Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1977"

Jane and the Other Mrs. Rochester: Excess and Restraint in "Jane Eyre"

Abstract: lane Eyre is a didactic novel which subordinates the values of passion to those of restraint. Its central and readily demonstrable moral doctrine is that individualism must be subjected to time-honored human conventions and that romantic passion cannot be allowed to usurp the prerogatives of divine law. When Jane makes her crucial decision and leaves Rochester, this message is explicit in her stated and unqualified rationale for doing so, and it is implicit in the shape of the subsequent action, which is designed to show that her decision was correct. However, clarity is not persuasiveness, and an argument that would forbid a romance as compelling as this one must be persuasive indeed. If the denouement of the story, Jane's enrichment, liberation, marriage, and maternity, demonstrates the practicality of her earlier decision, the validity of the principle that underlies this decision is never substantiated. The novel never really justifies its premises; it merely and flatly asserts that Jane is correct. Were assertion the unique rhetorical mode of Jane Eyre, modern readers would be forced to accept a rather unconvincing and limited vision. However, Charlotte Bronte's opinions on passion and restraint are not confined to dictum and transparent parable as modes of expression. The specific substance of her argument is such that it cannot be demonstrated literally, and thus she must present it figuratively. Within a Gothic context rich in symbolic potential the novel presents a rhetoric that supports its fundamental imperative, and the key figure in this rhetoric is Rochester's mad wife, Bertha. A new twist on the old Gothic motifs of dark secrets, family curses, and monstrous or unearthly apparitions, she exists within a tradition that subverts the decorum of verisimilitude, and other conventions as well.' Within this less restrictive dimension she functions to communicate, through symbol, analogy, and example, a rationale for the moral bases of the novel. As the figurative representation of something unspeakable and as a projection of Jane's own dark potentials, Bertha is used to show why Jane must act as she does and why, despite the strength of opposing arguments and sympathies, the protagonist must decide to leave her beloved when his prior marriage is revealed.2

The Language of Realism, The Language of False Consciousness: A Reading of "Sister Carrie"

Abstract: Answer, first, why the heart thrills; explain wherefore some plaintive note goes wandering about the world, undying; make clear the rose's subtle alchemy evolving its ruddy lamp in light and rain. In the essence of these facts lie the first principles of morals. "Oh," thought Drouet, "how delicious is my conquest." "Ah," thought Carrie, with mournful misgivings, "what is it I have lost?" Before this world-old proposition we stand, serious, interested, confused; endeavoring to evolve the true theory of morals-the true answer to what is right.1

Willa Cather's "A Lost Lady": The Paradoxes of Change

Abstract: Critics have long recognized the pioneer theme that runs through major works by Willa Cather.' The standard interpretation of this theme is that the early novels -0 Pioneers! and My Antonia-present the nobility of the pioneer spirit; the later novels trace the decline that results from the loss of that spirit. Novels not immediately part of the pioneer series are interpreted by this theme; for example, The Song of the Lark has been said to "closely resemble" O Pioneers! and is like My Antonia in that "both depend upon a mystical conception of the frontier, and both look back longingly to the heroism of better days." 2 Such an approach carries an inherent risk of bias-of fitting the individual work into the preconceived framework. A Lost Lady has suffered especially from this critical predisposition. Shortly after A Lost Lady was published, Regis Michaud called its female protagonist, Marian Forrester, "an American Emma Bovary."3 In doing so, he announced the interpretation that has persisted to the present. According to the standard reading, the subject of A Lost Lady is Marian Forrester, and the theme concerns her betrayal of the noble pioneer values of the West. Mrs. Forrester's decline parallels the West's decline; the novel becomes an elegy for the pioneer past, narrowly linked to a specific time and place. Yet both external and internal evidence contradicts this reading. Cather is never simply a period or a regional writer. Her novels are rooted in place as surely as Joyce's are rooted in Dublin; however, just as surely, she uses a specific situation as a vantage point from which to consider universal themes. In her novels, Cather gives to the individual the task of transforming commonplace existence so that he or she may live according to "the great truths." The major pioneer novels preceding A Lost Lady present two aspects of this theme of transformation. In 0 Pioneers! Cather focuses upon the transformation itself through the relationship between Alexandra and the land. Early in the novel Alexandra progresses toward the formation of her dream in the scene on the Divide; the rest of the novel depicts her actualization of this dream. The transformation is a literal one; the land is actually shaped to reflect Alexandra's vision of it, with "order and fine arrangement manifest all over the great farm." 4 In My Antonia Cather

