Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1973"

The Form of the Sentimental Novel

Abstract: Most discussions of sentimental literature, taking their lead from Goldsmith's "Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy," center on matters of content and atmosphere-especially the prevalence of tears, whether those of the characters or the audience. But sentiment on stage is not equivalent to sentiment in the novel, nor can the most striking formal characteristics of the fiction being written in the 1760's and 1770's be illuminated by invocations of such philosophic doctrines as Shaftesbury's benevolism. Through a discussion of the form of sentimental fiction, I would like to suggest that such works as Tristram Shandy, The Man of Feeling, and The Sorrows of Young Werther were neither the resurgence of a cultural stream that had somehow gone underground for almost half a century, nor part of an essentially discontinuous novelistic tradition. They show instead both a structural and a thematic continuity with earlier eighteenthcentury novelists, and with the work of Pope and Swift, that is more central to the best of sentimental literature than any continuity with the themes, plot turns, and moral atmosphere of late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century drama. A convenient foil to my view is the frequent assertion, however qualified, that the form of the novel had become so established in the little more than twenty-five years between Pamela and Tristram Shandy that Sterne could already freely experiment with all the givens of the "well-made" novel, including its typographical conventions. In this literary-historical commonplace, formal balance and circumstantial realism are the assumed standards; sentiment, gothidsm, and Sterne are the deviations, to be explained more by reference to the history of ideas than the history of the novel. At best the change is explained as a "revolt against realism": the critic defines sub-genres and asks us to sit back and wait for Jane Austen. But I would like to argue that Sterne, among others, is not upending but extending the essential self-definition of the novel in England, and I would like to show how a literary form whose first appearance trailed banners of fidelity to real life and moral correctness could metamorphose into Sterne's elaborate formal games and the "discovered" manuscripts of Walpole and Mackenzie. Structure in the sentimental novel strives to imitate feeling rather than intellect, and to embody direct experience rather than artistic premeditation; this basic imperative of the novel from Defoe on is only made a little more apparent in the works of Sterne, Mackenzie, and others. The form of the sentimental novel, the gothic novel, and eighteenth-century fiction in general never seriously imitates such non-literary fictions as the order of providence, philosophic system, or social hierarchy, no matter how it may comment on them or include their patterns

"Frankenstein" and the Tradition of Realism

Abstract: The English novel, as a form, has rarely been kind to characters with large aspirations. For the most part, it has preferred to chastise them and to praise those heroes reconciled to unheroic lives. In a way, the limits of praiseworthy aspiration and of the capacity to act effectively on the world are established in Robinson Crusoe, which offers us a hero whose heroism consists in survival and learning to use the most ordinary materials to build a home and a thriving economy. That the story is, as a whole, incredible makes it all the more characteristic since its literary strategy is to make the unbelievable seem quite ordinary, and it uses extravagance not to create a hero with the kind of aspirations appropriate to romance, but with great expectations which go no further than getting rich. The conventions of realism, to which, by and large, the central traditions of the novel were moving by the nineteenth century, entail a preoccupation with ordinary materials so that, even in large historical dramas like those of Scott or in fictions, like Dickens's, where fantasy is allowed a much freer rein, the hero who aspires greatly is regarded with distrust, or gently mocked, or frustrated entirely. Most of the great novelists, from Scott and Jane Austen to Thackeray and George Eliot, tend to concern themselves with heroes and heroines whose major problems are not to affect the course of history or even to make a significant public difference, but to achieve, within the limits imposed by an extremely complicated and restrictive bourgeois society, a satisfactory modus vivendi. Only in gothic fiction can we find heroes whose ambitions-like Melmoth the Wanderer's-outstrip the limits of that society and are not unequivocally judged. Only there can we find directly and unprejudicially dealt with the large emotional energies which are impatient with the quotidian. Yet it is striking that the great nineteenth-century non-realistic fictions like Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights, or even lesser works like Melmoth the Wanderer and Uncle Silas, and certainly the romances of Scott, all tend to share certain attitudes toward heroism which we have hitherto too easily located in traditions of realism. Close examination of any of these works makes clear how inadequate the term realism is for any but the crudest sorts of notation, and how naturally "realistic" methods slip over into romance, or gothicism, or other non-realist categories. It is possible, I think, to take a work like Frankenstein and see it as representative of certain attitudes and techniques that become central to the realist tradition itself. As it works frankly in a world freed from some of the inhibiting restrictions of "belief" and "fact," it allows us to see at work quite openly some of the tensions

