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Modernistic narration

Interior Monologue

Except in the last section, the narrations of The Sound and the Fury are interior monologues. Interior monologues are narratives in which characters' thoughts are revealed in a way that appears to be uncontrolled by the author. The chaotic thoughts of Benjy narrate the first section. He also records what is said around him without understanding it. Quentin's inner voice relates his experiences in the Compson family and details his thoughts and behavior on the day of his suicide. Jason's inner voice relates the third part of the book. By this method, Faulkner lets the reader see the nature of all three characters without describing them. Because we know what these three characters are thinking, they are clearly focused in the novel. Many of the other characters, particularly the Compson parents and Caddy, are less clearly drawn, because we always see them through the eyes of Benjy, Quentin, or Jason. Dilsey's section is not written as an interior monologue and the reader sees her character from her behavior and her dialogue.

Stream of Consciousness

"Stream of consciousness" writing is designed to give the impression of the everchanging, spontaneous, and seemingly illogical series of thoughts, emotions, images, and memories that make up real-life thought. Faulkner was influenced by the writings of Irish novelist James Joyce, who had developed the use of stream of consciousness in his novel Ulysses. Many writers of the period, including Faulkner, were influenced by Joyce's use of this technique. Within some of the interior monologues in The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner uses techniques peculiar to stream of consciousness. An absence of punctuation and capitalization characterizes stream of consciousness, as well as the repetition of words and phrases. Changes in type, such as switching to italics, can also be used effectively to portray changes in thought. While the writing of this book came early in his career, Faulkner showed a mastery of this technique. It has been largely abandoned by contemporary novelists, who still frequently use the interior monologue.

Naturalism

Definitions

The term naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Unlike realism, which focuses on literary technique, naturalism implies a philosophical position: for naturalistic writers, since human beings are, in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings. Zola's 1880 description of this method in Le roman experimental (The Experimental Novel, 1880) follows Claude Bernard's medical model and the historian Hippolyte Taine's observation that "virtue and vice are products like vitriol and sugar"--that is, that human beings as "products" should be studied impartially, without moralizing about their natures. Other influences on American naturalists include Herbert Spencer and Joseph LeConte.

Through this objective study of human beings, naturalistic writers believed that the laws behind the forces that govern human lives might be studied and understood. Naturalistic writers thus used a version of the scientific method to write their novels; they studied human beings governed by their instincts and passions as well as the ways in which the characters' lives were governed by forces of heredity and environment. Although they used the techniques of accumulating detail pioneered by the realists, the naturalists thus had a specific object in mind when they chose the segment of reality that they wished to convey.
In George Becker's famous and much-annotated and contested phrase, naturalism's philosophical framework can be simply described as "pessimistic materialistic determinism." Another such concise definition appears in the introduction to American Realism: New Essays. In that piece,"The Country of the Blue," Eric Sundquist comments, "Revelling in the extraordinary, the excessive, and the grotesque in order to reveal the immutable bestiality of Man in Nature, naturalism dramatizes the loss of individuality at a physiological level by making a Calvinism without God its determining order and violent death its utopia" (13).
A modified definition appears in Donald Pizer's Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, Revised Edition (1984):

[T]he naturalistic novel usually contains two tensions or contradictions, and . . . the two in conjunction comprise both an interpretation of experience and a particular aesthetic recreation of experience. In other words, the two constitute the theme and form of the naturalistic novel. The first tension is that between the subject matter of the naturalistic novel and the concept of man which emerges from this subject matter. The naturalist populates his novel primarily from the lower middle class or the lower class. . . . His fictional world is that of the commonplace and unheroic in which life would seem to be chiefly the dull round of daily existence, as we ourselves usually conceive of our lives. But the naturalist discovers in this world those qualities of man usually associated with the heroic or adventurous, such as acts of violence and passion which involve sexual adventure or bodily strength and which culminate in desperate moments and violent death. A naturalistic novel is thus an extension of realism only in the sense that both modes often deal with the local and contemporary. The naturalist, however, discovers in this material the extraordinary and excessive in human nature.

