Modernist Art of Fiction

7/30/2019 Modernist Art of Fiction

1/26

THE MODERNIST ART OF FICTION

One possible way of approaching modernism is to place it within a larger

cultural framework, by establishing its position to other isms emerging at the

end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. This is what we

tried to do in the previous chapter, by having a look at the obvious interrelations

between various trends whose main characteristics are the innovation in form

and the modification of the worldview. Another approach, which we consider

equally profitable and rewarding, is to profit from the theoretical and analytical

effort of the modernist novelists themselves, whose essays may fully document

our interpretation of the modernist work. If the former approach essentially

encourages a view of modernism within a cultural context, the latter provides

the interpreter of modernism with a highly nuanced view from inside

modernism.

Given these two possibilities, this chapter will focus on the critical

contribution of some turn-of-the-century and twentieth-century novelists, which

is expected to cast proper light upon the artistic intentions and the creative

mechanisms involved by the modern novel as it distinguishes itself from the

nineteenth-century novelistic conventions. For grounding our decision to devote

a whole chapter to an inside approach to modernism, we shall start from astatement Woolf made in her essay The New Crusade. We specifically value it

as it has given us, in a way, the indication one sometimes needs as to what

pathway to follow for an appropriate analysis of a literary phenomenon which,

even if turned into a canon by now, is still prone to controversy.

[] of all the makers poets are apt to be the least communicative about their

processes, and, perhaps, owing in part to the ordinary nature of their


2/26

material, have little or nothing that they choose to discuss with outsiders.

The best way of surprising their secrets is veryoften to read theircriticism.1

The students of modernism may maliciously find in this statement the

confirmation of their fear of modernism, as well as a comfortable explanation

for their being reluctant to come to grips with such difficult pieces of writing as

the modernists novels. Why should one take the trouble of reading such

novels, if the modernists themselves are unwilling to communicate? Why

should one make an effort to sympathise with the creating artist, if it is only an

elite, if at all, that the modernist addresses? Why should one try to identify the

meaning of a world made of such intricately woven ordinary words, if one is

not even allowed to aspire to the position of an insider?

Just like any instance of literary language, Woolfs words have a certain

degree of ambiguity, which could, no doubt, encourage hypothetical questions

like those we have formulated above. Yet, these same words may generate a

totally new perspective on modernism, according to which reader and writer

are part of the same creative act and contract, according to which the reader is

cherished and praised as an invaluable contributor to meaning creation. It is no

longer fear that one should feel when confronted with the modernist writer and

his experiment, but pride and satisfaction that one has been drawn into the

process of creation and consequently made into the creators peer.

There are several key terms in the above quotation whose disambiguation

and proper understanding are likely to give us the key of access to the meaning

of modernist fiction.

Maker represents, in ordinary speech, one that makes, meaning which

is far too general, and therefore vague, for Woolf to have chosen it in her

discussion of literature, unless she assigned to it a sense that would fruitfully fit

in her argument. As a synonym of creator and author, maker is the one

who brings something new into being or existence. Written with an initial

capital letter all three terms designate God or the Supreme Being; without the

capital they ascribe comparable but not equivalent effects and powers to a

1 Virginia Woolf, The New Crusade, The Moment and Other Essays (London: The Hogarth Press,1947) 201.


3/26

person. Maker is likely to imply a close and immediate relationship between

the one who makes and the thing that is made and an ensuing responsibility or

concern for what is turned out.[] In many of its human applications (as in

king maker, a makerof men, a makerof phrases) maker suggests the use ofappropriate material as an instrument through which one gives form to ones

ideas.2

The noun poet, which at first sight may pass unnoticed because of the

vulgar sense associated to it, i.e. one who writes poetry, a maker of verses,

acquires in Woolfs text an extended and deeper meaning in accordance with

the words etymology. A poet is a creative artist of great imaginative and

expressive gifts and special sensitivity to his medium.3 Only in the light of this

latter acceptation of the term do we comfortably and logically place the poet in

the larger class of makers.

Communicative may be taken to literally mean talkative. Yet the term

proves far more open and rewarding if it is interpreted as relating to

communication. Communication implies the necessary existence of a

transmitter willing and able to transmit information, but also of a receiver,

whose contribution is indispensable to the process of meaning creation.

Literary communication is to a certain extent similar to ordinary

communication, mainly due to the ordinary nature of the poets material, that is

language. The distinction between the two resides in the processes, in

Woolfs terms, technique and style, in more specialised terms, the

knowledge of which makes readers be seen as insiders, and consequently as

active participants in the process of making. Since knowledge of processes and

technique is not implicit in reading, Woolf indicates the possibility to approach

a modernist writers creation from two sides, the creative and the critical, in

other words to contemplate the creator as doubled by the theorist and critic. It is

in this combination that Woolf seems to see the code of access to the meaning

of the writers work.

The turn-of-the-century writers, whose works record the clear passage

from the realist to the psychologically-oriented novel, agree that, if there should

2

Websters New Collegiate Dictionary, 8th

series (Springfield, Massachusetts: G.&C. MerriamCompany, 1983).3Ibid.


4/26

be a change at all in point of novel writing, this change should reside in a shift

of focus from the description of the outer world to the representation of the

inner world. This shift of interest is accompanied by an increased concern with

the mechanisms of the art of writing, with the instruments writers shoulddevelop in order to meet the requirements of their newly formulated content

purposes. The turn-of-the-century novelists, and, following the tradition they

set up, the modernists as well develop explicit theorising tendencies mainly

because they seem to be aware that they are supposed to face at least two

essential questions. The first one necessarily refers to what they mean by reality

under the new circumstances. The second is even more compelling. If reality,

or life, or spirit has changed, which seems to be the case, then it is clear that the

novelistic conventions that they inherited from their predecessors are no longer

satisfactory and need changing. Both questions require clarification on their

part, which may be the reason why these novelists always combine the creative

activity and the theoretical effort.

Yet what is interesting to notice in such a discussion devoted to the

writers contribution to the delimiting of what we are to see as the modern(ist)

novel is that not only the novelists who adopt a new standpoint to reality and

try to impose significant formal changes are keen on elucidating what they feel

to be a turning point in the novels theory and practice. Both the novelists that

Virginia Woolf calls materialists and those that she praises as novelists

concerned with the spirit consider it necessary to express a specific view

relating to the future of the genre. No matter what their attitude is to the formal

changes likely to occur as a result of a changing reality, most turn-of-the-

century and twentieth-century novelists see it as their duty to clarify aspects

relating to the destiny of the novel.

The letters exchanged by H.G. Wells and Henry James at the beginning of

the twentieth century are revealing in this respect. While openly disagreeing on

the purpose and practice of their art, the two writers seem to share the

conviction that the novel as an art form remains indispensable to the

understanding of the twentieth-century civilisation, although it clearly

distinguishes itself from the nineteenth-century novelistic offer. If this is an

attitude easy to accommodate within James system of thought, it is highly


5/26

unexpected from a writer like Wells, directly accused by a modernist like

Woolf of being a materialist. Yet, no matter what the two writers standpoint is,

what one can read behind the statements they made in their letters is that

literature, we may call it novel at this point, is ultimately a form of art. In 1915,H.G. Wells wrote:

To you literature like painting is an end, to me literature like architecture is

a means, it has a use I had rather be called a journalist than an artist, that

is the essence of it.

Henry James replied, his answer representing an implicit statement of the

principles of modernist literature to come.

Meanwhile I hold your distinction between a form that is (like) a painting

and a form that is (like) architecture for wholly null and void. There is no

sense in which architecture is essentially for use that doesnt leave other

art exactly as much so It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes

importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty

of its process.4

In much more radical terms, T. S. Eliot will see in James it is art that

makes life the only possible way of redemption for the modern spirit.

Referring to the technique Joyce used in Ulysses, Eliot considered literature to

be an antidote to the twentieth-century chaos. James had created in a period of

relative stability. Eliot sensed and experienced the disintegration of the

nineteenth-century value system and he found in Joyces use of myth, through

the parallel with Odyssey, the only possibility of facing and coping with the

twentieth-century pervading entropy.

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between

contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which

others must pursue after him. [] It is simply a way of controlling and

4 quoted in Christopher Gillie, Movements in English Literature, 1900-1940 (Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1975) 1.


6/26

ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of

futility andanarchy which is contemporary history.5

What is, however, surprising is that it is precisely the materialist Wells

who signals the change of use of the modern novel. In his essay The

Contemporary Novel, he announces the end of the period when the novel had

been considered a favourite form of entertainment, this being, in his opinion,

the main distinction between the modern and the Victorian novel.

There is, I am aware, the theory that the novel is wholly and solely a means

of relaxation. In spite of manifest facts, that was the dominant view of the

great period that we now in our retrospective way speak of as the Victorian,

and it still survives to this day. 6

Yet Wells does not seem willing to completely give up the idea of the

novel as a means. He only tries to associate to it a different purpose, which, in

his view, is the moral one. Thus, although apparently departing from the

Victorian novelistic tradition, he follows in the steps of his predecessors, by

insisting on the practicality and effectiveness of the novel as an instrument and

vehicle.

It is by no means an easy task to define the novel. It is not a thing

premeditated. It is a thing that has grown up into modern life, and taken

upon itself uses and produced results that could not have been foreseen by

its originators.7

According to Wells, the value of art resides in the power to effect changes

upon the social and the individual. Wells also makes the mistake of judging the

novel by standards other than the artistic ones, mistake for which he is

penalised by the finely ironic reply given by Henry James in the above quoted

letter.

5 T. S. Eliot, Ulysses, Order and Myth, The Idea of Literature. The Foundations of English Criticism

(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979) 224.6

H. G. Wells, The Contemporary Novel, The Idea of Literature. The Foundations of EnglishCriticism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979) 159.7Ibid., 164.


