Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1980"

The Gothic Origins of Science Fiction

Abstract: Les conventions et valeurs du genre Gothique vehiculees dans la SF. Realisme du futur (?) et imagination du sinistre. Interiorisation du Gothique, exteriorisation de la SF. Necrophilie. Impact de l'histoire et de la politique| reaction a l'individualisme prometheen et a la revolution democratique.

"Biografia de un cimarron" and the Novel of the Cuban Revolution

Abstract: "Hay cosas que yo no me explico de la vida. Todo eso que tiene que ver con la naturaleza para mi esta muy oscuro, y lo de los dioses mas. Ellos son los llamados a originar todos esos fen6menos que uno ve, que yo vide y que es positivo que han existido. Los dioses son caprichosos e inconformes. Por eso aqui han pasado tantas cosas raras." These are the opening lines of Miguel Barnet's Biografia de un cimarron, confusedly, yet significantly translated into English as The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave.l But who speaks here, the old runaway slave or the young Cuban anthropologist? Is the book a biography, as the original title proclaims, an autobiography, as the English title reads, or a documentary novel, as it is generally classified? I hope to show in what follows the pertinence of these questions with regard to Cuban literature by analyzing the documentary novel, one of the most popular forms of narrative to emerge in Cuba since the triumph of the Revolution. I also hope to show through such an analysis, which will focus mainly on Barnet's book, the role that Cuban literature of the Revolution plays today in the context of Latin American literature. As is well known, the questions posed above are fundamental ones in anthropology. They are the questions that Claude Levi-Strauss asks throughout Tristes tropiques, and they address fundamental concerns in the social sciences: how can I ever know the other, yet remain myself?2 In the literary realm the problem

Why the Man Who Liked Dickens Reads Dickens Instead of Conrad: Waugh's a Handful of Dust

Abstract: Toasting the Immortal Memory at the Dickens Birthday Dinner (1977), Barbara Hardy spoke for many Dickensians and some moderns when she referred to Waugh's use of Dickens in A Handful of Dust as "the strangest invocation of Dickens in modern literature." Tony Last's deplorable fate-having to read the works of Dickens over and over to a madman in the Brazilian jungle-cannot be "a joke against Dickens," Hardy decided, for a complete set of few other novelists "would turn up . .. in a mud hut on the Amazon." 1 In 1934, however, seven years before Edmund Wilson's restorative essay, Dickens was not the household word he once had been or has again become. Dickensians will quickly discern that Waugh caricatures Dickens outrageously and, in places, unfairly. But the joke, hilarious and effective, is definitely against Dickens. Waugh's reaction, like Aldous Huxley's, indicates that the response of modern satirical novelists to Dickens has been mixed. At other times an imitator of Dickens, Waugh puts the works of Boz in Mr. Todd's hut for a very satirical reason: he considers the Inimitable largely responsible for the breakdown of social restraints. This collapse, a consequence of the secularization of life, has resulted in the prevalence of savagery in the modern wasteland. To explicate the joke against Dickens from Waugh's perspective, one must discover why Mr. Todd reads Dickens instead of Conrad. Begun "at the end," A Handful of Dust originates from "The Man Who Liked Dickens," a short story "about a man trapped in the jungle, ending his days reading Dickens aloud." Inspiration for the story came during Waugh's visit with "a lonely settler" in Boa Vista, who could easily have taken him prisoner at that stage of his trek through Brazil. After publishing, Waugh "wanted to discover how the prisoner got there." So he re-used the tale as Chapter Six in a novel that contrapuntally compares the civilized man's plight among the primitives of Brazil with prior disservices done to him by "other sorts of savages at home." 2 Absurd events at Chez Todd are based on an autobiographical incident in which Dickens originally played no part. The isolated settler was a half-mad religious enthusiast, aptly named Mr. Christie, not a Dickens fanatic. As Waugh's

From Roman Policier to Roman-Police: Wilkie Collins's "The Moonstone"

