Joyce and the stream of consciousness

What is happening in fiction in modern age?

Writers did not believe in the traditional idea of novel. It wasn't reality. It negletted subjectivity and inner time which could no longer be represented in linear way. If Mr. Joyce started his research with the symbolic realism of Dubliners where the trditional idea of the hero is totally rejected, in that the character inhabiting in Dublin are simply a paradigm of the existential condition of the human being at the turn of the century.
Differently from the traditional novel, that celebrated heroes, self-made men, people of success, the modernist novel cannot cope wth that idea and history is no longer made of the great people of the past ( Garibaldi, Napoleone,..) but rather, the ordinary experience of the human being.
In the Common Reader Virginia Woolf speaks of the novelists of the tradition, main stream as "slaves" unable to give room to subjectivity, the private intimate part of the individual, thus highlighting the role of consciousness, one that disregards any concept of lnear time to privilege the flax of thoughts emotions and private feelings that makes up what Virginia calls "the luminous-halo".
In addition, narrative strategies like moment of being and epiphany open up a space of fullness or revelation that allows the individual to come to turn with himself/herself and the problems of reality.
If this is what life is like, the novelists has to experiment with language to find out, to dis-cover the real nature of existence. It follows that, the narrator, the author of traditional novel, looses his authorial role to give space to his/her characters flow of thoughts, feeling and emotions. As a result he is eclipsed, hidden behind some short conjuctions, tiny connectors that seem to bring readers directly into the mind of a character ( interior monologue is the medium) and language use resorts to free indirect speech, free indirect thoughts, the shift of the point of view, the light motif, and similar technical devices. This is exactly what happens in the panorama of fictional and experimental research before a certain Joyce decides that all of his life would base on exsthethical research, one nourished by the philosophy of Walter Pater, the Oxford professor, whose reflection on time inflounced all modernist thinkers and writers. It follows that there was a revival of interests in "building-roman": D'annunzio in Italy wrote Il Piacere, Oscar Wilde wrote The portray of Dorian Gray , protagoninsts of such "building" focused on young people, something that in postmodern term we would call process of construction. The narrator's intent to reflect on sense of life, of existence, of being. But still there is a central position of the narrator so that we cannot say there are very revolutionary experiments. They still conform to a linear concept of time and conceive of existene in terms of linear devices.
Only a great writer (James Joyce) would later realize that if you really wanted to adire to lifeas it is, you have to adire to the inner dimension of consciousness, the working of which do not follow chronology or any time order and the "shower of atoms" that bombards people's mind comes to all time (present, future and past) and from all spaces in different ways. They may be activeted by emery, an uditory stimolous, by a picture, by a sit, by an incident,...
You can easily understand there is not at all any order as the one modernists were in love with and which they looked for desperately. Ordered had disappeared and they remained in a caothic world where they felt lost. Tha is why, great modernist writers ( Joyce), in their fictions, celebrate the anti-hero: superman or self-made men would now recall a panthonimy rather than fictional reality.
This explains for the adoption of the stream of consciousness in Ulysses.
Joyce's experimentation disrupted syntax: there will be no syntax, no word order, no time reference, not any connection. Thoughts, feelings and emotions would conjure up all that crosses consciousness. Punctuation will totally disappear and it follows that modernist Joyce conceives of a new role for the reader: Joyce's Ulysses. The triumph of the stream of consciousness is extremely demanding on the part of the reader: he is asked to make sense of what he reads but he is never guided. There is no eclipsed narration, no punctuation to guide. He must do everything by himself, in short he has to share a life: the fictional context.
But hoe does all this cohere? Joyce must resort to a sort of "glue". He dears something nobody can understand. Only Mr. T.S.Eliot will be able to explain the sense of Mr. Joyce's experiments. In a famous review he published( Ulysses, order and myth),which appeared in The Dial in 1923, Mr. Eliot explained the mystery of Joyce's complex experiment. Joyce was interested in reflecting on life, existence, the nature of human beings,... and desperately tried to find the suitable language that would allow him, to save that, in language, with language, through language, something that would anticipate a postmdern discover: we construct ourselves in language.