ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

fragmentary song. The mind functions in categories and would like to
believe them real. The literary forms of biography, drama and fiction
implement this natural wish. (Double Image 69-70)
As a result, the inherent lie of fiction is inescapable. What’s more, in its very
fictiveness, narrative is bound up with biography, the attempt to write non-fiction. In
giving up the attempt at realism through inclusiveness, Heppenstall makes his
allegiance to modernism clear:
The writing and reading of fiction and biography give the mind an
agreeable sense of coming to grips with reality and with the supreme
reality of individual human life. But nothing could be more remote
from the reality of a man’s life than any version of it which could be
written down. The mere writing gives form to things which had no
form and substitutes an intellectual form for a form which once had
reality. Every piece of writing is a dramatisation. Even a chemical
equation dramatises the complicated mutual impact of substances. The
equation is a brief synopsis. Certain common elements are abstracted
and given balance and opposition. More is omitted than included. And
this is true not only of shabby thought and cheap writing. It is only a
little less true of the best of both. Biography is always tendentious and
always untrue. Fiction and drama are further refinements of the
biographical method. To praise no matter what play or novel for being
‘true to life’ is to prove oneself a fool. The naturalists, the
photographic realists, are the most crafty liars of all. It is only when we
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