What is Twentieth Century Novel?// The Novel as the Modern Epic// The stream of Consciousness Novel //The modern Psychological Novel

• What is Twentieth Century Novel?
•  The Novel as the Modern Epic
• The stream of Consciousness Novel 
• The modern Psychological Novel 

Introduction: Modern novels have taken place of the ancient epics. The magnitude of epic is not its volume or narrative enlargement; rather it is expansion of thought and perception. An epic reflects the conscience of an age, its life style and thought equilibrium. Thus, from Homer to Milton the epics become the carriage of social, moral and communal representation. Later, the same search of age – consciousness is done, at least tried, through the dramas. The dramas have their limitation in its time frame and dramaturgic setting. Even Shakespeare fails to cross these limitations. After many currents and cross currents of prose-lyrics become multi-faceted, many – sided, complex and abundantly rich in it astonishing variety. The modern novelists are reading the conscience of his characters through the medium of his own, and by the process the dimensional mirror of novel is reflecting an age conscience which we have already read in epics. Modern novel is truly the ‘comic prose epic’.(Fielding)

The twentieth century novel represents a departure from traditional forms of storytelling, reflecting the significant social, political, and intellectual upheavals of the era. These novels broke away from the conventions of the 19th-century realist and Victorian novels, adopting new techniques, themes, and philosophies that were shaped by World War I, World War II, industrialization, urbanization, and shifting ideas about identity, psychology, and society.

The novels of this period often focused on themes such as alienation, disillusionment, existentialism, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. Authors like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and George Orwell experimented with narrative forms, exploring the inner workings of the human mind and using modernist techniques like fragmentation, nonlinear storytelling, and symbolism to convey the complexity of individual experience.

Dialogism: Mikhael Bakhtin has pointed out a singular characteristic of the novel – the dialogic quality. The traditional epics compact diverse elements in life and looks upon humanity with a vaster sweep of vision. The novels, however, actively assimilate aspects of life – crisis, correlation and combination – out of which a   dimensional thought is expressed. In the 19th century, Dickens and Balzac have successfully depleted the multidimensional qualities in their pragmatic fictional works.

In all these efforts there have been a giant leap into the terrain of humanism but yet the possibility of grossness looms large. The totality of the storyline seems here mechanical – a piling of facts, elements, incidents and characters. Here is no harmony, rather assimilation. Henry James thus accuses these traditional novels as ‘loose baggy monsters’. Thus through the passage of James, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tomas Mann there comes an inwardness in the novel and give birth to the stream of consciousness novel.

The Novel as the Modern Epic

In the 20th century, some novels came to be seen as the modern equivalent of the epic, a long narrative form traditionally associated with grand, heroic tales of national or mythological significance (e.g., The Odyssey, The Aeneid). The modern novel, however, shifts its focus from the heroic exploits of gods and warriors to the personal, internal struggles of ordinary individuals. The epic scope in modern novels is achieved not through heroic action, but through an exploration of deep philosophical, psychological, and social concerns.

For example, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is often seen as a modern epic, as it draws parallels to Homer’s Odyssey while focusing on the everyday life of its protagonist, Leopold Bloom, in Dublin. Similarly, novels like Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) can be considered modern epics because of their deep philosophical reflections, extensive length, and detailed depictions of social and cultural changes.

These novels, though not grand in the traditional sense, use the epic form to explore the complexity of the modern human experience, touching upon vast themes like time, memory, identity, and the alienation of the individual in an increasingly fragmented world.

The Stream of Consciousness Technique in Fiction

The stream of consciousness novel is a narrative technique that attempts to depict the continuous flow of thoughts, feelings, and memories that pass through the minds of characters. Rather than presenting events in a structured, chronological order, the stream of consciousness novel captures the fragmented, disjointed, and often irrational nature of human thought. This technique allows authors to delve deeper into the psychological complexity of their characters.

This form is most closely associated with Modernist writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) are key examples of stream of consciousness novels. In these works, the inner lives of the characters are given precedence over external events, and the narrative is often nonlinear, moving freely between past, present, and future as characters experience memories and emotions.

The stream of consciousness technique reflects the growing interest in psychology and the unconscious mind, particularly following the work of Sigmund Freud, and represents a significant departure from the traditional omniscient narrator of the 19th-century novel.

