Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1975"

Flaubert: Writing and Negativity

Abstract: In the opening pages of L'Education sentimentale we encounter the following two sentences: "La campagne etait toute vide. II y avait dans le ciel de petits nuages blancs arretes, et l'ennui, vaguement repandu, semblait alanguir la marche du bateau et rendre l'aspect des voyageurs plus insignifiant encore." The context will, of course, be recalled: Frederic Moreau is on a boat travelling up the Seine from Paris to Nogent and it is on this journey that he will make the decisive encounter of his life with Marie Arnoux. On a hasty reading the sentences appear as a relatively straightforward enumeration of descriptive elements, particularizing the landscape, indicating the movement of the boat, evoking the general aspect of the passengers on board. A more attentive reading will, however, yield further, more significant qualities; above all the evident care taken over the composition of the sentences: the attention to structure and rhythm in a conscious attempt to create through shape and sound a kind of plastic image or correlative of their semantic content. There are, for example, the "blank" quality of the first sentence, the characteristic use of the ternary period, the strategically placed "vaguement repandu," the weighty, arresting sound of "alanguir," the placing of "encore" after instead of (as is more usual) before "plus insignifiant," again for obvious rhythmic and sonorous effect. Furthermore, if we go back to the sentences after we have read the whole novel, we shall find that, through their power of suggestion, they reach beyond the immediate context to integrate symbolically with some of the major themes of the novel: thus, the motifs of void and immobility, boredom and insignificance, adumbrate many of the central realities the hero will encounter in the course of his "education." Finally, the sentences could be read in another way: they could be said to reflect, at the micro-level, the principles governing the overall form of the book. As Jean-Pierre Richard has argued, in Litterature et sensation, the creation of form in Flaubert's fictions proceeds from a tension between the principles of fluidity and solidification, dissolution and petrification; from an urge to yield to what is apprehended as the unstructured, dissolving rhythms of life and an impulse to impose order and coherence on those rhythms. Our extract, both in the content of its dominant images (flux and immobility) and in its own formal structure (at once free-flowing and yet harmoniously arranged) may be said to reflect the larger dialectic of formal elaboration in Flaubert.1

"Mentalized Sex" in D. H. Lawrence

Abstract: D. H. Lawrence is probably the most notoriously censored author in all of literary history. His very first novel, The White Peacock, had to be toned down, words like "mucked" and "passionate" changed to "dirtied" and "infatuated." From then on it was one suppression after another. When the police confiscated the first edition of The Rainbow in 1915, Lawrence automatically became the inspiration (though not quite the spokesman) for a new generation of writers who wished to establish sex as a legitimate subject of literature-with what effect everyone knows. Lady Chatterley's Lover, his last novel, was Lawrence's major effort in this struggle. "I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful. And this novel is the furthest I've gone. To me it is beautiful and tender and frail as the naked self is, and I shrink very much even from having it typed. Probably the typist would want to interfere-." 1 In 1928 he had it printed in Florence, privately, having first explained all the dirty words to the Italian printer-who said he knew of such words himself and saw no reason to be squeamish about setting them in type. At first Lawrence had thought that he might do an expurgated edition for his British and American publishers, but it proved impossible. He said the book bled when he tried to clip it.2 No legitimate publisher dared to bring out an uncensored edition until 1959 in the United States and 1960 in Great Britain-that is, 30 years after Lawrence's death. One wonders what he would have thought of the way publishers and readers have finally made use of his "frail" classic. Lawrence said that he had "put forth" Lady Chatterley "as an honest, healthy book, necessary for us today." 3 He wanted "men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly." 4 He was not so much advocating

"Dubliners": Portraits of the Artist as a Narrator

Abstract: Joyce's explicit statements concerning his artistic intentions in Dubliners are not very useful as a basis for interpretation. Admittedly, they identify some of the themes in the collection; but they do not provide insight into its challenges. We read the book at a very superficial level if we assume it narrates "a chapter of the moral history" of Ireland, with Dublin serving as "the centre of paralysis." Joyce's outline for the arrangement of the stories, moreover, lists only obvious categories: "childhood," "adolescence," "mature life," and "public life." 2 Yet it is upon the evidence of these remarks from his correspondence that many arguments for unity have been founded. Critics who have taken this point of departure have usually had to supplement their arguments for narrative and thematic relationships with source studies, intricate symbolic systems, and biographical backgrounds. Ultimately, they have oversimplified the difficult question of sequence; and they have neglected the fact that Joyce relocated some of the stories when he was getting the book ready for publication. They have concluded, for example, that "The Dead" is a nihilistic coda and that Joyce conceived it as a protest against his native land; or, as in the work of Homer 0. Brown, they have said that the final story in Dubliners reverses the meaning of the book by celebrating self-knowledge and self-acceptance and "breaks the link between Joyce and the narrator of the earlier stories." 3 Professor Brown's point is certainly tenable; and it makes sense both in terms of Joyce's exile from, but continuing love for, Ireland. Dubliners, however, supports another theory, one which proposes that the stories are studies in the growth of Joyce's developing and maturing consciousness and that his exploration of this growth-imaging also his formal interest in narrative art-gives the book coherence. For the purposes of orientation in a discussion of Dubliners, perhaps we should begin with an observation which Joyce made in 1900: "Life we must accept as we see it before our eyes, men and women as we meet them in the real world, not as we apprehend them in the world of faery." 4

