Modern Psychological Novel ( WOOLF and JOYCE)

For many critics the years 1900–1945 are the high point in the development of the English novel.
The novels of this era contrast markedly with most nineteenth-century novels. There can be found a
greater degree of subjectivity in the novels of writers whose concern was more with the inner life of
characters. Instead of drawing on an existing world of public values, writers felt they had to build up
a world of private values. The definite shape of a novel’s plot, which organizes characters and events,
gave way to less logical and sequential modes of organisation. There was a stress on the individual’s
sense of what is valid in experience, and techniques of subjectivity were evolved to represent this.
What is called the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique was developed in various ways by writers in
order to render directly and in depth the experience of individual characters.
There was at this time, too, a related change in attitudes to time. Writers no longer simply wrote
‘he said’ or ‘she recalled’, or ‘this reminded him of’, or ‘she decided in future to …’. Time was not a
series of separate chronological moments, and consciousness was seen as a continuous flow, with past
and present merging. Under the general influence of work by psychologists such as Sigmund Freud
and Carl Jung, writers came to believe that we are our memories, that the present is the sum of our
past and that the form and style of the novel have to capture this understanding. One result was that
the novel concentrated less on a social, public world and more on the inner world of unique and
isolated individuals or the shapeless, unstructured sensations of life. In all, the novel became a less
rigid, plotted and naturalistic form.

Virginia Woolf :
Virginia Woolf’s first novels were relatively traditional in form, but she later rebelled against what
she called the ‘materialism’ of novelists such as H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy.
Her characteristic method appears in her third novel, Jacob’s Room, published in 1922. She renders
the flow of experience through a stream of consciousness technique, but her work is also particularly
characterised by an intensely poetic style. She utilises poetic rhythms and imagery to create a lyrical
impressionism in order to capture her characters’ moods with great delicacy and detail. The novel
shows her breaking free from traditional forms and the traditional concerns with external reality – the
‘materialism’ which she felt to be untrue to life.
As diversity in individual character portrayal increased, so also did novelists’ concept of setting and
space. Shakespeare had Hamlet say: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of
infinite space.” In the Modern novel, space can equally be enclosed or infinite, often at the same time,
in one character’s mind.
Virginia Woolf’s main novels are Mrs Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves
(1931).
Mrs Dalloway describes the events of one single day in central London through the mind of one
character, Clarissa Dalloway, who is to be the hostess of a party for high-society friends later the same
evening. It is a finely shaded portrait of an individual personality. The novel contains many flashbacks
to Clarissa Dalloway’s past experience as she seeks to bring together past memory and present action
and as she endeavours to balance a need for privacy with a need for communication with other people.
In The Waves, Virginia Woolf takes six characters who are all at different stages in their lives. She
explores how each one of these characters is affected by the death of a person they all knew well.
In To The Lighthouse, two days in the life of a family on holiday are recorded: one before the Great
War, one after it, when some of the characters have died. Again, Virginia Woolf is more interested in
her characters’ mental processes than in their visible actions. Mrs Ramsay is a powerful figure in the
family who is searching for a truth which lies beneath surface facts. Her husband, Mr Ramsay, is
more literal-minded and contrasts with Mrs Ramsay. In the second part of the novel we learn that Mrs
Ramsay has died, but she continues to exert a spiritual influence over all those who return to the
holiday home years later. The narrative and emotional focus of the novel is on Mrs Ramsay, but the
inner worlds of many of the characters are communicated. Some readers have felt that in places the
novel breaks away from prose and becomes something closer to poetry. The novel is also marked by a
use of poetic symbolism, most strikingly in the ‘lighthouse’ of the title. The lighthouse is a suggestive
and ambiguous symbol which takes on uniquely different meanings for each character in the novel
and for each reader who attempts to interpret it.
Virginia Woolf adopts the technique of ‘stream of consciousness’; how the memories of the past
mingle with perceptions of the present and how the constant switches in tense capture the
simultaneous nature of her experiences. There is no simple chronology to ‘what happens’. In fact,
there is only minimal reference to an outside world.
 James Joyce:
The major Modernist writer who shares Virginia Woolf’s concern to render the inner life of
characters is James Joyce. Joyce takes stream of consciousness to extremes, often abandoning
cohesion, syntax, and punctuation and lexical correctness which previously brought order and clarity
to narration. Memories are prompted, unusual ideas connected, playful links created between words of
similar sound or meaning. The language is often ungrammatical, but rules are broken in order to
represent the workings of the mind.

