Lecture 32- The Modern Novel II

[Music] [Music] good morning and welcome back to the lecture series we are discussing modernis M and the treatment of time through looking at um stream of Consciousness one of the uh devices literary devices that have been deployed Time and Again by different modernist writers such as uh Virginia wolf and James choice so we will also have some textual discussions uh in our lecture today uh while Aristotle in his Poetics emphasizes the youth of time where the plot needs to be constructed as a unified time frame uh Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity proved that nothing is absolute not even uh how time functions the 18th century novelists uh followed the linearity of time uh with a cohesive beginning middle and end uh so some of the classic works that follow a linear progression are written by authors such as George Elliott we have Jane Austin then Thomas Hardy and so this is how writings always lead to a closure and the readers expectations are likewise shap towards the late uh 19th and early 20th century with the Inception of a modernist literature there is a self-conscious Breakaway from this traditional style of writing genertion in the 20th century uh there is a a shift towards science and psychology something that we have already mentioned in our uh previous lecture and there is uh influence of works by Sigman Freud whose basic uh premises of argument was that uh subjective reality uh was based on the play of basic drives and instincts which enable us to interpret the activities happening in the physical world in the outside world so the focus of the novelists had moved away from the social realities of the characters to the characters psyche so the inner Journey uh starts from here on there is an attempt to grasp the multitudinous thoughts and feelings that uh pass through a a character's mind so the complex universe that the Mind itself is started interesting the modernist uh you know uh tradition the modernist writers this leads to the discovery of terms such as internal monologue and streams of Consciousness uh both interior monologue or internal monologue and stream of Consciousness involve the presentation of a characters thoughts to the reader however there are certain differences between the two in uh inter interior monologue or internal monologue unlike in stream of Consciousness the characters thoughts are uh often presented using traditional grammar and syntax and they usually have um some clarity some logical uh progression from one sentence to the other and the ideas are still more coherent one idea uh continues and leads to the next uh interior monologue uh relates a character's thoughts as coherent uh fully formed sentences are present as if the character is talking to himself so although it's talking within on the uh thought process is still uh coherent it is unified it is not uh fragmented on the other hand in stream of Consciousness we see uh that you know uh there is a portrayal of the actual experience of thinking that goes on inside of a human uh psyche uh where I mean it is all chaos and destruction so it is not a closed space the the Mind does not function as a closed space it is constantly being interrupted by the happenings outside so uh the fragmentation happens as a result of too many thoughts coming and overwriting one another an external uh happening uh punctuating the thought uh somewhere in the middle and so on so it makes the reader experience those thoughts in the same way as the characters are thinking them so from hopping uh navigating from one thought to the other rather the reading experience becomes more challenging in the case of the stream of Consciousness and a lot more skills are expected uh out of the reader so Mrs deliv uh by Virginia wolf uh is a work it's a classic and it deploys stream of Consciousness remarkably through the protagonist Clarisa Del uh Mrs Del by Virginia wolf was published uh on 14th of May 19 1925 and it details one day in the life of Clarissa Del who is an upper class woman in post uh World War I England the working title of Mrs Dela was the hours and the novel began as two short stories Mrs delway in uh Bond Street and the unfinished one which is the prime minister the book describes uh Clarissa's preparations for party she will host in the evening and uh the party that follows with an interior perspective the story travels backwards and forwards in time to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the interwar social structure social scenario the novel addresses the nature of time in personal experience through multiple interwoven stories so several stories are interwoven and and they come uh you know and they are played uh inside uh Clarissa's psyche the overwhelming presence of the passing of time and the impending fate of uh you know death for each of the characters is felt throughout the novel as the Big Ben Towers uh over the city of London uh you know rings for half an hour characters cannot help but stop to notice this loss of life to time how we lose certain moments of our life to time in uh regular intervals and this uh feeling this realization keeps coming back throughout the story whenever uh Big Ben comes to punctuate a thought uh you know a personal thought in the middle for a character like Septimus who has experienced The Vicious War the notion of death constantly uh floats in his mind as he continues to see his friend Evans talking about the war the constant stream of Consciousness uh perspective of the characters especially that of uh Clarissa serves as a destruction from the passing of physical time how how much time has elapsed outside is sometimes you know not noticed until we look at the Big Ben and uh listen to the uh Clock Tower right um so it is uh telling us how individuals are ultimately marching towards their death but each character is intermittently reminded of this the inevitability of death the fact that death is which some people have to reach in the end so like Joyce's uls's the novel emphasizes the passage of time within the frame of the novel which takes place in the course of a single day uh I would like to read briefly from uh Mrs D to understand how stream of Consciousness happens she had a Perpetual sense as she watched the taxi caps of being out out far out to see and alone she always had the feeling that it was very very dangerous to live even one day not that she thought herself clever or much out of the ordinary how she had got through life on the few Twigs of knowledge Fring danels gave them she could not think she knew nothing no language no history she scarcely read a book now except memo in bed and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing all this the Caps passing and she would not say of Peter she would not say of herself I am this I'm that so we see that the thoughts are happening too many things I mean she's thinking of people she knows she knows um and then um she has Impressions uh from uh her imagees surrounding that also go on to influence the the way her her thoughts are processed the way uh you know the psyche functions so it's a mingling of past present future it's a mingling of the inner and the outer this is how stream of Consciousness happens as a layered thought process from here uh we will move to James Joyce's uh novel ulyses which was published in 1922 uh 1922 is a key year in the history of literary modernism publication of judices by James Choice uh alongside uh seminal work by PS Elliott the Wasteland so these are uh some of the signposts of uh modernist literature as we know the story ulysis takes place on 16th June uh 194 and is about a man named uh liopo Bloom who walks around Dublin uh the book uh tells the story of uh Molly Bloom as well who is Leopold Bloom's wife and the stepen deas who is a school teacher Joyce made a use of Henry fings Epic Novel which is modeled on uh Homer's Odyssey we see intertextuality in this world work where Joyce is drawing on characters from uh other authors's works so characters that are already uh present in uh Works written before ulyses uh ulyses draws on the psychological and subjective narration uh of uh dorothi Richardson uh Lawrence Sterns uh the life and opinions of of tristem Shandi inspired choices conception of time there is a focus on the process uh of artistic transformation and exploration Joyce appropriates the mythical structure of Homer's Odyssey which is the uh original and you know constant reference in this work Homer odsy and uh Joyce is using it uh in uh a shifted context in a modern context in an everyday uh context how uh odsy can be reread Rewritten in the modern context in the uh Vis A the urban life the diminished uh uh urban life uh set in uh set in Dublin and and you know the course of one day in a modern man's life he appropriates the mythical structure of Homer's odsy the book consists of 18 chapters in which each uh covers one hour of the day and each chapter parodies a specific chapter of homus odsy so we understand that in the modern times in other words the Epic cannot be relieved the conception of time has uh contracted to a great extent lives not you know larger than lives lives are not uh as uh colossal as that of the uh epic characters right uh so in the diminished modern man's life which is crushed by you know the urban reality how do we live ODS again if we have to live it we have to live it like uh leopo Bloom right um so uh each chapter is also Associated like we will see with a specific color or art or even a bodily organ so there is a combination of kaleidoscopic writing with a schematic structure in uluses the characters are set in modern Dublin and the book explores the squalor the monotony of dlin life this is in contradistinction with the elevated lofty ideals that inform for epic writing uh here life is limited uh human uh you know agency is also carved down by several uh determinants there is monotony and and the narrative technique deployed here is stream of Consciousness parody and jokes as well as linguistic Association and a frequent use of late motive motives that keep uh you know track traveling uh through our course of reading the work so here is an excerpt from ulyses I quote he is Young Leopold as in a retrospective Arrangement a mirror within a mirror he Presto he beholdeth himself that young figure of then is seen uh precious manly walking on a nipping morning from the old house in uh clam Brasil to the high school his book Satchel on him uh bandolier wise and in it a good in a in it a goodly hunk of Reen Loaf a mother's thought unquote so coming back to the art of the novel by Milan kunda in Dialogue on the art of the novel kunda asss that his his own novels so kunda talks about the form of the novel from there on he goes into discussing how he writes his novels what goes into making his own novels says that his novels I quote lie outside of the aesthetic of the novel normally termed psychological unquote by this kund does not deny his characters of an inner life but uh just that he does not want to offer the reader some kind of a comforting illusion that uh psychological uh realism uh has offered to the readers the access to the characters inner life uh is in a way denied the character has to be uh understood without uh having access fully to their inner life one can have very bare very paired of minimal uh uh information about a given character from kundra's novel uh so two centuries of psychology iCal realism according to kunda has created some nearly invaluable standards regarding uh creating the characters in the novel so for example the writer it is one of the expectations uh from on the part of the reader that the writer must give the maximum amount of information about a character about the character's physical appearance um his or her way of speaking and behaving and then um he must let the reader know about the characters past because that that's where all the motives of the characters present Behavior are located so this is uh in a way drawing a straight line uh between past and present and then the characters must have complete Independence right the author with his own considerations has to disappear so that he or she does not dis disturb the reader the author's you know uh the author's absence will uh make the fiction turn into a reality uh so so the readers uh are given into very similitude they start taking the fiction as reality the modern uh you know writing is a complete Breakaway from this we have already discussed uh you know the meta fictional qualities in uh authors such as uh Margaret Atwood in uh Thomas King we have discussed uh