Wheat, chaff, stalks, seeds

[alice wellintown]

Speaking of Dickens and Lawrence  and Joyce ... Eliot ....Woolf. . . .

Novelists, not historians or political pamphleteers, explore and
develop new subject matter, new style, and new technique, engage in a
radical reconsideration of the relationship between reality and
fiction ...

And

They plumb the cultural changes of their works & days, as real in the
conventional and historical sense as the Vietnam War and student
protests of the 1960s.

Progressive industrialization is a powerful force in these novels.

But,  the history we read in D.H. Lawrence’s fiction is concerned with
human consciousness and the
unconscious life of characters living and loving in the age of
accelerating cultural transformation.

In Woolf’s _To The Lighthouse_ we get an idea of what history-bereft
of human experience and artistic expression would mean.

 History, Literature, and the practitioners of both are tangled in
lines cast deep into Remembrance.

 History may be considered an objective series of public events, and
Literature may be regarded as an Art that
represents, or ignores, or fictionalizes these events. And history may
be considered a narrative, and its relation to literature may be more
reciprocal, and our sense of the nature and significance of narrative
may influence our sense of historical patterns and their meanings and
vice versa.

Tangled Lines and Links

The chain and link metaphor is a favorite of Dickens. Pip to Magwitch.
Scrooge to Mankind and His Business.

If you prefer Melville’s Monkey-Rope, CH. 72 M.D. “I saw that this
situation of mine was the precise
situation of every mortal that breathes; only in most cases, he, one way or
other, has this Siamese connection with a plurality of other mortals.”

If Joyce delight thee more see Ulysses Ch. 3, 35-40, “The cord of all
link back, strandenwining cable of all flesh. That is why
mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello! Kinch here.
Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.

Remenbrance belongs to the people and Art can claim its veracity and its power.
In Hawthorne and His Moses, Melville, speaking of the relationship of veracity
and art wrote: “For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared
white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal
herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the
Truth, -even though it be covertly, and by snatches.”

 For Joyce, Art is not dependent on or conditioned by history but is a
self-creating integral power.
This aesthetic principle is suggested by the titles of his fiction: in the
Portrait of the Artist as a young Man, art is the cause of itself in the sense
that the art of the artist produces its own genesis. In Ulysses art is the
cause of its self in the sense that the art of the Odyssey produces its own
re-enactment in a single day in Dublin. In Finnegans Wake art is the cause of
itself in the sense that the end of the work joins the beginning to produce a
wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer.