Modernist Fiction and “the accumulation of unrecorded life” Ella Ophir Given the prominence of the concept of ‘everyday life’ in cultural studies, there are surprisingly few systematic considerations of its treatment in modernist art and literature. The practice of cultural studies itself emerged in opposition to the entrenched categories and hierarchies of the academy, and the wide-ranging inquiries into social life conducted under its rubric have been framed by a broader project of political critique. Theorists and researchers have turned their attention to the mundane as “both the locus of capitalism’s dreariness and the only site on which to revolutionize and change it;” they have sought to reveal the workings of power in the microstructures of social life the better to map the means of evasion and subversion. 1 In this way, as Laurie Langbauer and Rita Felski have argued, much of the work that privileges everyday life as an object of inquiry tends to value the activities that comprise it primarily insofar as they resist “the imposition of order, repetition, and coherence.” 2 Because modernism is generally characterized as an aesthetics of rupture, administering to sluggish convention ‘the shock of the new,’ it is often cast as an aesthetic forerunner or counterpart of the critical project of unsettling the comfortable groove of everyday life. The agonistic stance that has dominated writing about everyday life, however, has been subject to reconsideration, and modernism’s association with it should be re-examined as well. Recent revaluations of habit and routine in particular can help illuminate the ways modernist works do not just seek to disrupt or transcend the everyday, but also, in sometimes surprising ways, affirm it. Rita Felski’s recent analysis of the role of the concept of everyday life in cultural studies suggests that the prevailing “hermeneutics of suspicion” has led to a devaluation of routine and habit that seems either to assume the possibility of perpetual disruption or to postpone the acceptance of routine until revolution has restored the integrity of the microstructures that guide our default behaviour. Felski draws a contrasting perspective from studies of everyday life in the phenomenological tradition, which typically understand routine and habit as “necessary rather than unfortunate.” Analyses of everyday life, she concludes, citing Agnes Heller, should at least begin from the recognition that “we would simply not be able to survive in the multiplicity of everyday demands and everyday activities if all of them required inventive thinking” and that “disengagement is an indispensable precondition for … continued activity.” 3 Distrust of the relative disengagement of everyday conduct also appears in many accounts of modern art. The repetitive nature of industrial and bureaucratic labour has been found by many since Wordsworth to induce “an almost savage torpor” and a consequent craving for “gross and violent stimulants.” 4 Alternatively, as Carlo Ginzburg notes, the modern city has been seen itself as a gross and violent stimulant, effecting “an enormous increase of our sensorial life.” 5 These opposing characterizations of the modern quotidian, however, are usually routes to the same conclusion. Chronic overstimulation has the same result as understimulation: a deadening of the senses and a “qualitative impoverishment of our experience” (20). Against this stultification, some disruptive or galvanizing force is then defined as the specifically modern function of art. This conception of art as a pitched battle against the necrotizing forces of everyday life appears, in various modulations, in a number of modernist essays and manifestos. It is sometimes a component of a more general contempt for middle-class conformity. Wyndham Lewis, for instance, complained that the majority of people “wish to be automata: they wish to be conventional,” and the inaugural issue of his magazine BLAST declared its intention “to destroy politeness [and] standardization.” 6 Other modernists insist more specifically on the need to rouse the senses out of somnolence. For Conrad the writer’s strenuous task and “only justification” is “to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” 7 “Cleansing the doors of perception,” Jed Rasula suggests, is “demonstrably the dominant argument for (and of) poetry from Blake to the present.” 8 In one of the visions of Williams