However, James Joyce’s contribution to the development of the novel in English in the twentieth
century goes beyond particular techniques of formal experimentation. His contribution was a major
one on several levels. His first short stories, published in the collection Dubliners (1914), depict the
lives of the ordinary people of the city with clarity and realism. The stories are carefully organised so
that meanings arise not only from the individual sketches but also from the relations between them.
The best known of these stories – The Dead – is the final one in the sequence, to which many of the
previous stories point. It is a story in which a husband is shocked out of his self-satisfaction and
egotism by learning of his wife’s love for a young man she had known many years before. The theme
of many of the stories in Dubliners is the attempts of many of the citizens to free themselves from
lives in which they feel paralysed by relationships, by social, cultural, and religious traditions, or by
their own natures. Joyce’s treatment shows a mastery of the short-story form and becomes
increasingly detached and neutral.

Joyce’s first major novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), is semiautobiographical
and tells the story of Stephen Dedalus from the very earliest days of his life, showing him growing
into adulthood and independence under the powerful influences of Irish national, political, and
religious feelings. The novel shows how he gradually frees himself from these influences and decides
to become an exile from Ireland and to dedicate his life to writing. He also develops a view of the
writer as necessarily alienated from the values of society and committed only to artistic values. Like
T.S. Eliot in poetry, Stephen believed that the true artist had to be objective and not simply give
direct expression to his feelings. He compared the artist to the God of creation who ‘remains within or
behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his
fingernails’.

Ulysses is the high point of Modernism, bearing the same relationship to the development of the
novel as The Waste Land does to poetry. Both were published in book form in 1922. Some chapters of
Ulysses had already appeared serially in 1918 and met with serious censorship problems. As a result,
Joyce had great difficulty in finding a publisher for the whole book, which finally came out from
Shakespeare and Company in Paris.
Copies were seized in both Britain and America and the controversy continued for several years.
The first open editions were published in the United States in 1934 and in Britain in a limited edition
in 1936 and a popular edition in 1937. In addition to its innovative techniques of ‘stream of
consciousness’, the novel exhibits a wealth of forms and styles and explores a rich variety of ideas.
Most striking is the use of Homer as a model. The characters and episodes of the novel have parallels
in ancient Greek stories although the comparisons are often deliberately comic or ironic. For example,
like Ulysses, Leopold Bloom wanders from one place to another but his adventures are distinctly
unheroic. Each chapter corresponds to an episode from Homer’s Odyssey but, instead of being written
in a uniform, elevated language, each has a distinct style of its own. For example, in a scene set in a
maternity hospital, which Bloom visits, the prose imitates English literary styles from Beowulf to the
Victorian age which also reflect the growth of a baby in the womb from conception to the moment
just before its birth in the present.
However, the connection with episodes from Homer’s Odyssey gives the novel a wider, more
universal significance. Ulysses tells the story of one day in the lives of Dublin citizens and vividly
evokes the life of the city. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom becomes a modern Ulysses, an Everyman in a
Dublin which becomes a microcosm of the world.
Joyce’s last work, Finnegans Wake (1939), took fourteen years to write. In the novel, Joyce
attempted to present the whole of human history as a dream in the mind of a Dublin innkeeper, H.C.
Earwicker. Any attempt to depict life realistically is abandoned.
Devices of literary realism are replaced by a kind of dream language in which as many associations as
possible are forced into words and combinations of words. In many ways, the novel is about language
itself: Joyce uses puns and plays on words within and across both English and other languages. He
pushes language to the absolute limits of experiment and for most readers the result is a very
demanding, sometimes incomprehensible experience. The use of language suggests the merging of
images in a dream. It enables Joyce to present history and myth as a single image with all the
characters of history becoming a few eternal types, finally identified as Earwicker, his wife, and three
children. This corresponds with a cyclical view of history which Joyce developed and in which the
events of human life are like a river that flows into the sea from which rain clouds form to feed once
again the source of the river. Thus, life is always renewed.

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write
in the English language. He was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility
into English literature. Conrad wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that
depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of what he saw as an impassive, inscrutable
universe. Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew, among other things, on
his native Poland's national experiences and on his own experiences in the French and British
merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-
dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the
human psyche.

His first novel, Almayer's Folly, set on the east coast of Borneo, was published in 1895. Its
appearance marked his first use of the pen name "Joseph Conrad". Almayer's Folly, together
with its successor, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), laid the foundation for Conrad's
reputation as a romantic teller of exotic tales – a misunderstanding of his purpose that was to
frustrate him for the rest of his career.

