 Introduction

In a well-known essay titled "Modern Fiction" (1921), Virginia Woolf offers her definition of
the task of the novelist: it is to convey to the reader the intricacies of human spirit, "this
varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may
display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible" (Woolf 1984: 160-161).
This description, in a nutshell, comprises the most remarkable features of the Modernist
novel: its intense focus on subjectivity, its refusal to define man's personal being in terms of
social and historical circumstances that which Woolf calls "the alien and external" - and a
keen interest in the dynamic of the psyche, which may also include the writer's fascination
with psychopathology and various forms of "aberrations".

Thus presented, the aesthetic goals of Modernists also require adequate tools, as Woolf calls
them in another essay', with which to penetrate the inner life of an individual. Innovative
writing techniques, employed by authors such as Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, James
Joyce or Virginia Woolf, are inseparable from their urge to explore the way one's mind
perceives and comes to terms with the complexities of the modern era. The most famous
stylistic innovation associated with the Modernist movement, stream-of-consciousness,
abandons the authorial omniscience from the text altogether, so that the narrative is
completely contained in the mind of a fictional character.

In "Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown" (1923), Woolf uses the term "tools" to refer to
novelistic conventions and modes of presentation. Those which were
previously used by the Realists, as she argues, are outdated and cannot be
applied by the new generation of writers, whose primary interest is in the
individual psyche and the workings of the mind. As Woolf states, "the tools of
one generation" have become "useless for the next" (Woolf 1924: 17).

Other stylistic features characteristic for the Modernist novel such as Free Indirect Style,
merging the voice of the author and the voice of the character, or various techniques related
to the narrative time and subjective experience of temporality essentially all serve the same
purpose always to look within, to understand the hidden motives and longings of an
individual, to grasp and depict the concealed life of the spirit. This central interest clearly
distinguishes the Modernists from their predecessors of the late Victorian period, who were
primarily concerned with social issues and social interactions. Edmund Wilson sums up
these radically different literary interests, which emerged at the beginning of the twentieth
century, by saying that the field of literature was shifted "from an objective to a subjective
world, from an experience shared with society to an experience savoured in solitude" (Wilson
1959: 265-266)

The Modernist preoccupation with the life of the spirit needs to be understood in conjunction
with all the turbulent changes experienced by the generation who lived in the first decades
of the twentieth century. At the turn of the century, rapid industrialisation, social upheavals
a change in the scientific paradigm, the crisis of faith and significant shifts in major
philosophical systems as exemplified in the works and research of Charles Darwin, James
Frazer, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry Bergson, William James and Karl Marx
all contributed to an altered cultural atmosphere, constituting the experience of modernity.
Furthermore, the Modernist authors lived through the devastating experience of the First
World War, having to come to terms with destruction and loss of life on a previously
unimaginable scale, as well as with the emotional effects of the war, the grief and trauma
which continued long after its conclusion. The shock and tragedy of the war years also largely
contributed to the overall loss of religious and moral certainties in the early twentieth
century.

This spiritual climate was reflected in the changes in literature, especially in the more
complex and conflicted ways in which the modern authors conceived of the self. In his study
Modernism and the Fate of Individuality (1991), Michael Levenson sums up these changes
in the following manner:

Ours may be the age of narcissism, but it is also the century in which ego suffered
unprecedented attacks upon its great pretensions, to be self-transparent and self-authorized.
It discovered enemies within and enemies without, walls within, mirrors without, it no longer
perched securely on the throne of the self, it no longer sat confidently at the centre of the
social world... [One may] follow the diverse fortunes of individuality in modern English
fiction. its changing verbal aspect, its historical limits and symbolical resources, its political
dispossession, cultural displacement and psychological self-estrangement, its uneasy
accommodation of mind and body, its retreat from the world and its longing for community
(Levenson 1991: xi).

Among the chief influences on Modernist fiction were the psychological theories of Sigmund
Freud. Freud began to publish his research on the interpretation of dreams and the dynamics
of the unconscious psyche in 1896, with the first translations which appeared in 1909, he
quickly became influential throughout the English- speaking world (Stevenson 1992: 62).
Some of his most notable studies were published in the first two decades of the twentieth
century: The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1900), Totem and Taboo (Totem
und Tabu, 1913) and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920), which
is why this period is also referred to as the Freudian age.

The major Modernist novelists react in different ways to Freud's concept of the self and his
approach to the unconscious. In Conrad's work, for instance, there is no explicit mention of
any Freudian terms. However, Ian Watt points out that the two authors, in fact, have much
in common. In Heart of Darkness (1899), Conrad's protagonist and chief narrator, Marlow,
faces the destructive potentials of the unconscious psyche embodied in the character of
Kurtz, who has undergone terrible regression in the heart of the African continent. Ian Watt
points out that, just like Freud, Conrad never engages in a joyous celebration of the wild
instinctive energy and its release from the unconscious; instead, both authors advocate that
it must be controlled, and the means of control they propose are also similar: honest
dedication to one's work and duty, and a practice of internal moral restraint even when the
external ones, provided by the social structures, prove inadequate or no longer exist. As Watt
concludes, both Conrad and Freud reach a profound insight into the unconscious psyche, but
warn against yielding to the urges that they discover there. In other words, "what they see
is... just the opposite of what they want to see" (Watt 1981:166-167).

On the other hand, the non-fictional works of D. H. Lawrence express strong criticism of
Freud's views. In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), for instance, Lawrence
distinguishes between "Freudian" and "Non-Freudian" unconscious, arguing that Freud in
fact explores only those cravings in the unconscious psyche which are originally caused or
influenced by the conscious mind, and which therefore simply represent the "bastard spawn"
or inverted reflection of our idealistic consciousness. As opposed to this, there exists non-
Freudian, or "pristine" unconscious, which is the life instinct itself, ontologically preceding
consciousness. It is, for Lawrence, the source of our vitality and creativity of which he holds
an entirely positive view (Lawrence 1965: 591). In spite of these strong disagreements with
Freud, however, it may be noticed that Lawrence still uses some methods of presentation of
the unconscious in his novels which bear the imprint of Freud's teachings. Symbolical
episodes, pregnant with psychological meaning - such as the one in St Mawr (1925), where
the protagonist gets in touch with the deep layers of the self when she first sees the
eponymous stallion - are clearly inspired by Freud's work on the interpretation of dreams
(Stevenson 1992: 65).

Symbolical episodes suggestive of Freud's influence may likewise be found in the novels of
Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway (1925), for instance, where symbolical imagery is
purposefully chosen to convey the deranged mental state of one of the characters, Septimus
Warren Smith Like Lawrence, however, Woolf expresses a dislike of the more controlling
and repressive aspects of Freud's psychoanalysis, and proposes that the unconscious psyche
should be explored in a manner more affirmative than Freud's. Her hostility to
psychoanalysis is evident, for example, in the unsympathetic characterization of the
psychiatrist Bradshaw in Mrs Dalloway. Bradshaw is depicted as a tyrant who threatens his
patients and bullies them into submission, while his defining character trait is his desire for
domination and power.

When it comes to Joyce, critics point out that he left a record of ironic and hostile comments
on Freud, however, Joyce never really argued that Freud's views on the mind were wrong,
only that they had been expressed better by others, such as Giordano Bruno or Giambattista
Vico (Ellmann 1959: 351), Additionally, it may be argued that Joyce, just like Woolf and
Lawrence, benefited from Freud's methods of exploring the unconscious. Richard Ellmann,
for instance, points out that the interior monologue in Joyce's novels was partly, influenced
by Freud's theories of verbal association (ibid., 368). It may also be possible to trace Freud's
influence in Joycean "epiphanies" - the moments of revelation and self-insight in his novels
and short fiction, which serve as an entry point into the unconscious (Brivic 1976: 307).

Regardless of the degree to which the leading Modernists embrace or reject Freud's theories,
one cannot neglect Freud's overwhelming influence on the general cultural atmosphere in
which the Modernist literature was created. As Kenneth Graham points out,

The pronounced shift in the basis of characterization in fiction after about 1900, from the
outward to the inner, from the mode of action to the mode of concealed motivation, dream,
reverie, and atavistic, drive, from the traditional area of chronological time and outward
space to the radically new dimensions of psychological time and non-logical organization,
suggests if not necessarily Freud's direct influence then at the very least a widely shared re-
orienting of perception about the individual that deserves to bear his name as its most
systematic and articulate theorizer (Graham 2004: 211-212).

Another articulate theorizer of the same era, whose ideas were just as influential as Freud's,
was Friedrich Nietzsche. His widely publicized pronouncement that "God is dead may be
viewed as the final stage of the gradual decline in religious faith which was initiated in the
1860s when Charles Darwin first published his theories on evolution. Nietzsche's
renunciation of religion was also closely related to his overall insistence on epistemological
uncertainty, which extended onto the field of ethics, social norms and even hard sciences.
His general argument was that our understanding did not draw its laws from nature, but
prescribed them to nature; the universe was, according to Nietzsche, essentially structureless
and unknowable, and it was only our consciousness which tended to project structures,
shapes and categories upon it. Randall Stevenson argues that a parallel may be drawn
between the Nietzschean uncertainty principle especially the loss of faith in an omniscient
deity - and the absence of an omniscient narrator from the leading fiction of the Modernist
period. As early as in the novels of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, who are usually
considered the precursors of Modernism, there appears a suggestion that the universe lacks
absolutes and that stability, coherence and meaning may only be established at the subjective
level, by focusing on one's personal understanding and vision of reality (Stevenson 1992:68-
69).

Nietzsche repeats this statement in several of his works, most notably in The
Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882).

Lionel Trilling (2008: 392) points out that Nietzsche's early work, The Birth of Tragedy from
the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872) is likewise of
extreme importance for understanding the background and context of Modernist art.
Nietzsche discusses the Dionysian rites of the pre-Socratic Greece, stressing that the mental
states they produced of rapture, ecstasy, and temporary eclipse of the isolated ego-
consciousness - represented a necessary opposite to the Apollonian principle of rationality
and individuality, making it possible for an individual to merge with the world temporarily,
for the "prodigal son" to reconcile with the estranged, maternal Nature (Nietzsche 2007: 18).
Nietzsche's canonization of the primal energies epitomized in the Dionysian rites, and his
insistence that the dialectic between the Dionysian and the Apollonian principle is of crucial
importance for the emergence of Greek tragedy, are echoed in similar preoccupations of the
Modernist writers. Like Nietzsche, they feel the need to explore the self beyond the confines
of the rational ego in their quest for psychic wholeness. When it comes to the four novelists
discussed in this book, the influence of Nietzsche's vitalism and his affirmative attitude
towards the irrational portion of the psyche is perhaps most easily discerned in the writings
of D H Lawrence.

Modernist literature may also be read as a reaction to industrialism and the concomitant
process of reification. The term "reification", which refers to objectifying or depersonalizing
an individual, was first used by Marx to denote the position of a worker in the process of
capitalist production the fact that he is degraded and virtually reduced to an appendage to a
machine, while also being forced to turn himself into a usable commodity which can be
exploited for wages (Stevenson 1992: 76). Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson, however,
points out that the notion of reification also has wider social and cultural implications. He
defines it as a process whereby numerous traditional forms of human organisation are being
deconstructed and then reorganized in such a way as to serve the utilitarian goals of late
industrial capitalism:
[It] is first and foremost to be described as the analytical dismantling of the various
traditional or "natural"... unities (social groups, institutions, human relationships, forms of
authority, activities of a cultural as well as of a productive nature) into their component parts
with a view to their... reorganization into more efficient systems which function according to
an instrumental, or binary, means/ends logic (Jameson 1982: 227).

This "objective fragmentation of the outside world, according to Jameson, is matched and
accompanied by an inward, psychic fragmentation of an individual. As he explains, in the
process of capitalist instrumentalisation, the rational, "quantifying" functions of the modern
man's mind become privileged, and so does the development of technological and scientific
mentality. This, however, goes "hand in hand with the systematic underdevelopment of
archaic mental powers" (ibid., 228). Imagination, intuition, one's sensual and instinctive life,
as well as the affective domain of being, do not find their place and usability in the
predominantly utilitarian and materialistic world.

This threat of reification and psychic fragmentation at the beginning of the twentieth century
is one of the main reasons why Modernist writers become preoccupied with subjectivity and
the life of the spirit. In his well-known text "The Ideology of Modernism" (1957), Georg
Lukacs comes to the same conclusion about the Modernist project, but views it in a negative
light. He observes that these writers are deeply dissatisfied with the conditions of late
capitalism, but that this awareness does not compel them to criticize the existing social order
in their work, nor to explore some possibility of change. Instead, their disappointment only
causes the Modernist authors to reject contemporary reality altogether and turn their
attention inwards, towards exploring the potentials of the mind. In this process, they end up
becoming fascinated by the extreme and deranged mental states (or "aberrations", as Woolf
calls them in her essay), which Lukacs also refers to as "the escape into psychopathology".
Thus, their protest becomes an empty gesture, incapable of providing the reader with any
meaningful sense of direction (Lukacs 1969: 29-30).

Fredric Jameson takes a more positive view on the aesthetic goals and preoccupations of
Modernism. He argues that Lukacs is wrong to see this literary movement as "some mere
ideological distraction, a way of systematically displacing the reader's attention from history
and society to pure form, metaphysics, and experiences of individual monad" (Jameson
1982: 266). Instead he proposes to define the Modernist narrative as a socially symbolic act,
whose purpose is to create "Utopian compensation" for the dehumanizing practices of late
capitalism. As Randall Stevenson explains:
The modern industrial and financial world negates feeling in favour of instrumentality,
reduces whole beings to the sum of their usable functions, or leaves people hollowed out...
Such a world urgently requires some compensating enhancement and enlargement of the
inner life to sustain for the individual a full humanity and an integral sense of the self
(Stevenson 1992: 76).

Thus interpreted, the Modernists' interest in the subjective, interior life is not an escape from
social reality but an act of revolt, a reaction to the devaluation of an individual in the modern
society (Tučev 2019: 413). By exploring the phenomena of individual consciousness, along
with the expressive potentials of language and sensual impressions, Modernist fiction opens
up an alternative space. It is, as Jameson maintains, "the place of quality in an increasingly
quantified world, the place of the archaic and of feeling amid the desacralization of the
market system, the place of sheer colour and intensity within the greyness of measurable
extension and geometrical abstraction" (Jameson 1982: 236-237). The following chapters
will explore how the four major Modernist novelists - Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce and Woolf -
affirm the importance and value of the individual self in the modern world, what stylistic
features and narrative strategies enable them to accomplish this task, and, perhaps most
importantly, in the words of Lionel Trilling (1967: 98), how they conceive of what the self is,
and what it might become.