6 - Text
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Narrative theory is based on the distinction between the events in the story and how they are rendered as a text. Narratological analysis is primarily about the tension between the two, which becomes increasingly explicit and creative among modernists. This chapter focuses on the modernists' innovations in the text's mechanics, language, and style. Their striking innovations in these areas transformed the language in which narratives were articulated and experienced. By inventing words, transforming syntax, exploring the strengths and weaknesses of language, and devising new styles, modernists forged new contexts for experience.
MECHANICS: COINED WORDS AND STYLIZED SENTENCES
Realists were acutely aware of the difficulty of finding the right words for experience, as Flaubert acknowledged in Madame Bovary: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” But even Flaubert did not seriously question the mechanics of letters, words, and sentences. Modernists experimented with these basic elements, including individual letters. In mini-dramas of that experimentation, Joyce had letters walk away, while Woolf had them blow away.
Joyce obliged readers to think about the conventional and arbitrary arrangement of letters that they always see locked in words by tracing throughout Ulysses the fate of five sandwich-board men each wearing a tall white hat bearing a single red letter: together the hats spell the name H. E. L. Y. 'S., for Wisdom Hely's, a stationery store where Bloom once worked.
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- Information
- The Modernist NovelA Critical Introduction, pp. 153 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011