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The Columbia History of the British NovelEven while the writer stands detached, creating characters, we experience his or her urgent effort to create a self. Thus the reader must maintain a double vision. He must apprehend the narrative and the process of creating that narrative. In such diverse works as the Marlow tales, The Rainbow, and To the Lighthouse (1927), the process of writing, of defining the subject, of evaluating character, of searching for truth, becomes part of the novel. Yet, as Woolf writes in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924), "where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth, the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition." "Finding a way"-the quest for values and for aesthetic form-becomes a major modernist subject. -686- Conrad believed that "another man's truth is a dismal lie to me." To understand why Conrad thinks each of us is locked into her or his own perceptions and that all values are ultimately illusions, perhaps we should examine Conrad's ironic image of the cosmos as created by an indifferent knitting machine-an image he proposed in an 1897 letter to his optimistic socialist friend Cunninghame-Graham: There is a, — let us say, — a machine ...» |
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