Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1987"

The Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Abstract: In a stirring but sketchy essay entitled "Finding Feminist Readings: DanteYeats," Gayatri Spivak writes that "feminist alternative readings might well question the normative rigor of specialist mainstream scholarship through a dramatization of the autobiographical vulnerability of their provenance." Such autobiographical dramatization, Spivak points out, has already begun in the work of Jacques Derrida and other male critics, but "the privilege of autobiography to counter the rigor of theoretical sanctions is accessible to very few of the world's women" (47). The feminist reader's access to a text like Conrad's Heart of Darkness is especially problematic in the terms Spivak considers. Not only is the tale concerned with a kind of mainstream male experience associated with traditional Western high art (penetration into a female wilderness, confrontation with monstrosity, male rites of passage, life at the "edge"), but those who write about it may be tempted to ally themselves with the heroic consciousness that Conrad presents. The feminist reader, in contrast, is apt to be more skeptical about and alienated from this masculinist tradition, and her access to Conrad's text may be so inhibited that her commentary is thrown off its most responsive and useful center. Her pleasure-in-the-text in Roland Barthes' sense may be rendered uneasy. Her understanding of Marlow or Kurtz may produce not psychic plenitude but psychic penury. The question of the readerparticipator's sense of self in imagined contexts obtrudes, and in reading Heart of Darkness she becomes aware of a particular kind of ambiguity. Even if the sexism of Marlow and Kurtz is part of the "horror" that Conrad intends to disclose, the feminist reader cannot but consider that the text is structured so that this horror-though obviously revealed to male and female reader alike-is deliberately hidden from Kurtz's Intended. If Heart of Darkness is one of the Ur texts of modernist high art by which our reading (and teaching) habits are tested, it is a text which makes us tend to distinguish between women inside texts and women outside texts, between women as fictive characters and women as living readers. Conrad's tale thus opens several difficult questions: must the woman reader neutralize awareness of her gender so that her reading becomes "objective" (non-autobiographical) in the way that male readings supposedly are? Is this neutralization in any way a complicity with the sexism of "mainstream commentary"? Might not the disclosure of her own autobiographical vulnerability throw light on Heart of Darkness as an example of how high art functions, or on the question of why, in Spivak's words, "the traditions and conventions of art are so brutally sexist" (60)?

"A Language Which Nobody Understood": Emancipatory Strategies in "The Awakening"

Abstract: Despite the academy's growing commitment to producing and publishing feminist interpretations of literary texts, insofar as feminist critics read Kate Chopin's The Awakening as a novel about sexual liberation, we read it with our patriarchal biases intact. Of course The Awakening's final scene is breathtaking; Edna Pontellier transcends her circumscribed status as sensual entity-as the object of others' desires-and stands before us as her own subject, as a blissfully embodied being: "... she cast the unpleasant, pricking garments from her, and for the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the waves that invited her."'1 It is because of this new dignity and visibility Chopin gives to women's desires that The Awakening has been celebrated as one of the great subversive novels-a novel belonging to the tradition of transgressive narratives Tony Tanner describes in Adultery in the Novel. But in this essay I will suggest that Tanner's ideas are inadequate to account for the real transgressive force of Chopin's novel. Instead, I want to locate this force in Chopin's representation of a language Edna Pontellier seeks but does not possess, in her representation of "a language which nobody understood."2 In Adultery in the Novel Tanner explains that eighteenthand nineteenthcentury novels derive a "narrative urgency" from their power to interrupt the status quo by representing characters or ideas which impinge on society's stability. While most bourgeois novels affirm marriage, the nuclear family, or genealogical continuity as the source of social stability, these same novels gather momentum by representing "an energy that threatens to contravene that stability of the family on which society depends": an energy frequently embodied in the adulterous woman.3 While prostitutes, orphans, adventurers, and other marginal characters dominate the early phases of the novel and

"From Work to Text": The Modernist and Postmodernist Kunstlerroman

Abstract: From modernism to postmodernism. If the twentieth century has witnessed a dramatic change in sensibility, a shift in the prevailing episteme, and if that shift registers itself foremost in the very nature and function of the aesthetic artifact, then one way to define the transformation would be to examine in detail representative narratives which deal directly with the development of the artist and the nature of his or her calling. I have chosen as my "tutor" texts two works generally recognized as representative modernist and postmodernist kiinstlerromans, Thomas Mann's "Tonio Kroger" (1903) and John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (1968). I propose to examine the two works in terms of their definition of the artist, his relation to society, the nature of his vocation, and, most important, the authorial treatment of the subject, especially as regards structuration, use of irony, overdetermined literary devices, and metalinguistic themes and techniques. The choice is not at all arbitrary-the two works, as will be shown, define artistic sensibilities in ways that invite comparison. Moreover, in the essay cited in the epigraph, Barth not only refers to "Tonio Kroger" twice, but acknowledges the fact that his own work can very well be seen in relation to the great modernist tradition that he "cut his literary teeth on.,"i

