E070 the Novel

The NovelBA English

2002 0033E070

J. Cohen, J. Desmarais, B. Moore-Gilbert

J. T. Parnell

This guide was prepared for the University of London by:

J. Cohen, Phd, Lecturer in English, Goldsmiths College, University of London

J. Desmarais, MA, PhD, Lecturer in English and Art History, Departments of

English, and Historical and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of

London

B. Moore-Gilbert, MA, DPhil, Reader in English, Goldsmiths College, University

of London

J.T. Parnell, PhD, Lecturer in English, Goldsmiths College, University of London.

This is one of a series of subject guides published by the University. We regret that

due to pressure of work the authors are unable to enter into any correspondence

relating to, or arising from, the guide. If you have any comments on this subject

guide, favourable or unfavourable, please use the form at the back of this guide.

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nBBA and Diploma in English

033E070 The Novel

December 2008: First correction

Students should note the following examiners’ changes for the2009 examinations onwards:

033E070 The novel

There is one change to the demands of Section B:

‘Answers in this section should refer to AT LEAST TWO differentauthors. You may NOT write about an author or text that you havediscussed in Section A.’

Thus, students preparing for the examination in this unit shouldprepare at least six texts by three different authors.

i

Contents

ContentsIntroduction ..............................................................................................................1

Subject objectives ......................................................................................................1Content ......................................................................................................................1Suggested primary reading ........................................................................................2Suggested topics ........................................................................................................3Advice on reading ......................................................................................................3Secondary reading ......................................................................................................4Suggested study syllabus ..........................................................................................6Study questions and recommended secondary reading for suggested study topics ................................................................................................................7The origins and rise of the novel (weeks 1–2) ..........................................................7Genre and sub-genre ..................................................................................................8Narrative technique and theory: character ................................................................9Narrative voice and perspective ................................................................................9Narrative structure and chronology ........................................................................10Narrative theory ......................................................................................................10Realism and mimesis ..............................................................................................11Self-conscious fiction ..............................................................................................11Modernist and postmodernist fiction ......................................................................11Gender ......................................................................................................................12The role of the reader ..............................................................................................13Using this subject guide ..........................................................................................13Methods of assessment ............................................................................................14Preparing for the examination ................................................................................14

Chapter 1: Section A author study: Jane Austen ....................................................17Essential reading ......................................................................................................17Recommended secondary reading on Austen ........................................................17Introduction ..............................................................................................................18The debate on Austen ..............................................................................................18Austen and the novel ..............................................................................................19Mansfield Park: the rhetoric of realism ..................................................................21Persuasion: subjectivity and narrative voice ..........................................................23Suggestions for further study ..................................................................................25Learning outcomes ..................................................................................................25Sample essay questions ..........................................................................................25

Chapter 2 Section A author study: Honoré de Balzac (Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot) ..............................................................................27

Essential reading ......................................................................................................27Recommended secondary reading ..........................................................................27Further reading ........................................................................................................28Introduction ..............................................................................................................29Background ..............................................................................................................29The Human Comedy cycle ......................................................................................31Realism ....................................................................................................................32Characterisation ......................................................................................................33Contrast ....................................................................................................................34

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The Novel

Sensation, genre, mystery and melodrama ............................................................35Themes ....................................................................................................................35Narrative voice ........................................................................................................36Language ..................................................................................................................37Learning outcomes ..................................................................................................38Sample essay questions ..........................................................................................38

Chapter 3: Section B topic study: modern Gothic ..................................................39Essential reading ......................................................................................................39Recommended secondary reading ..........................................................................39Introduction ..............................................................................................................40The history of Gothic ..............................................................................................40Gothic elements in Fowles and Murdoch ..............................................................41The cultural politics of modern Gothic ..................................................................43Gender issues ..........................................................................................................44Class issues ..............................................................................................................46Suggestions for further study ..................................................................................46Learning outcomes ..................................................................................................47Sample essay questions ..........................................................................................47

Chapter 4: Section B topic study: post-modernism ................................................49Essential reading ......................................................................................................49Recommended secondary reading ..........................................................................49Introduction ..............................................................................................................51Post-modernism: problems of definition ................................................................51Describing post-modernism: Harvey and Jameson ................................................52White Noise: the simulated culture of post-modernity ..........................................53Prescribing post-modernism: Lyotard ....................................................................55City of Glass: post-modernism and metafiction ....................................................56Suggestions for further study ..................................................................................57Learning outcomes ..................................................................................................57Sample essay questions ..........................................................................................57

Appendix ..................................................................................................................59Sample examination paper ......................................................................................59

1

Introduction

IntroductionThis subject, The novel, is a Group B advanced unit. It will focus primarily on worksoriginally written in English but will also consider novels in translation. This subjectguide focuses on novels from the eighteenth century to the present, but you areallowed to study and write on earlier material where relevant.

Subject objectivesThis subject is designed to help you to gain an understanding of a form central toEnglish literature and literary studies more generally. The term ‘novel’ has beenloosely applied by writers and critics to a broad range of texts but, for the purposes ofthis subject, the term will be restricted to fictional works, written in prose, ofsufficient length to be deemed ‘novels’. Some of this subject’s main objectives will beto help you to:

• gain an understanding of the development of the novel as a form of literaryproduction from its beginnings to the present day and in relation to its social andliterary contexts

• explore how individual novelists employ specific literary techniques in order toserve their particular narrative strategies

• compare how different authors have used the novel to address recurrent thematicconcerns and expanded the possibilities of the form in different ways

• study contemporary critical debates about the novel through an engagement withsecondary sources

• engage with the issues involved in canon formation.

It will be useful to keep these points in mind when you set about planning your owncourse of study and when assessing your progress. (Self-assessment procedures arediscussed in the Handbook.)

ContentYou can organise your course of study around particular authors and/or particulartopics of your choice but you should try to read a representative selection of novelsincluding eighteenth- and nineteenth-century realist novels, early twentieth-centurymodernist novels and some post-modern fiction. You are also recommended to studyauthors from across the British, American, European and non-Western traditions. Thefollowing list is by no means exhaustive; it is a selection of important and influentialnovels you may care to study. You may want to think about what this list, a ‘canon’ ofsorts, includes and what it leaves out. You should try to read at least some of thenovels from this list, but you should not feel limited by this selection. Bear in mindthat you will want to explore the novel both synchronically (i.e. as it exists at a givenmoment without reference to its past) and diachronically (i.e. as it passed throughtime). When studying the earlier history of the genre, the selection of texts willinevitably be more limited to European novels.

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The Novel

Suggested primary reading(Dates in parentheses, unless otherwise stated, indicate year of publication.)

• François Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1534).

• Philip Sidney The Arcadia (1581).

• Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1605–1615).

• John Bunyan The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–1684).

• Aphra Behn Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave (1688).

• Eliza Haywood Love in Excess (1719).

• Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719) or Moll Flanders (1722).

• Henry Fielding Joseph Andrews (1742) or Tom Jones (1749).

• Samuel Richardson Pamela (1740) or Clarissa (1747–1748).

• Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–1767).

• Frances Burney Evelina (1778).

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) or Elective

Affinities (1809).

• Pierre Choderlos de Laclos Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782).

• Ann Radcliffe The Romance of the Forest (1791) or The Mysteries of Udolpho

(1794).

• Maria Edgeworth Belinda (1801).

• *Jane Austen Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1818).

• Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847).

• Herman Melville Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (1851).

• Charles Dickens Hard Times (1854).

• Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857) or The Sentimental Education (1869).

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866).

• George Eliot Middlemarch (1871–1872).

• Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1873–1877).

• Emile Zola Germinal (1885).

• *Honoré de Balzac Eugénie Grandet (1833-34) and Pere Goriot (1835).

• Henry James The Spoils of Poynton (1897).

• Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1902) or Nostromo (1904).

• *Marcel Proust Remembrance of Things Past (1913–1927).

• *Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (1915-38).

• Rabindranath Tagore Home in the World (1916).

• Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920).

• James Joyce Ulysses (1922).

• Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway (1925).

• Mikhail Bulgakov The Master and the Margarita (1928–1940, published

1966–1967).

• Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

• Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958).

• Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1958) or Pale Fire (1962).

• Alain Robbe-Grillet In the Labyrinth (1959).

• Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962).

• John Fowles The Collector (1963).

• Iris Murdoch The Unicorn (1963).

• Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).

• Gabriel García Màrquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).

• Rita Mae Brown The Rubyfruit Jungle (1969).

• Italo Calvino If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979).

• Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981).

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Introduction

• J.M. Coetzee The Life and Times of Michael K (1983).

• Angela Carter Nights at the Circus (1984).

• Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).

• Don Delillo, White Noise (1985).

• Paul Auster, City of Glass (1987).

• Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987).

• Robert Coover Pinocchio in Venice (1991).

*The two Austen, and the two Balzac, novels are listed as essential reading in Chapter1 and 2.

*Proust’s and Dorothy Richardson’s novels unfold over several volumes. Althoughyou may want to read them in their entirety, you will gain a worthwhile sense of whatthese writers are doing by reading the first volumes in the sequences (Proust’sSwann’s Way and Richardson’s Pointed Roofs).

Suggested topicsSome topics which you may like to investigate are listed below. All of these arerelevant to the study of the novel – though you need not restrict yourself to them.

• The origins of the novel and its relationship with epic and romance.

• Critical accounts of the rise of the novel, including ideas about the relationshipbetween the early novel and a rapidly expanding print culture, and the relationshipbetween the novel and the rise of the bourgeoisie.

• Genre, including questions about the novel’s defining characteristics (and whethersuch characteristics are historically specific), its generic hybridity and the sub -genres into which it is divided.

• Narrative technique and narrative theory, including issues of narrative voice andperspective, the concept of character and narrative structure.

• The development of realism and the concept of mimesis, including the dominanceof realism in the nineteenth century and its partial rejection in the twentiethcentury.

• The alternative traditions of self-conscious fiction, and the development of thenovel in modernist, postmodernist and postcolonial fiction.

• The role of gender in the novel.

• The role of the reader.

Other topics, which are not listed here, might occur to you as you study.

Advice on readingBecause of the wide range of this subject, there is no one book or grouping of booksthat can adequately cover the whole content. The books recommended below andelsewhere in this study guide address most of the central concerns of the course, butwhen you focus on particular authors and topics you may want to supplement thisreading with more specialised studies. Although you will be studying individualnovelists as well as topics, the primary concern of this subject is not with particularnovelists but with the novel as a genre. Thus the reading recommended below and inthe suggested reading organised by topic in Chapter 4 covers broad issues rather thana core syllabus of novels or novelists. Furthermore, in order to allow you the freedomto make your own selection of novels for close study, it is not practical to providebooklists for each of the authors listed above. This means that for your study of

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The Novel

authors and topics not listed above or discussed in this subject guide you will need tocompile your own reading lists, with the help of the Handbook and bearing thefollowing in mind.

Most libraries have computerised indexing which will cross-reference. So the entry‘Cervantes’, for example, should produce lists of Cervantes’ writing, but alsobiographies, critical readings, etc. The constraints of time make it impossible for youto read very widely on particular authors, so if you want to find out more about, say,Flaubert’s Madame Bovary you should look for a collection of essays or a single bookwhich aims to provide an introductory overview. Although they are not available forall the novels that you might study, the kind of short, authoritative, critical discussionsof individual novels offered by a series like the Cambridge ‘Landmarks of WorldLiterature’ will generally provide sufficient information on given texts. If you want topursue your reading further, the bibliographies in such books are a good startingplace.

You will know from your work on the foundation units that the nature of Englishstudies has changed radically over the last 20 years. Bear this in mind. If all thecriticism that you read on, say, George Eliot was written in the 1950s you may have alimited idea of the range of critical responses to this writer. At the same time, do notassume that criticism from an earlier date is necessarily redundant.

Secondary readingEssential texts

Hawthorn, Jeremy Studying the Novel, an Introduction. (London and New York:

Arnold, 1997) third edition [ISBN 0-340- 69220-0 (pbk)]. A clear, if basic,

introduction to many of the key issues and topics.

Hoffman, Michael J. and Patrick D. Murphy (eds) Essentials of the Theory of Fiction.

(London: Leicester University Press, 1996) second edition [ISBN 0-7185-0119-5

(hbk); 0-7185-0120-9 (pbk)]. A very useful collection of essays by some of the

major commentators on questions of narrative theory.

Booth, Wayne C. (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991)

second edition [ISBN 0-14-013736-X (pbk)]. A highly influential and admirably

clear study of the ‘rhetoric’ of a wide range of American and European novels.

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith (1983) Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. (London

and New York: Routledge, 1989) [ISBN 0-415-04294-1 (pbk)]. An excellent

introduction to the theory of narratology using a wide range of international texts.

Other recommended books

Alter, Robert Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre. (Berkeley, London:

University of California Press, 1975) [ISBN 0-520-02755-8]. A fluent study of

the ‘tradition’ of self-conscious novelists who question and parody dominant

novel-types.

*Auerbach, Erich Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature.

Translated by W. Trask. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953)

[ISBN 0-691-01269-5 (pbk)]. The author traces the gradual raising of low-life

mimesis to the level of high art and offers a close analysis of passages.

*Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin.

Edited by M. Holquist. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982)

[ISBN 0-292-71534-X].

Barthes, Roland (1967) Writing Degree Zero. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin

Smith. (London: Cape, 1984) [ISBN 0-224-02267-9]. A brief but elegant

statement of a post-modernist rejection of realism in France.

5

Introduction

Barthes, Roland (1973) S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)

[ISBN 0631176071].

Bradbury, Malcolm (ed.) The Novel Today. (Glasgow: Fontana, 1990) revised edition

[ISBN 0-00-686183-0].

*Brink, André The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino.

(Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998) [ISBN 0-333- 68408-7 (hbk); 0-333-68409-5 (pbk)]

Brooks, Peter Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard UP, 1984) [ISBN 0674748921 (pbk)].

Couturier, Maurice Textual Communication: A Print-based Theory of the Novel.

(London and New York: Routledge, 1991) [ISBN 0-415-03920-7]. A

sophisticated and informative text which explores the impact of the environment,

the market and the law on fiction from a materialist viewpoint.

Eco, Umberto The Role of the Reader. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1979). (London: Hutchinson, 1981) [ISBN 025320318X (pbk)]. Reader response

theory which argues that some texts are ‘open’ and others are ‘closed’.

