&quot;The Anaesthetized and Bewildered Present&quot;: The Dislocation of Time in 1940s Modernist Texts

In Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1944), Rosamond Lehmann’s The Ballad and the Source (1944), and Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950), the actual present strikes characters as unreal, since history is overturned, partly by the proximity of war: past, present and future are mingled. These prose texts are placed in relation to T.S. Eliot’s poetic commentary on our ambivalent attitude to time, Four Quartets (1943), which can similarly be seen as a response to the writer’s experience of the Blitz. The texts this thesis engages with explore the idea of simultaneity, a multiplied presence – but they also bespeak a disbelief in an independent present, one untainted by the past and future. Indeed, in these texts, the “anaesthetized and bewildered present” (The Demon Lover and Other Stories, Bowen 221) is obscured both by compressions and expansions of time, often in combination with a collapse of identity. Brimming with both nostalgia and painful memories,...Show moreIn Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1944), Rosamond Lehmann’s The Ballad and the Source (1944), and Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950), the actual present strikes characters as unreal, since history is overturned, partly by the proximity of war: past, present and future are mingled. These prose texts are placed in relation to T.S. Eliot’s poetic commentary on our ambivalent attitude to time, Four Quartets (1943), which can similarly be seen as a response to the writer’s experience of the Blitz. The texts this thesis engages with explore the idea of simultaneity, a multiplied presence – but they also bespeak a disbelief in an independent present, one untainted by the past and future. Indeed, in these texts, the “anaesthetized and bewildered present” (The Demon Lover and Other Stories, Bowen 221) is obscured both by compressions and expansions of time, often in combination with a collapse of identity. Brimming with both nostalgia and painful memories, but also due to the looming presence of war, the texts are all in some way ‘haunted’, both metaphorically as well as literally. Ultimately, this thesis will argue that under the pressure of the war and its aftermath, 1940s Modernist texts question the linearity of time and experience.Show less

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"The Anaesthetized and Bewildered Present": The Dislocation of Time in 1940s Modernist Texts