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HEART OF DARKNESS
CHAPTER # 4
Modern
Fiction:
Its
Chief Features
Materialism
In making any survey 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! Their master.
pieces certainly have a strange air of simplicity. It is for the historian of
literature to decide if we are now beginning or ending, or standing in the
middle of a great period of prose fiction. Our quarrel then is not with the
classics. And that we speak of quarrel. ling with Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy
is because of the fact of their existence in flesh and blood, that their work
has a living, breathing and everyday imperfections which bids us take what
liberties with it we choose. But it is also true that, while we thank them for
a thousand gifts, we reserve our unconditional gratitude for Hardy and for
Conrad. Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy have excited so many hopes and
disappointed them of persistently, that our gratitude largely takes the form
of thanking them for having shown us what they might have done but have not
done. No single phrase will sum up the charge or grievance which we have to
bring against the mass of work so large in its volume and embodying qualities. 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. Their characters live abundantly but it remains to ask how
they live, and what they live for.
If we fasten, then, one the label on all these books, on which is one word, materialists, we mean by it that
they write of unimportant things; that they spend immense industry making the
trivial and the transitory appear true and the enduring.
Historical Influence
The modern English the novel, though still distinct in many ways has been affected by many of the same
historical and social influences while its literary development has been
influenced by the fiction of many other countries, notably of France.
In England, the exploitation of a vastly enlarged reading public by the mass mediums greatly
increased the separation between highbrow and "lowbrow". This
separation, combined with the increasing political and social dominance of a vulgarly
philistine class of financiers and industrialists widened the gap between
writers and society. No writer since Dickens has been both the beat and the
most popular; the greatest modern novelists bear on both sides of the Atlantic
the same stigmata of alienation and dissent: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, James
Joyce and D. H Lawrence were alike exiles and expatriates.
Realism and Naturalism
The increasing
separation of the modern novelist from the values and attitudes of his society
is reflected not only in the subjects but, also in the structures of his
fiction and its modes of presenting reality. Scott had given the novelist the dignity of the historian: Stendhal aspired to be the chronicler of his century;
Balac set out to be the scientific naturalist of the human species, but it was
not until Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary in 1857 that the novel was given a
pattern of conscious technical expertness. The same realism was soon given
to the school of Flaubert; it rejected any idealization reader or the writer;
instead, the novelist was to be a wholly objective recorder of reality’.
With naturalism, the
process went further. Emile Zola codified the analogy of the novelist and the scientist:
neither of them selects or creates; they merely study and report. They studied
large segments of experience that had hitherto been ignored. They scorned their
reader's desire for edification and entertainment and outraged they're fine
feelings. In general, they worked in the spirit of science, with its ideal of
thorough dispassionate enquiry. And that there was a new kind of realism
heralded by the invention of a new label: naturalism.
Impressionism
and the Stream of Consciousness
Impressionism follows
from Flaubert's concern with objective methods of narration, but its the quasi-scientific and epistemological base also relate it to Realism and
Naturalism. The doctrine was clearest in the Impressionist painters, who
theorized that the "real" pictorial reality was not the object as it
was known to be, but the object as it appeared to the observer under special
conditions of the atmosphere.
“Life is not a series
of gig lamps symmetrically arranged", declares Virginia Woolf: "life
is a luminous halo. Her whole effort is accordingly to render the "myriad
impressions" that we daily receive, the "semi-transparent
envelope" veiling all our activities. She is, in short, an impressionist ;
and as such, she joins the large company, including Conrad, Proust, and
Lawrence, who has extended into
literature the method of the French painters: a projection of the artist's
immediate sense-impression as opposed to a literal reproduction of surfaces or
an intellectual Analysis of what underlies them. Yet even when they
deliberately distort appearances for the sake of essences, the aim of these
writers remains fundamentally realistic. They have simply developed finer
instruments than the earlier realists and penetrated further below the surface
of the familiar. They are simply striving to convey in purer form the
impression life makes upon us.
But beyond these
experimenters is a more advanced group whom in The Twentieth Century Novel
Professor Beach aptly describes as "expressionists." In certain
chapters of Ulysses, James Joyce definitely departs from the world of
appearance and employs the principles of abstract composition. And Joyce is but
one of a number who, eager to distil the very quintessence of actuality, is
led to the use of extra-realistic devices and enter the realm of the unreal.
The type of narrative
to which the term, "stream-of-consciousness" applies, has its origin
in English in the novels of Dorothy Richardson and Joyce. In the followers of
Joyce and Mis Richardson, it is probably Virginia Woolf who makes the most
frequent use of the stream-of-consciousness method, especially in Mrs Dalloway
and To The Lighthouse. The stream-of-consciousness type of narrative is a new
and radical development from the subjectivism. Its definite feature is the
exploitation of the element of incoherence in characterizes both our normal and
our abnormal states of mind. Our psyche is such an imperfectly integrated
bundle of memories, sensations and impulses, that, unless sternly controlled by
some dominating motive it is likely to be at the mercy of every random gust of
suggestion. In our day, an extraordinary amount of interest has been shown in
what we may call passive states of mind. This stream-of-consciousness floods
the novels of James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and Conrad Aiken,
and trickles through the novels of innumerable others.
The Summing Up
The new writers have
felt the need to break up conventional patterns. They have wanted new technical
devices, new procedures for rendering the psyche.
Instead of the regularity
of form, they show a tendency to what at first blush appears a freakish
changefulness and unpredictability. The analysis will show that form with them is
not so freakish as it seems; only, their principles of form are not those
which have been traditional for the novel. They are not determined by the plot
as with Fielding or Trollope. So they have a tendency to denormalization.
Instead of uniformity
and simplicity, they tend to diversity and complexity. In this respect, they
show a superficial resemblance to the earlier Victorian novelists, with their
abundance and colourful variety of material. And yet the spirit and technique
and dominant preoccupations of the new men are so different from those of the
Victorians that no one would dream of comparing the two schools.
Instead of
concentration around a limited issue, they show an eccentric tendency, a tendency to fly off in many different directions.
Instead of continuity
of action, they show continuity. A continuous action seems to them too unlike
ordinary experience, with its freakish, accidental interruptions, it is overlapping
of time and circumstance, they feel that the sense of life is often best
rendered by one group of characters, one centre of consciousness, to another.
Moreover, they do not
particularly of a given action, following it through to the fall of the
curtain. They know the imagination has the faculty of filling up the gaps in the action presented in fragments, of getting the impression of an entire life from
a mere hinting indication of the high moments. Again, they feel that the
imagination is stimulated and rendered more active, is actually exhilarated, by
broken bits of information, as the nerves are stimulated by the discontinuity
of an electric current.
Want of continuity,
yes-but not of a sort of rhythm, a sense of movement, of wave-like progress.
This rhythm is not metrical like that of verse but is constituted by
repetition, by the recurrence of themes, by a kind of lyrical agitation of the
stream of consciousness.
Instead of dramatic the effect,, these men go in for something more like lyricism.
They show a tendency to
throw overboard terms intellectual, logical, sentimental. They rely more on
impressions of the senses- on a mere succession of sensations-for rendering the
psyche. And then this method conforms to the actual thought process, which is
chiefly made up of items of sensation, rather than being a connected chain of
logical reasoning.
The new writers do not
represent a sharp and complete break with tradition. In particular, some of
them have learned a great deal from the earlier novel. But it will be seen how
much they were in reaction against most of its main tendencies. And, in
general, their motive has been to give new life to a form which, in the hands
of the writers of that school, had become so impoverished and anaemic.
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