Forster, E.M. (1927) Aspects of the Novel. Edited by Oliver Stallybrass

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) [ISBN 0-140-18398-1 (pbk)]. Of historical

interest for its influential and much debated account of ‘rounded’ and ‘flat’

characters.

Genette, Gérard Narrative Discourse, an Essay in Method. Translated by J. E. Lewin.

(Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press,1980) [ISBN 0-801-49259-9 (pbk)].

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic, the Woman Writer

and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 1979) [ISBN 0-300-08458-7 (pbk)].

*Hunter, J. Paul Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

(New York and London: Norton and Co., 1990) [ISBN 0-393-30861-8 (pbk)].

*Iser, Wolfgang The Implied Reader, Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction

from Bunyan to Beckett. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1974) [ISBN 0-8018-2150-9 (pbk)]. Argues that the reader’s experience of

reading is at the centre of the reading process.

James, Henry The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism. Edited by Roger Gard

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) [ISBN 0140432701 (pbk)].

Jameson, Fredric The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.

(Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press and Routledge, 1981 and

1989) [ISBN 0-415-04514-2 (pbk)]. Argues for the centrality and inevitability of

political interpretations of literary texts. Especially good on Conrad.

Kermode, Frank The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative.

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979) [ISBN 0674345355].

Kettle, Arnold (ed.) The Nineteenth Century Novel: Critical Essays and Documents.

(London: Heinemann in association with Open University Press, 1981) revised

edition [ISBN 0-335-10181-X].

Levin, Harry The Gates of Horn, a Study of Five French Realists: Stendhal, Balzac,

Flaubert, Zola and Proust. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963)

[ISBN 0-19-500727-1]. A survey of nineteenth-century realist novelists in France.

Lodge, David The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of

Modern Literature. (London: Edward Arnold, 1977) [ISBN 0-7131-6258-9 (pbk)].

Lodge, David After Bakhtin: Essays on fiction and criticism. (London and New York:

Routledge, 1990) [ISBN 0-415-05037-5 (hbk); 0-415-05038-3 (pbk)].

*Lodge, David The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts.

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) [ISBN 0-140-17492-3 (pbk)]. Originated as a

journalistic enterprise, but contains surprisingly useful thumbnail definitions of

fictional topoi with illustrative examples.

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The Novel

Lukács, Georg (1955) The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah and Stanley

Mitchell. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) [ISBN 0-140-55081-X (pbk)].

Lukács, Georg (1920) The Theory of the Novel, a Historico–Philosophic Essay on the

Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. (London: Merlin,

1978) [ISBN 0-85036-236-9 (pbk)].

McHale, Brian Postmodernist Fiction. (London: Routledge, 1989)

[ISBN 0-415-04513-4].

McKeon, Michael The Origins of the English Novel 1660–1740. (Baltimore, London:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) [ISBN 0-8018-3746-4 (pbk].

Phelps, Gilbert A Short Guide to the World Novel, the Myth to Modernism. (London:

Routledge, 1988) [ISBN 0-415-00765-8]. An extensively researched, non-

Eurocentric study of the development of the novel in world culture.

Scholes, Robert and Robert Kellogg The Nature of Narrative. (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1966) [ISBN 0195007735 (pbk)].

Showalter, Elaine (1977) A Literature of Their Own, British Women Novelists from

Brontë to Lessing. (London: Virago, 1984) [ISBN 0-86068-285-4 (pbk)].

Spencer, Jane The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen.

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) [ISBN 0-631-13915-X (hbk); 0-631-13916-8 (pbk)].

Stern, Joseph Peter On Realism. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973)

[ISBN 0-7100-7379].

Stevenson, Randall Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. (London: Prentice Hall,

1997) revised edition [ISBN 013837659X (pbk)].

Toolan, Michael, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. (London: Routledge,

1988) [ISBN 0415008697 (pbk)].

*Watt, Ian (1957) The Rise of The Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding.

(London: Pimlico, 2000) [ISBN 0712664270 (pbk)]. A highly influential study of

the generic and sociological influences which gave rise to the novel.

Waugh, Patricia Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction

(London: Routledge, 1984) [ISBN 0415030064 (pbk)].

* Highly recommended

Suggested study syllabusHere is a sample 20-week syllabus to give you an idea of how you could structureyour own syllabus for this subject.

Weeks 1–2: Background reading on theories of the novel and debates about its origins (i.e. books like Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination and Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel).

Weeks 3–4: Author study: Cervantes’ Don Quixote and some secondary material.

Week 5: Topic study: the genesis of the novel as a form (suggested text: Defoe’sRobinson Crusoe).

Week 6: Topic study: the epistolary novel (suggested text: Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses or Burney’s Evelina).

Weeks 7–8: Author study: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Persuasion.

Weeks 9–10: Author study: Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot.

Week 11: Topic study: varieties of realism (secondary reading on realism and the novel).

Week 12: Topic study: narrative voice and perspective (suggested text James’ TheSpoils of Poynton and some secondary material).

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Introduction

Weeks 13–14: Topic study: modernism and the novel (suggested text — Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway).

Week 15: Author study: Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and some secondary material.

Weeks 16–17: Topic study: modern Gothic (suggested texts – Fowles’ The Collectorand Murdoch’s The Unicorn).

Week 18: Topic study: magic realism (suggested text – Màrquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude).

Weeks 19–20: Topic study: Post-modernism and the novel (suggested text – Delillo’s White Noise).

You will notice that some of the novels in this subject are very long, so you may needmore than one week just to read them. Adjust your schedule accordingly.

Study questions and recommended secondaryreading for suggested study topics

Because the focus of this subject is on broad questions about the novel as a genre andin order to allow you the freedom to select which novels to study, the essay/studyquestions and recommended reading below relate to topics rather than individual texts.These topics are not the only ones that you might wish to investigate further, but theywill help you to gain a fuller sense of the concerns of this subject. Although thequestions below are framed as essay questions of the kind you are likely to encounterin the examination for this subject, you can use them as a focus for your studies on agiven topic even if you are not intending to write on it. As a guide, we have generallyspecified whether your responses should cover one or more writers, but you are free toignore this advice and adapt questions to suit the novelists and novels you have chosento work on. Bear in mind, however, that broad questions about the genre are often mostsuccessfully addressed with reference to two or three novels by different writers.

If you are working on a topic not covered in this subject guide, you may want todevise your own questions in order to give focus to your studies. One way of doingthis is to choose a brief statement of a particular commentator’s thesis and use this asa means of structuring your response. Remember that a bold or contentious claim ismore likely to provoke you into thought and a productive counter argument than abland one.

Unless given below, the full bibliographical details for books can be found in therecommended secondary reading in the Introduction to this study guide.

The origins and rise of the novel (weeks 1–2)Questions

1. ‘[In epic] it is memory, and not knowledge, that serves as the source and power

for the creative impulse. That is how it was, it is impossible to change it: the

tradition of the past is sacred. [...] The novel, by contrast, is determined by

experience, knowledge and practice (the future)’. (BAKHTIN) In the light of this

quotation, compare the presuppositions of epic with those of the early novel.1

1 The Iliad or The Odyssey areprobably the most easily

accessible examples of epicnarrative.

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The Novel

2. ‘Romances are generally composed of the constant Loves and invincible

Courages of Hero’s, Heroins, King’s and Queens [....] where lofty Language,

miraculous Contingencies and impossible performances, elevate and surprize the

Reader [....] Novels are of a more familiar nature; Come near us [... and] delight

us with Accidents and odd Events, but not such as are wholly unusual or

unpresidented’. (CONGREVE, Preface to Incognita, 1692) To what extent is

Congreve’s distinction between romances and novels persuasive?2

3. Write a critical account of Ian Watt’s thesis about the rise of the novel. You

should pay particular attention to Watt’s hypothesis about the relationship

between the rise of the middle class and the rise of the novel, and the assumption

that ‘formal realism’ is the defining feature of the new genre.

4. ‘[No] single word or phrase distinguishes the novel from romance or anything

else, and to settle for “realism” or “individualism” or “character” as the defining

characteristic diminishes the very idea of the novel and trivializes the conception

of a literary species.’ (HUNTER) Discuss with reference to critical debates about

the origins of the genre and at least two early novels.

Suggested reading(See the main booklist at the head of this introduction for publication details.)

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. ‘Epic and Novel’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds) Essentials of

the Theory of Fiction. Chapter 3.

Hunter, J. Paul Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

McKeon, Michael The Origins of the English Novel 1660-1740.

Scholes, Robert and Robert Kellogg The Nature of Narrative. Chapters 1–3.

Watt, Ian The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding.

Genre and sub-genreQuestions

1. ‘[The novel] is plasticity itself. It is a genre that is ever questing, ever examining

itself and subjecting its established forms to review.’ (BAKHTIN) Discuss with

reference to at least two novelists.

2. ‘We do the novel [...] a disservice if we fail to notice, once we have defined the

different world from romance that novels represent, how fully it engages the

unusual, the uncertain, and the unexplainable.’ (HUNTER) Discuss with reference

to at least two novelists.

3. ‘From the novel’s beginnings, intertextuality has been one of the few defining

characteristics of the genre.’ Discuss with reference to at least two novelists.

4. ‘One question the novel repeatedly asks is: How do you know?—answering basic

and simple human needs to know about the world, and to pursue that need in the

reading of novels.’ (HUNTER) Discuss with reference to at least two novelists.

5. ‘“Realism” is only one element in the novel’s history, other traditions such as

romance, gothic, fantasy and science fiction are equally important.’ Discuss with

reference to at least two novelists.

6. ‘Satire depends on simplification and is thus antithetical to the novel, which

excels in presenting complexity.’ Discuss with reference to at least two novelists.

7. ‘The history of the novel is a history of anti-novels.’ (FRANK KERMODE)

Discuss with reference to one or more novelists.

2 This question would offer aproductive way into a discussion

of Don Quixote and/or acomparison between a ‘romance’

like Sidney’s Arcadia and anearly ‘novel’ such as Defoe’sMoll Flanders or Haywood’s

Love in Excess.

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Introduction

8. ‘The novel is the only developing genre and therefore it reflects more deeply,

more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of its

unfolding.’ (M. BAKHTIN) Discuss with reference to at least two novelists.

9. ‘Because the novel is such a flexible genre and because novels are written across

periods and cultures, it is meaningless to speak of a coherent “novel tradition”.’

Discuss with reference to at least two novelists.

10. With reference to at least two novelists you have studied, consider the view that

the concept of individualism underpins the novel form.

Suggested reading

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays.

Brink, André The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino.

Narrative technique and theory: characterQuestions

1. ‘I believe that all novels [...] deal with character, and that it is to express

character—not to preach doctrines [...] that the form of the novel [...] has been

evolved.’ (VIRGINIA WOOLF) Discuss with reference to at least two novelists.

2. ‘We may divide characters into flat and round.’ (E.M. FORSTER) Consider the

validity of Forster’s distinction with reference to at least two novelists.

3. ‘Personality is what living beings have. “Character” on the other hand is what

people in novels have. The biggest ideological presupposition that novel readers

are encouraged to make is to think that characters in novel have personalities.’

Consider the means by which any one novelist encourages and/or discourages

such a view.

4. How valid is the distinction between novels of character and novels of action?

You should refer to at least two novelists.

Suggested reading

Forster E.M. ‘Flat and Round Characters’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds) Essentials of


Gass, William H. ‘The Concept of Character in Fiction’ in Hoffman and Murphy

(eds) Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Chapter 13.

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. Chapter 5.

Woolf, Virginia ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds)

Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Chapter 2.

Narrative voice and perspectiveQuestions

1. ‘The choice of point(s) of view from which the story is told is arguably the most

important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally

affects the way readers will respond [...] to the fictional characters and their

actions.’ (DAVID LODGE) In the light of this claim, consider the handling of

point of view in the work of one or more novelists.

2. ‘No lyricism, no comments, the author’s personality absent.’ (FLAUBERT) With

what success does any one novelist achieve Flaubert’s dream of impersonality?

3. Consider the importance of narrators and/or narrative perspective in the work of

one or more novelists.

10

The Novel

4. ‘The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter

to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself.’ (PERCY LUBBOCK)

Discuss with reference to the work of one or more novelists.

5. With reference to one or more novelists, consider how adequately the term

‘stream of consciousness’ describes their techniques of representing thought

processes.

Suggested reading

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction.

Booth, Wayne C. ‘Distance and Point of View: An Essay in Clarification’ in Hoffman

and Murphy (eds) Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Chapter 9.

Leaska, Mitchell A. ‘The Concept of Point of View’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds)


Lodge, David The Art of Fiction. Chapters 6, 9, 26, 27 and 33.

Lodge, David ‘Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction’ in Hoffman and Murphy

(eds) Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Chapter 24.

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. Chapters 6–8.

Narrative structure and chronologyQuestions

1. ‘The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one did

survive the wreck.’ (MELVILLE, from the epilogue to Moby-Dick) Consider the

significance of beginnings and endings in the work of one novelist you have read.

2. ‘What puts our mind at rest is the simple sequence, the overwhelming variegation

of life now represented in [...] a unidimensional order.’ (ROBERT MUSIL) In the

light of this quotation, consider the significance of narrative structure in the work

of one or more novelists.

3. Consider the novelistic handling of time by at least two novelists.

Suggested reading

Brooks, Peter Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative.

Brooks, Peter, ‘Reading for the Plot’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds) Essentials of the

Theory of Fiction. Chapter 23.

Genette, Gérard ‘Time and Narrative in A la recherche du temps perdue’ in Hoffman

and Murphy (eds) Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Chapter 14.

Kermode, Frank The Sense of an Ending .(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966)

[ISBN 0195007700].

Narrative theoryQuestions

1. ‘Narrative theory helps us understand the mechanics of fiction, but is less helpful

when it comes to particular questions of interpretation.’ Discuss with reference to


2. With reference to one or more novelists, show how aspects of narrative theory

have enhanced your understanding of the genre.

Suggested reading

Gennette, Gérard Narrative Discourse, an Essay in Method.

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.

11

Introduction

Realism and mimesisQuestions

1. ‘The realist novel purports to offer a neutral and transparent representation of the

world, but is actually informed by particular assumptions about the “real” and

mediated by highly conventional rhetorical strategies.’ Discuss with reference to


2. ‘Recipe for the “realist” novel: invent a plot based on cause-and-effect; add well-

defined characters; assume throughout the world is susceptible to rational enquiry

and therefore knowable.’ Discuss with reference to one or more novelists.