7/26

You see now the scope of the claim I am making for the novel; it is to be the

social mediator, the vehicle of understanding, the instrument of self-

examination, the parade of morals and the exchange of manners, the factory

of customs, the criticism of laws and institutions and of social dogmas and

ideas.8

For the same mistake, Wells is held responsible, together with Galsworthy

and Bennett, for not having been able to adapt his technique and views on art to

the changing spirit of a new age. The Victorian writers are still praised by the

moderns for the way in which they made their work into an appropriate

response to a specific social, political and economic challenge. However, the

novelists who chose to follow in the Victorians steps when confronted with a

radically novel environment are severely indicted by a modernist like Woolf.

Our quarrel, then, is not with the classics, and if we speak of quarrelling

with Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy, it is partly that by the

mere fact of their existence in the flesh their work has a living, breathing,

everyday imperfection which bids us take what liberties with it we choose.

[] If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should say that

these three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with

the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and left us with

the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back upon them, as

politely as may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its

soul.9

Though harshly criticised by Woolf, Wells sees the novels contributionto the reflection of the effervescence of the age as a certainty and a necessity. It

is true that he fails to be too specific as to what modifications the novel should

undergo in order to fit into the modern frame of mind. That is why, instead of

insisting on how the novelistic form should be turned into a more appropriate

instrument of expression of the modern civilisations complexity, Wells prefers

enlarging upon what the novel should be made to express. In line with the

8

H. G. Wells, The Contemporary Novel, 172.9 Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, The Idea of Literature. The Foundations of English Criticism(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979) 196-197.


8/26

Victorians against whom he seems to make a stand, Wells gives prominence to

the novels content to the detriment of its form and medium, that is he

disregards exactly what keeps the novel distinct from the reality which it

reflects.

And it is inevitable that the novel, just in the measure of its sincerity and

ability, should reflect and co-operate in the atmosphere and uncertainties

and changing variety of this seething and creative time.10

Unlike Wells, Henry James and Joseph Conrad focus on what gives

specificity to the novel, on what distinguishes the novel as an art form from any

other art forms, on what keeps fiction distinct from reality while establishing a

necessary relationship with reality. At the turn of the century, the two writers

set up a new tradition, that of the modern(ist) novel, of which Wells had only

an intuition and for which he could offer only much too vague technical

solutions. James and Conrad revolutionised the theory of the modern novel not

by ostentatiously rejecting the Victorian conventions, which they assimilate to

a certain extent, but by privileging form and language as specifics of the art of

literature.

Henry Jamess theory of the novel, and especially that of the point of

view, plays a considerable part in the definition of the new conventions of the

modernist novel. By his essay The Art of Fiction, Henry James largely

contributes to the practice of modernism in the field of novel writing, adopting

a considerably different standpoint from that of the nineteenth-century

novelists.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the novelists develop a sense of self-

awareness, considering it their task to depart from the tradition of the novel as

an overflow of story-telling gift, on the part of the writer, or as entertainment,

on the part of the reader. This is the tradition that H.G. Wells also delimited,

but never counteracted. James pleads in favour of fiction being autonomous,

thus entitled to exist in its own rights and by its own rules, and not as an

offspring of reality, whose complexity was far greater than whatever a work of

fiction could presumptuously assume it possible to express.10 H. G. Wells, The Contemporary Novel, 168.


9/26

Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel

was not what the French call discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a

conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it of being the expression of

an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. 11

Adopting the standpoint of the theorist of literature, James considers the

nature of literature, restoring it to a dignified status among other cultural

manifestations. Reference is made, it is true that just in passing, to the old

dispute between Plato and Aristotle regarding the wicked nature of fiction.

The old superstition about fiction being wicked has doubtless died out in

England, but the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard directed

towards any story which does not more or less admit that it is only a joke.

[] It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a

production which is after all only a make believe (for what else is a

story?) shall be in some degree apologetic shall renounce the

pretension of attempting really to compete with life. 12

In Platos opinion, art was a harmful and imperfect form of knowledge,

inferior to the phenomenal reality and the Idea. Art was equated to lie, to the

untruth as compared to the truth of the knowledge acquired through the

dialectical science. Aristotle answered Platos accusations, reinstating art, and

especially the art of the word, in its cognitive rights. He insisted on art as a

form of knowledge superior to history, basing his assertions on the opposition

between the true and the possible. Poetry, literature in an extended acceptation,

can have access to the universal, which history, as a neutral rendering of events

as they occurred, cannot. The relationship between art and reality exists under

the sign of the possible, and art is not to be interpreted as a non-truth.

Consequently, literature is neither true nor false, but it can become true and

take part in the process of knowledge since it functions according to the laws of

the verisimilar (conformity to the real) or according to the laws of the necessary

11

Henry James, The Art of Fiction, Longmans Magazine 4, 1884 (www. esterni.unibg.it/siti-esterni/rls/essays/James) 5.12Ibid., 5-6.


