Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1978"

Second Thoughts on "Narrative Situations in the Novel": Towards a "Grammar of Fiction"

Abstract: The nineteen-fifties mark the end of the Linnaean age of the theory and criticism of the novel, with its emphasis on the definition of different species, kinds and types of the narrative genre. The one feature common to the otherwise widely divergent fictional theories of Percy Lubbock, Jean Pouillon, Edwin Muir, Wolfgang Kayser, and Kate Hamburger, to name but a few, is their aim to distinguish between types of the novel or modes of narration. My own first attempt at fictional theory in 1955, Die typischen Erzahlsituationen im Roman,l was also undertaken under the influence of this approach. Modem theoreticians and critics of the novel who are inclined to judge these earlier theoretical studies of fiction as being much too rigid for a description of the plurality of the forms of fiction, without considering the historical function of this approach in its time,2 should be reminded of what Claude Levi-Strauss observed concerning Linnaeus' relation to Darwin: "Darwin would not have been possible if he had not been preceded by Linnaeus, that is to say, if one had not already laid the theoretical and methodological bases permitting to describe and define the species which are subject to change."3 In fact the foundations were then laid for modem theories of narrative literature in which the main accent is no longer on the classification of the basic forms but on the variations and modulations of these forms, on their combinations and fusions as they appear in a particular novel or short story. In the meantime the linguistic approach to narrative texts has left its imprint on the critical scene, producing a new interest in the structure of the smaller narrative units, the sentence, the paragraph, etc. and demanding a more precise and systematic description of linguistic and literary phenomena than seemed necessary in older studies of the novel. In this article I shall try to modify my original theory of the novel and in so doing take into account the new situation. I should like to consider this modified

Fantasy and Femaleness in Margaret Drabble's The Millstone

Abstract: Le theme de l'echec dans the Millstone de M. Drabble est decrit par l'A. comme un mecanisme de defense, qui masque autre chose. Le personnage central, avec son imagination infantile et son refus de l'identite feminine, symbolise notre propre resistance a la verite, a la realite des motivations inconscientes. La conscience de soi et la quete de la feminitude| le passage de l'innocence a l'experience de la maturite, c. a d. le desir d'enfanter. Le feminisme circonspect de la romanciere.

Double-Distancing: An Attribute of the "Post-Modern" Avant-Garde

Abstract: In his classic essay "'Psychical Distance' as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle," 1 Edward Bullough described the operation of distance as the quality through which expression achieves aesthetic validity: "Distancing means the separation of personal affections, whether idea or complex experience, from the concrete personality of the experience." 2 He also coined the terms over-distanced (e.g. melodrama for the sophisticated) and under-distanced (e.g. melodrama for the un-sophisticated) to describe a quality in unaesthetic work. Consciously or not, Bullough himself was responding to what have come to be known as "Modernist" works, reacting to modernist procedures at about the same time James Joyce was trying to explain modes of perceiving within the modernist optic. During the post-Flaubertian post-Jamesian early 20th century, Joyce's view, like Bullough's, was characteristically fresh but on its way to becoming scrupulously orthodox. In his frequently misunderstood theory of distance, Joyce distinguished crudely but effectively between "kinetic" and "static" art: "The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire and loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them are improper arts. The aesthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing." 3 Neglecting "over-distancing," Joyce is describing attributes of under-distancing and enunciating Bullough's requirements for a work of art. We may proceed from there to describe certain contemporary works which, while seemingly breaking Bullough's rules and bending Joyce's, are still both "static" and properly distanced. Conventional modernism is characterized by fine-tuned and delicately balanced ironic productions which make the kinetic virtually impossible as a response by embodying motion in the artifact and refusing both definition and conclusion. Empathy and even antipathy are not banished from modernist texts where it is possible, even desirable, for the implied reader to discover himself and momentarily identify with the persona's predicament. For this seeming violation or imbalance to be viable, however, the text must impose an extra measure of distance by such means as humor, irony, symbolism and allegory. It is through irony in fact that distance is most readily achieved, through a device, that is,

