I.

THE MODERN ERA SOCIAL, CULTURAL, ARTISTIC AND

INTELLECTUAL INTERACTION

At the turn of the century a new movement was beginning to find shape and
momentum: modernism. In literature, as in history, what looks sudden is usually born
out of a long process. As the critical term is retrospective, the break itself is difficult
to point in time but it affected art, literature, philosophical attitudes, social values,
politics and science. Thus modernism has no easily identifiable starting date, it grew
as a response to the world`s social and intellectual changes.
The remaking of human ideas and expectations round the turn of centuries is
not new. New forms and styles were shaping everywhere. The idea of the modern
took on more and more meaning: there was talk of the modern city, modern
architecture, modern science, modern man, the modern woman, modern
consciousness, the modern soul. Writers and thinkers weighed the modern question;
late Victorian sages like Flaubert, John Stuart Mill, Zola, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Kirkegaard
and Nietzsche the world historical figures the Danish critic Georg Brandes called
the men of the Modern breakthrough aimed to express and explore the distinctive
character of the new: its break with past ties, faith and traditions, its will to bring a
new consciousness to birth. [Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel,
Secker&Warburg, London: 1993, p.4]
The wave of changes at the turn of the last century brought about with it a re-
examination of the social, economic and physical bases of society. This process of re-
evaluation was intensified by World War I and the latest advances of science.
Socially, the period between1910-1930 was one of widespread turmoil and
suffering. When the crash came in 1914, aside from the crippling loss of lives, it
contributed to the sense of radical newness of the apocalyptic and of destruction and
desolation. The surface changes that had taken place were obvious: London, Paris and
Berlin were the triple hubs of the capitalist, industrialized world, where the
technological revolution resulted in a great number of key technical innovations.
The process of urbanization produced a huge gap between city, which had
grown larger and dirtier, and country. The routines of urban life became increasingly
dominated by the rigid routines of the office and factory. Living in sterile, crowded
urban environments, modern man often finds himself isolated from his neighbour,

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alienated from meaningful achievements in a mechanized setting, and deprived of
individual freedom. [Ronald T. Sion, op.cit., p.10]
People were now using all the gadgets of transportation and communication
brought about by technological advances. [Milton Birnbaum, op.cit., p.20] But, it was
alarming, that man became more involved in a competition of mere acquisition, while
life was losing depth and value. The individual was overwhelmed and subjugated to
colossal, dehumanizing forces of industry, commerce and production, worsened by
the loss of faith in religious values, another disintegrating force. Mechanical,
disintegrated, amorphous: these are the continuing key words to describe the effect of
the industrial priorities on individuals and on the whole society. [Raymond Williams,
Culture and Society, London: The Hogarth Press, 1993, p.201] The dilemmas of the
modern age, associated with the human quest for meaning and fulfillment, affected
both society in general and writers in particular.
An essential hypothesis in the development of the idea of culture is that the
art of a period is closely and necessarily related to the generally prevalent way of
life; and further that, in consequence, aesthetic, moral and social judgements are
closely interrelated. [Raymond Williams, op.cit., p.130]
If literature is important to history, it is not because it serves as a social
document or as a footnote to political or intellectual history, but primarily because it
addresses the major issues of its time. The value of any idea rests not merely in the
fact that it is talked about at length and in detail, but rather in its having been realized
formally, given meaning by an artist sensitive to both its formal and its moral
implications. Literature helps us to see the reality of any idea in a full, clear and
meaningful form. [Frederick Hoffman, The Twenties: American Writing in the
Postwar Decade, London: Macmillan, 1962, p.XI]
Any account of the innovative work in music, painting, literature and the
subsequent changes in artistic technique, necessarily shows the importance of the
intellectual context in which such ideas were current, their relationship with profound
shifts in intellectual assumptions that challenged the stable, predictable world of the
nineteenth century.

To live, as we do, in a knowledge explosion, is both inspiring and terrifying. The world of
men has become so small that the stress upon us is very great. We know that all human
communities lag behind the knowledge that has recently become available and our closeness

2
to one another has made us sensitively aware that some lag more than others. [Laurence
Brander, Aldous Huxley: A Critical Study,, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969, p.145]

One of the underlying conditions for a period of artistic innovation is a reaction

against the past, a sense of contrast with what had gone before, which is also a
symptom of profound changes in dominant states of mind and feeling. In a time of
cultural upheaval, the mental world of men of letters and scientists is the incentive for
the development of central ideas, such as those specific to Modernism. The ideas that
the Modernists took from Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud and others entailed a cultural
revolution whose effects are still with us. The concrete results of the effects of
science, increased mechanization and Freudian psychology... are most clearly felt in
the works of Joyce, D.H.Lawrence, V. Woolf, E.M.Forster, Aldous Huxley.
The ideas of the unconscious, of intuition, of the necessary evolution of art, of
the expression of thoughts which are not dependent upon linear progression, of the
relationship of abstraction to the real world, as well as concepts like intuition and
expression, or subjectivity and inner division, or harmony and rhythm are part
of a changing framework of ideas - which can only be understood in a European
context - inspired stylistic change in Modernist work in all the arts. [Christopher
Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, pp.XVI,16]
The conditions for revolutionary change involved in particular a general
atmosphere of skepticism - i.e. critical examination of artistic modes of discourse,
skeptical distance from social norms and withdrawal from social consensus - which
prompted a basic examination of the languages of arts.
The intellectual climate was just as important as historical, political and social
events, and much of the ideology had been available before the war. The modernist
era was inspired by the Industrial Revolution and began in the middle of the
nineteenth century. By the start of the twentieth century, the pace of the technological
development accelerated appreciably. Industrialization within a capitalistic free-
enterprise system tends to stress individual competition, mastery and progress. Mass
production and technological innovations dramatically increased society`s control of
the environment and seemed to hold the potential for unlimited social improvement.
The sciences, particularly the new human sciences such as psychology, seemed to be
an essential part of the process. Psychology and related disciplines could explore and

3
discover aspects of human behaviour that help people adapt to the new technology.
Scientific knowledge was seen as an indispensable part of a better society.
The intellectual life was extremely influential and the contemporary
developments in philosophy and science challenged the stable predictable world of
the nineteenth century. As early as 1905, Einstein radically questioned assumptions
about the character and interrelation of space and time [Randall Stevenson, The
British Novel Since the Thirties, B.T.Batsford Ltd., London: 1987, p.23] formulating
his special theory of relativity. His inference that all values and measurements should
be seen as dependent upon the point of view of the observer may have encouraged
reliance on an intervening first person singular, an intensive perceiver as the
subjective center of the novel. Einstein`s suggestion that time was not an
independent universal order, but dependent for its measurement and understanding
upon the perspective of the individual, bears comparison with the increasingly
internalised chronologies of Joyce and Woolf. [Randall Stevenson, The British Novel
Since the Thirties, B.T.Batsford Ltd., London: 1987, p.23]
The arts also reflected the themes of progress, individualism, and control.
Modern architecture expressed control of the environment through its slogan form
follows function. Abstract paintings and sculptures reflected individual achievements
and the uniqueness of each artist`s private identity. Modern literature conveyed
individualism through a diversity of themes and styles. Success often depended on a
unique innovation that made previous trends seem old-fashioned and passe. Overall,
the movement of modernity held the promise of a utopian future based on unlimited
growth and economic development, and challenged the conventions of middle-class
society. [Gary Collier, Henry L.Minton, Graham Reynolds, Currents of Thought in
American Social Psychology, Oxford University Press, 1991, p.267] What needs to be
emphasized is that the nature of this intellectual and artistic change can only be
understood in a European context and in relation to all the arts.
The artistic life of the early 1920s witnessed an unprecedented upheaval. In
December 1902, Paris was already the capital of progressive vitality and innovation in
the arts, and it was to remain indissolubly linked with the modernist movement. Great
artists were working there and many others were drawn to the city. The innovative
artist responds to basic and recurrent problems of a philosophical character, centered
on representation, personal identity, our relationship to the biographical past, the
growth in secularization, the ways in which works of art may be related to general

4
conceptions of language, logical versus irrational processes, and emotions which may
work at a subconscious level. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p.275] None of these are
simply aesthetic problems. They are of general philosophical, epistemological,
ethical and hence political concern, and the art they provoked thereby earns a
particular standing in our awareness of the past.
In or about December 1910, human character changed, said Virginia Woolf.
This was the year when Roger Fry organized the first postimpressionist exhibition in
London, later styled as the earth-quake of 1910. This enterprise scored a spectacular
success as an incentive and put the names of such avant-garde painters as Cezanne,
Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso and Matisse on the map, and it caused an enraged
conservative critic to admit that art has become a viral matter. [Ian Scott Kilvert
general editor, British Writers, vol.7 (Sean O`Cassey to Poets of World War II), New
York: Charles Scribner`s Sons, 1984, p.XII]
In music Stravinsky was the most prominent figure among the new wave of
composers, which also included G. Mahler, Richard Strauss; for twentieth century
music, this is the most exciting and influential period, with Debussy, Ravel in France,
Schoenberg in Vienna, and Bartok in Hungary.
As new ideas spread, they brought about profound stylistic changes in the arts
all over Europe, they were adapted to native cultural traditions and to the individual
artistic temperament. The innovatory work can exert, once it is appreciated, a
retrospective influence. It can recast our understanding of the past so that we see it as
anticipating innovation.
This is because the relationship of the innovative artist to the past is often one
of rediscovery, so that progress may depend on breaking line and hopping over one`s
immediate predecessors.
One of the major phases of innovation is that of radical change to the language of an
art entailed by different aspects of a changing experience that may have an equal
claim on us, in perception and in art. The artist`s acquisition of a language is a
means towards the development and mastery of a style, and the concept of language
applies to the non-verbal arts as well, in so far as the painter or musician become
competent in mastering the painterly or harmonic conventions of a particularly past
period or style. Technique and style are terms independent from each other,
because the individual artist learns technique, whereas an already acceptable style
may be found. The mastery of any style presupposes the acquisition of some

5
technique, even when the style is merely being imitated, so technique is the ability to
control the elements of an artistic language, in the process of creating a style. This
process of style creation, in the absence of previously accepted consensual languages,
was felt to be as radical in music and painting as in literature, e.g. Debussy`s and
Cezanne`s influence on their arts. In Debussy`s Prelude a l`apres-midi d`un faune,
there is for the first time in music... no thematic development, no thread of a logical
discourse, but instead a purely sensuous flow of harmony and a new elusive poetry of
instrumental timbre, a continuous process of transformation, fragmentation and
regeneration of harmonic and melodic particles. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p.11]
Christopher Palmer`s assessment points to technical changes such as: the renunciation
of thematic development, and a purely sensuous flow of harmony, which made for a
new, fragmentary and unstable language for music. His music lacks the conventional
harmonic thread of logical discourse. Cubists, Surrealists, Futurists, Dadaists, Abstract
Expressionists -all performed versions of the same enterprise, i.e. fragmenting
conventional standards of representation.
Cezanne, in his turn, produced paintings at the turn of the century which
enforced an awareness in the viewer of a new kind of interrelationship between their
elements, an awareness indeed of the language of the work; the viewpoint in the
objects is simply not consistent; it is as if the artist had moved out. [Christopher
Butler, op.cit., pp. 13-14]

Emile Bernard had recognized, in 1904, Cezanne`s distortion of detail, and how far
this feature of his work had taken him beyond Impressionism, in the raising of form towards
a decorative conception and of colour towards the most musical pitch. So that as the artist
works on, the further he gets from objectivity, from the opacity of the model he started from,
and the deeper he goes in to sheer painting for its own sake; the more he abstracts his picture,
the more broadly he simplifies it, after a narrow, conforming, hesitant commencement.
[ibidem]

We can see that no one version can claim to be adequate to the complexity of the
objects it aims to represent. In a variety of fields, previous, conventional views were
challenged by modern thought.

In physics, quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle made it clear that our knowledge
could never be complete. The very act of observation transformed the reality we wished to
describe. Meanwhile, psychoanalysis turned the entire scientific project inward while
modernism in the arts undermined the stability of the objective world-picture. All this tended
to draw attention to the observer rather than the observed. The truth of the world could be
seen to reside less and less in a universe of matter out there, rather it must be definable only in

6
the relationship between the observer and the observed, between out there and in here.[ Bryan
Appleyard, The Pleasures of Peace, London: Faber&Faber, 1990, p.222]

Kandinsky, an originator of abstract painting, is another example of an artist

influenced by a matrix of ideas. For him, the rhythmic composition of a painting by
Matisse had an internal life and consequently a sound. But this may only be
perceived if the viewer`s soul is mature enough to perceive the pure inner sound of
this line. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p.37]
The harmony of a painting can tune up the soul. He takes from Steiner and
other theosophists a theory of electrical vibrations, which are given off by particular
thoughts and feelings, and are communicable to the initiated through colours and
forms. The personality of the artist can transmit such thoughts into the picture, which
then broadcasts its own spiritual vibrations, much like a musical source transmits
waves of sound, so that colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is
the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays... to cause vibrations in
the soul. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p.37] With Kandinsky reason, consciousness,
purpose play an overwhelming part. But of the calculation nothing appears: only the
feeling. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p.39]

Kandinsky`s paintings are progressively more abstract and reliant on subconscious feeling.
The Impression is a direct impression of outward nature, expressed in purely pictorial form;
the Improvisation is a largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of inner character, the
non-material nature; and the Composition is the expression of a slowly formed inner feeling,
which comes to utterance only after long maturing. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p.39]

His work depends in its appeal to the unconscious upon a general theory of the mind
which was to attempt to dominate the literary culture of the Modernist period. The
image avoids any merely accurate reproduction of the external world, it relies instead
upon the psychologically ineffable; subjectivism, intuition, and Gestalt expression are
to the fore.
In January 1911 Kandinsky and his friend the painter Franz Marc heard a
concert of Schoenberg`s music; Marc described his reactions to the concert in a letter
to his friend August Macke, also a painter. It enthusiastically endorses the parallel
between painterly abstraction and music, and it also explains the concept of atonality.
Atonal music disrupts conventional syntactical expectations, i.e. the melodic phrases
within the musical sentence. His music seemed to be in a perpetual flux. By writing a
symphony for chamber ensemble, Schoenberg could develop to an unprecedented

7
degree of complexity the contrapuntal interplay; he attempts to synthesize so many
past procedures here, that the form itself begins to come apart. A new type of unity is
attempted here, by putting the major themes of the work into all sorts of contrapuntal
relationship with one another. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p.49] It is important to note
that Schoenberg claims to have profited in doing this from the miraculous
contribution of the subconscious, which forged for him relationships between the
themes of the work of which he was not consciously aware in the process of
composition. An emancipated harmonic system thus allows the composer not so
much to create as to discover relationships between its parts, uninhibited by the need
to observe conventional methods of unification, or awareness of audience response.
The events of his music ultimately depend upon an intuitive free association. Some of
his musical pieces are an early example of a formal principle which is central to much
Modernist work - that of juxtaposition. Conflicting elements are presented, not as an
ellipsis awaiting expansion, but with any linking wholly suppressed. [ Christopher
Butler, op.cit., p.54]

This music seeks to express all that dwells in us subconsciously like a dream; which is a great
fluctuant power, and is built upon none of the lines that are familiar to us; which has a
rhythm, as the blood has a pulsating rhythm, as all life in us has its rhythm; which has a
tonality, but only as the sea or storm has its tonality; which has harmonies, though we cannot
grasp or analyse them nor can we trace its themes. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p.54]

The Cubist achievement in Paris had an extraordinary influence on perceptions of the

Modernist movement in all the arts. It has been argued that modern art does not
begin at any identifiable point, but the modern situation of art undoubtedly began with
Cubism. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p. 70]
Many artists of the early decades of the twentieth century - especially
experimental music and painting - claimed that their art was intended to be
independent of normal thought processes, and aimed at a transformation of
consciousness, to be achieved often enough through the liberation of the unconscious.
And so the nature of the unconscious became an issue central to the development of
Modernist art. A deep philosophical change was taking place, so that Modernism, as it
became a movement, developed not just an implicit aesthetic, but made equally
challenging assumptions about the nature of the artist and the psychological responses
for which the new art might call. The development of new languages for the arts was
therefore part of a larger trend of change in ideas about the human nature and a wager

8
wish to try out new suggestions regarding the nature of man - his personal beliefs,
convictions, or way to salvation.
Many of the philosophical and psychological concerns of the early decades of
the twentieth century focus on the nature of personal identity. Among the new
philosophical outlooks that began to react by redefining the nature of existence and
the essence of human personality, Friedrich Nietzsche - the founder of modern
ontology - marks a step forward towards the reassertion of the individual. My
hypothesis. says Nietzsche, is the subject as multiplicity. His argument is the use
of political metaphors to describe a self, which he sees as inherently divided, into a
multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and
our consciousness in general. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p. 92]
One of the most pervasive influences on twentieth century thought in general
and literary theory in particular is Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis; he
has been an immensely seminal force in the widest range of social contexts.
Psychoanalysis regards mind as being in some way intrinsically connected with body.
It upholds the view that human behaviour can be viewed developmentally, i.e. adult
behaviour can be interpreted as an elaboration or evolution of infantile behaviour, and
that complex higher forms of behaviour can be interpreted as elaborations of
simple, primitive behaviour patterns and drives. [Charles Rycroft, A Critical
Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Penguin Books: 1995, p.7]
Freud`s method of interpretation moves toward a Nietzschean preoccupation
with the role of archaic impulse within the psyche. For as the dream narrative is
scientifically explained and systematized as an allegory, within which incidental
detail can always be significant, its levels of interpretation emerge as the manifest
and the latent content of the dream, once the psychical material that has been
suppressed comes to light. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p. 93]
What Freud shares with the modernism of the first two decades of the century
is the belief that the culture around us needs to confront mythical and patriarchal
orders form the past, a position common to Jung and many others. Moreover, Freud
approves of von Hartmann`s idea that the association of ideas in artistic creation is
governed by the unconscious, and the self emerges as the site of internal conflicts
between primeval instinct and cultural authority, so that civilized behaviour is
perpetually threatened from within. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p. 94]

9
 A number of works of this period with artists as their central characters test out
these ideas about the nature of the subjective, and the internalized conflict between
the civilised and the regressively primitive. They also begin to exploit broadly
Freudian cultural assumptions, about the ways in which self-revelation, through
dream, metaphor and symbol, might take place in the text as in dreams, and the new
assumptions about the nature of language seem fully justified. The central assumption
was summarized by Ernst Cassirer in 1925: all mental processes fail to grasp reality
itself, and in order to represent it, to hold it at all, they are driven to the use of
symbols. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p. 104] Where literal language gives out, we are
driven to symbol, in the dream and in literature.
The language of Modernist literature begins to be seen as capable of taking on
new types of implication, concerning the underlying motivation of its authors and
their personae; and also to adapt experimentalist modes of expression to the more
precise tracking of actual - i.e. elliptical, disjointed, juxtapository - mental processes,
phenomenon outlined in The Principles of Psychology (1890). The William Jamesian
stream-of-consciousness became one of the most characteristic devices of Modernism.
It refers to a technique of writing that captures images, emotions, it represents the
movement of thoughts and impressions as they flow through the mind. The first to use
it was Edouard Dujardin in Les Lauriers Sont Coupee, and later Dorothy Richardson,
James Joyce, V. Woolf, Marcel Proust, W. Faulkner. The introspection of the
Modernist protagonist is more and more distanced from the rationalist lucidity of their
nineteenth century predecessors and the Modernist hero is far more threatened by
disintegration, under the pressures diagnosed by Ibsen, Nietzsche, Freud and many
others.
One of the pressures exerted upon the individual was the industrial wealth
versus spiritual poverty, a pessimism about the nature of civilisation. The sense of
doom for civilisation was diagnosed by Oswald Spengler in Decline of the West
(1918) and by Sigmund Freud in Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930):

...if the development of civilisation has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of
the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the
diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilisations, or some epochs of
civilisation - possibly the whole of mankind - have become neurotic? [George Gilpin, The
Art of Contemporary English Culture, London: Macmillan, 1991, p.9]

10
The great city demands competition and invention, but it also threatens its inhabitants,
who feel anonymous within the mass and cut-off from face-to-face relationships.
Georg Simmel, for example, is concerned with the isolated and divided psychology,
emphasizing an aspect of subjective experience in the town, which is central to the
concerns of philosophers, poets, painters in the early twentieth century, from Bergson
to Joyce and V. Woolf - that is, its effects upon the rhythms of consciousness. The
countryman has a steadier rhythm of uninterrupted habituation which is rooted in the
more unconscious levels of the psyche, whereas Metropolitan man has to develop
a protective organ of intellect to cope with the novelty of his experience and its
speedier rhythms. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p.134]

Simmel also argues that the lonely depersonalization of metropolitan society

provokes a new defensive intellectualism, which leads the exceptional individual to
preserve an interior life of introspection against the overwhelming and machine-life
activities of city life. The city becomes the site of a new kind of sensibility, which can
only express itself through disjunction and juxtaposition.
The Futurists were by far the most important of the avant-garde groupings
which made life in the modern city central to their concerns. They were deeply
influenced by Bergson`s anti-rationalist philosophy. He profoundly influenced
attempts to represent the passing of time in Modernist art, particularly by sustaining
the idea that subjective experience has a peculiarly rhythmic character. Bergson`s
central argument is that the present carries the past with it. It is swollen by memory,
in our experience of duree. He defines this pure duration in his Essai sur les
donnees immediates de la conscience (1889) as:

the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live,
when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states. For this purpose it
need not be more absorbed in the passing sensation or idea; for then, on the contrary, it would
no longer endure. Nor need it forget its former states: it is enough that, in recalling these
states, it does not set them alongside its actual state as one point alongside another, but forms
both the past and the present into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a
tune, melting, so to speak, into one another. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p.142]

Our perceptions are full of memories; the details of past experience mingle with the
immediate and present data of our senses, as every perception fills a certain depth of
duration, prolongs the past into the present, and thereby partakes of memory.
[Christopher Butler, op.cit., p.142] Once freed from accepted logic, we may discover the

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Bergsonian psychology in Boccioni`s pictures, which are the synthesis of what one
remembers and what one sees.
Simultaneism marks a further development in the Modernist conception of
personal identity. The Bergsonian theory depends upon an implied biographical unity
or stream-of-consciousness, which may be fluid, and often enough disjunctive; the
mental experience is seen as a process, so that only the flux is real. The approach to
experience of nineteenth century scientific positivism has to be given up in favour
of a subjective, time-dominated psychological fluidity, within which the purpose and
the will constitute the only reality. [Christopher Butler, op.cit., p.210] New
psychological ideas emphasized the multiplicity of consciousness and were
profoundly influenced by Henri Bergson`s concept of duree, of time as flow and
duration rather than as a series of points moving chronologically forward. Marcel
Proust in France had explored ways of presenting the past as contained in the present,
and more and more the new concept of time came together with the new concept of
consciousness to develop a new view of character.
We have seen that the intimate connection between changing conceptions of
the self and innovation in art moved, in the late nineteenth century, away from the
description of social reality towards a focus upon associative processes within the
individual consciousness. The liberating openness to image-association and the
transition form logical deduction to juxtaposition produced worlds which seemed less
and less susceptible of explanation and description through the causal processes of
historical narratives. The way was thus made open for the world to be seen as
simultaneous, or as subject to the intuitive leaps of the unconscious, by an artist
responsive to such preoccupations as: Bergsonian intuition, the release of primitive
instinct, or the internal conflicts and contradictions caused by the family and social
institutions.
All the new developments in early Modernism tended to encourage the artistic
expression of the irrational, most particularly as the symptom of contradictions and
tensions which society at large denied and repressed. A growing number of avant-
garde groups in the Modern period claimed that the new art was intended to be
irrational, as part of a battle against authority for the liberation of subconscious
processes, and the transformation of human consciousness. [ Christopher Butler, op.cit.,
p.263]

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In order to better understand the cultural and intellectual life that deeply affected
human mind at the turn of the century, it is worth looking at the traditions of social
thought - the disciplines of history, sociology, and social psychology - and their
development in Britain, France and Germany.
British social theory was based on Charles Darwin`s theory of evolution that
helped establish empirical methods within the British social sciences. The most
immediate application of evolutionary theory to society was based on the speculative
writings of Herbert Spencer, who believed that societies evolved through a process of
natural selection. Each individual pursued his or her own self-interest, and the
resulting competition led to the elimination of the weak and helpless and the
preservation of the strong. The concept of natural selection also helped produce a cult
of individual differences and gave rise to a eugenics movement. The most forceful
spokesman for this movement was Darwin`s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, who used
empirical methods in an attempt to identify superior and defective individuals for the
purpose of selective breeding.
Another trend was an attempt to use the evolutionary theory to derive a list of basic
social instincts, which could then be used to explain social behaviour through
biological drives. William McDougal provided a version of the social instinct theory.
[Gary Collier, Henry Minton, Graham Reynolds, Currents of Thought in American
Social Psychology, Oxford University Press, 1991, p.12]
In France, Auguste Comte provided a hierarchy of sciences with la morale at
the top and sociology, biology (including psychology), chemistry, physics, astronomy,
and mathematics below. The sciences became more and more exact as one moved
down the hierarchy and more complex as one moved up. The more complex sciences
rested on more basic ones, but they possessed laws of their own and were therefore
not reducible to the more basic sciences.
The French writers who had the greatest impact on social psychology were
Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon. They were both influenced very much by the
concept of hypnosis and used it to explain the erratic behaviour of crowds. Tarde and
Le Bon were part of a long French tradition which began with Franz Anton Mesmer,
trained in Vienna but who practised in Paris. He postulated a theory a theory of
animal magnetism, which pervaded the entire animal world but was unevenly
distributed. Some individuals, like himself, had unusually high concentrations and
could therefore heal others who were deficient and prone to illness.

