MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL
Modernism has been described as one of the most
profound changes and upheavals ever to have occurred in the history of
literature. It is not limited to English literature, of course, nor to the
twentieth century, but reflects a shift in knowledge and understanding, in
sensibility and expression, as the world approaches the twenty-first century.
What D.H. Lawrence called in a poem ‘the struggle of becoming’ is explained in
any age and in any culture: however, Modernism is now seen to have encompassed
the changes which overtook society’s expression of its concerns in the first
half of the twentieth century, a time when values and systems which had been
more or less stable for a century and longer were questioned and, in many cases,
overthrown.
What drives the Modern is the need to redefine: the
redefinition covers practically every aspect of society: past, present and
future. To attempt to classify Modernism in a few words would be impossible. Every
individual voice made its own contribution to the Modern; in literature, as in
all the other forms of artistic expression.
Modern writing has given rise to unprecedented
amounts of commentary, exegesis and criticism, precisely because each
individual creative voice can be seen to be distinctive: it is not as easy to
classify writers into groups, trends, and movements. Even groups like the Bloomsbury
Group and the Auden Group are full of diverse personalities and divergent
creative achievement. A significant by-product of Modernism in literature is a
new age of critical writing much of the best of it by the creative writers
themselves.
Modernism adopted new techniques, especially in
narration. In this, the cinema, the popular new art-form of the century, was
hugely influential, especially in cross-cutting, in close-up and in bringing a visual
awareness of image, character, and story-telling to a mass audience. Cinema
also influenced worldwide ideas of humour (from Charlie Chaplin and Mack
Sennett onwards), of glamour and escapism, especially in the Depression years
of the 1930s, and of propaganda.
FORSTER, CONRAD AND FORD
Only connect . . .
(E.M.
Forster, Howards End)
E.M. Forster offers a more detailed critique than
many of his contemporaries of the social and cultural world of the early part
of twentieth century and of the values which held the British Empire together.
Like Kipling, Forster spent time in India; but his view of the country is
different from Kipling and in his last novel, A Passage to India (1924),
he questions whether the dualities of East and West, the Indian people and the
ruling British, can be truly brought together. ‘East is East and West is West,’
Kipling had written, ‘and never the twain shall meet.’ Forster tries to bring
them together, but in doing so he illustrates the complexities of the colonial
situation. Life is rarely simple in Forster’s novels. In A Passage to India,
Forster can admire the detachment of the Hindu mind, at the same time
criticising the inflexibility of the British approach to life. His heroine’s
response to the openness and freedom of India is praised but it brings into the
open the impossibility of making a whole out of two different people,societies, attitudes and religions.
Contrasts are central to Forster’s novels. In Where
Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and A Room with a View (1908) he
contrasts refined English gentility and sensuous Italian vitality.
Howards End (1910)
also explores contrasts in relationships. The overt contrasts are drawn between
two families, the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes. The Wilcoxes represent material
values and the effective management of the outer life; the Schlegels represent
the inner life and the importance of spiritual values. The heart of the novel
is Forster’s attempt to explore the relationship between these two kinds of
reality. On a symbolic level, the two families struggle for the
house named in the title, which in a sense stands for England itself.
Symbolically, too, the house is within sight of and increasingly surrounded by
the sub-urban, anonymous housing of a new middle-class Britain – which the Schlegels
regard as ‘civilised’ in only the most superficial and mechanised way.
As the epigraph to the novel puts it, ‘only
connect’. If there were some connection between these different worlds, these
contrasting attitudes of mind, and these opposing values, then individuals and
societies might form complete and healthy wholes and human love might flourish.
The lower-middle-class character Leonard Bast becomes something of a symbol of
how these ideals of connection are threatened by class differences, poverty,
and a lack of ‘culture’. The connection must involve the whole of the
personality and must not be dictated merely by social codes or conventions or by
external necessity. As a homosexual, Forster had great difficulty in
reconciling his private world with the codes of behaviour expected during the
times in which he lived. This conflict emerges in his novel Maurice (written
1913, published in 1971) – a novel about homosexual love which was only
published following the author’s death.
