Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1969"

Structural Analysis of Narrative

Abstract: The theme I propose to deal with is so vast that the few pages which follow will inevitably take the form of a resume. My title, moreover, contains the word "structural," a word more misleading than enlightening today. To avoid misunderstandings as much as possible, I shall proceed in the following fashion. First, I shall give an abstract description of what I conceive to be the structural approach to literature. This approach will then be illustrated by a concrete problem, that of narrative, and more specifically, that of plot. The examples will all be taken from the Decameron of Boccaccio. Finally, I shall attempt to make several general conclusions about the nature of narrative and the principles of its analysis. First of all, one can contrast two possible attitudes toward literature: a theoretical attitude and a descriptive attitude. The nature of structural analysis will be essentially theoretical and non-descriptive; in other words, the aim of such a study will never be the description of a concrete work. The work will be considered as the manifestation of an abstract structure, merely one of its possible realizations; an understanding of that structure will be the real goal of structural analysis. Thus, the term "structure" has, in this case, a logical rather than spatial significance. Another opposition will enable us to focus more sharply on the critical position which concerns us. If we contrast the internal approach to a literary work with the external one, structural analysis would represent an internal approach. This opposition is well known to literary critics, and Wellek and Warren have used it as the basis for their Theory of Literature. It is necessary, however, to recall it here, because, in labeling all structural analysis "theoretical," I clearly come close to what is generally termed an "external" approach (in imprecise usage, "theoretical" and "external," on the one hand, and "descriptive" and "internal," on the other, are synonyms). For example, when Marxists or psychoanalysts deal with a work of literature, they are not interested in a knowledge of the work itself, but in the understanding of an abstract structure, social or psychic, which manifests itself through that work. This attitude is therefore both theoretical and external. On the other hand, a New Critic (imaginary) whose approach is obviously internal, will have no goal other than an understanding of the work itself; the result of his efforts will be a paraphrase of the work, which is supposed to reveal the meaning better than the work itself. Structural analysis differs from both of these attitudes. Here we can be satisfied neither by a pure description of the work nor by its interpretation in terms that are psychological or sociological or, indeed, philosophical. In other words, structural analysis coincides (in its basic tenets) with theory, with poetics of literature. Its object is the literary discourse rather than works of literature, literature that is virtual rather than real. Such analysis seeks no longer to articulate a

The Demons of History in Dickens' "Tale"

Abstract: A Tale of Two Cities has probably given serious critics of Dickens more trouble than any other of his novels. Written at the height of Dickens' artistic maturity, it seems almost willfully to turn away from the very modes of imagination that had made him great and to stress some of the facile formulas that had merely made him popular. From the first, admirers of Dickens have sensed this book to be an uncharacteristic expression of his genius, while Dickens' detractors have seized upon it as a transparent revelation of his general weakness as a novelist. The novel offers good evidence for both views, though the former seems to me on the whole the more cogent of the two. On the one hand, it is clear that Dickens was attempting something new, as he himself confesses in his letters, in treating this whole historical subject. The fact, on the other hand, that the general strategy of this novel differs from that of his other fiction has the effect of leaving certain regrettable conventional elements nakedly exposed which, in the more typical novels, are submerged in the great swirl of brilliant fantastication that can only be called Dickensian. In Little Dorrit, Bleak House, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, the teeming life of Dickensian invention tends to draw our attention away from the imaginative thinness of the heroes and heroines, the contrived coincidences, the strained notes of melodrama, the moments of dewy-eyed, lipserving religiosity, while the more intently dramatic presentation of character and event in A Tale of Two Cities frequently stresses just these qualities. The Tale, then, is conspicuously the uneven work of a writer who, in his greatest novels as well, persists in a kind of splendid, self-transcending unevenness. It is essential, however, to try to see just what he was aiming at in this uncharacteristic book, for his peculiar method of historical fiction here does enable him to make palpable to the imagination a realm of experience that is generally beyond the scope of his other novels. If Dickens' Two Cities in the age of revolution lack the vivid humor and warmth, the intimate feel of bizarre yet familiar British experience, associated with the contemporary England of his other novels, we should not dismiss the Tale for failing to be another Pickwick but should rather seek to understand why Dickens chose to restrict the role in it of just such appealing characteristics. The term Dickens stresses in his correspondence to distinguish the technique of the Tale from that of his previous novels is "picturesque," and that will do nicely for the book if we extend its meaning beyond the limited sense of "dramatic immediacy" which Dickens seems to have had in mind. Most of Dickens' fiction is boldly visual, but the visualization typically concentrates on fascinating

The Knowable Community in George Eliot's Novels

Abstract: There is always change in the village,1 but we can only understand its bearings on literature if we first understand what is happening to the literature itself. Just as the difference between Jonson and Crabbe is not the historical arrival of the "poor laborious natives" but a change in literary bearings which allows them suddenly to be seen, so the difference between Jane Austen and George Eliot and Hardy is not the sudden disintegration of a settled, traditional order but a change in literary bearings which brings into focus a persistent rural disturbance hitherto unrepresented in fiction. Thus we can say that the traditional novel, by which is meant very often the traditional novel of country and provincial life, depends essentially on a knowable community. This is a point to consider with Dickens, who, responding to the scale and complication of the city, had to remake the novel in a quite different direction. But a real continuity from Jane Austen to George Eliot, and then on to Thomas Hardy, can focus our attention on the problem of the knowable community within country life.