Henry James and Walter Besant: "The Art of Fiction" Controversy

Abstract: On April 25, 1884, the popular novelist and antiquarian Walter Besant delivered a lecture called "The Art of Fiction" at the Royal Institution in London. On the following day the Pall Mall Gazette devoted a short paragraph to the lecture in its "Occasional Notes"; and on April 30 it printed a longer response-also called "The Art of Fiction"-from the critic Andrew Lang. In May, Chatto and Windus published the lecture with the author's notes and additions. The Spectator for May 24 carried an unsigned review of this edition, "Mr. Besant on the Art of Fiction," by its editor, R. H. Hutton; and passing references appeared that year and next in other journals.1 Henry James joined the debate in Longman's Magazine in the fall with his own version of "The Art of Fiction"; to which Robert Louis Stevenson rejoined in the winter Longman's with "A Humble Remonstrance." In 1891 the New Review revived the debate through two symposia, "The Science of Fiction," featuring Besant, Paul Bourget, and Thomas Hardy, and "The Science of Criticism," featuring James, Lang, and Edmund Gosse. In 1895 James's erstwhile friend, the young novelist Vernon Lee, added some relevant ideas "On Literary Construction" in the Contemporary Review. These are the chief British contributions to that "era of discussion," as James called it, through which the novel in England and America acquired its first modern credo. The American contribution was more noncommittal: it consisted of brief reviews of Besant's lecture in the Nation (July 3, 1884), the New York Times (August 31, 1884), and the New York Tribune (August 29, 1884); of copious quotations from James's essay by his friend Grace Norton in the Nation (September 25, 1884); and of pirate editions coupling Besant's lecture with James's response as central items in the great debate.2 Technically the "era of discussion" had begun in 1882 with William Dean Howells' controversial essay, "Henry James, Jr.," in Century Magazine, and Stevenson's "A Gossip on Romance" in Longman's. A small uproar over the role of character and incident in fiction had been set off by these entries which re-

Ovid and the New Mythologists

Abstract: In The Stoic Comedians Hugh Kenner elaborates the plight of the self-reflexive, meta-novel tradition in modern fiction. From the time of Flaubert, he argues, many novelists have felt compelled to take as their central theme neither subjective emotion nor objective social reality, but the prior problem of the possibilities of their own medium. The novelist must build words into convincing fictions, yet all the conventional modes for creating the illusions of reality-both in language and in fictive forms-present themselves first of all as merely sterile constructs of a terrified human attempt to mask the emptiness of existence in a hostile and unknowable world. Fictions present themselves primarily as fictions and defy our attempts to assert their reality. However, within what Kenner describes as the closed system of fictions, each calling up others in a parody of Nietzsche's eternal return, the novelist remains also a comedian. He retains the power of manipulating this closed and unreal system in continually fresh and even illuminating ways; there remains an infinity of possible permutations elaborating the sterility of the fictions the writer employs. Kenner's principles continue to illuminate the contemporary novel though in a slightly different way. Some important contemporary novelists, enervated by what John Barth calls "the literature of exhaustion," seem to be seeking a different, less tortured and self-conscious means of liberating themselves to play within the closed system of received fictions. I am thinking particularly of what seems to be a shifting attitude towards mythology-exemplified in the similar tones (though quite different subject matter) in Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera, Donald Barthelme's Snow White, and Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics and To. All four works seem much closer to each other than they do to the other two basic modes of treating mythology in contemporary fiction: Joyce's quest, for example, for a myth that can help order, interpret and ennoble the flux of contemporary experience, and Pynchon's deadly serious attempts to set off the interpretive limits of mythology by placing it into a series of ironic relations to that same flux.1 In the group of works I've cited, emphasis shifts from myth as a means for interpretation to myth as a field for imaginative play; the writer seems less interested in interpreting an evanescent reality beyond the fiction than in accepting his fictive base as a means for liberating his own imagination and allowing it to play freely with imaginary situations, secure that at the least the writer is free from obsessive concerns with the possible "truth" of what he is trying to do.

