Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1988"

Periphrasis, Power, and Rape in "A Passage to India"

Abstract: Periphrasis, defined most simply as "the use of many words where one or a few would do," has, like all figures, a more devious side. Rooted in the Greek "to speak around," described variously as a figure that simultaneously "underand over-specifies," or "the use of a negative, passive, or inverted construction in place of a positive, active or normal construction," the circumlocution associated with periphrasis begins to suggest a refusal to name its subject that emphasizes the fact of its elision.' If we go further and describe it in Gerard Genette's terms as a figure that both opens up and exists in a gap or space between sign and meaning, a figure that is moreover "motivated" in its usage,2 then we arrive at the association between periphrasis, power, and rape that structures both linguistic and social relations in A Passage to India and provides the space for re-reading E. M. Forster's most enigmatic novel. To introduce this association, we must move immediately to the event at the heart of the novel, Adela Quested's experience in the Marabar caves that leads to the trial of the Indian doctor Aziz for attempted rape. Or so we assume: the charge, like the event, is either elided completely or referred to by the English as an "insult," a clearly motivated circumlocution. Later, in a moment of vision during the trial, Adela returns to the caves and retracts her accusation of Aziz, but the reader never learns what if anything actually happened there. Where we would have the naming of the crime and its perpetrator, exists only a periphrasis, a gap. That Forster deliberately created this gap is clear from the original version of the scene, where an assault definitely occurs: the reader is in the cave with Adela and feels the hands that push her against the wall and grab her breasts; we too smash the assailant with the field glasses before running out of the cave and down the hill.3 In the published version, not just the violent physical attack but the entire scene in the cave is elided. Into the interpretive space opened by this elision, critics have not feared to rush, supported by Forster's statement that "in the cave it is either a man, or the

After the Fall: The World of Graham Greene's Thrillers

Abstract: Although such statements from Greene have tended to discourage serious critical consideration of his entertainments, if we overlook the perfunctory tone we can see the remark revealing his understanding that such formulaic literature as spy novels demands a special structure of narrative conventions not encountered in "serious" or, to use J.A. Cawelti's term, "mimetic" fiction-conventions which, as critics like Cawelti, Robert Warshow and Ralph Harper argue, both determine and are determined by the expectations readers bring to these works. Yet, despite his labelling Stamboul Train, The Confidential Agent, The Ministry of Fear and Our Man in Havana as entertainments, and authorial comments like the one quoted above notwithstanding, I shall argue that Greene deliberately sets out to challenge-if not frustrate-reader expectations by either departing from the basic conventions of the formulaic narrative world or else utilizing these conventions in such a way as to blur the line separating formulaic from mimetic fiction. I do not wish to suggest, however, that these entertainments are mere literary games in which a clever author plays with his readers' sensibilities. Like Conrad's The Secret Agent before them, Greene's thrillers represent a serious attempt to establish the spy novel as an appropriate vehicle for exploring the tensions, ambiguities, darkness and sense of alienation which characterize the experience of modernity in the twentieth century. The most significant feature of formulaic narratives-spy novels, westerns, gothic romances, science fiction fantasies, detective thrillers-as defined by Warshow is self-referentiality:

Character as Nominal: A Sketch for a Theory

Abstract: The idea that the sentence is a prototype or model for plot is not new, but what seems to be the obvious consequence of that idea-namely, that there must be some kind of correspondence between the nominals in a sentence and the characters in a plot-seems to have received little or no attention. That is the subject I want to consider in the following pages, examining the resemblance between character and nominal as a lexical item, as a syntactical (actually structural) unit, and as a rhetorical device.'

Margaret Drabble's "The Waterfall": New System, New Morality

Abstract: The Waterfall is Margaret Drabble's most literarily-allusive novel, a complex metafiction that draws attention to problems of finding a style and of making an ending. Jane Gray, the first-person narrator, is writing a novel about herself in the third person in an attempt to understand her passion for James, her cousin's husband; and she intersperses her stylized, romantic fictionalization with a critical, analytical first-person commentary. In the same way that Anna Wulf, the protagonist of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, is writing a novel in order to understand her feelings for her lover, so too does Jane write in order to "comprehend" her experience;' and just as the conventional novel Anna writes demonstrates Lessing's sense of the limits of conventional form, so too does Jane's novel express Drabble's commentary on novelistic convention. Drabble has referred to Lessing as "both mother and seer," and nowhere is her indebtedness more apparent than in the metafiction of The Waterfall.2 Though most readers of The Waterfall have approached the novel-in the way critics usually approach Drabble's fiction-as social realism significant for what it reveals "about life,"3 Drabble's manipulation of novelistic convention here is as

The Dis-position of the Subject: Agency and Form in the Ideology of the Novel

Abstract: The interpretation of given reality and its abolition are connected to each other, not, of course, in the sense that reality is negated in the concept, but that out of the construction of a configuration of reality the demand for its [reality's] real change always follows promptly. The change-causing gesture of the riddle process-not its mere resolution as such-provides the image of resolutions to which materialist praxis alone has access.