MODERN NOVEL

Novel is the most important and popular literary medium in the modern times. It is the only literary form which meets the needs of the modern world. The modern period in England is obviously not such a period when society is functioning on the basis of certain fundamental values. 

This is the age of interrogation and disintegration. Old values have been discarded and they have not been replaced by the new values. In England of today, the society is no longer homogeneous; it is divided in different groups who speaks different languages. 

The western man is swayed by conflicting intentions. It is difficult for him to choose between communism and capitalism, between belief in God and skepticism, confidence in science and fear in atom bomb because every belief is riddled with doubts. 

Science which is playing a predominant role today and which insists on the analytical approach has also helped the novel to gain more popularity because the method of the novel is also analytical. 

Modern novel is realistic as opposed to idealistic. He is realistic in the wider sense and tries to include within the limits of the novel almost everything and not merely one side view of it. Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE and George Eliot’s MIDDLE MARCH had proved that the texture of the novel can be as supple and various as life itself. In the second place modern novel is psychological. 

The psychological problem concerns the nature of consciousness and its relation to time. Modern psychological has made it difficult for the novelist to think of consciousness------- moving in a straight chronological line from point to the next. He tends rather to see it as altogether fluid existing simultaneously at several levels. To the modern novelists and readers who look at consciousness in this way, the presentation of a story in a straight chronological line becomes unsatisfactory and unreal. People are what they are because of what they have been. 

We are memories, and to describe as truthfully at any given moment means to say everything about our past. This method to describe this consciousness in operation is called the “stream of consciousness” method.

Since the stream of consciousness novelist like Virginia Woolf, believe that the individual reaction to any given situation is determined by the sum of his past experience. It follows that everyone is in some sense a prisoner of his own individuality. It therefore means that reality itself is a means of personal impression rather than public systematization and thus real communication between individual is impossible. 

In such a world of loneliness, there is no scope for love because each personality, being determined by past history, is unique. This idea is further strengthened on account of disintegration of modern society in which there is no common basis of values. That is why modern novelist regards love as a form of selfishness or at least as something much more complicated and problematical than simple affection between two persons.  

D.H. Lawrence believes that true love begins with the lover’s recognition of each other’s true separateness. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway rejected Peter Walsh, the man she really loved, because of the fear that his possessive love would destroy her own personality.

Stream of consciousness novelist is dissatisfied with the traditional methods. He has realized that it is impossible to give a psychologically accurate account of what a man is at any given moment, either by static description of his character or by describing chronological reactions. He is interested in those aspects of consciousness which are essentially dynamic rather than static in nature. For him, the present moment is sufficiently specious. It not merely gives him the reaction of the person to a particular experience at the moment, but also his previous as well as his future reactions. 

His technique, therefore, is a means to escape from the tyranny of the time dimension. The stream of consciousness technique not only helps to reveal the character completely, historically as well as psychologically, it also presents development in character which is in itself very difficult. It is a method by which a character can be presented outside time and place.