The modes of modern writing: Metaphor, metonymy, and the typology of modern literature

by David Lodge

The Modes of Modern Writing tackles some of the fundamental questions we all encounter when studying or reading literature, such what is literature? What is realism? What is relationship between form and content? And what dictates the shifts in literary fashions and tastes? In answering these questions, the book examines texts by a wide range of modern novelists and poets, including James Joyce, T.S.Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Philip Larkin, and draws on the work of literary theorists from Roman Jakobson to Roland Barthes. Written in Lodge's typically accessible style this is essential reading for students and lovers of literature at any level. The Bloomsbury Revelations edition includes a new Foreword/Afterword by the author.

Genres: Literary Fiction, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Reference

279 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

David John Lodge was an English author and critic. A literature professor at the University of Birmingham until 1987, some of his novels satirise academic life, notably the "Campus Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988). The second two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another theme is Roman Catholicism, beginning from his first published novel The Picturegoers (1960). Lodge also wrote television screenplays and three stage plays. After retiring, he continued to publish literary criticism. His edition of Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (1972) includes essays on 20th-century writers such as T.S. Eliot. In 1992, he published The Art of Fiction, a collection of essays on literary techniques with illustrative examples from great authors, such as Point of View (Henry James), The Stream of Consciousness (Virginia Woolf) and Interior Monologue (James Joyce), beginning with Beginning and ending with Ending.

Reviews

[Stela · Rating 4 out of 5]

The history of modern English literature … can be seen as an oscillation in the practice of writing between polarized clusters of attitudes and techniques: modernist, symbolist or mythopoeic, writerly and metaphoric on the one hand; antimodernist, realistic, readerly and metonymic on the other.

This is, in a nutshell, what The Modes of Modern Writing is about: demonstrating that the Modern English writing oscillates between two poles: metaphor and metonymy. David Lodge uses Roman Jakobson’s distinction between the two aspects of the language: one to be found on the selection axis, hence, metaphoric, the other on the combination axis, hence metonymic and synecdochic. These terms could be reinforced by Roland Barthes’ dichotomy of readable (readerly) and writable (writerly) texts and are more appropriate than the usual antithetic distinction between modernist and realistic literature (for modernists claim their literature is the truly realistic one).

Of course, this distinction could be used to reconcile not only various groups of writers, but also distinct periods in a writer’s creation, since

…there is not a distinction between two mutually exclusive types of discourse, but one based on dominance. The metaphoric work cannot totally neglect metonymic continuity if it is to be intelligible at all. Correspondingly, the metonymic text cannot eliminate all signs that it is available for metaphorical interpretation.

After establishing the premises, the critic proceeds to demonstration by reviewing some modernist writers. Among them, the most interesting observations, in my opinion, concern James Joyce and Virginia Woolf’s. In both there is a transition from metonymic to metaphoric: Joyce’s “Dubliners” is mostly metonymic and “Finnegans Wake” metaphorical. As for Virginia Woolf, there is a similar technical difference between "The Voyage Out" and "The Waves". However,

Virginia Woolf’s metaphorical mode is correspondingly different from Joyce's. It might be said that whereas his writing aspired to the condition of myth, hers aspired to the condition of lyrical poetry.

Consequently, modernists, and even antimodernists and modern writers who are only tangentially modernists seem to oscillate between metonymic and metaphoric poles of writing.

But what about postmodernists? Well, as the last chapter of the study implies, even when you find metonymic and/or metaphoric traits in their works, it is quite impossible to classify their work based on this dichotomy. Postmodernism, defined by Barth as a literature of exhaustion, reveals a world often closed to reader’s interpretation efforts, and it is futile to look for the pattern in the carpet, anyway. Characterized by contradiction, discontinuity, randomness and excess, it short-circuits either metaphor and metonymy, by playing one against the other. The danger lies, the critic warns, with those books that rely only upon defying the established rules, since the moment the rules disappear, they are prone to disappearing, too:

Postmodernism cannot rely upon the historical memory of modernist and antimodernist writing for its background, because it is essentially a rule-breaking kind of art, and unless people are still trying to keep the rules there is no point in breaking them, and no interest in seeing them broken.

What else to add? Oh yes, some ideas, in no order whatsoever, that I liked and hope to use someday:

- there are texts that are axiomatically literary – they cannot be classified elsewhere, even though their value is secondary (e. g. Love Story ☺);
- realism is so good in depicting repression because it is a mode of writing derived from consciousness, daylight, ego;
- “… literature written in metonymic mode tends to disguise itself as nonliterature”;
- the gratuitous obscenity of some scenes in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch could be explained by the confusion (instead of choosing) between metonymic and metaphoric;
- Finnegans Wake escapes both criticism and reading in full (I oversimplified, but it’s funny nonetheless!);
- Philip Larkin is a metonymic poet.

Overall, an extremely rewarding reading, by the same David Lodge who never disappoints me with his beautifully organized ideas, his strong arguments, his clear and “readerly” style, his tender irony.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating study of various metaphoric, metonymic, and synecdochal collisions of Edwardian, Modernist, and postmodern novelists as they run out their aesthetic and theoretical guns. Parenthetically, Lodge makes the prospect of reading Orwell almost agreeable.

[Traveller]

http://www.english.fsu.edu/jobs/num04...

ROFL

[Beverley Sylvester · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of criticism and theory is brilliant and deeply insightful. Lodge does an exceptional job of providing relevant examples for his statements that clarify his points without overstating them. He also incorporates jargon when appropriate without unnecessarily overcomplicating his text (as is the case in certain academic writings).