Between the mirror and the mask or “truth [that] lies at the bottom of a well”

He spoke, and returned madly to the same reflection, and his tears stirred the water, and the image became obscured in the rippling pool. As he saw it vanishing, he cried out ‘Where do you fly to?  Stay, cruel one, do not abandon one who loves you! I am allowed to gaze at what I cannot touch, and so provide food for my miserable passion!’…As he sees all this reflected in the dissolving waves, he can bear it no longer, but as yellow wax melts in a light flame, as morning frost thaws in the sun, so he is weakened and melted by love, and worn away little by little by the hidden fire… - Ovid, Metamorphoses 1

The description of Narcissus lamenting his self-love and his unfortunate reality, as exhibited in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2000), shares many similarities with the particularities of the narcissistic disorder: an inflated sense of one’s importance, and a need for attention and admiration that is the result of a self that is “worn away little by little by the hidden fire”. Modernity has created the perfect conditions for feeding the inflated sense of grandiosity and identity disturbance that characterizes our society. However, in order to understand how a psychological condition can be used to describe a historic era, first one must analyse how the ties of the individual to the society have changed, and why these changes have led to a predominance of the narcissistic character.

For Greek Philosophers, “truth lies at the bottom of a well, the water which serves as a mirror in which objects are reflected” (Gray 2016, p. 39). The 1900s, the century of the advent of psychoanalysis, were characterized by a new way of looking at society from inwards outwards. Through looking into the depth of the human mind, psychology shed light into the inner workings of man, attempting to break through the “mirror” that reflected how the human psyche worked. The individual - as a symbol of modernity and of all the processes that accompanied the attitudinal changes brought by the technological advent of the new age – was to become the centre of a world where until now he had been just another cog in the machine. Psychoanalysis offered an innovative ‘tool’ for analysing a society that was becoming more and more focused on the individual, giving rise to a framework that allowed a minute investigation of reality in all its elements. As such, the advent of the era of Homo Psychologicus ( Jacoby 2017, p.2) facilitated the analysis of major disorders that afflicted the individual and in turn it helped create a basis for the investigations of problems that troubled the individual on a societal scale.

In turn, a historical analysis of society shows that certain periods have a particular disorder that best characterises them. The building block of society is the individual; hence, the afflictions of the individuals contribute to creating societal disorders that become the psychocultural archetypes of an age. According to Christopher Lasch, “every age develops its own peculiar form of pathology, which expresses in exaggerated form its underlying character structure” (Frosh 1989, p.1). Shifting from hysteria to depression, and finally to narcissism as the archetypal disorder that has characterized our society from the 1970s onwards, these manifestations stand as cornerstones of the unity (or in this case lack) of the self in modern society. They also offer an interesting insight in the changes in the ways we think and how we relate with each-other and our surroundings.

The emphasis on material wealth that characterises modernity, the importance of seeking attention to re-affirm yourself, and the dissolution of interpersonal ties between people, are all underlying factors of the cultural shift that highlights the transformation of narcissism into “psychocultural affliction rather than a disease” (Twenge and Campbell 2013,p.2). Narcissism ceases being an affliction only of the individual and metamorphoses into a disturbance of the group, spreading like an epidemic until it becomes the best adjective to delineate our society. The shift to narcissism -as the archetypal societal problem of our age- summarises the psychological and philosophical crisis of a self that is “mediated by electronic images” (Lasch in Frosh 1989,p.3) and is limited to the confinement of the surface levels of things.

Today, narcissism seems to be an affirmed reality. Not only is there extensive literature that debates and confirms this (Lash 1991; Frosh 1989, 2016), but we see the term narcissism having achieved a more widespread usage outside the clinic than any other pathology before it. The focus in academic and clinical debate now revolves around the question if the current archetype that best describes the existing psychological condition of contemporary society is indeed narcissism or if we are facing yet another change and are moving to the age of paranoia. Stephen Frosh (2016) in Relationality in a time of Surveillance: Narcissism, Melancholia, Paranoia argues that we have moved to “the sort of hate-filled paranoia that only narcissism can induce” (4). He believes that narcissism was the product of the neo-liberal age and that the society of surveillance we live in produces a form of subjectivity that is inevitably paranoid. “To be accepted as ‘citizens’, we somehow have to be constantly scrutinized and self-scrutinizing, aware that we are being watched and so monitoring everything we do…aware that we leave traces behind us wherever we go, that there are few places to hide” (Frosh 2016, p.3). The suggestion here is that we are moving in a sort of perpetual manic state where our ego is not only facing problems in building a coherent self but is in a status of constant threat from its surrounding.

