Psychological Novel:-

Literary historians have viewed modernism both as a literary movement specifically the period can be
traced from the last quarter of the 19th century to the last star of the 2nd world war as well as a collective
term for the remarkable groups of movements and schools literature and arts and music in Europe in the
same period that includes symbolism, post imperials, cubism, imagism and so on. The Period most
characterize as one of confrontation of “little magazines” and the rapid spread of “avagnt garde” works
and ideas across national borders.

On the other hand the development of novel as a popular form in nineteenth century was a European
phenomenon and one of the most remarkable feature of history is the speed with which it matures. In the
twentieth century Dorothy Richardson was the first English novelist to introduce this stream of
consciousness technique. In 1916 James Joyce published “A Portrait of a artist as a young Man” in which
he also employed the stream of consciousness technique. He perfected this in Ulysses and in Finnegan
wake he passes its probable limits. The modernist novel therefore may be described as non-chronological
with experiments in the representation of time. Instead of upholding the Victorian realist allusion, the
modernist brake narrative frames on move from one level of narration to another instead of plot events.
There is a emphasis on a characters consciousness, unconsciousness, memory and perception. Modernist
works are characterized by the use of such technique as free indirect style or stream of consciousness.

Stream of Consciousness is a term by psychologist William James (brother of Henry James) in his The
Principles of Psychology published in the book form in 1890. In his book which was one of first attempts
to acknowledge the inner life of the mental process, William James wrote;

“A river of stream is the metaphor by which it (consciousness) is most naturally described. In talking of it
hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought of consciousness or of subjective life.”

The Principle of Psychology proved to be a ground breaking book, and for many modernist novelists,
“looking into our minds and reporting what we there discovered became all important”. Thus this
psychological insight passed into literature soon as a narrative strategy. The best known English
exponents of this technique were Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

Since modernist writers felt that the traditional technical could not meet the social pressures of this age,
they rejected the socio descriptive novel. In forever of a novel centering on “the character itself” however
in practice each novelist developed selective principles and personal structural procedures. James Joyce,
Dublin born novelist is one of the three great contemporary rich men whose contribution to modern
writing is inmejorable. In his literary career he wrote novels like Ulysses (1922), Finnegan wake (1939)
and A Portrait of the Artist a Young Man (1916).

In Dubliners in 1914, two stories in particular stick out as early trials of stream of consciousness
technique- Araby and Eveline. Forexample in Araby the narrator an adolescent boy describes his feelings
for Mangan’s sister thus;

“Her image accompanied me even in placemost hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt
went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by
drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who
stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-
you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land’

Joyce masterpiece Ulysses (1922) employs the stream of consciousness technique extensively Joyace here
seeks to present a microcosm of the whole of human experience by taking as hi frame work the intensive
description of a day in the lives of a group of people in Doublin in 1904. Ulysses was considered a
revolutionary book in style and conception- A characters inner consciousness is rendered directly without
any break between it and pure description or action often the characters name being introduced:

“the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kissthe iron and the wine
shops half opened at night and the castenates and the night we missed the boat at algecirasthe watchman
going about serene with his lamp and o that awful deep down torrent o and the sea crimson sometimes
like fire”

In Addison to the mastery abrupt shift from reflection to reflection Joyce also introduces a great range of
reference and allusions to Greek literature, Shakespeare and the Bible. However Joyce inevitably imposes
structures on these random arrangements. In Ulusses the ultimate arder and meaning of events in related
to those primary images which span human culture: each event is continuous with all other is continuous
with all other such events in human history, reflected through languages into its radical meaning:

Bloom/ Stiphen are Ulusses/Telemachus as they are the eternal type of father/son.

Virgina Woolf was the daughter of sir Lesly Stephen, the biographer. In the first decade if the twentieth
century Woolf had become a leading figure in the Bloomsbury group. During the interwar period, Woolf
was an important part of London's literary and artistic society. She published her first novel, The voyage out, in
1915, through her half-brother's publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company. Her best-known works
include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928).

Virginia wool was one of the stylistic inoveters of her time. Like Joyce she reacted against what she called
“materialism’ of the leading novelist of her day- Wells, Bennet and Galsworthy. She developed, parallels with
Joyce, the stream of consciousness method to convey “myriad impressions” the mind receive. She wrote :

“let us record the atoms as they fall upon the minds in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern,
However disconnected and incoherent in appearance which each sight and incident scares upon the
consciousness let us not take it for granted that life exists far more fully in what is commonly thought big, than
what is commonly thought small.

Her chart starry the mark on the well is disting wished by a capacity for a deep and complex response in the
subtle to-and-fro activity of the mind the movement of the narrative following the minds logic not that of
grammar. In her fourth novel Mrs. Dalloway Woolf employs the stream of consciousness method through the
use of time this time is a psychological construct that clocks the internal and external subjectivity of each
characters thought and emotions. In the following passage the title character Clarissa Dalloway watches cars
driving ;

“she had a perpetual sense as she watched the texi cabs of being out, out far out to see and alone; she always
had the feelings that it was very ,very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever of
much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniel’s gave
them she could not think; she know nothing; no language; no history…..”
Woolf thus more than simply say Mrs. Dalloway watched the taxis and thought about her life rather she lets
the reader into character’s by using long sentences with semi colons to show the show deift of ideas and the
transition between thoughts the readers are able to watch as Mrs. Dalloway’s mind moves from observation
about things she is seeing to reflections about on her general attitude of her life. Woolf ‘s style is thus leisurely
and repetitive, constantly to dominant images. These images have no significance outside the novel Woolf
alone makes their meaning by the patterning she creates in the flow of recorded experience.

Psychological Novel is thus an umbrella turn referring to works of fiction in which the thought s of fiction in
which the thoughts feelings and motivation of the characters are of equal or greater interest than the external
action of the narrative. Writers vastly differs in this styles such as Shakespeare to Laurence Sterne to Tolstoy
to Henry James and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf have all contributed to and arrived at this form of novel.
Each Writer seeks a different way of organizing and communicating the arbiter and each finally gestures
towards the inability of any style device to render fully the processes of thought.