Category: British and Irish Literature

Dragging Myself Through Beckett’s Molloy

It’s probably fair to say I dragged myself through Molloy with only the occasional moment of more willing crawling. Samuel Beckett, perhaps, would have approved. This novel, his work as a whole, is full of pained movement that seems only one kick away from stillness. At school I studied Waiting for Godot and Endgame, two plays that I loved (eventually), but Beckett’s prose has always been both intimidating and unenticing. In Molloy we have big black brutal blocks of text with nary a paragraph break. I was hardly going to rush to read this, given I knew only to expect death and misery in what I did read. What is strange is that Beckett also wrote during his career its polar opposite, formally speaking: tiny fragments so fragmentary I could get nowhere at all in them, where even a single sentence seemed something so primordially bare that comprehension eluded me.

Regardless of these varied torments, I felt I had to make a sustained attack upon his prose. There are many good books I still have to read, of course, but always nudging me for Beckett was the awkward fact that many authors I really like – Jon Fosse and Thomas Bernhard, for example – are often claimed by critics as being his inheritors. And so, I tried again. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” – so does Sam put it in his late story “Worstwood Ho”. If I’ve failed, this time it’ll at least be a failure of interpretation, rather than a failure to get past the first page.

Eventually I felt I was getting something out of the work. But rather than try to summarise a book that is full of nonsense (Molloy spends several pages working out the optimal sequence for transferring sixteen stones between his four pockets and one mouth, to give one example), it makes more sense to note the path into meaningfulness, or at least the possibility of meaning, that I found most helpful, and reflect upon the relationship between the text I’ve read and the authors following him that I love.

Chasing

I mentioned movement at the beginning, and movement is maybe the best way into forming an understanding of Molloy, especially as it relates to the more accessible and well-known Godot. The plot of Molloy concerns two people, Molloy and Moran, each the narrator and author (both are writing reports) of their equally-sized parts. The first man is looking for his mother’s apartment, while the second man is seeking the first. Whereas Estragon and Vladimir in the play are tasked with waiting for someone, Molloy and Moran are tasked with finding someone – Molloy by himself, Moran by a figure called Youdi via his messenger Gaber. Molloy gets distracted often in his quest, and has experiences like getting arrested, running over a dog, and possibly murdering a man. Moran is more driven, if not for that any more successful. He is accompanied by his son, but though his narrative and voice are distinct, there are many similarities with Molloy’s path, including the talk of bicycles, a murder, and the decay of the body and mind.

Movement towards a goal, as opposed to waiting at an appointed point. These are not so different as they seem. In both cases Beckett’s tales are readable as a kind of allegory. Moran is instructed to find Molloy, but quickly forgets what he’s to do when he meets him – still, he trusts his instructions on faith. Just as Vladimir and Estragon are informed about Godot by a boy, Moran doesn’t hear from Youdi directly but via Gaber. These names are all richly interpretable. Gaber is Giver in German, but I also noticed it sounded like the archangel Gabriel. Youdi, as an invisible presence giving orders, reminded me of Yahweh, with whom he shares a syllable count and first letter. If the waiting of Vladimir and Estragon resembles that of the early Christians who believed the end of the world was about to arrive if only they waited a little longer, I thought there was something similarly religious in the shape of Moran’s quest in particular. Travelling with his son, and with a marked faith to his narration and cruelty to his action, I thought of the Binding of Isaac. In other words, the novel’s central dynamic and naming feels religious without ever being explicitly so, in the way that might make us feel comfortable resting upon such a view and ceasing any further enquiry.

Yet a simple allegory this is not, no more than is Godot. One topic that complicates matters is that of something close to movement: the body itself. Both Molloy and Moran’s bodies are in decay. Beckett might say with a wry and considered smile that they are both on their last legs. Certainly that seems the case for Moran, whose legs stop working over the course of his section. Molloy’s hardly seemed to work to begin with – he traverses the earth with a combination of crutches and a bicycle, something I could only imagine with some difficulty. No matter the damage, however, the bodies keep going. We could relate this back to the idea of faith by saying this is proof of how determined the characters are to honour their commitments – to one’s mother, to Youdi. But there’s too much humour in the writing to make this interpretation a comfortable one. Molloy ends his story crawling on the floor, before accidentally falling into a ditch; at one point, Moran gets on the floor and starts rolling about like a “cylinder”. Such moments are too funny to allow a straight-faced interpretation of the action. Their bodily faith seems too much like lunacy.

