The Innovations of the Twentieth- Century Novel

Abstract: The Twentieth-century novelists have established a new path in the evolution of the
English novel. The didacticism of the texts came to a standstill when the novel became true to life,
representing the world with its joys and sorrows, thus its function was to entertain its middle-class
public. However, the novel was still considered an inferior text by the members of the high class.
Not until the twentieth-century the novel would achieve a different status, but that was the merit of
the progress in all scientific areas. The new discoveries made by scientists such as Einstein with his
Theory of Relativity, and Bergson, who has given a new meaning to the way in which we perceive
time, had a great contribution to the way in which the novel was reshaped by the twentieth-century
novelists. Its pioneers, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce developed new techniques of story-telling,
which departed a great deal from what had been written before. Nevertheless, an undeniable factor
which created a climate of change had been the First World War, thus its damage affected people
world-wide, leaving them with the feeling of loss and alienation. The birth of the modernist novel
took place for the precise reason that the old form of fiction could no longer express the grim
reality, caused by all the changes that occurred after the war. However, the innovations of the
novel were not independent of what it had been written before, but an adaptation to the old form of
the novel. Moreover, the new discoveries made by Freud helped considerably with the exploration
of the unconsciousness, which became the new technique in the representation of the inner self of
the human being. Consequently, the outer world has been cast aside in the favour of the unknown
world of repressed feelings and desires.
Key Words: Twentieth-century novel, Modernism, Art, Innovations, Unconsciousness.

The Twentieth-century novel departs greatly from the previous century,

thus the writers focus on a different perspective of approaching life, people
and society. If the nineteenth-century novelists reflected with true lenses on
the reality of their surroundings, by the end of the nineteenth-century, the
outside reality was replaced by the inner world. This new projection of life
disclosed the real self without the censure of the social rules and norms of
conduit. Man was stripped down of any artifice and revealed on its pure base.
Certainly, novelists have always tried and succeeded in creating an outbreak,
and detach from the old forms by creating new ones. However, the moulding
of the novel was long established, and the innovations did not completely
replace the old form, but rendered new values and implemented new points of
view. Even though it was firstly conceived as way of entertainment for the
middle-class, the novel soon became enriched with deeper meaning, which
elevated it in significance and value. The old values such as fame and fortune
or the marital status, which stand for the visible, have been replaced by the
intrusion into the private thoughts and feelings, thus the old writings could no
longer resonate with the events that happened in the twentieth-century. It was
an alienation of thought and feeling, thus the world suffered from the many
atrocities committed during the First World War, which created: “a shift in
the scale – the war, the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages – has
shaken the fabric top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us
perhaps too vividly conscious of the present”.1 The people left behind could
not readapt to a world that no longer expressed or resembled the old reality.
Nevertheless, pain and suffering endorsed many creative texts, which were
crafted by their creators as a consequence of the shadows of doubt in the
meaning of their own survival. The grotesque of what was left behind
triggered a pessimistic view regarding the manner in which literature should
follow the old design. It was the birth of a new era, an era influenced by the
social climate, an era which had its birth on the ruins of a war. Modernism
could be depicted as the after war time, in which many dissipated pieces were
placed together, containing hidden symbols and an orientation towards the
inner life; perhaps an eccentric projection of a new form of art. Virginia
Woolf represented brilliantly this state of incertitude in one of her most
exquisite novel: Mrs Dalloway. Her novel weaves in the aspects of pretence,
the dissatisfaction of living, and the post-war trauma, creating a microcosm of
the human existence which related to the twentieth-century reality.
A novelist is a storyteller, who has the ability to project a vision (real or
imaginary) in a specific manner. Before the twentieth-century a writer used an
arsenal of experiences from which to base a story, however this practice
diminished after the First World War, signalling its downfall. The values were
renewed not only on the external plane but also on a moral one, provoking
changes that seemed impossible before. Nevertheless, the process of
withdrawal had begun, thus the battlefields had sworn men to silence. The
world became incapable to express meaning and salient in word economy,
being used as a strategy to cope with grief and destruction. This strategy was
enacted in writing by Ernest Hemingway, who developed the iceberg theory,
which had a strong influence on the twentieth-century fiction. His technique
involved the reduction of adjectives and keeping the sentences as simple as
possible. The decline on the use of imagery brought in a shift from the
external world into the inner living, thus people had less to communicate and
spent more time engrossed in the inner reality.
On the other hand, the old literary forms have not gone entirely extinct,
as nothing is ever lost from the past heritage, being fused with the new ones.

