Notes of the 9th of March 2012

Modernism is a cultural movement of the first decades of the 20th century. Virginia Woolf and James  Joyce are taken as paradigms of this movement. Modernism is an inclusive movement because it holds “other” and new experiences, it looks for new narrative techniques because the traditional novel of the 19th century doesn’t represent reality anymore. The narrative research of Modernism tends to find out narrative methods that draw life as seen by the authors. First of all they are interested in focusing the reader’s attention on the subjectivity of characters. Characters are mainly antiheroes because authors have a new anthropological vision based upon the Darwinist idea that human beings have weakness and fragility caused by the environment.  Writer’s aim is to return to the reader the interiority of the characters, that is given by stream of consciousness, that is to say perceptions of outside, thoughts, memories and fears not chronologically ordered. 

Virginia Woolf and James Joyce use different narrative techniques to report situations and represent the stream of consciousness: Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway uses interior monologue: this narrative technique is characterized by the third omniscient narrator who adopts one character’s style using free indirect speech, so the reader has the impression to be in a deep connection with what the characters are thinking. The narrator is obscured, eclipsed because just the inward conscious of the protagonists emerges. In Woolf’s narration the connectors still exist and the reader can discriminate private world from external world through indication of time (see the presence of Big bang sound in the novel, where time of consciousness is against time of the clock).

This kind of literary techniques used by Joyce and Woolf are taken from Symbolist and from Greek myth. The connection of perceptions, thoughts, memories and fears often adopted in Ulysses is also given by sound links.  The framing principle of the Joyce’s work is Odyssey myth, that make the writer possible to set his chaotic jumble of thoughts. Eliot explains in the magazine “The Dial” that the rejection of the Ulysses is given by the comprehension difficulties it can give. He adds that the Mythical Method is used by Joyce to put in order and “giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”.  The function of the myth in Joyce is showing that human being is not changed, he stay the same in different time and context.