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The Fox
D H Lawrence
NARRATIVE VOICE AND REALISTIC CONVENTIONS
The discerning of the precise nature of the narrative voice in the text is one of the tasks we shall
set ourselves
Might not this neutrality be only apparent; are there not subtle modulations which make The narrative voice not simply expository but directive?
That the voice of narration is transparent and ostensibly neutral is conventionally the case for much “realistic” fiction.
referential detail
Thus, for instance, when “the farm” is mentioned in the text, we
- eliminate from our minds images of crowded city streets, industrial smoke and dust, tall dense buildings and conjure up fields and open spaces, a visible sky. The notion of the farm’s reality will be reinforced in various ways: the use of the definite article to qualify it seems to add a presumptive history to the place; the giving of a
proper name - Bailey Farm - which may be balanced against the I London suburb of Islington (country versus city) which is also named,
an accumulation of details which, though irrelevant in themselves on the level of the novella’s plot, lend a certain weight of legitimacy to the text’s claim to reality because of their extra-textual existence.
ENIGMA
To the study of narrative point of view, the building of the realistic illusion, and the posing of the enigma, we will add a fourth line of inquiry: the tracing of a system of semantic oppositions throughout the text and of the effects that these oppositions produce.
The existence of a community more extensive than the two characters to whom we have been introduced is implied. Does the narrative voice speak from this community?
The implied existence of this group sets off the girls as a counter group
We have been informed of an interesting circumstance: the habitual way in which our two young ladies are viewed (addressed) is . It is a piece of information which raises a question: why this departure from reality ? - rather than putting curiosity to rest. The first enigma has been posed.2 How and when will this first question be answered or will the problem merely be compounded by more partial revelations?
Two additional points may be mentioned before passing on to the second sentence of the text. We will note the choice of the word “girls” to describe two people, female, who we will soon learn are nearly thirty
old. “Girls”: youth, celibacy, inexperience, childishness - how many of these concepts associated with girlishness will we be able to apply to our two characters?
setting out upon their venture.
Evokes the previously mentioned problem of the selection of the word “girls” to introduce Banford and March
the second half of this sentence is couched in language reflecting the spirit in which Banford and March “took” the farm..
Bradford was a small, thin, delicate thing with spectacles.
in place of the explanation of what went wrong and how; the second paragraph leads off with a diversionary tactic to a physical description of Banford. We note that a link with the previous sentence is nevertheless established through the recurrence of the word “thing.”
our attention is shifted back to the situation on the farm.
Sentences five and six provide background information of several sorts to the farm situation: -one of the girls’ geographical origins (Islington), social origins (tradesman), motivational factors (ill-health, prolonged maidenhood).
the expression “it did not seem as if” forces us to wonder: to whom? And we become aware that a particular point of view - Mr Banford’s? the community’s? - has infiltrated the voice of the text
Once again, our quest for information that will gratify our curiosity about the farm is delayed by a break in the exposition of background material
She had learned carpentry and joinery at the evening classes in Islington. She would be the man about the place.
March’s intention of being “the man about the place” is expressed in free indirect speech
They were neither of them young: that is, they were near thirty. But they certainly were not old.
The factual information contained in these sentences may be succinctly restated: the girls were almost thirty years of age. But whose judgment is it that this age is neither young nor old? Is is it the voice of the community to whom they were known by their surnames and from whose standpoint,the narrator has chosen to speak? Is this the way the girls see themselves? Is there not in this hesitation between old age and youth a hint at their future as old maids?
.not made merely to be slaved away. Both girls agreed in this.
. From this point forward, the girls’ questions and judgments will be frequently mingled with the narrator’s point of view.
the reader has been led on a rollercoaster of hopes and disappointments in this text. The inner tension that will characterize the novella has begun to take shape. Soon the stage will be set for the entrance of the “one evil. .. greater than any other”: the fox.
setting out upon their venture.
evokcs thc previously mentioned problem of the selection of the word “girls” to introduce Banford and March
the second half of this sentence is couched in language reflecting the spirit in which Banford and March “took” the faim.
Unfortunately, things did not turn out well.
The third sentence begins with a reversal:
The word “unfortunately” introduces for the first time in the narrative an élément of évaluation. Whose feelings does this “unfortunately” reflect? Is it meant to be the voice of universal commisération before the doings of unreliable destiny?
With what purpose is the euphemistic “did not turn out well” used to say “turned out badly?”
We will note in passing the introduction of a motif
: the motif of eyes,
linked with mental and physical power.
No matter how March made up the fences, the heifer was out, wild in the woods, or trespassing on the neighbouring pasture, and March and Banford were away, flying after her, with more haste than success. So this heifer they sold in despair.
The impatience and frustration of the two girls is reflected in “no matter how,” placed for emphasis at the beginning of the sentence
the heifer, unfortunately, refused absolutely to stay in rhe Bailey Farm
the dysphoric mode occurs earlier in this paragraph
Their inability to come to grips with the
situation finds expression in the phrasing “the heifer was out “ since instead of seeing the process we see only the result
The beast’s transgressions are foregrounded by certain effects of sound d and rhythm: alliteration in “wild in the woods”; repetition of rhythmic and sound groupings in “‘trcspassing in the ‘neighbouring ‘pastures.”
The adversary rclalionship bctwccn girls and cow is built through syntactic parallelism, as in:
the hcifcr was out
March and Ranford were away
abrupt sentence that follows reproduces the cadence of sudden
The fowls were quite enough trouble.
The impatient exasperation concerning the fowls expressed here has a distinctly unfarmerly ring to it
March had set up her carpenter’.s bench ai the end of the open shed. Here she worked, making coops and doors and other appurtenances. The fowls were housed in the bigger building, which had served as barn and cow-shedin old days.
This account of March’s productivity produces another mini-reversal
The loss of the cows is seen to have led to a reorganization and a ncw spurt of activity.
THE MUSICIANS
Ray BRADBURY
this suspension of meaning is instrumental in creating the enigmatic quality of the story.
ORDER OF PRESENTATION
The boys come first, described at some length before being opposed to “the limits set by their stern mothers.”
The dead Martians are presented in an indirect way, combining enigma, metaphor, and suspense. T
Several metonymies also indirectly evoke the Martians: “the dead forbidden town,” “the dead town’s doors,” “the old towns,” “the dead city.”
, the three elements of the skelton are derealized by metaphor and comparison: “white xylophonebones,” “ribs, like spider legs, plangent as a dull harp,” “ a skull like a snowball.” ‘
the description of sandwiches is a good example of the selective process
of all narration: devoting seven lines out of sixty to this -
the boys’ greediness must be justified by the economy of the story
it develops the “normal” pole (the food is typical of Midwestern custom later to be contrasted with the “terrible.”
INTERPRETATION
A more striking passage in which to anchor a negative isotopy is “panting obtaintcd commands” - in which “tainted” could be said to indicate the corrupted nature of the boys.
the system of oppositions in the story is very useful here to indicate the author’s axiological stand
this suspension of meaning is instrumental in creating the enigmatic quality of the story.
Because of this contrast with their opponents the boys are valorized in spite of the gruesome character of their game. What is central to the story is the recognition of death. The robot-like firemen impose ignorance of death; the boys accept it thanks to their vitality.
central choice of Autumn is an apt one. Because Autumn is traditionally the time of passage between life (Summer) and death (Winter) it affords an ill meeting ground
The dance (of mortality) conjures up the medieval allegorical dance of death, juxtaposing the living and the dead.
association of life/death terms appears in the metaphor
peppermint-stick bones,” a combination that occurs in the middle of the paragraph and pointedly unites what the Firemen are trying to discard
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Becket : waiting for Godot
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John Fowles The Fench Lieutenant’s woman
THE EXPOSITORY SCENE
After this introductory validation, the scene of exposition should provide elements of information on the three major axes of reference: who? where? when? (actors, place, time). Those elements are unevenly provided by this first chapter, not without reluctance or delay as far as the characters are concerned. Time is mentioned in the first paragraph (1867, the time of the story) and the place is described at great length, but the text withholds information concerning “the pair” throughout a full page, down to the fifth paragraph (“strangers”} in which their external appearance is described in detail. The important labels that identify characters (their names, for example) are nevertheless withheld. Finally, the third character, unmentioned till then, occupies the last paragraph, the end of the chapter, in a splendid textual isolation that is comparable to the figure’s position on the jetty.
NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE
Two features stand out: the vacillation in tense between past and present, and the resort to a hypothetical observer as the focalizer of the descriptions.the present tense found in the first sentence is not the usual present of enunciation (here and now) but what is called the gnomic present (the time of universal truth, as in proverbs). The brief shifting out to the past(1867) is followed by a return to the gnomic present. The present of enunciation bursts in much later with “I exaggerate?” which is followed by an unusual denudation of the writer’s activity, the collision of two eras will be one of the effects of the novel, whether explicit or implicit
Fowles uses a striking combination of zero focalization to deliver geographical, historical, and social information and a delegation of focalizing power to an anonymous “person.
This delegation of focalization is handled with deliberate awkwardness (see repetitions of “could have deduced,” “might have suspected,”) in order to draw our attention to a convention of nineteenth-century narration: adopting an external view of characters (for realistic effect) moving to an intimate internal or zero focalization
A central clement in Fowles’s pastiche of the nineteenth-century novel consists in the juxtaposition of this exceedingly limited focalization with the zero one which is more appropriate to expository purposes
The reality illusion is based on standard veridictory effects: the use of geographical names, historical accuracy_. These two axes are used to validate the third actorial one. A more original device is the use of the personal testimony of the author, acting here as a real person, an extra literary voice: “I can be put to the test,” “I can be put to proof ….”
Metaliterary effects
These self-referential comments of the writer on his own activity can take many forms. The very explicit “I write” bas been mentioned already
Since the whole novel is an imitation of nineteenth-century fiction it can be read throughout in a metaliterary perspective, even at its most realistic moments.
