THE GREATEST MODERNIST EXPERIMENTS IN FICTION

Modernist writers did not agree with the traditional idea of novel. They believed it couldn’t return a realistic idea if life because it neglected subjectivity and the nature of life which couldn’t represent in linear terms as the intelligent reader has seem Virginia Woolf’s extract.

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway the reader travels in space and time according to a subjectivity order (the main character’s order).

Mr Joyce started his research with the symbolic realism of Dubliners where the traditional idea of hero is rejected, in that the Dubliners are simply a paradigm of the existential condition of the human being at the turn of the century, while traditional novel celebrates heroes, self made men, people of success. Modernist novel cannot cope with that idea, and history is no longer made of the great people of the past.

In The Common Reader Virginia Woolf speaks of the novelist of the traditional main stream, as slaves unable to give room to subjectivity, the private intimate part of the individual, thus highlighting the role of consciousness, that disregards any concept of linear time to privilege the flux of thoughts, emotions and private feelings that make up what Virginia Woolf calls “the luminous halo”.

In addition narrative strategy like moments of being and epiphanies open up a space of fullness or revelation that allows the individual to come to turns with him/herself and the problems of reality.  

If this is what life is like, the novelist has to experiment with language to find out, to discover the real nature of existence. It follows that the narrator, the author of the traditional novel, loses his authorial role, to give space to his/her characters’ flow of thoughts, feelings and emotions.

As a result he is eclipsed, hidden behind some short conjunctions, tiny connectors that seem to bring readers directly into the mind of a character (the interior monologue is the medium) and language use resorts to three indirect speeches, three indirect thoughts, the shift of the point of view, the leit motiv and similar technical devices. This is exactly what happens in the panorama of fictional and experimental research before a certain Mr. Joyce decides that all of his life would focus on aesthetical research, one nourished by the philosophy of Walter Pater, the Oxford professor whose reflection on Time influenced all Modernist thinkers and writers.

It follows that there was a revival of interest on bildungsroman: Gabriele D’Annunzio in Italy wrote Il Piacere, Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray and Joyce wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Strangely enough all of the protagonists of such ‘buildings’ focus on young people, something that in Postmodernist terms we would call processes of construction, to reflect on the sense of life, of existence, of being.

But still there is a central position of the narrator, so that we cannot say that they are revolutionary experiments. They still conform to a linear concept of time and conceived of existence in terms of linear development.

Only a great writer would later realize that if you really wanted to adhere to life as it is, you have to adhere to the inner dimension of consciousness. Consciousness and its workings do not follow chronology or any time order, and shower of thoughts that bombard people’s mind come all times (future, present and past) and from all spaces, in different forms. They may be activated by memory, by an auditory stimolous, by a picture, by a situation, 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.

Order had disappeared and they had remained displaced in a chaotic world where they felt lost. That is what great Modernist writers like Joyce, in their fiction, celebrates the anti-hero, not the hero, that would now recall a pantomime rather than a fictional reality.

This explains for the adoption of the stream of consciousness in his masterpiece Ulysses.

Joyce’s experimentation disrupts 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 totally disappears, and it follows that Modernist Joyce conceives of a new role for the reader: Joyce’s Ulysses- the triumph of stream of consciousness- is extremely demanding on the part of the reader. He is asked to make sense of what you reads but he is never guided: there is no eclipsed narrator, there is no punctuation to guide the beginning or the end of a sentence. He must do everything by himself; in short he has to share the life, the fictional context of his writings. But how does all this cohere? He must resort to a sort of glue. He dares something nobody understands to give his experimental research unity. Only Mr. T. S. Eliot will be able to explain the sense of Joyce’s experiment: in a famous review he published, Mr. Eliot’s Ulysses, Order and Myth, which appeared in The Dial in 1923, the poet explained the mystery of Joyce’s complex experiment. Joyce was interested in reflecting on life, existence, the nature of the human being, the sense of his disdain and desperately trying to find the suitable language that would allow him, and to say that in/with/through language, something to anticipate the Postmodernist discovery the human being’s identity is like a language construct.