The characters of Joyce and Woolf are caught, then, as they are immersed in the so-called stream of consciousness; and some version of an interior flow of thought becomes the main modernist access to 'character.' The reader overhears the characters speaking, so to say, from within their particular consciousnesses, but not always directly. The modernists felt free also to enter their characters' minds, to speak as it were on their behalf, in the technique known as 'free indirect style' (style indirect libre in French).
A marked feature of the new fictional selfhood was a fraught condition of existential loneliness. Conrad's Lord Jim, Joyce's Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Lawrence's Paul Morel and Rirkin, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway were people on their own, individuals bereft of the old props, Church, Rible, ideological consensus, and so doomed to make their own puzzled way through life's labyrinths without much confidence in belief, in the knowable solidity of the world, above all in language as a tool of knowledge about self and other. Jacob of Woolf's Jacob's Room remains stubbornly unknowable to his closest friends and loved ones, above all to his novelist. The walls and cupboards of Rhoda's room in The Waves, also by Woolf, bend disconcertingly around her bed; she tries in vain to restore her sense of the solidity of things by touching the bottom bed rail with her toes; her mind 'pours' out of her; the very boundaries of her self soften, slip, dissolve. The old conclusive plots?everything resolved on the novel's last page, on the model of the detective story?gave place to irresolute open endings: the unending vista of the last paragraph in Lawrence's Sons and Lovers; the circularity by which the last sentence of Joyce's Finnegans Wake hooks back to be completed in the novel's first word, so that reading simply starts over.
Novelists built modern myths on the dry bones of the old Christian ones.
In his review of Ulysses ('Ulysses, Order, and Myth,' 1923), T. S. Eliot famously
praised the novel for replacing the old 'narrative method' by a new 'mythical
method': Joyce's Irish Jew, Bloom, is mythicized as a modern Ulysses, his day's
odyssey often ironically reviving episodes in Homer's Odyssey. This manipu
lation of 'a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity' was,
Eliot thought, 'a step toward making the modern world possible for art,' much
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in keeping with the new anthropology and psychology as well as with what Yeats was doing in verse. Such private myth-making could, of course, take worrying turns. The 'religion of the blood' that D. H. Lawrence celebrated led directly to the fascist sympathies of his Aaron's Rod and the revived Aztec blood cult of The Plumed Serpent.
Language and textuality, reading and writing were now central to these highly metafictional novels, which are often about writers and artists, and surrogates for artists, such as Woolf's Mrs. Ramsay with her dinners and Mrs. Dalloway with her party, producers of what Woolf called the 'unpublished works of women.' But this self-reflexivity was not necessarily consoling?Mrs. Flanders's vision blurs and an inkblot spreads across the postcard we find her writing in the opening page of Jacob's Room. Perhaps the greatest modernist example of language gone rampant, Finnegans Wake taxes even its most dedicated readers and verges on unreadability for others.
The skeptical modernist linguistic turn, the rejection of materialist externality and of the Victorians' realist project, left ineradicable traces on later fiction, but modernism's revolutions were not absolute or permanent. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were influential but unrepeatable. And even within the greatest modernist fictions the worldly and the material, political and moral questions never dried up. Woolf and Joyce, for example, celebrate the perplexities of urban life in London and Dublin, and, indeed, modernist fiction is largely an art of the great city. Lawrence was preoccupied with the condition of England, industrialism, provincial life. Satire was one of modernism's recurrent notes. So it was not odd for the right-wing novelists who came through in the 1920s, such as Wyndham Lewis and Evelyn Waugh, to resort to the social subject and the satiric stance, nor for their left-leaning contemporaries? who came to be seen as even more characteristic of the red decade of the 1930s?such as Graham Greene and George Orwell, to engage with the human condition in ways that Dickens or Balzac, let alone Bennett-Wells- Galsworthy, would have recognized as not all that distant from their own spirit.
Despite the turn to documentary realism in the 1930s, the modernist emphasis on linguistic self- consciousness did not disappear. Instead the new writers politicized the modern novel's linguistic self- consciousness: they deployed the discourse of the unemployed or of the West Midlands' proletariat, for example, for political ends. The comically chaotic meeting of English and German languages in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin stories is central to the fiction's dire warning about Anglo-German politics; Newspeak in George Orwell's Nineteen- Eighty-Four is the culmination of the author's nearly two decades of politically motivated engagement with the ways of English speakers at home and abroad. In this politicized aftermath of the modernist experiment, novelists such as Aldous Huxley in Brave New World satirically engage the socio-politico-moral matter of the 1930s in part through reflections on the corruptions of language.
Where World War I was a great engine of modernism, endorsing the chaos of shattered belief, the fragility of language and of the human subject, the Spanish Civil War and then World War II confirmed the English novel in its return to registering the social scene and the historical event. World War II provoked whole series of more or less realist fictions, including Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, as well as powerful singletons such as Graham Greene's Ministry of Fear and Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. The new fictions of the post?World War II period speak with the satirical energies of
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the young demobilized officer class (Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim set the disgruntled tone), and of the ordinary provincial citizen finding a fictional voice yet again in the new Welfare State atmosphere of the 1950s, as in Alan Sillitoe's proletarian Nottingham novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
Questing for new moral bases for the post-Holocaust nuclear age, William Golding published the first of many intense post-Christian moral fables with The Lord of the Flies, and Iris Murdoch the first of many novels of moral philosophy with Under the Net, both in 1954. Murdoch espoused the 'sovereignty of good' and the importance of the novel's loving devotion to 'the otherness of the other person.' Murdoch and Golding were consciously retrospective (as were the contemporary Roman Catholic novelists Greene, Waugh, and Muriel Spark) in their investment in moral form. But even such firmly grounded determinations could not calm the anxieties of belatedness. As the century drew on, British fiction struggled with a disconcertingly pervasive sense of posteriority-?postwar flatness, postimperial diminutions of power and influence, and the sense of the grand narratives now losing their force as never before.
Some younger novelists, such as Ian McEwan and Martin Amis (son of Kingsley), became obsessed with Germany (the now accusingly prosperous old foe), and with the still haunting ghosts of the Hitlerzeit?and not least
