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“Tradition” seems to have a complex meaning in the realm of literature. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as
“a belief, principle, or way of acting that people in a particular society or group have continued to follow for
a long time.” But, as T. S. Elliot describes in his “Essays”, it is not only about “following the ways of the
immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its success.” 1Throughout time the concept of
beauty has fluctuated and changed in many ways, each century having a different idea of what defines beauty in
art, music, architecture and literature. Wars, revolutions, rises and falls of empires and kings and astonishing
discoveries sculpted the image of human kind, its way of thinking and behaving. Nevertheless, there does
appear to be certain classical concepts of beauty that are not inconsistent with many of the modern views.
And who is most appropriate to criticize a literary work or to compare it to other literary works from different
periods-“that spongy tract, those fictions in prose of a certain extent which extend so indeterminately?” No
“elaborate apparatus. Principles and systems may suit other forms of art”2, but they cannot be applied to
literature. Only a human being can appreciate its value. Through his nature, man has a sharp critic spirit, more
or less conscious, criticism being “as inevitable as breathing”, as T. S. Elliot says in his “Essays”. Human feels
with his heart closeness to the novel, appreciation, admiration, or maybe, on the other side, he may not like it
and be in opposition with the author’s style and views. And because we are all unique and perceive reality
through our own subjectivity we tend to have very opposite opinions on the same work of art. While I really
enjoyed Virginia Woolf’s “To the Light House”, a complex book in my opinion in which very little is said in
words, but a great deal occurs in feelings, where silence becomes more important than words, some of my
colleagues claimed that they found this novel boring and hard to get through.
1
Eliot,T.S.- “Selected Essays”
2
Forster, EM – Aspects of the Novel, pg 17
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It is obvious that writers cannot stay apart from this realm of criticism. Virginia Woolf, at the recommendation
of T.S. Eliot read James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. While T.S. Elliot said that is “the most considerable work of
imagination”, Virginia Woolf claimed that “never did any book so bore me”. She considered Joyce “a self-
taught working man… egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating.” “When one can have cooked
I think that the evolution of the narrative techniques was quite abrupt. Over a period of only two hundred years,
from the 19th century Victorian novel to the Modernist novel of the 20th century many things have changed, one
of them being the reflection of the author in his creations. The novels of the Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Anne and
Emily, of Thomas Hardy or of George Eliot are in a great measure based on the spirit of tradition. The
patriarchal God-like author, omniscient and omnipotent, controlled the course of life of his characters, which
were like puppets in his hands. He was “the voice in which the story is written that is outside the story and that
knows everything about the characters and events in the story.” (Cambridge Dictionary) Although I feel
fondness for the novels of this Victorian authors, sprinkled with drama and passion, I think that the plot is to a
certain extent predictable and the characters are unidirectional. In a society guided by prejudice, they are
categorized as either bad or good. But in fact human nature is far more complex than this. Just like the concept
of Yin and Yang, a man’s character is a mixture of vices and virtues, of light and darkness, there is a constant
Charles Dickens took a different direction, being at the edge of tradition and innovation. He makes the first step
to modernism by using the first person narrative, meaning that the narrator sees reality through his own eyes, it
is subjective and controlled by his own emotions and sensitivity. His characters are complex and unpredictable.
In the first half of the 20th century, the emblematic figures of Modernism took literature to another level. In
order to make a novel seem more realistic, the emphasis was put on “realistic ‘rendering’ rather than “mere
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‘telling’”. (Clarke 4) 3I think that because the author is no longer an omniscient and omnipresent relater, but
someone who describes the scene directly to the reader, the novel becomes more credible. If the reader
“suspects for a moment that he (the author) is behind the scenes, controlling the lives of his characters, they will
not seem to be free.” (Clarke 4) The author is hidden, felt, but never seen. While the traditional novel is based
more or less on chronology, the modernist novel illustrates a discontinuous reality, a personal time. The focus is
on the inner experiences, feelings and sensations. The 20th century novels offered the readers a unique feeling of
mystery and suspense. Although in appearance they look chaotic and shapeless, due to the abundance of details,
flashbacks, shifts from one consciousness to another, in fact they are very carefully structured and infused with
correspondences and references. Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” is the best example for the shifting narrative
perspective. Her experimental novel is based exclusively, with a little exception consisting in the descriptive
passages, on the monologues, personal thoughts and feelings of the six major characters, Louis, Bernard,
Neville, Rhoda, Susan and Jinny, which interfere throughout the novel. The modernists reject the omniscience
and in fact promote immediacy and value the sincere experience. These novels illustrate a new poetic way of
portraying human experience. I believe that modernist writers are more concerned with the workings of human
A very well known quote says that history repeats itself. It is the same with literature, in terms of themes. The
same kinds of events repeat over and over again. It is followed the cycle of life, birth, the initiation process
towards maturity marked by contradictory feelings, the mixture of love and hate, of loneness and togetherness,
of exaltation and despair, all this ending up with death. From the ancient times of the Greek Empire, the same
basic themes, motives and myths are put in a different light, being reinvented and reinterpreted. One modernist
novelist, James Joyce, gives his novel, “Ulysses”, a mythological dimension. One of his characters, Leopold
Bloom, burdened with anguish and isolation, embarks on a symbolic journey to find the wholeness of his self.
He was exiled in his own country Ireland and lives a drama caused by the death of his son and the problems
3
WAYNE C. BOOTH THE RHETORIC OF FICTION (1961)
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from his conjugal life. The other character is Stephen Dedalus, a poor young artist with many debts and
narrowed dreams. His father underestimates him, oppressing his aspiration. After his death, Stephen is
searching for a father figure who could appreciate his value, just like Homer’s Telemachus. A modernist writer
approaches a myth from the Bronze Age, creating a modernist version of it.
In my opinion, modernism is certainly a break from tradition. The novel, like the iron at the smithy, or like the
gold from the Bible who is burned in the oven for purification, has suffered many changes, I would say towards
perfection, from the omniscience and omnipresence to the first person narrator, from the unilateral characters to
more complex and unpredictable ones, all this with the purpose of mirroring reality. Continuity can be found in
the essence, the themes and motives which are universal for humankind, but a lot of change has occurred in the
form.
Bibliography:
Cambridge Dictionary
Lectures
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