10/26

(conformity to the logic). Literature, poetry in Aristotles terms, is and is not

reality at the same time.13

The fundamental condition of existence of literature resides in the

opposition between fiction and reality. Relying on the Aristotelian concept ofmimesis understood as representation, it may be argued that fiction is,

paradoxically, different from reality, while simultaneously using reality as its

material. What distinguishes fiction from reality is the former functioning as a

sub-assembly of the linguistic system. The autonomous status of literature can

be defined only starting from the centrality of language to the literary system.14

Without being particularly specific about it, James pleads in favour of the

autonomy of fiction as art, by focusing on the similarities between the art of

fiction and the art of painting. If the status of painting as art has never been

contested, as it benefits from a medium of expression which is only its own, the

fact that fiction represents reality by sharing the medium with ordinary

communication has very often contributed to it being relegated to a position of

subordination, of subservience to reality. The essence of the lesson James tries

to teach his fellow novelists is to be found in the concept of form, i.e. literary

language. Only by admitting the centrality of language to the creative process

can one help fiction out of the impasse of being treated as a parasite which

draws sustenance from life and must in gratitude resemble life or perish. 15

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life.

When it ceases to compete as the canvas of the painter competes, it will

have arrived at a very strange pass. It is not expected of the picture that it

will make itself humble in order to be forgiven; and the analogy between the

art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see,

complete. Their inspiration is the same, their process (allowing for the

different quality of the vehicle) is the same, their success is the same. []

Their cause is the same, and the honour of one is the honour of another.

13 see Gabriela Duda,Introducere n teoria literaturii (Bucureti: Editura All, 1998)14 see Kte Hamburger,Logique des genres littraires (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986)15 Virginia Woolf, The Art of Fiction, The Moment and Other Essays (London: The Hogarth Press,

1947) 93.


11/26

Peculiarities of manner, ofexecution, that correspond on either side, exist in

each of them and contribute to their development.16

James tries to contradict the view that the novel is a novel, as a pudding

is a pudding17, adopting the position of the creator with complete knowledge,

and thus in perfect control of his art. This is the main heritage that he bestows

upon his fellow modernist writers. The distinctiveness of modernist fiction has,

more often than not, been accounted for in terms of a severe break with and

rejection of the eighteenth or nineteenth-century novel. Yet, on a closer reading

of modernism, one could discover that the modernist novelists are more

deferential to realism, and to the readers of realism in particular, than it may

superficially show. The distinctiveness of modernism, in line with the tradition

set up by Henry James, resides in the novelists determination to approach

fiction as art less than in his stubborn intention to depart from the literary

conventions of the preceding centuries. Under the pressure exercised by a

changing reality, or life in Jamess terms, that they wish to express, the

modernists consciously investigate the inherited forms, trying to adapt them to

the new meaning requirements.

In a manner, implicitly or explicitly adopted by all the twentieth-century

modernists, James does not discard the Victorian novel as artistically inferior to

the modern one. He also refrains from qualifying it as inappropriately equipped

to express the depth and complexity of life. The epithets James selects to point

to the difference between Victorian and modern literature are the French naf

vs. discutable. These epithets suggest in no way James looking down upon the

artistic achievements of writers such as Dickens or Thackeray. They are part of

the contained critical vocabulary of a person whose obvious intention of

challenging the inherited novelistic forms does not necessarily imply rejecting

them from a position of superiority. What James tries to hint at is that the

changes in sensibility at the turn of the century require new forms of

expression, but, even more poignantly, a new attitude of writers to the

institution of literature.

16 Henry James, The Art of Fiction, 6.17Ibid., 5.


12/26

[I]t would take much more courage than I possess to intimate that the form

of the novel, as Dickens and Thackeray (for instance) saw it had any taint

of incompleteness. It was, however, naf (if I may help myself out with

another French word) and, evidently, if it is destined to suffer in any way

for having lost its navet it has now an idea of making sure of the

corresponding advantages.18

This is an idea clearly expressed later on in the twentieth century by an

undoubtedly modernist novelist like Woolf. If James only appreciates whole-

heartedly the artistic performance of novelists like Dickens and Thackeray,

Woolf is more explicit in her establishing the relationship between the modern

and the old art of the word.

In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction, it is

difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is

somehow an improvement upon the old. With their simple tools and

primitive materials, it might be said, Fielding did well and Jane Austen

even better, but compare their opportunities with ours! [] We do not

come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now

a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should

the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty

pinnacle.19

Woolfs statement contains an internal contradiction, in the sense that she

sees the modern, we may also read modernist, art of fiction as an improvement

upon the old, while insisting, at the same time, on the circularity of the creative

process associated with different cultural periods. Woolf never claims to be a

methodical and professional critic. She considers herself to be only an

interested and attentive reader of literature. The truth, from our point of view,

lies somewhere in between the two positions, but the latter variant may account

for the inconsistency, possibly inaccuracy, of her statement. Yet, if it werent

for the contradiction traceable in the initial paragraph of Woolfs Modern

Fiction, we would say that her argument is very much in line with T. S. Eliots

18 Henry James, The Art of Fiction, 5.19 Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 195-196.


13/26

standpoint expressed in more general terms in Tradition and the Individual

Talent.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His

significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead

poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast

and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not

merely historical, criticism.20

T. S. Eliot goes even further in his analysis of the relationship between the

present and the past. By relying on the concept of tradition, the critic

emphasises the indispensability of the creators awareness of the present-past

relationship to the creative process. Awareness of the past means implicitly

internalising its values, no matter if these values are assimilated or rejected.

