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 a
statement 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
 material, have little or nothing that they choose to discuss with outsiders.
The best way of surprising their secrets is very often to read their criticism.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.
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 maker of men, a maker of phrases) maker suggests the use of
appropriate 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. Merriam
Company, 1983).
3
Ibid.
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 should
develop 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
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 ordering, of
4
quoted in Christopher Gillie, Movements in English Literature, 1900-1940 (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1975) 1.
 giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and
anarchy 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 English
Criticism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979) 159.
7
Ibid., 164.
 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 contribution to

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

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

10
H. G. Wells, The Contemporary Novel, 168.
reality, whose complexity was far greater than whatever a work of fiction could
presumptuously assume it possible to express.

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

11
Henry James, The Art of Fiction, Longmans Magazine 4, 1884 (www. esterni.unibg.it/siti-
esterni/rls/essays/James) 5.
12
Ibid., 5-6.
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
(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 of
mimesis 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. []

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.
 Their cause is the same, and the honour of one is the honour of another.
Peculiarities of manner, of execution, 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.
17
Ibid., 5.
 [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.
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.
21
Ibid., 216.
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 of
the 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 English
Criticism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979) 150.
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-century
option 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 Foundations
of English Criticism (Moscow: Progress Publishers) 145.
 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 of
things, 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 are experience, 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.
 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 or
27
Ibid., 13.
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 artists
standards 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 we
28
Joseph Conrad, Henry James. An Appreciation, 153.
 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 if
we 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.
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.
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 of Ulysses, 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 of Ulysses. The
book is not pornographic, and can produce on nobody the effects of a
33
Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 199.
 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 all 35 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.
36
Ibid., 208.
37
Ibid., 208.
 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.
 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.
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.
 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.
45
Ibid., 202.