Note: 20^th February 2013

We are going back to J. Joyce to understand what happening in fiction in modernism experimental research. Modernist believes that traditional novel cannot give a realistic idea of reality.

In Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway the reader travels in speace and time in a subjected order (the main characters order)

If Joyce started his resource with the symbolic realism in Dubliners where the traditional idea of the hero is totally rejected, in that the characters inhibiters of Dublin are simply a paradigm of the existential condition of the human being at the turn of the century. Differently from traditional novel that celebrates heroes, self made men, people of success, the modernist novel cannot cope with that idea, and history is no longer made of the great people of the past but rather the ordinary experience of the human beings.

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 of the individual, thus highlighting the role of consciousness, one 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, looses 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 free indirect speech, free indirect thoughts, the shift of the point of view, the “leitmotiv” 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 Portrait 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 it is called prosthesis of construction. Philosophy lies behind such Buildungsroman that is the narrator’s intent 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 really revolutionary experimented. They still conform to a linear concept of time and conceived on existence in terms of linear development.

Only a great writer would later realize that if you really want 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 of atoms that bombard people’s mind come at all times (future, present and past) and from all spaces, in different formats. They may be activated by memory, by an auditory stimulus, by a picture, by a situation, by an incident and in many other ways. You can easily understand there is not at all any order as the one Modernists were in love with, and which they looked at desperately.

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

This explains for the adoption of the stream of consciousness in his 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 will 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 read 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? How does such form of narration acquire a structure? He must resort to a sort of “glue”. He dares something nobody understands to give his experimental research unity. Only T. S. Eliot will be able to understand the sense of Joyce’s experiments: 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 tries to find the suitable language mean that would allow him, a man of the 20th century to say that in language, with language, something that would anticipates the postmodern idea that we construct our identity in language.