Narrative Personae and Desire in Modernist Fiction

Examining modernist fiction in the context of a longer tradition of narrative impersonality, Narrative Personae and Desire in Modernist Fiction explores how narrative language renders subjective states of interiority and desire. Inspired by linguistic analyses of the “speakerless sentences” of narrative language and their unoccupied centers of perception, Kevin Ohi argues that modernist texts are populated by quasi-persons: narrative “voices” that are impersonal while trailing effects of personality, and characters whose personhood is suspended, the incisive rendering of psychology and desire produced by externalizations of consciousness.

Certain first-person texts highlight the constitutive tension between the functions of narrator and character joined in that first person, while in third-person texts, a charismatic or impervious central voice can be shown nevertheless to “hold” the psychologies it empties from the characters it describes. At stake is the particular way that modernist narrative responds to the question of literature's capacities for addressing psychic life. In Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples, Ronald Firbank's Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, and James Purdy's Mourners Below, this volume finds a paradoxical merger, a humanizing effect achieved by narrative depersonalization and its evocations of psychology and desire.