Modernism In English Literature

Modernism
The Modern Novel

As T.S. Eliot once said, “Every age gets the art it deserves and every age must accept the art it gets. A complex age like the 20th century, upset by two World Wars and marked by unrest and ferments, couldn’t as result produce anything but complex art, mainly resulting, more than in any previous age, from experimentation. The search for new forms of expression, which affected all branches of literature, was carried on first of all in fiction and novel. So far novelists had concentrated above all on plots, and their main preoccupation had been with characters in society, since they thought that the function of novels was to present people in a social context, so that they became mirrors of their own age. The English novel was essentially bourgeois in its origin and throughout the 18th and the 19th centuries it was firmly anchored in a social world. The novelist used to make digression, address the reader, comment on his own performance, and he was faced with a relatively easy task : he was expected to mediate between his characters and the reader, relating in a more or less objective way significant events and incidents in a chronological order. The existence of accepted social values and standards of behaviour led to the presentation of a social pattern which was familiar territory to both reader and writer. Naturalism brought nothing new from this point of view and the structure of the novel remained basically unaltered. In the 20th century, instead, preoccupation began to shift from society to man himself; characters became all important, because of their inner selves and not because of what was going on outside and around them. The novelist rejected omniscient narration and experimented new methods to portray the individual consciousness; the viewpoint shifted from the external world to the internal world of a character’s mind. The analysis of a character’s consciousness was influenced by the theories about the simultaneous existence of different levels of consciousness and sub-consciousness, where past experience is retained and the existence of the past in the present determines the whole personality of each human being. In other words, if the distinction between past and present was almost meaningless in psychological terms, then there was no use in building a well structured plot, in leading a character through a well arranged chronological sequence of events. It was not necessarily the passing of time that revealed the truth about characters.
The main causes of dissatisfaction with traditional forms can be grouped as follows:
The social and political events that led to and followed the First World War and the consequent economic crisis which created a general sense of discontent and “anxiety”; the collapse of all established principles, which had so far been a sort of collective heritage that the writer could freely exploit; the spread of education from primary school up to University (as a result of the Education Acts of 1870, 1902, and 1944), which provided a larger number of better learned readers and eventually a demand for new forms of expression; the development of radio and film techniques;
Freud’s studies in psychoanalysis and his theory of the unconscious, along with his theory of the individual’s past memories going on living in the present and determining the nature of his behaviour.
These were just some of the factors that, in the field of fiction, were to lead to radical and revolutionary changes in English Literature, which some scholars have later labelled with the general definition of “Modernism”. The term may be misleading since it can be applied to all the artistic movements of the early part of the century. However, as far as English fiction is concerned, “Modernism” usually refers to those novelists who actually experimented with new forms and who, focusing on the mental processes that develop in the human mind, tried to explore them through what is called the “stream of consciousness” technique. This new technique applied to literature the theories worked out by two philosophers: the Frenchman Henry Bergson (1859-1941) and the American William James (1842-1910). Bergson’s conception of what he called “la durée”, or duration flux, according to which inner time has a duration that eludes conventional clock time, had turned the old conception of time from a sequence of separate points into a flowing continuity. William James, in his Principles of Psychology (1890) had stated that consciousness “does not appear to itself chopped up in bits… (but) flows like a river or a stream”. Hence “let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness”. The stream of consciousness technique was introduced to reproduce the uninterrupted flow of thoughts, sensations, memories, associations and emotions in a flux of words, ideas and images quite similar to the mind’s activity. As the scholar R. Humphrey argues, the term “consciousness, however, is not to be confused with other mental activities like “intelligence” or “memory”, since it indicates “the entire area of mental attention, from pre-consciousness on through the levels of the mind up to and including the highest one of rational communicable awareness”. In other words, while the psychological novel dealt with the “rational communicable” area, stream-of-consciousness fiction is instead concerned with that area which is beyond communication. There are, in fact, two levels of consciousness : the “speech level”, which can be communicated either orally or in writing, and “the pre-speech level”, which has not communicative basis and is not “rationally controlled or logically ordered”. An easy example could be that of an iceberg, of which only the summit is visible, while the biggest part is submerged. Stream of consciousness fiction is concerned not so much with the part of the iceberg which emerges, but with the one that lies below the surface. To this purpose, the novelist has to explore what starts and constitutes the mental process (e.g. memories, dreams, sensations, intuitions and so on) and analyse how this process works (i.e. through symbolizations, associations of ideas and so on). The techniques used to depict consciousness ( a hard task for a writer, since consciousness is a private aspect and always in movement, often overlapping past, present, future) include cinematic devices, like “montage”1, “flashbacks”2, “fade-out”3 and “slow-up”4, and other devices such as “the story within a story”, the use of similes or metaphors or a particular use of punctuation (parentheses, dashes and so on). Yet the basic and most prominent method is the use of the interior monologue5. Though the term is often confused with “stream of consciousness”, there is a distinction between them, since stream of consciousness is the psychic phenomenon itself, while the interior monologue is the instrument used to translate this phenomenon into words : it is the verbal expression of a psychic phenomenon. Novelists adopt the interior monologue to represent, in a novel, the unspoken activity of the mind. The main character of the novel is what happens within the character’s mind. The action takes place within the character’s mind. To do so, the interior monologue often disregards logical transitions, the logical formal order, formal syntax and even conventional punctuation, so as to reflect the apparently disconnected and chaotic sequence of thoughts which doesn’t follow a chronological order but a subjective time, “the inner time”. The indirect interior monologue is characterized by the following devices:

The author is present within the narration; the character’s thoughts can be presented both directly and by adding descriptions, appropriate comments and explanatory or introductory phrases to guide the reader through the narration (a monologue introduced by clauses such as “ he thought”, “ he decided” and so on).
The character stays fixed in space while his/he consciousness moves freely in time: in the character’s mind, however, everything happens in the present, which can extend to infinity or contract to a moment. This concept of “inner time”, which is irregular and disrupted with respect to the conventional conception of time, is preferred to “external time”, since it shows the relativism of a subjective experience. The character’s thoughts flow freely, not interrupted by external events. The work by Joyce Finnegans Wake (1939) presents the technique of the extreme interior monologue as the narration takes place inside the mind of the main character, while he is dreaming. Distinct words, sometimes foreign, and free associations are fused to create new expressions, with references to all areas of human experience.
It is possible to distinguish at least three groups of novelists among the innovators of the first decades of the previous century.
The first group consists of the psychological novelists who concentrated their attention on the development of the character’s mind and on human relationships. One of the most important is Joseph Conrad, whose novels try to go beyond the surface of external phenomena in order to record the mystery of human experience.
The second group includes the Modernist novelists, who chose subjective narrative techniques, exploring the mind of one or more characters, like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
The social and political problems of the Thirties forced the writers’ attention back to the society around them. An example is given by George Orwell who attacked totalitarianism and the ideals of scientific progress.