Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1970"

Murder and Manners: The Formal Detective Novel

Abstract: The formal detective novel, the so called "pure puzzle" or "whodunit," is the most firmly established and easily recognized version of the thriller. Sharing sources with the novel proper, boasting a tradition dating from Poe, and listing among its practitioners a number of distinguished men of letters, the detective novel has enjoyed a long, though slightly illicit, relationship with serious literature. As with literary study, historians and bibliographers of the form, discovering incunabula, repudiating apocrypha, and tracing sources and lineage, have published their findings in a multitude of books and essays, in somewhat learned journals and parascholarly periodicals. And almost since its inception, critics have been denouncing the rise and announcing the demise of the whodunit. But the detective novel has survived the vicissitudes of literary taste and the sometimes suffocating paraphernalia of scholarship; though it attained its greatest heights of production and consumption in the 1920's and 1930's-the so called Golden Age of the detective story -the best examples of the type retain a remarkable longevity. The whodunit, in fact, has become a kind of classic in the field of popular fiction. One commentator has rather loosely defined the detective story as "a tale in which the primary interest lies in the methodical discovery, by rational means, of the exact circumstances of a mysterious event or series of events,"1 which could describe a number of literary works, including Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Tom Jones, and Absalom, Absalom!. In reality the form, in Raymond Chandler's words, has "learned nothing and forgotten nothing."2 It subscribes to a rigidly uniform, virtually changeless combination of characters, setting, and events familiar to every reader in the English speaking world. The typical detective story presents a group of people assembled at an isolated place-usually an English country house-who discover that one of their number has been murdered. They summon the local constabulary, who are completely baffled; they find either no clues or entirely too many, everyone or no one has had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime, and nobody seems to be telling the truth. To the rescue comes an eccentric, intelligent, unofficial investigator who reviews the evidence, questions the suspects, constructs a fabric of proof, and in a dramatic final scene, names the culprit. This sequence describes almost every formal detective novel, the best as well as

Womanhood in Jane Austen's Novels

Abstract: The contradiction between Augustan values on the one hand, and feminine and youthful attitudes on the other, comes to the fore most revealingly in Jane Austen. As has often been observed, her young heroines finally marry older men-comprehensive epitomes of the Augustan norms such as Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley. Her novels in fact dramatize the process whereby feminine and adolescent values are painfully educated in the norms of the mature, rational and educated male world.2

Caliban as Prospero: Benjy and "The Sound and the Fury"

Abstract: My thesis, put as simply as possible, is that Benjy's section of The Sound and the Fury is a special handling of the narrative archetype of romance. To see how this can be so it is necessary only to see the archetypal conceptions of innocence Miss Scott presents in the preceding comments, for it is Benjy's innocence and the innocence of his world that begin to identify his narrative as romance, the literary form closest to the naivete of childhood and to the wish-fulfillment dream.

"Howards End" and the Neglected Narrator

Abstract: A significant feature of most recent criticism of the novels of E. M. Forster has been the lack of attention paid to the function of the narrator as commentator. Alan Wilde in his treatment of Howards End, for instance, beyond mentioning four times in passing that "Forster commented" or "Forster said," fails to discuss the role of the narrator in the novel.1 Although Frederick Crews indexes such varied techniques as "use of comedy," "use of fantasy and allegory," "use of mythology," "use of symbolism," "characters," he makes no reference among these techniques to the use of the narrator.2 In his account of books by J. B. Beer and K. W. Gransden, the reviewer for The London Times Literary Supplement (22 June 1962) complained that "the technical aspect [in Forster criticism] does not get sufficient attention, particularly as it concerns the shifting viewpoint given us of characters and events, and in the way (though in Aspects of the Novel Mr. Forster deplores personal intrusions by the novelist) he himself 'shapes his prose,' as Lionel Trilling points out, 'for comment and explanation. " When the narrator is mentioned, moreover, he is mentioned only to be disparaged. Crews (p. 51) sees the only use of the narrator in The Longest Journey as giving Forster an opportunity "to blurt out, every now and then, an exact confession of what he himself wants the story to mean," and seems relieved when he can suggest of A Passage to India that "Forster's theme is now sufficiently grand, and his relationship to it sufficiently controlled, for the novel to stand unsupported by moralizing rhetoric" (p. 179). He believes that "if Joyce, in his effort to be ingenious and comprehensive, recedes towards incoherence, Forster too readily withdraws to lucid commentary" (p. 175). Harry T. Moore, too, thinks A Passage to India Forster's most satisfactory novel because, among other things, it has "fewer editorial comments than all the rest."3 And F. R. Leavis complains of the author's presence in The Longest Journey and Howards End: "The other two novels are much less the artist's: in them the imposing or seeking of any such conditions of detached and happily poised art has been precluded by the author's essential interest."4 If Forster's most frequently quoted phrase is the "only connect the prose and the passion" from Howards End, a second significant note of most recent

