THE METALANGUAGE OF MODERNIST

FICTION

Too little unanimity can be identified in the modernist

literary bid, and yet one feature of modernist literature is its
explicit interest in fiction as art, or the art of fiction. As
compared to the realist narrative conventions, stress is laid upon
the mechanisms of writing, though in a manner which
distinguishes itself from the postmodernist literature. The
modernist novelists attitude to literature implies a necessary
reference to the specific medium of literature, i.e. literary
language, in a sustained effort to keep literature distinct from
reality. Language, as well as an ever-growing interest in the
nature and operation of language1 function as a feature of
modernity marking the evolution from a type of literature
centred on meaningful content to one centred on form and
writing. The modernist writer voices his/her dissatisfaction with
the inappropriateness of language, in as much as it is a medium
shared by fiction and reality, by literary and ordinary
communication. The way in which Virginia Woolf expresses her
anxiety as to the medium of literature can be considered central
to the whole modernist mood and practice. Im going to []
1

Randall, Stevenson, The British Novel since the Thirties (Iai: Institutul European, 1993) 241.

talk about words. Why they wont let themselves be made a craft
of. They tell the truth: they arent useful. That there should be
two languages: fiction and fact.2
If the modernist writers assumed a position of selfawareness to their art, and especially to the mechanisms through
which the fictional world comes into being, it is hardly
imaginable that the reader of modernism could make his way
through the intricacy of modernist writing without changing his
reading habits. He should place himself in a similar position of
awareness to the art of fiction. He is supposed to be conscious of
literature as a craft and therefore get trained in its basics or
essentials. He should be ready to give up the pleasure derived
from reading the novel as entertainment and assume the
responsibility of contributing to meaning creation. The language
used by the modernist writers draws attention to itself selfreflexively. The reader cannot thus ignore it. On the contrary, it
is only based on it that the access to reality, as imagined by the
modernists, becomes possible.
This chapter will be thus devoted to the definition of the
literary concepts that we consider necessary for a proper
understanding of modernist fiction. Explaining them in the
beginning of a course of lectures on modernism does not mean
that they are completely new to the reader of literature or that
they have not been applied to the analysis of the eighteenth or
nineteenth-century narrative conventions. It is just that the
modernist novels seem to foreground the narrative methods, in
2

Leonard Woolf, ed., A Writers Diary, Being Extracts from the Diary of V. Woolf (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1954), 260.

the sense that the previously transparent literary language that

had offered unhindered access to reality is replaced by a more
opaque one that inevitably scares and repels the reader. To get
over this feeling of frustration, it would be better for the reader
trained at the school of realism to approach a modernist novel by
moving from theory to practice, from literary concepts to
literary texts, rather than the other way round, as he had been
used to. The commonly acknowledged effort implied by the
reading of modernism will be compensated for by the
intellectual pleasure derived from coming to grips with an
undoubtedly challenging literary phenomenon.
Indispensable to the analysis and understanding of the
modernist novels are the categories of narrative technique and
character. This is the locus of most modernist deviations from
the novelistic norm of the previous centuries. Dissatisfied with
the obtrusive intrusion of the omniscient narrator, which triggers
a position of subservience on the part of the reader, the
modernist novelist loosens the control of the authorial voice
over the narrative. The all-knowing and almighty narrator is
partially silenced being compelled to a position of equality with
the characters. In exchange, the characters voices are made
more audible than they had ever been before.
Narrative technique
The narrative technique is central to the novel, and it is
important to remember that, no matter how skilful a novelist
may be in making the reader see and feel, everything comes to

us via a form of telling. The narrator is the one who tells the
story, or is assumed to be telling a story in a narrative. The
narrator is a narrative construct, a fictional voice transmitting
the story. The sense of immediacy or distance depends upon the
writers choice of a certain point of view, which is to say that the
readers access to reality is always mediated.
Point of view is the position from which the story is told. In
spite of a large number of categorisations offered by
narratologists, the main distinction is basically made between
first-person narratives and third-person narratives.
The first-person narrative is the narrative mode in which the
narrator appears as the I who recollects his/ her part in the
events related, either as a witness of or as a participant in it. The
point of view of a first-person narrator is generally limited to
his/her limited knowledge and experience, yet it has the
advantage of offering the illusion of a natural and direct access
to the protagonists thoughts and feelings. Generally, first-person
narrators are overt narrators, in the sense that they are given
noticeable characteristics and personalities, as sometimes is the
case with third-person intrusive narrators. Although conveying a
sense of direct implication and immediacy, the first-person
narrators are in most cases unreliable, because of their partial or
biased knowledge.
The third-person narrative is the most frequently used
narrative mode. Third-person narrators, usually omniscient,
stand outside the events of the story and they appear in the
narrative only under the form of a narrating voice. They have an

extensive, unlimited knowledge, which makes them highly

reliable. Third-person narrators also have a privileged access to
the characters innermost thoughts and feelings. In third-person
narratives, however, and this is especially the case of modernist
narratives, knowledge may be confined to whatever is observed
by a single character or a group of characters. In other words,
the story is filtered through the consciousness and sensibility of
one or more characters, the control of the omniscient narrator
becoming veiled and unobtrusive. In modern narratives, the
withdrawal of the omniscient narrator encourages the emergence
of multiple points of view.
From a modernist perspective, the narrator, undoubtedly a
necessity for any narrative work, becomes indispensable to the
proper formulation of the modernist writers literary standpoint.
The modernist writer is able to preserve his position of
impersonality, the presence of the narrator contributing to the
striking of the correct balance between subjectivity and
objectivity. Thus, the narrator proves his indispensability by
being an accurate and unflinching observer, schooled to that
absolute loyalty towards his feelings and sensations, [] which
an author should keep hold of in his most exalted moments of
creation.3 The apparent distortions at the level of the narrative
categories of point of view and narrator are caused by the
modernist novelists preference for the techniques used to
present consciousness in fiction.

Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, The Common Reader (London: The Hogarth Press, 1962) 286.