Under the circumstances, it is impossible for Eliot to accept the idea that the

new implies an improvement upon the old. From Eliots point of view, what

matters is exactly the circularity of the process, which Woolf also noticed. It is

not improvement that the modern art presupposes, but change of the premise

from which it starts.

[The poet] must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves,

but that the material of art is never quite the same. [] That this

development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the

point of view of the artist, any improvement. [] But the difference

between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an

awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the pasts awareness

of itself cannot show.21

The definition of the modern art, from James point of view as well, is

underlain by the idea that any form of novelty is perceived as such only against

the background of the existing forms. Novelty is not to be judged in absolute

terms. Moreover, newness, and this is the point that James, so much accused of

ignoring his audience, seems to make, is dependent on the readers perception,

20 T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 215.21Ibid., 216.


14/26

as much as it is on the writers innovation. Awareness should lie central to any

artistic enterprise, as the essential ingredient of a process of development. The

modern mind is characterised by inquisitiveness and it is the power to question

and challenge that makes all the difference between the literature of the turn ofthe century and the Victorian one.

Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of

attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints, and

there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular

to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though

they may be times of genius, are not times of development, are times

possibly even, a little, of dullness. The successful application of any art is a

delightful spectacle, but the theory, too, is interesting; and though there is a

great deal of the latter in the former, I suspect there has never been a

genuine success that has not had a latent core of conviction. Discussion,

suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilising when they are frank and

sincere.22

The key word in the above quoted passage is art, concept that becomes

central to all the modern theory of the novel. In Conrads opinion, shared by all

the other modernist writers, the novelist is an artist, or a craftsman, whose

condition of existence resides in his being capable of speaking, in expressing

life through language, which is the specific medium of literature. It is only by

language that the artist can investigate and interpret outer or inner reality.

The artist in his calling of interpreter creates (the clearest form of

demonstration) because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him,

silence is like death [].23

If James related the art of fiction to painting, Conrads definition of

literature implies an analogy to music, which he considers the art of arts. Yet,

irrespective of the terms of the comparison, both novelists agree on the status

of literature that they feel it their duty to impose against the nineteenth-century

22

Henry James, The Art of Fiction, 5.23 Joseph Conrad, Henry James. An Appreciation, The Idea of Literature. The Foundations of EnglishCriticism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979) 150.


15/26

cultural background. Literature is art. Both James and Conrad are aware that

this status can be argued for only starting from the centrality of language to the

literary system, Conrad being, however, more explicit and straightforward than

James in this respect. He has the perfect intuition of the twentieth-centuryoption in matters of novel writing when presenting the novel as exclusively an

art of the word or, better said, as an art of words. Its success and quality

depends on its integrity, i.e. on the blending of content and form, as well as on

an exquisite and new use of words.

And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect

blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-

discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can

be made to plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness

may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace

surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of

careless usage.24

James draws attention to the fictional character of fiction. The art of

fiction exists only to the extent to which it can properly create the illusion of

reality. The only problem that the writer must face is that the concept of reality,

or better said ones view of reality, finds itself in a constant process of

redefinition. The formal renewal proposed by the modernist novelists is not the

result of an intention to break with the conventions of the nineteenth century.

The innovation in form rather springs from a conscious understanding of the

fact that reality has changed, and so it requires new moulds in which to be cast.

The novelist who aims at producing an art object must, according to James,have the sense of reality. He is expected to invent forms and methods able to

contain the meaning of reality. Form becomes thus an investigation

instrument with the modern writer. Literature no longer shows submissive and

apologetic reverence for reality, it starts existing in its own right as a superior

form of knowledge.

24 Joseph Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus,The Idea of Literature. The Foundationsof English Criticism (Moscow: Progress Publishers) 145.


16/26

Humanity is immense and reality has a myriad forms. [] Experience is

never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of

huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of

consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the

very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative, much more

when it happens to be that of a man of genius it takes to itself the faintest

hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. 25

In the quotation above James essentially refers to the quality of

experience and emphasises the indispensability of the novelists contribution to

the investigation of lifes complexity. In a less explicit manner, he also states

that the inner reality is far more complex than the outer one. He thus opens the

way for a new type of literature centred on consciousness with all the

modifications of form required by the necessity of rendering the mind

transparent and foregrounding consciousness. He goes even further in praising

the art of fiction when he intimates that fiction is capable of (re)producing

reality. The fragmentary quality of experience is formally paralleled by the

emergence of a multitude of subjective, though not reliable, points of view.

According to James, the exquisiteness of the creation is dependent on the

quality of the impressions. What gives the extent of a writers value is his

power of seeing. The novelist is a keen observer endowed with imagination.

