MODERN NOVELS AND NOVELISTS

One way to understand the modern novel is to show its development in the work of writers such
as Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and William
Faulkner. This list is by no means exclusive, but it represents those authors who are essential
figures of the modernist literary canon.

Along with their modernist contemporaries, Conrad, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, and Faulkner
are “modern” because they share certain literary preoccupations with an unstable modern world,
have a diminishing belief in the idea of progress, are concerned with the radical subjectivity of
the self, and, consequently, are preoccupied with the novelist’s need to present “reality” from
multiple perspectives. Of paramount concern to modernists is the question of how the world is
perceived—or, rather, their concern is the difficulty of perceiving the world as an agreed upon or
objective reality. Thus, the modern novel relies on stream-of-consciousness narrators and even
unreliable witnesses to the present and the past, underscoring the strenuous effort by novelist and
reader alike to arrive at a semblance of the truth. The modern novel, in other words, has an
epistemological thrust, a dynamic questioning of what its characters know and how they think
they know it.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

Many commentators on the modern novel date its inception to World War I—and its aftermath—
because its horrors led to skepticism about moral values, religious principles, and political
convictions that nineteenth century writers and readers believed were universal and enduring.
The basic elements of modernism, however, evolved earlier; they appeared in Joseph Conrad’s
early work, completed before World War I.

Conrad experienced the sort of displacement and disorientation that are the hallmarks of high
modernism, that is, of novels that inquire into the foundations of civilization, the core beliefs and
modes of perception that nineteenth century novelists took for granted or only fitfully
questioned. This was a time when Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud first began to
undermine the Victorian confidence in a coherent universe.

Conrad grew up in Russian-occupied Poland, the son of an impoverished

Polish nobleman who wrote political plays and was persecuted by the
Russians. Early on, Conrad absorbed the devastating history of Poland, an
enlightened country that had been partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and had risen against its oppressors in several
futile rebellions. Conrad left his native land and went to sea, deciding
several years later to reestablish himself in England and pursue writing as a
career.

Conrad doubted the Victorian notion of progress. His novels, such as Heart
of Darkness (1899 serial, 1902 book), reminded the British that their island
nation had once been a part of the Roman Empire and that the British
“moment” in history—its pride in the achievements of imperialism—might
be just that: a moment. Conrad ridiculed the European notion that its
economy and political structures would prevail in history. He exposed the
futile blindness of such pretensions in Nostromo (1904), a novel that
prophetically described the repetitive round of revolution and
counterrevolution and reaction that would pervade much of twentieth
century South and Central America, even as Europeans and Americans
invested in undeveloped countries and deluded themselves into believing
their presence would result in a socially, economically, and politically
improved world.

Charlie Marlow, Conrad’s narrator in Heart of Darkness, Victory (1915),

and other works, is a quintessential modernist because he cannot
complacently accept civilization like his contemporaries. His views are
antiheroic and anti-Romantic; he questions nineteenth century hero
worship, which led Romantic and Victorian writers such as Thomas Carlyle
and Ralph Waldo Emerson to argue that history is made by “great men” and
that history itself is just the sum of innumerable biographies of great men.
Kurtz in Heart of Darkness sets out to become one of these great men, and
it is Marlow’s task to discover why Kurtz fails—not merely as a person but
as a representative of a Western civilization attempting to bring its values
to the so-called savages in Africa.

Marlow meditates on Kurtz’s intentions. Is Kurtz’s corruption, his

assumption of absolute power over the indigenous peoples, the logical if
unforeseen result of his arrogant quest to save them? Marlow questions and
doubts his ability to understand not only Kurtz’s story but also history itself.
Does history, in fact, have a meaning? Even more troubling is Marlow’s
inability to tell the truth about Kurtz to Kurtz’s fiancé, a proper Victorian
woman who cannot begin to understand how Kurtz succumbed to evil, the
heart of darkness that humans, the novel implies, are all too inclined to
perpetuate.

Conrad’s contribution to the modern novel is enormous. He brought a

brooding, musing sensibility to narrative and an awareness of the way
human consciousness feeds on itself and elaborates whole worlds rather
than just describing them. The great tradition of nineteenth century was
realism: The novelist attempted to accurately convey the world and render
its complexity. The focal point, in other words, was the world, not human
consciousness, although certain late nineteenth century writers such as
Henry James began to demonstrate that it was the narrator—as much as or
more than the story he or she had to tell—who was the cynosure of fiction.
Thus, James’s narrators, such as Lambert Strether in The
Ambassadors (1903), anticipate the next major development in the modern
novel, which occurs in the work of Marcel Proust.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

Like Conrad, Marcel Proust grew up in an atmosphere of societal upheaval.
The Commune of Paris, a popular uprising for a more democratic
government, had failed in the year of the novelist’s birth, and France had
been defeated in war by Prussia. In this demoralized and uncertain
environment, with a declining aristocracy and dynamic middle class, the
sensitive Proust was exposed to an era of rapid change. Like Conrad, Proust
relied on the supple and subtle perception of his narrator to convey a
conception of society and history as a construct, an extension of the human
ego filtered through the sensibility of the artist. Proust could describe a
town, a group of people, a country setting in the manner of a realist, yet it
was his attention to language that made the descriptions stand out. Unlike
the realist, in other words, Proust was not merely imitating nature to render
an accurate picture of it; rather, he heightened sense through an exquisite
attention to style (diction, imagery, and the rhythm of his prose).

masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past (1913) is a standard modernist

work, focusing on time and history as subjects in themselves. Proust’s
narrator is concerned not solely with his memories but with the way he
remembers and with how others formulate their sense of the past and
present. In Proust, human identity itself becomes a product of language,
and thus the artist becomes not merely a reporter (as in the realist
tradition) but also a symbolist; that is, the writer fastens on those objects,
scenes, and anecdotes that are shaped to define the way his or her
characters live and think of their lives.

James Joyce (1882-1941)

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914- 1915, serial; 1916,
book), James Joyce extended the Proustian effort to render reality as it
appeared to human consciousness by resorting to different linguistic
registers with their own vocabulary and grammar. Thus, the child Stephen
Dedalus emerges with his own language in the opening passage about a
“moocow.” Joyce is not merely describing a child’s world, or picturing that
world from the child’s point of view—as Charles Dickens does in Great
Expectations (1860-1861, serial; 1861, book), for example. On the contrary,
Joyce inhabits a child’s world using the child’s words and phrases to create
a sense of immediacy, of what critics have called a stream of consciousness.
Reality is not there to be observed but rather to be created in the child’s
mind. Stephen is the artist already making up stories in his unusual style.
The modern novelist captures the fluid nature of perception as it is enacted
in the mind.

Perhaps the most conspicuous example of Joycean stream of consciousness

is Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy at the end of Ulysses (1922). Joyce
daringly delves into Molly’s private thoughts and feelings as she lies in bed
dwelling on her lover’s and her husband’s behavior as well as on her own
cravings for sex. Her constant repetition of the word “yes” to convey her
obsessive desire shocked many of Joyce’s contemporaries. He was breaking
new ground in fiction, announcing, in effect, that what made the novel
modern was the novelist’s willingness to deal explicitly with subjects that
heretofore had been deemed illicit and the province of pornographers.
Joyce, however, believed that the novelist should not shy away from any
feeling or desire expressed by his or her characters, even if this meant—as
it did—that his or her work would be censored. Ulysses could not be legally
published in the United States until 1933, when a court lifted the ban on the
novel.

Joyce’s modernism is defined then, not only by his method of narration but
also his subject matter: women as fully active and demanding sexual
creatures and who tell stories from their own point of view and with their
own words. Similarly, the hero of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Jew, is
hardly a conventional male protagonist. He is, rather, what some critics
have called an antihero because he engages in no daring actions and is not
a leader of society or a military figure. He is, outwardly, unremarkable.
What makes him noteworthy is the attention Joyce devotes to Bloom,
including to his lively inner life, which is, in its own way, adventurous and
absorbing. In other words, the modern hero or antihero acquires his or her
status through the energy and imagination the novelist invests in him or her
and not as the result of a record of accomplishment (namely in men) that
society admires. Bloom is the common man as hero, making up the story of
his own life as he lives it.

Like Proust, Joyce exercised a sort of sovereignty over his material, a

superiority over the requirements of both classical literature—in the form of
epics such as Homer’s Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.)—and nineteenth century
realism, which took society as a given, a template on which to place
characters. Joyce’s characters are alluring not because of what they do but
because of the way Joyce invents them, endowing them with an interior
language rather than just with certain mannerisms and tics, the externals of
the characters that Dickens, for instance, was so adept at creating.

Joyce focused his novels on contemporary society and, it could be argued,

from a male point of view, notwithstanding his sensitive creation of
characters like Molly Bloom and Gerty MacDowell in Ulysses. One of Joyce’s
contemporaries, Virginia Woolf, wished to remake the modern novel so that
it more fully reflected women’s creativity in narratives that questioned the
conventional ordering of history and traditional gender relationships.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Virginia Woolf sought to bring the full weight of women’s concerns and
talents to the development of the modern novel. She rejected the rigid
hierarchies of a male-dominated society and sought in her own fiction to
portray women as proactive, as makers of the world. She admired women
writers and artists such as her contemporaries Rebecca West and Vanessa
Bell (her sister) and based her eponymous heroine, Orlando, on
Bell. Orlando: A Biography (1928) is a quintessential modernist novel that
violates the standards of realistic fiction even as it mimics and burlesques
biography, one of the most conventional literary genres that depends on
linear development and chronological storytelling. Orlando, born in the
Elizabethan period and still alive at the time of the novel, exemplified the
development of civilization and gender. West was especially intrigued by
the passages in which Orlando undergoes gender reassignment from a man
to a woman. West maintained in her 1928 essay on Woolf, “High Fountain of
Genius,” that these passages made up the heart of the novel because Woolf
was

debating . . . how far one’s sex is like a pair of faulty glasses on one’s nose;
where one looks at the universe, how true it is that to be a woman is to have
a blind spot on the North Northwest, to be a man is to see light as darkness
East by South.
In other words, Woolf was incorporating in her exploration of gender a
typically modern concern with perception— that is, with the vantage point
from which individuals view their world. That Orlando’s gender itself
transcended time was Woolf’s way of exploring human identity in a context
far larger than was available in the nineteenth century novel.