"Waverley" as History; Or 'Tis One Hundred and Fifty-Six Years since

Abstract: It was as history that Waverley and the Waverleys made their great impact, and it is history that they are really about. And like history itself the appeal was and is multifarious and many-layered. What appealed to the nineteenth century was Scott's concrete reconstruction of the past, the "what" of history. This was not only a question of the feelings of patriotic Scotchmen and nostalgic Englishmen but of the most serious and profound European minds brooding on the rapidly disappearing past and the rapidly expanding future and the enigmas of man's history. Not only French historians, like Thierry, but sociologists of the future, like Tocqueville. Thus Tocqueville in England:

Some Contemporary Czech Prose Writers

Abstract: I often ask my friends in the United States: "Do you know Closely Watched Trains?" This innocent, and to many cultured Americans, slightly embarrassing question is really part of a very private research. Most will recollect having heard about a movie of that title; a few will actually have seen it. Here and there I find someone who is aware that this Oscar-winning film by Jirl Menzel was made from some Czech novel ... or was it a short story? They are not sure. After many inquiries I have come across only one person who knew the name of the author of that short novel: Bohumil Hrabal; but this person was Canadian and had a Czech boy-friend. And not even she knew that the book in question was published in the United States-not by an obscure publisher, but by one of the best known publishing houses, Grove Press. This all only reconfirms the well-known fact that is, however, too often disregarded in surveys of the World's Leading Writers: namely, that different art forms of a small nation have correspondingly different chances to become known to the world at large, and consequently to be considered important in the context of world art. Music is privileged: the virtuoso is admired everywhere, even if he speaks only his native tongue. Films, too, have a wide audience, all you need is to supply sub-titles, because the appeal of a motion picture rarely depends on dialogue. But a novel, a short story, a poem-that is language. It first must be translated, and although there are many people in the United States who understand Czech, barely a handful of them are translators sensitive enough to get not only the obvious meaning of the original, but also all the other messages, connotations, niceties-all the poetic qualities of a work of art. Yet even if you find such a miracle of an American (to my mind only two of them are active at the moment), you still have to find a publisher. Films are easier to promote: there are all those Festivals, all those Oscars, Golden Lions, Silver Sails and what not, which all means publicity, and the interest of U.S. distributors can be aroused. But you have no Festivals of Novels, and the little golden statues, the Edgars and the Hugos, go only to writers of what in my country is usually referred to in Viktor Sklovskij's term as "poklesla literatura" (debased literature). The average U.S. publisher is usually just not interested, unless something happens-preferably something tragic-and the name of a small nation, for a short time, makes headlines. When, under such circumstances, a small country like Czechoslovakia produces suddenly a whole series of good, or even outstanding films, these products appear to the not very knowledgeable American to be flowers growing out of a cultural desert. At the time the Czech movies began to reach the West (about 1964, when Milog Forman's Peter and Paula was reaping laurels at European Film

Henry James and the French Mind: The International Theme in "Madame de Mauves"

Abstract: "Madame de Mauves" bears the distinction of being among the first of James's works to deal with the "international theme." James generally repudiated his early tales in establishing the canon of his work for the New York Edition, which appeared between 1907 and 1909. Nevertheless, he did include "Madame de Mauves," along with two other early stories, both of which also embody the "international theme." One may justifiably hazard a guess, therefore, that James recognized "Madame de Mauves," in spite of its crudely melodramatic touches-two characters, including one of the four principals, blow their brains out-as occupying an important position in the progression of the European motif towards an increasingly subtle complexity in The American and, much later, The Ambassadors. Few critics do more than remark that there may be a connection between James's experimental technique in the novel and the puzzling aspects of its heroine's character.' In this study we shall examine the deficiencies and strengths of the "central consciousness," Longmore, to perceive what light they may shed on the heroine's, Euphemia's, true nature. We shall attempt to trace the sources of some of the ambiguities of character, and to see whether they correspond in any

