Modern Fiction

“It is for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible.”

In a classic instance of Woolf’s imagery, she uses metaphorical language to depict the modern author entrenched in overwhelming conflict. She pairs this metaphor with the tricolon (a series of three parallel words or phrases) “beginning or ending or standing,” which emphasizes the difficult conclusion that the historian must draw from the disarray.

“[Bennett] can make a book so well constructed and solid in its craftsmanship that it is difficult for the most exacting of critics to see through what chink or crevice decay can creep in. There is not so much as a draught between the frames of the windows, or a crack in the boards.”

This quotation is an example of some of Woolf’s most vivid imagistic language. She describes Bennett’s books as solid and well-crafted objects and then as buildings in which there are no errors and which are therefore invulnerable to decay or invasion. Woolf’s metaphor is a unique way of describing another writer’s work without dedicating much time and space to quotation. The compliment is also implicitly backhanded, as Woolf soon makes it clear that literature without “flaws” does not capture the messiness of human existence.

“So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception.”

This quotation serves as part of Woolf’s tirade against the traditions of Victorian Realism, which seeks to manifest “solidity” and “likeness” in a way that is not only impossible but that in fact “obscures” the most important elements of reality. Woolf has a very different way of depicting the “light” that she sees Victorian practices as obfuscating. The quote illustrates The Relationship Between Form and Content and the impossibility of separating the two; both Woolf and the Realists agree that “life” is fiction’s core preoccupation, but the differing ways in which they choose to depict it imply very different understandings of it.

“The mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls different from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there […]”

Employing characteristically vivid imagistic language, this is perhaps the most important quotation for Woolf’s literary project. The asyndetic listing of adjectives “trivial, fantastic, evanescent”—i.e., a listing that omits conjunctions—replicates the swift and ungovernable nature of the impressions that fall upon the mind while the phrase “from all sides they come” underlines the way the mind finds itself caught up in the marvelous experience of life.

“If he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.”

This quotation is a complex, extended sentence that takes the reader through a winding path of subclauses. This mimics the kind of narrative Woolf is describing: one with “no plot.” Woolf rhetorically replicates the kind of confusion—or freedom—that pushes against the rigid conventions of the “Bond Street tailors.”

“[T]he proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.”

Woolf uses litotes—"little other than”—to comment ironically on the power of “custom,” which is in fact much greater than she here attempts to make it seem. The phrase implies a simple explanation of what constitutes The Proper Stuff of Fiction, although the whole essay questions this simplicity.

“Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.”

Woolf reiterates her view of how a writer ought to interpret the world. She exhorts her reader twice over—"let us […] let us”—to lend power to her persuasive rhetoric. She also juxtaposes the almost scientific language of “record” and “trace” with the adjectives “disconnected and incoherent” to demonstrate how one might find some order in the chaotic whirl of atoms that is the human experience.

“[T]he problem before the novelist at present, as we suppose it to have been in the past, is to contrive means of being free to set down what he chooses.”

In a rare (and somewhat equivocal) depiction of unity between modern novelists and those of the past, Woolf describes the difficulty of forging a unique literary path. She suggests writers have always to write what they wish amid the confines of convention.

“[A]s the eyes accustom themselves to twilight and discern the shapes of things in a room we see how complete the story is, how profound.”

Woolf here describes the process of reading as similar to waiting for one’s eyes to adjust to the dark in an unfamiliar room. This metaphor gives the reader a sense of the disconcerting nature of Chekhov’s story by means of visceral description.

“[N]or are we certain, since short stories, we have been taught, should be brief and conclusive, whether this, which is vague and inconclusive, should be called a short story at all.”

As ever in this essay, Woolf questions literary conventions; here, she brings into doubt the classic characteristics imposed on the genre of the short story. Also characteristically, she is not extreme in her language. Her series of subclauses mirrors the inconclusiveness of her judgment on the nature of the short story.

“[I]f the Russians are mentioned one runs the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction save theirs is a waste of time.”

This is an ironic suggestion from Woolf, who herself mentions the Russians in an essay discussing many works besides theirs. Woolf sets this argument up in order to rebut it. However, the strength of the phrase “a waste of time” carries across to her descriptions of other and, she believes, inferior writers.

“It is the sense that there is no answer, that if honestly examined life presents question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in hopeless interrogation that fills us with a deep, and finally it may be with a resentful, despair.”

Woolf’s long sentence and complex syntax mirror the unanswerability of the questions that life itself poses. Her repetition—“question after question” and “on and on”—emphasizes the number of questions and the impossibility of answering. The imperative “must” further underlines the helplessness of the writer, who finds themselves finally in “despair.”

“‘The proper stuff of fiction’ does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction: every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon.”

The phrase “the proper stuff of fiction” recurs as a motif throughout this essay. Toward its conclusion, Woolf contradicts her previous statements of what that “stuff” might be with the radical declaration that it “does not exist.” She immediately juxtaposes this with the paradoxical suggestion that “everything” is the proper stuff of fiction: It is at once everything and nothing.