Time and the Modern Novel

To write about the contemporary novel presents two main difficulties. In a time of rapid change it is hard to tell, in the first place, what is contemporary, and, in the second, what is the novel. There is the additional difficulty that every age seems to contain a whole conglomeration, a whole jumble of ages, all of which regard themselves as the authentic one.

Is Mr. Priestley the real representative of our age, or Mrs. Woolf, or Mr. Huxley, or Mr. James Joyce, or Mr. Hemingway, or Mr. Faulkner? To ask the question is to be conscious that all these writers have already, in a few years, become almost historical figures, have receded a little into the past. It is nearly twenty years since Ulysses appeared, a book which was greeted variously as the end of the novel and as the beginning of a new prose literature. Ulysses, with all its genius, has done extraordinarily little to fructify or to influence prose fiction. The same is true of the novels of Mrs. Woolf and Mr. Huxley. Is this duo to some defect in their gifts, or to the increasing rate of change in the civilized world, which will not allow anything new to remain valid for more than a few years?

The most original work in prose fiction during the last twenty years has been influenced by a factor which in the novel before then was almost unknown: the historical sense. By this I mean not merely a peculiarly acute awareness of the uniqueness of one’s own age as a stage in a general development, but also an ever-present knowledge that all civilizations have only a relative value, that they are, even in periods of apparent stability, in perpetual change, and that, considered all together, they make up at best only a fluctuating and imperfect whole. To see in this way is to see everything, not as a form or category, but as a development; and so the novel itself, sometime in the beginning of this century, became a development, something not to be accepted as a self-evident form, but to be ‘carried further.’

What interested the novelist of Mr. Joyce’s and Mrs. Woolf’s generation was the stage which the novel had reached, and how it could be ‘carried further.’ The learned novelist appeared, the novelist who knew all about the ancestry, beginnings, and proliferation of the novel; and Ulysses is, among other things, a sort of résumé and summing up of the history of prose fiction. A somewhat similar achievement appeared in poetry about the same time: Mr. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Most of the original work in fiction during the last twenty years has been conditioned by the historical sense. The novel has ceased to be an accepted category as it was to Dickens and Thackeray, even to Bennett and Galsworthy, and become a process.

But the historical sense, if one carries it to its conclusion, sees not merely this or that but everything as a development — a secular development which does, it is true, imply certain universal principles impressive in themselves, but yet so insists on the differences between one age and another that it tends to see less clearly the permanent categories that rule all human life than they were seen in former times. We are far more conscious than our fathers were that time changes everything: not only ourselves in our progress to death (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a far deeper sense of that than we have), but the world around us, our physical and intellectual environment, the ordinary customs and prejudices that give direction to our existence. Time is the problem of the modern novelist; of Proust, of Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, of Mr. Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, of Mrs. Woolf in To the Lighthouse and The Waves, of Hermann Broch in The Sleepwalkers.

The modern novel may describe the development of a single character, as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or that of modern civilization, as The Sleepwalkers. But the insistence is on change rather than on permanence, on potentiality rather than on essentiality. If this kind of novel is executed by a writer of great philosophical as well as imaginative powers, something may be produced which transcends its category, as The Sleepwalkers does. The Sleepwalkers is saturated more thoroughly in the historical sense than any other modern novel, but by its intellectual and moral passion it rises above the contemporary and shows us human life as an eternal category, perpetually changing and perpetually returning to itself. It is a resolution of the time novel such as is not likely to be achieved again, for it is rarely that Hermann Broch’s union of philosophical and imaginative power is found in a novelist.

The Sleepwalkers, therefore, is not typical of the time novel, one of whose characteristics is this stopping short of a resolution. Its immediate ancestor was the period novel, the best example of which was Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, which has been imitated a score of times and is still being imitated. What makes The Old Wives’ Tale impressive is really a sense of the passing of time which is as old as storytelling itself and can be found in the tale of King David.

