Voynich, Bennett, and Tressell: Two Alternatives for Realism in the Transition Age

254 VOYNICH, BENNETT, AND TRESSELL: TWO ALTERNATIVES FOR REALISM IN THE TRANSITION AGE By James G. Kennedy (Northern Illinois University) Raymond Williams has argued that modern tragedy, from Ibsen to Camus, has been limited by "the Idea of tragedy which is now temporarily dominant, but which is offered as at once historical and absolute."1 This idea Is a set of simplifications: tragic order ("suffering is a vital and energising part of the natural order") and the tragic individual ("loneliness and the loss of human connection ") and the Irreparable death ("an absolute fact of human existence") and "the fact of transcendent evil" ("inescapable and Irreparable" evil in the nature of man) (59, 44, 58). Williams challenges this idea, which amounts to "the confirmation of disorder," with the idea of revolution as tragic action that is the "comprehension and . . . resolution" of disorder (83). Williams proposes not resignation to suffering but "the struggle against suffering [i.e., revolution] learned in suffering"; not the "deadlock" of individualism preventing "human connection," but "the whole fact of community"; not "the life-death contradiction . o . . Ί exist - I shall die· . . . [as] absolute," but "•we exist - we shall not die· [as] ... a resolution"; not evil, like political terror, as absolute in human life, but "the long revolution against human alienation" including "the new kinds of alienation" that revolution produces (203, 58, 188, 59, 82). Theory and practice, like Brecht's, "that suffering is avoidable, but . » . is not [now] avoided" suggests that tragic art can bring a wisdom different from our received notions of 'the human condition· (203). By "the assumption of a permanent, universal and essentially unchanging human nature," bourgeois ideology suppresses the fact that there have always been men who have struggled to end suffering (45, 49). Williams· alternative ideas of modern tragedy are like the "contrast " he sees in Nietzsche "between «moral· and 'metaphysical· .... a particular, rational kind of wisdom, as opposed to the •wisdom of being'" (41). Williams says that "the general distinction between «aesthetic· and «moral· which is common in this period [I88O-I920] is really based on seeing a contrast between the 'moral · or «merely human,· and the ·metaphysical,· which is somehow •the natural order'" (41, 45). »The aesthetic' means that which is cut off and autonomous and inexpressible only for those who expect a work of art to reflect a concrete historical environment . For all aesthetes, the work of art means immensely as a makebelieve (or even occult) timeless refuge from horror and boredom. It is time to wonder whether not only the modern Idea of tragedy but also our 'aesthetic' ideas of poetry and fiction are all versions of the Western, bourgeois flight from the struggle against suffering In the present. Art for art's sake, the Symbolist Move- 255 ment - the whole heartless business of the Romantic Image, the dancer, the condition of music, etc. - assume that there is no way in history for human fulfillment.2 Even realistic fiction, which cannot escape the "relative or customary," nevertheless, has tried since 1880 to transcend the necessary despair of individuals in class society by whispers about the eternal riddles of existence.-5 The few exceptions are novels written by men and women who are loyal to some prospect of social revolution. In the Transition period, novels by E. L. Voynich and Robert Tressell illustrate the moral (and revolutionary) alternative for realistic fiction that was pursued by no one else.^ Novels by Arnold Bennett, on the other hand, rise to metaphysical elevations that are inconsistent with Bennett's naturalistic convention of characterization. The selection of Bennett is arbitrary« any bourgeois novelist in the period, whether liberal or conservative in his opinions, could stand opposite to Voynich and Tresell. The two novelists whose sensibilities were progressive (in sympathy with the people) or working-class, wrote novels different In focus and method from those written by men or women whose sensibilities (their ways of seeing the world, not their opinions) were colored by their middle-class consciousnesses.5 In the following discussion, it will be possible for me to pass beyond class Judgments in sympathy for and understanding of novelists ' characters, but it will be impossible for me to hold two class points of...