From A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf. Mariner Books, 2003.
19 June 19 1923
One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoevsky.. And do I? Or do I fabricate with words, loving them as I do? No, I think not. In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system and to show it at work, at its most intense . . Am I writing The Hours [original title of Mrs. Dalloway] from deep emotion? Of course the made part tries me so much, makes my mind squint so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it. Its a question though of these characters. People, like Arnold Bennett, say I cant create, or didn’t in J[acob’s] R[oom] characters that survive. My answer is — but I leave that to the Nation [a London newspaper]: its only the old argument that character is dissipated into shreds now: the old post-Dostoevsky argument. I daresay its true, however, that I haven’t that ‘reality’ gift. I insubstantise, wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality — its cheapness. But to get further. Have I the power of conveying true reality? . . . Nevertheless, I think it most important in this book to go for the central things, even though they don’t submit, as they should however, to beautification in language. (248)
15 October 1923
. . . tunneling . . . telling the past by installments, as I have need of it. (60)
From The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell, vol. 2, Harcourt Brace, 1980.
29 August 29 1923
I should say a good deal about The Hours, & my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment. (263)
Material on Modernism and its Preoccupations
Modernist website from UNLV: http://faculty.unlv.edu/kirschen/handouts/modernism.html
UVA The Electronic Labyrinth: http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0255.html
Definitions of Modernism
The term modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the twentieth century, but especially after World War I (1914-1918). The specific features signified by “modernism” . . . vary with the user, but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not only of Western art, but of Western culture in general. (Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms)
Major works of modernist fiction. . . subvert the basic conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up the narrative continuity, departing from the standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language by the use of stream of consciousness and other innovative modes of narration. (Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms)
. . . a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century…. Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader: conventions of realism … or traditional meter. Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronological development was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the flow of characters’ thoughts in their stream-of-consciousness styles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions….. Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favoured techniques of juxtaposition and multiple point of view challenge the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms. (Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford University Press, 1991)
Definition of Stream of Consciousness
“Stream of consciousness was a phrase used by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe the unbroken flow of perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings in the waking mind; it has since been adopted to describe a narrative method in modern fiction. [. . . ] As it has been refined since the 1920s, “stream of consciousness” is the name applied specifically to a mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce the full spectrum and continuous flow of a character’s mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings and random associations” (Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms)
And Interior Monologue
. . . reserved for that species of stream of consciousness which undertakes to present to the reader the course and rhythm of consciousness precisely as it occurs in a character’s mind. In interior monologue the author (or narrator) does not intervene, or at any rate intervenes minimally, as describer, guide, or commentator, and does not tidy the vagaries of the mental process into grammatical sentences or into a logical or coherent order. (Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms)