Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1986"

The Name of the Horse: "Hard Times", Semiotics, and the Supernatural

Abstract: "Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too...." This (and much more in the same vein) is Bitzer's Gradgrindian definition of a horse at the start of Hard Times. We could accept the definition if Bitzer offered it as one momentary way of looking at the animal. But Bitzer is offering the definition-to Gradgrind, of course--as the only one, as the strictly true one, faithful to the factual horse in itself. We ourselves know that there are other ways of looking at a horse; and, as it unfolds, Hard Times seems to mime our knowledge. The novel rejects the Gradgrindian assumption of a non-arbitrary, strictly denotative relation between names and things or facts. It expands the ways of defining horse until at the end we come upon a horse who-by dancing!-keeps Bitzer captive in a horse-carriage for twenty-four hours and thereby allows young Tom Gradgrind, a bank robber, to escape from the law. We are willing by the novel's end to add a new meaning to the definition of horse: it is a graminivorous quadruped that performs antinomian ballets. This definitional possibility does not violate our ideas about the way meanings work, about the ways meanings are both fixed and in transit, both single and polysemous. But do we feel as comfortable with Hard Times' last-expressed view of language itself, in Sleary's farewell speech? Gradgrindian definition rigidly limits meaning; but in spite of the novel's expansion of the limits, the restrictive limitation of definition returns at the novel's end. Like the elder Grad-

Being and Seeming: The White Hotel

Abstract: this novel had on them, and their enthusiastic response brought Thomas world-wide attention, including the belated and sometimes grudging respect of his countrymen in England. The excitement generated by the novel stems in part from the author's calculated subversion of twentieth-century science and metaphysics, and in part from his handling of a venerable theme: the multitudinous ways appearance and reality diverge. The author realizes these ends through a complex layering of fictive elements: he deploys several narrative voices, he doubles or mirrors his plot details, he introduces echoes of myth, and, most importantly, he chronicles the entire course of his central character's psychoanalysis. With its gradual penetrating of the psyche's elaborate and destructive defenses, psychoanalysis is an ideal structural device for a fiction concerning appearance and reality. The Freudian therapist deals with a world of deceptive appearances that he or she must pierce before reaching psychological bedrock. Indeed, the system resembles those forms of philosophical idealism based on the idea-it has roots in Christian, Gnostic, and Neoplatonic thought-that imperfect sensory apparatus makes direct apprehension of a hidden reality difficult. But Freudian psychoanalysis does not countenance an ultimately transcendental reality. Freud rejected all forms of supernaturalism. Though he saw that the unconscious lies beneath many layers of repression, he resolutely refused to believe that the psychic mechanisms he studied might have ontological or epistemological analogues. Thus in his writings he often refers to a positivistic "reality principle" that the healthy mind must recognize and accept. For this principle Freud favored a Greek word, ananke, and his fictional counterpart in Thomas's novel puns on it when he makes "Anna G."-he would pronounce the "G" hard-the case-history pseudonym for Lisa Erdman.

Bare Places and Ancient Blemishes: Virginia Woolf's Search for New Language in "Night and Day"

Abstract: In a 1923 review of a novel by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf credits her with the invention of, or at least the adaptation of, "the psychological sentence of the feminine gender." Woolf attempts to describe it ("It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes"), then concedes that men, too, have used such sentences. The difference seems to be that the woman's sentence "is used to describe a woman's mind...."1 The idea of a woman's sentence, obscure and confused as it is here, continued to interest her; several years later in A Room of One's Own she has an equally puzzling discussion of the woman's sentence as opposed to the "male sentence."2 And the notion haunts her novels. A fairly explicit rejection of the male sentence, for example, occurs in The Waves when the writer Bernard sets down the "facts" of a situation:

