LITERARY PRODUCTION

FICTION

The most popular literary expression in the 20^th century was fiction. Novelists had previously concentrated above all in plot, and their main preoccupation had been with characters in society, since they thought that the function of novels was to present people in a social context, so that they became mirrors of their own age. In the 20^th century the emphasis began to shift from society to man himself; characters became all important because of their inner selves. Narrative as such began to lose its importance. The main causes for dissatisfaction with traditional forms were:

-Social and political events before and after the two world wars which created a general sense of discontent and anxiety;

-The collapse of all established principles;

-The expansion of education from primary school to university level;

-Freud's studies in psychoanalysis and his theory of the unconscious;

-The development of radio and film techniques.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL

The psychological novelists constituted the actual bridge from the 19^th century to our own. One of these was Henry James. He developed his actions in chronological sequences. He nevertheless rejected the traditional canons which he analysed in all their finest nuances. The second writer to be included is Forster. Rather than plot, his main concern lies whit the complexities of characters, whom he usually presents caught in the clash between different cultures. Characters can be built around a single idea or capable of development and change in all their contradictions and doubts. The third great novelist in the group is Lawrence. Like Forster he also focused on the conflict existing between the conscious mind and the hidden drives of the unconscious, but unlike Forster, he was more explicit in denouncing the danger of repression and presenting sex a sort of religion.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

As far as English fiction is concerned, "Modernism" usually refers to those novelists who actually experimented with new forms and who, while focusing on the mental process that develop in the human mind, tried to explore them through what is called the stream of consciousness tecnique. This new tecnique applied to literature the theories developed by two philosophers: Bergson and James. Bergson's conception of what he called "la durée", proposed that inner time has a duration which eludes conventional clock time. James had stated that consciousness does not appear to itself chopped up in bits but flows like a river or a stream.

INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

The method used to depict consciousness is the use of the interior monologue. Although this term is often confused with "stream of consciousness", there is a distinction between them, since stream of consciousness refers to the mental activity itself, while the interior monologue is the instrument used to translate this phenomenon into words. It was Joyce and Virginia Woolf who exploited it more fully, although in different ways: Woolf used a more repetitive style and the so called "indirect interior monologue", which provides more rational links for the association of ideas. Joyce went further in experimentation by using the "direct interior monologue", whereby he shifted obruptly from thought to thought, without any apparent connection of verb, subject or even punctuation.

THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL

There were many novelists active in the inter-war years and in the post-war period, although two stand out mainly as authors of utopian, or rather dystopian, fiction, Huxley and Orwell. However, while in previous ages Utopia was seen as a land of peace and brotherhood in contrast to the corruption and tyranny of the time in which the books were written, in our age the situation has been reversed. Under the impact of the conflicts preceding and succeeding the second world war, the old faith in "Human Perfectibility" and the "inevitability of progress" was undermined, and the 20^th century utopia turned into a dystopia, in which the optimism of the previous fables was replaced by a gloomy vision of the future and a warning for the present.

JAMES JOYCE

James Joyce is considered the greatest but also the most complicated writer of the 20^th century. He was born in Dublin in 1882,. Here he studied French, Italian and German languages and literatures and English literature. In June 1904 he met Nora Barnacle and in October settled in Trieste. The years in Trieste were difficult, filled with disappointment, frustration and financial problems, while he continued his writing and his efforts to publish Dubliners, a collection of short stories all about Dublin and Dublin's life. It had been serialised by " The Egoist", an avant-garde review. In 1915 he composed Ulissex. It began appearing serially in New York's "Little Review", and only after it was published in book form. The outcry following it publication, and the subsequent court action in the United States to determine whether or not it was pornographic, brought Joyce an unwelcome notoriety. But an enlightened judge upheld the artistic integrity of the work, and Ulissex was published in the USA and after in Britain. In 1923 he began to work on Finnegans Wake; this last novel may be interpreted as a dream containing the whole of human history. Joyce died in 1941.

JOYCE'S CONCEPTION OF THE ARTIST

Joyce thought that the artist ought to be invisible in his work, in the sense that he must not express his own viewpoint. He should instead try to express the thoughts and experiences of other men. He advocated the total objectivity of the artist and his independence from all moral, religious or political pressures.

