The Narrative Perspective



PALADE EDITH

English-Romanian

IIIrd year

Experiments in Modernist Fiction

Narrative techniques - Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf vs. Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Laurence

Starting with the early days of twentieth century, the English writers felt that they had to break the traditional ways of creating literature in order to come with something innovative, as a reaction against the Victorian culture and aesthetic. In this essay I will try to emphasize the common and distinctive aspects of the narrative techniques used in their novels by two modern writers, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Laurence.

Virginia Woolf uses an ambiguous type of narrative perspective , this is why her novels are difficult to read for most of the people. In Mrs. Dalloway, we cannot speak about an omniscient third person narrator, as in her traditional novels, but about a type of narrative one used with by VirginiaWoolf successfully, called Free Indirect Style. It is a combination between direct and indirect speech, which exposes and develops the characters. The objective voice preserved throughout the narrator merges with the subjective voice revealed by the character.

By the use of this technique, Virginia Woolf would enter her characters’ minds and souls, without using the dialogue too much, as she was convinced that neither the dialogue nor the narrator would allow her to present the most complex human relationship and the changings of the human consciousness that occur in only seconds. There are two aspects of the free indirect style: free indirect speech and free indirect thought. Through the last one, everything that a character interferes with, feels or thinks about is reported from the depths of the characters’ own consciousness. This is why it is used especially when the character is alone, as a self-reflection. When the narrative shifts to the subjective point of view of an individual character, the reader discovers both the way in which a character sees the words and actions of other characters and the way a character creates opinions and decides upon action.

The Free Indirect Style depends heavily on the reader’s involvement. Margaret Anne Doody says, in her essay George Elliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel , that “The technique turns upon a discrepancy between a character’s thoughts and authorial respeaking of them. The effect depends upon the reader’s noticing a gap, a distance … (therefore, Free Indirect Style) is inherently ironic, setting out limitations in a wider perspective. But the irony is not dismissive and detached, nor can we regard ourselves has prejudging the characters whose thoughts infuse the narrative. Our judgment emerges slowly under the quiet guidance of the author, and can be completely formed only when we understand the character’s point of view. The author makes us see the world as the character sees it, and we must comprehend his view before rejecting or modifying it.”

In Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Gérard Genette, defined the role of the narrator: “The narrator is present as source, guarantor, and organizer of the narrative, as analyst and commentator, as stylist … and particularly … as producer of metaphor”.

Another technique used by Virginia Woolf to create the narrative perspective is the Stream of Consciousness, a style of writing started in the early twentieth century. It reflects the flow of characters’ thoughts and feelings, so it represents a subjective point of view. It gives readers the impression that they are inside the character’ s mind. The stream of consciousness is pretty difficult to follow, since it is the interior monologue of the character, usually characterized by leaps in syntax and punctuation, tracing a character’s fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings. The readers experience the daily life of the characters, as Virginia Woolf describes the trivial, ordinary life of her characters, still with the stream of consciousness style. It merges the past with the present by naturally developing flashbacks within the character’s consciousness.

In comparison with V. Woolf, D.H. Laurence was also interested in the consciousness of his characters when he wrote his novel Sons and Lovers, but with with a difference; through an illustration of the emotional properties of the consciousness, not the mental ones, as in Mrs. Dalloway. The inner torments of the individual determine his dilemmas, which constitute the main theme of the novel. It centers on the emotional development of the main character (Paul Morel), since childhood to young maturity (buildungsroman), the disintegration of the individual trapped in the modern civilization. There is a struggle between passion and intellect, plus the love for the mother, which makes decisions very hard to make.

The critic Helen Baron claims that Lawrence embeds his own understanding about human consciousness not only in Paul's character but also in the very style of the writing. In her essay, Disseminated Consciousness in Sons and Lovers, Baron writes that Lawrence tests readers' assumptions that the will can control what the body feels and the mind thinks, claiming Lawrence represents consciousness as something that cannot be contained. Baron wrote that "Lawrence's exploration of consciousness is so strongly embedded in the narrative tissue that the very words themselves are treated as cells with permeable boundaries."

Sons and Lovers is told from the point of view of an omniscient third person narrator, as it can access the thoughts of the characters and moves back and forth in time while telling the story (as in the traditional novel). Although Laurence tries to be objective, sometimes he is subjective, mostly when adding editorial comments (modern feature). This gives the novel a type of belonging to Late Victorianism – Early Modernism.

Being highly autobiographical, one may identify the narrator of the novel with Lawrence, who seems to be looking back in time and trying to come in terms with his own youthful problems and feelings, through the character of Paul Morel. The narrator is sometimes subjective as he sympathizes with Paul, but at other times he blames him. The other characters are to be judged in a similar way. I think the narrator is simply thinking about how people naturally change their perspective according to the circumstances. Other times, the narrator allows the characters to speak for themselves in passages of dialogue. This narrative technique makes the reader feel closer to them, as the narrator doesn't guide the view of their motivations.

The narrator intrudes, saying, "Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over." Lawrence alternates between showing and telling in the novel. When he shows, he simply describes the characters' action and lets them speak for themselves. When he tells, he summarizes scenes and sometimes comments upon them. The narrator's presence is most obvious in the latter instance.

The narrative perspective changes during the novel to determine from which character’s point of view the story seems to be narrated at each point. Most of the novel is concerned with Paul’s relationship with women, especially his mother, Miriam, and Clara. 

Joseph Frank’s Spatial Form in Modern Literature, a theory dealing with narrative problem in modern fiction, explains reduction of temporality for the sake of spatiality. There is a distinction between story and plot. The term “defamiliarization’’ means that the writer modifies the reader’s habitual perception by drawing attention to “artifice” of the text. This technique of “defamiliarization” forces the reader to see meaning not as authorial, stable, spread in diachronic temporal order but as generative one, moving back and forth using a synchronic and simultaneous perception. An important part of the narrative turns an inner attention to the psychic region of characters ignoring the sense of temporality. This is also known with the term of “flashback”, technique used by Virginia Woolf too, enabling her to tell the whole story of Mrs. Dalloway where the past and present merge in the characters’ consciousness.

Talking about the style of the narrative, one may see that both novels use a combination between realistic description and poetic images. On the one hand, realism is a style describing in a true-to-life manner the everyday events and on the other hand, the poetic narrative lifts life out of its normality, making it seem supernatural or symbolic of universal themes outside ordinary daily experience. The poetry appears mostly in the description of nature and implies the reader’s emotion, the novels would not be understood properly without.

In my opinion, the expressionism of the language is used more frequent and it is more important in Virginia Woolf’s novel than D.H. Laurence’s, because her whole novel is a poem itself, full of artistic images, elaborate and rhythmical language, words comparison or metaphors and similes. Laurence himself confessed in a letter dated October 1910 that his writing is “a novel – not a florid prose poem, or a decorated idyll running to seed in realism”. A characteristic of D.H. Laurence’s style is the combination between realism, impressionism, symbolism and expressionism, each of them being supply for the atmosphere, the significance and the vision.

As a conclusion, there are some common aspects in Virginia Woolf’s and D.H. Laurence’s novels, giving them the features of modernism, such as the combination between realistic description and poetic images, the technique called “flashbacks”, that makes the temporality insignificant and the stress on the consciousness importance. Both of them make use of symbols and metaphorical images that increase the expressivity of the novel. But there are also aspects that differentiate the two writers such as the fact that V. Woolf uses the “free-indirect” style, while D.H. Laurence doesn’t; as well as the fact that the last one knows how to make from an apparently realistic (Late Victorian) novel – written from the point of view of an omniscient IIIrd person narrator – a modernist one.

Bibliography:

1. Burlui, Irina, Lectures in 20th Century British Literature, Publishing “Al. I. Cuza” - University Iasi, Faculty of Philology

2. Doody, Margaret Anne, “George Elliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 1980

3. Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin 1980

4. Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” in The Widening Gyre, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1963

5. Baron, Helen, “Disseminated Consciousness in Sons and Lovers”, in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 4, October 1998

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