The second tension involves the theme of the naturalistic novel. The naturalist often describes his characters as though they are conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance. But he also suggests a compensating humanistic value in his characters or their fates which affirms the significance of the individual and of his life. The tension here is that between the naturalist's desire to represent in fiction the new, discomfiting truths which he has found in the ideas and life of his late nineteenth-century world, and also his desire to find some meaning in experience which reasserts the validity of the human enterprise. (10-11)

For further definitions, see also The Cambridge Guide to American Realism and Naturalism, Charles Child Walcutt's American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream, June Howard's Form and History in American Literary Naturalism, Walter Benn Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Lee Clark Mitchell's Determined Fictions, Mark Selzer's Bodies and Machines, and other works from the naturalism bibliography. See Lars Ahnebrink, Richard Lehan, and Louis J. Budd for information on the intellectual European and American backgrounds of naturalism.

Characteristics

Characters. Frequently but not invariably ill-educated or lower-class characters whose lives are governed by the forces of heredity, instinct, and passion. Their attempts at exercising free will or choice are hamstrung by forces beyond their control; social Darwinism and other theories help to explain their fates to the reader. See June Howard's Form and History for information on the spectator in naturalism.

Setting. Frequently an urban setting, as in Norris's McTeague. See Lee Clark Mitchell's Determined Fictions, Philip Fisher's Hard Facts, and James R. Giles's The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America.

Techniques and plots. Walcutt says that the naturalistic novel offers "clinical, panoramic, slice-of-life" drama that is often a "chronicle of despair" (21). The novel of degeneration--Zola's L'Assommoir and Norris's Vandover and the Brute, for example--is also a common type.

Themes Walcutt identifies survival, determinism, violence, and taboo as key themes.

2. The "brute within" each individual, composed of strong and often warring emotions: passions, such as lust, greed, or the desire for dominance or pleasure; and the fight for survival in an amoral, indifferent universe. The conflict in naturalistic novels is often "man against nature" or "man against himself" as characters struggle to retain a "veneer of civilization" despite external pressures that threaten to release the "brute within."

3. Nature as an indifferent force acting on the lives of human beings. The romantic vision of Wordsworth--that "nature never did betray the heart that loved her"--here becomes Stephen Crane's view in "The Open Boat": "This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual--nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent."

4. The forces of heredity and environment as they affect--and afflict--individual lives.

5. An indifferent, deterministic universe. Naturalistic texts often describe the futile attempts of human beings to exercise free will, often ironically presented, in this universe that reveals free will as an illusion.

The red badge …

Naturalism and Fate 

The idea that a human being is at the mercy of fate or a pitiless universe had fascinated writers of Crane's time, in particular the French novelists Émile Zola (1840-1902) and Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), as well as the German playwright, poet, and novelist Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946). They pioneered a literary movement known as naturalism. However, although these naturalists often receive credit for  originating as a literary motif the concept of a cruel universe that determines man’s fate, writers centuries before had explored the idea. In the Old Testament of the Bible, Job suffers numerous reverses–including the loss of his material possessions, his sons, and his health–even though he is a righteous man. In Greek tragedy–in particular in the plays of Sophocles, such as Oedipus Rex–fate plays an extremely important role as  an inexorable force. William Shakespeare explored this idea in the early 1600's with unsurpassed insight in his play King Lear, in which Gloucester says in Act IV, Scene I, "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. / They kill us for their sport" (Lines 38-39). Many other writers before and after Crane also focused on naturalist themes. Among American writers who did so, besides Crane, were Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and James T. Farrell.  
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Impressionistic Format 
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Author Crane tells the story in third-person point of view, presenting the impressions of a young Union volunteer during his preparation for war and during his first experiences in combat. The dialogue is written in the homely vernacular of common folk.  Rather than focusing on the objective reality of the Union and Confederate clash in the Battle of Chancellorsville, Crane dwells on the subjective reality of a young soldier’s reactions to the scenes around him. Through the soldier’s eyes, Crane sees and paints a word picture of war; it is an interpretation rather than a historical account, an impressionistic portrait rather than a photograph. 

It is not an epic war story that contrasts the morality of the opposing sides, but the story of the individual, internal struggle of the youth. The story is written from the 3rd person narrative, yet omnipotent only to Henry’s point of view, therefore making the reader more understanding and sympathetic to Henry’s battle with the concept of how courage, honor, and manhood coexist with the urge for self-preservation and the universal law that all human life meets “the great death” and that as soldiers, each man could be considered “a cog in the wheel” and therefore dispensable.