"The Immense Indifference of Things": The Tragedy of Conrad's "Nostromo"

Abstract: In Conrad's major works, especially in Nostromo (completed in 1904), the novel that is probably his masterpiece, one encounters mysterious and exasperating contradictions-or are they paradoxes?-that might help to account for the misery Conrad experienced as a writer. One of the most self-conscious of modern novelists, as rigorous and relentless in his own way as Flaubert, whom he admired, and as fundamentally pessimistic as Schopenhauer, whose lifedenying and misogynous philosophy may well have influenced him, Conrad sets up again and again in his novels dialectical struggles-melodramas of "opposites" -that cannot be resolved except through the destruction of both, and the necessary deaths or defeats of his central characters. If authorial intrusion assures us repeatedly that our personalities, our identities, our very lives cannot be realized except through "activity" (see Martin Decoud's thoughts just before he commits suicide), the same authority will insist, will dramatize most sensationally and cruelly (especially in Victory) that the very reverse is true: Heyst's bitter, skeptical father, a Schopenhauerian "destroyer of systems," turns out to have been quite correct in diagnosing action as the "barbed hook" that leads inevitably to man's destruction. Idealists like Jim and Kurtz (in his "European" phase) and Charles Gould are not only willing to gamble their lives for the sake of their ideals-which are, of course, "illusions" to Conrad; they are willing, quite unconsciously eager, to gamble the lives of others, of entire communities. They are suicidal: if heroic at all, their heroism consists of an unconscious and, in Jim, rather adolescent inflation of the ideal of simple, direct, aggressive, "masculine" activity. Conrad admires them, in a way-but he cannot take them seriously, nor does he wish to present them as tragic heroes. Marlow, Stein, Dr. Monygham, and even Nostromo-whose cynical, instinctive intelligence is easy to overlook-speak more directly for Conrad, their profound skepticism a necessary critique of and check upon the frenzied activities of the "idealists." But if the idealists are horribly limited in vision, mistaking the "bait" of melodrama for reality, and thereby drawing into destruction any number of other, less credulous people, it is certainly the case that the skeptics offer very little; the more convincing they are, the more their intellectual cynicism seems to be the ultimate comment upon human existence-for does not Conrad himself share Martin Decoud's attitude toward Costaguana's politics, and Nostromo's fate in the "desperate adventure"

Tragedy and Comedy in Brown's "Wieland"

Abstract: Many critics and scholars have written extensively about the various sources of Charles Brockden Brown's novel, Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), yet what may be the most pervasive general influence-that of Shakespeare-has been overlooked entirely so far. The sources enumerated certainly are important for an understanding of Brown's immediate use of other writers, as well as for a grasp of his translation of historical events into fiction. Thus, one critic has stressed the role of the Godwinian "novel of ideas" in the make-up of Wieland, while others have focused on such diverse things as the presence of the Gothic formula, the influence of various German works, the historical background of the spontaneous combustion motif, or the story of one American farmer whose execution of his family, reported in contemporary newspapers, bears an obvious relation to the "sacrifice" effected by Theodore Wieland. What I would argue, however, is that these immediate sources are all partial, while a reference to Shakespeareto Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing, in particular-can provide us with a fairly thorough guide, not only to the origins of Brown's novel, but also to its multiple meanings. My intent is not finally to point out specific Shakespearean sources for Wieland, though Brown's deep and continuing fascination with Shakespeare makes such an approach both attractive and sensible. What I want to suggest, rather, is a more general parallelism between Shakespeare's typical generic distinctions and that mixing of genres which, it seems to me, is one of the most interesting of Brown's achievements in this book.

The Illusion of Diabolism in the Cabellian Hero

Abstract: Many of Cabell's critics have suggested that the author of "The Biography of the Life of Manuel" was obsessed with "diabolism," and that the Cabellian hero was cursed by foreknowledge of his own damnation. Edgar E. MacDonald, for example, writes, "Cabell's hero invariably has a well-developed sense of damnation, but he appears to prefer that state to the conventional morality of society. Edmund Wilson would trace Cabell's recurrent theme of damnation to the Calvinism of Cabell's paternal Presbyterian ancestry." 1 Joe Lee Davis, in his book-length study, describes one of Cabell's major characters in the following terms: