On a train in Canada last year, I was reading a copy of Ulysses when a Canadian guy stopped beside me and said, “Whoa, you’re reading Ulysses? Good luck!” It was an experience that was often repeated during my trip, and even when I returned home. The novel carries a fearsome reputation, even among the best-educated. Yet why should the majority of the reading public be so frightened by a novel that is, after all, more than eighty years old? Shouldn’t the controversy surrounding it have died down by now? The answer to these questions seems to lie not merely in Joyce’s novel, but also in the work of later writers and in our own contemporary fiction.
The movement that produced novels like Joyce’s Ulysses was called modernism, which was at its height in the 1920s. It encompassed all genres of art but particularly poetry; as in the work of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and novels; such as Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Other prominent modernist novelists include Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Dorothy Richardson, Wyndam Lewis and William Faulkner. The writing produced during this period was about creating a literary art that embodied the zeitgeist of modernity: in its apparent chaos, its sense of the disintegration of social, national and political boundaries and emphasis on the disorientating nature of change and experimentation.
As Eliot himself wrote of Joyce’s method of fiction:

It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history (Eliot; Ulysses, Order and Myth).

The novel was then still a fairly young literary medium but it had quickly acquired a set of conventions; these, the modernists felt, should be challenged and invigorated. This meant the development of new styles and techniques of writing, most famously, the ’stream of consciousness’ technique, which involved the attempt to structure a narrative through the natural progression of a character’s thought. This technique takes an extreme form in the final “Penelope” episode of Ulysses, where, in a disorientating whirlpool of language with no mediating authorial voice, without even standard punctuation, Molly Bloom contemplates her past and future life:

“And how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Woolf used this technique with a lighter touch, moving subtly in and out of stream of consciousness, for example, “Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom. There was the green linoleum and a tap dripping. There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel”. However, she also experimented in other ways, particularly with genres. For example, her last novel, Between the Acts (1941) has both poetry and drama embedded within the framework of the novel.
In these authors and their immediate successors there is an almost aggressive desire to push fiction as far as it will go, to be genuinely avant-garde, to reform the mind of the reader through subtle and disorientating language games. In order to achieve this effect these novels were thus also written with a painstaking attention to detail that is rare in contemporary fiction; for example, the novel Joyce regarded as his masterpiece, Finnegans Wake (1939), took him 17 years to write and see published. Part of this stylistic revolution included the use of frequent allusion to myth and other works of literature, usually for thematic reasons, but also as a way of ordering narratives and of playing games with the reader. While of course it was nothing new to allude to the works of another author, where the modernists differed was in their use of allusions as a structural device–for example, the events of Ulysses are delicately controlled through a running parallel with Homer’s Odyssey.
Realistic development of plot was thus often subsumed, and even abandoned, under a concern with language and style. Sometimes there seems to be almost no plot at all–as in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (1927), the central interlude of which is an intensely detailed, poetic description of the decay of an empty house:

Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions–’Will you fade? Will you perish?’

