granted. They didn’t believe that life they were living. Being

disillusioned & contemplating the society & cosmos most of them looked

within themselves for the principles of order. They turned to eternal

things. For that matter we see modern literature being pre-occupied with

its own self, process of perception, nature of consciousness. In its

extreme subjectivity modern literature went parallelly with other modern

arts (e.g. painting).

The main feature – subjectivity & self-interest. Modernist aesthetics

was formed under the influence of French symbolist poets :

Charles Baudleъr

Arthur Rimbaut

Paul Verlaine

Stephan Mallarmй

Their aim was to capture the most perishable of personal experience in

open-ended & essentially private symbols, to express the inexpressible, to

express the slightest movements of the soul, or at least evoke it subtly if

not express, create the atmosphere of the soul. The symbolist concentration

upon single moments of individual perception. Life in their reproduction

was reduced to small fragments of experience. This fragmentation influenced

not only composition of the work but also the character. The character was

disassembled in fragmentary pieces & these pieces of human character were

not held together by any theory of human type, like a collagй,

juxtaposition – all transitions are removed. You just put the fragments

together. The widely used technique “stream of consciousness” takes the

form from a fluid associations, often illogical moment to moment sequence

of ideas, feelings & impressions of a single mind. Traditional literary

forms & genres merged & overlapped. The introduction of poetry into prose

became possible, imagery characteristic of poetry – into prosaic text. The

forms of the past were also employed but to produce the satirical effect.

An equally important principle – “the stream of unconsciousness” – the

use of irrational logic of dreams & fantasies, denies ordinary logic

(“exhausted rationality”). They employed the shadowy structure of dream.

The idea “time & space” didn’t exist & the imagination was only slightly

grounded in reality but generally it created new patterns by combining

previous experiences, etc.

The authors employed myth very much as a kind of collective dream.

Modernist’s myth was stripped of its religious & magical associations.

Joyce’s “Ulysses” is based on the ground of Homer’s ”Odyssey”. Eliot said:

“In using the myth, in manipulating the contentious parallel between

contemporaniety & antiquity Mr. Joyce is pursuing the method which others

must persue after him. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of

giving a shape & significance to an immense panorama of futility & anarchy

which is contemporary history”. Myth is the way of organizing history. The

writers’ quest for order lead to their preoccupation with the artist

himself & with the artistic process. The imaginary character stood for the

author himself:

Marsel Proust “Remembrance of the Things Past”

Lawrence “Sons & Lovers”

Joyce “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

We can’t say that the artist became modernists’ hero. Not all writers of

that period were modernists. There was the co-existence of different

styles.

James Joyce (1882 – 1941)

He was born in Ireland (Dublin). Although he spent many years not in

Ireland he is considered one of Irish writers. Primarily he wrote about

himself, transforming his experiences in his books, & relatives & friends –

into symbols. His works are said to be “expansive & inclusive”. Expansive –

because he gave a very wide panorama of Dublin life at the turn of the

century, inclusive – because his works seemed to include all the human

history. These novels still are the stories & novels about life in general.

He started to attend an expensive private boarding school but his father

became bankrupt & he continued his education at home. Then he attended

“University College” in Dublin. He read very much & began to write

seriously. He produced critical articles, essays but also poems & notebooks

of epiphanies (theological term – an intense moment in a human life when

the truth of a person or some thing is being revealed). He studied in

Paris, then returned to Ireland & in 1904 left it. He lived in different

places in Europe. First, he earned money by giving English lessons. In 1905

he submitted to the publisher his first version of the collection of

stories “Dubliners”. But it was repeatedly rejected & even after acceptance

it was subjected to severe censorship for sexual frankness & use of

obscenities & use of real names & places. This collection consists of 15

stories devoted to childhood, mature life & public life. All are unified by

the theme of person’s loneliness & hopelessness. Joyce describes life with

all naturalistic details. Everything suggests that life is dead. All the

stories explore the paralysis of Irish life. The most famous stories are

“Araby” & “The Dead ”. The stories are arranged in successive sequences –

childhood, adolescence, mature & public life. Mood is gloomy, imagery is

dark & malignant. People are incurably lonely, their hopes are doomed to

disappointment & frustration.

