Introduction: a new way of seeing reality
Modernism is the literary movement that, in the early twentieth century, broke with Victorian certainties and explored the fragmented inner life of the individual.
Between 1900 and 1940, English literature underwent a profound transformation caused by the trauma of the First World War, the decline of the British Empire and the rise of new sciences like psychoanalysis. Writers no longer trusted the omniscient narrator of the nineteenth-century novel, because the world itself had stopped feeling coherent, orderly and morally stable. They became fascinated by what happens inside the human mind, by the irregular flow of thoughts, sensations and memories that ordinary people experience every single moment. The philosopher Henri Bergson, with his idea of subjective time (la durée), and Sigmund Freud, with the discovery of the unconscious, deeply influenced this new artistic sensibility. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are the two greatest English-language voices of this revolution and they invented techniques that still shape contemporary fiction today.
James Joyce: the stream of consciousness and the epiphany
James Joyce (1882–1941), an Irish writer who spent most of his adult life in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, is famous for pushing language and narrative form to their extreme limits. In his short-story collection Dubliners (1914) he portrays the moral and spiritual paralysis of his native city through ordinary characters who suddenly experience an epiphany, a brief moment in which a banal detail reveals a deep truth about their lives. With Ulysses (1922) he then perfected the stream of consciousness, a technique that reproduces the continuous, unfiltered flow of a character's thoughts, often without punctuation, logical connections or grammatical correctness. The whole novel takes place on a single day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin, and parallels Leopold Bloom's wanderings with the structure of Homer's Odyssey. A concrete example: in the famous final monologue, Molly Bloom thinks in bed for about forty pages with almost no full stops, jumping from memories of her youth in Gibraltar to her husband's breakfast and back, exactly as the human mind really works at night. Joyce also uses the so-called interior monologue, which is similar but slightly more organised than pure stream of consciousness, and a rich symbolic structure based on classical myth.
Virginia Woolf: moments of being and time
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), a central member of the Bloomsbury Group in London, shares Joyce's interest in inner life but develops a more lyrical and philosophical approach. In Mrs Dalloway (1925) she follows Clarissa Dalloway during a single June day as she prepares a party, while in parallel the war veteran Septimus Warren Smith slides into madness and suicide; the two characters never meet, yet their consciousnesses are connected by the sound of Big Ben striking the hours. Woolf calls these illuminations moments of being, instants in which the curtain of daily routine lifts and the character perceives the hidden pattern of existence, in contrast to the dull moments of non-being that fill most of our lives. She uses the indirect interior monologue, where the third-person narrator slips fluidly in and out of different minds, and she opposes clock time, called chronological time, to mental time, the subjective duration in which a few seconds can contain an entire childhood. In her feminist essay A Room of One's Own (1929) she also argues that women need economic independence and physical space in order to write fiction, a claim that still resonates strongly today.
Ricorda
- Modernism rejects the omniscient narrator and explores the fragmented inner life through stream of consciousness, interior monologue and a non-linear treatment of time.
- Joyce centres his work on Dublin, the epiphany and a mythical structure, reaching his most radical experiment in Ulysses (1922).
- Woolf focuses on moments of being, on the contrast between clock time and mental time, and on a feminist reflection on writing in A Room of One's Own.
Esercizio attivo sul quaderno: scrivi un breve paragrafo (circa 80 parole) in inglese in cui racconti dieci minuti della tua giornata scolastica usando la tecnica dello stream of consciousness, poi sottolinea in rosso un'eventuale epiphany e in blu un moment of being, spiegando in italiano la differenza tra i due concetti.