Beckett’s bodies try to reorientate the reader’s attention to the disregarded parts of existence. At one point Molloy sings the praises of the anus in more flowery language than I am prepared to quote; Moran, meanwhile, is obsessed by masturbation. It’s hard to think of the book as being about faith when that faith goes nowhere but the bodies with their earthiness are constantly present on the page. Then there is the matter that Moran, who is depicted as consciously religious, is guilty of all the crimes the religious normally are in the eyes of the confidently irreligious. He is full of pride (“I was short of sins” is a shockingly good way to tell us the exact opposite), he holds fast to that strain of Christian thought which demands “a horror of the body and all its functions”, yet is excited when he has a moment free from his son because it will allow him to masturbate. He also murders a stranger and drives away his son through repeated corporal punishment. Religion is certainly not the hero of this work, and devotion to the ideal seems hardly capable of taking its place.

Both Moran and Molloy’s sections of the story are bleak. Their bodies don’t work, their minds are in so much disorder, and all their strivings are unrewarded. Moran, for example, eventually, struggles home from his wanderings to find his animals dead. Both characters keep going because of a kind of faith, but the problem is that their leap of faith leads them not to land in God’s arms, but to fall straight into a ditch.

The question at this point is why read this book, or Malone Dies, or The Unnameable? The second novel of the Trilogy has the eponymous Malone stuck in what may be a hospital or a prison, telling stories to pass the time before he dies, only to get annoyed at his own work every-so-often and declare it “tedium”. This is an even more cramped space for narration than Molloy. At least with the first novel we could hope that something better might await Moran or Molloy – foolishly, perhaps, I thought perhaps their striving might be rewarded. With a man in bed, telling fictional stories and wishing he were dead, it’s even harder to find the traditional joys of fiction. If you don’t find Beckett funny, and I don’t find him quite funny enough, and you don’t love his language, which is often technically impressive and inventive (one favourite was “the unconquerable dark” which “licks the light” on a character’s face), the work is a hard sell. Indeed, it’s work. But now I can at least say I’ve managed the first two parts of the trilogy. That’s an achievement for before I die, anyway.

Two influences: Fosse and Bernhard

Besides thinking about religion and the body, I also found trying to compare Beckett with Jon Fosse and Thomas Bernhard a useful exercise to understand what Beckett might be trying to say, and why I found the others so much more enjoyable than I found him.

The main links between Fosse and Beckett concern ageing and madness and their associated changes to cognition. If only Molloy will monologue about his arsehole, excrement plays a role in both writers’ worlds. In the final section of Fosse’s Melancholy, for example, we could say the main narrative tension concerns the old woman Oline and her challenge to balance her need to pee with her promise to visit her dying brother. Something has gone wrong with her body, and she must resist it as long as she can. This is a similar dynamic to Molloy – the need to balance one’s duty to something higher with the demands of the body that carries us there. Another link, and related to this, is one of susceptibility. Both writers’ characters’ consciousnesses are very vulnerable to their external experiences, leading them to constantly lose track of what they are doing. Again, in Melancholy, there’s Lars, who in the scenes at the pub in Düsseldorf allows his idea of reality to be shaped by the words of his obviously-ill-intentioned fellow artists.

What separates these two writers, it seems to me, is their associated value judgements of these states. If the body is played for laughs in Beckett, it is also something decidedly important because it is the most human part of us. The “going on” of his characters is a physical going on, even if it’s just Molloy’s bizarre crutches-cum-bicycle hobbling. Fosse, I think, has less love of the body. Perhaps this is his (latent at the time of Melancholy, open by the time of Septology) Catholicism showing. Oline’s decay is something she has to avoid to remain connected to higher ideals, while Lars’ madness is just that – a sense that he has lost contact with something important and necessary for his art, something emphasised in the second section of the novel where he is in an asylum and more susceptible than ever to the faintest suggestions. In Septology, meanwhile, the second Asle is dying from alcoholism and hence unable to paint or, indeed, hold himself to life.

The things that Fosse values are beyond the body – our flesh and blood are necessary only insofar as they enable us to reach them. The overwhelming mystical experience of a world where the boundaries between past and present blur, as in Aliss at the Fire, or the presence of God in Septology – these are the things that really matter. If Beckett, in his bizarre and comic and even cruel way, celebrates the body, Fosse condemns it. But because Fosse’s vision has this religious and mystical angle instead of the bleak metaphysical emptiness of Beckett’s, I naturally prefer the former’s work, it being closer to my own leanings.

