THE METALANGUAGE OF MODERNIST

FICTION

Too little unanimity can be identified in the modernist

literary bid, and yet one feature of modernist literature is its

explicit interest in fiction as art, or the art of fiction. As

compared to the realist narrative conventions, stress is laid upon

the mechanisms of writing, though in a manner which

distinguishes itself from the postmodernist literature. The

modernist novelists’ attitude to literature implies a necessary

reference to the specific medium of literature, i.e. literary

language, in a sustained effort to keep literature distinct from

reality. Language, as well as an ever-growing “interest in the

nature and operation of language”1 function as a feature of

modernity marking the evolution from a type of literature

centred on meaningful content to one centred on form and

writing. The modernist writer voices his/her dissatisfaction with

the inappropriateness of language, in as much as it is a medium

shared by fiction and reality, by literary and ordinary

communication. The way in which Virginia Woolf expresses her

anxiety as to the medium of literature can be considered central

to the whole modernist mood and practice. “I’m going to […] 1 Randall, Stevenson, The British Novel since the Thirties (Iaşi: Institutul European, 1993) 241.

talk about words. Why they won’t let themselves be made a

craft of. They tell the truth: they aren’t useful. That there should

be two languages: fiction and fact.”2

If the modernist writers assumed a position of self-

awareness to their art, and especially to the mechanisms through

which the fictional world comes into being, it is hardly

imaginable that the reader of modernism could make his way

through the intricacy of modernist writing without changing his

reading habits. He should place himself in a similar position of

awareness to the art of fiction. He is supposed to be conscious of

literature as a craft and therefore get trained in its basics or

essentials. He should be ready to give up the pleasure derived

from reading the novel as entertainment and assume the

responsibility of contributing to meaning creation. The language

used by the modernist writers draws attention to itself self-

reflexively. The reader cannot thus ignore it. On the contrary, it

is only based on it that the access to reality, as imagined by the

modernists, becomes possible.

This chapter will be thus devoted to the definition of the

literary concepts that we consider necessary for a proper

understanding of modernist fiction. Explaining them in the

beginning of a course of lectures on modernism does not mean

that they are completely new to the reader of literature or that

they have not been applied to the analysis of the eighteenth or

nineteenth-century narrative conventions. It is just that the

modernist novels seem to foreground the narrative methods, in 2 Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writer’s Diary, Being Extracts from the Diary of V. Woolf (London: The Hogarth Press, 1954), 260.

the sense that the previously ‘transparent’ literary language that

had offered unhindered access to reality is replaced by a more

‘opaque’ one that inevitably scares and repels the reader. To get

over this feeling of frustration, it would be better for the reader

trained at the school of realism to approach a modernist novel by

moving from theory to practice, from literary concepts to

literary texts, rather than the other way round, as he had been

used to. The commonly acknowledged effort implied by the

reading of modernism will be compensated for by the

intellectual pleasure derived from coming to grips with an

undoubtedly challenging literary phenomenon.

Indispensable to the analysis and understanding of the

modernist novels are the categories of narrative technique and

character. This is the locus of most modernist deviations from

the novelistic norm of the previous centuries. Dissatisfied with

the obtrusive intrusion of the omniscient narrator, which triggers

a position of subservience on the part of the reader, the

modernist novelist loosens the control of the authorial voice

over the narrative. The all-knowing and almighty narrator is

partially silenced being compelled to a position of equality with

the characters’. In exchange, the characters’ voices are made

more audible than they had ever been before.

Narrative technique

The narrative technique is central to the novel, and it is

important to remember that, no matter how skilful a novelist

may be in making the reader see and feel, everything comes to

us via a form of telling. The narrator is the one who tells the

story, or is assumed to be telling a story in a narrative. The

narrator is a narrative construct, a fictional voice transmitting

the story. The sense of immediacy or distance depends upon the

writer’s choice of a certain point of view, which is to say that the

reader’s access to reality is always mediated.

Point of view is the position from which the story is told. In

spite of a large number of categorisations offered by

narratologists, the main distinction is basically made between

first-person narratives and third-person narratives.

The first-person narrative is the narrative mode in which the

narrator appears as the ‘I’ who recollects his/ her part in the

events related, either as a witness of or as a participant in it. The

point of view of a first-person narrator is generally limited to

his/her limited knowledge and experience, yet it has the

advantage of offering the illusion of a natural and direct access

to the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings. Generally, first-

person narrators are ‘overt’ narrators, in the sense that they are

given noticeable characteristics and personalities, as sometimes

is the case with third-person intrusive narrators. Although

conveying a sense of direct implication and immediacy, the

first-person narrators are in most cases unreliable, because of

their partial or biased knowledge.

The third-person narrative is the most frequently used

narrative mode. Third-person narrators, usually omniscient,

stand outside the events of the story and they appear in the

narrative only under the form of a narrating voice. They have an

extensive, unlimited knowledge, which makes them highly

reliable. Third-person narrators also have a privileged access to

the characters’ innermost thoughts and feelings. In third-person

narratives, however, and this is especially the case of modernist

narratives, knowledge may be confined to whatever is observed

by a single character or a group of characters. In other words,

the story is filtered through the consciousness and sensibility of

one or more characters, the control of the omniscient narrator

becoming veiled and unobtrusive. In modern narratives, the

withdrawal of the omniscient narrator encourages the emergence

of multiple points of view.

From a modernist perspective, the narrator, undoubtedly a

necessity for any narrative work, becomes indispensable to the

proper formulation of the modernist writer’s literary standpoint.

The modernist writer is able to preserve his position of

impersonality, the presence of the narrator contributing to the

striking of the correct balance between subjectivity and

objectivity. Thus, the narrator proves his indispensability by

being “an accurate and unflinching observer, schooled to that

absolute loyalty towards his feelings and sensations, […] which

an author should keep hold of in his most exalted moments of

creation.”3 The apparent distortions at the level of the narrative

categories of point of view and narrator are caused by the

modernist novelist’s preference for the techniques used to

present consciousness in fiction.