3. ‘New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; in order to

represent it, modes of representation must change.’ (BERTOLT BRECHT)

Discuss with reference to one or more novelists.

4. ‘Although realist fiction is often condemned for its bad faith and conventionality,

it is better understood as a pragmatic effort to render a complex world humanly

comprehensible.’ Discuss with reference to one novelist.

5. ‘The realism/experimentalism dichotomy is formalist. It construes realism as a set

of narrative techniques, and experimentalism as their subversion. This is

inadequate. Realism needs to be seen as a heterogeneous phenomenon.’ Discuss

with reference to one or more novelists.

Suggested reading

Auerbach, Erich Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature.

Barthes, Roland S/Z.

Barthes, Roland Writing Degree Zero.

Gasiorek, Andrzej Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After. (London and New York:

Edward Arnold, 1995) [ISBN 0340572159 (pbk)]. Especially Chapters 1 and 8

Levine, George ‘Realism Reconsidered’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds) Essentials of


Lodge, David The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology

of Modern Writing.

Lodge, David ‘Middlemarch and the idea of the classic realist text’ in After Bakhtin:

Essays on Fiction and Criticism. Chapter 3.

Lukács, Georg ‘Marxist Aesthetics and Literary Realism’ in Hoffman and Murphy

(eds) Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Chapter 10

Self-conscious fictionQuestions

1. ‘Self-conscious fiction explicitly lays bare the conventions of realism; it does not

ignore or abandon them.’ In the light of this claim, consider the relationship

between ‘realism’ and ‘self-consciousness’ in the work of one or more novelists.

2. ‘We’ll not stop two moments, my dear Sir,—only, as we have got thro’ these five

volumes, (do, Sir, sit down upon a set – they are better than nothing) let us look back

upon the country we have pass’d through.’ (LAURENCE STERNE) Consider the

significance of self-conscious narration in the work of one or more novelists.

Suggested reading

Alter, Robert Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre.

Waugh, Patricia Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction.

12

The Novel

Modernist and postmodernist fictionQuestions

1. ‘They’ve changed everything now [...] we used to think there was a beginning,

middle and an end.’ (THOMAS HARDY) In the light of this quotation, consider

how and to what end one or more novelists resist traditional narrative structure.

2. ‘Reality doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist, personality doesn’t exist. God was the

omniscient author, but he died; now no one knows the plot.’ (RONALD

SUKENICK) Discuss with reference to one or more novelists.

3. ‘Modern fiction does not dispense with the idea of coherence, but rather looks for

new kinds of order.’ Discuss with reference to one or more novelists.

4. ‘My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates

either his twentieth-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century pre-

modernist grandparents.’ (JOHN BARTH) To what extent does any one author

you have studied fulfill Barth’s ideal?

5. With reference to one or more novelist(s), consider the relationship between

innovation and tradition in either the ‘modernist’ or the ‘post-colonial’ or the

postmodern novel.

Suggested reading

Barth, John ‘The Literature of Replenishment’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds)


Frank, Joseph ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’ in Hoffman and Murphy (eds)


Lodge, David, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the

Typology of Modern Writing.

McHale, Brian Postmodernist Fiction.

Stevenson, Randall Modernist Fiction: An Introduction.

GenderQuestions

1. ‘The tradition of women novelists from the eighteenth century to the present day

offers a significant challenge to traditional accounts of the genre’s forms and

functions.’ Consider the view with reference to at least two novelists.

2. ‘There is no reason to think that the form of the epic or of the poetic play suit a

woman any more than the sentence suits her. But all the older forms of literature

had hardened and set by the time she became a writer. The novel alone was

young enough to be soft in her hands.’ (VIRGINIA WOOLF) In the light of this

quotation, consider at least two women novelists of the eighteenth and/or

nineteenth centuries.

Suggested reading

Hoffman and Murphy (eds) Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Chapters 27–29.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic, the Woman Writer

and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.

Showalter, Elaine A Literature of Their Own, British Women Novelists from Brontë to

Lessing.


13

Introduction

The role of the readerQuestions

1. ‘The truest respect which you can pay the reader’s understanding, is to halve

matters amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as

yourself.’ (LAURENCE STERNE) In the light of this quotation, consider how

one or more novelists engage the reader in the process of interpretation.

2. ‘Your attention, as reader, is now completely concentrated on the woman [...] for

several pages you have been expecting this female shadow to take shape [...] and

is your expectation that drives the author toward her.’ (ITALO CALVINO) In the

light of this quotation, consider how one or more novelists exploit and/or

subvert the reader’s expectations.

Suggested reading

Eco, Umberto The Role of the Reader.

Iser, Wolfgang The Implied Reader, Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from

Bunyan to Beckett.

Using this subject guideThis subject guide is not an exhaustive study of, nor a comprehensive guide to, thenovel. Instead it is an elaborate series of signposts which suggests directions, topics,themes, questions and critical approaches that could prove useful to you. It is up toyou to construct a course of study for yourself, using these pointers. Your scheduleshould include the study of secondary literature – literary criticism and other materialyou feel could provide a useful background to your study – as well as primary texts.

This subject guide, then, provides a general model – a guide to helpful criticalprocedures and relevant material. However, you have to adapt this model to your ownneeds and interests. Ideally, you should try to read as many of the novels listed aboveas possible to give yourself a sense of the progression and scope of the novel as anevolving form. More practically, we suggest you study at least two authors and atleast two topics in detail. This should be enough to allow you to answer threequestions confidently in the examination. Don’t forget that it is perfectly acceptable toinvestigate issues which are not mentioned in this subject guide as long as they are ofrelevance to the objectives described above.

This subject guide does not constitute the subject itself, but is an example of how you

could construct an appropriate course of study and devise appropriate ways of

studying the material you choose. It also indicates the range of material that is the

minimum amount necessary to face the exam with confidence. Simple regurgitation

in the examination of the illustrative material in this subject guide will be regarded as

plagiarism and heavily penalised. You must adapt such material in ways appropriate

to your own chosen syllabus of study. Examiners will always look unfavourably at

examinations composed of answers which draw solely on the illustrative material

provided in this subject guide.

Please note that there are other subject guides and introductions that might prove to beof use to you, especially those which have sections on fictional prose writings. Forexample, the Group A Moderns advanced unit subject guide contains a usefulintroduction to Joyce. Look through the other subject guides and see if they coverauthors or topics that may be of interest to you. Do bear in mind, though, that thissubject guide is unique in two important respects:

14

The Novel

1. It focuses exclusively on one literary form, the novel, whereas other subject guideshave invited you to examine a period (e.g. Romanticism), a body of writings inboth prose and poetry (e.g. women’s writing or nineteenth-century Americanliterature), a single author (e.g. Shakespeare) or a general topic (e.g. modernliterary theory).

2. It includes novels in translation from other languages. Bear this in mind beforewaxing lyrical on the language of foreign texts you choose to write on in theexamination. You may be celebrating the translator’s verbal dexterity, rather thanthat of the original author.

Methods of assessmentYou will be assessed by one three-hour examination. The examination paper will be intwo parts and you will be asked to answer three different questions, at least one fromeach section.

Section A will comprise questions inviting you to compare and contrast novels by asingle author of your own choice. They will normally invite discussion with referenceto at least two novels. Section B will comprise questions on broader topics andthemes and invite discussion with reference to at least two novels by differentauthors. You will be expected to demonstrate on this part of the examination somefamiliarity with theories of narration and the novel, and a knowledge of the broadercontexts of fiction.

This subject guide is organised around the structure of the examination paper. Itcontains examples of the kind of questions you can expect in the examination, in therelevant chapters. There are two Section A single author studies and two Section Btopic studies as models for you to follow. There is also a sample examination paperattached at the end of this guide. Please note the rubric which states:

‘Answer three questions, choosing at least one from each section. Candidates may

not discuss the same text more than once, in this examination or in any other

Advanced level unit examination.’

This means that you should not write on the same text in more than one answer –although you may make passing reference to it.

Preparing for the examinationThe sample examination paper included at the end of this subject guide gives you agood idea of the range of questions you can expect. Remember, it is better to go fordepth rather than breadth in the examination.

An essay is not only an attempt to understand but also to convey understanding. It is thisspecialised skill which the examination by essay seeks to test. Unfortunately, somestudents’ essays fail to adequately convey understanding. This is rarely because astudent fails to grasp the concepts involved. Rather it is due to the failure of the essayistto make a complete, well-supported case for whatever he or she is trying to say.

Preparing for the examination, then, starts with the study of the topic or topics thatinterest you, followed by close reading and analysis of texts. Then you must begin toorganise the evidence that these analyses provide. Writing sample answers and essayswill not only prepare you for specific topics in the examination, but will also improveyour reading and analytical skills.

As you will have to choose from a limited number of essay titles for a subject withvery few constraints on what you can study, you must devote time to your essaytechniques. Before you launch into the essay, make sure you are properly prepared.

15

Introduction

Start by reading through the questions a few times before you begin, thinking aboutwhich questions will enable you to display your knowledge and analytical skills tothe best extent. In so doing, you should ask yourself which themes/areas, etc. youcould appropriately and profitably use to answer these questions. When you havedecided on your essay questions, spend some time planning your answers, preferablyparagraph by paragraph. This should assist you in writing efficiently and effectivelywithout too many false starts, thus maximising your time.

The answer to a general examination question must be narrowed with ruthlessdirectness. Some questions will be so broad as to take in, conceivably, whole areasand eras of literature. A successful essay must chart a very precise route through suchsprawling expanses of territory. You need to clearly define the terms within which youintend to answer the particular questions you have chosen.

Start at the beginning. The introduction is essential. Here, you should tell the readerhow you have interpreted the question and what direction the essay will take. Just astelevision news reports start with an announcement of the headlines, so yourintroduction should contain a clear concise statement of the main argument the essaywill present. Look closely and ask yourself: will this main statement answer thequestion? The essay, with the thesis statement as its centre, should not simply expressyour opinion: it should make a considered and well-supported argument.

The main body of the essay should then follow on from what you say in yourintroduction. Each paragraph must be directly related to developing what is implicit inthe main statement.

You should also use the question as a landmark, referring back to it regularly to make

sure you are following the right path and actually answering it.

Remember• Don’t expect bald statements to stand on their own: support your claims with

examples (quotations for instance) or close reference to the text.

• At the same time, don’t pad the essay with unnecessary details or quotations.The fine line between too much and too little detail can be drawn by consideringyour audience: this is usually a tutor or examiner who is most interested in yourpowers of analysis and your ability to express yourself in a clear, organised way.

• You should not include plot summary: you must assume that your readers arevery familiar with the work or works you are treating, even if such works are notgenerally part of the literary canon.

• If you are using quotations do not expect them to stand on their own. Even a shortpassage could be interpreted in more than one way. Quotations should becontextualised (as well as analysed) if you are to maximise their contribution tothe essay.

• Don’t be too abstract, vague or speculative: make your argument clearly andconcisely.

The conclusion should be a concise summary of your main thesis, but it must not besimply repetitive. The conclusion might also be an appropriate place to mentioninformation which did not directly follow from your main argument but which isrelated and of interest to the reader.

The Novel

16

Notes

17

Chapter 1: Section A author study: Jane Austen

Chapter 1

Section A author study: Jane AustenEssential reading

Any complete texts of Mansfield Park and Persuasion will suffice, but the followingeditions contain useful editorial material and retain Austen’s original volume andchapter divisions. These divisions can be especially helpful in considering questionsof narrative structure.

Jane Austen Mansfield Park. Edited by James Kinsley with an introduction by

Marilyn Butler and notes by John Lucas. (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1990) [ISBN

0-19-282757-X].

Jane Austen Persuasion. Edited by John Davie with an introduction by Claude

Rawson. (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1990) [ISBN 0-19-282759-6].

Recommended secondary reading on AustenBakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Edited

by M. Holquist. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982)

[ISBN 0-292-71534-X].

Bradbrook, Frank W. Jane Austen and her Predecessors. (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1967) [ISBN 66-10245].

*Butler, Marilyn (1975) Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1987) [ISBN 0-19-812968-8].

Butler, Marilyn Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its

Background 1760–1830. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981)

[ISBN 0198129688 (pbk)].

Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. (Pennsylvania:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996; originally published 1983)

[ISBN 0812216105 (pbk)].

*Duckworth, Alistair M. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s

Novels. (Baltimore, Md., and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994;

originally published 1971) [ISBN 0-8018-4972-1].

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer

and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 1979) [ISBN 0-300-022867].

Hardy, Barbara A Reading of Jane Austen. (London: Athlone Press, 1975)

[ISBN 0-485-12032-1].

Honan, Park Jane Austen: Her Life. (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1987)

[ISBN 0-297-79717-2].

Hunter, J. Paul Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

(New York and London: Norton and Co., 1990) [ISBN 0-393-30861-8].

Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel. (Chicago and

London: Chicago University Press, 1988) [ISBN 0-226-40139-1 (pbk)].

Kirkham, Margaret Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction. (London: The Athlone Press,

1997; originally published 1983) [ISBN 0485121298 (pbk)].

18

The Novel

Lodge, David ‘Composition, Distribution, Arrangement; Form and Structure in Jane

Austen’s Novels’ in Lodge, David After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism.

(London and New York: Routledge, 1990) [ISBN 0-415-05037-5].

Lodge, David The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts.

(London: Secker and Warburg, 1992) [ISBN 0-436-2567-1].

*Poovey, Mary The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the

Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. (Chicago and

London: Chicago University Press, 1984) [ISBN LC83-003664].


(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) [ISBN 0-631-13915-X].

*Tanner, Tony Jane Austen. (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Macmillan, 1986)

[ISBN 0-333-32318-1 (pbk)].

Watt, Ian (1957) The Rise of The Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding.

(London: Pimlico, 2000) second edition [ISBN 07012664270 (pbk)].


IntroductionAlthough we will be looking principally at two novels, Mansfield Park (1814) andPersuasion (1817), it would be equally possible to answer a question from Section Aof the examination paper by referring to two of Austen’s other three novels. Indeed,much of the discussion here might be applied, with some necessary modifications, toAusten’s entire canon.