Experimentation
. Fowles’s talent as a researcher into local Dorset and into the Victorian era is highly gratifying to those interested in Munmouth’s disastrous invasion or in the elimination of the crinoline in the world of British high fashion. The less historically-minded will delight in the humorous presentation of these elements
the tone of this beginning is characterized by a few humorous hints that enhance the parodic intention and reveal the author’s wit ,the ponderous Victorian façade. “That largest bite from the …. England’s outstretched south-western leg” is associated with one incisively sharp .., morning.”
topographical coherence, hence an effect of verisimilitude
the treatment of space, as well as the treatment of Time,(time markers: next …etc) evinces the author’s intention of facilitating the reader’s entrance into the role of the narrator
The presence of the narrator is an important element in the creation of the “referential” or “realistic” illusion. He is distinct from the author and thus an agent of authenticity.
the fact that Brown is presented as the enunciator of the narrative establishes a screen behind which the real enunciator can hide
appears here as an eye-witness, in the most basic sense of the term
«the narrator ‘s attitude is essentially that of an observer. However, his
Remarks go beyond mere factual observations. ´Brown’s remarks broaden the semantic scope of the passage
the uninteresting corridors of power
seemed to climb along as though it were a ladder
an expression of desperate purpose as though he knew. .. i suppose
I had the impression of a shower of gold it seemed as though a sudden desire…
again I had the impression that English was a language…
he must have had a heavy handicap
the modalizing devices have different effects in the economy of the passage, but a particularly interesting point is that they answer to two contradictory purposes:
they make the text acceptable to the reader in terms of his experience, the knowledge that he shares with other men about the world, to the point that he will overlook the fact that he is identifying himself with some characters, consider them as persons he might see in real life (this is called naturalization of the text);
(on the contrary, to show off the text as text, by drawing the attention of the reader to the linguistic process
- Not to what is told but to how it is told (this is called the denudation of the text).
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Graham Greene
The Comedians
topographical coherence, hence an effect of verisimilitude
the treatment of space, as well as the treatment of time,(time markers: next …etc) evinces the author’s intention of facilitating the reader’s entrance into the text
the fact that Brown is presented as the enunciator of the narrative establishes a screen behind which the real enunciator can hide
the narration overtly amplifies its own procedures with “for next it was Mr Jones,” “I began to wonder when the Presidential Candidate would appear” and, more cunningly, “I hope Mr Smith is well,” as well as with the metaphor of the race (“he had lost his place,” “ he stuck the race out stubbornly,”
MICROTEXT AND MACROTEXT
What looks like an anecdotal situation can be perceived, in the general perspective of the book, as an essential semantic component, holding the kernel of the main isotopies of the novel. For example, Brown’s remarks on the pharmacist anticipate the latter ‘s death; the reader understands that the ladder he is climbing is not a simple metaphor of his difficult walk on the deck, but an image of life and its tribulations. In ^the same way, the metaphor of the “shower of gold” will find its complete explanation in the last chapter of the book when Mr Fernandez takes in Brown as a partner in his undertaking business, after the narrator has definitively lost his property in Haiti. Perhaps the apparently inane “yes, yes” of Mr Fernandez can be seen as the expression of an acceptance of life of which Brown is incapable, which might explain why twice in the book, here and on the novel’s very last page, he is woken up from a dream (brought back to reality) by Mr Fernandez. Brown cannot actively participate in the comedy of life? he is (as here on the deck)-a;voyeur of other people ´s efforts to master their destiny. Too cynical to share the “absurd” illusions of the Smith couple, he regrets the “dignity” of innocence; on the other hand, he cannot wear the guise of falseness and assume a role as “Major” Jones do
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SULA
Toni MORRISON
COMPOSITION
This passage is a scene: the meeting of two characters
little dialogue framed by narration
The dialogue is then replaced by a brief summary: “Their conversation was easy. ..,”
the narrator (narrated speech instead of direct speech).
STRANGENESS IN PSYCHOLOGY AND STYLE
Our cultural expectations (the result of prevailing values and clichés) are circumvented by Toni Morrison
the reader is thus puzzled
differences and convergences between focalization and enunciation.
She had no idea what she would do or feel during that encounter.
Would she cry, cut his throat, beg him to make love to her? She
couldn’t imagine.
The sentences are in internal focalization
the lofty term “encounter” belongs visibly to the narrator’s vocabulary;
The contraction “couldn’t,” being closer to conversational tone, suggests the character’s enunciation, together with the three successive questions which are technically speaking free indirect speech
This free indirect style is closer to the character’s enunciation than the previous sentence which was more directly controlled by the narrator
from the first sentence to the second the distance between the narrator and the character decreases, which produces an effect of closeness, almost complicity.
EXTERNAL FOCALIZATION: DISTANCE AND CONNOTATIONS
Toni Morrison uses focalization very selectively: the second protagonist BoyBoy is never focalized internally
Eva is studied in-depth, to make emotional identification easier for the reader,
…” The elements of description are carefully selected; nothing concerns his body except “he danced.” All the other items of information deal with his clothes. The connotations of “shiny orange shoes, citified straw bat, cat’s-head stickpin” are clear enough
the irony of “a picture of prosperity and good will”: BoyBoy is devoid of moral conscience, feels no guilt or responsibility, he is surface without depth.
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Ezra Pound
Portrait d’une femme
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Aldous Huxley Crome Yellow
THE BEGINNING OF THE NOVEL
This movement in space has the effect of giving an initiatory thrust to the diegesis
The first paragraphs of the story have for task to set the reader as well as the main character on the road to the creation of meaning.
Setting and decor may be expected to have a double function
they participate in the establishment of the reality effect. Second, spatial elements have a symbolic function: they may extend, reflect, concretize, the psychological, thematic, or axiological dimension of the work.
Space is foregrounded in the first sentence of this passage by the placement of the phrase “along this particular stretch of line
Besides preparing the reader for the scene in the train compartment which follows, these two sentences introduce the idea of remoteness, of a deep, rural, pastoral England which reaches not only physically into the country’s “green heart” but back in time to the English past. This is an impression which is reinforced by the picturesque place the slow, bucolic indolence with which the train moves on.
Once a geographical framework has been fixed through the list of stations, The narrative is given a temporal span
There, time notation will be rather vague - a succession of days punctuated by weekends and culminating at Bank Holiday. The over-concern with the apparent here will fade away into the fusion of past and present alluded to above.
NARRATOR AND CHARACTER: PROXIMITY
“this”_(deictic) of the first sentence
The reader has already been projected into the immediacy of the situation
occupant (internal focalization). Textually the transition from what seems to bc a purely narrational discourse to one in which the narrator’s and the character’ s voices seem to mingle is operated by “Denis knew the names” followed immediately by an enumeration of those names.
his impatient recital of the stages to be passed
The same sort of intersection of discourse (character zone) occurs in the following sentences with “goodness only knew whither” which is a narrativized version of the oral expression “goodness only knows where.”
Denis is not presented by means of a physical description
, the spoken (or thought) idiom (“thank Heaven”) infiltrates the narrative discourse: the narrator temporarily shifts out to his character’s perception of things.
Denis is presented from the inside. The techniques used to create intimacy between reader and character in the first paragraph will continue in the second.
Once again, deictics (“now,” “next”) connect the discourse to a particular situation and to the person who is experiencing it
Denis took his chattels off the rack and piled them neatly. ..”
the use of the precious, recondite “chattels” for “luggage” or “belongings” is just such a word choice as Denis would delight in.
RECAPITULATION OF FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE AND CHARACTER ZONE
Free indirect discourse, which integrates the discourse of the character
into that of the narrator without explicit signs of discontinuity (such as
expressions like “he thought,” “he said,” “he wondered”), breaks the
smooth composed flow of ordinary narration by introducing into it certain
qualities of the spoken (or thought) word. In this text there are many
occasions on which Denis’s voice seems to break through. These
occasions are marked by:
1. Incomplete sentence structure (“A futile proceeding.”)
2. Enumerations (“Bole, Tritton… Camlet-on-the-Water”)
3. Drastically truncated forms (“Anything. Nothing.”) 4. Questions (“… what had he done with them?”) 5. Repetitions (“None, none, none.”)
6. Conversational interjections (“thank Heaven,” “goodness only knew whither”)
7. Exclamations (“Oh, this journey!” “… and oh!. ..”)
8. The use of “one”- often used in English to express impersonally and in general terms a personal opinion or predilection.
True to the requirements of internal] focalization
Furthermore, by allowing the reader to eavesdrop on Denis’s rumination in the train, he exposes his thought .processes.
He is genteel but probably not well-off
the hero of a Victorian vignette: “One pictured him at home, drinking tea, surrounded by a numerous family
His is the touchingly ridiculous eamestness of inexperience
He is an intellectual. Thoughts are more real to Denis than actions
lapses into an analysis of his own exertions. His thoughts progress from his immediate surroundings (the smell of the cushions, the tactile sensation of sunshine) to his more general circumstances (the third-class carriage) to metaphysical speculation (“what right had he… to be alive?”). The same pattern is repeated in the exchange with the guard where contact with reality quickly dissolves into fabulation
unceremonious exit from the train. His next forthright activity, running, results in breathlessness, while his imperious demand to be given his bicycle is roundly ignored
it remains that his various gestures are cancelled by their meaningless overabundance : when he does, he does too much. This over-zealousness empties action of meaning
The theme of action versus inaction introduced in these first paragraphs of the novel will be developed throughout the pages that follow, culminating in the final fiasco of Denis’s one successful plan of action
There will be a parallel development of the themes of life versus art and body versus spirit, both of which flow from the early presentation of Denis with his youthful anxieties and doubts.
in the figure of the guard
paternal figures
Odysseus to Denis’s Telemachus
None of it will, of course, serve to avert the final disaster of his premature departure
The place names, though fictional, are highly evocative. A number of them call up images of the rural world into which Denis is moving: bole (the stem or trunk of a tree; clay; an unglazed aperture in the wall of a castle, cottage or stable);
Camlet is the name given to a costly fabric,
It is also reminiscent of Camelot, the name given to the site
of the legendary court of King Arthur and the
Knights of the Round Table.
When he turns to self-castigation at having wasted so much time (could those two hours really have made so much différence?),
Similarly, the elaboration of the notion of wasted time into “precious minutes [spilt] as though his reservoir were inexhautible” strikes a note of rather melodramatic angst. And again, Denis’s condemnation of “all his works” comes comically into perspective
when it becomes clear that he is only twenty-three years old. The narrator is relying on the reader’s common sense and knowledge of the world in order to gently satirize his young protagonist
deviation from the norm
. The text has two movements: Denis imprisoned in the train, reduced to futile arranging of luggage, the passive victim of “misery and a namelcss nostalgic distress,” and Denis released from captivity, jumping, cramming, deranging (the use of this verb, usually associated with mental derangement, has an ironic effect
rather frenzied series of actions
The satire comes from the rapid succession of these verbs of action _ . _
which only resulç in inefficacity
Denis’s claim to manly determination is even more attenuated by the verb “bundle”
Georges Orwell England, your England
George Orwell, “England Your England” in Inside the Whale
Enunciation
The use ofpronouns, is particularly interesting in this passage. The
opening sentence focuses on the narrator with “I” and “me” practically
bracketing the utterance.
typographical isolation. It stands as a kind of epigraph
As I write” brings about a sense of the urgency of the writing act inasmuch as it is shown as simultaneous with a deadly me
The stress is thus laid from the beginning on the emotive aspect of the situation which is dramatized
I” still appears in the first two sentences of the next paragraph; but this time, it is far less obtrusi
a syntactic chiasmus: “they do not feel
enmity against me. .., nor I against them”) and as the subject of an
interpolated clause (“I have no doubt”)
. e whole second paragraph is centred on “they;’_ wüh, a tendency to particularize (“they do not feel,” “they are,” “one of them
Then the third and fourth paragraph will resort to the neutral “one” in essay-like fash
“you” is introduced, it would seem, simply as a variation of “one”: the meaning would be very slightly altered by such formulae as “when one cornes. ..,”
replacing “you” by “one,” if grammatically possible, becomes quite improbable if the text is to keep its emotive charge. Imagine the loss in feeling-tone if one were to read: “then the vastness of England swallows one up, and one loses for a while one’s feeling
a commendation of Englishness. Thus the repeated collocation “you” + “foreigner(s)” is clearly a rhetorical opposition that helps reinforce the notion of singleness and difference. This is all the more so as “England” and “you” are made interchangeable owing to a syntactic parallelism of construction:
What can the England of 1940 have in eommon with the England of 1840?
