Sandbox/carrot
Post-Victorian literature, such as the modernist novel The Waves by Virginia Woolf, expresses a distinct need to break free from the confinements of definition, and is, in this way, almost entirely different from most literature. Despite the relatively miniscule difference between the time periods which separate these two genres, this transgressive aspect of Post-Victorian literature lies in stark contrast to Victorian literature in general, with its romantic prose and notions. Early poetry written by Thomas Hardy, while aiming to express the same human condition as the modernists, does it in a much more structured and traditional manner which can be carefully defined as Victorian, as can be his later novels. The distinct gap between prose like Woolf’s and poetry like Hardy’s is due, in part, to the way literature is a reflection of the time period as a whole, as well as of the general population and the author’s audience. The artists themselves must also be considered, but with a much more critical eye as they are both a reflection of the times as well as being active observers and recorders. What Virginia Woolf and Thomas Hardy have done, as representatives of their respective times, is to take the idea that ‘In poetry there is revolution; in the novel, continuity and evolution’ and blurred the interface between the two so that there is hardly the distance there once was between formulaic poetry and prose.
According to modernist writer (and contemporary to Woolf) T.S. Eliot, the job of the poet is “to force, to dislocate, if necessary, language into meaning” [cite] and therefore language becomes much more poetic by its very nature. There is no doubt about Woolf’s writings being poetic. She uses unexpected turns of phrases, and herself considers The Waves as a very long prose-poem, being disgusted with the novels and poetry of the time. Because she lived through the fin de siècle, a conscious reader can see her style growing and changing as the atmosphere around her changes. Woolf wrote The Waves during the period of “High Modernism” and in her diaries throughout the 1920’s a reader “can find her sketching out ideas for a work of prose fiction which would be crepuscular” (Cite 9). The allusion to twilight is a familiar one to critics and readers alike because it signals a time of division, and while this obsession with the dual nature of things is common for writers of all time periods, Woolf developed a style for helping to discuss this intrinsic duality of humanity, and was eventually best known for her masterful use of it. The term “stream-of-consciousness” was eventually coined to describe her style of writing (IBID). Woolf herself stated that “[I]f one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot, little probability, and a vague general confusion in which the clear-cut features of the tragic, the comic, the passionate, and the lyrical were dissolved beyond the possibility of separate recognition” Virginia Woolf, "Modern Novels" (1919). This is a perfect understanding of The Waves- as a type of free-form work of art which delights in the ‘dissolving’ or decay of barriers between forms of poetry or prose- and allows it to simply stand on its own as a text. This is certainly an evolutionary idea and perhaps one people today still do not quite grasp or embrace, as a human’s need to categorize in order to understand overpowers the intellectual decision to destroy these categories in order to build new relations.
There is a hope by the authors of modern literature that in the process of dislocating language, the reader will also become dislodged, into an area slightly removed from time in the way it exists as a strict social dictation. Time is an important locator and has been used as a rhetorical strategy, either consciously or unknowingly, since the conception of prose as the present-day reader knows it. It hinges upon the memory of the writer and the time which passes between the event and the memory being written down. Critic Katherine Elkins has this to say about the common modernistic feelings on memory:
Key modernists demonstrate that fragments of memory can be recombined to produce new memorial experiences. Partaking of the physical and the phenomenal, of matter and imagination, modern memory recomposes the past with the present in a way that challenges our understanding of influence. (510)
That is to say that we create the memories that we want and thus shape our own realities. It is a much more internalized process, and it can be argued that is it much more selfish, as it does less to consider its ‘audience’ than pre-Modern writings. This “fragmentation” lies at the heart of Modernism, and explains why the prose of the time which follows characters, like The Waves, is continuously breaking and rejoining the ties between other characters in the text, allegorical or historical characters, and even different parts of their one self. Modernism is less concerned with the so-called ‘objective realism’ of earlier works, even Hardy’s poetry.
