Consciousness in Modernist Fiction

A Stylistic Study

V. Sotirova

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137307255
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This stylistic study of consciousness in the Modernist novel explores shifts across different viewpoints and the techniques through which they are dialogically interconnected. The dialogic resonances in the presentation of character consciousness are analysed using linguistic evidence and evidence drawn from everyday conversational practices.

1

The Modernist Revolution

1 Revolution in form

The striking opening of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is still seen by critics as the example par excellence of all the revolutionary innovations that Modernism brought to the novel. Thus, in a recent introduction to the Modernist novel, Jesse Matz, quoting the first sentence of the novel,¹ writes:

The first words here are familiar enough. What could be more traditional than beginning ‘once upon a time’? But what follows was (in 1916) new and strange: the words seem to be said and heard directly from life itself, without planning or purpose, they let silly baby-talk cheapen the language of literature; they make a joke of storytelling customs, and they plunge us directly into an unfamiliar world, without the kind of preparation (scene-setting, introductory explanations) that might normally ease us in. Gone is any welcoming narrator, any clear or ‘objective’ descriptions – any proper beginning. (2004: 2)

Matz goes on to explain that: ‘Starting without preparatory narration makes Portrait more like life, which never prepares us for what is to come’ (2004: 3). The parallel between what is, in my opinion, a rather difficult opening section of a novel and ‘life itself’, however improbable, is what the Modernists themselves were trying to pursue. The most frequently alluded to statement to this effect is Virginia Woolf’s insistence in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ that the works of Edwardian novelists like Alan Bennett and John Galsworthy continue to disappoint precisely because of their departure from what life really is: ‘Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”’ and it is so because ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ (McNeillie, 1994[1925]: 160) works differently from what is depicted in the novels of Realism. And it is with reference to Joyce’s Portrait that she asserts that: ‘If we want life itself, here surely we have it’ (McNeillie, 1994[1925]: 161).

Unpacking Matz’s thoughts on these first few lines of Portrait, we can deduce that it is perhaps the verisimilar presentation of the voice of the small child that makes the narrative sound ‘like life itself’, i.e. the quality of the narrative language. The somewhat vague parallel between the unpredictability of the prose and the unpredictability of life also has its function: it points to a critical perception of the organisation of discourse in Joyce’s Portrait as somewhat chaotic. The qualifications ‘new’ and ‘strange’ seem to sit uneasily with the parallel with ‘life itself’ for is not life familiar and well-known?

The mimeticism of life, however, does not result in easy processing, but rather obstructs automatic comprehension and this is, in fact, one of the paradoxes of Modernist form. For Sylvia Adamson, who provides a unique account of the language of Modernism, the revolution in the literary language, so characteristically invoked by commentators of Modernism, can be defined, following T.S. Eliot, as ‘a return to common speech’ (Eliot, 1942: 16; cited in Adamson, 1999: 591). For Adamson the linguistic correlative of this return can be found in the transposition of features of spoken language into the medium of writing as orality markers. Adamson defines ‘oral style’ as ‘the form of language canonically associated with conversation’ (1999: 592) and characterised by its interactive and fragmented nature and its use of context-dependent reference. If we look more closely at the opening of Joyce’s Portrait, it is possible to find the linguistic explanation for the critic’s intuitions about the life-like and, at the same time, ‘strange’ and ‘new’ quality of the prose:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo . . .

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. (Joyce, Portrait, 7)

The first sentence, recording the story that Stephen’s father used to tell him, is characteristically filled with verbatim repetition of whole noun phrases which in writing would normally be replaced with a shorthand form, such as a pronoun (e.g. ‘a moocow coming down along the road’ – she/it). This amount of unwieldy repetition can be explained by the well-known fact that children’s discourse contains a lot of repetition (Keenan, 1977). The mimicking effect is doubly intensified: the father peppers his story with repetition in a parody of the manner in which a child would tell it (or comprehend it), the narrator opens up his story with a verbatim transcription of this child-like narrative. The paragraph ends after one sentence, thus staging the choppiness of the discourse from the beginning. The next paragraph consists of a single sentence, comprising three short clauses which are simply juxtaposed, but not linked. None of these short paragraphs develops a coherent discourse idea. The second paragraph that might, on the surface, seem logically constructed is in fact a random conglomeration of impressions and free associations. Its surface cohesiveness based on a continuity of referents, such as ‘that story’, ‘his father’, ‘he’, turns out to lack coherence because each clause reports unrelated information about the protagonist’s father. The random juxtaposition of impressions is reinforced by the lack of conjunctions to signal the logical connections between clauses.

The third paragraph continues the trend of disrupted coherence: the third person masculine pronoun is used in continuation with its use in the previous paragraph, but this time with a new referent – the boy himself. These first few lines of Portrait certainly instantiate the context-dependent use of reference typically found in conversational discourse. And this is, in part, what accounts for the two contradictory characteristics of Modernist style: its mimetic, spoken quality and its opacity. Ambiguous use of reference is at once evocative of everyday language and more difficult to decipher when transposed to the written medium. As Adamson argues in relation to a poem by Olson, Modernism employs techniques approximating speech more mimetically than Romanticism, but paradoxically produces a more alienating communicative effect therefrom:

Olson’s topic-skipping may well be the most naturalistic in reproducing the associative leaps and self-interruptions we all practise when we talk to ourselves or to an intimate friend, but put in writing and addressed to a public audience, it strikes many readers as a perversely difficult form of communication. (1999: 599)

This ‘alienating communicative effect’ is reinforced by the lack of overt conjunction that could have potentially marked the relationship between ideas expressed in sequential clauses and sentences in the opening passage of Portrait. With the loss of syntactic complexity, a stylistic ideal that held sway for many centuries, Modernism also does away with complex logical connectivity. One of the reasons why complex syntax was part of the stylistic ideal for generations of writers is the fact that: ‘It was a common place of eighteenth-century criticism – inherited from Locke and echoed by Coleridge . . . – to equate a “good writer” with a “close reasoner” and to see a “pertinent use of connectives” as the index of both’ (Adamson, 1999: 635). The dismantling of this ideal results in greater freedom in the construction of discourse, one which is achieved at the expense of ease of processing.

It is well-known that subordinating conjunctions and syntactic complexity are more sophisticated forms of construction which are acquired later in life, not least as a result of formal education, and which are typically markers of written style (Chafe, 1982; Ochs, 1979). In line with Modernism’s tendency to mimic spoken language, the loss of hypotaxis leads to an increased reliance on paratactic relations between clauses, with linking typically based either on simple juxtaposition (asyndeton), as is the case in the opening paragraphs of Portrait, or on repetition, or on the use of simple coordination with and and but, or on ‘appositive, parenthetical and tag clauses’ (Adamson, 1999: 537). In its extreme versions the simplifications of syntax in Modernist writing result not only in very short sentences, consisting of one short clause only, but in very short paragraphs too. The sentence as a complete information unit is thus reduced to its minimum with any analysis and logical organisation of ideas denied the reader. The replacement of complexity based on logical connectivity with parataxis leads to what Adamson calls ‘the information deficit’:

One important product of the shift from hypotaxis to parataxis is an information deficit. When parataxis occurs in speech, intonation normally tells us where the links are, and information about the nature of the link is often supplied by the context of speech and the shared knowledge of the speech participants. In a hypotactic style of writing much of this information is carried instead by explicit connectives. . . . By removing connectives, paratactic writing creates potentially serious problems of intelligibility. (Adamson, 1999: 641)

The paradoxical double effects of Modernist writing are evinced in the close alignment between parataxis and speech, and also in the lack of logical connectedness that places a greater demand on the reader to infer meanings buried in iconic ordering or repetition, the two devices deployed instead of hypotactic style. The pervasive use of repetition, as part of the move towards orality, goes against the stylistic ideals of centuries of literary writing in which it had been considered ‘a form of redundancy’ (Adamson, 1999: 643). Its role in spoken language, however, as an interactive tool that helps interlocutors build relationships (Tannen, 1987a; 1987b; 1989), makes it part of the stylistic repertoire of Modernism.

Joyce’s short passage mimics closely the speech patterns of the protagonist’s child discourse. Its syntactic continuity is disrupted through the ambiguous use of reference, through repetition, through total avoidance of any conjunctions, providing logical links between clauses, and through a refusal to develop an idea beyond the boundaries of the clause. These features both account for the verisimilar evocation of the child’s discourse and point of view and at the same time disturb the logical coherence of the written text.

To appreciate fully the formal innovations that the Modernist novel brings to the genre Joyce’s opening of Portrait can be placed alongside a passage from Jane Austen’s Emma, a novel that marks the beginning of a tradition of novelistic writing that filters the narration through the point of view of a character and records the characters’ thoughts in a verisimilar way:

How long had Mr. Knightley been so dear to her, as every feeling declared him now to be? When had his influence, such influence begun? – When had he succeeded to that place in her affection, which Frank Churchill had once, for a short period, occupied? – She looked back; she compared the two – compared them as they had always stood in her estimation, from the time of the latter’s becoming known to her – and as they must at any time have been compared by her, had it – oh! had it, by any blessed felicity, occurred to her, to institute the comparison – She saw that there never had been a time when she did not consider Mr. Knightley as infinitely the superior, or when his regard for her had not been infinitely the most dear. She saw, that in persuading herself, in fancying, in acting to the contrary, she had been entirely under a delusion, totally ignorant of her own heart – and, in short, that she had never really cared for Frank Churchill at all! (Austen, Emma, 339)

At the height of her distress – the moment when Emma realises that Mr. Knightley might love her friend Harriet while she herself becomes aware of her feelings for him – her inner discourse is portrayed with minimal use of the syntactic incoherence that would normally express the emotions of someone so distraught. The only indication of Emma’s flustered state is the use of dashes to signal breaks in the line of Emma’s thoughts. But the presence of the dashes, although indicative of heightened emotion, does not indicate real syntactic breaks; the sentences which are thus separated are complete and without the dashes would remain logical and coherently joined.

The indices of the style used for the presentation of this character’s thoughts are rather different from those deployed by Joyce. Austen’s heroine asks herself questions and exclaims several times under the sway of strong emotion, but her thoughts are still logically construed and composed in full sentences that are grammatically coherent and joined in coherent discourse. Joyce’s narrative, in its attempt to mimic the digressions of spoken language and the free associative leaps of children’s speech, strikes against the measure of two norms: those governing textual organisation per se and those establishing the generic rules of novelistic openings that serve the purpose of orientating the reader in the narrative world. Although both passages transcribe the thoughts of the characters whose point of view is endorsed by the narrative, this endorsement is fuller linguistically in the Modernist opening of Portrait where the mimeticism of the passage is pushed to an extreme and the effect on the reader is one of greater interpretative difficulty.

This tendency ‘for the idiom of [empathetic narrative] to reflect the norms of the character’s rather than the narrator’s speech-variety’ (Adamson, 1999: 673) is part of a radical shift in Modernism towards ‘breaking the standard’ language. The coexistence of different varieties – be they dialectally marked, or simply registrally set off against each other – thus accounts for one of the hallmark characteristics of Modernism – its polyvocalism (Adamson, 1999: 608). While the representation of non-standard varieties is not new with Modernism, for a nineteenth-century author like Dickens a non-standard variety would have an ‘indexical’ function and would be used in dialogue to represent authentically the voice of a character, typically of lower class origin. In Modernism, however, ‘Standard English is typically present . . . , but it is demoted from the role of narrative continuo so that neither it nor any alternative variety can be taken as the vehicle of authorial viewpoint or authoritative statement’ (Adamson, 1999: 609).