Character
In general terms, the character represents an existent
endowed

with

anthropomorphic

traits

and

engaged

in

anthropomorphic actions.4 Major or minor, dynamic or static,

consistent or inconsistent, flat or round, the character is one of
the main fictional constructs that creates the illusion of reality. It
is very much on the existence of the character and his
resemblance to or difference from the people in the real world
that the readers interpretation of the fictional world depends. A
character in a narrative piece of literature is constituted by
characterisation. Characterisation may be direct, in the sense
that the characters traits are given directly, though more or less
reliably, by the narrator, by the character himself, or by another
character. If the traits can be only deduced from the characters
actions, reactions, thoughts or emotions, one speaks about
indirect characterisation.5 Depending on the artistic position
adopted by the novelist, therefore on the nature of his belonging
to a certain literary current, the characterisation may produce
either typical or highly individualised characters. It seems,
however,

that

characterisation

becomes

irrelevant

with

modernist novelists, even if, from a narrative point of view, they

do not manifest readiness to renounce character.6 Subordinated
to the concept of form, and more specifically to that of structure,
the character is a possible way of access to reality, as seen by the
modernists, different from the reality of the realist writers. Most
4

Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Hampshire: Scolar Press, 1991).

see also Gerald Prince, op. cit.
6
see also chapter Character in David Daiches, op. cit.
5

modernist characters emerge from an attempt to put together the

individual and the general, repeatable aspects of life. The
difficulty arises from the fact that the individual requires an
excessive use of details, whereas access to the general would
impose the avoidance of details in a text. By using the minute
detail in the portrayal of characters the modernist feels that he is
running the risk of being too close to the realist literature.
Characters are to be merely views: personality must be avoided
at all costs. [] Directly you specify hair, age etc. something
frivolous, or irrelevant gets into the book.7 The features of
generality and indeterminate quality of the characters may make
the modernist characters seem too rigid and decorated, but by
the artfully organised structure, they always come into
significant relations with other characters who round off the
whole, eliminating the impression of artefact. Although it is
difficult to generalise, we may say that the modernist character
is perceived less as a bodily presence than, and this is especially
the case of the modernist experimenters, as a centre of
consciousness. The interest in the characters inner life and
mental mechanisms required the invention of new methods of
investigation, which the reader of modernism must be aware of
if he wants to properly decode the meaning of the modernist
work.
In a novel, a fictitious prose narrative of considerable
length, characters are usually presented in a plot, which may be
more or less complex. Plot, as the temporal synthesis effected
7

Leonard Woolf, ed., op. cit., 60-61.

by the writer of the elements of action, character, and thought

that constitute the matter of his invention 8 used to operate as an
important unifying and ordering principle of the fictional world.
Yet, though the modernists finally give up plot considering
it too restrictive for the complexity of the fictional world that
they want to render, they never imagine the possibility of
building up a work without characters. Moreover, they transfer
onto the character responsibilities relating to the narrative
construction of the fictional world, responsibilities previously
held by a third or a first-person narrator. Consequently, the
modernist writers being no longer interested in plot will
obviously lead to further emphasis on the character and his inner
life and actions. The modernists plunge into the characters
mind performed by means of consciousness investigating
techniques implies a necessary foregrounding of this narrative
category.
Plot
Paradoxically, plot is the narrative category one should
consider in the analysis of modernist fiction on account of its
absence and not because of its being central to the narrative
organisation of a novel. To grasp the degree of novelty of the
narrative formula proposed by the modernist writers, it is
essential to understand that part of the modernist innovation,
translated in their departure from the narrative conventions of
8

J. A. Honeywell, Plot in the Modern Novel, Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, eds. M Hoffman and
P. Murphy (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1993) 239.

the realist novel, resides in the resistance of modernist writing to

plot.
Any definition of plot implies a necessary reference to the
concept of story. Story represents the number of incidents
related in a novel in their chronological order, whereas plot
implies the order in which the same incidents are narrated,
which may considerably differ from the chronological one.9
The plot is the selected version of events as presented to the
reader or audience in a certain order and duration, whereas the
story is the full sequence of events as we imagine them to have
taken place in their natural order and duration.10
As events are too little relevant in the modernist fiction, and
chronological sequencing even less, prominence being given to
the characters mind and the characters subjective response to
the world of outer events, plot itself becomes irrelevant. It may
be argued that there are modernist novels in which plot still
exists. It is true, as we will try to show in the succeeding
chapters, but its function is not to organise the material provided
by the story, but rather to create the illusion that a solid realist
convention in point of novel writing is preserved. Plot, in these
cases, is that part of the readers inherited knowledge of
novelistic conventions on which innovation can be built.
Plot is the dynamic, sequential element in narrative
literature.11 Spatial art, that is the narrative which presents its
9

on the distinction story-plot and their relation to subject and motif see tefan Avdanei,
Introduction to Poetics, vol. 2 (Iai: Institutul European, 2002).
10
Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford, New York: Oxford UP,
1996)
11
Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford
UP, 1960) 207.

materials simultaneously, or in a random order, as is the case of

modernist narratives, especially aiming at making the mind
transparent, resists plot. The ordering effect of plot is generally
replaced by the more inclusive organising effect of structure.
Structure
If plot refers to the ordering of the story in a novel,
structure is a term more appropriately used to cover the overall
organisation of a piece of literature as a work of art, which
accounts for its being preferred to plot by the modernist writers.
Although the concepts of structure and form are sometimes used
interchangeably, structure represents more than form as it
subsumes categories essential to novel organisation such as plot,
theme and form. Structure is the sum total of individual
elements involved in the making of a novel, considered in their
interrelation, which produces the effect of totality and
wholeness. It is true that in a realist novel structure is closely
connected to plot and the episodic construction of a novel may,
even if only apparently, allow for a different patterning of these
episodes, without substantial meaning modifications. In a
modernist novel, however, structure plays an essential part,
compensating for the absence of plot. The effect of randomness
and disorder produced by a modernist novel is, in most cases,
the result of an elaborately devised structure. Chapter and
section, order and chronology can and do contribute to the
understanding of a novel in terms of structure. Yet a significant
role in matters of structure is performed by theme, character or

