MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL

 

 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.