Yet to reach the status of the artist, the novelist should be in perfect control of

his medium, of language and form. Prominence is given to the subject as the

only able to reconstruct the object of perception.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication ofthings, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life,

in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any

particular corner of it this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute

experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing

stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said

that impressions areexperience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the

very air we breathe.26

25 Henry James, The Art of Fiction, 9.26 Henry James, The Art of Fiction, 9.


17/26

Just as in the case of the twentieth-century modernist literature, whose

tradition James initiated, veiled but compulsory reference is made to the reader,

on whose presence and contribution the meaning of the literary work depends.The effect that James mentions absolves him from the guilt of having ignored

his audience, intending his art, in the best of situations, for a reading elite. The

existence of an effect implies the necessary and active presence of the one on

whom this effect can be traceable.

Although the novel is probably the most protean of all literary forms,

being at the same time doomed to remember that reading can be performed

only from left to right and from beginning to end, and that it always takes

longer to read a novel than to contemplate a painting, what Henry James

theoretically expresses and practically proves by his novels is that the novel

represents a structure and, in consequence, it can be properly approached only

in its integrity. Character, incident, narrator, point of view, plot are relevant

only to the extent to which they contribute to the interpretation of the novel as a

whole. The integrity of the novel, as the expression of the writers intention, is

to be found in the interaction of these categories.

As a creating artist, James develops an acute interest in form, the intricacy

of his style sometimes tending to blur the content of his novels. As a critic, he

is determined to see fiction as art only in the unity of form and content.

The story and the novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and thread,

and I never heard of a guild of tailors who recommended the use of the

thread without the needle or the needle without the thread.27

The artist is allowed complete freedom in the choice of subject and

method. He assumes thus the whole responsibility of making them fuse and

turn them into the vehicle of expression of his intention. The inseparability of

form and content prevents the reader from judging the work of art by any other

standards than the artistic ones, as Wells seemed to propose. The rest of values

(ideological, ethical, political or economic) potentially present in the work,

likely to produce various attitudes on the part of the reader, of acceptance or27Ibid., 13.


18/26

rejection, should be subordinated to the artistic value. Moreover, critical

evaluation should start from criteria that are certainly not definable in terms of

likes and dislikes. Evaluation, which generally offers verdicts as to the artistic

achievement, should logically be based, in James opinion, on the artistsstandards and not on the critics.

Referring to Henry James in the essay Henry James: an Appreciation,

Conrad shares his fellow writers idea that art, the art of fiction included,

implies choice, which makes it escape morality. What Conrad insists on is that

art should be judged only by aesthetic standards, his view being perfectly

consonant with James.

[] it is obvious that a solution by rejection must always present a certain

lack of finality [] Why the reading public which, as a body, has never laid

upon a story-teller the command to be an artist, should demand from him

this sham of Divine Omnipotence, is utterly incomprehensible.28

In matters of form, there can be no prescriptions. Form is unique and its

merit resides in being flexible enough to be turned into the perfect mould to

contain a subject of the writers choice and to incorporate, in union with the

content, the artists intention. The novel, as James imagined it, is the literary

form able to deal with all particles of the multitudinous life in a way that can

hardly be called dogmatic. In this respect, James sees in the novel the most

magnificent form of art. James seems to anticipate the modernist theories

according to which there are not subjects more poetic than others, therefore

more appropriate for poetic treatment. Poeticity resides exclusively in the

treatment of subject. James excludes thus the idea that there are taboo subjects,

that had been carefully avoided by the Victorian novelists, and paves the way

for the modernist literature in which the trivial or the vulgar are selected as

subject-matter of the novel as peers of the exceptional or the extraordinary, yet

all as part of the miracle of life.

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his

donne; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. [] If we28 Joseph Conrad, Henry James. An Appreciation, 153.


19/26

pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice,

in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice

will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise

from flying in the face of presumptions, and some of the most interesting

experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common

things.29

At some moment later, Woolf proves that she pays similar attention to

form considering it indispensable to the expression of the writers intention.

Woolf stresses the creators freedom to choose that method that he considers

appropriate for a proper relationship between writer and reader to be

established. In her view, any method will do on condition it is properly used to

serve the novelists intention. Yet, from the way in which she encourages the

use of any method, one may wrongly believe that the effect of disorder and

randomness that the modernist work sometimes produces on the reader is the

result of an imperfect, if any at all, choice of method.

Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to

express, if we are writers; that brings us closer to the novelists intention ifwe are readers.30

To dispel such possible misunderstandings, Woolf becomes more explicit

and she insists herself on the inseparability of form and content, of the how

and what of literature. The difference between the novelists of the past and

the modern ones does not reside ultimately in the method employed, as we may

expect, but in what both categories of writers want to express through the

method they opted for. Artistic value or beauty, however, is to be found neither

in the beauty of the represented material, nor in the beauty of a particular

convention, but in the quality of the fusion of the two, which is nothing but the

literary work of art.

The problem of freedom of choice of subject matter and form recurs in

Woolfs, as well as in all the turn-of-the-century and twentieth-century

29 Henry James, The Art of Fiction, 11.30 Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 200.


20/26

writings, as a sign of the self-awareness condition towards which literature

directs itself.

