Some thoughts on Woolf after reading “The Brown Stocking” by Auerbach..

In “Modern Fiction”, Woolf writes against authors of realist Victorian novels, arguing that Bennett and Galsworthy were “materialists” who wrote of “unimportant things.” She criticized Victorian empirical realism which was preoccupied with verisimilitude in its representation of physical and material reality. Verisimilitude is a realist literary technique (evident in Defoe) frequently employed by Victorian novelists to create a sense of material corporeality by incorporating a whole host of specific details about a physical environment that gives the illusion of an objective reality. This Victorian realism was based on the belief in the individual apprehension of external reality or truth through the senses. This sense of assured knowledge of an orderly world and the coherent, rational, stable and knowable self can perhaps account for the presence of the authoritative omniscient narrator who looks on from an ahistorical and transcendental position. He sees all and knows all, presenting eternal truths about settings and characters authoritatively to readers, who are lulled into believing that they are witnessing an ostensibly “natural” unfolding of historical events. However, with the widespread social- political turmoil during the first 4 decades of the 20th century, there was a breakdown in traditional certainties which resulted in an epistemological crisis and a climate of radical skepticism and uncertainty. The scientific evolutionary theories of Darwin and the anti-religious theories of Marx challenged Christianity, scientific explanations became “harder for the layman to understand”, while the debacle of World War one exploded traditional values such as “patriotism and loyalty to authority.” The idea of a coherent, rational and unified self was also challenged by Freud’s theories of the unconscious, the repressed desires of the id and various psychological complexes. Thus, in response to the sense that the “world of the 1910 was more complex than the orderly world that had been presented to the reader in Victorian literature”, Woolf repudiated Victorian realism which emphasized exterior materialism, calling for a new focus not with the “body but with the spirit.” In her works, exterior events become subordinate to the representation of interior subjective mental consciousnesses of characters. Woolf also challenged the contrived nature of linear plotting and formulaic chronological narrative sequences in Victorian novels, arguing that “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 consciousness to the end.” If “a writer could write what he chose, not what he must (based on literary convention), there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style.” Woolf called for a new form of realist fiction, which aimed at providing a mimetic psychological representation of “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.” Not only does she stress the complexity of diverse thoughts, feelings and impressions that the mind experiences, she also emphasizes the literary representation of an unbroken and arbitrary flow of these thoughts, feelings, random associations, shifting and contradictory observations, memories and subconscious intuitions in a quotidian setting. Unlike Victorian novels, where the presentation of individual thoughts was calculated to motivate or anticipate external (predictable/contrived) events within the narrative scheme, exterior events in Woolf’s fiction take the backseat, serving mainly to release inner processes. In Woolf, the vitality of the inner life is contrasted with the poverty of the external life.

Auerbach also mentions the demise of the omniscient narrator in To the Lighthouse, where narrative shifts between the interior consciousnesses of multiple unidentified narrative voices occur. These diverse voices conjecture about the possible ambiguous meanings of events, or speculate about the histories, behavior and motivations of characters without certainty. This defies the traditional Godlike representations in Victorian literature that presumed human behavior and motivations to be knowable through rationalistic deductions and logical reasoning. This reminds me of Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which is not a modernist text, but a postmodernist metafictional text that parodies the conventions of Victorian realism in a more hyperbolic and self-conscious manner than the modernist Woolf. The narrator postures to be an omniscient third person narrator at the outset, only to playfully subvert the realist convention of omniscient authorial intrusion. Unlike Victorian novels that employ narrator intrusions for reinforcing the illusion of realism by establishing continuity between “real” life and the fictional world, Fowles employs it to disrupt realism. The narrator erupts into the text and self-reflexively proclaims himself as the inventor of the story he is narrating. He alerts the reader to the text’s status as constructed fiction by stating that “the story I have told is all my imagination”, where the “characters I create never existed outside my own mind.” The suspension of disbelief is further disrupted when the narrator enters into a self-conscious discourse about the processes involved in the text’s creation, anticipating and subverting the reader’s expectations of conventional realist Victorian narrative strategies:

“Who is (the character) Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come? I do not know. […] If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ mind and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and the voice of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God”

By claiming ignorance about the true nature of the character Sarah, the narrator deflates the authority of omniscience that he has assumed for the past 12 chapters. The reader is made aware that previous insights into Sarah’s nature are not absolute truths, or even incomplete truths, but fabrications that resulted from the narrator’s imitation of Victorian convention. Thus, realism and epistemological certainty are exposed to be historically-specific and ideologically-established Victorian literary conventions. In refusing to explain the true motivations behind Sarah’s behavior, the narrator introduces epistemological uncertainty and thwarts the reader’s expectations of coherent meaning and “absolute truth.” This subverts the Victorian belief in the authority of realist novels as unproblematic reflections of reality that can transmit transcendental moral truths to be held up for emulation by the reader. Thus, the epistemological uncertainty of modernism seems to have carried over to the postmodern era, albeit in a more radical and self-conscious incarnation.