Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1985"

Why Political Novels Have Heroines : Sybil , Mary Barton , and Felix Holt

Abstract: L'angoisse sociale nee de la lutte des classes et le refuge de l'innocence feminine chez Disraeli, E. Gaskell et G. Eliot.

Rhythm and Narrative Method in Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Abstract: Before the publication of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in 1958 public awareness in the West of fiction from Africa was confined chiefly to white writers such as Doris Lessing, Alan Paton, or Nadine Gordimer. Thus Achebe's first novel, written in English, though he is himself a Nigerian of the Igbo people, was a notable event. More noteworthy was the fact that it was a very good novel and has become over the years probably the most widely read and talked about African novel, overshadowing the efforts of other West African novelists as well as those of East and South Africa. Its reputation began high and has remained so, stimulating critical analysis in hundreds of articles, many books, and dissertations. Its story describes, whatever one may expect from its Yeatsian title, the life of a traditional Igbo rural village and the rise of one of its gifted leaders, Okonkwo, before colonization, and then observes the consequences for the village and the hero as they confront the beginnings of the colonial process. Achebe's subsequent three novels, more or less related but not sequential, No Longer At Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), and Man of the People (1966), though all respected, have not matched its success. Achebe's fiction established firmly that there is an African prose literature-poetry had probably been well known since Senghor in the 1940s-even when written in English. Not that there has not been debate over and criticism of Things Fall Apart, and from Achebe's standpoint a good deal of misunderstanding through refusal of readers to take its African character seriously; but as a recent study confirms he continues to be "the most widely read of contemporary African writers." 1 His first novel has been "as big a factor in the formation of a young West African's picture of his past, and of his relation to it, as any of the still rather distorted teachings of the pulpit and the primary school," 2 and of course he has influenced his fellow writers just as significantly in finding their own subject matter and voice. When beginning Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, readers are often struck by the simple mode of narration and equally simple prose style, which critics have seen as Achebe's desire to achieve an "English . . . colored to reflect the African verbal style [with] stresses and emphases that would be eccentric and unexpected in British or American speech."" He reshapes English in order

Fiction as Greatness: The Case of Gatsby

Abstract: More than half a century after its publication, The Great Gatsby is still a vexed case, seen variously as a portrait of the 20s, a picture of the American Dream that is at once lyrical and critical, an example of point-of-view narrative that draws shrewdly on James and Conrad.1 All these things Fitzgerald does, no one would deny; what is vexing is what to make of them? Is the novel, ultimately, a critique of either Gatsby or his dream? What, ultimately, does Nick Carraway or the reader learn? Finally, what does the greatness of Gatsby and Fitzgerald's novel consist of?2 In looking at Fitzgerald criticism, one frequently discerns a certain petulancy: Gatsby's dream is itself so meretricious and vulgar, why all the ado? Nick himself is too smug on the one hand ("I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known") and too conniving on the other (Jordan Baker's not-so-broad hint at the book's close). Or else, Fitzgerald the author comes up short: unable to see through his tinsel materials, unable to sort out his ironies, unable to curb his rhetoric. The book seems to be imbued with excess: the tawdry excesses of the Flapper Age, the wild parties, the flashy and notso-flashy materialism of Gatsby, the excesses of capitalism, the sentimental and blinding excesses of the rags-to-riches story itself, the American Dream. It is in this light that Gatsby criticism often seems to dig its heels in, roll up its sleeves, and perform analysis, i.e., reveal these puffed-up Appearances and Myths for what they truly are: spurious, specious and inflated. The critical act itself-practiced in all our disciplines--seems imaged here: to see through, to become undeceived, to deflate, to deconstruct. Fitzgerald criticism, even more than most, is marked by the moral fervor of exposure and judgment.3