The Artifice of Failure in "Tristram Shandy"

Abstract: Tristram Shandy does not really begin ab ovo, though the narrator claims it does. Neither does it begin in medias res. Outrageously and appropriately it begins in flagrante delicto. It begins as a sexual joke, and remains just that until, after nine volumes, the cock-and-bull story ceases without concluding. The novel is about how any one comes to know anything, it is about reality more intensely than are most other novels, and the inconclusive conclusion is presented rather than stated: man is a mystery, and the world is inscrutable; the ordinary modes of apprehension and analysis are totally inadequate to the tasks they are called upon to perform; life itself is ineffable, ineluctable, and certainly tragic-redeemed, in so far as redemption may be possible, by laughter, which makes sport of the mystery; by love, which accepts it; and by art, which re-creates it. Narration in chronological terms is as false to life's complexity as is an epistemology based upon the "transverse zig-zaggery" (in Uncle Toby's phrase, used in another connection) of Locke's theory of the association of ideas. Against the conventional mode of story-telling and the "idiosyncratic wilfulness"1 of Locke, Sterne sets the figure of a circle, and it may be said that the novel's structure is peripheral. If the reader, and Sterne, are little nearer an understanding of the heart of the matter at the end of the novel than at the beginning, at least the ordinary mendacities by which men live have been discredited, and the magnitude of life's difficulties has been exposed to view. The testing of all hypotheses has ended in failure, but in the endeavor the circle has been drawn: the effort itself has led to the making of a work of art. "It is not things themselves," says the epigraph from Epictetus, "that disturb men, but their judgments about these things." And one of the tasks of Tristram Shandy is to capture or recapture the sense of things as things. It is a scientific novel, conceived in the spirit of serendipity-the only approach that a self-respecting scientist can arguably take. The novel is written in the first person, supposedly by the eponymous hero of the tale, whose "double prerogative of narrator and commentator, of observer and material witness, of writer and philosopher" (the words are those of Henri Fluchere) is maintained throughout. And the attitude is necessarily one of "constant vigilance."2

The Failing Center: Recent Fiction and the Picaresque Tradition

Abstract: As recently as ten years ago everyone knew fairly well what he meant by picaresque and could assume that someone else who used the word meant approximately the same. Not that "picaresque" has ever been a neat, tightly defined concept. The more Crocean critics, who have insisted that the Spanish novels in which the tradition originates are disconcertingly unlike each other at many points, have been difficult to refute. But whoever used a label like "picaresque novel" could be taken to refer to a kind of pseudo-autobiography of a special kind of miscreant hero, a simple episodic form, a perspective that saw society from the bottom up, and a report on life that recorded many adventures and rapid changes of fortune in a wryly ironic style full of satirical overtones. The formula fitted the great monuments of the tradition at least as well as most formulas fit individual masterworks, and the term that subsumed it was as useful as such terms can be expected to be. But ten years can be a long time. The critics who have spent the intervening decade telling us that we are living through a major revival of the picaresque have adapted the word to their own purposes, sometimes so radically as to create a semantic problem. For example, a reviewer in a recent New York Times Book Review:

Petrus Borel, Prison Horrors, and the Gothic Tradition

Abstract: Madame Putiphar (1838) should be better known. Petrus Borel, a member of the "petit cenacle" to which Theophile Gautier and Gerard de Nerval also belonged, was one of the most colorful exponents of "frenetic" literature. He liked to call himself le lycanthrope-the wolf-man. Champavert (1833), subtitled "Contes immoraux," established him as a specialist in gory tales at a time when "charnelhouse" writing was in fashion. Some of Flaubert's early exercises in literary violence were heavily influenced by these texts; even as late as 1861, when he was writing Salammbo, he had Petrus Borel in mind as he himself described tortures and disembowelments. Rape and child murder are among the more innocent subjects of Borel. At first glance, Madame Putiphar-Borel's only full-length fiction-appears a less outrageous work than Champavert. As for the title, it is meant to evoke not a Biblical setting but the aspect of the Joseph story that deals with temptation, purity, and injustice. The "madame" in question is Mme. de Pompadour, and her victim is a handsome young Irishman in exile whom she has jailed for life when he rejects her lascivious advances. The lasciviousness is suggested with skill. But it is the desolation and despair in the prisoner's underground dungeon that are at the center of this novel and that account for its most powerful pages. The story opens with a prefatory poem, an allegorical prologue in which the soul is assailed by three temptations: the world, the cloistered existence, and the seduction of Death. In part, this moralistic beginning is a concession to the taste of the time. "Philosophical" considerations frequently surrounded the flimsiest fictional productions, and the theme of metaphysical temptations was popular. Borel's preliminary poem about surrender to life, withdrawal from worldly involvement, and attraction to nothingness and non-being is, however, of particular importance. First, because of its tense, feverish, obsessive tone that prefigures the pungency and affective concentration of some of Baudelaire's finest poetry.