A withdrawal from the external phenomena into flickering half shades of the author’s private world is the basic pattern of stream of consciousness novel. It occupies with time, subjectivity, inwardness, absence of action, plot and catastrophe. The stream of consciousness novel does not adhere to the concept of reality. From the Freudian and Youngian concept here the reality lies not in the outer actions, but in the inner working of the human mind, in the inner perceptions. Consciousness is a constant flow, not jointed, and not chopped up in bits. It is the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. By this technique, the novelists try to catch the flow of life before it hardens into intellectual concepts and mechanical habits.

The novel based on this technique is mostly psychological. Emphasis lies on the individual and that too on the inner working of his mind. There is definite change in the concept of reality. There is decay of plot, decay of character. Actually the entire method of characterization is changed. The ‘stream of consciousness’ technique novelists record the impressions upon the mind of the character. It is the interior monologue of the character.

The modern novel is free and frank treatment of sex, love and marriage. The pre occupation of the modern novel with sex themes is very much due to the theories of psychologists like Freud and Havelock Ellis and the frustration, boredom and brutality caused by the two devastating world wars. The writers’ life of Kafka, James Joyce, and Henry James rightfully exhibits this.

The novels written by Stream of Consciousness writers clearly reflect the decay of plot and there is a tendency of discontinuity instead of continuity of action. They do not particularly care about neatly finishing off a given action, following it through the fall of the curtain. In short, these novels are like incomplete sentence. The great modern novels like Ulysses by Joyce or Pilgrimages by Dorothy Richardson are still stories, but they are stories without an ending, and the characteristic modern novel is a story without an ending. Despite of these, these novels are a serious art form which is well constructed in its aesthetic unity. Henry James, Conrad, Mrs. Woolf and other novelists have given careful thought to the aesthetics of the novel and propounded their own theory.

A few notable writers of Stream of Consciousness Novels

Undoubtedly Dorothy Richardson is the English writer who is the pioneer in this field and who presents stream of consciousness writing at its purest. But among the other writers Mrs Woolf is notable writer who’s Mrs Dalloway or To The Lighthouse are her immortal creation. Her Mrs. Dalloway is the interior monologue of Clarrisa Dalloway whose party remains a delusive notion of our culture. Clarrisa in her stream of thought finds out the hoax meaningless sociological norms and customs. The suicide of Septimus has no impact on anybody even to Dr Brads who instigated her to commit suicide. The crisis of the society haunts in this novel. James Joyce’s Ulysses is a masterpiece in this genre. The hero of the novel Leopold Bloom and his monologue of a single day in the slum of Dublin city constitute the whole novel. Bloom is loitering to and fro, interacts with different persons – particularly with his wife and affectionate son like youth Stephen Dedalus. Within these twenty four hours of stream of conscience the three thousand years history of European culture, creative and experimental assimilate into a harmonious whole. His other novel A Portrait also roughly defines the stream of consciousness in the opening and closing pages of the novel. The emphasis in the stream of consciousness method is on the psychic being of the characters and the associate mode is kept in the forefront of Stephen’s consciousness. Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse is an experiment towards a new method of satisfactory re-creating the reality inherent in human personality. The Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson is without plot, comedy – tragedy, love interest or catastrophe. Here is only Miriam Henderson, living from day to day, experiencing, feeling, and reacting to the stimuli of the outside world of people and things.

Conclusion

In summary, the twentieth century novel is characterized by a move away from traditional narratives, embracing modernist techniques such as the stream of consciousness, and focusing on the psychological depths of characters. The novel became a tool for exploring the complexities of modern life, reflecting the alienation, disillusionment, and search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. By presenting ordinary individuals’ experiences as worthy of epic narrative treatment, and by delving into the intricacies of the human mind, 20th-century novels mark a significant evolution in the history of literature. The stream of Conscience is also called the psychological novel, the novel of subjectivity, the novel of the interior monologue. Enriched by the philosophic thinkers like James, Freud, Jung, Adler and Bergson, the novelists like Proust, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf preoccupy with the subjectivity, inwardness, absence of plot and action and to the deepest recesses of the human psychology. But above all these novels as an organized symmetry have tried to rich the ‘dialogism’ and ‘carnivalesque’ – the two true essence of any epic writing.

Ardhendu De