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Abstract
Aesthetics of impersonality in modernist fiction are, more correctly, anaesthetics of impersonality: in order to bear the pain of modern life the modernists separate the life of the mind from the life of the body. In Chapter One I make literal and metaphorical intersections between literature and medicine, presenting artist and physician as figures of healing who use impersonality to diagnose and treat the pain of personal experience. In three separate chapters I show that in impersonalizing the personal, in turning autobiography into fiction, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway act as anaesthetists who use narrative strategies to privilege intellectual perceptions of experience.
In Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse Woolf's memories translate into moments of being experienced in the "semi-transparent envelope" that protects the body from pain, leaving the mind to project itself abroad in the world. Joyce's letters to Nora illuminate the paradox in being both an intellectually refined artist and a sensual, physical man, which is ironically expressed in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as Stephen Dedalus explicitly represses and implicitly expresses the life of the body. Hemingway's letters and non-fiction betray a code of honor enabled by numbing agents. In Farewell to Arms he admits bodies at risk that are anaesthetized to and seem unaware of the pain disallowed by male standards of behavior. In the final chapter I treat traditional realist novels of the period that present thematically centered aesthetics of personality. Bestselling authors John O'Hara, Anzia Yezierska, and Storm Jameson confront the confusion, anxiety, and pain of society, providing material referentiality between mind and body, individual and society.
The modernist authors, like the physician, use impersonality to sustain detachment, relegating pain to the level of subjective symptom. Anaesthetics and analgesics provide a way for artists and physicians to deny and repress pain, creating the happy illusion that pain can be controlled or eliminated. By suspending belief in impersonality I resist these anaesthetic effects and explore the attendant gains and losses, the claims of empathic identification, and the real potential for pain as a locus of meaning.
