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Kerim Can Yazgnolu Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aytl zm IED 684 Contemporary Novel (Till 50s) Final Paper Modernist texts often focus on social, spiritual or personal collapse and subsume history under mythology and symbolism. Other characteristics are a focus on the city and a championing as well as a fear of technology; technical experimentation allied with radical stylistic innovation; a suspicion of language as a medium for comprehending or explaining the world; and an attack on nineteenth-century stalwarts such as empiricism and rationalism. Comment on the aesthetic and thematic features of five novels of your choice excluding the novels you worked on by stressing the urge to keep the human element as unified and reality as relative. Modernist writers manipulate language, plot, narrative voice, perception and point of view by using new narrative techniques such as interior monologue, stream of consciousness, and novel uses of rhythm, repetition and symbolism, to create multifaceted narratives which are against any single interpretation. They create new artefacts reflecting the new ways they look at the life and the inner life of the individual. It is worth remarking that there is an experimental probing in modernist fiction in relation to questions of language, perception and meaning. The questions of what the meaning of life is and how we do create meaning can be answered with the modernists inquiry into the processes of meaning-making and the experimental interrogations of forms and techniques, along with such themes as quandary of the human subject, intellectual and physical decay, fragmentation of the mind, social decrepitude, technological renovations, their malicious and beneficial repercussions,

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industrialisation, the cataclysm of war, urban society etc. This study will delve into The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, Howards End by E. M. Forster, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce and Molloy by Samuel Beckett by bringing the aesthetic and thematic concerns of modernist fiction into focus. First of all, it is significant to emphasise the fact that fiction is rendered as an impression by many modernist novelists. Ford Madox Ford is one of them underlining sense perception. In this respect, The Good Soldier exemplifies literary impressionism by exhibiting dense visual sensation. Literary impressionism, a radical technique, can be seen as a revolt against the nineteenth-century traditional novel and rationalism. The Good Soldier is a collage of varied impressions. The Good Soldier is concerned with two married couples: Arthur Dowell (the narrator) and his wife Florence Dowell and Edward Ashburnham and his wife Leonora Ashburnham. Rather than following a linear plot in The Good Soldier, Ford is preoccupied with the mental and emotional landscape of John Dowell, who is a wealthy American and has lost his wife, Florence. We enter the mind of John Dowell and follow his associated ideas in a stream of consciousness in the novel. Because the novel is limited to the mind of John Dowell, it is solipsistic. The events of the story take place between August, 1904, and August, 1913, a nine year period throughout most of which the two couples are the best of friends, living the life of the leisured rich at European spas in elegant idleness. The novel reflects the autumn sunshine of the Edwardian era and a way of life which would be brutally wiped out with the outbreak of World War I. The novel exhibits the personal disillusionment and the crisis in religion, class-consciousness and sexuality. It reveals the conflict between appearance and reality. Dowell believes that his wife is suffering from a heart condition. However, Florence commits adultery with the younger man, Jimmy and then with Edward Ashburnham. Then, she commits suicide like Edward Ashburnham. The novel illustrates the hypocrisy of the upper-class condition of sexual infidelity. As a collage of

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memory and imagination, The Good Soldier is narrated from the points of view of Dowell; thus, it is unreliable. Edward Ashburnham owns the estate Branshaw Teleragh. As the novel opens, he has recently returned from serving as a military officer in India and arrives at the health spa, Bad Nauheim, in Germany, where he meets the Dowells for the first time. Although he appears to be brave, sentimental, and heroic, like the knights in ancient romances, the reader learns that he has been involved in a series of unfortunate affairs with women. His parents arranged his marriage to Leonora Powys, a convent-educated Catholic girl. His wife, Leonora, makes herself the guardian of his estate and sets out to recover their financial losses. Edward Ashburnham appears almost noble, the ideal of the British country gentleman and good soldier. Actually, he is quite the contrary, a raging stallion, recklessly ruining every female whom he meets. The superficial goodness is only a veneer masking his corruption. All the other characters have two sides. Florence Dowell, the respectable wife, has had an affair with Jimmy. She certainly does not hesitate to become Edward Ashburnhams mistress and commits suicide when she learns that Edward is attracted to Nancy Rufford and that the man in whose house she committed adultery with Jimmy is now talking with her husband in Bad Nauheim. Leonora is purposeful in trying to manage her husbands estate economically, but she is cruel and unloving. Arthur Dowell, the narrator himself, is stupid and lazy. The quandary and hypocrisy of the human subject, and social crisis in surface reality and inner reality are best explained in the novel if we trust on the narration of Dowell. There are time-shifts, defamiliarisation of the traditional concerns, and fragmentation of details. The focus of the narration is internal rather than external, and the narration is homodiegetic. In Dowels narration, there are numerous mistakes and inconsistencies. The instability of impressions is of great significance in shaping and transforming our perceptions. The novels chronology is complicated and circular. The multiple narrative perspectives enable the reader