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 The first scientific study of hypnosis was carried out not in France but in
England. James Braid performed controlled experiments on hypnotic suggestion,
noted that it corresponded with a restricted field of consciousness, and invented the
term hypnotism to describe the process.
The three themes that dominated social psychology during its first decades
were imitation, suggestion and the more general concept of group mind. Le Bon`s
book The Crowd is generally credited as being the first extensive treatise on crowd
psychology, including many of the topics that would later form the core of social
psychology. Le Bon covers not only crowd behaviour but conformity, the leveling of
taste, popular culture, self-alienation, leadership, and the role of the unconscious in
social behaviour.
The foundation of modern sociology - at about the same time with the
advances in psychology - were laid by the theories of Emile Durkheim and Max
Weber. Both sought to find solutions to the crises in the social living by confronting
what they considered to be the heart of the individual`s dilemma: a state of confusion
in a rootless, incoherent world from which the traditional values and rules had been
dislodged. [Stephen Coote, T.S.Eliot. The Waste Land, Penguin Books, 1985, p.173]
And both proposed, among other things, a return to myths as a regenerative source of
cultural values and coherence.
Emile Durkheim was one of the first social theorists to use quantitative
procedures to study social phenomena; arguing that, since the biological equipment
and psychological structure of people were fundamentally the same, they were
irrelevant for explaining the variability of social behaviour. He is often regarded as
one of the principal founders of modern sociology; and the central underlying theme
that runs through all of his books is the general concept of conscience collective. This
can be translated as either collective conscience or collective consciousness, and,
in fact, the concept of the conscience collective takes on both connotations because it
is both a set of obligations i.e. conscience, and the basis for experience i.e.
consciousness.
Underlying Durkheim`s idea of the conscience collective is the notion that
social phenomena, such as religion, customs, and fashions, are social facts that is
things with objective characteristics that exist outside the individual. Social facts have
three characteristics: they are external, general, and constrain behaviour. [apud
Currents of Thought in American Social Psychology, pp.13, 38, 39, 43]

14
 The German tradition began with Johann Gottfried Herder, who developed a
historical approach to the study of society. He emphasized the role of the role of the
cultural community or Volk in shaping the personality of the individual; and he also
stressed the significance of language in the acculturation process.
G.W.F. Hegel developed a more comprehensive system that focused on both
the socialization of the individual and the evolution of society; the concept of
socialization was to be incorporated and developed by Sigmund Freud. In fact, one of
Freud`s greatest contributions was his ability to fuse the French tradition, with its
emphasis on the irrational, and the German tradition, with its emphasis on the social
development of character.
Wilhelm Wundt, who is commonly regarded as the founder of experimental
psychology, was also the first German writer to present a comprehensive treatment of
social psychology. Indicative of Herder`s influence, he called his social psychology
Volkerpsychologie. Wundt viewed social psychology and experimental psychology as
complementary. While experimental psychology was limited to the study of
consciousness, social psychology examined the social aspects of mental processes as
expressed in objective products, such as language, customs and myth, and used
comparative and historical analysis rather than introspection. Wundt therefore
advocated a comprehensive psychology based partly on the natural sciences -
experimental psychology - and partly on social sciences - social psychology. Wundt`s
work on social psychology was influential in the development of the social sciences at
the turn of the century, especially cultural anthropology, sociology and linguistics.
[Currents of Thought in American Social Psychology, p.13]
Throughout the 1930s, the appearance of two new disciplines, psychoanalysis
and cultural anthropology, could not be left unnoticed. The economic and social
conditions marked a dramatic shift in cultural and intellectual trends and a pendulum
swing away from the conservative focus on the individual that was characteristic of
the twenties.
The most important views of psychoanalytical theory are: the human psyche in
its totality is unknown, it has vast areas that are not open to rational exploration; this
leads to the concept of the unconscious; and second, the human conscious is not under
the command of will, reason, feeling, but instinct (which is blind, out of control,
unknown). Freud stated that dream analysis is the royal road to the unconscious.

15
 Undoubtedly, Freud is one of the few who had a persistent impact on culture,
on both sides of the Ocean, especially in revealing the great hidden sources of the
unconscious, strange forces in the depths of our mind, manifested in dreams,
hallucinations, and all expressions of man`s unconscious. [Frederick J Hoffman,
op.cit., pp.242-244]

Freud and psychoanalysis had recently revealed the great hidden sources of the
unconscious, strange forces in the depths of our mind, manifested in dreams, hallucinations,
and all expressions of man`s unconscious. Breton`s definition of surrealism was given in the
first Manifesto: Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, verbally, in
writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought`s dictation, in the absence of
all control exercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations. The
mechanism of the dream became the most important source of all surrealist art; in its
disguises one found remarkable associations of images and discordances of thought.
[Frederick J Hoffman, op.cit., pp.242-244]

Freud did not invent the concept of the unconscious; the term had been used in
English for at least a century and a half before Freud began his work. Freud argues
that someone can have thoughts without being aware of them, and these unconscious
thoughts might determine aspects of behaviour; unconscious thoughts have been
repressed by the regulatory mechanisms of the mind. [Alan Durant and Nigel Fabb,
Literary Studies in Action, Routledge, London:992, p.39] The general concept seems
to have passed through three historical periods. Before the 1700s, there seems to have
been a vague recognition that behind conscious processes, such as thought and
imagination, were other processes unavailable to awareness. During the 1700s, the
unconscious was seen as the vital seat of passion and a source of inspiration for art
and creative thought. During the 1800s, there was the growing recognition that the
unconscious played a role in pathological behaviours, such as hysteria, epilepsy, and
dreams. In 1868, Ernst von Hartmann published his massive work, Philosophy of the
Unconscious.
Virtually, all of Freud`s central concepts can be found somewhere in the
previous scientific literature. What Freud accomplished was a grand synthesis that
wove the separate pieces into a unified theory; showing that far form being a small
insignificant part of the mind, the unconscious contained most of a person`s vital
urges and the largest part of the personality. The contents of the unconscious are kept
unconscious through various defence mechanisms, such as repression, projection and
rationalization, of which a person is also unaware. He later expressed the opinion that

16
all mental processes begin unconsciously and some cross the barrier and become
conscious; people become conscious through the use of language, by labelling and
describing their experience. Freud emphasized that the unconscious manifests itself
through language 0 in jokes, slips of tongue, in dreams, where the dream content has a
linguistic basis. Freud`s theory is one of the construction of the subject. The
importance of phenomena like verbal slips is that they testify to the existence of the
unconscious through the distance between what was said and what the conscious
subject intended to say; thus they testify to the distance between the subject of the act
of signification and conscious subject i.e. the ego. In this distance there is opened a
gap which is the are of desire The mechanisms of the unconscious can indeed be
seen as the mechanisms of language. [Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh eds., Modern
Literary Theory, London: Edward Arnold, 1989, p.139] For Freud, people become
conscious only when they think about what they are going through; unlabeled
experiences simply slip from awareness.
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan also thought that the unconscious is
structured like a language. He stressed Freud`s argument that the dream had a
linguistic basis: to interpret the dream was to return to a group of words that fitted
together in the dream like a picture-puzzle. [Jeremy Tambling, What Is Literary
Language?, Open University Press, 1988, pp.58,60] Here, they were both influenced
by Saussure. The unconscious emerges as a result of repressed desire; the desire
behaves like a language moving ceaselessly from object to object. Just as language
can never fully seize on meaning, so desire, for Lacan, is a driving force with no
ultimate satisfaction.
Lacan resorted to the structural linguistic concepts of sign and signifier to
explain how the onset of language splits the conscious from the unconscious.
Language, Lacan argued, is not a matter of a one-to-one correspondence between
signifier and signified; the signifiers of language cannot fix the arbitrary field of the
signified; signifiers slide across the continuum and hence the desire to control
meaning but this is not possible because of the nature of language. [Modern Literary
Theory, p.120] As we accept control over thoughts, given by language, we are thereby
committed to the endless chain of signification. [Kenneth MacLeish ed., Key Ideas
in Human Thought, Bloomsbury: 1994, p.478]
By teaching that the conscious mind is only a tiny and often misleading
fragment of the mind as a whole, Freud changed our way of thinking about ourselves

17
and each other, and the most notable impact in literature was on Joyce,
D.H.Lawrence, V. Woolf.
Freud did more than develop the concept of the unconscious. He also
developed his method of free association [Currents of Thought in American Social
Psychology, p.103] to explore personality and provided the first comprehensive theory
of its development and structure. For Freud, personality consisted of three basic
components - the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is the original component and
includes the basic instincts and biological drives. The superego consists of the
internalized values of society acquired through identification with one`s parents. It is
useful to see the ego as the mediator between the id and the superego - attempting to
meet the demands of the id within the restraints imposed by the superego and by
external society. The ego is the only rational aspect of personality, but it also contains
unconscious defense mechanisms designed to protect the person from excessive
anxiety.
No socio-psychological account of Freud`s influence would be complete
without a brief mention of his writings on cultural and social psychology: Totem and
Taboo, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The Future of an Illusion, and
Civilisation and its Discontents.
Freud`s theories provided a new means of integrating body and mind, in some
cases reversing the traditional causal connection; he tried to construe an appropriate
scientific image for psychoanalysis. Like other currents of thought, psychoanalysis
was shaped by the cultural and intellectual climate at the turn of the twentieth century.
The rapid growth of modern cities created a new sense of social awareness about the
depersonalized yet highly interdependent urban culture. The emergence of the new
urban-industrial environment generated new pressures that profoundly affected the
daily lives of all people who lived and worked in the cities. In a real sense, it was the
anxiety associated with urban life that created the depression, neuroses, and other
disorders so characteristic of the twentieth century.
The psychoanalytic movement developed as a direct response to these
problems and reflected the values and ideals of the progressive movement. Before
long, psychoanalysis became the fashion among artists, writers, and intellectuals
because it helped justify their own soul-searching in a world of great conflict and
constant change. The appeal of psychoanalysis during the 1930s was not because it

18
provided a finished description of how the mind operates, but because it provided a
general framework within which social problems and issues could be discussed.
Freud`s impact was sufficiently was sufficiently large that it represents a
scientific revolution in the Kuhnian sense of a change in beliefs or assumptions that
guide a scientific discipline. It marked the end of the psychological approach known
as introspection and changed the way we view psychology and even ourselves.
A side-effect of Freud`s early work, the role and importance of mythology,
became very much a central concern of psychoanalysis through the exploration of
cultural archetypes. The most notable theorist in this area was Carl Gustav Jung, an
early disciple of Freud. Archetype was a Jungian term for the contents of the
collective unconscious, i.e. for innate ideas or the tendency to organize experience in
innately predetermined patterns. Another substantive influence was Jung`s description
of psychological types as described in the homonymous work published in 1921, and
its English version appeared in 1931. Aldous Huxley praised the psychologist who
does genuinely understand human beings in the profound intuitive way in which a
good novelist, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, understands them and adopts the
difference between what Jung calls the two attitude-types, i.e. the introvert and the
extravert. [Pierre Vitoux, Aldous Huxley and D.H. Lawrence: An Attempt at
Intellectual Sympathy in The Modern Language Review, vol. 69, 1974]
Another concept derived from the theory of psychoanalysis is myth, which is
seen as a means of bringing order to the contemporary world and discipline to feeling
and experience. A fundamental characteristic of modernism is the prevalence of myth
as against realism. The most important writers that have resorted to myth are: Joyce,
D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, W. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, W. Faulkner, E. O`Neill.
Aldous Huxley was probably the most important of the writers who
recognized that, at the start of the twentieth century, our picture of reality and our
notions of how we come to know reality changed. Scientists revealed that time slows
down when one moves faster, matter bends time-space, gravity deflects light, all in
all, the most noteworthy events of the twentieth century have not been political but
scientific. I don`t see that it would be possible to live in a more exciting age, said
one of Huxley`s characters, Calamy, in 1925. Scientists` exploration had a very
important consequence: it provided a clear demonstration of the conventionality and
limitation of human perception, both in range and degree of objectivity.

19
The drawback, however, was the time-lag between discovery and popular
dissemination, which was becoming a permanent gap. Bertrand Russell reports in
1925 that: everybody knows that Einstein did something astonishing, but very few
people know exactly what it was that he did. [June Deery, Aldous Huxley and the
Mysticism of Science, New York: St.Martin`s Press Inc., 1996, p.16] Few understood
relativity theory; as much as possible, its ideas were sensationalized, leading to
mystification rather than comprehension. What is noteworthy is the ignorance among
the intellectual class, the split between scientist and non-scientist. Huxley was
appalled by the general lack of interest, he was one of the few literary artists to
explicitly and repeatedly refer to scientific ideas in his writing, and his own grasp of
science also enabled him to offer pertinent counterarguments to technological
societies and the ensuing dehumanization.

Commenting on the ability of Huxley to understand science and literature, Ross Parmenter
concludes that he could discuss science, because no man of letters of his time knew as much
about science, and because no scientist had his grasp of literature as a creative art. Attributing
some of Huxley`s unpopularity to this knowledge of science, Philip Thody wonders if
Huxley`s critics cannot forgive him the knowledge they lack. [Bharati Krishnan, Aspects of
Structure, Technique and Quest in Aldous Huxley`s Major Novels, Uppsala, 1977, p.18]

Contemporary writers could hardly avoid remarking on the immediate and material
impact of technology on quotidian experience. Their attitude was occasionally
enthusiastic but more often contemptuous; they did not engage with scientific ideas or
theories. They did not appear to be interested in working out the philosophical
consequences of the new scientific paradigm, despite the fact that henceforth science
must be a necessary element in the formulation of a tenable philosophy of nature and
man. [June Deery, op.cit., p.18]
For Huxley, the modernists` blindness to the developments in science meant
that a certain amount of the life of the twentieth century is to be found in our poetry,
but precious little of its mind. [June Deery, op.cit., p.18] The deliberate difficulty of
modernist texts, their elitism and introspection, were certainly partly attributable to a
defensive manouvering against science. At the same time, with their focus on
experimentation and technique, one could say that modernist authors were
emulating science by themselves becoming as difficult, as inaccessible, as specialized
and as technical. They were secretly intrigued by the idea that they might in their

20
own medium produce works as difficult, inventive, intellectual as scientific theories.
[June Deery, op.cit., p.18]
The debate over the relationship between literature and science stemmed from
the Victorian era, and it was in such a context that Aldous Huxley wrote. The
instigators were T.H.Huxley and Matthew Arnold, this being also a family
inheritance for Aldous Huxley. T.H.Huxley professed that he would hate to see
anything starve, or cripple, literary, or aesthetic, culture, for the sake of science; he
therefore stoutly recommended literature as part of a general education that would
apply more attention to science. Matthew Arnold stressed the role of literature as a
necessary complement or antidote to science; he pointed to the insufficient moral
nourishment science provided for either the individual or society, and claimed that of
the two, literature was the more inclusive field. [June Deery, op.cit., p.18]
The decline of religious belief at the turn of the century bequeathed to art a
considerable burden. By the early twentieth century, the widening chasm between
science and literature was contributing to the feeling of a marked cultural crisis. The
relation between the arts and the sciences was perceived to be a problem. The notion
of there being altogether two cultures came soon after; a phrase which came from a
C.P.Snow lecture, subsequently published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific
Revolution. Leavis`s response came soon enough; and the essence was that there were
not two but only one culture; this included science, because science would never be
sufficiently rich to constitute a culture on its own. [June Deery, op.cit., p.18]
In his contribution, Huxley was determined to be more concrete and specific
than previous discussions. The questions we ought to be asking, he suggested are:

What is the function of literature, what its psychology, what the nature of literary language?
And how do its function, psychology and language differ from the function, psychology and
language of science? What, in the past, has been the relationship between literature and
science? What is it now? What might it be in the future? What would it be profitable,
artistically speaking, for a twentieth century man of letters to do about twentieth century
science? [Aldous Huxley, Literature and Science, London: Chatto&Windus, 1963, p.6]

Huxley`s more concrete approach meant that he focused on language and, more
particularly, on the incorporation of scientific material into literature; referring to the
ways in which literature can complement science. Modernist art emphasized that
culture had changed in response to the machine age.

21
 The impact of science on modernist literature is, however, debatable. The early
part of the twentieth century is regarded as a brilliant period in the history of both art
and science, but there is sometimes a parallel construction of artistic and scientific
achievement. [June Deery, op.cit., p.1]

Aldous Huxley is a significant exception and his career proves that there are
possibilities for a dialogue, or interaction. His interest was in defining and attempting
to occupy an important role for the literary intellectual; he articulated key
developments that were important undercurrents in the first half of the twentieth
century and have grown in significance ever since. He believed that literary artists
were under an intellectual and moral obligation to engage with science and explicitly
refer to its ideas in their writing in order to heal the division between the two
cultures; literature`s reference to science was also a matter of some urgency as the
most profoundly important sociological factor of modern times was the growth of
technology and what may be called the technicization of every aspect of human life.
[June Deery, op.cit., p.2]
Another discourse he sought to accommodate to the literary medium was
religion. Huxley faced the greatest epistemological question of his era and perhaps of
any era, i.e. how to relate art, science and religion as modes of knowing, as
perspectives on reality, as devices for creating order. Huxley named the relations
between literature, science and philosophy as the most important and the most
interesting of the subjects which may, theoretically, be made into poetry, but which
have, as a matter of fact, rarely or never undergone the transmutation. [June Deery,
op.cit., p.38]
He thought it the artist`s cultural responsibility - as of any intellectual - to be a
disseminator and synthesizer of ideas, as a moral commentator and, where
appropriate, a consensus builder.

22
 II. AN OUTLINE OF MODERNISM TERMINOLOGY AND
MAJOR LITERARY INNOVATIONS

The issue under consideration is so complex that it needs clarification, indispensable

for any understanding of the concept. Thus, we may find certain terms with
overlapping contents, such as: modern, new, twentieth century, contemporary,
avant-garde, recent; or modern and its cognate words modernization,
modernity, modernism.
Twentieth century once indicated the new, the exciting, the unfamiliar, the
promising and the slightly threatening; by now it is already over and it denotes not a
future but a past; now it refers to no more than a period. [Bernard Bergonzi, The
Myth of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature, New York: St.Martin`s Press,
1986, p.XI] Avant-garde, if it refers to work that is experimental or innovative in its
time, is equally applicable in 1908 or 1980. Recent denotes any work produced after
a given date.
Of these terms, modern and contemporary imply notable differences. Apart
from the commercial or scientific meaning, and respectively the sense of present day,
both terms have acquired a critical shade of meaning with a specific aesthetic and
chronological reference.
The term modern movement is now applied internationally and in all the arts to
works of a radically experimental nature produced during the first twenty-five to
thirty years of the previous century. [British Writers, New York: Charles Scribner`s
Sons, 1984, p.XII] In Peter Faulkner`s words, modernism - which replaced the
phrase the modern movement (also the title of a book by Cyril Connoly) - is part of
the historical process by which the arts have dissociated themselves from nineteenth
century assumptions, which had come in the course of time to look like dead
conventions. [Peter Faulkner, Modernism, New York & London: Routledge, 1993,
p.1]
In this critical context, the modern writer is one who re-examines the
foundations of his art. He is especially concerned with innovations in form, technique,
modes of sensibility, vocabulary, linguistic structure, and is less concerned with public
and social issues; by comparison with the contemporary writer, his imaginative world
is timeless.

23
 The contemporary writer pays less attention to formal or linguistic
experiment. His fiction draws its vitality form the world he lives in, from its
historical, political, economic and social character; and he feels himself well qualified
to interpret the changing circumstances of his age. [British Writers, p.XII] T.S.Eliot,
James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are obvious examples of modern writers; Aldous
Huxley, George Orwell , W.H.Auden, C.P.Snow (and, at a different level,
J.B.Priestley) of the contemporary; D.H.Lawrence and Windham Lewis, while
unquestionably modern in certain respects, have a foot in both camps. [British
Writers, p.XII]
Another approach to the differences between modern and contemporary is
offered in the early 1960s, with the publication of Stephen Spender`s seminal book,
The Struggle of the Modern. He used modern to refer to the great wave of innovation
and transformation which affected all the arts in Europe and America in the years
immediately before World War I and which seemed at the same time to embody the
essence of twentieth century newness. [Bernard Bergonzi, op.cit., p.XI]
This definition is fairly comparable to what we now name modernism, the
major artistic movement responding to the sense of social breakdown in the early
twentieth century. Its representatives affected the development of music, painting,
literature. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, inspired by the Cezanne Memorial
Exhibition of 1907, had independently painted Analytical Cubist works in 1908.
Marinetti issued his Futurist Manifesto in 1909, and in the 1920s the surrealistic
movement known as Dadaism emerged (Marinetti and Apollinaire). Schoenberg,
Ravel, Stravinsky were composing their masterpieces. In literature T.E.Hulme,
T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.B.Yeats, J.Joyce, D.H.Lawrence were publishing at the time.
In 1909 Proust began work on A la recherche du temps perdu and Freud lectured in
the United States; Gertrude Stein published Three Lives and William James A
Pluralistic Universe.
The modern artist was alienated from the everyday, social world, and yet he
had a vision of a new, unified and transformed order of things. Art assumed a new
importance, as the aestheticism of the late nineteenth century was metamorphosed
into the more radical and ambitious programme of the modernists.
For Stephen Spender, the counterpart of the modern was the contemporary,
exemplified by Wells, Shaw and Bennett. The contemporary was not alienated from
the society he lived in; he might well be a reformer and zealous to improve it, but he

24
began with an acceptance of the here-and-now, in contrast to the rejections of the
modernists. [Bernard Bergonzi, op.cit., p.XI] He upheld the traditional qualities of
rationality and will, and he had no doubts about what D.H.Lawrence called the old
stable ego.
Another critic who draws the same distinction between modern and
contemporary is David Lodge, who recognized that, in Britain, the contemporary
novel is no longer modern. This distinction has become a commonplace of current
criticism. The basis for David Lodge`s argument is Stephen Spender`s book, The
Struggle of the Modern. He reinforces the idea that the contemporary writers the one
who engages in a direct, prosaic way with the social and political circumstances. On
the other hand, there are those who distrust or detest their circumstances, to the extent
of abandoning the hope of acting on them in a practical way. Instead, such writers
seek a radical transformation of conventional forms of communication, through which
to express poetically an inner crisis of sensibility, a crisis which often manifests itself
in the search for a tradition which has been lost or broken. [David Lodge, The
Language of Fiction, New York: Columbia University Press, 1967, pp.243-245]
The modern disturbs us with the novelty of his vision and his technique; the
contemporary, on the other hand, is usually much more immediately accessible to the
general public. [David Lodge, The Language of Fiction, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1967, pp.248]
The major point of the continuing controversy is the meaning of life. The
contemporary tends to have a fairly simple faith in the competence of ordinary prose
discourse to represent life; the modern feels the need to employ an elaborate
linguistic craft to fix and identify the uniqueness of every individual experience. Thus,
the analysis of language is one of the most precise ways of indicating the difference
between modern and contemporary writing. In the essay Modern Fiction (1919),
V.Woolf criticizes Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy for being materialists who cannot
catch life. She suggests:

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being lie this. Examine for a moment an
ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic,
evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant
shower of innumerable atoms... Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life
is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end. [apud Douglas Hewitt, English Fiction: 1890-1940, New
York&London: Longman, 1988, p.111]

25
Anthony Burgess, in his instrumental book The Novel Now, adds a new dimension to
the term contemporary, saying that its definition would have to bring in time, but it
would not have to neglect the things that give time significance - the facts of history,
the thoughts, feelings, hopes and apprehensions that make one era different from
another. [Anthony Burgess, The Novel Now, New York: W.W.Norton & Co.Inc.,
1967, p.22]
Thus, the concept is enlarged with new connotations. Of James Joyce, the
modernist, Anthony Burgess had said that he has equipped our minds with the words
and symbols we need in order to understand the contemporary world, and he will still
be waiting to help us when the fearsome future rolls in. [Anthony Burgess, The Novel
Now, New York: W.W.Norton & Co.Inc., 1967, p.23]; we are still learning to be his
contemporaries, to understand our interpreter. It is also helpful to look at some
related terms, such as modernization - the process of bringing new; modernity - the
character of life under changes; and modernism would be the reflection of modernity.
Modernization describes the impact of factory production or industrialization on an
economic system with accompanying social and cultural consequences. By the
twentieth century, the process of modernization has taken effect in numerous parts of
the world. While it may benefit some sectors of society, others may be less worse off.
It may also be viewed as a problematic phenomenon in view of the resulting threats to
the environment and to established patterns of social and cultural life. [Kenneth
MacLeish ed., Key Ideas in Human Thought, Bloomsbury, 1994, p.481]
In Michael Gorra`s terms, modernism as an ethos requires two things: first, the
artist`s imagination or memory of a stable, conventional culture; second, that culture`s
disruption and the artist`s consequent awareness of the inadequacy of its artistic
conventions to express either the multiplicity or the chaos of contemporary life.
[Michael Gorra, The English Novel at Mid-Century, Macmillan, 1990, p.4]
To conclude this theoretical part, mention should be made that we have found
Peter Childs definition of modernism and modernity as the most relevant,
informative of all.

