Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1967"

The Whole Contention between Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf

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A Russian Preface for Nabokov's "Beheading"

Abstract: Priglashenie na Kazn' was written in 1934 and translated into English as Invitation to a Beheading by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with Vladimir Nabokov in 1959. In 1966 the book was reissued in Russian by Victor Press (Paris) with the expectation that Soviet tourists in Western Europe would be interested in a novel by Russia's most distinguished emigre author. Nabokov's writings are already well known and widely disseminated in Russian literary circles that keep in touch with literature abroad; but the ordinary Soviet reader probably knows little more of Vladimir Nabokov than the name. This preface, which appears in the Paris edition in Russian translation by M. Arnold Blokh, attempts to keep both sorts of Russian reader in mind and also to say something valid about Nabokov's importance for a reader of any nationality (or party) whatsoever. J. M.

Fielding and the Uses of Style

Abstract: When Fielding, in both the Preface to Joseph Andrews and in the prefatory chapters of Tom Jones, speaks of the genre he is inventing as a comic variant of the Homeric epic, the core of serious truth in his critical stricture is qualified by irony; the reader is offered excellent guidance which he must follow with caution because of a lurking suspicion that the deft hand of the narrator, in the midst of explanatory gestures, is somehow pulling his leg. The very presence of such prefaces, to begin with, should serve to remind us that Fielding is the first of the great intellectual novelists: like Flaubert, James, Joyce, Gide, he is anxious to define the novel in terms of literary tradition, modern and classical, and, like them, he theorizes about what he writes as he writes it. Fielding's association of the novel with the epic is suggestive in several ways, but what is most relevant here are the implied assumptions about the function of language and the relationship of the writer to his audience. A good deal has been said in recent years about the novel as private experience: the living-out of fantasy, which is of course essentially private, is usually thought of as the characteristic act of novel-reading. But this surely does not account for our total experience as readers of novels, and Fielding, with a neoclassical conception of the epic very much in mind, repeatedly insists that a novel is something to be shared by a community of the discriminating. The force of the very first sentence in Tom Jones, which introduces the metaphor of the feast that will be sustained throughout the novel, is to make clear at once that the novel is conceived as public experience: "An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money." Now, the most public aspect of a literary work is its language, for words we all share in common, while the kinds of imaginings to which words stir us inevitably take place in the privacy of the individual mind. And it seems to me that the most fundamental influence of the epic on Fielding is in his decision to base the novel on the artfully ostentatious manipulation of words. In keeping with the general function of rhythmic beat, extended simile, and formulaic recurrence in the epic, his most essential procedure as a novelist is constantly to enrich his fictional world by reminding us in different ways of the literary artifice through which that world comes into being. The most obtrusive expressions of this tendency in his writing are, of course, his parodies of epic devices. Most of these, though ingenious enough, are far from representing an imaginative assimilation of the epic: the great mock-epic set-pieces, like Molly Seagrim's churchyard brawl or Joseph Andrews' battle with the hunting dogs, are brilliant entertainments, not novelistic revelations. Of much more significance to Fielding's achievement as a creator of