My second favourite who came, allegedly, from under Beckett’s overcoat is Thomas Bernhard. What links both writers is a certain cruelty. Beckett’s we see, for example, in Moran’s corporal punishment of his own son, which eventually leads him to flee, or in the pig butchery of the Lambert father in Malone Dies, who relishes in the creatures’ deaths. We might also perceive cruelty in Beckett’s treatment of his characters generally – the need to leave them immobile, bedbound, trapped. Bernhard’s cruelty is located differently: in his narration, in the bile of his narrators – the snobbery of the narrator of Woodcutters towards the artistic pretensions of the people at the party, or Roithamer’s hatred of his family in Correction. My preference here is again for the successor. Beckett’s narration bloodies his characters to build a bleak world, whereas Bernhard’s narrators bloody their world in order to big up themselves or what they like. If I am ultimately equivocal about Beckett’s bodies – the cruelty and bleakness balances the sense that they are important things – there’s no such sense of this with Bernhard.

Bernhard’s narrators are arrogant snobs. In Wittgenstein’s Nephew Bernhard describes a road trip across Austria just to get a copy of the Swiss newspaper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, because he detests Austrian papers and wants to read a particular article in this one. Crazy, certainly, but also an indication of passion, even of love. We may not share his good taste but it’s hard not to respect the idea of good taste. Woodcutters is a broadside against the bourgeoisie, but through the figure of the actor at the dinner party there are moments when Bernhard seems to say “look here, here’s something real and important.” In other words, proper snobbery can only be possible where there is a real value of the things and people one looks down on – a negative judgement that implies an affirmation of what is absent. You don’t need to agree with him to value the very valuing.

There is no such vision in Beckett, where all and each seems so much dirt. In Bernhard we laugh at the narrators for being nincompoops, and we laugh at the objects of their rage. But in Beckett, the few things he seems to place some value upon – the body, the faithful adherence to a duty – are also mocked relentlessly. The result is that Beckett seems more negative than the all-denying Bernhard.

The Unnameable awaits. I’ll keep it waiting for the moment – I need a break from Beckett for now. I do not, however, regret reading either Molloy or Malone Dies. Fun they decidedly were not. But like many difficult books, trying to gather my thoughts together for a blog post has done a good bit to redeem them. I have a better sense of why Beckett has so many fans, even if I cannot yet call myself one of them, and I can see how his influence eventually wound up inspiring those whose works I more unequivocally love. There’s much more to the texts than I got out of them. The theme of identity, for example, is worth exploring. I could also, should also, probably do more close reading of the language itself. But in my defence, these are tasks for books we love. So poor Sam will miss out on the premium™ MAS blog post treatment for the moment.

For a long time, I was kept away from Beckett by a lack of a way in. I had seen so many titles and articles, indeed own Beckett’s Dying Words by Christopher Ricks (gifted, rather than bought), which told me how much love and pleasure he could offer to the initiated, but this only made me feel foolish for not having any success myself. I hope this post may nevertheless have helped you.

Meanwhile, if you, reader, are a Beckett fanatic, what helped you to get into him?

Narrative in Crisis in Forster’s Howards End

Howards End, E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel of Britishness and class conflict, is without a doubt one of the most strangely contemporary old books I have ever read. While it fits politically nice and snugly into the mild meliorist tradition of someone like Turgenev, what makes Howards End so disarming to me is the specificity of its problem set. We might read a novel by Sally Rooney, who regularly expresses her political positions in public, but never really find those same views stated quite so obviously in the text itself. Instead, with her worlds of permissive and diffuse relationships she seems to describe what is, rather than tell us what she wishes for. 

Not so here. Howards End very clearly advocates for empathy with its “only connect” tagline, questions the obligations of those with money by literally having a dinner party where alternatives are acted out, and shows a kind of class striation and conflict that is still uneasily present today in the UK and elsewhere. As a work, its sympathies are not just “liberal” in the sense that most books are because authors generally have to care about at least some people or they wouldn’t bother writing about them – it is liberal in the sense that a reader today who doesn’t agree with that particular sets of views will probably find themselves feeling attacked and yet unable to dismiss the book as being of another time as one might with, say, a feminist novel of the 1860s. That is its strangeness.

