Experimental Fiction

by Armstrong, Julie;

  Modernist writers considered that the Victorian novelists treated their minds as something static, whereas by looking into their own minds, they discovered that consciousness was erratic, not static at all. Consciousness was ever flowing, shattering into a myriad of sensations and impressions, so that one was at the whim of one’s thoughts and feelings – thoughts and feelings that were difficult to control. However, Woolf came to the conclusion that thoughts are ultimately held together by the self, a self that emerges from these fleeting impressions and interpretations of the world – through the stories one tells one’s self about the world, and one’s experiences in it.

  In order to arrive at her discoveries, Woolf explored her ideas through her fiction; she experimented with form and writing techniques: fragmentation, stream of consciousness and multiple perspectives. Septimus Smith, a character in Mrs Dalloway, is a shell-shocked poet and a veteran of the First World War. He conveys to the reader this wandering of consciousness; his mind divides into multiple, contradicting thoughts and feelings, at any given moment, in time. However, with the writing of To the Lighthouse, Woolf ‘provided a kind of paradigm for the new priorities of modernist fiction, for its growing inclination to turn from the world to the mind’ (Stevenson, p. 61).

  Why did the modernist writers experiment with anti-linear fiction?

  Modernist work departed from linear chronology to show how anti-linear thought processes more accurately convey how the world is perceived. This idea of ‘quick-silverness’ of mind, as referred to by Woolf, is a key concept to the understanding of modernist fiction.

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  Experiment with this: Learning to Experiment with ‘Quick-Silverness’ of Mind

  Write a scene from a novel. Create a character at an early twentieth-century dinner party. Go into the character’s mind. Do not write a description of the events and other characters in the room, but write the random impressions and feelings, the diverse and conflicting thoughts your character has about the other guests and the dining experience, as they flow incessantly in the character’s mind.

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  How was reality perceived in modern fiction?

  Modernist writers were seeking to address the complex realities around them; this was at odds with the way reality had previously been perceived. Modernist writers were endeavouring to describe reality as it was actually experienced. To do this, as already stated, it was essential that the form of the novel had to be transformed. At the end of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf asks: ‘What is meant by “reality” ’? For Woolf it seems that art ‘is an extension of reality’ (Woolf, A Critical Memoir, Winifred Holtby (1936) (A new preface, Marion Shaw, 2007), Continuum, p. 41). It is

  something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun … But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast in the hedge; that is what is left of the past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

  In other words, reality is constructed in the mind; it is about how the world is seen by the observer rather than what is actually seen.

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  Experiment with this: Learning to Write How We See the World Rather than What We Actually See

  A character in a novel is making a journey by train for the first time. Consider how they feel about this new experience. What kind of person is your character: optimistic, pessimistic? Are they nervous, excited, happy, fearful? How will this affect the way they see the world around them? Will they fixate on the size, speed, noise of the train? Will they be exhilarated, terrified, intrigued? Now write the journey. Bear in mind, this is not necessarily about how the world/train/journey actually is, but how it appears to your character.

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  How did modernist writers react against realism?

  Woolf saw each artist’s vision of reality as being individual. This had implications in terms of plurality and fluidity of perception, something also being investigated by philosophers and psychologists of the era. This led James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) to abandon any coherent voice, so that the work had a dislocation similar to that of a dream. The modernist considered that life is not realism. And so, many traditional realistic techniques, such as description, plots of external action, dramatic scenes, climaxes and resolutions, were abandoned. Writers went into themselves. Joyce, Woolf, Richardson and Faulkner reacted against realism through streams of consciousness; new forms of prose emerged, prose that was closely allied to poetry.

  According to Woolf:

  Poets present sensations, emotions and processes of thought, with only lightly indicated backgrounds. They reveal, rather than explain. They suggest. They illuminate. They flash a torch through the darkness on to a child’s green bucket, an aster trembling violently in the wind … Poets have an immense advantage over novelists. (Memoir, pp. 101–2)

  Woolf wanted to write prose but she also wanted to have the freedom of the poet. The poet is able to experience intense perception, for example, how the cold feet of insects must feel upon the bark of a tree, in The Mark on the Wall.

  And so she was continually experimenting:

  … stretching her prose to the fullest limits of intelligibility, and sometimes beyond, seeing how far it was possible to discard description, discard narrative, discard the link – sentences which bind ideas together, seeing how far it was possible to write her prose from within, like poetry, giving it a life of its own. She was devising her new techniques; she was testing possibilities … she had begun to question the necessity of all the heavy impedimenta of plot, narrative … (Holtby, pp. 99–100)

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  Experiment with this: Learning How to Write Prose Like a Poet

  Using the title ‘A Child’s Green Bucket’, write a short story in which you privilege sensations, perceptions and emotions over plot. Experiment with revealing rather than explaining, suggesting rather than saying, illuminating rather than stating. Write prose with the freedom of a poet.