Modernism is variously argued to be a period, a style, genre, or combination of these; but it is

first of all a word; one which exists alongside cognate words. Its stem, Modern, is a stem
that, from the Latin modo, means current, and so has a far wider currency and range of
meanings than Modernism. ... As an international art term it covers the many avant-garde

26
styles and movements that proliferated under the names of Expressionism, Imagism,
Surrealism, Futurism, Dadaism, Vorticism, formalism and, in writing if not in painting,
Impressionism. Its forebears were Darwin, Marx and Nietzsche; its intellectual guru was
Freud. Modernist writing is most particularly noted for its experimentation, its complexity, its
formalism, and for its attempt to create a tradition of the new. Its historical and social
background includes the emergence of the New Woman, the peak and downturn of the British
Empire, unprecedented technological change, the rise of the labour party, the appearance of
factory-line mass production, was in Africa, Europe and elsewhere. Modernism has therefore
almost universally been considered a literature of not just change but crisis. ... In relation to
Modernism, modernity is considered to describe a way of living and of experiencing life
which has arisen with the changes wrought by industrialisation, urbanisation and
secularisation; its characteristics are disintegration and reformation, fragmentation and rapid
change, ephemerality and insecurity. It involves certain new understandings of time and
space: speed, mobility, communication, travel, dynamism, chaos and cultural revolution. This
societal shift was differently theorised at the turn of the century by, for example, Emile
Durkheim, Max Weber and Ferdinand Tonnies. [Peter Childs, Modernism, London&New
York: Routledge, 2000, pp.12, 14-15]

There is a commonly accepted matrix of ideas, expressed in rather abstract language,

used by the modernist temper to speak of the past. Modernity revolts against the
normalizing function of tradition; we observe the intention of blowing up the
continuum of history and we can account for it in terms of the subversive force of this
new aesthetic consciousness. The idea of modernity is intimately tied to the
development of European art and culture. The new time consciousness, which enters
philosophy in the writings of Bergson, does more than express the experience of
mobility in society, of acceleration in history, of discontinuity in everyday life. The
new value placed on the transitory, the elusive and the ephemeral, the very celebration
of dynamism, discloses the longing for an undefiled, immaculate and stable present.
Modernism proclaimed, for the first time, that the real is always in flux
(although it has been a fact before it was recognized). It now follows that the real is
itself not something that can be determined according to a dialectic of appearance and
reality, rather, the real depends upon the dialectical speed regulating appearance and
reality, rather, the real depends upon the dialectical speed regulating appearance and
disappearance. One major challenge of modernism, i.e. the exploration and expression
of the subtle potentialities of consciousness, calls for the artist to allow the
unpresentable to become perceptible in his writing itself, in the signifier.
The whole range of available narrative and stylistic means is put into play. The
grammar and vocabulary of literary language are no longer acceptable as given;
rather, they prevent the unpresentable from being put forward. [Postmodernism. A
Reader, ed.& introd, by Thomas Docherty, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, pp.23, 43]

27
 Thus, the stable predictable world of the nineteenth century was disrupted, and
there was need for a coming to terms with the perceived state of chaos and
fragmentation of the real world.
Bradbury`s account of modernism as the distortion of the familiar sums up an age in
which, V. Woolf argues, all human relations have shifted - those between masters and
servants, husbands and wives, parents and children, shifted as a new generation
rebelled against the late Victorian rigidity and began to ask why the given relations of
society need to be given; shifted as Freud began to reveal the complexity and
irrationality of the human mind, as Nietzsche suggested morality was a construct to
hide man`s amorality from himself. Yet, in moving through that wreckage, the
modernist artist, in theory, finds a means of overcoming chaos through an artistic
representation and contemplation of that chaos so powerful that one does not feel the
lack of an external order, of that familiar linear logic taken from story or history.
[Michael Gorra, The English Novel at Mid-Century, Macmillan: 1990, p.4] Another
point of view in the attempt to define literary modernism is offered by relating it to
postmodernism, another hard-to-define-or-pin-down concept. Modernism is usually
looked at by postmodernism using three terms of reference, i.e. the validity of
historical narratives (the tradition in which we think of ourselves); the question of
originality as regards the artist, representation, language; the question of difference
and other voices. Ihab Hassan`s account of this relationship is highly relevant:
Modernism and postmodernism are not separated by an Iron Curtain or a Chinese
wall; for history is a palimpsest, and culture is permeable to time past, time present,
and time future. [Postmodernism. A Reader, ed.& introd, by Thomas Docherty,
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, p.149]
Distinguishing between the two, Ihab Hassan makes up a table that draws on
many ideas in many fields - rhetoric, linguistic, literary theory, philosophy,
anthropology, psychoanalysis, political science, even theology. One distinction is that
between modernism as metaphoric and postmodernism as metonymic. This is based
on Roman Jakobson`s theory about the metaphoric nature of language. He argued that
realistic prose fiction is largely metonymic, the narrative is forwarded essentially by
contiguity. On the other hand, metaphor works through similarity. Metaphor allows
the mind to juxtapose the disparate fragments of the world and reveal their hidden
correspondences. Naturally, it follows that modernism relies upon the metaphoric.
The modernist novel will not be bound by the world as it is, but tries instead to create

28
its own order out of chaos, to construct a meaning for a world otherwise without one.
[Michael Gorra, The English Novel at Mid-Century, Macmillan: 1990, p.5]
In pursuit of the features of modernism, we might refer to how writers
conceived of the condition of modernity. The sense of the fleeting, the transient
and contingent, defined by Baudelaire, is perhaps the definitive mark of the early
grasp of the modern. According to Rene Girard, in Deceit, Desire and Novel, the
transition to modernity can be mapped by the shift from external to internal
mediation: where, under the ancien regime, the model to be copied had been
transcendent to the subject (beyond the universe of the hero), internal mediation
triumphs in a universe where the differences between men are gradually erased and
the model becomes increasingly like the subject. The condition of modernity is
indissolubly linked to the condition of the modern artist, whom W.Lewis sees as one
who turned away from the immediate world; and, at the same time, it seemed to
foster a duplicity in the writer, allowing him to see the world, to be at the very center
of the world, and yet to be unseen to the world. [Peter Nicholls, Modernisms. A
Literary Guide, London: Macmillan, 1995, pp.6, 14, 17, 179]
Modernism in literature was a movement that radically probed the nature of
selfhood and problematised the means whereby self could be expressed. This
phenomenon did not take place in a vacuum; a variety of factors are involved - the
general diffusion of social alienation, the rise of the psychoanalytic movement, the
disorientation brought about by the shock of the Great War and the increasing
experimentalism of almost all the contemporary artistic movements.
The Freudian subject exists only in relation to ongoing and changing
experience, while Jacques Lancan defines the subject as a dynamic and even
problematic urgency, as a cultural construction that is inherently undecidable in the
sense that it is continually being reformulated by unconscious operations.
This, inevitably, brought about a change in the kind of discourse that belonged
to the modernist novel. This kind of discourse heralds the stream-of-consciousness
novel where, compared to the classic novel, not a great deal happens, or it happens
off-stage, as it was, glanced at in memory and allusion rather than presented directly.
The emergence of the stream-of-consciousness novel was obviously related to a huge
epistemological shift in culture at large, from locating reality in the objective world of
actions and things as perceived by common sense, to locating it in the minds of
individual thinking subjects, each of whom constructs their own reality, and has

29
difficulty in matching it with the reality constructed by others. If the modern novel is
a form of communication, then, paradoxically, what it often communicates is the
difficulty or impossibility of communication. One of the modernist arguments for
removing the intrusive authorial voice - wise, omniscient, reliable, reassuring - from
the novel was that it was false to our experience, that life is in fact fragmented,
chaotic, incomprehensible, absurd. [David Lodge, The Practice of Writing, London:
Secker&Wartburg, 1996, pp. 185, 187-8] The trouble with the classic realist novel, in
this view, was that it was not realistic enough: truth to life was sacrificed to the
observance of purely narrative conventions. V.Woolf called for a kind of fiction that
would record the atoms of experience as they fall upon the mind, in the order in
which they fall, that would trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent
in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. [see
V.Woolf, Modern Fiction, in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life]
The truth about a character is the sum of his whole emotional experience
pervading and indeed constituting his consciousness. Development depthwise rather
than lengthwise becomes the logical technique. [David Daiches, A Critical History
of English Literature, vol. 4, Secker&Warburg, London: 1979, p.1154]
The research of William James proved to be highly influential due to his book
The Principles of Psychology (1890) which outlined the phenomenon of the stream-
of-consciousness , one of the most characteristic narrative devices of modernism as a
whole and of Joyce`s mature work in particular. It refers to a technique of writing that
captures images, emotions that pass through the mind. The first to use it was Edouard
Dujardin in Les Lauriers Sont Coupee; then Dorothy Richardson in Pointed Roofs;
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner.
James Joyce used the stream-of-consciousness method as an attempt to find a
verbal equivalent for the inner thought-processes of a character: I try to give the
unspoken, unacted thoughts of people in the way they occur. The interior monologue
may give the impression of an actual thought-track. He might have read Arthur
Symons` book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), which makes ample
reference to this technique.
The first major treatment is in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where it
is used as a device of the narrator to organize his narrative, in complete words and a
regular syntax. Then it became a crucial cornerstone of his mature work; in Ulysses he
takes this technique to a more complex and studied level. Here it is used to present

30
characters` thoughts more immediately than in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man. The maturity of the technique is reflected in imitating the fragmentary nature of
interior speech by breaking down the sentences and individual words. Later on it
becomes the central experience of Finnegans Wake.
Stuart Gilbert, his disciple and friend, said: At every instant of conscious life
we are aware of the simultaneity and multiplicity of thought-streams. The life of the
mind is a symphony.
Naturally, it follows that rhetorical discontinuity is a mark of modernist
writing. We recognize the perception of discontinuity from Forster`s only connect
to Yeats`s Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon
the world... and Eliot`s I can connect / Nothing with nothing and These fragments
I have shored against my ruins. The exploration of discontinuity is a characteristic of
twentieth century as the elaboration of continuity was of the nineteenth, or, in other
words, disruption versus coherence. Apparently, the modernist work is a heap of
broken images calling for a reader to impose order upon it, i.e. coherence, meaning.
Any obscurity in works evincing such rhetorical discontinuity is due to the
suppression of links in the chain, of explanatory and connecting matter... [Monroe K.
Spears, Dionysus and the City, Oxford Univeristy Press, 1970, p.26]
This is because mental life - which is not fundamentally rational - is organized
not in logical chained way, but rather it is like a stream, a flow. A stream is
comparably looser than a chain; there is movement in a stream, there are no fixed
priorities, whereas in a chain the organization is, more or less, prescribed.
Thus, the traditional forward flow of narrative time is disrupted. If everyday
life is now felt to be oppressive, it is partly because time is experienced as endless
repetition. It is no accident that the concept of linear time should be as intimate and
peculiar an aspect of Western civilisation as the concept of cyclical/circular time is of
Eastern ones. [Patricia D. Tobin, Time and the Novel, Princeton University Press,
1978, p.12]
Though experience can be organized into historical order for narrative
purposes, it does not always exist in the mind in that way. Memory can precipitate
various disordered, distant events into present consciousness, mixing past and present.
Thus, in following the thoughts and memories of individual characters, the modernists
could amend or ignore conventional chronological order.

31
 The works of Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner are fully committed to entering
characters` consciousness; and the conventional chronology of the novel is altered by
frequent associations of present events with memories of the past: from this
intermingling of past consciousness with present awareness, an extensive history of
the previous life of each character can be assembled. This was not a very new
technique; as the general urge towards transformation in art was a European process.
The emphasis on memory, and its use to reintegrate past experiences with present
impressions are dominant in the fiction of Marcel Proust. His Remembrance of Things
Past (1913-1927) is concentrated within the experience of individual consciousness,
and might have influenced writers at the time.
These novelists were seeking to find words that would convey allusive and
evanescent thought: not only the words that come to the mind, but the images of the
inner world of fantasy, fusing with sounds and smells, the world of perceptual
experience. [Leon Edel, The Modern Psychological Novel, p.16]
We may refer to the last chapter of James Joyce`s Ulysses, entitled Penelope
- Molly Bloom`s interior monologue. The chapter has been unanimously admired as a
genuine stylistic and psychological tour de force: psychological, because it unleashes
the heroine`s subconscious, a panoramic development of her mingled thoughts;
sytlistic, because the text burst out into a flow of words, unordered by any punctuation
mark for more than fifty pages. Thus, Joyce, to create a new kind of interior
monologue, destroys punctuation, one convention of traditional narrative that had
been most resistant to change. Freeing the flow of thoughts from the unpleasant
strains of commas, full stops and question marks, Joyce allows it to break out in an
endless flow of words, one after another, with no other link other than that offered by
meaning. This chapter also evinces the flow of feminine thinking, ended by the final
and only mark, which becomes as symbolic as a word. The sentence being abolished,
the word becomes the basic unity of the discourse. [Pia Branzeu, Armura de sticla,
Timisoara: Excelsior, 1995, p.33] Temporal discontinuity implies a new way of
reading and it affects point of view as well. In this disarranged world, we have to
admit that various things occur at the same time. The language may be set down
word-by-word but the writer is also creating an illusion of simultaneity: we hear, see,
smell, at the same time, as in life.
The effect of a Faulknerian novel, for example, resembles that of a movie-
montage, where the rapidity of the images, and the sequence in which they come

32
before our eyes, create a multiple activity of the senses and an illusion of things
occurring at the same time instead of successively. A real mental cinema of flashing
images, often confused and incoherent, often sharply focused, aims at making the
reader feel himself an actual participant, not a mere listener. The writer, or rather, the
writing tries to give us the illusion that we are experiencing what is happening there.
The relationship between writer and reader has changed. It is already a
commonplace that the formal characteristic of the modernist work is its construction
out of fragments. Compared to earlier writing, modernist literature is notable for what
it omits - the explanations, interpretations, connections, summaries, and distancing
that provide continuity, perspective and security in traditional literature. A typical
modernist work will suggest rather than assert, making use of symbols and images
instead of statements. The pattern is beneath the surface. The reader has to dig the
structure out. This is why the reader of a modernist work is often said to participate in
the actual process of making the poem or story.
Often, the modernist work is structured as a quest for the very coherence that,
on its surface, it seems to lack. The search for meaning involves the reader in the
process of giving shape to the work of art.
The emergence of the modernist novel of consciousness is often described in
terms of a shift of emphasis from telling to showing (a metaphor, in this context).
Written language cannot literally show us anything except writing. The stream-of-
consciousness novel only shows us the operations of the mind by another kind of
telling than straightforward authorial report.
The writer breaks and reshapes the language, because he holds in his hand one
medium only with which to create his work, i.e. words. The word is asked to carry,
on shoulders not broad enough, the whole of a writer`s experience. [Leon Edel, The
Modern Psychological Novel, p.123]
Modernism has a language of its own. As we study it more intensely, we learn to read
this language: we learn its codes, dialects, variants; we develop a sensitivity to its
seeming confusion; and we conquer its persistent attempts to resist lucidity and
comprehension. For Michael Levenson, the dichotomy between the Victorians and the
moderns is constructed around what he calls the false stability of the nineteenth
century versus the true instability of the modernists. [Randy Malamud, The
Language of Modernism, London: UMI Research Press, 1989, p.3] Woolf exposes the
lame and empty language of false Victorian stability; Woolf, Eliot and Joyce all

33
embrace the flux, uncertainty, and confusion that are essential to a language reflecting
the truth of modern instability. Ford Madox Ford, in this vein, writes that art must
correspond to the incoherence, the tenuousness, and the odd vibration of life.
Modernism is written in a language that is, in some way, fundamentally different from
the language in which the antecedent tradition of English literature had been written.
Modernism takes as its fundamental basis the capability to write what is not
understood - that is, to write beyond what is understood, in a language that transcends
the inadequate language at hand. If we never say anything save what is really
understood, the field of understanding will never be extended. One demands the right,
now and again, to write for a few people with special interests and whose curiosity
reaches into greater details, claimed Ezra Pound. [Randy Malamud, The Language of
Modernism, London: UMI Research Press, 1989, p.7]
A crucial facet of the language of modernism is its difficulty. The essential
reasons for this difficulty are twofold: first, simplicity in language seems insincere,
naive, irreverent to those trapped in the midst of the dizzying modernist vortex, and
generally irrelevant to the sense of external complexity that pervades the modern age;
second, logic and reason, which follow from simple and straightforward language, can
be obstacles to valid kinds of experience and imagination.

34
 II.1.1. Literarity - The Function of Language: Poetics and Prosaics
Literature is a form of art and any discussion about the nature of literature should
refer to its specific material, i.e. language. A common phrase is that literature is the
art of the language; consequently, the writer`s medium is language, whatever he does
it is by means of words. However, to say that words are the material of a literary work
of art is not enough, it needs further clarification. Roman Jakobson introduced the
term literarityas that which makes a verbal message into a work of art. He also
dissociated between the art of the language as opposed to other forms of art, and the
art of the language as opposed to other speech acts. The latter use comes closer to the
concept of literarity, the quality by which a text becomes a work of art, with no other
internal modifications. Thus the question what is art becomes when is art? [Gerard
Genette, Introducere in arhitext. Fictiune si dictiune, Editura Univers, Bucuresti:
1994, pp.89-92]
The relationship between literature and language has been of great interest
along the centuries and it can be trace das far back as Antiquity when they could point
to the two levels of language usage, i.e.: clear, direct language or logos, which helps
understanding, and indirect, obscure language or mythos, which helps interpretation.
The same dissociation was mentioned by Aristotle, whose theory has been highly
influential for the Western literary mind for more than twenty centuries. He has
coined and defined two fundamental terms, i.e. poiesis and mimesis.
In Greek, poiesis means poetry as well as creation and the title itself
Poetics indicates that the book deals with the way language becomes the medium for
the work of art. Aristotle explains the two functions of language, i.e. legein used for
speaking (to inform, to ask, to persuade, to promise), the object of rhetoric; and poiein
the artistic function of language, necessary in the creation of a work of art, the
object of poetics. [Genette, Introducere in arhitext. Fictiune si dictiune, Editura
Univers, Bucuresti: 1994, p. 93]
Thus it was acknowledged that literature is made of language and one
important part of studying it involves studying its language. Variation within language
functions is a resource for selection, choosing a language of literature out of all the
various possibilities that exist for expression. [Alan Durant & Nigel Fabb, Literary
Studies in Action, Routledge, London: 1992, p.198]
A fair correspondent of Aristotle`s terms in contemporary literary theory is
denotation and connotation. There are a number of theories about the difference

35
between literary and non-literary language. These theories are to be found with the
Romantics and even earlier, but for modern literary theory I.A.Richards`s formulation
has probably been the most influential: A statement may be used for the sake of
reference, true or false, which it causes. This is the scientific use of language. But it
may also be used for the sake of the effects in emotion and attitude produced by the
reference it occasions. This is the emotive use of language. [David Lodge, The
Language of Fiction, Columbia University Press, New York: 1967, p.7]
This statement echoes Jakobson`s definition of the poetic function of
language. The starting point of this analysis is in the question: What makes a text
become a work of art? Jakobson`s answer is: the poetic function. He qualifies this
statement saying that poetry is language in it aesthetic function. [Gerard Genette,
p.100] In Richard`s scheme, the supreme form of emotive language is poetry while
referential language is typified by scientific description.
Furthermore, it is imperative to motivate the difference between poetics and
prosaics which lies in the use of language. They are united by speech acts but these
have different purposes. It will be useful therefore to look at the literary theories about
poetry and prose.
Poetics means poetry in a virtual, potential state; to be poetry it has to suffer a
change from virtuality to reality, form identity to alterity. This alterity, which brings
about an openness of the ego towards both beings and Being as Heidegger
employed the terms is fulfilled poetically in the language, and mystically in
silence. Poetry is also a transfiguration of the everyday, prosaic language, which the
poet returns to its first, natural state. The form in which this metamorphosis is
accompanied is the poem. To write, for the poet, means to allow the language say
more than it usually does. (Jean-Claude Renard)
Mallarme, Vallery and later on the Russian Formalists developed a theory of
the poetic language as distinct from the prosaic language, by the use of language
which is no more a transparent means of communication, but a sensible, autonomous
material performing the magic, indestructible unity between sound and meaning.
[Gerard Genette, p.99] For Valery, poetry is like dancing, while prose is like walking.
[David Lodge, p.11]
The notion of a radical discontinuity between the language of poetry and the
language of other kinds of discourse has challenged a diversity of opinions about the