John Steinbeck: Novelist as Scientist

Abstract: The fiction of John Steinbeck has had a special appeal to the scientist, for of all the major American writers of fiction in this century, Steinbeck alone has had an abiding interest in natural science and brought that interest to his writing. The marine scientist, in particular, has claimed Steinbeck for his own because of the writer's life-long attachment to the seashore and its animals. He was, according to several professional scientists who knew him, "a very good amateur biologist." Furthermore, if Steinbeck does have a claim on the attention of future generations of readers, much of that claim will be based on his concern with science, since he alone, among American novelists of his time, saw man as part of an ecological whole. At the same time, however, Steinbeck's scientific outlook created many problems for him as an artist and contributed significantly to a generally negative response to much of his work by literary critics. His use of science put him in a position of isolation-often the critics did not understand what he was doing. Further, his use of ideas associated with science brought him into conflict with the novel form and its traditions, leading him into difficulties with characterization, plot, and point of view which he was only partially able to overcome. While the modern novel as a whole has tended to drift back toward the poetic and mythic, Steinbeck's fiction, particularly during those years when he was most heavily influenced by his marine biologist friend, Edward F. Ricketts, was often infused with large doses of naturalistic philosophy. Thus, his example not only provides some interest as an exception to the general flow of modern American fiction, it throws into sharp relief the central scientific-poetic duality of the novel form itself. The novel form has always been attached to "science," in the broadest sense of the word. The English novel was born out of the Reformation, the middle-class version of the Medieval romance. Its development and popularity must be linked in part to a change in the climate of belief. Largely by accident of inheritance and by an evolutionary adaptation, the novel, among all the literary species, assumed those characteristics which best fitted it to carry the burden of the major philosophical conflict of the post-Renaissance Western world: science versus religion, or the new faith versus the old. Neither poetry nor drama could adequately carry the burden of this conflict because each was already committed by origin and development to the old. It became the task of an essentially new form to explore the nature of reality, an ancient question brought into the center of modern consciousness by the power of science at last to command a degree of belief which roughly matched the power of religion.

"Between the Acts" and the Coming of War

Abstract: In none of her other novels is Virginia Woolf as conscious of and responsive to contemporary events as in Between the Acts. Conceived early in 1938, finished in February 1941, published only after her death in that year, the book reflects the impact on her of the extraordinary events of the time-the Munich crisis, the declaration of war, the fall of Paris, the preparations for a German invasion, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz-moments in the history of her country and her civilization in which the threat of catastrophic ruin was constant. She was not a reporter and had no wish to record these incidents directly in her work or to write a "topical novel." But as her diary for those years shows, she was constantly responding to the decisive historical events taking place. This intrusion of public life into her private diary was unprecedented in her career, so it comes as no surprise that the sense of crisis also affected her fiction in deep if indirect ways. What she wrote about Henry James's reaction to the coming of the First World War could be said of her response to the second: "It was Belgium, it was France, it was above all England and the English tradition, it was everything that he had ever cared for of civilization, beauty, and art threatened with destruction and arrayed before his imagination in one figure of tragic appeal" ("Henry James," CE, I, 267).1 Images of calamity dominate the diary entries for the period: "the whole of Europe may be in flames-it's on the cards" (17 May 1938); war will mean "the complete ruin... of civilisation in Europe" (17 August 1938); "Now we are in the war. England is being attacked. I got this feeling for the first time completely yesterday; the feeling of pressure, danger, horror.... Of course this may be the beginning of invasion" (31 August 1940). And invasion inevitably meant the end for the Woolfs: a prominent Jewish socialist like Leonard would almost certainly be sent to a concentration camp, and they had already decided to take their own lives in the event of England's collapse rather than permit this to happen. Nor was this desperate mood idiosyncratic. As E. M. Forster wrote in 1939, in an essay appropriately called "Post-Munich" that captures the apocalyptic feeling of the

