The spatial event of writing: John Galsworthy and the creation of Fraternity

The spatial event of writing

The happening, or spatial event of the text, is its bringing into being by the intersection of multiple actors and agencies – authors, texts, readers – across space and time. It is a theory that suggests that all texts are performances, which coalesce through the interactions of the multiple spatialities of their different agents. As such, the text has no stability in time or space; rather, it is always an emergent event. The power of this theory, as Hones observes, is that it is able to accommodate differences in approach across the field of literary geography, for it regards each approach as a distinct spatial event. Despite the inherent flexibility of the ‘spatial event of the text’, and its recognition that creation occurs across the event of the text, our geographical understanding of it remains a little skewed, for it has tended to follow the thinking of reader-response criticism, where emphasis is placed on the agency of the reader and their interaction with the text as a finished product. ⁶ Little attention has been directed to the ‘other side’ – to the intersection and distribution of social agencies that occur in, or are pivotal to, the making of a text as a material entity. This skew is understandable where we recognize reading as a creative act that brings a text into being, but it does not address the fact that the intersections that take place between writers, readers and texts in the process of a text’s making may well be significantly different to those that come after the material text.

In part this lacuna may well owe to the problematic nature of creation, which has long been understood through a Platonic lens, wherein creativity is seen to arise through the introspection of the lone consciousness. ⁷ As such, it tends to be seen as non-representable, and while Brace and Johns-Putra demonstrate that this is not so, understandings of literary creation remain wedded to intertextual influences or to the identification of seed moments, both of which lose a sense of the liveliness and longue durée of creation. ⁸ This has not been helped by the power of New Criticism, which has guided literary studies away from the agents of the text as a source of literary meaning towards the agency of the text. Literary geography has not been immune to this theoretical shift, with Brosseau’s work encouraging us to attend not to what a text says about space or author, but to how it says it. ⁹ Meanwhile, the non-representational turn within the discipline more broadly has created epistemological and methodological challenges for a sub-discipline actuated by words and texts. ¹⁰ We have, therefore, tended to concentrate our efforts on what novels mean, rather than on how they are made meaningful by their creators. Against this backdrop Hones’ work offers something of a departure, for in applying Doreen Massey’s propositions about space to the novel – that it arises from spatial interrelationships, that multiple writings and readings of a novel will coexist in space and that the novel is always in a state of becoming – it encourages us to see the text as a social making. Although much of the emphasis is on the imaginative or conceptual making of the text, it is a theory that pushes us to consider the text as a lived social practice in which creative agency is distributed among a variety of actors.

Within literary studies there is a long tradition of work that is interested in the nature of social influences and attribution within the creative process. These studies have tended to argue, albeit with different motivations, for the text as a collaborative undertaking, for where the former seeks to draw out the multiplicity of influences at work on a text, the latter seeks to work through these to the ‘real’ author. ¹¹ Both, however, tend to theorize the creative process as an open system in which multiple others are involved. These others can be external agents who take the role of resonator, opponent, editor or collaborator, or as something more fluid, as in Attridge’s work, where the ‘other’ is ‘that which beckons or commands from the fringes of my mental sphere’. ¹² Whether person, idea, experience or encounter, these studies draw our attention to the text as a collaboration of agencies, which work to destabilize our intellectual field and transport us beyond what we think or know. Yet, in their focus on collaboration these studies take us little further than an understanding of how and why agency is distributed within the creative process. We learn little, for instance, of what these others produce. That they produce something is inevitable, for, as Crang argues, novels articulate a geography that is peculiar to the time and space of their creation. ¹³ Although time and space are employed here as a broad periodization or epoch, it lends itself to thinking about how particular others at particular times participate in the making of a text and its geography.

If we recognize that others produce something we are simultaneously recognizing another dimension of the spatial event of the text. It is a theory that has tended to focus on the geographies of the text – how it works in the world – yet a turn to its ‘other side’ brings to the fore not only the geographies of its creation, but the textual geographies that arise from this creation. To explore this duality it is instructive to turn to Rogers’ work on the leakiness of place, for it urges us to consider creation as an outcome of translocal connections, both physical and imaginative, to other places and people. At the same time, it is concerned not only with tracing these connections, but in exploring the productive effects, or the ‘restless, generative quality’ of these connections. ¹⁴ If we apply these ideas to the ‘other side’ of the spatial event of a text it suggests that novels are both products and expressions of translocal spatialities; they arise from socio-spatial influences and these influences participate in the imaginative forging of new social worlds. As such, ‘others’ seep into an author’s creative practice – into the happening of their text – connecting the author to ideas beyond their self and these translocal connections help make new geographies happen within the text.