The next step was an inevitable one. In the period novel the generations had indicated the stages in the mutations of time; in its successor these stages were concertina’d and became stages in the development of the characters, so that every character became a series of changes, each of them, including the last, relative and inconclusive. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of the best examples of the time novel, describes the main character, Stephen Dedalus, as passing through a number of mutations from childhood to manhood; but Stephen himself is never actually there — he is always becoming, and he is still becoming when the book ends, though the author tries to give a decisive turn to the last stage to which he brings him.

Most novels of development end in this way, showing the hero experiencing a more than usually deep illumination or coming to a more than usually firm resolve; but one has only to reflect that these states too are mere stages to recognize that such a conclusion to a story is as purely relative as the rest. Mr. Ramon Fernandez has said finely that the imagination works in a continuous present; and the time novel, which describes life as a series of stages, never achieves that present. Its characters are perpetually on the threshold of it; a single step more and they would set their feet in it; but they cannot take that step, the moment of realization is continuously postponed; for time to them is a development, an invisible moving line between the past and the future, and never a state, a present.

There is another consequence of this conception of personality as a series of stages: that it insensibly analyzes the personality into a succession of states in which it is lost. This process is carried to its extreme limit in Ulysses, where the personality is reduced to floating sensations, idle or serious thought associations, a stream of consciousness that flows for something less than twentyfour hours, and is left flowing. It is far more than the carrying of a process to its conclusion; it is an attempt to break through by the use of the historical sense into another kind of present, complex and many-faceted, a sort of synthetic present of which the actual present is only the last echo. But, whatever its actual achievement, it destroys ihe traditional absoluteness of the present and of human character and fate, which can be felt not only in novels of tragedy like Wuthering Heights or Le Père Goriot, but in the novel itself as a convention that has lasted for two hundred years. The abundance and complexity of the relations Ulysses piles up are unexampled, and seem designed to fill a bottomless gap which no powers, however ingenious, can fill; so that it remains, in spite of this, in the realm of the relative, like all novels inspired by the historical sense.

All, perhaps, that this amounts to is that the novel, like everything else in the modern world, has become part of a problem apparently moving to its resolution, but not resolved. The historical sense is a modern norm of thought and feeling; it cannot be simply wished away, even if that were desirable; but on the other hand its effect on the work of the novelist has been to make his picture of life merely relative and therefore less significant than the work of the older novelists, simple and naïve in comparison as that was. Our feeling for time has grown, our feeling for eternity has dwindled.

Our feeling for time is the result of various factors which did not exist in former ages, and, now that they do exist, cannot be ignored: of increased knowledge, of observed and felt change in the environment of our lives, of the unstable physical and intellectual world in which we find ourselves. We know on the one hand that history is a vast process of change, and on the other that the world is changing round us and that it will not be the same world in ten or twenty years’ time. This knowledge is importunate; it is necessary to us not only as intellectual beings, but as organisms which must adapt themselves if they are to survive. It colors all our images of existence; the future has become almost a palpable part of our lives, like the past, and it is no longer a source of comfort, a channel for all our hopes, as it was thirty years ago in the heyday of Mr. Shaw, but a matter demanding real and anxious consideration, like the present. From this scheme — past, present, and future — there is no escape, and yet in its totality it does not make up a satisfactory whole, for it is nothing but a process of change in which the present is swallowed up in the past and the future, in a simultaneous state of ‘ having been ‘ and ' about to be.’

The feeling for the present seems to depend upon a feeling for eternity. The historical sense as it operates is inimical to our feeling of eternity, and acts as a dissolvent for it. It is there, a capacity of great potentiality which we cannot but use. Nevertheless it is obviously insufficient, obviously conducts us, if we employ it primarily, to a conception of life which has neither shape nor solidity nor meaning. The characteristically modern novel is a novel in which it is employed primarily, and that is the reason why the modern novel is so tentative, and why it so quickly goes out of fashion. The feeling for eternity has an obvious connection with the sense of form and the capacity to produce it; the feeling for time has obviously a connection with the sense of change and flux. The feeling for eternity and the feeling for time are both natural to man, and in the man of imagination they operate together. Accordingly the novel of the last twenty years may be roughly described as the result of a disastrously exclusive consciousness of time.