Truth and Persuasion: The Language of Realism and of Ideology in Oliver Twist

Abstract: The representation of speech in a novel can be seen as the point in which realism reaches perfection: since the represented object and the representing medium are one and the same-language-the very distinction between medium and object which is at the basis of representation but which representation also seeks to camouflage, if not to obliterate, is no more. From a duality, which is always also a duplicity and a lie, we move to simplicity and truth. We know, however, that an author does not "transcribe" (faithfully or not, fully or in an abbreviated form) the speech of characters since characters are fictive, made up by the author, and their speech does not exist anywhere else except on the page of the novel. Instead of speaking of "realism" we have hence to speak of "realistic effect," that is to say, the manipulation of language to create a certain impression. But there is more still: When in reading, for example, War and Peace-a novel in which large portions of the text are in French-we notice that Napoleon speaks to his soldiers in Russian,2 we have to conclude that the representation of speech is not only-and maybe not even primarily-controlled by mimetic considerations but is also determined by compositional constraints. We can say that the reason for the Russian aristocracy speaking French is mimetic-it reaches towards a closing of the gap of representation, it aims at accurate imitation, at truth; when Napoleon speaks Russian, on the other hand, we are no more in the realm of realism and truth but rather in the realm of persuasion and rhetoric, which is another way of saying that the author has some compositional purpose for which the rendering of speech in a particular fashion is but a tool. I will call this latter way of rendering speech figurative, or rhetorical, while the first one will be called, by contrast, literal or mimetic. Oliver Twist is in some respects similar to War and Peace. We can say that the representation of the slang (or cant) of the criminals obeys a mimetic logic or, as Dickens himself said in the Preface, is designed to "show [the dregs of life] as they really were" (though note the moral qualification "so long as their speech did not offend the ear" and the complementary, this time positive, moral aspect, that this "would be a service to society").3 But the representation of Oliver's speech, as critics noticed a long time ago, cannot be understood in the same way. When Oliver speaks

Hemingway's Barbershop Quintet: "The Garden of Eden" Manuscript

Abstract: At the end of Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night Dick Diver and his wife Nicole have gone to the barber's together, as is their custom, to "have haircuts and shampoos in adjoining rooms." As they reach the Carleton Hotel in Cannes, Nicole's lover, Tommy Barban, sights them from a passing car and follows them to the barber shop for a dramatic showdown. Though Dick is half-shaved and Nicole half-shorn when Tommy enters, they agree to talk things out at a nearby cafe. There Tommy holds that the Divers' marriage "has run its course" and demands a divorce for Nicole so the lovers can

Pulpit, Stage, and Novel: "Mansfield Park" and Mrs. Inchbald's "Lovers' Vows"

Abstract: The point, she claims, is that the characters in the novel do not learn from the play; its lessons make no impact. One argument against this claim is Jane Austen's evident contempt for naive didacticism ("Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick and wicked")2; her sense of the high significance of language and style in relation to moral effect. Inadequacy and affectation of language are likely to indicate the dangerous superficiality or hypocrisy with which social behaviour may be recommended. Her novels are instructive examples of the complexity, the fine shading, the relativity to context and practice, of values which can nevertheless be generalized in principle; understanding and judgement are not improved by crude and sentimental fictions. Nor does Dr. Zelicovici's claim alter the force of Marilyn Butler's argument about acting in private, which uses as evidence Thomas Gisborne's account of the injuriousness of acting to the female sex, encouraging vanity and destroying diffidence "by the unrestrained familiarity with the other sex which inevitably results from being joined with them in the drama."3 Jane Austen had read Gisborne's Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797) with approval in 1805, though it should be said that being "pleased with [Gisborne]" (she does not specify the book) does not mean she endorsed everything in it; she had, for some reason, "quite determined not to read it" before Cassandra's recommendation.4 Dr. Butler counters the illuminating but misleading claim of Lionel Trilling that acting is dangerous within the novel because it lures the honest soul into insincerity:

The Drama of Reference in James's "The Golden Bowl"

