Virginia Woolf 'Modern Fiction': Summary and Analysis

 

Mrs. Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) is a critic of great insight and penetration who has thought long and deep about the mysteries of the art of fiction and has produced her own theory about the form and substance of a good novel. Her views on the novel were expressed from time to time all through her literary career in her letters, articles and critical essays. From such writings, much can be gathered about her aesthetics, but it is only in the essay 'Modern Fiction' included in the 'The Times Literary Supplement' published in 1919 that we get a coherent and systematic theory of fiction.

REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION:

When Virginia wolf started writing novels, the fiction of H. G. Wells, Arnold Benett and Galsworthy were already much popular. Their novels were perfectly constructed. They were perfectly written in the 18th century Henry Fielding's tradition with a closely knit plot, with proper climax and denouement and well-marked characters. But Mrs. Woolf found these novels disappointing. They certainly had much to give which was admirable and worthwhile but there was also much else which she found wanting. She calls these writers materialists because, 

 "...they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body

that they have this appointed us, and left us with the feeling

that the sooner English fiction turns its back upon them,

the better for it soul."

Regarding the drawbacks of H. G. Wells, Virginia writes:

 "Mr. Wells had purity of inspiration but he took upon his

shoulders the work that ought to have been

discharged by government officials."

Lost in the discussion of social, economic and political problems of the day, Mr. Wells forgot the crudity and coarseness of his human beings. According to Virginia, Wells' sociological concerns killed the artist in him.

Arnold Benett was also a perfect artist. His characters were all alive but they did not know what they lived for. In other words, Bennett failed to give us the reason of life. He missed the soul. Virginia felt that we do not get the reality of life in his novels. She writes, "Life refuses to live there." Further, she says that we do not find life even in the pages of Galsworthy, though he was admirable as a craftsman. They were all materialists,

"...because they write of unimportant things;

because they spend immense skill and immense industries

making the trivial and the transitory appear

the true and the enduring."

POURING ‘LIFE’ IN NOVELS:

Virginia remarks that life is missing in the novels of H. G. Wells and Galsworthy. She writes:

"Life escapes them and perhaps without life

nothing else is worthwhile."

Thus, according to Mrs. Woolf, the test of a successful novelist is that he should give life or spirit or reality or truth. But Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy were mere slaves to convention. It was Fielding's convention of the well-made novel which compelled them “to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love, interpret and air of probability."

The result was that they became artificial and their novels missed the soul. They sacrificed the soul, for the sake of formal perfection. What they gave us was something other than life.

But on the other hand, there were writers like James Joyce with 'Ulysses and 'Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man' who are so different from the traditional novelists. Virginia compares Joyce's work with the works of the traditional novelists and calls him "a spiritualist". She writes appreciatively of him in the most glowing terms:

 "In contrast with those, whom we have called materialists,

Mr. Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal

the flickering of that innermost flame."

Regarding Joyce's work, Virginia further comments: 

"On a first reading, at any rate, it is difficult not to a claim

it a masterpiece. If we want life itself, here surely we have it."

Thus, according to Mrs. Woolf, a writer of fiction should give life as it actually is and not be a mere slave to convention and tradition. But the question may be asked as to what is the nature of this life, of this "quick of the mind", of this "innermost flame".

CONCEPT OF STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS:

In one of her most famous and often quoted passages, Mrs. Woolf unveils her own revolutionary concept of modern psychological novel. She believes that the novelist must express the inner psyche of human mind. She writes:

 "The mind receives myriad impressions, trivial, fantastic, evanescent or engraved with the sharpness of steel."

She further says: 

 “So that if a writer were a free man and not a slave,

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 the bond street

tailors would have it."

She opens up her own concept of the psychological novel in the following words:

 "Life is not a series of jig lamps symmetrically arranged;

life is a luminous halo, semi-transparent envelope,

surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end."

Thus, according to Virginia Woolf, life is not fixed or static. It is a flux or shower of atoms. It is the prime business of the novelist to convey this fluidity, this ever changing flux, with truth and sincerity. The conventions of plot, tragedy, comedy, climax, and catastrophe and so on may be ignored because they are artificial and distort and falsify the reality of life. The writer should only concentrate on the rendering of inner reality of human life.

Further, Mrs. Woolf points out:

 "Any method is right; every method is right that

expresses what we wish to express."

The technique does not matter; it is the end, the aim of the novelist which is important. Any method would do as long as it brings us to the quick of the mind. In this connection Mrs. Woolf appreciates the works of the contemporary Russian novelists and short story writers. She says that they have succeeded in capturing the very vagueness and inconclusiveness of life and display and understanding of the human heart and soul.  

In the end, Mrs. Woolf tells us that in novel writing,

"...nothing is forbidden but only falsity and pretence.

The proper stuff of fiction does not exist; everything is the

proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought every

quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon."

At last, she says that traditions and conventions must be changed and altered in keeping with the changes in our conception of life and reality. It is only through such changes that the art of the novel can grow and flourish.

CONCLUSION:

To sum up, for Virginia Woolf, the novel is neither "a criticism of life" in the Arnoldian sense nor an entertainment in the popular sense. Novel is a rendering of life in all its fluidity, complexity and subtlety. Mrs. Woolf is one of those great thinkers who tried to give to the English novel a new direction, a new form as well as a new spiritual and psychological awareness. She was extremely dissatisfied with the works of the popular English novelists of her times. She accuses them of having cared for the body but not for the spirit. They tell us about every button on a suit trailer in Bond Street, but nothing about the yearnings and cravings of the spirit of man. She finds this spiritual note in the writings of the great Russian novelists, every one of whom, according to her, possesses "the features of a saint" and advises English novelist to follow their examples.

Click to watch a video lecture.