Nathalie Sarraute and the Practice of Writing

Abstract: The publication in 1968 of Nathalie Sarraute's new novel, Entre la vie et la mort, confirmed the continuity of work which extends along a clearly defined central line of pursuit. Her five novels to date, together with an initial collection of prose pieces, the critical essays and studies and the radio plays, have a coherent relationship that it would not be easy to find surpassed in the writings of any other novelist. This tightly integrated body of work has been produced over a considerable period of time (some thirty-five years), but it is difficult as yet to point to any really adequate critical assessment of its achievement. The reasons for this are complex, and to a great extent the complexity stems from the work itself; from a certain ambiguity of approach suggested by it that, in writing which can be so readily characterized in terms of its coherence, inevitably seems paradoxical. The problem posed by the novels, and here lies the difficulty of adequate assessment, is largely one of reading, and what might relevantly be attempted in the present essay is in some sort the disengagement of the premises for the reading of Nathalie Sarraute's work, an attempt that will not perhaps be without some general interest with regard to a certain history of the novel form. The habitual approach to Nathalie Sarraute's novels is made in the vital context of discussion of the "nouveau roman." Such an approach, however, can also be misleading, as misleading as the concept of the "nouveau roman" itself, which is popularly defined with reference to certain theories of Alain RobbeGrillet. This is a procedure that has led to the consequent creation by critics of literary "schools" into which the most unlikely novelists, Nathalie Sarraute among them, are then grouped. Simply to call to mind a few important publication dates is to place Nathalie Sarraute at this level in a rather different history: 1938, La Nausee; 1939, Tropismes; 1942, L'Etranger; 1945-49, Les Chemins de la liberte; 1948, Portrait d'un inconnu (with a preface by Sartre); 1951, Malone meurt, Molloy; 1953, Martereau, Les Gommes. The habitual approach via the context of the "nouveau roman" thus tends to involve a focus on purely negative elements in her novels, on the terms of the rejection of certain assumptions basic to the traditional, "Balzacian" novel common to a group of contemporary French novelists (but common equally to more or less the whole range of "modern" novelists, to Virginia Woolf, for instance), and so fails to distinguish the particular quality of Nathalie Sarraute's work. If there are significant connections to be made between this work and that of, say, Robbe-Grillet, they can only be made by considering the meaning of the two quite separate bodies of work for the novel form, and not by discussing the one in terms of the other. Indeed

The Dreaming Narrator in S. Y. Agnon

Abstract: The reader of Agnon is likely to receive as his first impression a sense of the extraordinary waywardness of the story-line. In a long novel such as Hakhnasat Kala (The Bridal Canopy), 19321 the pattern is almost classically picaresque. The hero's journey in search of a bridegroom and a dowry for his daughter takes him through the Jewish villages of Galicia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. His chance encounters with mendicants, burghers, students of the law, functionaries of all kinds, the poor and the rich, provide the opportunity for an endless series of reminiscences, legends, moral tales, and even beast-fables. Linking them is the naively pious personality of the wanderer himself, Reb Yudel, as well as the overall atmosphere of hasiddic spirituality which involves all the characters in its warmth. Reb Yudel's return to his wife and family at the end of his journey (like that of Leopold Bloom at the end of Ulysses) brings the stream of incidents and chance associations to an end, but by no means binds them together in a unified plot structure.2 A more complex and enfolded narrative technique is provided by the shorter novel 'Ido Ve'enam (Edo and Enam), 1950.3 Instead of a simple string of episodes associated in the picaresque manner, we have here a concentric system of narratives or hints of narratives to which the central node of relation is more than casually linked. There are no fewer than twelve such secondary narrations deployed in a brief work of twenty-five thousand words, and the narrator has a way of picking them up again and again as the story proceeds rather in the manner of a