To Soar in Atonement: Art as Expiation in Gaddis's "The Recognitions"

Abstract: Despite the intricacies of structure and design that have gone into the making of The Recognitions, there is apparent in the work, as in the flamenco music so loved by Wyatt, "the tremendous tension of violence all enclosed in a framework." Much of what strikes the casual reader as "excessive" in the book-its length, the virulence of its satire, the wide and esoteric range of its allusiveness, the improbability of certain incidents-suggests the extreme lengths to which William Gaddis was prepared to go to create an art commensurate with all reality rather than some limited aspect of it. As with Moby Dick, the novel's implications move in wider and wider circles from the bobbing coffin of Queequeg, or the catastrophic final harmony at Fenestrula. The Recognitions is an obsessive book, in that both author and characters seem driven to extremities of experience, perception, and thought. Individual figures such as Reverend Gwyon, Stanley, and Anselm are obsessed with the ultimate validity of reality, though their obsessions take different forms: arcane theology and philosophy, Catholicism and baroque music, absurdity and religious despair. Recktall Brown is driven by avarice, Otto by prideful self-esteem, Basil Valentine by his personal variety of embittered fastidiousness. These obsessions jar each other in contrapuntal relationships: Valentine and Brown, Stanley and Anselm, Gwyon and Aunt May, and the quasi-protagonist Wyatt in individual relation to each of them. Indeed, it is through the focal character of Wyatt that The Recognitions carries on a continual and insistent debate. That debate, which might be termed the obsession of the novel as a whole, revolves around the following double question: What is the nature of, and what are the conditions for, genuine art?

Shandean Geometry and the Challenge of Contingency

Abstract: Shklovsky's famous claim that Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel of world literature is both an embarrassment and a challenge to the student of Sterne. The pronouncement lacks the authority and resonance of Whitehead's more famous dictum that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, even the plausibility of the analogous statement about Cervantes and the history of the novel. It recalls instead the Sterne-obsessed speaker in Wayne Booth's wonderful parody who projects a history of Western Literature from Homer to Hemingway in which all writers would be judged by the way they adumbrate or derive from the Master of York. This is a fine comment not only on the excesses of the cult of Sterne, but on any scholarship which claims that its chosen text has "included and exhausted all that the human imagination can rise or fall to" (to quote another mad speaker, the Hack in A Tale of a Tub). Whether or not all novels really are or really need to be about the writing of novels, I think the insight of the Russian Formalist about Sterne's "typicality" is suggestive: Shandy remains one of the best novels for thinking about the nature of the novel as a form. Sterne is one of the first of the "narratologists," a philosopher about the way stories have been told and can be told. The aspect of novelistic form that I would like to use Shandy to reflect on is what may be called the logic of events in a narrative: why does what happens happen? To what extent are the events predictable, to what extent are they explainable? Does the sequence of events imply a characteristic way things have of happening, a set of laws for the fictional universe? And if this is the case, then are we to see such laws as following from or making a comment on beliefs held by the author and his readers about how things happen in the real world? I will begin by considering two familiar ways of accounting for why matters fall out as they do in Tristram Shandy. The first asserts that events do happen in such a way as to imply a view of the universe: Sterne gives us what B. H. Lehman describes as a representation of "contingency incarnate." 1 The second

The Aesthetic of Forbearance: Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night"