From Imitation to Rhetoric: The Chicago Critics, Wayne C. Booth, and Tom Jones

Abstract: Toward the end of his NOVEL essay on the reception of The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth raises the difficult question of whether he and various commentators on his book "belong as critics to a profession in which there is any chance whatever of cumulative discourse."' The praise accorded his book, he finds, is hardly more helpful than the blame, for both often spring from failures to grasp clearly not only the specific problem he has dealt with but also, more crucially, the specific assumptions about fiction and criticism underlying his approach to the problem. Since each critic approaches his own problem with his own assumptions, since indeed he is probably led to discover his problem because of his assumptions, these also come to govern his approach to the work of other critics. His praise of others' work, then, like the blame, turns out to be essentially irrelevant to it. Depending thus on fortuitous agreements and disagreements as to assumptions, problems, and even terms, discourse among critics breaks down, with critics "forever shout[ing] slogans at each other from distant armed camps." Booth does not set forth this pessimistic view merely as a way of suggesting that no one has really "understood" The Rhetoric of Fiction; he admits, in fact, similar failures of his own in dealing with other critics. Yet his argument has the effect of rendering The Rhetoric of Fiction somehow beyond critical appraisal, for the book becomes truly accessible only to those who happen to share its assumptions and are thus able to understand what the book attempts. The only way to break through this Struldbrugg-like isolation of one critic from others and achieve in critical discourse "progress of a limited kind," Booth urges, is to agree that "there are many legitimate questions based on differing assumptions and definitions and amenable to differing methods": then "those willing to share a mode, an interest, a language" will at least be able to communicate. But, it would seem, those unwilling-or unable-"to share a mode" must remain in "distant armed camps." Is it possible to enter Booth's "camp" in order to understand his work without at the same time becoming a member of his army? The location of the camp is Chicago, and the governing principles are Neo-Aristotelian. In fact, an earlier Neo-Aristotelian has put very directly this matter of the confusions and mis-

The Contributions of Formalism and Structuralism to the Theory of Fiction

Abstract: What follows here is both a discussion of a topic and a review of currently available books on that topic. The topic itself is important for two reasons: (a) because formalism and structuralism have indeed made significant contributions to the poetics of fiction, and (b) because these contributions have not been sufficiently recognized by American (and British) critics. The achievements of formalism have not been sufficiently appreciated because they have simply been unavailable until recently to readers who, like myself, are ignorant of the Slavic languages. Even now, we do not have in English all the formalist criticism I, for one, would like to see available. We have the excellent little anthology of Lee Lemon and Marion Reis (Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Bison Books, 1965-hereafter abbreviated to L & R) and a new volume, also well edited, by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Readings in Russian Poetics, M.I.T., 1971-abbreviated to RRP)-and that is all. Beyond these, there are some translations into French, Italian, and German. Thus the formalists have been only recently, and then scantily, available through their own writings. But I believe it is possible now to make a fair estimate of their achievements, even for a reader who, like myself, is confined to English and French. The structuralists pose another problem. Where formalism is in some sense a completed literary movement, which can be treated historically (as it is in Victor Erlich's excellent Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, Mouton, 1955), structuralism is very much in a state of becoming, with all the subdivisions and internecine struggles that we expect to find in a revolution in progress-especially one that shows signs of being successful. And where formalism was primarily a literary movement strongly influenced by linguistics, structuralism is a whole movement of mind, which no single discipline can claim to dominate. Thus Jean Piaget, in his superb survey of structuralist thinking (Structuralism, Basic Books, 1970), can treat his subject as it appears in mathematics, logic, physical science, biology, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy. The study of language and other semiotic systems can make a strong claim to being at the center of all structuralist activity, but the study of literature has only a small piece of this intellectual action. In addition to this, structuralist literary criticism is mainly untranslated from the French at the present time, and some of it appears to be equally impenetrable in either language. To understand it, a considerable investment of time and energy seems to be required-much of it to be expended in studying disciplines which do not appear to be immediately useful in the neatly compartmented world most aca-

Flaubert to Joyce: Evolution of a Cinematographic Form

Abstract: I believe that the reification of narrative form represents one of the defining characteristics of much of the fiction we designate as modern. This trend seems to begin in the latter half of the nineteenth century, most notably with the publication of Madame Bovary in 1857, continues into the twentieth century, and on to the present day. By reification I mean precisely what Ezra Pound meant when he described Flaubert's efforts as an "attempt to set down things as they are, to find the word that corresponds to the thing, the statement that portrays, and presents, instead of making a comment, however brilliant, or an epigram."' Reified form, then, is a way of transcribing the narrative not as a story that is told, but as an action that is portrayed and presented, and some or all of the following characteristics are usually present in each reified narrative:

Melodrama and Totality in "Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes"