Equally, in contrast with Victorian novels, modernists often refused neat resolutions for their novels and characters are seldom simply divided into heroes and villains. Their desire to react against the characteristic style of fiction of their Victorian predecessors is also shown in their rejection of the sensationalism and sentimentalism that was a characteristic of many, though of course not all, Victorian fiction, as in such novels as Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) or the proliferation of detective fiction of the late nineteenth century. The device of the intrusive omniscient narrator who calls for pity for his characters was abandoned, for example, as in Dickens’ Dombey and Son (1848), “Alas he knows it not; and if he did, what air of hers would stir him, rigid man!”; the authorial voice of modernist authors was self-effacing and distanced from events. Equally, they showed an evident wish to explore areas that were controversial or not traditionally considered artistic, like the representation of shell-shock in Mrs Dalloway, which was then a hotly debated issue.
Thus, considering the carefully considered ideology of this movement, it is reasonable to suppose that it should have been a revolutionary development in the progress of fiction: as Eliot said, “Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him”. But this did not happen. While between modernist and Victorian fiction there was a massive gulf of achievement, the gap between us and the modernists instead seems to be one of retreat, back to ’safe’ modes and styles of writing. There are few writing today with the same deliberate spirit of stylistic experimentation. The conventions that modernist writers worked so hard to dismantle have somehow been rebuilt and realism, romance and detective fiction are once again the order of the day. But how did this happen?
In the wake of the end of the Second World War, true modernism in fiction arguably came to an end. However, its influence lingered on, surviving patchily, reacted against by many writers and ultimately becoming what is known as postmodernism.
One of the pioneers of this movement was Joyce’s friend and protégé, Samuel Beckett–although he later became more famous for plays such as Waiting for Godot, his novels are also very influential. Between 1946 and 1949 he produced the major prose narrative trilogy, Molloy, Malone Meurt (Malone Dies), and L’innommable (The Unnameable) as well as another novel, Watt, which appeared in the early 1950s. These novels used devices common to the modernists, which was further complicated by the adding of post-structuralist ideas about the deep meaninglessness of language. His language games thus tend to have a more bitter edge than in modernist fiction.
The energy of the modernist movement also dissipated into the fiction of other early postmodernists such as Vladimir Nabokov, who often experimented with the form of the novel. Nabokov’s most famous work is undoubtedly Lolita (1958). The story of a middle-aged European intellectual’s infatuation with a 12-year-old American ‘nymphet’, the novel showed an extreme version of the modernist desire to challenge readers through taboo subject matter. New, experimental energy also came from American writers such as Kerouac and Burroughs, who developed a new style of stream of consciousness they called ’spontaneous prose’, using drugs and alcohol as a catalyst for writing produced without inhibition.
In the sixties, writers such as B. S. Johnson, aware of the realistic turn that general fiction was taking, campaigned vigorously for a renaissance of technical innovation and experimentation in the novel, using modernist techniques as a model and carrying them further in unexpected ways. His Albert Angelo (1964) included carefully holed pages in order that readers might choose for themselves the order in which they received the writer’s words; The Unfortunates (1969) carried the pursuit of disintegration further by being printed and boxed in interchangeable sections. Following in his footsteps, Jonathan Coe is one of the few authors of his generation to pursue a genuinely experimental course of fiction. For example, The Dwarves of Death (1990), is structured following the pattern of a popular song, dividing the sections into ‘Intro’, ‘Theme One’, ‘Key Change’, and so on.
However, this experimental fiction, although often extremely popular, as in the case of Kerouac’s On the Road, which arguably influenced an entire generation, was fast becoming a marginalized form of expression. Running parallel to it was a progression towards the most popular genres of the contemporary novel: realism, particularly in the form of science and crime fiction. This progression is prominently evidenced in the dystopian visions of George Orwell, for example, in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949); despite his challenging political satire he believed in telling a story straight-forwardly, without any drive towards stylistic experimentation. This movement away from experimentalism was continued by writers such as J.R.R Tolkien, whose The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) created a whole new genre of popular realistic fiction, fantasy, which used realistic techniques to describe other worlds.
Also, crime fiction and thrillers, always popular since the Victorian period, have of recent years become a dominant and even respected genre. This has occurred to such an extent that poorly written, yet pacy and controversial novels, such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), have come to be regarded with something like reverence: such is the revolution of plot over style.
Other trends in that have become significant to contemporary literature include hybrid genres. A mixture of realism, the remains of postmodernism and fantasy elements, in such novels as Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Rushdie’s works from Midnight’s Children (1981) to Shalimar the Clown (2005), created a fertile genre known as magic realism. This writing, although in many cases beguiling and imaginative, is, however, relatively stylistically tame compared with the works of the modernists. Also, what has been termed ‘hysterical realism’, as exemplified by the works such as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) is characterized by extreme length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story, is considered to be a merging of elements of postmodernism with an often gritty form of realism.
Still, despite these interesting hybrids, straightforward realism is the dominant mode of expression for the early twenty-first century. Even postmodernism is widely viewed to be either dying or dead and novelists like Jonathan Coe are all but voices in the wilderness. The popularity of science fiction and fantasy literature in particular seems to reflect a cultural drive towards escapism and unthreatening modes of discourse, hence, for example, the Harry Potter phenomenon. Most contemporary writers seem to have little desire to make their readers work particularly hard for their entertainment. Thus, the reason why novels such as Ulysses remain somehow threatening despite their age is, unhappily enough, that fiction has failed to progress in the challenging way that modernist writers hoped and imagined it would. It seems most likely that this is the product of the busier nature of our culture: perhaps we can no longer cope with the demands that experimental fiction imposes upon us as readers. Maybe all we really want is a detective novel to read on the train. Or then again, perhaps we just need a new Proust or Joyce to stir things up–if literature really does move in cycles, roll on the 2020s.