Miranda's Story: Nadine Gordimer and the Literature of Empire

Abstract: In his study of the connections between adventure tales and imperialism in the modern world, Martin Green briefly turns his attention to "a group of writers whose hour has just struck, the women born in the empire, who rebelled against its male ethos as well as against its imperialism and made their fiction out of that rebellion." 1 Although he does not mention Nadine Gordimer, she belongs in the company of those who make up his list: Doris Lessing, Olive Schreiner, Elspeth Huxley, Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield. Gordimer, in fact, is the only one of these writers who did not eventually return to the metropolitan culture which gave birth to the literature of empire. She remains in South Africa, determined to invent an identity for herself as an African writer. Gordimer certainly would not see herself as the descendent of Haggard and Henty, nor as the inheritor of the tradition of Conrad and Joyce Cary. But the politics of South Africa make her an "outsider" to the experience of the majority of her countrymen, and the literature of empire still haunts her fiction. In the literature of empire white men enter Africa to serve their own desires, whether for political power, adventure, or a journey into the recesses of their own psyche played out in an exotic setting.2 Africans are merely part of the background, like the fantastic figures on the shore whom Marlow, in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, observes as he makes his way upriver to Kurtz. In Conrad, just as in Rider Haggard, the agenda of outsiders sets the story in motion. From an African perspective the distinction between the search for King Solomon's mines and Marlow's subtle, honorable attempt to probe the moral depths of imperialism is beside the point. The dominant motif of the genre remains the quest of white for black. Another characteristic of adventure tales set in Africa is the marginality of white women, who serve, like the Victorian angel in the house, as tokens of patriarchal power and emblems of virtue in an evil world. This is particularly

Fiction and (Post) Feminism in Atwood 's Bodily Harm

Abstract: Margaret Atwood's fifth and latest novel, Bodily Harm, engages the corrosive question of the "post-feminist" 80s: "Why would any woman today label herself a feminist?"' The protagonist of the book, a free-lance journalist named Rennie Wilford, is thought to be "way out ahead of it" by Canadians in the know. Early in the novel we learn that she has already written a well-received piece, entitled "Burned Out," on the alleged death of the Women's Movement: "interviews with eight women who'd explained why they'd gone into weaving placemats and painting miniature landscapes on bottles, instead."2 The present-tense action of the book takes Rennie from Toronto, where she has recently had a mastectomy, to a little-known Caribbean island, where she meets among others a woman named Lora. Bored by the stories that the brash, uncultivated Lora tells, Rennie tunes out when she talks and condescendingly notes that "the Women's Movement would have loved Lora, back in the early seventies" (87). But Rennie's breast cancer has come at an already painful period of self-doubt in her life as a woman and a writer, and when she subsequently steps unwittingly into the center of a minor revolution and is imprisoned as a spy, she sees for herself the oppression and brutality Lora has always lived with and recounted. The heroine of the radical chic is finally radicalized; and by validating Lora's experience of female oppression, the novel implies that only the most naive and solipsistic (like its "heroine," Rennie) can find the grim premises of feminism boring, cliched, and outdated. In fact, Bodily Harm suggests, the stories women told in the 60s and 70s are still true, terrifying, and subversive, as Rennie in the end admits.

Booth's Rhetoric, Bakhtin's Dialogics and the Future of Novel Criticism

Abstract: * This essay was provoked by and is indebted to a paper by Hendrik van Gorp on "Theories of Novelistic Polyphony: Bakhtin vs. Stanzel, Genette, and Booth" presented at an International Colloquium on Mikhail Bakhtin: His Circle, His Influence, at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, October 7-9, 1983. I have also benefited from conversation and correspondence with Wayne Booth. Homer Goldberg and Marianna Torgovnick helped with close critical readings. 209

