The English novel of the XXth century.

A well-known writer, William Sommerset Maugham, was a playwright , novelist and critics. In his works he supported basically realistic principles, however, his style had been influenced with naturalism, neoromanticism and modernism. He achieved a great popularity and acknowledgement for his masterful narration, true insight, perfect literary form, based on the principle of simpleness, lucidity and harmony.

His first novel, “Liza of Lambeth” gave a realistic picture of slum life, and the novel based on his own life, “Of Human Bondage” showed the hardship and difficulties of his own early life. But “The Moon and Sixpence” which used the life-story of the French artist Gauguin (who left his ordinary life in france and went to live and paint on an island in the South Seas) presents a new figure as hero, the artist who is fighting against conventional society. “Lakes and Ale” is a satire on the English social and literary life of the first part of the century and has a warmth not found in all his work. He is perhaps best-known for his short stories:for example, the collection published in 1928 under the titile “Ashenden”. Ashenden is a spy, another figure who has become very popular as a hero in English fiction during this century and the character who tells the story become particularly associated with Maugham himself in the minds of the public. he is shown as a man who has traveled widely and has a great knowledge of people and places, as well as expensive food and drink. Maugham is a sharp observer of people, and is amused by the, but doesn’t want to get closely involved with them. He wants to tell good stories rather than to explore character deeply, and the stories often have a bitter or unexpected ending.

D.H. Lawrence’s view of the writer’s purpose was very different: he felt it was the novelist’s job to show how an individual’s view of his own personality was often affected by conventions of language, family and religion, and to show how people and their relationships with each other were always changing and moving. He took the form of the traditional novel and made it wider and deeper. Much of “Sons and Lovers” is taken form his own early life: his hero, Paul Morel grows up near Nottingham in the English Midlands as Lawrence did, and also wants to be a creative artist. The centre of the novel is the relationship between Paul and his mother: he loves her and needs her to help him make sense of the world, around him, but in order to become an independent Man and a true artist he has to make his own decisions about his life and work, and has to struggle to become free from her influence. Paul Morel needs to put the outer and inner world together in a true relation. Lawrence shows how the daily life of his characters influences them (Paul’s father is affected by his life as a miner and Miriam, one of women Paul loves, is influenced by her life on the farm) but he is also concerned to express the inner qualities of human nature. This is often done through a description of nature – when Miriam Watches a sunset with Paul, Lawrence’s description gives the story of their relationship:

“She went to the fence and sat there, watching the gold clouds fall to pieces and go in immense, rose-coloured ruin towards the darkness. Gold flamed to scarlet like pain in the intense brightness. Then the scarlet sank to rose, and rose to crimson and quickly the passion went out of the sky. All the world was dark grey.”

“The Rainbow” tells the story of a family through thee couples of different ages. The first couple , Lydia and Tom, have a deep and loving understanding of each other and can also communicate with the outside world; the second couple (Lydia’s daughter Ann and Tom’s nephew Will) have physical passion for each other, but in Lawrence’s words “their souls remain separate”. The third couple (Anna and Will’s daughter Ursula and her lover Anton) use language as a wall to keep them apart at the deepest level, and each other tries to force their own wishes on the other. Lawrence says of the first couple “There was an inner reality, a logic of the soul, which connected her with him, but the other couples have their reality and their reality and their inner lives are poorer as a result.

“Woman in Love” shows two couples – the women are sisters, the men are connected by close friendship – trying to understand the true meaning of love and to work towards a real closeness of souls. As in “The Rainbow” relation ships – trying to understand the true meaning of love and to work towards a real closeness of soul. As in “The Rainbow” relationships between men and women are seen growing and changing through time, and there is also a powerful sense of the presence of nature and how small man is in comparison:

“What ever the mystery which has brought forth man and the universe, it is a non-human mystery, it has its own great ends, man is not the criterion”.

James Joycewas born and educated in Italy and spent most of his adult life in Europe, mainly in France, Italy and Switzerland. His first short stories published as “Dubliners” are realistic on the surface but also carry a deeper meaning. “The Dead” in which a husband is shocked out of his self-satisfaction by discovering his wife’s love for a dead man she knew many years before, is the most notable. A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man presents Joyce himself as a young man in the character of his hero, Stephen Dedalus, who is formed by the powerful forces of Irish national, political and religious feelings, and shows how he gradually frees himself from the influence of these forces to follow his own nature and his own fate.

Stephen Dedalus also appears as a character in “Ulysses”, a book which is regarded as one of the most important novels in English of the century. In “Ulysses” Joyce created a completely new style of writing which allows the reader to move inside the minds of the characters and presents their thoughts and feelings in a continuous stream, breaking all the usual rules of description, speech and punctuation. This style is known as “interior monologue” or “stream of consciousness”, and it has had a powerful influence on the work of many other writers.