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  How did the modernist writers see the world?

  Modernist writers saw the world through multiple perspectives, both micro and macro. The weaving of past and present, like moving from image to image, was attributed, in part, to the techniques of the cinema. Perspectives

  … suddenly diminish to the consciousness of a snail, who sees cliffs and lakes and round boulders of grey stone … then suddenly they swing to the vast bird’s-eye view from an aeroplane flying above the trees. (Woolf, pp. 110–1)

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  Experiment with this: Learning to Use Multiple Perspectives

  Imagine you are seeing the world through the lens of a camera. Write a scene from a novel in which the lens captures a bird’s eye view of the landscape below, then suddenly zones in on specific features: a church, a stained glass window in the church, a spider’s web spun in the corner of the window, a fly trapped in the web struggling to break free; then swing back into the sky, to a bird, a cloud, a drop of rain, a rainbow – write from all of these perspectives.

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  Gender Crisis

  This chapter explores the impact the New Woman and the Homosexual or Decadent had on the content, form and writing techniques of modernist fiction, so that readers and writers of contemporary experimental fiction can comprehend what the modernist texts are doing and incorporate these strategies into their own fiction.

  Who illustrated the crisis of gender definition and representation?

  The most dramatic examples at the turn of the century which best illustrated the crisis of gender definition and representation were the New Woman and the Homosexual or Decadent. What is interesting about the movement into modernism of these figures is that they anticipated so many of the later concerns of postmodern writers, in te
rms of both form and ideas about insecure and unsettled identities, as they challenged gender and social boundaries. This resulted in such questions being asked as: what does it mean to be a man or a woman? Are men and women simply biological states of being or are they constructs imposed by society? To investigate such questions, new writing techniques evolved; as already discussed, the writer turned their attention inwards, rather outwards, at the exterior world. The stream of consciousness was a technique writers used to explore the inner world.

  What role did women have in the making of modernism?

  Lyn Pykett suggests that women had an important role to play ‘in the making of modernism’ (Pykett, 1995, p. 2). In the early years of the twentieth century, there was both a social crisis, how women lived their lives, and a crisis in representation. The struggles included both political and cultural representation. During this period, the women’s movement was seeking to improve women’s social and political positions and

  Modern woman (hence modern man), modern marriage, free love, the artistic aspirations of women, female eroticism … It was precisely these issues, and indeed, the whole context of the late Victorian dissolution with which self-consciously modern novelists engaged – from H. G.Wells, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence to May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and Rebecca West. (Pykett, 1995, p. 15)

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, most men of 21 years and over had the right to vote in general elections. However, all women were excluded. Therefore, this period saw the ‘votes for women’ campaign with the founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903, led by Emmeline Pankhurst. Suffragette militancy, which included hunger strikes, stone throwing, setting fire to empty houses and cutting telegraph wires, challenged the notion of femininity and masculinity and initiated a break of traditional behaviour between men and women. In 1911, Dora Marsden founded The Freewoman, a paper that linked challenges to conventional sexuality with feminism; it also sought to open debates on wages for motherhood. Later, Ezra Pound persuaded Marsden to include literary material and the paper became a space for experimental writing, including that of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot.

  So, it can be seen that the period of modernity saw the rise of the first wave of feminism, which consolidated in the women’s suffrage movement, during the fight for the vote. Clearly, the aims of the suffrage were to enable women to find their own voice and assert an identity not imposed upon them by patriarchy.

  Woolf paid tribute to the women fighting for the vote through the character Mary Datchet, the suffrage worker, in Night and Day. Although Woolf chose to adhere to her desire to be an artist, as opposed to sacrificing this desire to enfranchising the woman citizen, at a time when many women writers, artists, actresses and musicians were very much torn between their obligations to their practice and their obligations to society. The dilemma of these creative practitioners was: how could they create when there was not a single woman with a vote, when women worked, cooked, cleaned and bore children?

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  Experiment with this: Learning to Use Stream of Consciousness

  Write a passage from a novel in which a female writer is wrestling with her dilemma: should she simply be a writer and create? Or, should she fight for the right to vote along with her comrades? Use stream of consciousness to capture her outpouring of thoughts and inner conflict, that is, write without stopping for ten minutes. Do not be concerned with punctuation and syntax. Simply be present and go with the flow of writing. Do not censor the writer’s concerns and questions that she has in her mind.