… what have you in common with the child….
This identity is then asserted in the following paragraph from the start, immediately after the insisting “above all”: ‘it is your civilization.” The words are italicized, emphasizing the interlocutor in this assimilation
Another rhetorical device intended to underline the sameness of “you” and “it” may also be noted: the use of similar constructions and repeated expressions:
1. first sentence you will never. ..away from it
fourth sentence you will never… away from it
2. first sentence it is your civilization, it is you’
fourth sentence it is yours, you belong to it
The synecdoches used in the text (“suet puddings” and “red pillar-boxes” for “England”; “your soul” for “you”) are particularizing ones in which a part or parts stand for the whole.
Once the assimilation interlocutor/England has been hammered in, the last paragraph of this introduction can resume the neutral tone of the essay with a return to the consideration of England in the third person
the final equation, England = you, clearly shows that the paradox was only a rhetorical trick to express communion. Besides, the obtrusive presence of “our national life” and “are we not 46 million individuals” strengthens this strategy.
IRONY
The dramatisation of his own existence as narrator
uses to load his discourse with emotion. Such rhetorical devices as repetitions, parallels, and contrasts have already been mentioned. His use of irony also seems essential to the meaning of the text.
The first ten lines are filled with unexpected associations: “highly civilized human beings… are trying to kill me…
The rhetorical paradox here is based on the uncertain extension of the term “civilizcd” when associated with the expression “trying to kill.” Similarly, blowing people to pieces and never sleeping the worse for it may seem highly inco
Q_bedience to the law considered as a natural duty” appears as a continuous ground for ironical statements in this opening: “they are only ‘doing their dut
Orwell’s ironic purpose: it is only a “saying,” a cliché people have in their minds when they should know better. But what is one to make of the last sentence of this paragraph: “He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.” Is it_n_ot an antiphrasis, a condemnation of blind patriotism? It sounds very much so.~
The function of irony at the beginning of the text is thus twofold. First, the distance it creates in the first ten lines helps to dramatize the situation of the writer whose coolness and grim humour must be felt (by the intended interlocutor) as an expression of sympathy. Then, the paragraph devoted to apparent praise of patriotism in fact condemns nationalism as nonsensically positive.
Another kind of irony will then prevail in the test of the passage. Turning to a commendation of Britain, Orwell will play the national game of self-deprecation, self-irony, a particularly Engl
form of humour
a humorous defense of “national individualism.”
Amusing, derisive, or simply matter-of-fact
against the deadly surrender to a single national way of thinking; actual individual existence is opposed to ideological mass conformity.
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D.H. Lawrence
The Ladybird
SEMANTIC CONFIGURATION OF DAPHNE’S PHYSICAL PORTRAIT
Throughout the passage the physical elements of the portrait are distributed and picked up in order to create rather a complue vision. The elements named and described are (from top to bottom): hair, brow, eyes, checks, complexion, mouth, chin (details of “her face”), throat,
shoulders, legs.
It is striking how the head is privileged over the body. The latter is evoked in general terms ( “built,” “stature,” and “frame”) accompanied by aesthetic adjectives (“fine” and “splendid
The reader enter’s Daphne’s soul, not her dressing-room. This remark is meant to point out: 1) the fact that even a “scandalous” writer is determined and limited by the moral and aesthetic conditions of his time; 2) that a description, though it purports to be exhaustive, is actually a process of selection, focussed on only a few items and is, furthermore, culturally code
detaih it is worth noting the importance given to Daphne’s legs, through three epithets (the maximum number for any item of the physical portrait - “lovely, long
the mythological references (“Artemis or Atalanta”) in the same sentence.
Our perception of Daphnés physique is oriented and determined by two important features of the preceding paragraph: her beauty (“she had been one of the beauties. .,”) and disease (“she was ill, always ill”). Her portrait is organized around these two poles.
the isotopy of healthy beauty is undisturbed except in the sentence “her shoulders were still straight
Column 2 is the most ambivalent: il contains euphoric elements which can be dysphoric as well. For example, “thinness” connotes both elegance and fragility; white is beautiful but also morbid, it leads to the
adjective “pallid” which connotes death, as “ash-blond” suggests supreme elegance but also post-mortem coldness (“she filled the heart with ashes”). Similarly, the adjective “heavy” connotes abundance and gorgeousness (“heavy hair”) but also fatigue and exhaustion (“heavy lids”). The “pink checks,” a token of freshness and youth in another context are here contaminated by suggestions of fever, unhealthy nervousness, and “reddened lids.” And the “green-blue” colour of the eyes is negatively shadowed by the adjective “glaucous.” To sum up, the sentence “her beauty was a failure” clearly indicates that Daphne’s handsomeness contains the seeds of imminent ruin. Hence the linkage of beauty with artificiality: the image of the hot-house flower (Column 4) implies that Daphne’s grace and charm are transient, fragile,
We recognize here a familiar stereotype: that of the romantic heroine
~ who pines away because of grief and frustrated love.1 Her discase itself is a cliché: phthisis, the ailment of the nineteenth century “belle dame,
Lawrence is travelling here in terra cognita and the reader advances on firm ground, paved by cultural tradition and intertextuality.
But this is a feint. The pattern set in the first two paragraphs is subverted by the rest of the text. The cliché is abandoned and disrupted, the ideology which sustains it is overthrown, and the text develops from tradition to modernity.
But Daphne was not born for grief and philanthropy,”
The reader is invited to take this sentence as a sign that the
comfortable pattern previously cstablishul has to bc questioned amplified by the mythological reference opposing Daphne (the virgin
nymph who fled Ap’ollo’s lust) to Artemis and Atalanta (respectively a goddess and a maiden, excelling in the chase and in the arrogant defense of their virginity): that is to say, an opposition between the passive prey victim and the active hunter-victimizer.
So we are led to rearrange our comprehension of the text along the lines of the new perspective propounded by the narrator. A new Quality ,emerges: artificiality versus reality. The artificiality mentioned in the first diagram, which appearcd as a secondary adjunct to the central opposition of beauty versus disease is now activated into a primary role. The opposition between, on the one hand, strength/beauty and, on the other, delicacy/beauty becomes an antagonism between Nature and Culture.
Daphne’s case is almost too good an example of the psychoanalytical theory of self-repression, though Lawrence does not always respect Freudian orthodoxy. The father is traditionally associated with the Law and the Conscience, whereas in this novella w,t_is the mo h.r..whQ has_ modelled Daphne according to current ideology. And it is the father who here embodies the free flow of instinct which Lâwrence implies Daphne inherited from him. So her inner self is caught in an unconscious struggle between the dictates of society (the superego) and her drives
(the id).
Her conscious mind strives to imitate her mother’s attitude, _her consciousness -drags her towards her masculine heritage: This is why the idea of her physical strength is constantly reiterated in the text, in spite of the notations concerning her illness.
It is is expressed by the metaphor of the dam which, at the end of the novella, is to be opposed to the metaphor of the “full river flowing inside her.”
So it is with strong natures today: shattered from the inside.” Here the text moves from story-telling to personal discourse, from the “then” of the story to the “now” of direct communication between author and reader
that only Psanek can bring out the potentialities of the heroine and turn her extemal (artificial) beauty inside out, revealing the dark (positive) aspect of her inner self. Only Psanck can replace the pseudo-mystical relation her husband offers her with a primal communication of bodies and souls “in darkness.” Only he can move her from the social to the primitive and part from her with the assurance of a meeting “in Hades,”
the description of Daphne’s dress recalls her mourning: black frock, no ornarnents. But this description has also another function: to demonstrate her
aristocratic elegance, simplicity, and modesty.
x
Thornton Wilder
Our Town
x
Nathanael WEST
The Day of the Locust
To be sure, Tod is surprised by the din outside, but this feeling of surprise is experienced doubly by the reader who is unable to make head or tail of the situation due to the tight control of information by the narrator.
these metonymies (a figure which in itself generates perplexity by delaying comprehension) are all the more baffling in conjunction with the location “office.”
The reader is so preoccupied by the specialized vocabulary which accompanies the description (dolman, hussar, sabretache, shako, musket, grenadiers) that
the problem of incongruity awakened
the coinciding of terms
belonging to different centuries (“quitting time” and “musket,” for example
the anachronism
The mystery , another incongruously placed symbol of Hollywood factitiousness,
the half Mississippi steamboat. The comic scene of pseudo-defeat and
disorder will have its grim pendant in the last pages of the novel with the
apocalyptic riot of the “diers.”
In these first paragraphs some stylistic features may be noted: first, the recurrence of parallel constructions
This taste for parallelism will
be confirmed elsewhere as will that of enumeration
As Tod advances into the Californian cityscape and the falling night, the narrator will take the opportunity to reveal pertinent
Elements of his past (thanks to flashbacks or analepses) intermingled with -Tod’s present observations of the people and landscape that surround him.
the text offers us his perceptions - “heard a great din” - thus encouraging through internal focalization
close-up
The information concerning Tod’s past incites the narrator to increase his control and move gradually to what seems to be zero focalization.
This power of the narrator is confirmed by the anticipation or prolepsis revealing the quality of Tod’s future
masterpiece (“… a picture he was soon to paint, definitely proved ho had talent.”)
THE TRUE AND THE FALSE
The chapter is constructed along the double axis of the true and the false
- appropriate clothes/inappropriate clothes
- natural landscape/unnatural landscape
- authentic architecture/ inauthentic architecture
recurrent adulteration
METATEXTUALITY
Because Tod Hackett is an artist, his frame of reference tends to be visual rather than verbal, the inter-text against which he measures the reality that surrounds him is that of the visual arts rather than literature.
