Showing papers in "Modern Fiction Studies in 1986"

"Women Must Have Spunks": Jean Rhys's West Indian Outcasts

Abstract: Since Wally Look Lai described Wide Sargasso Sea as \"one of the genuine masterpieces of West Indian fiction\" (17), quite a number of critics have focused on the Caribbean aspects of that novel, as well as Voyage in the Dark and several of Rhys's short stories. Louis James (111) and Mary Lou Emery (421), for example, have shown that Rhys's Caribbean concerns situate the intensely personal vision of her fiction within a much larger historical context. More specifically, Nancy Fulton has pointed to the parallels between black and white characters in Wide Sargasso Sea (344). Similarly, Helen Tiffin explains that Antoinette's suffering and enslavement by Edward Rochester reinforce her identification with the black Creole community (339), and Antoinette's ambiguous relationship with blacks has been explored by Charlotte Bruner as well (237). Despite considerable critical attention to Jean Rhys's West Indian themes and characters, however, there has been relatively little focus on the black characters themselves. This is a significant oversight because two black West Indian characters—Selina Davis in \"Let Them Call It Jazz\" and Christophine Dubois, Antoinette's former nanny and only friend in Wide Sargasso Sea—are unique

Technology in the Dystopian Novel

Abstract: Although Gissing puts the case against "science"—by which he clearly seems to mean technology—in the most extreme form, still his is a view shared by many, perhaps even by most twentieth-century literary intellectuals, whom C. P. Snow characterized as natural Luddites. In particular, it is a view that informs the dystopian novel, a uniquely modern form of fiction whose emergence parallels, reflects, and warns against the growing potentialities of modern technology. As I have argued elsewhere, the dystopian novel, in projecting an admonitory image of the future, fuses two fears: the fear of utopia and the fear of technology ("We" 56-57). By utopia I mean those imaginary models of static, regimented, totally ordered—in short, "perfect"—societies found in the writings of figures such as More and Campanella, C abet and Comte, Edward Bellamy and H. G. Wells. The fear that some form of these Utopian models was being actualized by history led the Russian émigré philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev to write that passage that Aldous Huxley made famous as an epigraph to Brave New World and that can

Sanity and Responsibility: Big Chief as Narrator and Executioner

Abstract: Lecture de " One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest " qui assigne le role de heros positif et de narrateur au personnage de Big Chief, conformement aux declarations de Ken Kesey

Fantasy Fiction and Related Genres

Abstract: Among the problems that have come into view since academic teachers and learned societies laid their hands on fantasy fiction (ff), once the domain of fanclubs and arcane magazines, the question of definition is one of the most intriguing. If ff is not simply anything that will sell as ff, what is it? In what sense can it be said to be a genre? If it is a genre, what is its history? To date, there have been more than a dozen book-length attempts in English and a few in other languages to answer these questions, plus a number of periodical essays dealing with the same problem.1 What strikes the observer most about these investigations is their scope of disagreement. If one author asserts that as a genre, \"fantasy\" has existed only since the 1960s (Pesch 23), another claims that it flowered between 1880 and 1957 (Irwin x), and yet another categorically denies fantasy the status

Olaf Stapledon and the Idea of Science Fiction

Abstract: Unlike his great predecessor H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon never wrote an essay on the genre of the scientific romance or about the influences on his own imagination. Wells's career endured long enough for him to see a collected edition of his works and numerous reissues of separate texts. Sometimes he contributed Forewords to such later editions, but one of them—a 1933 omnibus of his best-known scientific romances—prompted a retrospective Preface surveying his entire achievement in what he called \"my fantastic stories\" (240). Although there is some self-disparaging revisionism as Wells, approaching seventy, looks back over his shoulder at books written mostly in his thirties, the Preface to The Scientific Romances is important as a record of his thoughts about his literary genealogy, as an account of intentions and aspirations, and as a compact Wells's Rules of Order designed to help the reader of fantastic fiction \"to play the game properly\" (241). ' If Wells downplayed the artistic and social value of the \"playful parables\" of his younger days, he was still careful to outfit himself with a distinguished and selective pedigree. He claimed descent from Apuleius,

Moments of Meaning Dearly Achieved: Virginia Woolf's Sense of an Ending

Abstract: These stories are inconclusive, wc say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that wc recognize. In so doing, wc raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tunc is familiar and the end emphatic ... as it is in most Victorian fiction, wc can scarcely go wrong, but where the tunc is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchckov, wc need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the harmony. Probably wc have to read a great many stories before wc feel, and the feeling is essential to our satisfaction, that wc hold the parts together, and that Tchckov is not merely rambling disconnectedly, but struck now this note, now that with intention, in order to complete his meaning. (Essays I: 240-241)