3 Virginia Woolf, ‘Joseph Conrad,’ The Common Reader (London: The Hogarth Press, 1962) 286.

Character

In general terms, the character represents “an existent

endowed with anthropomorphic traits and engaged in

anthropomorphic actions.”4 Major or minor, dynamic or static,

consistent or inconsistent, flat or round, the character is one of

the main fictional constructs that creates the illusion of reality. It

is very much on the existence of the character and his

resemblance to or difference from the people in the real world

that the reader’s interpretation of the fictional world depends. A

character in a narrative piece of literature is constituted by

characterisation. Characterisation may be direct, in the sense

that the character’s traits are given directly, though more or less

reliably, by the narrator, by the character himself, or by another

character. If the traits can be only deduced from the character’s

actions, reactions, thoughts or emotions, one speaks about

indirect characterisation.5 Depending on the artistic position

adopted by the novelist, therefore on the nature of his belonging

to a certain literary current, the characterisation may produce

either typical or highly individualised characters. It seems,

however, that characterisation becomes irrelevant with

modernist novelists, even if, from a narrative point of view, they

do not manifest readiness to renounce character.6 Subordinated

to the concept of form, and more specifically to that of structure,

the character is a possible way of access to reality, as seen by

the modernists, different from the reality of the realist writers.

4 Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Hampshire: Scolar Press, 1991).5 see also Gerald Prince, op. cit.6 see also chapter ‘Character’ in David Daiches, op. cit.

Most modernist characters emerge from an attempt to put

together the individual and the general, repeatable aspects of

life. The difficulty arises from the fact that the individual

requires an excessive use of details, whereas access to the

general would impose the avoidance of details in a text. By

using the minute detail in the portrayal of characters the

modernist feels that he is running the risk of being too close to

the realist literature. “Characters are to be merely views:

personality must be avoided at all costs. […] Directly you

specify hair, age etc. something frivolous, or irrelevant gets into

the book.”7 The features of generality and indeterminate quality

of the characters may make the modernist characters seem too

rigid and decorated, but by the artfully organised structure, they

always come into significant relations with other characters who

round off the whole, eliminating the impression of artefact.

Although it is difficult to generalise, we may say that the

modernist character is perceived less as a bodily presence than,

and this is especially the case of the modernist experimenters, as

a centre of consciousness. The interest in the character’s inner

life and mental mechanisms required the invention of new

methods of investigation, which the reader of modernism must

be aware of if he wants to properly decode the meaning of the

modernist work.

In a novel, a fictitious prose narrative of considerable

length, characters are usually presented in a plot, which may be

more or less complex. Plot, as “the temporal synthesis effected

7 Leonard Woolf, ed., op. cit., 60-61.

by the writer of the elements of action, character, and thought

that constitute the matter of his invention”8 used to operate as an

important unifying and ordering principle of the fictional world.

Yet, though the modernists finally give up plot considering

it too restrictive for the complexity of the fictional world that

they want to render, they never imagine the possibility of

building up a work without characters. Moreover, they transfer

onto the character responsibilities relating to the narrative

construction of the fictional world, responsibilities previously

held by a third or a first-person narrator. Consequently, the

modernist writers being no longer interested in plot will

obviously lead to further emphasis on the character and his inner

life and actions. The modernist’s plunge into the character’s

mind performed by means of consciousness investigating

techniques implies a necessary foregrounding of this narrative

category.

Plot

Paradoxically, plot is the narrative category one should

consider in the analysis of modernist fiction on account of its

absence and not because of its being central to the narrative

organisation of a novel. To grasp the degree of novelty of the

narrative formula proposed by the modernist writers, it is

essential to understand that part of the modernist innovation,

translated in their departure from the narrative conventions of

8 J. A. Honeywell, ‘Plot in the Modern Novel,’ Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, eds. M Hoffman and P. Murphy (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1993) 239.

the realist novel, resides in the resistance of modernist writing to

plot.

Any definition of plot implies a necessary reference to the

concept of story. Story represents the number of incidents

related in a novel in their chronological order, whereas plot

implies the order in which the same incidents are narrated,

which may considerably differ from the chronological one.9

“The plot is the selected version of events as presented to the

reader or audience in a certain order and duration, whereas the

story is the full sequence of events as we imagine them to have

taken place in their ‘natural’ order and duration.”10

As events are too little relevant in the modernist fiction, and

chronological sequencing even less, prominence being given to

the characters’ mind and the characters’ subjective response to

the world of outer events, plot itself becomes irrelevant. It may

be argued that there are modernist novels in which plot still

exists. It is true, as we will try to show in the succeeding

chapters, but its function is not to organise the material provided

by the story, but rather to create the illusion that a solid realist

convention in point of novel writing is preserved. Plot, in these

cases, is that part of the reader’s inherited knowledge of

novelistic conventions on which innovation can be built.

Plot is the dynamic, sequential element in narrative

literature.11 Spatial art, that is the narrative which presents its

9 on the distinction ‘story-plot’ and their relation to ‘subject’ and ‘motif’ see Ştefan Avădanei, Introduction to Poetics, vol. 2 (Iaşi: Institutul European, 2002).10 Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1996)11 Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1960) 207.

materials simultaneously, or in a random order, as is the case of

modernist narratives, especially aiming at making the mind

transparent, resists plot. The ordering effect of plot is generally

replaced by the more inclusive organising effect of structure.

Structure

If plot refers to the ordering of the story in a novel,

structure is a term more appropriately used to cover the overall

organisation of a piece of literature as a work of art, which

accounts for its being preferred to plot by the modernist writers.

Although the concepts of structure and form are sometimes used

interchangeably, structure represents more than form as it

subsumes categories essential to novel organisation such as plot,

theme and form. Structure is the sum total of individual

elements involved in the making of a novel, considered in their

interrelation, which produces the effect of totality and

wholeness. It is true that in a realist novel structure is closely

connected to plot and the episodic construction of a novel may,

even if only apparently, allow for a different patterning of these

episodes, without substantial meaning modifications. In a

modernist novel, however, structure plays an essential part,

compensating for the absence of plot. The effect of randomness

and disorder produced by a modernist novel is, in most cases,

the result of an elaborately devised structure. Chapter and

section, order and chronology can and do contribute to the

understanding of a novel in terms of structure. Yet a significant

role in matters of structure is performed by theme, character or

narrative technique. The organisation of a novel according to a

certain pattern involving contrast, repetition, complementarity,

with clear narrative, spatial and temporal limits induces in the

reader a sense of structure.

