Chapter One : Background to the Study

1. Introduction

2. Modernist Generic Literary Forms and Techniques

2.1 Modernist novel :

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the

English novel had undergone a radical shift in its form and style. It was a period of

revolutionary innovations and experimentations in science and art, and literature had to adopt

itself to these new circumstances and developments. The novels of this era reached their

highest level of advancement in comparison with the previous Victorian novels, and were

considered as the most significant novels of the English language (Carter 324). There was a

great “turn of the novel”, and the moral, realistic, popular tradition of the Victorian fiction

started to disappear and to be replaced by a new, different, and more complicated form,

termed now as the Modern novel (Bradbury 1). Before the modernist period, fiction was not

regarded as a serious art just like poetry, music, and painting ; it was more entertaining and

edifying in its way. Since the 1880’s, however, this view started to change, especially in the

works of Gustave Flaubert who is known as the father of Modern fiction. In Madame

Bovary (1857) and other works, Flaubert showed that “fiction could become a matter of

fine artistic planning and execution…intensely imagined, carefully framed, ambiguous in

meaning, and intricate in their philosophical designs” (Matz 15). Thus, the Modernist novel

made a remarkable break with the Victorian traditional forms of writing, and came up with

new artistic forms to reflect the new realities of the twentieth century.

One of the major features that distinguishes the Modernist novel from the Victorian

is its focus on exploring the inner world of characters rather than the external events and

plots, in order to depict their thoughts and feelings through the presentation of stream of

consciousness in the Modernist fiction as a principle that challenged the genre of the novel,
and as a narrative technique which shifted authority from the narrator to the character. It was

a unique achievement to the modernist fiction to the extent that “[n]ever before had a novelist

ventured so far into the heads of characters” (Matz16). Psychologists of the modernist period

came up with a new introspective approach to analyze the mental life of humans. The

psychologist William James described it in his book Principles of Psychology (1890) as “the

looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover” (James 116). Therefore,

many prominent novelists employed this narrative technique in their novels such as in

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and To the Light House, James Joyce‘s Ulysses and A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as an attempt to break with the old forms of

charaterization and to adopt new literary devices that enable the writer to get into the human

psyche.

2.2 Modernist short story :

In the Modernist period, the English short story had gained a significant status in

literature, and became the major literary genre and the most modern in its tendency. Its

features comform with the new traits of modernity in being “rapid, fleeting, weightless,

ephemeral, and imaginatively agileˮ. In this respect, the short story was considered as the

most twentieth century successful art, and there is no other modern art including drama,

poetry, and even novel had achieved this state. Short-story collections were the most

rewarding works of that time : Saki’s Chronicles of Clovis (1911), Joyce’s Dubliners (1914),

Lawrence’s The Prussian Officer (1914), Mansfield’s Bliss (1920) and The Garden Party

(1922), Maugham’s The Casuarina Tree (1926), Bowen’s The Cat Jumps (1934), and P.G.

Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle (1935) are among them (Baldick 137-138,140). In his book

Modern short stories (1939), John Hadfield pointed out that there was “no other form of

imaginative writing in which the twentieth century has discovered so many new possibilities
of art, interpretation of life, and entertainmentˮ (qtd. in Baldick 137-138). The birth of a new

kind of short story in the 1880’s and 1890’s, termed now as the Modernist short story,

coincided with the emergence of Modernism as a social and literary movement. This

coincidence is not only circumstantial; instead, there was a common ground between the

formal abilities of this short body of writing and the episodic, fragmented nature of that

period, in addition to the period’s interest in experimentation and formal innovation ; it was a

text-context relationship. The relevance can be traced, for instance, in “The Modernists’

compression of time and dependence on symbolismˮ, in the “limited action

and…preoccupation with personality ; [in] the self-conscious foregrounding of form and

the…reliance on patternˮ. Unlike the Victorian era, many writers in Modernism tend to

depend on “single significant eventsˮ in forming their literary works, and even prominent

novels as Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway were originally considered as short

stories due to their reliance on single dramatic events which are : “Clarissa Dalloway’s party,

[and] the meeting of Bloom and Stephenˮ. It was a modernist tendency to follow such

strategy in writing, which is more appropriate to the short story than to any other genre (Head

1,6,8). Furthermore, the Modernist short story was described as being a young literary form

and very similar to the cinema in its characteristics; In this regard, Elizabeth Bowen in The

Faber Book of Modern Stories (1937) argued that :