Emma Bovary's Dance of Death

Abstract: The passage has a narrative structure not unlike the one which Freud discusses in his essay "The Theme of the Three Caskets." Of the choices which characters often must make among three possibilities, where the "correct" one is the most attractive but represents death, Freud writes, "Choice stands in the place of necessity, of destiny. Thus man overcomes death, which in thought he has acknowledged. No greater triumph of wish-fulfillment is conceivable. Just where in reality he obeys compulsion, he exercises choice; and that which he chooses is not a thing of horror, but the fairest and most desirable thing in life" (76). Emma, the initiate, must first learn how to make the choice; for now a proxy chooses for her. Beginning with, "Emma ne savait pas valser" (86) ("Emma did not know how to waltz" [37]), and moving through Emma's envious thought, "Elle savait valser, celle-lk!" ("That woman knew how to waltz!"), the last dance at the ball shows Emma just starting to cross a mental and dramatic threshold. Although she will never waltz again, she will spend the rest of her life trying to place herself in the position which she imagines the other woman occupies. Throughout the novel, Emma appropriates a freedom of choice which repeatedly unveils itself as illusory. By this time in the novel we sense that forces we only dimly perceive have shaped the story's outcome. The forces of necessity which dictate Emma's choice and thus her death-wish are psychological and economic within the realities of her world. I will argue that another kind of force shaping her experience, one of a different order, is the popular motif of the dance of death, transformed and embedded by Flaubert in the novel's structures. Flaubert seems to have explored, in Madame Bovary, the way both the features and the movement of a popular motif can provide a model for understanding experi-

Fugal Structure, Nestorianism, and St. Christopher in Michel Tournier's "Le Roi des aulnes"

Abstract: saying that its structure does not derive from the characters but is "en v(rit6 suspendue A ses seules et secretes vertus, et soumise A un ordre qui ne ddcoule que d'elle-mime" (really suspended from its own, secret virtues and subject to an order deriving only from itself).' He even says that the psychological and historical elements of the novel are as unimportant to the progress of its plot as the little rods and pistons on a child's toy locomotive are to its forward movement (VP, 129).2 His surprising statement is true. The novel's plot develops not from the characters but from three main other sources: the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, which provide the method of development; the Nestorian Heresy, which provides the central idea; and the legend of St. Christopher, which provides the plot outline. It is Bach's final fugues which inspired the "dessein g(ndral" (general plan) of Le Roi des aulnes (VP, 128). As Tournier explains, the cantor of St. Thomas encoded his own name into the last fugues of The Art of the Fugue by building a theme on the notes represented in German notation by the letters B A C H and thereby, according to Tournier, giving the fugues their "incandescence" (VP, 130).3 Therefore, it is not surprising to discover that Tournier has slyly structured Le Roi des aulnes around much the same principle, using the letters of his own name to inspire eight different fugal themes, each beginning with a letter of the name TOURNIER:

Albertine; Or, the Limits of Representation

Abstract: Proust's fifth volume La Prisonnihre opens with a decisive retreat to the interior on the part of its narrator, Marcel: "ce fut du reste surtout de ma chambre que je perlus la vie extdrieure pendant cette piriode" ("Besides, it was from my room above all that I perceived outside life during that time").' This sentence alerts us to what will become almost unbearably palpable in the course of the volume: the claustrophobic atmosphere, the restriction of the scene of action to Marcel's room. The few exceptional scenes that intrude on this atmosphere of interiority (notably the death of Bergotte and the performance of Vinteuil's unpublished septet) serve only to heighten Proust's sharp division of public and private realms by briefly reinserting the noisy world of salon politics into what will in fact make up the major drama of this volume: the politics of sexual intimacy, the continuing work of interpretation. The evident restrictions on movement and visual perception inherent in such a withdrawal mask a much more fundamental retreat: a retreat whose primary concern is language. Marcel's withdrawal renders inessential the language of worldliness-mots d'esprit and anecdotes, what Walter Benjamin calls the "physiology of chatter"2-which dominates the preceding volume. It becomes a way of stripping away the static interferences and unassigned frequencies of worldly discourse; it is a purging of voices which has in view the revelation (or construction) of a new language, one which I will examine in the pages which follow.3 To do so we must first situate Marcel's repudiation of the world in terms of the trajectory of fascination. For Marcel's retreat is by no means a solitary one-it is a retreat with Albertine. And Albertine's function in this text is that

"Without Sin, and with Pleasure": The Erotic Dimensions of Fuentes' Fiction

Abstract: pendence Day in Where the Air is Clear to the mysterious and sensual fusion of Pollo and Celestina at the end of Terra Nostra, erotic couplings recur throughout the novels of Carlos Fuentes. These scenes appear regularly and yet rarely, too powerful for indiscriminate use. In these embraces, to varying degrees, the lovemaking of a man and a woman takes on telluric significance, and in some cases their sexual union achieves a kind of cosmic eroticism, implicitly rejuvenating the world around it-the world of the referent and the world of the prose. For Fuentes then, as for the surrealists, eroticism serves as an opening to a reality beyond the everyday, not so much to the individual unconscious as to supra-individual forces in the universe. The words of another descendant of surrealist thought, Georges Bataille, suggest that in this Fuentes captures a universal erotic principle: "in individual love as well as in impersonal eroticism, a man is immediately in the universe."1 The scenes from Fuentes' texts that I will discuss constitute a vital force

The Politics of Selfhood: Bob Slocum, T. S. Garp and Auto-American-Biography

Abstract: As an idea and a commodity, the personalized life in America numbers among our most popular notions. This curious cultural circumstance reflects the disparity that various critics have observed between our governing model of selfhood and its consequences: that of a privileged, personally empowered and singularly expressive identity whose realization, in Fredric Jameson's words, ironically "maims our existence as individual subjects and paralyzes our thinking about time and change just as surely as it alienates us from our speech itself."1 Such an irony is hardly new in American literature. Indeed, Sacvan Bercovitch takes it to originate our literary history--a theory that helps explain the strange typological affinity between the seventeenth century Americans whose quest to empty or annihilate the self rendered it an obsession, and their twentieth century countrymen whose obsession to fill and preserve the self renders it a void.

"Never Be Safe but in Hiding": Omniscience and Curiosity in "The Old Curiosity Shop"

Abstract: It was a long night, that seemed as though it would have no end; but he slept too, and dreamed-always of being at liberty, and roving about, now with one person and now with another; but ever with a vague dread of being recalled to prison; not that prison, but one which was in itself a dim idea, not of a place, but of a care and sorrow; of something oppressive and always present, and yet impossible to define. Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop

"Like Tiresias": Metamorphosis and Gender in "Clarissa"

Abstract: Richardson's Lovelace has recently been castigated as a character whose "thoroughly narcissistic and regressive ... 'rakishness' ... is nothing less than a crippling incapacity for adult sexual relationship, ... [and whose] misogyny and infantile sadism achieve their appropriate expression in the virulently anti-sexual act of rape."' Terry Eagleton winds up this attack on Lovelace with an equivalent attack on those who have found Lovelace entrancing: "It is this pathetic character who has been celebrated by the critics as Byronic hero, Satanic vitalist or post-modernist artist."2 Warner, one of the critics Eagleton derides, has admitted in a review article that he "celebrated Lovelace as the heroic practitioner of a Nietzschean style of subversive interpretation" in his Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation.3 Eagleton and Terry Castle revile Warner for his misogynist attitude toward Clarissa, and Warner defends himself by claiming that his debunking of Clarissa was necessitated by the way the "conceptual categories of novel criticism ... constituted a built-in bias toward Clarissa's way of reading the world; and because contemporary humanism also privileged her valorization of selfhood, sincerity, and the 'natural."'4 Warner, in his book, presents Lovelace as victim-of Clarissa's false construction of a self; Castle and Eagleton present Clarissa as victim--of patriarchal society and of hermeneutic violence. To Eagleton, Clarissa is a "saint and martyr ... [whose] death signifies ... an absolute refusal of political society: sexual oppression, bourgeois patriarchy and libertine aristocracy together."5 Eagleton's attempt to claim Clarissa for feminism, Castle's feminist reading of Clarissa, and Warner's deconstructive celebration of Lovelace all involve, despite disclaimers, explicit and implicit taking sides in the textual battle between Lovelace and Clarissa: each critic denigrates one protagonist to raise the other. For Eagleton, Lovelace is reduced to a "pathetic character"; Warner wonders, in a remark worthy of Lovelace at his most misogynist, whether Clarissa isn't "hiding something unsavory beneath her garments."6 Warner's Clarissa seems to be a bitch who can't take a joke, as Eagleton notes, and Eagleton's Lovelace seems to be a trivial cripple, as Warner notes.

Missing Corpses: The Deconstructive Mysteries of James Purdy and Franz Kafka

Abstract: A defining generic trait of mysteries seems to be their doubleness: there is the story of detection, and there is also the story of the crime which the detective pieces together.1 The second story is tangled up and hidden within the first, which tells of its untangling or, quite simply, its detection. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, a third layer is established by the narrative frame, and in some of the more intricate variations, there may be several smaller narratives or narrative fragments embedded within the larger one. "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," for example, contains half a dozen embedded stories, from Commissionaire Peterson's tale about finding the hat and goose to James Ryder's confession. The jewel itself contains story within story: "In the larger and older jewels every facet may stand for a bloody deed."2 In the case of the blue carbuncle, "there have been two murders, a vitriol-throwing, a suicide, and several robberies." Holmes as master story-reconstructor knows them all.

Novel Ideology@@@Modernism and Authority: Strategies of Legitimation in Flaubert and Conrad

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