None of this makes great literature, however. I came away from Howards End disappointed in it, but I think in my disappointment I have found an interesting thread to expand on in this post. This book’s politics are unmissable, for good or ill, and they are important to Forster, or else he would not have written the book. But just how he presents his theme, the way he arranges and explores it through his characters, is full of choices. Here I find decisions of focus, narrative, and characterisation, that I cannot help but fault. What is more, I suspect Forster would agree. For connected to the novel’s politics is also a kind of conscious crisis of representation – the story itself is in strain – as the narrator practically admits of the difficulty of writing his theme with the toolset of an Edwardian novelist. 

The Plot

Howards End is the story of the Schlegel family, in particular its two eldest children, the daughters Margaret and Helen. They are middle class in that hugely spacious definition of it current somewhere like the UK. Each has what today would be about one million pounds in the bank, according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator – enough, in the 1900s, to live without working, but not quite enough to feel fully at ease. Though living in England, they are half-German, hence the name. Their father was first a soldier with the Prussians, then a philosopher of sorts, before he moved and settled in England. His name is a slight unsubtlety – a real Schlegel was an idealist philosopher in the early 19th century, and “idealist” is the word we might use to describe Margaret, Helen, and their younger brother Tibby. Without obligation to live in the world, the sisters are free to philosophise upon it at little gatherings of their friends and their brother free to enjoy the abstractions of beautiful music.

There is another world, however – the world of “anger and telegrams”. This is the world of the Wilcox family, with its patriarch Henry, scion Charles, daughter Evie and colony-bound Paul. The Wilcoxes are also middle class, (apologies to my international readers), albeit far wealthier than the Schlegels due to their involvement in business. Having met the Schlegels on a tour of Germany, the two families are later brought together by fate and chance within England itself.

The final family is the Basts, Leonard and Jenny. They are poor, but still in a way middle class too. (The narrator notes: “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.”) Leonard works as a clerk, which allows him some purchase above “the abyss” of true poverty, but as the novel progresses that abyss gets closer and closer. Jenny, meanwhile, is crude and childish. However, an experience in her past connects her to the Wilcoxes, just as Leonard’s accidental acquaintance with the Schlegels, via a misplaced umbrella, brings him into their world. In this way, Forster sets up the Schlegels to act as a balancing point between the two extremes of their class, and sets the stage for a conflict between them, one involving all the usual things we expect of an English novel – marriage, love, and property.

The Brilliance of a Missing Name

Our introduction to Leonard Bast comes in the novel’s fifth chapter, when all the Schlegels, including a relative from Germany, are gathered to listen to a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This chapter is one of the novel’s best, because it manages to use not just this event as a way of delivering its themes, but also its very form. For a novel about the importance of connecting, Howards End tells us exactly how everyone responds in a different and hence disconnected way to the music: the Schlegel’s aunt taps, Helen visualises a heroic conflict, Margaret hears music, Tibby follows the score on his knee, and their German cousin thinks patriotically of how Beethoven was German. It is not quite a cycling of free minds, as in say, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, but it is still usefully weightless narration.

This, however, is not what makes the chapter good. What does that is the presentation of Leonard. Margaret, socially minded as ever, has been speaking to “some young man”. Later, after the next few pieces of music this man interrupts the Schlegels to say that Helen (who had just run off, overwhelmed by the music), has taken his umbrella. His awkwardness is obvious – he had “for some time been preparing a sentence.” Margaret helpfully gives him their address, but he suspects instead some hidden deceit. “To trust people is a luxury only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it,” begins the narrator. We learn how “the young man” had been the victim of confidence tricksters in the past, and how it has made him wary. The Schlegels, learning instead from their father, view every deceit as “rent.” “Rent to the ideal” of a society where we trust one another, that is.

The young man comes home with them to collect his umbrella, but does not stay for tea. He is forgotten, except as a memory of another world, of how “beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy, who has recovered his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address behind him, and no name.” This ending makes explicit what has given the chapter its force: not once is Leonard named. He is both forcibly a character in the sense that he physically occupies space, yet forcibly denied that most basic right of character – an identity instead of a mere description. It seems to me that this is the most interesting moment of the whole novel, because in the denial (which only lasts a chapter) we see reflected an attitude relevant to the work as a whole. This strange clerk, this young man, does not seem to matter. He does not matter to the people talking to him, even if politically he might be on their side, and Forster chooses to let this come across in the text. That the text both draws our attention to this, then reveals his name in the next chapter, serves a simple purpose – it shames us into realising how easy it is to think nothing of another human life.