Knowing in James: A Phenomenological View

Abstract: To know and how to know, that is the question for Henry James. And the answer to that question lies in what the "impression" means for him as a way of knowing. In "The Art of Fiction," James calls the novel "a personal, a direct impression of life." 1 For him, this phrase carries a multitude of meanings and references. In the creative process, according to James, a work of fiction begins with the author's impressions. Then, in the reading process, it achieves the ends of representation by evoking impressions in its audience. In the work itself, when he pleads for economy of construction, James asks above all that a novel adhere to "unity of impression" 2 as its principle of composition. Further, in his own fictions, James's heroes and heroines have dramas because they have impressions; indeed, their dramas are their impressions. And he tells their stories by relating the impressions of observers, registers, or reflectors on the scene who constitute a work's aesthetic center by acting as its center of consciousness. If James is an epistemological novelist, forever fascinated with the vicissitudes of consciousness, then this abiding concern with the processes of knowing shows itself in the importance he assigns to the "impression" as a broadly significant category, applicable in a wide variety of contexts in both art and life. Clearly, then, what the impression means for James as a way of knowing deserves careful explication. A phenomenological explication of the impression's meaning suggests itself because of the close relations between James's art and his brother William's philosophy. Many critics have been intrigued by Henry's surprised discovery that he had "unconsciously pragmatised" (Letters, II, 83) in much of his life and work.3 And they have shown the extent to which he was right when, politely ignoring their marked differences in temperament and taste, he told William that "Philosophically, in short, I am 'with' you, almost completely" (Letters, II, 44). But the growing awareness in philosophical circles of Wil-

Catch-22 and the Language of Discontinuity

Abstract: Joseph Heller's Catch-22, with its irreverent and bitterly comic description of the last days of World War II, has seemed for many of its readers a frighteningly accurate portrait of the "mentality" behind contemporary social and intellectual institutions.' Heller's novel, however, issues more than just a simple challenge to the various commercial, military, and religious organizations which govern the lives of its characters. In the world of Catch-22, patients' illnesses always coincide with their doctors' areas of specialization (182-3), fliers disrupt political indoctrination sessions with cries of "Who is Spain?" or "When is right?" (35), and Yossarian, the bombardier, must struggle against the "logic" of the Air Corps if he is to continue to survive. Such situations reveal how society's institutions reflect fundamental discontinuities in language, thought, and behavior.2 More than this, they suggest that at the heart of such dislocations is that problematic and radical discontinuity which has been the subject of so much critical discussion.

Character as a Lost Cause

Abstract: In Fall 1977 Novel published two condensed panel discussions-"In Defense of Authors" and "In Defense of Readers"-from its tenth anniversary conference on current trends in novel theory. Held at Brown on April 14-16, 1977, widely attended by students, academics, and townspeople, the conference was designed to bring together a distinguished group of critics and writers who might profitably consider the present state of fiction studies. To this group the editors of the journal addressed a working hypothesis: that fiction studies in England and America might be characterized, on the one hand, by the defense along many fronts of the human dimensions of the genre, and on the other, by more abstruse or more technical concerns, largely European in origin. Renewed interest in the author's presence or in reader reactions would be illustrative of the first tendency; hermeneutics, structuralism, and formalism of the second. Obviously the categories were too neat to account for the overlappings and convolutions of the tendencies themselves, or of anyone's critical thinking about them; and yet the tendencies were and are observable and worth discussion. The panel called "Character as a Lost Cause" was so entitled because, among recent defenses of the human dimensions of fiction-intrusive authors, unruly or wrongheaded readers-fictional characterization had until very recently received comparatively little critical attention; and because many contemporary novelists had in some sense written it off. The panelists themselves-Martin Price of Yale University, Julian Moynahan of Rutgers, Arnold Weinstein of Brown-and their moderator (and now editor) had all been engaged at one time or another in writing it back in again and were willing now to speak in its defense-even to deny its lostness. What follows is an edited version of their initial remarks and a condensed version of the discussion which they generated.