narrative technique. The organisation of a novel according to a

certain pattern involving contrast, repetition, complementarity,
with clear narrative, spatial and temporal limits induces in the
reader a sense of structure.
The major characteristic of modernist fiction remains,
however, its clear interest in the individuals inner life and
mental mechanisms. For this reason, it was compulsory that the
modernist novelists should think of techniques capable of
probing always deeper in the characters consciousness. Some of
these methods are not necessarily new. They had been
successfully, though not extensively, used in the eighteenth and
nineteenth-century novels as well. What the modernists did was
to turn them to good account in the effort to foreground the inner
reality, more complex and more real than the outer one.
Probing consciousness through the different consciousness
investigating techniques and giving up plot as a structural
element are closely related to the modernists philosophy of
time, consonant with Freuds and Bergsons ideas at the
beginning of the twentieth century. This philosophy of time, as
chronology and duration, as a mental incorporation of objective
time into subjective time, is artfully synthesised in Virginia
Woolfs Orlando.
But time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and
vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has
no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of
man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the

body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer

element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or
a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an
hour may be accurately represented in the timepiece of
the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy
between time on the clock and time in the mind is less
known

than

it

should

be

and

deserves

fuller

investigation. [] time when [man] is thinking becomes

inordinately long; time when he is doing becomes
inordinately short. (47)
Techniques to investigate consciousness in fiction
A term coined by William James to show the way in which
consciousness presents itself, stream of consciousness has come
to be closely associated with the activity of the modernist
writers, intent on presenting the inner life of characters as
accurately as possible. The concept, indispensable as it has
proved itself to be, on which much of the correct decoding of
modernist fiction depends, has been, however, subject to many
clarifying discussions from the literary point of view.
The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms refers to
stream of consciousness as the continuous flow of senseperceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human
mind; or a literary method of representing such a blending of
mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an
unpunctuated or disjoined form of interior monologue.

Quoting a series of referential names in the field, Gerald

Prince in Dictionary of Narratology mentions the fact that the
meanings of stream of consciousness and interior monologue
have often tended to overlap, but he also indicates that there
have been tendencies to contrast the two. [Interior monologue]
would present a characters thoughts rather than impressions or
perceptions, while [stream of consciousness] would present both
impressions and thoughts. The difference in meaning and in the
capacity of investigating the characters mental world is
paralleled by the grammatical difference between the two. While
interior monologue respects morphology and syntax, stream of
consciousness presupposes the absence of punctuation, syntax
and morphology, being thus able to capture thought in a
preverbal stage, before any logical connection has been
linguistically established.
Although both definitions mentioned above might partially
hold true, we consider that they cannot cover all the possibilities
of presenting consciousness that modernist fiction confronts its
reader with. It is true that one cannot help noticing Joyces
preference for presenting consciousness by the interior
monologue and everybody is aware at present that Joyce is
definitely responsible for setting up the modernist canon. Yet it
cannot be denied that it is impossible to account for numerous
passages in Woolfs or Lawrences novels in terms of interior
monologue. In those passages the presence of an omniscient
narrator is still felt, while the reader intuits the fact that what he
finally gets is nothing but the characters mind.

Our presentation of the consciousness investigating

techniques is largely based on Dorrit Cohns study Transparent
Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in
Fiction which manages to provide the reader of modernism with
the appropriate investigation instruments, covering situations in
which the technique of the interior monologue cannot be
applied. Cohn identifies various modes of objectifying
consciousness and fictional minds in the two major narrative
contexts we have already referred to: third-person contexts, and
this is the most frequent case, and first-person contexts. The
terminology Cohn uses also proves very useful as it manages to
grasp accurately and subtly the differences between various
degrees of involvement on the part of the narrator as well as
various ways of access to a characters mind.
Dorrit Cohns theory is founded on three modes of
presenting consciousness in third-person contexts. The first one,
psycho-narration, refers to the narrators discourse about a
characters consciousness. It is a technique frequently used to
summarise feeling, needs, reactions which are so diffuse that
they cannot be properly rendered in a characters own idiom.
The second one, quoted interior monologue, relates to a
characters mental discourse, distilling moments of pointed
self-address that may relate only distantly to the original
emotion.12 The third, the narrated monologue, is defined as
the characters mental discourse in the guise of the narrators
12

Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978) 44.

discourse. Grammatically, the styles adopted to express the

characters thoughts are those available to express the
characters words: direct, indirect and free indirect speech, the
reporting verb that indicates speech being replaced by a
reporting verb suggesting a mental process.
Psycho-narration
The omniscient nineteenth-century realist novelist would
have had at his disposal, technically speaking, the best narrative
environment to use psycho-narration, had it not been for his
manifest interest in events and his intention to keep the action
moving

and

place

the

character

in

various

revealing

relationships with other characters. The realist writer was so

keen on constructing plot that he reduced the psycho-analytical
instances to that minimum that he considered necessary to serve
his narrative purpose. The term events, therefore, also covers
the large number of characters and situations the writer had to
handle and control by a rapid movement in space and time. Only
too little room was left for the characters inner lives and
unexpressed thoughts. Omniscience offered the novelist a far
more tempting possibility. He had the privilege, which the
modernists consciously chose to give up, of being able to
generalise about human nature. The individual character was
given less credit as a consciousness since it represented mainly
an example at hand on whose basis generalisation could be
made. Consequently, what the novelist assumed as known, the
characters consciousness, was seldom rendered manifest,

except for the cases when it engendered the formulation of

general truths about the human condition. Instead of allowing
the character to hold central stage, this type of narration
ostentatiously dealt with the intelligence and character of a
narrator who was foregrounded to the fictional individuals
detriment. In the realist novels, psycho-narration inevitably
points to the omniscient narrators superiority to the narrated
consciousness. Arnold Bennetts Anna of the Five Towns
provides readers with numerous examples of conventionally
used psycho-narration.
They could go back into the past and find other cases
where a swift impulse had shattered the edifice of a
lifetime. They knew that the history of families and of
communities is changeless, irrepressible, incurable. They
were aware of the astonishing fact, which takes at least
thirty years to learn, that a Sunday-school superintendent
is a man. (140)
With the psychological novel, which displays a new marked
interest in the characters inner self, the previously vociferous
omniscient narrators are silenced and they become veiled.
Although the fictional consciousness moves to the fore, there are
narrators who go on imposing a certain distance between
themselves and the consciousness they narrate, drawing the
readers attention to their own presence as well as to a difference
in perspective between narrator and character.