The debate on AustenWhile Austen’s reputation as an ‘important’ novelist has to some extent remainedstable from her own time to the present day, there has been, nevertheless, considerabledebate among readers as to the value and significance of her writing. If Lord DavidCecil could claim in 1935 that Austen’s ‘graceful unpretentious philosophy…is asimpressive as those of the most majestic novelists’, then a host of readers – includingan influential theorist and practitioner of the novel form like Henry James – hasequally complained of what are perceived to be Austen’s profound thematiclimitations and the ‘smallness’ of her imagined worlds. Two of Austen’s best-knowncomments on fiction might be seen to endorse not only this pejorative view of herrange, but also a sense of a radically circumscribed vision too. Writing to a niece whowas herself dabbling with fiction, Austen expressed her satisfaction that Anna wasorganising her characters and:

…getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life; 3 or 4 Families in

a Country Village is the very thing to work on.

Two years later, in 1816, Austen described her own work in somewhat self-deprecating terms as:

…the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as

produces little effect after much labour.

Such comments can, of course, be interpreted in a number of ways, but it is worthconsidering the negative assessment of Austen a little further. In terms of location, it is true that the novels focus almost exclusively on small communities of gentry in the home counties, with the larger urban world represented minimally by the odd‘excursion’ to, say, Bath, Portsmouth or a roughly-sketched London. More disturbing still for many readers is the apparent absence of any explicit or palpableresponse to the massive social, political and cultural changes wrought by theIndustrial Revolution at home and the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars across the Channel.

19


If we follow the logic of this approach, the charges are potentially seriouslydamaging: living in one of the most turbulent periods in British and European history,Austen writes about the passionless love affairs of the gentry. That ‘love interest’informs Austen’s novels to the extent that all six of her complete novels replay thebasic narrative structure of romance – whereby the heroine wins and marries her manafter a series of complications – might indeed add fuel to the view that her concernsare not only trivial but also escapist. Add to this the criticisms that the novels endorsea class-obsessed snobbery, that they are politically reactionary and that Austen is anapologist for the male ideology of female subordination, and we have yet morereasons to question Austen’s reputation.

Debates about literary reputations are, of course, the very stuff of literary history, butit is important to consider the specifics of the controversy over Austen. To what extentis ‘narrowness’ a relative rather than an absolute term, and how might a similar chargebe levelled at any number of novelists? What might be the value and the significanceof Austen’s focus on such small and relatively homogeneous communities? BecauseAusten consistently deploys romance motifs, and because her central concern is themarriage of her heroines, does it necessarily follow that she eschews meaningfulengagement with the urgent issues of her day? To what extent are readers applyinganachronistic judgements when they condemn Austen’s broadly politicalconservatism?

Although it might be argued that some elements of the debate outlined above amountfinally to matters of taste, it is noteworthy that a shift in the orientation of criticalapproaches to Austen, which occurred in the 1970s, has changed both the nature ofthe questions asked of the novels and, unsurprisingly, the kinds of answers given inreturn. Thus, a new Austen has emerged as critics have sought to recover the historicalspecificity of the novels’ concerns. Because we are primarily concerned with Austenthe novelist, the fuller details of the complex relationships between the novels and thewars and revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are outsidethe scope of this chapter. However, it is important to stress that Austen’s formal andthematic concerns are intimately related to the ideological struggles and debates thatinformed her times. Because the relationship between ‘history’ and novels is always acomplex one, there are some dangers in simply ‘placing’Austen’s novels in relationto, say, the French Revolution (1789), or the battles of Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo(1815). Nevertheless, you should try to familiarise yourself with some details of thehistorical contexts that take place ‘around’Austen’s writing, and the ‘war of ideas’ inwhich her novels engage.

Before we move on to more particular questions of form, you might think about waysin which Mansfield Park and Persuasion might be described as ‘political’. In whatways does the larger world of ‘history’ make itself felt in the novels? How fruitful isthe suggestion that both novels are primarily concerned with the state of a nation feltto be in transition if not crisis?

Austen and the novelWhen Austen’s first-published novel, Sense and Sensibility, was printed in 1811, itstitle page carried the subtitle ‘A Novel’. If this seems self-evident and redundant tomodern readers, then it is worth remembering that Austen was writing after a periodof at least a hundred years of experiment in prose fiction. During the early decades ofthe eighteenth century, the generic boundaries between various kinds of prose fictionand other sorts of writing were by no means concrete or widely agreed. That Austenwas able to categorise her novel with such confidence is an indication that, by thebeginning of the nineteenth century, tacit agreements had been reached enabling bothreaders and writers to understand something reasonably specific by the term ‘novel’.

20

The Novel

Just when such agreements became general has been much debated, but we can get asense of their nature from the comments of Austen’s narrator in Northanger Abbey (anovel published posthumously but first drafted around 1797/98). Referringapprovingly to particular novels by Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth, Austen’snarrator defines these novels as:

…works in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most

thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the

liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen

language.

If this is a little vague, then the ensuing list of features of the periodical essay, againstwhich Austen seeks to define the ‘novel’, is, perhaps, more telling. Such essays arecondemned for offering ‘improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topicsof conversation, which no longer concern any one living’.

What kind of novel is Austen defining here? What do you think she means by the

‘improbable’ and ‘unnatural’ and to what extent is it possible to reconcile such

exclusions with Austen’s own approach to plot and character?

What role do romance and fairy-tale motifs play in Austen’s fiction? If we take a

longer view of the novel, beginning with, say, Don Quixote and ending with late

twentieth-century fiction, how useful and comprehensive is Austen’s definition?

Austen’s ‘realism’In his review of Emma in 1815, Walter Scott described Austen as an exemplarypractitioner of a new realism in prose fiction, a realism which he saw as peculiar tothe novel as it was developing in the early nineteenth century. Interestingly, the‘realism’ that Scott finds in Austen is not a naïve and slavish mimeticism (i.e.imitation), but rather a skilful presentation of characters from ‘ordinary walks of life’presented ‘with such spirit and originality, that we never miss the excitation whichdepends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising from the consideration ofminds, manners and sentiments greatly above our own’. What Scott recognises here,and what some modern critics have ignored in various condemnations of ‘realism’, isthat novelistic realism rarely, if ever, aspires to offer ‘reality’ in unmediated form.Scott’s understanding of Austen’s realism is noteworthy in its suggestion of anexpectation of a general level of plausibility combined with an exemplary rather thannaturalistic approach to character.

While Scott’s critical tenets differ markedly from those of modern critics and readers,his sense that Austen’s realism is a key characteristic of her fiction is one that hasbeen shared by many recent commentators. Retrospectively, Austen can be seen tohave drawn together some of the disparate realist strategies of eighteenth-centuryfiction and to have developed them in hitherto unprecedented ways.

Familiar equally with Richardson’s refinements of the epistolary form and Fielding’suse of the intrusive third-person narrative voice, Austen blends what has come to becalled ‘telling’ (direct commentary and judgement from the narrative ‘voice’) and‘showing’ (the scenic, or dramatic, presentation of events in which the charactersspeak and act without noticeable or intrusive authorial intervention) with greatsubtlety. Although Austen’s own novels are no less didactic or conventional than thoseof her eighteenth-century predecessors, they can often give the impression that theyare ‘slices of life’ rather than carefully contrived fictions.

It might be argued that this is largely a matter of reader response, since the readergenerally chooses whether or not to suspend his or her disbelief. Even so, part ofAusten’s impressive technical achievement was to create a sense of ‘reality’ by

21


deploying familiar narrative techniques in new ways. Similarly, Austen’s handling of anarrative point of view and her ability to make apparently ordinary and mundaneevents carry the broader burdens of her most serious concerns, make her as skilled anovelist as any in a century that produced the great ‘classics’ of European realism.

In order to gain a sense of Austen’s relation to eighteenth-century novel traditions,

you may find it useful to consult Bradbrook (1967) and Spencer (1986). The latter is

particularly helpful because its demonstrates Austen’s inheritance from women

writers like Charlotte Lennox and Fanny Burney, and helps us to understand the

particular social pressures that helped to shape the tradition of didactic fiction for

women. If you are interested in debates about Austen’s feminism, then you might

also consult Poovey (1984) and/or Johnson (1988) and Kirkham (1983).

Mansfield Park: the rhetoric of realismMansfield Park is the first of what for many readers are Austen’s three mostsuccessful and ‘mature’ novels (to be followed by Emma and Persuasion). Notions ofmaturity and development in treatments of writers’ careers are not always reliable,since they often presuppose a progression that is by no means a given and impose afalse sense of teleology. That said, however, it is reasonable to view Mansfield Park astechnically more accomplished than the novels first drafted a decade earlier (Senseand Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice). Austen is clearly asmuch concerned in Mansfield Park with the meaning of certain key words (abstractnouns in particular) as she is in her earlier novels. It might be argued, however, thatthe novel’s greater success is partly a result of its ability to present abstractions inconcrete form. Thus the sometimes jarringly obvious antitheses of the kind found inSense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice have not altogether disappeared inMansfield Park but are handled with much greater subtlety.

Make a list of some key words/concepts that you consider important in Mansfield

Park. You might want to think about implied oppositions like that between innovation

and tradition, as well as explicit ones like the antithesis between propriety and

impropriety. How central and how intrusive are such oppositions in the novel?

Now reread Chapter VI of the first volume.

Chapter VI begins with the narrator setting the scene for a dinner-table discussion atMansfield Park. Thus we are told that Mr Rushworth has just returned from a friend’swho has ‘had his grounds laid out by an improver’ and that Rushworth is now ‘eagerto be improving his own place in the same way’. Having prepared the ground withsuccinct summary, Austen, typically, shows us the fuller significance of these detailsby having Rushworth himself discuss ‘improvement’ in such a way as simultaneouslyto further our sense of his rather vacuous mind and to suggest the broader resonanceof the topic of estate improvements. Whether or not we pick up the importance of thereference to Repton (an influential and controversial theorist of landscape gardeningin the early nineteenth century) in this chapter, we are left in little doubt thatRushworth wants to ‘improve’ out of a fidelity to fashion rather than from any moreconsidered impulse. To confirm the point, Austen has Rushworth repeat hisbuzzwords in a comically absurd way:

It wants improvement, ma’am, beyond anything. I never saw a place that wanted so

much improvement in my life.

That Rushworth’s attitude towards Sotherton is coloured by a sense of bare statisticsrather than any character it might be felt to have is clear throughout the chapter, butAusten seems keen to express much more than Rushworth’s mercenary views here.

22

The Novel

If Rushworth’s name suggests his precipitous and ill-considered judgement of ‘worth’,then Fanny Price’s indicates, perhaps, not only her own merit, but also her ability tosee the real value of things. Tellingly, Fanny – whose true ‘price’ Edmund and theother Bertrams come to learn in the course of the novel – is appalled by the prospectof the avenue being destroyed at Sotherton. More important at this stage, however, isEdmund’s description of Sotherton as a ‘house built in Elizabeth’s time’ that although‘ill placed’ is nevertheless ‘unfavourable for improvement’. The reference to‘Elizabeth’s time’ suggests not only antiquity, but also the period often viewed duringthe eighteenth century as the ‘golden age’ in British history. More particularly,Austen’s contemporaries would have been familiar with the language of‘improvement’ from controversies about radical alterations to estates, and becausesuch vocabulary served as central metaphors in debates about British constitutionalchange that followed in the wake of the French Revolution.

Once we have understood that Austen’s approach parallels Edmund Burke’s strategy,in Reflections on the Revolution in France, of embodying traditional cultural values inthe actual fabric of estates, the fuller significance of the metonymic relationshipbetween the estates of Sotherton and Mansfield Park and traditional cultural valuesbecomes clear. In the light of continuing debates about whether revolution after theFrench model or milder kinds of ‘improvement’ were needed in Britain, theconclusion of Austen’s character Edmund is especially resonant:

…had I a place to new fashion, I should not put myself into the hands of an improver.

I would rather have an inferior degree of beauty, of my own choice, and acquired

progressively. I would rather abide by my own blunders than by his.

Bearing in mind that part of Sotherton’s function in the novel is symbolic, have

another look at Chapters VIII, IX and X. How critical are Mary Crawford’s remarks

on the proximity between the estate and the church at the end of Chapter VIII?

Consider how the disuse of the Sotherton chapel and the discussion of Edmund’s

desire to become a clergyman relate to the wider concerns of the novel. Think

carefully about what Austen is doing in Chapter X. To what extent does this chapter

prefigure particular relationships that develop later in the novel?

Chapter X, with its clearly symbolic handling of location, is to some extent anextreme example of Austen’s technique in the novel. Nevertheless, the technique itselfshould remind us of how Austen’s ‘realism’ works. The details of the imagined worldare on one level quite realistic – gardens and gates – and plausible, but at the sametime Austen is asking the reader to consider a complex of secondary, or non-literal,meanings. It is in this sense, of course, that realism is not mimetic in any simple way,but rather a carefully constructed, artful representation in which ideology and rhetoric(the novelist seeks to persuade us of the value of particular ‘truths’ or ways of seeing)are to the fore.

To what extent are Austen’s techniques typical of ‘realist’ novelists? Think about

some of the other novels you have read so far on this and other course units. Is this

the way, for example, that Great Expectations or Jane Eyre are organised? How

important is the rhetorical figure of metonymy to an understanding of realist fiction?

By reading the Sotherton episode carefully, we can discover what are some of thecentral concerns of the novel. At this relatively early point in the narrative, Austen hasher characters debate questions of inherited values and how they might be preservedor radically altered. Allowing for the fact that the novel also engages with otherfundamental issues – the education and marriage of Fanny Price, for example – theseare the key questions that inform Mansfield Park.

23


Bearing in mind that the physical structure of Mansfield Park stands as a metonym fora traditional English culture, how would you set about interpreting the rest of thenovel? Look carefully at the preparation for the performance of Lovers’Vows (thedebate begins seriously in Chapter XIII and the remainder of the first volume islargely taken up with the theatricals) and the ramifications that follow the return of SirThomas Bertram. How would you explain what might appear to be an excessivereaction to a minor disruption?

What is the significance of the fact that it is Fanny (the poor cousin and ‘outsider’)who defends and in some sense ‘saves’ Mansfield Park? How and with what degree ofsuccess does the marriage between Edmund and Fanny resolve the novel’s mosturgent concerns?

Persuasion: subjectivity and narrative voiceAlistair Duckworth has suggested that Austen’s novels can be fruitfully viewed astexts which look back to eighteenth-century Providential fictions and forward to thefictions of doubt that flourish as the nineteenth century unfolds. Thus, on the onehand, a novel like Mansfield Park seeks to affirm traditional Christian values in a waythat bespeaks some confidence, while on the other it charts the painful isolation ofFanny Price. Fanny’s sense of self-worth is hard won in a milieu that provessometimes aggressively uncongenial to her values of quietness, stillness and self-abnegation. For all that they finally adhere to the conventions of comedy, Austen’snovels are consistently preoccupied with the lives of young women whose securityand happiness are radically threatened.

