THE NEW FICTION

By E. NAGESWARA RAO

How small a part

of Universal Mind can conscient Reason claim!

’Tis to the unconscious mind as the habitable crust

is to the mass of the earth;

–Robert Bridges.

It is generally believed that the world underwent an intellectual revolution round about the beginning of the present century. Drawing its inspiration chiefly from Darwin and Marx who stand in the remote background, this revolution took new turns. The rapid progress of science and technology caused much distress and destruction. The scramble for political domination, and national animosities, culminated in that terrible catastrophe of the first world war. Terrible indeed it was–but it seems to be only a beginning in this final act of, what Wingfield Stratford would call, “civilisaiion’s all but complete suicide.” The world echoed and re-echoed with the humming of air raids, the booming of machine-guns, and the helpless cries of millions of innocent people who were tortured to death. The paradox of untold misery overtaking a mighty nation like England, soon after her tremendous victory over Germany, puzzled every one. In every home in Britain, there was at least one casualty due to war. The immediate past was agonising, the imminent future a blank. There was a deep sense of frustration and disillusionment in the minds of the people.

The first world war testified to the spiritual barrenness, moral anarchy, economic instability and scientific superstition of the modern age. The literary artists felt the shock in all its intensity. They were already fed up with conventional themes and techniques. There was a steady reaction against nauseous Victorianism. To express the new experiences a new technique was felt necessary. Under, these circumstances a new literature sprang up. Wilfred Owen declared, “the poetry is in the pity”–“in the pity of war.” Disillusioned ex-servicemen became the heroes of many a novel overnight. Trench warfare was the epic theme of many pacts. Presently Dr, Sigmund Freud appeared on the scene with his brilliant thesis on psycho analysis which violently shook the foundations of human thought. That man has got a sub-conscious–a reservoir of suppressed thoughts and desires–was an eye-opener to many. Freud declared that every little action of man–even his dreams, reveries, half-expressed and unexpressed thoughts–could be traced back to his sex instincts. People now began to look at things from a new perspective. Experiments were commenced in the light of psycho-analysis. ‘Stream of consciousnees’ was one such experiment.

It is possible to trace back the origins of the exploratim of the consciousness to the Upanishads, to Shakespeare, to Wordsworth, and to Dostoevsky. The famous sleep-walking scene in Macbeth where Lady Macbeth laid bare her guilty conscience, is a splendid portrayal of the sub-conscious feelings. The complex thoughts of Hamlet, the victim of indecision, are also fathomed by Shakespeare successfully in his soliloquies. Wordsworth exploited the same process in his Prelude an autobiographical poem. Dostoevsky dissected his characters with an incisive psychological penetration. We may come across excursion into the subconscious realm in the novels of Samuel Richardson (Pamela), Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy) and Henry James. The last named, in his The Portrait of a Lady (1881) told the story almost fully in terms of the inner life of his protagonists. His characters register impressions rather than set about deeds. Charles Lamb in his well-known essay, Dream Children: A Reverie, gave us a classic example of this method. There may be some other writers who experimented with this process occasionally. But as an effective and full-fledged technique in fiction, it was only in the nineteen twenties that it became important. In the work of James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, it attained perfection. Broadly speaking, we may say that this was a simultaneous innovation made in Ireland, France and England, by Joyce, Proust and Miss Dorothy Richardson respectively. But Prof. B. Ifor Evans contends that the real originator of this technique was Edouard Dujardin to whom James Joyce himself acknowledged his debt.

