Sigmund Freud
The cultural climate of the early 20° century witnessed a profound change, comparable to a revolution, in thought and feeling. An entire system of thought was disrupted by scientific, political and psychological theories, and World War I hastened the destruction of old ideas , ushering in a period of experimentation in all forms of artistic expression. One of the influences was Sigmund Freud (1856 –1939), the founder of psychoanalysis. His studies led to a new concept of the mind and revealed the primacy of the instincts. Above all, Freud’s name is associated with the discovery of the power of the unconscious , “the true, psychic reality”, which determines many of or actions. Moreover, Freud discovered that man unconsciously tends to remove or modify things that he cannot accept. Hence the necessity to analyse consciousness more and more deeply, and the awareness that there is no objective reality besides the individual and the sum of his personal experiences.
William James
Another important contribution came from the American psychologist William James (1842 – 1910) Henry James’s brother, who spoke of the endless flux and infinite change of the inner life, so that reality cannot be objectively given but is subjectively perceived through consciousness. In his “Principles of Psychology” (1890) he wrote: ”Consciousness …flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it, hereafter, let s call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life”. As a consequence, the present does not really exist; the real specific event is the individual with his consciousness where past and future constantly flow into each other. William James’s definition appealed to writers, and it was taken over to denote the new narrative technique destined to be so effectively used by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
Henri Bergson
To the contributions of psychology must be added the new concept of time introduced by the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941). The most original aspect of his thought is the “concept of duration”. Bergson distinguished between: - the mathematical time of science (e.g. one minute consists of 60 seconds and each minute equals the other) and - the time of the mind, which is lived in a personal way and changes from one person to another, or from one situation to another. In other terms, the time necessary to boil some water is the scientific time, but the time that the person waits for the water to boil is the time of spiritual experience, and is always different. Bergson called this second time “duration”
Modernist fiction
Around the beginning of World War I, a new mode of consciousness gained momentum as a reaction against such 19 th-century beliefs and ethics as the materialism of Marx and Darwin, the conservatism of the Victorian bourgeois mentality, the idea of false “stability” offered by progress and industrialisation. For novelists, the consequence was a distrust of 19 th-century realistic pretension to mirroring life and history, psychology and human interactions. The writers of fiction who are most representative of experimentations in new forms are called “High Modernists”
High Modernists
Novelists like Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) and James Joyce (1882 – 1941) exemplified this reaction by rejecting and criticising the mechanistic modern society. The use of the “stream of consciousness” technique, of subjective narrators, of mythical structures showed their commitment to a new narrative, based on the psychological and intellectual developments of their characters, the complexity of their emotional lives and their subjective perceptions. The technique they used (mixtures of styles – juxtaposed monologue sequences – associative movements of the mind) are so interwoven as to produce a sense of simultaneity and constant change which compels the reader to assume an active role in making sense of the text.