Abstract: The classical detective story disposes of an interestingly paradoxical economy, at once parsimonious and squandering. On one hand, the form is based on the hypothesis that everything might count: every character might be the culprit, and every action or speech might be belying its apparent banality or literalism by making surreptitious reference to an incriminating Truth. From the layout of the country house (frequently given in all the exactitude of a diagram) to the cigar ash found on the floor at the scene of the crime, no detail can be dismissed a priori. Yet if the criterion of total relevance is continually invoked by the text, it turns out to have a highly restricted applicability in the end. At the moment of truth, the text winnows grain from chaff, separating the relevant signifiers from the much larger number of irrelevant ones, which are now revealed to be as banal and trivial as we originally suspected they might not be. That quarrel overheard in the night, for example, between Mr. and Mrs. Smith is shown for an ordinary marital row. That cigar ash-say, pointing unambiguously to Colonel Asquith's brand-is proven to have been deposited on the floor before the crime took place. Of the elaborate house-plan, only this door or that window enters into the solution, and of the exhaustive description of the scene of the crime, only a few items count while the rest relapse into insignificance. It is hardly an accident that most readers of detective fiction can afterwards remember "whodunit?" but have totally forgotten the false clues and suspects that temporarily obscured his identity. For the detective's final summation offers not a maximal integration of parts into whole, but a minimal one: what is totalized is just-and no more than-what is needed to solve the crime. Everything and everybody else is returned to a blandly mute positivity. This observation, of course, is meant to shift the emphasis from where it normally falls in discussions of the detective story: away from the mystery that it solves towards a recognition of the hypothetical significances that it finally dissolves. Though the detective story postulates a world in which everything might have a meaningful bearing on the solution of the crime, it concludes with an extensive repudiation of meanings that simply "drop out." 1 It is often argued that the detective story seeks to totalize its signifiers in a complete and allencompassing order. On the contrary, it is concerned to restrict and localize the

Future Recollections of Immortality: Temporal Articulation in Jane Austen's "Persuasion"

Abstract: Gladly yielding his charge to the care of a willing escort, Charles Musgrove hurries off to the gunsmith's, while Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot withdraw to a quiet path. Here, in an untypically complex statement, it is noted that "the power of conversation would make the present hour a blessing indeed; and prepare for it all the immortality which the happiest recollections of their own future lives could bestow." With privileged hindsight, the narrator can confirm, as hero and heroine cannot, the enduring impact of the moment, projecting it beyond the writing present, and suggesting by a fusion of time-planes its climactic centrality within the narrative. This explicit illustration from the penultimate chapter of Persuasion hints at what is observable throughout in more implicit guise. The force of time2 and sense of the past3 have been held to account for the book's atmosphere and appeal, while this last complete novel by Jane Austen has been described as the only one with a plot involving "considerable temporal complexity." 4 To examine how far the climax of Persuasion and the novel as a whole can be articulated according to the development of its temporal elements will be the concern of this essay. Common to all literature, but assuming a different value in different genres, time takes on a relatively important aspect in prose fiction, compared with its character of near-evanescence in lyric poetry and of near-isochrony in drama. In the harmonious totality of the epic form, the "life-immanence of meaning is so strong that it abolishes time"; in the novel, by contrast, "meaning is separated from life, and hence the essential from the temporal." Thus, Lukacs concludes, "the entire inner action of the novel is nothing but a struggle against the power of time." 5 His position has been endorsed by later critics, one of whom takes issue with the application of "structure" to fiction, holding the analogy to architecture essentially false. An analogy to "tempo" in music would be far more apt, since fiction "is conceived in time. Its essence is rhythm. The thing is not perceived as a whole in one view. It moves sequentially, from moment to moment." 6

Henry James and Percy Lubbock: From Mimesis to Formalism

Abstract: There is no need in these days to point to the only begetter of all our studies in this manner of approach to the novelist at work. Others no doubt, though few and soon named, had opened the way but the novel in its wayward exuberance had hardly been held to any serious account of its practice till it was called to confront the most magisterial of its makers. Henry James took the whole of its conduct in hand with a large assurance that cleared the air of certain old and obstinate misunderstandings. ... [T]here he stands, foursquare to all our theories of the novelist's art; and [theories] may blow where they list, but it is still with the burly figure of Henry James that they have first to reckon.'