Joseph Conrad was another novelist who used the
wider world beyond England as the setting for his explorations in character and
motive. Conrad’s novels have a variety of locations which reflect his own extensive
travels, mainly as a merchant seaman. Like several of the important writers of
the time, he came to Britain as an exile from elsewhere. He was born Jozef Teodor
Konrad Korzeniowski of Polish parents and did not learn English until his early
twenties. He joined the British merchant navy, and became a naturalised British
subject in 1896. He brought to his novels experiences and attitudes which were
unusual for a writer of his time. He shared with both Kipling and Maugham a
fascination with different cultures, especially the Far East and Africa, but he
has more wide-ranging and explicit political insights than these writers
normally express.
In his early novels, Conrad uses his sea experiences
in remote places as a means of exploring human character and English codes of honour
and loyalty in particular. His situations are often extreme and test human
beings to their limits. Lord Jim (1900) is the story of a young
Englishman who panics and deserts his ship. Lord Jim later dies an honourable
death but not before his moral conflicts are explored in detail. Innocence and
experience, and the resulting moral growth which the character undergoes, turn Jim into a
Conradian hero.
Nostromo is
often considered to be Conrad’s masterpiece. It was published in 1904, the same
year as Henry James’s The Golden Bowl . The two novels are in many ways
opposites: where Conrad is concerned with the effects on his characters of
extreme stress and danger, James looks at the complexities and the refinements
of art. Both writers are, however, engaged with the unfolding of deep
mysteries, with the establishing of true identities and valid relationships in
a flawed world. The bowl in James’s novel is as much a symbol of human frailty
as is the treasure of silver which corrupts Nostromo in Conrad’s novel.
The ‘incorruptible’ Emilia in Nostromo, in her
relationship with the Italian sailor who is the book’s hero, has a similar
innocence to Maggie Verver’s in her relationship with the Italian prince,
Amerigo, in The Golden Bowl. Where James’s characters find their
truth in Europe rather than America, Conrad places his characters in the
imaginary South American country of Costaguana.
Nostromo,
like many of Conrad’s novels, involves a journey towards discovery in a vividly
described and richly peopled country of the mind. Nostromo has a more
clearly defined social and political setting than most of his works, but it is
the moral struggle which is paramount.
Themes of trust and betrayal, ignorance and
self-knowledge dominate Conrad’s works, and will be taken up again in many
forms by later twentieth-century writers from Graham Greene to John Le Carré
and beyond.
The critic F.R. Leavis places Conrad firmly in what
he called ‘the great tradition’ of novelists whose moral affirmations make them
stand out as major contributors to literature. Many other critics have questioned
this ‘tradition’. Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James also gain Leavis’s
approval, and few would deny that these are all highly significant writers. The
importance of their writings goes beyond moral and aesthetic values, and they
can be critically considered from several other viewpoints (for example, social,
political, popular, cultural) without in any way diminishing their
significance.
Conrad was indeed a profoundly moral novelist but he
recognised the moral complexities of his age which stemmed in part from the absence
of any clearly shared set of values between people. In order to present this
world fictionally, Conrad develops techniques of multiple points of view. A
hero like Lord Jim is not judged directly by Conrad but his behaviour is seen
from different narrative viewpoints, including the viewpoint of a narrator
distinct from Conrad himself. He is a master of complex narrative techniques
such as time-shifting and flashbacks, which prevent a reader from adopting too
simplistic an interpretation of events.
Conrad wrote long novels, short stories and
novellas, with his most famous novella being Heart of Darkness (1899).
In it Conrad describes a long journey to a place deep inside the Belgian Congo,
the heart of darkness of the title. The story is again told by the intermediate
narrator Marlow, who retraces his first visit to colonial Africa and his
growing awareness of the evils he encounters. The story contrasts Western civilisation
in Europe with what that civilisation has done to Africa. Early in the novel,
while on the River Thames near London, Marlow speaks:
‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one
of the dark
places of the earth.’. . .