Some technical aspects of this method may be considered briefly. Now, it is no longer the plot, characterisation, story and external actions that mattered. The temperaments, moods, fantasies, associative memories, momentary observations and subconscious thoughts of the leading persons in the novel assumed a greater significance than before. “It is an axiom with this kind of writer,” says Frank Swinnerton, “that all reality lies in the consciousness.” He realised that the soul or Payche is like a “a vast fluid, or even vaporous mass, wide-spreading, far beyond the feeble village lights of our conventional reading of character, deep-sounding into our nervous animal organisation, into childhood.” Our consciousness which is part of our soul does not proceed logically or coherently, except at certain times and for certain periods under the pressure of some urgent practical need. Generally it follows a freakish association of ideas whose progress cannot be charted. The soul is singularly indifferent to the past and future, near and far. The exponents of this new technique also believed that Psyche is the focus of all our experience of life. In their thirst for fresh technical devices, they had to trespass the conventions. Instead of regularity of form they showed a “tendency to deformalization”. Diversity and complexity supplanted the former uniformity and simplicity. A continuous action seemed to them quite unlike ordinary experience. “They feel that the sense of life is often best rendered by an abrupt passing from one series of events, one group of characters, one centre of consciousness to another.” So they deviated from the convention of chronological continuity. They broke up Time into atomic bits and scattered them as they liked, whereas the Victorian novelists “clung on to the calendar and clock”. They believed that “Time has no positive quality; its value and duration are relative to their fluctuating factors; one person’s whole life-story may have no greater time-value than twenty-four hours in the life of another.” This annihilation of the tyranny of Time necessitated the minimisation of plot, almost complete elimination of action, and sometimes even the eschewing of thought, which as A. C. Ward tells us, is also “susceptible of a certain fixity”. But the consciousness remains–bottomless and endless.

If the destruction of the time-factor is the sole criterion of this technique, then Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza also belong to it. But this technique is also concerned with, as James D. Hart puts it, “the depiction of the mental and emotional reactions of characters to external events, rather than the events themselves; as opposed to the usages of conventional plot-structure, description, and characterization, the action is presented in terms of images and attitudes within the mind of one or more central figures.” That is to say, the mental and spiritual life is presented in these novels. Our thoughts, nebulous and complex and in-expressible as they are, are photographed as it were and placed before us in the album of a novel. The inner life of man–the growth and development of his mind and the glorification of his soul–is much more important than his outward movements and actions. It is the quintessence of life. Other things are there only as a framework. These innovators do not specially care about neatly finishing off a given action, following it through to the fall of the curtain. The imagination has the faculty of filling up the gaps in an action presented in fragments, of getting the impression of an entire life from a mere hint of the high moments. Though there is a want of continuity, there is a sort of rhythm–rhythm constituted by repetition, by recurrence of themes–and a wave-like progress.

Generally the narration in these novels is rhetorical. Often the real and imaginary accounts slip into each other like the colours of a rainbow. There is no clear dividing line between them two, so much so that the reader is at pains to distinguish the one from the other. It is said that William Faulkner uses italics for all imaginary digressions. This mixing up of real and imaginary narratives indiscriminately, is borrowed from the modern ‘flash-back’ technique in cinemas which is perfected in Germany, Russia, France and other European countries. These innovators do not care very much for sentence structure and grammar. They try to use words in their original picturesque sense, and they do not mind interchanging a verb with a noun, if it suits their purpose.

These novelisits have great fondness for dissonances which originated in the symbolist school of poetry in France. The swift change from the elevated and poetical style to the familiar and ironical, appears as a sardonic commentary on the meanness and prosiness of life. A similar effect is produced when there is a change-over from the real to the ideal. There is also a not-too-harmonious mingling of tones as in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

There is yet another aspect–the linguistic–of which James Joyce was the greatest master. Two or more words are taken and each is split up into two. Then the split-up pieces are re-assembled to form a new word with a greater significance. This may be called a sort of linguistic double decomposition which is evidenced in Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense. In James Joyce’s Work in Progress, a character says ‘alcoherently’which obviously is a product of reassembling ‘alcohol’ and ‘incoherently’. Added to this linguistic gymnastics, are bits of conversation as in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room which reflect the meaningless babble of our modern society.

