Consciousness in Modernist Fiction

This book explores stylistic techniques that interweave different viewpoints in Modernist fiction. Consciousness was a central concern of the Modernist novel and there has been a strong critical interest in the techniques of its presentation. Critics are aware of the Modernist practice of refracting narratives through the consciousness of numerous characters, but while narratologists as well as stylisticians have studied the linguistic indices of narrative viewpoint, the linguistic mechanics of shifts across different characters' minds or across character's and narrator's voices have remained unexplored. This book offers the first stylistic analysis of the linguistic evidence and shows that the implications of such practices far exceed the attempt to simply juxtapose different characters' viewpoints and thereby interpret the narrative world through different perspectives; rather than simply co-existing in the tissue of the narrative, the viewpoints of D.H. Lawrence's and Virginia Woolf's characters are interconnected in dialogue that occurs at the interstices of viewpoint shifts. This is significant because it impacts on the very discourse of the novel itself as a genre, i.e. its dialogicity. James Joyce's rendering of consciousness intersects the voices of character and narrator, and this in turn implicates the reader in the construction of meaning. The identification of dialogic techniques in the presentation of consciousness serves to question a long accepted belief that the novel of consciousness is a novel of fragmentation and occlusion. Instead, the dialogic Modernism identified here suggests a more deliberate concern on the part of writers to engage directly with the philosophical questions of self and other that were being explored, in a very different format, by Heidegger, Bergson and Buber.