In the full form the collection was published in 1914 together with his

autobiographical novel “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, which

was to be called “Stephen-Hero”. This book explores the story of the

formation of the artist’s consciousness. In criticism it is called “a

gestation of the soul”, for he tries to penetrate into people’s mind. It is

deeply psychological work. In form it is “buildungsroman” (German word

meaning “educational novel”). Life is shown chronologically. The main hero

– Stephen Dedalus. The process of his maturing is shown in the development.

In the first part the language is very simple. Then some glimpses of

family life are given. The disagreement between its members has political

roots. Another stage is school & college. Stephen does not participate in

boys’ games. He longs for the moment when he can be alone, he is weak &

suffering. The Jesuit college bred an aversion for religion in the young

artist. Everything was repulsive in the college: sermons, system of

punishment, religibility + hypocrisy. It was an anguish experience. Stephen

learnt to build a wall between him & all the rest of the humanity.

The book has an open ending – we don’t know Stephen will do. It ends

with the decision to leave Ireland. This exile, solitude are the ways in

which Stephen opposes to the oppressing influence of the society. He

rejects what life suggests to him – his choice is loneliness. The problem

of correlating of artists & society is solved by Joyce from highly

individualistic standpoint. The last pages express Stephen’s understanding

of form & time categories. “The past is consumed in the present & the

present is living because it has force in the future”. The name “Dedalus”

is symbolic. It is a symbol of new art which is liberated from restrain of

old art… He discovers & explores the possibilities of new art. Its aim is

to create a new labyrinth of forms of new art.

In 1922 ”Ulysses” was published. It started as another short story for

“The Dubliners” but grew into the massive novel. Joyce recreates the action

of “Odyssey” in a single day – July 16, 1904 (it was a significant day for

Joyce: he decided to leave Ireland & met his future wife). Since two plains

run parallel. The main characters are associated with certain people in

“Odyssey” by Homer: the main characters are Stephen Dedalus & Leopold

Bloom, an advertising solicitor & in a certain way an eternal Jew both

figuratively & literally. Minor characters are the people whom they meet in

different places. Dedalus acts as Telemachys & Leopold Bloom is modern

Odyssey & his wife Molly is modern Penelope. Bloom wanders from place to

place throughout this day – butcher’s shop, post office, cemetery, printing

house, library, pub, hotel, again pub, shop, his poor house, cheap pub… his

adventures has nothing in common with adventures of Odyssey. They are down

to Earth, petty. In Bloom Joyce tried to show wandering of “eternal…”. He

has unheroic adventures & finally meets Stephen who becomes his spiritual

son. This is a plot.

In form the book is mostly a never-ending stream of Bloom’s

consciousness (he is not an intellectual person, his impressions are very

incoherent). The book has a very rigid form. Joyce describes in many

details every moment of the day: actions, feelings & thoughts. But apart

from it Joyce deepens into human consciousness… he tries to render

something which doesn’t depend on people’s mind, he tries to penetrate into

human psyche, impulses which govern, move them. Each chapter corresponds to

the certain episode in Homer’s “Odyssey” & each chapter has its own style.

It witnesses that Joyce was a virtuous of the English language. ”Ulysses”

has 18 episodes, each of them tracing the deeds & the thoughts of three

people during one day in Dublin. The book is a mosaic. It consists of

different & not quite linked together parts. There is almost no plot. Joyce

still puts the idea in it to describe symbolically man’s wandering in the

chaos of life & floating with the stream of his thoughts. The humanity is

lost & confused about all the contradictions of modern life, people waist

their lives in this chaos, their existence is sensless & purposeless. The

three main characters present three eternal types of human beings – common

person, an artist, a woman. Bloom stands for the symbol of a typical

bourgeois person. He is very limited & content with down-to-earth

pleasures.