Abstract: miliar, realistic world of the novel of manners, a world in which the obscurity of the dialogue results only from the characters' avoidance of the vulgar and the obvious. Such a reading assumes that the novel operates within a fixed ontology that embraces the objects referred to in the text and the selves who discuss these objects. In William's quotation from the outraged readers ("and have done with it"), the pronoun "it" stands for an entity that exists independently of language, an entity that could be discussed "clearly" in another language. In the reading that I propose, the central drama of The Golden Bowl-and a crucial dimension of the Major Phase-is the drama of reference, that is, the designation of an extra-linguistic entity and speculation on the nature of this entity. Since reference is a complicated philosophical issue which has only begun to surface in literary debates, I shall limit my theoretical discussion and concentrate on the role of reference in James's text. His novel illustrates the value of reference for literary criticism better than do abstract generalizations.2 My essay examines the role of reference in the two most important domains of representation for the text: dialogue, where the question emerges most clearly, and the presentation of the individual's experience, where I discuss stylistic features and their consequences for the reading of character.

Murder and the Communities: Ideology in and around "Light in August"

Abstract: In a recent essay, Andrd Bleikasten called for an ideological study of the texts of William Faulkner. "The conspicuous absence, in Faulkner criticism, of any substantial and serious consideration of the ideological aspects of his fiction," argues Bleikasten, indicates the desire of Faulkner studies to present Faulkner as a "moderate conservative or moderate liberal" ("For/Against," 30-31). Bleikasten points to Cleanth Brooks's well-known reading of Light in August, in which the pariah is set against the cohesive community, as an example of this conservatism: "Nowhere does [Brooks] allow for the possibility that the rejection of culturally standardized roles might spring from a sane impulse of selfpreservation, and that, conversely, social conformity might be crippling" ("For/Against," 32).1 For Brooks,

The Subject in Exile: Puig's "Eternal Curse" on the Reader of These Pages

Abstract: And then the doctor attaches too much importance to those confessions of mine, which he refuses to give back so that I may look at them again. My God! He has only studied medicine, and so he has no idea what writing in Italian means to us who talk dialect but cannot express ourselves in writing. A written confession is always mendacious. We lie with every word we speak in the Tuscan tongue! If only he knew how we tend to talk about things for which we have the words all ready, and how we avoid subjects that would oblige us to look up words in the dictionary! That is the principle that guided me when it came to putting down certain episodes in my life. Naturally it would take on quite a different aspect if I told it in our own dialect.

James, Degas, and the Modern View

Abstract: If the caf6 alliance between painters and writers in Paris in the 1870s and early '80s resembled a stormy marriage giving rise to revolution, the connection between their distant relatives in London was decidedly less familial. There the fiction writer was looked upon as something of a bastard child among the prodigy of the sister arts, certainly beneath the painter in cultural and aesthetic rank and not about to be included in forums concerning the future heights of English aesthetics. Writing to Grace Norton around this time, Henry James confessed, "I suppose it is the demon of envy-but I can't help contrasting the greater reward of a successful painter, here, and his glory and honour generally, with the so much more modest emoluments of the men of letters."' And among the literati themselves there was, in James's words, "almost no care for literary discussion,"2 making the fiction writer's profession all the less worthy of English esteem. By 1884, however, with Walter Besant's essay on "The Art of Fiction" and James's now famous response of the same title, there appeared from the literary side of London a rhetoric intended to spark critical discourse among writers and designed also and perhaps more significantly to legitimize the novel's relatively recent birth by establishing close ancestral ties with painting. Although by French standards the two essays resulted in little more than a flurry of exchanged ideas among writers, something really did result regarding the status of fiction in the sisterhood of English arts. As Mark Spilka has observed, Besant wanted the "British public to take fiction seriously as an art," and although this was not then "a national sentiment.... it became one the moment he spoke, for Besant himself was a register for the national mind, and what he had just recorded was the arrival of a newly-received idea." This, according to Spilka, was "the chief source of James's encouragement from Besant's lecture. If he could press strongly and intelligently enough in favor of this newly-arrived commonplace, he could affect the English and American climate for his own kind of fiction; he could educate and enlarge his own limited audience and so insure his own artistic freedom."3 Anyone the least familiar with the James essay knows the lengths to which James pushed his rhetoric in order to confirm once and for all equal hereditary standing between painting and fiction. When he let it be known that "the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novels is ... complete,"4 he was couching cultural propaganda in critical terms. This is certainly not to suggest that his critical motives were purely ulterior, but this kind of quasi-political double entendre appears again