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Apostol Maria, English-German

Continuity and change in the British modernist fiction

Every historical period, every epoch is marked by particular changes in terms of ideologies,

principles, conceptions and perception of the individual’s existence and so happens also in the 20 th

century in which Modernism is probably the greatest and most innovative change from many points

of view. Science, psychology, art, literature… All these bring, through their representatives, new

ideas, new concepts, new points of view. The curious thing is that all these fields blended somehow

together and borrowed definitions and theories from one another, especially literature from the

previous three fields above mentioned. European literature changed considerably during this period

and Malcom Bradbury says that “The change was far more than fiction’s subject-matter. Deeper

structures were reshaping too.” ( Bradbury, 2).

Actually, changes happened at different levels. First of all, at the formal level, literature takes

inspiration from the concepts of Einstein and Bergson. The first, with the General Theory of

Relativity, suggests that everything is relative, that there is no eternal truth, that the individual’s

perception of the world can never be comprehensive, but rather subjective and fragmented. Bergson

goes deeper in the matter and states that there are two kind of “times”: the subjective time, that is

related to the “human experience” (Bergson, qtd. in Marrati, 1100) and the objective time, that is the

chronological time, the clock time. What novelists and artists have done is to focus on this

“subjective time” and more precisely on the inner experience of the individual. V. Woolf has

perfectly reproduced this perception of time in all her novels, but we consider Mrs. Dalloway as the

best example. The action of the novel lasts only one day, therefore the chronological, objective time

is 24 hours. And why is the novel so long, if the novel unfolds in one day? Because Woolf describes

the thoughts and feelings of Clarissa Dalloway, of Septimus Warren Smith, of Lucrezia, of Peter

Walsh: the reader goes from the present at the beginning of the novel, to the past a few pages later

when Clarissa thinks about her relationship with Sally Seaton, again to the present with Septimus

Warren Smith on the street. Pages and pages of inner experiences, of emotions, of flashbacks and
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fastforwards. This is a new, important change that has the role to introduce the reader into the

psyche and soul of the character, to know all their shades, to see how split is their view of the world.

Curiosly, even if D.H. Lawerence’s name appears in the list of the modernist writers, his books are

easier to read and understand than those of Woolf or Joyce, for example. Why? Because Lawrence

focuses more on the content of the novel, rather than on its language and form, that is subjects such

as Oedipus complex, inspired from Freud’s psychological theories.

This brings us to another important innovation in terms of content that is strictly related to the

subjectivity mentioned above: like the Romanticist, modernist writers focus on the individual with

the difference that they shift from an external description of their solitude to an inner analysis of

their existence and thoughts. More particularly, most of the writers focus mainly on an important

individual: that of the artist. Peter Walsh, Lily Briscoe, Louis, Stephen Dedalus, Paul Morel, Ursula

Brangwen…These are a few names of artists that appear in Woolf, Joyce and Lawrence’s novels.

Important chapters and fragments of their novels are dedicated to the analysis of the artist, of his or

her struggles. All have in common one thing: they suffer. The psychological “pain” is caused by the

fact that the artist has to fight against the society, because it either refuses them, like in the case of

the woman artist – Lily Briscoe – or doesn’t appreciate them. This causes what Joyce defines a

“paralysis”: they fight between the will to fit social conventions and the desire to fulfil themselves

as artists. Although half a century earlier, Baudelaire has a great definition of the artist that can be

used to describe also the artist in the 20th century: in his poem The Albatros he writes that “The poet

resembles this prince of cloud and sky/ […]When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers,/

His giant wings prevent him from walking.”(Baudelaire, qtd. in Aggeler, 13-15-16). The poet, the

artist in general, is “king” in his own world, that is the one of art and emotion, but is clumsy in the

society, because he is not understood nor accepted. He is mocked. Remaining on the line of bird

metaphors, we can mention as an example Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man: Stephen fights between the desire of fulfilling his mother’s wish to embrace the priesthood

and his own desire to be an artist. This cause him the above mentioned “paralysis” which will be
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“defeated towards the end of the novel when Dedalus decides to “fly away” from the ground, where

he is prevented from walking ( Baudelaire, qtd in Aggeler, 16), from developing as an artist, and go

up in the sky where he is a “prince of cloud and sky” (Baudelaire, qtd in Aggeler, 13), where he can

be himself and where he can enjoy art and beauty.

Last but not least, important changes happen also in terms of techniques that are used to

describe the “action” in the modernist novel. In the introduction we saw that literature has borrowed

from other fields different theories and techniques that were considered by the authors suitable to

represent the new subjective reality. For example, from movies were taken the “moving pictures”,

that is a particular ability to create the sense of a moving camera on a set in writing. Woolf did it

perfectly in Mrs. Dalloway: at the beginning the ‘camer’ in set on Clarissa who “said she would buy

flowers herself.” (Woolf, 129 ) and then it switches to Clarissa actually being in the flower shop

buying flowers. Then the reader is brought in the past, through a flashback in which she remembers

about her youth and Peter Walsh. Further in the book the ‘camera’ focuses on Septimus Warren

Smith and then on his wife Lucrezia and their thoughts. Speaking of thoughts, a question that many

people probably wondered about is ‘how can an author render thoughts and feelings in writing?’

The answer is ‘ interior monologue’ , ‘stream of consciousness’ and lack of the omniscient narrator:

these are some of the techniques that were used to express thoughts in the most faithful way, that is,

without the intervention or opinion of the narrator. Through long discourses, sometimes without a

lot of punctuation (like in Joyce’s Ulysses) , the consciousness of the individual is described, or

better, it described itself. ‘Epiphany’ or ‘ Moment of being’ are two other important techniques that

are included in the list of changes brought by the modernist writers: it is a moment of truth, in

which the individual has a moment of clarity in his existence and, for a while, feels like he or she

has grasped the reality in its entire and the key to be an entire himself or herself. This comes as

suddenly as it goes away, leaving in the individual a sense of peace and harmony. This is the case,

for example of Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse when, in the end she has her epiphany , her

“vision” (Woolf, 391) and finally manages to finish her painting.

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The modernist British novel is a conglomerate of new concepts, notions and techniques that are

cleverly employed by modernist writers to show that reality cannot be grasped as a whole and that

every and each individual has a different vision of it due to his or her experience of it. Another

reason why the modernist novel presents such a fragmented world, besides the influence of

Einstein’s relativity, derives probably from the reality of that time mainly characterised by the war

and its terrible consequences.

Bibliography

Bradbury, Michael. Modern British Novel. Penguin Books, 1994

Marrati, Paola. “Time, Life, Concepts: The Newness of Bergson”. MLN Comparative

Literature. Vol. 120, No. 5. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, pp. 1099-1111,

www.jstor.org/stable/3840699?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents , Date of Access

8/12/2018

Aggeler, William. “The Albatros”. The Flowers of Evil, Academy Library Guild, Fresno, 1954 ,

lines 13-15-17 of the poem, https://fleursdumal.org/poem/200, Date of Access 8/12/2018

Woolf, Virginia. “Mrs. Dalloway”. Selected Works of Virginia Wooolf, Wordsworth Editions,

2005

Woolf, Virginia. “To the Lghthouse”. Selected Works of Virginia Woolf, Wordsworth Editions,

2005