This statement just about sums up why I always find Modernist fiction so relatable. Because of the "Self-Awareness" they breathe in themselves.
It's a struggle, an extreme fight between heart and brain. A heart holding the buds of creation and a brain holding the extreme poison of self-awareness. The middle ground of this battlefield is the barren land of how does someone express something real when both feeling and language are unreliable?
The fear and insecurity of criticism... The urge that society will "understand" and "accept" what I say, what I mean, which, to be honest, most of the time they don't.
In fact, who are "They"...?
There is an "I" in every "They" the mirrors point towards. The eternal struggle and fear of misjudgement and misinterpretation.
Yet when I read the Modernists, I find the inspiration that in how those people knew society wouldn't accept them momentarily, maybe not even in their lifetimes, but they couldn't stop. Woolf's initial novels were extremely criticized, Joyce's stories were banned in his own land, Faulkner was treated as "uninterpretable" for years, Fitzgerald's most influential work never saw the light of success in his lifetime.
Like a perfect embodiement Camus' idea of rebelling against the absurd... There'll never be a complete answer, a complete acceptance, a complete understanding, a complete overcoming of our limitations of language, of morality.
But there will be feelings, moments of tenderness, there will be the shine of hope and continuity that Woolf had wanted to provide... Maybe not in the name of life or death always, but in the name of love. A love that's not to be interpreted as mere romance of sorts... But as the poetry of the universe itself!
As Proust had said,
"When my body fades away, when my soul gets the better of my flesh... then I will truly love."