<div dir="ltr"><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif">Like
any decent essay since Montaigne, this one in question wanders. At times it
contradicts itself. In my view Woolf ultimately proposes that “everything is
the proper stuff of fiction; whatever one honestly thinks; whatever one
honestly feels.” And the modern fiction writer can do anything, use whatever
method they choose, in order to achieve this honesty, the emptying out of
falsity. </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif">This
proposal at the conclusion of the essay would be an endorsement of the
collection of atoms method, then, but it would also open up Woolf’s support of
all other kinds of methods; the idea is to rebuke falsity. </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif">I
think that the levels of contradiction we see in this essay show that Woolf
really used this essay as an opportunity to think.</font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif">In regard to Woolf’s own
relation to the moderns of whom she speaks, the way that the essay collects its
thoughts as it goes, no matter how they will be negated later (the proper stuff
of fiction is X; there is no proper stuff), itself is illustrative of the
collection of atoms method; all impressions are recorded.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt"><span style="font-size:16pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> </span></p></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Helvetica"><font size="1"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Helvetica"><font size="1">Michael R. Schrimper</font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Helvetica"><font size="1">Ph.D. Student, Department of English</font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Helvetica"><font size="1">University of Colorado Boulder</font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Helvetica"><font size="1">Traditional Territories of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute Nations</font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Helvetica"><a href="https://www.colorado.edu/english/michael-schrimper" class="gmail-" style=""><font size="1">https://www.colorado.edu/english/michael-schrimper</font></a></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 2:25 AM Jeremy Hawthorn via Vwoolf <<a href="mailto:vwoolf@lists.osu.edu">vwoolf@lists.osu.edu</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<p>On 18.05.2020 14:58, <a href="mailto:mhussey@verizon.net" target="_blank">mhussey@verizon.net</a> wrote:<br>
</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span>I don’t quite agree with Naremore here.
Woolf mentions Joyce as ‘the most notable’ of ‘several young
writers’ who are chafing at convention, and I think it is
reasonable to see herself as implicitly included among those
‘young writers’. Her complaint about Joyce is more specific;
his (narrative) ‘self’ ‘never embraces or creates what is
outside itself and beyond’, he lays a ‘didactic’ emphasis
upon indecency. I don’t think those writers you quote are
taking the lines from ‘Modern Fiction’ out of context, and
it seems to me reasonable to take the essay (in both its
1919 and 1925 iterations) as a modernist manifesto, though
not necessarily as a recipe for how to make a Woolf novel.</span></p>
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</blockquote>
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</p>
<p>Well this and Christine Froula's response sent me back to reread
"Modern Fiction" - which I have now done more than once. One
conclusion I am sure of: Woolf does not "advise," or "instruct" or
"insist" (all verbs used by the critics who I quoted) that the
novelist "record the atoms &c &c." In the closing lines of
the essay she writes: "nothing - no 'method', no experiment, 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; no perception comes amiss."<br>
<br>
But does she include herself among the "young writers, among whom
Mr James Joyce is the most notable" whose work contains a quality
that distinguishes it from that of their predecessors? This is a
more difficult question. To me, her criticism of Joyce in the
essay would suggest that she does not, as does her praise of
Conrad, Hardy, Sterne, Chekhov and Thackeray. Taken together, this
means that she criticises quite strongly the only representative
of the "young writers" that she names, while asserting the
superiority of the work of five pre-modern writers to his fiction.<br>
<br>
Taking up Christine Froula's question, I admit to being puzzled by
"the spiritual Mr Joyce," especially when his work fails because
of "the comparative poverty of his mind." He is spiritual because
"he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that
innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain." I
take it that "spiritual" is chosen to distinguish him from the
"materialists" from whom she distances herself; Joyce is not
interested in objects outside the self but in processes inside it.
But it is an odd use of "spiritual."<br>
<br>
Incidentally, Woolf's complaint about the emphasis on indecency in
Joyce is somewhat at odds with her praise of Sterne. In his
introduction to Sterne's <i>A Sentimental Journey</i> (Penguin
edition, 2001), Paul Goring quotes Woolf's view that with Sterne
"we are as close to life as we can be," notes her praise of
Sterne's "many passages of . . . pure poetry," and references her
quotation from the Paris scenes in Sterne's work. But Goring notes
that Woolf appears to be completely oblivious of the succession of
sexual innuendos in the passage she quotes to illustrate Sterne's
"pure poetry."</p>
<p>Jeremy H<br>
</p>
<br>
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