Modernist Fiction

An Introduction

R.W. Stevenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317903376
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the revised edition of this popular text, Randall Stevenson has expanded, re-emphasised and amended his work to make it even more relevant to today's student studying the Modernist period in literature. The book covers a wide range of modernist novelists and novels, and also provides an invaluable guide to key developments in the genre. Stevenson has developed his text by adding a discussion of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is now taught more regularly than Lord Jim. In addition he takes a fresh look at the politics of the Modernists, in conjunction with the politics of their texts, pointing out the drawbacks of politically-progressive readings of many modernist novels. Finally, in the section on gender, Stevenson includes discussions of such significant figures as Djuna Barnes, HD, Katherine Mansfield and Rebecca West, as well as expanding the reference to Gertrude Stein throughout. The revisions in this updated text serve to make the authors' arguments sharper and allow the text to remain central to the discussion of modernism, modernity and the novel.

—1—

MODERNISM AND MODERNITY

Just as authority has been undermined in religion and morals, so too in art. The old accepted standards cannot satisfy a changing age …

The old fixed canons of taste have lost their validity … the novelist ignores the earlier conventions of plot … vocabulary, literary structure, and orthodoxy of opinion …

When we come to some of the essentially modern novelists we feel that the psychological tendency has gone … as far indeed as it can go …

The spirit of psychological analysis … this is ‘modernism’ with a vengeance.

(pp. 22–3, 92, 109, 266)

R. A. Scott-James’s views in his study Modernism and Romance are typical of comments on new, modern or ‘modernist’ tendencies in contemporary literature which were made in the 1920s. One of several studies of fiction published at that time, Elizabeth Drew’s The Modern Novel: Some Aspects of Contemporary Fiction (1926), for example, likewise remarks that

the great majority of the present generation of novelists … have made psychology, conscious and deliberate psychology, their engrossing interest, and it is natural that such an interest should entail their finding the older technique too clumsy for their new purposes. (p. 248)

Many later critics have followed the kind of thinking outlined by Drew and Scott-James. What has come to be known as modernist fiction – at its strongest in novels published in the 1920s by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence – is usually defined on the grounds of its rejection of techniques and conventions apparently inappropriate or ‘too clumsy’ for new interests at the time. A principal part of these new interests is usually held to have been in the ‘psychology’ – or heightened concern with individual, subjective consciousness – which Drew and Scott-James identify. The present study traces this interest, and examines the stream-of-consciousness and interior monologue styles developed to reflect it, throughout Chapter 2.

Given how representative of critical thinking in the 1920s and since Scott-James’s comments are, one of the most interesting things about them is that they were made as early as 1908, at a time when it is unusual to find the word ‘modernism’ applied to literature at all. For any study of writing in the early twentieth century, there is a good deal to be learned not only from Scott-James’s remarks themselves but from the surprisingly early date of their publication. First, his views emphasize that the disposition for change and transformation in the novel, so obvious to commentators by the 1920s, actually originated much earlier than Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and the other modernist fiction of that decade. The roots of transformation in modernist writing need to be considered as reaching back at least to the fiction of Henry James – one of the novelists Scott-James refers to when he talks of ‘the spirit of psychoanalysis’ (p. 109) – and other authors, Joseph Conrad in particular, working around the turn of the century.

Secondly, Scott-James helps define a division of opinion apparent early in the twentieth century, and widening in the years that followed, about the relative merits of tradition and transformation in the art and life of the times. Scott-James may have used the term ‘modernism’ early, but he does not use it approvingly. In the passage quoted above he talks darkly of ‘“modernism” with a vengeance’, and throughout his study the term is most often used in relation to transformations in his age which he considers neither welcome nor worthwhile. He remarks, for example, that

there are characteristics of modern life in general which can only be summed up, as Mr Thomas Hardy and others have summed them up, by the word modernism. The hybrid may not be very pleasant to delicate ears, but perhaps what it expresses is not a very pleasant thing. (p. ix)

Scott-James’s views of the indelicacy of the term ‘modernism’, and of what it signifies, are corroborated by the Oxford English Dictionary. This shows that at least until the early twentieth century, ‘modernism’ was most often used to designate fashionable newfangledness, the sort of innovation which betrayed the solider values of tradition. Even the terms ‘modern’ and ‘modernity’ were certainly not consistently ones of approval.¹ By contrast, among the generation of writers and artists coming into prominence after Scott-James wrote, it was more and more often tradition rather than innovation which was viewed with suspicion. ‘Modernism’ and ‘modernist’ are therefore terms appropriately applied – even if they may sound ‘hybrid’ – to the work of writers sharing the belief that a modernizing of forms and the reshaping or abandonment of tradition were necessary conditions of their art. This belief distinguishes the group of novelists to be assessed in this study from the many others who went on writing, throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, more or less within styles and conventions established in the latter part of the nineteenth.

Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells are the examples of this traditional sort of novelist whom Virginia Woolf singles out for criticism in essays which usefully clarify the new preferences of her time – ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919) and ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ (1924). The ‘modern’ of her first essay’s title is certainly not a term of disapproval, but one which helps define writing able to generate new styles to accommodate the priorities of a new age. For Woolf, the work of Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy – ‘the most prominent and successful novelists in the year 1910’, as she calls them – remained restricted by limited vision and outmoded fictional conventions. In her opinion, it was essential to recognize instead that ‘the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it’, and to follow the new example of ‘young writers’ such as James Joyce.² Even a few years after she wrote, it was clear that in some areas Woolf’s wishes had been thoroughly fulfilled. By the mid-1920s, the example not only of Joyce but of novelists such as D.H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Woolf herself, had made ‘the stuff of fiction’ substantially different from what it had been twenty or thirty years earlier, in ways impossible for commentators at the time to overlook. Thomas Hardy, for example, one of the last successful Victorian novelists, summed up the ‘modernism’ he saw in contemporary fiction in 1926 by remarking – simply if rather wearily – They’ve changed everything now … we used to think there was a beginning and a middle and an end’.³ By emphasizing amendment of conventional fiction’s chronological construction, Hardy incidentally indicates another area of modernist initiative in changing the form of the novel. This phase of innovation is further discussed in Chapter 3.

A third aspect of Scott-James’s significance, however, is the element of reservation or qualification his views introduce into some of the distinctions just outlined. Woolf and other modernists acted on their belief in the need for change, and looked back disparagingly on authors such as Arnold Bennett who seemed to them too content with convention. Yet Scott-James suggests that such a complacent generation may never have existed. Though he hardly approved of the consequences, he indicates that long before Joyce and Woolf began publishing, ‘the old fixed canons of taste’ had ‘lost their validity’ and that it was not unusual to find a novelist who ‘ignores the earlier conventions’. Perhaps the stylistic and structural innovation characteristic of modernism’s greatest achievements needs to be seen as less unique or daring than it has sometimes been considered. Virginia Woolf, after all, remarks at the start of ‘Modern Fiction’ that ‘it is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is somehow an improvement upon the old’, but she soon goes on to admit that

In the course of the centuries … 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. (p. 103)

As Woolf suggests, an urge to ‘keep moving’ is not unique to modernism: neither an urge for novelty nor a commitment to change are altogether new in literature. It may be that the differences between modernism and earlier writing are best considered relative rather than absolute, quantitative rather than altogether qualitative. This is a possibility to be kept in mind throughout analysis of modernism’s stylistic, structural and linguistic transformations in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. Departures from the serial, chronological construction of storytelling, for example – its usual beginning, middle and end – are by no means uniquely the invention of modernist fiction. Likewise, according to one contemporary critic, Wyndham Lewis in Time and Western Man (1927), even the stream-of-consciousness technique – often held to be the principal innovation and distinguishing achievement of modernist fiction – had first been practised long before, by Charles Dickens in Pickwick Papers (1837). There is better evidence, as Chapter 2 explains, that it was first used extensively in French fiction in the late nineteenth century.

Nevertheless, even if the stream of consciousness was not the wholly original invention of Dorothy Richardson or James Joyce, it had not been employed previously in English writing on the scale, or with the flexibility, which those authors had established for it by the mid-1920s. The evidence of Scott-James helps to avoid crediting modernism with an absolute originality it did not possess, yet the range and scale of changes the movement introduced, and the regularity and radicalism with which these were put into practice, remain quite sufficient to set apart and make distinctive a period in the literary history of the twentieth century. If not always totally new in kind, modernist innovation was spectacularly, inescapably new in extent. Thomas Hardy was by no means the only critic who recognized a contemporary urge not just for change, but to ‘change everything’. Herbert Read, for example, remarks in Art Now (1933) that

there have of course been revolutions in the history of art before today. There is a revolution with every new generation, and periodically, every century or so, we get a wider or a deeper change of sensibility to which we give the name of a period … But I do think we can already discern a difference of kind in the contemporary revolution: it is not so much a revolution, which implies a turning-over, even a turning-back, but rather a break-up, a devolution, some would say a dissolution. Its character is catastrophic …