A story told with the wrong tools

With the comment earlier about the text’s refusal to depict “the poor” there’s the clearest indication from the narrator there’s some kind of representational crisis afoot alongside all the other crises of the early 20th century, such as changing demographics (“our race is degenerating”, the progressive Margaret remarks) and the threat of war. The problem is that even if the narrator is uncomfortable with his telling, he cannot quite see the solutions that will come to change the face of literature only a few years later. Structurally, Howards End is as conservative as its politics are liberal. Even if we have advanced beyond the days of Turgenev or Austen, when the story must end with a harmonious marriage, Howards End still ends with its shadow – domestic happiness and stability at last achieved. So much, so acceptable – happy endings do happen.

What I find much harder to accept is the role of chance in Howards End, which substitutes for the representation of tragedy by other means. That Leonard Bast might make the acquaintance of the Schlegels at a concert is possible. That his wife might have become a fallen woman thanks to Henry Wilcox while he was visiting a business concern of his in Cyprus some ten years previously is too much. Chance becomes unfair when the reader feels they are not being taken seriously. Howards End reminded me a little of Hardy, who seemed in The Mayor of Casterbridge to enjoy the action of hurting his characters more than he cared for the point he was trying to make. I don’t believe Forster did have any great love of scandal, which makes his choices even more absurd to me.

What is so bad about Jenny’s history with Henry is that it is utterly pointless within the story. The reveal takes place some two-thirds of the way through the book at the wedding of Henry Wilcox’s daughter Evie, a time of conspicuous consumption and general opulence. Into this place arrives Helen, bringing the Bast couple, who are destitute following Leonard’s loss of his job. Leonard and Henry have already met, briefly, at the Schlegel’s. Following Henry’s offhand suggestion at that time that Leonard look for another job the richer man has caused, inadvertently, the latter’s stumble towards his abyss. To accuse Henry of responsibility for another man’s fall the text need do precisely nothing, for the matter is clear already.

Adding guilt for a crime committed in the past, about which there is no prior evidence or indication in the text, merely cheapens all this. (If anything, Henry is depicted as made uncomfortable by the idea of sex, which makes the incident harder, not easier, to believe.) If we want to comment, as I believe Forster does, upon the unfairness of economic outcomes, then the contrast of starving Basts and feasting Wilcoxes is entirely sufficient. Further, if it is moral intrigue that we want, then Margaret (engaged to Henry), forced into the morally unpleasant position of attacking her sister for her “theatrical nonsense” in bringing the two uninvited guests to the party, provides drama enough. This is psychology, rather than scandal, and all the more interesting.  

In other words, Forster lacks subtlety here. Or rather, he’s capable of it, but allows unsubtle moments such as this into the plot at key moments. Through events like the running-over of a dog in the Wilcoxes’ motorcar and their response to it, (“the insurance company will see to that”), their attitudes and carelessness are skewered well enough.

The novel’s finale is another moment involving the Basts where Forster seems to prefer silly action to serious subtlety. After Margaret’s rejection of the Basts at the wedding, in a moment of rage and confusion, Helen sleeps with Leonard while his wife is in bed next door. This is reasonably plausible if we assume more alcohol than was previously mentioned was involved. Helen becomes pregnant from the encounter and with still more confused emotions leaves England for the continent. After some time and concerned by her sister’s lack of contact, Margaret devises a plan with Henry to catch Helen at Howards End, where the family books are now being stored. Helen arrives, Margaret and she meet, and they decide to spend one night together before Helen departs again. Meanwhile, Leonard, who has been living for the past few months by cadging money off family members, decides he must see Margaret to confess. Hot-tempered Charles also heads to Howards End, to get Margaret away and back to her husband.

When Charles sees Leonard, the cause of his sister-in-law’s shameful pregnancy, his response is to whack him over the head with the Schlegel’s sword. (The blunt side.) Leonard falls over and is crushed by a bookcase he bumps on the way down. He does not get up. The aspiring upper middle class murders the descending lower middle class – one cannot get more direct than that! But one certainly should be less direct. Leonard doesn’t need to die at all. A life of despair, as Leonard watches his family gradually give him less and less money until he becomes truly desperate, would be far worse. It would also serve the book’s key message, “only connect”, far better, by showing how he was slowly disconnecting from everything. Instead, at the novel’s end, it’s an attempt to connect that he dies, which certainly makes Charles look bad, but is far less impactful as a political message of the sort the novel seems to want to make.