The book caused a storm of outrage. It was banned in Britain & America

for more than ten years. Now it is praised for technical experimentation &

stylistic brilliance. The book attracted attention to the stream of

consciousness technique. In general it evoked controversial responses.

Even before completing “Ulysses” Joyce wrote “Finnegan’s Wake” – a

novel. If “Ulysses” is considered to be a daybook, “Finnegan’s Wake” is a

night book. Joyce tried to present the whole human history in a dream of a

Dublin innkeeper Earwicker by name. The style is appropriate to a dream,

the language is shifting & changing, the words blur & glue together, this

suggests the merging of images in a dream. This technique enables Joyce to

present history & myth as a single image. The characters stand for eternal

types, identified by Earwicker himself, his wife & the three children.

The work masks the limit of formal experiment in the language.

“Finnegan’s Wake” is considered to be a closed book. It is very

sophisticated. Joyce loses the thread of narration sometimes… attempted in

the sound of words, construction of a sentences, to render the meaning of

what he was talking about (e.g. images of woman & the river are merging;

the rhythm – gurgling, flowing water). What unifies these two books – both

of them express Joyce’s positive credo: he asserts that life is eternal,

human society does change but the change has a circular character.

Everything is renewed, nothing can be destroyed. Joyce starts the work with

the continuation of thoughts & the beginning of them is at the end. Man

must believe in the city (symbol of Dublin).

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1889 – 1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot is considered today’s genius in poetry.

Quintessence: refine sensibility – the essential quality of the poet. “Our

civilization comprehends great variety & complexity; & this variety &

complexity playing upon a refined sensibility must produce various &

complex result. The poet must become more & more comprehensive, more & more

allusive, more indirect in order to force, to dislocate if necessary

language into his meaning” – said Eliot. This is an account of what a

modern poet should do. He must be finely tuned to the world to be able to

express the various & complex. The poet can distort the language, to use it

figuratively.

Extremely was influential figure in literary circles. Editor, poet,

playwright, critic – he came from a prosperous American family, his father

was a rich manufacturer & his mother wrote poetry. He was brought up in St.

Louis Missouri. He was educated in private school & attended Harvard to get

his degree in philosophy in 1906. Then left for Paris. There he attended

lectures of Henry Bergson – “Subjective Idealism Philosophy, Theory of

Intuitivism”. Being in Paris he read much on French symbolist poets. The

symbolist movement was one of major influences upon his poetry. The goal of

art is to express the unique personal emotional responses to a certain

moment in human life through indefinite illogical, sometimes private in

meaning symbols. Eliot returned to Harvard & there he read widely in

Sanskrit & oriental philosophy (had a powerful influence on him). In 1915

he decided to give up philosophy to remain in England & to begin writer’s

career. In 1916 he completed his Ph.D. theses, but never received a degree.

He married & settled in England permanently.

The beginning of his literary career starts from 1910 when he wrote “The

Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. It was published in 1915 in magazine

“Poetry”. The poem is written in a very simple style. Then he made a

collection “Prufrock & Other Observations”. This was compared with “Lyrical

Ballads” of Wordsworth & Coleridge. This work inaugurated the age of

modernism in poetry. There is no plot in the story. It’s a dramatic

monologue but of the new kind. It sounds like a stream of consciousness of

a person who walks up the street of London. The protagonist is Alfred

Prufrock. He is an antiromantic hero, rather timid, self-centred. The tone

is very ironic, images are startlingly fresh. The title suggests that some

feeling should be shown to the other person. The poem starts as a dialogue:

Let us go out – you & I…

Critics argue that you & I are two sides of one & the same person. Eliot

says that “YOU” is a companion of Prufrock. We should pay attention to the

epigraph: “The truth will remain under”. This means that the speaker can

persuade himself to talk only if this will never be heard. It is his own

dramatic monologue. Prufrock is intensely preoccupied with himself.

Probably he signs his love song to himself… (though it doesn’t matter much)

We can understand “love-song” in ironic sense because the whole poem is

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