In the Flesh: "Esther Waters" and the Passion for Yes

Abstract: The crucial problem for characters in a naturalistic novel is to find an effective and responsible way of saying "yes." The saying of "no" in such works is comparatively easy, but the odds are distinctly against affirmation, as a glance at any representative sample of this fiction soon makes clear. In Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, for instance, we meet a character whose life is wholly determined for him by a collection of environmental and genetic influences over which he has no control. Even as a rigid class system coldly frustrates Jude's considerable efforts to improve himself through hard work and honest devotion to ideals, a baleful defect of the flesh, alluded to by his aunt in her oracular pronouncement that "'the Fawleys were not made for wedlock; there's sommat in our blood,'" thwarts all of his attempts to achieve happiness with women. In the face of such a coercive determinism, the only honorable response, most readers are likely to agree, is a strong and self-assertive "no," a satanic non serviam; anything less-certainly any form of acquiescence-would seem craven, a failure of human dignity, a denial of free will. "'Cannot we kill you?'" the invading Danes challenge St. Edmund in Carlyle's Past and Present, embodying in their threat all the injustice and oppression of a naturalistic universe. To which the stubborn saint replies, "'Cannot I die?'" Jude makes much the same defiant response to the powerful forces that control him. When Christminster officials refuse to admit him to their exclusive academic circle and oblige him to abandon hope of a scholarly career, he denounces them in a bitter passage from Job. And when his disastrous experiences with women confirm the accuracy of his aunt's prediction, he says "no" to these defeats too, persisting, however futilely, in his dream of domestic happiness. It may be argued that Jude's strong if ineffectual "no" to an oppressive universe is in reality a form of affirmation; that in saying "no" to the forces that seek to control him, he is in fact saying "yes" to himself, to the independent order and needs of his own nature. This view would place Jude in the great tradition of Romantic life-affirmers-yea-sayers whose celebration of self is of necessity preceded by a rejection of forces hostile to the self-and therefore in the

The Comedy of Survival in Dickens' Novels

Abstract: Every Dickens novel generates characters whose behavior seems obsessive and self-absorbed to the point of madness. The eccentricities that distinguish so many of these characters are not random quirks, however, but elaborate and often brilliant defensive strategies. All Dickens' characters, from Pickwick to Our Mutual Friend, must contend with societies whose rituals are largely pretenses, concealing almost continual assaults by one individual against another. The assaults can be hilarious or horrible-Flora embracing Arthur with her sweetly flustered gabble of sentimental language or Uriah Heep writhing his way toward Agnes-just as their moral significance can veer between the almost angelic virtue of Joe (who drives Pip frantic with his conversational monologue on a present for Miss Havisham) and the abject grovelings of Jonas Chuzzlewit. Social rituals from the solemn affectations of the Pickwick Club to monstrous institutions like Chancery offer protective cover for the assailants and are themselves the gradual result of collective fraud. Each of Dickens' novels, whatever its special concerns, makes the idea of a beleaguered self a central theme. The theme is revealed in the blandest social functionary and the most idealized heroine as well as the most flamboyant eccentric. As each novel begins gradually to intimate that all its characters are engaged in this secret common pursuit, it becomes apparent that the obvious assailants as well as the obvious victims are on the defensive, find themselves threatened in some vital way. Every act of sheer villainy in Dickens is in part an act of revenge, often desperate, as the later villains like Rogue Riderhood and Orlick openly assert. Raymond Williams has remarked on the way that Dickens' characters seem to talk through and beyond each other, manipulating conversational forms into aggressive self-assertion and self-advertisement.1 What I am emphasizing here is the defensive nature of such mannerisms. They arise in a complex of motives shared by all the individuals who make up the novel's society, a deep and pervasive insecurity in the social and psychological conditions that have shaped both the meekest and most arrogant of these characters. All of them, Pickwick as well as Jingle, Pip as well as Pumblechook, are in some basic and unremitting way trying to create and sustain a social personality and often, desperately, a basic sense of identity. The comic and villainous characters develop brilliant defensive strategies that allow them to gratify egotistic desires, shore up their self-esteem, and avoid anxiety and a troubled conscience. The "serious" characters are either protected by the narrative itself (Oliver Twist, for example) or-