In the following fragment from The Ambassadors Henry

James, who generally prefers a certain indirect and oblique
view of [the] presented action by seeing his story through the
opportunity and the sensibility of some [] witness or
reporter13, Strethers in this case, uses psycho-narration to
analyse Strethers inner motions. In other words, although James
chooses Strether as the character through whose eyes and
sensibility he should filter the whole action, by adopting the
technique of psycho-narration, it is precisely Strethers inner self
that James brings under the narrators scrutinising lens. Thus,
even if Henry James pleads in favour of a veiled narrator, in this
example the narrators voice is still audible and his perspective
is distinct from Strethers on whom most of the narrative
responsibility in the novel is passed.
It might, on repetition, as a mystification, have irritated
our friend [Strether] a little; but he knew, as we have
seen, where he was, and his being proof against
everything was only another attestation that he meant to
stay there. (180) (my emphasis)
Yet, though the narrators perspective is kept distinct from
the characters, it is not perceived as superior and intruding, as
in the case of Bennetts text. The possessive adjective our and
the subject of the paranthetical sentence, together with the tense
shift from past to present signal the disparity of voice between
13

Henry James, Preface to The Golden Bowl quoted in Rodica Kereaski, Lectures in 20th Century
English Literature (Bucureti: Tipografia Universitii din Bucureti, 1977) 95.

character and narrator, without placing the latter in a position of

superiority to the former. The personal pronoun we, also
including the reader, limits the narrators knowledge only to the
knowledge that has already reached the reader by means of the
narrative, so thanks to Strethers mediation.
The same effect of distinctiveness of voice and views is
obtained in the following fragment from Woolfs To the
Lighthouse. Lilys and Tansleys flows of thought are
unobtrusively altered by the presence of another consciousness,
that of the narrator, revealed by the pronoun one, which could
have its origin only in the narrators generalising thoughts. The
fact that the narrators voice is equal in intensity with the
characters voices is also suggested by its being discreetly
placed in between brackets.
What damned rot they talk, thought Charles Tansley,
laying down his spoon precisely in the middle of his
plate, which he had swept clean, as if, Lily thought (he
sat opposite to her with his back to the window precisely
in the middle of view), he were determined to make sure
of his meals. Everything about him had that meagre
fixity, that bare unloveliness. But nevertheless, the fact
remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if
one looked at them. She liked his eyes; they were blue,
deep set, frightening. (312)

Similar in intention, i.e. to silence audible narrators and

enable the foregrounding of fictional consciousness, the two
texts differ as to their narrative realisation. While Henry James
learns to veil his narrator and to assign narrative tasks to the
character,

Virginia

Woolf

foregrounds

the

fictional

consciousness and learns to give due, though not exaggerated,

credit to the omniscient narrator, whose voice, equal in intensity
with that of the character, contributes to keeping the narrative
under tighter control.
An alternative position is that of a veiled narrator who
almost completely identifies with the fictional consciousness.
Thus the narrative creates the illusion of a perfect coincidence
between the authorial and the characters voices. The
consonance of the two voices makes the reader perceive the
narrators knowledge of the characters mind as coincident with
the characters self-knowledge. The modernist writers generally
prefer more direct monologic techniques of presenting
consciousness in their novels, such as the interior monologue or
the narrated monologue. Yet they also resort to this type of
consonant psycho-narration, which indicates the fact that they
feel it closer to the more direct monologic techniques
extensively used in the stream-of-consciousness novels.
A good example of consonant psycho-narration is offered
by Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, its narrators
characteristic being the ability to adapt his style to the age and
mood of the novels hero. The narrator is still a reporter of the
characters thoughts, feelings and sensations. He uses a language

full of verbs and nouns of consciousness, but deliberately avoids

assuming the position of superiority which would have been
indicated by the presence of explanatory commentaries or the
presence of subordination such as He thought that. The
narrator is sympathetic with the characters thoughts and
feelings, the reporting being carried out by metaphor, and not by
abstractions or generalities. The tone is always highly
individualised and involved, never neutral.
He heard the sob passing loudly down his fathers throat
and opened his eyes with a nervous impulse. The
sunlight breaking suddenly on his sight turned the sky
and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses with
lakelike spaces of dark rosy light. His very brain was
sick and powerless. He could scarcely interpret the letters
of the signboards of the shops. By his monstrous way of
life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of
reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real
world unless he heard in it echoes of the infuriated cries
within him. He could respond to no earthly or human
appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of summer and
gladness and companionship, wearied and dejected by
his fathers voice. He could scarcely recognise as his his
own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself. (104-105)
Although considered more appropriate for rendering the
mind transparent in the nineteenth-century conventional novels,

psycho-narration is still preserved as a technique by the

modernists because of one major advantage that neither the
quoted interior monologue nor the narrated monologue can
have. While both the interior monologue and the narrated
monologue are, from a temporal point of view, limited to the
very instant when the character formulates his silent speech,
psycho-narration is temporally flexible, and its flexibility is
almost limitless, due to the narrators possible movement in time
over a larger time span. Dorrit Cohn considers that one of the
reasons why psycho-narration still exists as a means of
expressing consciousness in twentieth-century fiction, in spite of
the narrators apparently omniscient intrusion, is its temporal
elasticity which allows both contraction of a longer time span
and expansion of the instant.
Psycho-narration is a way of articulating a characters inner
life in the competent and accurate words of a narrator at
moments when thoughts are so deep and obscure that there is an
increased risk of their remaining unverbalised but for the
narrators verbalising intervention.
Of all modernist novelists, D.H. Lawrence is the one who
manifests a marked preference for psycho-narration. His
preference is accounted for by the fact that his novels deal with
zones of the subconscious or the unconscious whose
presentation always requires a narrators mediation. In Cohns
opinion, any one of D.H. Lawrences novels yields a rich

