Bacaoanu Simona-Maria, group L232, year III English-French

13.12.2012

Modernist literature between continuity and innovation

Modernist literature comes with a huge change at all levels and step by step it becomes more different from the previous literary movements. Now the focus falls upon the human mind and how it works, order is no longer something to be controlled, chaos and doubts seem to put their mark in peoples lives and this is also reflected in the literary works of the most important writers of the 20th century. At the beginning of this very impressive type of literature there is still a certain connection with realism and naturalism that considered environment or heredity to influence and therefore control people. A very clear and stable system of values, such as religion, family, law system or social ranking has no longer such a great influence in peoples lives and their mindset like before. People stopped living just by obeying some rules and started wondering and questioning themselves about their situation, about the pursuit of life itself. All this chaos is produced because of the importance given to life experience and there are some great personalities that marked this century from its very beginning. First, there was Charles Darwin that came with the idea that man is not a divine creation and then came Karl Marx saying that change, evolution, progress in society comes as a result of tense, friction, contradiction; therefore the social mechanism is the engine of change. But one of the most influential person of this century is Sigmund Freud who, with his revolutionary studies in psychoanalysis, proved scientifically that the unconscious has a great power over our personalities; the human mind is split in three categories: the ID which is the obscure area of human basic instincts, the EGO, which is a conscious self and the SUPEREGO that has control over sense. Here, modernist writers are more and more obsessed with exploring the id, with putting more and more questions about what it really does mean to be human and how people deal with this. The, there is Einstein with his theory of relativity, explaining and demonstrating that the passing of time is different from one to another. So nothing seems to be trustworthy anymore. Thus, modernist literature tries to explore all these new and turned scientific domains that deal with a new type of confused and enigmatic man. In writing, modernist authors sought encapsulating all these results in one work or another and the way they did it led to new and innovating writing and narrative techniques. The psychology, the philosophical and spiritual exploration of the man are now modernists most important issues.
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Bacaoanu Simona-Maria, group L232, year III English-French

13.12.2012

Among the innovative characteristics of modern fiction is the stream of consciousness, in other words, a technique very similar to the interior monologue, unless that it doesnt clarify the characters thoughts and feelings, it makes him/her think about everything that happens in and around him/her and he/she gets even more confused. All the random thoughts grow like a river, all the words come easily, smoothly flowing and floating in the mind, there is a lack of punctuation or of correct syntax in the writing of the author. The attention is concentrated on the way all the perceptions and sensations and representations are connected together and thus on how exactly the character reacts at his/her lowest level of sensorial psychological processes. Such example of the Virginia Woolfs use of stream of consciousness is "She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; (Virginia Woolf, Miss Dalloway). We can see that in a few seconds, Miss Dalloway gets to feel certain emotions just by remembering one episode of her past life and at the same time she reacts to what happens in the present, too. The discourse flows just like the thoughts flow in the mind and feelings in the whole body. Modernist writers seem to actually feel the reality they write in their novels. Subjectivity is brought to a new level. There is limitation in what characters know about themselves and about what happens around them. And the reader is put in the same limited position, too. Related to Einsteins theory of relativity of time and place is the fact that modernist novels are also one-day episode novels. In only one moment or in just few seconds a character is able to feel that his/her entire life passes through his/her eyes. The complexity of the mixed feelings and thoughts makes people perceive time and space with different dimensions from a person to another. What the modernist authors try to do is actually recuperating the moment. Time is now internal, and so is space. Modernist literature doesnt focus on the plot. In fact, there is no plot at all. All the actions are ephemeral, but what remains in the memory of the characters is everlasting and it will revive every time something or someone comes to them or crosses their minds remembering them everything, every single emotion or sensation. One of the most used thematic characteristics is spiritual loneliness. In Dubliners, everyone seems to be affected by a general alienation. In each of the 15 stories, someone seems to be frustrated because of his incapability of escaping from the monotonous life governed by rules and order. The general atmosphere is oppressive and sad. Joyce, though, slightly inserts some political and historical-geographical factors that had led to the status of Dublin and of the Dubliners of his time. Marginalized by the British Empire and due to the
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Bacaoanu Simona-Maria, group L232, year III English-French

13.12.2012

fact that the country was placed on the west coast of the Western Europe, few things could be done to take the country out of the anonymity. A stylistic characteristic of the modernist literature is the use of the free indirect speech which is a mixture between the direct speech and the indirect speech. In other words, the narrators voice seems to overlap the characters thoughts; e.g.: He repeated to himself a phrase he had written in his review: "One feels that one is listening to a thought-tormented music." Miss Ivors had praised the review. Was she sincere? Had she really any life of her own behind all her propagandism? There had never been any ill-feeling between them until that night. It unnerved him to think that she would be at the supper-table, looking up at him while he spoke with her critical quizzing eyes. (James Joyce, Dubliners, The Dead). Modernist writers also play with words and language, every word might have or not many other connotations. One has to rethink if what he/she had read meant something or another. Ambiguity and equivocal language are constantly present and the reader cannot be sure he understood exactly what was meant. As a modernist writer, James Joyce can be considered the most innovative writer of the 20th century since his works are extremely hard to digest by the readers. In his later novels, he adopts different writing styles in the same novel. Even though Joyce seems to organize Ulysses nearly to obsession, the book is not organized on most common principles of fiction and the impression of shapelessness remains in the mind of the readers. Then, the vocabulary Joyce uses in Ulysses is not only hard to understand, but its even impossible to comprehend, for a lot of it was invented by him and then some of Joyce's sentences can be quite hard to process even though you know what every word means in particularly : From outrage (matrimony) to outrage (adultery) there arose nought but outrage (copulation) yet the matrimonial violator of the matrimonially violated had not been outraged by the adulterous violator of the adulterously violated." (Ulysses, Ithaca). Concluding, Modernist Literature is placed somewhere between Naturalism and the age of The Lost Generation, between the continuity of what has been previously written and the innovation brought in style, writing, narrative perspective. Characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional styles of poetry and verse, modernists experimented with literary form and expression. The modernist literary movement was driven by a desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of their time.