In the early 1920s, Virginia Woolf sees reality shifting under her feet. Relations between people are changing, the figure of the artist is changing, character itself is changing. Human reality is changing, and if art is to capture or represent it—as Woolf holds that it must—art itself must change.
The pre-modern realists claim to be depicting objective reality, that their writing is ‘like a window open on creation. A kind of transparent Screen is mounted in the window frame’ through which we can look at reality without distortion or affect. (Zola qtd. in Schor 38) But for Woolf, this is not possible. ‘Real’ characters are relative to the reader: ‘what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?’ (MBMB 10) The qualities of a ‘real’ character are not some ahistorical necessity, they are contingent on the social, historical and even personal conditions of their judge. Woolf claims that modern character is entirely new, and thus necessitates a fiction which is entirely new if it is to capture this character.
If these ‘materialists’—Woolf’s term for the pre-modern realists—are to focus on character at all, they do so only on the body; the description is always from the outside, of material possessions and milieu. The materialists will look ‘out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature.’ (MBMB 16) The materialists, then, ‘write of unimportant things’ (MF 159) whereas the modernists are driven to write of something vital, important, worthwhile, and above all, true: they write of life as spirit.
This relocation of reality to ‘the dark places of psychology’ (MF 162) has its conceptual roots in the writings of Freud, reaching the English modernists by way of French philosopher Henri Bergson and English psychologist William James. For Bergson, to confuse the mechanised time of a clock with our internal experience of time is to confuse our ‘habitual’ self, constituted by our belongings and sociality, with our conscious self. Internal conscious experience is indeed temporal, but not in a linear, quantitative way whereby events can be spatially juxtaposed as in a clockface or timeline. Instead, consciousness flows—James’ metaphor—in an unpredictable, acausal way, which Bergson terms duration. There is an interpenetrating relationship between the inner psychological world and the external material world: not only are past memories and future imaginings interwoven in duration, but present external perception is too. Freudian free association provides the force behind this motion, rather than logical or causal entailment.
To write of this psychological reality, the modernists must break and abuse language as it stands. If they were to aim at exactitude, denying or shying away from vagueness as the materialists do, they would never capture that essential thing, that ‘luminous halo’ of life. (MF 160) The focus of the modernists on form is key to their aims of capturing this essential spirit, since the “natural” or “transparent” language of the Edwardians, and of the Victorians before them, is complicit in creating the shared external world of objects and politics. But remember: this world is artificial. The real world is in internal duration, ‘the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain’. (MF 161)
But the picture is complicated, since the modernist writer cannot totally discard the conventions of language. They are a crucial tool, forging a connection between writer and unknown reader. But they are a double edged sword: while one edge faces outward toward the task at hand, cleaving a path for common understanding and sense, the other edge faces inward, the artist endangered by their own weapon, their movements restricted by the blade they whirl. This is when ‘convention ceases to be a means of communication between writer and reader, and becomes instead an obstacle and an impediment.’ (MBMB 21) While they are caught up in the dance of convention, ‘this, the essential thing, has moved off’. (MF 160)
The figure of the artist also undergoes a shift in the modernist turn; a synthesis of the romantic and the naturalist. On one hand, the modern writer is primarily transcriber, not romantic ponderer:
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. (MF 161)
Woolf recalls Zola’s naturalism, positioning the writer as scientist, but instead shifts reality to the interior rather than exterior world. On the other hand, however, the modern writer is driven by some transcendent force to capture character in writing, they must express this force. But free artistic choice is paramount: ‘“The proper stuff of fiction” does not exist’, (MF 164) nor does the proper method: ‘Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express’. (MF 162) The writer must have the freedom and courage to write of the foreign, using the tools of the foreign.
So for Woolf, the materialists cannot get at the essence of the modern character. They are condemned with their old forms to write of old content. And while she retains a kind of realism, ‘reality’ has changed: internal psychological reality is authentic, external reality is mere facade. The role of the writer then is twofold: to record and to express.
Schor, Naomi. “Zola: From Window to Window.” Yale French Studies, no. 42, Zola, Yale UP, 1969, pp. 38-51. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/2929505.
Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4: 1925 to 1928, edited by Andrew McNeille, Hogarth Press, 1984, pp. 157–165.
—. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Hogarth Press, 1924.
Zola, Émile. “The Experimental Novel.” 1893. The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, translated by Belle M. Sherman, Haskell House, 1964. Accessed at www.marxists.org/archive/zola/1893/experimental-novel.htm.