The Generic Identity of the Novel

Abstract: The enormous difficulties critics have experienced in their efforts to arrive at a generally acceptable definition of the novel can be attributed in large measure to a failure to understand the nature of literary genres. Those familiar charges of pigeonholing and Procrustean beds levelled against attempts to treat genres systematically in the effort to move beyond the use of generic terms as mere labels of convenience point directly, if ineffectually, to misconceptions which have frustrated the labors of generic theorists, and point equally directly at inadequacies in the typical anti-generic stance. The charges arise from the recognition that while conventional generic theory seeks to separate literary types into distinct rigidly delimited categories, literary works resist such tidy schemes and writers are too notoriously perverse to bow meekly to such dictates. Polonius's comments to Hamlet on the range of plays performed by the Players expose the manifest faults of such generic schematizing: "The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historicalpastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited" (II, 2). In this locus classicus for anti-generic critics we see all the endless ramifying of categories to accommodate the diversity of literary works, all the ad hoc adjustments of a rigid generic schema, all the foolishness of theoretical frameworks which treats genres as demarcated categories. What is peculiar about the position taken up by anti-generic critics is that it most often proceeds from an inability to conceive of any notion of genre beyond that of distinct categories, separate compartments into which works are flung whether they fit or not. Rather than try to discover if there is a conception of genre that works otherwise, the anti-generic critic assumes that the conventional way is, if not the right, the only way, and condemns the entire undertaking for limitations that are as much his own as those of the theorists he attacks. Frameworks that treat genres as delimited categories derive from Aristotelian essentialist thinking, which holds that an object possesses an essence, an essential property or set of properties which defines it as a particular kind or species of object and distinguishes it clearly from other kinds. To seek essences in this sense of the word is to search for properties that are both necessary and sufficient for identifying an object as a member of a particular species. Necessary properties are often readily established, but it is seldom if ever possible to discover a property or set of properties that are both necessary and sufficient. Listings of properties will usually be found to have one of three faults: the properties listed are mere accidental features; the list specifies so few features that it allows in more objects than the category is intended to admit; or it is so detailed and extensive that it eliminates objects thought properly to belong to the category.

Hawthorne's Portrait of the Artist: A Defense of "The Blithedale Romance"

Abstract: Henry James was right. The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne's fourth novel (published in 1852), is not only "very charming"; it is "the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest" of all his "unhumorous fictions." 1 It is also rich in his characteristic psychological subtlety and highly dramatic; it is written with such easyseeming mastery of English prose music and such wit that its style is a pleasure in itself; and, dealing with a recent period of idealistic social experiment, as well as with the status of women, it is right now strikingly timely. Yet the novel has always had, and continues to have, a mixed press. A current work on Hawthorne shows the sort of case that can be made against it. After noting that Hawthorne at first vacillated among many titles for the novel ("Hollingsworth," "Zenobia," "Priscilla," "Miles Coverdale's Three Friends," etc.), this particular critic goes on:

The Smollettian View of Life

Abstract: It is a textbook commonplace that Tobias Smollett's novels are "episodic"-in other words, that attention is concentrated on individual episodes and how they unfold, rather than on the unfolding of a novel length plot. Nevertheless, critics who undertake to find a synthesizing force in Smollett's novels invariably seek it in the place where it is least likely to reside-the temporal structure (or plot) of the work. Thus Robert Giddings can call Peregrine Pickle "the story of a young man's moral decline and eventual return to life from a period of imprisonment, a better, because a wiser man" and be correct, yet not come close to describing the experience of reading Peregrine Pickle.1 All of Smollett's novels follow a rudimentary scheme of development such as Giddings describes (poverty to respectability, crime to repentance, separation to reunion), but to name these schemes is not to touch what is central in these books. The truth is that the reader is simply not interested in whether Peregrine will finally deserve Emilia, or secure his patrimony, or be transformed into a "better" person-what does interest the reader, and Smollett, are the dynamics of each individual scene at the moment in which it occurs. When reading a novel by Smollett, our thought is rarely "how did this come to be?" or "what is going to happen?" but "what is happening right now, and how am I to take it?" This kind of novel is hard to deal with critically. It can be represented simply as a string of episodic adventures held together only by the character of the adventurer himself (the picaresque); or it can be abstracted to fit our customary notion of what holds a novel together (temporal development); or it can be examined within the limits of a preconceived philosophical framework, so that Roderick Random, for instance, becomes a study of Reason and Passion.2 All of these approaches are to a certain degree useful; all provide a particular kind of insight into Smollett's work. But none is completely satisfying-directed on novels as broad and various as Smollett's, such narrowed illumination often obscures more than it reveals.