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to question the reality. Dowell informs us through the knowledge taken from the others. It can be said that the relativity of knowledge and meaning comes to surface in the novel. Moreover, Virginia Woolf, who is portrayed as the Dark Lady of English letters, poses challenges to the nineteen-century conventional literary realism and techniques by using radical innovative literary devices. In Modern Fiction, she insists that life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. This dictum is exemplified in The Waves. In a state of hectic interior flux, the trivial and the vital, the past and the present, are continuously interacting in the novel. There is endless conflict and clash between the multitude of ideas and emotions rushing through ones consciousness and the numerous impressions from the external world. Therefore, personal identity becomes evanescent. People yearn to unite both with one another and with some larger pattern of order hidden behind the flux, to experience time standing still momentarily. Woolf walks a line between chaos and order as in The Waves. She depicts and explores the transitoriness of life and tries to catch moments of being in the novel. The experimentation with narration is clearly seen due to the fact that The Waves is prose yet poetry; a novel and a play in Woolfs words. The novel focuses on six characters, three women, Susan, Rhoda and Jinny, and three men, Bernard, Louis and Neville. A shadowy but significant seventh character is Percival, who is interconnected with each character in the novel. The novel was written in nine episodes separated by the interludes, descriptions of time passing from morning to night in the manner of a postimpressionistic artist. In these episodes, there are varied soliloquies of the characters in varying combinations at successive stages in their lives from childhood to late middle age. Each character has definable qualities and functions as merely symbols in the novel. Susan stands for maternity, whereas Rhoda remains terrified of society, that is, she is totally alienated from the society. Isolation, alienation and human beings attempts to overcome their

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isolation and to become part of a unified pattern are explored throughout the dramatic soliloquies of the characters. The individual monologues are separate but synchronised, and the voices are inward-looking and self-absorbed. Perception, language and the conscious and unconscious processes of thought and feeling are scrutinised, and these multifaceted narratives form a unified but experimental narrative. The characters are linked by intricately woven threads of certain shared mental images and memories. For instance, central to their narratives is the dinner with Percival, who dies in India. This common experience is a kind of unification. We do not know Percival, but Percival as an externalised character is observed through merely the perceptions of the others. Actually, The Waves reflects a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears and horrors of the characters. Bernard states that I am not one person; I am many people. We are one, but we have multiple selves. We are fragmented as well as unified. The modernist mind wanders into questions about this paradox. Besides, Woolf tries to capture the movement of the sea. The rhythm of the sea is of great significance in conveying meanings to the characters. The wave metaphor reflects the moments of being in the novel. Life and death are powerful themes which are interconnected with each other. The sea represents life and rebirth, and tree stands for knowledge in the novel. What is more is that Woolf draws attention to the nature, role and status of women indirectly through Susan, Rhoda and Jinny. As we mentioned earlier, Susan is fitted to traditional mother figure, and Rhoda is incarcerated within the social norms and tries to free herself from them, but she fails. Jinny is an object for erotic contemplation since she loves going to parties. Actually, they are trapped in this enclosure. The time concept is really important in Woolfs novels. In The Waves, there is cosmic time encapsulating a sense of cosmic unity. Woolf insists on simple, imperishable beauty, albeit a beauty haunted by mortality. For Woolf, there are no insignificant lives, only inadequate ways of looking at them.

