MODERNISM AND TIME IN LITERATURE

Establishing relationships between Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf) and Ulysses (James Joyce)

WHAT CONSTITUTES MODERNISM IN LITERATURE?Time frame: early 1900s to mid 1960sConsequence of huge social upheaval and catastrophe in this periodCharacterised by an inward focus on the inner self and consciousness and a sense of decay, pessimism and alienation, experimentation and innovationInitially a reaction against Victorian ideals and aesthetics, as society entered unknown and dangerous territory and isolated from popular literature and mediaLater rejected excessive cynicism and embraced consumerism and optimism

CONTEMPORARY EVENTS WHICH SHAPED MODERNISMWorld War IThe beginnings of the emancipation of Black people, women and the lower classesThe birth of psychoanalysis and the ideas of Freud – the inner workings of the mind became a field of studyThe birth of mass literacy and as a consequence, the popular press and popular literature (which was scorned by intellectual Modernists)The birth of cinema

MODERNISM IN VARIOUS ART FORMS Poetry: influence of French Symbolists and Imagists – no more flowery descriptions, focus on sparse prose and “the thing itself”, and lack of rhyme and rhythm, allusions, layered meanings and styles, experimentation with form and style (The Waste Land) Literature: searching for meaning in the wake of World War I, couldn’t make sense of the world so focused their analysis inwards, studying the inner workings of the mind (Freud), unreliable narrators and subjective not objective truth, loss of traditional structures

TIME IN MODERNIST LITERATURE

Henri Bergson: believed that our notion of time was false; we can only measure immobile, complete lines, while time is mobile and incomplete. Argued that we shouldn’t mistake “time” and our artificial methods of measuring it.

Time is really duration – and no two moments are the same because memory impacts each experience (consciousness)

So writers set aside conventional structures in order to further explore the consciousness

Best example: Proust, In Search of Lost Time – the moment the character tastes a madeleine, he is transported back in time via memory

‘Modernist dailiness’: the preoccupation with everyday life is combined with the intimation that much greater spans of time and culture are contained within the diurnal (daily) round. Visible in Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses

IN MRS DALLOWAY Follows Clarissa Dalloway and several other characters over the course of a day as she prepares for a party

Takes place in one day, but we are transported to other times and places by the characters inner thoughts and monologues

Characters are constantly in motion, creating cityscapes

Big Ben is heard repeatedly through the novel – Clarissa fears death so she notices the constant reminder of the passage of time; also a motif which represents patriarchy

IN MRS DALLOWAY Then again silence fell; and then, night after night, and sometimes in plain midday when the roses were bright and light turned on the wall its shape clearly there seemed to drop into this silence this indifference, this integrity, the thud of something falling. [A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]

Woolf juxtaposes clock time and pure duration – the passing of days and seasons, then one noise “the thud of something falling” triggers the representation the moment when a shell falls in France

In brackets – what is a tragedy for her characters is of no importance in the passage of time

IN ULYSSES Somewhat a retelling of the Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem of Odysseus’s 10 year journey home; In Ulysses, it becomes Leonard Bloom’s wanderings through Dublin during one day

Filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein described Ulysses as the most important event in the history of cinema (rather than literature). ‘Montage form as structure is a reconstruction of the laws of the thoughts process’

Divided into 18 episodes, taking place on 1 day (like Mrs Dalloway),in a variety of locations, using a variety of literary techniques, including stream of consciousness and an altered representation of time (like Mrs Dalloway) as well as all the other typical features of modernism such as allusions, ambiguities and a study of the human condition

IN ULYSSES ‘The blind of the window was drawn aside. A card Unfurnished Apartments slipped from the sash and fell. A plump bare generous arm shone, was seen, held forth from a white petticoat bodice and taut shiftstraps. A woman’s hand flung forth a coin over the area railings. It fell on the path’.

“Unfurnished Apartments” – the narrator reads the card with no break in prose, as if we see it as he sees it

Fragmented – an arm shone, was seen, held forth, then the hand

IN ULYSSES Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money.