Eliot, Joycc, Lawrencc, and Woolf

One of those whose poetry filled with unpoetic and unheroic characters and situations was T. S. Eliot, an American expatriate who became a British subject. His characters wand unattached and uncommitted, preoccupied with both the trivial and the overwhelm­ing. They drift, usually without purpose or fulfillment, in a dry and cluttered world devoid of spiritual meaning. They are selfconsciously modem, both obsessed with time and cut off from a vital relationship with the past. In Eliot's own imagination, how­ever, conscious detachment from the nineteenth century was ac­companied by a conscientious search for inspiration in literary and philosophical Tradition, and in artistic concepts nurtured on the

Continent. For Eliot, tradition included the literary tradition of En­glish metaphysical poetry and, eventually, the religious tradition of the Anglican church, to which he bccaine a convert.

Another expatriate, and another key writer of the modem period, was James Joyce, who exiled himself from Ireland and the city he thought of as «dear, dirty Dublin» in order to escape the restrictions of nationality, language, and religion. In Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich, Joyce lived and wrote — most often about the people and places he had left behind — and became a principal figure in the development of the twentieth-century novel. Joyce began his work with the short stories collected in «Dubliners» (1914). The stories describe the cramped lives of inhabitants of Ireland's largest city. «А Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man» (1916), a sensitive and largely autobiographical novel, appeared two years later, and even­tually Joyce completed the massive and difficult «Fiimegans Wake» (1939), a blend of dream and reality, invention and translation, com­plex patterns and multiple puns. But perhaps his most widely ac­claimed novel is «Ulysses» (1922), which employs a variety of prose styles and a story line which parallels that of Homer's «Odyssey» to recount the events of asingle day in the lifcof aDublin man, Leopold Bloom. «Ulysses» is perhaps the most influential novel of our time.

D. H. Lawrence's response to the repressiveness of industrial­ized society was to affirm the instincts and impulses of man. He believed the body was «wiser» than the intellect, and he trusted in «brute blood knowledge», a knowledge available to men and women at all social levels and essential to human life.

In Mexico, New Mexico, and Australia, among other places, he sought to escape modern industrial society and to explore the «primi­tive» in the individual and in culture. He pursued his vision of expe­rience in his poetry and stories. The censors believed that Lawrence was preoccupied with sex and obsessed with destructive relation­ships. But in novels such as «Sons and Lovers», «The Rainbow», and «Women in Love», Lawrence's focus was on how well or ill his characters understood their deepest human drives, especially as those drives were affected by personal demands and society's expectations. In this sense, Lawrence shared with Joyce and other modem writers a concern with the less conscious processes of the human mind, de­veloping techniques to reveal the «inner life» of the individual.

Virginia Woolf was a perceptive literary theorist, critic, and reviewer. Her disapproval of several popular novelists of her day was based on her belief that they were too concerned with fiction as a social statement and not enough concerned with how fiction might reflect human character — especially the character of the mind. Woolf felt that writers could belter speak to readers by re­cording the striking detail and conveying the telling moment in an individual's life rather than by informing readers of the individual's manners, wealth, or social status. And, like Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence, she placed her stories as much in what the novelist Henry James called «the chamber of consciousness» as in the world of «things». She believed it was quality of mind which determined human uniqueness and vitality, rather than appear­ance, habitat, or social standing. It should come as no surprise, then, that one of Woolf's chief commitments — in novels such as «Mrs. Dalloway» and «To the Lighthouse» and stories such as «The Legacy» — was to the inner lives of women. Woolf knew that, «modem» as her age was, its economic, political, social, and intellectual habits created an environment in which the inner life was often the only true life that many women had. It was, then, by being a psychological novelist that Virginia Woolf was able to affirm the uniqueness and integrity of the individual, illuminate the lives of women, and fulfill the promise of her own artistic potential.