Modernist Fiction I: Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence
Modernist fiction. High modernism: 1910-1925, the great age of the novel. Disappearance of a common system of
beliefs. New perception of time. New notions of the nature of consciousness (Freud, Jung). A reaction to the hegemony
of realist fiction.
Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957): developed the interior monologue technique and attempted to write a ‘feminine’
prose to counter the dominance of ‘masculine’ realism.
Innovations of Modernism: psychological realism, linguistic intensity, stream of consciousness technique, multiple
points of view, flashback, ambiguity. Roland Barthes: readerly and writerly text. (S/Z)
Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919): attacks H.G. Wells (1866-1946), Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), John
Galsworthy (1867-1933); without life ‘nothing else is worthwhile’; interest in ‘the dark places of psychology’.
D.H. Lawrence: ‘Nothing is important but life…For this reason I am a novelist…The novel is the one bright book of
life. (‘Why the Novel Matters’, published 1936); ‘The novel is the perfect medium for revealing to us the changing
rainbow of our living relationships.’ (‘Morality and the Novel’, 1925)
Ford Madox Ford: launches The English Review (1908).
Innovations in short story writing: Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, James
Joyce, George Meredith, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf.
Further Reading. Childs, Peter, Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000) AIT
Ford, Boris (ed.), The New Pelican Guide to English Literature: Vol. 7: From James to Eliot (London: Penguin, 1983),
pp. 13-111, AIT, KLM C140.191
Levenson, Michael (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: CUP, 1999)
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
Life. While often included in the canon of great English writers, he is not a native speaker. Born Jozef Teodor Conrad
Korzeniowski in Poland. 1874: takes part in voyages on various French merchant ships to the West Indies. 1878: signs
on an English ship, learns English, and starts a career in the British merchant service. 1886: becomes a British citizen.
1890: takes a steamboat up the River Congo (as described in Heart of Darkness). 1895: publishes his first novel,
Almayer’s Folly.1896: settles in London, and dedicates himself to writing.
Work. For a long time regarded as a writer of adventure stories. Almayer’s Folly (1895), An Outcast of the Islands
(1896), The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: A Tale of the Forecastle (1897). Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900),
Typhoon and Other Stories (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Mirror of the Sea (1906), The Secret Agent (1907), Under
Western Eyes (1910), The Secret Sharer (1912), The Shadow Line (1917), Last Essays (1926).
Influences, Themes and Motifs. Started as an Impressionist writer in the manner of Ford Madox Ford; moral
ambiguities of human existence; the difficulty of communication; test of moral codes in moments of crisis;
impossibility of communication; desolation and emptiness.
Quest for the unknown: ‘It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa at the
time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself
with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now: ‘When I grow up I shall go
there.”’ (A Personal Record, 1912)
Heart of Darkness (1899) Biographical elements: derived from Conrad’s personal experience in Belgian Congo in
1890. The nightmares facing the white man in the Congo. Fidelity to art and experience is a moral issue: ‘Art itself may
be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to the
light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.’
Conrad’s aesthetics: to teach and delight the senses; to reveal the hidden truth with the help of intuition; to analyse
social problems and moral issues. Foregrounds the role of intuition, enters the consciousness of his character.
Narrative structure: story within a story. ‘The meaning of an episode is not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping
the tale which brought it out as a glow brings out a haze.’ Aspects of interpretation: adventure story; quest narrative;
parable; psychological novel; Albert J. Guerard: the story records a symbolic journey of a man into his soul and as the
boat travels Marlow becomes more self-aware (The Journey Within, 1958); colonial narrative; Chinua Achebe, Conrad
as a ‘bloody racist’ (1975).
Further Reading. Adams, Richard, Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Penguin Critical Studies (London: Penguin,
1991) AIT
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1994) AIT
Cox, C. B. (ed.), Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and Under Western Eyes: A Selection of Critical Essays,
Casebook Series (London: Macmillan, 1981) AIT
Ford, Boris (ed.), The New Pelican Guide to English Literature: Vol. 7: From James to Eliot (London: Penguin, 1983),
pp. 131-49, AIT, KLM C140.191
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
Life. ‘My mother was a clever, ironical, delicately moulded woman of good, old burgher descent. She married below
her. My father was dark, ruddy, with a fine laugh. He is a coal miner. He was one of the sanguine temperament, warm
and hearty, but unstable: he lacked principle, as my mother would have said….She despised him – he drank. Their
Modernist Fiction I: Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence
2
marriage life has been one carnal, bloody fight. I was born hating my father: as early as every I can remember, I
shivered with horror when he touched me….This has been a kind of bond between me and my mother. We have loved
each other, almost with a husband and wife love, as well as filial and maternal.’ (Letter by D. H. Lawrence to Rachel
Annand Taylor, 3 December 1910) 1912: elopes with Frieda Weekley to Germany.