Joyce's Gnomons, Lenehan, and the Persistence of an Image

Abstract: Our understanding of characters and characterization in the novel has vastly increased in sophistication since the days when it was possible to ask seriously how many children Lady Macbeth had, or to see characters as mere portraits of the author and his friends or enemies, or to view them functionally as foils or ficelles and not much more. Even so, human nature being what it is, we must struggle continually against the temptation to forget that novels like poems are verbal structures merely; or that, reversing our angle of vision, our knowledge of Jesus or of Napoleon is in one very important sense exactly like our knowledge of Hamlet: it is ultimately derived entirely from reading words written or printed -arbitrary symbolic data representing conceptual reductions of sense-data.* I want to discuss a few of the printed data that can be discovered and shown concerning a minor character of Joyce's, Lenehan-who has no given name like real people. The aggregate of these printed data can lead us into some unorthodox but instructive ways of examining the conception and genesis of "character" in the mind of Joyce and perhaps of other writers as well, for Lenehan bears about him traces of his creation, and achieves a very strange kind of immortality. The more specialized criticism dealing with Joyce's characters and characterization has developed in lines parallel with those followed by criticism in general. Thus his characters have been seen as though they were real persons now living, therefore possessing a theoretically infinite store of recoverable data: how many lovers had Molly Bloom, and should we like to be married to her?1 Stephen Dedalus in the Portrait is the young Joyce, perhaps painted by Picasso or Braque; Molly Bloom is an amalgam of Nora Joyce and the Virgin Mary.2 But

Deus Ludens: The Shaping of Mark Twain's "Mysterious Stranger"

Abstract: Knowing more than ever now about the gloom of Mark Twain's final years,2 we can imagine his miseries driving him into an artistic senility, a senility in which he spent year after year, ream after ream of manuscript "proving" to nobody that nothing and nobody are of any consequence, that life is meaningless, reality a lie. We cannot pretend that the last fables, chief among them the three variations on the Mysterious Stranger tale,3 reveal any reconciliation with life, or that the theology in these stories will hold water, or that as stories they are without serious flaw. But what the Stranger tales do attempt, what kind of struggle they represent, needs considerable clarification. Mark Twain's motives and his experiment are commonly misunderstood, and consequently our idea of how the tales complete his life in literature remains off balance. Much has been said recently about the three stages the story passed through; but still we lack solid explanations why Twain began, in succession, three different tales, why he suddenly abandoned Philip Traum after going so far with him, brought a very different emissary from Hell to the world of Tom and Huck, and finally completed the story he did-about a strange adolescent named "Forty-Four" and an anachronistic print shop in medieval Austria. Just what was it, especially in that last, meandering rendition, that Mark Twain was trying to work out? By way of an answer, I shall try to clarify here some of the technical problems Mark Twain was struggling with in each phase the story passed through-problems that grew out of a collision of his theme with the most basic requirements of his fictionand then outline the complex solution he was moving towards in the tale he

Huxley's Either/Or: The Case for "Eyeless in Gaza"

Abstract: "Huxley's finest novel" was David Garnett's verdict, reviewing Eyeless in Gaza in 1936; but, he added, "on the whole the plan of popping about in time is a mistake. If the chronological method had been followed, I should have stopped reading at page 500 and have missed almost all the boring parts of the book." More recently, George Woodcock has recalled how "the radical young" who had grown up under the liberating influence of Huxley's earlier work "were disturbed and disappointed at what seemed a retreat into obscurantism on the part of one of the writers we most admired." 1 The issues that perplexed the novel's first readers-the obscure chronology and Anthony Beavis' conversion to pacifism and mysticism-have since received a good deal of critical explanation. But they are worth examining again, for this is a richer and more carefully conceived novel than the explanations have led us to believe. Anthony's commitments, we now know, are those which Huxley himself made in 1935-36 and continued to pursue until his death. With his entire literary output before us, it is easy to detect the desire for spiritual wholeness and engagement latent in the cynicism of Gumbril Jr. (Antic Hay), Calamy (Those Barren Leaves), and Philip Quarles (Point Counter Point), who lead as naturally to the achieved transformation of Anthony Beavis as Huxley's disappointing later work follows from it. So Eyeless in Gaza has come to mark the end of the vital and much admired novelist of the 1920's and early '30's, and the beginning of the social prophet cum publicist of the late '30's and beyond.2 We also understand now the mimetic function of the novel's structural dislocations. They reflect not only the chaos and discontinuity of Anthony's early world-view, but also the sense of order and unity which underlie the fragmentary surface of reality.3 Under the tutelage of Dr. Miller, Anthony learns to see (in the primary metaphor of the novel) the patterns to which he has previously blinded himself. Simultaneously, the reader learns to perceive the Gestalt coherence attained by the interactions of past and present, parts and whole. "One in