In other words, it’s not just that the drama is silly, it’s that it is cheaper, less interesting, than the alternative. Margaret’s divided loyalty between her husband and her sister is much more morally meaty than having her be divided over her husband’s unbelievable indiscretion from before they ever met. Charles’ failure in life is much better depicted in the scraps of his home life that we see – his too many children, his too small prosperity, and his anxiousness over his own class position – than through having him become a murderer. And finally, Leonard’s abjection is far more interesting than his poor heart. In other words, I am trying to say something like – more Chekhov is needed. As he well knew, drowning, slipping into the wrong life and having no idea how to escape it, is far more horrible – and relevant to our own existences – than scandal.

Conclusion

Howards End is an accomplished novel. The pieces fit together, the characters exist reasonably well, the theme reaches the reader without too much difficulty. The rich remain so, the poor suffer, and those in the middle muddle along, maybe with a bit of mental torment but no real difficulties. Its strength is its articulateness – its discussions feel forceful in the way that only discussions felt as part of a tradition can do – and in many of its subtleties and images, such as the “rent” to the ideal of trust. Yet overall, I think it is ruined by structural decisions that devalue the effort Forster clearly put into his more subtle comments. If it had been published not in 1910, but say, 1924, as was A Passage to India, or even later, perhaps Forster would have had more opportunities to tell his story more effectively. He might have read Woolf’s “The Russian Point of View”, for example, and realised all the options he had missed.

As it stands, this is a strange work. It’s so modern in its sympathies, so outdated in its approach, that the overall effect is of a contemporary novel by a new writer who hasn’t yet mastered their craft.

For more ambivalent comments on Forster, I’ve written on Maurice here

Jacob’s Room and the Limits of Biography

1922 was a good time to be a person who read books written in English. Ulysses and The Waste Land both appeared that year, though you might have had trouble getting your hands on the former because it was banned in various places for obscenity. However, if you wanted cutting edge fiction but couldn’t get your hands on Joyce’s work, then luckily there was another great writer ready and waiting. Virginia Woolf is a wonderful writer, and every time I have returned to her I am grateful for it. My wanderings within the pages of the first of her “experimental” novels, 1922’s Jacob’s Room, was no different. This is a novel about a man where his role as plot actor is very much secondary, his voice muffled. It’s a Bildungsroman with very little Bildung. Most of all, though, it’s a frolic, a joyous exploration of what literature and language can do.

But also, however, what they cannot. Jacob’s Room concerns the short life of a young man in Edwardian England, Jacob Flanders, yet from the title alone there’s already a hint of a problem – for the title refers to his lodgings, and not to the man himself. This problem is what makes the work so fascinating – I interpret Jacob’s Room as a work that’s both determined to shake off old ideas of characterisation and literary creation, while at the same time trying to defend itself against the kind of total narrative collapse that rejecting old forms entirely might lead to or imply. It’s this strange mix of past and future, a kind of conservative modernism, that makes the work so fascinating. Compared to Ulysses, it’s really a kind of anxious battleground about what the future of literature might look like – and what it should not.

Out With The Old

Somewhere or other I remember reading that literary modernism began with a growing scepticism of the idea of character. Perhaps the best way to explain how this works is by reference to a work by one of my favourite German writers of the 19th century, Theodore Fontane, No Way Back. In that novel, our main character, Count Holk, has an affair while away from his wife. His letters home, naturally, reveal none of this. But we, readers, know the truth. And eventually his wife finds out too. Fontane uses letters as a way of exploring the communication difficulties two people can have, all the while Holk’s character remains known to us and his wife’s remains knowable too – that Holk ultimately does not understand her, leading to the novel’s tragedy, is a fault of his character, not a statement about character in general.

Letters and other writings dot the pages of Jacob’s Room as well, and as with No Way Back they are places for concealment more than communication. Jacob writes home, revealing nothing of his loves or his thoughts. His mother is delighted, “he seems to be having… a very gay time.” But what separates the treatment of writing in both works is that in Jacob’s Room there comes no revelation of the truth, no contradiction to the apparent world of the letter. The final scene sees his mother and Bonamy, the man who loved him, standing in Jacob’s empty room with “all his letters strewn about for anyone to read.” The dispersal of the letters indicates a similar dispersal of character. Who is Jacob? One person to his mother, another to Bonamy. Putting all the letters together, or the two people talking, would only be to court chaos. It’s not that character is changeable; rather, that there may be nothing solid about it all.

