Ungureanu Iulian

English- Romanian

Inovation and Experimentalism in English Modernist Fiction

At the end of the 19th Century Great Britain changed. Queen Victoria died after 63
years of rulling this huge Empire. Simbolicaly, this means the end of an era. It was also the
moment when the first BOER war started. This was one of the first proves that nothing in this
world is sure: a little force went against such a big empire as Great Britain. In the entire world
changes apeared, especialy in the mentality of the world. The view over the realation with
other is changed by Karl Marks, who said that evolution and change happened as a result of
social conflict, not of social harmony. Darwin changed the view over the relation with
Divinity and Freud over the relation of people with themselves.
These changes in the world caused also changes in literature. The end of the 19 th
century was the moment when Victorian Literature era reached its end. It was also the effect
of what Harold Bloom calls The anxiety of the influence. The Victorian period was the era
of great writters like Dickens, Bronthe sisters or Thomas Hardy. The fears of the new wave of
writters not to have an original work but one derivated from the existing literature made them
to change radicaly their view about literature in order to guarantee their survival into posterity.
When this happened, a new era started: Modern Literature.
The first wave of modernists have as exponents two of the greattest novelists of all
time: Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. They will try to write a new type of novel.
In my opinion, one of the most important features of modernism and modernist
literature is the fact that it rejects both the content and the form. If in previsious novels the
plot prevailed over other elements, now it is now longer important. More important than the
exterior world becomes the inner one. Thoughts and feelings are the substance of the text, not
the action. Now we can see more than ever into characters minds. Virginia Woolf, for
example, tried to capture how the word looks like from inside her characters minds. In To the
Lighthouse we can see into Lily Briscoes mind, but also in other characterss mind, in Mrs.
Dalloway we read about the eponym characters thoughts and Septimus ones and in The
Waves we can see the world from six different points of view, because the novel is made up

Ungureanu Iulian
English- Romanian

of soliloquies spoken by the book's six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and
Louis. We can also see this technique in Joyces novels. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man everything from the exterior world is filtered trough Stephen Dedalus mind. We see the
world as he sees it. More than that, Joyce used another innovative technique: the world is seen
from the Stephens perspective at different stages in his life. When he is a little child we see
the world as a child sees it. As Stephen growns up, the way in wich the world looks like is
changing. The fact that evryone have different perspective about the world is also suggested
by the title of the novel. It is A portret and not the portret. This may suggest that this novel
is one of many perspective about the artist.
The technique used to enter into characters minds is the stream of consciousness,
which is also specific to modernist literature and is part of their inovations. It is a style of
writing in which the narrator relates everything that happens in the main characters mind as it
occurs. In To the Lighthouse, for example, each section is fragmented into stream of
consciousness contributions from various narrators. Joyce was a pioneer of the stream of
consciousness technique. In the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where
were basically inside young Stephens head. The way in which Joyce decided to start his
novel made me fell confused, especialy because it was written in a childish way, presenting
Stephens thoughts when he was just a child. Even it is a bit confusing, this technique presents
human thoughts as they occur, without any processing. A character can think in complex
sentences, like Stephen Dedalus in final chapters of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
but his thoghts can also be a chain of phrases, like in Leopold Bloomss thoughts from the 8 th
episode of the novel Ulysses:Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugar-sticky girl
shovelling scoopful of creams for a Christian brother. Some school treat. Bad for their
tummies.
Another particularity of this technique, that can be confusing for readers is the fact that
the transition from the outside world to characters mind is made without any markers like