Molly in Furs: Deleuzean/Masochian Masochism in the Writing of James Joyce

Abstract: Masochism is not only a subject that obsessed, as well as a weakness that possessed, James Joyce, but it seems to have provided one source of psychosexual energy out of which he drew his writing. This essay will explore how the force of masochism, as defined by Gilles Deleuze in Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty, shaped the narration (not the story told, but the storytelling) principally of Ulysses-an issue that the narratives (plot lines) of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses provoke. At one point in his psychoanalytic study Joyce in Nighttown, Mark Shechner ponders the relation of Joyce's masochism and writing style, and concludes: "In Joyce's case, especially, irony and masochism go hand in hand, for both involve a strategic self-abasement. The masochist courts pain in the interest of disarming his superego much as the ironist cultivates self-criticism for the purpose of disarming his critics." 1 My sense of the matter is different and more elaborate, as Shechner's might have been had he substituted for the Freudian Oedipal model of masochism he relies on a Deleuzean paradigm based directly on the writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze's conception of masochism is applied appropriately to Joyce not only because it is derived from Masoch, and Joyce knew-lived-Masoch, but also because Deleuze urges students of masochism to take a literary approach, since the original definitions of sadism and masochism stem from literature: "the clinical specificities of sadism and masochism are not separable from the literary values peculiar to Sade and Masoch." 2 Deleuze argues for a "genuinely formal, almost deductive psychoanalysis which would attend first of all to the formal patterns underlying [sadism and masochism], viewed as formal elements of fictional art" (M 65). My application of Deleuze to Joyce will extend Deleuze's ideas even further into the territory of formal artistic principles. From art masochism arose, and to art it will herein

Narrators and Narrative in Defoe

Abstract: The structural analysis of narrative draws on two axioms, which may often be unannounced. The first, expressed by Wayne C. Booth and.the Chicago theorists, is that narrative may be treated as an exercise in rhetoric, and may be analyzed in terms of its address to its reader. The second, formulated by Vladimir Propp and the Russian Formalists, is that any given narrative is an organization of motifs and devices, which could have been organized otherwise. The combination of these two axioms can generate a poetics of narrative which will serve to articulate the practice of any individual author. In this paper, I intend to look at the specific rhetorical device of Defoe's fiction, the first-person narrator, and to see how it functions within the organized narratives as wholes. It is tempting to think of first-person narration as a rather monolithic device, and to overlook its flexibility. The eventual aim of this argument is to show that Defoe gradually developed the role of his narrators, by making more problematic the relation between them as narrators of adventure and as agents of adventure. Though Defoe's fiction may be most memorable for its direct and vivid presentation of episodes, these episodes are functioning units in larger organizations of narrative. The process of combination of narrative units into complete narratives is a difficult one to articulate, depending on what is taken to be a "narrative unit." 1 However, it is fair to suggest that in general "episodes" are combined into narrative by stressing either their temporal succession or their causal connection. In most early popular fiction, the temporal relation is the more important, and the narrative is read as story, rather than as plot.2 Popular narrative derives its hold on the reader's attention by the "and then . . ." principle, rather than by the "and so . . ." principle. From this point of view, Defoe's first extended fiction looks like a clear case of temporally connected narrative. Its title, in full, offers the recounting of a sequence of exciting events, without suggesting the presence of any underlying causal connection between them:

"And Then Rose for the First Time": Repetition and Doubling in "An American Tragedy"

Abstract: quires a re-surfacing that does not take place. In a novel replete with repetition, death itself appears to remain starkly singular. Two days and as many chapters later, however, a different kind of rising does take place when the appropriately named woodsman, John Pole, finally drags Roberta to the surface. It is as if the delayed repetition of the novel's critical event accentuated the special function in this novel of repetition itself-as a narrative resurrection of the past, a kind of recitative "raising of the dead."2 The implied repetition whose referent is so delayed draws our attention to the power of the narrative act, and in the process denies a natural sequence to events by bridging, even effacing time. Roberta surfaces a second time in the text, then, not the lake-through the immediate re-presentation of a "first time" whose referential status is deferred until the woodsman's suc-

From Semiotic to Discursive Intertextuality: The Case of "Madame Bovary"