Abstract: "Forbearance, good word." This curt entry in F. Scott Fitzgerald's notebooks is the tempered reflection of the private man. The public Fitzgerald was more rash. The man who, on meeting his idol James Joyce, offered to jump out of the window to demonstrate his adulation, lacked, unquestionably, the instinct to forbear.2 Forbearance conventionally prescribes a standard of behavior, a "good" word in that it designates a social virtue, a deliberate restraining of self-assertive impulses. Yet such acts of restraint, social or moral, were probably uncongenial to a writer of Fitzgerald's temperament, a romantic novelist attracted to personality defined as "an unbroken series of successful gestures," 3 the uninterrupted, sweeping gestures of the self. That Fitzgerald's praise of forbearance surfaces in the literary musings of his notebooks suggests, rather, that forbearance is a good word primarily in Fitzgerald's private vocabulary of art, a word connoting a determined fictional strategy within a determining moral stance. Forbearance as an aesthetic attitude emphasizes the active sense of the word-a withholding, a deferral until the proper moment for expression declares itself. Forbearance, aesthetically conceived, implies a suppression of narrative information and as such represents a guiding principle in the construction of plot. A forbearing fiction demands a canny narrative treatment of history, of character, and of appropriate generic and mythic material to insure that the ironic mystery of its fable is protected against sentimental, moralistic readings. In a letter of "uncalled for" advice to John Peale Bishop, Fitzgerald counsels the aspiring novelist on the primacy of mystery over morality in the novelistic treatment of causality and human destiny:

Malamud's Travesty Western

Abstract: A New Life is a Western, or more accurately a neoor meta-Western, which is to say, a Western written by an author (typically in a university, where such literature is studied) aware of the tradition, the genre, and therefore a book about that genre as well as about life in the West. It is helpful, I think, to remind ourselves that at the same moment at which Bernard Malamud's meta-Western was appearing, another book was being published, very different in every other aspect, but like A New Life academic in its origins and its relationship to the tradition of the classic or pop Western. Moreover, like Malamud's novel it, too, is set in the landscape of Oregon, and Oregonians move through its pages. I am thinking of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which in 1976, fifteen years after its conception, has been quite deliberately detached from the name of its original begetter and re-invented, re-presented by Milos Forman and Jack Nicholson as a Hollywood Western. I have in fact recently seen it in that form, in which it is being discovered by an immensely larger audience than ever read it (or even bought it) in print. I hear that even as I write a film version of A New Life is also being planned and cast. Yet I am convinced, for reasons which should be clear to you before I am through, that it will never touch as large and varied a group of viewers as Kesey's book. The mass audience is able to respond to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at the deepest psychic levels because in the end it proves to be a real Western as well as a meta-Western, or perhaps because it was from the start a real Western merely disguised as a meta-Western. What I intend to suggest (assuming that every genre embodies an archetype, at whose heart is a characteristic myth of love) is that the erotic center of Kesey's novel re-embodies the archetypal Eros which underlies the most American of all fictional forms. I have spent a good deal of my life writing about that myth, from my early essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey" to a relatively late study called The Return of the Vanishing American, and I like to think there remains scarcely a literate American who is not aware of its structure and meaning. It seems to me, therefore, sufficient at this point to say merely that it is a myth of transitory and idyllic love between two males in the Wilderness, one a White refugee from White civilization, the other a non-White member of a group which has been exploited or persecuted by his White lover's people. White Women, who represent the world of Law and Order from which the renegade White Man is in flight, when they appear in this myth at all, appear as the Ultimate Enemy. Whenever we find such pairs at the center of a fiction, whether they be Twain's Huck and Jim, Cooper's Natty Bumppo and

The Escape from Irony: "Under the Volcano" and the Aesthetics of Arson

Abstract: When Alice comes upon Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, she needs help. She has read "Jabberwocky" out of a backwards book some time before, and though it "seems very pretty," she cannot make any sense of the poem. Recognizing in Humpty Dumpty a literary man of sorts ("you seem very clever at explaining words"), she asks him for an explication. Alice has come to the right place; Humpty Dumpty is a know-it-all who can "explain all the poems that ever were invented," along with some that have yet to be written. After reducing the mysteries of "Jabberwocky," Humpty Dumpty seems to fall asleep. Alice walks away, muttering that he was "unsatisfactory," and just then "a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end." Neither Lewis Carroll nor the nursery rhyme tells whether Humpty Dumpty had anything to say after breaking into pieces. But it seems likely that if he ever managed to pull himself together, Humpty Dumpty would have lost both his glib confidence in language and its capacity to explain away mysteries. He might have become imprisoned in his own history, a gothic autobiographer. But the chances are that Humpty Dumpty's fall simply put an end to his speeches altogether. Still, it did not put an end to the figure of Humpty Dumpty, at least in the imaginations of modern novelists. Tenniel's egg-man is, after all, almost too perfect a symbol: the elevated position, the arrogance, the premature dependence on language as a tool to explain away secret knowledge, and perhaps because of all this, the complacent snooze that results in fragmentation. If the image of Humpty Dumpty in bits on the ground begins to remind the reader of the figures the modernists chose to exemplify their heritage (broken towers, ruins of all sorts, invaded or arid gardens, ripped-up books), then it is no wonder that he is revived in that most literary of modern novels, Finnegans Wake. In his metamorphosis into HCE (in "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly"), Humpty Dumpty stands in for Everybody, and rises again. But he is not always so lucky. Early in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, Jacques Laruelle picks up an unmailed love letter written by the Consul and intended for Yvonne. In it, the Consul declares what he should have been doing with his time while he was drinking: "producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty.. . ." Or books on "secret knowledge." Or magical prophecy. Humpty Dumpty never has his triumph because the poems-and those other literary works-never get written. Worse yet, the letter in which he is mentioned never gets to Yvonne, and by the time Laruelle

"The Middle of the Journey": Death and Politics

Abstract: The Middle of the Journey has often been taken, for good reasons, as a "political" and a "liberal" novel. By this is commonly meant that we are to see in it, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has said, "a searching and compassionate account of the liberal's dilemma in a world of absolutes." And Daniel Patrick Moynihan, also much taken by the book, praises it as "a novel about the two great absolutist ideas of our time and the wan possibility of maintaining a distance from either." Such an understanding of the novel has its proper claims upon our attention, and few readers of The Middle of the Journey, published in 1947, can free themselves of their memory of the book as a studiously crafted examination of the literary mind engaged in political complexities. That mind contrives its fictional realities as it holds in fixed positions the political possibilities of the day: communist, anti-communist, anti-anti-communist, liberal. This understanding of Trilling's achievement can, however, also temper one's admiration for it. Must the novel, one asks, be so claustrophobically paradigmatic? Must it, for all its elegance, be determined to air certain issues of the time in so deliberate and chaste a way? These misgivings are reinforced by some facts surrounding the composition of the novel. They support the reader's sense that The Middle of the Journey is an elaborate design that, in its fullness and delicacy, has a design upon him. In explaining the peculiarly important function that one character, Gifford Maxim, came to have in the writing of the novel, Trilling wrote in 1975 that Maxim was perfectly appropriate to his "polemical" intention. That intention was one of "bringing to light the clandestine negation of the political life which Stalinist Communism had fostered among the intellectuals of the West." 2 This was not to be the whole of the novel; indeed, it has, I believe, a more general and grave ambition and to that we may presently turn. But surely the function of Gifford Maxim in the book was to cast a deep political shade-that of anti-Stalinisminto every corner of the action. Trilling had seen clearly how Stalinism had damaged writing in the thirties. "Proletarian literature" had been the result, and against its predictable rigidities he opposed his whole being as a writer. Political reality was hardly so certain as such a literature had assumed. As Trilling explained in 1975, the figure of Maxim was based directly on Whittaker Chambers. By 1947, Trilling had known Chambers for twenty-three