The Evolution of the Novel in the Context of Modernism and New Theories

The Beginning of Modernism

In the 1910, at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a new tendency, a new movement, called

It's a complex cultural movement that involves all arts: poetry, paintings, music and novels. The main feature is that they want to change the world they were living in, they wanted a new life, a new situation.

Modernism expressed the desire to break with established forms and subjects.

The Transition to the Psychological Novel

The victorian novel, as well as the 18th century novel (Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift), describe the life as the novelist saw it, with a well defined plot and situation, a well defined structure, and well defined characters. In addition, the Victorian writers shared the opinions of the readers, because they came from the same social class. Differently from this type of novel (also called social novel), the psychological novel will replace social

novels at the beginning of the 20th century. The result is that the writers are no more interested in describing events, situations as they used to do, but they

wanted to describe destinism, the psychological problems they were living in.

In particular they were no more interested in actions, in sequences of events, but they were interested in man's interaction and communication, in the language men use to communicate.

Scientific and Philosophical Influences

The reasons for having this new type of novel, the psychological novel, were all those scientific and philosophical discoveries that we had at the beginning of the new century. For example the importance and the relevance of Sigmund Freud's revelation of the psyche, that introduced new areas of investigation that had never been discussed or investigated before. He wanted to go deeper into the analyses and the understanding of the human soul. After him, the human soul was seen as having a multiplicity of aspects, so man is made up not only of one single personality, but he carries all his opposites, so he gave voice to all those feelings and sensations which had never been relevant or important.

Relevant is also Einstein's theories of relativity. With his theory of relativity Einstein said that we cannot see reality

as it really is, because at the moment you are watching reality, you are changing it, it is impossible to have a reality that is fixed in that particular moment and always like that, because we with our present, with our way of watching it, we are changing reality. His ideas are very relevant for this new attitude because writers, now, are influenced by these inventions, that were impossible. to ignore.

Time According to Bergson and James

Talking about literature we have two important philosophers, the french Henri Bergson who introduced a new idea

of time. In a few words he said that there are two two levels of times: the time of the mind and that of the clock. The time of the clock, also called historical time, is what we objectively know, it's a physical reality, no one can modify it, it's external, linear and measured by the clock.

But he introduced something new, he said that there is also another level of time, the time of the mind, that is the

psychological time (both Joyce and Woolf will be influenced by the idea), this is internal, subjective, it's the time that

is made up of memories, flashbacks, jumps in time, it's what happens in our mind where the time cannot be stopped

and in our mind there's a kind of coexistence of past, present and future.

50 in our mind we can see the past, present and future simultaneously.

Another important American philosopher is William James, whose brother was Harry James, who claimed an important idea: intuition is more important than intelligence. That was shocking for the time because he maintained the superiority of intuition (what we perceive with our sensations is in his view more relevant than intelligence). The new narrative technique: the stream of consciousness. So, this is the time we have a lot of philosophical and scientific ideas that influenced artists,

The Stream of Consciousness Technique

All this revelations will influence the writing. a lot because this theories will gave birth to the new technique used by

the modern novelists.

Having all of this new types of theories, it was not possible to write in the same way as before, because life changed a lot and also the way of writing changed, so we have a new technique that took in consideration all these discoveries, this technique is called stream of consciousness, this is a term taken from psychoanalysis (William James used this expression for the first time). This stream of consciousness means free association of ideas and thoughts as they occurred in mind, at random, not in a logical order, making our understanding impossible, without the writer's guide and help.

They put into practice this technique thanks to the "interior monologue", it is exactly the verbal expression of the

stream of consciousness. While the stream of consciousness is a psychic phenomenon, the verbalization of the

stream of consciousness is a technique called "interior monologue”. This will make the reading particularly demanding, difficult. This technique doesn't use graphological devices. In fact in our mind there is no full stop, no question word, so the writing is exactly the reproduction of what happens within the mind, without logical connectors or graphological devices, that usually help. This is the way novelists tend to reproduce into writing what was happening within their own minds. James Joyce for example, uses in some works like Dubliners, the direct interior monologue, that means using the

direct speech but without any graphological devices, we don't have any reporting verbs.