Milly Theale's Malady of Self

Abstract: I had from far back mentally projected a certain sort of young American as more the "heir of all the ages" than any other young person whatever ... so that here was a chance to confer on some such figure a supremely touching value. To be the heir of all the ages only to know yourself, as that consciousness should deepen, balked of your inheritance, would be to play the part, it struck me, or at least to arrive at the type, in the light on the whole the most becoming. Preface, The Wings of the Dove

"Tristram Shandy's" Phantom Audience

Abstract: Tristram Shandy, I want to argue, is a story without an audience-or rather, a work projecting an empty space where internal or imaginary audience normally exists in literature. The argument, so far as it involves formal or objective consideration of the novel-close analysis of the text in a mode now grown unfashionable-is straightforward enough; what is no longer straightforward is the matter of audience itself. For actual readers of literary works, once banished on theoretical grounds in favor of internal audience, have in recent years been reintroduced into interpretation in the guise of phenomenological subjects, affective creators of meaning, haunted deconstructors of centerless structures of signification.1 I may announce at the outset, then, that my own analysis of audience in Tristram Shandy derives from a view formulated many years ago by W. K. Wimsatt, one anticipated by Walker Gibson and more recently asserted by Walter Ong:2 "the actual reader of a poem is something like a reader over another reader's shoulder; he reads through . . . the person to whom the full tone of the poem is addressed in the fictional situation." 3 Wimsatt speaks of poems here because poetry was his major concern in The Verbal Icon, but the same view of audience of course extends to narrative as well-to the "gentle reader" or "candid reader" of Tom Jones, to Madam or Sir or "your worships and reverences" as they appear in the pages of Tristram Shandy. There are, I think, severe objections to Wimsatt's formulation of the formal or objective view of audience, but as I have recently had occasion to discuss those objections at some length elsewhere4 I should like instead to concentrate on what remains essentially right about his insight. The idea of audience as an internal or imaginary presence was meant to account for what occurs when we open the book and begin to read:

Expressionism in "The Rainbow"

Abstract: In his essay, "Lawrence as a Painter," Herbert Read observes: "Lawrence was an expressionist," and he goes on to compare him with Nolde or Soutine.1 Edward Lucie-Smith relates Lawrence's "advocacy of expressive form" to German expressionist poetry, and his later paintings to the work of expressionists such as Kirchner.2 Canvases like "Red Willows" (1927) and "Dance Sketch" (1928) support this claim (although Lawrence's paintings tend to be transcriptions of "literary" ideas, lacking the subtle power of his verbal imagery). Most strikingly, Daniel Weiss illustrates the affinity between Lawrence's psychological vision in his novels and the expressionist art of Edvard Munch.3 Such literary and painterly affinities are appropriate to the movement, for as R. S. Furness notes, "developments in literature and painting ran parallel," with some artists, such as Barlach and Kokoschka, outstanding in both media.4 Let me therefore make clear at the outset that "expressionism" in the present study refers (directly and by analogy) to Lawrence's verbal emulation of the visual arts, rather than the distinct techniques of "literary expressionism" practised by such writers as Strindberg, Trakl, Kafka, and Joyce.5 According to the journal Der Sturm, expressionism "is not a fashion, it is an attitude to life, an attitude moreover of the senses, not of the mind." 6 Definitions of the movement are therefore notoriously difficult. To Kristian Sotriffer, "Its underlying characteristic . . . consists of an over-intensification of experience, a rejection of the classical canon, a distortion and exaggeration bordering on the hysterical, a shattering of traditional forms and the reordering of the fragments to make vehicles for changed thinking and sensation, and a new, more critical

Deplorable Quixotics@@@The Romantic Approach to "Don Quixote": A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in "Quixote" Criticism

Abstract: Preface Abbreviations 1. Don Quixote as a burlesque novel 2. The Romantics 3. Cervantes and the chivalresque ideal 4. Symbolic and allegorical criticism 5. Unamuno, 'Azorin', Ortega 6. 'El pensamiento de Cervantes' 7. Perspectivism and existentialism Conclusion Appendix Bibliography Index.