This returns us, momentarily, to the idea of collaboration, which is so central to influence and attribution studies. Yet, where influence and attribution studies merely register the collaborative presence of others within the creative process, a translocal approach activates others as a performative and interconnected part of this process. Other people, ideas and places are not just isolated or disconnected performers within the creative process; rather, they are an assemblage of spatialities and imaginaries that connect present worlds to past worlds. In this light, it seems more appropriate to regard the happening of the text as a social, rather than a purely collaborative process, for a social perspective gives us more scope to explore texts as ‘but one outcome of a process that far exceeds them’; words may produce one space, but the process of choosing, shaping and defending these words may well reveal a multiplicity of others, other worlds and others worldly experiences. ¹⁵ That is why Skinner argues that we must interpret the text as an object linked to its creator and its creator’s social world, for it is through an author’s being-within-the-world that texts emerge and transform. ¹⁶

This paper, therefore, explores the ‘other side’ of literature’s spatial event through John Galsworthy’s composition of Fraternity. It argues that the compositional process of this novel was translocal in the sense that it was an outcome of spatial influences and that these influences helped to express and articulate new geographies within the novel. The first part of the paper works from the text to explore how the textual style and strategies Galsworthy developed within Fraternity owed to European literary influences. These influences were evident not merely as intertextual motifs, but were complicit in the generation or performance of a new, very European, sense of space within Galsworthy’s work. In the second part of the paper attention turns to the role of reception-in-creation. Galsworthy regularly sought advice from his friends Edward Garnett and Joseph Conrad, each of whom brought ‘other’ worlds to impinge upon Fraternity. The influence of these individuals and their worlds can be felt in the very generation of the novel’s narrative world. Thus, Fraternity is not the simple result of influences, but instead emerges from a concatenation of spatialities that arise from Galsworthy’s social relationship to a multitude of imagined and real others.

This focus on the literary practice of John Galsworthy does raise something of a methodological issue. Where geographical studies of creation have tended to focus upon contemporary practices, where there is opportunity to ‘talk with’ writers about the making of their work-in-process, problems inevitably arise when we move away from contemporary writing to explore the past practices of writing. ¹⁷ Here we have few opportunities to ‘talk with’ the writer, and so find ourselves in the position of having to explore the practice of creation in the representations authors leave behind them. As historical geographers point out, this is not as paradoxical as it seems, for representations are inherently lively being replete with expressions, emotions, thoughts and actions. ¹⁸ What is more, if we follow Barton and Hamilton, all social relationships are inescapably textual: we write and read for them, about them and in them, and so, while the author may appear to us indirectly their texts are pregnant with, and exist as sites of lived, social interactions. ¹⁹ Thus, this paper works from the premise that we can access past practices through the lived textuality of an author’s life; their letters, journals, memoirs, writings and diaries.

Fraternity and its European others

Fraternity was Galsworthy’s seventh novel and it tells the story of the Dallison family – Hilary Dallison, his wife Bianca, his brother Stephen and Stephen’s wife Cecilia – as they come to realize that their comfortable, middle-class lifestyle is predicated upon the existence and toil of their working-class shadows. At first glance this novel seems very much a part of Galsworthy’s ‘indubitably English’ style, for as Edward Garnett observes,

power was given him to analyse and set down the impulses and actions, mental, moral and emotional, of the English types he knew so well, as explicitly as the two English masters, Thackeray and Trollope, who drew each the Englishmen of their day, in portraits no less faithful to life. ²⁰

There is something of a slight in this remark, for at a time of literary innovation with the new realism of the 1890s and the work of early modernists like Henry James and Joseph Conrad, the stress on ‘explicitly’ suggests Galsworthy’s inclination towards the encompassing, omnipotent and deterministic prose style associated with Victorian social realism. ²¹ One of the overriding purposes of Victorian social realism was to convey a sense of social and moral certainty from the represented world to the real world, and in Virginia Woolf’s view, this was precisely what Galsworthy’s fiction sought to do. ²²

