Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1981"

A Well Hidden Hand

Abstract: Question: Why are certain cheap books so fantastically popular? Answers: Because most readers are poorly educated or marginally literate, because they cannot resist promotional hype or other forms of mass manipulation, because they tolerate nothing but cliches, stock character-types, and certified Big Ideas, and because they consistently mistake certain familiar emotions, fantasies, stage effects, or mere organ tones for art.

Sister to Faust: The City's "Hungry Woman" as Heroine

Abstract: As Eugene Gant sets out for the "shining cities" of the North, in Thomas Wolfe's novel Of Time and the River, his sister stands beside him in Catawba's little railway station. Soon the paths of brother and sister, once connected by family ties, will diverge, never to reunite. The outbound train will take Eugene on a "road to freedom," away from the "mournful" South to the North's "golden cities"-ultimately to Boston, to Cambridge, and Harvard, where Eugene will discover the university's "enormous library with its million books." 1 All of these books, which he tries madly, obsessively, to read, prove incommensurate to his hunger, a furious and relentless hunger-"literal, cruel and physical," he calls it-and insatiable: a desire "to devour the earth and all the things and people in it." Driven by this "ravening appetite," Eugene tries to "read everything that has ever been written about human experience." He wants to "know it all, have all, be all." Real life, no matter how crammed with experience, cannot satisfy this epic craving; nor can realistic fiction, limited as it is to the usual, contain the impossible fulfillment it demands. Eugene's hyperbolic hunger, by ordinary standards egotistical if not simply mad, requires for its full expression literary forms that will enlarge life: those of legend and myth. Not surprisingly, in the first three books of Of Time and the River, Eugene's story is subtitled "The Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth"; and Eugene himself is called "Young Faustus." Later he is simply Faust.2 After his father's death Young Faustus returns home briefly, to hear of the hungers still unappeased in the sister he left behind. "'You're the lucky one!'" she told him at the railway station; "'You got away! . . . to Boston-to Harvard.' " No one had imagined an equally "incredible escape" for her. No one had thought of buying her a ticket to "freedom" and including her in the city's "enchanted promise" by paying for her education. Unlovely and without charm, though enormously charged with life, she remains unenhanced by legend. If anything, legend diminishes her stature by emphasizing her deficiencies. For this frenzied Helen, a woman strikingly misnamed, lacks beauty. Her gaunt tormented face will inspire neither love nor poetry nor heroic strife: it will launch no ship.3 Still, she has known supernal longings. Like her brother, she too has hungered for fame, has longed for adventure, voyages, cities, and the power of artistic expression. Recalling her "grand ambitions," Helen says wearily, "But

A Constant Reality: The Presentation of Character in the Fiction of John Fowles

Abstract: In her essay "Against Dryness," Iris Murdoch set the terms of what is one of the central dichotomies in recent fiction. We must overcome, she suggested there, our "desire for consolation" as seen in our sense of form: "Against the consolation of form, the clean crystalline work, the simplified fantasy-myth, we must pit the destructive power of the now so unfashionable naturalistic idea of character." 2 But in later discussion with Frank Kermode, she points out the difficulty of creating character, when "often it turns out in the end that something about the structure of the work itself, the myth as it were of the work, has drawn all these people into a sort of spiral, or into a kind of form which ultimately is the form of one's own mind." 3 Much post-war fiction is testimony to this latter comment, and many novelists, certainly those practitioners of the nouveau roman and their progeny, have adopted the hermeticism of the "crystalline" work with its self-referential stance, subsuming character into function or pattern, person into participle in the "sentence" of the text. Against this, however, we can posit the attempts of John Fowles to "foreground" character, to open the character out to the "tragedy" of the human situation in acceptance of his "suffering freedom," to struggle against what Fowles sees as the twentieth century's retreat into form and Lamaism.4 Humanity and morality are important to Fowles, and he refuses the retreat into the formal mythoi of his novels, emphasizing instead the content and human character rather than the medium of the artifice. His method chiefly involves three stratagems: manipulation of narrative points of view; an attempted negation of the print medium itself; and the adroit use of the proper name. The aim is to present character in the way that Nicholas comes to see Alison in The Magus: as a "constant reality." Fowles wants to create the illusion that his characters are as real as we who read-not just "like" people we know, but of the same ontological

"Rasselas" and Some Meanings of "Structure" in Literary Criticism

Abstract: Samuel Johnson wrote what he called "a little story book"-i.e., The History of Rasselas-while his mother lay dying; and it is easy to read the author's life into the work.' Near the end of the tale, an old man says that praise is an empty sound to him: "I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation of her son, nor wife to partake the honours of her husband" (45, 195).2 And we remember that Johnson's wife died seven years before the composition of Rasselas, even as we hear in our minds the last sentences of the preface to Johnson's Dictionary:

Significant Absences: Faulkner's Rhetoric of Loss

Abstract: Among the prominent characteristics of Faulkner's prose is his thoroughgoing preoccupation with the past. Dominating his themes, it is reflected in his concern with the fate of the wilderness, the Old South, and the American Indian as aboriginal figure, as well as with the fates of individual characters, which so often hinge upon causes emerging from half-real and half-imagined pasts. His thematic preoccupation is reinforced by an almost exclusive use of the past as his narrative tense, even to a remarkable degree in interior monologues disclosing his characters' present thoughts. Faulkner's depiction of the past is paradoxical, as we shall see, but a consideration of the rhetorical devices through which he controls its narrative presentation confirms the importance of both structural and thematic absences that pervade his works. Conversely, the significant absences in Faulkner's prose clarify the nature of his concern with time and transience and show that his well-known passion for the past develops logically from a very real preoccupation with loss.

The Reader as Ironic Victim

Abstract: "Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on their mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice, and materialism."-Settembrini to Hans Castorp, in Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Women in Richardson and Fielding

Abstract: Recently the critical journals have been publishing an increasing number of articles which derive their ideology from the women's movement. Some real critical gains have resulted, but there have also been excesses, in which the ideological commitment has obscured rather than illuminated the text. Katherine M. Rogers' article "Sensitive Feminism vs. Conventional Sympathy: Richardson and Fielding on Women" (NOVEL, Spring 1976) seems to me to be excessively committed, and as a result it does serious injustice to Fielding who, we are told, "accepted the male chauvinism of his culture"; and it does less than justice to Richardson, who is celebrated as a "radical feminist" (257). There are a number of points on which I would like to take issue with Professor Rogers. The most general is her determined polarizing of the two novelists into feminist and chauvinist, a polarizing which leads her to distort the evidence available in the novels she discusses. The choice of novels is itself revealing. We find much discussion of Clarissa, unquestionably Richardson's best novel, set against much discussion of Amelia, which is certainly not Fielding's best novel. Pamela, which reveals a side of Richardson that is not radically feminist, is skipped over briskly. There are accurate descriptions of Pamela: "in Part I Pamela is primarily a sex object" (256); "it is true that Pamela shows Richardson sharing this assumption that sexual violation means moral ruin . ." (260);". . . Richardson appears to have accepted this view [that women are the sexual property of men, and that the highest end of their existence is marriage] in Pamela" (261). But these are promptly put aside in favor of contrary evidence from Clarissa: "in Clarissa he made a point of proving that a woman's sexual condition does not define her moral status" (260); "he made a point of discrediting it [the view that women are the sexual property of men] in Clarissa." Clarissa is certainly a much better novel than Pamela, and more profound psychologically, but that does not mean that we should give lighter weight to the evidence in Pamela that Richardson was tarred with the chauvinist brush of his time.

Historical Fiction and the Implied Reader: Scott and Iser

Abstract: We have this moment finished Waverley. It was read aloud to this large family, and I wish the author could have witnessed the impression it madethe strong hold it seized of the feelings both of the young and old-the admiration raised by the beautiful descriptions of nature-by the new and bold delineations of character-the perfect manner in which every character is sustained in every change of situation from first to last, without effort, without the affectation of making the persons speak in character-the ingenuity with which each person introduced in the drama is made useful and necessary to the end-the admirable art with which the story is constructed and with which the author keeps his own secrets till the proper moment when they should be revealed, whilst in the mean time, with the skill of Shakespeare, the mind is prepared by unseen degrees for all the changes of feeling and fortune, so that nothing, however extraordinary, shocks us as improbable; and the interest is kept up to the last moment. We were so possessed with the belief that the whole story and every character in it was real, that we could not endure the occasional addresses from the author to the reader. They are like Fielding; but for that reason we cannot bear them, we cannot bear that an author of such high powers, of such original genius, should for a moment stoop to imitation. This is the only thing we dislike .... -Maria Edgeworth, writing "to the author of Waverley," 23 October 1814.1

Allegory and Narrative in "Clarissa"

Abstract: Critical treatment of Clarissa seems frequently torn between two kinds of impulses, both of which respond to aspects of the novel, neither of which accords well with the other. On the one hand are critics who use Clarissa and Lovelace as emblems of a polar opposition. The oppositions range from Dorothy Van Ghent's mythic scale with God above, hell below, Clarissa representing the archetypally virtuous and masochistically suffering female and Lovelace the archetypally violating male, to Christopher Hill's social scale in which Clarissa represents the virtuous Puritan impulse away from the bourgeois, financial concerns of her world and Lovelace represents an aristocratic, cavalier rebellion against those concerns.1 Despite differences in the valorisations they give their emblems, all these critics see the novel in terms of allegory, as a war of ideas or concepts, for which the text supplies labels. Nor is there any question that there is considerable pressure by Richardson, and by Clarissa and Lovelace, to see the two protagonists as embodiments, warnings, exemplars, ideals, of virtuous women, fallen women, rakes, triumphant or despondent. Still, quite a few other critics have insisted on looking at the book less as a war of themes than as a delicate investigation of the often different, but often quite similar, psychologies of Lovelace and Clarissa.2 They note, rightly, that the novel is, after all, considered an initiator of the kind of psychological realism which we normally associate with Henry James and more modern writers,3 and that the epistolary format of the work necessarily forces us to see characters from the inside as minds rather than from the outside as labels.4 One could reconcile the two approaches by positing that the allegorical divisions exist in the minds of the characters, which minds Richardson details with novelistic realism. Such a reconciliation, though, avoids more problems than it

The Novels of Jane Austen: Attachments and Supplantments

Abstract: From her juvenilia to the drama of Persuasion and Sanditon, Jane Austen shows a persistent fascination with the variability of objects for love. Throughout Austen's fiction love is dramatized as an essentially unfocused emotional disposition which only happens to be turned to any particular end through the chance disposition of circumstances. As has been observed from the time of Sir Walter Scott's review of her work in 1815, hers is an extremely unsentimental version of love. The power of circumstances in her work has also been observed quite often.2 Less noted, however, has been the close connection between Austen's lack of sentimentality and her general emphasis upon the power of casual circumstances in determining the success or failure of communication between individuals. That is to say, love's object is variable in Austen's world because her people can never understand each other completely, only partially