1
Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays, (Oxford University Press, New York), 2008, p 27.
The idealistic morals were cast away, being replaced with ordinary
happenings and feelings. Moreover, the taboo topics gained ground, and any
prohibitions became the norm. Pandora’s Box was revealed, placing into the
light all dark desires and frustrations as: sexual orientation, race, hate agenda,
and self-consciousness. “The texts of modernism have been queered;
racialized, their whitewash stripped away; gendered, regendered, and cross-
gendered; classed; globalized; postcolonialized; popularized.”2 Yet the
transition was not implemented as an addition, hence the past in Modernism
has a different functionality. It displays irony and not the promotion of the old
values hence degrading them with acid satire. The transition to the post-war
world has been done slowly, thus the writers were left challenges from their
daunting predecessors, starting with D.H. Laurence’s insurgence against ‘the
old skin and grief form of the English novel, Virginia Woolf’s reaction
against ‘materialism’ of writers like Arnold Bennet and H. G. Wells, and
James Joyce’s linguistic and narrative innovations,3 thus they were setting up
the path towards of a more experimental approach to literature, and a strong
desire in eloping the old form. For example, Joyce’s Ulysses depicts an
antihero, who has none of the qualities of the mythological hero illustrated by
Homer. The muse of the epic art was not forsaken but thrown into the creative
matrix, which gave life to various forms of art. However, the message
transmitted became obscured, thus as “a product of First World War, in the
literary-historical dimension to understand the continuities or discontinuities
between modernism and Romanticism, or in the sociological dimension, to
understand it as a result of the megalopolitan experience.”4 Yet, the muse is
not an entity but a memory of the past that had been developed and readapted
to a new reality from generation to generation. Here are encompassed a large
variety of narratives as a web of stories. Agreeing with Georg Lukacs one
could state that “the novel is at the same time the only art form which
includes time among its constitutive principles.”5 In his Theory of the Novel,
Lukacs presents time as an essential part of a whole, yet the parts fuse with
the transcendental base, creating misperception. Time is a powerful tool in a
novel and dominates over action. However, before twentieth-century, time
was chronologic. In modernist writings, time is quite different perceived, thus
it transforms the matter from the outside world into an element of inwardness.
The new representation of time is found in the compression of memory,
whereas its deliverance gives a new life to the story. The Theory of Relativity
endorsed by Albert Einstein introduced concepts as space-time, functioning as
2
A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, (Blackwell Publishing, Oxford), 2006, p. 4.
3
The New Pelican Guide to English Literature: The Present, Editated by Boris Ford, (Penguin Group,
London), 1983, p. 418.
4
Modernism, Edited by Michael H. Whitworth (Blackwell Publishing, Oxford), 2007, p.6.
5
Modern Criticism and Theory, Edited by David Lodge, (Pearson Education, Harlow), 1988, p. 22.
a unified entity. However, it was Henry Bergson, whose thesis on Matter and
Memory made a real shift in the way in which the greatest novelists conveyed
time. Bergson has demonstrated that relativity relates to epistemology not
physics.

A notable contribution to the modern literary theory was made by

Roman Jakobson. Even though his work was centred on highly technical
analysis of grammar and phonology, he defined literariness as the linguistic
term that transforms a verbal message into a work of art. Linguistics is placed
into juxtaposition with poetics hence “poetics deals with problems of verbal
structure, just as the analysis of painting is concerned with pictorial structure,
poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics.”6 No matter how
separated two fields of arts may seem, in the twentieth-century it was quite
common to amalgamate them. Therefore, the writers (least the great ones)
were notorious for these transgressions, which impinged upon the crossing of
boundaries. It was the proclamation of modernity that was endeavoured by the
new generation of writers, freeing themselves from the restrictive patterns that
were draining the intellect. The evolution of the texts started with Modernism,
a term that some critics found difficult to define because “the term has been
extended to cover disparate yet cognate fields, acquiring different
chronologies and shadings of meaning as it moves from art history to
architecture, music and intellectual history.”7 Modernism connected all arts
becoming a lingua franca which dared its pioneers to reach extreme depths in
their display of art; an art which has risen from basic principles as rationalism,
functionalism, and anti-ornamental style. Yet, for the reader, the image
projected may not be as simple to disclose, though the texts envelope, besides
a myriad of symbols, an authentic display of feeling, thus “only a wide
exposure to the diversity of emotion expressed in contrasting works of art can
prevent the arts imposing new emotional tyrannies instead of enhancing
emotional freedom.”8 However, the innovations made in the twentieth-
century started with the writer. In spite of the fact that it can be scarcely
noticed in most of the modernist writings, the novelist is the creator of the
fictional world. At the first glance, it can be noticed that the writer has more
freedom of expression, which would not have been possible a century before.
The writer creates a web of stories, which function as a given reality or an
artifice world. The reader is drawn in without many explanations, thus the
narrator weaves many layers of the story, sometimes, disjointed from the rest