The Modernist attempt to reform the literary language can be generalised as an attempt at dismantling the very core of literariness which rests on the promotion of features of orality into a major structuring principle:

The ‘innovation of Modernism’ put Romantic illusionism in question, by exposing the fact that a poem is not a conversation (or more generally that writing is not speech) in the same way that Post-Impressionist painting exposed the fallacy of supposing that a canvas could act as a window. But just as much of the art produced by the Post-Impressionists and their successors gains its effects not by discarding traditional illusionist techniques but by dislocating or intensifying them (as in the multiple perspectives of Braque’s cubism, or the real-life still-lifes of Duchamp’s objets trouvés) so Modernist writing typically works by radicalising the techniques of Romantic orality . . . (Adamson, 1999: 599)

The use of linguistic constructions that both mimic the digressions and interruptions of spoken language and intensify them results in complex and paradoxical effects which make literary language sound at once as ‘common speech’ and as impenetrably difficult. What started in Romanticism as an attempt to evoke ‘common speech’ established itself as the staple techniques of literary writing which in the Modernist period lost their function as style-markers of orality and quite paradoxically became transformed into features that disrupted the comprehensibility of written discourse.

The demoticisation of literary language with the use of non-standard varieties promoted to the level of poetic and narrative dominants, with the simplification of syntax and the discarding of heightened emotive language can be interpreted as a revolt against elitist and privileged forms of language, only accessible to certain layers of society. But at the same time the density of orality techniques which obscure the comprehensibility of written language creates its own brand of elitism by making the language of literary texts removed from common forms of written expression and by disrupting the smoothness and coherence of the written medium. Even the expression of subjectivity in narrative which perhaps starts in English in the Romantic period with Austen’s Emma, adopting a narrative method that filters an entire novel through the viewpoint of a protagonist, is radicalised in Modernism to an extent that makes Ulysses hard to comprehend for a majority of readers.

The Modernist revolution in form, then, aligns the style of the period with spoken language on many levels. This allows for a strong argument in favour of a certain democratisation of literary language. The linguistic practices of Modernism can be interpreted as a gesture against dominant traditions, dominant linguistic varieties, dominant forms of writing. The views of critics who see Modernism as a powerful statement against the status quo of late capitalism can be mapped onto the linguistic forms adopted by Modernist writers that align their style with spoken language.

At the same time, the dismantling of the conventions of previous literary traditions on a scale that challenges the easy processing of literary texts is a factor that has prompted other critics to interpret such texts as elitist and ahistorical. The difficulty in reading Modernist texts, which can be explained with a close analysis of their formal make-up, can easily be seen as the result of a deliberate attempt to obfuscate reality and in this way renounce responsibility for any social engagement with pertinent political issues. After all, Modernist texts do not present a transparent and realistic picture of the world as it had been known in literary representation until then. Their linguistic difficulty makes it hard to comprehend any ideas that might lie behind their surface texture. The persistent resistance to straightforward representation creates comprehension difficulties that can be viewed as an expression of a historically disengaged attitude that remains aloof and that seeks the perfection of the artistic sign, but severs and denigrates its connection to the signified real.

It is to these wider questions of the cultural and historical significance of Modernism that have dominated critical debates about Modernism, therefore, that I must now turn in order to establish a connection between style and cultural history, and thereby begin to chart the way of the stylistic cultural history which is the subject of this book.

2 The critical commonplace of Modernism

It has become a commonplace in literary criticism to characterise Modernism as the most revolutionary movement in the history of literature. In a cla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Modernist Revolution
• 2 The Novel of Consciousness
• 3 D.H. Lawrence’s Dialogic Consciousness
• 4 James Joyce’s Extratextual Dialogicity
• 5 Virginia Woolf’s Transparent Selves
• 6 Modernist Style and Contemporary Philosophy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index