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  In February 1922, Life magazine had a cover on which it displayed a young woman known as a flapper. A flapper, who exemplified the new social and political freedoms available to some women following the First World War, was a hedonistic, often promiscuous, single woman, who enjoyed wearing make-up and fashionable clothes, and whose pastimes included smoking, drinking, sniffing cocaine and dancing to jazz music, this being the era of dance crazes, which emerged from the African American districts in the United Sates, in particular in New Orleans.

  Flappers liked to cause a flap purely for the fun of it and enjoyed being seen in a culture of seeing. They challenged previous representations of women and abandoned corsets. In addition, they wore short skirts, had their hair cut in bobs, often had boyish figures which implied androgyny and had a distinct slang vocabulary, for example, ‘sugar’ meaning ‘money’, ‘feather’ meaning ‘small talk’, ‘slat’ meaning ‘young man’, ‘half-cut’ meaning ‘intoxicated’.

  Young women who were considered to be flappers included the dancer Josephine Baker, who danced exotically in a skirt consisting of fake bananas; Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of Scott Fitzgerald, both of whom spent the summer of 1924 in Montmartre celebrating the success of The Great Gatsby; Tamara de Lempicka, who was a painter; Nancy Cunard an avant-garde poet; and Diana Cooper, who went on stage and was said to be D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Artemis in his novel Aaron’s Rod (1922).

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  Experiment with this: Learning to Experiment with Language and Representations of Women

  Research the language, clothes, hairstyles and lifestyles of flappers. Write a scene from a novel in which a group of flappers have fun at a dance hall.

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  Who challenged the sexual conventions of previous generations?

  Sigmund Freud’s work and ideas challenged conventions in matters of sexuality and sexual identity. Freud regarded individuals as being motivated largely by sexual desires, desires that were often repressed. The reshaping of sexuality was explored in the work of such writers as James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, work which initiated the change of attitudes towards obscenity and censorship, leading to an increased openness. In Women in Love, through the relationship of Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin, Lawrence explores themes of homosexuality, in particular in a famous erotically charged scene in the novel in which the two men wrestle naked.

  The Bloomsbury Group played their part in challenging the conventions and morals of previous generations. The group included Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Clive Bell, to name a few. The Bloomsbury Group was interested in new artistic practices, ideas and sexual representations in fiction. They championed personal freedom, including the right to experiment sexually, which also included homosexual practice.

  Homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967. However, in addition to D. H. Lawrence, writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ronald Firbank, Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall, Vita Sackville-West and Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote about homosexual practice with candour. Maybe this was partly due to the trials surrounding Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality in 1895. He claimed that art is not moral, and therefore, the aim of the author is not a moralistic one. Ultimately, Wilde’s imprisonment challenged assumptions about ‘normal’ relationships.

  How did the modernists reflect upon the experience of gender?

  The Modernists reflected on the experience of gender, researching into the psychological experiences that defined each individual which led them to critique the ideas of masculinity and femininity, not simply in terms of legal representation, but in terms of the aesthetic. Virginia Woolf was concerned with whether women writers should simply replicate a male perspective or if it was possible to produce a feminine aesthetic. To do so, it was necessary for the modernists to look deep inside character, paying full attention to consciousness and the nature of being. It led to a number of questions being asked: Do men and women view the world differently? Do men and women use the same language in their speaking and writing? And so, modernists broke from the fixed gender mores of Victorian society and explored sexuality with a new frankness. Therefore, in the early twentieth century, there was a new spirit of sexual liberation, a spirit alluded to by Virginia Nicholson as experiments in living; this, in part, was due to a rising bohemian culture, a culture in which open discussions of sexual matters sometimes led to open relationships, particularly true of the Blooms
bury Group. Fiction explored a freer sexuality for men and women and this changed the representations of both sexes in fiction, for example, Grant Allen’s, The Woman Who Did (1895), H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909) and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928).

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  Experiment with this: Learning to Experiment with Switching Gender Roles and Multiple Narratives

  Write a short story in which in the first part of the narrative the character is a man. However, this character goes to sleep and wakes to discover that he has metamorphosed into a woman overnight: the same person, the same personality, but a woman’s body. Now tell her narrative. Explore the magnitude of becoming a woman; that is, is the restricting clothes she has to wear, for example, a corset? Also, show in the narrative the impact her body has on men; for example, in Orlando, there is an incident in which a flash of an ankle nearly results in a sailor falling to his death.

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  The City and Fiction

  This chapter illustrates how modernist writers found the city a source of inspiration for creativity and how it became the setting for a number of modernist texts, for example, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. It shows how the changing face of the city, with its dizzying array of new experiences, transformed modern fiction with the intention of enabling contemporary readers and writers to understand the texts and the modernist era, so that they could enrich their own fiction, by experimenting with modernist techniques.