Chirea Alexandra Madalina,an III,grupa RE,forma ID

Elements of modern literacy in Virginia Woolf and James Joyces

novels

Apparently paradoxical,the English women poets and novelists from the Victorian
era,brought a touch of innovation to a literature wich confronted with
traditionalism and puritanism,mentained in a country reigned by a queen defined
by an ostentative fairness.
As a partisan of feminine emancipation and as a literary critic,Virginia Woolf has
analized the phenomenon. Although Brontes sisters novels were written by women
without more life experience than the whole that can be found in the house of a
respectable pastor,this two women writers had awoken the wind of passion ,wild
in a literature wich was sterilized of passion.
It is pathetic,affirms V.Woolf in one of her critic essays The Common Reader
the obstination of the clerics daughter,forced to adopt a masculine pseudoname
George Eliot to be able to enter into the cultural citadel and to step in an
intellectual zone,forbidden to women (economics,politics,evolutionism)pathetic is
the serenity with wich she suffer the ostracism,for the guilt of breaking the moral
victorian code.
The Victorian era has been extended long time after the queens death,the queen
with the longest reign from the history of England.
The antivictorianism of Virginia Woolfs critic and belletristic writings,after the
first World War,does not force open doors.Ofcourse this is not only happening in
the limits of militant feminism.
She,herself,a blending of intellectualism and excessive sensibility,almost morbid,
Virginia Woolf established the feminine literature problem under the sign of the
interest for the infinite variety of human aspects,when she writes pamphlet A
Room of ones own : It would be a thousand times pity if women would write as
men do,or live as men live,or looked like men,because if two genders are totally
unsatisfying,considering the vast variety of the world,how would we manage with
just one?

Virginia Woolf evoked,with a strange humor,fed with subtile historichal

intuition,the victorian climate,symbolized by her as a great humidity produced by a
cloud,mounted above England in the first days of the XIX century.
The walls are covered with iedera,the light cannot enter in houses,the feelings are
veiledly expressed in beautiful phrases,the open conversation is considered
indecent. This symbolic assimilation of the victorian historic climate with a natural
one,dominated by a insalubrious humidity,becomes eloquent for the vehement
antitraditionalism and the declared modernism of the female writer.
Writers like Virginia Woolf,James Joyce,Proust and T.S Eliot,are a formula in
opposition with the victorian and post victorian traditionalism,and it is the result of
a great recepticity besides new or unknown modalities for the English spirit.
James Joyce is initially presenting the features of an Irishmen,as we known from
the examples wide known : Swift,Wilde,Shaw : Full of humor,imagination and
elocution,rebel and obtrusive,preoccupied for beauty and etic aspects.
Joyce is ,besides all,eager for novelty and in his intimate substance,poet and
musician,and as a method and bend,scientific researcher and psihanalist. His visual
deficiency (wich he had suffer from ,progressively in his childhood) was translated
as at the other great blind men Homer,Milton with a rich auditory and sensorial
imagination.
Joyce had oscilated all his life,but mostly in his youth,between bitter disbelief and
implacable critic,for his country and a nostalgic and passionate admiration for her
values,to wich he was very counscious proud.
Proud and aware of the ancient cultural values,wich ennoble Irland,young Joyce
looked with aversion to the exaggerate exaltation of ancestral virtues and to the
dark background of the past poetry ,in the moments when it would be a necessity
of present reality and an affirmation of vitality.
In the eyes of the teenager,who made himself,from his first manifests ,a very
unmerciful and precise observation of reality with and intense preoccupation for
the revival of irish culture the exaltation of the past and the folklore aesthetics
constituated a threaten of stagnation and an aberration besides his conviction ,wich
was that the only way for Irland to progress and revival is her integration into the
European culture.
The same mind opening beliefs grows from Virginia Woolfs theory of modernism.
Receptive,she anticipates the emerge of the English novel,from its
insularism,considered by her deathly,the opening to literary zones,unknown for the
English spirit.
Russian literature gave her the revelation of some layer survey of a conscious in
wich the English post-victorian literature could never venture. Her influences were
mostly : Joyce,Dostoievski,Tolstoi,Cehov,Defoe,Montaigne,Proust etc

The pleading for modernity,wich often comes back as leit-motifs in Virginia

Woolfs critic,her disbelief crises and her refuse to accept the mental conventions
and habitudes : the modern literature,with all its imperfections,has upon us the
same power of fascination ,has the same attribute to be as we are ,what we have
done and lived,instead of being something strange ours.We differ violently from
our predecessors.
A displacing in the order of the things The war,the abrupt movement of the mases
kept on sight for centuries had alienate us from the past and made us conscious
for the present.
In the novel Mrs. Dalloway,her vision is dominated by an intimate filosofical
affectivity,generated by delicate emotions and dramatical poetry : the
Time,subjectively built-up.
The interior duration of consciousness is often in her novels,the level of authentic
feelings,spontaneous,unfenced by exterior constraint.
The novel Mrs. Dalloway,suggests the opposition between the conventional
living,solid fixed in codes,mathematical rithm of time (hours,clocks,years) and the
real subjective one.
According to Virginia Woolf, the modern writer cannot make a world, cannot
generalise, he can only present a small section of reality as he sees it. It is very
ridiculous to pretend to be an omniscient narrator.
The duty of the writer is to deal with ordinary things, to examine for a moment an
ordinary mind on an ordinary day, which means to write books which have no
ordinary plot.
Modernists are not interested in the fact-recording business. That is why Mrs.
Dalloway focuses on a single day, which is all that takes for the reader to get to
know the inner mind, thoughts, ideas, associations and memories that fill the
content of the mind of Mrs. Dalloway on that particular day that the novel
captures.
Similar to Virginia Woolfs visions,the theory of clear perception of the luminous
delimitation of an object as one of the conditions of beauty,extracted from the
filosophy of Thomas dAquino,polished from his childhood imitation in the rituals
and the mystic of religion,it will bring the young writer to find the artistic
inspiration as epiphany ,fugitive annotations of some revelations.
Another important idea of Joyces aesthetics ,exposed in Portrait is the
detachment, the impersonality of the artist. In his novel ,the artist must be as
God in Creation,invisible and almighty,to feel it everywhere but not see him.
Joyce's technical innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive use of
interior monologue; he used a complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from
the mythology, history, and literature, and created a unique language of invented
words, puns, and allusions.

A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man is Joyces first serious novel, where the
technique of the stream of consciousness and interior monologue are employed.
Next to Virginia Woolf, he is one of the two most prominent modernist artists. The
novelty they plead for was concretised in a literature that was excessively
psihological ,of a fine delicacy,almost hermetic . Critics pronounced their writings
as being alecsandrism,crepuscular lighning ,decadentism. Along with the
writings of this genetration of writers, entered in the light of the artistic interest
zones of human consciousness never explored before by the classic literature,a
gain for the literature wich is preoccupied with the dinamics of the interior life.
James Joyce is a contemporary of Virginia Woolf, both were born and both died in
the same years and brought the light of modernity to their cultural era.

Bibliography: V.Woolf Doamna Dalloway prefata

- J.Joyce portret al artistului in tinerete
- internet