Platonic Shadows in C. S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles

Abstract: As a literary critic, science fiction writer, Christian apologist, and creator of the Chronicles of Namia, in the last several decades C. S. Lewis has attained a reputation and following enviable in size and amazing in diversity. In many ways the quiet Oxbridge professor's achievements have assumed an air of authority, an aura of credibility, difficult to explain; Lewis, after all, is not an \"apologist\" in the same sense as Merton, nor a critic with a comprehensive system such as McLuhan. He is not, likewise, a fiction writer whose \"science\" background even begins to parallel that of Asimov, whose characterizations approach those of Faulkner, whose ethical dilemmas rival Greene's, and whose epic sweep is as broad as Tolkien's.

Agendath Netaim: Promised Land or Waste Land

Abstract: One of the great set pieces in Ulysses is J. J. O'Molloy's rendering of John F. Taylor's speech on the Irish language with its allusion to Moses leading his people to the Promised Land.1 Joyce uses it as one of die examples of windy rhetoric in the Aeolus chapter and dien has Stephen deflate it with his starkly realistic response: \"A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or the Parable of the Plums. \" J. J. O'Molloy recites Taylor's words:

Male and Female in The Snail on the Slope by the Strugatsky Brothers

Abstract: Many of the best works of Russian literature defy classification by genre. It may be that the broad Russian imagination cannot be contained in narrow Western aesthetic categories. On the other hand, Russian writers may simply have emulated the formal originality of Pushkin's "novel in verse" Evgeny Onegin (1823-31), thus establishing a tradition of untraditional forms. In any case, following Onegin came nineteenth-century mixedgenre masterpieces such as Dead Souls, Gogol's "long poem in prose"; A Double Life, Karolina Pavlova's "sketch" (ocherk) in poetry and prose; and War and Peace, a philosophical-historical epic that Tolstoy himself refused to call a novel.1 And in the twentieth century such literary experiments continued unabated among Russian symbolists, futurists, and NEP writers.2 In this context we can more easily understand the unconventional form of The Snail on the Slope (Ulitka na sklone). This contemporary

The Reader as Voyeur: Complicitous Transformations in "Death in the Woods"

Abstract: Like most writers, Sherwood Anderson was vitally concerned with the workings of the imagination and the creation of art. For Anderson, these concerns were also inextricably linked to questions of personal salvation. In letters to his son John, himself a painter, Anderson asserted that \"The object of art ... is to save yourself\": \"Self is the grand disease. It is what we are all trying to lose\" (Letters 166, 167). Given Anderson's faith in the redemptive possibilities of art, it is not surprising that the writer frequently compared \"literary [and nonliterary] composition to the experience of pregnancy and deliverance, and also to the poles of maleness and femaleness in life\" (Letters xv). One letter composed three years before the author's death well illustrates Anderson's understanding of the problematic nature of such \"deliverance\":

Evelyn Waugh During the Pinfold Years

Abstract: On a trip to Ceylon in January and February 1954, Evelyn Waugh suffered the hallucinations that form the basis of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.1 Like the protagonist of his novel, Waugh believed he was being persecuted by a group of psychologists using some sort of electronic telepathy to listen in on his private thoughts and to tease, torment, and vilify him about his private life and his public reputation. It is clear both in the novel and in biographical accounts of the incident that Waugh's and Pinfold's ordeals were caused by the cumulative effects of chloral hydrate and bromide, combined with liberal doses of alcohol.2 Yet the paramount importance of the episode in Waugh's life is that he fictionalizes it as an artistic crisis—a thorough shaking of confidence in his imaginative powers. Pinfold emerges victorious from his ordeal first by maintaining his belief that the \"voices\" were real—real to him at any rate—and then by establishing control over his imagination through writing his own Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Waugh himself regains control by laying to rest many

The Heir Must Die: One Hundred Years of Solitude as a Gothic Novel

Abstract: A brief survey of the salient conventions that distinguish the Gothic novel may convince readers of Gabriel GarcÃ-a Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude that the book suits the genre. Reading Solitude as a Gothic novel not only yields a comprehensive interpretation but also heightens appreciation of its wit and craftsmanship. If the reader bears in mind the Gothic conventions dear to devotees of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Edgar Allan Poe canon, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and Alejo Carpentier's Explosion in a Cathedral, the reader will see how ably the Gothic conventions in any one of them can also pump the pedals of Pietro Crespi's pianola though the birds of magic realism sing other songs. Gothic novels began in romances, sentimental novels, and Oriental tales, notably The Thousand and One Nights.1 Edmund Burke's theory of the sublime added the most distant geographical reaches to the influence of Gothic architecture that in itself accentuated effects of spatial stress through contrasting light and dark, height and