Tod’s magnum opus, “The Burning of Los Angeles,”
Tod chose to throw pretense to the wind and to come West to a career which could not claim to be anything other than commercial
Contact with the grotesqueries of the California scene has made Tod understand that his true vocation is that of a satirist rather than an idealizer, a Daumier rather than a Winslow Homer, and that his road to the truth does not lie through the process of beautification but through that of distortion. This, needless to say, is not far from the aesthetic orientation of Nathanael West’s novel, with its gallery of grotesques, its exaggerated yet at the same time deadpan presentation of the unlikely and the extreme guileless” bad taste
The problem of the relationship between Tod, the focalizer, and the narrator is a delicate one: the general concurrence between the two does not rule out occasional dissociations, particularly in scenes in which Tod’s emotional involvement may endanger his objectivity and his desire for Faye undermine his ironic distance.
x
J.D. SALINGER
FOR ESMÉ - WITH LOVE AND SQUALOR
NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE
.” The sense of increased distance between narrator and character that results from this strategy is the narrative counterpart of the alienation experienced by the protagonist himself during the painful episode of his life that is related - an alienation not only from others, but from his own emotional life
detachment,
the extensive use of military tcrms to describe what is essentially a rejection of army routine. Because of this noncommunication, the narrator seeks other company on his last day in Devon.
By re-opening the channels of communication Esmé has turned the tables on her adoptive father, allowing the man, and therefore the writer, to be re-born
Salinger has always shirked publicity
And yet, many readers of Esmé have been tempted to find connections between the narrator and the author
the hero-narrator is a writer who, like Salinger, went through the trauma of World War II
the dénouement of the text, when an epiphanous experience permits the rebirth of a writer as if Salinger were unveiling the sources of literary creativity from which Esmé originates.
The preoccupation with matters sartorial
is rcndered plausible when the rcader Iearns thai Tori is in fact an artist who has come to Hollywood as a costume and set dcsigner. This information in turn naturalizes the many keen observations on the attire, of those ho passes in the street
the novcl’s opening, markcd as it was by a disorientation stcmming from the dclibcrate positing of the false as true
and it becomes clear that their garments are rcally costumes, the..frontier separating the insidc thé studio from outside grows hazy and the reader gathers that the Hollywood manufactory of illusions at which Tod has found employment is perhaps a metaphor for the society in which he lives
It is Tod’s prognosis that this second group has “come to California to die”
This is the first indication of the originality of this “Hollywood novel”: instead of concentrating on the glamorous people in the movie industry, the stars and tycoons, it will focus on these eager and frustrated outsiders.
The pictorial (and metaliterary) digression that follows Tod’s sight of the “diers” is broken by the spatio-temporal markers in the text: “He reached the end of Vine Street…. Night had started to fall.”
From his vision of the trees and hills it appears that cityscape has contaminated landscape. The trocs and hills, struck by the reflected light of Los Angeles, seem outlined in neon and seem to absorb the city’s artificial light in a negative way (“their centers turned from deep purple to black”)
These houses, however, seen by the same painterly eye (“the
soft wash of dusk”)
appropriately reminiscent “ of that fiction of fictions, The Arabian Nights. Tod’s nature as an observer
emerges in the judgments he makes on these monstrosities
. Stylistically,
the last paragraph adopts the gnomic (universal) present.
graphic separation from the previous development
this chaos is an externalization of the character’s mental state.
X’s apathy and inability to act are expressed through repeated reversals articulated around the word “but”:
he thought if he wrote… but he couldn’t insert. ..
he… tried again… but finally crumpled. ..
he was aware. ..he ought but instead… he put his arms…
The slowness of his reactions is conveyed by the adverbial phrases of time (for a long while, for a minute, then, finally, a few throbbing minutes later) and by the long repetitive catalogue of he + verb, alternating physical and mental activity
the hypersensitivity of his eyes, mentioned earlier
description is a preparation for the end of the story when curative sleep will finally come to X. Indeed it is the eyes which make a transition to the second part of the description through the phrases:
when he opened his eyes;
an hypallage, or transferred epithet, since the minutes aren’t throbbing
which exoncrates the apathetic X from any suspicion of willpowe
X’s first failed gesture of communication is going to open the way to a second more successful communicatory situation.
expectation and suspense
The final paragraph of the description leaves the reader still in suspense as to what the precise contents of the package are.
a reality effect
weight of authenticity
. There is a clear relationship betwecn the way Esmé speaks (her idiolect or the linguistic featurcs of her discoursc) and the way she writes.
As earlier, Esmé shows a predilection for adverbs: extremely, justifiably, frequently, tremendously, etc. which in turn show a tendency towards emphatic expression and self-dramatization.
2. Her style also remains quite formal, even a bit on the stilted side: “I hope you will forgive me…”; “I am taking the liberty….”
“I have been justifiably saddled” [a difference in register between “justifiably” and “saddled” makes the expression strange as well as the fact that “justifiably” does not convey the idea of causal inevitability that Esmé means to express
exactitude and precision
In her self-protective reliance on the factual and the objective she is similar to the narrator himself
She still is prey to an endearing mixture of social sophistication and self-doubt:
Please write as soon as” [solicitation] versus “you have the time and inclination” [illusion of detachment and nonsolicitation].
She blends the formal and the extremely intimate: “my warmest regards to your wife” versus the gift of the watch.
Indeed, the placement of the announcement of the gift in a postscript makes what was probably the essential impulse behind the letter appear to be an afterthought. Further, it reduces a sublime act of unselfishness to the matter-of-fact status of a “by-the-way.”
“I am taking the liberty” which constitutes a sort of apology for her intrusion into the narrator’s personal life
indeed, the narrator suppresses any account of it himself, speaking of the cause of his mental collapse through a description of the effect),
To show that X is as reluctant as Esmé to parade his feeling_s, the narrator uses an unadorned account of the passage of time (“it was a long time before X could set the note aside” and “he just sat with it in his hand
for another long period”) to imply the depth of the impact of Esmé’s message. Once again, X takes refuge in distracting speculation (“he wondered if the watch was otherwise undamaged”) rather than face the full emotional force of the moment
“the swift termination [for end] of the war and a method of existence [for way of life]…”; “the duration of the conflict
Far from being a sign of hie gift’s uselessness, the impairment of the watch reveals the veritable quality of its healing power. ‘the watch is not here a functional object but a symbol of Esmé’s restorative affection.
there only remains for the narrator to step out of the role he has adopted in telling this second part of his story
tactfully using the form of the maxim to cover his emotion, he makes use of a shared linguistic code (the use of Esmé’s expression “faculties intact,”
Richard Brautigan
A Confederate General from Big Sur
This text taken from A Confederaie General from Big Sur is situated at the beginning of Part One, Chapter 4. Its title “Augustus Mellon, CSA” refers te, the historical background of the book, the American Civil War (CSA stands for Confederate States of America). Fr~w,a topical, point of view, this passage is a kind of parenthesis or introduction to the chapter; it is only in the following paragraph that the Civil War makes its official entrance into the narrative.
. Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created - nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want anyone to know ourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an “average, honest, open fellow,” I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to eonceal - and his protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of reminding himself of his misprision.
There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is his and not his brothers’ story. 911_my life I have lived among his brothers but Mis one has been my friend. Besides, if I wrote about his brothers I should have to begin by attacking all the lies that the poor have told about the rich and the rich have told about themselves - such a wild structure they have erected that when we pick up a book about the rich, some instinct prepares us for unreality. Even the intelligent and impassioned reporters of life have made the country of the rich as unreal as fairy-land.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are différent from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very diffic,ult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are hetter than we are because we had to disco ver the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are diffèrent. The only way I can describe young Anson Hunter is to approach him as if he were a foreigner and cling stubbornly to my point of view. If l accept his for a moment I am lost I have nothing to show but a preposterous movie.
INTRODUCTION OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS
The necessity of establishing a link between this passage and its context is evident from the first line: “The first time I met Lee Mellon,” which has a familiar ring.
“Sometimes when you meet people for the first time, they stare at the sky.” This comment is delivered in the tone of an aphorism
Brautigan often shows a bias for catching a character within a rigid phrase like “the rich queer” or “the world’s ugliest waitress” or “the freezer king of Sepulveda Boulevard,” half way between the language of the fairy tale and the catchwords of advertising. These labels have a comic effeçl, but also a distancing one.
OPACITY AND CLARITY OF BRAUTIGAN’S DISCOURSE
In this text Brautigan’s discourse is characterized by:
1. Tropes (figures of speech)
- the hypallage “gray screeching” is evocative but confusing for it brings together two different types of sensual perception;
Bizarre Collocations- “totem” with “drop of the whiskey”;
Redundancy is here used to communicate the slowness of Jesse’s mental activity and create an efficient comical effect
. It retains every external form of logic even when
one finds it hard to make head or tail of what is said:
- the tone is set by the comparison between “trade” and “grade school” which in spite of their graphic and paronomastic resemblance represent two irreconcilable worlds: business and childhood. The notion of exchange that led Jesse to combine the two words structures the next sentence, constructed on a binary pattern to suggest reciprocity and equivalence
Rationality is subverted by nonsense.
SEMANTIC CODES
isotopy: semantic homogencity of an utterancc), arc distinguishable in this passage:
1. the American West (cf the title of the hook)
- totem (connotes: Indian); hides (connotes: trappers) - San Francisco: cable cars, Embarcadero
-Pacific Ocean (cf Big Sur): ship, longshorernen, seagull
Thelma as a possible anagram of Hamlet
the cyclic structure of the book.
The first time I met Lee Mellon the night went away with every totem drop of the whiskey. When dawn came we were down on the Embarcadero and it was raining. Seagulls started it all, that gray screeching, almost like banners, running with the light. There was a ship going someplace. It was a Norwegian ship.
Perhaps it was going back to Norway, carrying the hides of 163 cable cars, as part of the world commerce deal. Ah, trade: one country exchanging goods with another country, just like in grade school. They traded a rainy spring morning in Oslo for 163 cable car hides from San Francisco.
Lee Mellon looked ai the sky. Sometimes when you meet people for the first time, they stare ai the sky. He stared for a long time. “What?” I said, because I wanted to be his friend.
“Just seagulls,” he said. “That one,” and pointed ai a seagull, but I couldn’t tell which one it was for there were many, summoning their voices to the dawn. Then he said nothing for a while.
Yes, one could think of seagulls. We were awfully tired, hung over and still drunk. One could think of seagulls. It’s really a very simple thing to do… seagulls: past, present and future passing almost like drums in the sky.
We stopped ai a utile café and got some coffee. The coffee was brought to us by the world’s ugliest waitress. I gave her an imaginary name: Thelma
My name is Jesse. Any attempt to describe her would be against my_ better judgment, but in her own way she seemed to belong in that cafe with steam rising like light out of our coffee.