Partly because it is her last completed novel, and partly because it does signal someformal and thematic departures from Austen’s previous novels, Persuasion has oftenbeen placed at the nineteenth- rather than eighteenth-century end of the spectrumtouched upon above. Anne Elliot is that much more isolated than even Fanny Price.Austen imbues Anne, like Fanny, with a moral integrity that is lacking in othercharacters, and, like Fanny, Anne too is ignored and undervalued by those around herfor most of the narrative. What makes Anne’s situation particularly painful, however,is that her one chance of happiness – in the form of marriage to Captain Wentworth –seems to be behind her when the novel begins. If the threat of personal and culturalatrophy is raised only to be expunged in Mansfield Park, then it seems to pervade theautumnal atmosphere of Persuasion.

Consider some of the ways in which Persuasion might be seen as a more melancholy

and pessimistic novel than Mansfield Park. Does a sense of flux or stability finally

dominate the novel? Why does Austen use several locations rather than a central one

in the novel? To what extent does the novel suggest a loss of faith in the privileged

value in Mansfield Park?

For a number of complex reasons, many of them ideological, Austen’s novelsgenerally prefer objective ‘facts’ to subjective judgements. Thus, Catherine Morland,Marianne Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse and even Elizabeth Bennet learn the dangersof subjectivism in the course of the narratives in which they are central. Interestingly,the situation is slightly different in Mansfield Park and Persuasion. In both novels, theheroines are already exemplary insofar as they think of others ahead of self and tendto judge by external, objective standards rather than subjectively. However, bychoosing to present such exemplary and near ideal heroines, Austen is faced with anumber of problems. Firstly, she needs to show that, in spite of the generally negativeassessments of those around them, Fanny and Anne really are worthy. Secondly,Austen confronts the difficulties of convincing readers that her exemplary heroines arein some sense living and breathing rather than ‘flat’ allegorical figures.

24

The Novel

To what extent do you feel Austen is able to overcome these potential difficulties?

What are the primary technical means by which she attempts to transcend these

possible limitations?

Austen’s techniques are complex enough to require careful scrutiny, but in simpleterms it is a skilful and flexible handling of point of view that enables her to succeedin presenting us with heroines who might otherwise prove totally unsympathetic. IfFanny Price and possibly Anne Elliot remain less than fully endearing to modernreaders, it is in spite of Austen’s best efforts. By presenting the majority of eventsfrom her heroine’s perspectives, Austen affords us privileged insights unavailable tothe other characters who inhabit the imagined worlds of the novels. More particularly,Austen opens up the active and intelligent minds of Fanny and Anne to the gaze ofher readers, so that once again the narrative is subtly working to win us over to theapproved values of the heroine.

Think again about how Austen handles point of view in both novels. How does she

prevent the subjective views of Fanny and Anne from overwhelming the objective

concerns of both novels? Now reread Chapter VII of Volume I of Persuasion, paying

particular attention to the way in which Anne responds to her meeting with Captain

Wentworth.

For many readers, the paragraph beginning ‘Mary, very much gratified by thisattention…’ typifies a peculiarly ‘modern’ subjectivism that pervades the novel. Byemploying a third-person narrative voice in tandem with a flexible use of focalisation(the important distinction here is between who ‘speaks’ and who ‘sees’ a particularnarrative event), Austen is able to move freely between interior and exterior views.This paragraph, for example, begins and ends with apparently exterior views, but inbetween moves so close to Anne’s perspective that it might be read as a kind of‘stream of consciousness’:

…a thousand feelings rushed upon Anne, of which this was the most consoling, that

it would soon be over. And it was soon over. In minutes after Charles’s preparation,

the others appeared; they were in the drawing room. Her eye half met Captain

Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice – he talked to Mary, said

all that was right; said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy

footing: the room seemed full – full of persons and voices – but a few minutes ended

it […] the room was cleared, and Anne might finish her breakfast as she could.

Austen succeeds brilliantly here in giving a sense of the rush of emotions and

impressions that assail Anne, but how far can we go with the notion that here and

elsewhere in the novel Austen endorses a subjectivism that verges on solipsism? Look

again at the paragraphs that follow the one quoted above. How, and to what effect,

does Austen employ free indirect speech here? To what extent is a sense of external

and objective values retained in spite of what is clearly sympathy for private

emotional experience?

Clearly, Austen’s use of narrative voice in the novel is intimately bound up with herbroader concerns. Furthermore, that there is considerable debate among readers as towhether Anne learns to value impulse ahead of reason or vice versa is partly a resultof an inherent ambiguity and, perhaps, ambivalence that stems from Austen’s chosentechniques. We are in no way obliged, of course, to resolve and close all the questionsthat a given novel poses. Indeed, such closure may do some violence to what sometheorists of the novel see as the inherently ‘dialogic’ nature of the novel form.

25


Nevertheless, you might pursue your reading of Persuasion further so as to clarify a

broader understanding of the novel. Is ‘persuasion’ finally seen to be a good or a bad

thing in the novel? You might find it useful to pay especial attention to Wentworth’s

use of the metaphor of the nut in Chapter X, and the events around Louisa’s fall in

Chapter XII.

What values does Austen embody in the Navy and what are the wider social

implications of Anne’s marriage to Captain Wentworth?

Suggestions for further studyAs you gain a greater sense of some of the preoccupations of the novel as it developedin the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, you might consider how Austen’s fictionrelates to novels that appear otherwise quite different. To what extent, for example,does Austen share with other novelists since Cervantes an almost obsessive concernwith epistemological questions? What kinds of family resemblances are there betweenAusten’s heroines and the protagonists of other nineteenth- and twentieth-centurynovels? In these and other ways your study of Austen might easily broaden out into aconsideration of a topic study that would enable you to answer a question in SectionB of the examination paper.

Learning outcomesBy the end of this chapter, having studied the essential reading and some of the

recommended critical texts, you should be able to:

• summarise the debates about Austen’s fiction

• discuss the degree to which her novels are informed by particular historical

concerns

• describe and give examples of some of the techniques Austen employs as part of

the rhetoric of her fiction

• explain what it means to call Austen a ‘realist’, and how such ‘realism’ relates to

other novels and novelistic traditions.

Sample essay questions1. Consider the significance of one of the following in Austen’s fiction: place,

dialogue, point of view, irony.

2. How useful is the term ‘realism’ in relation to Austen’s fiction?

3. Consider the relationship between any two of Austen’s novels and aspects of

either eighteenth- or nineteenth-century fiction.

4. Consider Austen’s handling of the relationship between the individual and society.

The Novel

26

Notes

27

Chapter 2: Section A author study: Honoré de Balzac (Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot)

Chapter 2

Section A author study: Honoréde Balzac (Eugénie Grandet andOld Goriot)Essential reading

Honoré de Balzac Eugénie Grandet. Translated by Sylvia Raphael; introduced by

Christopher Prendergast. (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1990) [ISBN 0-19-282605-0].

Honoré de Balzac Old Goriot. Translated and edited by A.J. Krailsheimer. (Oxford:

World’s Classics, 1990) [ISBN 0-19-282858-4].

Eugénie Grandet (first published in 1833–4) and Old Goriot (first published 1834) areregarded as key works in the Balzac canon, both as parts of The Human Comedycycle and as works in their own right. Eugénie Grandet was admitted as a text on theFrench university syllabus in 1889 and thereby achieved ‘classic’ status. Old Goriotis, perhaps, more representative of Balzac’s grand project and was the first of hisnovels to use the technique of recurrent characterisation: that is, the serialreappearance of the same character in different novels.

Recommended secondary readingWe recommend that you acquaint yourself with at least two critical commentaries onThe Human Comedy and a biography. The following is not a complete list but isintended to guide you to some of the more significant studies.

Criticism

Bertault, J. Balzac and The Human Comedy. (New York: New York University Press,

1963) [No ISBN].

Butler, Ronnie Balzac and the French Revolution. (London: Croom Helm, 1983)

[ISBN 0-709-93208-1].

*Festa-McCormick, D. Honoré de Balzac. (Boston: Twayne’s World Authors Series,

1979) [ISBN 0-805-76383-X].

Hemmings, F.W.J. Balzac: an interpretation of la Comédie humaine. (New York:

Random House, 1967) [No ISBN].

Hunt, H.J. Balzac’s ‘Comédie humaine’. (London: Athlone Press, 1964) [No ISBN].

*Lukács, György The Historical Novel. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976)

[ISBN 0-140-55081-X (pbk)].

Marceau, F. Balzac and his World. (London: W.H. Allen, 1967) [No ISBN].

Oliver, E.J. Honoré de Balzac. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1965)

[No ISBN].

Pritchett, V.S. Balzac. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973; London: Hogarth, 1992)

[ISBN 0701209879].

On Eugénie Grandet

*Saxton, Arnold Honoré de Balzac: Eugénie Grandet. (Harmondsworth: Penguin

Masterstudies, 1987) [ISBN 0-140-77137-9].

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The Novel

On Old Goriot

*Auerbach, Eric Mimesis. Translated by W. Trask. (Princeton : Princeton University

Press, 1953) [ISBN 0691012695 (pbk)]. See part of Chapter 18, ‘In the Hotel de

la Môle’.

Bellos, David Honoré de Balzac, ‘Old Goriot’. (Landmarks of World Literature,

Cambridge University Press, 1987) [ISBN 0-521-31634-0 (pbk); 0-521-32799-7

(hbk)].

Biography

Hunt, H.J. Honoré de Balzac: a Biography. (London, 1957; reprinted and updated,

New York: Greenwood Press, 1969) [No ISBN].

Maurois, André Prometheus: the Life of Balzac. (London: The Bodley Head, 1965)

[No ISBN].

Robb, Graham Balzac: a Biography. (London: Picador, 1994) [ISBN 0-330-33237-6].

Further readingBellos, David Balzac Criticism in France. 1850–1900. The Making of a Reputation.

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) [ISBN 0-19-815530-1].

Brooks, Peter The Melodramatic Imagination. (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1976; New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)

[ISBN 0231060068; 0231060076].

James, Henry Notes on Novelists, with some other notes. (London: Dent, 1914)

[No ISBN].

James, Henry The Question of Speech; the Lesson of Balzac: Two Lectures.

(Cambridge: Houghton, Mifflin, 1905) [No ISBN].

Kanes, Martin Critical Essays on Honoré de Balzac. (Boston, Mass.: Hall, 1990)

[ISBN 0816188459].

Kanes, Martin Père Goriot: anatomy of a Troubled World. (New York: Twayne;

Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan

International, 1993) [ISBN 0805785825 (pbk); 0805783636 (hbk)].

*Levin, Harry The Gates of Horn: a Study of Five French Realists. (London and Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1963) [ISBN 0195007271]. See Chapter IV on Balzac.

*Lukács, György Studies in European Realism. Translated by E. Bone with a

foreword by Roy Pascal. (London: Hillway, 1950; New York: Grosset and

Dunlap, 1964 – introduction by A. Kazin) [No ISBN]. See Chapters I, II and II.

McLaughlin, Kevin Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century

literature. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995) [ISBN 0804724113].

Nochlin, Linda Realism. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) [ISBN 0-140-13222-8].

*Petrey, Sandy Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola and the Performance

of History. (Cornell University Press, 1989) [ISBN 0801422167].

Prendergast, Christopher Balzac, Fiction and Melodrama. (London: Edward Arnold,

1978; New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978) [ISBN 0-713-15969-3].

Prendergast, Christopher The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) [ISBN 0-521-36977-0].

Pugh, Anthony Balzac’s Recurring Characters. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

1974) [ISBN 0802052754].

*Reid, James H. Narration and Description in the French Realist Novel: the

Temporality of Lying and Forgetting. (Cambridge Studies in French, 1993)

[ISBN 0-521-42092-X].

Schehr, Lawrence R. Rendering French Realism. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford

University Press, 1997) [ISBN 0804727872].

29


Stowe, William W. Balzac, James and the Realistic Novel. (Princeton, N.J.;

Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1983) [ISBN 0691065675].

Taine, Hyppolite Balzac. A Critical Study. Translated by Lorenzo O’Rourke. (New

York: Haskell House, 1973) [ISBN 0838316700].


IntroductionThe overall aim of this chapter is to inform and focus your reading of two of the earlynovels from Balzac’s The Human Comedy. The core texts belong to Honoré deBalzac’s (1799–1850) cycle of novels collectively issued under the generic title of TheHuman Comedy (La Comédie humaine), published in 17 volumes between 1842 and1848. Balzac’s aim was that, taken together, they should represent a comprehensivepicture of the social and moral history of France in the early nineteenth century. Asyou might expect of such a prolific author, his work has generated an enormousamount of criticism. The bibliographies above represent a selection of some of themore accessible secondary material written in English.

The first two sections below provide a contextual discussion of Balzac. They describethe rationale behind the large project of The Human Comedy and Balzac’s placewithin the nineteenth-century tradition of Realist literature. The sections thereafterdeal with the separate issues of:

• characterisation (Balzac’s use of contrast, the character of Vautrin)

• sensation, genre, mystery and melodrama

• themes (the opposition between Paris and the provinces, the motif of money, therelationship between parents and children)

• narrative voice

• language.

The chapter concludes with a list of learning outcomes and sample examinationquestions.

BackgroundBalzac documented the life of his times in his novels, and so you should make surethat you understand some of the important events in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French social and political history – an awareness of some of the keyhistorical moments will actually enhance your enjoyment of the novels! EugénieGrandet, for instance, describes the social and political changes that took placebetween the French Revolution in 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830, whereas OldGoriot is set in 1819–1820, just after Napoleon’s downfall. In Eugénie Grandet wesee Balzac as a commentator on contemporary events; in Old Goriot, he is writingwith the benefit of hindsight.

Familiarise yourself with some of the following key events in the history of France

about which Balzac expected his readers to be well informed:

• Fall of the Bastille in Paris (14 July 1789).

• Declaration of the Rights of Man (27 August 1789).

• Nationalisation of church property (2 November 1789).

• France’s ancient provinces divided into administrative départements (12

November 1789).

• Civil Constitution of the Clergy (12 July 1790).