36
nature of prose and poetry, some of them quite general and categorical, such as a
poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. (Shelley)
More explicit comments are to be found, for instance, in F.W.Bateson`s
introduction to English Poetry and the English Language (1934) where he stated that
poetry is and essentially verbal activity and that it is only by observing the words
that the reader can become aware of the poem`s structure. He extends his argument
to the criticism of prose: if words are the media of poetry, what are the media of
prose? And the answer would seem to be, Ideas. [apud David Lodge, p.12]
Prose uses only the denotations of words; poetry exploits their connotations as
well. Prose is essentially logical; poetry creates non-logical patterns by means of
metre, rhythm, alliteration, etc. Prose is essentially progressive; poetry stands still.
Poetry attempts to arrest us and see the physical thing while prose is a pot which
lets the words leak out. (T.E.Hulme)
Another point of view had been voiced by Stephane Mallarme, who
considered that poetry is made not with ideas but with words. [Archibald MacLeish,
Poetry and Experience, The Riverside Press, Cambridge: 1961, p.14] Since ideas are
expressed in words and cannot very well exist without them, and since many words
signify ideas whether we wish them or not, this statement must be taken to mean that
poetry is made not with words-as-expressions-of-ideas but with what Mallarme called
words themselves, words as sensuous events, in brief, words as the sounds that
convey them.
F.R.Leavis`s approach implies that poets are assessed according to their
awareness of the possibilities of language; novelists according to their awareness of
the possibilities of life. We are usually less conscious of a novelist`s use of language
than of a poet`s. The relation of literary language to reality also concerned Cristopher
Caudwell in Illusion and Reality, 1937 language [i.e. all language, not just poetic
language] communicates not simply a dead image of outer reality but also and
simultaneously an attitude toward it. [apud David Lodge, pp.18,66]
Another perspective, in the tradition of the discontinuity between the language
of poetry and the language of prose, is the argument that poetry is untranslatable and
non-paraphrasable. That poetry is untranslatable is a basic tenet of modern criticism
and it appears to follow logically from any critical theory which holds that form and
content are inseparable and which accounts for the literary effects of a given work
primarily or exclusively in terms of its verbal organization. Novels, on the other hand,

37
are apparently translatable, in the sense that we all read translated novels with some
confidence in our judgement of them and their authors.
David Lodge argues that novels are not completely translatable and that poems
are not completely untranslatable. Sound is an element of language which may be
exploited by writers for mimetic and expressive purposes. Still, the high degree of
phonological activity in poetry is not a valid reason for regarding its language as
essentially different from that of prose. He endorses this view by quoting W.H.Auden:

poetry is not, like music, pure sound. Any elements in a poem which are not based
on verbal experience are, to some degree, translatable into another tongue, for
example, similes and metaphors, images, which are drawn from sensory experience
the unique perspective on the world which every genuine poet has survived
translation. [apud David Lodge, pp.18-26]

Such arguments point to a view of language as a continuum, rather than two sharply
divided modes. David Lodge`s aim was to show that if we are right to regard the art
of poetry as essentially an art of language, then so is the art of the novel. [ David
Lodge p.47] Thus the specific nature of poetry would be: a work of art whose signs
cipher, transcend things and which is to be deciphered, de-constructed, taking into
account its intrinsic rules, as an aesthetic thing with its own life.
We have seen that language holds a specific placed in its relation to poetry.
The poem implies a re-birth of the words, because the poet uses the word not like
ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that
the word only now becomes and remains truly a word. [Martin Heidegger, The
Origin of the Work of Art] Or, to put it in other words, this is an art which exploits the
resources of language in such a way that words become what in non-literary
discourse they merely represent.
A number of critics have formulated this idea in different ways, i.e.
A.N.Whitehead, W.K.Wimsatt, Winifred Novottny: The great and amazing
peculiarity of poetic language is its power to bridge or seem to bridge the gap between
what has meaning but no particularity i.e. ordinary language and what has
particularity but no meaning i.e. the reality language is about. [apud David
Lodge, p.63] Heidegger upholds the idea that poetry is the saying of the
unconcealdness of what is. Language itself is poetry in the essential sense. Poetry
takes place in language because language preserves the original nature of poetry.
[apud Jeremy Tambling, What Is Literary Language, Open University Press, 1988,

38
p.91] He sees ordinary uses of language deviating from this original poetry, which is
itself crucial, since it first brings to word and to appearance. Heidegger would wish
for a literature giving a structure to total complexity. Language usage customarily
conceals reality Being, as Heidegger calls it in poetic language Being is brought
into presence, starts up into consciousness. Literary language becomes, indeed,
performative. Heidegger takes normal language usage to be an occlusion of the real,
following Nietzsche; both feel that poetic language draws previously non-existent
awareness and concepts into being. It follows that literature can be defined in terms of
depth. Ordinary language that says what it means is rejected in favour of
ambiguity(Empson), paradox(Brooks), ambivalence and richness of imagery and
of metaphor. [Jeremy Tambling, p.19]
We have tried to approach the concept of literary language: this language that
says nothing, is never silent, and is called literature according to Michel Foucault,
The Order of Things). Geoffrey Hartman`s idea of literarity, expressed in Saving the
Text (1981) is: To call a text literary is to trust that it will make sense eventually,
even though its quality of reference may be complex, disturbed, unclear. It is a way of
saving the phenomena of words that are out of the ordinary or bordering the
nonsensical that have no stabilised reference.

II.1.2. Experimenting with Language

The apostles of the modern movement in prose and verse alike found the mainstream
of the day obsolete in its presentation of experience, insular and untrained in
technique, flabby in its use of language. Partly, the problem was one of language and
style. The verbal currency coined by the Romantics and the Victorians had become
unacceptably worn and dulled. Language has become the central issue in modernist
thought, and it had to be revived as life has to be revived as well.
In philosophy, Wittgenstein was the most important exponent of the view that
all philosophical problems have a linguistic origin, and that philosophy is a battle
against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. He makes a
radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves
the same purpose: to convey thoughts. [Jeremy Tambling, What Is Literary
Language? Open University Press: 1988, p.25]

39
 An essential modernist task is the creation and propagation of a new language
and this is a common denominator for writers who have made the quest for a new
language a fundamental aspect of their literature. They announce the inadequacy of
the old language, and the myriad possible alternatives for a replacement. Language
does not simply serve communication: indeed, the question is to what extent
communication is possible at all through language, which was impoverished because
it was used as an instrument. Furthermore, in the process of self-identification, the
role of language is also found to be fundamentally unreliable. How is meaning
possible if the language we use can never be a reliable tool? We had the experience
but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a
different form or That was one way of putting it not very satisfactory / A
periphrastic study in a worn out poetical fashion, / Leaving one still with the
intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings. [T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets, in
Collected Poems, London: Faber & Faber, 1974, p.198] Nietzsche had coined the
phrase the prison house of language suggesting the idea that language can prevent
thought rather than facilitate it. The implication is that language can never be
completely under the control of the user.

The user will always remain within his own language, never able to stand outside, as
it were, and contemplate his deepest linguistic assumptions. So little is the user in control of
his language that he will often be unaware how far his perceptions of the world, his
understanding of his own feelings, are governed by the very language he uses to try to make
sense of them. That which is capable of being expressed by the individual is in theory
limitless, but in practice there will never be a language user able to transcend his or her own
limitations in order to exploit linguistic forms to the full. [Allan Ingram, The Language of
D.H.Lawrence, Macmillan: 1990, p.13]

The solution can be found in the revolution of the word and the revival of
the language. Linguistic experiments performed by Joyce, Eliot, Pound reflect a
conviction that language, in the modern age, had to stretch had to say more than it
had been able to say before; had to reveal more, embody more.
There is a tradition that the poet stands in a somewhat symbolic relation to
language. Heidegger says that language speaks, and the poet belongs to language.
Poetry imagines language in a singular way. Poetry is a translation of the language of
Being into mortal language. And the modern poet, more than ever, is the explorer of
experience using language in order to build up rich patterns of meaning. The function
of poetry is not self-expression but the proper fusion of meaning in language.

40
 The poet`s art is a means to meaning a means by which the world can be made to
mean The poet`s labour is to struggle with the meaninglessness and silence of the world
until he can force it to mean, until he can make the silence answer and the non-Being Be: We
poets struggle with non-being to force it to yield being / We knock upon silence for an
answering music. [Archibald MacLeish, Poetry and Experience, The Riverside Press,
Cambridge: 1961, pp.8-9]

More than any other poet in the twentieth century, T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound,
these two great innovators, influenced their fellow practitioners of the craft, Pound
by the freshness of his point of view and help to his friends and Eliot by the intensity
of his interest in precision and purity of language.
T.S.Eliot expressed the mood of his generation, both as a theorist and as a
creator. The Waste Land was a demonstration and a manifesto of what the new poetry
wanted to do and could do. As he himself acknowledged, the environment in which
one grows up has a formative effect on one`s character and subsequent work. As for
his literary beginnings, he was much indebted to French literature. The kind of
poetry that I needed, to teach me the use of my own voice, did not exist in English at
all; it was only to be found in French. Specifically, the form in which I began to
write, in 1908 or 1909, was directly drawn from the study of Laforgue. It was to
Laforgue that he owed more than to any one poet in any language. [David Moody,
T.S.Eliot Poet, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p.6]
Then, there was the lesson of Baudelaire: Fourmillante Cite, cite pleine de
reves / Ou le spectre en pleine jour raccrchoe le passant ; I knew what that meant
because I had lived it before I wanted to turn it into verse on my own account.
[David Moody, T.S.Eliot Poet, Cambridge University Press: 1979, p.6] When he sad
he had lived it he referred to the urban imagery of St. Louis, upon which the images
of Paris and London had been superimposed. And he transformed this experience in
The Waste Land which echoes Baudelaire: Unreal City / Under the brown fog of a
winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London bridge, so many, / I had not thought
death had undone so many! [T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land in The Waste Land and
Other Poems, Faber&Faber, London: 1990, p.25, lines 60-64] His views on poetic
symbolism, the use of mythological and literary parallel, allusions, music in poetry,
sensibility, all these bear the influence of Baudelaire.
To these literary influences, he added in 1910-1911 the profoundly formative
influence of a romantic year in Paris. We went to read French literature and

41
philosophy, and to be initiated by Alain Fournier into the intellectual life of Paris. But
what most deeply drew him was that depuis plusieurs annees, la France representait
surtout, a mes yeux, la poesie. He even had at that time the idea of giving up
English and trying to settle down and scrape along in Paris and gradually write
French. [David Moody, op.cit., p.6]
On the whole, his view of poetry derives from the nineteenth century tradition
of Flaubert and Baudelaire and their French successors as well as from the more direct
influence of Irving Babbitt and Santayana at Harvard and Ezra Pound and T.E.Hulme
in London. Pound was a brilliant sponsor of young literary talent and Eliot was one of
his finest disciples among the London literary figures.
In the Paris of 1910-1911 Bergson was the most noticed figure. Eliot
himself thought the soul constituted of its memory-images; he characterized the
passive state of mind as one in which life was like a cine-film, a fixed sequence of
flickering clichs; and he opposed to that the act of intuition, or the immediate
consciousness of life-in-process which placed the mind within the absolute. [David
Moody, op.cit., p.26] His thesis work on philosophy tackled the relation of chaotic
subjective experience to a higher and absolute coherence.
The Waste Land (1922) expressed better than any other poem of that decade
the sense of hopeless drift which afflicted all the more sensitive members of the post-
war generation and the lack of a positive spiritual faith; it is a chart of the devastated
world after World War I capturing the collapse of civilization and rendering a feeling
of universal ruin.
Eliot restored the intellectual dignity of English poetry; he formed a means of
expression in the poetry for the surface and the depths of a representative modern
mind, intensely aware of his surroundings. The Waste Land could be regarded as
ethos, and the solution to the waste land would be the retrieval of the conditions of
experience, a major concern of most philosophers and poets. The forgetting of
Being meaning reification, alienation, is another way of expressing the waste land.
The poet is the only one who can redeem us from the waste land.
Here, one of Eliot`s key terms might prove helpful, i.e. dissociation of
sensibility and thought, which is related to the revival of language. The poets of the
seventeenth century possessed a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have
never recovered. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became
more crude. [T.S.Eliot, The Metaphysical Poets]

42
 Eliot`s poem is an experiment with language. He demonstrates how alive and
resounding with possibility current speech could be by his ability to incorporate into it
fragments which had been long inert. He gave new relevance to both past and present
by bringing the old and the new powerfully together.
Poetry is, for the modern reader, a vehicle of transformation. It alters the view
of the world especially in terms of emotions. Consequently, modern poets must
revitalize language, must look for something new; this is best expressed by Pound`s
desire to make it new. Imagism, whose most important representative is Ezra
Pound, is one of the modernist movements which demanded clear and precise images,
elimination of every word that did not contribute to the presentation, and a rhythm
freed from the artificial demands of metrical regularity. They adopted the invention of
the French symbolists vers libre. [for a detailed presentation of Pound`s main
statements see Durant&Fabb eds., Literary Studies in Action, p.111]
The Imagists wished to use ordinary language and the exact rather than the
decorative word, to create new rhythms, expressive of the twentieth century, and to
allow absolute freedom in the choice of the subject. An image is that which presents
an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time; as opposed to
impression, which is merely the trace deposited in the mind by a previous
experience, leaving art to re-represent that trace so precisely that the intervening
passage of time will be obliterated. [Peter Nicholls, op.cit, p.712]
A core of burning paradox was preferred to a gloss of surface beauty. Ezra
Pound speaks about each word being charged with meaning. Through the image
poetry will restore living contact with reality. Poetry makes you stop and see a thing,
the image has to grab you (T.E.Hulme). Furthermore, the proper and true symbol is
in reality (Ezra Pound). Through symbol we are given access to something, therefore
it has connotation of depth.
Imagism, ideogram, and vortex have come to be seen as crucial to
Anglo-American modernism. Pound`s theory of the ideogram is a theory of poetry
and of language. For him, the ideogram is a place in which there is a tension between
the abstract and the particular. The ideogram can restore immediacy to language, and
it preserves the past in the present.
A representative imagist poem is In a Station of the Metro: The apparition
of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough. Here is G.S.Fraser`s
interpretation of the poem:

43
 It`s a rainy day, we are to imagine the underground station full of drab figures in dark
clothes, and suddenly, in the crowd, the pale, flower-like faces of a small group, perhaps only
a couple, of beautiful girls. Apparition suggests startingness, and it is a word used for
ghosts. Then we are presented the image of the petals or blossoms, soon to fall. Beauty grows
out of the crowd, triumphantly, though perhaps, like the petals, only in the end to fall on the
ground and be trampled heedlessly under the foot. [G.S.Fraser, The Modern Writer and His
World, Pelican Books, London: 1964]

Nothing of all this is being said, everything is, as in a Japanese haiku,

beautifully implied. An imagist poem is both made manifest in words and it manifest
distrust of words.
A writer using the Chinese ideogram theoretically represents ideas and
feelings in a tangible medium, thus one open to rational investigation of the totality of
what is being conveyed. This idea discussed by Pound was promoted most visibly by
Ernest Fenollosa in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry (1919).
Fenollosa`s conclusion about reading an ideogram, or even an approximation of it as
a form in another language, is that we get a renewed sense that poetry must render
what is said, not what is merely meant. [Criticism and Culture, pp.69,70]
Pound wrote to Eliot that The Waste Land, though only 433 lines long, was
the longest poem in the English langwidge (Letters, p.169). By langwidge, Pound
means language that has been tossed up in the air and reconstructed afresh, without
the stale conventional connotations of its tradition. Landwidge starts with
language, but the modern aesthetic goes beyond the constraints of convention at its
inception. The remnants of language linger in the background, but the future of
modernism is written in each author`s perception of langwidge. The new language
must communicate to and through a world of alienation, confusion, distortion,
acceleration a world turned upside down. [Randy Malamud, op.cit., p.11]
In the revolution of the word the paradigmatic case is James Joyce. He
expressed the dilemma: I`d like a language which is above all languages, a language
to which all will do service. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing in a
tradition. Joyce`s writing is predicated upon a need to escape from the stylistic and
formal constraints of tradition thus, as he explains, his literature is fundamentally
dependent upon some kind of alternative to English. [Randy Malamud, op.cit., p.6]]
Bonnie Kime Scott provides an alternative interpretation by including Joyce in
a matrix of feminist criticism and considers that the young Joyce was largely a
realistic, individualistic, logocentric writer who subscribed to a classical aesthetics of

44
stasis. The mature Joyce became a collectivist, a destructionist and a mythologist of
the unconscious. [Bonnie Kime Scott, James Joyce, The Harvester Press: 1987, p.1]
His non-conformist spirit might account for his wish to depart from
established patterns in view of investigating new ways of novel writing and handling
the language. Like William Faulkner, he founded no school, he developed an aesthetic
theory and practice as far as it would go, there was no further road that way. He is also
a symbol of the artist exile in contemporary bourgeois society. He realized that Ireland
was a paralysed country, therefore in order to know it better and to acquire a degree
of objectivity, he had to get away from it. Moreover, he was convinced that his
writings would not find a congenial reception or even a fair hearing in the naroow
environment of Ireland.
When Joyce moved to Paris in December 1902, this was already the capital of
progressive vitality and innovation in the arts, and Paris was to remain indissolubly
linked with the Modernist movement throughout the rest of Joyce`s lifetime. His
frequent residences in France and subsequent contact with French experimental
writing, as also his connections with Eliot and Pound (il miglior fabro as Eliot
called him) brought him to a turning away form logic by disrupting the traditional
forward flow of narrative time, by laconic juxtaposition, and a unique and dense
verbal texture, according to the idea that for every work of art there is a unique
individual form appropriate to its subject matter.
Modernist writers, with J. Joyce, V.Woolf, D.H.Lawrence as its best
representatives in fiction, directed their creative energy to concentrating on probing
the unutterable territory of the human consciousness and mind. This entailed a testing
of the capacity of language to approximate to the inner realities of such phenomena as
simultaneity, sudden illumination or epiphany, as well as the relative time and the
unconscious.
Joyce`s medium was language and it is precisely this language that demands a
critic`s attention, since it affects the reader as much as it affects the work. Harry Levin
sums up Joyce`s achievement:

The technical and psychological paradox is that Joyce, as his comprehension of

ordinary humanity increased, became less comprehensible to the common reader. He is
commonly remembered not as the mature creator forging, in mingled arrogance and piety,
the uncreated conscience of his race but as a winged figure poised for a break with the
dominating forces in his background. Language, religion and nationality were envisaged by
Stephen as a series of nets to restrain that initial impetus. When his trial flight succeeded and

45
the creative process began, the metaphor was calculated to change. For the irreducible
substances out of which Joyce created his monumental achievement were nationality, religion
and language. [Harry Levin, Introduction to The Essential James Joyce, Hammersmith,
London: 1991, p.11]

His preoccupation with words is given voice to by Stephen Dedalus in A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man who, as an artist, is to give the word to future
humanity. Stephen`s sensitivity to words and to the relationships between different
words and reality, and between sound and semantics is his own. Joyce`s hero develops
the intricate labyrinth of his mind and art at the cost of wordly comfort and sets
himself to take wings from Ireland and from the present into exile and into the future.
Stephen`s discovery of the significance of his name comes about as a result of his
increasingly specialized involvement with language. [Patrick Parrinder, James
Joyce, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p.75] Stephen Dedalus is a combination of
a Christian and a pagan name, which, in turn, suggests a split personality; Stephen
was the first Christian martyr, suggesting maybe his saint-like devotion to art;
Dedalus from Greek mythology invented wings, suggesting ingenuity and daring
spirit. He is fascinated by different meanings of queer words, as well as by the
correspondence between words and things, and his concept of coloured words. His
own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very
words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms...
[James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pp.198-199]
The vocabulary which surrounds him is not individual or authentic, but
secondhand, heaps of dead language. As he became an international writer Joyce
tended more and more to represent the state of not being at home in one`s language as
a universal condition, the fate of the fallen man after Babel rather than a product of
the power-structure of the British Empire. [Patrick Parrinder, op.cit., p.77] Further
aspects of the modernist novel can be seen in Ulysses. The substance of Ulysses is
words, language itself, in which the whole complex, conflict-ridden relation between
substantial and essential, actual and ideal, concrete and abstract, are contained. The
core of his method was explained to his friend Frank Budgen:

I enquired about Ulysses. Was it progressing? I have been working hard on it all day, said
Joyce. Does that mean that you have written a good deal? I said. Two sentences, said
Joyce. I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of Flaubert. You have been
seeking the mot juste? I said. No said Joyce, I have the words already. What I am seeking
is the perfect order of words in the sentence. There is an order in every way appropriate. I

46
think I have it. [Boris Ford ed., The Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol.7 The
Modern Age, Penguin Books, 1976, p.387]

Joyce`s style in Ulysses depends on the use of words which makes it a comprehensive
handbook of verbal techniques, and an amazing display of the magical power that
words assert over things. Treasured phrases enable Stephen to transform the dull
phenomenon of Dublin, to transcend the decayed city by communing with a
rapturous seascape. Ulysses has been described by Arnold Goldman as an
encyclopaedia of styles. After the psychological hyperrealism of the early chapters
of Ulysses, the text is taken over by a bewildering variety of voices and discourses
parodic, travestying, colloquial, literary: newspaper headlines, oratory, women`s
magazines, pub talk, operatic songs, encyclopaedia articles, and so on; while the
narrative level of the text is full of gaps, non sequiturs, anticlimaxes and unsolvable
enigmas, and the chronological order of events is broken down and rearranged by the
operations of memory and the association of ideas in the consciousness of characters.
Reading such a text we are reminded that the world we inhabit is constructed, not
give; constructed in language.
The relation of thought to language hardly required further explanation, since
the application of linguistic analysis to cultural forms is currently everywhere in
evidence, and since we are willing to agree that the structure of language informs
consciousness and the various systems that consciousness may construct. Language is
not only the vehicle of thought but its determining medium.