“Ulysses” has no real plot, but follows the three main characters – Stephen, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly – through a day in Dublin. The Characters and parts of the novel are connected with and reflected characters and events from ancient Greek stories, as title suggests. The novel is funny, touching and often satirical; some events are clearly fanciful, while other parts of the book are completely realistic. Joyce is again concerned with the artist and the nature of the act of artistic creation, and also with the relationship between mind and body, especially when he is attempting to show all the half-formed thoughts that through the characters' minds. At the end of the novel, Molly is lying in bed-among many thoughts that go through her mind, she is planning a mun’cal evening:

“What shall I wear shall I wear a white rose those cakes in Liptons I love the smell of a rich big shop at L’s a pound or the other ones with the cherries in them of course a nice plant for the middle of the table I love flowers. I’d love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven there is nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers…”

Summing up, Joyce is a serious novelist, whose concern is chiefly with human relationships – man in relation to himself, to society, and to the whole race. This is true also of his latest work, though his interest in linguistic experiments makes it difficult to understand his meaning. Acutely aware of the pettiness and meanness of modern society, and of the evils which spring from it, he is unsurpassed in his knowledge of the seamy side of life, which he presents with startling frankness. He is a keen analyst of man’s inner consciousness.

Virginia Wolf was also attempting to explore the consciousness of her characters, but she was not attempting to deal with so many types of people and situations as James Joyce was. Her first mature work, Jacob’s room, in which her distinctive technique is fully used for the first time. By a series of disconnected impressions, revealed mainly through the consciousness of people with whom he came into contact, we are made aware of the personality of Jacob. These momentary impressions, which shift and dissolve with the bewildering inconsequence of real mental processes, are revealed by the use of the internal monologue, and from them we are intended to build up gradually a complete conception of the young man. This same method, handled with greater firmness is again used in Mrs. Dalloway. “To the lighthouse” shows a still firmer mastery of the “Stream of consciousness” technique, and is by many accounted her finest work. It’s study of the relationships of the members of the Ramsly family achieves a greater artistic unity than is found in her previous novels. The youngest son, James Ramsay, wants very much to go by boat to the lighthouse but is prevented by his father, and the novel ends with the same family in the same house ten years later; James at last goes to the lighthouse, but this time, he hates his father for making him go as much as he earlier hated him for preventing him. The novel presents two kinds of truth – Mr. Ramsay’s, which is truth of facts that can be proved, and Mrs. Ramsay’s, which is an attempt to find the truth that lies below the facts. “Orlando” presents a main character who begins as a man in the 16^th century, and ends as a woman in 1928, still only 36 years old. Although, as this suggests, the surface of the story is fanciful, and often amusing, there is a serious point to be made in that Orlando only understands the truth of things when he/she stops separating the different parts of his/her character.

Graham Green, the one who wrote “The Aunt American” divides his many books into two groups: serious novels and entertainments. In his serious novels the characters who are failures – in comparison with what they wanted and hopes to do are seen as being nearer God than those who are more successful in worldly ways. “Brighton Rock” has at its center an evil man who thinks he can conquer everything and everyone who stands in his way. He is outside the laws of man, but for Green only God's law is strong enough to reach him: his soul can after all be saved because he did love, once. “The Power” and “The Glory” are of Green’s strongest novels, tells the story of a priest in South America who is in danger from the sources of the state and has the choice of saving his soul (by continuing to act as a priest) or his body (by escaping or by breaking the promises he made when he became a priest). He knows very well the weakness of his own nature and this, to Green, makes him more able to rise to spiritual greatness than a man who had not done so much wrong.

John Galsworthywas a consistent adherentofrealism, he believed in isfavourable impact on the society. Galsworthy’s best work – “The Forsyte’s Sague” is a true picture of contemporary bourgeois England. Galsworthy had a deep concern in social antagonisms, characteristic for the bourgeois society. He writes about the unjustice of the existent social establishment, he warmly depicts the working class, in a number of his works he exploits the theme of class antagonisms, but in his critics he never trepasses the certain limits, he tried to show that class struggle can do only harm. But as writer he is powerful in depicting hypocracy and selfishness of English bourgiousie, and as artist, he showed truly the process of its political and moral degradation. This theme is revealed in the history of several generations of the Forsytes.

Galsworthy sees a true Forsyte, not only I those who have the family name, but everybody who owns instincts of property and who lives according to the laws of property. A Forsytre can be recognized by his sense of property, by his skill to consider things in a practical regard. Born to be empirist, he lacks the ability for abstract thinking. A Forsyte never wastes energy, never reveals his feelings. Forsytes love to demonstrate their solidarity, for their power roots in their solidarity. In majority they are dull, prosaic people but very sensible. They are not creators, but they do acquire what is made by others. This circumstance is laid into the basic conflict of the novel “A Man of Property”. The conflict is based on the collision of the world of beauty and art, - with the world of Forsyte represented by Iren and Bossiney.