"For the Ovaltine Had Loosened Her Tongue": Failures of Speech in Barbara Pym's Less than Angels

Abstract: Barbara Pym's best novels meticulously and often hilariously examine the problem of imperfect or totally failed communication, the primary source of both comedy and gloom in her vision of human relations. It need be noted only fleetingly that men and women can rarely talk to each other in Pym's novels. Her male characters are generally exploitive, although not intentionally cruel, almost always egotistical, frequently pompous, insensitive, and patronizing, sometimes endearingly childlike, but hardly ever as smart or discerning as the women who endure them and love them. Although Pym's women generally display considerably greater intelligence, sensitivity, and self-awareness than her men, they enjoy little more success in communication, even with the most benevolent intentions toward each other. Critics have frequently noted the triumph of the ordinary in Pym's novels and her glorification of the pleasures of everyday life (see Brothers, Larson, Snow). Ordinary routines such as housework, cooking, and shopping may indeed help to preserve sanity and even offer a source of joy. However, for many of Pym's characters the ordinary falls far short of the heart's desire. To compensate for the inadequacies of quotidian existence, they exercise a transforming imagination upon the dull and occasionally burdensome activities of daily life. This ability sharply distinguishes them from Pym's male characters, who exercise their imagination only upon themselves, whereas the women use imagination to transfigure their worlds, including, of course, their men. Toward the end of Less Than Angels, Pym quotes a significant passage from Austen's Persuasion:

A Janus-Text: Realism, Fantasy, and Nabokov's Lolita

Abstract: Vladimir Nabokov has called Lolita, whose manuscript he almost chucked into an incinerator once in 1950 and again in 1951, his \"special favorite\" (Strong Opinions 15) and said that of all his works he had \"the most affection\" for it (Appel, Interview 44). It was the only English novel he valued enough to translate into Russian, which he did in 1967. But when it first came out in Paris (1955), New York (1958), and London (1959), it certainly did not look like many reviewers agreed with him. Although it headed up to the top of the bestseller list and stayed there for a year, and although—contrary to the impression one has reading more recent Nabokov criticism, which tends to overemphasize Lolita's being turned down by four American publishers only to be picked up by Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press in Paris, known for its publication of Jean Genet and pornography—John Hollander, Howard Nemerov, Lionel Trilling, and Kingsley Amis, among others, gave it strong positive reviews, many were less than impressed by what they read, and many were downright hostile. Granville Hicks in the Saturday Review, for example, said Lolita was \"not one of the more memorable novels\" (38), and Robert Hatch

In the Company of Strangers: Absent Voices in Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Beckett's Company

Abstract: On the night before Dr. Jekyll disappears for the last time, Utterson is summoned to the doctor's home by JekylPs butler. The butler is disturbed because his master has mysteriously withdrawn into his laboratory for several days. But he is more deeply disturbed by the voice that issues from behind the locked door of the laboratory: it sounds strange and unfamiliar to him. Utterson agrees when he listens to this strange voice that it is \"much changed\" and that it could not be the voice of \"the master.\" The lawyer's concern over the mystery is deepened when he reads the \"strange note\" that Jekyll had apparently written to a druggist, franticly pleading for certain chemicals to be delivered to him. The note is even stranger than Utterson and the butler realize, and its implications are more far-reaching: written in it is the formula that Jekyll had used to regain his identity after having lost it for a time to Hyde. The reason that Jekyll has disappeared and his voice is so strange is that his identity no longer conforms to that formula. He no longer fits the text by which he defined himself. Nor does Hyde's identity continue to be contained within the formula Jekyll had written for him. Whereas Jekyll cannot return to the text that defines him, Hyde keeps uncontrollably breaking out of his.

