalence: “What we have here is not modernism’s balanced ‘either-or’ but […] postmodernism’s more comprehensive ‘both-and’” (Wilde 19-20). Woolf’s new language was meant to speak to the needs of modernity, but its implications and innovations stretch beyond modernism into postmodernism.

For Joyce, the need for a new language manifested itself in the mutating language depicting Stephen Deadalus’s increasing age and maturity in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), in the fragmented sensory descriptions in Ulysses, and in the wholly new language he created for Finnegans Wake (1939). His experiments in language and structure in both of the latter novels are often claimed for postmodernism as well as modernism, indicating a link between the modernist search for an adequate language to express uniquely modern concerns and the postmodern tendency to indulge in language-play. The distinction between the two is mostly purpose: Joyce and Woolf need to disrupt existing language and create new language to understand and describe modernity—they need new signifiers for a new signified; postmodern writers, on the other hand, have stopped looking for meaning in a meaningless, constructed world, and thus wish to explore linguistic possibility on its own terms—the signifier becomes all. Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947) is an early example of postmodern language play, giving the same extremely brief story over and over in different styles. The story has no meaning outside itself, and exists only for the sake of its stylistic and linguistic permutations. Though the distinctions are real, postmodernism inherits its desire to test the limits of language directly from modernism.

The attribution of “unity” and “order” is applicable to the modernist novel only in that modernist authors continue to seek some semblance of unity and order, though they suggest that if unity and order exist, they are only created temporarily and subjectively. The modernist trend is toward the fragmentation of self and experience rather than unity or order. Clarissa Dalloway draws the many disparate parts of herself together for public occasions, but that does not completely negate her fragmented self: “That was herself when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman” (55). Even more fragmented is the picture of the self Joseph Conrad depicts in Heart of Darkness, as Marlow and Kurtz can be read symbolically as two halves of the same person. Conrad’s narrative technique draws attention to the fragmented nature of experience—Kurtz’s character and actions are revealed slowly, piecemeal, from three or four different perspectives. Woolf rejects traditional linear order in her novels as she attempts to depict simultaneity and the psychological experience of time (Dick 54). Conrad, too, has Marlow narrate his experience out of order at times to emphasize the fact that perception and memory are not orderly things. The leap from modernism to postmodernism in this case is the leap from desiring a form of unity and order in a fragmented world to accepting and embracing fragmentation as inevitable. Though the two are admittedly different responses, postmodernism represents a natural progression from the concerns of modernism rather than a rejection of them.

Many postmodernist critics claim that postmodernism gives freedom from the unified “grand narratives” of Enlightenment modernism and instead presents “little narratives” (Waugh 87). However, far from endorsing a totalizing narrative, modernist authors are intent on showing individual experience, pointing out the subjectivity of all perception, and focusing on fleeting days and moments. Both Joyce and Woolf write one-day novels in Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, exploring different consciousnesses and different perspectives on the same things. Though the onlookers in Mrs. Dalloway’s London are united in watching the skywriting aeroplane, they cannot agree on what it is writing (29). Later in the novel, Peter’s point of view on the ambulance going by is vastly different that of Septimus, who is inside it, or the reader, who knows that Peter’s suppositions about it are inaccurate (229). In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe has difficulty with her painting because she insists on painting it the way she sees reality, rather than conforming to the way trendsetting painter Mr. Paunceforte has decided reality should be seen (18-19). She eventually finds meaning not through an overarching narrative, but through her art, which is built on momentary impressions: “What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” (161). Woolf’s criticism argues that plot or narrative itself is not, or should not be, necessarily the goal for authors: “If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, and not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style” (“Modern Fiction” 108).

Conrad, too, shows the impossibility of a single authoritative narrative clearly in Nostromo. For the first half of the novel, Nostromo is more talked about than seen, and the various descriptions of him create a heroic figure of near-mythic proportions—a portrait which is dashed in the second half as Nostromo takes center state and reveals that even he is deeply implicated in the materialist culture around him. To drive the point even further, Conrad has a minor character narrate the final stages of the climactic revolution and his account, though apparently factually accurate, does not fit with what has previously been revealed about the characters in the rest of the novel (316-27). Conrad layers narration upon narration, encouraging the reader to question the reliability of any of his narrators. Not only is there no grand narrative for Conrad, but even his little narratives relentlessly expose the mankind’s corruption—the opposite of the Enlightenment’s hope for human perfectibility.

The self-consciousness of Conrad’s narrative strategies calls attention to another connection between modernism and postmodernism, that of self-conscious or self-reflexive writing itself. A hallmark of postmodernism is the self-awareness of its texts; for example, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), in which many books are started, none finished, and is ultimately about the process of reading itself. Several stories by Jorge Luis Borges (who wrote his major fiction in the 1940s, earlier than historical postmodernism, but has marked postmodern leanings) are explicitly about writing and the process of building a text (and thus a world), from the fiction-into-reality tale “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” to the consideration of what historical context means to authorship in “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” and the description of the library which contains all possible permutations of all possible works, “The Library of Babel.” A distinction is often made here between modernist self-consciousness and postmodernist self-reflexivity—“Modernist works are about consciousness or reality, while postmodernist texts are about writing and fiction” (Caughie 31)—yet modernist authors are also very aware of their own work’s constructedness, their own writing process.

