Virginia Woolf is one of the clearest commentators on the division between the subjective

and the objective methods of writing in her period. In her essay on Modern Fiction she defines as
spiritual Joyce's attempt to come close to the quick of the mind. As opposed to him there is
'material', realist style of writers such as Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. In her essay 'Mr Bennett
and Mrs. Brown' she discusses the inability of the realist method to represent a hypothetical
character, Mrs. Brown. While the Realists list the facts about her dress, appearance, background and
material circumstances, her spirit or inner nature escapes. In a similar manner, Lawrence attacks the
lifelessness of Galsworthy’s characters, which he attributes to 'the collapse from the psychology of
the free human individual into the psychology of the social being'.
Galsworthy and Wells defend their preferences. Galsworthy admits it is not the individual
psychology of characters that interests him so much as their existence as types, through whom he
can satirize the whole society. Wells similarly sees his subject as 'contemporary social development
and its problems', and says he would rather be called a journalist than an artist: 'The business of the
novelist is facts.' This is completely opposite to Conrad's sphere of interest – e.g., in Lord Jim,
where the protagonists questions whether facts can explain anything.
'In or about December 1910,' Woolf suggests, 'human character changed.' It is possible she
had in mind the exhibition of Post-Impressionist paintings, or political and social uncertainties. She
also writes that the changes in understanding human character resulted from the influence of Freud's
theories. In 'Modernist Fiction' she writes about the Modernists' interest in dark places in
psychology. The investigation of dreams and the unconscious which Freud begin to publish in 1896
quickly became influential throughout the English-speaking world. Lawrence writes that the
Oedipus complex and incest motive were 'a commonplace of tea-table chat'. In Lawrence's Women
in Love, Gerald seeks the body of his sister, who has drowned, and discovers 'a whole different
universe down there' (in the depths of the lake), where he feels helpless as though his head was cut
off. It suggests his self-division, and points to Lawrence's interest in the deeper, less rationally
control layers of the self – whose existence Freud's work helped establish as part of the general
outlook of the twentieth century. In Woolf and Lawrence there are numerous symbolical episodes
of the same kind, leading beyond the surface of reality, inspired by Freud's work in the
interpretation of dreams. Freud's ideas contributed to the general trend in Modernism, from
objective to subjective. Both Lawrence and Woolf, however, dislike psychoanalysis and explore the
unconscious in a way different from Freud. (An unsympathetic image of a psychiatrist Bradshaw in
Mrs Dalloway.)
Nietzsche's ideas are often given as much credit as Freud's for establishing the cultural
climate at the beginning of the 20th century. First, there is his much publicised pronouncement that
'God is dead'. It sums up the general trend of decline in religious faith which started in the 1860s
when Darwin published his theories on evolution. Whereas the Victorian age and the Victorian
novel radiated self-confidence, the new period in literature is permeated with religious, moral and
political instability. The absence of an omniscient author from twentieth-century fiction perhaps
mirrors the loss of faith in an omniscient deity. Conrad and James examine the processes whereby
individual vision attempts to create coherence and meaning. It is a quest for a stabilising point in a
universe that lacks absolutes.
Nietzsche's views are also important because he questions not only religion, but the
existence of coherence and meaning anywhere. His philosophy challenges ultimate authority or
truth in any form, it challenges the certainty of any facts: 'there are no absolute truths'. Human
consciousness ascribes shapes and categories to the universe, but Nietzsche sees the universe as
essentially structureless and irrational. 'Our understanding does not draw its laws from nature, it
prescribes them to nature.' Such philosophical works (also those written by William James) express
the epistemological crisis at the beginning of the 20th century and a turning away from the stable
assumptions about the external universe which characterized the 19th century. Nietzsche likewise
expressed scepticism towards the activities of science. Physics is, for him, just another
interpretation or a way in which we arrange the world. Science itself was ready to investigate its
limitations and uncertainties – Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Einstein's Theories of Relativity.
These laws suggest that perception depends on the position of an individual observer. The only
remaining certainty and control, according to Lawrence, may be found in 'the individual soul in the
individual being'. Modernism explores the contents of individual souls as the only remaining clue to
the universe.
The individual soul is also a refuge from modern industrialism. Black coal pits in
Lawrence's novels stand out sharply against an open green background, reflecting the dark threats to
nature imposed by the spreading industrialisation of the machine age. One of Lawrence's characters,
Gerald, justifies his innovations in the coal mines on purely economic and technological reasons.
He subordinates the welfare of his workers to improvements in efficiency and to the increase of
profit. Gerald thinks in terms of instrumentalizing the entire mankind. He feels almost religious
exaltation when he thinks about this 'inhuman principle in the mechanism he wants to construct'.
Gerald is alienated from his own feelings: machine-like and chillingly inert emotionally, he dies an
appropriately icy death, frozen in the Alps. Long before his death, however, real life has been
drained out of his workers, reduced to mere mechanic instruments. Lawrence also closely connects
industrialisation to greed. In Conrad's Chance we also encounter a dehumanised financier who is 'a
mere sign, a portent'. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness is similarly described as 'hollow to the core', and
T. S. Eliot takes from this novel his epigraph for 'The Hollow Men'. In this poem inner emptiness is
presented as a general condition of a spiritless modern humanity. Human beings are fragmented and
mechanical, empty behind their eyes and automatic in their actions.
Reification – portrayal of people as things or objects. It may be regarded as a literary device,
but it is also (according to Karl Marx) a real condition of modern workers. Marx writes that the
capitalist system of production distorts the worker into a fragment, degrades him so he becomes just
an appendage to a machine: ‘The means of production, the material conditions of labour, are not
subjected to worker, but he to them. This in itself entails the personification of things and the
reification of persons.’ Similar to Lawrence, Conrad also shows the corruption of mining wealth in
Nostromo. Heart of Darkness also deals with the loss of humanity and corruption related to greed.
However, Modernism generally displays a disposition not only to reflect or show awareness of
reifying forces in contemporary life, but to find means, at least in imagination, to compensate for
them. The modern world urgently requires some compensating enhancement and enlargement of the
inner life, something that will help an individual to recover his/her humanity and an integral sense
of the self.
This compensatory function of modernist innovations is clarified by Fredric Jameson in his
study The Political Unconscious. Jameson points out that Modernism does not simply reflect the
reifying tendency of late capitalism, but also attempts to balance and even neutralize it. He sees
Modernism as a revolt against reification and a symbolic act of creating Utopian compensation – to
counterbalance the increasing dehumanization of capitalism. Modernism generates ‘myths of the
self’ and searches for a fuller sense of the self, freed from the object world and a life reified by the
logic and dynamics of late capitalism. In this sense Modernism may be viewed as a late extension of
Romanticism, or a modified replacement for it. Romantic poetry responded to an earlier phase of
industrial revolution, while Modernism offers its ‘Utopian compensation’ in a later phase, when
one’s daily life is dehumanised. The Romantics used the natural world as a kind of mirror which
was capable of reflecting the shape and drama of the individual soul. However, by the end of the
19th century, further technological development destroys nature so that it no longer has the potential
which it had for the Romantics. The population is more than ever centred in complex,
claustrophobic cities which usually form the background in Modernist novels. External nature no
longer provides comfort or the reflection of the self.
The mirror of nature is broken, the external world is hostile, empty and permeated by the
traces of man’s disastrous actions (World War I, industrialisation). It is indifferent and fractured.
This is why the Modernist vision has to turn inwardly, to inner space, the only dimension where
according to Woolf ‘dreams persist, good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules’. The mind of
the early twentieth century withdraws to this inner space because late capitalism has turned an
individual into a meaningless, almost worthless commodity.