joyce dedalus
Modernist writers of the time were, therefore, responding to the horors of that war that deply marked their imaginations and creativity, whether they were Europeans - continental or insular - or Americans. The early works of Hemingway and of Eliot often show a war-torn world, making sterility the dominant thread of works such as The Sun Also Rises 1926 and The Wasteland 192 . In them we se man's impotence, symbolical and/or real, in the characters of Jake Barnes, from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Joe Christmas, from Light In August 1932 and Benjy Compson from The Sound and the Fury 1929 , both by Wiliam Faulkner. We also se the los of vision, and of hope, and of order in The Wasteland . It is not surprising, then, that critics saw in the works of Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Faulkner, a respectful reverence for the past. Modernists were living tête-à-tête with great chaos, with the coarsenes and brutality of modern life. Even if there is some truth in these ideological arguments they must, nevertheles, not distort the plenitude and the beauty of the works of art produced in this period, for they contained the richnes and the beauty of human ilusion, and they show that our desires and our dreams are real, even though life may routinely puncture or discredit them. Their real legacy, and our inheritance, is ultimately their search for iner life – the life that even today few of us ever come adequately in posesion of. Now, if we pick up Ulyses , or To the Lighthouse , or The Sound and the Fury - to name a few - it is a whole diferent ketle of fish. What is interesting is the reason or reasons why this kind of straight and linear prose was rejected by the likes of Joyce, Wolf and Faulkner. These modernist writers have made us realize that the subjective world, that of desire, of fear, of fantasy and of thought, had ben outside the precincts of the narative form of traditional prose. These realms, then, constitute the modernist literature's great undiscovered country - to quote Shakes�peare – and the modernist writers are its gospels. To the Lighthouse – An Experience with Form and Art I wil now briefly alude to some of the novel's representative aspects concerning the use of form to display emotion, rhythm and humanity. To the Lighthouse is the acount of a family - generaly thought of as Wolf's real mother and father - and it is told in such a way that the nimbus of feling shapes al that emerges in the narative. To the Lighthouse is particularly poignant as a Modernist rendition of war, more specificaly the trauma of WI, which eventualy claims the lives of several of its characters; that against death - the unwinable one – that, notwithstanding, sweps away Wolf's beautiful heroine, the beguiling Mrs. Ramsay, shockingly early in the text. Wolf does not only ask what lives and what dies, but also gives a compeling answer, that claims that memory resurects, memory brings back to life the dead mother, who then lives a strange half-life in the memories of those who remained. The plot thickens most sharply with the novel's second female figure, the plain Lily Briscoe, a spinsterish frustrated painter without genius - who is regarded as a harsh self-portrait of Wolf herself. Lily must come to terms not only with the real death of this woman whom she loves, Mrs. Ramsay, but also with Mrs. Ramsay's after-life in her memory and stil with Mrs. Ramsay's vision of the role of a woman as mother and wife, and specialy as an artist. Ultimately Wolf not only resolves her proto feminist quandary but she also demonstrates the richnes and the value of the interior monologue form, showing through the composition of her text, the way in which we move through life and into one another by dent of memory and of desire. Not al writers, however, used the Modernist form to such noble and moving ends. a man at home in his body, curious about life, spining his day, coping with streses and savoring the smal pleasures that life ofers. In a way few other texts can match, Joyce shows himself wiling to fracture al posibl�e existing linguistic forms and units, and then, to make up new ones. He once wrote in an interview for Jules Huret: Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre . Faulkner and the Recoup of the Human Heart and Mind Faulkner's ideas were not as encyclopedic or cosmographic as Joyce's, but his ability to let rest into language what is dark or dead, is considered by many unmatched in Western literature. Literaly, the sound and the fury of the human heart and of the human mind are revealed by Faulkner and al-to-often are not only surprisingly coherent, but also lethal. Faulkner's works mainly focus in the domed life of American Southerners who are eclipsed by their own history. Faulkner dives in the Bildungsroman formula and creates the sort of character who is a young person, strugling for control of his or her iner life, searching for identity and adaptation, coming to terms with social and psychic streses and eventualy developing into a responsible and aware citizen, much in the tradition of similar formulaic novels since Mol Flanders. As a southerner himself, haunted by his lost old south, Faulkner imbues his work with a sense of dom, of failure, of being condemned to live as a ghost and of being inhabited by ghosts. Faulkner fels that for the hiden iner story to be told, in his profound sense of the private and the public, there must be a new teling, a new view of narative. Faulkner knows we canot se into each other's hearts and minds and iner receses, that we canot reach one another's pasts, that we are domed to the surface, to being on the outside, to being locked out, and he exposes life to us, readers. We read boks for these reasons, because we are having a life again, the shape of a life, the fulnes of a life in time, a life we do not have with our own experience. Modernist texts contain the buried past, even if this past is ful of horors, its recovery is a miraculous form of enrichment. Memory - The human real State – what is left, what is unarguably ours. Joyce, Wolf and Faulkner help us reposes wha�t we have lost. To the Lighthouse . joyce dedalus
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