The short story is a young art…it is the child of this century. Poetic tautness and clarity

are so essential to it that it may be said to stand at the edge of prose ; in its use of

action it is nearer to drama than to the novel. They [short story and drama] have

affinities―neither is sponsored by a tradition ; both are, accordingly, free ; both, still,

are self‒conscious, show a self‒imposed discipline and regard for form. (qtd. in Baldick

137)
Moreover, the Modernist short narrative moved from the Victorian long descriptions of plots

and characters. It gave a narrow space to the explanation of events and a larger one to the

reader’s competence in detecting their meaning. H.E. Bates, in his book The Modern Short

Story : A Critical Survey (1941), agreed with Bowen’s comparison between the short story

and the cinema, and he explained that :

The story now described less, but implied and suggested more; it stopped short, it

rendered life obliquely, or it was merely episodic; so that the reader, if the value of the

story was to be fully realized at all, had to supply the confirmation of his own

experience, the fuller substance of the lightly defined emotion, and even the action

between and after the episodes. The short story, in fact, moved nearer the film, and the

two arts, rendering life largely by suggestion, brief episodes, picture-sequences, indirect

narration, and the use of symbolism, developed together.(qtd. in Baldick 139)

Therefore, the formal capacities, the youthfulness, and the modern tendency of the Modernist

short story, as well as, its similar characteristics to modernism and to the cinematic art

rendered it to become the most popular literary genre of the twentieth century, the best

representative genre of literary Modernism, and the favourite form of writing to many

novelists, poets, and playwrights at that time.

2.3 Modernist stylistic techniques of characterization :

2.3.1 Epiphany :

The term epiphany can be defined as “a moment of sudden and great revelation or

realizationˮ (oxforddictionaries.com), or it is “a moment when you suddenly feel that you

understand, or suddenly become conscious of, something that is very important to youˮ

(dictionary.cambridge.org). It is derived from the Greek word epiphaneia which means a

“manifestationˮ or “showing forthˮ (Abrams 80). In religion, “[t]he term primarily denotes

the festival which commemorates the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles in the persons of
the Magi. The feast is observed on January 6th, ‘Twelfth Night’, the festival of the ‘Three

Kings’. More generally, the term denotes a manifestation of God’s presence in the worldˮ

(Cuddon 277). In Modernism, James Joyce was the first artist to introduce this concept to the

Modernist literature. Despite the fact that Joyce did not innovate literary epiphany, he was the

one who had given it its critical fame (Tigges 11). In his novel Stephen Hero : Part of the

first draft of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (1956), Joyce, through his main

charcter Stephen Daedalus, described epiphany as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether

in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itselfˮ (Joyce

216), it is the sudden “revelation of the whatness of a thingˮ (qtd. in Ellmann 83). Thus,

epiphany is a concept with different meanings and origins, and James Joyce, in his works,

gave it a secular and literary sense in order to simulate the new realizations, insights and

disillusions that had shocked humanity in the beginning of the twentieth century.

Furthermore, characters in Realism had undergone epiphanic moments in significant

and serious situations, provided with logical reasons and explanations ; However, in

Modernism, epiphanies can be traced in trivial objects and incidents which are scarcely

observed only to the character who experiences such realizations (Kern 107). Stephen in the

aforementioned novel, for example, had experiened an epiphany when he noticed that the

Ballast Office Clock, a common place in Dublin that he used to pass by all the time, had

become suddenly remarkable (Kim 1). “[W]e recognise [sic] that it is that thing which it is.

Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the

commonest object…seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphanyˮ (Joyce 218). For

Joyce, the artist is filled with such revelations and realizations, and he should extract them

“not among gods but among men, in casual, unostentatious, even unpleasant momentsˮ

(Ellmann 83). Unlike the Victorian epiphanies, the Modernist epiphany take a long time in

order to manifest. In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), for instance, Lily Briscoe
underwent an epiphanic moment when she changed the place of a tree to finish her painting.

An incident that appears to be inane and unimportant, but it took the whole novel in order to

achieve its full intensity. The insight become clear only when Lily returned to the house after

ten years (Kern 108).

Suddenly she remebered When she had sat there last ten years ago there had been a

little sprig or leaf pattern on the table-cloth, which she had looked at in a moment of

revelation. There had been a problem about a foreground of a picture. Move the tree to

the middle, she had said. She had never finished that picture. She would paint that

picture now. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse 110)

In other words, the literary epiphany emerges slowly in the Modernist fiction from

insignificant scenes and moments of everyday life that seems ordinary and not revelatory at

all unless to the person who observes them.