FEATURES AND THEMES

Apart from rejecting Irish nationalism, Joyce rejected Irish life in toto. Yet at the same time he set all his novels in Dublin, the capital of the country he had grown up in and rejected, and his concern with the particulars of life there was unflagging and obsessive. He spent all his adult life abroad and becoming the most cosmopolitan of Irish writers in his openness to the influence of other intellectual traditions. Like other European writers of the time he was deeply interested in all aspects of modern culture. Like other writers, he found himself involved in the controversy over the two most influential literary currents of the time, realism and symbolism. Joyce always refused to be classified in either movements since realism and symbolism often combined in his works. He created a new kind of language, a mixture of existing words, inventive word combinations, and not-existent words. Syntax is disordered, punctuation not-existent.

DUBLINERS

Joyce literary production can be divided into two period. The first period of his work is marked by a realistic technique. One of the most significant works of this period is Dubliners. The fifteen stories which the book contains were all written by 1905, except for "The Dead", the longest and most ambitious, which was written in 1907. The work in an acute analysis of Dublin's life. The stories are arranged in thematic sequence, divided into four sections, each of which represents one stage in life: childhood, adolescence, maturity, public life, plus an epilogue. The style of the book is essentially realistic, with a scrupulous cataloguing of detail, the ability to create a sense of place and remarkable moments of sudden insight, which are one of  the characteristics of Joyce's art. He called these moments of insight "epiphanies" Joyce adopts this expression to signify a sudden revelation, the moment in a novel or story when a sudden spiritual awakening is experienced, in which all the petty details, thoughts, gestures, objects, feelings, come together to produce a new sudden awareness.

FROM DUBLINERS,"THE DEAD"

One of the best example of "epiphany" can be found in The Dead. The Dead is the last of the stories in Dubliners. It forms the climax to the theme of decay and stagnation that runs through all the stories intended to show the spiritual paralysis of Dublin, the heart of modern Ireland. But it also goes beyond the earlier stories by developing a more compassionate view of the lives of its characters, as well as moving away from the rigorously realistic and objective presentation of their lives, which is the dominant approach in the rest of the book. The story can be divided into two main parts. The first takes place at a dinner party shortly after Christmas; and in the second the central character, Gabriel Conroy, meditates in a hotel room on what has passed. The first section is set at the house of Kate and Julia Morkan, Gabriel' s aunts. Joyce skilfully makes this gathering representative of contemporary Ireland, including the different generations, different religious denominations, and political sympathies. All the events are viewed through the eyes of Gabriel Conroy. The high point of the party for Gabriel is a speech he makes after dinner. As he and Gretta walk home he is filled with love and desire for his wife, and remembers the happy moments in their courtship and married life. But once they reach the intimacy of their hotel bedroom he realises that his wife is weeping; he seeks to comfort her, and is shocked to find that an old Irish song sung at the party had brought back to her thoughts the memory of a young man, Michael Furey, who had been in love with her and had died for her sake. After Gretta has fallen asleep, Gabriel lies awake and thinks of the events of the night: his own fatuous complacency, his petty irritations and weak desires, and the futility of the lives that surround him.

ULYSSES

The second period of Joyce's writing sees the transition from a somewhat traditional approach to a stage of experimentation, rich in symbolism and allegory. The best known work of the second period is Ulysses. It takes as its material a single day, June 16, 1904, in the life of three Dubliners, and it is divided into three corresponding parts. The central character in the first part is Stephen Dedalus. Stephen is a young man with intellectual ambitions, the enemy of his own country and a martyr to art. He is an arrogant young man preaching the gospel of art to the Irish. His surname Dedalus, is of course that of legendary Greek artificer: Stephen desires to convert the philistine Irish to the cult of beauty inherited from the Greeks. The second part of Ulysses is dominated by the figure of Leopold Bloom, the Ulysses of the title: a middle-age married man, who wanders around Dublin as Ulysses wandered around the Mediterranean, encountering adventures which roughly parallel those of the Homeric hero. The third part is dominated by his wife, Molly Bloom, who corresponds to Ulysses' s wife Penelope, just as Stephen Dedalus represents Ulysses' son Telemachus. The novel begins with Stephen evicted from his lodgings and forced to wander the streets in search of a father and a home; in his wanderings he meets Bloom, who adopts him by offering to take him home and give him shelter. At home, awaiting the wanderers, is Molly Bloom, like Penelope on Ithaca. The book concludes with her ruminations as she lies awake in bed.