Life Breaks In
Entropic Modernism in Mrs Dalloway & The Secret Agent
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36399/GroundingsUG.10.192Keywords:
Entropic Modernism, Virginia Woolf, Modernism, Mrs Dalloway, The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad, TextualityAbstract
This essay takes as its framework the concept of entropy, a thermodynamic principle which describes the degree of disorder in a system. As entropy is always increasing, so is the intensity of destruction, decay and chaos in the systems of the modernist text. The essay uncovers the entropic compulsions implicit in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and Virginia Woolf’s high-modernist work Mrs Dalloway, using theory and criticism from Georg Simmel to J. Hillis Miller. Some of the traditional aesthetic features of literary modernism – epistemological crises, temporal distortion, and the trauma of industrial modernity – are considered in terms of the advancing thermodynamic theory of the fin-de-siècle. Such theoretical scientific innovation is shown to permeate individual and collective consciousness in the literature of the period. The essay posits the presence of an entropic modernist textuality; vibrations beneath the surface which denote a gradual decline into total disorder.
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