The Case for Dombey Senior

Abstract: Dombey and Son is among the most telling of Dickens' titles, in that it reminds us continually of little Paul's status in life and death. As son (small "s") he dies before the novel's real development has started, and is influential mainly as a poison in his father's mind. As Son (capital "S") he remains indissolubly linked with the great firm until its downfall, the Idea for which life and humanity-his mother's and sister's, his own-are spent. But the dichotomy is not simple. As Son, he is not only the focus of all Mr. Dombey's ambitions, but the recipient of whatever love Mr. Dombey has it in him to give. As son he is the flesh and blood boy whose preference for Florence is the posthumous poison in Mr. Dombey's soul. There is also the Son's extension, as complex vacancy after Paul's death. Captain Cuttle in his disastrous interview with Carker proposes Walter as replacement, Carker in secret counsels proposes himself. Carker fails in his assault upon Son, but through Edith's agency, not Dombey's, and only when he has fulfilled his carker role in Dombey and Son. Captain Cuttle turns out to be right, but ironically beyond expectation; Walter is Mr. Dombey's heir in more ways than one. The reader of this novel is therefore aware of Paul in several capacities. He is the real boy, sensitive and doomed, drawn to the waves, and puzzled to think what they are always saying; and he is the boy born to be Son, a tragic destiny in life and death. The chapters depicting his childhood are among the most moving in Dickens, notably the long fourteenth chapter, where the dying boy's consciousness is presented in depth. His confused recollections prefigure Virginia Woolf's method of presenting consciousness, though Dickens never allows his readers or himself to become wholly submerged. Paul's feelings in this last illness are conveyed with an intensity bordering on hallucination as his world grows tenderer, happier, and starts to fade. Only at the very end of chapter sixteen does Dickens intervene, and at the last moment spoil his effect.

The Consciousness of "Twin Consciousness": Patrick White's "The Solid Mandala"

Abstract: In a sense Patrick White has always told one story twice in the same book. This is true of The Living and the Dead (1941) in which "the two ways, of the living or the dead"-either "To recognize the sickness and accept the ecstasy" or "instinctively to close the eyes"-are presented to and followed out by the characters. It is also true of The Aunt's Story (1948) where the heroine, a divine fool who is initiated into "continuity of being," is contrasted with what she might have been, a vegetable-like sister and her kind. Again, in the massive The Tree of Man (1955) White's two central characters live through the same events only to give to them responses that are of very different quality. Indeed, the essential lives of Stan and Amy Parker slowly seem to separate out during the course of the story until we finally come to see that this apparently problematic book has always been one of spiritual crisis. The hero ascends at his death to be taken into the "One," while Amy Parker, in surviving him, seems to fall beneath him as if condemned in some implicit Judgment for a lifelong if intermittent materialism. In Voss (1957), White's way of telling the same story twice is even more stylized. While the explorer Voss is to his own mind living out his personal Superman mythology in the Australian interior, in the larger context he exemplifies an implicitly Christian mythology. His double story is meanwhile redoubled, as it were, broadcast by his interpreter and "bride," Laura Trevelyan, who remains in Sydney mystically suffering his heresy and the agony of his Christ-likeness. Yet again, in Riders in the Chariot (1961) one has the sense of two groups of characters steadily separating out, at least spiritually or implicitly. There are the four "minor saints" whose souls are envisioned towards the end (in Alf Dubbo's resurrection-redemption painting "The Chariot") as they ascend towards God; and a group of four accusers, Mrs. Jolley, Mrs. Flack, the parody Christ-figure "Blue," and the book's Pilate-Judas, Harry Rosetree, all of whom are imagined finally as sealed up in labyrinths of self-torment. Since all these novels are impelled by a sense of crisis and have what might be called an apocalyptic drive, it is not surprising to find that White's most recent novel, The Solid Mandala (1966), resembles them in this respect. It resembles them, but then goes well beyond resemblance. Indeed it almost seems as if White had taken an abstract of his earlier books and then written The Solid Mandala from that vantage point. It is not just that he tells one story twice in the same broadly stylized book, rather that he now writes a strict double story. One would emphasize that in saying this one is not simply referring to matters of style. Actually, The Solid Mandala implicitly rejects stylization. As much as any