The Modern Fiction (the English Critical Tradition) ed. Ramasamy and Sethuraman

                                                

Virginia Woolf's The Modern Fiction (The English Critical Tradition) ed. Ramasamy and Sethuraman. Woolf belongs to the category of Post Modern writers. In her work, 'The Modern Fiction', Woolf has all the possible suggestions for the modern novelists. Also she provides parameters for a proper literary work that differs from the current entertainment-sake fictions.
In this prose, Woolf suggests,

• ·         Modern novelists should write what they feel and not what society or publisher wants them to write.
• ·         Write what inspires them.
• ·         Not to follow any special methods.
• ·         A writer's job is to portray the complexities of life, the unknown through the work, not the important things.

Woolf also praises some writers of her age as "James Joyce, Henry Fielding did well, Jane Austen even better.”

She also highlights the aspect of T.S. Eliot on literature- “Literature is like everything, is a process, which makes the present, thus it does not improve, but always keep changing, its material is not same.”

She agrees Eliot and says, “We do not come to write better, we only keep on moving now a little in this direction, now in that but with circular motion.”

She adds, “It is for the historian of literature to judge whether the modern novel has really progressed from its early dabbling.”

As a critic, Woolf naturally upholds her “right to judge the past with debt as well as doubt.” She criticizes M. G. Wells, Arnold Benet, John Galsworthy for writing unimportant things and she calls them as ‘materialists’, because these writers put life into their novels-concerned with the body, not the soul of the novel.

She accuses Mr. Benet as the worst culprit of the three, as he can make a work well constructed in its craftsmanship. She says it as she considers there is nothing in a well constructed novel, worth preserving for the prosperity.

She praises several authors for innovation and she names them as ‘spiritualists’ include James Joyce and she says what interests him.

Moreover, Woolf wants the modern writers to focus on the awkwardness of life and craved originality.  She advises modern writers to look within life and see what life is like.

She says that “mind receives a crowd of impressions- trivial, fantastic or engraved with the sharpness of steer.”

She does not like “life like novels, nor in the tyrant plot, nor in the conventional comedy or love-interest.” She asks, “If life like this? Must a novel be like this?”

She advises, “Look within and life, it seems, is very far being ‘like this’. Life is not a series of gig lamps, symmetrically arranged. Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of the conscious to the end.”

To Woolf, the objective of the writer in creator is to look within life and life as a whole. She says, traditionalism and materialism do not capture at that moment. A writer have to trust upon life is free and he/she could what he chose.

Woolf says that James Joyce is the most notable. She praises Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, William Henry Hudson, James Joyce, and Anton Chekhov. Woolf’s criticism was often done by intuition and feeling rather than by scientific, analytical, systematic method, she says, “life escapes and perhaps life nothing else is worthwhile. It is a confession of vagueness of it to make use of such a figure.”

To Woolf, life is not fixed, but a changing process. It is a flux, shower of atoms of “luminous halo”.

Human consciousness is a shelter of sensation and impression. Duty of novelist is to convey these sensation and impressions. There should be no limitations or conventions.

Virginia Woolf is the first theorist of the “Stream of Consciousness”. She says, “It is a task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit of life.”

She observes:

“Nothing,- no method, unexperiment, even of the wildest is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence.”

“The proper stuff of fiction does not exist, everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought, every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon.”

• ·        Novels of Virginia Woolf have well knit plot, perfect structure and coherence unlike most of modern psychological novelists belonging to “stream of consciousness”.
• ·        Novel can grow only if a novelist is free from conventions to write from his or her own vision of life and keeps in the view ‘the changing concepts of life and such other scientific discoveries about the working of human mind or consciousness.

This essay focuses on how writers should write or what she hopes for them to write. She suggest a specific way to write, instead she wants writers to simply write what interests them in any way that they choose to write.

She concludes:

“Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to expresses what we wish to express, if we are writers that bring us close to the novelists’ intention if we are readers.”