2.3.2 Stream of Consciousness :

Stream of consciousness was first coined by William James, the American

philosopher and psychologist, in his book Principles of Psychology (1890). It is “the

continuous flow of sense-perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mindˮ

(Baldick, The Concise Oxford 244). In literature, it can be defined as “the literary technique

whereby an author attempts to render the internal verbal, imaginative, and perceptual

activities of a characterˮ (Stringer and Sutherland 649). The term was first introduced to

literature in 1918 by May Sinclair in a review that discusses Dorothy Richardson’s novel

sequence Pilgrimage (1915-38) which involve the remarkable English uses of this technique

(Drabble 975). Prominent Modernist novels as Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse,

and The Sound and the Fury are classified as stream of consciousness novels. Unlike the

previous novels, the stream of consciousness novel is the one in which the consciousness of

characters is its basic subject matter and not its techniques, themes, or purpose (Humphrey 2).
Hence, The main concern of the writer of such novels is to explore the psychological aspects

and the inner life of his characters.

The stream of consciousness technique of characterization is presented in literature

through various literary methods which are different from one fictional work to the other.

Interior monologue is a major technique that is often confused with stream of consciousness.

Edouard Dujardin had claimed to be the first to use it in his novel Les Lauriers sont coupé

(1887), and he defined it as :

the speech of a character in a scene, having for its object to introduce us directly into

the interior life of that character, [without author intervention] through explanations or

commentaries ;[...] it differs from traditional monologue in that : in its matter, it is an

expression of the most [intimate thought that lies nearest the unconsciousness] ; in its

form, it is produced in direct phrases reduced to the minimum of syntax ; and thus it

corresponds essentially to the [conception we have today of poetry]. (qtd. in Humphrey

24)

Moreover, the interior monologue technique is divided into two different types, which are

direct and indirect interior monologue. The direct interior monologue is the type in which

there is no authorial involvement through his explanations and comments in the text, and no

auditor to whom the concerned character would speak to in the fictional scene. Instead, there

is a direct consciousness rendering to the reader without such words as “he said” or “he

thought” (26). A good example to this type of interior monologue is in Joyce’s Ulysses. In the

depiction of the consciousness of Molly Bloom when she is lying in bed:

Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with

a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up

with a sick voice doing his highness to made himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs.

Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for
 masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out…for

her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments[…]. (qtd. in Humphrey 26)

This monologue is characterized by features of inchoherence and fluidity as being

unpunctuated, using pronoun references, including persons’s names and events that Molly is

thinking about, and interrupting ideas (27). The second type is the indirect interior

monologue which is defined as “the type of interior monologue in which an omniscient

author presents unspoken material as if it were directly from the consciousness of a character

and, with commentary and description, guides the reader through itˮ. The difference between

the direct and the indirect monologue is that the writer involves himself between the reader

and the character’s mind in the indirect monologue and nearly absent in the direct one (29).

Another two techniques which were used to present the stream of consciousness in the

Modernist fiction are : description by omniscient author and soliloquy. Unlike the interior

monologue technique which had gained its highest flourishment in the twentieth century,

both of these techniques were basic literary methods that were more familiar and acceptable

by the readers, and which were adapted to a special use in Modernism. The description by

omniscient author can be defined as “the novelistic technique used for representing the

psychic content and processes of a character in which an omniscient author describes that

psyche through convential methods of narration and description” (33). This technique was

often used with other stream of consciousness techniques and rarely was used alone in a

literary work. Modernist writers as Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner had rarely adopted this

technique in their fiction ;however, it had been used heavily by Dorothy Richardson. A good

example of this technique is in her novel Pilgrimage (1915-38) :

The little shock sent her mind feeling out along the road they had just left. She

considered its unbroken length, its shops, its treelessness. The wide thoroughfare, up

which they now began to rumble, repeated it on a larger scale. The pavements were
 wide causeways reached from the roadway by stone steps, three deep. The people

passing along them were unlike any she knew.They were all alike. (qtd. in Humphrey

34)

The two things that are remarkable in this passage are : The reader is inside the character’s

psyche, and the method is mostly descriptive and written in the third person (35). Soliloquy

as a stream of consciousness technique can be defined as a technique that allows the author to

represent the consciousness of characters directly to the reader, but the auditor is implicitly

assumed. The difference between this technique and the interior monologue is its well

coherence due to its aim which is to “communicate emotions and ideas which are related to a

plot and actions”. Many authors of the stream of consciousness genre took advantage from

conventional soliloquy and combined it with interior monologue in their works to depict the

inner and outer life of their characters. In short, all these narrative techniques whether the

new inventions of the twentieth century or the old conventional methods which were

reformulated at that time, both types were used by stream of consciousness writers in order to

develop the use of this narative technique of characterization.