metaphoric complex, made up of all kinds of electromagnetic,

igneous, and meteorological hyperboles.14
As a characteristic of Lawrences narrative, in almost all
cases when the writer chooses to use psycho-narration to render
the sub- or unconscious visible, the reader is more or less
explicitly warned about the nature of the psychic states that are
being narrated.
She sounded purely anxious. Nevertheless, Gudrun, with
her arms outspread and her face uplifted, went in a
strange palpitating dance towards the cattle, lifting her
body towards them as if in a spell, her feet pulsing as if
in some little frenzy of unconscious sensation, her arms,
her wrists, her hands stretching and heaving and falling
and reaching and reaching and falling, her breasts lifted
and shaken towards the cattle, her throat exposed as in
some voluptuous ecstasy towards them, whilst she
drifted imperceptibly nearer, an uncanny white figure,
towards them, carried away in its own rapt trance, ebbing
in strange fluctuations upon the cattle, that waited, and
ducked their heads a little in sudden contraction from
her, watching all the time as if hypnotised, their bare
horns branching in the clear light, as the figure of the
women ebbed upon them, in the slow, hypnotising
convulsion of the dance. (Women in Love, 196) (my
emphasis)
14

Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., 49.

Paradoxically, and most surprisingly, the writers whose

intention is to present the mind and the inner self as directly as
possible have to resort to the most indirect of methods when
they come to the portrayal of the most deeply hidden zones of
psychic life, the subconscious and the unconscious. Thus, no
matter how serious the writers reluctance to it might have been,
psycho-narration proved indispensable as the most direct,
indeed the unique, path that leads to the sub-verbal depth of the
mind.15
Quoted Interior Monologue
The interior monologue or the quoted monologue is
another technique used to present a characters consciousness. It
is not an invention of the modernists, but in the eighteenth and
nineteenth-century novels characters were allowed the freedom
to express their thoughts and feelings in the form of the quoted
monologue only after elaborate introductions on the part of the
omniscient narrators. The narrators and the characters voices
were felt as clearly distinct. The presence of the introductory
formulas (he thought, he whispered, she asked herself)
combined with the use of the quotation marks drew the readers
attention to the existence of two points of view, different or
coincident, yet distinct. Because of the clear distinctiveness of
voices, the method of interspersing the narrators discourse and
the characters interior monologue is seldom, if ever, used by the
15

Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., 56.

modern(ist) writers. It is very difficult, almost impossible, to

find such alternations even in works such as James, Lawrences
or Conrads, whose indebtedness to the techniques of realism is
quite obvious. This avoidance may be accounted for by the fact
that the modernists considered the separation of voices a much
too explicit, even annoying, separation between the external and
the mental worlds. Or, what the modernist practice tends to
demonstrate is exactly a continuity between the exterior world
and the world of the mind.
When Lawrence intends to be most conventional in
technique, readers might come across combinations of quoted
monologue and psycho-narration, which simultaneously point to
the disparity of voice and to the narrators position of
superiority.
Paul wished he were stupid. I wish, he thought to
himself, I was fat like him, and like a dog in the sun. I
wish I was a pig and a brewers waggoner. (Sons and
Lovers, 114)
In the modern novel, James Joyces work providing the
clearest examples, the separation line between the narrators
discourse and the characters inner discourse is wiped off, the
effect being one of increased textual continuity. The characters
monologue and the narrators reported discourse melt into each
other, being almost impossible to distinguish between the two.
The interior monologue is no longer signalled by the use of the

quotation marks, but by the shift of tense from past to present,

the change in person, and sometimes the specificity of the
monologues idiom, the more so as the introductory formulas are
very often dropped.
The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the
world again. Enough of this place. Brings you a bit
nearer every time. Last time I was here was Mrs Sinicos
funeral. Poor papa too. The love that kills. And even
scraping up the earth at night with a lantern like that case
I read to get at fresh buried females or even putrefied
with running gravesores. Give you the creeps after a bit.
I will appear to you after death. You will see my ghost
after death. My ghost will haunt you after death. There is
another world after death named hell. I do not like that
other world she wrote. No more do I. Plenty to see and
hear and feel. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them
sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me
this innings. Warm beds: warm fullblooded life.
(Ulysses, 121)
With the exception of the first sentence signalling the
presence of the narrator, the paragraph includes Leopold
Blooms monologue, apparently unmarked and unanchored. To
become aware of his having smoothly entered the characters
consciousness, although he is not encouraged to keep the
narrators and the characters voices distinct, the reader must be

highly perceptive. He must identify the change in person from

the third to the first, the shift of tense from past to present, and
most importantly, as is often the case with Joyces quoted
monologues, the passage from the narrators narrative language
to the characters idiom.
According to Cohn, even when the frequency of occurrence
of the thinking verbs is higher in the modern psychological
novels, their function is rather an incantatory than one of
separating the narrators and the characters discourse. Their
being used rather redundantly is reminiscent of the narrators
presence, without, however, imposing the narrator as an
aggressively distinct voice. Virginia Woolfs The Waves is a
radical experiment in this direction. If it were not for the
minimal introductory formulas, the novel would be easily
regarded as an autonomous monologue under the form of a firstperson text. The Waves is a multiplication of quoted
monologues, introduced by minimal narratorial interventions, on
account of which the reader interprets the text as a third-person
and not as a first-person one. There are, however, instances in
Woolfs novel when the reader is required to make a
considerable effort in order to correctly assign the interior words
to a certain character. The interior monologue extends across
paragraph boundaries and there is no repetition of the narrators
orienting intervention.