The aim of five centuries of European effort is openly abandoned. (pp. 58–9, 67)

As Read suggests, innovations in contemporary fiction were only one aspect of a radical change in the period’s sensibility as a whole, apparent in ways confined neither to the novel genre nor to writing in Britain. Fiction by Marcel Proust or André Gide in French, or by Thomas Mann or Franz Kafka in German, shares many characteristics of new forms appearing in the novel in English. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) marks an analogous revolution – or in F.R. Leavis’s term, ‘New Bearing’ – in English poetry. Ezra Pound’s determination to ‘make it new’ and his memorably simple demand ‘I want a new civilisation’⁴ are likewise reflected in his own poetry – in the Imagist movement he helped to foster around 1910 and eventually, most substantially, in the Cantos he began to publish in 1917.

Read’s ‘revolution in the history of art’, and modernist dispositions like Pound’s for a ‘new civilisation’, are at least as apparent in fields beyond contemporary literature as they are within it, affecting almost every genre of artistic enterprise throughout Europe and eventually the United States. Equally radical changes were introduced to the structural constitution of contemporary music. The conventional structuring of tones in Western composition, the diatonic scale, was replaced in 1908 by Arnold Schoenberg with a free a-tonality – a kind of creative anarchy of semi-tones – which he organized around 1920 into a new serial arrangement of twelve tones, interrelated independently of traditional systems. As one later commentator expresses it, such innovations ‘undertook a radical dismantling of the established syntax of Western music’⁵ – what Herbert Read would have called a ‘break up … a dissolution’ of conventions of construction developed over centuries of European artistic endeavour.

This kind of ‘dissolution’ is equally clear in contemporary European painting. As in modernist fiction, artists made changes not necessarily in their subject or theme, or in the nature of what was represented: but in the form and structure of the representation: the style and strategy of the art itself. Pablo Picasso’s early Cubist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1906–7) still – more or less – represents human forms, though the means by which it does so are changed so radically that even this is not wholly convincing or clear. The unitary perspective of painting, the tradition of seeing things from a single point in space, is abandoned in Picasso’s work in favour of an apparent multiplication of points of view which allows the presentation of opposite sides of a face together in the same picture. Fundamental changes of this kind in the conventions of art greatly astonished the British public when they appeared in the exhibition of Post-Impressionist painting organized by Roger Fry in London late in 1910. This is usually thought to account for Virginia Woolf’s choice, in her essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, of December 1910 as an especially revolutionary time for the contemporary sensibility; a moment when, she suggests, ‘human character changed’ (I, p. 320).

Whether Woolf actually had Fry’s exhibition principally in mind when she wrote ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ is a matter further discussed in Chapter 2. At any rate, no matter how far she and other novelists were directly concerned with changes taking place in many other forms of contemporary European art, these do often provide illuminating analogues for innovations in their writing, as well as confirming the revolutionary nature of the period as a whole. Practically, however, there are difficulties in concentrating on modernist fiction while also keeping a spectrum of European arts in view. There are now, in any case, a number of critical studies which offer broad surveys of the diversity of change and the different forms modernist innovations took across the field of early twentieth-century art as a whole.⁶ This study briefly refers to other art-forms where appropriate, while including the work of Marcel Proust as a major example of literary developments occurring elsewhere. Proust’s fiction is in any case well worth examining, as in a number of ways it can be connected particularly closely and usefully with the British context. Especially in the areas of structure, chronology, and concomitant change in views of time, the innovations of modernism can be more fully and easily illustrated from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu, 1913–27) than with reference only to fiction in English. In these and other areas, his example appealed fairly directly to several English modernists themselves. Both Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf record admiration for Proust. ‘Oh if I could write like that’, Woolf remarks, mentioning at certain stages an intention to try to do so – to adapt certain of Proust’s styles for her own use.⁷

Such instances of admiration o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1 Modernism and modernity
• 2 Space
• 3 Time
• 4 Art
• 5 Value
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index