Modern Fiction

I HAVE been trying recently to make out what it is that happens in people’s minds, in the heads of persons who write novels. Novelists I have read — they are mostly English — seemed to me divided into two groups: the 'materialists' and the 'spiritualists.' By materialists I mean those who take their characters from life and then proceed to tell us everything about them — their appearance, their clothes, the house they live in, the number of their servants, their bank balance, their successive illnesses, the date of their death. By spiritualists I mean those who try to present life from within — who try to give us the feeling of being in a mind, what it is like to have emotions, to see things, to remember. The distinction, of course, is not absolute. Many writers combine both methods; but my complaint is against that absolute supremacy which the materialistic method has obtained in England.

There are many reasons for this supremacy. One is the enormous influence of Richardson and Fielding. Another is the English habit — of taking for granted that people are the products of the society they live in. In a society where money counts for so much, where social position is everything, it is natural that writers should be chiefly interested in the external facts of life. There is also the newspaper — the daily habit of recording events as 'news' in terms of time, place, circumstance. The novelist, trained in the same school, habitually describes. He tells us what people wore, where they lived, how they moved. Yet life, as experienced by each individual, is not a sequence of external events. It is rather a succession of mental states, impressions, feelings, moods, fleeting glimpses.

It seems to me that a new method is needed; that the only excuse for the novelist now is to reveal the mind. The aim of a novelist, if he is honest, should be to show what nobody else has shown. But the novelist of the materialistic school, by telling us only about the outside of life, neglects the essential qualities which constitute the reality of experience. He gives us characters which are, as it were, articulated skeletons — handsome perhaps, well dressed, moving through society — but with no inner life. Passages of observation, description, anecdote, are made to do the work of revelation which should be done by the presentation of the shifts and changes of mind.

I do not mean by this that the novelist should ignore fact. Facts are necessary; but they cease to be sufficient. The novelist must, I think, be a recorder of impressions — impressions in the sense of the immediate data of consciousness. He must endeavour to transmit, not a series of external actions, but a pattern of moods and sensations. Instead of beginning with plot, with action, he should begin with a mood — with a sense of being, and letting that mood expand. For the life of the mind, like the life of the ocean, has currents and eddies; it has depths and shallows; it has interruptions and resumptions. To follow those movements is the true business of fiction.

Several recent books have attempted this kind of presentation. I will take, for instance, Mr. Conrad. He is essentially a realist; he is essentially interested in action and situation; yet he is a man of imagination, and in his best work — in 'Heart of Darkness', for instance — he manages to present the inner life as well as the external. He catches those strange flashes of perception which disclose the mind. But such success is rare. More often the English novelist remains content with the outside. He gives us dialogue and incident; he constructs plot as if the main purpose of life were the arrangement of events. In doing so he neglects the subtler materials of fiction.

What, then, are those materials? They are moods, sensations, ephemeral thoughts. They are the little things that make up consciousness — the associations that pass through the mind in a moment, the sudden guesses, the reflections, the recollections, the fleeting images that come and go. The novelist who can reproduce these things will have caught something of the truth of life. He will make his characters live by presenting not their actions only but their thoughts — not as mere explanations of action, but as part of a continuous flow which is in itself significant.

To write in this way requires a new technique. The old method — of telling and describing — must be supplemented by one that records. The novelist must learn to place side by side impressions, to let them confront each other without forcing them into an ordered narrative. He must accept the right of his characters to be inconsistent, to be full of contradiction. For the mind is not a coherent machine; it is a cloud of sparks. The writer must therefore abandon the desire to explain everything. He must be content to suggest, to imply, to indicate. By such means the complexity of life may be rendered.

There is a danger, of course, in leaning too much to the impressionistic method. It may lead to a neglect of moral significance, to an aestheticism that cares only for effect. Yet the greatest writers have combined both methods — the presentation of the external fact and the revelation of the inner life. The aim should be balance. The author who can give us both will be the true novelist of the future. He will show us the outward world with precision and the inward world with sympathy.

I have spoken of English fiction; but these ideas apply to all modern writing. The novel in every language is suffering from the same disease — from an excessive trust in the external fact. Something must be done to retrieve the truth of experience. If the novelist of the future will attend to the life of consciousness, if he will endeavour to present that life with honesty and subtlety, he will give us a new art, an art that will be faithful to the truth and yet beautiful.