Mapping the Inner Landscape: Exploring Emotion, Memory, Life, and Time in Psychological Novels

Abstract

On the eve of the First World War, three novelists, unknown to one another, were writing works that were destined to exercise a remarkable influence on the fiction of modern times. In France, Marcel Proust, a sickly man and a semi-recluse, deeply introspective and self-absorbed, published in 1913 the first two volumes of Remembrance of Things Past. While these volumes were on the press, an Englishwoman, Dorothy Miller Richardson, vigorously feminist and possessing a considerable awareness of the inner life of the mind, had begun to write what eventually became a thirteen-part novel entitled Pilgrimage. Between the emergence of these two ambitious works, James Joyce, an Irishman and then a teacher of English, began publishing in serial form in 1914 a novel entitled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This work was destined to have an important sequel that would mark a turning point in the imaginative literature of the modern age. Thus, between 1913 and 1915, the modern psychological novel was born—what has come to be known in English letters as the stream-of-consciousness novel or the novel of the silent or internal monologue. In these psychological novels, attention is primarily focused on the flowing thoughts and inner experiences of the characters. Against this literary background, the present paper attempts to explore the place and distinct identities of emotion, memory, life, and time in psychological novels. It examines how these elements operate within the inner landscape of characters and artistically contribute to the representation of consciousness, perception, experience, and human existence.