Modernist Fiction - Learning Literature

Modernist Fiction – Writers on the
novel 1
• “It is fine to see how the old three volume tradition is being broken
through. One volume is becoming commonest of all. It is the new
school, due to continental influence. Thackeray and Dickens wrote
at enormous length and with profusion of detail; their plan is to tell
everything, and leave nothing to be divined. Far more artistic, I
think, is the later method, of merely suggesting; of dealing with
episodes, instead of writing biographies. The old novelist is
omniscient. I think it is better to tell a story precisely as one does in
real life, hinting, surmising, telling in detail what can so be told and
no more. In fact, it approximates to the dramatic mode of
presentment”. George Gissing, Letter to his brother Algernon,
August 1885
• “They have changed everything now … we used to think there was
a beginning and a middle and an end”. Thomas Hardy qt in V.
Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary
Modernist Fiction – Writers on fiction
2
•
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. […] The writer seems constrained,
not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a
plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so
impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last
button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But
sometimes […] we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the
customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this? Look within and life, it seems, is very far from
being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives myriad
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; the moment of importance came not here
but there; so that if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he
must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no
comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button
sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. 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 complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and the external
as possible?” Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 1919
Modernist Fiction – Writers on fiction
2
•
•
Che la si voglia chiamare vita o spirito, verità o realtà, questa, - che è la cosa essenziale -, si è allontanata, o ci è
passata davanti, restia a lasciarsi costringere più a lungo negli abiti stretti che le offriamo. […] Lo scrittore sembra
costretto, non per sua libera scelta ma dal tiranno potente e senza scrupoli che lo tiene in pugno, a fornire un
intreccio, una commedia, una tragedia, una storia d’amore, e a permeare il tutto con un’aria di credibilità così
impeccabile che, se tutti i suoi personaggi prendessero vita, si troverebbero vestiti, fino all’ultimo bottone del
cappotto, secondo la moda del momento. Il tiranno ottiene ubbidienza; e il romanzo viene scritto in base ai suoi
ordini. Ma certe volte […] abbiamo il sospetto di cogliere un dubbio momentaneo, uno spasmo di ribellione,
mentre le pagine si riempiono nel modo consueto. Ma la vita è veramente così? E’ così che devono essere scritti i
romanzi?
Guardatevi dentro e la vita sembra molto lontana dall’essere ‘così’. Analizzate per un attimo una mente normale in
un giorno normale. La mente riceve una miriade di impressioni – futili, fantastiche, evanescenti, o scolpite con una
punta d’acciaio. Esse ci giungono da ogni part, in uno scroscio incessante di innumerevoli atomi; e mentre
ricadono, mentre prendono forma nella vita di un qualsiasi lunedì o martedì, acquistano un accento diverso dal
solito; l’attimo importante diventa questo e non quello; quindi, se uno scrittore fosse un uomo libero e non uno
schiavo, se potesse scrivere quello che vuole, e non quello che deve, se potesse fondare il suo lavoro sul proprio
modo di sentire e non sulle convenzioni, non esisterebbe nessun intreccio, nessuna commedia, nessuna tragedia,
nessuna storia d’amore o catastrofe nello stile comunemente accettato, e forse nemmeno un bottone cucito
secondo i dettami dei sarti di Bond Street. La vita non è una serie di lampioncini disposti in ordine simmetrico; la
vita è un alone luminoso, un involucro semitrasparente che ci racchiude dall’alba della coscienza fino alla fine. Non
è forse compito del romanziere esprimere questo spirito mutevole, misterioso e indefinito, per quanto possa
mostrarsi complesso e aberrante, con una miscela possibilmente priva di elementi esterni ed estranei? Non
chiediamo solo più coraggio e sincerità; vogliamo suggerire che la materia del romanzo è un po’ diversa da quella
che l’abitudine vorrebbe farci credere. Virginia Woolf, Il romanzo moderno, 1919
Questioning the key features of
realism
•
•
•
•
•
Narrative authority and reliability
Contemporary setting
Representative locations
Ordinary speech
Linear plots
Modernist Fiction
• Forefathers of modernism: Henry James (18431916) and Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
• Henry James: “a novel is in its broadest definition
a personal, and direct impression of life”;
selectivity; technique of the “limited point of
view”
• Placing the consciousness of characters at the
heart of the narrative world is one of James
determining influences on the modernist fiction
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
•
•
•
•
•
Józef Teodor Conrad Korzeniowski
1874: Joined the French Merchant Navy at Marseilles
1878: Joined a British ship, after 4 years with French ships;
1886: British nationality;
1889: applied for the command of a river-steamer on the
Congo
• 1895, left the Navy and published his first novel Almayer’s
Folly
Conrad’s works
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Almayer’s Folly 1895
An Outcast of the Islands 1896
The Nigger of the Narcissus 1897
Youth 1898
Heart of Darkness 1899
Lord Jim 1900
Typhoon 1902
Nostromo 1904
The Mirror of the Sea 1906
The Secret Agent 1907
Under Western Eyes 1911
Chance 1912
Victory 1915
The Shadow Line 1916
The Arrow of Gold 1919
The Rescue 1919
The Rover 1923
Suspense 1925
Conrad on language
• English was for me neither a matter of choice
nor adoption […] There was adoption; but it
was I who was adopted by the genius of the
language […] its very idioms […] had a direct
action on my temperament and fashioned my
still plastic character.