Abstract: Over the past twenty-odd years, semiotics has established itself as a powerful, rigorous and at times elegant technique for the close reading of literary texts. Until recently, of course, the semiotic undertaking tended to remain within the text itself, leaving the issue of the relation between literature and society to more traditional kinds of criticism-whether of the liberal or Marxist kind. In the last several years, however, semiotics has begun to make some tentative moves towards coming to grips with the social contextuality of literature. On the one hand, some Marxist academics have attempted to use semiotics to support a critique of ideology; Frederic Jameson's The Political Unconscious is the most interesting and successful example of this. On the other hand, there has been a movement from within semiotics itself to try to define a text's social existence through the elaboration of a concept of "intertextuality." One of the most prominent contemporary literary semioticians is Michel Riffaterre, whose recent work, which seeks to define "intertextuality" in a methodologically fruitful way, illustrates this change in emphasis. Following a line of investigation originally suggested by Jonathan Culler,' Riffaterre argues that literary texts can best be understood as specific "actualizations" of cultural "presuppositions."2 Culler's definition of presupposition-as "that which must be revealed by another, or by an effort of didoublement: of thinking from the point of view of the other"-is heavily tinged with a Hegelianism that Riffaterre rejects, substituting the more Kantian (or Chomskian) formulation of presuppositions as simply "the implicit conditions of an explicit statement." The advantage of Riffaterre's redefinition is that it guides him to look for sets of conditions rather than Culler's less easily delimited "point of view." In any given instance the conditions governing statements will constitute a system, and it is this system of presuppositions which the Riffaterrean student of intertextuality hopes to be able to disengage from the sociolect.

Garden, Sermon, and Novel in "Mansfield Park:" Exercises in Legibility

Abstract: The phenomenological approach to place as articulated in our own time by urban design theorists like Kevin Lynch (The Image of the City)-"environmental images," says Lynch, "are the result of a two-way process between the observer and his environment"-is more complex when we speak of fictionalized places; for, in the latter, legibility, Lynch's term for the "ease with which [the parts of a cityspace] can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern," suggests too how the novel itself is to be read.' This is particularly true for eighteenth-century fiction, where we do not expect a character to say, as Margaret Hale does in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), "I am trying to describe Helstone as it really is." The eighteenth-century novelist is more likely to ask, "Who is seeing it, what kind of person is the observer?" And even, especially in the epistolary novel, "how do we know what is?" The epistolary novel is itself an exercise in perception, an interplay among a panoply of individuated perceptions; setting may serve as basis for judging the perceptive qualities of characters within the text and readers without. In a fiction where there is only written language and the often feverish activity of characters creating themselves at a given moment in time, only then to be recreated by readers at yet another moment, writing and reading are matters of crucial concern; but what can be read is a kaleidoscope of moments caught like still camera shots, a fluctuating reality. In Smollett's Humphry Clinker, to cite an obvious example, the Bath of Matthew Bramble is not that of his niece Lydia. Richardson's Clarissa, incarcerated in a London brothel, cannot "read" the city at all. That enclosure which precludes her reading what Lynch calls the "overall pattern" formed by districts, landmarks, and pathways, signals in turn the limitations of the single eye, the individuated letter. In Richardson's novel, legibility derives from the totality of the text, the letters collected into the "story." Reading is the process of putting the parts together.

