Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1983"

Proper Ladies and Heroines@@@The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen@@@Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels

Abstract: Preface Editor's Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature and Culture Part I The Field of Cultural Production The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods The Market of Symbolic Goods Part 11 Flaubert and the French Literary Field Is the Structure of Sentimental Education an Instance of Social Self-analysis? Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus Principles for a Sociology of Cultural Works Flaubert's Point of View Part 111 The Pure Gaze: Essays on Art Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception Manet and the Institutionalisation of Anomie The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic.

Toward a Mechanics of Mode: Beyond Bakhtin

Abstract: It seems paradoxical that a Russian Formalist whose theories date from 1928-29, when Formalism was falling out of favor, should be the first to study the links between the public ceremony of joyous debasement and an important segment of French literature. But in fact we must thank Mikhail Bakhtin for having treated in Rabelais and His World (1940) the traditional representations of disorder and anti-social outrage as esthetic phenomena with recognizable patterns and conventions. Through his analysis of the carnival, he has located their source and justified their presence while throwing light on their positive function not only in Gargantua et Pantagruel but, by extension, in a growing number of outrageous comedies. It is surprising in another sense that Bakhtin's first book, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929), places the serious writing of Dostoevsky in the same large "carnivalesque" tradition, discovering there a popular language previously ignored by critics bent on elevating literary icons. This earlier study goes far towards explaining the mechanics of a writer whose power escapes very few but whose gifts are more often praised and misprized than understood. Approaching the carnival as a folk super-genre, it discloses virtues where flaws have offended the eyes of earlier (and later) critics. The awkwardness of Dostoevsky's style, his failure to differentiate between the voices of his protagonists, the sharp shifts in tone and perspective, the curious juxtapositions, the unresolved plots and internal tensions are, for Bakhtin, part of an overriding esthetic proper to the "dialogic" work. They belong to the same tradition which spawned the circus, the symposium, and the menippean satire. This is a bold position, a remarkably clear-sighted one, and the pieces distinguished and assembled by Bakhtin not only fit marvelously together; they are in themselves elegant and well shaped. If in this essay I feel obliged to question certain aspects of Bakhtin's approach, it is precisely because his discoveries are too important to be clouded by the limitations of his perspective. These books are significant partly for the insights they bring to two major writers but mainly because, together, they constitute a message groping for a method, a view of the arts as they relate to primitive ceremony and interrelate modally. Despite a profound sympathy for the idea that carnival activities provide us with a frame of reference for the study of

Early Hardy Novels and the Fictional Eye

Abstract: Late in his life, Thomas Hardy told a correspondent about his traumatic memory of an event that occurred when he was sixteen: "I am ashamed to say I saw [Martha Brown] hanged, my only excuse being that I was but a youth, and had to be in the town at that time for other reasons. ... I remember what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back." 1 At about the same time, Hardy recorded in third-person form a similar memory of another hanging he witnessed not long thereafter, watching through a telescope from the heath near the family cottage in Higher Bockhampton: "The sun behind his back shone straight on the white stone facade of the gaol, the gallows upon it, and the form of the murderer in white fustian, the executioner and officials in dark clothing and the crowd below being invisible at this distance of nearly three miles. At the moment of his placing the glass to his eye the white figure dropped downwards and the faint note of the town clock struck eight.... He seemed alone on the heath with the hanged man and crept homeward wishing he had not been so curious." 2 Hardy's verbal reconstruction of these pivotal scenes from his adolescence, specific versions of which would recur in his first published novel and in two of his last three, have a number of striking elements in common: the persistence in the mind's eye of a highly charged moment from the past with overtones of sexuality; the definition of the quality of light, either diffused, as in the first example, or strongly centered, as in the second; attention to colors and outlines in the recreated scene; and emotional interaction between the viewer and the viewed, in which the sight is seen through and colored by an affective lens-in these cases, that of excitement and shame.3 These hanging scenes, and numerous other such scenes in Hardy's Life and fiction (the Life being essentially a narrative text not unlike the novels) are instances of "the voyeuristic moment," the moment in which the seeing subject and the seen object intersect in a diegetic node that both explicitly and implicitly suggests the way in which the world is constituted in and through the scopic drive. In using the term "voyeuristic moment," I am deliberately invoking J. Hillis Miller's discussion of what he calls the "linguistic moment" in the Victorian

Order and Meaning in Clarin's "La Regenta"

