Modern Fiction

Utilizing the traditional form of a critical essay, Woolf writes in a unique stream-of-consciousness style that seeks to persuade her reader that traditional forms themselves perhaps ought to be done away with. “Must novels be like this?” (160), she asks in one of the essay’s many rhetorical questions. Similarly, in her discussion of the short story she invokes conventional wisdom—that short stories “should be brief and conclusive” (163)—before questioning whether the story under discussion can really be called a short story at all given that it has neither of these traits. By implication, her argument also casts doubt on the characteristics that critics have used to make generic classifications (i.e., classifications related to genre). Woolf challenges these conventions, exploring The Relationship Between Form and Content, in service of the essay’s central project: the reconfiguration of English fiction for the modern or Modernist writer. The essay “Modern Fiction” is not simply a “survey” of its declared subject matter but a pseudo-manifesto on the possibilities of both style/structure and subject matter in modern literature.

Woolf was distinctly influenced by both the philosophical and artistic developments of the early 20th century that accompanied literary Modernism. These brought about a new way of perceiving person and time that emphasized both fragmentation, or what Woolf refers to as “innumerable atoms,” and multiplicity of perspective: “from all sides they come” (160). This influence leads Woolf to draw a line in the sand between writers she identifies as “materialists” and those who lean toward the “psychological” and the “spiritual.”

The “materialists” focus on the external world of craftsmanship, and Woolf describes them with correspondingly superficial imagery: “bells and buttons” (159), or figures “dressed down to the last button of their carts in the fashion of the hour” (160). In a similar vein, Woolf describes Bennett as a “workman”—a utilitarian rather than artistic designation—and imagines his novels as material structures, again emphasizing physicality and exteriority. She grants Wells more “inspiration” but says he has some “clod of clay” intermingled with his genius (158), implying that the material and the bodily infringe on the psychological.

In opposition to these writers, Woolf positions those whose writing evokes the immaterial, which Woolf identifies with “life itself” (162). The “spiritual” writers, James Joyce foremost among them, delve deep into the human psyche and compose their works to depict this. Woolf also suggests that Russian literature exemplifies spiritual traits. Such writers demonstrate the wealth of content that materialist writing leaves unexplored. By means of this overarching juxtaposition between materialists and spiritualists, Woolf creates two poles for her comparative argument and demonstrates how modern fiction ought to privilege one over the other.

Allusion and reference are among Woolf’s central rhetorical techniques in establishing this juxtaposition. She invokes other writers to underline her perspective and to act as starting points from which to spin out her argument about the potential of modern fiction. Besides aiming to persuade, Woolf’s use of such examples reflects her understanding of human psychology. Part of Woolf’s theory of literature rests on her belief in the vital interdependency of human experience: She does not put stock in Wells’s or Bennett’s creation of discrete characters because she cannot separate individuals from the stream of impressions that comprise the human experience. In “Modern Fiction,” her allusions serve as practical examples of the “myriad impressions” from which life emerges.

In contrast to the view of the novel that E. M. Forster propounds in Aspects of the Novel (1927)—that a story is “a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence, dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on” (Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Penguin, 1962)—Woolf therefore sees the writer as at the mercy of the pause, acceleration, and dilation of moments that only sometimes “shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday” (160). Woolf argues that modern fiction ought to resist linearity, organization, and even comprehensibility in order to capture the complexities of existence itself: “[L]ife is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged” (160). Continuing with the metaphor of light, Woolf instead describes life as “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us” (160). This imagery of enclosure or encirclement reinforces Woolf’s description of the writer as someone surrounded by a whirlwind of impressions. However, this envelopment is not for Woolf a confining feeling but rather a miraculous gathering of possibilities. It is, in fact, the means by which a writer can become “free” of the confines of tradition.

Woolf’s own style of criticism is correspondingly open, unresolved, and indefinite. Her diction may be formal, but her imperatives—e.g., “look within” (160)—frequent rhetorical questions, and inconclusive tone invite the reader into Woolf’s coterie rather than making them passive recipients of a lecture. Woolf aims to innovate but does not place herself in a position of supremacy. While it is undoubtedly Chekhov’s “understanding of the heat and soul” and Joyce’s improbability and incoherence that most excite Woolf (163), she spends much of “Modern Fiction” acknowledging the merits of her literary predecessors, even those she names “materialists”: The divide between Tradition and Modernity is not as absolute as it initially appears. Jane Austen and Henry Fielding receive praise for their work, which Woolf contends relied on far more “simple tools and primitive materials” than the writers of the present have at their disposal (157). This suggests that Woolf would not do away entirely with tradition, conventions, and the canon but would instead ask writers and readers alike to accept their own shortsightedness—or, as she puts it, to accept that they are stumbling around in a world of fragments and attempting to piece something together from them. To pretend otherwise, to Woolf, is the real crime of the “materialists.”

Woolf concludes by imagining the art of fiction as a woman and asking writers to “break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured” (164). This personification allows Woolf to ventriloquize her own demands to writers. Their “modern fiction” must disrespect tradition to honor fiction herself, breaking her down into her smallest parts and rebuilding something new from her ruins.