MODERN AS VISION
351
until the present time. It demands respect however when it lingers
on in the work of that heroic survivor, Samuel Beckett. Beckett
is
characteristically modern
in
that he makes his audience aware that
the mysterious eloquent apathy of his characters is the result of a
whole external disaster in surrounding history.
When we read the following by Miss Pamela Hansford Johnson
on Literature in
The Baldwin Age
we
ask
ourselves whether it is not
Miss Johnson who is "in retreat":
The full retreat began in the years between 1922 and 1925, the
years that saw
Mrs. Dalloway
and
Ulysses.
It was the retreat into
peri–
mental experiment in verbal and oral techniques: and it pretty well
dominated the English novel for the next thirty years ...
What shrivelled away in their work was any contact between man
and society. "Bloomsday" is Bloom's alone and no-one else's: Mrs. Dalla–
way, if she is anything at all, is merely herself, walking in her own dream
of a private world. Everything dropped away from the novel but Man–
ner: all that counted was how the thing was done, and never the thing
itself. We must blame no writer for the influence he exerts on his
successors: to have been an influence at all is a seal of achievement.
Yet the followers of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce began to lead
the novel into sterility. And nobody saw anything wrong in that inexor–
able and dangerous process. Why not? Because life was growing too
hard for writers to face, and quiet lay in impotency alone.
It is difficult to disentangle
this.
It reads like lines deliberately
crossed in order to confuse and mislead. For example, in the muddling
up of Joyce and Mrs. Woolf as though they were one flesh like
Hamlet's uncle and his mother, or Sir Charles and Lady Snow; and
writing that no one "saw anything wrong" in these writers--as
though F.
R.
Lewis and Wyndham Lewis had not spent years con–
ducting the most vigorous polemics against Virginia Woolf (as
also
against James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence ) .
The passage confuses two important issues. For while on the
one hand it is untrue to imply that there was no contact between
man and society in James Joyce, it is true that the method of the
interior monologue, which in
Ulysses
was a technique for presenting
not just his main characters but also a whole society as a state of
consciousness, became in Virginia Woolf's work largely an instru-