Edward Said describes three phases to Conrad's literary career. In the first and longest, from
the 1890s to World War I, Conrad wrote most of his great works, including The Nigger of the
'Narcissus' (1897), Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret
Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911). The second phase, spanning the war and
following the popular success of Chance (1913), is marked by the advent of Conrad's public
persona as "great writer". In the third and final phase, from the end of World War I to
Conrad's death (1924), he at last finds an uneasy peace; it is, as C. McCarthy writes, as
though "the War has allowed Conrad's psyche to purge itself of terror and anxiety."

Conrad was always at heart a writer who sailed, rather than a sailor who wrote. He used his
sailing experiences as a backdrop for many of his works, but he also produced works of
similar world view. Writing to his friend Richard Curle, Conrad remarked that "the public
mind fastens on externals" such as his "sea life", oblivious to how authors transform their
material "from particular to general, and appeal to universal emotions by the temperamental
handling of personal experience".

Conrad the artist famously aspired, in the words of his preface to The Nigger of the
'Narcissus' (1897), "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel...
before all, to make you see. That – and no more, and it is everything." Writing in what to the
visual arts was the age of Impressionism, and what to music was the age of impressionist
music, Conrad showed himself in many of his works a prose poet of the highest order.
Conrad used his own experiences as raw material, but the finished product should not be
confused with the experiences themselves.

Many of Conrad's characters were inspired by actual persons he met, including, in his first
novel, Almayer's Folly (completed 1894), William Charles Olmeijer. The historic trader
Olmeijer, whom Conrad encountered on his four short visits to Berau in Borneo,
subsequently haunted Conrad's imagination. Conrad often borrowed the authentic names of
actual individuals, e.g., Captain McWhirr (Typhoon), Captain Beard and Mr. Mahon
("Youth"), Captain Lingard (Almayer's Folly and elsewhere), Captain Ellis (The Shadow
Line). "Conrad", writes J. I. M. Stewart, "appears to have attached some mysterious
significance to such links with actuality." Equally curious is "a great deal of namelessness in
Conrad, requiring some minor virtuosity to maintain." Thus we never learn the surname of
the protagonist of Lord Jim. Conrad also preserves, in The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', the
authentic name of the ship, the Narcissus, in which he sailed in 1884. For the natural
surroundings of the high seas, the Malay Archipelago and South America, which Conrad
described so vividly, he could rely on his own observations.

Conrad was keenly conscious of tragedy in the world and in his works. In 1898, he wrote:
"What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are
conscious of it. As soon as you know of your slavery the pain, the anger, the strife – the
tragedy begins."

He believed that his own life was like a series of short episodes because he was himself so
many different people : he was a Pole and an Englishman, a sailor and a writer." An outsider
in exile; an outsider, nationally and culturally, on British ships; an outsider as an English
writer Conrad called himself a "bloody foreigner." It was as if he could come close to a sense
of our fate in the world or the essence of the universe, a sense that reached beyond the time
he described and beyond his characters' circumstances. This idea of "beyond" satisfied
something in his imagination. He worked as though between the intricate systems of a ship
and the vague horizon of a vast sea.

In 1975 the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe published an essay, "An Image of Africa: Racism
in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'", which provoked controversy by calling Conrad a
"thoroughgoing racist". Achebe's view was that Heart of Darkness cannot be considered a
great work of art because it is "a novel which celebrates... dehumanisation, which
depersonalises a portion of the human race." Referring to Conrad as a "talented, tormented
man", Achebe notes that Conrad reduces and degrades Africans to "limbs", "angles",
"glistening white eyeballs", etc. while simultaneously (and fearfully) suspecting a common
kinship between himself and these natives—leading Marlow to sneer the word
"ugly."[ Achebe's essay, a landmark in postcolonial discourse, provoked debate, and the
questions it raised have been addressed in most subsequent literary criticism of Conrad.

Jeffrey Meyers notes that Conrad one of the first men to question the Western notion of
progress, to attack the hypocritical justification of colonialism and to reveal the savage
degradation of the white man in Africa." Likewise, E.D. Morel, who led international
opposition to King Leopold II's rule in the Congo, saw Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a
condemnation of colonial brutality and referred to the novella as "the most powerful thing
written on the subject." His condemnation of imperialism and colonialism, combined with
sympathy for its persecuted and suffering victims, was drawn from his Polish background, his
own personal sufferings, and the experience of a persecuted people living under foreign
occupation. Personal memories created in him a great sensitivity for human degradation and a
sense of moral responsibility.