NOTES OF 20/02/2013

Modern artists didn't agree with the idea of the classical novel: it couldn't return a real image of life.

The nature of life could no longer be represented in linear terms, as the intelligent reader has seen in Virginia Woolf' novel Mrs. Dalloway: the reader travels in space and time according to a subjective order (the main character'sorder).

Furthermore James Joyce used the symbolic realism, where the traditional idea of the hero is totally rejected, in that the characters inhabiting Dublin are simply a paradigm of the existential condition of the human beings at the turn of the Century.

Differently from the traditional novel that celebrated heroes, self-made men and people of success, the modern 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 about the novelists of the traditional, main stream: they are 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 linear time to privilege the flux of thoughts, emotions and private feelings that make up what V. Woolf calls "the luminous halo".

In addition, narrative strategies like moments of being and epiphanies open up a space of fullness or revelation that allows the individual  o come to terms with himself/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' fluxes of thoughts, feelings and emotions. As a consequence 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 the language use resorts to free indirect speech, free indirect thought, 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 this lives 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 wrote The Picture Of DorianGray and James Joyce wrote The Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man.Strangely enogh, all of the protagonists of such "buildings" focus on young people, something that in postmodernist terms we would call processes of construction. Philosophy lies behind this "Bildungsroman" 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 experiments. They still conform to a linear concept of
time and conceive of existence , in terms of a linear development.

Only a great
writer would later realize that if you really want it to adhere to life as it
is you have to adhere to the inner dimension of consciousness. It and its
working do not follow chronology or any time order and the shower of thoughts,
of atoms that bombard people's mind come from all times (future-present-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 for
desperately. They had remained displaced, in a chaotic world where they felt
lost: that is why the greatest modernist writers, as Joyce, celebrate in their
fiction the anti-hero, not the hero, that would now recall a pantomime rather
than fictional reality.

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

Joyce's experimentation disrupts with syntax:
there will be no syntax, no word order, no time reference, not an y 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
trial of 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 narrator, there is not punctuation to guide the beginning
or the end of the sentence. He must do everything by himself: in short he has
to share life, the fictional context of his writing.

But how does
all this cohere? He must resort to a sort of "glue", he dares something nobody
understands to give his experimental research used. Only T.S. Eliot will be
able to explain the sense of Joyce's complex experiment.

Joyce was interested
in reflecting on life, existence, the nature of the human being, the sense of
his da sein and desperately tried to
find the suitable language means that would allow him a man of the 20^th century and to say
that in language, with language, through language, something will anticipate
the postmodern discovery that the human being's identity is a language
construct..