The major characteristic of modernist fiction remains,

however, its clear interest in the individual’s inner life and

mental mechanisms. For this reason, it was compulsory that the

modernist novelists should think of techniques capable of

probing always deeper in the character’s consciousness. Some of

these methods are not necessarily new. They had been

successfully, though not extensively, used in the eighteenth and

nineteenth-century novels as well. What the modernists did was

to turn them to good account in the effort to foreground the

inner reality, more complex and more real than the outer one.

Probing consciousness through the different consciousness

investigating techniques and giving up plot as a structural

element are closely related to the modernists’ philosophy of

time, consonant with Freud’s and Bergson’s ideas at the

beginning of the twentieth century. This philosophy of time, as

chronology and duration, as a mental incorporation of objective

time into subjective time, is artfully synthesised in Virginia

Woolf’s Orlando.

But time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and

vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has

no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind

of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon

the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer

element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or

a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an

hour may be accurately represented in the timepiece of

the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy

between time on the clock and time in the mind is less

known than it should be and deserves fuller

investigation. […] time when [man] is thinking becomes

inordinately long; time when he is doing becomes

inordinately short. (47)

Techniques to investigate consciousness in fiction

A term coined by William James to show the way in which

consciousness presents itself, stream of consciousness has come

to be closely associated with the activity of the modernist

writers, intent on presenting the inner life of characters as

accurately as possible. The concept, indispensable as it has

proved itself to be, on which much of the correct decoding of

modernist fiction depends, has been, however, subject to many

clarifying discussions from the literary point of view.

The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms refers to

stream of consciousness as “the continuous flow of sense-

perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human

mind; or a literary method of representing such a blending of

mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an

unpunctuated or disjoined form of interior monologue.”

Quoting a series of referential names in the field, Gerald

Prince in Dictionary of Narratology mentions the fact that the

meanings of stream of consciousness and interior monologue

have often tended to overlap, but he also indicates that there

have been tendencies to contrast the two. “[Interior monologue]

would present a character’s thoughts rather than impressions or

perceptions, while [stream of consciousness] would present both

impressions and thoughts.” The difference in meaning and in the

capacity of investigating the character’s mental world is

paralleled by the grammatical difference between the two. While

interior monologue respects morphology and syntax, stream of

consciousness presupposes the absence of punctuation, syntax

and morphology, being thus able to capture thought in a

preverbal stage, before any logical connection has been

linguistically established.

Although both definitions mentioned above might partially

hold true, we consider that they cannot cover all the possibilities

of presenting consciousness that modernist fiction confronts its

reader with. It is true that one cannot help noticing Joyce’s

preference for presenting consciousness by the interior

monologue and everybody is aware at present that Joyce is

definitely responsible for setting up the modernist canon. Yet it

cannot be denied that it is impossible to account for numerous

passages in Woolf’s or Lawrence’s novels in terms of interior

monologue. In those passages the presence of an omniscient

narrator is still felt, while the reader intuits the fact that what he

finally gets is nothing but the character’s mind.

Our presentation of the consciousness investigating

techniques is largely based on Dorrit Cohn’s study Transparent

Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in

Fiction which manages to provide the reader of modernism with

the appropriate investigation instruments, covering situations in

which the technique of the interior monologue cannot be

applied. Cohn identifies various modes of objectifying

consciousness and fictional minds in the two major narrative

contexts we have already referred to: third-person contexts, and

this is the most frequent case, and first-person contexts. The

terminology Cohn uses also proves very useful as it manages to

grasp accurately and subtly the differences between various

degrees of involvement on the part of the narrator as well as

various ways of access to a character’s mind.

Dorrit Cohn’s theory is founded on three modes of

presenting consciousness in third-person contexts. The first one,

‘psycho-narration’, refers to the narrator’s discourse about a

character’s consciousness. It is a technique frequently used to

summarise feeling, needs, reactions which are so diffuse that

they cannot be properly rendered in a character’s own idiom.

The second one, ‘quoted interior monologue’, relates to a

character’s mental discourse, “distilling moments of pointed

self-address that may relate only distantly to the original

emotion.”12 The third, the ‘narrated monologue’, is defined as

the character’s mental discourse in the guise of the narrator’s

12 Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978) 44.

discourse. Grammatically, the styles adopted to express the

character’s thoughts are those available to express the

character’s words: direct, indirect and free indirect speech, the

reporting verb that indicates speech being replaced by a

reporting verb suggesting a mental process.

Psycho-narration

The omniscient nineteenth-century realist novelist would

have had at his disposal, technically speaking, the best narrative

environment to use psycho-narration, had it not been for his

manifest interest in events and his intention to keep the action

moving and place the character in various revealing

relationships with other characters. The realist writer was so

keen on constructing plot that he reduced the psycho-analytical

instances to that minimum that he considered necessary to serve

his narrative purpose. The term ‘events’, therefore, also covers

the large number of characters and situations the writer had to

handle and control by a rapid movement in space and time. Only

too little room was left for the characters’ inner lives and

unexpressed thoughts. Omniscience offered the novelist a far

more tempting possibility. He had the privilege, which the

modernists consciously chose to give up, of being able to

generalise about human nature. The individual character was

given less credit as a consciousness since it represented mainly

an example at hand on whose basis generalisation could be

made. Consequently, what the novelist assumed as known, the

character’s consciousness, was seldom rendered manifest,

except for the cases when it engendered the formulation of

general truths about the human condition. Instead of allowing

the character to hold central stage, this type of narration

ostentatiously dealt with the intelligence and character of a

narrator who was foregrounded to the fictional individual’s

detriment. In the realist novels, psycho-narration inevitably

points to the omniscient narrator’s superiority to the narrated

consciousness. Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns

provides readers with numerous examples of conventionally

used psycho-narration.