Realism

Definitions

Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. Although strictly speaking, realism is a technique, it also denotes a particular kind of subject matter, especially the representation of middle-class life. A reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method, the systematizing of the study of documentary history, and the influence of rational philosophy all affected the rise of realism. According to William Harmon and Hugh Holman, "Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists plumb the actual or superficial to find the scientific laws that control its actions, realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence" (A Handbook to Literature 428).

Many critics have suggested that there is no clear distinction between realism and its related late nineteenth-century movement, naturalism. As Donald Pizer notes in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, the term "realism" is difficult to define, in part because it is used differently in European contexts than in American literature. Pizer suggests that "whatever was being produced in fiction during the 1870s and 1880s that was new, interesting, and roughly similar in a number of ways can be designated as realism, and that an equally new, interesting, and roughly similar body of writing produced at the turn of the century can be designated as naturalism" (5). Put rather too simplistically, one rough distinction made by critics is that realism espousing a deterministic philosophy and focusing on the lower classes is considered naturalism.

In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in various contexts. As the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War, the increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth in industrialism and urbanization, an expanding population base due to immigration, and a relative rise in middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment for readers interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture. In drawing attention to this connection, Amy Kaplan has called realism a "strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change" (Social Construction of American Realism ix).

Realism was a movement that encompassed the entire country, or at least the Midwest and South, although many of the writers and critics associated with realism (notably W. D. Howells) were based in New England. Among the Midwestern writers considered realists would be Joseph Kirkland, E. W. Howe, and Hamlin Garland; the Southern writer John W. DeForest's Miss Ravenal's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty is often considered a realist novel, too.

Characteristics

(from Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition)

·  Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot

·  Character is more important than action and plot; complex ethical choices are often the subject.

·  Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past.

·  Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class. (See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel)

·  Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances.

·  Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact.

·  Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important: overt authorial comments or intrusions diminish as the century progresses.

·  Interior or psychological realism a variant form.

·  In Black and White Strangers, Kenneth Warren suggests that a basic difference between realism and sentimentalism is that in realism, "the redemption of the individual lay within the social world," but in sentimental fiction, "the redemption of the social world lay with the individual" (75-76).
The realism of James and Twain was critically acclaimed in twentieth century; Howellsian realism fell into disfavor as part of early twentieth century rebellion against the "genteel tradition."

DAISY MILLER

Even in a short work of Daisy Miller , James's themes are evident. With this work, James's use of the limited point of view that make the main character Winterbourne who is limited by his self-absorbed anxieties and thus unable to see Daisy for who she is.

His Realism. The beginnings of the movement which has been called psychological realism, concerning itself with motives and processes of thought--the inner life. Developed by Bourget and far more fully by Dorothy Richardson in such a book as Pilgrimage, the inner life of Miriam Henderson in many volumes. Far removed from later psychological fiction founded on Freudian theory--as in D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson. Again the genteel tradition dealing with people who in the main have genteel impulses only. James held in horror this later naturalism--it was merely vulgarian.

“Narrative point of view”

 One aspect of James ‘s technical artistry merits special attention, that is, his exploitation of the fictional technique known as the “narrative point of view”, which refers to the perspective from which the story is told –for example, by a major character or a minor one or a fly on the wall .It could be the first person point of view or a third person point of view .In James ‘s opinion, such characters are not neutral registers of an action but participants in a situation. What James has done is to shift the focus of the novelist’s attention from the events of a fictional world to the question: how is his narration is not on what is actually the scene but on how a particular individual sees it .As readers m, we are likely to read the character ‘s mind through which everything filters, and we have to work out the situation ourselves, Therefore “central consciousness” is preferably used to refer to this perceptive power of a single character.

(2) Psychological realism

Another merit of James’s fiction is his psychological approach to characters. Unlike He is an observer of the mind rather than a recorder of the times .It is not incorrect to say that James begins the writing of “psychological” novels-the exposition of a character’s psychological development .His novels were not well read because people in his time were not ready for such a new approach; but novels of this kind stand out prominently in the fiction of the 20th century. Faulkner and Joyce are best representatives in this area .The main reason for the blooming of psychological novels is that people recognize the important function of the brain in making decisions.

