Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning

Guided by a clinical and theoretical discourse that runs from Kierkegaard through Freud and Klem to Bakhtin and Kristeva, Bahun sees modernist experimentation with the novel's character, chronotope, and language as activating the "melancholic function of porosity" (53), generating a creative and critical aperture to exploit the penneable borders between subject and object, individual and community, past and present, sound and meaning. The larger stakes of Bahun's enterprise, then, consist in showing that melancholia provides a "structural template" (196) for revising conventional accounts of historical agency-or lack thereof-in modernist literature. In "Virginia Woolf and the Search for Historical Patterns," Bahun elucidates the "poetic politics" of Between the Acts, the imperative, inflected by "moderate optimism and despair" (157), to actively engage "the culture of the death drive" (155) and "address the anguish of the present moment in such manner that occlusions and gaps . . . are rescued from the abyss of non-knowledge" (18687). The competing impulses towards wholeness and fragmentation, union and dispersal, she adds, are iterated and heightened through the enactment of "anticipatory grief' on the precipice of World War II (although she mistakenly sets the novel during the Sitzkrieg [12, 159, 163]).