Abstract: The plot of Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes has generally been viewed as something of a liability. Lanson saw it as an exemplary illustration of "l'ecoeurante extravagance des intrigues que combine lourdement la fantaisie de Balzac,"' and this has been a habitual response of criticism ever since ("excessively slick," "luridly sensational," "undeniably extravagant" are characteristic of the judgments offered by more recent critics). That the record should be virtually unanimous in its condemnation of the novel is, of course, readily understandable: the tissue of unexpected encounters, violent coincidences, abrupt reversals of fortune, multiple disguises which make up the plot of Splendeurs evidently suggest a cheap sensationalism and an exotic theatricality which speak of a fatal concession to the commercial, sub-literary mode of Eugene Sue (with whom Balzac was engaged in active rivalry during the 1840s). Yet it is arguable that the established critical consensus on the novel has missed a great deal. Such a suggestion should not however be taken as indicating that the customary description of the novel as "melodramatic" is somehow inappropriate or inadequate. The melodrama is central, and any attempt to develop a revaluation of the novel must start from the fact of that centrality; it dictates the essential terms on which the question of the exact literary status of Splendeurs must be decided. The case I wish to argue here, therefore, is not that the way to rescue Splendeurs from its damaging critical heritage is by asserting an artistic achievement located, as it were, outside Balzac's use of melodrama. On the contrary, what needs to be stressed is the wholeness of Splendeurs, its deep unity of vision and technique, involving above all a recognition that, in this novel, Balzac does work in and through the conventions of contemporary popular fiction, but that his achievement lies in the radical transformation of these conventions in the service of a serious and dignified artistic purpose. The focus of this transforming activity is in a particular type of relationship that Balzac, like Dickens (as we shall see, the meaningful comparison here is with Dickens and not with Sue), establishes between melodrama and realism. This is not the place to enter into the semantic jungle that has grown up around the intensely problematic category of literary "realism". Among the various approaches to this concept, there is however one, in relation to which the complex ramifications of the plot of Splendeurs prove to be of great significance. That approach, which has occupied a central and fruitful place in literary theory (and, in particular, in the work of Georg Lukacs and Raymond Williams) springs essentially

Eustacia Vye and Eula Varner, Olympians: The Worlds of Thomas Hardy and William Faulkner

Abstract: It is difficult in considering William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels not to be reminded of Thomas Hardy. This association is made, for example, in the first sentence of Cleanth Brook's study of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha stories. "Most readers associate William Faulkner with the South," he says, ". . . as automatically as they associate Thomas Hardy with Wessex.. ..1 But, perhaps significantly, this is also the last mention of Thomas Hardy in the book and Brooks goes on to develop a fuller comparison of Faulkner's South with the Ireland of W. B. Yeats. It is of course true that in such a case there is little need to pursue a comparison between Faulkner and Hardy, since in general terms it is so obvious. In the world of Yoknapatawpha and that of Wessex we see a largely agrarian or pastoral society which is on the brink of or in the process of change. The shrinking of the forest and the consequent shrinking of man's spiritual horizons is a major theme of several of the stories or sections of Go Down, Moses (1942). The tone of the narrator who tells us of the passing of Major de Spain's hunting camp and of its replacement by a sawmill is elegiac, just as the whole volume is in one sense an elegy for the repeated failures of the progressively de-mythologized generations of McCaslins. Perhaps one should turn to the beginning of Light in August (1932) to understand how fully in Faulkner the sawmill represents the blind degradation and deadening of the environment. Similarly it is with a tone of elegiac regret that Hardy, in The Return of the Native (1878), records the passing away of the profession of the reddleman in the face of modem methods.2 Because Hardy, except in the special case of The Well-Beloved (1897), never attempts the chronicle novel, he cannot show the disintegration of his rustic society in the way of Faulkner, whose scope in time can easily spread from the Civil War to the Second World War in a single novel and whose events and characters can pass with equal ease from one Yoknapatawpha novel to another. Yet there remains in a pastoral novel like Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) a comparable sense of a lost world, since, though no wailing train disturbs with its technological threat or promise the pace of life in rustic Wessex as it does in Yoknapatawpha County,3 Hardy and his

Willa Cather's Last Four Books

Abstract: In her major novels Willa Cather explored the archetypal dimensions of the human imagination: 0 Pioneers!, with its vision of the new land and its heroic settlers, is written in the epic mode; My Antonia, with its quest into the author's personal memories, is a pastoral; The Professor's House, which chronicles an ugly tale of human greed, is largely satiric, and Death Comes for the Archbishop, with its saintly missionary priests, portrays the disciplined, timeless world of the paradisal imagination. But what of those books written after Death Comes for the Archbishop, particularly those last four volumes (Obscure Destinies, Lucy Gayheart, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, The Old Beauty and Others) which critics agree mark the decline of Miss Cather's art? Can these novels, from a writer of such depth, be as undistinguished and insignificant as has been suggested?' The answer is at once affirmative and negative. With the exception of the long story, "Old Mrs. Harris," the later writing lacks the imaginative energy which found consummate expression in the earlier novels. But the vision which underlies these books is precisely one which discounts the urge to expression through art; for it was the author's conviction in later years that not art but only life truly matters in the end. Consequently Willa Cather's last fictions occupy that paradoxical, but not uncommon, position of works of art pointing to their own devaluation. As a romantic Willa Cather believed in the absoluteness of the artist's vocation.2 Her major novels were all written as egotistic expressions of an individual con-