Splintering the Mythos of Modernism: Metamodernist Dialogues in Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room (2012)

Abstract

Abstract This paper advances a myth-critical interpretation of Pat Barker’s 2012 novel Toby’s Room, anchored in an exploration of how the novel engages, intertextually and diachronically, with the literature and art of modernism. Exploring the intersections of Barker’s text and Virginia Woolf’s 1922 novel Jacob’s Room, the present study contends that Barker’s novel can be productively approached from the critical lens of literary metamodernism to spell out how the text manages to traverse and expand the traditional boundaries of the ‘mythos’ of modernism. As discussed, the metamodernist critical paradigm can illuminate the varied processes of diachronic dialogue in Barker’s historical fiction, which, as will be argued, unwrite and rewrite the centrality of war to disruptive, chaotic, and fragmentary forms of expression. In Toby’s Room, the canonical tradition of modernist mythmaking is destabilized and transformed; it splinters to incorporate difference and multiplicity, thereby becoming open-ended, as Barker’s dialogic narrative makes room for previously silenced voices and identities, remaking and reactivating the decentering energies of modernist expression.1