West, too, had been writing a novel—Harriet Hume: London Fantasy (1929)
—exploring the differences between genders. She examined what would
happen to a woman who could enter a man’s mind and think his thoughts.
Like Woolf, West employed the radical experimentation of the modern novel
to challenge the social and political conventions of a patriarchal society.
Woolf, West, and others, including Djuna Barnes (in Nightwood, 1936),
added a vital element to modern fiction, developing the Joycean notion of
how human identity develops from the creation of language and the artist’s
unique point of view.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

The phantasmagorical aspects of modernism take on even greater political
dimensions in Franz Kafka’s novels, especially The Trial (1937). One of the
most influential modernists (his fiction gave rise to the term “Kafkaesque”),
Kafka explored the terror of twentieth century society, in which an
individual could be accused of a nameless crime (as in The Trial) and
succumb to the bureaucratic maze of figures and institutions that prosecute
him (or her). To many critics, the arbitrary nature of the trial, the arcane
procedures used to determine the victim’s guilt, and the constant pressing
of a case against the individual until he begins to believe himself guilty of
the charges, presaged the regime of the totalitarian state later dramatized
in the novels of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell. The very idea of a
rational world is under attack in The Trial, and society seems like a
modernist hell because there can be no standard of judgment, no principle
of justice, no ethical code by which everyone is measured openly and fairly.
Only the interests of the state are important, and the sole criterion for the
individual’s existence is whether he or she is deemed to have acted in
conformity with the current line the authorities avow. In such an absurd
world, the definition of reality keeps changing. Thus, Kafka elaborated the
modernist attack on universal truths and obliterated the basis on which
society had been organized since the Enlightenment. Kafka’s novels verge
on nihilism, the conviction that there is no meaning in the universe. While
he was certainly not the first writer to broach this notion of
meaninglessness— after all, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth decries a world
that is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing—Kafka was an original
because his work reflects this nihilistic tendency in a logical and nonlinear
structures. In other words K, the protagonist of The Trial, lives in a world
that does not make sense to him and that cannot be explained in terms of
his own failings or ignorance. William Faulkner (1897-1962) William
Faulkner’s classic modernist novel The Sound and the Fury (1929) would
seem to be a gloss on Kafka’s nihilism. The novel is narrated both by an
idiot named Benjy and by his highly intelligent brother, Quentin, a Harvard
student who commits suicide after being tormented by a world that will not
conform to his heroic expectations. The third part of the novel is narrated
by Jason, the crass and cynical brother who survives on sarcasm.

The language of the novel is brilliant not only because Faulkner finds such
distinctive voices for his narrators but also because each narrator
represents a different way of looking at the world: Benjy focuses on images
and the sense experience of the moment while Quentin intellectualizes and
broods on his conflicted attitudes toward his family and society. Jason, the
realist, simply accepts the status quo and looks for ways to profit from the
weakness of others.

Set against these three troubling witnesses to a world gone awry is Dilsey,
the faithful family servant who has brought up the brothers. While the novel
does not endorse her simple Christian faith, it suggests that the reserves of
strength in her character are an abiding aspect of civilization, an enduring
sensibility that counters— even if it does not triumph over—the anarchic
forces that envelop the brothers.

In Faulkner’s novels, the search for meaning is heroic, and failure—while it

is frequent—nevertheless conveys a certainly nobility in human efforts to
comprehend the world. This is especially true in another of his
masterpieces, Absalom, Absalom! (1936), an intense, multilayered historical
work involving several generations of one family. The narrators piece
together and argue over the story of Thomas Sutpen and his sons, a story
that ultimately deals with the history of the South and the efforts of the
narrators to construct a coherent interpretation of a man and his progeny.
The Postmodern
After Faulkner, a new generation of writers emerging from World War II
sought to define themselves in what came to be called a postmodern world,
one that would have to find new ways of dealing with the radical
subjectivity, nihilism, and the search for meaning that are the hallmarks of
modernism. For this new postwar generation, Gertrude Stein became an
inspiration. She was an uncompromising writer and poet who crafted
several untraditional narratives that refused to rely on novelistic
conventions such as plot and well-developed characters.

Stein’s self-reflexive language, which suggests the writer creates his or her
own reality rather than mirrors the reality outside that creation, elevated
the notion of the novel’s language as self-sustaining, that is, language did
not have to refer to an outside world. Language itself, in other words,
became the subject matter of novels. Attention to the power of words
themselves, which was a key focus of Stein’s work, was a defining feature of
the modern and postmodern novelist. In this sense, modernism was not
rejected but took a new shape in the postmodern novel.