Now the wind lifts the blind, said Susan, Jars, bowls,
matting and the shabby arm-chair with the hole in it are
now become distinct. []
I cannot be divided, or kept apart. I was sent to school;
I was sent to Switzerland to finish my education. I hate
linoleum; I hate fir trees and mountains. []
But who am I, who lean on this gate and watch my
setter nose in a circle? I think sometimes (I am not
twenty yet) I am not a woman, but the light that falls on
this gate, on this ground. [] (72-73)
The text goes on like this presenting Susans monologue for
a couple of other pages, without the narrators signalling again
that it is Susans thoughts that the reader is experiencing. The
only graphical mark, of which less attentive readers may
sometimes be unaware, is the absence of closing inverted
commas at the end of those paragraphs that are to be interpreted
as a single characters monologue.
By adopting the technique of the quoted monologue, the
narrator draws the readers attention to his still being in control
of the narrative. The narrator may be more or less neutral,
depending on which the reader will be more or less aware of the
distinctiveness of viewpoints, narrators and characters. There
are novels in which the interior monologue is embedded in and
connected to psycho-narration. But in these cases, the interior
monologue readily lends its idiom to psycho-narration, which
gets thus contaminated and more difficult to recognise.

He snorted. He felt about this engagement as he always

felt about any engagement; the girl is much too good for
that young man. Slowly it came into her head, why is it
then that one wants people to marry? What was the
value, the meaning of things? (Every word they said now
would be true.) Do say something, she thought, wishing
only to hear his voice. For the shadow, the thing folding
them in was beginning, she felt, to close round her again.
Say anything, she begged, looking at him, as if for help.
(Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 355)
This contamination in cases in which the two techniques
happen to occur together is suggestive of the fact that psychonarration and interior monologue do not usually tolerate each
other in character-oriented narrative situations. The narrators
investigation of the characters consciousness through psychonarration alongside the characters voicing of his own inner life
create narrative discontinuities, inducing in the reader a feeling
of arbitrariness and redundancy of perspective. This is the
reason why, more often than not, modernist novelists avoided
such a combination, preferring instead a mixture of psychonarration and narrated monologue, whose effect of continuity
was far closer to their intention of equalising the narrative
voices involved. In a novel like Joyces Ulysses, which abounds
in quoted interior monologues and where the passage from
narration to quotation is so smooth that it is almost impossible to

tell for sure where one ends and the other begins, psychonarration is hardly ever used. Not only are the quotation marks
which signal this passage omitted, but there are hardly verbs of
consciousness such as he thought or he pondered to announce
the use of psycho-narration.
Mr. Bloom walked behind the eyeless feet, a flatcut suit
of herringbone tweed. Poor young fellow! How on earth
did he know that van was there? Must have felt it. See
things in their foreheads perhaps. Kind of sense of
volume. Weight. Would he feel it if something was
removed? Feel a gap. Queer idea of Dublin he must
have, tapping his way round by the stones. Could he
walk in a beeline if he hadnt that cane? Bloodless pious
face like a fellow going in to be a priest. (191)
This specific use of the quoted monologue in a third-person
narrative context results in a subjective rendering of the internal
vision, on the one hand, and on a mixture of subjective and
objective expression of the external happenings, on the other.
Besides, in Ulysses the narrator and the character share not only
the field of vision, but also the idiom through which they relate
it.
The quoted interior monologues create the illusion that the
reader has access to what the character really thinks or feels, as
the narrator lends the quotation of his characters silent
thoughts the same authority he lends to the quotation of the

words they speak to others.16 We may thus say that the use of
the quoted interior monologue has the same effect in
psychological realist novels as the use of the dialogue. In point
of illusion creation, they perform, roughly speaking, the same
function: just as the dialogues create the illusion that they
render what characters really say to each other, monologues
create the illusion that they render what a character really
thinks to himself.17. Yet although the monologue seems to
resemble

the

dialogue

grammatically,

the

two

differ

semantically, as in the monologue I (person speaking) you

(person spoken to) coincide, each pronoun containing the other
within itself.
Narrated Monologue
The narrated monologue is mainly a literary invention. It is
a third mode of rendering a characters consciousness in thirdperson contexts. This technique is characterised by a
transformation of the characters thought or language into the
narrative language of third-person fiction. 18 The narrators words
function as a mask for the characters inner voice. Both on
account of the ambiguity of voice generated by the use of this
technique and of the highly delusive form of this same
technique, the modernist novelists seem to have shared a clear
preference for the narrated monologue. The preference for a less
16

Dorrit Cohn., op. cit., 76.

Ibid., 76.
18
The style underlying it is the free indirect one, a major mode of representing speech and thought,
situated between indirect speech and direct speech. For a more detailed description of free indirect
discourse see Michael Toolan, Narrative. A Critical Linguistic Introduction (London and New York:
Routledge, 1991)
17

direct technique of rendering consciousness may surprise us in

the light of our discussion of the two other techniques presented
before. There certainly are modernists, Lawrence for instance,
who show, as a general characteristic of their work, a
predilection for psycho-narration, so for a more indirect
technique.

