The Experimental Novel

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

- in her essay Modern Fiction (1919) V. Woolf mentioned two important pleas:
- on the one hand, the inward turning of the modern novel – a more adequate manner
of looking upon life - vs. the outward turning of the traditional novel
- on the other hand, the reaction of the modern novelists against the conventions of
the old novel which no longer reflected the modern awareness of the essence of life
- Woolf distinguishes between 2 categories of writers: the materialists (Edwardians)
and the writers concerned with the spirit (Georgians), the traditional and the
modernist novelists
- the novel as a public document vs. the novel as a private world of values
- writers turn towards the small reality of the individual
- a completely new universe, a completely new relation between subjectivity and
objectivity
- modernists investigate the individual mind from within, they are faithful to the
subjectivity of the individual mind whose truth becomes objective
- the aesthetic consequences affected the character, the plot, the point of view, the very
essence of the novel as a literary genre
- the character is primarily a mind, a consciousness
- the modern novel no longer relies on the validity of external life
- it was replaced by introspection
- chronology and the relation cause-effect are no longer important
- the plot never has a linear development, it is disrupted, depending on each individual
writer’s concept of time
- the technique of point of view becomes essential for the modern novel, is much more
sophisticated than before
- therefore, the novel becomes an impure genre combining poetry and the essay
- Woolf and Joyce come closest to the poetical novel by the complex meanings and the
concentrated style
- Huxley’s novels are mostly explanations and demonstrations, his methods are those of
the essay
- the novel reflects the writers’ need for inner balance in a world of utter confusion and
despair
- modern novelists created a new rhetoric of the novel which centres around the
fragmentary, the fleeting, the transient aspects of human experience, blurred by
doubt and insecurity:

The mind receives a myriad of impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or

engraved with the sharpness of steel… From all sides they come, an incessant shower
of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of
Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old;
 …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.
…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. (V. Woolf/ Modern Fiction)

- experience is a continuum, a flux of incidents which are difficult to recapture

- the writers’ intention was to merge past and present, give a chain of images of past,
present and future
- the plot was made up of inner, personal reactions to external activities
- the concept of ‘stream of consciousness’ (applied to the novels of Woolf, Joyce,
Dorothy Richardson, Faulkner) labelled an approach to the presentation of
psychological aspects of the characters in fiction
- the concept was coined by the American philosopher William James
- in Principles of Psychology (1890) he stressed the fact that reality is not objectively
given, it is perceived subjectively through consciousness
- the mind is an active stream, a flux with its own movements and structure:

A river or a stream are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it
here after let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness or of subjective life.

(William James)

- consciousness is an inclusive concept, contains the whole area of mental processes,

the rational and irrational ones:

Let us think of consciousness as being in the form of an iceberg – the whole iceberg and not
just the relatively small surface portion. Stream of consciousness fiction is, to follow this
comparison, greatly concerned with what lies below the surface…We may define the stream
of consciousness fiction as a type of fiction in which the basic emphasis is placed on
exploration of the pre-speech levels of consciousness for the purpose, primarily, of revealing
the psychic being of the character.

(R. Humphrey/ Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel)

- the interest in mental processes is not new

- what is new is the concern for sensations, intuitions, memories manifested in
symbolizations, associations, metaphors…
- the major instrument of the stream of consciousness technique: the interior
monologue
- makes it possible for the writer to explore the character’s consciousness
- there is a direct interior monologue and an indirect interior monologue
- the direct interior monologue is a first person discourse, there is no interference from
the novelist’s voice; the character’s thoughts are left to follow their natural course,
without any logical connection or normal syntactical organization, without any formal
punctuation;
- the indirect interior monologue is a first or third person discourse, a reproduction of
the character’s thoughts filtered through the author’s mind; the writer’s voice offers
guidance for the reader; good examples are the monologues in To the Lighthouse; they
render the fluidity of thought and sensation controlled by the author’s mind
- other special techniques rely on the distinction between objective “clock” time and
subjective time of lived experience proposed by H. Bergson
- it makes it possible to expand moments of great significance and compress others of
little importance
- also by means of free associations continuity is achieved through the power of one
thing to suggest another
- the use of cinematic devices – time and space montage, the multiple point of view, the
flash backs, the slow-ups, the fade-outs

Virginia Woolf: The Rise of the Poetic Novel

- continued the brilliant traditions of the 19th century feminist line in the novel, but also
transformed the novel from an essentially narrative form into a poetic form of fiction,
based on the exploration of feeling and thought:
 The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill
with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long night seemed to have set in; the
trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The
saucepan had rusted and the mat decayed. Toads had nosed their way in. Idly,
aimlessly, the swaying shawl swung to and fro. A thistle thrust itself between the tiles
in the larder. The swallows nested in the drawing-room; the floor was strewn with
straw…..(To the Lighthouse)

- she also was a remarkable essayist and book reviewer

- there are two major elements in Woolf’s life that influenced her making as a writer:
- her family background
- and her connection with the Bloomsbury Group
- the highly intellectual atmosphere in her home contributed greatly to the formation of
the future novelist, stimulated the potentialities of an intelligent young girl
- her father – Leslie Stephen, distinguished editor of the Cornhill Magazine, also
literary critic and biographer
- possessed a large library, was acquainted with many important literary figures of the
time
- Virginia and her sister Vanessa (became a famous modernist painter) were educated at
home
- Virginia studied classics and history at King’s College, London
- 1912, married the writer Leonard Woolf, they founded Hogarth Press
- the Bloomsbury Group was set up in their house:

…a typically native equivalent for Montparnasse, as an aesthetic clearing house, a publishing

centre, a forum for taste. (Malcolm Bradbury)

- the group brought together young intellectuals, most of them Cambridge students
- it concentrated on aesthetic problems, artistic experience, human relationships
- influenced by the philosopher G.E. Moore, but also Walter Pater, and late Victorian
aestheticism
- preoccupied by a general pursuit of aesthetically genuine values
- had several nervous breakdowns
- 1941, committed suicide by drowning in the river Ouse, Sussex

Work:
- The Voyage Out (1915)
- Night and Day (1919)
- Jacob’s Room (1922)
- Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
 - To the Lighthouse (1927)
- Orlando. A Biography (1928)
- The Waves (1931)
- The Years (1937)
- Between the Acts (1941)

Short Stories:
- The Mark on the Wall (1917)
- Kew Gardens (1919)
- Monday and Tuesday (1921)

Essays:

- The Common Reader (1925)

- A Room of One’s Own (1929)
- The Common Reader (1932)
- Flush: A Biography (1933)
- Roger Fry: A Biography (1940)

To the Lighthouse

- like Mrs. Dalloway it is a free experiment with time, an illustration of the complex
interplay between what is the present experience and what remains in the human mind
as simple memory
- there is a subtle interplay between the subjective time (duree) and the objective
(chronological) time
- the chronological time is neutral, impersonal, equally affecting all physical existence
- the subjective time is felt differently by each character
- life in time is a major thematic interest for V. Woolf
- she is fascinated with the relationship between past and present, and the
timelessness of death
- the novel concentrates on a poetic expression of vague, undefinable feelings and
frustrating questions
- the scene is remote from the noisy city world, the characters are isolated on the Isle of
Skye, on the Hebrides, in the house of the Ramsay family.

- Mrs. Ramsay is a complex character, made into a symbolical focus towards which the
characters of the novel – the members of the family and their guests – aspire

- she is the perfect embodiment of feminity, apt to connect people, to help them
discover themselves, relying more on intuition than intellect

- she is the character who endeavors to bring people together

- her knitting allows her to work out a pattern with skillful fingers, while her mind
roams free

- the house itself is the structure which binds the story together

- it is remote, bleak, isolated on the isle and has its own existence throughout the three
divisions of the novel

- in The Window the house contains two separate but connected worlds: on the one
hand Mrs. Ramsay’s and Lily Briscoe’s universe, on the other hand, that of the male
characters, mainly represented by: Mr. Ramsay, William Bankes, Charles Tansley

- the dinner is the climax of the first part, it is an occasion for assembling separate
individualities, and for Mrs. Ramsay to reveal her captivating personality

- she spreads her light but also anxiety over her guests, and gathers them into a
community, at the same time separating their minds, thoughts

- the lines recited by her in the end of the dinner sum up the mood of the evening:
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be,

Are full of trees and changing leaves.

- the major focus concerns Mrs. Ramsay’s efforts to unite her family and the group of
friends but their differences and opposite thoughts and feelings make her task only
partly possible
- Time Passes, the counterpoint, marks a process of disintegration, the decay of the
house over a period of ten years

- it is an interlude, a passage achieved through metaphoric projection

- the human figures are removed from the stage, their fate is recorded in brackets
- the atmosphere is depressive, gloomy
- the house is ravaged by hard winds, is dominated by chaos, just like the lives of the
inhabitants
- there is no more meaning anywhere, everything is relative
- all that Mrs. Ramsay had achieved while alive is quickly destroyed by forces which lie
beyond human control
 - The Lighthouse is a counterpoint to the second chapter
- marks the principle of a spiral-like evolution of life
- two climactic moments are simultaneous
- Lily Briscoe finishing her painting illustrates the idea that whatever permanent unity
life can provide is to be found in art: Mrs. Ramsay was an artist in human
relationships, and Lily Briscoe has her artistic vision
- the universe is still a chaos, but the individual can create small islands of peace and
harmony which are everlasting
- art is permanent, immortal, and so is Mrs. Ramsay’s image in everybody’s mind
- the novel is a masterpiece as to the treatment of time: it stands still, limited to a few
hours, then time elapses quickly – it is the time of the macrocosm – and, finally, time
goes both directions: into the future with the Ramsays who are going to reach the
lighthouse, and into the past with Lily Briscoe whose thoughts wander backwards until
the image of Mrs. Ramsay is recreated
- Woolf demonstrates that human experience transcends past, present and future –
they merge into an eternal flux
- the symbolical image of the lighthouse – idea of permanence and continuity:

To reach the lighthouse is, in a sense, to make contact with a truth outside oneself, to
surrender the uniqueness in one’s ego to impersonal reality. (David Daiches)

- the steady beam of the lighthouse may be interpreted as Mrs. Ramsay’s steady
influence on all the others, but also as the immutability of the objective time
Conclusion:

- V. Woolf’s novels are an expression of personal feelings, characterized by lyrical

effusions, and have a unique poetic quality
- she also became a competent critic (essays published in The Common Reader – about
H. James, G. Eliot, J. Austen, Th. Hardy, the Bronte sisters), was preoccupied with the
condition of the novel
- she proposed a radical and abrupt shift of focus from the outside world to the inside
world
- the substance of the novel should no longer be limited to the social environment and
external background
- the novelist should endeavor to catch ‘the flux of experience’
- the beginning had been made by Henry James:
A novel in its broadest definition is a personal, a direct impression of life: that to begin with,
constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity at all, and therefore
has no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say. (H. James/ The Art of Fiction)

- V. Woolf made a distinction between Edwardians (Galsworthy, Wells, Bennett) and

Georgians (Forster, Joyce, Lawrence)
- the Edwardians concentrated, in her view, too much on the fabric of things
- the Georgians focused on character, the revelation of the essence of the human
being
- life reflected in fiction is not a regularly patterned universe with an objective existence
- it is a state of mind, a subjective reaction to experience
- Vision is more important than plot. (Alberes)
- the traditional categories of the novel - plot, character, themes were no longer
adequate to communicate the stream of consciousness
- the novel assumed poetic features
- Woolf’s novels are poetic texts centred on subjective states of mind, on the discovery
of the hidden pattern of life

- sensitivity, subtlety, rendering of a specific state of mind are key-words for the
theory of the modern novel