‘I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans
first came
here, nineteen hundred years ago – the other day. .
. . Light
came out of this river since – you say Knights? Yes;
but it is like
a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of
lightning in the clouds.
We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the
old earth keeps
rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.’
The theme of darkness leads to the figure of Kurtz,
the central character, a portrait of how the commercial and material
exploitation of colonial lands can make men morally hollow, and create a
permanent nightmare in the soul. The fears Conrad expresses find an echo in
T.S. Eliot’s poetry, especially in his poem The Hollow Men with the
epigraph ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’ – a direct quotation from Conrad’s novella.
Conrad also shares with other writers of this time a
sense of impending anarchy and the collapse of moral and political order. His
most explicitly political novels are Nostromo (1904), The Secret
Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911). Throughout his
fiction he depicts human isolation, the conflict between different parts of
one’s personality and external fate as well as the difficulties of human
communication. He writes with a deep pessimism reminiscent of Thomas Hardy and
he appreciates E.M. Forster’s need to ‘only connect’. Formally and technically,
however, Conrad is a more innovative and influential writer and closer to Modernists
than Hardy or Forster. The word ‘Modern’ is again important here. It came into
use in the nineteenth century in the context of art and architecture. Only
later did writers begin to use it – George Meredith’s sonnet sequence Modern Love (1862) and George
Moore’s novel A Modern Lover (1883) being significant examples.
Ford Madox Ford was a contributor to Des
Imagistes, a collaborator with Joseph Conrad on the novels The
Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903), and a critic, being the
founder of The English Review, from 1908 to 1910. He became one of the
most influential figures in literature during and after the First World War, encouraging
new writing, founding the Transatlantic Review and assisting in the
spread of new trends, in an untiring and hugely productive career. Noted in his
own day as poet, editor, and autobiographer, Ford is now best remembered in his
own right for The Good Soldier (1915), subtitled The Saddest Story
Ever Told, which has been described as ‘the greatest tragedy of
sexuality in English prose’. It is recounted by a first-person narrator, John
Dowell, whose unreliability undermines every scene in the novel, rendering the
whole story ambiguous. Full of time-shifts, and with a mysterious death which
is only resolved on the last page, it has remained both fascinating and
influential.
Ford’s ‘Impressionist’ trilogy, Fifth Queen (1907–8),
and the tetralogy Parade’s End (1924–28), with its hero Tietjens, were
notable contributions to the experimentation with narrative techniques and styles
which Ford spent his life promoting. The trilogy is about one of the wives of
Henry VIII, Catherine Howard; the tetralogy follows its hero through intrigues
of passion and the experience of the war, bringing together personal and
universal themes, tracing the breakdown of the old order and the emergence of
the new, in a way that few other novels have done.
Like many other creative writers, Ford published a
great deal of criticism. Henry James had constantly commented on his own and
others’ writing in The Art of Fiction (1885) and The Art of the Novel
(1893). Shaw had used the prefaces to his plays to raise social issues.
Artists frequently used their position to discuss, evaluate, and pronounce on the
rapidly changing world in which they lived. D.H. Lawrence’s essays cover a vast
range of topics, from psychology to American literature; T.S. Eliot is, by
many, as highly regarded as a critic as he is for his poetry and drama;
Virginia Woolf ’s two volumes of The Common Reader (1925; 1932), discuss
a wide range of writing, with a concern for the values it expresses; E.M.
Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) was immensely influential; and
Ford’s own overview, The English Novel (1930), is a complementary
survey, concluding with Conrad. Ford’s The March of Literature (1935)
is the last of this kind of personal, polemical critical writing, which
flourished between the wars. The quality and quantity of critical writing at
this time is a sign of how much all these writers were crucially absorbed by the
role of literature and by the changes in writing and reading which were happening
in their own lifetimes. It is a testimony to the urgency of the debate that
most of what they wrote is still vivid, relevant, and illuminating, whether of
the earlier writers they examined or of later writing.