Helen of Troy would have looked out of place. “What’s /felen of Troy doing in here?” some longshoreman would have asked. He wouldn’t have understood. So Thelma il was for the likes of us.
Lee Mellon told me that he was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and grew up in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina. “Near Asheville,” he said. “That’s Thomas Wolfe country.”
“Yeah,”I said.
Lee Mellon didn’t have any Southern accent. “You don’t have much of a Southern accent,” I said.
“That’s right, Jesse. I read a lot of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant when I was a kid, “ Lee
Mellon said.
I guess in some strange way that was supposed to gel rid of a Southern accent. Lee Mellon thought so, anyway. 1 r.ouldn’t argue because I have never tried a Southern accent against the German philosophers.
“When 1 was .cixteen years old I stole into classes ai the University of Chicago and lived with Iwo highly cultured young Negro ladies who were freshmen,” Lee Mellon .caid. “We all .dept in the .came hed together. Il helped me gel rid of my Souihern accent.”
“Sounds like il might do the trirk,” I said, not knowing exactly what 1 was saying.
pp. 24-26.
Scott Fitzgerald THE RICH BOY
THE Homodiegetic narrator
The reader discovers in the third sentence that he is in the presence of a homodiegetic narrator, one who is represented in the text by the designation “L” This is an important factor since a homodiegetic narrator poses the problem of the filtering consciousness through whose discourse the events of the story are told. The illusion of narrational objectivity
hesitations before unpalatable truths
tendencies to impose unwarranted interpretations
METATEXTUALITY
The text manifests a certain preoccupation with its own status as text.
warning as he dces so against the pitfalls of stereotyping.
Once again, the fact that what the reader has before him is a literary artefact is underscored by the presence of the word “story” just as the narratoi s status as a story-teller/scribe is emphasized by the expression “if I wrote. …”
Having proceeded from general humanity to a specific group - the rich - the narrator gradually narrows his field to that of the individual case promised in the first sentence
This quality of ambiguity is typical of the narrator’s attitude to the ostensible object of bis discourse. In speaking about the rich in general terms, does lie not ignore bis own strictures concerning the avoidance of stereotypes?
This will be a pattern in what is to follow: when knowledge of the object falls short, the subject falls back upon bis own reactions
The text bas a way of compensating for what at first might seem an intolerable want of certainty. It establishes structural patterns to contain and counterbalance ambiguity of meaning. This is so in the case of the pattern of metatextual references mentioned above. It is also truc of the way in which each paragraph progresses from a generalization:
to an assertion which has deception or conflict at its core:
we hide the truth the poor lie about the rich feel they are
from others and the rich and the rich better than we are
ourselves about themselves
Such patterning gives the text an internal logic that offsets its lapses and contradictions.
x
Bernard Shaw
Pygmalion
x
THE TITLE
These two chapters are indeed tuning points in_ the stor
Forster chose the reverse strategy, akin to understatement
centrality of these chapters in the nove
NARRATIVE STRATEGY
Chapter four brings together Lucy, the young heroine of A Room with a View, and George Emerson in a dramatic scene that will eventually change the course of their lives. They are brought together by a chance encounter in the Piazza Signoria and by the unexpected event that takes place there - the murder of an unknown Italian
Indeed, she spends much of what remains of the novel trying to find her way back to the safety of the conventional social forms, but the real emotions and commitments of life will eventually claim her for their own.
The narrator in this passage has set himself a double task: he wants to rnake the reader privy to Lucy’s perception of the events that befall her and
,,t he also wishes to guide the reader to an interpretation of these events and perceptions. To this end he will use a delicate blending of focalization; he will shift out to his character’s consciousness as each step in the evolving story is taken; he will shift in and away from her when he bas comments
In fact, the central scene - that of the Piazza - will be sandwichéd bélweën two narrational_commentaries that complement each ôther.’
It is interesting to note how these comments opposing the chivalrous and natural modes of behaviour, which provide a sort of thematic frame for the scene, are transferred from the narrator’s sphere into the mental universe of the heroine. This fluidity of lcvels is to bc observed elsewhere in the chapter and is typical of Forster’s narrational technique: an intimacy with the characters’ inner lives is created which does not, however, preclude their being subject to the narrator’s critical scrutiny.
Cohesion is given to the chapter by the repetition of formulae related
~ to the theme of the artificial/natural duality noted above
TRANSITION
a rainy afternoon at the Pension Bertolini in Florence playing the piano. The narrator quickly shifts out to internal focalization
Zero (omniscient) focalization: “Mr Beebe was right. Lucy never knew her desires . . . .”
Internal focalization: “Conversation was tedious; she wanted something big, and she believed
Lucy has recognized that she is not satisfied with conversation of the sort she has just shared with Mr Beebe and Miss Alan
The electric tram has already been associated in Lucy’s mind with the outwardness, the playful vivacity of the Italian spirit
which takes up the axiological opposition culture/nature central to Lucy’s rebellion.
The winds have been associated with the teeming and unconscious life force of the universe.
THE MEDIEVAL LADY
Story time stops, temporarily giving way to a pause for commentary.
A return to story time and action with the use of the shifter “this”:
“This afternoon shc was peculiarly reslive.”
In the interval, the narrator amplifies Lucy’s fleeting thoughts into a reflection of his own on the nature of womanhood as conventionalized by society.
Finally, all of culture seems to conspire in the upholding of this law: “poems had been written. . . .”
becomes clear in the development of the opposition between Eternal Womanhood and the transitory self. The former is associated with the confines of courtly roles (knights, castles, queens) while the “kingdom” of the modern girl is that of Nature: “In lier heart there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of sea.”
. The exalted style of the passage beginning “She has marked the kingdom of this world,” with its multiple adjuncts moving outward towards the final “receding heavens,” seems to express a vision of infinite possibility, while the drop back into familiar language (“Before the show breaks up. ..”) brings with it a drop back into the daily difficulty of selffulfillment.
CREATION OF ATMOSPHERE
a viable alternative to a ride on the electric tram
without the censoring presence of cousin Charlotte, Lucy is able to purchase photographic representations of art works in which the human form is depicted in various states of undress.
He explains, with due irony, the use of the euphemism “a pity” to designate the nude and the rather surprising judgment that Venus, the central figure in Botticelli’s famous painting, is considered to “spoil” the picture because she is only wearing lier hair
This is tantamount to saying, of course, that Lucy has no taste
her taste is a product of her class and culture -
But it is this very flexibility in the young girl which will be lier salvation.
Lucy is as yet fixed in an attitude of passivity
The atmosphere of the square, on which evening is falling, is notably shadowy
The fountain flows dreamily while human and inhuman figures idle at its edge.
Clearly the scene is being set for events which could not occur in the bright light of the habitual or the recognizable, events which the pagan gods have gathered to watch with their usual amused interest in the affairs of men. The square’s fountain has as its center the figure (a male nude) of the sea god, bathed in shadow as Lucy comes upon the scene. I
This atmosphere of unreality will provide the medium necessary for the magical crossing of spiritual boundaries, of subtle but undeniable changes in perspective which will alter Lucy’s view of the world (its “original,” that is, its former meaning disappears) and give existence a new dimension.
an apogec is reached
THlE SCENE OF VIOLENCE
She surmises that the disputants are two Italians
that they have fallen out over money.
ail the actions are understated: bicker for quarrel, spar for strike, hit lightly for hit.
The events partake of the same unreality that characterized the Piazza
The strangeness of this perception is transmitted by the absence of a modalizing verb, such as “seem,” which would create some sense of distancing from the perception
Lucy’s fainting is described not as it would appear to someone watching, but as it is experienced by the fainter. Instead of being told that she loses consciousness, we are given a phenomenological breakdown of passing out: fading light, the sensation that things that were once at eye level now loom overhead and that what was above falls over, silence.
DIALOGUE
George ‘s remarks are generally straightforward and to the point, while Lucy falls back on fixed responses which are not always entirely appropriate.
The verbal situation is duplicated on the level of physical gesture. George openly and frankly extends his hand towards Lucy who first pretends not to sec it and then rather desperately comes up with a -ruse whereby she hopes to f7ce from the young man’s disturbing presence
The photographs, which were first used as a symbol of minor revoit (the possession of artistic representations of the nude asserted the right to forbidden knowledge), here become a ploy in Lucy’s regressive wish to retreat from the very knowledge she was seeking.
ACROSS SPIRITUAL BOUNDARIES
she has mustered sufficient sôcial skills to deal with the external situation.
On their way home, George and Lucy also break a conversational barrier. The photographs will play their third role in the chapter by provoking an exchange between the two young people when George throws them into the river.
Reality in its rawest form - violence and death - bas marked these eternally static reproductions with its colour: red.
he returns Lucy’s purchased pictures of life-at-thirdhand to the swirling waters of Nature.
George ‘s reaction to the photographs, if it is confused, has at least the virtue of being honest. It also figures in the text as the demonstration of that exploded myth of the idcalized lady and her knight in shining armour - the one forever disembodied and untouchable, the other forever gallant and invulnerable. George’s vulnerability has a happy effect.
This idea is treated more extensively in a later chapter when George is confronted with the sight of cousin Charlotte who bas seen him stealing a kiss from Lucy in a field of violets, and he blushes:
Among other things, it is the situation produced when the mind interferes with the instincts of the heart, when the artificial triumphs over the natural, when inhibition frustrates passion, when fear prevents self-knowledge.
The imagery of half-light and dimness which was the objective correlative of Lucy’s inner state
on the Piazza Signoria seems to find its sense here. The scene which took place there (with the panoply of gods, themselves representative of basic human drives, the meeting of satyrs and men at the base of Neptune’s fountain, and finally, the clash ending in death), seems to have surged out of the darkness of human nature and found a responding chord in the “depths” that Lucy hardly knew she possessed and which until then had only found expression - through art! - in her music.
It is appropriate, then, that the scene should end with a sort of fusion of life and art, when Lucy, taking up again the parallel position (“leaning her elbows on the parapet”) hears in the turbulent waters of the Arno a roar which suggests “some unexpected melody to her cars
A ROOM WITH A VIEW
E. M. FORSTER
a completer
Mr Beebe was right. Lucy never knew her désires so clearly as after music. She had not really appreciated the clergyman s wit, nor the suggestive twitterings of htiss Alan:, Conversation was tedious; she wanted something big, and she believed that il would have come to her on the windswept platform of an electric tram.
This she might not attempt. Il was unladylike. Why? Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte had once explained to her why. Il was not that ladies were inferior to men; il was that they were différent. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored. Poems had been written to illustrate this point.
