Chiastic Modernism: Rational Uncanniness and Uncanny Reason

This paper seeks to offer a continuity thesis by showing that modernism is in many ways a continuation – both from a theoretical and a literary historical point of view – of well-established cultural contradictions and rhetorical strategies. I argue that a focus on the uncanny in modernist literature illuminates the complex chiastic interdependence of the apparently simple opposition between the rational and the irrational: the former constantly discovers in the latter not only its antagonist, but also its most important motivation. Thus, reason folds back onto itself in a chiastic fashion: rationalizing the uncanny generates further instances of the uncanniness of reason. This paradoxical operation is not simply a marginal device that modernist writers sporadically deploy, but, as I reveal in my brief analyses of D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Joseph Conrad, it can rather be regarded as one of the central organizing principles of modernist literature and culture. The last part of the essay shows that Woolf’s genius lies in the fact that she relocates the modernist chiasmus at the level of the opposition between ethics and aesthetics. The uncanny in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway upsets the distinction between the two categories, suggesting a new modernist aesthetics of the trivial.

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