Contrary to this idea of dislocation, Hardy’s poetry aims to locate the reader; to place them in a distinct setting which he develops with his use of language. This setting is almost always external to the reader, and although Hardy’s aim is generally the same as what most writers attempt (that is, to communicate a scenario which encompasses the whole domain of human nature with a few concise words) he shows true mastery of language when it would be fair to say that all authors attempt this concision, but only the greatest achieve it. The poem Hap, one of his earlier and therefore less critically acclaimed poems, should be looked to as a general example of his poetry before his novel-writing career. It is written in a standard poetic form with a distinct rhyme scheme and iconic first person speaker in an earth-bound environment (meaning only that there is a sky above it and it is subject to sun and rain), and there is a clear ‘story’ happening to the speaker, despite all the dialogue being rhetorical and hypothetical. It is a poem of dramatic situation, much like that of the Victorian poem, though it should be noted that “he differed from the great Victorians other than Browning in not wishing to write poetry like that of Keats” who was considered to be the standard in poetry writing for the time (Bowra 6-7). This places Hardy somewhere between the Great Victorians and the Modernists. He straddles the line of duality that most writers strive toward, making him a truly progressive writer of poetry and evidence of an evolving style.
Part of Hardy’s appeal, and one of the ways which he is distinctly set apart from the modern period of writing, is his satire. Hardy excels when he provides the reader with a bleak world view, which is one of the reasons why his poetry cannot be considered purely Victorian, but only Victorian-influenced [CITE]. Hap is similar to that of Hardy’s later novels and poems in that it delights in a sense of hopelessness-- probably more so, in fact, than it delights in sheer hope. These satirical and sometimes morbid situations are important to Hardy as a writer because they are ‘situational’ and, as Bowra notes, “when he tries to write a more abstract and more purely philosophical poetry, Hardy is less successful. […] His genius was essentially dramatic, and his cosmic personalities are convincing only when they take part in human action” (17) Human action is essential to revolution, and Hardy was the perfect person to incite revolution through his words-- be they poetry or prose. His biting satire normally provoked readers through questions of mortality and the idea of god as an absent being (during a time when it was taken for truth that a God existed and his existence authorized a hierarchy which Hardy made light of as well). In Hap he creates a situation where “some vengeful god” speaks directly to him, and tells the speaker that he takes joy in the speaker’s sorrow (ll 1-3).
Hap
The problem of clarity is also something to be considered when analyzing the gap between the two periods of literature. Both writers intend to do several things with their writings; to write in a way which expresses what it is to be human, to develop critical ideas, and to have the reader take something in from their work, whether that be emotional (pleasure or frustration) or intellectual (forming new opinions on the topics the work explores). To communicate an idea is a universal aspiration of writers. The form, idea, and content can- and do- differ from one piece of work to the next but this is what makes a writing movement exist. If they did not differ, there would be neither revolution nor evolution, because a static movement is an innate contradiction in terms. Eric Warner calls formal conversational prose “pandering to the values of the audience” and the “movement” from Victorian to Modern came about when writing became condensed and compressed under new innovation, such as Freud and Einstein, whose newly emerging ideas made an indelible impact on both the scientific and literary worlds [Wagner, 5-6]. However, Warner does not take into account that both Woolf and Hardy alienate different audiences while promoting others, for the sake of ‘movement’. With text like The Waves, Woolf is signalling to a group like her beloved Bloombury Group: high minded in both conceptual and literary ideals, and valuing allusions, vagueness, and experimentation with the formal use of diction to which readers were accustomed. Hardy was much more concerned with getting readers to empathize with his work, and through this pathos he could better get the reader to understand his satire on the modern world.
There is a chapter in The Waves which Bernard continually compares and contrasts himself with Byron whom he has been reading while at college. This passage can be looked at critically from many different perspectives to make certain --. Byron, like Keats, was a poet of high regard in the Victorian era. He wrote exceedingly romantic, formulaic, and winding poetry which were the qualities that were mostly looked at when analyzing a Victorian poem. His characters, however, were barely human and had traded in most of their humanity for romanticised notions of how life should be, which echoed with a familiarity to a long distant past that had been greatly idealized. Woolf juxtaposes this tradition of romanticizing the past with a setting that is placed continuously in the present. The allusions are to heroes and figures of the past but they are describing Bernard’s present, and even then they are markedly ‘not him’. Woolf, using Bernard as a mouthpiece, says about Nevelle “You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character” then later “Yet Byron never made tea as you do...” (55).