There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in -jour midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was queen of much early Victorian song. Il is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up sirange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of,sea, She has marked the kingdom of this
world, how full il is of wealth, and beauty, and war- a radiant crust, huilt around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens. Men,
A ROOM WITH A V/EW 173
Lucy does not stand for the medieval lady, who was rather an ideal to which she was bidden to lift up her eyes when feeling serious. Nor has she any system of revolt
This afternoon site was peculiarly restive. She would really like to do something of which her well-wishers disapproved. As she might not go on the eler,tric tram, site went to Alinari’s shop.
There she bought a photograph of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus
Giorgione’s Tempesta, the Idolino, some of the Sistine fresc,oes and the Apoxyomenos were added to il.
she extended uncritical approval to every well-known name.
“The world,” she ihought, “is
certainly full of beautiful things, if only 1 could corne across them.” Il was not surprising that Mrs Iloneyc,hurch disapproved of music, declaring thai il always léft her daughter peevish, unpractical and touchy.
“Nothing ever happens to me,” she reflecied, as she entered the Piazza Signoria and looked nonchalantly ai ils marvels, now fairly familiar to her. The great square was in shadow; the sunshine had come too late to strike il. Neptune was already unsubstantial in the twilight, half god, half ghost, and his fountain plashed dreamily to the men and satyrs who idled together on ils marge. The Loggia showed as the triple entrance of a cave, wherein dwelt many a deity, shadowy but immortal
Il was the hour of unreality - the hour, that is, when unfamiliar things are real.
She fixed her eyes wistfully on the tower of the palace, which rose out of the lower darkness like a pillar of roughened gold.
lis brightness mesmerized her, still dancing before her eyes when she bent them to the ground and started towards home.
Then something did happen.
Two Italians by the Loggia had been bickering about a debt. “Cinque lire,” they had cried, “cinque lire!”
M.r._George Emerson happened to be a few paces away, looking ai her
across the spot where the man had been. How very odd! Across something. Even as she caught sight of him he grew dim; the palace itself grew dim, swayed above her, fell onto her softly, slowly, noiselessly, and the sky fell wïtki il.
She had complained of dullness, and lo! one man was stabbed, and another held her in his arms.
They were sitting on some steps in the Uffizi Arcade. He must have carried her. He rose when she spoke, and began to dust his knees. She repeated:
whole world seemed pale and void of ils original meaning.
Oh, my photographs!” she exclaimed suddenly. “What photographs?”
“1 bought some photographs at Alinari’s. I must have dropped them out there in the square.” She looked at him cautiously. “Would you add to your kindness by fetching them?”
stole down the arcade towards the Arno
The palace tower had lost the reflection of the declining day,
He returned, and she talked of the murder. Oddly enough, it was an easy topic. She spoke of the Italian character; she became almost garrulous over the incident that had made her faint five minutes before
There a cabman signalled to them
He had thrown something into the stream.
“What did you throw in?”
Things I didn’t want,” he said crossly.
“Mr Emerson!”
“Well?”
“Where are the photographs?”
He was silent.
‘7 believe it was my photographs that you threw away.”
“I didn’t know what to do with them,” he cried, and his voice was that of an anxious boy. Her heari warmed towards him for the first time. “They were.covered with blood. There! l’m glad I told you; and all the time we were making conversation I was wondering what to do with them.” He pointed downstream. ‘They’ve gone.” The river swirled under the bridge. ‘7 did mind them so, and one is so foolish, it seemed better that they should go out to the sea
They were close to their pension. She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. lie did likewise. There is at times a ma
- this is the real point
He had thrown her photographs into il, and then he had told her the reason. Il struck her that il was hopeless to look for chivalry in such a man
he might even have a high opinion of her. But he lacked chivalry; his thoughts, like his behaviour, would not be modified by awe
She had been in his arms, and he remembered il, just as he remembered the blood on the photographs that she had bought in Alinari’s shop.
Anxiety moved her to question him.
PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON THE COMMUNICATION Pattern
ANALYSIS OF THE LETTER
The opening sentence is made very unfriendly by the “official” phrase “I write this letter to inform you that This matter-of-factness will be turned into sarcasm a few lines later when “inform” is repeated with “they” (the jailers) as subject this time: “You didn’t think they would inform me of it, did you?” The tag of this sentence renders it very derogatory to Robert Jackson because it underlines “you didn’t think,” hence his limited mental abilities.
The interplay of pronouns is also noteworthy: I..1 inform you; the people … read that letter you sent them; they read it …; you are under a grave illusion, I must admit; you didn’t think they would inform me of it, did you; but you are …; they let me read it; … has read it, all to my embarrassment; for it sounded ….”You” and “they” are central, especially as “it” each time implies “you” and “them.” Jackson thus expresses his exclusion, his frustration, and finally his rejection of “it.” (“
So we have a kind of triangular exchange
The unnatural character of such “class operations” is demonstrated by its effects which are rhetorically dramatized in the text by the repetition of the verb “cause” and the play on that repetition (owing to a change of syntactic structure):
1. (implied by 2) “all to my [it caused me] embarrassment”
2. ‘lit didn’t just cause me embarrassment”
3. ‘lit has also caused me to be put in a cell”.
The first two paragraphs are thus very expressive owing to rhetorical devices: first, as already
mentioned, the use of an unusual register, a kind of officialese contrasting with the intimate nature of other letters; then, repetitions (“read,” “inform,” “embarrassment,” “cause,” “bent on selfdestruction,” “cause me harm,” plus of course the repetitions of “you,” “they,” and “it”).
a systematic use of rhetorical questions to underline the outrageousness of the “it”
A question is said to be rhetorical when, despite its interrogative syntax, il has no interrogative function.
RATIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL AWARENFSS
grave illusion serious error did not know
think + ! = didn’t think feeble of mind
(your) not preparing me (your) not warning me (your) pretending
(your) misleading me
foolish conformity
may not have known any better
Axiologically speaking, it is clear that “I” is ceaselessly associated with positive items whereas “you” is linked to negative ones.
.” There will be no softening of the expression this time; outrage calls for outrage. The cliché “to be sick in the mind” forms the basis of this final volley of abuse. Note the use of very short sentences, the
elliptic syntax,
the rapid shift of subjects and the absence of connectives, all tending to express a sort of frenzy, a paroxysm in Jackson’s rejection of his father.
I didn’t create this impasse …. Did I colonize, kidnap, make war on
myself, destroy my own institutions, enslave myself, use myself, and
neglect myself, steal my identity …. It was a fool who created this
monster, one accustomed to power and its use, a foolish man grown
heady with power and made drunk, dizzy drunk from the hot air that
inflates his ego. I am his victim, born innocent, a total product of my
surroundings. Everything that I am, I developed into because of
circumstantial and situational pressures… necessity and environment
formed me and everyone like me ….
The whole passage is capital because it is a good instance of Jackson’s rhetorical vehemence and it gives at the same time the reason for this extremeness. On top of that, it highlights the importance of the socioeconomic environment in the making of Man, a Marxist idea repeated over and over again in Jackson’s letters.
SOLEDAD BROTHER
George JACKSON
July 1965
Lester,
I write this letter to inform you that the people who hold me here read that letter you sent them. They read it and smiled with satisfaction and triumph. You are under a grave illusion, I must now admit. You didn’t think they would inform me of it, did you? But you are in serious error. They let me read it. Apparently every petty official in the prison has read it, all to my embarrassment. For it sounded like something out of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
It didn’t just cause me embarrassment. It also has caused me to be put in a cell that has the lock welded closed. Can it possibly be? Is it within the scope of feasibility that you did not know that to tell these people I was “bent on self-destruction” (to use your reference) would cause me harm? Are you so feeble of mind as to “report,” after a visit with me, that l am bent on violent self-destruction and think it would cause me no harm!
I have always respected and loved you people, and hated myself, cried bitter tears of remorse, when, because of circumstances and conditions, which I didn’t understand, I let you down. Even after I discovered the true cause of my ills, when I found out that this social order had created, through its inadequacies and its abandonment of our interest, the basis for
my frustrations, I forgave you for not preparing me; for not warning me, for pretending that this was the best of all possible worlds. I forgave you for misleading me. I forgave that catholic school thing. I tried to understand your defeat complex and your loyalty to institutions contrary to the blaeks’ interest.
I’ve traveled widely over this country and some in Mexico. l’ve met and have had exchanges with hundreds of thousands of people. I’ve read extensively in the fields of socio-economic and political theory and development, all of this done against serious resistance from all sides. But because I knew one day that I would ftnd what I’m after, and answer some of the questions that beset my mind with confusion and unrest and fear, I pushed ahead in spite of the foolish conformity that I saw in you people. Now I have arrived at a state of awareness that (because of the education system) few Negroes reach in the U.S. In my concern for you, I try to share the benefits of my experience and my observations, but am rewarded by being called a madman. Thank you for the vote of confidence you displayed in that letter to the warden. I’ll never forget il! All my younger life you betrayed me. Like I said, I could forgive. At first you may not have known any better, but over the last two years I’ve informed you of many things. I’ve given you my best and you have rejected me for my enemies. With this last aci, you have betrayed my
bosom interest, even though I warned you not to say anything ai all. I will never forgive you this. Should we live forever /’ll never trust you again. Your mind has failed you completely. To take sides against your son! You did il in ‘58 and now again. There will not be a third âme. The cost to me is too great. Father against son, and brother against brother. This is truly detestable. You are a sick man.
George
George Jackson, Soledad Brother
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 79-80.
Doris Lessing The Grass is singing
THE NEWS ITEM S PECIFICATION
“By Special Correspondent” functions here as a signature,
capitalized heading and subheading in normal type, paragraph itself in italics) makes up , if not a Facsimile, at least a close approximation of newspaper printing.
What is the impact of this beginning?
One possible effect is that the reader may think the quotation is a real
unc thcreby grounding the novel in non-fictional reality
semantic contents of both words quite topical and typical of the press, combining scnsational and intriguing qualities.
the first
sentence in the past includes “ycstcrday,” a shifter referring to the prescrit
of enunciation
THE OBJECTIVE FALLACY
The general effect of direct utterance in the passive is the so-called “cffect of objectivity,” by which the speaker or writer never appears to commit himself
subjectivity-cancelling effect which, fallacious though it may be, tends to reinforce credibility because apparently no personal comment, no interference of enunciator and utterance is involved. (It should be recalled in passing that enunciation is speech considered not only as a medium but as an individual act, a personal praxis.)
THE TREATMENT OF DRAMATIC EVENTS
Mary is further neutralized as an individual by the plural “their homestead”
the front veranda of their homestead
The general effect of the paragraph as such seems to be one of reduction to normalcy of a number of disturbing factors
THE NARRATIVE
The text that follows the news item is at the same lime continuous and discontinuous with it. The discontinuity (marked typographically) concerns enunciation: with the change of enunciator and the use of the narrative past, we lose the sense of immediacy and co-presence of speech and reality.