2.4.3 Polyphony :

Polyphony is defiened as “a style of musical composition employing two or more

simultaneous but relatively independent melodic linesˮ (merriam-webster.com). In literature,

it is “a feature of narrative, which includes a diversity of points of view and voices” (Par. 09

Kakabadze). The term was borrowed from music, and was first introduced by the Russian

philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment (1866) was the

starting point for Bakhtin to begin his theory about the polyphonic novel (Dehkordi 3673).

The polyphonic novel is the one “in which several different voices or points of view interact

on more or less equal term” (Baldick, The Concise Oxford 199). According to Bakhtin, the

novels of Dostoevsky included the first examples of polyphony in literature, and he

considered Dostoevsky as “a creator of the polyphonic novel” (Dehkordi 3673). Moreover,

Bakhtin made a comparison between monologic and polyphonic novels. Monologic novels

for him are overwhelmed by the narrator’s only voice and point of view ; however, in the

polyphonic ones, character’s voices can be heard and expressed freely (Teranishi 49).

Polyphony, then, is a “multi-voicedness” ; it emerges in a novel when the narrator gives a

space for characters to interact and argue with each other and with the author as well, and this

is what creates a multiplicity of consciousness interaction in the novel (Shodhganga.Inflibnet

1-2). Bakhtin argued that characters in Dostoevsky’s works are “free people, capable of

standing [alongside] their creator, capable of not agreeing with him, and even of rebelling

against him” (Teranishi 49). In this respect, Saul Bellow, in his book Where Do We Go From

Here : The Future of Fiction (1965), agreed with Bakhtin’s view, and he explained that “[The

novel] becomes art when the views most opposite to the author’s own are allowed to exist in

full strength. Without this a novel of ideas is mere self-indulgence, and didacticism is simply

axe-grinding. The opposites must be free to range themselves against each other, and they

must be passionately expressed on both sides” (qtd. in ). Therefore, polyphony is a new

narrative technique that allows plurality of perspectives to arise within the same literary work

in which the the author’s, narrator’s, and characters’s voices can be heard.

3. Psychoanalytic theory :

Since this dissertation is concerned with concepts of personality and consciousness,

Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality is required. Through his early studies on mental

disorderes, such as hysteria and obsessional illness, that had no scientific reasons, the

viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) moved from his old way of treating

patients with psychological problems, based on neurology, and innovated a new method of

treatment that enables him to get into the person’s mental life. Via this new method, Freud

realized that the personality of an individual with a psychological disorder is overwhelmed by

some obscure urges that come from the deep part of the psyche. At first, Freud believed that

these unknown impulses are originated from “delayed reactions to traumas, especially sexual

traumas that had been experienced in early childhood and then dissociatedˮ ; however, in

later time, he founded that these urges are nothing but repressed “instinctual drivesˮ or

“forcesˮ that arises from the deep dark area of the mind that he called “the unconsciousˮ

(Perlman and Brandell 44). Freud was the first to admit the significance of the unconscious

part of the mind, and his revolutionary theories about the internal processes of the human

mind shocked humanity at the end of the nineteenth century (Par. 06 Beystehner). According

to Freud, the human mind is made up of two parts. The conscious mind, in which the person

is aware of what he is doing, thinking and feeling, and the unconscious part of the mind, in

which the individual has no cognition for the mental activities that happen there (Par. 02

Devita). Freud coined the term “psychoanalysisˮ in 1896, and from that time, he started to

develop its major basics, objectives, techniques, and methodology (par. 06 Beystehner). The

psychoanalytic theory can be defined as “a method of investigating and treating personality

disordersˮ (yourdictionary.com), or it is “the personality theory, which is based on the notion

that an individual gets motivated more by unseen forces that are controlled by the conscious

and the rational thoughtˮ (businessjargons.com). Freud divided personality into three. The id,

the ego, and the superego. The id is characterized as being unconscious ; it represents the

pleasures and instincts that the person inherit from his birth, and which are the primary reason

of all human behaviours. The ego is the conscious part of personality. It is responsible for

restraining the id’s needs, and relating the id with the outer world. The superego is

accountable for limiting the satisfactions, representing “the influences of others…as well as

the impact of racial, societal, and cultural traditionsˮ (Par. 09-10 Beystehner). Thus, the

psychoanalytic theory of personality, developed by Sigmund Freud, is a twentieth century

creation in the field of psychology. It helped psychologists as Freud to investigate the human
personality and discover its unconscious aspects which are located at the core of the psychic

life in order to understand the way humans behave.