[] the problem before the novelist at present [] is to contrive means of

being free to set down what he chooses. He has to have the courage to say

that what interests him is no longer this but that: out of that alone

must he construct his work. For the moderns that, the point of interest, lies

very likely in the dark places of psychology. [] the emphasis is upon

something hitherto ignored; at once a different outline of form becomes

necessary, difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predecessors. 31

By the same token, one major problem for the modernist novelists, prone

to constant controversy, is whether certain subjects are more poetic than others,

or some are more likely to become the proper stuff of literature. The answer

Woolf finds is that poeticity is inherent in the treatment of the subject and not

in the subject as such. Whatever is life, no matter how trivial or extraordinary,

should become part of the novelists interest. The essence of life or reality does

not necessarily lie in the obviousness of sonorous events. It is more likely to

appear in the ordinariness of the small thing.

A farmyard, with its straw, its dung, its cocks and its hens, is not (we have

come to think) a poetic subject; poets seem either to rule out the farmyard

entirely or to require that it shall be a farmyard in Thessaly and its pigs of

mythological origin.32

Without taking her words literally, we may find in this statement an

explanation for the modernists pushing their novels towards zones which had

not been previously explored and which, in their opinion, represent the true

province of literature. Moreover, this conviction makes the modernist novelists

challenge at first and then deal with most of the taboo subjects of the Victorian

period, subjects over which much of the turn-of-the-century discussions were

31

Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 201.32 Virginia Woolf, The Pastons and Chaucer, The Common Reader (London: The Hogarth Press,1962) 27.


21/26

centred. Under the circumstances, it is absolutely necessary that the methods of

novel writing should be rethought and adapted to the new spirit of a new age.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they

fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in

appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let

us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly

thought big than in what is commonly thought small.33

Yet, much as Woolf may have insisted on the novelists freedom of

choice, her work does not lend itself so openly to criticism in the age on

account of its subject matter. It is the formal features of Woolfs novels that

draw the readers attention and make critics consider her an experimental

modernist. Joyce, on the other hand, whose propensity towards realism, even

naturalism is obvious in his focusing on the trivial, sometimes the obscene,

seems to have generated the widest range of contradictory points of view with

the twentieth-century novelists and critics. However, no matter if their position

was in favour of Joyces experiment or against it, most of those who

formulated a view to Joyces work apparently reached some consensus on the

idea that something new, hitherto ignored, in terms of form and subject matter

was coming into existence.

Bennett, Woolfs materialist, is out of breath rattling out harsh criticism

against Joyces narrative technique and subject matter. Implicitly contrasting

Joyces shockingly straightforward method with the conventional more discreet

and contained novelistic methods, which he himself used in his writings,

Bennett voices his dislike ofUlysses, while focusing on some major narrative

aspects that help him ground his argument. He may not have sensed when

writing his essay James Joyces Ulysses that he had managed to pinpoint

exactly what represented the specificity of a modern(ist) writers work as

compared to that of a realist.

It would be unfair to the public not to refer to the indecency ofUlysses. The

book is not pornographic, and can produce on nobody the effects of a33 Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 199.


22/26

pornographic book. But it is more indecent, obscene, scatological and

licentious than the majority of professedly pornographic books. James Joyce

sticks at nothing. He forbids himself no word. He says everything

everything.34

It is as if Bennett feared the everything he refers to in horror. It is clear

that from his point of view, the beauty of a work of art should reside in the

decency of its approach to reality or life. Yet, it is not only the subject matter

that is likely to shock the English public, perhaps even the French according to

Bennett, but also the narrative method adopted by Joyce, who chooses to smash

the code to bits. [F]orty difficult pages, some twenty-five thousand words

without any punctuation at all35 sounds the sentence passed by Bennett when

referring to Molly Blooms monologue in the concluding pages of Ulysses,

which, as a matter of fact, he considers the best part of the novel. Moreover,

Bennett is ruthless when he accuses Joyce of having written a novel that is

more like an official shorthand-writers note than a novel.36 Paradoxically,

it is exactly the overtly realist dimension of Joyces work that shocked the

professed realist, not because of the abundance of descriptive and explanatory

detail, but rather because of the quality of Joyces observation. If he does not

see life whole, he sees it piercingly.37 Technically speaking, a novel that

reproduces the characters thoughts on hundreds of pages can only be dull in

Bennetts opinion. Morally, such an investigation of the human consciousness,

as the one Joyce performed by the new literary methods, can only lead to the

contesting of mans sense of beauty and faith.

The rendering is extremely and ostentatiously partial. The author seems to

have no geographical sense, little sense of environment, no sense of the

general kindness of human nature, and not much poetical sense. Worse than

all, he has positively no sense of perspective. [] His vision of his world

34 Arnold Bennett, James Joyces Ulysses, The Idea of Literature. The Foundations of English

Criticism (Moscow: Progress Publishers) 209.35

Ibid., 209.36Ibid., 208.37Ibid., 208.