The emphasis is no longer on the news but on its medium. The
semantic contents of the article are superseded by its material form (the
clipping) which is itself re-semantized into another sign: an omen or a
warning.
Here understatement appears as a new disguise, a new way of neutralizing the disagreeable topic: “a bad business,” “a very bad business.”
TREATMENT OF TIME
Chronological sequence which ordinarily provides the guiding thread in a narrative is here disregarded, replaced by a topsy-turvy presentation insisting especially on 13 and its contrastive value.
THE IMPORTANCE OF “PEOPLE”
On the level of narrative focus, there is a particularizing movement from “people all over the country” to “the people in the district” and “the three people in a position to explain” or “the people round about.”
The rcader is left facing anonymity
Even when the speech of one individual is reported one finds “someone said” or “came the reply” (of whom?) and nothing else.
- A less conspicuous but more significant function of “people” lies in the peculiar handling of semantic categories: “people” are white people only; coloured people are excluded. This is implied by the last sentence of thc first paragraph, a direct intervention of the narrator in the present of gencral truth (gnomic present). This sentence identifies “people all over flic country” who “felt (… ) anger mingled (. ..) with satisfaction” as
l white people” having “that (… ) feeling” and opposes them to “natives
the “printed paper” isotopy is repeatedly associated with “people,” with the implication that they are literate people, hence white people. This is another way to exclude the natives from the category: “people.”
MODALIZATION AND THE NARRATOR
Needless to say, the ideology thus revealed docs not necessarily coincide with that of the author/narrator. In fact, another characteristic element of the text is to be found in the numerous occurrences of modals or modalizing words and phrases
AS IF (. . .) which COULD only (….) . . . COULD only….
2. Many MUST have snipped (. ..), put (. ..) keeping it
PERHAPS as an omen….
It was AS IF they had. (… )
There was, !T SEEMED, a tar.it agreement(
The effect of the modalizers is, first, to make the presence of the narrator felt in the text and to indicate critical distance
Placing in first position the newspaper version of the central event of thc novel is of course a narrative trick and not an especially original one. In fact, giyen the contents of the headline, the reader is tempted te, see in il another signature, that of the detective story, which might very well
/~ make use of that technique to posit its enigma from the start
all WHYs, WHEREs, WHENs, and HOWs being only conducive to the identification of the criminal. As
Neither the truth of the alleged murderer s confession nor his identity will be further investigated. In fact, the dctective story signature is partly a misleading one. But only partly, for the unconvincing and clearly faked presentation of fact gives the reader the feeling that there is something to uncover in this case. There must be untold molives for curtailing_ and normalizing information that way, and thc reader expects the following narrative to give him more particulars and to explain the half-truths of this report in “officialese.”
In this passage, this expectation is entireIy defeated.,The narrative fails -~ to achieve proper narrative status as no story-telling takes place. Action is practically absent; the whole text is concerned with comment, Il (printed matter) being the written counterpart of 12 (discussion).
In fact, the passage deals essentially with mystery, hence the ail pervasive insistence on abnormality (13): abnormal silence (12), abnormally normal paragraph (It), abnormal use of “people”, abnormal social status of the Turners,
abnormal reticence of the narrator (overmodalization), abnormal absence of action.
the text also contrasts overstatement with understatement, reticence, and evasion. In the final analysis, the passage is governed and informed by the concept of the taboo (12). This is no mere attempt at mystification for the sake or the thrill of it. The prohibition on speaking is intrinsic te, the mystery which will in fact be probed and enlarged throughout the book: that of the relationship between blacks and whites.
a completer
But the people in the “district” who knew the Turners, either by sight or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quirkly. Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put il among old letters or between the pages of a book, keeping il perhaps as an omen or a «-arning, glancing ai the yellowing piece of paper with closed, secretive ffirr.c. For they did not discuss the murder; that was the most extraordinary rhing about il. Il was as if they had a sixth sense which told them ii,t,rything there was to be known, although the three people in a position ro crplain the facts said nothing. The murder was simply not discussed. “A had business,” someone would remark; and the faces of the people
round about would put on that reserved and guarded look. “A very bad business,” came the reply - and that was the end of il. There was, il seemed, a tacit agreement that the Turner case should not be given undue publicity by gossip. Yet il was a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind, to talk and discuss and pull to pieces, all speaking al once, making the most of an hour or so s companionship before returning to their farms, where they saw only their own faces and the faces of their
black servants for weeks on end. Normally that murder would have been discussed for months; people would have been positively grateful for something to talk about.
To an outsider il would seem perhaps as if the energetic Charlie Slatter had travelled from farm to farm over the district telling people to keep quiet; but that was something that never would have occurred to him. The steps he look (and he made not one mistake) were taken apparently instinctively and without conscious planning. The most interesting thing about the whole affair was this silent, unconscious agreement. Everyone behaved like a flock of birds who communicate - or so il seems - by means of a kind of telepathy.
Long before the murder marked them out, people spoke of the Turners in the hard, careless voices reserved for misfits, outlaws, and the selfexiled. The Turners were disliked, though few of their neighbours had ever met them, or even seen them in the distance. Yet what was there to dislike? They simply “kept themselves to themselves”; that was all. They were never seen al district dances, or fêtes, or gymkhanas. They must have had something to be ashamed of; that was the feeling. Il was not right to seclude themselves like Mal; il was a slap in the faee for everyone else; what had they got to be so stuck-up about? What, indeed! Living the way they did! That little box of a house - il was forgivable as a temporary dwelling, but not to live in permanently. Why, some natives (though not many, thank heavens) had houses as good; and il would give them a bad impression to see white people living in such a way.
And then il was that someone used the phrase “poor whites.” Il caused disquiet. There was no great money-cleavage in those days (that was before the era of the tobacco barons), but there was certainly a race division. The small community of Afrikaners had their own lives, and the
13ritishers ignored them. “Poor whites” were Afrikaners, never British. But the person who said the Turners were poor whites stuck to il defiantly. What was the différence? What was a poor white? Il was the way one lived, a question of standards. All the Turners needed were a drove of cfiildren to make them poor whites.
“l’hough the arguments were unanswerable, people would still not think of them as poor whites. To do that would be letting the side down. l’he Turners were British, after all.
Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 9-11.
Emily Dickinson
as if The sea should part
x
Tom Stoppard The Real thing
x
John Irving
The world according to Garp
RETENTION OF INFORMATION; DELIVERY OF DISTRACTING
COMEDY
comedy, a most powerful ingredient in a chapter in which one would hardly expect any. Indeed, the tone used by Irving throughout this chapter creates an anticlimax after the formidable dramatic intensity of the previous one.
the tragic machinery has been set in motion at the end of Chapter 13 and that the expectation of a catastrophic denouement has been strongly set up in the reader. This expectancy is partly frustrated in the next chapter, first - as demonstrated above - because of the ellipsis concerning Walt, second because of the introduction of the lighter mood of comedy.
From the beginning of the passage the stress is laid on the practical and everyday-life aspect of the situation
The matter-offact prevails over the symbolic significance.)
a discrepancy is set off between the reader’s
- or the policés- assumption and the reality of things.
This discrepancy is also at the core of the main comic device used in this passage:
‘THEMES AND MOTIFS: GENERAL COHERENCE
The subject of the passage is mostly convalescence
Danger always lurks on the fringe of the protected sphere within which the characters nurse their hurts
Garp’s distrust of teenagers and young people is voiced here again with the usual vindictiveness.
Garp’s fear and anger are shown as excessive and neurotic, and his responsibility in the accident does not seem to have sobered him down
Helen’s more rational behaviour acts as a foil to lier husband’s neurosis
At this stage we are already aware of the fact that The World According to Garp is very much nurtured by the motifs of fear, violence, sex, and accidents
x
The gondola ride will not serve as the pretext for evoking a Venetian reality through concrete detail
ruminations.
Similarly, the conversation which takes place in the gondola betwecn the narrator and Mrs Prest is only sketchily and incompletely related.
associated ideas
HENRY JAMES THE NARRATOR AS WITNESS
A homodiegetic narrator
superlatives to the list: Aspern was “one of the most brilliant minds of his day
This is hyperbolic praise, but the narrator does not stop here. He resorts to the present of universal truth (gnomic truth) - thus raising Aspern’s stature in the most incontestable manner, by aphorism - to express just how high the divine poct stands in his estimation: “One doesn’t defend oné s god: one’s god is in himself a defence.”
The association of Aspern with light is strengthened by contrast. The narrator bas come to the brightness of Venice in quest of the spirit of this brilliant American Orpheus, a mythological poet himself associated with Apollo, the god of light.
Aspern’s connection to the sacred is further emphasized through an accumulation of terms having this notion denotatively or connotatively in
common (an isotopy): fellow-worshipper, flocked, minister, temple.
At the beginning of the text, the narrator evokes his concern with Aspern in a rapid succession of terms as if one descriptive term could not possibly transmit the excess of his feeling: “my curiosity,” “my infatuation,” my interest,” “a fixed idea
Each of these cases Cumnor and I had been able to investigate.. . .
, -,..we had never failed to acquit him conscientiously…. - I judged him.. . .
These juridical terms and the repeated verbs denoting capacity might partially obscure the fact that one is dealing with a self-confessed “worshipper.”
The world at large (“the world,” “the multitude,” “as everyone knows”) bas acquiesced in this judgment.
Shabby behaviour, grave complications, and awkward circumstances have soon clustered round the hero’s memory only to be dispersed again when the responsibility for these shadowy misdemeanours is firmly laid at the feet of “the Maenads” (frantic female worshippers of
i Dionysos).
The narrator dismisses a conjecture of M rs Prest’s about them with a detached, “This was possible.” Miss Bordereau ‘s value is not intrinsic, but to be measured only insofar as she touched (or was touched by!) the great poet.
hyperbole is used to characterizc Miss Bordereau. But rather than to praise, it is used to denigrate.
THE ROLE OF MRS PREST
Mrs Prcst, too, acts as an instrument of equilibrium.
Mrs Prest brings with her the world of Venice - its sophistication, its ease, its sense of relationship and nuance
the implication being that il was beyond their intellectual or emotional range. Mrs Prest responds that “he had been at least Miss
Bordereau’s,” cannily shifting the focus of “poet” from the poetry to the
man.
Mrs Prest’s intelligent amusement at what to the narrator is evidently sacrosanct forces a question on the readers: if Mrs Prest does flot take everything the narrator says at face value, need we?