Pynchon's Endings

Abstract: We don't know much about Thomas Pynchon. We don't know how he writes. We don't know what he has in mind. We do know that he studied science as well as English at Cornell, that he worked for Boeing before starting to write full time, that physicists and mathematicians have verified the accuracy of his complex scientific allusions, and that he has written three novels. The more we learn about modern physics, the better we understand Pynchon's novels-not only thematically but structurally as well. I would like to focus on the structures. I will not attempt to explain them or reduce them by application of scientific theory. I will simply start with the assumption that Pynchon has a thorough understanding of and feel for both physics and literature. And with this assumption in mind, I will examine, as empirically as possible, the endings of his three novels. My conclusions, I hope, will lead beyond Pynchon's novels to a broader understanding of modern and post-modern fiction. "Where we going?" asks Benny Profane in the beginning of V. "The way we're heading," says Pig Bodine. "Move your ass" (8).1 And we never know where we're heading except that it's the way we're going. We follow the capricious string of Benny's yo-yo as he shuttles back and forth from Times Square to Grand Central Station, from Rachel Owlglass to Paola Maijstral, as he hunts blind albino alligators in the New York sewers and finally travels to Malta. We follow the wild trajectories of Benny's many acquaintances among the "whole sick crew." And we follow Herbert Stencil as he searches after Victoria Wren, Vera Meroving, Veronica Manganese-or V., a woman whose name and shape are continually transformed. But in the end the pattern becomes clear. For we discover that the novel has been governed by an omniscient narrator through a series of simple flashbacks, complex rear projections, and-principally-the intercutting of intricate plot lines. And he ties up all the loose ends in the epilogue, where he tells us what Stencil started out to search for but would never find-the secret of his father's death.

Our Trial: Franz Kafka's Challenge to Literary Theory

Abstract: Like iron filings around a magnet, most critical methods gravitate towards a certain set of intrinsically suitable texts. But Kafka seems accessible to almost any methodology one might care to apply. In fact, he appears to be the ideal subject for a course in "approaches to literature." The debate on validity in interpretation is not likely to end in the foreseeable future, if at all; but even those who believe in the possibility of multiple and equi-valent interpretations must be disconcerted by the claims of the various conflicting Kafka readings to represent the sole and unequivocal truth about his texts. Only a deliberate blurring of focus can reconcile, for example, the Freudian and the existential readings: if both are held to be applicable at once, they lose some of the very specificity that makes them useful tools for textual analysis. The critics' playground is at the same time the critics' problem. While Kafka may not be in the foreground of current literary interest, the irritation he continues to present may well be the test case for critical theory. Is our failure to resolve the Kafka problem an unperceived signal of a fundamental methodological bankruptcy? In starting more from the dilemma than from the texts the newest group of Kafka scholars may at last be on the right track, and it may be useful for literary scholars in general to know what they are doing. The case is by no means closed nor have the implications for critical theory yet been worked out; but a start has been made. One difficulty is that this most recent step in Kafka scholarship is taking place in Germany, mapped onto a critical system somewhat removed from those most familiar in this country and against a background of earlier work on Kafka not all of which is as canonical outside the world of "Germanistik" as within it. The near-synchrony of these studies' appearance and the finely overlapping nature of their insights make one wish that their authors could have been-not solitary writers of separate books-but participants in one of those rare conferences that really moves a scholarly field along. By contrast the events of the Kafka centennial in 1983 (in which I myself participated) did less to advance the field than to make public what was already in fact its penultimate stage. Some of them, such as the exhibition at the Pompidou that reinforced the image of an essentially absurdist or surrealist Kafka, were actually retrogressive. The newer German critics do their best to undermine this kind of "pigeon-holing" of Kafka, revealing in their different ways

Mimesis, Authority, and Belief in Narrative Poetics: Toward a Transmission Theory for a Poetics of Fiction