What is Human? Ursula LeGuin and Science Fiction's Great Theme

Abstract: When H. G. Wells's Time Traveller encounters mankind's descendants in 802701 a.D., he has a right to question their humanity. The Eloi, though retaining our basic appearance, are smaller, weaker, feeblewilled beings who have lost nearly all the human intellect that has made us dominant. The Morlocks have similarly lost their intellectual birthright but look even less like us. They do, however, maintain characteristic human activities. They use not just tools but machines and have a manufacturing economy, trading goods for unwilling Eloi flesh. A reader who asks on the basis of the Time Traveller's observations

Emma Zunz: The Jewish Theodicy of Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract: In September, 1948, the Argentinian magazine Sur published an unusual short story by Jorge Luis Borges entitled "Emma Zunz." Later, in June, 1949, it became part of the volume "El Aleph. " In this story the author does not express Jewishness in his usual manner; the content and form are exceptional. First, unlike his other stories, the protagonist is here a woman; second, she is not in search of a magic stone or a fountain of youth, as are his other characters. She is very much concerned with her own female condition and Weltanshauung. Finally, sex, rape, and violence, absent in the rest of his essays and fiction, are here the main artistic and moral framework for the plot. In other writings where Borges uses Jewish motifs he creates an esoteric and rigorously intellectual corpus: in DiscusiÃ3n (1932) he attempts a vindication of the Kabbala and uses the gnostic idea of numbers and letters as proto-cosmic symbols; in "El otro, el mismo" (1964), a poem about the Golem of the Maharal of Prague, he relates this myth to Gershom Scholem's scholarly approach; in Elogio a la sombra (1969), another volume of poetry, the people of Israel are treated as the concatenation between nature and some

Aspects of Fantasy: Selected Essays from the Second International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film, and: Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, and: Hard Science Fiction (review)

Abstract: themselves by the political and military establishments; but what is revealed when the information is brought out into the light is mainly that it is very silly, that up there in the higher echelons the games that are played cluster around the refrains of old playground songs; not that this stops those refrains acting simultaneously as the verbal triggers for destruction, as the keys which turn the locks of the slaughterhouse.

Out of the Gernsbackian Slime: Christopher Priest's Abandonment of Science Fiction

Abstract: \"People in the science-fiction world talk about George Orwell or Aldous Huxley or Olaf Stapledon as though they're 'outsiders' who once wrote a little science fiction. But actually those are the people who wrote the real stuff; all the Heinlein stuff is a pure confection, all air, like the stuff you put on top of apple pie. So I feel, now, that nobody is writing real science fiction. All we have is a caricature of what it might have been.\" —Christopher Priest (Interview with Charles Piatt 32)

Displaced Communities and Literary Form in Flannery O'Connor's "The Displaced Person"

Abstract: Most commentary on Flannery O'Connor's \"The Displaced Person\" follows that of Robert Fitzgerald, who summarizes the religious theme of the story when he writes that \"the estrangement from Christian plenitude is estrangement from the true country of men\" (394). The estrangement noted here is metaphorically a geographical one, and later critics have elaborated on the story's implication that all humans are uprooted and do not possess the earth as their real home. These interpretations involve reading the story as product, as a kind of achieved metaphor establishing a connection between home in the material and home in the spiritual realms. Indeed, O'Connor's typical narrative method encourages us to read her stories as products in which the concluding epiphanies gather up the preceding events in an image of clarity and retrospective meaning. At the end of Section One in \"The Displaced Person\" the stricken Mrs. Shortley has \"been displaced\" and \"seemed to contemplate for the first time the tremendous frontiers of her true country\" (214). And near the conclusion of Section Three Mrs. Mclntyre \"felt she was in some foreign country where the people bent over the body were natives\" (235). Revelatory conclusions such as these invite the perception that her stories get fixed only in the epiphanies that complete them. Treating O'Connor's \"The Displaced Person\" as a process uncovers significant patterns that parallel the theme of the story read as product and are necessary for the effectiveness of the concluding revelations. I am suggesting that the story still needs to be investigated on the dramatic level—that is, as a sequence of developments—as a displacement of community, and on the rhetorical level as a displacement of literary strategies. What occurs on the dramatic level is a pro-

