The ‘modern’ in the term Modernism refers to the period from the mid-19th to early mid-20th centuries. It was only after the industrial revolution that this modernism arose and was spread, but there were several attempts for modernism before the industrial revolution. For example, the protestant reformation and the French civil revolution are one of many. World War II and American pop culture in the 20th century contributed greatly to the spread of modernism. Realism quickly declined as it faced a crisis of reproduction after World War II. Questions and rebellions arose over whether it was possible to recreate the horrors of war in a realistic way. Thus, modernism is opposed to realism, which was the mainstream of European literature in the 19th century. While realism tries to portray the reality of life as open and immutable, modernism portrays life as subjective and tentative suggesting it cannot be identified. Thus, instead of describing reality, modernism expresses consciousness and unconsciousness by reflecting the feeling. Modernists suggest that all values or truths come from oneself not from others. In other words, it is not to imitate or reproduce the reality of life, but to create it on its own. In this respect, the Unwritten novel is a classical modernistic work.
“So we rattled through Surrey and across the border into Sussex. (…) At that instant he roused himself, crumpled his paper contemptuously, like a thing done with, burst open the door and left us alone.”
In the Unwritten novel, the speaker's gaze and description are towards the people on the train. There are various people in one space, and people get in and off every station. Many modernist writers treated modern human conditions from an existentialist perspective, and thus the shock and deterioration of the human soul brought by science and technology along with the Industrial Revolution were representative themes. Trains of the time were a representative symbol of development and revolution, but at the same time, they also revealed disconnection between people. That is why trains appear in many modernist works, and in the "Unwritten novel".
“each one of the five doing something to hide or stultify his knowledge. One smokes; another reads; a third checks entries in a pocket book; a fourth stares at the map of the line framed opposite, and the fifth…”
“The best thing to do against life was to fold the paper so that it made a perfect square, crisp, think, impervious even to life.”
In the unwritten novel, the people on the train are minding their own business even though they are in the same space. They fold the newspapers to make a shield to not interact with others; which the author calls ‘an act of not looking at life’. In art, Hans Sedlmeier argues that modernism is expressionism eager for its root and an effort not to empty it. In this context, the ‘life’ woman is looking at is the root. The novel talks about how life appears, what life is, how life is vain, which are at the end all efforts of not to empty by constantly thinking about life. However, people on the train, except for the speaker, pretend not to know that life is such and stopped thinking. Only the speaker is looking at her life. Therefore, the author criticizes those who do not look at life by saying “Ah, but my poor, unfortunate woman, do play the game-do, for all our sake, concept it!”.
As mentioned above, modernism is not copying or reproducing the reality of life, but rather creating it on its own, and the plot of Unwritten novel is literally the creation of a life. The speaker arbitrarily imagines the life of the woman sitting opposite from her thinking it would be “like this”. It does not matter whether it is real or not. The speaker’s thoughts, opinions, and feelings about the woman’s life are all expressed in a combination of consciousness and unconsciousness. Such a combination is what the author wanted to emphasize.
The techniques within the novel are also an aspect of modernism. After realism, there was also a revolution in modernist techniques, as new perceptions of human consciousness emerged. Unlike before, which only illuminated the world of consciousness, modernism also brought unconsciousness and subconsciousness to the surface. This is the flow of consciousness technique. This technique is based on the fact that humans are memories themselves, and that they can know the truth or the source of the associated facts in one aspect of human consciousness. In psychoanalysis, consciousness is at odds with unconsciousness, and in phenomenology, consciousness is always the center of the object and the consciousness of something. "Stream of Consciousness" was first written by American psychologist William James in 1890, referring to the unbroken continuation of thoughts and consciousness in the human mind. "The Stream of Consciousness," a creative technique of modern novels, especially psychological novels, refers to a method of portraying the fragmented, disordered, and miscellaneous conscious world of characters in the novel through free association. But this is a literary method, not the actual stream of consciousness itself. The novel, which uses the "Stream of consciousness", focuses more on the real existence of humans and the reality of the inner world than on external events. Interior monologue is another name for "Stream of consciousness" and is sometimes understood as a method for representing "Stream of consciousness". The following sentence uses the stream of consciousness technique in the work.
“Hilda’s the sister-in-law. Hilda? Hilda? Hilda Marsh—Hilda the blooming, the full bosomed, the matronly”
“Down they get (Bob and Barbara), hold out hands stiffly; back again to their chairs, staring between the resumed mouthfuls. [But this we’ll skip; ornaments, curtains, trefoil china plate, yellow oblongs of cheese, white squares of biscuit—skip—oh, but wait!...]"
In the work, the speaker comes up with the name "Hilda" and the character's appearance using her stream of consciousness. While describing the situation, the speaker's consciousness intervenes and escapes back and forth while creating her story. Most of Virginia Wolf's works use such stream of consciousness, and "The Mark on the Wall" is one of the most representative works, but "Unwritten Novel" is the one that influences genre classification. The background of the work, thoughts, insights about humans, techniques, and genres are the outposts of modernist literature in the 20th century.