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He thought..., He wondered.... Joyce used in his novel a narrative style that combines
traditional
third person narrative with insights into a characters mind that resamble the first person. This
style is also called free indirect discourse. Even if Virginia Woolf and James Joyce wrote in
third person narative, they tried to avoid as much as possible the omniscience of the narrator.
Is well known the fact that both, Woolf and Joyce had bitter things to say about omniscience.
Another important feature of the modern novel, in my opinion, is the language used by
the authors. Language may vary in style like in Ulysses, where Joyce used a big numbers of
styles. In chapter Aeolus , for example, we have some newspaper headlines. Joyce also
used Dublin slang, early translations from Latin or satirised sentimental literature using its
style of writting. We can also see language in its development from early stages of life to
maturity in Joyces Portrait of the Artist. In its development we can see how language
evoluated from one of a little child with short senteces and many ellipses to a more and more
coplex language. Alongside with the stream of consciousness, this feature of the

novel

atracted me the most. The stream of consciousness is the closest description possible of the
way we are thinking. Language is different from person to person, depending on their level of
culture or on the domain in which they are working. What modernist writters did was trying to
show this differences in language and styles, they didn only use their own language but make
efforts to render these differrences. I think that these features bring the modernist novel closer
to reality than any other type of novel.
Space and time arent new features of the novel, but the way in which are used is
inovative. Modern writters are no longer interested in linear time. As Virginia Woolf said
Life is not a series of gig lamps. The modernist novel imports in this period elements from
cinema like flashbacks, flashforwards, slowmotion. The narator skipps in time, sometimes
over big periods in just one paragraph as we can see in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man. He can also narrate things from one day in a 200 pages novel like in Mrs Dalloway or
even over 700 in Ulysses. The fact that inner world is more important that the exterior one is

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English- Romanian

also reflected in the distribution of actions in time. In To the Lighthouse the action from part
one which happened in one evening and from part three which happened in one morning is
spread over several pages weather the second part presents the actions from 10 years in few
pages. Woolf paid more attention to her charcters thoughts than actions. Space is also vague.
Characters can migrate from a place to another by their stream of consciousness.
Another characteristic that is more important than the plot in the modernist novel are
motifs and symbols. Speaking about James Joyce in Axels Castel, Edmund Wilson says that
he is simbolic rather than narrative. His masterpiece, Ulysses is based on the Odyssey. Each
episode of the novel has its referent in Homers epic. The three big correlations are: Leopold
Bloom to Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus to Ulysses's son Telemachus, and Molly to Ulysses's wife
Penelope. Edmund Wilson also says about A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that it is a
simply series of pictures of Stephens life as successive stages of his developement. More
important that this stages are the beauty of surface and form and philosophical themes.
All this features together give modernist novels another important characteristic,
something that wast used before by novelists, something that give us, as readers a more
important role than before. Using all this techniques the writter made us take part at the
creation of the novel. A novel is not complete until it is filtered by readers mind. Giving us the
posibility to interpret events and to think hard to understand one of them modernist writters
make creators of the novel. The shiftings in time and space, the flashforwards, the stream of
consciousness keep us in a continous awarnesses.
Bibliography:
1. Edmund Wilson, Axels castel
2. Shmoop Editorial Team. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Shmoop
University, Inc. Last modified November 11, 2008. Accessed December 14, 2015.
http://www.shmoop.com/portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man/.
3. Shmoop Editorial Team. "Ulysses." Shmoop University, Inc. Last modified
November 11, 2008. Accessed December 14, 2015. http://www.shmoop.com/ulysses-joyce/.

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4. Shmoop Editorial Team. "The Waves." Shmoop University, Inc. Last modified
November 11, 2008. Accessed December 15, 2015. http://www.shmoop.com/the-waves
5. SparkNotes Editors. SparkNote on Mrs. Dalloway. SparkNotes LLC. 2004.
Accessed December 14, 2015. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/dalloway/
6. Shmoop Editorial Team. "To the Lighthouse." Shmoop University, Inc. Last
modified November 11, 2008. Accessed December 15, 2015. http://www.shmoop.com/to-thelighthouse/
7. SparkNotes Editors. SparkNote on To the Lighthouse. SparkNotes LLC. 2003.
Accessed December 14, 2015. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lighthouse/