In 2002, I taught a history seminar on modernism that included a survey of formal innovations in the novel. One student questioned what those innovations had to do with important historical developments such as imperialism and World War I. He was puzzled by my attaching such importance to formal aspects of novels and especially to the seemingly trivial events that were sometimes their main subject. After some reflection, I decided that his question warranted a lengthy response, which became this book. I do not treat how modernist novels impacted historical developments directly, but rather how they engaged those developments and how they differed from realist novels in that engagement. This chapter explores modernists' recalibration of the scale of events including the trivial ones that troubled my student as well as the way novelists integrated them causally, or otherwise, into increasingly weak plots in works that also addressed historical developments of the master narratives.

SCALE: RECALIBRATING THE SMALL AND THE LARGE

In accord with science's powerful model of knowledge based on empirical evidence, realists emphasized objective observations, and so characters in their novels are significant primarily for the actions they perform. As a precursor of modernism, in “The Art of Fiction” (1884) Henry James rejected the primacy of action over character by linking the two, as he asked, “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”