Other letters and writings are similarly undermined. Those of well-bred Clara are “those of a child”, and even when she writes in her diary, there’s nothing more there than air – she writes “how the weather was fine, the children demons, and Jacob Flanders unworldly.” There’s a sense that even when characters in Jacob’s Room try to express themselves, they cannot. We readers only have what we can see of them, hear of them, and that is rarely enough. “It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, not yet entirely what is done.” This phrase is repeated, word for word, twice in Jacob’s Room. What pessimism, really, lies in it – “hints,” “not exactly,” “not yet entirely”. If character is so diffuse that this is how we trap it, then clearly what we can trap will be far from the real thing.

Elsewhere that pessimism is more clear, as we can see from this description of men on a bus: “Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all–save “a man with a red moustache,” “a young man in grey smoking a pipe.”” Traditionally, by focusing on individuals, we might get a past. This does not work here. Jacob’s father has a grave that may not be his, while the scenes of Jacob’s childhood are mere flashes of impressions with as much attention on the other characters and their thoughts as on Jacob himself.

Finally, we might hope that impersonal forces would provide a key to character. Instetten, in Fontane’s Effi Briest, decries this “society-thing” that forces him to kill a man he does not hate because of an idea of honour he is powerless to reject. What are the forces in Jacob’s Room?“The incessant commerce of banks, laboratories, chancelleries, and houses of business”, “the men in clubs and Cabinets”. Woolf explicitly names this “unseizable force” that drives men to their deaths. But whether the forces of her novel match those of, for example, Fontane’s, is another matter.

On the one hand, Jacob is shaped into seeming conventionality by a usual society – the artistically-inclined former graduates of Cambridge and Oxford. He stands for the Greeks (despite knowing the language poorly) and for Shakespeare, neither a particularly radical opinion. He has other views, such as his ideas of women, that are still more clearly conditioned by society. However, though ultimately his society does kill him – for the Great War is coming – it seems fair to say that Woolf suggests we cannot just turn to impersonal forces to describe character either. Since Jacob is hard to fix down to begin with, he is too uncertain to be moulded by external forces.

All this is to say that the novel looks to the sources of character from fiction of previous centuries – what is revealed in letters, or the forces of an impersonal society, and says these are not adequate. Even dialogue itself is typically disconnected, disjointed words floating on the page, with Jacob rarely speaking. The old ways do not work, but how does Woolf innovate and experiment to build an alternative idea of character – and what are the limits?

In With The New

If I try to think of how this novel works, what makes it modern in its depiction of character, the answer is simple – the fragmentary flashes of prose that make up the bulk of the text. Jacob’s Room is told in snatches, sometimes only a single short paragraph long. It is true that every biography is broken into events and key moments, for lives are long. But in Jacob’s Room the moments chosen are less obviously important, even when contextualised. We might read symbolic importance into them, such as by analysing the significance of the sheep’s skull he finds on the beach as a child or the image of the moth, but it’s not necessarily the case that any of the characters joins us in such narrativizing work.

All memory is fragmentary. When I try to think back to yesterday, an ordinary day, there’s scant solidity to it. I recall a few images, the food I cooked for dinner, but little more. Woolf enjoys noting vibrant colours, and drifting between her characters’ consciousnesses, as if they are already looking back from some moment a little ahead. This gives the text a kind of blurred feeling. Even its characters seem themselves a little like names on whirling sticks, because none is quite embodied, pinned down and described like a beetle in the previous century would be. Really, like certain paintings, while we may appreciate the texture of Woolf’s prose up close, it’s only when we retreat a little that we see the overall effect – the mood, the shifting shapes settling into scenes.

Such fragmentation puts action into the background and overall reflects that pessimism about getting to the heart of character which I mentioned earlier. Solidity, perhaps, comes from the novel’s interest in architecture and buildings, which, suggested by its very title provides the clearest example of this. Yet Jacob’s own room, when we first encounter it at Cambridge, gives no clue to his personality. “Jacob’s room had a round table and two low chairs.” For the first mention of the title, its lack of force is its force. He has books and the detritus recognisable to anyone who has gone to Oxbridge – “a photograph of his mother; cards from societies with little raised crescents, coats of arms, and initials.” A piece of writing in his own hand is titled “Does History consist of the Biographies of Great Men?” – a normal assignment then, as if to highlight that Jacob is really only an average Edwardian, nothing special. 

