MODERNIST ATTITUDES IN NOVEL
When we build up a given period for special study the twentieth century or the modern period we carry out an admittedly arbitrary study. Late nineteenth century writers and critics defended the study of separated historical periods, on the assumption that coherent cultural periods had a different concensus, or spirit of the times, and that spirit could be observed in any tiny part of time or group of artifacts chosen for study. It depends on a faith that objective knowledge of history, and certain cumulative progress embodied in the march of history. The twentieth century has abandoned the belief in that kind of traditional historicism, but not giving up the need for literary history (Kershner, p.31). The idea of literary modernism seems to be incessantly controversial. It is undeniable that literary forms undergo drastic changes at the beginning of the twentieth century, but polemics about the prominence of the changes still continue. In this study, modern British novel will be examined in terms of narrative technique, time, and subject by referring to certain modern novels.
While studying a literary work time when it is created is crucial. Thus, before examining novels, it will be useful to have information about modern times and modernism. If it is chosen the year 1900 as a dividing line, it will be seen that some interesting items that hint at a large change. In 1900, Max Planck first set forth the quantum theory that is essential to nuclear physics. William Crookes separated out uranium. Gregor Mendel’s work on heredity was rediscovered. Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published. The Labor Party, basically a part of protest against middle-class policies that was based on working-class support, was founded in England. First zeppelin flew and the first wireless speech was sent. Queen Victoria died after a lifetime spanning nearly a century. The turn of the century itself stimulated a sense of crisis and discontinuity. New movements such as; the New Spirit, New Paganism, New Realism, and New Drama in arts, and New Woman Figure emerged. As Henry Adams says ‘’My historical neck broken by the irruption of forces totally new. Man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old.’’ The quality of life changed as well. With modern mass transit system, electrified trams and use of alarm clocks, rationalization of working hours, and traffic jams were seen. Telegraph, telephone, mass media, influential newspapers, cinema, and radio came out. In the late nineteenth century, low-priced magazines and book editions became feasible and late nineteenth century Education Acts in England were working in a new readership. The social sciences or human sciences were progressing with the help of John Dewey and Max Weber’s attempts. Recent critics argued that the twentieth century got a huge change in the grounds of knowledge. Jacques Derrida denotes that ‘’There is a rupture a moment around the turn of the century in which language invaded the universal problematic and everything became discourse.‘’ The major modernist achievements emerged in the 1920s. For instance, James Joyce’s Ulysess was published along with T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land; Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.
The most common usage of the word modernism appeals to the work of writers who brought a self-conscious avant-garde. Especially T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrance, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce are prominent. None of them are regarded as true modernist throughout their careers. In general 1920s are considered as hesitant mark of modernism. Most modernist artists agreed about what they reject. They were tired of old subjects and old artistic forms, and Pound’s dictum ‘’Make it new’’ would be subscribed to by most modernists (Kershner, p.31-38).
Writers exiled themselves in one way or another by identifying themselves with the working class like George Orwell, by leaving the country like Robert Graves, or by pursuing strange gods like Aldous Huxley to single out one in a crowd. The complex of ideas, values, and relations no longer were written. To write anything of moment seemed writers plausible to cut themselves free from the cultural imperialism. The most general common characteristic of the modernist writers was alienated relations to their own cultures (Stade, p.1-5).
Time has shown up as one of the main issues that need to be considered in contemporary fiction. It has arisen in the context of big cultural changes. In the twentieth century one of the most important effects on literature’s exploration of time was the collection of radical sciences called the ‘New Physics’. With the emergence of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, the conception of time has changed. As Kant says “Time is a merely subjective condition of our intuition, and in itself, independently of the mind or subject, is nothing.” According to Husserl the self only has meaning as a creation in time. Nguyen asserts that “No longer determined by either organic or cosmic cycles of time, Greenwich time is a mathematical fiction which signals the collapse of human experience of space and time into a mathematical formula (p.33). The adoption of a standardized time can be considered time can be considered to have benefits. But, some sociologists state that its application by industry caused alienation. Cottrell’s study Of Time and the Railworker (1939), took the railway as its focus, examining the ways in which train divers had become enslaved by the industry’s timetabled regime. Samely, in Sons and Lovers time is an important figure. The story is set in the early 1900s during the industrial revolution. By using this specific time, Lawrence provides context for the relationships, events, and behaviours in the novel. In To The Lighthouse time is not mentioned classically. Time is placed in certain moments, which entirely distorts it from the clock time. Time is measured by people’s experiences. In the novel ten years is covered in a few pages. Time is both lasted and compressed.
In those years there were two contradictory developments. We observe that rows of critiques of universal and precise time being taken up (one of the most notorious is Einstein’s theory). Whereas, in work places we see the definite imposition of such an abstract and dehumanized model of time on lots of ordinary people. In fictional text of the period, author’s explorations of imagination are opposed to the inhuman strictness of industrial time. Lawrence’s Women in Love, and Huxley’s Brave New World are considered as examples in which industry and time forms are given. It shows us that writers find themselves resisting to dominance of time (Morrison, p.27-29). As Stevenson asserts, during 1920s time was a fashionable discourse and conscious theme among writers. As a result of radical compression of time, use of allusion, and verbal collage have been seen (Kershner, p.57).
Narrative technique is another aspect in modern fiction. A narrative is a kind of retelling of something happened in a story. It is not the story itself, but the telling of the story. While a story is a sequence of events, a narrative recounts those events. It shapes the story. The theorist Paul Ricoeur examines the relationships between narrative and experience of time in a way that asserts the dispersive strategies of modern fiction into relief. The important aspect of narrative in social and personal lives is to affirm the commonality of our temporary impressions. Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence (Ricoeur, p.52). Time shouldn’t be considered as a linear process, but as a versatile construction. Between cosmic time, historical time, and personal time, our experience of time can be discordant and unsettling. Aim of narration is to link these different levels of understanding of time, creating a sense of continuity.