While agreeing with at the same time both Frosh’s (2016, p.13) description of a paranoid ego that is “essentially narcissistic”, and Twenge and Campbell’s (2013) arguments about the existence of a narcissistic epidemic , today’s condition seems to be more of a merge between narcissism and paranoia rather than a shift from one condition to the other. The Cambridge Dictionary (2021) defines paranoia as “an extreme and unreasonable feeling that other people do not like you or are going to harm and criticize you [and that] someone who has paranoia has unreasonable false beliefs as a part of another mental illness”. This definition helps in understanding the connection Frosh makes between the two conditions, and it also assists in highlighting how we can have a narcissistic society that is highly paranoid.

The current reality seems to be characterised by a form of ‘cultural’ narcissism that is enframed and moulded by paranoia. According to Pulver, narcissism is one of the most important concepts, however, “it is very confusing” (in Jacoby 2017, p.3). It stands almost as an umbrella term for many different conditions which range from “serious disturbances in self-evaluation and an overwhelming self-hatred… [people] suffer from not being ‘the fairest of them all’ and look at themselves as nothing but ugly and inferior… [simultaneously we find the opposite end of the spectrum an insistence on] ‘perfect beauty’…total intelligence, brilliant genius” (Jacoby 2017, p.3). This dual aspect of narcissism fits perfectly with a society that is going through an affirmation crisis by trying to find its balance between nature and technology, real and unreal, surface level experiences and real ones. At the same time, a discrepancy seems to exist between how we see ourselves, and how we want to be seen; the divide and distortion between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ seems to reach a dangerous level in a society that promotes a narcissistic way of seeking value only in skin-deep things.

However, as a social pathology, narcissism reflects the societal problems, and as society and technology develop so does the condition itself. The narcissism Freud (1914) talked about is certainly different from our current manifestation of narcissistic disorder which incorporates the paranoia of a society that is under constant self-scrutiny. The interpersonal ties between people and the way we construct our self-image have undergone a radical change with the advent of the new media. “Each society constructs human subjects in its own image” (Frosh 1989, p.4), and a society that has been facing the results of the disenchantment of modernity cannot produce individuals that develop in a healthy way. Philosophers such as Adorno and Horkheimer (2002), have continuously pointed out the consequences we as humans face because of manifested egoism of consumer capitalism which inevitably led to a self-centredness that is at the heart of the narcissistic disorder. This process produces a massive crisis of identity, where our self-image or ego ideal is built on an empty narrative or depthless images instead of meaningful objects.

The problem of how the environment affects the individual has been a concern from the beginning of psychoanalysis as seen in Freud’s (1914) Moses and Monotheism or the Future of an Illusion . However, it was especially with Christopher Lasch(1991), issues of the society as a whole began being seen as the cause of socio-pathological conditions. His analysis of pathological conditions through economic, political, and cultural angles facilitates the understanding of how the advance in technology has created a shift in the way we form relationship from in person to online. This in turn has added to the valorisation of commodities and a self that is faced with the dilemma of how to form coherence and stability. In our culture, “everything is the look, and if an object has value and specificity only in its surface, then so will the ego. ‘I am so like an object’ becomes ‘I am an image, nothing more’” (Frosh 1989,p. 2). This image-oriented perception of reality has as its symbol the mirror imagery which also dominates narcissistic pathologies. Hence, the unwilling absorption of the myth of Narcissus into our culture disintegrates the self, which is faced with a constant crisis for survival.

