Hesse, Woolf, and the Art of Reconstruction

Chiroux, Adrien
(2022) 1922/2022 – Total Modernism: Continuity, Discontinuity, And The Experimental Turn — Location: Torino (Italy) (18.May.2022)

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Written at the end of the 1920s, Hermann Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf (1927) and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), modernist novels par excellence, are marked by the discoveries of their time, more particularly those of psychoanalysis. Through the use of fragmentation devices (of the novelistic structure, the plot, the narrative) or through the complex network of characters organized around a central figure, these two novels explore the new conceptions of identity proposed by S. Freud and C. G. Jung. By doing so, they confer a modernist orientation to the Bildungsroman: the formation of the hero now corresponds to the understanding and integration of the different facets of a fragmented psyche. Nevertheless, far from being reduced to a mere literary transposition of these theories, these works, when taken in their aesthetic totality, actually constitute what could be called – using the verb bilden also presents in Bildungsroman – Gebildete Romane (“constructed novels”). The novelistic divisions and the multiplication of voices generate the presence of different points of view that confront and dialogue with each other until they interweave so deeply that they form the novels themselves. These novels, conceived as the results of a dialectic between fragmentation and composition, deconstruction and (re)construction, thus constitute singular literary objects in that they reinvent the genre of the novel by drawing on the writing processes of the avant-gardes and on a new conception of identity.
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Chiroux, A. (2022). Hesse, Woolf, and the Art of Reconstruction. 1922/2022 – Total Modernism: Continuity, Discontinuity, And The Experimental Turn, Torino (Italy). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/107445