They could go back into the past and find other cases

where a swift impulse had shattered the edifice of a

lifetime. They knew that the history of families and of

communities is changeless, irrepressible, incurable. They

were aware of the astonishing fact, which takes at least

thirty years to learn, that a Sunday-school superintendent

is a man. (140)

With the psychological novel, which displays a new marked

interest in the character’s inner self, the previously vociferous

omniscient narrators are silenced and they become veiled.

Although the fictional consciousness moves to the fore, there are

narrators who go on imposing a certain distance between

themselves and the consciousness they narrate, drawing the

reader’s attention to their own presence as well as to a difference

in perspective between narrator and character.

In the following fragment from The Ambassadors Henry

James, who generally prefers “a certain indirect and oblique

view of [the] presented action” by seeing his story “through the

opportunity and the sensibility of some […] witness or

reporter”13, Strether’s in this case, uses psycho-narration to

analyse Strether’s inner motions. In other words, although James

chooses Strether as the character through whose eyes and

sensibility he should filter the whole action, by adopting the

technique of psycho-narration, it is precisely Strether’s inner self

that James brings under the narrator’s scrutinising lens. Thus,

even if Henry James pleads in favour of a veiled narrator, in this

example the narrator’s voice is still audible and his perspective

is distinct from Strether’s on whom most of the narrative

responsibility in the novel is passed.

It might, on repetition, as a mystification, have irritated

our friend [Strether] a little; but he knew, as we have

seen, where he was, and his being proof against

everything was only another attestation that he meant to

stay there. (180) (my emphasis)

Yet, though the narrator’s perspective is kept distinct from

the character’s, it is not perceived as superior and intruding, as

in the case of Bennett’s text. The possessive adjective ‘our’ and

the subject of the paranthetical sentence, together with the tense

shift from past to present signal the disparity of voice between 13 Henry James, ‘Preface’ to The Golden Bowl quoted in Rodica Kereaski, Lectures in 20th Century English Literature (Bucureşti: Tipografia Universităţii din Bucureşti, 1977) 95.

character and narrator, without placing the latter in a position of

superiority to the former. The personal pronoun ‘we’, also

including the reader, limits the narrator’s knowledge only to the

knowledge that has already reached the reader by means of the

narrative, so thanks to Strether’s mediation.

The same effect of distinctiveness of voice and views is

obtained in the following fragment from Woolf’s To the

Lighthouse. Lily’s and Tansley’s flows of thought are

unobtrusively altered by the presence of another consciousness,

that of the narrator, revealed by the pronoun ‘one’, which could

have its origin only in the narrator’s generalising thoughts. The

fact that the narrator’s voice is equal in intensity with the

characters’ voices is also suggested by its being discreetly

placed in between brackets.

What damned rot they talk, thought Charles Tansley,

laying down his spoon precisely in the middle of his

plate, which he had swept clean, as if, Lily thought (he

sat opposite to her with his back to the window precisely

in the middle of view), he were determined to make sure

of his meals. Everything about him had that meagre

fixity, that bare unloveliness. But nevertheless, the fact

remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if

one looked at them. She liked his eyes; they were blue,

deep set, frightening. (312)

Similar in intention, i.e. to silence audible narrators and

enable the foregrounding of fictional consciousness, the two

texts differ as to their narrative realisation. While Henry James

learns to veil his narrator and to assign narrative tasks to the

character, Virginia Woolf foregrounds the fictional

consciousness and learns to give due, though not exaggerated,

credit to the omniscient narrator, whose voice, equal in intensity

with that of the character, contributes to keeping the narrative

under tighter control.

An alternative position is that of a veiled narrator who

almost completely identifies with the fictional consciousness.

Thus the narrative creates the illusion of a perfect coincidence

between the authorial and the character’s voices. The

consonance of the two voices makes the reader perceive the

narrator’s knowledge of the character’s mind as coincident with

the character’s self-knowledge. The modernist writers generally

prefer more direct monologic techniques of presenting

consciousness in their novels, such as the interior monologue or

the narrated monologue. Yet they also resort to this type of

consonant psycho-narration, which indicates the fact that they

feel it closer to the more direct monologic techniques

extensively used in the stream-of-consciousness novels.

A good example of consonant psycho-narration is offered

by Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, its narrator’s

characteristic being the ability to adapt his style to the age and

mood of the novel’s hero. The narrator is still a reporter of the

character’s thoughts, feelings and sensations. He uses a

language full of verbs and nouns of consciousness, but

deliberately avoids assuming the position of superiority which

would have been indicated by the presence of explanatory

commentaries or the presence of subordination such as “He

thought that”. The narrator is sympathetic with the character’s

thoughts and feelings, the reporting being carried out by

metaphor, and not by abstractions or generalities. The tone is

always highly individualised and involved, never neutral.

He heard the sob passing loudly down his father’s throat

and opened his eyes with a nervous impulse. The

sunlight breaking suddenly on his sight turned the sky

and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses with

lakelike spaces of dark rosy light. His very brain was

sick and powerless. He could scarcely interpret the letters

of the signboards of the shops. By his monstrous way of

life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of

reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real

world unless he heard in it echoes of the infuriated cries

within him. He could respond to no earthly or human

appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of summer and

gladness and companionship, wearied and dejected by

his father’s voice. He could scarcely recognise as his his

own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself. (104-105)

Although considered more appropriate for rendering the

mind transparent in the nineteenth-century conventional novels,

psycho-narration is still preserved as a technique by the

modernists because of one major advantage that neither the

quoted interior monologue nor the narrated monologue can

have. While both the interior monologue and the narrated

monologue are, from a temporal point of view, limited to the

very instant when the character formulates his silent speech,

psycho-narration is temporally flexible, and its flexibility is

almost limitless, due to the narrator’s possible movement in time

over a larger time span. Dorrit Cohn considers that one of the

reasons why psycho-narration still exists as a means of

expressing consciousness in twentieth-century fiction, in spite of

the narrator’s apparently omniscient intrusion, is its temporal

elasticity which allows both contraction of a longer time span

and expansion of the instant.