6
Modern Criticism and Theory, Edited by David Lodge, (Pearson Education, Harlow), 1988 , p. 31.

7
Modernism:An Anthology, Edited by Lawrence Rainey, (Blackwell Publishing, Oxford), 2016, p. xx.
8
The New Pelican Guide to English Literature: The Present, Edited by Boris Ford, (Penguin Group,
London), 1983, p. 499.
of the narrative. The discrepancies between the signifier and signified are
unconventionally rendered, hence discontinuity takes place in the shape of
transgressions from a different time zone, place, character, and even thought.
The digressions only indicate that the human mind functions on many planes,
thus thoughts are usually intermitted. There are no established rules or limits
on how a text should be written. The subject could be anything as long as it
encompasses what the writer wishes to transmit: “Any method is right, every
method is right, that expresses what we wish to express, if we are writers.” 9
Virginia Woolf advocates new values in her essay on Modern Fiction. She
stresses the importance of expressing feelings rather than facts and objects,
which cannot uplift the spirit or content the heart. She mentions, as an
important step forward, the Russian influence, prising them for taking risks,
and denigrates the artifice of some of her fellow writers, who cannot produce
emphatic works or grasp the transcendence of the soul. Virginia Woolf does
not deny that there is real value in what had been written before, but she
pleads for improvement of the texts, which no longer produce excitement or
any aesthetic pleasure: “English fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness
to our natural delight in humour and comedy, in the beauty of earth, in the
activities of the intellect, and in the splendour of the body. But any deductions
that we may draw from the comparison of the two fictions so immeasurably
fell apart.”10 In Modern Criticism and Theory, David Lodge speaks about the
metamorphosis of the narrative that leads the writer to its death. This
argument is particularly true in the case of the modernist writer; yet the theme
of the sacrifice had been rendered in the previous works, and death at a young
age was quite common among geniuses. Indeed, writing as process of creation
requires sacrifice and especially when encompasses the work of a genius. A
good example would be Doctor Faustus, created by at least three famous
writers, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas
Mann. The books illustrate how great knowledge comes with extreme
sacrifice. In Goethe’s case, the quest ended with the arrival of that perfect
moment, which could be pinned down, in Joyce’s work, to that rare moment
of epiphany. Sacrifice was also the condition of the artist in the modern times,
both Virginia Woolf and James Joyce had made sacrifices in order to achieve
the ultimate glory. In Joyce’s case, the sacrifice came in the shape of the
country he so much loved, especially his home town, Dublin. Speaking about
his fellow artist, Virginia Woolf, it could be said that the sacrifice was even
greater, thus it was recorded that she used to have severe bouts of depression
after finishing her writings, so severe that she had to be admitted to several
mental institutions. The more she wrote the severe the attacks were, and
eventually led her towards committing suicide. One cannot but wonder, was it

9
Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays, (Oxford University Press, New York), 2008, p.11.
10
Idem, p. 12.
worth the sacrifice? It may seem that achieving immortality comes with too
much of a dear price.

Moreover, it seems that the modernist writer continued exploring the

path his predecessors had taken. In analysing some literary elements such as
digressions or distortion, a glance in the past could demonstrate that
unconventional writers could be found right from the eighteenth-century. One
of these writers was Laurence Sterne, thus his Tristram Shandy would take by
surprise anyone who expects to find in it a conventional novel, hence its
content was written ahead of its time and can be compared with any
modernist or postmodernist text. It was the first time a writer tried to approach
the depths of the unconsciousness and the subjective time, but not until
Virginia Woolf defined the technique as stream-of-consciousness, it became
truly acknowledged. A writer’s predicament is also to bring a balance in the
amalgam of the voices that emerge from a text. Nevertheless, writers leave in
their texts their own fears and desires, expressed conscious or unconscious.
These elements are not employed in a certain order and may seem chaotically
displayed. Certainly, reading a modernist novel can be at the best time
frustrating, as the reader gets lost and loses track of time, space or even
voices, thus, sometime, the reader cannot visualize the character, mainly
because there is no accent on the physical features. It is like a projection of
faceless thoughts, which become more familiar with the number of pages. But
the order is restored by the end of the novel, and the aggravation comes to an
end as the voices are connected with an identity. There is a distinction
between the narrator and the author of a text. The narrator is an alter-ego of
the author, who distances from the author with the completion of the text.
Nevertheless, the alter-ego can function as a series of selves, which are
dispersed throughout the writing. They are not the same yet drawn together,
coming in conflict with one another, but still part of the same entity. Virginia
Woolf’s novels such as Between the Acts and The Waves illustrate multiple
selves that function as a whole. This new rendering of the character employs
the artistic vision of the modernist writer.