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The Novel

• France becomes a constitutional monarchy (3 September 1791).

• Legislative Assembly governs France (October 1791–September 1792).

• French Republic declared (22 September 1792).

• The Jacobins oust the Girondins as the most powerful revolutionary party

(November 1792).

• Execution of Louis XVI (21 January 1793.)

• Coalition against revolutionary France formed by Britain, Austria, Prussia, Spain

and some lesser powers (13 February 1793).

• Committee of Public Safety established in Paris (6 April 1793.)

• Christianity officially abolished (5 October 1793).

• Rules of the Directory established (3 November 1795).

• Napoleon Bonaparte becomes First Consul (December 1799).

• Peace of Amiens (27 March 1802) between Britain and France.

• Renewed war between Britain and France (May 1803).

• Establishment of the (first) Empire (16 May and 2 December 1804).

• French navy defeated by Lord Nelson at Trafalgar (21 October 1805).

• Napoleon defeats Russo–Austrian armies at Austerlitz (2 December 1805).

• A ‘continental system’ binds most of Europe to Napoleonic France (1808).

• Peninsular War begins with British intervention in Portugal (1809).

• Napoleon annexes much of the north European coast from Holland into the Baltic

(1810).

• French invasion of Russia and retreat from Moscow (1812).

• Paris occupied by British and their allies (30 March 1814).

• Louis XVIII enters Paris (3 May 1814).

• Congress of Vienna opens (1 November 1814).

• Napoleon returns to France (1 March 1815) and forces the new king to flee; there

followed ‘The Hundred Days’ terminating in Wellington’s victory at Waterloo (18

June 1815).

• Louis XVIII restored (18 July 1815): ‘The Restoration of the Bourbons’.

• Charles X succeeds to the throne (September 1824).

• Invasion of Algeria (July 1830).

• Charles X abdicates following the July (1830) Revolution in Paris.

• Louis Philippe elected King of the French (7 August 1830).

• censorship of the press and repression of political radicalism (‘The September

Laws’, 1835).

A useful book that puts Balzac in an historical context is Ronnie Butler’s Balzac andthe French Revolution.

31


The Human Comedy cycleBefore we consider in detail the novels Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot let us lookfirst at the larger framework of The Human Comedy.

Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot were first published as parts of a 12-volume seriesentitled Studies of Nineteenth-century Manners, subdivided into three groups: Scenesof Private Life, Scenes of Provincial Life and Scenes of Parisian Life. Both EugénieGrandet and Old Goriot appeared as part of Scenes of Private Life. The three Sceneswere yoked under the general title The Human Comedy in 1841. Balzac’s aim for thisvast, ambitious project was to echo Dante’s Divine Comedy (begun about 1307), andas a novelist he was concerned not so much with making stories as with providing anaccurate account for his contemporaries of the kind of society in which they wereliving. In 1842, in his famous preface to The Human Comedy, he wrote that if Frenchsociety was to be the historian then he was to be merely the secretary:

…by making an inventory of vices and virtues, by bringing together the main

products of the passions, by depicting particular types of people, by choosing the

principal events of society, by composing types by bringing together features from

several different individuals, I would perhaps manage to write the history that so

many historians forget to write, that of manners and customs.

He went on to say that his aim was ‘to create a world with its own parish registers’.And he claimed that the world he carried round in his head and put down on paperwas more real, more interesting, than the world in which he was actually living. Oneof the most famous stories about him concerns Eugénie Grandet – both the novel andthe character who gives it its title. In 1833, at the time when he was writing EugénieGrandet, Balzac was at a Parisian café with some friends. They were debating thenature of French provincial society, when he suddenly interrupted the conversationand said ‘Yes, yes, all this is very interesting, but let’s talk about something moreimportant. Who is going to marry Eugénie Grandet?’ This merging of the real and thefictional is one of the defining features of The Human Comedy project.

Balzac described French society in such detail and with such thoroughness thatFrench readers of the time read his novels not just for entertainment but also forinformation. His novels were regarded as compellingly written narratives with strongcharacters and humour and as social documents. This was part of Balzac’s originalscheme. He wanted to depict the different facets of French cultural life as realisticallyas possible, and he sought to describe all areas of social life – urban, provincial andrural. In the preface to Eugénie Grandet in 1833, Balzac claimed that in writing thisnovel he was filling a gap in the literature of his time by dealing with life in theprovinces, and the way he juxtaposed life in the capital with life in the provinces wasof particular interest to the contemporary reader. In his pursuit of ‘real life’ Balzacresearched his novels. His descriptions of the provinces in the 1820s were often basedon real places, as indeed some of his characters were based on real people. ThisRealism has inspired many French critics and scholars to try to map his fictionalworlds against actual French locations. In the French editions there is much detailedinformation in the introductions and notes about which town Balzac is actuallyreferring to.

‘Comédie’ in French denotes drama or theatre. How does Balzac set the stage for action

in Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot? Look carefully at the opening paragraphs of the

novels, and the way the author describes interiors and landscapes. To what extent does

Balzac’s description of things serve as indexes to the inner lives of characters?

32

The Novel

In the preface of 1842, Balzac drew an explicit analogy between his grand literaryproject and the classificatory disciplines of history and science. The organisation ofhis fiction under the overarching title The Human Comedy was an attempt to emulatethe zoological sciences that grouped animals in terms of species and sub-species. Thehuman world, in his view, was also composed of genres and sub-genres, comparableto the animal world’s division into ‘species’. (Note that Old Goriot is dedicated to azoologist called Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.) In studying Eugénie Grandet and OldGoriot, we must remember that they fit into a larger project, and they were intendedto represent variations on the theme of human social life.

Consider the implications of Balzac’s adoption of a taxonomical (that is,

classificatory) model for structuring his fiction. Think about the consequences that this

might have for the structure of not only the entire Human Comedy but the structure of

individual novels within the larger framework. What stresses does Balzac’s notion of a

‘grand scheme’ have for the writer in general? What narrative strategies might a writer

employ to create a sense of unity and coherence? Think about the Aristotelian notions

of time and place, and also the role and function of characters.

RealismIn the nineteenth century Realism reflected, in the most direct way, the new social andpolitical conditions of nineteenth-century man and woman. The culmination of theEnlightenment in first the American and then the French Revolutions gave Westernhumanity the material conditions in which self-consciousness about issues likeRealism became possible. The move towards political and social democracy in Francewas particularly significant for Realism, because art and literature also becamedemocratised. The middle classes (which were rapidly growing in number) and thepoor had been previously ignored, but in the nineteenth century they becameimportant subjects for Realist writers and painters. Nothing was regarded as tooignoble or ugly to be painted. In Émile Zola’s novel The Masterpiece (1886), forexample, the artist-hero, Charles Lantier, prefers to find inspiration in a pile ofcabbages rather than the picturesque medievalism of the Romantics. So Realismgained strength in the nineteenth century and it was associated, particularly in France,with the expression of new, radical forces. Although Realist modes of writing wereestablished before the nineteenth century, Realism as a conscious mode was notpossible, because individual perceptions of external reality were bound up still withmetaphysical systems of belief and faith.

The novels of Balzac reflect these social and political changes, and The HumanComedy can be read as his attempt to represent contemporary French society in allits manifestations – the worst aspects alongside the best. In Eugénie Grandet and OldGoriot, Balzac is not interested in revisiting historical moments: his stories reside inthe present, where he finds his inspiration and material. He tells the story of his owntimes and life in post-revolutionary France. He had what Linda Nochlin has describedin her book Realism as an enthusiasm for giving a ‘truthful, objective and impartialrepresentation of the real world, based on a meticulous observation of contemporarylife’. Contemporaneity was, she maintains, the most crucial element in Realist writingand painting. The past was no longer seen as the sole subject for art. It had to beabout the here and now – what was tangible and visible, and could be established bymaterial fact.

Karl Marx admired Balzac’s novels because he said that Balzac understood classsociety. In Volume 3 of Das Kapital (1894), Marx described Balzac as ‘a novelist whois in general distinguished by his profound grasp of real conditions’. Balzacunderstood the social and economic shift away from the aristocratic in France to the

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mechanical and the bourgeois. He understood the nature of the underclass, the‘Parisian catspaws’ as he described them, ‘who do not even know the names of thosewhose chestnuts they pull out of the fire’ (Old Goriot, Chapter 1). Balzac’s sensitivityto the details of French society, from the highest to the lowest echelons, probablyinspired Somerset Maugham’s comment in Ten Novels and Their Authors (1954) thatBalzac was a ‘vulgar little man’. This method of surveying and detailing the entireorganism, the entire social spectrum, becomes a defining feature of writers, artists,philosophers and scientists right across Europe in the nineteenth century.

The Realist novelist is often described metaphorically as a doctor who examines the

parts of anatomy to understand the whole. How successful do you think this

metaphor is for describing the work of Balzac? You might like to consider Chapter 15

of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), where the reference to the processes of

medical research may be taken as a metaphor for the approach of the Realist writer.

Balzac described his role as a writer in 1833 as that of a humble copyist, but thiscomment should not be taken at face value. The French existentialist writer and critic,Jean-Paul Sartre, made reference to the complex notion of Balzac’s Realism in hisnovel, Nausea (1938), where the main character, seated to dine at a provincialrestaurant, is trying to read a passage in Eugénie Grandet concerning a conversationbetween Eugénie and her mother. He is however distracted from his reading by aconversation at a neighbouring table and is struck by the difference between the ‘real-life’ conversation – personal, fragmentary and incomprehensible – and the so-called‘realistic’ conversation in the novel – structured and coherent. You might like toconsider the notion of ‘realistic’ in relation to your own reading of these two novelsby Balzac.

To what extent does Balzac transcribe in a literal sense his own life and times? How

does he ‘shape’ his material into fiction? Is it useful to see his characters as life-like

or larger than life? Some critics have described his approach as ‘imperialist’ rather

than Realist. What do you think they mean by that?

CharacterisationBalzac’s novels teem with characters.

You might find it useful, after reading the novels, to ‘map’ the characters against the

narrative structure – make a list of them, noting when they appear and how they

relate to one another.

In Old Goriot, for example, there are the microcosms of the Maison Vauquer and thefashionable parts of Paris. In the Maison Vauquer, there is a hierarchy of charactersthat corresponds to the physical structure of the boarding-house and the amounts paidas rent by the boarders – Old Goriot, Eugène de Rastignac, Mademoiselle Taillefer,Vautrin, Mademoiselle Michonneau, Poiret, Madame Vauquer, and others such asBianchon, the medical student. In the fashionable areas of Paris, we meet Viscountessde Beauséant, Countess Anastasie de Restaud, Baroness Delphine de Nucingen, theDuchess de Langeais and various noblemen. In Eugénie Grandet, the story revolvesaround the town of Saumur, at the centre of which is the Grandet householdconsisting of Old Grandet himself, Madame Grandet, Eugénie, Nanon and,temporarily, Charles. Around this group are the satellite figures of the townsfolk –among whom the most prominent are the Cruchots and the Grassins, whose sole aimis to lay claim to Grandet’s enormous wealth. By mapping the characters and their

34

The Novel

environments in the way described above, thereby establishing their importance in thenovel and their interrelationships, you will, hopefully, see the complex nature andcomprehensive scope of Balzac’s writing.

Focus on the treatments of the servant figures in the novels – Nanon and Fat Sylvie.

How does Balzac relate their social role to their function in the narrative structure?

ContrastThe texture of Balzac’s writing is frequently created by contrast of one kind or other.Contrast was one of the main principles around which Balzac constructed his novels,and he made particular use of character contrast. In Eugénie Grandet, the callousindifference of the worthless Charles, who, we are told ‘provided…a strange contrastto the worthy provincials, who were already rather sickened by his aristocraticmanners’ (Chapter 2), is juxtaposed against the devoted and trusting Eugénie. Look atSection 4 and study the comparison drawn between Grandet’s betrayal of the regionalwinegrowers and Charles’s betrayal of Eugénie. Indeed we might even point to alarger contrast between the moral behaviour of men and women in this novel. Themiser Grandet lacks a moral sense and we see this in his behaviour and attitude to hiswife. His nephew Charles also abuses the woman who loves him – he takes Eugénie’smoney and departs. Only the women show a glimmering of human feelings, but theyare a constituency without power (or money).

Do you agree with this view? Compare the presentation of female characters in both

novels.

As well as arranging his characters in ways that invite comparison, Balzac usescharacter as a lens through which we view the vices and virtues of nineteenth-centuryFrench society. In Old Goriot, for example, Parisian society is shown to be greedy,corrupt and unjust through the thoughts and actions of greedy, corrupt and unjustindividuals. As Diana Festa-McCormick claims in her book, Honoré de Balzac(1979):

Hardly a manifestation of the human condition is left unstirred; all desires, conscious

and unconscious, licit and illicit, are given life within the hearts of the characters. We

catch their expressions as we would in real life, through actions or words, a gesture, a

revealing glance, the tone of a voice, a hidden tear, a smile or laughter. We discern

the nuances as the student Rastignac himself learns to do. (p.78)

What does Eugène de Rastignac learn as he journeys across Paris, between the

Maison Vauquer and Madame de Bauséant’s palace, in search of personal fulfilment

and professional success?

VautrinMuch has been written about the character of Vautrin (based on a real criminal whobecame the Chief of Police). He functions in a more complex way than othercharacters in Old Goriot in that he not only reflects the dysfunctional nature of urbanlife, but he also serves as the vehicle for Balzac’s own bitter feelings about Frenchsociety. Vautrin is a figure of temptation and revolt rather like Satan in Milton’sParadise Lost, but rather than against God, his revolt is against Man, and he usesEugène de Rastignac in order to triumph and dominate.

Look at the long conversation between Rastignac and Vautrin in the garden (Chapter

2). Is Balzac presenting us with a modern Garden of Eden scene? Note the ways in

which Vautrin criticises society, and consider in particular his advice to Rastignac

about adopting the same unscrupulous means as society in order to win through. How

do you think this relates to Balzac’s own views about the state of Restoration France?

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Sensation, genre, mystery and melodramaThe deathbed scenes in the novels are sites for melodrama, and you should thinkabout the way that Balzac weaves together Realism and sensation, genre, mystery andmelodrama. The combination of these elements accounted for the contemporarypopular appeal of Old Goriot, although one critic observed that Balzac’s ‘passion fortruth was often in conflict with his lust for marvels’.