Psycho-narration is a way of articulating a character’s inner

life in the competent and accurate words of a narrator at

moments when thoughts are so deep and obscure that there is an

increased risk of their remaining unverbalised but for the

narrator’s verbalising intervention.

Of all modernist novelists, D.H. Lawrence is the one who

manifests a marked preference for psycho-narration. His

preference is accounted for by the fact that his novels deal with

zones of the subconscious or the unconscious whose

presentation always requires a narrator’s mediation. In Cohn’s

opinion, “any one of D.H. Lawrence’s novels yields a rich

metaphoric complex, made up of all kinds of electromagnetic,

igneous, and meteorological hyperboles.”14

As a characteristic of Lawrence’s narrative, in almost all

cases when the writer chooses to use psycho-narration to render

the sub- or unconscious visible, the reader is more or less

explicitly warned about the nature of the psychic states that are

being narrated.

She sounded purely anxious. Nevertheless, Gudrun, with

her arms outspread and her face uplifted, went in a

strange palpitating dance towards the cattle, lifting her

body towards them as if in a spell, her feet pulsing as if

in some little frenzy of unconscious sensation, her arms,

her wrists, her hands stretching and heaving and falling

and reaching and reaching and falling, her breasts lifted

and shaken towards the cattle, her throat exposed as in

some voluptuous ecstasy towards them, whilst she

drifted imperceptibly nearer, an uncanny white figure,

towards them, carried away in its own rapt trance, ebbing

in strange fluctuations upon the cattle, that waited, and

ducked their heads a little in sudden contraction from

her, watching all the time as if hypnotised, their bare

horns branching in the clear light, as the figure of the

women ebbed upon them, in the slow, hypnotising

convulsion of the dance. (Women in Love, 196) (my

emphasis)

14 Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., 49.

Paradoxically, and most surprisingly, the writers whose

intention is to present the mind and the inner self as directly as

possible have to resort to the most indirect of methods when

they come to the portrayal of the most deeply hidden zones of

psychic life, the subconscious and the unconscious. Thus, no

matter how serious the writers’ reluctance to it might have been,

psycho-narration proved indispensable as “the most direct,

indeed the unique, path that leads to the sub-verbal depth of the

mind.”15

Quoted Interior Monologue

The interior monologue or the ‘quoted monologue’ is

another technique used to present a character’s consciousness. It

is not an invention of the modernists, but in the eighteenth and

nineteenth-century novels characters were allowed the freedom

to express their thoughts and feelings in the form of the quoted

monologue only after elaborate introductions on the part of the

omniscient narrators. The narrator’s and the character’s voices

were felt as clearly distinct. The presence of the introductory

formulas (‘he thought’, ‘he whispered’, ‘she asked herself’)

combined with the use of the quotation marks drew the reader’s

attention to the existence of two points of view, different or

coincident, yet distinct. Because of the clear distinctiveness of

voices, the method of interspersing the narrator’s discourse and

the character’s interior monologue is seldom, if ever, used by

15 Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., 56.

the modern(ist) writers. It is very difficult, almost impossible, to

find such alternations even in works such as James’, Lawrence’s

or Conrad’s, whose indebtedness to the techniques of realism is

quite obvious. This avoidance may be accounted for by the fact

that the modernists considered the separation of voices a much

too explicit, even annoying, separation between the external and

the mental worlds. Or, what the modernist practice tends to

demonstrate is exactly a continuity between the exterior world

and the world of the mind.

When Lawrence intends to be most conventional in

technique, readers might come across combinations of quoted

monologue and psycho-narration, which simultaneously point to

the disparity of voice and to the narrator’s position of

superiority.

Paul wished he were stupid. ‘I wish,’ he thought to

himself, ‘I was fat like him, and like a dog in the sun. I

wish I was a pig and a brewer’s waggoner.’ (Sons and

Lovers, 114)

In the modern novel, James Joyce’s work providing the

clearest examples, the separation line between the narrator’s

discourse and the character’s inner discourse is wiped off, the

effect being one of increased textual continuity. The character’s

monologue and the narrator’s reported discourse melt into each

other, being almost impossible to distinguish between the two.

The interior monologue is no longer signalled by the use of the

quotation marks, but by the shift of tense from past to present,

the change in person, and sometimes the specificity of the

monologue’s idiom, the more so as the introductory formulas

are very often dropped.

The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the

world again. Enough of this place. Brings you a bit

nearer every time. Last time I was here was Mrs Sinico’s

funeral. Poor papa too. The love that kills. And even

scraping up the earth at night with a lantern like that case

I read to get at fresh buried females or even putrefied

with running gravesores. Give you the creeps after a bit.

I will appear to you after death. You will see my ghost

after death. My ghost will haunt you after death. There is

another world after death named hell. I do not like that

other world she wrote. No more do I. Plenty to see and

hear and feel. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them

sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get

me this innings. Warm beds: warm fullblooded life.”

(Ulysses, 121)

With the exception of the first sentence signalling the

presence of the narrator, the paragraph includes Leopold

Bloom’s monologue, apparently unmarked and unanchored. To

become aware of his having smoothly entered the character’s

consciousness, although he is not encouraged to keep the

narrator’s and the character’s voices distinct, the reader must be

highly perceptive. He must identify the change in person from

the third to the first, the shift of tense from past to present, and

most importantly, as is often the case with Joyce’s quoted

monologues, the passage from the narrator’s narrative language

to the character’s idiom.

According to Cohn, even when the frequency of occurrence

of the thinking verbs is higher in the modern psychological

novels, their function is rather an incantatory than one of

separating the narrator’s and the character’s discourse. Their

being used rather redundantly is reminiscent of the narrator’s

presence, without, however, imposing the narrator as an

aggressively distinct voice. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is a

radical experiment in this direction. If it were not for the

minimal introductory formulas, the novel would be easily

regarded as an autonomous monologue under the form of a first-

person text. The Waves is a multiplication of quoted

monologues, introduced by minimal narratorial interventions, on

account of which the reader interprets the text as a third-person

and not as a first-person one. There are, however, instances in

Woolf’s novel when the reader is required to make a

considerable effort in order to correctly assign the interior words

to a certain character. The interior monologue extends across

paragraph boundaries and there is no repetition of the narrator’s

orienting intervention.

