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Modern Fiction
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Themes
The Proper Stuff of Fiction
Discussion of “the proper stuff of fiction”—what it has been and what it should be—is the central element of Woolf’s essay and an element both to explore and to push against. The use of the word “proper” itself suggests the authoritative influence of tradition and convention. Writing in the wake of Victorian Realism, Woolf is likely referring to the conventional material of this tradition, which prioritized historical/social novels, the bildungsroman, and a linear narrative as “appropriate” to fiction. The tradition also suggested that a woman was hardly a “proper” author for fiction at all. It is worth noting that many female writers of the previous century—including Jane Austen, whom Woolf invokes, and George Eliot, one of the central figures of the Realist movement—wrote under male pseudonyms to avoid having their writing be dismissed or overlooked.
Woolf therefore immediately separates herself from what “custom” would suggest is the “proper stuff of fiction,” and the rest of the essay debates what the material of modern fiction ought to be and how it ought to be written about. Woolf’s consideration of this question is expansive and open-ended. She cites a number of authors to present examples of what might and might not be the “proper stuff of fiction,” but Woolf is never overly critical even of those she paints as superficial and outdated “materialists.” She in fact identifies many merits in the work of H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy. Nevertheless, she contrasts even these positive traits with the work of writers like Joyce, whose matter is not material but “spiritual”—an attempt to record the human experience of life as a “luminous halo.” To the extent that “correct” subject matter exists, Woolf therefore locates it in the realm of psychology. Nor is this subject matter synonymous with psychological plausibility—i.e., characters whose motivations and actions ring true. Rather, writers should seek to capture the human mind from the inside, depicting what it is like to think and feel via techniques such as stream of consciousness.
This makes any attempt to identify the “proper stuff of fiction” itself somewhat futile: “[T]he proper stuff of fiction does not exist” (164). Woolf does not leave her readers with this negative, closed definition but instead immediately redefines her own terms: The “proper stuff of fiction” is not nothing but “everything,” filtered through the prism of human consciousness. The broad statement also hearkens to Woolf’s claim that the writer of modern fiction ought not to feel limited by the edicts of convention or history. Instead, modern fiction ought to pursue real “life” in its totality.
Tradition and Modernity
Modernism is often viewed as breaking definitively with earlier eras and styles of literature. According to this argument, events like World War I were so cataclysmic and produced such a marked shift in public consciousness that art had to evolve dramatically to remain relevant. As an essay explicitly dealing with modernity, “Modern Fiction” contains traces of this view; at the very least, Woolf urges writers not to follow traditional dictates simply because they are traditional. However, the essay begins by implicitly cautioning readers not to assume that modern literature is necessarily superior to that of the past, and what follows further blurs the boundaries between Modernism and what came before. Woolf praises James Joyce, for example, but then remarks that even Ulysses pales in comparison to novels penned by Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy, respectively. Though Conrad is often considered an early example of Modernism, Hardy is typically grouped with the Victorians, particularly where his novels are concerned.
Similar ambivalence characterizes Woolf’s discussion of (and praise for) Russian literature. For instance, she suggests that “no one but a modern, no one perhaps but a Russian” would have thought to write Chekhov’s “Gusev” (162). This creates an equivalence between “a modern” and “a Russian,” suggesting that Russian literature is modern literature and that modern English fiction has much to learn from Russian influence. Chekhov, however, is another figure whose work straddles genres and periods: Critics analyze his writing through the lenses of Modernism and Realism alike. Moreover, Woolf’s reluctance to apply the Russian literary model too stringently to English literature has everything to do with tradition. The sadness of Russian literature, she argues, stems from Russian writers’ acceptance of the unanswerability of the questions life poses. Woolf praises this indeterminacy, but she hints that another response to it is possible besides despair—specifically, laughter, noting that “English fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our natural delight in humour and comedy” (163).
As it does in other areas, “Modern Fiction” therefore refuses to draw rigid lines between Modernism and the literature of the past. Woolf in fact suggests that doing so misunderstands the nature of art, which is cyclical rather than linear and therefore not easily separable into discrete categories:
It is doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency (157).
This suspicion of claims of progress is itself characteristically modern and perhaps the main thing that separates Woolf’s understanding of fiction from that of previous writers.
The Relationship Between Form and Content
In defining the “proper stuff of fiction,” Woolf is concerned as much with form—a work’s style, genre, narrative structure, etc.—as with content. The focus in some ways dovetails with her critique of both “materialist” writing and tradition, as the former involves a preoccupation with superficial details and the latter with recognizable, tidy forms. She therefore criticizes Bennett as much for his “well constructed and solid” works as for his subject matter (158), and she laments contemporary writers’ adherence to outdated literary conventions: “[W]e go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds” (160).
Woolf here identifies a mismatch between form and content, arguing that traditional forms fail to capture what she argues is fiction’s appropriate purview: the subjective human experience. As Woolf describes it, this experience is fragmented, fleeting, and often contradictory. Her novels seek to evoke these qualities via techniques like stream of consciousness, but even her nonfiction reflects her philosophy of writing. In “Modern Fiction,” she is impressionistic and descriptive, employing imagery and vivid, almost poetic language rather than becoming entrenched in quotation or evidentiary pieces. She is also rarely definitive in her statements. Just as life “presents question after question” (163), “Modern Fiction” is replete with rhetorical questions that Woolf often poses but rarely answers.
However, Woolf is careful not to brand her own formal techniques superior. She praises Chekhov’s “Gusev,” for example, which in some ways is highly traditional: Although it presents many of its main character’s thoughts and feelings using free indirect discourse, its third-person narrator also speaks from the bird’s-eye view common to 19th-century Realism. Woolf’s appreciation for the story instead lies primarily in its unconventional pacing and structure, which she implies mimic the strangeness and uncertainty of life itself: “The emphasis is laid upon such unexpected places that at first it seems as if there were no emphasis at all” (162).
Ultimately, Woolf’s openness to diverse forms flows necessarily from her understanding of human consciousness: “The mind receives a myriad impressions […] 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” (160). As life and experience are so varied and changeable, no single form—even the loosest—could claim to represent it definitively.
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By Virginia Woolf
