The Type of Protagonist in Post-“Ulysses” Modernism (Based on the Novels by R. Musil and W. Gombrowicz)

Abstract

Recently, foreign literary criticism has produced scholarly works that attempt to rethink the usual ideas about modernism. At the same time, the systematic understanding of modernism lacks periodisation: the distinction between its “classical” stage, represented by the works of the “founding fathers” of modernist prose, J. Joyce, F. Kafka and M. Proust, and the next stage, the 1930s, when the influence of these writers on literature was enormous, and the fiction, along with imitating them, tried to escape their influence.

The purpose of the article is to describe and characterise the type of protagonist in modernist novels of the 1930s in comparison with the main characters of J. Joyce’s “Ulysses”, which will make it possible to separate this stage of modernism from the “classical” one and will contribute to a deeper understanding of the general issues and worldview of modernist works of the 1930s.

The methodological basis is M. Kundera’s concept of the evolution of the genre of the modern novel in three “times”, where the third, the modernist one, is represented by the novelists of the 1930s, in particular, W. Gombrowicz and R. Musil.

The central characters of the novels “The Man Without Qualities” by R. Musil, Ulrich, and “Ferdydurke” by W. Gombrowicz, Józio, as well as Leopold Bloom, the main character of J. Joyce’s “Ulysses”, are “everymen”, “people in general” by character and their position in society and the world. They are simultaneously “and” and “and” and “under-” and “under-” However, the fact that they are intellectuals, loners, and in their plot role – sons, not fathers, like Bloom, makes their characters similar to Stephen Daedalus – another main character of “Ulysses”. This synthetic, Stephen-Bloom type of protagonist reveals the concept of “immaturity” in the plot of W. Gombrowicz’s novel and “the man without qualities” concept in R. Musil’s novel. These concepts comprehend the worldview and problems of the 1930s as an era of the establishment of mass society, where the problem of personality arises especially acutely.