Tales of Truth and Imagination Generic ambiguity in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando By Ida Brenden Engholt A Thesis Presented to The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages University of Oslo In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the MA Degree Spring Term 2010 Supervisor: Jakob Lothe - 2 - Acknowledgements I feel very fortunate and privileged to have had the chance to spend the last year in the company of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf‟s great novels. Working with authors of such high literary regard has been both challenging and rewarding. Not only has the writing process provided me with insight into the literature of two of the most acclaimed practitioners of the English language. It has also given me the opportunity to look deeper into the groundbreaking nature of the modernist movement. Now, at the end of the road, I am pleased with the course of my journey. I am also left with a reinforced appreciation for modernist literature, and for the superior skill of Joyce and Woolf. First of all, a heartfelt thanks goes to my brilliant supervisor Professor Jakob Lothe for your enthusiasm and belief in this project. I am truly thankful for all your encouragement, constructive criticism, and advice that never failed to leave me with a clear head and renewed motivation. Marte, Karoline, and Karine, my 10th floor “accomplices” over the last year. Thank you for our ever too long coffee-breaks, as well as mutual support in the twelfth hour. Sharing this experience with you has been amazing. My wonderful friend Charlotte! Thank you for reading my drafts, even when there was not much to read, and for insightful feedback and encouraging words along the way. Your contribution to this project has been of utmost value to me. And of course, I hope to return the favour some time. Thank you to my parents for tremendous support over the years, and for always being proud of me in all my accomplishments. Finally, thank you Daniel, for countless dinners, for patiently listening to my concerns, and for invaluable distractions and affectionate support throughout the entire process. - 3 - - 4 - TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements........................................................................................................3 Table of Contents..........................................................................................................5 1. Introduction...............................................................................................................7 1.1 The authors, their works, and modernism as a literary mode..................................7 1.2 Theoretical background.........................................................................................11 1.3 Method and approach.............................................................................................18 1.4 Outline of the following chapters...........................................................................19 2. James Joyce and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man....................................22 2.1 The Novel...............................................................................................................24 2.1.1 The bildungsroman .................................................................................28 2.1.2 The künstlerroman...................................................................................36 2.2 The pseudo-autobiography.....................................................................................45 2.2.1 (Self-)portraiture: Stephen and James......................................................47 2.2.2 The role of the narrator in fictional autobiograpy....................................51 2.3 Joyce‟s “biografiction”...........................................................................................54 3. Virginia Woolf and Orlando...................................................................................56 3.1 The Novel ..............................................................................................................58 3.1.1 The bildungsroman and the künstlerroman.............................................62 3.2 The pseudo-biography............................................................................................70 3.2.1 The biographer/narrator of the mock biography......................................72 3.2.2 Manipulating the traditional biography...................................................80 3.2.3 The art of biography.................................................................................85 3.3 Woolf‟s “biografiction”..........................................................................................87 4. Conclusion................................................................................................................89 Bibliography.................................................................................................................98 - 5 - - 6 - 1. Introduction On or about December 1910 human character changed (“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, 320) These words were famously uttered by Virginia Woolf in her 1924 essay «Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown». It was her way of declaring that the old certainties, norms, and restrictions of the Victorian period were gone, as modernism had entered the literary scene in the years immediately prior to the turn of the century. A new artistic era had begun, and artists and writers began to realise that the world was a place of intangibility and discontinuity, that time and space were not absolute entities, and that visual perception could be manipulated and distorted. Along with her Irish contemporary, James Joyce, Woolf was one of the chief practitioners of this period, and the date in her quote may be indicative of when she first embarked on her own modernist project. Now, a hundred years later, both authors are widely renowned for creating some of the greatest masterpieces of English literature, and as contributors the evolution of the novel during the early years of the twentieth century. This thesis will argue that the novels of Joyce and Woolf helped bring about a shift in the Irish and English literary traditions, since they both played a significant part in creating a whole new style of fiction – a fiction suffused with a constant and deliberate play with traditional genre- traits, realism, and history-writing. The thesis will present a comparative reading of one novel by Joyce and one novel by Woolf. I will explore how the two authors in their respective novels manage to transform the traditional novel by bringing in elements of other well-known genres, such as biography, autobiography, bildungsroman and künstlerroman. These are genres that otherwise can be found in works of both fiction and non-fiction, and traditionally, they are associated with a certain set of rules and conventions on how they should be carried out in literature. I will explore how these rules are being twisted and manipulated by Joyce and Woolf in order to transform the traditional genres, thus creating works of literature that go beyond the traditional novel, and become representative of the modernist movement of the early twentieth century. And consequently: can these two works of literature still be considered as novels? Or are they (auto)biographies? Or perhaps an intricate mixture of both? 1.1 The authors, their works, and Modernism as a literary mode In order to address and discuss these problems, I have selected A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, and Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Sharing a global reputation, both writers are unquestionably amongst the most influential and innovative writers of the - 7 - early twentieth century, and of Irish and English literature in general. Their writing tore down the literary paradigms of the Victorian period and created entirely new ones, and the English novel was introduced to a new aesthetic that rejected the concept of realism as literature‟s foremost feature. They both contributed to the development of the novel, as they assumed a modernist approach to literature, thus rejecting the Victorian ideals and notions of how a narrative should be constructed. The term modernism is commonly used to identify the forms, concepts and styles of the literature of the last decade of the nineteenth century, and of the early twentieth century. Knut Hamsun‟s Hunger, published in its final form in 1890 is often considered to be the first modernist novel. Joesph Conrad‟s Heart of Darkness, and even more so, Lord Jim are also nineteenth century contributions to the movement. The novels I am going to explore in this thesis, however, are amongst the most clear-cut and renowned works of modernism. This period in literary history saw the beginning of trends that would come to define the entire twentieth century. The term has also been used to describe the “new” Western culture of this period, as it questioned traditional modes of social organization, religion, morality and gender-roles. I support the view of modernism as a multifaceted period with no clear or obvious beginning or end. Increasingly, as several critics have noted, there is something odd about “modernism” as the designation of a period at the beginning of a previous century. Yet this particular period and concept have retained a central position in literary criticism and history. Aspects of modernism are activated and modulated by authors writing in different countries in a period covering more than