Modernism and the Ordinary (review)

In the past few years, “the ordinary” has become a major conceptual category in literary studies. Its emergence was announced by a special issue of New Literary History on “Everyday Life” in 2002. In her introduction to it, Rita Felski writes that “the theoretical issues and political questions raised by everyday life are far from settled; indeed, they are still very much in their infancy.”¹ Olson’s study is a bold attempt to extend those theoretical issues to the study of modernism. “Literary modernism takes ordinary experience as its central subject” is the book’s polemical claim (3). This represents a startling departure from one well established account of modernist aesthetics, which holds that the modernist writers rebelled against nineteenth-century realism and instead formulated an aesthetic that privileged closely observed representations of interiority and, especially, epiphanic moments of heightened consciousness.

The book’s strongest chapters, those on Woolf and Joyce, intervene directly in debate about the genealogies of modernism to show that the ordinary has played a constitutive role in the development of modernist style. Olson begins by revisiting the notion of epiphany as it was formulated by Joyce out of his engagement with Ibsen. The first half of the chapter traces the development of Joyce’s aesthetics from 1900’s “Drama and Life” to the theory of epiphany outlined in Stephen Hero. The early essay claims that “Life we must accept as we see it before our eyes, men and women as we meet them in the real world” (37). Olson argues that the figure of Stephen evolves as a foil to this view of the commonplace, with his theory of epiphany increasingly treated as an object of satire. In Ulysses, Steven’s artistic frustrations mark the final rejection of this method—and of Ibsen’s version of realism—in favor of an attention to the materiality of the ordinary. The novel figures this materiality in a variety of ways, the most notable of which is its lists. The infinite extendability of these lists mimics the flux and indeterminacy of the ordinary, and its resistance to literary codification. This reading of Ulysses does an admirable job of drawing attention to a single salient feature of such an impossibly unwieldy text. Olson should perhaps have wielded this insight more effectively against earlier critics of the modernists, who through their inordinate focus on the notions of myth and epiphany, did the most to entrench these limiting notions.

Critics of Woolf, too, have often elided her concern with the ordinary in favor of her interest in heightened states of consciousness. Olson, though, shows that Woolf’s critical work creates a sharp generic distinction between poetry and prose in order to suggest that the latter should be rooted in the ordinary. In her reading of Mrs. Dalloway, Olson shows that Woolf is concerned to present “the cotton wool of daily life” (66) as a buffer against the threats posed by social, historical, and personal change. The repetition of everyday life provides a ground on which we can orient ourselves in relation to larger historical forces. The dependability of the ordinary functions in Mrs. Dalloway as a refuge from the traumas of the First World War. But the inattentiveness that characterizes our attitude to the ordinary also makes it evanescent, elusive to memory. The chapter concludes by describing Woolf’s stylistic experimentation as an attempt to capture this evanescence.

One objection to this study is that Olson is very charitable to the authors she treats, sometimes to a fault. The chapter on Stein, for instance, begins by noting the paradox of Stein’s conspicuously bohemian existence and the consistent emphasis on habit and the ordinary in her work. Though she acknowledges that Stein’s politics with regard to the Second World War are deeply problematic, she does not pursue the troubling implications of the fact that the continuity of Stein’s own daily life was achieved at the cost of her collaboration with the Vichy authorities. It could be said of Woolf, as...