47
 II.2. Disruption versus Coherence.
The Stream-of-consciousness Technique
One of the most important concepts brought about by modernism is discontinuity,
which seems to be a key term when we refer to the modern age and the people living
it. We recognize the perception of discontinuity from Forster`s Only connect to
Yeats` Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world and Eliot`s I can connect / Nothing with nothing and These fragments I
have shored against my ruins. The exploration of discontinuity is a characteristic of
the twentieth century as the elaboration of continuity was of the nineteenth century.
Apparently, the modernist work is a heap of broken images calling for a reader to
impose order upon it, i.e. coherence and meaning.
Flux, fragmentation and pluralism were key notions of the early twentieth
century thought; the life of the mind is irregular, fragmentary, chaotic (T.S.Eliot); it
is organized like a stream, a flow. Emotions, memories, fleeting associations, elusive
images, mysterious associations and perceptions of the conscious and subconscious
mind, called for the emergence of this technique championed by James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner.
Pound`s Cantos, T.S.Eliot`s The Waste Land, Joyce`s Ulysses are examples of
rhetorical discontinuity. Any obscurity in these works is due to the suppression of
links in the chain, of explanatory and connecting matter [Monroe K. Spears,
Dyonisus and the City. Modernism in Twentieth Century Poetry, Oxford University
Press: 1970, p.26] This is because mental life which is not fundamentally rational
is organized not in logical chained way, but rather it is like a stream, a flow. A stream
is comparably looser than a chain; there is movement in a stream, there are no fixed
priorities, whereas in a chain the organization is, more or less, prescribed. Thus the
traditional forward flow of narrative time is disrupted.
This is a device common to both poetic practice and narrative discourse,
although the stream-of-consciousness technique is ascribed to the novel. Though
experience can be organized into historical order for narrative purposes, it does not
always exist in the mind that way. Memory can precipitate various disordered, distant
events into present consciousness, mixing past and present. Therefore, in following
the thoughts and memories of individual characters, the modernists could amend or
ignore conventional chronological order. [Randall Stevenson, The British Novel Since
the Thirties, B.T.Batsford Ltd, London: 1987, p.20]

48
 The works of Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner are fully committed to entering
characters` consciousness. In works such as Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway the
conventional chronology of the novel is altered by frequent associations of present
events with memories of the past: from this intermingling of past consciousness with
present awareness, an extensive history of the previous life of each character can be
assembled.
This is not a brand-new technique, as the general urge towards transformation
in art was a European process. The emphasis on memory and its use to reintegrate
past experience with present impressions are dominant in the fiction of Marcel Proust.
His Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927) is concentrated within the experience
of individual consciousness, and might have influenced writers of the time.
These novelists were seeking to find words that could convey elusive and
evanescent thoughts: not only the words that come to the mind, but the images of the
inner world of fantasy, fusing with sounds and smells, the world of perceptual
experience. [Leon Edel, The Modern Psychological Novel, p.13] It is the very
atmosphere of the mind that they try to capture.
Temporal discontinuity implies a new way of reading and it affects
perspective. In this disarranged world we have to admit that various things occur at
the samer time. The language may be set down word-by-word but the writer is also
creating an illusion of simultaneity: we see, hear, smell at the same time, just as do in
real life.
The effect of a Faulknerian novel, for instance, resembles that of a movie-
montage where rapidity of the images, and the sequence in which they come before
our eyes, create a multiple activity of the senses and an illusion of things occurring at
the same time instead of successively. [Leon Edel, The Modern Psychological Novel,
p.167] A veritable mental cinema of flashing images, often confused and incoherent,
often sharply focused, aims at making the reader feel himself an actual participant, no
more a mere listener. The writer or rather the writing attempts to give us the illusion
that we are experiencing that is happening there.
The relationship between writer and reader has changed. It is already a
commonplace that the formal characteristic of the modernist work is its construction
out of fragments. Compared with earlier writing, modernist literature is notable for
what it omits the explanations, interpretations, connections, summaries and
distancing that provide continuity, perspective and security in traditional literature. A

49
typical modernist work will suggest rather than assert, making use of symbols and
images instead of statements. The pattern is beneath the surface. The reader has to dig
the structure out. This is why the reader of a modernist work is often looked at as
participating in the actual work of making the poem or story.
More often than not, the modernist work is structured as a quest for the very
coherence that, on its surface, it seems to lack. The search for meaning involves the
reader in a process of giving shape to the work of art.
The writer breaks and re-shapes the language, because he holds in his hand
one medium only by means of which to create his work: i.e. words. He sets out to use
words to render the very iridescence and bloom of life or to frame in syllables the
light and the dark moments of memory and feeling. The word is asked to carry, on
shoulders not broad enough, the whole of a writer`s experience. [Leon Edel, The
Modern Psychological Novel, p.123]
Joyce`s extended use of the unspoken soliloquy or silent monologue is an
exact transcription of the stream of consciousness of the individual, which has the air
of an untouched photographic record and has been compared to the film of a moving-
picture. The psychological is constructed by the linguistic: without language there
can be no thought.
Patrick Parrinder best epitomizes Joyce`s style, describing his interior
monologues as:

spontaneous and overflowing; transparent and directly expressive of mental events;

objective and impartial in reporting these events; capable of expressing any form of
experience; faithful to the subjectivity of experience and its filtering through an individual
personality or temperament; they appear to proceed at exactly the same pace as the events
they describe. [Patrick Parrinder, op.cit., p.167]

In the last chapter of Ulysses he omits punctuation entirely from its last forty pages,
enhancing the sense of Molly`s ideas, emotions and memories as a mingling flood, a
seamless, stream-like continuity. He often presents the thoughts of his characters
without formal obstructions or any authorial interventions. [Randall Stevenson,
p.19]
Gertrude Stein took her model from contemporary painting; the link between
writing and painting being clearest in some remarks about Cezanne: each part is as
important as the whole. Her shift away from representation (to what she calls this
background of word-system) deliberately invests language with bodily values.

50
William Carlos Williams, for example, who learned much from Stein, remarks in his
Autobiography that It is the making of that step, to come over into the tactile
qualities, the words themselves beyond the mere thought expressed that distinguishes
the modern. [quoted in Stephen Fredman, Poet`s Prose, p.19] For Stein, then,
language is to be grasped not as a means of reference to a world of objects that can be
dominated, but as a medium of consciousness.
It is perhaps not surprising to find that for most of the modernists music came
to stand as the ideal form of disinterested expressivity; and we have philosophical
confirmation in the work of Schopenhauer, for whom music is by no means like the
other arts, namely a copy of the ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of
which are the Ideas. For this reason the effect of music is so very much more
powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of
the shadow, but the music of the essence. [Peter Nicholls, op.cit., p.49]
In this version of Plato`s shadow and essence, music offers freedom from
imitation, since it expressed only the inner nature, the in-itself, of every
phenomenon.
In addition to Joyce`s linguistic aptitude and in compensation for his defective
eyesight, he was gifted with an especially fine tenor voice. Professional singing was
one of the potential careers he had contemplated. Most of his poems are songs; lyrics
which, without their musical settings, look strangely fragile. Yeats, upon first reading
them, praised Joyce`s delicate talent, and shrewdly wondered whether his ultimate
form would be verse or prose. Operating within the broader area of fiction, he was to
retain the cadenced precision of the poet. Above all, he remained an accomplished
listener, whose pages are continually animated by the accurate recording of overheard
conversation. According to Parrinder, music is the stalking-horse to bring language
into our sights. [Patrick Parrinder, p.169] In Ulysses the chapter entitled Sirens
illustrated how music works through language. His experiment with words is carried
further in Finnegans Wake, the climax of an unprecedented use of the language
potentials.
The novel communicates by means of a tissue of interwoven discourses. There
is the discourse of the narrator, who may be a character or an authorial persona, who,
if the latter, may be covert or overt; and there are the discourses of the represented
characters, as manifested in their direct speech, or what we usually call dialogue,
and as manifested in the representation of their thoughts through soliloquy, reported

51
speech, free indirect style, interior monologue and so on. But all three discourses will
also contain echoes of, allusions to, anticipations of, other discourses both spoken and
written the discourses of popular wisdom, literary tradition, cultural institutions,
social classes, and so on. All these lead to Bakhtin`s particular conception of literature
(and especially the novel) as being essentially dialogic. But this richness and
complexity of discursive texture in the novel, what Bakhtin called the novel`s
polyphony, offers a certain resistance to the idea of the novel as communication.

II.3. Impersonality

The Romantic theory introduced the analogy between divine and literary creativity.
Poets were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators or prophets. The
theological aura around authorship was replaced by modernist accounts of the
impersonality of the great writer.
In France, Mallarme was the first to anticipate and call attention to the
necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed
to be its owner. For him, it is language that speaks not the author, to write is, through
a prerequisite impersonality, to reach that point, where only language acts, performs
and not me. [Modern Literary Theory, p.115] The poet, in the very experience of his
freedom, finds himself both bound to language and delivered from it by a speech
whose master, nevertheless, he himself is. Words choose the poet. The art of the
writer consists in little by little making words interest themselves in the books
Little by little the book will finish me. [Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference]
The basic model of communication is a linear sequence: addresser message
addressee. The addresser encodes a message in language and sends it to the
addressee via speech or writing and the addressee decodes it. But who is the addresser
in prose fiction? The poststructuralist critic Roland Barthes proclaims the death of
the Author. He considers the author an ideological construct whose purpose is to
legitimate a practice of writing and reading that always pursues the voice of a single
person, the author`s confiding in us. The removal of the author utterly transforms
the modern text. The temporality is different. There is no other time than that of the
enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. We know now that a text

52
is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the message of the
Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of
them original, blend and clash. [Modern Literary Theory, eds. Philip Rice & Patricia
Waugh, London: Edward Arnold, 1989, p.116] Thus, Barthes suggests that the text is
irreducibly plural, a weave of voices or codes that cannot be tied to a single point of
expressive origin in the author.
Barthes`s emphasis upon the anonymity of the writer recalls T.S.Eliot`s earlier
account of the impersonality of the author in Tradition and the Individual Talent:
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality. This depersonalization is also accounted for by Martin Heidegger in The
Origin of the Work of Art: It is precisely in great art that the artist remains
inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys
itself in the creative process for the work to emerge.
F.R.Leavis sees The Waste Land as taking impersonality to an extreme limit:
it would be difficult to imagine a completer transcendence of the individual self, a
completer projection of awareness. [F.R.Leavis, The Waste Land, in T.S.Eliot: A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Hugh Kenner, Prentice Hall, 1962] Eliot`s escape
from personality may be seen as a parallel phenomenon to D.H.Lawrence`s rejection
of the old stable ego of the character. As C.K.Stead points out, the escape is made,
not away from the self, but deeper into the self, below the levels of consciousness.
Thus the escape is actually an inclusion of deeper levels of the personality
extending to the archetypal and the collective; and Stead shows how small a role Eliot
gives to the conscious will in the process of writing poetry. [Monroe K.Spears, op.cit.,
pp.52-53] Lawrence`s narrative voice became more dialogical, learning how to
achieve a many-voiced narrative tone. He was experimenting radically with what it
means for a novelist to lose his own distinct voice in the voices of his characters,
especially in their inner voices. In his practice, all rules about point of view are
abolished: the borderlines between author`s voice and character`s voice are
deliberately blurred, i.e. The Rainbow, Women in Love.
Especially the techniques developed by such writers as Joyce, Eliot, Pound
were ones designated far more to disguise and conceal the personality of the author
than to reveal it. When Stephen Dedalus speaks of the role of the artist, it is in terms
of the removal of the creator from what he has created. The artist, like the God of the
creation, remains within or behind or beyond his handiwork, invisible, refined out of

53
existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails... The artist must stand to his work as God
to his creation, invisible and all powerful; he must be everywhere felt but nowhere
seen.[apud Allan Ingram, p.11]
Joyce makes Stephen echo the famous passage in Flaubert`s Letters which
states that the writer should stand aloof from his work. The artist must stand to his
work as God to his creation, invisible and all powerful; he must be everywhere felt
but nowhere seen. [Patrick Parrinder, p.71]
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man takes the doctrine of impersonality
further into an area that Flaubert himself had never attempted. It sets out to be an
impersonal, or ironic autobiography. The stylistic changes throughout the Portrait
are adopted in order to reflect, first and foremost, the development of Stephen`s mind
and of his linguistic sophistication; and they also act as a kind of denial of authorship.
Stephen himself comes to believe he is following a predestined course, and unfolds a
fervently idealistic creed. Through him Joyce is able to affirm the romantic myth of
artistic genius and to partially dissociate himself from the arrogance and self-conceit
which follows from that myth. [Patrick Parrinder, p.72]
Joyce started off from the facts of his life. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man transmutes the stuff of actual experience into artistic myth. The theme if the
artist`s own biography is encountered again and again in the modernist novel. A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is both the portrait of the novel`s creator and the
revelation of the life principle on which the novel is written. It represents that reality
which the novelist is most familiar with: his own life and his own art. In Joyce`s time
the portrait of the artist the occurs in: Thomas Mann`s Tonio Krger, Andr Gide`s
The Counterfeiters, D.H.Lawrence`s Sons and Lovers, and in Proust`s monumental
work A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Thus one important concern, common to the writers of the early years of the
twentieth century was to question personality. This is also motivated by the writer`s
sense of the dislocation experienced by the individual faced with the conditions of life
in the modern world. Therefore, to write is to draw back form one`s writing, in order
to let speech speak alone, culminating with the phrase uttered by Derrida for the
work, the writer is at once everything and nothing.
Even with the most impersonal of writers there is a strong sense of having
been experimented upon by an intelligence that chooses to remain hidden. In Jacob
Korg`s words, the reader feels that he is himself being judged by some enigmatic

54
intelligence, some representative of a world of values to which he is a stranger. [apud
Allan Ingram, p.10]
We may conclude by mentioning David Lodge`s summing up of this theory:

A novel is in one sense a game, a game that requires at least two players, a reader as well as a
writer. The writer who seeks to control or dictate the responses of his reader outside the
boundaries of the text itself, is comparable to a card-player who gets up periodically from his
place, goes round to the table to look at his opponents hand, and advises him what card to
play. [Small World: An Introduction, in Write On, 1985]

II.4. The Power of Tradition. The Mythical Method

Paradoxically, there is a relation between modernism and the power of tradition.

Literally, modern implies a contrast with the past, a break with tradition and
convention. Diachronically, the self-conscious awareness of a break with the past may
be felt in two main ways: as emancipation, a joyful release from the dead hand of
convention, from stale pieties and restrictions; or as disinheritance, a loss of tradition,
belief, and meaning. The modern is acutely conscious of the contemporary scene, but
he does not accept its values.
The paradoxical meaning is reflected by the twofold concerns, i.e. the term
strongly implies some sort of historical discontinuity, either as a liberation form
inherited patterns, or, at another extreme, deprivation and disinheritance; on the other
hand, modernists have been as much imbued with a feeling for their historical role,
their relation to the past, as with a feeling of historical discontinuity. [Monroe
K.Spears, p.13]
D.H.Lawrence, for example, is widely regarded as breaking with tradition in
probing human consciousness, in attempting to represent impersonality, in
experimenting with rhetorical forms, in exploring male bonding, and in opening up
fictional endings. But he absorbs much of the tradition from which he broke.
Malcolm Bradbury has also noticed that the break with past Victorian
conventions of narrative and literary morality, authorship and readership was never to
become complete. Many of the Victorian conventions and myths continued to haunt
the radical surprise of the modern, and Victorian fiction with its omniscient and

55
Godlike voice, its weighty realism, its chronological plotting, its presiding moral
confidence, its role as the bourgeois epic leaves its lasting imprint on British
fiction to this moment. [Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, London:
Secker & Warburg, 1993, p.4]
Even the most revolutionary kind of art practised by Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence,
Pound, Yeats, Woolf retains a lively imaginative interest in the past; aware of what
Bakhtin said that everything that belongs to the present dies along with the present.
The modern writer in his work is preoccupied with trying to bridge a gulf within his
own awareness of past from present. The tension between the past and the present is
expressed in the best modernist works.
The poet who had thought most deeply about literary history is T.S.Eliot. He
meditated on the idea of tradition in his famous essay Tradition and the Individual
Talent. Here he made it clear that no artist has his complete meaning alone, he
belongs to the cultural history and any aesthetic criteria must include the diachronical
perspective.

Our tendency is to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he
least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is
individual, the peculiar essence of man. On the contrary, if we approach a poet without this
prejudice we shall find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be
those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.
[T.S.Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent]

The historical sense should accompany the modern writer, who develops a
consciousness of the past. We are aware that it is impossible to study literature apart
from an epoch`s entire culture. Mutatis mutandis, it is even more dangerous to
encapsulate a literary phenomenon in the single epoch of its creation, in its own
contemporaneity.
Language and myth are very much akin. At the very early stages of human
culture, the connection between them was very strong. They are offshoots of the same
root. The early human experience is their common basis. They appeared at the same
time; when man could speak, he could also create myths. The mythic man regarded
myth as truth itself. Myth is related to man`s first awareness of himself and of the
world, moreover, he is the structure of this knowledge. [Georges Gusdorf, Mit si
metafizica, Timisoara: Editura Amarcord, 1996. p.11] As much as myth belongs to
language, it is also related to thinking. The mythic consciousness is a dominant of
man`s existence in the world. That was the time when words had magic powers. Myth

56
is a structure which reflects a perception of the world. It was an important means for
man to get in touch with the sacred.
It is a term of complex history and meaning. Etymologically it comes from the
Greek muthos, i.e. anything uttered by word of mouth. Myth is always concerned
with creation, it explains how something came to exist. Myths are essentially stories
about the beginning of things and of men, the disposition of the universe, the creation
of the world, the gods, the appearance of man.
Many philosophers and writers took myth very seriously, showing its
tremendous importance in primitive societies and suggesting its universal
significance. Freud demonstrated the universality of myth and its fundamental relation
to the individual unconscious, which expresses it directly or in disguise; and Jung
carried this kind of analysis further and generalized it with his theories of the
archetypes and the collective unconscious.

Myths, according to Jung, are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the
nature of the soul; all the mythologized processes of nature... are symbolic
expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible
to man`s consciousness by way of projection... [Monroe K.Spears, op.cit., pp.67-68]
Archetype is also of Greek origin, meaning original pattern, basic model
from which copies are made, the abstract idea of class and things, a paradigm; it is
atavistic and universal. The archetype is the product of the collective unconscious.
The fundamental facts of human existence are archetypal, i.e. love, birth, family. The
archetypes are structural elements of the human psyche in general; predispositions
of the psyche, unfilled outlines given content by overt myth, fantasies and the like.
An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors This
mythical material vexes the intellect because it refuses to fit into any formula, and so
there is a constant effort to banish it; but we can never legitimately cut loose form
our archetypal foundations unless we are prepared to pay the price of a neurosis
The myths and archetypes, Jung insists, must be reinterpreted to connect the life of
the past that still exists in us with the life of the present, which threatens to slip away
from it. [Monroe K. Spears, p.68]
Psychoanalytical theory, developed by Freud and Jung, revitalized these
concepts, soon accepted by literature. A fundamental characteristic of modernism is
the prevalence of myth against realism. Many modernist works are unified by

57
reference to myth. The artist reconsidered his medium, and a significant and radical
change was the decline of chronological narrative structures and their replacement by
what Joseph Frank called spatial form, the presentation of the unity of a work in
the entire pattern of internal reference. [Monroe K. Spears, p.66] Syntactical
sequence is given up for a structure depending on the perception of relationships
between disconnected word-groups, which must be juxtaposed and perceived
simultaneously. Frank relates spatial form to the preoccupation with myth. The time
world of history is transmuted into the timeless world of myth, for which historical
time does not exist, but only external prototypes. This timeless world finds
appropriate aesthetic expression in spatial form. [Monroe K. Spears, p.66]
The method is common to Ulysses, The Waste Land, the Cantos, for example.
Here, myth is a means of bridging discontinuities and of achieving a deeper level and
a community of consciousness. The use of myth is one way in which the modernist
writer has felt able to give coherence to his work, the myths often being of the most
general kind, concerned with death and regeneration, the cycle of nature, the order of
seasons, or as in the case of Joyce, the use of archetypes, such as Dedalus the
fabulous artificer, Ulysses the paternal wanderer, Finnegan the builder of cities.
The moderns wished to express the whole experience of modern life, and
James Joyce, in his Ulysses, wanted more than a limited description. He attempted to
hint at the very essence of humankind, and from the very beginning he had in mind
the writing of a unique book. He aimed at a synthesis of human experience. As the
idea of Ulysses took shape, Joyce devised a comic epic poem in prose. First, Joyce
had to find his hero. The concept of a national epic implies, as Georg Lukacs put it,
protagonists who are total individuals who magnificently concentrate within
themselves what is otherwise dispersed in the national character. [Patrick Parrinder,
p.117] Joyce regarded Ulysses as the one complete all-round character in world
literature; he was a character that came closest to everyman.
Unlike Homer`s Odyssey, whose time limits cover many years, Joyce`s
Ulysses encompasses events during a single day in Dublin, i.e. 16 June 1904 (now
known as Bloomsday) and his characters are Dubliners, their wanderings take them
round and round their native city.
Joyce`s Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, a Jewish canvasser, who is looking for
someone to take the place of his dead son Rudy in his affection. The Telemachus of
Ulysses is called Stephen Dedalus the hero of Joyce`s earlier autobiographical

58
novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He, somehow or other, feels out of
time with his millieux and especially with his family. Stephen is not looking for his
father like Telemachus but for someone with whom he could establish a bond
closer than that he feels for his father. They wander separately around Dublin until
they eventually meet, in the late evening. They come together from opposite ends of
the mind and, at least for a while, they feel that their companionship has a soothing
effect. In this pattern, Molly Bloom, a concert singer, is a faithless Penelope.
Thus the traditional narrative method was replaced by the mythical method,
which ahs stood James Joyce in good stead a phrase coined by T.S.Eliot in the
essay Ulysses: Order and Myth (1923), proving that Joyce was a classicist, part of a
tradition, a champion of order over chaos. Prior to Eliot`s essay, in December 1921,
the French poet Valery Larbaud, had introduced the Homeric parallel of Ulysses in a
public lecture at Shakespeare and Company. The emphasis on classical tradition was
endorsed by Joyce`s friend, Stuart Gilbert, whose study has supported generations of
Joyce scholars with Homeric scaffolding. [Bonnie Kime Scott, p.78]
T.S.Eliot heralded not fragmentation and experimentation but a continuous
parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity. He decisively rejected any notion fo
chaos or arbitrariness in Ulysses. The chaos, instead, belonged to contemporary
history to which Joyce had found a way of restructuring and ordering. In Eliot`s
view, Joyce`s use of the Homeric parallel was the key to his construction and had the
importance of a scientific discovery: it is simply a way of controlling, of ordering,
of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy
which is contemporary history [Patrick Parrinder, p.120]
Eliot`s reading implicitly links Ulysses to The Waste Land, a poem unified by
the interweaving of motifs from the anthropological study of myth. He adds that
psychology, ethnology and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what
was impossible even a few years ago. [apud Monroe K.Spears, p.67] Frazer`s
Golden Bough was the first full demonstration of both the immense variety and the
recurrent patterns of myth, i.e. including ritual, folklore, and related beliefs and
practices, with the relation between human and plant reproduction, e.g. vegetation
myths and fertility rituals, as a central theme.
The artwork extends its roots into the distant past. In The Waste Land the
seeming disjointed is related to the erudition and to the wealth of literary borrowings
and allusions: from Jessie Weston to J. Frazer, Baudelaire and Dante, Sanskrit and

59
many others. This proves that the great works of the past can still strengthen our
spirit. The Waste Land owes much to Jessie L.Weston`s book From Ritual to
Romance, whose theme is anthropological: the waste land there has a significance in
terms of fertility rituals. Eliot`s interest in myth, old story and ancient ritual was not
for the sake of pure learning. It was intelligently practical: he wanted a rite of passage
that would work, one that would save the self alone from an alien world. For it is
ultimately the function o fart, in imposing a credible order upon ordinary reality, and
thereby eliciting some perception of an order in reality, to bring us to a condition of
serenity, stillness and reconciliation [A.David Moody, p.108]
It has been argued that The Waste Land resembles Ulysses in several
fundamental aspects. The impact of Ulysses on Eliot was powerful, starting with the
basic formal influence, i.e. the mythical method which is fundamental to the poem,
the manipulation of a continuous parallel between the present and the past. Thus, the
Oxen of the Sun episode might have suggested both the title - Agendath is a waste
land, a home of screechowls and, at the end, the theme of infertility and chaos
as typical of the modern world. Circe and other episodes might have suggested the
notion of the City as Inferno, and of fantasy merging with the sordid details of low
life. The early episode Hades includes the themes of burial of the dead, and death
by water, references to Tiresias and the dog.
Another modern writer who made a strenuous effort to repay the debt to our
ancestors is the American poet Ezra Pound. His life was centred with great energy on
the pursuit of what Matthew Arnold called the best that has been thought and said in
the world, and on the attempt to make it new for the present day. He showed an
amazing voracity for swallowing up talented utterance in all languages. His career
might be viewed as a struggle to build a cultural railway from Idaho to Provence, or
even to Peking, for he incorporated Chinese characters into his later verse and
translated as freely from Chinese and Japanese as from Ialian or Greek. [The Norton
Anthology of Modern Poetry, p.375] Pound`s formulation for the loyalty to what is
best in our diverse inheritance is: What thou lov`st well is thy true heritage.
The relationship between Ulysses and The Waste Land could be extended to
the Cantos. In Canto I lines 1-68 are an adaptation of book II of Homer`s Odyssey.
Here we have Ulysses`s voyage to Hades, the underworld of the dead; and Circe is
also mentioned, the enchantress with whom Ulysses lived a year until he determined
to return home to Ithaca. She instructed him to get directions for his trip home by first

60
visiting the Theban prophet Tiresias in the underworld. About the presence of Tiresias
in The Waste Land T.S.Eliot explains:

Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a character is yet the most
important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant,
seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct
from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes
meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. [T.S.Eliot,
The Waste Land, pp.44-45]

Furthermore, Canto XVII reminds one of Ulysses`s voyage through the

Mediterranean in search of home in Ithaca.
Monroe K. Spears, in his book Dionysus and the City chapter II The Nature
of Modernism: Dionysus represents Dionysus as the symbol of modernism in
general; he explains the indissoluble relationship between a Greek god Dionysus
(meaning twice-born) and a modern literary trend. Dionysus was resurrected for the
modern world in Nietzsche`s Birth of Tragedy (1872) which presented a view of the
Greeks very different from the conventional one, of Apollo.

