After Three Years: The Story of the Application of an Old Principle in Platemaking and Its Adaptation to Book Printing (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from After Three Years: The Story of the Application of an Old Principle in Platemaking and Its Adaptation to Book Printing

Expressionism in fiction, as in drama, does not go as far away from literal reproduction of the raw material as does expressionism in painting. Novelist and dramatist alike feel some obligations toward life as it concretely exists. Still, as has been pointed out, the principle of abstract composition, seen in one form in Dos Passos' later novels in the sharp, discontinuous breaking through of the narrative by quite unrelated images and seen also, as a matter of fact, in the whole idea of fictional counterpoint, represents leanings toward the mode of expres sionism. Perhaps Dos Passos might be best called a post impressionist; the elements which he breaks up to recombine abstractly are strongly actualistic, and indeed the total effect of the whole composition retains no small part of that actualistic flavor. Like Cézanne's landscapes, the later Dos Passos novels readily identify themselves as representations. On the other hand, there is in both that breaking up of the surface that in dicates the abstract rather than the actualistic or impression istic conception of the material. For a further instance, Faulk ner's As I Lay Dying illustrates extremely well the breaking up of the surface by means of a fragmentary and discontinuous handling of points of View, with recombination in terms of a circular pattern of diverse personalities and personal emotions centering in a simple story. Virginia Woolf also, in The Waves, breaks up the narrative surface by disintegrating all the char acters into stream-of-consciousness fragments extending sup posedly over many years, and then intermingling the frag ments, effecting the recombination by a symbolic use of the waves as seen in a succession of points of time from dawn to sunset. And of course Ulysses, which represents in some form.

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