Abstract: To examine the current state of narrative poetics and to speculate on its future, we need first to recall Aristotle's Poetics and its substantial place in the theory of the novel. The Poetics presents a systematic theory of rules for composition, for critical evaluation, and for production of the proper effect of tragedy on the audience. Central to Aristotle's theory is the concept of mimesis. For tragedy to produce the proper effect of fear and pity, it must represent plausible characters, situations, and actions, and these must convince the audience of their potential reality. Although Greek tragedy's highly stylized literary form could scarcely serve as a model for a naive realism, Aristotle's concept of mimesis contributed greatly to a sixteenthand seventeenth-century concern with realism in drama and prose discourse. Recently J. Paul Hunter and Lennard Davis have demonstrated that a constituent element in the novel's emergence was the blending of factual and fictional narratives in the popular press of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.1 As these narratives became more involved and expansive the "novel" emerged as a suitable form for these extended tales of characters and society. Though no "poetics of fiction" existed per se, the principle of mimesis can be distinguished as the novel's central organizing force. Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, and other novels associated with the "rise of the novel" all have mimesis-or at least the question of it-as one of their main focuses. A cursory history of the novel confirms that a significant organizing principle of the genre has been the linguistic representation of life, thus marking a significant distinction between the novel and drama. Although Greek tragedy and the drama that followed was highly stylized, it held within it the potential for imitation as well as representation, whereas the novel is bound by the linguistic signs printed on a page and may only approach imitation in highly self-conscious novels within novels. Such self-consciousness, of course, lays bare the devices of the novel and thereby estranges the reader's experience of a represented life. When Victor Shklovsky recognized the concept of estrangement (ostraneniye, sometimes translated as "defamiliarization") in literary texts, he and his fellow Russian Formalists momentarily redirected perception away from representation and toward the "literariness" of literary devices. The concept of estrangement, however, ultimately reinscribes itself in a "higher mimesis"; Shklovsky writes, "art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things

"The Present and Future States of Novel Criticism": A Hopeful Overview

Abstract: In 1967, the journal Novel began publication with the goal (articulated in a later collection of essays) of moving "Towards a Poetics of Fiction." Both the publication and its goal were accurate signs that the novel was becoming a widely and intensely studied, as well as a widely and pleasurably read, kind of literature. In 1985, it is easy to forget how recently the novel has risen to academic respectability. But not so very long ago novels were to be avidly read by graduate students, but not taught in graduate courses or written about in dissertations, and the field of academic publishing featured far more work on poetry than on fiction.

"The Present and Future States of Novel Criticism": Our Two-Headed Profession

Abstract: In the old days we would have a sudden insight that opened up a novel, quickened it to life, generated a new understanding about a character, a social situation, or the use of language. Then we would search for a rationale-or a theoryto support our new reading. The meaning and value, we assumed, were discovered by opening ourselves more fully to the literary work. Now we have come to realize that no one reads without at least an implicit set of assumptions about the nature of language and literature and at least an implicit set of political values. And that these assumptions and values determine what we look for and what we find-however unexpected. For many critics this awareness is accompanied by a sense that theory takes precedence over reading. We can spend hours, even days, at meetings of a professional literary society and never hear the name of a single literary work. To understand our dilemma, we may have to go back to the sixties. Not because this was the period that undermined historical sensibility by insisting on "relevance." But because we had reason to question much of what history had passed down to us. Imperialism, we had been taught, was a term denigrating European colonialist powers and Asian countries seeking more land. It was hard to accept the fact that America was acting imperialistically in Vietnam-that we had a long history of imperialism going back to the settling of the frontier, that indeed we now had to read Walt Whitman with new eyes. Nor was it a difficult step from there to a full realization of what we should have always known: that words like "humanism" and "objectivity" are loaded. "Humanism" carries connotations of "universality" (applying to all humans) and "humane" (caring for all humans), but it was a system of education designed to teach young men how to rule and maintain power. Its values were not as broad as it claimed but limited by the position if not the experience of the ruling class. And it consolidated its power in the study of English literature as England was establishing its empire. Humanism was open to neither the great majority of people nor to their experiences. And "objectivity" was practiced best by those who had the power to decide what should be examined and how to examine it objectively. Think of the mainline scientific studies documenting the inferiority of black people and women. We should have begun to wonder about objectivity much earlier, when Heisenberg demonstrated that the very act of looking at an electron caused a disturbance, or distortion, in what we saw. We would soon discover that ideology also causes a disturbance in "neutral" paradigms. What brought the problem to our attention was the way newspapers were reporting "objectively" about what they still called the "conflict" in Vietnam, calling our troops "advisors" and our bombing missions "protective reaction." Or what they were choosing