Punti di vista

Introduzione

Il mio percorso ha come obiettivo quello di analizzare alcuni personaggi che si sono distinti in ambito artistico e letterario durante il Novecento, e che con le loro opere hanno cercato di cambiare il modo di osservare la realtà ed hanno sperimentato nuove prospettive.

Per questo motivo ho inserito Pablo Picasso, artista che nella sua fase cubista utilizzò la tecnica della scomposizione per rappresentare simultaneamente un soggetto da diversi punti di vista. Per quanto riguarda la letteratura inglese ho scelto Virginia Woolf, esponente della corrente del modernismo; nelle sue opere il punto di vista si sposta “all’interno” del personaggio e la realtà viene percepita attraverso impressioni ed emozioni soggettive. Nell’ambito della letteratura italiana ho inserito Luigi Pirandello e il relativismo conoscitivo. Nel romanzo Uno, nessuno, centomila si assiste ad una moltiplicazione dei punti di vista: il protagonista scopre infatti di non avere una, ma infinite identità. L’ultimo autore che ho scelto è il tedesco Bertolt Brecht, focalizzandomi sull’opera Leben des Galilei che vede come protagonista Galileo Galilei, scienziato che cambiò radicalmente il modo di vedere l’universo, la sua “rivoluzione” può essere paragonata a quella che l’autore portò nel teatro.

–

Virginia Woolf

(London, 1882 Rodmell, 1941)

“The proper stuff of fiction does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit...”

(V. Woolf, Modern Fiction – The Common Reader, 1925)

A modernist novelist

Virginia Woolf embodied the modernist experimental spirit. She was dissatisfied with the conventional novel and her works helped to free it from one-dimensional realism. After Joyce, she is considered the other great introspective novelist in the language, because she shifted the focus of novels from plot and action to thought, memory and feeling. Her novels aimed to create a truer picture of human experience and relations, so the events that traditionally made up a story were no longer important for her; what mattered was the impression they made on the characters who experienced them. In her novels the omniscient narrator disappeared and the point of view shifted inside the characters’ minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas, momentary impressions presented as a continuous flux.

The stream of consciousness technique

In her works she demonstrated that the ever-changing variety of thoughts, emotions and memory at any moment of human experience was momentous and rich enough to provide the material for a whole novel. This eventful subjective life makes it possible for her novels to dispense almost entirely with plot. What happens in the mind of a number of characters is far more important and interesting than what they actually do. In attempting to render the inner life of characters, V. Woolf developed a series of literary devices that are part of the stream of consciousness technique. These devices allowed her to achieve an effect that seemed to immerse readers directly in the stream of her characters’ thoughts, feelings, memories and associations. She also developed a technique for moving between one stream of consciousness and another. The style she developed to capture the rhythms of transitory feelings, the blend of random thoughts and associations, intuition and memories in the human mind often approaches poetry in its subtlety and its intensity.

Woolf vs Joyce

As for Joyce, also for Virginia Woolf subjective reality came to be intended with the technique called “stream of consciousness”. However, differently from Joyce’s characters who show their thoughts directly through interior monologue, sometimes in an incoherent and syntactically unorthodox way, Woolf never lets her characters’ thoughts flow without control, and maintains logical and grammatical organization. Her technique is based on the fusion of streams of thought into a third-person, past tense narrative. Thus she gives the impression of simultaneous connections between the inner and the outer world, the past and the present, speech and silence. Similar to Joyce’s epiphanies are Woolf’s moments of being, rare moments of insight during the characters’ daily life when they can see reality behind appearances. While Joyce was more interested in language experimentation and worked through the accumulation of details, Woolf’s use of words was almost poetic, allusive and emotional. Fluidity is the quality of the language which flows following the most intricate thoughts and stretches to express the most intimate feelings.

Life

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, she grew up and was educated in a highly cultivated atmosphere. The death of her mother in 1895, affected her deeply and brought about her first nervous breakdown and she began to be in revolt against her father’s aggressive and tyrannical character. It was only with her father’s death that V. Woolf began her own life and literary career, she became member of the Bloomsbury Group, famous for its unconventional ideas and anti-conformist attitudes. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf and three years later published her first novel (The Voyage Out), in 1925 the novel Mrs Dalloway appeared, in which Virginia successfully experimented with new narrative techniques. The Second World War increased her anxiety and fears. She became haunted by the terror of losing her mind, finally she could stand it no longer and committed suicide putting some stones in her pockets and drowning herself into the river Ouse.

From “Mrs. Dalloway” – Clarissa and Septimus

It is the night of the party, Clarissa is watching outside and she is thinking about the death of Septimus

She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the room, coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating, with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed. She pulled the blind now. The clock began striking.