Genealogies of Imagined Worlds: 8 Modernist Fragmentation – Multiplicity and Perspective

Modernism intensifies the turn toward pluralised symbolic worlds by fragmenting both narrative and perception. Where Romantic and Symbolist imaginaries expanded the symbolic horizon, Modernist literature confronts the contingency, multiplicity, and instability of that horizon itself. Possibility is no longer simply expanded; it is decoupled from fixed orders, exposing the relational and perspectival nature of construal.

Works such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway dissolve linear narrative, juxtapose multiple points of view, and render interiority as a field of overlapping temporalities and relational tensions. The symbolic world is no longer coherent in the traditional sense but emerges through the interplay of fragments, impressions, and shifts in consciousness.

This fragmentation foregrounds the perspectival character of possibility: what is real, what is meaningful, what is possible, varies according to the position, perception, and interpretive act of the observer. Symbolic fields are no longer universal but localised, contingent, and historically mediated. The narrative becomes a medium for exploring how individual and collective construals intersect, conflict, and co-evolve.

Modernist fragmentation also reconfigures the reader’s role. Interpretation is no longer passive; readers navigate relational webs of meaning, negotiating possibilities within an intentionally destabilised symbolic cosmos. The horizon of potentiality is participatory, reflexive, and inherently plural.

In short, Modernism articulates the contingency of symbolic construal itself, making visible the multiplicity of worlds embedded in perception, memory, and narrative. It is a decisive step toward understanding imagination as a field of relationally co-constituted possibilities rather than a mirror of a given reality.