From Alienation to Fictionality: Writing Depersonalization as High Modernism Turns Late

Abstract This article argues for the significance of modernist fiction to the history of depersonalization, a psychiatric concept that describes the feeling of estrangement or detachment from one's own thoughts, feelings, sensations, body, or actions. It also suggests that reading modernism with a focus on depersonalized experience helps to distinguish “high” from “late” modernism, and to nuance existing critical understandings of the latter term. It begins by looking to the personal journal and psychoanalytic studies of Edith Jacobson, making the case that Jacobson's work exemplifies a persistent tendency to relate and conflate depersonalization with a more familiar term in literary studies, alienation. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is then found to anticipate and extend Jacobson's work by exploring the degree to which depersonalization derives from alienation and by considering aesthetic experience as a way of negotiating both. Next, through readings of Woolf's Between the Acts and Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing, the article argues that late modernist engagements with depersonalization turn away from questions of alienation and instead foreground those of fictionality. These readings challenge established critical views of late modernism that emphasize its (outward) turn from epistemological questions of the mind or associate it with postwar linguistic negativism. Ultimately, a focus on depersonalization produces a formally self-conscious late modernism that explores a narrow space between fictionality and reality, as well as the sense in which the self is fictional.