The psychoanalytic theory has undergone various adaptations during Freud’s period

and even in later time. It was first concerned with Freud’s interest in clinical practice and

treating neurotic patients (Shodhganaga. Inflibnet 95-96). Then, Freud evolved his theory to

tackle other domains and disciplinces mainly literature. Freud, in his Introduction to

Psychoanalysis (1920), a collection of lectures, presented the theoretical framework of

psychoanalytic criticism that merges literature with other arts as dreams and neurotic

symptoms (Abrams 248). Psychoanalytic crticism can be defined as “an approach to criticism

or a critical technique that applies the principles, theories and practices of psychoanalysis to

literature, both in the analysis of the work and of the authorˮ (thefreedictionary.com). The

beginnings of this literary approach can be found in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams

(1900) in which he analyzed literary characters as Oedipus and Hamlet, and he gave an

interpretation of seemingly unsignificant details of narratives as “displacements of repressed

wishes or anxietiesˮ (Cuddon 332 ; Drabble 823) In addition, it is interested in finding a

shared ground between the artist as a creature and what he creats. In literaure, unlike any

other psychoanalytic method, the Freudian’s psychoanalytic method seeks to analyze literary

characters through the language they use in the literary work as if they were real persons and

not only “a symptom of the writerˮ (Cuddon 332). Therefore, psychoanalytic criticism is a

literary interpretation of literary works, authors and characters through the integration of

aspects from literature with others from psychology.

4. Cognitive Stylistics :

Since its beginnings, stylistics had relied on the employment of detailed linguistic

analysis and compositional mechanisms while interpreting works of literature. However, this

discipline was lacking a psychical aspect that could identify our way of reading and
interpreting the literary work. Cognitive stylistics or cognitive poetics is one of the main

advanced branches of modern stylistics which had been included recently to the field as an

attempt to enhance and renew its methods of analysis. Its objective is to concentrate on

models which highlight the relationship between the reading process and the human psyche

rather than models of text and composition. This evolvement was considered as a “cognitive

turn” in stylistics (Simpson 38-39). Cognitive stylistics/poetics can be described as an

interconnection between linguistics, cognitive science, and literary studies (Par. 07

Krishnamurthy). It is “all about reading literature” (Norgaard et al.7). It tries to give

assumptions about what would occur during the process of reading, and how would this

influences the interpretations that the reader had come up with about the literary text.

Cognitive stylistics starts from the supposition that “reading is an active process and that

readers consequently play an active role in constructing the meaning of textsˮ (Jeffries and

Mclntyre 126). The implementation of cognitive stylistics in the fictional works provides an

understanding to the fictional minds, a regard to the world of fiction in relation to the real

world, and a comparison of personalities, habits, and incidents (Glotova 2445). The

relationship between literature and psychology is reinforced by Margaret Freeman ; In her

book Poetry and the Scope of Metaphor : Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literature (2000),

she argued that the literary texts are “the products of cognizing mindsˮ, and identified

interpretations as “the products of other cognizing minds in the context of the physical and

socio-cultural worlds in which they have been created and readˮ (qtd. in Glotova 2445-2446).

Cognitive science scholars expanded the linguistic analysis of literature through the

presentation of a variety of theories, such as “schema theory, cognitive metaphor theory,

conceptual metaphor theory, text world theory, blendings, and mental space theoriesˮ (Par. 07

Krishnamurthy). Schema theory, for example, is one of the theories which had contributed to

the introduction of stylistics into the cognitive realm. According to the schema theorists,
meaning is not embodied only in the text ; instead, meaning can be achieved through the

reading of the text in accordance with the reader’s previous knowledge. Both aspects of

comprehension are fundamental, supplementary, and dependable on each other. They are

labeled as “bottom-up or stimulus-driven processes” which leads the reader to build a specific

mental world from the linguistic features of the text, and “top-down or conceptually-driven

processes” that mobilizes the reader’s previous knowledge which becomes energized by the

linguistic props (Norgaard et al. 8). Thus, cognitive stylistics is a recent approach in modern

stylistics that had been emanated from the integration of different fields, and which had

combined linguistic analysis with cognitive theories in order to have new ways of reading,

analyzing, and interpreting literary texts.

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