Andrew's Wiki
Bennett Brown

Novels are written primarily to catch character

• Novels are not didactic (about ideas) or poetic (to sing a song)
  • “so clumsy, verbose, undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive”
• Everyone is interested in characters, but novelists never cease in being fascinated with character in and of itself, apart from any practical use
  • Character reading is crucial for everyday life
• To artists, humans and their characters are of “overwhelming importance”
  • Characters “impose” on authors, like the author is unwilling in the matter
  • Making them “automatically” write a novel about them
• Mrs. Brown
  • On a train: Virginia’s everyday life example of character
    • A new kind of inspiration from Romantic inspiration: quite dull
    • Woolf sees in the conditions of leisure space the natural effect of everyone being novelists, ie, interested in character (what a convenient example for me)
      • “being uncomfortable, like most people, at travelling with fellow passengers unless I have somehow or other accounted for them”
      • (even mentions golf club and seaside house: these are staples of the world
  • “Detail could wait” b/c she really wanted “to steep oneself in her atmosphere”
• Character is very capacious concept
  • Both French naturalism and Russian spiritualism can be headed under “Character”
• Bennett has agreed that character is of utmost importance, and that character must be REAL, but Woolf asks, “What is reality?”
  • Woolf: reality is something wtih the “power to make you think…of all sorts of things through its eyes”

Edwardians v Georgians

• Cast
  • Edwardians: Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy
    • “necessary” “after the creative activity of the Victorian age” (here’s the underlying historical argument I was seeing in Modern Fiction)
  • Georgians: Forster, Lawrence, Strachey, Joyce, Eliot
• Georgians: no great novels yet
  • Why? Because they have no models to write them with; it’s not about some supposed decay (ie degeneration argument) but instead b/c lack of code, which would make the polite prelude before the “guts” of the book come out)
  • Convention: like politeness of a hostess talking about the weather before securing basis for the “far more difficult business of intimacy”
    • A novelist, house property is this handy key
    • You need it to create relationship with your audience, but you can’t let it get in the way of communication!
      • Edwardian authors never got past convention
    • Georgians can’t use conventions by another generation: “convention ceases to be a means of communication” but is instead an “obstacle” to it
• Triple decker novel
  • “dreary, irrelevant, and humbugging”
  • allows you to “escape the appalling effort of saying what I meant”
  • instead describe, describe, describe
  • “enormous stress upon the fabric of things” which she objects to (this is materialism)
• Problems with Georgians
  • “so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth, the truth is bound to reach us in rather an exhaused and chaotic condition”
    • we hear the “axes”
  • Kicking and screaming too loudly: grammar and syntax destruction is childish, “Wonton”
  • Joyce; waste of energy: too much emphasis on the vulgar, on the indecent (it’s not even indecence for indecency’s sake!)
  • Eliot; too obscure (not tolerant to the weak); throws out too much convention
  • Woolf thus takes up moderate position: doesn’t seem to put much weight on superficial signs of change. Remember, all novels, ALL of them no matter if written in 18th c or the 23rd century, must be about character

Recommendations for Art

• Requires experimentation
• Must keep character first

“On or about December, 1910, human character changed.”

• “not sudden or definite”
• Cook example
  • Victorian cook: “leviathan” of downstairs, never sees the light
  • Georgian cook: “creature of sunshine,” visible, on same mass cultural plane as “master”
  • Cook is as “solemn an example of the power of the human race to change” as any
• “All human relations have shifted:” master/servant, parent/child, husband/wife
  • Simultaneous changes in religion, politics, conduct, literature

Conclusion

• Everyone, she thinks, is “amazed” by what they experience
• Everyone has a bewildering array of emotions they can’t master or understand fully
• Humans have “unlimited capacity and infinite variety” which like the conditions of “life itself”
• This is humanism, in the sense that the human is used as the template by which to judge everything, including both art and “life itself,” which are seen to be cast in the mold of the human
• Might I suggest that Woolf is making too narrow an understanding of the human? She thinks humans are only human: too strictly classical understanding of what makes a human. Despite her talking about new flashy Psychology!