Yet, in the very composition of Fraternity Galsworthy was aware of something different going on, observing to Edward Garnett that it was ‘a queer book. More intimate than anything I’ve done – I mean by that, that there seems less machinery of story, less history, more life’. ²³ Galsworthy came to regard Fraternity as one of his most closely observed pieces of work, believing it to be, ‘perhaps, the deepest of them all’. ²⁴ Within his oeuvre though, it is a novel that has attracted little attention, perhaps because, as one of his biographers remarks, ‘in so far as the book is the story of character Fraternity can be seen as a modern novel in a sense that his other books were not’. ²⁵ As well as being a distinctive style of writing, one that is more introspective, fragmented and oscillating in nature, the modern novel is also noted for a very distinctive textual geography, one that is more European, transnational and mobile in nature. ²⁶ Working with new styles, Kitchin and Kneale observe, and developing strategies of defamiliarization and estrangement allow authors to create cognitive space in which to think about future, or different, spatialities. ²⁷ Although Fraternity did not explicitly deploy such strategies, the difference and unfamiliarity of its style may well have afforded Galsworthy opportunities to rethink and rearticulate the representational nature of his novels. Thus, it may well be that Fraternity has defied easy classification because it writes the world in a way that challenges not only the indubitably English style of Galsworthy’s writing, but also its indubitable Englishness.

From around the mid-19th century there arose something of a challenge to Victorian social realism. It was a challenge that had its origins in continental Europe, where a number of authors, inspired by the French writers Émile Zola and Gustav Flaubert, came to develop a literary tradition known as naturalism, or latterly, new realism. Naturalist writers believed that the dominant mode of social realism tended to over-write and over-determine the social world; it created a very closed, ordered and linear world, one often focused around the home, wherein the messiness of real life was reduced to a polite, ideal and coherent whole. ²⁸ They, in comparison, sought to write the world in a manner that was more ‘real’, developing a more pared down and more economical prose style that revealed the world in all its starkness, grittiness and ugly complexity. ²⁹ Naturalist writers intended their work as an extension, not a representation of life; as such, they sought to develop a greater interiority and more cautious style, which indicated rather than told, suggested rather than revealed and which pivoted upon knowing what to leave out, when to stop writing and when to shift scene. ³⁰

Galsworthy’s first encounter with naturalism occurred around 1900 when he was introduced to the work of Ivan Turgenev and Guy de Maupassant, and as he later observed, it was with these two writers that he ‘served that spiritual and technical apprenticeship which every young writer serves, guided by some deep kinship in spirit to one or other of the old past-masters’. ³¹ What he seemingly admired about them was their ‘highly disciplined and detached . . . temperament . . . [where] the author is allowed freedom only in the range of subject and character selected’. ³² The English novel, in Galsworthy’s mind, was inclined to self-indulgence and often went to bed drunk; ³³ naturalism though, by almost absenting and reining in the author was able to avoid such over-writing and omnipotence. As early as 1901 Edward Garnett, Galsworthy’s literary friend and advisor, had encouraged Galsworthy to withdraw from his narratives, observing that the story might ‘take higher rank if the objective method had suddenly vanished . . . and if hints and tokens of a fierce, unexplored subjectivity had expanded into . . . those flashes by which human nature suddenly goes off into tracks of intense individuality’. ³⁴ Although he had experimented with a naturalist style in many of his early novels, it was only in Fraternity that Galsworthy really developed these ‘tracks of intense individuality’.

It is a technique that is particularly well-articulated through Hilary’s growing consciousness of his shadows, and in particular Ivy to whom he is attracted, and his uncertainty over how he should behave towards her:

To give up befriending a helpless girl the moment he found himself personally menaced was exceedingly distasteful. But would she be friendless? Were there not, in Stephen’s words, a hundred things he did not know about her? Had she not other resources? Had she not a story? But here, too, he was hampered by his delicacy: one did not pry into the private life of others! ³⁵

It is not Galsworthy who is telling us this, but Hilary, and it demonstrates Galsworthy’s shift towards free-indirect style. Although commonly associated with literary modernism – and it was this broad group of writers that would be responsible for its aesthetic development – free-indirect style had its origins in the European tradition of literary naturalism. It was a technique for abdicating authorship and giving voice to the character, and as Pascal has shown, it enabled authors to resist, contravene and challenge literary conventions, for it was the character not the author who was responsible for the narrative. ³⁶ As such, Fraternity was designed to be a critical narrative form; it offered the reader an alternative world to that of social realism, and it drew its credibility and authenticity from the performative influence of its European others.