‘Now the wind lifts the blind,’ said Susan, ‘Jars, bowls,

matting and the shabby arm-chair with the hole in it are

now become distinct. […]

‘I cannot be divided, or kept apart. I was sent to school;

I was sent to Switzerland to finish my education. I hate

linoleum; I hate fir trees and mountains. […]

‘But who am I, who lean on this gate and watch my

setter nose in a circle? I think sometimes (I am not

twenty yet) I am not a woman, but the light that falls on

this gate, on this ground. […] (72-73)

The text goes on like this presenting Susan’s monologue for

a couple of other pages, without the narrator’s signalling again

that it is Susan’s thoughts that the reader is experiencing. The

only graphical mark, of which less attentive readers may

sometimes be unaware, is the absence of closing inverted

commas at the end of those paragraphs that are to be interpreted

as a single character’s monologue.

By adopting the technique of the quoted monologue, the

narrator draws the reader’s attention to his still being in control

of the narrative. The narrator may be more or less neutral,

depending on which the reader will be more or less aware of the

distinctiveness of viewpoints, narrator’s and character’s. There

are novels in which the interior monologue is embedded in and

connected to psycho-narration. But in these cases, the interior

monologue readily lends its idiom to psycho-narration, which

gets thus contaminated and more difficult to recognise.

He snorted. He felt about this engagement as he always

felt about any engagement; the girl is much too good for

that young man. Slowly it came into her head, why is it

then that one wants people to marry? What was the

value, the meaning of things? (Every word they said now

would be true.) Do say something, she thought, wishing

only to hear his voice. For the shadow, the thing folding

them in was beginning, she felt, to close round her again.

Say anything, she begged, looking at him, as if for help.

(Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 355)

This contamination in cases in which the two techniques

happen to occur together is suggestive of the fact that psycho-

narration and interior monologue do not usually tolerate each

other in character-oriented narrative situations. The narrator’s

investigation of the character’s consciousness through psycho-

narration alongside the character’s voicing of his own inner life

create narrative discontinuities, inducing in the reader a feeling

of arbitrariness and redundancy of perspective. This is the

reason why, more often than not, modernist novelists avoided

such a combination, preferring instead a mixture of psycho-

narration and narrated monologue, whose effect of continuity

was far closer to their intention of equalising the narrative

voices involved. In a novel like Joyce’s Ulysses, which abounds

in quoted interior monologues and where the passage from

narration to quotation is so smooth that it is almost impossible to

tell for sure where one ends and the other begins, psycho-

narration is hardly ever used. Not only are the quotation marks

which signal this passage omitted, but there are hardly verbs of

consciousness such as ‘he thought’ or ‘he pondered’ to

announce the use of psycho-narration.

Mr. Bloom walked behind the eyeless feet, a flatcut suit

of herringbone tweed. Poor young fellow! How on earth

did he know that van was there? Must have felt it. See

things in their foreheads perhaps. Kind of sense of

volume. Weight. Would he feel it if something was

removed? Feel a gap. Queer idea of Dublin he must

have, tapping his way round by the stones. Could he

walk in a beeline if he hadn’t that cane? Bloodless pious

face like a fellow going in to be a priest. (191)

This specific use of the quoted monologue in a third-person

narrative context results in a subjective rendering of the internal

vision, on the one hand, and on a mixture of subjective and

objective expression of the external happenings, on the other.

Besides, in Ulysses the narrator and the character share not only

the field of vision, but also the idiom through which they relate

it.

The quoted interior monologues create the illusion that the

reader has access to what the character really thinks or feels, as

“the narrator lends the quotation of his characters’ silent

thoughts the same authority he lends to the quotation of the

words they speak to others.”16 We may thus say that the use of

the quoted interior monologue has the same effect in

psychological realist novels as the use of the dialogue. In point

of illusion creation, they perform, roughly speaking, the same

function: “just as the dialogues create the illusion that they

render what characters ‘really say’ to each other, monologues

create the illusion that they render what a character ‘really

thinks’ to himself.”17. Yet although the monologue seems to

resemble the dialogue grammatically, the two differ

semantically, as in the monologue ‘I’ (person speaking) ‘you’

(person spoken to) coincide, each pronoun containing the other

within itself.

Narrated Monologue

The narrated monologue is mainly a literary invention. It is

a third mode of rendering a character’s consciousness in third-

person contexts. This technique is characterised by a

transformation of the character’s thought or language into the

narrative language of third-person fiction.18 The narrator’s words

function as a mask for the character’s inner voice. Both on

account of the ambiguity of voice generated by the use of this

technique and of the highly delusive form of this same

technique, the modernist novelists seem to have shared a clear

preference for the narrated monologue. The preference for a less

16 Dorrit Cohn., op. cit., 76.17 Ibid., 76.18 The style underlying it is the free indirect one, a major mode of representing speech and thought, situated between indirect speech and direct speech. For a more detailed description of free indirect discourse see Michael Toolan, Narrative. A Critical Linguistic Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1991)

direct technique of rendering consciousness may surprise us in

the light of our discussion of the two other techniques presented

before. There certainly are modernists, Lawrence for instance,

who show, as a general characteristic of their work, a

predilection for psycho-narration, so for a more indirect

technique. Some others, especially the so-called

experimentalists, Joyce, in particular, privilege the interior

monologue, a far more direct technique of presenting

consciousness. Yet, all of them assimilate the narrated

monologue as a convenient way of accessing the character’s

inner world under the guise of the narrator’s words. The

consensus regarding the effectiveness of this technique may be

accounted for in two ways. Firstly, the modernists aim at a

certain degree of impersonality, which this mixture of voices is

likely to ensure. Secondly, the modernists’ intention is to free

the reader, while still maintaining the authorial control over the

narrative, which could be better effected by a less direct mode of

expressing the character’s consciousness. Since the narrated

monologue wipes off the boundary between narration and

quotation, it is a technique privileged by those narratives which

focus on the character’s mental and emotional life.