In contemporary fiction; the comforting coherent, linear historical frames characteristic of realist fiction have often been replaced by more fractured and unsettling narrative forms. According to some writers new ways of exploring the relations between time, history, and subjectivity have to be found in a narrative form (Morrison, p.34). For instance, in Sons and Lovers retrospective point of view is used via flashbacks, the narration is flourished. Lawrence’s style of narration in describing the world of Paul’s childhood makes it clear that the story itself endorses Paul’s own viewpoint. As Paul moves into the foreground of the story, the father is set back into the background. Lawrence uses this method to strengthen the protagonist’s own attitudes. His narrative technique mixes the character’s direct personal thoughts with the narrator’s indirect reporting. The pronoun “I” is not employed for hero, but author has lived so completely within his hero that the narrative read like an autobiography (Niazi, p.125). In To the Lighthouse we see the free indirect discourse. In the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, it is defined as a manner of presenting the thoughts or uttarances of a fictional character as if from that character’s point of view by combining grammatical and other features of the character’s direct speech with features of the narrator’s indirect report. For instance;
“There will be no landing at the Lighthouse tomorrow.” said Charles Tansley, clapping his hands together. Surely, he had said enough. She wished they would both leave her hand and James alone and go on talking.” We can guess whose thought is being recounted in free indirect discourse; most probably it is Mrs. Ramsay. But it is not certain. While reading such a novel, we find
ourselves filling in the blanks, making concrete the ambiguities, and thinking who is to be thinking what.
In modern novels narration is a masking of identity and a confounder of truth. Conrad uses repetition of narrative patterns, stories of loss, and defeat mechanically repeating themselves. Lawrence applies narrative disjunction, stark, unimagined breaks between events. Woolf uses mutable consciousness variation in the freefloating, where the human gets over itself and creates ties with the nonhuman. Beckett employs ample demonstration of how human fallibility and importance extend to all productions of the mind.
Twentieth century art is influenced by war with common themes of alienation, isolation, and fragmentation. Alienated relationship, disordered world, discontinuous selves, discredited authorities, and ruined time are the main subjects used in contemporary novel.
When we considered the World War I, it affected people deeply. A number of towns were destroyed, and families uprooted. Contemporary poetry, short story, drama, and novel have a common theme which is theme of feeling alone. Much of the writings are marked by deep, psychological trauma. The novel of twenties is the virtual disappearance of main character of the classical novel. It sees the end of earlier functional humanism and of the socially approved hero, who becomes instead anti-hero, the rebel or the galvanized puppets of their authors’ transcendental ideas. In Huxley’s works, the modern man is searching for spiritual and psychological balance, but it is really hard for him to reach this inner peace, because of his wrong attitudes. In Sons and Lovers recreating parts from Lawrence’s own experience are handled. Not only concerns it with childhood and adolescence, but also fear, shame, self-consciousness, emotional hypersensitivity, sexual awakening, and the hubristic certainty. Most probably, Lawrence was aware of Freud. He grasped the basics of psychoanalytic theory and heard through Frieda of the term Oedipus complex. As Terry Eagleton suggests, the year 1912, when Lawrence finished the novel saw the largest ever miners’ strike in England. The working class life is put in the novel. Lawrence was not just writing about the working class but writing his way out of it. Clara is a feminist figure. Miriam complaints about opportunities denied her through fact of being born a woman. Lawrence may not give feminism the platform it deserves, but he alleges its presence nonetheless (Morrison).
During contemporary period fathers, fatherlands, principles of authority, conventions and traditions were still alive, but denigrated. English modernists looked toward psychology, anthropology, and physics. They looked around them new occasions. Virginia Woolf says: “We are sharply cut off from our predecessors. Every day we find ourselves doing, or thinking things that would have been impossible to our fathers. No age can have been more rich in writers determined to give expression to the differences which separate them from the past and not to the resemblances which connect them with it. Tell Arnold Bennett that all rules of construction hold good only for novels which are copies of other novels.” (Stade, p.9-11). Literary modernism is the point at which philosophical interests go into their own. Philosophical concerns are in a sense formative of modernism. In philosophical terms, human is no longer related with humanism, in literary terms, it is considered as loss of narrativity (Sheehan, p.17). With Eliot’s new theory of meaning, a synthesis occurs in which meaning is neither exclusively subjective nor objective, but rather a product of multiple perspectives (Levenson, p.184). Working class writes wrote novels which proved their own displacement by editing voyages of self-discovery. Work, forms the sense of belonging of writers, and of their protagonists; books create identity. Identity comes out through denial of allegiance which is the most favourite genre for working class writer (Trotter, p.34).
Literature has always been in our lives. One can convey his ideas, feelings, and thoughts through literature. Sometimes pleasures, sometimes complaints are uttered via it. It has always been in progress. History, economy, sociology, experiences, scientific developments and human psychology shape the form and content of literature. From past to present different kinds of literary genres have been seen. Although novel is a new genre when it is compared to other literary forms, it has been one of the most prominent and favoured one. Problems of a period, lifestyle, and reactions of people reflected by means of writer in certain novels. In twentieth century wars and progress in social and scientific learnings affected people deeply. This redounded on novel. In this study modern fiction is analyzed in terms of time, narration, and subjects. Changing concepts of them are examined by appealing to some writers and novels.
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