While looking for something interesting to read online recently I stumbled across something boring. Namely, Robert McCrum’s Guardian piece on ‘The best boring books’, listing big, grey bricks of supposedly anaesthetic prose. Two modernist novels had been singled out for critique: James Joyce’s notorious Finnegans Wake and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. I began to wonder whether there was something intrinsic to modernism that leant itself towards dullness and tedium in the mind’s eye of the public.
Gabriel Josipovici recently asked What Ever Happened to Modernism? As part of an in-depth literary study, he charted the recent decline of modernist literature in opposition to other, more traditional forms of storytelling. Is there something about Modernism that turns many readers away? Why are Joyce, Eliot and Kafka missing from our holiday reading lists? If they are on our bookshelves, why do we never pick them up? And how many times have you seen someone reading Stephen Hero on the train?
Virginia Woolf’s work is packed with wit and sophistication, but it’s through movie adaptations that her mainstream reputation seems to shine.
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