| Literary Modernism is typically read as protest against or symptom of the general decline of cultural and communal cohesiveness. But this decline is part and parcel of the growth of modern world-view. As the shift to secularism expands our horizons outward, new challenges arise as the internal depths that the mythic world-view had obscured are excavated and brought to surface. As Descartes has shown, when the enlightened man turns the magnifying lens outward, what he always also magnifies are the fractures and uncertainties in the signal that communicates to him the integrity of his identity. In the genealogy of Modernism, this dialectic finds an exemplary figure in Ibsen, who relentlessly sought after clarity of vision untainted by lies, but found only ghosts.;Psychoanalytic theory allows us to read this often praised striving of Ibsen instead as a pathogenic influence and injunction, a legacy that sustains itself as repetition compulsion that claims identity and immediacy with the lost object or objectivity in the true signal only by not seeing the vulnerability inherent in communication. This study offers a reading of three writers who actively strove to restore mediation through fiction. Shedding the Enlightenment bias that shuns the vicinity of madness, this study confronts the psychopathologies in the corpora of August Strindberg, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett, and finds that these writers' struggles with psychosis resulted in productive restorations of a mediate world that can contain the fractures in identity and stay the threat of the pathogenic injunction that calls for clarity and identity above all. |
