Culture and consciousness in the twentieth century English novel: 1900-1930
-Between 1900 and 1930 revolutionary developments took place in the English
novel and it caused a rethinking of the relationship between fiction and reality. This
era is known as modernism.
Culture and reality: James and Conrad-Joseph Conrad (
1857-1924) and Henry James (1843-1916) both of whom first published in the 19 th
century( earliest of great modernist novelist writing in English)
-James is American, Conrad is Pole and both chose to settle in England.
-The collision of different cultures was an important theme for James and Conrad.
-The relation of America to Europe is a central concern of James’ fiction in many
works such as: The portrait of a lady(1881), The wings of the Dove(1902) and Daisy
Miller(1887).
-James was a cosmopolitan not only in theme but also in influences on his work
(Jane Austen, G. Eliot, N. Hawthorne, Balzac and Turgenev)
-Conrad has a wide range of cultures.
-His prose style has influences of the 19 th century French writers Maupassant and
Flaubert.
-Heart of Darkness(1902) has many features of modernist fiction, such as: nihilism
and despair, the fascination with the unconscious, a symbolic richness which gives
multiple interpretations.
-Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) and John Galsworthy(1867-1933) write in the
accepted realist mode, using an omniscient narrator, a chronologically sequential
narrative and the accumulation of details of social and public life.
-Freud has an enormous influence on modern literature.
-Henri Bergson(1859-1941) distinguished two “times” different, one is the scientific
time(mathematical, abstract) and the other is the real duration(our direct experience of
time as a flowing).
- James developed ( in practice in his work) the use of an observing
consciousness.
-Narrator( the narrating voice) x reflector (the character whose point of view orients
the narrative perspective).
-The various manipulations of narrator and reflector are very good sources of irony.
History and art: Lawrence and Woolf
-history x novel
-history as an objective series of public events x novel as an art form which may
represent, ignore or fictionalize them.
-history as a narrative and its relation with the novel as more reciprocal.
-modernism, sometimes, is accused of ignoring historical and social realities.
-modernist fiction–period of historical crisis.
-Lawrence(1885-1930) writes about the history of the development of human
consciousness and the unconscious life.
-The Rainbow (1915), Women in love(1921)
-Lawrence’s novels’ characteristics : symbolism, repetition of imagery and the use
of sustained passages of highly poetic yet often abstract language.
-A feature of modernism narratives is to order their material by symbol, pattern or
metaphor.
-Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
-To the Lighthouse(1927) was described as a psychological poem( consciousness
is privileged)
-It’s divided into 3 parts.
-Virginia Wolf was very important to the feminist writing.
-The Waves(1931), The voyage out(1915), Mrs. Dalloway(1925).
Phases of modernism: Forster and Joyce
-1st phase of modernism ending around the beginning of World War I.
-In the first decade of the century we have the 3 last great novels by James, most
of Conrad’s major fiction and the first two novels of E.M. Forster(1879-1970)
-Forster’s works contain both modernist and Victorian elements.
-Howards End(1910) in this novel the English society is divided between the
business world and the world of culture and the emotions. A symbolic reconciliation is
suggested by the marriage of the chief member of each group.
-A Passage to India(1924) is more symbolic and less schematic than Howards End
and it belongs to the later post-war phase of modernism.
-Lawrence, Joyce and Woolf are the main figures of the post-war phase.
-Joyce’s Dubliners(1914) has influence on the modern short story in English.
-Joyce inaugurates in English the oblique, laconic short story (that’s a French
influence) later developed by Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961).
-A Portrait of the Artist as a young man(1916) and Lawrence’s Sons and
Lovers(1913) both have a primary interest in the psychological and intellectual
development of a young man.
-Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) - central text of modernism. It combines mythical and
literary allusions, parody and pastiche, punning and humour, with a powerful sense of
the infinite complexity and subtlety of the individual’s emotional and intellectual life.
-Ulysses was banned in England until 1936 on grounds of obscenity.
The realist tradition: Bennett, Galsworthy, Wells
-In terms of influences and subjects matter there are some similarities between the
realists and the modernists.
-Bennett was influenced by French and Russian novelists and Wells, in his
scientific romances he shows a sense of apocalyptic and of the impact of war and
technology on 20th century society.
-Bennett’s regional settings connects him with the regional realistic of the 1950s.
-Wells was a pioneer of science fiction( The war of the worlds (1898) and The first
men in the moon(1901))
-Bennett’s The old wives tales(1908) and Riceyman Steps(1923) contains telling
studies of ordinary lives. He “tells” information rather than “shows” it.
-Galsworthy was very famous and successful during his lifetime.
-The most general criticism of his work is that his satire is often lacking in focus
and rigour.
-Wells was very versatile writer of fiction and journalism.
1920s satire: Lewis, Huxley and Waugh
-In Aldous Huxley’s, Wyndham Lewis’ and Evelyn Waugh’s works we can see a
vein of tragicomic satire.
-These authors dealt with dehumanization and the dissolution of the self in their
works.
-Lewis was an artist, philosopher, editor and a novelist
- He was a leading spirit of Vorticism ( an anti-realist movement in art, based on
jagged, rhythmical, mechanistic forms)
-The Vorticism principles are reflected in Lewis’ novel such as: Tarr (1918), in
which he describes men as comic because they were “things” behaving as persons.
-Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow(1921) at first is a novel of ideas, similar in form to
the novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866). Dennis Stone, the protagonist of
Crome Yellow is an anti-hero, weak and ineffectual.
-The hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Falls(1928) is a shadow, passively
enduring a series of outrageous injustices and misfortunes.
-The works of these authors show the problem of how to live in a society which
seems meaningless.
-The stance of the implied author varies: Huxley tends to include some equivalent
for himself in the novel. Waugh is detached and invisible, Lewis is outraged, polemical
and assertive.
-These authors represent a powerful alternative vision of the modern condition.