Pip: L’Esprit Literary Review arrives this week with two essays that, between them, ask whether the novel has been quietly doing the same radical thing for a hundred years — and whether most of us have been too distracted by comfortable fiction to notice.

Mara: Both pieces come from the same critical project: one tracing Modernism’s formal legacy into contemporary American fiction, the other asking how Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language illuminates the way a novel renders consciousness. Let’s start with the question of what Modernism actually is — and whether it ever left.

Form, Modernism, and Belief in the Novel

Pip: The central provocation here is taxonomic and a little combative: the essay argues that what gets called “New Modernism” in contemporary fiction isn’t really Modernist at all — and that the writers actually sustaining the avant-garde are hiding in plain sight.

Mara: The anchor claim comes early, defining what a genuinely Modernist novel does. Lucy Ives’ formulation of the “weak novel” gives it shape: “It is a novel that only weakly consents to participate in the conventions of genre, that is always about to — and sometimes does — fail to be a novel at all.”

Pip: Which means the formal risk isn’t decorative. The weakness is the point — a novel that reflects on its own status as a novel, where form becomes content rather than a container for it.

Mara: The essay tests this against Ives’ Life Is Everywhere, a novel that opens with ten pages on the history of botulism before introducing anything like a character. The argument is that this isn’t chaos — it’s artistic vision, the kind that mainstream publishing has largely rejected in favor of what the essay calls “prima facie experimentalism.”

Pip: Unnamed narrators and omitted quotation marks standing in for actual formal risk. The literary equivalent of a costume.

Mara: The essay is careful to distinguish: writers like Lucy Corin, Emily Hall, and Sonya Walger are doing something the essay insists we simply call Modernism — a “formal commitment to form” that runs continuously from Woolf and Joyce to the present. The argument borrows T. S. Eliot’s formulation that a new work simultaneously alters all the works that preceded it.

Pip: So Modernism isn’t a period. It’s a stance.

Mara: Exactly — and that reframing is what the essay calls its main utility: freeing the term from temporal constraints while keeping its distinctiveness as a commitment to innovation from within convention, not around it.

Pip: Which sets up the harder question — how language itself makes any of this possible.

Wittgenstein And Narration

Pip: The second essay asks something more fundamental: not just what a formally ambitious novel does, but how language is such that it works at all — how words on a page render a character’s inner life with any fidelity.

Mara: The essay grounds that question in Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park, a novel structured around a single dreary Friday in the lives of suburban mothers, each chapter rendered through free-indirect style. The Wittgenstein connection arrives via a passage from Philosophical Investigations: “For we want to ask ‘What would you be missing if you did not experience the meaning of a word?’”

Pip: So the claim is that words have something beyond their definitions — a phenomenological texture, a history, an idiosyncrasy that operates below the level of grammar.

Mara: Right. Stanley Cavell, reading Wittgenstein, puts it this way: “My words are my expressions of my life; I respond to the words of others as their expressions.” The essay uses this to explain why Juliet and Amanda — two characters rendered in the same free-indirect technique — feel like entirely different people. Different words bend differently around different minds.

Pip: It’s a quiet argument, but the stakes are real: if words carry this kind of extra-linguistic charge, then novelistic voice isn’t style on top of content — it is the content.

Mara: And the essay connects that back to Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit: you see one aspect and the other is hidden, not by the image but by your prior way of taking it. Two readers encounter the same word and bring entirely separate histories to it. As Cavell puts it, the difference arises simply because we are two, and not one.

Pip: Which means the novel’s formal grammar — its narration, its free-indirect weave — is doing something closer to philosophy than communication.

Mara: The essay closes on exactly that note, quoting Wittgenstein: “But if a sentence can strike me as like a painting in words, and the very individual word in the sentence as like a picture, then it is no such marvel that a word uttered in isolation and without purpose can seem to carry a particular meaning in itself.”

Pip: So: Modernism as ongoing belief, and language as something that exceeds its own definitions. Neither essay is really finished — both read as beginnings.

Mara: Which seems intentional. Next time, we’ll see what else is being excavated.

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