Dionysus had much in common with other dying and reviving gods of vegetation;
but he was unique in being the only Greek god who was born of a mortal
mother, dies and was resurrected and was celebrated in mystery cults which
involved the ritual eating of the flesh and drinking of the blood of a sacrificial
victim (goat, bull or human) who incarnated the god. [Monroe K.Spears, p.39]

The symbol of Dionysus was revealed fully in Frazer`s Golden Bough (1890), a work
of anthropology and comparative religion. Frazer demonstrated the importance and
universality of myth and magic, and provided the materials to show how they are
related to the collective and archetypal patterns of the unconscious mind. It was
Freud, however, who first mapped out in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) the
Dionysian realm of the Unconscious or, more precisely, of those parts of the psyche
not accessible to consciousness nor subject to reason.

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 III. CASE STUDIES

III.1. ALDOUS HUXLEY`S EXPERIMENT: THE COUNTERPOINT

TECHNIQUE
Huxley was aware that the need for exposure to good art is particularly acute,
therefore steadiness in a time of change and upheaval could be founded firmly only on
unalterable values.
Laurence Brander is one of the critics who praised Huxley - the man and the writer:
His work has that double interest we expect in any writing worth studying; it is by an
interesting and powerful individual; and it has something unique to say. Huxley in his
life and in his writing demonstrates an admirable way of coping with our
extraordinary world. [Laurence Brander, Aldous Huxley - A Critical Study, London:
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969, p.20]
Keith May expressed a similar appreciation: Few thinkers can have been more
capable than Huxley of continuing lively curiosity and of changing direction
whenever the facts indicated a need for change. [Keith May, Aldous Huxley, London:
Paul Elek Books Ltd., 1972, p.224]
Numberless passages in Huxley`s fiction and essays refer to the nature and
function of art, and the role of the artist in contemporary society, voiced by the artists
in some of his novels or his own personal comments in the essays. He dealt with a
great diversity of themes, but art appealed to him most.
Throughout the course of history, people have assigned more importance to
science, or art, or religion; however valuable and influential they - i.e. arts, education,
government, love, nature, science, philosophy, religion, mysticism - may be as ways
to a better life, these means should never be regarded as ends in themselves.

Religion, patriotism, the moral order, humanitarianism, social reform - we have all of us, I
imagine, dropped all those overboard long ago. But we still cling pathetically to art. Quite
unreasonably; for the thing has far less reason for existence than most of the objects of
worship we have got rid of, is utterly senseless, indeed, without their support and justification.
[Those Barren Leaves, p.68]

One of the issues to which Huxley gave serious consideration was the artist. As early
as 1926 in Jesting Pilate Huxley wrote Art and the artist have become tremendously
important in our modern world, and the reason for this is the need to fill the vacuum

62
created in the popular mind by the decay of the established religion. [apud dr.
Dumitru Ciocoi-Pop, Aldous Huxley`s Literary Ideology, p.43] In this context - the
aftermath of World War I, marked by the decay of old values and growing
uncertainties regarding the modern age, development of social consciousness
alongside a decline in religious beliefs, an acute discrepancy between scientific
advancement and spiritual values - the artist is looked upon as a kind of prophet,
guiding light, one who can synthesize the life of an epoch. At the same time, as the
influence of religion declines, the social importance of art increases. We must beware
of exchanging good religion for bad art. [Texts and Pretexts, p.1]
Huxley himself is an excellent illustration of an artist, in whom the gift of
experience and the gift of expression successfully meet.

The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials -
in his case experience... [Experience] is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and
hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and
co-ordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what
happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents
themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of
experience in conjunction with that of expression. What he says so well is therefore
intrinsically of value. [Texts and Pretexts, p.5]

He was a very sensitive human being, receptive ... open to im-pression and also
capable, through talent, emotions, intelligence, work and discipline, of ex-pression.
[Ronald W.Clark, op.cit., p.263]
The illuminating function of the artist in the community, by making available
large areas of value and meaning, has been repeatedly emphasized by Huxley: ... the
artist finds expression and form of words suitable for making known and interesting
what was previously wither unknown or uninteresting. [Integrate Education in The
Human Situation, p.4]
The artist is a man who, through his qualities, stands apart from most people,
because he is

equipped with better tools than those of common men - sometimes too, with a divining rod by
whose aid he discovers, in the dark chaotic mass, veins of hitherto unsuspected treasure - new
meanings and values. He opens our eyes for us, and we follow in a kind of gold rush... what
was empty of significance becomes, after his passage, suddenly full - and full of his
significance. [Man and Nature in Texts and Pretexts, p.49]

The same idea is reinforced in Tragedy and the Whole Truth:

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...the artist is endowed with a sensibility and a power of communication, a capacity to put
things across, which events and the majority of people to whom events happen do not
possess... Artists are eminently teachable and also eminently teachers. They receive from
events much more than most men receive, and they can transmit what they have received with
a peculiar penetrative force, which drives their communication deep into the reader`s mind.
One of our most ordinary reactions to a good piece of literary art is expressed in the formula:
This is what I have always felt and thought, but have never been able to put clearly into
words, even for myself. [Tragedy and the Whole Truth, in Music at Night, p.117]

The climax of the idea that an artist is apart and above the rest of the community is
expressed in Eyeless in Gaza: The men of genius knew more than their merely
intelligent contemporaries... Thanks to the novelists and professional psychologists,
we can think of our experience in terms of atoms and instants as well as in terms of
lumps and hours. [Eyeless in Gaza, p.141]
Acutely conscious of his role and aware of possessing a certain talent, Huxley
fulfilled all the requirements of a good artist, and his qualities as an artist seem to find
their best expression in essayistic literature.
So far we have considered the opinions on the role of the artist in society - i.e.
to guide and to educate - expressed in his essays, but Huxley availed himself of the
opportunity of commenting on art-related issues in the novels, by means of such
artists as: Philip Quarles, Mary Thriplow, Denis Stone, who voice their artistic
preoccupations either in conversation or in a notebook/journal. Philip Quarles, for
example, comments on the technique of introducing a novelist in a novel:

Put a novelist into the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalizations, which may be interesting -
at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other
possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him telling parts of the same
story as you are, you can make a variation on the theme. [Point Counter Point, pp.301-302]

It is clear for the reader of Huxley that he practices what he preaches and his own
artistic projects expounded in letters or essays, resemble, to a great extent, Mary
Thriplow`s or Philip Quarles`s. In a letter addresses to his son, Matthew, he explained
the novelty of his Utopian novel, Island: ... a work which would be simultaneously
funny, tragic, lyrical and profound; the job is one which had not been accomplished
in the past, and Huxley was also wrestling with the problem of getting an enormous
amount of diversified material into the book without becoming merely expository or
didactic. [apud Nicholas Murray, op.cit., p.157]

64
 In another letter, Huxley discussed the artistic innovation of Antic Hay -
anticipating the musical analogy of Point Counter Point or the dislocated time scheme
of Eyeless in Gaza: a work in which all the ordinarily separated categories - tragic,
comic, fantastic, realistic - are combined so to say chemically into a single entity,
whose familiar character makes it appear at first sight rather repulsive. [apud
Nicholas Murray, op.cit.] This is strikingly similar to Mary Thriplow`s self-
assessment of the novelist:

They like my books because they are smart and unexpected and rather paradoxical and
cynical and elegantly brutal. They don`t see how serious it all is. They don`t see the tragedy
and the tenderness underneath. You see, she explained, I`m trying to do something new - a
chemical compound of all the categories. Lightness and tragedy and loveliness and wit and
fantasy and realism and irony and sentiment all combined. People seem to find it merely
amusing, that`s all. [Those Barren Leaves, pp.42-43]

Apart from the newness of these artistic projects, they also share a feeling of
disappointment that their books might be misread. In his turn, Denis Stone`s work-in-
progress - a novel, too - does not meet much acceptance either. ... Denis blushed
scarlet. Mr. Scogan had described the plan of his novel with an accuracy that was
appalling... Mr. Scogan paid no attention to his denial, but went on: Why will you
young men continue to write about things that are so entirely uninteresting as the
mentality of adolescents and artists?... [Crome Yellow, p.12-13]
The most important and often discussed, by critics, literary project is
expounded as well as undertaken in Point Counter Point, the novel which both
experiments and includes his theory of composition, i.e. the aim to show man in all
his aspects, or the wish to look at man from various points of view at once -
multiplicity, and to render the counterpoint of life. In a period when all forms of art
were undergoing radical changes and experiments with both form and subject-matter,
Aldous Huxley`s artistic innovation - which was different in kind not in degree
from Joyce`s or V.Woolf`s experiments, for example - met contradictory critical
reception.
He described the novel to his father as ambitious, the aim of which will be to show a
piece of life, not only form a good many individual points of view, but also under its
various aspects such as scientific, emotional, economic, political, aesthetic, etc... It
will be difficult but interesting. [apud Nicholas Murray, op.cit., p.193] He started
work on the novel in 1926 but the process of writing was very demanding, a fact

65
recorded in several subsequent letters. His theory of multiplicity had been previously
expounded in his essays - which again serve as theoretical background - and his
personal letters. In a letter to Mary Hutchinson he confessed: One lives on so many
planes, and fully delightfully on each; every human being has as many storeys as the
Woolworth Building and shoots effortlessly and imperceptibly in spiritual elevators
from floor to floor. [Nicholas Murray, op.cit., p.190] or:

Any human being is a mass of organized molecules, a physiology, a part of the social
organism, believes himself to have an immortal soul and to be of cosmical importance, is a
patch of colour, can feel enormous emotions, can worship goods; every act he performs can
be interpreted in terms of physics and chemistry, of physiology, morality, of economics; his
life can be described in the style of the natural history textbook or in that of Paradise Lost ...
It remains to be seen whether I can manage it. [Nicholas Murray, op.cit., pp.193-194]

Since this theory of multiplicity or many-sidedness perspective was a constant

preoccupation throughout his whole work, the essays reinforce the idea. Do What You
Will is a collection of twelve essays that embody Huxley`s world view at the
beginning of the thirties and also one of his finest essay-collections to date whose
central idea is that man is multifarious, inconsistent, self-contradictory. In the final
essay on Pascal, he sets forth his philosophy - of life and art, as well:

To make a map of a mountain, to fix its position in space, we must look at it form every side,
we must go all round it, climb all over it. It is the same with a man as with a mountain. A
single observation does not suffice to fix his form and define his position in relation to the rest
of the world; he must be looked at from all sides. [Pascal in Do What You Will, p.236]

Not only is multiplicity necessary in order to render the complexity of life, but
simultaneity and diversity are also its essence. Milton Birnbaum holds the opinion that
Huxley`s preference for the Encyclopaedia Britannica was justified by the variety of
topics and also by the many different orientations - a kind of diversity that he tried to
fictionalize in Point Counter Point. [apud Milton Birnbaum, Politics and Character
in Point Counter Point, in Studies in the Novel, vol.IX, winter 1977, no.4, p.468]
In Vulgarity in Literature, an essay we are going to make ample reference in
the following chapters, Huxley states: Each one of us is like the population of a town
built on the slope of a hill: we exist simultaneously at many different levels.
[Vulgarity in Literature in Selected Essays, p.100] But men do not want to admit
they are what in fact they are - each one a colony of separate individuals, of whom

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now one and now another consciously lives with the life that animates the whole
organism and directs its destinies. [Pascal in Do What You Will, p.234] In a
discussion with Elinor about the idea of a new novel, Philip Quarles explains the
essence of the new way of looking at things, i.e. multiplicity:

Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. For instance, one person interprets
events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles; another, like
that young lady from Gulmerg, he nodded after the retreating group, thinks of it in terms of
good times. And then there`s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees,
professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is
to look with all those eyes at once. With religious eyes, scientific eyes, economic eyes,
homme moyen sensuel eyes... [Point Counter Point, p.197]

A similar discussion occurred between Aldous Huxley and his second wife, Laura,
who recorded it in her volume This Timeless Moment:

Laura: You mean, you want to do it like Bach, in all these different ways...
Aldous: Well, I mean Bach is music and this is something else.
Laura: can you do your novel like that?
Aldous (such longing in his voice): Well, it would be marvellous if I could. [Laura Archera
Huxley, This Timeless Moment]

The result of such a perspective would be queer; viewed with a multiplicity of eyes
and from multiple aspects, the various and apparently incongruous facets of reality
form a very queer picture indeed. A few years later Huxley would reiterate the idea
in an essay included in the collection Music at Night:

Juxtapose two accounts of the same human event, one in terms of pure science, the other in
terms of religion, aesthetics, passion, even common sense: their discord will set up the most
disquieting reverberations in the mind. Juxtapose, for example, physiology and mysticism
(Mme Guyon`s ecstasies were most frequent and most spiritually significant in the fourth
month of her pregnancies); juxtapose acoustics and the music of Bach (perhaps I may be
permitted to refer to the simultaneously scientific and aesthetic account of a concert in my
novel, Point Counter Point); juxtapose chemistry and the soul (the ductless glands secrete
among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life). This list of linked
incompatibles might be indefinitely prolonged. We live in a world of non sequiturs. Or rather,
we would live in such a world, if we were always conscious of all the aspects from which any
event can be considered. But in practice we are almost never aware of more than one aspect
of each event at a time. Our life is spent in one water-tight compartment of experience, then in
another. The artist can, if he so desires, break down the bulkheads between the compartments
and so give us a simultaneous view of the two or more of them at a time. So seen, reality
looks exceedingly queer. Which is how the ironist and the perplexed questioner desire it to
look. [And Wanton Optics Roll the Melting Eye, in Music at Night, Penguin Books in
assoc. with Chatto&Windus, 1955, p.33]

67
Calamy, in Those Barren Leaves, is much of the same opinion: It`s extraordinary
what a lot of different modes of existence a thing has, when you come to think about
it. And the more you think, the more obscure and mysterious everything becomes.
[Those Barren Leaves, p.280]
The idea of multiplicity was not completely new at the time. In 1891, Oscar
Wilde would write in his Intentions - the chapter The Critic as Artist - that the
most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety. [apud
The Portable Victorian Reader, ed.&intrd. by Gordon S.Haight, Penguin Books, 1977,
p.647]
Later on - in a period when art was highly revolutionary, creative, experimental, i.e.
1920s-1930s - Picasso introduced the same technique into modern painting and he
began to present the human face viewed simultaneously both frontally and in profile
on the assumption that if the eye may see only one view at a time, the mind is aware
that the other equally valid angles exist. [Murray Roston, Technique of
Counterpoint in Studies in the Novel,vol.IX, winter 1977, no.4, p.382 ]

His Still Life with a Guitar, 1924, painted only four years before the publication of the
novel, was one of the first paintings to view a scene from above and from the side; and in his
Girl Looking in a Mirror, 1932, the multiplicity of viewpoint was extended to include, in
addition to the various spatial angles, the further dimension of the mythic or archetypal
viewpoint which enters the mind of the viewer at the same moment as the spatial registers on
the eye. [Murray Roston, Technique of Counterpoint in Studies in the Novel,vol.IX, winter
1977, no.4, p.382 ]

How was Huxley going to recreate in writing this stereoscopic vision that had
preoccupied him so much and for so long? He resorted to music, the most abstract and
also the least intellectual of arts. There may be humorous music, tragic music, heroic
music, even program music, but there is no intellectual music, not even Beethoven`s
late quartets; ideas, as distinguished from emotions, may enter music only when
music mixes with language, as it does in opera or oratorio or lieder. [Peter Firchow,
Point Counter Point and Mann`s Magic Mountain as Novels of Ideas in Studies in
the Novel, vol.IX, winter 1977, no.4, p.533]

I have a literary theory, Aldous Huxley once said, that I must have a two-angled vision of
all my characters... I try to get a stereoscopic vision, to show my characters from two angles
simultaneously. Either I show them both as they feel themselves to be and as others feel them
to be; or else I try to give two rather similar characters who throw light on each other, two

68
characters who share the same element, but in one it is made grotesque. [Donald Watt,
Aldous Huxley`s Stereoscopic Vision in Hartford Studies in Literature, vol.II, 1970, no.1,
p.263]

The musicalization of fiction enabled Huxley to capture and recreate artistically the
counterpoint of characters and the counterpoint of life, and it is best explained by
Huxley in Point Counter Point:

The musicalization of fiction... A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out of shape,
imperceptibly deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become quite
different. In sets of variations the process is carried a step further... Get this into a novel... All
you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots... The novelist can
assume the god-like creative privilege and simply elect to consider the events of the story in
their various aspects - emotional, scientific, economic, religious, metaphysical, etc. [Point
Counter Point, p.301]

As regards the counterpoint of life, i.e. happiness versus suffering, this was employed
in two other Huxleyan novels, apart from Point Counter Point. For example, in Those
Barren Leaves, a fragment from the Autobiography of Francis Chelifer reads like
this:

Why shouldn`t I be happy? she [Barbara] asked. But, as a matter of fact, she added an
instant later, I`m not happy. How can one be happy when thousands of people are being
killed every minute and millions more are suffering? ... ...there`s not a moment when I
don`t remember all those killed and wounded. And poor people too: the way they live - in the
slums. One can`t be happy. Not really. [Those Barren Leaves, p.113]

In the same novel, Mary Thriplow`s approach to happiness and suffering in the world
counterpoints the above-mentioned passage.

I can never understand how it is that everybody isn`t happy - I mean fundamentally happy,
underneath; for of course there`s suffering, there`s pain, there are a thousand reasons why one
can`t always be consciously happy, on the top, if you see what I mean. But fundamentally
happy, underneath - how can anyone help being that? Life`s so extraordinary, so rich and
beautiful - there`s no excuse for not loving it always, even when one`s consciously miserable.
[Those Barren Leaves, p.160]

Counterpoint is not the only musical device employed by Huxley in his fiction; the
fugue also parallels, in musical terms, significant human problems. In Point Counter
Point he already experimented the theory that Edouard in Andre Gide`s novel, The
Counterfeiters, only stated: something like the art of fugue writing in music.

69
 The musico-literary analogy is considered to serve best the artistic purpose of
recreating the human fugue in writing. Paul Fontaine considers that the fugue -
despite the diversity of pieces and the difficulty of defining the word - displays a
ternary structure: an exposition which presents the subject in its several voices, a
development of the materials in the opening exposition, and a conclusion where the
subject or a countersubject may be treated in stretto. This structure is at work in Point
Counter Point as demonstrated by Donald Watt in his study of the fugal construction
of the same novel. [Donald Watt, The Fugal Construction in Point Counter Point, in
Studies in the Novel, vol.IX, winter 1977, no.4, pp.509-517] Harold H.Watts,
analysing the viability of Point Counter Point, finds the technique of the novel ...
analogous to the methods of montage being broached in films and the methods of
collage that Braque and others were offering to the eye. [Harold H.Watts, The
Viability of Point Counter Point, in Studies in the Novel, vol.IX, winter 1977, no.4,
p.411]
Huxley`s interest in the counterpoint technique in particular, and for the
musico-literary analogy in general, are not completely new or characteristic for the
twentieth century only. Shakespeare, one of the originators of the literary
counterpoint, used it comically and romantically to exalt life`s awesome richness.
Other writers as well had an ear for the eloquence of juxtaposition. Donne and his
followers, for example, made seriousness and levity alternate. [Jerome Meckier,
Fifty Years of Counterpoint, in Studies in the Novel, vol.IX, winter 1977, no.4,
p.371]
Almost three centuries later, Oscar Wilde - speaking of the principles of
literature as they were laid down by the Greeks - referred to the musical and metrical
relations: studying ... the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a modern
musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and ... with much keener aesthetic
instinct. [Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist in The Portable Victorian Reader,
p.648]
The powerful attraction towards the mental music of ideas is the common
denominator for Thomas Mann`s The Magic Mountain and Aldous Huxley`s Point
Counter Point. Der Roman war mir immer eine Symphonie,ein Werk der
Kontrapuntik, ein Themengewebe, worin die Ideen die Rolle musikalischer Motive
spielen. It is for this reason that Mann calls The Magic Mountain diese in zwolf-
hundert Seite ausgebreitete Gedankenkomposition. [apud Peter Firchow, Mental

70
Music: Huxley`s Point Counter Point and Mann`s Magic Mountain as Novels of
Ideas, in Studies in the Novel, vol.IX, winter 1977, no.4, p.533]
One of the greatest literary experimentalists of the twentieth century, William
Faulkner, was fascinated by antitheses, the tendency to view and interpret experience
in extreme terms, to see life and feel it on all levels as composed essentially of pairs
of warring entities, so he resorted to the counterpoint. I imagine as a musician
would do to compose a piece of music in which he needed a balance, a counterpoint.
[apud Walter J.Slatoff, Quest for Failure: A Study of William Faulkner, p.257]
So far we have seen that art tries to give a meaning to the inconsistencies of
life and fiction is only one way of having a glimpse at reality, but it is the means
Huxley used to satisfy his nagging desire to understand reality, [Ronald W.Clark,
op.cit., p.216] and the vehicle for a multiplicity and simultaneity of viewpoints and
ideas: human life manifest itself on different levels at once and it has multiple
meanings; literature is one way of reflecting the various aspects and expressing their
significance; the artist can offer us a view of the simultaneous aspects of life [apud
And Wanton Optics Roll the Melting Eye in Music at Night, p.33]
Another concept of major concern for Aldous Huxley`s writing is that of
wholly truthful literature. In his essay, Tragedy and the Whole Truth, Huxley
explains what is that characteristic so rarely employed by writers, which makes the
border line between life and literature seem so thin, and it also makes any piece of
writing convincible.
An idea which is merely stated in the essay Vulgarity in Literature - I have
a taste for the lively, the mixed and the incomplete in art, preferring it to the universal
and the chemically pure [Vulgarity in Literature in Selected Essays, p.103] is
further explained in Tragedy and the Whole Truth; wholly truthful literature being
the best exemplification of the chemically impure art. Homer`s Odyssey was one of
the examples that Huxley chose to offer to endorse his argument about tragedy versus
the whole truth; or, chemically pure and chemically impure art. In his opinion,
Homer`s preference for the Whole Truth, over a tragic treatment of the theme, is
precisely what makes the Odyssey convincing. The arguments develop logically,
clearly and forcefully, and lead Huxley in a position to explain what he means when
he says that Homer is a writer who tells the Whole Truth.