Do you agree with this comment that there is a conflict between these two

tendencies, or does Balzac effect a successful compromise?

Look carefully at the portrayal of the characters of Goriot and Vautrin, for example.

Consider the aura of mystery that surrounds both these characters at the opening of

the story, and then compare this with the sensational and melodramatic death of

Goriot and the arrest of Vautrin later on. How does the sensation, genre, mystery and

melodrama surrounding the lives of these two characters contrast with the realistic

portrayal of Rastignac and the Maison Vauquer? How does Balzac gradually build a

picture of Vautrin, one of his most celebrated characters, throughout the novel? Make

a list of instances where Vautrin is seen though the eyes of others and where his

character makes a more direct appeal to us through his own speech and action.

There is one final point about Balzac’s characterisation that must be made before wemove on, and that is his innovative use of recurrent characters. One of the ways inwhich he attempted to interrelate his novels was by creating characters who wouldreappear across the whole œuvre. He first employed this technique in Old Goriot, andthe characters in this novel who resurface across The Human Comedy cycle includeAnastasie Restaud, Madame de Bauséant and Rastignac. Vautrin appears in severalnovels, including Lost Illusions (Illusions Perdues) and The Splendours and Miseriesof Courtesans (Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes).

ThemesParis and the provinces

The opposition between the city and the country goes back at least as far as theAlexandrian poets of the third century BC, but it also became a preoccupation ofFrench Realist writers and artists in the nineteenth century, including Balzac, GustaveFlaubert and Zola. They were interested in the effects of industrialisation andtechnology on traditional modes of life, and the role played by Paris as the culturaland economic centre of France. The difference between life in the capital and life inthe provinces becomes a common theme in their novels. In Old Goriot, for example,Rastignac, a young man from the provinces, becomes corrupted by Paris, and inEugénie Grandet, Charles Grandet arrives at Saumur from the capital and looks downhis nose at his provincial relatives. In many ways, Balzac is conducting an experimentthrough his fiction. By placing provincial characters in the city and urban types in theprovinces, we the readers are able to witness the effects of the environment on theindividual. In Old Goriot, Paris itself is subdivided into rich and poor areas.

Make some notes on the way Paris and the provinces are portrayed in the novels.

How does Balzac establish a tension between the different districts of Saint Marceau

and Saint Germain in Old Goriot? What kind of appeal would his interest in

provincial life have for the contemporary reader? How does Balzac characterise the

existence of city dwellers in particular? How do other Realist writers of the period

depict modern city life?

36

The Novel

MoneyThe exuberance of the money-making process, it can be argued, is the real subject ofall Balzac’s novels. He was very interested in money, as were his readers, who lookedto some of his novels as practical guides to understanding the complex notions ofstocks, shares and equity.

The theme of money is explored in the greatest detail in Eugénie Grandet and thestory of Grandet’s miserliness and its effects on all those around him. Grandet makesa lot of money by understanding the way society works, and his manipulation offinance can be read as an example of what happened in France after 1789 when landowned by the Church was nationalised and subsequently bought not by the poorlandless peasants who worked on it, but by the rich in the towns. Through hispurchase of such land Grandet makes his fortune, and the novel describes hisobsession with wealth and his efforts to maximise profit at the expense of human life.

As a social Realist, Balzac lays bare in many of his novels the workings of a societyincreasingly dominated by commercial interests and the lustre of money. The openingdescription of Madame Vauquer’s boarders in Old Goriot, for example, sorts andgrades them in terms of how much they pay or are worth. The ‘seven boarders wereMadame Vauquer’s spoiled children, and she distributed her attentions and favoursamong them with an astronomer’s precision according to the sum of money eachpaid’ (Section 1). In Eugénie Grandet, the miser Grandet takes on some of thecharacteristics of the gold he covets, and we are given extensive descriptions offinancial transactions. With the money he has acquired through the buying-up of landGrandet acquires government stock, and this allows him to speculate – he is extremelygood at this, knowing when, for example, to sell his gold for paper money.

In what ways can we read the financial dealings of Grandet as an illustration of the

financial growth and development of France in the nineteenth century? How is the

handling of money used to symbolise character?

Parents and childrenBoth novels have at their centre monomaniac figures (Goriot and Grandet) whosedecline and fall are described as relating to their neglect of family values and theirsingle-minded pursuit of a single desire. Both stories end tragically. Goriot, likeShakespeare’s King Lear, is spurned by his daughters who unfeelingly squander hisgifts in order to achieve a higher social standing. In Eugène de Rastignac he finds analternative substitute son. There are many similarities between the story of King Learand Old Goriot. Look at the final scenes where Goriot is slowly dying. The ravings ofthe old noodle merchant contain painful truths, which reveal to Eugène de Rastignacthe imperfect but real nature of society. The monomania of Grandet is similarlyoverwhelming, but, unlike Goriot, he is incapable of loving his wife and daughtermore than his wealth and power. Even on his deathbed he refuses to renounce hismaterialism. ‘Take good care of everything,’ he says to his daughter, ‘You will have toaccount to me for all of it in the next world.’ (Chapter 5)

By what particular means does Balzac represent parental authority? How does the

story of Old Goriot differ from Shakespeare’s King Lear? Are these moral tales?

What do we learn through the characters of Eugène de Rastignac and Eugénie?

Narrative voiceA major feature of Balzac is the extent to which he intervenes as author and narratorin his novels to address the reader, telling us what to think and how to read. Unlike hiscontemporaries, Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, Balzac did not cultivate a

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transparent narrative voice. Instead, he exercises an authority in his novels, urging usto see the world as he sees it. Unable to stomach Balzac’s self-assured rhetoric, thecritic Roland Barthes claimed that reading the novels actually made him sick.

Find places in Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot where Balzac makes his presence felt.

Consider, for example, Balzac’s commentaries on the life of a young girl in Chapter 3

of Eugénie Grandet. What are we supposed to make of his intervention? Can you find

other instances in the novels where Balzac asserts his views? How may we reconcile

Balzac’s forceful intrusions with his assertion that he is a ‘humble copyist’?

LanguageYou are obviously reading Balzac’s novels in translation, and it would be difficult toanalyse some of the linguistic structures in detail, but you might consider Balzac’s useof language as either a way of revealing the interrelationships between individuals oras a kind of coinage, as something traded by individuals for certain benefits ormaterial gains. This latter notion of language as a form of currency is an old one(think about the phrase ‘to coin a phrase’ for example).

Two particular episodes are worth noting in this connection. In Old Goriot, theconversational nuances of the French working class are played out hilariously by theboarders who, when together, often lapse into ‘talking rama’ (Section 1). ‘Rama’ is averbal game that unites the boarders, who gain a certain coherence as a communitythrough a shared language. This episode provides comic relief in the story, but it alsodemonstrates Balzac’s acute sensitivity to the world in which he lived. He wasextremely attuned to the changing nuances of everyday speech. ‘Rama’, as Balzacstates, refers to the recent inventions of the Diorama and Panorama – visualconstructions that permit a comprehensive survey of a subject – both of which mightbe described as the model for Balzac’s own approach in surveying the entire structureof society.

In Eugénie Grandet language is manipulated by Grandet the miser to achieve a certainresult in a financial deal. In Chapter 4 he pretends to have speech and hearing defectswith the intention of ‘wearing out the patience of his business opponent and ofkeeping him so busy trying to express Grandet’s thoughts that the opponent lost sightof his own.’ Language is used expertly here to buy time and hence to win a deal: it is,in effect, a literal example of ‘linguistic coinage’.

Are there other episodes where language is used in a particular way to reveal

something about the nature of nineteenth-century French society?

38

The Novel

Learning outcomesBy the end of this chapter and the relevant reading, you should be able to:

• demonstrate familiarity with some of the key events in French cultural history in

the nineteenth century and relate them to the historical settings of Balzac’s novels

• situate Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot within the larger scheme of The Human

Comedy

• define and apply the term ‘Realism’ to Balzac’s writing

• identify some of the ways in which structure is provided by characterisation

• trace the development of certain themes in Balzac’s novels, especially those

relating to moral, social and economic issues

• describe Balzac’s narrative voice

• approach the work of other Realist writers using your familiarity with Balzac’s

approach to his subject.

Sample essay questions1. In what ways can Balzac’s work be seen as reflecting the nineteenth-century

obsession with scientific enquiry? Discuss with reference to at least two novels.

2. Discuss the notion of social class in Balzac’s novels.

3. In 1834, Balzac wrote, ‘It was necessary in order to be complete, to show a moral

sewer of Paris that gives the effect of a disgusting sore’. What contrast does

Balzac make between the city and the provinces? Discuss with reference to at

least two novels.

4. To what extent can we read Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot as the stories of

rebellion by children against their parents?

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Chapter 3: Section B topic study: modern Gothic

Chapter 3

Section B topic study: modernGothicEssential reading

John Fowles (1963) The Collector. (London: Vintage, 1998) [ISBN 009974371X].

Iris Murdoch (1963) The Unicorn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987)

[ISBN 014002476X].

Please note that new paperback editions of modern novels like these frequentlyappear. You may use any edition that you find convenient.

Recommended secondary readingOn modern GothicNot a great deal has been published on modern Gothic specifically (though there ismasses on ‘traditional’ Gothic). The only full-length text on the topic is:

Sage, Victor Modern Gothic: A Reader. (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

1996) [ISBN 0-219-04208-9].

Two essays are recommended:

Moore-Gilbert, Bart ‘The Return of the Repressed: Gothic and the 1960s novel’ in

Moore-Gilbert, Bart and John Seed (eds) Cultural Revolution?: The Challenge of

the Arts in the 1960s. (London: Routledge, 1992) [ISBN 0-415-07825-3]

181–200.

Stevenson, Randall ‘Contemporary Gothic’ in his The British Novel Since the

Thirties: An Introduction. (London: Batsford, 1986) [ISBN 0-7134-4664-1]

184–89.

On FowlesThis selection covers texts with useful material on The Collector.

Conradi, Peter John Fowles. (London: Macmillan, 1982) [ISBN 0-333-32846-9].

Kane, Richard Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles: Didactic Demons in

Modern Fiction. (London: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988)

[ISBN 0838633242].

Loveday, Simon The Romances of John Fowles. (London, Macmillan, 1988)

[ISBN 0333444825 (pbk)].

On MurdochThis selection covers texts with useful material on The Unicorn.

Byatt, A.S. (1970) Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch. (London:

Vintage, 1994) [ISBN 0099302241].

Dipple, Elizabeth Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit. (London: Methuen, 1982)

[ISBN 0-416-31290-X].

Gerstenberger, Donna Iris Murdoch. (London: Associated Universities Press, 1975)

[ISBN 0-8387-7731-7].

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The Novel

Kane, Richard Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and John Fowles: Didactic Demons in

Modern Fiction. (London: Associated Universities Press, 1988)

[ISBN 1087-04575-4].

Scholes, Robert Fabulation and Metafiction. (London: University of Chicago Press,

1967) [ISBN 0-252-00704-2].

IntroductionThe aim of this chapter is to introduce you to one of the most widely used genres incontemporary Western novel writing and to consider larger questions such as: what isa genre? and how and why do genres change and develop in literary history?

The history of GothicTo illustrate one Section B topic study, we shall be offering a genre study of modernGothic. Gothic has, of course, had a long and controversial history since itsemergence in the mid-eighteenth century with texts such as Walpole’s Castle ofOtranto and Beckford’s Vathek. It flourished in the Romantic period (approximately1780–1830) in the hands of writers like Anne Radcliffe, M.G. Lewis, Charles Maturinand Mary Shelley.

The early phase of Gothic is covered in two other subject guides: it would be a great

advantage to you to consult them to get a more detailed historical sense of the genre

and its characteristic themes and conventions. They are the Personal study

programme and the Romanticism units. It would be even more advantageous if you

could read one or two examples of Gothic from earlier periods. If time is pressing,

select short texts (some Romantic Gothic fictions, in particular, are extremely long).

Gothic continued to provide an inspiration to Victorian fiction, too, where it resurfacesin writers as diverse as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Towardsthe end of the nineteenth century it experienced something of a revival in works likeR.L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray andBram Stoker’s Dracula. It was also exploited by Modernist writers like Henry James,whose The Turn of the Screw is widely considered to be a classic of the genre, andJoseph Conrad. Conrad’s The Secret Sharer and Heart of Darkness both havesubstantial Gothic elements. Virginia Woolf, moreover, wrote sympathetically about itas a genre in which women writers had been prominent and particularly adept.

In addition to these early works, women are also very prominent in the contemporary

revival of Gothic. You might want to think about why they have been so attracted to

the genre throughout its history.

Gothic never entirely died out as a resource for serious writers in the period1900–1960, as some of the work of Evelyn Waugh and Mervyn Peake, especially,suggests. However it certainly fell into critical disfavour, as is indicated by the workof the Leavises, two of the most important literary critics in the period 1930–1960. InFiction and the Reading Public (1932), Q.D. Leavis railed against its ‘clumsy call fortears, pity, shudders and so forth’ and was strongly critical of writers like CharlotteBrontë and Dickens, who were most interested in its possibilities. After the war, herhusband F.R. Leavis sustained the attack. Revaluation (1956), for instance, dismissedwhat it described as ‘the trashy fantasies and cheap excitements of the Terror school’as unworthy of any serious attention. Thus when D.P. Varma wrote his study of thegenre, The Gothic Flame, in 1957 his tone was largely elegiac; Gothic is seen as apurely historical phenomenon, a genre which had nothing to offer the seriouscontemporary writer.

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Gothic nonetheless continued to flourish in the period 1930–60 in the domain of‘popular’ culture. In the post-war era, it took forms as diverse as the ‘horror’ fiction ofbestsellers like Dennis Wheatley and, above all, cinema. The Hammer House ofHorror series began in 1957, inspired by the success of Hollywood Gothic in the1930s and endless versions of the Dracula and Frankenstein stories helped Hammer tobecome one of the most successful British film houses over the next 20 years. With‘Psycho’ and ‘The Birds’ (both 1963), moreover, Alfred Hitchcock demonstrated that‘horror’ retained the potential not just for sensation, but for psychologicalinvestigations of considerable subtlety and power. From around 1960, Gothic oncemore began to claim the interest of ‘serious’ writers.