Tarot and Gravity's Rainbow

Abstract: Enter Tyrone Slothrop. He is pondering his ancestors' long and exploitive relationship with trees: \"Slothrop's family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper\" {Gravity's Rainbow 553). \"That's insane,\" he realizes—yet we immediately understand his complicity, and our own (for they are also our ancestors). We all exist, in a sense, precisely through the medium of paper; shit, money, and the word meet at a paper interface: con/texts. Though the enemy is always at some point within us, still we must be prepared to deal with the ancestors who continue outside and around us. Slothrop becomes increasingly aware of the apparent enormity of the forces aligned against him, as against so many forms of \"individual life,\" and voices the frustration frequently felt in the early 70s (as well as today): \"I can't dti anything about those people, they're all out of my reach. What can I do?\" (553). A nearby pineanswers simply and sharply: \"Next time you come across a logging operation out there, find one of their tractors that isn't being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That's what you can do\" (553). In Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon explores a variety of responses to the realization that there are \"powers\" out there that are actively hostile to individually creative growth. Familiar enough is the recommendation of the trees: do whatever you can to subvert the workings of those powers. Then perhaps consider hooking into already existing subversive groups, \"developing,\" as Pirate Prentice explains, \"at least as thorough a We-system as a They-system\" (638). But the fundamental problem with the so-called Counterforce that Prentice recommends is that it grants a compelling reality-status to the very description it opposes: so long as They are given the authority to decide what counts as any system, They will be able to control and eventually assimilate the would-be rebel. The dialectic offeree and counterforce must ultimately strengthen the oppressive grid; it is the grid itself that must be transfigured. Reflecting back on his own activities with the Yippies, Jerry Rubin laments the case with which he had been turned into little more than what Pynchon calls Their \"doomed pet freaks\" (713):

A Mirror of the Whole: Shaun in Book III, Chapters 1-3

Abstract: Even a cursory reading of Finnegans Wake should reveal that its larger encompassing forms are constantly mirrored within individual sections. Thus, for example, the fourfold Viconian superstructure of the entire work is, obviously enough, represented by the numbers of chapters within each section. Or Joyce's trinitarian preoccupations will be echoed in any number of formal permutations and combinations. It is certainly not too much to suggest that any puzzling or seemingly arbitrary aspect of the book can be illuminated by recourse to Joyce's established formal patterns. We must just be attentive, not only to the lexical gymnastics, but to the action, such as it is, of any passage in order to find the clue that will unravel the meaning. When we turn to Book III, Chapters 1-3, we are stymied not so much by problems of clarity—Chapter 2 is, in fact, unusually lucid—as by the nagging question, why. Why would Joyce, so rigorously economic a taskmaster even in his selfconsciously rococo moments, expend so much time, space, and energy in exploring the not altogether forceful fantasies and fetishes of Shaun-Jaun-Yawn? These chapters loom on first reading like a giant whale beached at what ought to be a crucial moment in the book. Between the collapse of HCE at the end of Book II and ALP's final journey to the sea, is there nothing better that Joyce can do than explore the hollow yearnings and exasperations of his most despised character?

Caligari and Cipolla: Mann's "Mario and the Magician"

Abstract: Bell, M. David. "The Search for Agendath Netaim: Some Progress, but No Solution ." James Joyce Quarterly 12 (1974): 251-258. Bulhof, Francis. "Agendath Again." James Joyce Quarterly 7 (1970): 326-332. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. 1959. New York: Oxford UP, 1982. Glasheen, Adaline. "Calypso." James Joyce's "Ulysses": Critical Essays. Ed. Clive Hart and David Hayman. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974. 51-74. Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. New York: Random House, 1961. ____"The Shade of Parnell." 1912. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959. 223-228. Kain, Richard M. "The Significance of Stephen's Meeting Bloom: A Survey of Interpretations." James Joyce Quarterly 10 (1972): 147-160. Parish, Charles. "Agenbite of Agendath Netaim. " James Joyce Quarterly 6 (1969): 237-241.

Willa Cather's "Consequences" and Alexander's Bridge: An approach through R. D. Laing and Ernest Becker

Abstract: In his classic work of existential psychiatry, The Divided Self, R. D. Laing explores and defines a \"schizoid way of being-in-the-world\" characterized by what he calls \"ontological insecurity,\" a condition in which \"the individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question\" (42). The ontologically insecure person may respond to the anxiety that becomes his constant condition by a splitting or division in the self. He seeks to protect his inner or true self, which comes to be experienced as \"transcendent\" or \"disembodied,\" by developing a \"false self system\" (73) whose job it is to confront and manage reality. Moreover, there is in the ontologically insecure person \"a failure to sustain a sense of one's own being without the presence of other people. It is a failure to be by oneself, a failure to exist alone\" (52). Such dependence on others for one's identity, however, threatens the self with engulfment, with \"complete loss of being or absorption into the other\

The Magic Mountain

Abstract: It is essential to break with ail so-called idealism of the kind that broods over how the word ought to be and would lovelessly impose on (he world the result of its thinking. ... A labor of Sisyphus, for the antinomies of the world are inherent in existence itself; they are existence, the very fullness thereof. ... An intellectual leader may be expected ... to step outside the interplay of contraries, recognize the inherent polarities, and find their equilibrium, but not to postpone the attainment of the equilibrium by putting more weight on the one pole than on the other. (Leiters [1921] 113)