Now we may, in passing, consider the work of the chief exponent of this technique. Miss Dorothy Richardson, in her twelve serial novels with the common title Pilgrimage, deals with the life of a single woman. Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” also in twelve volumes, seems to be a far more lasting work than the former. James Joyce in his Ulysses (1922) depicts the life of a single man–an Irish poet and school teacher called Stephen Dedalus–in Dublin during twenty-four hours. He tried to picture the “obsession of the soul’s secret life” and “express the subconscious in terms of the new aesthetic laws.” He takes us along the “flow of images in the consciousness” and shows us the “chaos of human experience” by means of a series of episodes, incoherent, but still convincing. “Ulysses,” says a famous French critic, “is the powerful confused synthesis of all the mental disturbance, and all the quest for new forms, that stirred in the post-war literature.” Finnegan’s Wake, which took seventeen years to complete, gives us a clear picture of Joyce’s deep erudition and great linguistic attainments referred to earlier. A. C. Ward tells us how, “distorted sound echoes of sense-making phrases can be caught from time to time, while the whole may perhaps be better considered as a kind of musical notation for the communication of profundities incommunicable in standard language.” It is said of Joyce that he pursued his technique beyond the point where it can serve the ends of art.

Mr. Virginia Woolf following in the footsteps of James Joyce, as far as technique was concerned, wrote Mrs. Dalloway in which she portrays the life of an aristocratic lady in London during the course of a single day. Here is a slice of life bearing the impress of the richness, variety, colour and intensity of the whole life which goes to prove that, in a single moment, a whole life-time may be re-lived as it were. Mrs. Woolf explored the kingdom of the subconscious with a delicate poetic sensibility in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Her work is a splendid counterpart of Joyce’s work. Joyce’s characters–Miss Rirhardson’s–are all normal people in the full possession of their faculties. But Mrs. Woolf depicted even abnormal types, such as Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, whose agonising story lead to his shocking suicide is really heartrending. And Mrs. Woolf is not alone in this venture. Conrad Aiken and William Faulkner have found this technique particularly suitable for the portrayal of abnormal states of mind. In one of Aiken’s novels, a man suffering from a schism in his nature and feeling inferiority complex is shown. In Faulkner’s famous novel The Sound and the Fury, there are sane and mean characters as well as an imbecile and a victim of suicidal mania. To return to the contrast of Mrs. Woolf with Joyce: Where the latter

Is “static, masculine, egotistic, rational”, she is “fluid, feminine, impersonal, emotional”. But both of them–in fact, every one who succeeds with this technique–are poets, or ‘prose poets’ as J. B. Priestley would call them. They are poets in the sense that they envisage “the communication of personality with personality, by an extension of their own personality”.

This technique is quite akin to surrealism. Whereas the former is generally restricted to the sphere of fiction, surrealism envelops the whole domain of Art. The surrealists or super-realists, as Waddington tells us, isolate an object completely from all its normal associations and thus bring to the surface of the mind a whole set of other associations with a peculiar emotional intensity. A work of surrealist art has the quality of a dream-image, when things are so often incongruous and slightly frightening in their relation to time or place”. Just as every one can dream and have irrational notions, we may get into an ‘unmatter-of-fact frame of mind’–and the expression of such a state is surrealism.

‘Stream of consciousness’ has weathered the storm and come to stay. It is being used in other literary forms like the drama, the biography and the essay. Elmer Rice in his The Adding Machine endeavours to project the inner workings of the mind into the theatre. Likewise, Eugene O’Neill in his Strange Interlude, tries to reveal the subconscious by coupling soliloquies and asides, indicating what the characters are thinking, to the dialogue which they are speaking. These soliloquies and asides are media for the images and reflections which reveal “hidden half-conscious motives and help to illumine the contrast between the inner and the outer life”. In this respect they are unlike the Elizabethan soliloquies which are often poetic declarations and nothing more. As regards biography, we have Virginia Woolf’s Flush dealing with the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Mrs. Woolf, instead of narrating in a straightforward fashion, told the story as it passed through the mind of Mrs. Browning’s dog. She tries to make us see the world as a dog’s world which requires a substitution of human values by canine values. “Smells and tastes are more important than sights and sounds, instincts dominate thoughts.”

We have said that this technique has come to stay. But people, like Galsworthy are sceptical about the survival of any of the innovations. They think, it is only the novel of character and manners that will outlive these methods. We can only leave this “imaginative shorthand” to Time and await its decision.

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