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In addition, in Howards End, E. M. Forster pays attention to the role of both property and propriety in upper-class English life by throwing into question the effects of machinery and industrialisation, the clash of values and portraits of modern life. The thinking, sensitive Schlegel sisters are opposed to the worldly-wise Wilcoxes in the novel. The Schlegels meet and befriend a poor young man, Leonard Blast, who shares aspects of the identities of both the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels. He is tied to the business world and is devoted to the intellectual and cultural world. At the beginning, he meets the Schlegels at the classical concert through an umbrella. The businessmen Wilcoxes deal with trade, and they are fond of machinery in the novel. The technology is admired by the Wilcoxes, but the narrator takes a stance to this admiration in describing polluted land and air in the novel. Margaret, one of the Schlegels, loves England, typified by Howards End, which is a property which had belonged to Mrs. Wilcox herself, even though she sometimes seems to be amid alien subject there. England needs to unite the best in its Wilcoxes, its providers and healthy consumers of material goods, with the Schlegel principle, expressed in the love of art and civilized discussion. By themselves the Schlegels are ineffectual. They can only watch helplessly as commercial development dooms their London house. After Helen has been carried away by her feeling for Leonards plight, she flees to her fathers ancestral home but cannot live there. Only at Howards End can she live securely and watch her child grow up. Howards End is about the failure of human relationships and about the failure to connect passion with reason, the heart and the head. However, it is through Only connect... that Forster succeeds in joining the prose and passion of life, the Wilcox and Schlegel principles in Howards End through the ministrations of another of Forsters characters willing to defy the class system in the interests of a nobler order. Howards End stands for traditional England, and Forster yearns for a unified collage of idealism and realism in the novel since the Schlegels represent German idealism, whereas the Wilcoxes symbolizes the industrialised England. In the end, it

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is only possible to make a place for the marginalized victims of the class system (Leonards child) by placing the reasonable hand of culture (Margaret Schlegel) over the management of wealth and industry (Mr. Wilcox) in the context of Englands agrarian history (Howards End). It is salient that Howards End subsumes Englands history under symbolism. What is significant is that the necessity of making moral connections with fellow humans, of struggling against the class divisions is central to Forsters thought in the novel. Courage, generosity, friendship and sympathy are important elements to understand disintegrated, fragmented subject who experiences the vicissitudes of industrialisation, machinery and urbanisation. So as to form a unified identity, Forster finds solution in connections in Howards End. One of the central symbols in the novel is hay. The characters suffer from hay fever. It indicates life, sustenance and hope. When we consider narratological aspects of the novel, the narrator constantly intrudes into the narration in order to comment on the events morally or not, which can be accepted as a modernist style. James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of the most significant modernist texts. Portrait is a semi-autobiographical novel that combines elements of the Bildungsroman and the Kunstlerroman traditions. A Bildungsroman is a novel describing the gradual education of its protagonist, while a Kunstlerroman explores the development of an artistic sensibility. The novel follows the gradual maturation of Stephen from his infancy, through his primary, secondary and university education to the eve of his departure from Ireland. The overall narrative is united thematically, and the story that is driving events traces with increasing insistence Stephens growing alienation from the inflexible social and cultural environments in Ireland. It is obvious that the narrative records Stephens progressive disillusionment with the central institutions defining the nature of Irish- Catholic society: the family, the church, and the nationalist movement. Stephen comes to a greater and greater sense of each institution as an oppressive and inhibitive force, antipathetic to all that he has

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come to value in his life. As a result, he turns with increasing determination from society and toward art. Joyce challenges the conventional literary forms through radical stylistic innovations in the novel. He adopts a style of address that lessens the gap between objective and subjective poles of experiences. This is best exemplified in the novels opening section. Joyce takes the ambivalent fluctuation between first- and third person point of view constitutive of free indirect style and transforms it into the structural principle of an entire mode of narration. Joyces prose adopts the apparently impersonal perspective of third-person narrative, but this perspective is continually infiltrated by the questioning consciousness of a barely comprehending child. Stephens sensibility is immersed in the flux of sense experience. His attention fluctuates continually between the allure of an externally imposed narrative and the range of sensuous impressions through which we register the world prior to the mediating structure of language. Then, in the narration, Joyce underlines Stephens sense of both the referential and the sensual power of language. Stephen exhibits an intense verbal self-consciousness that is fascinated by aesthetic pattern and form. In the novel, Joyce experiments with language in such a sophisticated way that Stephen is obsessed with language itself throughout his life. Thematically, the roles of family, Catholicism and nationalism are of great significance in the formation of identity of Stephen. One of the most important scenes in the novel is the Christmas dinner scene in which the outbreak of a bitter argument over Charles Stewart Parnell between Stephens father and Mr. Casey, supporters of Parnell, and Dante Riordan, an ardent nationalist who nonetheless follows the dictates of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in condemning Parnell as an adulterer takes place. In this scene, social, political and spiritual crisis comes to surface, and the dinner-party scene affords Stephen his first insight into the capacity of language to provoke and express powerful feeling. It is important to highlight the fact that the movement of the narrative reflects the ebb and flow of Stephens perception of the world. This perceptual rhythm gives the novel the structure of a