Calling attention to narration itself as Conrad does in Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes calls attention to the unreality, the artifice, of the novel. In Under Western Eyes, Rasumov even argues at one point that he is “not a young man in a novel,” which of course immediately reminds the reader that that is precisely what he is (132). The multiple levels of narration in Heart of Darkness act even more strongly than the interpolated narration of Nostromo to question narrative reliability. Heart of Darkness’s unnamed frame narrator is neither omniscient nor objective and his descriptions of Marlow both support and undercut Marlow’s narrative, suggesting both that Marlow is like Buddha, a bringer of wisdom, and that he has faults as a storyteller (6-7). There is a sense in which Heart of Darkness is as much about storytelling itself as it is about the story being told.

Woolf’s stream of consciousness narrative technique also draws attention to itself, asking the reader to interpret the work based on not only what the narrator says, but on whose consciousness is being evoked at any given moment. But there is an even more compelling example of Woolf’s self-reflexivity than her narrative technique. In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe is an artist rather than a writer or storyteller, but Woolf’s depiction of her painting and the difficulty involved in realizing her creative vision closely mirrors the difficulty of writing, illustrating the close relation between all forms of creative activity:

She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. (19)

Lily is Woolf’s substitute for herself in the novel, the artist figure who attempts to create balance in her work. Lily is concerned about the relationship in her painting between light and dark; when asked about a dark shape, she says it impressionistically represents Mrs. Ramsay and James, and that it is needed to balance a bright spot somewhere else in the painting (52). In the third section of the novel, Lily moves her attention back and forth between the window she associates with Mrs. Ramsay and the boat carrying Mr. Ramsay and the children to the lighthouse, suggesting that if the dark shape is Mrs. Ramsay, the bright one is Mr. Ramsay, and her goal is to create balance between the two (Caughie 33). Of course, this is precisely what Woolf is doing in the novel—exploring the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their children (especially James) through a series of impressions and moments. Rather than ending with the moment of connection between Mr. Ramsay and James, the novel’s final chapter ends with Lily applying the finishing stroke to her painting, just as Woolf is writing the final words in her novel (Kolner). Pamela Caughie even attributes the narration of the last section of the novel completely to Lily, granting her a specifically authorial role as well as a generally creative one; if that is the case, then Lily’s connection to Woolf is even stronger (36). Either way, it is clear that Woolf’s self-awareness in To the Lighthouse is not only about consciousness, it is also about writing as a creative process.

Woolf is similarly self-aware of both her own writing process and older writing styles in Orlando, which verges on pastiche in its imitation of the pre-modern literary styles. Fredric Jameson defines both pastiche and parody as “the imitation or, better still, the mimicry of other styles and particularly of the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles,” but then distinguishes them by suggesting that parody mocks the idiosyncrasies of the original work while pastiche uses previous styles without laughing at them (166-167). This marks, he says, the difference between modernism (parody) and postmodernism (pastiche), and locates the difference in the postmodern loss of stylistic norms with which to compare the idiosyncratic (167). However, though Orlando is quite humorous in tone, Woolf does not seem to intend to mock her literary ancestors in a negative way (as Lytton Strachey did in his Eminent Victorians)—hence even according to Jameson’s definitions, Orlando can probably be considered postmodern in its appropriation of earlier writing styles.

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of postmodernism is, in fact, its gleeful appropriation of older styles, idioms, even earlier texts or history itself, leading poet Andrei Codrescu to proclaim “Get It Used” as the postmodernist answer to Ezra Pound’s modernist slogan “Make It New” (Kershner 76). Umberto Eco’s formulation of intertextuality suggests that in some way all works inform one another and “talk to each other” (“Borges” 122), and his novels deliciously play with the medieval (The Name of the Rose, 1980, and Baudolino, 2000), the cultic (Foucault’s Pendulum, 1988), the Baroque (The Island of the Day Before, 1994), and pop culture (The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, 2004). Discussing the use of irony in modernism and postmodernism, Eco suggests that “with the modern, anyone who does not understand the game can only reject it, but with the postmodern, it is possible not to understand the game and yet to take it seriously,” going on to clarify, with quotes from John Barth and Leslie Fiedler, that the quintessentially postmodernist work would be instantly accessible to any audience, and yet have increased interest for those who “understand the game” (Eco “Postmodernism” 227).

