Theorists of the Modernist Novel

James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf

Deborah Parsons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134451326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Tracing the developing modernist aesthetic in the thought and writings of James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, Deborah Parsons considers the cultural, social and personal influences upon the three writers. Exploring the connections between their theories, Parsons pays particular attention to their work on:

• forms of realism
• characters and consciousness
• gender and the novel
• time and history.

An understanding of these three thinkers is fundamental to a grasp on modernism, making this an indispensable guide for students of modernist thought. It is also essential reading for those who wish to understand debates about the genre of the novel or the nature of literary expression, which were given a new impetus by the pioneering figures of Joyce, Richardson and Woolf.

KEY IDEAS

1

A NEW REALISM

Intrinsic to an understanding of the modernist novel is its preoccupation with the relation of lived reality and aesthetic form. ‘[W]hat is reality? And who are the judges of reality?’, Virginia Woolf asked in an essay on ‘Character in Fiction’ published in the literary journal Criterion in 1924 (E III: 426). ‘Is life like this? Must novels be like this?’, she demanded again the following year in ‘Modern Fiction’ (E IV:). ‘Have I the power of creating the true reality?’, she asked herself in her diary (D II: 248). Woolf was participating within a vigorous debate on the future of the novel in the new century, in which the appropriate form and focus of ‘modern’ fiction was yet by no means agreed. For despite a general consensus on all sides that the task of the novelist was the representation of ‘reality’, views on what actually constituted that reality, and on the most appropriate means for rendering it in fiction, were far more divergent. This chapter introduces Joyce and Richardson’s development of a new ‘psychological’ realism, and Woolf’s critical analysis of both its possibilities and its limits, within the context of this contested moment in the history of the modernist novel.

REALISM AND REALITY

From the very start of its relatively recent history the purpose of the English novel has arguably been the representation of everyday life – as opposed to the classical epic’s focus on the heroic, for example, or the lyric’s on private emotion. Theoretical accounts typically identify three main stages in the form of this representation through the novel’s development as a major genre: a ‘realist’ model established in the eighteenth century, in which narrative is held to be capable of providing a direct imitation or equivalent of life, challenged by a ‘modernist’ psychological and linguistic self-consciousness about that imitation in the early twentieth, and a ‘postmodernist’ demystification of any straightforward correspondence between art and life from the 1960s.

Although influential, one problem with the theoretical delineation of the novel genre into the three key narrative stages highlighted above – realist, modernist and postmodernist – is that it encourages the homogenisation of what were historically far more contested positions of literary principle and narrative strategy. Eighteenth-century writers such as Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson pursued the ‘reality effect’ in clearly varying ways, while George Eliot, often described as an archetypal realist, was far from naïve in her self-conscious awareness of the art of representation. As Terry Eagleton observes in his recent history of the novel genre, however, ‘[t]o call something “realist” is to confess that it is not the real thing’ (Eagleton, 2005: 10). The essential paradox of realism is that this is to undermine its central principle of seeming true to life. A writer’s (or more broadly period’s) ideological and epistemological position on the nature of reality will generally determine the narrative approach they take. While an eighteenth-or nineteenth-century novelist might acknowledge problems of subjective perspective and literary artifice, for example, they rarely allow them to intrude in such a way as to question the universal validity of the social, economic and moral scene presented (Lawrence Sterne is a notable exception). A contemporary ‘postmodern’ novelist, on the other hand, might regularly call attention to the fictionality of the world and characters he creates. Both, however, ultimately collapse life and artifice, towards one extreme or the other. We might think of the modern novelist as lying between these two poles, aiming to render in fiction the plurality and relativity of life as we experience it, at the same time as drawing attention to the creative effort of their art.

The origins of a ‘new’ realism can be found in the influence of Henry James (1843–1916). ‘A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value’, James had asserted in his essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ in 1884 (1956: 9). ‘It goes without saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality,’ he continued, ‘but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being. Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms’ (12). While the representation of reality remained paramount within James’ theory of the novel, his argument was yet that this could only be achieved through careful attention to artistic technique. James wanted to raise the status of the novel by encouraging a more theoretical understanding of its technical craft. ‘[I]t must take itself seriously for the public to take it so’, he declared, and to do it needed ‘a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it’ (44–5). James himself elaborated such a theory in the retrospective prefaces to his own novels that he wrote between 1907 and 1912, emphasising the importance of the writer’s artistry in giving shape and greater illumination to the material of life.

REALISM

Literary realism in its most basic sense aims to provide a faithful representation of experiential reality. A common argument connects the origins of both realism and the novel with the development of liberal capitalism in the eighteenth century, and the secular, empirical and materialist understanding of the world it promoted (Watt, 1957; Bergonzi, 1970; Eagleton, 2005). Ian Watt, for example, defines the classic realist novel as based in ‘the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and accurate report of human experience’ and ‘therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms’ (Watt, 1957: 32). The realist novel confidently assumes its ability to objectively convey to the reader an accurate imitation in verbal form of the kinds of details that Watt describes. Literary realism in this narrow sense is often contrasted with the formal experimentalism and internal, subjective focus of the modernist novel. According to this reading, and depending on the viewpoint of the critic, the realist novel presents either a reflection of the empirical world (a ‘window onto reality’) that is naive and conservative in its failure to recognise the role of language and ideology in determining its perspective (Heath, 1972; Belsey, 1980), or a humanist engagement with the social world that is anti-elitist and politically progressive (Lodge, 1977). An important proviso when analysing the novel genre is to recognise that literary realism is an expansive and diverse concept, the understanding of ‘reality’ and the methods used to represent it altering according to time and circumstance. For an understanding of the complexity of realism and the nuanced debate over its definition, see Auerbach, 1953; Booth, 1961; Levine, 1981; Furst, 1992; Gasiorek, 1995; Herman, 1996; Morris, 2003.

The novels that James wrote in the 1900s, however, in which his method of concentrating the narrative through the limited perspective of one character’s consciousness is most overt, appeared to mystify the reading public. The best-selling novels of the day were instead those of younger writers: H. G. Wells (1866–1946), Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) and John Galsworthy (1867–1933). They too believed it was the duty of the novelist to respond to changed times, and saw themselves as modernising a literary genre in which James was the establishment figure. The way in which they did so, however, was to emphasise not the impressionistic life of the individual but rather the social and material conditions of modern society at large. Wells, for example, presenting his own manifesto for the modern novel in a speech to the Times Book Club in 1911 (published in the Fortnightly Review later in the year as ‘The Contemporary Novel’), argued that it was the duty of the novelist not to narrow his subject-matter to a concentration on the sensitivities of the human mind, but to engage in the social, moral and political problems of his time, and to use the novel as an instrument for this purpose. ‘We are going to write about it all’, he announced:

We are going to write about business and finance and politics and precedence and pretentiousness and decorum and indecorum, until a thousand pretences and ten thousand impostures shrivel in the cold, clear air of our elucidations … Before we have done, we will have all life within the scope of the novel. (Parrinder and Philmus, 1980: 203)

As far as James was concerned, little could be further from all life than business and finance. In turn his own article on ‘The New Novel’ (1914) singled out Bennett and Wells as overloading their writing with material detail and description at the expense of imaginative perception. In so doing they only performed half the role of the novelist, he charged, presenting the raw matter of life without endowing it with the shape and form of art, and as a result never quite capturing the very reality they aimed at. Joseph Conrad put the same point somewhat more succinctly in a letter to Bennett in 1902, observing ‘You just stop short of being absolutely real because you are faithful to your dogmas of realism’ (Conrad, 1986: 390).

Wells responded angrily to James’ criticism with a harsh parody of his one-time mentor as an out-dated aesthete in Boon (1915). The letter that James sent in reply contained a heartfelt reassertion of his aesthetic credo:

so far from [the art] of literature being irrelevant to the literary report upon life … I regard it as relevant in a degree that leaves everything else behind. 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. (James, 1984: 770)

Essentially the two writers’ understandings of the function of the novel and the nature of reality were deeply at odds. For Wells the novel was a means towards revolutionising society, and should convey its political commitment as straightforwardly and as explicitly as possible. For James it was an art form, which in skilful hands could enrich awareness of human experience. The debate over the means and purpose of a modern realism would be repeated in similar confrontations between Wells and Richardson, Bennett and Woolf, and Galsworthy and D. H. Lawrence. For despite Wells’ confidence that it was the social arena that would inspire the modern novelist, the immediate future of the novel bore instead the mark of a Jamesian attention to the balance of artistry and reality in the capturing of conscious experience. James’ insistence on the essential relationship of form and subject-matter, and his demand that the novel have ‘a consciousness of itself’, had set an aesthetic standard for a younger generation of writers seeking some kind of reference point in a changing social and artistic world. James ‘is much at present in the air’, Woolf wrote in 1918, ‘a portentous figure looming large and undefined in the consciousness of writers, to some an oppression, to others an obsession, but undeniably present to all’ (E I: 346).