Sigmund Freud publication, The Interpretation of Dreams or Jokes and

their Relation with the Unconscious, gave a new understanding of the hidden
desires and repressed feelings. His foundation of the psychoanalysis
contributed enormously to the exploration of the unconscious mind, theory
which stands at the base of the modernist texts. An emergent modernity also
appears from Joyce’s texts, which combine realism with modernist
techniques. The transition from realism to modernism has been possible after
the review of the way in which the conscious mind connects with the
unconscious, thus “traces of the unconscious process of Joyce’s revisions
reside in the usefulness of Freud’s grammar of the dream-work.”11 In Stephen
Hero, the narrator is assimilated into a centre of consciousness, which is
condensed later in The Portrait, where Joyce will reduce greatly the text,
respecting the economy principle. Geoffrey Hartman argues that Freud
demonstrates Emerson’s observations about the significance of reaching into
the depths of the mind. However, he criticises the fanaticism of the
endorsement of his theories, and that his methods are paradoxes, thus he tries
to use the rational to inquest on the unknown. Hartman points out that the
wording of an interpreter is textual, having an unknown code as the literary
artefacts do, “thus it is a striking truth that literary analysis, like Freud's dream
analysis, does no more and no less than disclose a life in images or words that
has its own momentum. Ambiguities, overdetermined meanings, and strange
linkages are more obvious than the coherent design they seem to flee from.” 12
Moreover, new theories enacted psychological concepts which endorsed the
existence not only of a consciousness but several consciousness were
disclosed, which functioned in juxtaposition with many levels of
consciousness or sub-consciousness. Thus, the inner life is connected with the
outer reality, the childhood experiences determine an individual’s personality,
as it had been artistically presented by Joyce in his Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man. Marcel Proust was one of the writers who approached the
defining of the past intermitted with the present, thus he presented in his
work, In Search of Lost Time, a new concept of time and consciousness,
which moulded the personality of his character. The past experiences
preserved a high quantity of emotions, which were triggered to the present by
many factors, from a gesture to an object, as the famous madeleine which
induced memories from unconsciousness to the consciousness. Henry James,
also, had a massive contribution not only in development of fiction but in
describing states of mind. In The Art of Fiction, James brings into discussion
the novels which lack the manifestation of the artistic faith, thus constructing
a text which integrates the same creed enacted by other novelists would lead
to just another novel and nothing more. Nevertheless, every century has its
moments of modernity, when the old values are questioned and changed, yet
if the reality does not correspond with its exposure in a text, the message will
become inconsequential. Consequently, the change came with the inquiring of
the right questions: “Is life like this? Must novels be like this?13 The mutiny
of the twentieth-century writers caused novels to undergo many
transformations, in order to seek better means of expression, and that is
exactly what modernists did. They sought, as Ezra Pound’s slogan: Make it
New, to make innovations by focusing on the inner reality of the subjective

11
Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, Edited by Susan Stanford Friedman, (Cornell University Press,
London), 1993, p. 30.
12
Modern Criticism and Theory, Edited by David Lodge, (Pearson Education, Harlow), 1988, p. 375.
13
Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays, (Oxford University Press, New York), 2008, p. 9.
time. Certainly, the experiment was intricate and required to unleash the
instinctive part of the human being, thus steered the stripping down of all
conventions and values, leaving the thought to run uncensored. In the
modernist texts, there were no restrictions on the images presented, even
though it unleashed fears and repressed feelings. Having said that, the lack of
censure shocked the readers at very best, hence the modernist writer
endeavoured to bring in open the coal mine of the unconsciousness, as a new
source of inspiration.