The film The Matrix (1999) perfectly illustrates Eco’s concept of an easily-accessible yet richly allusive postmodernist work in its use of Christian, Buddhist, and even Lewis Carroll symbolism almost solely for the sake of reusing the past—the concepts are nearly divorced at times from their original contexts and depend only on a general and culturally available familiarity with the terms invoked. However, in the same essay Eco calls Joyce’s Finnegans Wake a postmodern novel, and Ulysses a borderline case (“Postmodernism” 227)—certainly he is not alone in claiming Finnegans Wake or even Ulysses for postmodernism, but in terms of accessibility, both of them fit much better in the intentionally difficult modernist paradigm. Yet this distinction, too, is not as definite as it could be. Eco’s novels themselves are rather inaccessible—not because knowledge of earlier styles and content is necessary to understand them, but simply because they require a level of attention and perseverance far greater than the average novel. Similarly, postmodernist experimental novels like those of Calvino or Thomas Pynchon may be read, but not necessarily enjoyed, without at least a cursory knowledge of their underlying conceits. On the other hand, modernist or borderline postmodernist works like Ulysses and The Waste Land rely heavily on mythic allusion and structure (Faulkner 21)—not perhaps in a way that could be labeled “pastiche,” but that certainly would fall under “Get It Used.”

Postmodernism’s at least theoretic move toward accessibility as well as its embrace of low culture and commercial art forms stand in opposition to modernism’s outcry against commercialism and the lack of interest in art they saw surrounding them (Kershner 43-44). If reality is artifice, as Jean Baudrillard argues (Baudrillard 188), then everything is art according to postmodernism, from literary novels and museum paintings to high-school doodles and traffic intersections. The erasure of the dichotomy between high art and low art may be the most clear distinction between modernism and postmodernism—though note in passing Woolf’s apparent endorsement of the low-culture circus in To the Lighthouse as opposed to the high-culture Ibsen (12) and William Faulkner’s use of the typically low-art detective story genre—and forms part of postmodernism’s general inclusivity as opposed to modernism’s exclusivity or elitism. Though all modernist writers did not always agree on the proper direction the movement should take, they generally agreed on what they were rejecting or excluding: Victorian codes of conduct, “traditional” forms of writing, representational art, externally imposed order, etc. Postmodernists, on the other hand, do not agree even on what they will take or leave from previous generations of writers. There are nearly as many formulations of postmodernism as there are writers, critics, or artists who are considered postmodernist. The effect of inclusivity is best illustrated by the explosion of interest in literature from marginalized groups, whether it be from former colonial areas, women, African-Americans, or others. Though postcolonialism is associated with poststructuralist theory, which is generally, though not exclusively, postmodern in outlook, there may be a foreshadowing of it in modernism.

Woolf is obviously a forerunner of feminist criticism, both highlighting specifically feminine narratives in her novels and arguing for a feminine literary tradition in her criticism, notably A Room of Her Own. She and other modernist women writers like Dorothy Richardson clearly anticipate the postmodernist criticism interested in literary feminism. If we allow art to intrude on our discussion of literary modernism for a moment, it is notable that post-impressionist and modernist artists, especially Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, were influenced by the art of “primitive” or marginalized groups. Gauguin, of course, is famous for his paintings of Tahitian natives, and Picasso gained inspiration from African sculpture and tribal masks. If literary modernism were extended to include the Harlem Renaissance in the United States, an extension some critics are more willing to make than others, then the connections between modernism and postcolonial literature become even stronger.

In all of the areas identified above—closed versus open endings, ambiguity, language, unity and order, grand versus little narratives, self-reflexivity, pastiche and appropriation, complexity versus accessibility, exclusivity versus inclusivity—modernism contains the elements that would later become central to postmodernism. In most cases, modernism had already taken one step in reaction against Enlightenment thinking, and postmodernism has just taken one more. Frederic Jameson admits the connections between modernism and postmodernism:

The principle objection to concepts of postmodernism of the type I have sketched here [is] namely that all the features we have enumerated are not new at all but abundantly characterized modernism proper or what I call high modernism. […] I must limit myself to the suggestion that radical breaks between periods do not generally involve complete changes of content but rather the restructuring of a certain number of elements already given: features that in an earlier period or system were subordinate now become dominant, and features that had been dominant became secondary. (177)

Refining this formulation, Brian McHale defines the dominant feature or focus of modernism as epistemological and the dominant of postmodernism as ontological. In other words, modernism foregrounds questions of knowledge—“How can I interpret this world of which I am a part?” (McHale 9)—and postmodernism foregrounds questions of being—“Which world is this?” (McHale 10). These questions are closely related, because they beg each other; each question, once it is answered, must be followed the other. McHale’s contention is that while both modernist and postmodernist fiction will ask both epistemological and ontological questions, one will always be asked first, determining the work’s status as modernist or postmodernist. My contention is that, as postmodern readers, these two questions are too closely related to ever be separated when we read either modernist or postmodernist fiction, and that modernism and postmodernism are thus too closely related to be separated into the dichotomies of opposites that critics find so appealing. There are distinctions between the two modes, but the distinctions are neither absolute, nor clearly demarcated. Both modernist and postmodernist tendencies can be found throughout modernist and postmodernist works, and trying to ignore that slippage is as reductive as trying to force either modernism or postmodernism into neat and tidy definitions.

Works Consulted

This paper originated in June 2007 for “Modern British Literature: Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf” at Baylor University.