Work. Now accepted as one of the greatest writers of the early 20 th c but in his lifetime his works were banned and his
writing was labelled as pornographic. Sons and Lovers (1913); F.R. Leavis’s reappraisal; The Rainbow (1915), Women
in Love (1920), Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930). Poetry: Love Poems and Others
(1913), Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (1964). Plays: The Complete Plays
of D. H. Lawrence (1965). Travelogues: Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia (1921), Mornings in Mexico (1927).
Essays: Movements in European History (1921), Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), Studies in Classic
American Literature (1923), Pornography and Obscenity (1929), Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence (1968).
Sons and Lovers (1913). ‘It follows this idea: a woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class, and has
no satisfaction in her own life. She has had a passion for her husband, so the children are born out of passion, and have
heaps of vitality. But as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers – first the eldest, then the second. These sons are
urged into life by their reciprocal lover of their mother….But when they come to manhood, they can’t love, because
their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them. William gives his sex to a fribble, and his mother
holds his soul. But the split kills him, because he doesn’t know where he is. The next son gets a woman who fights for
his soul – fights his mother. The son loves the mother – all the sons hate and are jealous of the father. The battle goes on
between the mother and the girl, with the son as object. The mother gradually proves stronger…The son decides to
leave his soul in his mother’s hands, and like his elder brother go for passion…Then the split begins to tell again. But,
almost unconsciously, the mother realises what is the matter, and begins to die. The son casts off his mistress, attends to
his mother dying. He is left in the end naked of everything, with the drift towards death.’ (Letter by D. H. Lawrence to
Edward Garnett, 14 November 1912)
Maurice Beebe: ‘The novel itself…stands for the transformation of life into art. Lawrence has tapped the Sacred Fount
and used up the life which finds its way into the novel. Having done so, he, like Paul, is both dead and reborn.’ (The
Artist Theme, 1964)
‘But the man who is the go-between from Woman to Production is the lover of that woman. And if that Woman be his
mother, then is he her lover in part only; he carries for her, but is never received into her for his confirmation and
renewal, and so wastes himself away in the flesh. The old son-lover was Oedipus. The name of the new one is legion.
And if a son-lover take a wife, then is she not his wife, only his bed. And his life will be torn in twain, and his wife in
her despair shall hope for sons, that she may have her lover in her hour.’ (Original Foreword to Sons and Lovers)
Alfred Kuttner: ‘In Paul’s case the abnormal fixation upon the mother is most obviously conditioned by the father,
whose unnatural position in the family is responsible for the distortion of the normal attitude of the child towards its
parents. The father ideal simply does not exist for Paul; where there should have been an attractive standard of
masculinity to imitate, he can only fear and despise. The child’s normal dependence upon the mother is perpetuated
because there is no counter-influence to detach it from her….Paul’s early fixation upon his mother is met and enhanced
by Mrs Morel’s abnormally concentrated affection for her son.’ (A Freudian Appreciation, 1916)
‘I hated the Psychoanalytic Review of Sons and Lovers. You know I think “complexes” are vicious half statements of
the Freudians: sort of can’t see wood for trees. When you’ve said Mutter-complex, you’ve said nothing – no more than
if you called hysteria a nervous disease….My poor book: it was, as art, a fairly complete truth: so they carve a half lie
out of it and say “Voila.”’ (Letter by D. H. Lawrence to Barbara Low, 11 September 1916)
Dorothy van Ghent: ‘The symbolism of the pits is identical with that of morel, the father, the irrational life principle that
is unequally embattled against the death principle in the mother, the rationalising and idealising principle working
rhythmlessly, greedily, presumptuously, and possessively.’ (On Sons and Lovers, 1953)
Maurice Beebe: ‘It seems to me apparent that neither the Freudian reading nor one which emphasises the concept of a
split answers some of the questions raised by a close reading of the novel. If it is intended too illustrate the case of a
young man defeated by an Oedipus complex, how do we explain the fact that Paul becomes a friend and protector of the
father surrogate, Baxter Dawes, that he deliberately kills his mother, or that…there is little evidence of sexual
inhibition.’ (The Artist Theme, 1964)
Further Reading. Ford, Boris (ed.), The New Pelican Guide to English Literature: Vol. 7: From James to Eliot
(London: Penguin, 1983), pp. 356-77, AIT, KLM C140.191
Hewitt, Douglas, English Fiction and the Early Modern Period 1890-1940 (London: Longman, 1992), pp.175-95, AIT
Lawrence, D. H., Sons and Lovers (London: Penguin, 1995) AIT
Salgado, Gamini (ed.), D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers: A Selection of Critical Essays, Casebook Series (London:
Macmillan, 1969)
Salgado, Gamini, A Preface to Lawrence (London: Longman, 1993) AIT
Dr Attila Dósa
Department of English Literature
University of Miskolc