Let us consider the following fragments from the work of

various modernist novelists, sometimes having divergent

attitudes as to how to express the fictional mind and inner world.

What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her

party! A young man had killed himself. And they talked

of it at her party – the Bradshaws talked of death. He

had killed himself – but how? Always her body went

through it, when she was told, first, suddenly, of an

accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had

thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the

ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the

rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his

brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it.

But why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it

at her party! (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 203)

He was walking down along the matting and he saw the

door before him. It was impossible: he could not. He

thought of the baldy head of the prefect of studies with

the cruel noncoloured eyes looking at him and he heard

the voice of the prefect of studies asking him twice what

his name was. Why could he not remember the name

when he was told the first time? Was he not listening the

first time or was it to make fun out of the name? The

great men in the history had names like that and nobody

made fun of them. It was his own name that he should

have made fun of if he wanted to make fun. Dolan: it was

like the name of a woman who washed clothes. (Joyce, A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 62)

As he dried himself a little with his handkerchief, he

thought about Hermione and the blow. He could feel a

pain on the side of his head. But after all, what did it

matter? What did Hermione matter, what did people

matter altogether? There was this perfect cool

loneliness, so lovely and fresh and unexplored. Really,

what a mistake he had made, thinking he wanted people,

thinking he wanted a woman. He did not want a woman

– not in the least. (Lawrence, Women in Love, 129)

The narrated monologue confronts the reader with an

alternation between narration and reflection. There is a constant

movement in and out of the fictional mind, movement which

sometimes is almost imperceptible, as there is a coincidence

between the basic reporting tense and the tense used in the

character’s language. Thus the inner and outer worlds are

perceived as fused, being extremely difficult at moments to

decide whether it is the fictional mind or the narrator’s

unobtrusive intervention that one contemplates.

The narrated monologue is to be seen as a strategy of

compromise between quoted interior monologue and psycho-

narration. The narrated monologue and the quoted monologue

share the question forms, the expressive elements, the

incomplete sentences, the deictic orientation. What keeps the

two techniques distinct is the use of tenses and pronouns,

whereas the distinction between narrated monologue and

psycho-narration resides in the absence of introductory mental

verbs in the former technique. Thus the narrated monologue is

felt to be a technique more direct than psycho-narration and

more oblique or indirect than the quoted monologue.

The obvious ambiguity of voice inherent in the narrated

monologue leads to its being perceived as suspended between

the immediate quotation and the mediated narration. Being a

strategy of compromise, it is favoured by most modernist

novelists, as it strikes a proper balance between the omniscient

narrator’s control and the fictional mind’s independence.

Consequently, the use of the narrated monologue also effects a

subtle compromise between the innovative experimental

modernist elements and the necessary, though apparently

rejected, realist convention. Paradoxically at first sight, it is

exactly those novelists who devised the techniques of the

dramatic novel, in James’ terms, who aimed at an objective

narration and opted for unobtrusive narrators that willingly

adopted the narrated monologue, as a means of reintroducing the

subjectivity of personal experience into the novel.

Yet, if the first two techniques presented above characterise

a monologic type of narrative, the narrated monologue is a

strategy specific to a dialogic one. Besides, “the narrated

monologue is a choice medium for revealing a fictional mind

suspended in an instant present, between a remembered past and

an anticipated future”19, reason for which it is preferred both by

those modernists who are more conservative in point of form,

such as Lawrence, and by those who are more experimental in

their novels, such as Woolf.

19 Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., 126.

The complexity of the modernist novels derives from the

fact that the narrated monologue never appears in isolation. It is

frequently alternated and mingled with the indirectness of

narratorial intervention, under the form of psycho-narration, or

the directness of figural consciousness, under the form of quoted

interior monologue. The combination of techniques offers a

profound and complete image of the character’s intricate inner

life with a clear movement in depth from the conscious level to

the unconscious one.

Given the fact that there may be autobiographical narrators

who are expected to have inner lives of their own to narrate,

there are also modes of presenting consciousness in first-person

contexts. Paralleling the three devices described above, whose

frequency of occurrence in modernist novels is hardly

contestable, one can identify means by which the consciousness

can be objectified from the problematic standpoint of a narrator

investigating his or her inner self in the first person. They are

called, using Cohn’s terminology, self-narration, self-quoted or

self-narrated monologue. Yet, in the case of the modernist

novelists such modes of presentation do only seldom appear.

And, in the rare situations when they appear, they are just

instances of radical experimentation embedded within a more

general third-person framework. That is why we shall refer to

them when approaching radical experiments in a novel such as

Woolf’s The Waves or an episode such as ‘Penelope’ in Joyce’s

Ulysses. It may be also profitable to focus on first-person

narrators when trying to account for the intricacy of narration

such as that offered by Conrad in his novels.

Setting

We may ask ourselves how important setting is as a

convention in a novel that focuses almost exclusively on the

mental activities and the inner life of the characters. No matter if

it is vague or more precise, if it presented objectively or if it

acquires a symbolic function, the setting refers to the spatial and

temporal circumstances in which the events of a narrative

occur.20 Or, modernist novelists have proved that events are by

far less relevant than what is going on at a mental level.

To be able to understand the literary significance of the

setting in a modernist novel, we have to start from a definition

of the term and what exactly it covers in its broadest sense.21 In a

restricted sense, setting may be used to refer to the place and

time where the characters appear, including their social context.

In a broader acceptation, it can cover the customs, beliefs and

mentalities of a specific type of society, the particular locations

in which events take place, but also the atmosphere and mood

created by all the other elements.

Because of its close relationship to plot and character,

setting proved indispensable as a novelistic convention to the

realist writers. In the nineteenth-century realist novel, the setting

was used either to render the character’s mood or to contribute

to the definition of the character’s situation. When explicitly

pushed to the fore, the setting expressed mainly the theme of the 20 see Gerald Prince, op. cit.21 see Richard Gill, Mastering English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1995).

novel, and consequently the author’s view of the world, at times

becoming even more important than characters or plot.