This critical attitude was evident in the way that Galsworthy co-opted Hilary into refashioning the space of the narrative, for where Victorian social realism tended to take form through the cloistered intimacy of the domestic sphere, Hilary moves the narrative into the street. In chapter nine we join him as he ‘chases’ Ivy, the subject of his passion, in a bid to protect her from unwanted attention: ‘Certain that Hughs was really following the girl, he had but to keep him in sight and remain unseen . . . Taking advantage of shop-windows, omnibuses, passers-by, and other bits of cover, he prosecuted the chase up Campden Hill’. ³⁷ This technique not only moves the action of the novel from the private to the public sphere, but it invites us to join Hilary on his pursuit through London’s streets, and this enables us not merely to observe, but to encounter what Galsworthy terms, the humanism of the world. ³⁸ As we walk with Hilary we are immersed in his everyday world, we are alerted to its commonplace features, but we are also made aware of its uncertainty, for to be-in-the-world is to be in a space of possibility; the street narrative does not convey a sense of social order or direction, but, rather, reveals the discomfort, anxiety and indignity of lived experience. ³⁹ In the context of the 18th century novel, Wall might term this a setting for, for the intention is not to represent or describe space, but, rather, to see what it does or can achieve for the narrative. ⁴⁰

This is very apposite, for, as Galsworthy records, Turgenev and de Maupassant not only influenced his development of free-indirect style, they also encouraged him to render ‘life through – but not veiled by – the author’s temperament; so that the effect is almost as though no ink were used’. ⁴¹ The intention was to develop a very economical prose style, which in its sparseness was able to immerse the reader within the living ‘sea of experience and sensation’. ⁴² A sense of this is evident in the way Fraternity avoids describing the social divisions between the Dallison family and their shadows in explicit terms, preferring to use allusion, insinuation and metaphor to dramatize their social interrelationships:

The tide of life was flowing in the town. The streets were awash with wave on wave of humanity, sucked into a thousand crossing currents. Here men and women were streaming out from the meeting of a religious congress, there streaming in at the gates of some social function; like bright water confined within long shelves of rock and dyed with myriad scales of shifting colour, they thronged Rotten Row, and along the closed shop-fronts were woven into an inextricable network of little human runlets. And everywhere amongst this sea of men and women could be seen their shadows, meandering like streaks of grey slime stirred up from the lower depth by some huge, never-ceasing finger. ⁴³

Once more the reader is in the street, watching events with Hilary. The wider significance of these events is neither described nor represented; rather, the reader infers them through Galsworthy’s use of illustration, allusion and suggestion. At times, his use of these techniques seems a little forced and cumbersome, but the purpose is to establish a setting that works in an almost clinical manner; it is, perhaps, a setting for, for it exists as a stage upon within the story can develop of its own volition. ⁴⁴ Thus, the reader is not told of social inequality, instead, they must infer it through the cyclical and habitual nature of street time that Galsworthy establishes. It is a narrative style that is supplemented by the use of short chapters that run, at most, to about four pages. This allows Galsworthy to shift the scene or character focus easily; as readers we see time moving on, we encounter, but do not linger with characters, and we see the juxtaposing of everyday spaces. The result is a montage or cubist-esque form of narration: everyday life is sewn together in a manner that allows us to observe and interpret, without becoming embroiled within or directed by it.

Reception-in-creation: the sociality of Fraternity’s writing

One aspect of the spatial event of the text is the importance attached to its multiple writings and readings. Often this is conceptualized in terms of textual variants and the role that readers play in actualizing the narrative world of the text. ⁴⁵ Drawing on the narrative theory of M.-L. Ryan, Hones argues that the narrative world is the imaginative construction of a holistic, coherent and richly textured world. ⁴⁶ It is a world that is often seen as a creation of the reader, who intuitively responds to signs and signifiers within the text in order to build up a cognitive image of the world. ⁴⁷ It is not, however, a purely textual creation, for, as Hones observes, the narrative world of the reader will always bear traces of their own geographical experiences. At the same time, it is not a process that merely happens once the text is in the world. Reading is central to the creative process, for ‘others’ are invited in to the textual event in order to help clarify and refine the narrative world prior to publication. This is, perhaps, best conceptualized as reception-in-creation; the worlds of the author and their invited reader intersect in an effort to define and refine the epistemological and ontological integrity of the narrative world. The purpose of this is to ensure that the narrative world can be activated by, will resonate with, and will find acceptance among its intended audience, but what it also does is enable others to shape the nature of the narrative world the novel provokes and produces. We can see this occurring in the months leading up to Fraternity’s publication, for Galsworthy called upon his literary friends, Edward Garnett and Joseph Conrad to help him ‘cut through stereotyped or irrelevant language and ideas so that the real writer can be heard’. ⁴⁸

Edward Garnett was one of Galsworthy’s earliest literary advisors. Garnett was something of a self-made ‘man of letters’ who began his career as a reader for several London publishing houses, before becoming a pillar of London literary society as a literary editor, critic and writer. In 1906, when his play The Breaking Point was refused a license, he initiated a vitriolic campaign to free art from censorship and initiate a new type of theatre that evoked the challenging style of continental playwrights like Henrik Ibsen and Gerhart Hauptmann. ⁴⁹ It was an outspokenness that seeped into his literary work, where he helped nurture the careers of some of the more unconventional and challenging early modernists writers, like D.H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad. Galsworthy in many ways was one of Garnett’s first protégés, for in 1901 it was he who urged Galsworthy to move towards a style of ‘intense individuality’, and who continued to criticize him for being wedded to a too explanatory method of writing. ⁵⁰ This was something Garnett seemingly saw persisting in parts of Fraternity, particularly in the characters of Martin and Mr Stone, who, he protested to Galsworthy, veered towards propaganda and thereby over-determined the interpretative space of the novel. ⁵¹ Martin is a trainee doctor, committed to the idea that poverty can be obliterated by living in the slums and setting good examples of healthfulness. Mr Stone, Hilary’s father-in law, is in contrast a theoretician. It is his belief that his book on universal brotherhood will demonstrate where society is going wrong. Galsworthy is very explicit in the connections he draws between these two characters:

Martin says an enthusiast is worse than useless; people, he says, can’t afford to dabble in ideas or dreams. He calls grandfather’s ideas Palaeolithic . . . Martin’s so cocksure. I don’t think he’d find many men of eighty who’d bathe in the Serpentine all the year round, and do his own room, cook his own food, and live on about ninety pounds a year out of his pension . . . and give all the rest away. Martin says that’s unsound, and the ‘Book of Universal Brotherhood’ rot. ⁵²

In arguing that Martin and Mr Stone risk turning Fraternity into propaganda, Garnett is intimating that their characterization is over-written; they are too revelatory and sit, perhaps, somewhat uncomfortably with the more self-conscious, subjective and ambiguous construction of Hilary. Garnett has identified what Iser might term a gap in the text – a space of indeterminacy – where meaning can be made. ⁵³ These gaps can be halts in the narrative or changes in view point, which plunge the reader into the text requiring them, Johnson observes, to take responsibility for interpretation, for meaning is not intended to be self-explanatory. ⁵⁴ Such gaps are necessary to the actualization of a text, but they need to be stylistically consistent, otherwise an author risks disorientating their audience by presenting them with possibilities for any number of narrative worlds. ⁵⁵ Garnett, therefore, is urging Galsworthy to be more consistent in his stylistic innovation in order to prevent reader disorientation. In acknowledging this Galsworthy noted, ‘I have succeeded in eliminating most if not all of what you criticized . . . it was especially hard for me in this book to see your point of “danger”, because I am not seriously after propaganda’. ⁵⁶ Garnett’s reading of Fraternity was influenced by his elision with London literary society and his awareness of its critical expectations. Critical success depended upon stylistic innovation, and if Galsworthy was to escape the label of a Trollopian social realist he needed to create a narrative world that was stylistically flawless and cohesive in its deployment of an intense individuality.