Abstract: Reading the one thousand and more pages of La Regenta (1884-85), by Leopoldo Alas (also known as Clarln), is an experience in entrapment. The more deeply we penetrate its reading surfaces the more exasperated and bewildered we as readers feel. Certainly like all novels, La Regenta refuses to be caught the first time around. Or the second or the third. The critical reader cannot keep the work complete and of a piece in his head; and as the sought for unity slips away, in its place a growing sense of despair and unease settles over him. Faced with such obstacles, he may even try to avoid, for a while at least, a text as disturbing and complex as La Regenta. Folded and double-folded in multiple layers, Clarin's novel has the fearful capacity to absorb, to pull the reader in. This of course is exactly what a great novel should do: it should uproot us from our unwanted and various selves and repot us in more conducive soil. But what if the readercritic stumbles in his understanding and experiencing of the text, and finds that apparently smooth, even impenetrable surfaces, once tapped in the right place, break into disquieting fragments? What if the order sought for isn't any order at all?

A War between the Orders: Yeats's Fiction and the Transcendental Moment

Abstract: Between 1896 and 1902 Yeats composed four distinct versions and wrote some 726 manuscript pages of an unfinished novel, The Speckled Bird, before he finally decided to abandon the project.' Yeats initially conceived of the novel as, among other things, his "first study of the Irish Fairy Kingdom and the mystical faith of that time" (Letters, 268), but he gradually expanded the idea to include his other major occult and artistic preoccupations. The subject of the final version is nothing less than, in the words of Robert O'Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, "the artist's quest for spiritual reality," and the post-1899 versions of the novel represent Yeats's attempt to produce a spiritual autobiography in the format of a realistic novel.2 Indeed, The Speckled Bird is Yeats's version of a bildungsroman and as such it dramatizes his autobiographical hero's spiritual growth and development, his increasing dissatisfaction with the materialistic world of the senses and his developing faith in a higher, invisible level of being.3 From its inception Yeats's novel was concerned with the visionary realm of the imagination, but it was not until 1900 that he was finally engaged in what he called "real novel writing, and not essay writing or lyrical prose or speculative thought" (Letters, 345). The four books of the final version chart protagonist Michael Hearne's spiritual awakening, his complex personal relationships to his father (modelled on J. B. Yeats), to Samuel Maclagan (modelled on Macgregor Mathers), and most importantly to Margaret Henderson (modelled on Maud Gonne), his attempt to establish a new set of mystical or Eleusian rites, and finally

Signs and History in "Bread and Wine:" Silone's Dilemma of Social Change

Abstract: Bread and Wine, written in the mid-1930's during Ignazio Silone's Swiss exile, depicts the difficulties of active resistance to the Fascist State in prewar Italy.1 During most of the novel, these difficulties are portrayed through the actions of the characters, especially those of the priest, "Don Paolo." In reality, "Don Paolo" is the identity assumed by the novel's clandestine revolutionary activist, Pietro Spina.2 Since the "real" day-to-day role of the activist repeatedly jars against the "fictive" (but equally day-to-day) role of the priest, the validity of Pietro/ Paolo's acts is constantly put in question by means of the narrative events.3 Ultimately, the various implications of this questioning come together to form a pair of interrelated, broader questions: can we change society simply by changing our identities, by agreeing to discard or significantly modify our old roles and values and to assume new ones? And even if we can, how can we control the results of such a change so that they will be beneficial rather than harmful?

Queen of Critics: The Achievement of Q. D. Leavis (1906-1981)

Abstract: Despite all this, his work has received, and continues to receive, all the attention. The literary-academic world has been oddly incurious about Q. D.'s work. For instance, R. P. Bilan's 300-page book on his literary criticism has a solitary reference to Q. D.1 William Walsh makes some amends in F. R. Leavis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), granting a chapter to Mrs. Leavis in the guise of "The Principal Collaborator." 2 But his advocacy of her achievement falls short and is less than enthusiastic, as if to speak boldly for it were to subtract from Leavis. Thus Mrs. Leavis's magnificent and major Dickens criticism is pushed off into another chapter on Leavis, and what ought to be a decisive judgment on her behalf-"My own impression, in fact, is that this is Mrs. Leavis's book to which her husband has contributed, rather than the other way round" (p. 145)-is slipped into a "brief consideration" of Dickens the Novelist, which nevertheless gives more consideration to his part in it than to hers. Little wonder, then, that Walsh closes his chapter on Mrs. Leavis, saying that her criticism, "perhaps under the huge wing of her husband's repu-