A fly in the ointment. Vanities and worldliness in some modernist stories (M. Proust, J. Joyce, V. Woolf, T. Mann)

In the writings of some "Modernist" writers marked by the grief of a lost world (that which existed before the First World War), the variation on the topic of the Vanity goes beyond the scope of the traditional "Ekphrasis", the "tomb-poem", or the funeral oration. In the texts discussed in this article, the social gatherings represented manifest social vanity, but they also convey a meditation on vanity itself : the social scene is analysed by a character whose skills are very close to the vision of the narrative voice. The narrative trick consists here in combining a sophisticated scopic arrangement and a narrative process inscribed in time, where the painting of "Vanities" suggests a kind of motionless eternity, through still-lives for example). The frequency of this process in the Modernist narrative invites us to recognize in this system the most important deviation from the principles governing Vanity painting. The very reflexive nature of the representation of social life (first discussed in this paper) goes together with a host of Vanity motifs (discussed in a second section). The fashionable night-life is thus in fact the last hour of a meditation on death as seen through the focus of a narrating character (third section).