• The novelist is interested in what life is like, in its everyday texture. The novel as a form is an exploration of the variety of life, through realistic prose narrative, in the hope of finding a pattern.
• Henry James introduced the technique of telling a story from the point of view of an observer who is not necessarily a main participant in the story, but whose curiosity, and success or failure in satisfying it, may become the main theme; and while the observer is judging the other characters, we may find ourselves being manoeuvered into judging the observer. He brought into the novel points of view so subtle, characters so reserved and refined, delicacies of motive so intangible, that probably no previous writer would have thought them solid enough for fiction. James is a writer of the Impressionist School, a movement which also included Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, writers whose works are marked by an over-reliance on subtlety and on delicate impressions of mood, scene, situation, and the careful unraveling of the psychological strands that make up these impressions.
• D. H. Lawrence’s difference is that he takes sides, angrily, among his characters, and hectors his readers, in a way which no other major novelist does. What is notable about Lawrence is his quickness, the impatience, the spurtiness of his way of writing. Most of the good novelists since about 1930 are plain straightforward writers, using old-fashioned story-telling methods, though symbolic overtones or allegorical meanings can often be found in some writers’ works.
• One of the great modern thinkers who has had a deep influence on the
modern novel, and on all forms of literature and art, is Sigmund Freud.
Freud’s ideas have become so much a part of the intellectual climate of
our time that one tends to take them for granted, and to forget what a
startling, indeed shocking impact they had on the literary mind when they
first became a matter for public discussion. His concept of the ego
and the id, the censor and the unconscious, is very important to modern
literature; his direct influence no doubt accounts in part for the frankness
about family relationships and the sexual realism of much of modern fiction.
New subtleties of psychological approach, or new delicacies of presentation
or description, which at first appear to open out new country for the novelist,
may in the end send him chasing so many different hares that he forgets
what he was primarily after: a purposeful exploration of life, a quest
for a certain kind of moral centre based on a just and varied sampling
of typical human experience. Rooted in a theory of biological instincts,
Freud’s view of the developing psyche placed a great emphasis on the power
of the unconscious to affect conduct; intellectual convictions seemed to
be rationalizations of emotional needs. The firm line which 19th-century
psychiatrists had drawn between the normal and the abnormal, the latter
of which they explained largely in terms of degeneracy, disappeared; dreams
and slips of the tongue, if nothing else, showed that we all displayed
neurotic symptoms.