The modernist experimentation with the "word," typified in works such as Joyce’s Ulysses, influenced but failed to achieve a position of dominance among other authors of the period, notably Virginia Woolf, who while making use of some of his techniques in her own works nevertheless kept his "revolution" at arm’s length. Woolf pushed the envelope of modernity but would not rupture the seal.
In "Modern Fiction," Woolf anticipated and wrote upon what she expected would be her own highly favorable reviews of Joyce’s latest, just appearing at the time in the Little Review. Though including a brief caveat—"with such a fragment before us, it is hazarded rather than affirmed" –Woolf sounded out loudly in support of Joyce’s experiment, and offered a pointed critique of the noted Ulysses defamer, H.G. Wells, whom she condemned as a materialist, writing of "unimportant things" (630). Joyce, Woolf writes, is spiritual, capturing the "flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain" (631). Her assessment of what we now call stream-of-consciousness as progressive and necessary, even or especially at the expense of traditional conceptions of coherence, suggests that she will seek to leap to the frontlines of authorship carrying Joyce’s experimental banner. Patrick Parrinder, however, in "The Strange Necessity," suggests that her fiercely pro-Joycian rhetoric began to break down in that essay over questions of decency and taste—the infamous "cloacal obsession" (156). This dating seems premature, despite the genuine accuracy of his conclusions. Woolf was compelled to turn her back on Dublin’s gutters, as indicated quite clearly by scathing remarks in her diaries written after reading the first two hundred pages.
The truly troubling element for Woolf, and indeed for the modernists generally, was the depiction of true "reality" in writing, not only in terms of how to go about it but precisely what to include. "I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the social system, and show it at work, at its most intense," she writes in her diary in June 1923 (248). Joyce sought to do as much with Ulysses, indeed one might easily attribute this quotation to the wrong author. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf clearly makes use of Bakhtin’s heteroglossic carnival—multiple competing voices, each possessing "its own belief system…each the speech of another in another’s language" (434)—that results in the "rejection of narrative objectivity, the surrender to subjectivity" described by Lukacs in "The Ideology of Modernism” (479). But Lukacs at that moment was speaking of Joyce. Both writers used the techniques that formed modernism’s leading subversive edge; Joyce simply cut deeper. Wells, Rebecca West, and Woolf reacted negatively to the additional gore.
The revolution of the word in the modernist period upset classical notions of reality, perhaps better described in that context as historicity, or as Kristeva writes, "facticity." It attempted to conflate that understanding of reality with the "reality" of individualized perception, "the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness" (Woolf, 631), and "if the human condition…is identified with reality itself, the distinction between abstract and concrete potentiality becomes null and void" (Lukacs, 479). Woolf did so identify the human condition. She without doubt fought in this revolution. But she was not the first to fall. She took Joyce as a model, but did not precisely duplicate his form. She fought a revolution for the mind, not the body. "I am the brain," she wrote in her diary. "Thinking is my fighting” (285).
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