At the same time, we notice a particular turn in the fragmentation of the self which leads to the fragmentation of society where individuals become alienated and their only tie to reality is a self-constructed ‘mirror’. The culture of Instagram and Facebook has created a sort of paranoia and fear of not being liked, not getting online attention, and the need for a constant validification that is presented in a considerably unhealthy way. These particularities of our current reality promote “the superficiality of interpersonal exchanges and [an increased] preoccupation with self-presentation which are often taken as characteristic of narcissistic personality” (Richards 2016, p.4). The unhealthy preoccupation with self-presentation is perpetuated by the “new media” which, according to Lev Manovich, “activates a ‘narcissistic condition’” (in Tyler 2007, p.344). In social media we notice different means of entailing the channelling of specific traits of the disorder. Not only does this culture of ‘pictures’ enable the forming of a surface level self, but simultaneously it gives the narcissistic person an immediate gratification through the ‘likes’ they receive.

For these individuals, what really is an artificial world where their need for affirmation gets realised immediately, instead of a meaningful human relationship. Life itself becomes like a virtual game, and the ego ideal faces a continuous crisis from this ever-shifting chaotic means of self-realization. Social media offers a means of achieving the recognition and connection that cannot be achieved in reality. The distance that exists between the real person and his online persona facilitates behaviours that would be difficult to exist in the real world. Similarly to other addictions, social media entices the affirmation needing individual to have a larger online presence which in turn creates more anxiety.

Many of these narcissistic traits that we find in social media users seem to be characterised by a form of paranoia that serves as a warped ‘instinctual’ reaction for surviving modernity. Often, under the conditioning of society individual feel as they have no choice but to take part in a social process such as Instagram, Facebook, or more recently TikTok in order to stop feeling alienated. In a reality where humans are de-humanized and turned only into a commodity, it is not surprising that narcissistic pathologies would emerge as a coping mechanism where this ‘domination’ of modernity leads to a state of paranoia that best describes the constant race for online ‘survival’. Frosh (1989, p.4) argues that behind the façade of “superficial aggrandizement and the glamour of modern culture lies a violence always threatening to erupt, always projected and materialized in modes of oppression and vicious domination”. However, the debate we notice in Frosh (2016), Richards (2018), about the shift to paranoia as the ‘archetypal’ manifestation of our current reality can be understood better if we see our current condition as being “the sort of hate-filled paranoia that only narcissism can induce” (Frosh, 2016, p.4). The inability to master oneself, leads to paranoid state of projecting the inner narcissistic rage and address it either to society or interiorize it. What results is a picture consistent with the narcissistic inevitable lack of empathy, the inability to love or care for anything apart from an egoistic love of the self, and a rage which is the result of this almost artificially created narcissism.

The illusion of substantial experience which in the end results completely empty and problematic is the result of a process of individuation that happens between the “the mirror and the mask” (Bromberg in Frosh 1989, p.2). The ‘mirroring behaviour’ that young children use to understand the reality that surrounds them - where the parents are used as a means of identifying with, and in turn the understanding of the world is developed through this initial ‘clan’ structure and applied in a major scale to society in general – loses its effect when part of what its mirrored allows only for a superficial perception of society. The mask we put on is one that hides the insecurities and anxieties of this self-formation process. In this reading of narcissism, the normal process of individuation presented by Jung as the “inherent drive in people to seek and realize themselves” (Jacoby 2017, p.1) is impeded by the development of a technological reality which is forming the basis of how we self-represent and self-form our ego-ideal in our times: the web and social media. At the same time, the sense of rivalry that the commodity and online culture promotes in turn creates “displacement…[as well as an] overwhelming sense of threat” directed at what endangers the consolidation of ego.

The fixation of paranoid states of being often under threat and observation could be the other side of the coin of the narcissistic disorder. The narcissistic megalomania and need for affirmation combined with the reality of the online culture could result in an increased need to be noticed which in turn can take a more negative twist and turn this need into a fixation or a sense of being observed, that is a characteristic of paranoia. Lacan argues that “in each of us there is a paranoid function: the ego. The ego, constituted by successive identifications enacted during the mirror stage ( stade du miroir ), is essentially narcissistic” (in Frosh 2016, p.13). When this narcissistic need to mirror internally the outside world is based on non-stable objects. “When these objects keep disappearing, to be replaced by new, existing but equally disposable alternatives” (Frosh 1989, p.6) the self will often feel threatened by the lack of stability in its identification objects. The narcissistic potential of creating self-destructive behaviour could manifest itself in this paranoid state of threat as the sole constant in an ever-changing reality. Both narcissism and paranoia seem to be a response for a society that is progressing too quickly for the individual who tries to find a stable footing in his/her reality.