71
We mean that the experiences he records correspond fairly closely with our own actual or
potential experiences - and correspond with our experiences not on a single limited sector, but
all along the line of our physical and spiritual being. And we also mean that Homer records
these experiences with a penetrative artistic force that makes them seem peculiarly acceptable
and convincing... Six, men, remember, have been taken and devoured before the eyes of their
friends. In any other poem but the Odyssey, what would the survivors have done? They
would, of course, have wept, even as Homer made them weep. But would they previously
have cooked their supper, and cooked it, what`s more, in a masterly fashion? Would they
previously have drunk and eaten to satiety? And after weeping, or actually while weeping,
would they have dropped quietly off to sleep? No, they most certainly would not have done
any of these things. They would simply have wept, lamenting their own misfortune and the
horrible fate of their companions, and the canto would have ended tragically on their tears.
[Tragedy and the Whole Truth in Selected Essays, pp.117-118]

Moreover, the impact of wholly truthful literature on the reader is radically different
than that of tragedy: Our mood when we have read a Wholly-Truthful book is never
one of heroic exultation; it is one of resignation, of acceptance... The catharsis of
tragedy is violent and apocalyptic; but the milder catharsis of Wholly Truthful
literature is lasting. [Tragedy and the Whole Truth in Selected Essays, p.123]
Twentieth century literature witnessed a revival of the writers` interest in the
whole truth: Proust, D.H.Lawrence, Andre Gide, Kafka, Hemingway - here are five
obviously and important contemporary writers, and also some of the most influential
to Aldous Huxley, we might add.
A related issue, that some of Huxley`s most important characters, such as
Philip Quarles, John Rivers, Anthony Beavis, discuss is the credibility of fiction in
connection with reality. In support of what these characters - who are, to a great
extent, Huxley`s mouthpieces, but definitely not his alter-ego - think about this
matter, we have found Heidegger`s statements about art, in The Origin of the Work of
Art, highly relevant: The nature of the work of art would be this: the truth of beings,
setting itself to work... The work is not the reproduction of some particular entity that
happens to be present at any time; it is, on the contrary, the reproduction of the thing`s
general essence. [Martin Heidegger, Originea operei de arta, Bucuresti: Editura
Univers, pp.50-51]
This is quite similar to what Philip Quarles said when talking about poetry
with Walter Bidlake: In nature there are always so many irrelevant things mixed up
with the essential truth. That`s why art moves you - precisely because it`s
unadulterated with all the irrelevancies of real life... Art gives you the sensation, the
thought, the feeling quite pure - chemically pure... [Point Counter Point, London:
Flamingo Modern Classic, Harper Collins, 1994, pp.7-8] And the same idea is

72
epitomized in Tragedy and the Whole Truth: Good art possesses a kind of super-
truth - is more probable, more acceptable than fact itself. [Tragedy and the Whole
Truth in Selected Essays, p.117]
The best starting point for anyone who wishes to discuss the relationship
between art-life with Aldous Huxley, is The Genius and the Goddess, where the
opening paragraph reads as follows: The trouble with fiction is that it makes too
much sense. Reality never makes sense... Maybe from God`s point of view. Never
form ours. Fiction has unity, fiction has style. Facts possess neither. [The Genius and
the Goddess in Great Short Works of Aldous Huxley, p.272] John Rivers is most
uncertain about the nature of reality; it may be too undignified to be recorded, too
senseless to be left unfictionalized. [The Genius and the Goddess in Great Short
Works of Aldous Huxley, p.273]
Anthony Beavis in Eyeless in Gaza further commented on the chief difference
between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace
people is high; in reality, very low. [Eyeless in Gaza, New York: Bantam Books,
1972, p.214]
For some of Huxley`s characters art may be a refuge from the ups-and-downs
of life, form what sometimes may be difficult to understand because of man`s own
limitations. Such a character is Denis Stone, who creates his own world of ideas, and,
eventually, chooses art over life: Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas,
even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas everything
was clear; in life everything was obscure, embroiled. [Crome Yellow, p.17]
In spite of all the various and often contradictory opinions upheld by the
characters, Aldous Huxley believes that life is essential and, indeed, superior to art.
He reached this conclusion after a lifelong search into the mystery of reality. Life -
that`s the great, essential thing. You`ve got to get life into your art, otherwise it`s
nothing. And life only comes out of life, out of passion and feeling; it can`t come out
of theories... [Antic Hay, London: Grafton Books, 1990, p.77] Casimir Lypiatt`s
pronunciation echoes one of Joyce`s characters in Ulysses, who also points to the
purpose and function of art: Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences.
The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.
[James Joyce, Ulysses, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986, p.152]
Consequently, the approaches to the life-art interrelationship are various and
complex, as the matter itself. It cannot be denied that literature represents life. In his

73
keen interest for life and the desire to give it an appropriate artistic expression,
Huxley reflects the more general tendency and wish of the modernists to express the
whole experience of modern life. [apud Randall Stevenson, The British Novel Since
the Thirties, London: B.T.Btasford Ltd., 1987, p.11]
In our analysis we cannot overlook the means of expression employed by the
man of letters, i.e. words, and their importance for Huxley himself, both as a theorist
and as a creator. Early in his life he took up an interest in words: ...sometimes indeed
Aldous seemed to cherish words as things in themselves and almost regardless of their
meaning..., writes his cousin Laurence of one family holiday at Montana. [apud
Ronald W.Clark, op.cit., p.152]
Language was a perennial problem that Huxley and his characters shared; in
fact, any good writer is concerned with words and their arrangement. Heidegger`s
statement in The Origin of the Work of Art that: the poet also uses the word - not,
however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them, but rather in such a
way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word, [Martin Heidegger,
op.cit., p.87] could be regarded in a larger context, because the duty of any writer is
also donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu, a phrase that Huxley chose to
comment in his extended essay, Literature and Science. [see Literature and Science,
London: Chatto&Windus, 1963, p.13] This is a modern concept shared by a number
of writers and philosophers at the beginning of the twentieth century, who thought that
language had to be revived, e.g. Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, T.E.Hulme.
Common language is inadequate for both men of letters and scientists, as a
medium of artistic and scientific expression. They are purifiers of language, but there
is an immense difference between their purposes:

The aim of the scientist is to say only one thing at a time, and to say it unambiguously and
with the greatest possible clarity... When the literary artist undertakes to give a purer sense to
the words of his tribe, he does so with the express purpose of creating a language capable of
conveying, not the single meaning of some particular science, but the multiple significance of
human experience, on its most private as well as on its more public levels. He purifies, not by
simplifying and jargonizing, but by deepening and extending, by enriching with allusive
harmonies, with overtones of association and undertones of sonorous magic. [Literature and
Science, London: Chatto&Windus, 1963, p.14]

What we do not have at the moment is the form of words with which to express the coming
together of scientific fact and scientific theory with our direct experience... It is these three
worlds - the world of abstractions and concepts, the world of immediate experience and
objective observation, and the world of spiritual insight which, must, in any integrated point

74
of view, be brought together. [A. Huxley, Integrate Education in The Human Situation,
pp.4-5]

The same relationship between literature and science - in terms of language viewed as
both science and magic - is approached by Huxley in the essay T.H.Huxley as a
Literary Man: The function of language is twofold: to communicate emotion and to
give information. [T.H.Huxley as a Literary Man in The Olive Tree, p. 47] It is by
a careful arrangement of the words by the artist that the message can affect the
reader; words alone are not powerful: whatever is expressed with art ... pierces the
mind and compels assent and acceptance. [T.H.Huxley as a Literary Man in The
Olive Tree, p. 48] It is here that the artist can prove his exceptional talent, i.e. the
ability to give poetical expression to poetical impression, the latter being more
common and shared by most people. Most of us can feel in a Keatsian way, but
almost none of us can write in a Keatsian way, as Huxley wrote in the famous essay
Literature and Science. [Literature and Science, p.34] On the other hand, if the words
are arranged without art, they possess no magical power and are incapable of
propping or molding the mind of the reader. [Writers and Readers in The Olive
Tree, p.43]
Huxley also focused on the inadequacies of language in Variations on a
Philospher, taking the opportunity to present ideas on most of the subjects that
preoccupied him. Maine de Biran was conscious of the hiatus between language and
the data of experience. Words cannot faithfully describe the experiences of the inner
man: In his essence the inner man is ineffable, and within him how many degrees of
depth, how many points of view have not as yet as much as glimpsed! [apud
Laurence Brander, op.cit., p.196]
As far as art criticism is concerned, language has limited potentialities in this
field too. The art critic cannot express in his own words what the artist says in a
particular form of art - i.e. music, painting, literature, etc. - in its specific language.
Thus, the key of interpreting a work of art is in the work itself, i.e. the critic`s task is
to direct the reader/listener, etc. to the work of art; his language never equals the
artist`s language.

...Nobody`s own words except those of Shakespeare himself, can possibly express what
Shakespeare meant. The substance of a work is inseparable from its form; its truth and its
beauty are two and yet, mysteriously, one.... Our own words are inadequate even to express

75
the meaning of other words; how much more inadequate, when it is a matter of rendering
meanings which have their original expression in terms of music or one of the visual arts
What, for example, does music say? You can buy at almost any concert an analytical
programme that will tell you exactly. Much too exactly; that is the trouble... The limits of
criticism are very quickly reached. When he has said in his own words as much, or rather as
little, as own words can say, the critic can only refer his readers to the original work of art:
let them go and see for themselves.[Music at Night, pp.36-39]

Words form the thread on which we string our experience, said Huxley in the essay
Words and Behaviour, as language is one of the primary facts of human experience,
and experience is necessarily related to morality. Furthermore, morality depends,
among other things, on language and how people use it. Communication is facilitated
by words, but there is the danger that inappropriate and badly chosen words vitiate
thought and lead to wrong or foolish conduct. [Words and Behaviour in The Olive
Tree, pp.82-83] What is even worse, language has become also a device which men
use for suppressing and distorting the truth, a fact most noticeable in political
propaganda, wars, etc. In the chapter entitled Language of the volume The Human
Situation, Huxley exemplified: As Hitler wrote, all effective propaganda has to limit
itself only to a very few points and to use them like slogans. ... Talleyrand, the great
French diplomat of the early nineteenth century and one of the great masters of
practical life, said that speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts - which was
undoubtedly true in his case. [Language in The Human Situation, pp.169-170]
And, in Eyeless in Gaza, he wrote: ...words express thoughts ... and thoughts
determine actions. [Eyeless in Gaza, p.576]
Another consequence of the misuse of language is that we become the slaves
of our cliches and are turned either into conforming Babbitts or into fanatics and
doctrinaires. [The Education of an Amphibian in Adonis and the Alphabet, p.12]
Going back to The Human Situation, we find an in-depth and informal
analysis of language; and the central idea is the ambivalent attitude towards it.
Goethe, for example, - one of the supreme masters of the word and one who also
spoke against language - said: Gefuhl ist alles; Name ist Schall und Rauch /
Feeling is everything, name is merely sound and smoke. Or, other remarks about
language in relation to religion selected from the epistles of St. Paul - The letter
killeth, but the spirit giveth life -, and about language in relation to philosophy in the
works of John Locke. Another interesting observation about language was made by
the great Christian existentialist philosopher Kierkegaard, who said that the purpose

76
of language is to assist and confirm people in refraining from action. [further details
see Language in The Human Situation, pp.169-170.]
The summing up of Huxley`s opinions about this matter is expressed in the
same volume:

Language is what makes us human. Unfortunately, it is also what makes us all too human. It
is on the one hand the mother of science and philosophy, and on the other hand it begets every
kind of superstition and prejudice and madness. It helps us and it destroys us; it makes
civilization possible, and it also produces those frightful conflicts which wreck civilization.
[Language in The Human Situation, p.171]

Other negative consequences entailed by a misuse of language are signalled in

Breughel, an essay included in the volume Along the Road, e.g. Most of our
mistakes are fundamentally grammatical. We create our own difficulties by employing
an inadequate language to describe facts. [Breughel in Along the Road, p.133]
We have had so far plenty of examples that testify to the unique and
exceptional powers of the artist to transcend the limitations of everyday, common
speech; Huxley`s attitude is ambivalent, too: However miraculously a poet may be,
there is always, beyond the furthest reach of his powers of expression, a great region
of the unexpressed and inexpressible. The rest is always silence. [The Rest Is
Silence in Texts and Pretexts, p.256]
The only form of art which comes closest to silence is music; but Huxley
draws a distinction between Wagner`s music, which is not so expressive because it
lacks that meaningful silence - it says less because it is always speaking - and
Beethoven`s or Mozart`s music, which has the ability to express the inexpressible.
From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the
mystical ecstasy and death - all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to
the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not
expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. [The Rest Is Silence in
Music at Night, p.19] Music possesses qualities unequalled by other forms of art; it
can recall to the listener`s mind human experiences of the most important and
inexpressible kind, which cannot otherwise be remembered. Moreover, experiences
come to us as a whole only by means of music. Music could be of help to a writer, as
well, where words failed in the poetic attempt to express the inexpressible:
Shakespeare resorted to music whenever he wanted to transpose an abstract idea into

77
words. One can`t remember pain... You can only remember its occasion, its
accompaniments... You can never remember its actual quality. No more than you can
remember the quality of a physical pleasure. [Eyeless in Gaza, p.89] When the
inexpressible had to be expressed, Shakespeare laid down his pen and called for
music. And if music should also fail? Well, there was always silence to fall back on.
[The Rest Is Silence in Music at Night, p.21]
Allusions to musical works abound in Huxley`s writings and his lifelong
interest in music started in his early childhood when, prompted by Brahms`s
Variations on a Theme by Haydn, he realized the enormous richness and
complexities, the endless potentialities of music. [apud Donald Watt, The Fugal
Construction in Point Counter Point in Studies in the Novel, vol.IX, winter 1977,
no.4, p.509]
About three decades later he would still praise music`s potentialities,
especially Beethoven`s Missa Solemnis and Bach`s Art of the Fugue, to express the
subtlest, profoundest and completest metaphysical problems of life. A substantial help
in the forming of Huxley`s musical tastes and his more informed knowledge of
particular works, was his activity as a musical critic for The Weekly Westminster
Gazette between 18 February 1922 and 2 June 1923. On a few occasions his music
criticism would turn out to be sources for the fiction; e.g. Antic Hay, Point Counter
Point, Little Mexican. [apud John Aplin, Aldous Huxley`s Music Criticism: Some
Sources for the Fiction in English Language Notes, no.21, 1983/84, passim]
References to visual arts are at least as frequent as music references. Kenneth
Clark noted in the Memorial Volume that what he wrote about painting proves him to
have been one of the most discerning lookers of the time, and Jacob Zeitlin,
commenting on the numberless references to art and related topics scattered
throughout Huxley`s writings, said that there are ample proofs of his ability to apply
the apparatus of the Kunstforscher, the specialist art analyst, to his subjects.
[Memorial Volume, pp.15, 129]
The two novels where the reader can find plenty of references to visual arts are
After Many a Summer and Point Counter Point, embedded in the texture of his fiction.
[for a detailed analysis of this aspect see Peter Bowering`s study The Source of
Light: Pictorial Imagery and Symbolism in Point Counter Point in Studies in the
Novel, vol.IX, winter 1977, no.4, pp.389-405]

78
 As in the case of music, Huxley also developed a strong personal interest in
painting; in between his literary projects or for relaxation he took up painting. In an
letter to H.L.Mencken in 1921, Aldous Huxley wrote: Architecture, sculpture and
painting give me, I find, as much pleasure as music. [apud Nicholas Murray, op.cit.,
p.131]
We conclude this section with a passage from Eyeless in Gaza which faithfully
sums up Huxley`s dilemma regarding art.

With the highest art one enters another world... a world of gods and angels... The great artists
carry you up to heaven. But they never allow to stay there, Mark Staithes objected. They give
you just a taste of the next world, then let you fall back, flop, into the mud. Marvellous while
it lasts. But the time`s so short. And even while they`ve actually got me in heaven, I catch
myself asking: Is that all? Isn`t there anything more, anything further? The old world isn`t
other enough. Even Macbeth, even the Mass in , even the El Greco Assumption... Painting,
music, literature, thought - they are not enough. [Eyeless in Gaza, p.302]

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 III.2. THE CHALLENGE OF D.H. LAWRENCE
In the novel the modernist period is dominated by such major figures as: Henry
James, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster.
Each made a distinctive contribution to the modernist transformation of fiction. The
novel claimed new freedoms of method and subject: new rights to social and sexual
frankness, new complexities of form and discourse. Over the course of the twentieth
century this transformation would continue, but doubtlessly the 1920s is generally
acknowledged as the major period of modern fiction. [Malcolm Bradbury, p.3] One
characteristic of these writers is their interest in art while the novelist is an artist
consciously involved in the novel writing technique
Although the 1920s was an age of experimentation in the literary field,
D.H.Lawrence stands out remarkably as one who belongs to the tradition of the
classic realist novel of the nineteenth century, solidly anchored in a social world, and
as much to the twentieth century, with its new interest in the human being, to say only
the least. I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist,
I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the poet, who
are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog
Only in the novel are all things given full play. [apud ALdous Huxley`s preface to his
volume of Collected Essays, Harper, New York: 1959]
From the onset, D.H.Lawrence`s writings have challenged conventional taste
and expectations. His status as a modern master is secure even if for quite different
reasons than T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound or James Joyce. He was a complex, modern man,
who refused to accept the modern world and the conventional life. Instead, he took a
great interest in the less conventional aspects of love and life which profoundly
challenged readers` expectations at that time.
But Lawrence`s idea of form already differed from that of most of his
contemporaries. So did his idea of sexual mores. In both instances he was forced to
compromise with the prevailing taste of his day. [read more in Brian Finney, D.H.
Lawrence Sons and Lovers, Penguin Books, p.2] He refused to adhere to the
Flaubertian tradition, illustrated by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford,
James Joyce.

The self-proclaimed apostle of new literary and moral freedoms, D.H.Lawrence had little time
for Richardson`s, Joyce`s and Proust`s narrative experiments. The purged novel form had to

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present readers with new, really new feelings, a whole new line of emotion, which will get us
out of the emotional rut. His apostolic mission, loudly announced in a series of essays in the
1920s, was both to break open fictional doors and to nag readers and writers into passing
through them. [Andrew Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, p.519]

Quite early in his life, he got fully aware of the deep contrast between the
beauty of nature and the pollution and ugliness brought about by over-
industrialization. Our civilization has destroyed the natural flow of common
sympathy between men and men, and men and women. And this is what I want to
restore into life. [apud Raymond Williams, p.218]
Lawrence was a writer with a strong sense of mission. He saw the falsities and
sickness of modern life and saw too, that the way for him to try to change people was
through thinking. As he confessed to his friend McLeod in 1913 I do write because I
want folk English folk to alter and have more sense. [D.H. Lawrence, Letters, I,
544] His deep insight in human beings as well as his awareness of the fundamental
dissatisfaction of the modern man deprived of faith, and his deep commitment to the
natural world were the dominant features of his genius.
The psychic and intellectual dislocations engendered by the Great War
animated both the non-fiction and the fiction of Lawrence`s leadership phase from
about 1919 to 1925 and he felt compelled to counteract his own disillusionment and
the sterile life of the age in short, to become a prophet to a generation torn from its
moorings in tradition.
He assumed the burden of the defence of character and conscience against the
onslaughts of modernism. Writing to Edward Garnett in June 1914, he agreed that he
could do without the old stable ego of the character but must take his stand with
character deeper down, with a self that was of the core, energized, dark yet vivid,
psychologic, inhuman. [D.H.Lawrence`s Letters, II, 183] He felt that he had come
to the bottom of the human person but refused to call what the had discovered there
either psyche or the soul, according to the accepted meaning of these terms. [Michael
Squires and Keith Cushman eds., The Challenge of D.H.Lawrence, The University of
Winsconsin Press: 1990, p.28]
He developed more complex and advanced conceptions of character and
conscience by his profound engagement with the psychology of unconscious
motivation he is the first English novelist to recognize the full challenge to

81
traditional narration offered by the Freudian revolution. Like Freud and Lacan, he
found new ways to probe the human psyche.
His major venture into consciousness is exemplified by the attempt to realize
that range of living human energy which the existing system had narrowed and
crippled. He put one of his basic beliefs in this way: You can have life two ways.
Either everything is created from the mind, downwards; or else, everything proceeds
form the creative quick, outwards into exfoliation and blossom The actual living
quick itself is alone, the creative reality. [Raymond Williams, p.27]
What interested him in his characters was not primarily the social man, though
he did not neglect him, but that part of man, that is submerged and never seen: the
unconscious, to which he preaches something like the passivity on the part of the
conscious.
Lawrence`s modernity lies in the fact that he very courageously explores life
with all its dependent aspects: physical, psychic, social. His strong wish is to unite
consciousness and spontaneous feeling, emphasizing the importance of the
unconscious. This is to be noticed in his in-depth analyses of feelings having as a
starting point fundamental biological elements as well as cosmic forces and energies,
inevitably related to the individual. Using natural elements and the surrounding to
support essential elements in man`s nature, D.H.Lawrence evinces his poetic gifts.
The modern movement was, in essence, an international affair, founded on
exile, the movement of the arts, ideas and forms from one bohemia to another. New
and powerful influences began to affect British writing. The ones that related to
Lawrence were: Nietzschean ideas of will, dissolution and renewal, German
expressionist notions of inward and self-revealing form and Freud.
Rooted in a theory of biological instincts, Freud`s view of the developing
psyche placed a great emphasis on the power of the unconscious to affect conduct;
intellectual conditions seemed to be realizations of emotional needs. [The New
Pelican Guide to English Literature, vo.7, p.19] A new dimension in the assessment
of human behaviour had to be taken into account. H
There was the enormous importance, in the theory of instincts, placed on the demands
of sexuality, particularly on those manifested in the Oedipus phase.
The consequences for literature are notable and challenging. Lawrence`s
novelty arises from his way of looking at human nature, with all its inherent aspects,
most of which had not been tackled before. He reveals the reader truths that are so

82
obvious but sometimes very hard to accept. The complexity of human beings takes
shape in fiction as well, due to Lawrence`s bold venture in the analysis of human
relationships, the relation of the self to the other selves, his wish to redefine the
unconscious as only another word for life.
He helps us discover what is already part of us and shapes us, and it certainly
cannot be denied or neglected. He is one of the few English writers who are
concerned with the most intimate feelings and fundamental experiences which cannot
be easily put into words. For this reason, Douglas Hewitt believes that Emily Bronte
is the one whom he most resembles. [apud Douglas Hewitt, English Fiction of the
Early Modern Period: 1890-1940, Longman, New York: 1992, p.185] His emphasis
on the inarticulate side of human nature as the deepest source of individuality and
feeling is essential to the understanding of his work, to which one should add the
theoretical background found in his essays: Fantasia of the Unconscious and
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious.
It is worth mentioning the forces that had been at work shaping the
development of Lawrence`s mind through the ealy years of his life: family; voracious
and unsystematic reading; non-conformist religion; but his mother was the single
most important person in his emotional and mental development. Studying the
language of D.H.Lawrence Allan Ingram notices a significant feature that emerges
from his early reading, i.e. with his mother and with Jesse, literature is experienced
as part of a secure relationship of trust and affection. Literary language, therefore,
was a medium that stimulated and flowed into the spoken language of mutual
exploration and personal awareness. [Allan Ingram, The Language of D.H.Lawrence,
Macmillan: 1990, p.26]
Later on, through Frieda, he became acquainted with new ideas, such as those
associated with Freud and psychoanalysis; while his stay in Italy had brought him
closer to European Modernism and experimentalism, most notably to the works of
Filippo Marinetti and the Futurists. All these elements helped Lawrence to create a
new outlook on life.

Life, which, for Lawrence, was essentially mystery, was not to be apprehended or explained
in terms of reason or logic; that was the way to kill it. It could be experienced only by direct
intuition transmitted only by touch, and the value of people for Lawrence consisted in how far
mystery resided in them, how far were they conscious of mystery, both in themselves and in
others. Since the mystery was killed by the scientific intellect, it obviously flourished most
strongly while the analysing scientific intellect was less powerful at the instinctual level of

83
life, in sexual relationship, in the experience of death, in the impulsive non-rational existence
of animals and nature. [Walter Allan, Tradition and Dream, Chatto&Windus, London: 1986]

In a large, diverse body of work novels, short stories, essays Lawrence explores
most of the important questions that have troubled humankind for more than a
century. His writings ask us to consider what is it to be part of the darkly mysterious
universe that is ours. The Lawrence that emerges form the pages is very much our
contemporary. He addresses issues about modern society and community, about
freedom and constraint, about gender and human identity, about love and power,
about language and truth. Lawrence`s prose and poetry explore ceaselessly what it
means to be alive and fully human. The search itself is more important than the
provisional answers he offered during his lifelong thought-adventure. [The
Challenge of D.H.Lawrence, p.4]
But his problem was to express emotion, feeling as they exist far below the
surface of the gesture; and this is necessarily linked to the use of language. His
handling of language differs greatly from Eliot`s, Pound`s, Joyce`s, being there to
convey what needs to be conveyed, not to be contemplated as a field of play. Still, he
had clear ideas about the proper use of literary language. One cannot but admit that
the writer`s handling of language is fundamental to the construction of any novel.
Lawrence quite explicitly saw himself as inventing language, both in terms of the
functions he expected language to perform form novel to novel, and in the ways he
adapted and refined language and linguistic forms as he rewrote each novel over
months and years.
His artistic project was complex and profound, aiming at a radical redefinition
of the problem of the self, and it entailed a revolution in the dynamics of character,
plot, language, and structure. Thus, his artistic innovations as a twentieth century
novelist extended to his wrestling with the problem of representing in words the deep
character and its promptings, as well as its transactions with the world.
He attempts to embody emotional changes so that the struggle into conscious
being becomes meaningful for the reader, through a forceful communication, who
can thus perceive the strength of Lawrence`s use of language.
The pure relationship to be achieved between me and another person, me
and other people, me and a nation depends, ultimately, upon the development of a
relationship between the writer and his writing, between the user of language and the
structure and texture of the language used. [Allan Ingram, p.57]

84
 In approaching D.H.Lawrence, one of the best critical traditions stems from
Leavis`s redefinition of the Lawrence novel as a dramatic poem which emphasizes
the poetics of his fiction. Here the focus is on style, tone, and rhetoric; on Lawrence`s
extraordinary free and sometimes baffling treatment of point of view, his webbing
together of dominant images, metaphors and symbols, his shadowing forth of mythic
traces in the mental life and situations of some of his characters, his sometimes
choreographic representation of characters in action and relationship, his painterly
effects in depicting landscapes and soulscapes. [The Challenge of D.H.Lawrence,
p.38]
Lawrence himself made it clear in 1913 that he was to study the relations
between man and woman, considered the problem of today, the establishment of a
new relation, or the readjustment of the old one He also set out to analyze from a
different perspective the struggles between parents and children, flesh and spirit. We
have chosen for exemplification two of his most representative novels: Sons and
Lovers and The Rainbow.
In Sons and Lovers a multitude of aspects are taken into consideration as the
basis for discussing the magnetic desire or impulse which puts male apart from
female but which also draws male and female together [D.H.Lawrence,
Fantasia of the Unconscious. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, Penguin Books:
1971, p.17], namely: psychic, intellectual, emotional, erotic/sexual. The incompatible
natures of the Morels inevitably create a huge gap between expectations and
fulfilment.