ROMANTICISM, REALISM AND IMPRESSIONISM

At the same time as Wells was pursuing his disagreement with James in both public print and private correspondence, he was encouraging Dorothy Richardson to write a novel based on her own life as a young woman struggling for independence amidst the social, cultural and political scene of turn-of-the-century London. Wells appears in Pilgrimage as the novelist Hypo Wilson, with whom Miriam Henderson has a long relationship (a thinly veiled account of Richardson’s own with Wells), as much literary apprenticeship as emotional entanglement. In Clear Horizon, when Wilson urges Miriam to write, it is something in his own style of socialist realism that he recommends: ‘You have in your hands material for a novel, a dental novel, a human novel and, as to background, a complete period, a period of unprecedented expansion in all sorts of directions …You ought to document your period’ (P IV: 397). While it is Wilson who praises and motivates Miriam’s creative development, however, it is in resisting domination by his irrepressible self-belief that she is driven to express passionately and assert her own mind. Richardson herself had spent over a decade in intellectual dispute with H. G. Wells by the time she began to write Pilgrimage, and she shaped her novel more against than in accordance with his influence.

Richardson’s opinion of Wells’ fictional aesthetic is revealed in an early review, written for the magazine Crank in 1906, of his recent novel In the Days of the Comet. Following a career of analysing the ‘here’ and ‘there’ of external life, she notes,

[t]here is, in this new book, an emotional deepening, a growth of insight and sympathy … for the first time that indefinable quality that fine literature always yields, that sense of a vast something behind the delicate fabric of what is articulated – a portentous silent reality. (Kime Scott, 1990: 400)

While commending this new recognition of an ‘underlying reality’ on Wells’ part, however, Richardson ultimately critiques as much as she admires. His novels are full of too much ‘stage machinery’, she argues, novelistic conventions that obstruct the direct expression of his material to his readers. Moreover he cannot portray women, who are transformed across his work into the same ‘rather irritating dummy’, from the outside ‘dressed up in varying trappings, with different shades of hair and proportions of freckles’, but with no internal identity of their own. ‘One hopes for a book where womanhood shall be as well as manhood’, she declares (400). It was a novel of ‘womanhood’ that she herself was already in the process of planning to write. Her aim, as she recalled in her foreword to the collected edition of Pilgrimage in 1938, was to find ‘a feminine equivalent’ to the ‘current masculine realism’, clearly associated with the best-selling Wells, that she saw as dominating the first decade of the twentieth century (430).

While Richardson’s retrospective ‘Foreword’ is regularly quoted in studies of her work, it promises a manifesto of her new ‘feminine’ realism that it never quite delivers. It had been requested by her publisher J. M. Dent in order to act as an introduction to the collected edition, but Richardson struggled with writing it, declaring it ‘the most horrible job I ever attempted’ (LDR: 341). The final piece is defensive and more than a little bitter in its comparison of her own obscurity to the recognised achievements of Joyce, Woolf and Marcel Proust, with whom she had been regularly compared in the 1910s and 1920s. It does, however, indicate Richardson’s view of the history of literary realism, and the place of her own writing within it, that is more complex than a quick reading might initially suggest. The end of Romanticism is signified by the reference to the French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), who Richardson describes as the ‘father of realism’ (429) and whose long series of over ninety novels and stories on bourgeois life in post-Revolution France, La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), put an end to the previous hegemony of the gothic or historical novel in fiction. Balzac, along with Arnold Bennett, whom Richardson cites as the model of an equivalent realism in the English novel, focussed the novel on the observation of human society and psychology rather than imaginary or past worlds, in so doing turning the attention ‘of the human spirit upon itself’ (429). Yet while Balzac and Bennett pursued this focus on human nature instinctively, their successors at the beginning of the twentieth century took it up as a defining principle, substituting ‘mirrors of plain glass’ for the ‘rose-coloured and distorting’ lens of Romanticism, in what they thought to be a direct and documentary representation of reality (429). By 1911, however, Richardson asserts (and here she is recalling Wells’ lecture on ‘The Contemporary Novel’), the novel could be seen as distorting reality the other way, focussed almost entirely on ‘explicit satire and protest’ in order to promote the particular social or political cause of the author (429).

Looking for a model of the novel for her own work, Richardson states, she realised that all of these previous forms were dominated by men (she interestingly avoids all mention of George Eliot, although Miriam Henderson dismisses Eliot to Hypo Wilson as writing ‘like a man’). With the only alternative being the Romantic-influenced women’s novel (such as those of Charlotte Brontë, Ouida or Rosa Nouchette Cary that Miriam reads in Pointed Roofs and Backwater) she thus opted to at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Critical Thinkers
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series editor's preface
• Why Joyce, Woolf and Richardson?
• Key Ideas
• After Joyce
• Further Reading