This convergence of paranoia and narcissism captures the modern condition and the destructive parts of the self that are easily recognisable in the current reality. According to Richards (2018, p.16), the narcissistic inflated sense of self is “a defence against the underlying anxiety and vulnerability” of the modern context. Frosh (1989, p.26) talks about an emphasis of the narcissistic pathology on “grandiosity and mirror fixation, a mixture of an inflated image of the self and a need to have this image constantly confirmed by others”, Lacan(2006) proposes the mirror stage as a key development of the individual although his theory also makes it easier to notice what could go wrong in the formation of the self and lead from a normal narcissism to a pathological one. What all these theories have in common is the need to find the “truth [that] lies at the bottom of a well”; or, in this case, uncover the origin of the problematic formation of the self in modernity.

Our consumer capitalist culture inadvertently promotes the control of others in order to secure the self-affirmation that the narcissistic ego needs in order to survive. More and more often, individuals define themselves as mere ‘things’ due to agencies of mass production that promote a standardized attitude towards objects and people alike. The individual becomes part of this mass production chain and loses his/her connection to the natural world by entering an artificially created narcissistic driven reality. The superficial images of our society form a façade that is becoming a reality for many individuals. More than any other pathological condition, narcissism, especially as argued from Lasch (1991) afterwards, offers an interactive view of psychoanalytic conditions while simultaneously focusing on how a society that is in constant flux affects our self-formation.

Taking in consideration the ever shifting economic, political, and technological realities, our culture still exhibits the classic elements of the narcissistic individual but on a societal scale. Megalomania, the need to control others in order to re-affirm yourself, and mirror fixation lead to a narcissistic rage that easily crosses borders with paranoia. As argued previously, the reality for the process of individuation seems to have shifted to narcissistic paranoia. The pressure of the surveillance society we live in has facilitated the crossing over of the domains between narcissism and paranoia. We can easily observe all the narcissistic traits but with a twist of the obsessive object relation that paranoia exhibits.

The best example of the paranoic-narcissistic shift in our society has become the concept of self-love which until recently was the symbol of a healthy self; something that showed the cornerstone of what an individual should aspire to. Nowadays, even this self-realizing concept is transformed in a narcissistic outlet driven by paranoia. The new practice of sologamy – or marrying oneself – shows how our fear of being alone mixed with a warped self -love have contaminated not only how we relate to each-other, but above all, how we relate to ourselves. A culture that promotes an unhealthy bordering to obsessive self-love with a focus from outwards inwards cannot but promote the narcissistic tendencies that our culture exhibits. Before, we were told that what counts is what’s inside us. However, now this has changed to what counts is the outside, the surface, the images. We have inadvertently created a society with a focus on the surface-level importance of reality, where the inside doesn’t matter. People paranoically fight about their ‘images’, and self-realization is perceived as successful when we look like the ‘idols’ we see in the new media.

Considering all the elements discussed, the aim of this essay is not to judge society or its individuals but to highlight a common worry that is made evident in our current reality. By arguing for the shift to a narcissistic driven paranoia, this essay is showing through the use of a ‘clinical metaphor’ some conditions that are crucial in understanding the ever-shifting reality we live in. The overlap of narcissistic traits with the paranoid states of mind is reaching a level that needs acknowledging. This reading stands for a need to review our understanding of individual conditions that affirm the need of more ‘cross-condition’ clinical and academic analysis in order to really understand what is at the “bottom of the well” of the human psyche. Only by taking down both the ‘mirror’ and the ‘mask’ do we stand a chance to continue the search for truth and understanding humanity that Freud initiated more than a century ago.

References

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Doyle, J. (2017). Rethinking a Case of Paranoia as a Workplace Complaint. Studies in Gender and Sexuality , 18 (1), pp. 4–12.

Freud, S. (1914). On Narcissism: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works. Available at: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_SE_On_Narcissism_complete.pdf . (Accessed: 7/12/2021).

Frosh, S. (1989). On narcissism. Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics , 18, pp. 22–48.

Frosh, S. (2016). Relationality in the Time of Surveillance: Narcissism, Melancholia, Paranoia. Subjectivity, 9, pp.1-16.

Gray, J. (2016). The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom. South Africa: Penguin Books.

Jacoby, M. (2017). Individuation and Narcissism. New York: Routledge.

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Lasch. C. (1991). The Culture of Narcissism . New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Ovid (2000). The Metamorphoses Book III: 474-510 . Translated by Kline, A.S. Houston: Boarders Classics.

Richards, B. (2018). Exploring malignancies: Narcissism and paranoia today. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society , 23 (1), pp.15–27.

Trzesniewski, K. H., Donnellan, M. B., and Robins, R. W. (2008). Do Today’s Young People Really Think They Are So Extraordinary?: An Examination of Secular Trends in Narcissism and Self-Enhancement. Psychological Science , 19 (2), pp.181–188.

Twenge, J. M. and Campbell. W. K. (2013). The Narcissistic Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. USA: Simon and Schuster.

Tyler, I. (2007) ‘From “The Me Decade” to “The Me Millennium”: The Cultural History of Narcissism’, International Journal of Cultural Studies , 10, pp 343–363.

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©Kiti Misha. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY).

1. Ovid (2000). The Metamorphoses Book III: 474-510 . Translated by Kline, A.S. Houston: Boarders Classics. ↩

Archetypal Genre

The novel became the dominant genre of fiction from the eighteenth century onwards, adopting a chosen literary genre to best represent itself and the society for which it was a mirror. The history of the novel is an unofficial history of humanity’s developments in the sciences, psychology, and sociology. It is a mirror through which we can study the depth of history from a perspective beyond the blunt chronology of dates and linear events . This essay aims to show how the predominant literary genre of a period reflects the scientific innovations of the time, as well as the dominant system of thought concerning how we perceive reality, time, and the self. Since the beginning of the novel, the question of “how to translate knowing into telling” (White 1990, 5) was an issue of monumental importance whose solutions reflect each writer’s philosophy and style.

As “the novel is the only developing genre” (Bakhtin, cited in McKeon, 324), the process of reflecting and capturing “reality itself in the process of unfolding” (ibid) was more accessible to it than to any other written mediums. From the Renaissance onwards there was a need to redefine reality through individual experience, and to let go of the collective mentality of the Middle Ages. This redefinition was congruent with the philosophical advancements of the eighteenth century. Key philosophical texts like those of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy and Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding laid the basis for the formulation of the individual and the self. As a result, characters in a novel “can only be individualized if they are set in a background of particularized time and space” (Watt 2015, 2). The novel became the experimenting ground to define what the individual was and how best to describe them three-dimensionally.

During its rise, the novel adopted “‘Realism’ as the literary mode of choice” (Watt 1999, 8); Realism lies in the way reality is presented using our senses. It has close connections with the writing of Locke, Descartes’ determination “to accept nothing on trust” (ibid, 12), and Defoe’s “primacy of the individual experience in the novel” (ibid, 12). Starting with Realism we see literature go towards the ‘low mimetic’ mode of representation as presented by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism . The hero is a normal human being like any of us, just “one step more heroic than the ironic” (Frye 2020, 125). It is important to remember that the word ‘realistic’ is used to illustrate a tendency in the novel and fiction in general, and it would be erroneous to use it as an adjective.

Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns is a perfect example of Realism in a novel that illustrates some of the conventions mentioned above. We read a story placed in a certain time, in a set place, developed through the memories of its characters, as is common with the development of the Realist novel. Differently from previous stories in which the setting was mostly left unspecified, Bennett gives a detailed description of the setting for the start of the story:

The Park rose in terraces from the railway station to a street of small villas almost on the ridge of the hill. From its gilded gate, to its smallest geranium-slips it was brand new, and most of it was red. The keeper’s house, the bandstand, the kiosks, the balustrades, the shelters – all these assailed the eye with a uniform redness of the brick and tile which nullified the pallid greens of the turf and the frail trees. The immense crowd, in order to circulate, moved along the tight processions, inspecting one after the other the various features of which they had read full descriptions in the “Staffordshire Signal” (Bennet 2009, 11).

Here we notice a “‘particularity of description’ or ‘realistic particularity’” (Watt 1999, 16) that is characteristic of the Realist novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This Particularity, according to Ian Watt, is one of the innovatory aspects of the novel that “reflects the philosophical shift” (ibid) of the period. Another important feature that comes out from this passage is highlighted in the extract’s characteristic of being a description of a description that the people read in the newspaper, the “Staffordshire Signal”. From this, we can deduce the increasing importance that the printing press had on writing, and the new dimensions that the novel was addressing “simultaneously represented and representing” (Bakhtin, cited in McKeon, 332).

The realist novel was not called as such only because it was realistic. If it merely “saw life from the seamy side, it would be an inverted romance” (Watt 1999, 10). The novel in its emergent form has some common elements that form its basic canons: attention to backgrounds and a plot established through the memories of the characters like mentioned previously, followed by the increased importance of the “individual mind under the impact of temporal flux…[or] the development of its characters in the course of time” (ibid, 21), the central role of this newly defined character not only in his/her life but in the bigger picture of events, hence leading to new importance attributed to categories of “space” and “time”. Another key component of the novel is expressed through “an authentic account of the actual experiences of the individual” (ibid, 26) given in language, as can be seen in the following passage from Anna of the Five Towns . These particularities form the cornerstone of this new developing genre:

‘There’s nobbut one point, Mr Mynors ,’ Tellwright said bluntly, ‘and that’s the interest on th ’ capital, as must be deduced before reckoning profits. Us must have six per cent.’

‘But I thought we had settled it at five,’ said Mynors with sudden firmness.

‘ We’n settled as you shall have five on your fifteen hundred,’ the miser replied with imperturbable audacity, ‘but us mun have our six.’ (Bennett 2016, 65)

In this passage, we can distinguish clearly between the persons speaking by their accent. This characterization and attention to detail are particular to the novel. Tellwright’s accent shows a lack of proper education, his place of origin, and through it, we can construct a mental image of him more easily and accurately than if this detail had just been described to us. Here we can also see the importance attributed to names. “The problem of individual identity is closely related to the epistemological status of proper names; for, in the words of Hobbes: ‘proper names bring to mind only one thing; universals bring to mind one of many’” (Watt 1999, 17). In Anna of the Five Towns we see various examples of names which have a secondary connotation or implied meaning added to them. Tellwright can be “tell it right” or he who thinks he is often right (Bennett 2016). Mynors is a name that a villain would typically have; hence it is supposedly difficult to sympathize with him. The trend of naming characters who are heroes with local English names, and characters who are antagonists with formal Latin or Greek names has been part of the literary tradition of the novel that reflects the distinction between the group and the “other”. We see the same trend continuing up to modern works of fiction such as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter (1997-2007), where the villains have Latin names such as Lucius Malfoy, Bellatrix Lestrange, Voldemort, etc.

All these characteristics distinguish the realist novel from previous fiction, reflecting the changes that were happening in the way of thinking due to the change of philosophical and scientific thinking of the time. However, as Bakhtin says, “the novel is the sole genre that continues to develop, that is yet uncompleted” (cited in McKeon, 321); hence it was only natural that as the world changed, the novel would change with it. What characterized Realism would soon be not enough to constitute an authentic portrayal of the individual’s apprehension of reality. On the contrary, the characteristic traits of Realism seem simplistic and incomplete because as Virginia Woolf stated, “they are not concerned with the spirit but with the body” (2002, 83).

The changes in how the individual perceives reality and his surroundings become more obvious when we notice how the concept of time has changed from Arnold Bennett to Virginia Woolf. In Bennett, characters are placed in a linear temporal dimension, while for Woolf that was not enough to capture the complexity of human nature. The descriptive style, particular to details of Realism lacked ‘spirit’. In To the Lighthouse, and in Modernist writing in general, we see the introduction of the ‘stream of consciousness’ or of the ability to be simultaneously in the present, in the past, and inside the mind of the character. One specific passage in To the Lighthouse quintessentially describes the complexity of Modernist writing:

At the far end was her husband, sitting down, all in a heap, frowning. What at? She did not know. She did not mind. She could not understand how she had felt any emotion or any affection for him. She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup, as if there was an eddy – there – and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it…Lily Briscoe watched her dripping into that strange no-man’s land where to follow people is impossible and yet their goings inflict such a chill on those who watch them that they try at least to follow them with their eyes as one follows a fading ship until the sails have sunk behind the horizon (Woolf 2006, 72).

In less than a page, we get a vivid picture of Mrs. Ramsey’s outer/physical world versus her inner/spiritual one. The description of Mrs. Ramsey helping with the soup around the table is given simultaneously with her inner world by allowing a glimpse into her thoughts as she performs this. The narrative perspective then shifts to a similar dualistic portrayal from her to Lily. This concept of “simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present” (Anderson, cited in McKeon 2000, 422) is closely connected to the development of science and especially to the emergence of the novel and the newspaper. News travelled faster; people started reading in the newspapers about places they had never been. The perception of reality shifted. The concept of time itself changed due to Einstein’s advancements in physics. Throughout the novel, Woolf herself adopts the juxtaposition of events to get a grasp of the passage of time. To the Lighthouse can be simplistically reduced to juxtaposing the holiday house when Mrs. Ramsey was alive to the same setting ten years later after her death. What is left is that “Time Passes” (Woolf 2008, 103-117), or as Proust called it, “pure time” (Frank, cited in McKeon 2000, 795).

In Modernism, we see a need for a break with the mimetic tradition of the past. The plot, the characters, and the settings matter, but they are viewed differently. Describing what someone sees or how somebody sees him/her is not enough to compose a realistic, believable character. Woolf was greatly affected by the writing of Freud and Einstein; hence the complexity of their new worldview was mirrored in her writings. The artistic movements of the time also influenced Woolf’s style. In her books we see the “Cubist presentation of all sides of an object ‘simultaneously’” (Kelly, cited in Soloman and Sherman 2007, 120) being applied to literature.

After the Second World War, Modernism became unable to convey the changes that the two World Wars had brought, and it started to represent “the stagnant orthodoxies of ‘high culture’” (Widdowson 20045, 258). In the pre-World War societies, the world was more clearly stratified; it was easier to distinguish literary genres and their specificities, as well as to adhere to a genre. In comparison with Realism and Modernism, the novel started to move even further down Norton Frye’s five modes of mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, and finally ending in the ironic mode with heroes “inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity” (Frye 2020, 123).

The postmodernist writer John Barth renders the complexities of Postmodernism as follows:

After which she resumed her labor and the radio the next musical selection until the next race. This music affected Ambrose strongly: it was not at all of a stripe with what they played on Fitch Bandwagon or National Barn Dance; this between races was classical music, as you should say: the sort upper-graders had to listen in class. Up through the floor of his bedroom came the rumble of tympani and a brooding figure in low strings. Ambrose paused in his dressing to listen and thinking on his late disgrace frowned: the figure stirred a dark companion in his soul. No man at all! His family, shaken past tears, was in attendance at his grave site. (Barth 1978, 38).

Not only do we have to read Barth by reflexive reference and by continuously merging fragments of texts with previous allusions until the final picture is clear, but even then, the image that comes out is closer to a parody or irony. Moreover, it may not always necessarily connect clearly and uniformly with what was before. The passage between reality and fantasy is so subtle that if it is not read carefully, the reader could lose sight of where one ends and the other begins. Hutcheon argues that “it is part of the postmodernist stand to confront the paradoxes of fictive/historical representation, the particular/the general, and the present/the past” (Hutcheon, cited in McKeon 2000, 831) and that this confrontation is in itself “contradictory, for it refuses to recuperate or dissolve either side of the dichotomy” (ibid). Hence the result is a pastiche: a by-product of our mass-media and capitalist society where nothing is clear cut anymore but a mixture of the “plurality and recognition of difference” (ibid, 838).

Postmodernism contests the previous genres by claiming it is impossible to “know reality, and therefore to be able to represent it in language” (ibid, 834). Similarly to Barth’s extract on postmodernity in this new genre, as soon as a semblance of order is established through writing, the author ‘destroys’ it. “Subjectivity, intersexuality, reference, [and] ideology” (ibid) become problematic grounds for the postmodern doubts about approaching reality, and the parody becomes parodied. All these uncertainties mirror a society that is evolving at an incredible pace, and where there are no longer any givens.

In the last twenty years, there has been no great technological or philosophical breakthrough. Science is at a standstill; we live at the time of the “literature of exhaustion” (Barth 1982, 64); philosophy or psychology is not showing any new paths. How we think of ourselves is still an evolving concept but different from what it used to be in Realism, Modernism, or Postmodernism. But even in this literary standstill, humanity will always search for answers. Our current reality and worries can be concretely seen in Philip K. Dick’s novel Ubik (2017) where the individual remains the centre of the search for truth or for how to approach reality, but the conditions of this search have changed.

A “felt ultimacy from weaponry to theology, the celebrated dehumanization of society” (Barth 1982, 70) is present in most writings today, or alternately “a coherent alternative to this world complete in every respect” (ibid). We pass beyond science taking all the scientific and philosophical developments and hypothetically advancing them through Science Fiction, or otherwise finding an out-of-reality or supernatural means to experiment in what is possible through Fantasy. As one of the representatives of literature today, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik (2017) does an excellent job of summarizing our collective worries. A new world described in the smallest particularities becomes our test field for a new way to approach problems and opportunities not restricted by the laws that govern our world. New worlds like Ubik’s grant the liberty of mixing genres, of experimenting with concepts, and merging theories or ideas that are difficult to put together otherwise.

The history of the development of the novel shows how each period in history has a classification that best represents the complex mix of scientific, social, and cultural changes that our society goes through. By going through all the stages of the growth of the novel we see a tendency of the particularities of an era manifesting in an archetypal form in the novel. In Realism the plot, characters, and setting gained a depth never had before. Time started playing a major role in the novel and the search of the individual to comprehend reality. Modernism advanced the research on time, hence giving a quasi-four-dimensional essence to the characters. Postmodernism recognized the immense complexity of the world and believed the only thing left was to parody life. Today the novel is trying to go beyond the physical boundaries of this world in search of a truth not conditioned by ever-changing scientific rules. Literature is the continuous search of the individual of ways how best to represent reality; it is an ever-changing art that mirrors the society’s constancy - or inconstancy. John Barth cites John James E. Irby’s quotation, “all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators, and annotators of pre-existing archetypes” (Barth 1982, 277), and claims that all writers are therefore also the historians of the subterranean collective history of humanity.

References

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Barth, J. (1982). The literature of exhaustion and the literature of replenishment . Northridge, Calif.: Lord John Press.

Bennett, A. (2016). Anna of the five towns . London: Penguin Books.

Dick, P.K. (2017). Ubik . Orion Publishing Co.

Mckeon , M. (2000). Theory of the novel: a historical approach . Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Northrop Frye (2020). ANATOMY OF CRITICISM: four essays. S.L.: Princeton University Pres.

Rowling, J. K. (1997-2007) Harry Potter (7 titles). London: Bloomsberg

Solomon, R.C. and Sherman, D.L. (2007). The Blackwell guide to continental philosophy . Oxford, Uk ; Malden, Ma: Blackwell Pub.

Watt, I.P. (1999). The rise of the novel: studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding . Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. Of California Press.

White, H.V. (1990). The content of the form: narrative discourse and historical representation . Baltimore; London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Widdowson, P. (2004). The Palgrave Guide to English Literature and its Contexts, 1500–2000 . Macmillan Education Uk .

Woolf, V. (2006). To The Lighthouse . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Woolf, V. and Mcneillie , A. (2002). The common reader. First series . San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

© Kiti Misha. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY).