The Literature Book

216

L

iterary critic and poet Ezra

Pound declared 1922 to

be the start of a new era,

asserting that the old one had

ended when James Joyce wrote

the last words of his novel Ulysses.

The “year that changed everything”

was bookended by the publication

of Ulysses and of T. S. Eliot’s poem

The Waste Land, two towering

achievements of Modernist literature.

Exploding the genres of realist

fiction and poetry, both works mined,

out of the depths of their authors’

astonishing originality and serious

artistic and moral purpose, a new

kind of literary ore. In the bleak

years after World War I, Joyce, Eliot,

and other writers began to form a

new culture out of the fragmented

remains of the old. Literature would

never be the same again.

Stream of consciousness

One approach Modernist writers

adopted to disrupt narrative realism

was stream of consciousness.

In fiction, stream of consciousness

is a representation of the flow of a

character’s thoughts, perceptions,

and feelings. While long passages

of introspection can be found

in much earlier works such as the

epistolary novel Pamela (1740) by

Samuel Richardson, fiction at the

turn of the 20th century went further.

Henry James and Marcel Proust

moved toward greater subjectivity

of viewpoint, in terms of both subject

matter and its formal treatment.

The first full-fledged use of interior

monologue in fiction is thought to

have been in a short novel, Les

Lauriers sont coupés (“The laurels

are cut down”), by Édouard Dujardin,

published in 1887. Joyce famously

picked up a copy of this book at a

Paris railroad station kiosk in 1903.

The style has been linked with

the rise of psychology as a science,

and indeed the phrase “stream of

James Joyce Born in a suburb of Dublin, Ireland,

in 1882, James Joyce was brought

up in poverty after his father lost

his job as a tax collector. Joyce

studied English, French, and Italian

at University College Dublin, then

moved to Paris, intending to study

medicine. He returned to Dublin

after his mother died, scraping a

living reviewing and teaching.

Joyce eloped with Nora Barnacle

in 1904 and the couple moved to

Zurich. Later, he got a teaching

job in Trieste. His book of short

stories, Dubliners, was published

in 1914, the year before he began

writing Ulysses. When sections of

this novel appeared in the

American journal The Little

Review, the magazine was put

on trial for obscenity. In 1920,

Joyce moved to Paris, where he

lived for 20 years. Here he wrote

his dreamlike late masterpiece,

Finnegans Wake. In 1940, Joyce

fled the Nazi invasion and went

to Zurich, where he died in 1941.

Other key works

1914 Dubliners

1916 A Portrait of the Artist

as a Young Man

1939 Finnegans Wake

ULYSSES

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS

Stream of consciousness

BEFORE

1913–27 Marcel Proust, in

his seven-volume In Search

of Lost Time, delves deep into

memory and the free-floating

associations that help to shape

the content of consciousness.

1913–35 Fernando Pessoa

labors on The Book of Disquiet,

the existential meanderings of

a Lisbon clerk—illuminating

fragments of thought and art.

AFTER

1927 In To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf moves back

and forth between narrative

omniscience and stream of

consciousness.

1929 William Faulkner uses

stream of consciousness in

The Sound and the Fury,

entering the minds of three

very different brothers.

Dislike that job. House of

mourning. Walk. Pat! Doesn’t

hear. Deaf beetle he is.

Ulysses

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