  In this book, two kinds of culture and values are presented—the American innocence, purity and the European experience, corruption. Here, James shifts his emphasis on the importance of manners to the smooth functioning of social intercourse in civilized society. He condemns the American failure to adopt expressive manner intelligently and points out the false believing that a good heart is readily visible to all –despite to evidence of one’s action. In the end, the flower Daisy dies in the winter of the Old World. Here James not only presents the confrontation, he also points out the consequence resulting from the misunderstanding between people with different cultural backgrounds. The purpose is to teach people to understand one another, namely, to gain the “full consciousness” in the complicated world. The novel turns out to be another story about American innocence defeated by the stiff, traditional values of Europe.

Daisy Miller is the first of James's writings to deal with what is generally called the international theme- the confrontation between Americans and Europeans. The influence of place is enormously strong. Perhaps the most important fact about Daisy is that she is American- and is therefore open, optimistic, and democratic but lacking the knowledge, culture, and sophistication of the Europeans among whom she travels. Equally important is the fact that Winterbourne, though born in America, was educated in Europe. As a result, he shares the European concerns for fine manners and for a rigid code of social behavior.

Daisy Miller can be seen as a clash between places. America- as represented by the Millers of Schenectady, New York- is newly rich and powerful, energetic, democratic, but rude, vulgar, and ignorant. Europe- as represented by Americans who have go thoroughly accustomed themselves to living abroad that they've become almost more European than the Europeans- is cultured and elegant but perhaps overly sophisticated, and even on occasion cruel. The clash between the two continents occurs mainly over matters of social behavior. Such actions as treating one's courier like a friend instead of like a servant, or visiting the Colosseum unchaperoned seem friendly and democratic to Americans like the Millers. To the Europeans and the Europeanized Americans they seem vulgar, even dangerous.

James also wants you to notice the difference between different places within Europe. As a resort town catering largely to Americans, Vevey is rather a halfway point between America and Europe. Social restrictions exist but they can be bent, as when Winterbourne allows himself to talk with Daisy without a formal introduction. Rome, on the other hand, is portrayed as being somber and weighted down with strict rules of social behavior. Influenced by Roman attitudes, Winterbourne becomes a much harsher judge of Daisy than he was in Vevey.

The Coliseum

The Coliseum is where Daisy’s final encounter with Winterbourne takes place and where she contracts the fever that will kill her. It is a vast arena, famous as a site of gladiatorial games and where centuries of Christian martyrdoms took place. As such, it is a symbol of sacrificed innocence. When Daisy first sees Winterbourne in the moonlight, he overhears her telling Giovanelli that “he looks at us as one of the old lions or tigers may have looked at the Christian martyrs!” In fact, the Coliseum is, in a sense, where Winterbourne throws Daisy to the lions and where he decides she has indeed sacrificed her innocence. It is where he decides to wash his hands of her because she is not worth saving or even worrying about.

Rome and Geneva

Daisy Miller’s setting in the capitals of Italy and Switzerland is significant on a number of levels. Both countries had strong associations with the Romantic poets, whom Winterbourne greatly admires. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein takes place largely in Switzerland, and Mary Shelley wrote it during the time that she, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron sojourned at Lake Geneva. Mary Shelley and John Keats are both buried in the Protestant Cemetery, which becomes Daisy’s own final resting place. For the purposes of Daisy Miller, the two countries represent opposing values embodied by their capital cities, Rome and Geneva. Geneva was the birthplace of Calvinism, the fanatical protestant sect that influenced so much of American culture, New England in particular. Geneva is referred to as “the dark old city at the other end of the lake.” It is also Winterbourne’s chosen place of residence.

Rome had many associations for cultivated people like Winterbourne and Mrs. Costello. It was a city of contrasts. As a cradle of ancient civilization and the birthplace of the Renaissance, it represented both glory and corruption, a society whose greatness had brought about its own destruction. Rome is a city of ruins, which suggest death and decay. Rome is also a city of sophistication, the Machiavellian mind-set. In a sense, Rome represents the antithesis of everything Daisy stands for—freshness, youth, ingenuousness, candor, innocence, and naïveté.

. Emily Dickinson (1830—1886)

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