23/26

and its inhabitants is mean, hostile, and uncharitable. He has a colossal

down on humanity.38

It is in similar terms that Richard Aldington analyses Joyces work.

Aldington objects to the modernist novelists handling of material and,

consequently, to his choice of subject matter. Even if he has a correct intuition

of the future influence of Joyces Ulysses, which he praises as a remarkable

book, he is dissatisfied with the view of life the modernist offered. Aldingtons

opinion is to be noted at this point for at least two reasons. It shows, on the one

hand, how significant and shocking Joyces, and the modernists, experiment

was when it was proposed as an alternative to the nineteenth-century

conventions since it aroused so quickly the interest of many of Joyces

contemporaries, no matter how in favour or against it they were. Secondly, it

served as a starting point for Eliots defence of modernism and his enlarging

upon the capacity of art to impose order upon a chaotic reality. From Eliots

point of view, there is nothing wrong with Joyces view of human life. Joyces

effort is to be interpreted in terms of how much living material he deals with

and how he manages to deal with it as an artist. 39

When Ulysses was just being printed, Woolf praised young Joyces work

as the most notably different from that of his predecessors. With the keen eye

of an intelligent observer of the panorama of modern literature, Woolf

identifies in Joyces work the goal towards which the modernist novelists

literature, hers included, was striving. She has a glimpse of what distinguishes

the modern novel from the realist one. Joyces writings give Woolf the

possibility to defend the modernist enterprise by an argument which is much in

line with what Henry James had anticipated several decades before.

They attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and

exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so they must discard

most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist. []

Mr. Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of

that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in

38 Arnold Bennett, James Joyces Ulysses, 208.39 T. S. Eliot, Ulysses, Order and Myth, 224.


24/26

order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to

him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of

these signposts which for generations have served to support the

imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither

touch nor see.40

James feels it the duty of the modern novelist to free the novel from the

restrictions imposed on it by the nineteenth-century sense of public value

translated into the much too limiting novelistic conventions. Yet modernity, in

James view, is a time variable and it means appropriately adapting to the spirit

of the age. By elegantly, even cautiously handling the matter, James seems to

prepare the reader for the advent of the modern novel, shocking as it may be.

The reader is warned against the danger of traditionalism and unquestioned

acceptance of shared values and invited to grant the novel the freedom it needs

to become a proper expression instrument of the twentieth century.

Half a century later, Woolf expressed ideas similar to James in an essay

also entitled The Art of Fiction. The modernist Woolf follows James and

Conrads example, considering theory and theorising upon the novel to be

essential to the creative activity.

For possibly, if fiction is, as we suggest, in difficulties, it may be because

nobody grasps her firmly and defines her severely. She has had no rules

drawn up for her, very little thinking done on her behalf. And though rules

may be wrong and must be broken, they have this advantage they confer

dignity and order upon their subject; they admit her to a place in a civilised

society; they prove that she is worthy of consideration.41

In the essay Modern Fiction, Woolf attempts to define her position both

to the nineteenth-century novelists and to her contemporary fellow writers,

being more direct, where James had been only ironically oblique.

Paradoxically, if James and Conrad, half Victorians in their practice,

theoretically opened up incontestable paths towards the modern novel, by a

professed break with the past, the modernist Woolf, a radical experimenter,

40 Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 199-200.41 Virginia Woolf, The Art of Fiction, 90.


25/26

chooses to renegotiate her and her contemporaries relationship to the past, by

an explicit effort of assimilation.

In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction, it is

difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is

somehow an improvement upon the old.42

In consequence, Woolf does not reject the nineteenth-century conventions

simply for being old and therefore inappropriate. The modernist innovation in

form is not the result of an a priori opposition to the old. It is dictated by the

findings of an examination of reality, whose complexity can no longer be

rendered by the existing forms. The writer should feel free to create, without

any strict impositions exercised by the inherited conventions.

Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has

moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting

vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly,

conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design

which more and more ceases to resemble the vision of our minds.43

The difference established by Woolf between the materialists, Bennett,

Galsworthy and Wells, and the modernists, Joyce for example, does not reside

in the different artistic value of their work, but in their different ability to grasp

the meaning of a changing reality, of what the modern writers considered life to

be. This ability implies, in Woolfs view, the re-inventing of the form of the

novel.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous

halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of

consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this

varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or

42 Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 196.43 ibid., 198.


26/26

complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and the external

as possible?44

Woolfs conclusion is a reconciliatory one, stating a principle and not

offering unique and final solutions. By an unbiased and in-depth analysis of the

novelistic conventions of the previous centuries, Woolf manages to synthesise

what James and Conrad had only hinted at. Fiction has changed status, more

precisely it has acquired the status of art. The writer/ creator/ maker/ artist has

to play his part in the definition of the new status of literature, by being willing

and ready to break with the existing literary systems and reinventing new ones.

The proper stuff of fiction does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of

fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is

drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of

fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us

break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is

renewed and her sovereignty assured.45

44 Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 199.45Ibid., 202.

Documents

Modernist Art of Fiction