Modern Novels and Vagueness

[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)¹

In "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," T. S. Eliot declares that the role of art in modern times is to provide a coherent "scaffolding"—the "mythical method" in Joyce's case—for a world that is itself meaningless.² Eliot's contemporaries and critical descendants also emphasize the "hard" and firmly delineated quality of modernist writing. It must be "the definite and the concrete," "exact," "objective," "particular"; its "watchword . . . is Precision"; it must seek "to refine, to clarify, to intensify"; it must avoid anything resembling symbolism's "mushy technique"—above all, it must not be "vague."³ But are concrete and precise really the best adjectives to describe works like Joyce's "damned monster-novel"?⁴ Virginia Woolf offered a very different view of modern fiction when she recorded her revelation while writing Jacob's Room:

happier today than I was yesterday having this afternoon arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel. . . For I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist.⁵

Woolf's plan for Jacob's Room explicitly challenges Eliot's contention that literature ought to provide an objective "scaffolding. " But what exactly is the "new form" for the "new novel"? And what would it mean for a novel to be "crepuscular"?

On the twenty-fifth of November 1922, a few months after the publication of both Ulysses and Jacob's Room, Bertrand Russell delivered a paper entitled "Vagueness" in front of a small group at Oriel College at Oxford University.⁶ In contrast to Eliotic precision, Russell lamented that he "propose[d] to prove that all language is vague and therefore my language is vague." He stated:

You all know that I invented a special language with a view to avoiding vagueness, but unfortunately it is unsuited for public occasions. I shall therefore, though regretfully, address you in English, and whatever vagueness is to be found in my words must be attributed to our ancestors for not having been predominately interested in logic.⁷

Russell claimed to regret addressing his audience in English because of its "vagueness." "We can see an ideal of precision [in English], to which we can approximate indefinitely," he asserted, "but we cannot attain this ideal . . . It is therefore not applicable to this terrestrial life, but only to an imagined celestial existence" (V 65). However, trying to aspire to this "celestial existence," linguistically and logically, seemed worthwhile, and therefore Russell insisted that language ought to be subjected to rigorous scientific standards:

Science is perpetually trying to substitute more precise beliefs for vague ones; this makes it harder for a scientific proposition to be true than for the vague beliefs of uneducated persons to be true, but makes scientific truth better worth having if it can be obtained.

(V 68)

Russell explained that he was giving the talk because, "vagueness is much more important in the theory of knowledge than you would judge it to be from the writings of most people," and he intended to demonstrate "that the process of sound philosophizing . . . consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things . . . to something precise, clear, definite."⁸

In "Vagueness," Russell highlighted several philosophical questions that were fermenting in 1922 and that are germane to the treatment of language and form in the "new novel." First, to amend the words of Joyce, "it seems that language was to blame" for what appeared to be otherwise unresolvable philosophical paradoxes. Russell called this tendency to treat purely linguistic confusions as actual philosophical questions the "fallacy of verbalism" (V 62). Second, Russell asserted that analytical methods and logical formulae were needed to clean up the muddle in which philosophy found...