Some

others,

especially

the

so-called

experimentalists, Joyce, in particular, privilege the interior

monologue, a far more direct technique of presenting
consciousness. Yet, all of them assimilate the narrated
monologue as a convenient way of accessing the characters
inner world under the guise of the narrators words. The
consensus regarding the effectiveness of this technique may be
accounted for in two ways. Firstly, the modernists aim at a
certain degree of impersonality, which this mixture of voices is
likely to ensure. Secondly, the modernists intention is to free
the reader, while still maintaining the authorial control over the
narrative, which could be better effected by a less direct mode of
expressing the characters consciousness. Since the narrated
monologue wipes off the boundary between narration and
quotation, it is a technique privileged by those narratives which
focus on the characters mental and emotional life.
Let us consider the following fragments from the work of
various modernist novelists, sometimes having divergent
attitudes as to how to express the fictional mind and inner world.
What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her
party! A young man had killed himself. And they talked

of it at her party the Bradshaws talked of death. He

had killed himself but how? Always her body went
through it, when she was told, first, suddenly, of an
accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had
thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the
ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the
rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his
brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it.
But why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it
at her party! (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 203)
He was walking down along the matting and he saw the
door before him. It was impossible: he could not. He
thought of the baldy head of the prefect of studies with
the cruel noncoloured eyes looking at him and he heard
the voice of the prefect of studies asking him twice what
his name was. Why could he not remember the name
when he was told the first time? Was he not listening the
first time or was it to make fun out of the name? The
great men in the history had names like that and nobody
made fun of them. It was his own name that he should
have made fun of if he wanted to make fun. Dolan: it was
like the name of a woman who washed clothes. (Joyce,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 62)
As he dried himself a little with his handkerchief, he
thought about Hermione and the blow. He could feel a

pain on the side of his head. But after all, what did it
matter? What did Hermione matter, what did people
matter altogether? There was this perfect cool loneliness,
so lovely and fresh and unexplored. Really, what a
mistake he had made, thinking he wanted people,
thinking he wanted a woman. He did not want a woman
not in the least. (Lawrence, Women in Love, 129)
The narrated monologue confronts the reader with an
alternation between narration and reflection. There is a constant
movement in and out of the fictional mind, movement which
sometimes is almost imperceptible, as there is a coincidence
between the basic reporting tense and the tense used in the
characters language. Thus the inner and outer worlds are
perceived as fused, being extremely difficult at moments to
decide whether it is the fictional mind or the narrators
unobtrusive intervention that one contemplates.
The narrated monologue is to be seen as a strategy of
compromise between quoted interior monologue and psychonarration. The narrated monologue and the quoted monologue
share the question forms, the expressive elements, the
incomplete sentences, the deictic orientation. What keeps the
two techniques distinct is the use of tenses and pronouns,
whereas the distinction between narrated monologue and
psycho-narration resides in the absence of introductory mental
verbs in the former technique. Thus the narrated monologue is

felt to be a technique more direct than psycho-narration and

more oblique or indirect than the quoted monologue.
The obvious ambiguity of voice inherent in the narrated
monologue leads to its being perceived as suspended between
the immediate quotation and the mediated narration. Being a
strategy of compromise, it is favoured by most modernist
novelists, as it strikes a proper balance between the omniscient
narrators control and the fictional minds independence.
Consequently, the use of the narrated monologue also effects a
subtle compromise between the innovative experimental
modernist elements and the necessary, though apparently
rejected, realist convention. Paradoxically at first sight, it is
exactly those novelists who devised the techniques of the
dramatic novel, in James terms, who aimed at an objective
narration and opted for unobtrusive narrators that willingly
adopted the narrated monologue, as a means of reintroducing the
subjectivity of personal experience into the novel.
Yet, if the first two techniques presented above characterise
a monologic type of narrative, the narrated monologue is a
strategy specific to a dialogic one. Besides, the narrated
monologue is a choice medium for revealing a fictional mind
suspended in an instant present, between a remembered past and
an anticipated future19, reason for which it is preferred both by
those modernists who are more conservative in point of form,
such as Lawrence, and by those who are more experimental in
their novels, such as Woolf.
19

Dorrit Cohn, op. cit., 126.

The complexity of the modernist novels derives from the

fact that the narrated monologue never appears in isolation. It is
frequently alternated and mingled with the indirectness of
narratorial intervention, under the form of psycho-narration, or
the directness of figural consciousness, under the form of quoted
interior monologue. The combination of techniques offers a
profound and complete image of the characters intricate inner
life with a clear movement in depth from the conscious level to
the unconscious one.
Given the fact that there may be autobiographical narrators
who are expected to have inner lives of their own to narrate,
there are also modes of presenting consciousness in first-person
contexts. Paralleling the three devices described above, whose
frequency of occurrence in modernist novels is hardly
contestable, one can identify means by which the consciousness
can be objectified from the problematic standpoint of a narrator
investigating his or her inner self in the first person. They are
called, using Cohns terminology, self-narration, self-quoted or
self-narrated monologue. Yet, in the case of the modernist
novelists such modes of presentation do only seldom appear.
And, in the rare situations when they appear, they are just
instances of radical experimentation embedded within a more
general third-person framework. That is why we shall refer to
them when approaching radical experiments in a novel such as
Woolfs The Waves or an episode such as Penelope in Joyces
Ulysses. It may be also profitable to focus on first-person

narrators when trying to account for the intricacy of narration

such as that offered by Conrad in his novels.
Setting
We may ask ourselves how important setting is as a
convention in a novel that focuses almost exclusively on the
mental activities and the inner life of the characters. No matter if
it is vague or more precise, if it presented objectively or if it
acquires a symbolic function, the setting refers to the spatial and
temporal circumstances in which the events of a narrative
occur.20 Or, modernist novelists have proved that events are by
far less relevant than what is going on at a mental level.
To be able to understand the literary significance of the
setting in a modernist novel, we have to start from a definition
of the term and what exactly it covers in its broadest sense. 21 In a
restricted sense, setting may be used to refer to the place and
time where the characters appear, including their social context.
In a broader acceptation, it can cover the customs, beliefs and
mentalities of a specific type of society, the particular locations
in which events take place, but also the atmosphere and mood
created by all the other elements.
Because of its close relationship to plot and character,
setting proved indispensable as a novelistic convention to the
realist writers. In the nineteenth-century realist novel, the setting
was used either to render the characters mood or to contribute
to the definition of the characters situation. When explicitly
pushed to the fore, the setting expressed mainly the theme of the
20
21

see Gerald Prince, op. cit.

see Richard Gill, Mastering English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1995).

novel, and consequently the authors view of the world, at times

becoming even more important than characters or plot.
Although they gave up plot or reduced it to a minimum,
giving prominence to characters and especially to the characters
inner reality, modernists never thought of abandoning the
supportive materiality of setting. Keen on the significance of
each detail in their novels, they definitely made setting into a
highly significant element of their work. Yet no common
denominator can be found for the particular use made of setting
in particular novels by particular modernist novelists. They
seem, however, to agree that setting, as part of an inherited set of
conventions, should be preserved and turned to good account if
an understanding of their work was to be facilitated. In other
words, they knew that setting was a compulsory ingredient in
the readers recipe for what a good novel should be and this
knowledge had to be profited by. Setting gets thus assimilated to
character, it is, in a way, internalised. In spite of its being
delineated in a delusively realist manner, the modernist setting is
characterised by indeterminacy, more often than not acquiring a
symbolic value, which contributes to a better understanding both
of character and of the writers worldview.
Symbol
In its most straightforward sense, a symbol is taken to mean
anything standing for or representing something else beyond it,
generally an idea that one conventionally associates with it.
Thus the symbol is used to evoke unseen worlds or to move one

beyond appearance, towards a hidden order of everyday reality.22

According to Kant, the symbol refers to the attributes of an
object which serve the rational idea as a substitute for logical
presentation, but with the proper function of animating the mind
by opening out for it a prospect into the field of kindred
representations stretching beyond its ken23. In simpler terms, a
symbol is a word or phrase that points to a concrete referent be
it object, scene or action that also takes some deeper
significance conventionally associated with it.
Being always interested in the beyond of things, all
modernists make extensive use of symbols, sometimes weaving
them into an elaborate texture without whose proper
understanding the overall meaning of the novel is incomplete.
This is obviously the case of Lawrences novels, which abound
in symbols whose main function is to move the reader beyond
appearance, but even more importantly, toward those hidden
zones of the human self difficult to unveil and thus suggestively
evoked by means of symbols. There are modernist novels
explicitly constructed around a central symbol, which works
alongside character, setting and theme. Ivory is central to
Conrads Heart of Darkness, silver is central to the same
modernist novelists Nostromo, the lighthouse is indispensable
to the proper understanding of Woolfs To the Lighthouse.
A symbol is also seen as a highly evocative image. Rather
vaguely, imagery is held to express those uses of literary
22

see Roger Fowler, ed., A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms (London and New York: Routledge,
1999).
23
quoted in Roger Fowler, ed., op. cit., 240-241.

language that evoke sense-impressions by reference to concrete

or perceptible objects, actions or states. The imagery of a literary
work includes the set of images available in that specific work,
which most often are pictures appealing primarily to sight, but
may also be interpreted in terms of the other senses.
Yet, no matter how important these rather insubstantial
aspects may be to the correct decoding of the works meaning,
the reader of literature should never forget that they take on
meaning only within a more comprehensive framework that
includes plot, structure, narrative technique, character and so on.
Parody
We would say that parody is also a means of probing
beyond, more specialised and highly analytical. It is a
subversive technique used to bring under a critical lens the
potentialities or limitations of a certain work, style, technique,
by imitation, or better said mimicry. We could say that parody
characterises a dialogic type of literature, which mainly
addresses an educated and knowledgeable audience, capable of
understanding the critical activity as inherent to the literary
enterprise and not separated from it. Parody always presupposes
the impersonation of the alien style, although the parodists
intentions may differ substantially. [It] always attacks its butt
indirectly, through style; it quotes from and alludes to its
original, abridging and inverting its characteristic devices.24
This is done with a view to making an ironic comment either on
24

Roger Fowler, ed., op. cit., 172-173.

the original or on the new work or to questioning the

appropriateness of existing techniques for the expression of a
certain reality. If a serious style is applied to a trivial subject
matter, parody comes closer to the burlesque. If it is used to
criticise manners or behaviour, it is related to satire. But the
most compelling situation from the point of view of the
modernist writer and the reader of modernism is to be found in
parody critically analysing style itself and its expressive
potentialities.
Joyce, who practically tried out all imaginable techniques of
investigation of the real, makes the most extensive use of parody
in his work. His intentions are less those of a satirist than those
of a self-aware creator interested in analysing the very
potentialities of language and seeing how deeply language, as an
investigation instrument, can go into the darkest recesses of the
real.
The following court scene in Joyces Ulysses is narrated in a
style that parodies the style of Celtic legends, with clear
reference to the Druid system, which casts a special ironic light
upon the debased contemporary Irish society and the workings
of its inhabitants, be they learned or not.
And whereas on the sixteenth day of the month of the
oxeyed goddess and in the third week after the feastday
of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the daughter of the
skies, the virgin moon being then in her first quarter, it
came to pass that those learned judges repaired them to

the halls of law. There master Courtenay, sitting in his

own chamber, gave his rede and master Justice Andrews
sitting without a jury in the probate court, weighed well
and pondered the claims of the first chargeant upon the
property in the matter of the will propounded and final
testamentary disposition in re the real and personal estate
of the late lamented Jacob Halliday, vintner, deceased
versus Livingstone, and infant, of unsound mind, and
another. (340)
In Chapter One, modernism was defined both within the
system of the literary tradition and within the cultural context
characteristic of the turn of the century. In Chapter Two,
modernism was defined starting both from the theoretical
contributions of important turn-of-the-century and modernist
novelists and based on the contradictory response generated
by modernism in the age. Both chapters have been underlain
by the clear effort to generalise on modernism and the main
issues relating to the modernist novel, the individual
novelists contributions being used only as necessary
exemplification. The subsequent chapters are underlain by the
effort to particularise. They will offer a more detailed reading
of the works of some of the novelists generally associated
with the canon of modernism, with a view to demonstrating
that the modernist art of fiction simultaneously implies
observance of and deviation from the narrative norms. No
matter how experimental the modernist novelists may have

been in their intention to represent what they considered to be

the more real reality, they never disregarded their position
within the larger framework of the literary tradition. It is only
based on the proper assimilation and exploitation of the
inherited conventions that the modernists could make their
experiment intelligible and accessible to their readers.