Garnett was not the only recipient of an early draft of Fraternity, so too was Joseph Conrad, who engaged in a somewhat different, and perhaps more resistant reading of it. In his view the ‘intense individuality’ of Fraternity created a narrative world that was too different to anything else within Galsworthy’s oeuvre. As he wrote to Galsworthy, there is ‘the public to consider. A writer like you must make himself accessible for the sake of that which he is working for’. ⁵⁷ Your style is that of ‘fidelity to the surface of life – the surface of events – to the surface of things and ideas’. ⁵⁸ Authorial success is dependent, Curry argues, upon adherence to an accepted style, which once accreted is difficult to challenge, and in Conrad’s view, the naturalist world that Fraternity creates has little fidelity to the expectations of Galsworthy’s normal audience. ⁵⁹ It is looser, more fluid and more speculative than is the social realism of his earlier works and this, Conrad argues, is too confusing, and if he finds it confusing so too will other readers: ⁶⁰

[Fraternity] is anything but simple. Its suggestions are multiple . . . and run in and out of each other. Yes! It is a complicated book. It is possible to view it in innumerable ways . . . But before all it is the book of a moralist . . . [and a] moralist must present us with a gospel – he must give counsel, not to our reason or sentiment, but to our very soul. ⁶¹

The reason for urging Galsworthy towards greater conservatism may well lie in Conrad’s own experiences of London literary society, for it was a society he effectively wrote his way in to. Conrad was an outsider, a Polish immigrant and a naval shipman, and on both counts this made him something of an oddity within London literary society, which was still a relatively closed social world in the early 20th century. Conrad received British citizenship in the late 1880s and from that time he gradually began to relinquish his seafaring career in preference for a life of letters, publishing his first novel Almayer’s Folly’ in 1895. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Nostromo quickly followed, and by 1908 he had published 13 works of fiction. Today these are considered masterpieces of the early modernist movement, yet despite critical acclaim at the time, popular and financial success as a novelist eluded Conrad until much later in his career. In order to support his writing Conrad often sought financial assistance from Galsworthy, and, so, his measured realism seems unsurprising when he advises Galsworthy to think not only of art, but of reception. ⁶²

The narrative world of Fraternity was not, therefore, stable; its meaning did not travel uninterrupted from reader to reader, location to location; rather, it was constantly remade in light of the reader’s world and the way this intersected with their encounters with an author’s textual heritage – the other narrative worlds they have created. Conrad, for instance, saw Galsworthy’s previous novels as having a ‘fidelity to the surface of life’, and it was this approach that produced the kind of narrative world an audience expected to find in the novels of John Galsworthy. The Man of Property (1906), for instance, was narrated primarily by Soames and Old Jolyon Forstye. There was some use of free-indirect style, but reported speech and a strong authorial voice that both described the scene and linked together different viewpoints was the dominate narrative style. A sense of this was evident in Soames Forsyte’s discussion with his architect Bosinney, over his planned suburban retreat, ‘Robin Hill’:

Soames hated sunshine, and he at once got up to draw the blind. Then he took his own cup of tea from his wife, and said, more coldly than he had intended:

‘Can’t you see your way to do it for eight thousand after all? There must be a lot of little things you could alter’. Bosinney drank off his own cup of tea at a gulp, put down his cup, and answered:

‘Not one!’

Soames saw that his suggestion had touched some unintelligible point of personal vanity. ⁶³

Fraternity lacks dominant characters to equal those of Soames and Old Jolyon Forstye or the stability and straightforwardness that these characters impart; perspectives shift in The Man of Property but these perspectives are often those of Soames or Old Jolyon, or are referred back to these two characters.

In contrast, Fraternity gives us Hilary, who Conrad believes is not,

a sufficiently big and human figure to stand in the forefront of the great question, the enormous interrogation point which for me symbolises the book . . . if the thesis of the book is as I understand it, you should have presented to us a man really belonging to the class and with the noble instinct trying to assert his manhood against the heart-withering, brain-muddling convention. ⁶⁴

Conrad, by interpreting the novel in this way, was something of a resistant reader; he was looking for a closed narrative world, one that had a linear plot and unambiguous morality, in which he needed to do little interpretative work as a reader. This owes, in part, to Conrad’s own literary practice, for as Barnett argues, he tended to create narratives that were premised upon a closed community of readers, thereby allowing him to control interpretation. ⁶⁵ In Fraternity, Hilary subverts this possibility, for in his introspection and mobility he is insufficiently decisive and, therefore, unable to direct the reader or signify their construal of the narrative world. At the conclusion of the novel, Conrad expects Hilary to indict his class for their shallowness and prejudice, but, instead, he returns to his class, undermining the strong narrative style and decisive morality Galsworthy establishes in his earlier novels. What we see, therefore, is not only geographical worlds, but imagined worlds impinging upon, and resisting, the creation of Fraternity’s narrative world.

