1 Sergiu MARIN, English-Spanish, 3rd year

INNOVATINOS BROUGHT TO THE MODERNIST NOVEL

<<Modernism is a comprehensive but vague term for a movement (or tendency) which began to get under way in the closing years of the 19 th century and which has had a wide influence internationally during much of the 20 th century. [] As far, as literature is concerned, modernism reveals a breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions, fresh ways of looking at mans position and function in the universe and many experiments in form and style. It is particularly concerned with language and how to use it (representationally or otherwise) and with writing itself. Thus, structuralism was from the outset closely connected with modernist tendencies, though the theories of structuralism did not gain a strong foothold until the 1960s, by which time post-modernism was wellestablished as a new movement.>> (J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory London, Penguin Books, 1999; p. 515-517). The modern world appeared as a world of unbounded knowledge opposed to the old world which had been a world of limited knowledge and frequent ignorance. This world of unprecedented discoveries and knowledge, dealt a deadly blow to past omniscience (a Renaissance-like universality) as well to past arrogance evinced by writers who purported they could speak on behalf of everybody. Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man, belongs to the subjenctive novel with little external action, having as its theme the spiritual development of a hero whose personality is founded on the authors. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a study of adolescence. It is the story of how Stephen Dedalus looks for an order and significance in life amid the muddle and disorder of his fathers house; how he resists the temptation to find that order in the Roman priesthood; an how he eventually discovers his vocation to be a priest of art. This story is told from inside. We see Stephens confusions and immaturities as he tries to assert himself, to mobilize his intellectual resources, so that he can look out on the world with his own eyes. Joyce handles his materials in an original way. A tableau, a snatch of conversion, an ordinary incident, are invested with profound meaning. The book has more in common with a symbolist poem than with a documentary fiction. Joyce has given, a creative expression to his doctrine of

2 Sergiu MARIN, English-Spanish, 3rd year

epiphanies, showings-forth, the sudden revelation of the whatness of things, when the soul of the commonest object seems to us radient; the moments of transcendent significance when our life experiences seem to come together as in a work of art. One marked feature of the Portrait is Stephens passionate interest in words. This was Joyces own passion, or obsession; and it distinguishes him as a characteristically modern writer. For the romantic subjectivist, a novel was a mirror, for Joyce, it had, above all, to be true to its primary character as a linguistic object. It was through his interest in language that Joyce discovered his sense of the world. The most striking feature of modern thought is its concern with language. Joyce was both professionally and by inclination a linguist and for him language is what defines the human world. The ineluctable modality of the visible eluded him; but his sense of hearing was as acute as his sight was weak. He was fascinated by the relationship between philosophy and psychology. To him, the human mind was as interesting in its ceaseless, half-articulate inner monologue as in its connected, articulate formulations. So, Joyce became the greatest technical innovator in the history of fiction, but he was not detached and scientific. There was an emotional drive behind his choice of material which was quite other than dispassionate curiosity of the investigator. One strong motive in Joyces work was hatred. He hated his own past in semi-colonial, dirty Dublin, the bickerings of his family, the restrictive religion he had been taught at his Jesuit college, the narrow-minded and provincial patriotism of Ireland. He wanted to avenge himself on the Dublin that had rejected him. And his revenge, an endearing one, was to write a great book about Dublin. He wanted to put everything into it. But here aims conflicted because the formal inventions that make Ulysses a handbook of fictional techniques are not compatible with extreme naturalism, which require the obliteration of the author. In Ulysses we are always conscious of the author. In Ulysses, Joyce re-created a day in Dublin of 1904, choosing a date of personal significance to himself. His story is of two lonely men who are brought together: the proud, intransigent, guilt-handed Stephen of the Portrait a self-made outsider and the Jew Leopold Bloom, whose race stamps him as an alien in the Irish city. Ulysses is notorious for the completeness of its portrayal of the modern city-dweller.

3 Sergiu MARIN, English-Spanish, 3rd year

Ulysses is a parody of the Odyssey, but this can hardly be gathered from the book itself. The Homeric parody is interesting when pointed out, but it is ingenious rather than successful, and it may have led Joyce into some of the ingenuities and pedantries which bore and bewilder many of us. In the first third or so of Ulysses, the only important technical innovation is the interior monologue. Joyce was not the first writer to use this method, but he was the first to do so on such a scale. In the interior monologue the thought of the characters are recorded directly, with all the ellipses and wanderings of actual thinking, and without narrative links and explanations. But if the interior monologue had been the only new device in Ulysses, it would not have been thought an obscure book. Later on, Joyce uses many other technical innovations, which are less functional. Some are mere virtuosity, like the episode which is perplexingly narrated through a sustained parody of all main styles of English prose. Joyces best work rests not on virtuosity but on something deeply humane: what his Bloom calls, in a touching moment- the opposite of hatred. Beneath his air of arrogance Joyce was a warm-hearted, sentimental, affectionate man, who fought down this side of himself because of some early insult. What is best in Ulysses is rooted in everyday situations. Joyce, unlike most modern writers, had a real feeling for family life. But this does not prevent him from giving a convincing picture of a middle-aged husband and wife, bound together by parent-hood. Joyces genius in Ulysses is in his inimitable eye for the normal. Many readers must have been astonished at Joyces seeming omniscience about the little secret oddities and perversities which we all have, but which we all think are quite peculiar to us. He shows us the extraordinariness of the ordinary. The work of the novelists who first appeared in the fifties is distinguished from that of their predecessors by its lighter, looser, structure, its disregard for the appearance of the solidarity and its astringent coolness. The great writers club had closed after the deaths of Joyce and Virginia Woolf in 1941, and it was not reopened.