Notes about the Main features of Modernism and J. Joyce's Literary Production (9/3/12)

During Modernism fiction is characterized by two forms: novels and short stories. Modernists are interested into make an artistic research and find new ways to render real life in novels, that is what traditional novels were not able to do. It follows that Modernists make a narrative technique research in order to present life as it really is. They focuse their attention on subjectivity and anti-heroes to render the imperfection of man.
For Modernists inner reality is everything passes in human mind and it is defined as flux of consciousness.
The most important novelists of Modernism are Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and the also experiment with new narrative techniques.
Virginia Woolf uses interior monologue in order to render character's flux of consciousness and its life. Interior monologue is the technique, while the aim is rendering the flux. In interior monologue the narrator is a third person omniscient narrator who has the point of view of a character and he uses free reported speech. In this way the reader feels a private contact with the character. For example, in the novel Mrs Dalloway the narrator is eclipsed because what emerges immediately is mental disorder of the character. Moreover there is an inner time and an external time (established by Big Ben sound). Mrs Woolf uses also the narrative technique of the shift of point of view: in this way the reader is able to know the inner life of many characters.
James Joyce may be considered the innovator par excellence. He wants to write in a realistic way and he goes beyond: in order to render flux of consciousness he uses stream of consciousness technique to convey thoughts, feelings... Someone has defined it as a total stream of consciousness technique, where the total disintegration of syntax is adopted: there are no connectors, no logical links (there is no cause and effect) because the reader is asked to understand and interpretate all semantic links. Like Virginia Woolf he uses a language of senses impressions in order to create the rythm of the prose that links everything. Mr Joyce wants to render what happens; there is a new conception of time, man is anymore a hero because of God's loss and he is one of a thousand.
Moreover there are Jung theories about man's behaviour: what a man does is not only influenced by the place where he lives and his unconscious, but also by his culture. In order to give a sense of it, man needs language.
Joyce creates an alternative novel in opposition with the traditional way to see the world. He arrives to Ulysses after an experimentation begun with Dubliners. In all his novels he underlines not only physical paralysis but also and inhability to change and to make decisions. His characters only think and it does not allow them to act (Hamlet's problem). So Joyce uses symbolical realism: symbols stay for other things and disclosing them man can see reality behind appearances.
Moreover the writer thinks that it is necessary to see throughout senses eyes. He realizes that the way we feel is not logically connected: he removes all syntax, that is reader's path. He wants in this way to render consciousness disorder. It is asked a lot to the reader because he has to interpretate the text.
J. Joyce's literary production is based on other texts, as Robyn Penrose in David Lodge's Nice Work says. Dubliners are based on French symbolism and on classical epic poems. Then Mr Joyce uses Odissey myth for Ulysses. It is the base and also the structure of Joyce's Ulysses and all its structure is resumed in Linati's sheme. Throughout myth everything is reviewed; in it there is the world and the body. Joyce uses myth because he knows that it is the myth of the man who seeks something.
When Ulysses was published, people generally criticized it, but the most important Modernist poet, T.S. Eliot explained in a magazine, "The Dial", that people did not like it because it was very demanding. Mr Eliot wrote that Joyce used a new narrative technique, the mythic method, throughout he gived a structure and a order and "a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history". Contemporary life is full of things and people live in Consumerism. Also other writers use this technique: Michael Cunningham in The Hours uses the novel Mrs Dalloway, but he restructurates it, projecting Mrs Dalloway in Postmodernism and presenting a woman in a new setting.
The myth in Joyce show also that man is not changed from his origins.