Fraternity was having different effects upon its readers as each brought their own conception of Galsworthy and his writing style to bear on their reading of the novel and their perception of the world it should produce on general reception. Where Garnett seeks to quieten Galsworthy’s authorial voice and fashion a narrative world that has creative opportunities for the reader, Conrad seeks to close down opportunities for the reader’s imagination by instigating a more powerful authorial narration. This tension coalesces most tellingly, Garnett observes, at the novel’s conclusion:

I once spent forty-eight hours, during a visit to Wingstone, trying to persuade him that it was impossible for him to make Hilary, the hero of Fraternity, elope with the little model. He confronted me with a letter in which Conrad, either out of devilment or in a fit of irritation, had advised him to the contrary, and it was touch-and-go for days as to which of his literary advisors would win! ⁶⁶

In Garnett’s mind the elopement of Hilary and Ivy sits awkwardly with the novel’s very progressive, artistic impulse. It was something of a clumsy ending that closed down the narrative world in a manner too decisive for Galsworthy’s new found style. Conrad, however, in his belief that Galsworthy should remain loyal to his realist roots saw the elopement as the didactic device for encouraging greater intercourse between social classes, thereby drawing the narrative world to a natural closure. As we follow Garnett and Conrad as they read themselves into the practice of Fraternity we see how reception-in-creation contests and reworks the social world and social relationships that underpin the novel’s development. In the end, the generative effect was the making of a new narrative world for Galsworthy, for, as he wrote to Garnett, ‘after much thought I’ve decided to shape the ending to your thinking – going back to my very first conception – I think I can do it and that it will be more in accord with the conception of Hilary and the girl as drawn’. ⁶⁷

Conclusions

The spatial event of the text argues for the novel as a geographical phenomenon that happens through the act and relationality of its readings. This, as Hones suggests, enables us to see the novel as an outcome of the creative agencies distributed across its event, for novels happen not once but at every reading of, or writing about them. In the main, it is a theory of the novel that proceeds from the materiality of the text; it attends to the reading practices of individuals, editors and critics as they engage with the novel as a published form. What this misses, however, is those practices that precede a text; its bringing into being, or happening, as a material entity. In terming this the ‘other side’ of the spatial event of the text, this paper argues that to develop a richer understanding of the novel as a geographical phenomenon we need to look not just to how it happens through the spatial relationships of its reading, but to how it happens through the spatial relationships of its writing. This allows us to conceptualize literary creation not as a series of eureka moments, or as reflections on general practice, or as a ceaseless process, but as a constellation, or meshwork, of social influences, encounters and tensions that emerge from our being-within-the-world.

Turning to the ‘other side’ of the spatial event of the text also enables us to do more, for it registers the generative effects of our being-within-the-world; the geographical phenomenon of the novel is inherently linked to the geographical phenomena in the novel. We can see this in Fraternity’s translocal creation, for it is forged through Galsworthy’s relationships to naturalism; the performative influence of these relationships help create a novel that is very European in both tenor and texture. It is a novel that moves beyond the stability of the domestic sphere so beloved of social realism, to explore the darker, more public and more itinerant nature of social life. It is also something that emerges in the novel’s narrative world, for as ‘others’ read their way into Fraternity’s creative practice they help to produce a world that is an amalgam of their different relationships to other times, spaces and Galsworthys.

Hones argues for the spatial event of the text as a way of fundamentally altering the impetus of literary geography, for it encourages us to look not at exceptional readings or writing, but, rather, at what Hones terms coeval difference or, to put it another way, the different, often ordinary and multiple practices of literary engagement. Turning to the ‘other side’ of the spatial event of the text, offers a way of exploring creation that is neither deterministic nor exhaustive. Literary creation, as Brace and Johns-Putra observe, is a ‘notoriously elusive’ concept, being simultaneously ‘lively and excessive . . . unpredictable and emergent . . . both a product and a process of the human imagination’. ⁶⁸ As such, it is something that we will rarely capture or fully understand, yet the spatial event of the text allows us to elucidate some of the possible influences and encounters at work on the ‘other side’ of Fraternity. These influences and encounters can be small and accumulating, working themselves out quite subtly over time, or they can be more intrusive, making their presence felt in very obvious ways, but what both ultimately provoke is a new way of seeing, understanding and, in Galsworthy’s case, of writing the world.