As the Suggestions for further study in this chapter demonstrate, it was not justFowles and Murdoch who became aware of the potential of Gothic in this period.Indeed, aside from the authors mentioned there, many other more recent British andAmerican writers have reworked the genre, to the extent that it has now become oneof the dominant genres in contemporary writing. Its critical rehabilitation has beenequally impressive. Since the late 1970s a vast number of books have been publishedon the genre, notable among which are Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic (1978),David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (1983), Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: TheLiterature of Subversion (1983), Chris Baldick’s In the Shadow of Frankenstein(1991) and Fred Botting’s Gothic (1996).

Gothic elements in Fowles and MurdochIn the first instance, both Fowles and Murdoch affiliate themselves to the Gothic byplacing their work in an explicit relationship to earlier examples of the genre. In herimportant essay of 1959, The Sublime and Beautiful Revisited, Iris Murdoch praisesEmily Brontë, Hawthorne, Melville and Dostoevsky as writers ‘to whom we wouldnot want to deny a first place’ in the literary hall of fame; this is clear recognition ofthe achievement of a by then largely marginalised tradition, the resources of whichshe herself was to explore in the next decade. (The title of Murdoch’s essay echoesnot just Kant, but also Burke, whose Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1756)provided a critical manifesto for eighteenth-century and Romantic Gothic.) Theominous opening of Murdoch’s The Unicorn, moreover, explicitly recalls Harker’sapproach to the Count’s castle in Dracula, and a series of scenes link the centralfigure, Hannah Crean-Smith, to Dracula himself. Hannah also resembles theprotagonist of Carmilla, another Gothic fiction by Sheridan Le Fanu, a nineteenth-century Anglo–Irish writer for whom Murdoch has expressed her admiration.

What effect does this invocation of Dracula have on our perception of Hannah? How

does it complicate our perception of Hannah as a victim? What are the implications

of Murdoch’s re-gendering of the Dracula figure as female?

Fowles is equally fascinated by earlier phases of Gothic. Thus while The FrenchLieutenant’s Woman (1969) cannot really be considered a Gothic novel, it is nonethelesssignificant that the model for Sarah Woodruff’s elusive ‘double’ identity is Dr Jekyll andMr Hyde, which Fowles’ narrator describes as ‘the best guidebook to the age’. Bycontrast, The Collector refers explicitly to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.

At the level of motif, too, these novels reveal their generic lineage. Let’s have a lookat The Collector. First of all it is in the form of a tale within a tale, like Shelley’sFrankenstein, Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner and James’ The Turn of theScrew and, as is often the case with these forebears, both frame and inner narrativesare mediated by unreliable narrators. The Unicorn has something of the apparentlyrambling or expansive structure of many Romantic Gothic texts, with a continualproliferation of new plot-lines and unexpected twists. Fowles’ text has a governess

42

The Novel

figure, Miranda, who recalls the protagonist in James’ The Turn of the Screw. MarionTaylor in The Unicorn is another governess (or companion) figure who is made toface the limitations of her own knowledge by her ‘charge’. Many earlier Gothic textsfocus on orphan figures and, of course, Clegg too is an orphan in the Fowles novel.Earlier Gothic is often preoccupied with extreme states of mind – even ‘madness’ –and clearly there is strong evidence for seeing both Hannah and Clegg as in somesense ‘mad’.

To what extent are Clegg and Hannah ‘mad’ or simply extremely clever or

manipulative?

In terms of the physical settings of the novels, note how the architectural conventionsof earlier Gothic return. While Clegg’s house is not to be compared in grandeur withthe castles and monasteries of Romantic Gothic, like them it is very old (built in1625), it is isolated, it is claustrophobic and has a basement room, once a priest’shole, that functions as a kind of dungeon.

What uses does Murdoch’s novel make of the architecture of the great house?

Suspense and horror, so characteristic of earlier Gothic, are heightened incontemporary equivalents like The Collector and The Unicorn by similar plotconventions, including kidnap and imprisonment – mental as well as physical. Finally,as in Romantic Gothic, violence of manifold kinds and sexual ‘deviancy’, includingincest (hinted at in Hannah’s marriage to her cousin), voyeurism and sado-masochismrecur in the work of Murdoch and Fowles.

What attitudes do Fowles and Murdoch invite us to take towards ‘deviant’ sexuality?

To what extent are they challenging the dominant discourses about sexuality current

before 1960? Can these novels be considered ‘permissive’ on the issue of sexuality?

But there are important differences, too, between contemporary Gothic and its earlierforms. Modern Gothic usually has a surface realism that allows the reader to suspenddisbelief in the face of apparently extreme events and situations. It tends to‘domesticate’ many of the genre’s established conventions, so that settings which aretraditionally distanced in time or space are so now only vestigially or symbolically.

When and where is Murdoch’s novel set? Is it set in England? What is the

significance of these aspects of its setting?

The same is true of social settings in modern Gothic. Although The Unicorn is setamong ‘the gentry’, most modern Gothic – like The Collector – prefers a moreordinary social milieu than the religious orders or aristocracy favoured by RomanticGothic. In certain respects Clegg is quite ordinary.

What factors make Clegg appear so ordinary?

Most obviously, the often unambiguously supernatural aspect of earlier Gothicdisappears; ghosts, vampires and monsters survive only metaphorically, within apsychologically realistic framework. Possession, for instance, as in the case of Clegg orGerald Scottow, or even Pip Lejour and Effingham Cooper, is transformed intoobsession. Each behaves ‘monstrously’ without ever threatening to become non-human.The ‘domestication’ of modern Gothic relates to one of its most important insights, thatthe everyday and the ‘normal’ may be sources of horror and terror quite as potent asanything conceived of by earlier Gothic. In contemporary Gothic, domestic violence can

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be as sickening as any of the torture scenes in Romantic Gothic; an apparentlyinnocuous neighbour or friend may become a ‘monster’ (consider the current spate ofchild-abuse scandals), and family and friends can be emotional ‘vampires’.

The cultural politics of modern Gothic The Collector is a particularly good example of how modern Gothic underminescultural and political categories like the ‘normal’ and the ‘perverse’, the ‘good’ andthe ‘bad’, or the ‘sane’ and the ‘mad’. Ostensibly, it seems quite easy to place Cleggin traditional moral terms; after all, his kidnapping and imprisonment of Mirandaleads directly to her death. Even in his day-to-day treatment of her, Clegg is often vile.

Collect some examples of Clegg’s behaviour which seem to you particularly

reprehensible.

It is similarly tempting to dismiss Clegg as simply mad. Miranda, certainly, describeshim as ‘possessed, quite out of his own control’. On Clegg’s trip to Lewes after hisvictim’s death, it occurs to him, too, that he is insane:

I kept remembering how people in Lewes seemed to look at me sometimes, like the

people in that doctor’s waiting-room. They all knew I was mad.

But despite the invitation to judge Clegg in such black and white terms, a number offactors prevent the reader from responding so simply. Perhaps the most importantreason for this is the way that Clegg is portrayed not simply as a ‘perverse’ individual,which on one level he undoubtedly is, but as representative – even stereotypically so –of a variety of attitudes which Fowles sees as characteristic of ‘mainstream society’.At one point in her diary, Miranda writes about the working-class protagonists ofcelebrated 1950s writers like John Braine and Alan Sillitoe. She finds Sillitoe’sSaturday Night and Sunday Morning (1959) particularly disquieting and criticises theauthor in the following terms: ‘Perhaps Alan Sillitoe wanted to attack the society thatproduces such people. But he doesn’t make it clear’. This seems to provide a clueabout Fowles’ real interest in this novel; he is fascinated not so much by the pathologyof a single individual, but by the way that society has helped to ‘produce’ Clegg’sbehaviour. The issue is highlighted by Clegg’s use of language.

What kind of language does Clegg use? Is it ‘original’ to him? If not, where does it

come from? What is Miranda’s view of his language? How might one argue that,

rather than language bestowing upon Clegg autonomy and subjectivity, it seems

rather to confirm him as ‘subject’ – in the sense of being subject to, or subjected to,

the social order which language both constructs and embodies?

This lack of subjectivity is partly evident in Clegg’s lack of imagination and theautomatic way that he so often responds to Miranda. His articulation of linguisticcliché underlines his reproduction of stereotypical forms of behaviour whichobviously originate in the society outside him. For example, great stress is laid uponthe way that Clegg constructs his self-image and thus his sense of identity, bytranslating his experience into and out of the narrative forms of the mass mediaculture which surrounds him. Before actually meeting Miranda, for instance, Cleggadmits: ‘I used to think of stories where I met her, did things she admired, married herand all that’.

When plotting the kidnap, what narratives does Clegg employ? Collect other

examples of Clegg’s self-perception in terms of the narratives of the ‘popular’ media.

How significant is this pattern of self-construction?

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Despite Clegg’s emphasis on his isolation and alienation from the society around him,which might incline the reader to dismiss him as a freak, it is quite obvious in otherways how ‘deeply conventional’ he is. Even in his appearance, Clegg unconsciouslyattempts to approximate to a particular stylistic and semiotic ‘norm’. Miranda noteshow his ‘trousers always have creases, his shirts are always clean. I really think he’dbe happier if he wore starched collars’. His attitude to art is also deeply conventional.When Miranda asks him to choose among her drawings, Clegg ‘picked all those thatlooked most like the wretched bowl of fruit’.

Gender issuesBut there are more important ways in which Clegg’s conventionality manifests itself.

In his expectations of gender roles and interaction, he conforms to the role expectedof an old-fashioned ‘nice young man’. Thus he paradoxically treats Miranda at timesas a ‘guest’, which Miranda sees as expressive of a peculiar kind of ‘chivalry’. He isforever behaving ‘according to some mad notion of the “proper thing to do”’. Indeed,their relationship sometimes seems troublingly close to a conventionally romanticone, as when Miranda tries to teach him to dance or when he takes her for the star-litnight-walk. At times, Clegg plays the attentive husband: ‘I got her breakfast…shegave me any shopping she wanted done…I cleaned up the house after I got back’.

By the same token, of course, Clegg attempts to make Miranda conform to thebehaviour he deems appropriate to her status a ‘nice young woman’. He is thushorrified when she uses ‘unfeminine’ language and is deeply upset when Miranda‘offers’ herself to him. Indeed his disappointment at such behaviour, arguably, marksthe turning point of the novel, after which Miranda is doomed. What Fowles appearsto allegorise, in such horrifying fashion, in this parody of the norm is the potential forthe ‘normal’ marriage, similarly, to imprison and deform.

Now consider similar issues in Murdoch’s novel. What expectations do Marion and

Effingham have of ‘romantic’ love? Are these expectations any less coercive or

damaging than those which Clegg holds? What is Hannah’s view of love? What are

both authors saying about ‘modern love’?

Clegg’s misogyny is clearly echoed by the society around him. Again, the very clichéshe uses show the extent to which this is the case. After one argument with Miranda,Clegg comments: ‘She was just like a woman. Unpredictable. Smiling one minute andspiteful the next’. Appalled by Miranda’s ‘forwardness’, Clegg again retreats behindstereotype. ‘You’ve got a one-track mind, just like every woman’. The way that Cleggsees Miranda as something to collect – it ‘was like catching the mazarine Blue again’– is part of a larger process of the reification (i.e. objectification) of women, forexample in the advertisements which so often precondition Clegg’s expectations aboutMiranda. He comments with acerbic justice on the newspapers’ treatment of thekidnapping: ‘If she was ugly it would all have been two lines on the back page’.

The violence that Clegg manifests towards his victim is also troublingly present insociety at large. He fantasises about hitting Miranda across the face ‘as I saw it doneonce by a chap in a telly play’. His sexual expectations also seem conditioned by thepornography which society licenses and circulates. For example, he is much takenwith a work called Shoes, from which, he confesses, ‘I got some ideas’. Given theoverlap between Clegg’s behaviour and what is deemed ‘normal’ in society outside, itis not, perhaps, unreasonable for him to conclude that ‘a lot of people…would dowhat I did or similar things if they had the money and the time’. Indeed, towards theend of her ordeal, Miranda declares: ‘He becomes the norm’.

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Now consider such issues in Murdoch’s novel. Is Effingham’s attitude towards

Hannah anything like Clegg’s towards Miranda? How far are there parallels between

the behaviour of Clegg on the one hand and Scottow and Hannah’s husband, on the

other, toward their respective captives?

Much of the horror of The Collector, then, derives from the reader’s increasing sensethat Clegg is a representative rather than ‘perverse’ member of society. Thecontradictions in his treatment of Miranda correspond to those evident in widersociety. The novel most clearly brings this out by creating a distinct series of more orless explicit parallels between Clegg and Miranda’s ‘ideal’ man, G.P., who at onepoint in the narrative is likened to Jane Austen’s Mr Knightley, ‘a man in a million’.Thus G.P., like Clegg, deprives Miranda of liberty in a number of important ways.Twice she describes him as like G.B. Shaw’s Professor Higgins in Pygmalion withoutever fully grasping the implications of G.P.’s desire, like Clegg, to fashion her,Pygmalion-like, to his own idea of what a woman should be. G.P.’s success in thisrespect can be gauged by the number of times Miranda rehearses his opinions. Forinstance, when she comments on the state of contemporary England, she is honestenough to admit ‘these are all G.P.’s words and ideas’.

Does the reader share Miranda’s estimation of G.P.? If not, why not? Does Miranda

come to ‘see through’ G.P. by the end of her ordeal? Are there parallels to be drawn

in the relationship between Marion Taylor and her male mentors?

Miranda’s autonomy is limited in other ways by G.P. Like Clegg’s, his domineeringbehaviour contributes to Miranda’s passivity. On one of the few occasions whenMiranda does draw analogies between G.P. and Clegg, she comments thus: ‘But I’mnot being to the full at all. I’m just sitting and watching. Not only here. With G.P’. Aswith Clegg, G.P.’s power over Miranda is partly a function of his success in isolatingher. He is characteristically extremely rude and unwelcoming to her friends. Atmoments G.P.’s desire for dominance lapses into mental sadism of a kind Clegg isnever capable of. He is crushingly insensitive about Miranda’s artistic efforts whenshe first offers them for his inspection: ‘It was as if he had turned and hit me with hisfist, I couldn’t hide it’. He responds to her disappointment with his customary brutalflippancy: ‘Have a tragic love affaire. Have your ovaries cut out. Something’.

Examine the kind of views G.P. expresses about women. To what extent are they

comparable to those of Clegg?

Two other links between the supposedly ‘ideal’ G.P. and the ‘perverse’ Clegg areworth noting. First of all, of course, G.P. is another ