Woolf and Joyce
Both authors use narrative style in unique ways to chart the shifts that take place in their characters. This attitude to style, as a tool to be used in tandem with the content of the novel to express its meaning was a key development of modernist literature. In Portrait, the constantly changing narrative style is used to mark the evolution of Stephen Dedalus’ perception of the world in which he lives. Whil e the novel is written using a third-person narrator, Joyce makes extensive use of free indirect discourse, and descriptions of the world are entirely as they are perceived by Stephen. At the novel’s outset, of his childhood Stephen describes things largely through the sensory experience of them and in simple, matter-of- fact statements. He describes on the novel’s opening page that ‘ When you wet the bed first it is warm and then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell. ’ Later on, as Stephen decides whether to join the Jesuit Order as a priest, his prose takes on the rich Victorian style of Cardinal Newman. This is representative of Joyce’s unification of form and content; considering becoming a Jesuit, his thoughts express themselves in the manner of a Jesuit. Towards the end of the novel, written in the for m of Stephen’s diaries prior to his departure, the style is most developed – and closest to that of Joyce himself. He writes: ‘ 23 March: have not seen her since that night. Unwell? Sits at the fire perhaps with mamma’s shawl on her shoulders. But not peevish. A nice bowl of gruel? Won’t you know? ’ His writing takes the form of an interior monologue, using sentence fragments and questions to mimic the sporadic nature of human thought, the style that Joyce himself would employ (to a far greater extent) in his next novel, Ulysses . In contrast to Joyce, Woolf uses narrative style more consistently in The Waves . She maintains a high poetic style to represent the thoughts of the characters throughout the novel, even when they are young children. Nevertheless, the style is unique, even among Woolf’s own work. The novel, aside from its interludes, is written entirely in monologues of the six characters, but it is clear that what the characters are ‘ saying ’ is not being spoken; rather we are reading the private thoughts of the characters. The difficulty in the work is that each of the characters’ thoughts are expressed in extremely poetic language. While written in the first person, and almost entirely in the present tense, the language seems detached from the characters. Unlike the interior monologues of Joyce in the diaries of Portrait, and in Ulysses, which attempt to mirror the natural patterns of thought, the interior monologues of The Waves seem entirely antithetical to the processes of real human thinking. This creates a sense of detachment from the characters – a detachment that some critics have criticize d in the novel as ‘artificiality’ (Lodge, 1994, p. 45). However, this sense of detachment is intentional: Woolf wanted the characters to be not so much distinct personalities, as voices, each expressing a facet of human consciousness, more specifically, Woolf’s own consciousness; this is, more so than any other of Woolf’s works ‘a personal book’ (Miko, 1988, p.64). The detachment, and inauthenti c replication of thought – it is at all times clearly writing, and not thought – makes all the voices of the novel the voice of the author, each different character a part of Woolf’s own personality. The choice to represent herself through a number of voic es, rather than one, reflects Woolf’s view of life as cyclical; so varied and constantly shifting is her experience of life, that it is best represented as shifting through the minds of different characters. In conclusion, Woolf’s and Joyce’s structural and stylistic innovations are a rejection not only of the linear novel, but the conception of life as linear. It is for this reason that they are two of the most important proponents of the modernist movement; their unique and irreverent works resonated with a world fragmented, and disenchanted with 19 th -century ideals, by the First World War.
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