Although they gave up plot or reduced it to a minimum,

giving prominence to characters and especially to the characters’

inner reality, modernists never thought of abandoning the

supportive materiality of setting. Keen on the significance of

each detail in their novels, they definitely made setting into a

highly significant element of their work. Yet no common

denominator can be found for the particular use made of setting

in particular novels by particular modernist novelists. They

seem, however, to agree that setting, as part of an inherited set

of conventions, should be preserved and turned to good account

if an understanding of their work was to be facilitated. In other

words, they knew that setting was a compulsory ingredient in

the readers’ recipe for what a good novel should be and this

knowledge had to be profited by. Setting gets thus assimilated to

character, it is, in a way, internalised. In spite of its being

delineated in a delusively realist manner, the modernist setting is

characterised by indeterminacy, more often than not acquiring a

symbolic value, which contributes to a better understanding both

of character and of the writer’s worldview.

Symbol

In its most straightforward sense, a symbol is taken to mean

anything standing for or representing something else beyond it,

generally an idea that one conventionally associates with it.

Thus the symbol is used to evoke unseen worlds or to move one

beyond appearance, towards a hidden order of everyday

reality.22 According to Kant, the symbol refers to “the attributes

of an object which serve the rational idea as a substitute for

logical presentation, but with the proper function of animating

the mind by opening out for it a prospect into the field of

kindred representations stretching beyond its ken”23. In simpler

terms, a symbol is a word or phrase that points to a concrete

referent – be it object, scene or action – that also takes some

deeper significance conventionally associated with it.

Being always interested in the beyond of things, all

modernists make extensive use of symbols, sometimes weaving

them into an elaborate texture without whose proper

understanding the overall meaning of the novel is incomplete.

This is obviously the case of Lawrence’s novels, which abound

in symbols whose main function is to move the reader beyond

appearance, but even more importantly, toward those hidden

zones of the human self difficult to unveil and thus suggestively

evoked by means of symbols. There are modernist novels

explicitly constructed around a central symbol, which works

alongside character, setting and theme. ‘Ivory’ is central to

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, ‘silver’ is central to the same

modernist novelist’s Nostromo, the ‘lighthouse’ is indispensable

to the proper understanding of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

A symbol is also seen as a highly evocative image. Rather

vaguely, ‘imagery’ is held to express those uses of literary

22 see Roger Fowler, ed., A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).23 quoted in Roger Fowler, ed., op. cit., 240-241.

language that evoke sense-impressions by reference to concrete

or perceptible objects, actions or states. The imagery of a

literary work includes the set of images available in that specific

work, which most often are ‘pictures’ appealing primarily to

sight, but may also be interpreted in terms of the other senses.

Yet, no matter how important these rather insubstantial

aspects may be to the correct decoding of the work’s meaning,

the reader of literature should never forget that they take on

meaning only within a more comprehensive framework that

includes plot, structure, narrative technique, character and so on.

Parody

We would say that parody is also a means of ‘probing

beyond’, more specialised and highly analytical. It is a

subversive technique used to bring under a critical lens the

potentialities or limitations of a certain work, style, technique,

by imitation, or better said mimicry. We could say that parody

characterises a dialogic type of literature, which mainly

addresses an educated and knowledgeable audience, capable of

understanding the critical activity as inherent to the literary

enterprise and not separated from it. Parody always presupposes

the impersonation of the alien style, although the parodists’

intentions may differ substantially. “[It] always attacks its butt

indirectly, through style; it ‘quotes’ from and alludes to its

original, abridging and inverting its characteristic devices.”24

This is done with a view to making an ironic comment either on

24 Roger Fowler, ed., op. cit., 172-173.

the ‘original’ or on the new work or to questioning the

appropriateness of existing techniques for the expression of a

certain reality. If a serious style is applied to a trivial subject

matter, parody comes closer to the burlesque. If it is used to

criticise manners or behaviour, it is related to satire. But the

most compelling situation from the point of view of the

modernist writer and the reader of modernism is to be found in

parody critically analysing style itself and its expressive

potentialities.

Joyce, who practically tried out all imaginable techniques of

investigation of the real, makes the most extensive use of parody

in his work. His intentions are less those of a satirist than those

of a self-aware creator interested in analysing the very

potentialities of language and seeing how deeply language, as an

investigation instrument, can go into the darkest recesses of the

real.

The following court scene in Joyce’s Ulysses is narrated in

a style that parodies the style of Celtic legends, with clear

reference to the Druid system, which casts a special ironic light

upon the debased contemporary Irish society and the workings

of its inhabitants, be they learned or not.

And whereas on the sixteenth day of the month of the

oxeyed goddess and in the third week after the feastday

of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the daughter of the

skies, the virgin moon being then in her first quarter, it

came to pass that those learned judges repaired them to

the halls of law. There master Courtenay, sitting in his

own chamber, gave his rede and master Justice Andrews

sitting without a jury in the probate court, weighed well

and pondered the claims of the first chargeant upon the

property in the matter of the will propounded and final

testamentary disposition in re the real and personal estate

of the late lamented Jacob Halliday, vintner, deceased

versus Livingstone, and infant, of unsound mind, and

another. (340)

In Chapter One, modernism was defined both within the

system of the literary tradition and within the cultural context

characteristic of the turn of the century. In Chapter Two,

modernism was defined starting both from the theoretical

contributions of important turn-of-the-century and modernist

novelists and based on the contradictory response generated

by modernism in the age. Both chapters have been underlain

by the clear effort to generalise on modernism and the main

issues relating to the modernist novel, the individual

novelists’ contributions being used only as necessary

exemplification. The subsequent chapters are underlain by

the effort to particularise. They will offer a more detailed

reading of the works of some of the novelists generally

associated with the canon of modernism, with a view to

demonstrating that the modernist art of fiction simultaneously

implies observance of and deviation from the narrative

norms. No matter how experimental the modernist novelists

may have been in their intention to represent what they

considered to be the more ‘real’ reality, they never

disregarded their position within the larger framework of the

literary tradition. It is only based on the proper assimilation

and exploitation of the inherited conventions that the

modernists could make their experiment intelligible and

accessible to their readers.