The Alienated Intellectual and Narratives of Ungroundedness: A Comparative Study inTwentieth-Century Fiction

The intellectual’s task of exposing the errors and injustices of society and their commitment to truth had long been sustained through Enlightenment ideals such as universality and reason. However, the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented undermining of the traditional image of the autonomous intellectual whose responsibility is to the speaking of truth to power. This precarious position was precipitated by the professionalization of intellectuals and the relativization of truth which eroded their authority. In this new political and intellectual climate where claims to universal truth are no longer tenable, the intellectual must find a new type of impersonal discourse which unmasks the prejudices and errors of their society. This thesis explores modernist mythopoeia as a suitable type of narrative for the modern intellectual because its simultaneous reference to belief and falsehood eschews truth-claims in that it commits to neither the language of religious dogma nor that of materialistic secularism. Each chapter is a detailed analysis of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley (1959), D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) respectively. In a post-mythic world where nothing can be transcendentally grounded, modernist mythmaking is a self-grounding aesthetic form through which the intellectual portrays their predicament and their ambivalent attitudes towards the social, political, or religious issues they criticize. What forms a continuity among the writers discussed in this thesis is their double awareness of the inescapable condition of inhabiting a world of one’s own creation. The use of myth by these writers is not in terms of content but that of being the metaphysic or condition underlying their worldviews. This thesis brings an original contribution to modernist scholarship by revisiting the view that modernism is characterised by an iconoclastic rebellion against the past. The novels examined in this thesis are narratives of ungroundedness which exhibit an ambivalent attitude towards myth’s dynamic tension between progression and regression.