THE NARRATEE AND THE IMPLIED READER
To whom, in fact, is the narrator speaking? What sort of reception does he expect his tale to reccive? The text provides a certain number of clues as to the type of person whom the narrator is taking into his confidence. First, he speaks of “our literature” and the “light by which we walk.” Clearly, he is addressing himself to someone literate, someone undoubtedly familiar with Jeffrey Aspern’s oeuvre.
cultured interlocutor
Greek mythology
wondering whether unwholesome curiosity is a just motivation for literary research.
And it is he who, on looking back, will recognize the irony implicit in the final sentence of the text, when the (falsely mcxicst) narrator - who is about to become immensely entangled in a pathetic and one-sided middle-aged romance - compares himself to his Byroncsquc idol, preparatory to becoming an absurd travesty of him.
HENRY JAMES THE ASPERN PAPERS
Writing, lie always knew, was a lonely business. It was hard for a lonely thing to feel that much lonelier,” sounds like a plea for sympathy coming from any writer and is one of those metaliterary sentences, quite frequent in the book, which blur the distinction between author and character and transgress the enunciative hierarchy
Mrs Prest knew nothing about the papers, but she was interested in my curiosity, as she was always interested in the joys and sorrows of her friends. As we went, however, in her gondola, gliding there under the sociable hood with the bright Venetian picture framed on either side by the movable window, 1 could see that she was amused by my infatuation, the way my interest in the papers had become a fixed idea. “One would think you expected to find in them the answer to the riddle of the universe,” she said; and I denied the impeachment only by replying that if 1 had to choose between that precious solution and a bundle of Jeffrey Aspern’s letters I knew indeed which would appear to me the greater boon. She pretended to make light of his genius and l took no pains to defend him. One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defence. Besides, today, after his long comparative obscuration, he hangs high in the heaven of our literature, for all the world ta see; he is a part of the light by which we walk. The most 1 said was that he was no doubt not a woman’s poet: to which she rejoined apily enough that he had been at least Miss Bordereau’s. The strange thing had been for me to discover in England that she was still alive; it was as if I had been told Mrs Siddons was, or Queen Caroline, or the famous Lady Hamilton, for it seemed to me that she belonged to a generation as extinct. “Why, she must be tremendously old - at least a hundred,” I had said; but on coming to r:onsider dates i saw that it was not strictly necessary that she should have exceeded by very much the common span. None the less she was very far
I
advanced in life and her relations with Jeffrey Aspern had occurred in her early womanhood. “That is her excuse,” said Mrs Prest, half sententiously and yet also somewhat as if she were ashamed of making a speech so little in the real tone of Venice. As if a woman needed an excuse for having loved the divine poet! He had been not only one of the most brilliant minds of his day (and in those years, when the century was young, there were, as every one knows, many), but one of the most genial men and one of the handsomest.
The niece, according to Mrs Prest, was not so old, and she risked the conjecture that she was only a grand-niece. This was possible; I had nothing but my share in the very limited knowledge of my English fellow-worshipper John Cumnor, who had never seen the couple. The world, as I say, had recognized Jeffrey Aspern, but Cumnor and I had recognized him most. The multitude, today, flocked to his temple, but of that temple he and I regarded ourselves as the ministers. We held, justly, as I think, that we had done more for his memory than anyone else, and we had done it by opening lights into his life. He had nothing to fear from us because he had nothing to fear from the truth, which alone at such a distance of time we could be interested in establishing. His early death had been the only dark spot in his life, unless the papers in Miss Bordereau’s hands should perversely bring out others. There had been an impression about 1825 that he had “ireated her badly,” just as there had been an impression that he had “served,” as the London populace says, several other ladies in the same way. Each of these cases Cumnor and I had been able to investigate, and we had never failed to acquit him conscientiously of shabby behaviour. / judged him perhaps more indulgently than my friend; certainly, at any rate, it appeared to me that no man could have walked straighter in the given circumstances. These were almost always awkward. Half the women of his time, to speak liberally, had flung themselves at his head, and out of this pernicious fashion many complications, some of them grave, had not failed to arise. He was not a woman’s poet, as I had said to Mrs Prest, in the modern phase of his reputation; but the situation had been différent when the man’s own voice was mingled with his song. That voice, by every testimony, was one of the sweetest ever heard. “Orpheus and the Maenads!” was the exclamation that rose to my lips when I first turned over the correspondence. Almost all the Maenads were unreasonable and
many of them insupportable; it struck me in short that he was kinder, more considerate than, in his place (if I could imagine myself in such a place!) I should have been.
Henry James, “‘the Aspern Papers” in The Aspern Papers and Other
WILLIAM FAULKNER
THF. BEAR
better in his turn. He was one of the men, not white nor black nor red but men,
hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility
to survive, and the dogs and the bear and deer juxtaposed and relu /,I against il, ordered and
compelled by and within the wildernesss in the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immutablerules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter- the hest grurrr o/ all, the best of all breathing and for ever the best of all li.crcnrnf;, rhe voices quiet and weighry and deliberate for retrospection and rernllrr rrorr and exactitude among the concrete nophies- the racked gun.c and rhr heads and skins - in the libraries of town houses or the offices of plantation houses or (and best of all) in the camps themselves where the intact and still-warm meat yet hung, the men who had slain it sitting before the burning logs on hearths when there were houses and hearths or about the smoky blazing of piled wood in front of stretched tarpaulins when there were not. There was always a boule present, so that it would seem to him that those fine fierce instants of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not woman, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the pagan’s base and baseless hope of acquiring thereby the virtues of cunning and strength and speed but in salute to them. Thus it seemed to him on this December morning not only natural but actually fttting that this should.have begun with whisky.
William Faulkner, “The Bear” in Go Down Moses (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1980), pp. 145-146.
its opacity taxes to the utmost our competence as readers.
The clash between “was” and “this time” reveals the coexistence of two moments of enunciation, what might be called a free indirect style effect, the past tensc coming from an author-narrator and the present from a character. The agrammatical “was” instead of “were” strengthens the orality and informality of the style,
The mind jumps at this opposition: man versus beast, but it finds the notion immediately challenged by the reservation introduced by “counting,” that suggests “if or provided you count Ben as a beast and Boon as a man,” as if Ben and Boon stood outside the classification, being neither man nor beast
The straight opposition man/beast is thus dismissed as too simple to account for complex cases, a rejection and critique of elementary binarism
What dominates the digressions is an assessment of values (an axiology), a hierarchy centering on the opposition between plebeian and aristocratie, tainted and pure, corruptible and incorruptible
Fortunately the reading is sustained by constant symmetries and repetitions.
shakes our hard-won certainties. These ambiguities may or may not be insoluble but their existence ensures that we have to launch momentary hypotheses and rest on the impression that entities that are usually separate or opposed, such as men and beasts, Indians and whites, masters and slaves, wilderness and men, hunting and talking, become interchangeable in this strange text, upsetting our mental categories, our cultural expectations and stereotypes.
At this.point the controlling focaüzation of “he” bas been erased by a widening of time and space references hardly compatible with the experience of a sixteen-year-old boy
when the scope widens and the vocabulary becomes abstract, the tone lyrical, and when the theme is one of fusion between wilderness, men, and beasts, we hear as directly as possible the implied author
A rich ambiguity comes from the expression “the best game of all” which, given the hunting isotopy, activates its possible meaning of gibier, then followed by “the best of all
I breathing and forever the best of all listening” is sent back by the similarity of construction to “the best of all talking.” We may well keep in mind the two meanings in order to juxtapose the ceremony of hunting in its subsequent celebration (“forever”) by the “priests.” “Forever” foreshadows the quotation from “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that occurs later
in the story, about the acquiring of truth and eternity through art: “For
, ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.” It therefore constitutes a m tliterary allusion to Faulkner’s exaltcd role that establishes a
ea
continuity between the wilderness, hunting, talking, and writing.
In the next sentence the same continuity rests on the central symbol of the “drinking of the brown liquor” that brings together many elements. It js a welter of metonymies and metaphors: the liquor is linked metonymically with the hunters’ best qualities (see the numerous value words of this sentence) through a metaphor with the blood and, thanks to the double meaning of spirit (liquor and soul), with the sublimation process which opens onto art and religion. The sacred is evoked by the images of holy communion, brought about by the denegation of pagan magie. A representative feature of Faulkner’s exalted style is to be found in the profusion of “not … but,” modifications and restrictions that express the groping for “retrospection, recollection and exactitude.”
The prosaic naming of the whisky comes belatedly with the return of the “character zone” of Young Ike. The concept of “character zone”, borrowed from Bakhtine, includes effects due to focalization (“it seemed to him”), lexical level (whisky/spirit), and even enunciation (“this”). T
THE NARRATIVE STRATEGY
It is clear that Faulkner largely disregards narratological categories. His protagonist, Ike, whether young or old, is not granted full narrative power, which would turn the text into a homodiegetic narration by a character-narrator divided into a narrating I (old Ike) and a narrated I(young Ike). This strategy would allow the ruminations and recollections to come straight from the horse’s mouth but would cut off the text from direct expression by the absentee author-narrator. By keeping for himself the power of narration, which produces a third-person narration - however improper this Anglo-Saxon formulation is since the narrative activity is necessarily personal and is simply deleted as in “(I say that) he was
sixteen” - the author-narrator makes it possible to occasionally steal the focalization from Ike, move into zero focalization, and launch into the characteristic celebrations of the wilderness that point toward myth.
If the celebrations were uttered by an autonomous character-narrator, their status would remain uncertain, perhaps the expression of a more or less fallible character, distinct from the implied author s system of values. So by adopting this hybrid and confusing strategy, Faulkner combines the advantages of two systems: the commitment of a declared world vision and the autonomy of a major focalizer.
One of the aesthetic problems of a later section of the story (Section IV) is precisely that McCaslin and Ike, in their direct speech pseudodialogue speak the same involved, rambling, visionary language, so visibly out of character that they are felt to be puppets, mouthpieces voicing theories of the author-narrator
The narrative strategy of the other sections is much smoother, both more sophisticated and more ambiguous: the changes in focalization and accordingly in style, instead of jumping jerkily from Ike to the narrator seem to evolve continuously, evokin
the image of a zoom technique rather than an abrupt change of lenses. This harmony is possible only because there is a deep affinity between Ike (old
I and young) and the author-narrator. Since the narrative voice visibly shares the values and world vision of its protagonist, it seems to express in more literary language the thoughts and impressions of the character, whose direct speech may remain simple and prosaic. When in Section IV this strategy is modified, the narrative voice encroaches upon the two characters who deliver a lecture in disguise.
To conclude, it must be em phasized that the brilliance of Faulkner’s text spurns all categorizations. Nevertheless, having a clear view of simple, abstract strategies allows us to appreciate Faulkner’s superb complexification on this level.
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