Andrew's Wiki
Modern Fiction

Intro

• Lit history not about progress in the sense that industries progress: novels do not get better as time goes on, but the artists are always “moving”
  • “The analogy between literature and the process, to choose an example, of making motor cars scarcely holds good past the first glance”
  • Cyclical cycle, not linear?
• Denies ability of seeing literature from a bird’s-eye view: again, literature isn’t available to the structures of rationality and science
  • “down in the plain little is visible”
  • Critics use vague language like “reality”

Bad Lit

• Quarrel with Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy
  • Disappointing
  • Unfulfilled promises
  • Favors Hardy, Conrad, Hudson
• Why? They are materialists: “concerned not with the spirit but with the body”
  • “Tinsel and trickery”
  • Life isn’t where they are: what they have is better left to government officials
    • “Life escapes”
    • Characters’ destinies: “unquestionable an eternity of bliss spend in the very best hotel in Brighton.”
  • Inferior characters
  • Topics are “unimportant,” “trivial,” and “transitory” rather than “true and enduring”
    • Not worthwhile
  • “Enormous labour,” “solidity”
• Such writing blocks out “conception” in a mire of convention
  • Writer tyrannized by probability, tragedy/comedy/romance necessity
• Well: his inspiration is choked by clay: materialist “from sheer goodness of heart”
• Bennett: too well-constructed: without soul

Good Lit

• Record “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day”
• Receiving “myriad impressions…an incessant shower of innumerable atoms”
  • What separates one day from another is how these atoms “fall:” and are accepted: different emphasis
• “Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
  • For Woolf, what’s important about life is that it contains consciousness
  • The writers who can convey this sensation are the Georgians
    • Representation: “convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit” in all its complexity, incoherence, and contradiction, with as little of the “alien” or “external” as possible
• Chance and probability (which are supports for the readers’ imagination, in order to get them to go along with the ride) are perhaps adventitious
• Joyce does so (referring to first installments of Ulysses in Little Review in 1918)
  • Sincere and exact, letting go of convention, of assumptions about what is or isn’t significant or full of life (small things have life too)
  • Spiritual, courageous
  • Problem: you may worry that he’s limited himself via method, too closed and not open; it’s narrow rather than joyful; could be indecent
    • Final verdict: “any method is right that expresses what we wish to express”
• Opens us “previously ignored or excluded “aspects of life” which might even be more important than the ones convention tells us are important

Recommendations

• Freedom! for author! You can represent what you want
  • “The accent falls a little differently:” this is the engine of literary history
  • However she wants to predict that psychology will be business of young authors

Conclusion

• Via analysis of Chekhov short story, gives obligatory genuflection to Russian novelists
  • But in the end she ends up giving nationalist rationale: different types of mind
  • English have the “instinct to enjoy and fight” rather than Russian’s “to suffer and understand”
• “Everything is the proper stuff of fiction,” with English mind and Russian mind perched on opposite sides of a spectrum
  • Pushing Fiction around keeps her young: never resting

Problem

• If she’s all for freedom, why is she mad about Edwardians? Seems to me like there’s an underlying historical argument: because human nature changed, the authors will now write diff, and they only need the freedom to follow history, essentially.