Another issue which was disclosed into the modern fiction was the
artifice of the social conventions, and the way in which human beings interact
with each other in the society. The angular presentation of the fictional world
is directed towards the image beyond appearances, trying to catch a glimpse
of the individual reality. Each writer tries to impose a certain perspective of
life, thus “they seem to have an attitude to life, a position which allows them
to move their limbs freely; a view which, though made up of all sorts of
different things, falls into the right perspective for their purposes.”14 An
influence in the development of modernist artists such as Virginia Woolf, it
was the constitution of the Bloomsbury Group. A group funded by a crowd of
intellectual friends. Its members included the Stephen sisters (Virginia and
Vanessa, who later will become Woolf and Bell), and names such as E. M.
Forester, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, “its members, many of whom were
in conscious revolt against the artistic, social, and sexual restrictions of
Victorian society, profoundly affected the development of the avantgarde in
art and literature in Britain.”15 Their organized meetings took place from
1905, at the Stephens house, directed by Virginia, who would marry a late
member of the Bloomsbury Group, Leonard Woolf. The Woolf’s will open
their own printing House, Hogarth House, where they will publish many of
the unconventional writers.

Moreover, one cannot summarise the innovation of the twentieth-

century novel without bringing into focus the feminist movement. Women no
longer conformed to be seen as the Angel in the house. The war transformed
women, thus with hardly any men around, women had to fend for themselves.
They become more in charge of their destiny, and that was just the beginning
of their fight for equal rights. Nevertheless, one of the most adherent
supporters of the feminist movement was the literary critic and writer,
Virginia Woolf. In A Room of One’s Own, she manifests her unruliness
towards the way in which women were treated when entering public
institutions, hence the vivid image she projects must be one of her early

14
Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays, (Oxford University Press, New York), 2008, p. 76.
15
The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Edited by Margaret Drabble, (Oxford University Press, New
York), 2000, p. 113.
encounter with the astonishment of a man of such disposition, yet the scene
does not effaces the poise adopted by the narrator, but merely displays the fact
that the woman’s escape was initiated by instinct rather than a submissive
attitude: “His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than
reason came to my help, he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf;
there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel
is the public place for me.”16 Yet, women found it hard to conform to the
norms imposed by the society; even before the twentieth-century otherwise
Virginia Woolf might not have employed a poet such as Christina Rossetti to
advocate her beliefs. Although Rossetti’s poems do not stray from the
conventional norms, her decision not to get married could be seen as a
statement of feminist unconventionality. However, she was not the only one
who defied the norms imposed by the society. More examples can be found in
the nineteenth-century literature. Some of female writers chose to write under
a false name like George Elliot (Marion Evans) in order to penetrate the
man’s world. She created a microcosm of the society, on which she used a
magnifier glass to capture human behaviour behind appearances. The heroine
from Middlemarch, Dorothea, conforms to the society standards of marriage,
but there is a change in her character after it, thus she starts to question the
man she married and her own happiness. Besides the disclosure of the human
traits, she was “the first English novelist to move in the vanguard of the
thought and learning of her day, and doing so she added new scope and
dignity to the English novel.”17 Another example is Emily Dickenson, who
became a recluse by her own choice. As in Virginia Woolf essay, she had a
room of her own, which, later on, she hardly left. She was considered an
eccentric, who wore white clothes and never married, thus she famously
disliked meeting people. However, her poetry, as admitted by Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, was completely in disagreement with the conventional
forms, but “as with her withdrawal from the world, which gave her
intellectual freedom, her chosen poetic form was a deliberate revolt - an
escape from the captivity of the conventions of poetry and oppressive sanity
of the world.”18

In conclusion, the innovations of the novel have started well before the
twentieth-century with writers like Laurence Sterne, who was an
unconventional writer on his own right. From then on, many modernist
writers have contributed to the development of the novel, but the immense
changes were due to many factors such as social climate, new scientific
discoveries, world-wars, and the feminist movement. Among the modernist
16
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, (Collins Classics, London), 2014, p.4.
17
David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature: volume II, (The Ronald Press Company,
London), 1969, p. 1067.
18
Emily Dickenson, The Selected Poems of Emily Dickenson, (Wordsworth Poetry Library, London), 1994,
ix.
writers, there are some exceptional figures like Joseph Conrad, who fooled
the Victorians by inserting many symbols, which disclosed the dark side of
imperialism; E. M Forster with his best novel: Passage to India, in which he
exposes the relationships between people of different race and status, and D.
H. Lawrence, who strips away any conventions, presenting the bare human
being. Finally, there are also the two greatest writers of the twentieth century:
Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Their innovations contributed enormously
to the modernization of the twentieth-century novel, as they uplifted the novel
to a different dimension altogether.

References

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London), 2014.
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(Penguin Group, London), 1983.
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14. Woolf, Virginia, Between the Acts, (Penguin Group, London), 1992.
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University Press, New York), 2000.