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musical composition: motifs are introduced, dispersed and then recombined as particular words and images inflect Stephens imagination. What is one of the stylistic and thematic innovations of Joyce is epiphany which is a moment of pure aesthetic apprehension in which the lineaments of eternal beauty and grace are suddenly revealed. In the novel, Stephen encounters a wading girl. She is both woman and muse. Her stillness, poise and beauty afford Stephen a moment of secular transcendence that alerts him to the possibility of a new and mysterious mode of being. What is significant is Stephens aesthetic theory in the novel. He introduces the two terms static (fixed) kinetic (moving). He argues that art can be improper when it has a kinetic effect that incites ones desire to go to or loathing to go away from something. He puts pornographical and didactic art in this category. Proper art has a static effect because it raises one beyond the physical world to a purely mental realm. For Stephen, aesthetic apprehension is a static process that involves the intellect and the imagination. For his freedom, he depends merely on silence, exile, and cunning. At the end of the novel, there are some diary extracts which are in the form of interior monologue. The traces of the stream of consciousness technique can be seen in the novel, as well. Samuel Beckett is rendered as one of the notable writers of twentieth century British literature. The Trilogy reflects Becketts erudite writing of the absurd in the manner of minimalism. Molloy is one of the novels of the trilogy which can be seen as an attempt to yearn for what the meaning of life is. Molloy consists of two parts that are strikingly similar but distinctly different. In part one, readers meet Molloy, the homeless, wandering old man who has returned to his mothers room. In part two, we meet Jacques Moran, who receives an assignment to search for Molloy. Molloy is writing out his story under compulsion; by the end of his fruitless adventures, Moran writes out his story, too. Molloy has lost his ability to walk, and his crutches and his bicycle are important parts of his story; Moran is nearly crippled by the time he begins writing, and both crutches and a bicycle have figured in his journey.

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Molloy has a complicated relationship with an old widow, Lousse; Moran has a complicated relationship with his son, also called Jacques Moran. Molloy obsesses over his sucking stones, devising elaborate schemes for their rotation; Moran obsesses over the wearing of his shirt. Molloy is uncertain who has brought him to his mothers room and ordered him to write his story; at the opposite extreme, Moran is employed by Youdi and receives his commands from Gaber, Youdis messenger. It is significant to emphasize Molloys attachment to his mother and his return to the room/womb; his immobile condition resembles the condition of the infant who has not yet learned to walk. In Morans part of the story, the protagonist relates to a son rather than a mother, suggesting some Oedipal connection. From a philosophical perspective, both Molloy and Moran seem to be trapped in existential anxiety, committed to meaningless actions. Besides, Molloy has speech impediments. Language constructs Molloy. Beckett explores the relationship between language and the world through the narratives of Molloy and Moran. Language is futile and does not mean anything, but Molloy and Moran are trapped in this linguistic enclosure. The nature of suffering and experience is illustrated in relation to conceptions of paralysis, birth and death. Molloy exemplifies fluidity and uncertainty of the human subject since individual has been traumatized after the cataclysm of the Second World War. Beckett shows us the debilitation and aggravation of the characters. Molloy is completely alienated from the society. For Molloy, Louis might be an illusion or a dream. Molloy might create the illusions in the novel like Moran. A yearning for a unified self is explicitly seen. Aporia is another important element displaying the meaning/lessness of life. For Molloy, the only refuge is death or oblivion. The text is auto-referential and is narrated from the point of view of Molloy and Moran. Therefore, it is homodiegetic. The focalization is internal. The sentences uttered by Molloy seem to be chaotic, messy and disjointed like his mind. The use of negation is of significance in raising existential and linguistic doubts. Interior monologues reflect the fragmented mind or conscious and

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unconscious processes of this fragmented mind of Molloy. Scepticism, rationalism, introspection, despair, cultural exhaustion and the debasement of humanity brought about by the war are scrutinised throughout the novel. To conclude, modernist texts illustrate the nature of the human subject by new narrative techniques for depicting the modern life in relation to questions of perception, psychology, language and meaning. All the works above mentioned exhibit a cubist-style questioning of the relationships between observer and observed, subject and object, and between perception, point of view, language and interpretation.