several uh short stories by Julio cazar and by George Lu bores all of them create a kind of rough experience for the uh reader the process of reading is fraught with difficulties which expects the reader to be more sophisticated more skilled in the act of reading so kunda States uh that his novels are outside uh the novel of psychology there is a you know psychology in them but uh that is not the primary interest or main state so uh kunda being a central European from the Central Europe sees the uh first world war as a catastroph that plunged our and literature into the grips of um a history a merciless history uh when kunda was writing himself we know that he faced a lot of censorship uh from the government the communist government he had to uh flee and he had to save his uh his uh writing drafts so the essential dreaminess of Marcel Prost or James Joy became impossible in the post World War I scenario Kafka uh opened the door to a new way of being as a you know a prostrate victim of an all powerful of a of a an overpowering uh bureaucracy right so recourse to dream recourse to surrealism to Fantasy mingling reality with fantastic elements became uh you know uh survival tactic for novel writing for a form an experimental form such as novel to exist um as a way of escaping from the Intolerable from The Impossible world uh the the real had to incorporate elements of fantasy and dreams there were there seemed to be no respite in reality so one had to seek respite uh in dream so uh Kira's key concern uh is the instability of the self and which is why characters often play games they are posing and they are dramatizing themselves um through uh you know such uh comic erratic uh odd behavior the characters are testing their own limits and it wouldn't be wrong to say as kunda himself says uh that the novelist is testing the character's limits and thereby the novelist is also testing his own limits within the uh you know parameters of modernity modern times so unlike James Joy there is no internal monologue in Kira's writings the reader realizes that the monologue is that of the author if at all there is a monologue it is that of the author as the author tries different approaches in order to analyze his own characters the author is trying to pursue uh Chase his characters uh down their own actions so his books are philosophical uh analysis of fictional characters and so the characters are conceived as experimental selves through through their experimentations uh are an aspect of the author's own self is uh eventually you know revealed so that's how the the form of Novel the genre of novel is addressing the question of human uh uh existence and self estrangement in the modern times so these characters the novel characters uh created by kunda are fully in line with his uh core idea that the history of the novel is a sequence of discoveries um so if the novel is a method of grasping the self first at the outset when servant is uh you know you know servantes uh conceives this uh genre for the first time through donot uh it is uh trying to grasp the self uh at the Inception through adventure and action we see adventure and action in servantes as well as in uh ttoo following that the grasping of the self happens through uh trying to understand the interior life as in the case of Joyce and Prost uh kund talks about the grasping of the self through examining existential situations so when the characters go through certain existential situations certain parts of theirself are revealed he begins with existential plights uh through his own characters he experimenting he uh you know he uh introduces a woman who has vertigo then a man who suffers because he feels his existence is too light uh there is a character who is uh you know defined by the series of uh love affairs and betrayals that she uh experiences and so on so he cre creates characters around these fundamental uh uh situations there are certain cases in hand that make up their identity and so kund puts them into situations which he as an author is constantly and repeatedly analyzing and uh he's analyzing their cases their situations from different uh angles as a way of investigating the question that is at the heart of the novel as a form which is the mystery of the self he's trying to unravel that self and its infinite possibilities so the character is not a simulation of a living being it is an imaginary being an experimental self in the words of kunda making a character alive means getting to the bottom of the existential Pro problem or claiming to get to the bottom bottom of their existential problem kunda would also posit that uh this is virtually impossible to get to the bottom of a problem and after that as though after that there is no problem no problem exists that is not a possibility so novel examines not reality but various ways of existence existence is not what has occurred already out their Frozen existence is the realm of you know variagated human possibilities everything that human can be everything that he or she is capable of uh then kunda says that the novelist is neither a historian nor a prophet he is an Explorer of uh these different ways possibilities of existence rather than giving a clear statement of thought a novelist involves in uh you know games of paradoxes and contradictions that's why that's how the novel is basically different from a thesis which uh seeks to raise a few questions and then tries to answer them so dogmatic reflection is necessarily uh exchanged with suggestions the author is not uh you know uh forwarding or pushing any kind of Dogma or indoctrination it uh the author can only suggest the author the moment a novelist tries to take a position the entire uh you know cause or the entire uh meaning of writing a novel uh the purpose is defeated so uh the story or the art of writing the novel has to override any form of any sort of uh thesis or direct suggestion proposition so the novel is a meditation on existence the question of existence as seen Through The Eyes of through the lens of through the medium of different imaginary characters so the theme of Novel at the heart of Novel we have the existential inquiry I'm going to stop our discussion here today and we will meet again with uh another lecture and another round of discussions thank you [Music]