He was so full of colour and animation, his voice ran so easily into comic grotesque,
he was so ready and so pleasant with everybody. Her own father had a rich fund of humour,
but it was satiric. This man`s was so different: soft, non-intellectual, warm, a kind of
gambolling. She herself was opposite. She had a curious, receptive mind, which found much
pleasure and amusement in listening to other folk She loved ideas, and was considered
very intellectual. What she liked most of all was an argument on religion or philosophy or
politics with some educated man. [D.H.Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, Penguin Books: 1969,
p.17]

But Walter Morel`s genuine vitality and sensuousness cannot find a way to Gertrude`s
heart, while her desire to open her heart seriously to him does not get any response.
Little by little, the young couple is losing the vital communication which gives
essence to marital relationship a fragile one in this case.

85
 Usually, the woman tries to reform man`s character, an attempt bound to
failure. Her high moral sense, inherited from generations of Puritans, is continually
striving with his rough, uncouth nature or whimsical temper.The pity was, she was too
much his opposite. She could not be content with the little that he ought to be. So, in
seeking to make him nobler than he could be, she destroyed him. She injured and hurt
and scarred herself, but she lost none of her worth. She also had the children. [Sons
and Lovers, pp.25-26]
Their marriage comes to a standstill, there is a battle between husband and
wife where the woman displays more power than is normally expected of her and the
man cannot endure the force that tries to shape his character. This is a moment of
critical importance in the development of the novel, especially concerned with the
inside. Gertrude Morel alienated herself from her husband, she felt lonely with
him and, at the same time, she took refuge in her new-born child. His mother loved
him passionately. He came just when her own bitterness of disillusion was hardest to
bear; when her faith in life was shaken, and her soul felt dreary and lonely. She made
much of the child, and the father was jealous. [Sons and Lovers, p.23]
One should pay due attention to what children meant for Mrs. Morel, when
she turned away from her husband. To understand parental influence on children, let
us remember that every individual has mother and father both sparkling within
himself [D.H.Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious. Psychoanalysis and the
Unconscious, Penguin Books: 1971, p.30] However, D.H.Lawrence dissociates
between the two showing that the influence goes on two distinct levels.

The business of a father is to stand outside as a final authority and make the necessary
adjustments. Then the father by instinct supplies the roughness, the sternness which stiffens in
the child the centres of resistance and independence, right from the very earliest days. A
mother may wish to bring up her child in the mode of what we call pure or spiritual love.
Then the child will be all gentle, all tender, always enfolded with gentleness and
forebearance, always shielded from grossness or pain or roughness. [D.H.Lawrence, Fantasia
of the Unconscious. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, Penguin Books: 1971, p.49]

This theory finds its correspondent in the novel when a scene, apparently unimportant,
is given much consideration since the consequences are rather dramatic. That is the
moment when William`s long curly locks had been cut by his father, quite a brutal act
for the mother, who could hardly endure this interference. Her character is equally
powerful and feminine. [see Sons and Lovers, p.24] She possesses a kind of spell over
her husband, and she also claims possession of her children. Having alienated them

86
form their father`s masculine influence, she also has the effect of effeminizing both
William and Paul, unconsciously discouraging them from becoming fully grown men
who would then leave her for a woman of their own. [Brian Finney, D.H.Lawrence.
Sons and Lovers, Penguin Books: 1990, p.27]
In the novel, Mrs. Morel acts as a force that both pushes her sons into the
world by means of education and simultaneously holds them back. The latter
aspect becomes more and more important throughout the novel, reflected in her
jealousy of their girlfriends. She lived by her children, but the relationship with Paul
her second son is even more significant than the first attempt to influence William.
Paul is a different boy, rather delicate and quiet, but his mother focuses her affection
on him.
As the gulf between Gertrude and her husband grew deeper, she found relief
and centred all her expectations on her sons, especially Paul. In return, Paul
experiences a powerful Oedipal attachment to his mother, a thing which will tragically
affect both. Paul and his mother are entangled in an emotional quagmire. Mrs.
Morel`s intimacy with her second son was more subtle and fine, perhaps not so
passionate as with her eldest [Sons and Lovers, p.89] Mrs. Morel`s life now
rooted itself in Paul. [Sons and Lovers, p.176]
Paul`s emotional and sexual expeience is found in his relationship with his
mother, and respectively, Miriam. The mother`s love effectively prevents Paul from
achieving any adequate embodiment of his own love for Miriam. The three find
themselves in a powerful and hard-to-define relationship. Problems arise form the fact
that Paul himself feels an unnameable attraction towards his mother, which creates an
emotional crisis. The extent of the bond that is established between mother and son is
most vividly dramatized in two episodes: the first one reveals her mind troubled with
the fear of losing Paul to Miriam.

She had been sitting thinking, because a chill to her eyes prevented her reading. She could
feel Paul being drawn away by this girl. And she did not care for Miriam. She is one of those
who will want to suck a man`s soul out, till he had none of his own left, se said to herself;
and he is just a guy as to let himself be absorbed. She will never let him become a man; she
never will. So, while he was with Miriam, Mrs. Morel grew more and more worked up.
[Sons and Lovers, p.199]

The climax is reached in another episode when she cries out to him all her anger
caused by the fact that Miriam means more to him than she does. She feels her place

87
in his heart is threatened, and she would not allow this. She tries to monopolize his
soul, at all costs, which is actually, a drawback for Paul. Since she rejected her
husband, she cannot be rejected by her son, too.

No, Mother I really don`t love her. I talk to her, but I want to come home to you. I cant
bear it. I could let another woman but not her. She`d leave me no room, not a bit of room.
And immediately he hated Miriam bitterly. And I`ve never you know, Paul I`ve never
had a husband not really [Sons and Lovers, pp.261-262]

Paul`s love experience is determined by two poles: desire and hatred. He felt dreary
and hopeless between mother and Miriam. There is something in him that makes him
aware of Miriam`s love, but, at the same time there is a battle between them. He
resists her love because the deepest of his love belonged to his mother. Desire and
hatred are the key terms of Paul`s emotional experience with all women, including his
mother. He cannot do or without them. Both their presence and their absence produce
in him a feeling of imminent extinction. Somehow Miriam is too much for him, he
needs her but he cannot accept her. He is afraid of the sense of non-being that women
produce in him. I don`t think one person would ever monopolize me be everything
to me I think never. [Sons and Lovers, p.276]
Ultimately, he came back to his mother. Hers was the strongest tie in the
world. Insistently, like a drum beat in the background of the novel, runs the question:
What is, what ought to be, what can be, the most vital relationship between man and
woman?
In The Rainbow new values and dimensions are added to human nature,
following the same dividing line between men and women. This is a much more
complex novel than Sons and Lovers. From the very beginning we find out that
women differ from men socially too. While the man is content with the blood
intimacy and communion with nature, facing inwards to the teeming life of creation,
the woman wanted another form of life than this, facing outwards, to the world.
Women think that the way to freedom is facilitated by knowledge, education
and culture. It was this, this education, this higher form of being, that the mother
wishes to give to her children, so that they could live the supreme life on earth.
[D.H.Lawrence, The Rainbow, Penguin Books: 1981, p.83]
Men give much consideration to a woman`s position in society and family.
The woman was the symbol for that further life which comprised religion and love

88
and morality. [D.H.Lawrence, The Rainbow, Penguin Books: 1981, p.53] Meanings
are enlarged, man and woman depend on each other and entrust one another for the
wished fulfilment. It is highly significant to have a look at Lawrence`s theoretical
views expounded in his essays.

Man`s highest moment is the emotional moment when he gives himself up to the woman,
when he forms the perfect answer for her great emotional and procreative asking. All this
thinking, all his activity in the world only contributes to this great moment, when he is
fulfilled in the emotional passion of the woman, the birth of rebirth, as Withman calls it. In his
consummation in the emotional passion of a woman, man is reborn. [D.H.Lawrence, Fantasia
of the Unconscious. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, Penguin Books: 1971, pp.97-98]

Which is quite true of Tom Brangwen, who is not at ease with or without a woman,
but ultimately, Lydia is the one who makes him feel a complete man, when united.
In return, she feels secure with him. The give-and-take between man and woman is
not balanced and this produces in Tom a sense of dependency or impotency. [see The
Rainbow, p.83]
Marriage is a sacred union, provided one finds the one person to be complete.
It acquires mystic and religious connotations: when a man`s soul and a woman`s
soul unites together that makes an Angel [The Rainbow, p.178] In this novel,
insight analyses are much deeper, and the heart-to-heart talkis given voice and
meaning, a fact unprecedented in fiction, due to the importance attributed by
Lawrence to the unconscious. [see The Rainbow, p.73]
If we compare the two couples: Tom-Lydia and Will-Anna, we shall notice
that their communion of souls and beings and the process of living together is as
difficult as it is altered. They each have a strong personality and sometimes their wills
clash. It seems that their roles have reversed, as Lawrence explained in an essay.
So that the male acts as the passive, or recipient pole of attraction, the female as the
active, positive, exertive pole, in human relations. Which is a reversal of the old flow.
The woman is now the initiator, man the responder The man may be the initiator in
action, but the woman is initiator in emotion. [[D.H.Lawrence, Fantasia of the
Unconscious. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, Penguin Books: 1971, pp.97-98]
Anna and Will`s relationship illustrates this change. [see The Rainbow, p.156]
The multiple aspects of their marriage and the process of getting to know each other
are minutely described by D.H.Lawrence as if he were the voice of their
unconsciousness. [The Rainbow, pp.191, 209] Love is a complex and ever-changing

89
process, which sometimes draws partners apart or makes them come closer; a certain
independence intervenes in the marital relationship, for the pure love to shine in
sunbeams finally. [The Rainbow, pp.201-212]
Apart from marriage, another major theme is religion. The one who undergoes
a religious experience is Anna, very much predisposed to questioning the language
of the church, which meant nothing to her, like any outward form. Yet she had
some fundamental religion. It was as if she worshipped God as a mystery, never
seeking in the least to define what He was. [The Rainbow, pp.141]
Consequently, in The Rainbow, much of the narrative is devoted to the attempt
of Will and Anna to come to terms with each other, to relate physical love to the
complexities of human personality, and to find harmony. Lawrence`s aim was to
transpose in language the equality of felt experience, to convey in words the flux of
affective life, erotic passion, religious emotion.
All science and all art depend on our ability to take risks, to dwell in new ideas
and believe the hitherto unbelievable. Science and art are built by the strength and
flexibility of our imagination, our ability to attend to the unknown and discover or
create meaningful wholes that make sense of the disparate particularities of our
existence. As we enter a novel, we all carry the burden of our special situation, our
personal incapacities, and our cultural moment. Part of what it means to learn to read
well is to go beyond our local deficiencies in order to achieve a full meeting with
something that is other, beyond, larger than what we bring. An alert reader of
Lawrence`s best work turns away with an imagination strengthened, altered and
empowered for such attending to life.
What is especially modernist about Lawrence`s contribution to fiction is the
sense of indissolubility of human consciousness and the literary form in which it is
given expression. Form must reflect the shape of the underlying psycho-drama.
[Brian Finney, p.11]
Through his best novels, D.H.Lawrence stands out as a revolutionary writer
comparable to Joyce and V.Woolf a great innovator, one who puts the novel form to
genuinely new uses and broke out of the limits imposed on story-telling.

III.3. WILLIAM FAULKNER`S LITERARY CREED

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For the last ten or dozen years, American literature has been dominated by the
writers who came of age during or shortly after the World War I that is, by
Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Wolfe among the novelists, by
Cummings and Crane among the poets, by Wilson and his contemporaries among the
critics, not to mention other names in all fields. [Malcolm Cowley, The Flower and
the Leaf, Viking Penguin Inc: 1985, p.10] Andre Gide called Faulkner the most
important of the stars in the new constellation.
Due to the quality of his personality and temperament, remarkably infused in
his work, he has assured himself a specific and singular place in the American literary
context. He is a representative modernist writer, but he does not belong to a certain
group. Every author has a distinct individuality, but Faulkner is hard to classify, he is
in a class by himself, and his work cannot be imitated except futilely, for he works
within no general tradition of craft and hands on no tradition to his successors.
His interviews are an important record of his beliefs and in one of them he
stated that the writer has three sources: imagination, observation and experience
[Faulkner in the University, Class Conference at the University of Virginia, Vintage
Books: 1959, p.103] meaning that personal experience is the background to which he
adds what he learns, imagines, what is transmitted to him; reality is thus enlarged, in
all directions into one vast legend. For the difficult task of rendering it he was best
equipped with talent and background than he was by schooling.
He travelled less than any of his contemporaries. He showed a great dislike
for literary society. His novels are the books of a man who broods about literature but
does not often discuss it with his friends: there is no ease about them, no feeling that
they come from a background of taste refined by argument and opinions held in
common. [Three Decades of Criticism, edited with an introduction by Frederick J.
Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery, 1963, p.95]
His art is a reflection of his beliefs, preoccupations, aspirations, rather than a
literary theory, and his main interest is with truth and the human heart. [apud The Art
of Fiction, an interview with Jean Stein] Although he emphasizes the importance of
the emotional over the intellectual, asserting that ideas and facts have very little
connection with truth, the mere act of reading Faulkner requires a sustained
intellectual effort and much of his appeal is clearly intellectual.
His views expressed throughout his work define him as a traditional man in a
modern South or, as George Marion O`Donnell called him, a Sartoris artist in a

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Snopes world. [Three Decades of Criticism, p.88] This Sartoris-Snopes theme is
central in his work and his novels are, primarily, a series of related myths or aspects
of a single myth built around the conflict between traditionalism and the modern
world. His attitude is a reaction to the process of dehumanization brought about by
civilization.

I think that man progresses mechanically and technically much faster than he does
spiritually, that there may be something he could substitute for the ruined wilderness, but he
hasn`t found that. He spends more time ruining the wilderness that he does finding something
to replace it. [Faulkner in the University, p.68]

One writing reflective for this aspect is The Bear a symbolic novelette in
which many of the writer`s leitmotifs, i.e. man up against nature, family and social
history, and the relativity of time, are comprised.
In his opinion, the modern world was in moral confusion. He lived in a world
that suffered form a lack of discipline, of sanctions, of community of values, a world
which is the victim of abstraction and of modernism. Thus Faulkner looks back
nostalgically upon the old world of traditional values.
The complex process of appraising Faulkner necessarily brings to our attention
his work as a whole, a vast and comprehensive legend of the South, which in its
totality, reveals the most important features of William Faulkner the man and the
artist.
One such feature is his humanism, made clear in his statements more than one,
I`m interested in people, [Faulkner in the University, p.19] or The way of the artist
is to believe most in man, that man will prevail, will endure as a soul; [Faulkner in
Manila, interviews, p.200] culminating with his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The
famous and often cited assertion is his advice to the young generation, sharing the
opinion that the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself alone can
make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the
sweat. [Three Decades of Criticism, p.348]
He followed his deep conviction that a writer`s duty is to write about man`s
soul in conflict with the evil nature of his environment, to use his talent to reveal the
truth about the human mind. However, this is not enough; any good writer should tell
the truth in such a way that it will be memorable, and he should give people hope.
This points to the moralistic function of the writer and the reforming character of a

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work of art. If the writer is to accomplish anything, it is to make the world a little
better than he found it, to do what he can, in whatever way he can, to get rid of the
evils like war, injustice that`s his job. [Interviews in Japan, p.94]
In a world of disorder and scepticism, the writer`s voice needs be a moral
support, one of the props, the pillars to help him [man] endure and prevail.
Faulkner`s work is an attempt to achieve this.
Faulkner`s clear-cut distinction between emotions - human heart, truth, people
and ideas, is a matter of temperament, as it has often been pointed out by critics,
also revealing his responses to the world around. Any work of art reflects the
temperament of its author, but in Faulkner`s case, the relationship between art and
temperament seems far more immediate, direct, and pervasive than is true for most
novelists. Walter J.Slatoff believes that no deliberate artistic intent is at the bottom of
Faulkner`s ambiguity and irresolution. [apud Walter J.Slatoff, Quest for Failure,
Cornell University Press: 1964, p.253]
Faulkner`s humanism must be viewed in relation to his faith, because religion,
Christianity is shaping not only the man, but it conditions a work of art. I think that
no writing will be too successful without some conception of God. [Faulkner in the
University, p.161] The same confession is uttered by Dewey Dell: I believe in God.
[William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Vintage Books: 1985, p.116] Faulkner recognizes
Christianity as inherent in any human being; and if he is aware of it, he can act
according to this code of behaviour by means of which he makes himself a better
human being that his nature wants to be. It is a trace that individualizes one that it is
also man`s reminder of his duty inside the human race. [The Art of Fiction, p.15]
As I Lay Dying illustrates this point of view, reinforcing the argument at the
same time. For instance, in the chapter entitled Cora we read: Sometimes I lose
faith in human nature for a time; I am assailed by doubt. But always the Lord restores
my faith and reveals to me His bounteous love for His creatures. [As I Lay Dying,
p.24] Faulkner`s hope does not fail him and he finds an answer to the world`s lack of
meaning, as in chapter Anse:

Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit Sometimes I
wonder why we keep at it. It`s because there`s such a reward for us above, where they can`t
take their autos and such. Every man will be equal there and it will be taken form them that
have and give to them that have not by the Lord. [As I Lay Dying, p.110]

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 As any conscientious writer, he evinced a continuous preoccupation with the
novel as form. Faulkner`s search for the most expressive way of representing his
characters authentic, credible, flesh-and-blood, living, suffering, anguishing human
beings leads him to try all kinds of literary techniques. The novel as revelation, the
novel as slice-of-life, as mere story just to report facts is not enough did not
interest him; these are the circumstances of interest but not the interest itself. His
quest for form entailed technical experimentation. He employed various methods and
techniques, such as rapidly shifting points of view; his use of more or less incoherent
narrators: Benjy, Quentin, Darl; his disordered time sequences, his whole method, as
Conrad Aiken puts it, of deliberately withheld meaning, of progressive and partial
and delayed disclosure. To these experiments with form and style we can add the
dislocation of the logical construction in the free association of images and Faulkner`s
psychological approach, i.e. the projection of events through the memory or
unconsciousness of a character in the form of interior monologue.
He extends his experiments to language as well, expressing his discontent with
the ability of language to convey the truth, sometimes resorting to the use of language
that would have been thought improper. This testing of language potentialities is part
of the revolutionary process in modern literature. Like Addie Bundren, he seems to
fear not only that words don`t ever fit even what they are trying to say at, but that
they are empty substitutes for feeling and experience: He had a word, too. Love,
he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was
just like the others: just a shape to fill a lack. [As I Lay Dying, p.172] Addie had a
conviction that language is a grotesque tautology which prevents any real
communication. The birth of Cash confirms her feeling that words are irrelevant and
that only physical experience has reality and significance.
A defining formal characteristic of the modernist work is its construction out
of fragments. No doubt Faulkner`s style places a burden on the reader; however a
fragmentary a work may be, there is a meaning underneath and the reader has to find
it, he has to dig the structure out. The reader`s reward, for the difficult task of of
deciphering Faulkner`s work, is that there is a situation to be given shape, a meaning
to be extracted.
We can say that Faulkner`s view of life conditions his style. [apud Walter
J.Slatoff, Quest for Failure, pp.249-251] Karl Zink asserts that at its best, form in

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Faulkner`s art constitutes a living effort to penetrate and realize in art an ineffable
complexity. The question of meaning is to be found in both life and modern art.

You get born and you try this and you don`t know why only you keep on trying it and
you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying
to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings , and it can`t matter, you know that, or
the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter
because you keep on trying. [Absalom, Absalom!]

The words are Judith Sutpen`s - Absalom, Absalom! and the passages
conveys the essence of Faulkner`s view of life; it cannot have meaning and yet it ust
this is the solution for both life and art. The demanding task of writing entails the
perception of success as failure, which is the attempt to do the impossible within
human experience. As this is a key term to the understanding of Faulkner`s striving,
the following passage will also prove relevant.

I was asked the question who were the five best contemporary writers and how did I
rate them. And I said Wolfe, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Caldwell and myself. I said we were all
failures. All of us had failed to match the dream of perfection and I rated the authors on the
basis of their splendid failure to do the impossible. I believed Wolfe tried to do the greatest of
the impossible, that he tried to reduce all human experience to literature. And I thought after
Wolfe I had tried the most. I rated Hemingway last because he stayed within what he knew.
He did it fine, but he didn`t try for the impossible. [apud Walter J.Slatoff, Quest for Failure,
p.145]

Faulkner`s emphasis on the word failureis voicing the idea that a man`s
reach should exceed his grasp. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you
can do. Don`t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to
be better than yourself. [The Art of Fiction, p.6]
He believes that every writer has a duty to tell the truth, and a dream which
anguishes him, he must be satisfied with what he does. Every attempt, every piece of
writing is a failure, but he should keep on trying; the only comfort being the solitary
job of writing; nobody can help you with it, but there`s nothing lonely about it.
[Faulkner in the University, p.111] He had a desire to transcend the usual rational
process of comprehension, to go beyond the limits that Hemingway stayed within, to
attempt the impossible.
Faulkner sees true understanding not as an intellectual act but as experience,
especially on the levels of consciousness, i.e. sensation, reason, intuition. Faulkner`s
quixotic ideal, his quest for failure, means that the finished work becomes, in a

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sense, the record of a process, the record of the artist`s struggle with his materials,
rather than the record of his victory over his materials. [Walter J.Slatoff, Quest for
Failure, p.253] His work could be regarded as an attempted poem, in the sense that
poetry is the most demanding form of art, and he did in his novels what he would
have like to do as a poet. [Faulkner in the University, p.4]
Faulkner supported an important idea about the potentialities of art to express
reality, thinking that music is a pure art and the best means for an artist`s purpose.
But, since words are more congenial to him and they are his talent, he would rather
read than listen; and he tries to express in words what sounds would have done better,
an idea upheld by Aldous Huxley as well. As for those feelings, emotions that cannot
be put into words the rest is silence. The only technique borrowed from music is
the counterpoint employed in the composition of The Wild Palms.
Any appraisal of William Faulkner should reveal the fact that he is not only an
American writer, but a writer of the world. Faulkner`s work should be regarded in
terms of issues which are common to our modern world. The legend is not merely a
legend of the South, but it is also a legend of our general plight and problem. His
strongest wish was to search, demand, ask always of one`s own soul and also o
give a proper, moving picture of man in the human dilemma. [Faulkner in the
University, p.281] This was a writer`s first job and he tried to fulfil it.
His basic conception of life was optimistic. The human effort is what is
important, the capacity to make the effort to rise above the mechanical process or life,
the pride to endure, for in endurance there is a kind of self-conquest.

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