Psychologial or Modern English Novel

Psychological novel has the following features which are essential to be understood.

Streams Of Consciousness
Primarily associated with the modernist movement, stream of consciousness is a form of interior monologue which claims as its goal the representation of a lead consciousness in a narrative (typically fiction). This representation of consciousness can include perceptions or impressions, thoughts incited by outside sensory stimuli, and fragments of random, disconnected thoughts. Stream of consciousness writing often lacks "correct" punctuation or syntax, favoring a looser, more incomplete style.

New Concept of Reality: The stream-of-consciousness is a revolutionary technique because of the fact that it is based on a revolutionary concept of reality. It is a common practice to contrast Modernism with Realism, as if the moderns were not concerned with reality. They were in fact as much concerned with reality as any of their predecessors. But their concept of reality was very different, as different as their technique of presenting it. For them reality is not something superficial, mechanical, rational, or purely scientific, but something deeper, mythic, alogical, or even irrational. Virginia Woolf rejects the theory and practice of her Edwardian predecessors like Wells, Galsworthy, and Bennett. She denounces these novelists as materialists who delight in the solidity of the fabric without venturing to come to grips with the inward reality of life. They make a lot of fuss about creating lifelike characters, all dressed and buttoned up. As for herself, she will render life as it is1 really experienced by human beings. And what is life? Virginia Woolf says: Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning, of consciousness to the end let us record the atoms as they all upon- the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident
scores upon the consciousness. Complete objectivity As Beach puts it, the progress of twentieth-century novel is marked by the disappearance of the author. In other words, narrative has approached the condition of drama. The stream-of-consciousness novelist tries to render the flow of the consciousness of a character as directly and as objectively as possible without any comment. He tries to remain out of the picture. The true literary artist, in Joyces words, like the God of creation remains within or behind or beyond or above his handwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, aring his fingernails. The Principal User of This Technique:Virginia Woolf s novels are poetry novels. She excels in suggesting delicately the subtle nuances of feeling experienced by her female characters. Her sensibility is too refined to admit anything vulgar.

Joyce baulks at nothingnot even at sexual indecency. But Woolf is very different. In fact a critic thinks that her major defect is her dread of copulation.

Human Consciousness: Its different Layers

The great psychologists like Freud, Adler and Jung probed deeper and deeper into the human consciousness. They studied it very carefully and conceived of it as nothing static or fixed. To them it was something in a state of flux, constantly changing and becoming different, in response to sensations and emotions received from outside. And then deeper probings and careful researches by them revealed that there were layers within layers in the human consciousness. Beneath the conscious, there is the subconscious, and then the unconscious. And the epoch-making revelation is that the past lives in the subconscious and the unconscious and is brought up to the conscious level through memory and recollection. And the conscious is only a small part of the human psyche or soul. Hence human actions are bound to be determined more by the subconscious and the unconscious than by the conscious.