We often think of Woolf as a writer of the inner world, someone who lived in the marginal thoughts of men and women. Jacob’s Room certainly shows her moving between her characters, but of them, Jacob is probably the one inhabited least. When we hear a voice, like his room it almost seems to tell us we were fools for expecting anything more of him – “I’m twenty-two. It’s nearly the end of October. Life is thoroughly pleasant, although unfortunately there are a great number of fools about. One must apply oneself to something or other–God knows what. Everything is really very jolly–except getting up in the morning and wearing a tail coat.” Here is the gentle delusion of superiority of the untested, but does this show Jacob to be any different to a hundred thousand other young men? Certainly not.

At the beginning I mentioned a kind of anxiety to the prose. Woolf read avidly among her modernist contemporaries such as Katherine Mansfield and knew through Eliot what Joyce was up to with Ulysses, so she had a keen awareness of the options for advancing prose which were being worked upon by others. One thing I found curious was that in her revisions of the novel Woolf primarily worked to reduce instances of interiority. It was as if, while retreating from the scenes and structures of 19th century fiction – the genealogies and letters, the carefully orchestrated scenes and overheard gossip – she did not want to commit wholly to something from the 20th century, that totally absorbing, egotistical monologic stream of consciousness of the sort we read from Molly Bloom at the end of Ulysses. Something that is both extraordinary, yet at the same time a kind of dead end, for it denies the soul of every other living being.

All this is to say that it’s as if Woolf were experimenting here with trying to find a third way of characterisation, neither the pure continuous interiority of the stream of consciousness, nor the lifeless puppetry of the realist novel. A characterisation through fragments, through assembling snatched moments of life, and of consciousness, into a kind of whole. Except, if that is the goal, it is a failure. I have no idea who Jacob is, and I am not sure that any truth on that score really lurks within the novel. We may have escaped the madness of stream of consciousness and run out onto the street, but now cars are hurtling past us, and all is disorientation.

Yet if the goal is not to create a character, but to paint a world, to load readers with the impressions and thoughts of a society, then by contrast Jacob’s Room is a great success. We learn as much about Jacob in five pages as we do in fifty – giving us more is only like putting another thin sheet of coloured glass upon a heap, and indeed the effect of colouring is diminished as more and more is added. The first sheet is when things are most striking. So it is that in a single one of Woolf’s fragments she has more than enough opportunity to create her effects.

The one that sticks in my mind comes from early on, a tiny story of four pages, in which Jacob’s mother receives a letter from his tutor proposing marriage, considers it, and decides to remain independent. In this section Woolf’s total technical mastery is evident. Mrs Flanders receives the letter and, expecting nothing but remarks related to her son’s work, reads it while continuing her own business. Thus do we see her, divided: ““Yes, enough for fish-cakes tomorrow certainly – Perhaps Captain Barfoot—” she had come to the word “love.”” A few sentences on she rages at her children, not truly out of anger towards them, but because she is angry at the letter and cannot control it. This is all wonderful, delicate writing. Her emotions, a world of them, are covered in a few pages. Completeness stretches even to time – we get a little epilogue, in which some years later Mr Floyd sees Jacob by chance in London, but thinks he “had grown such a fine young man that Mr Floyd did not like to stop him in the street.”

What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Woolf comes up against the limits of biography within this approach. She can create characters through her experimentation, certainly. But with her reluctance to travel too deep and stay too long inside their heads, as she does in her later novels, that characterisation can only go so far. That is why Jacob remains a blur, while those other characters, whose internal worlds are clearer to us, are themselves are much clearer – Mrs Dalloway or Mrs Ramsay, for example. Overall, Jacob’s Room is a book of wonderful prose, challenging forms, and experiments which remain relevant to writing even today. I did not love it as I do To the Lighthouse, but that is no matter. Woolf was such a prolific writer – of letters and diaries as well as her novels – that as readers we get a view of nearly-unmatched privilege compared to other writers. We see not just the brilliance of her experiments when they succeed, but also the many false-starts and sites of practice she needed to prepare for them. That, for anyone interested in the craft of fiction, will never not be exciting.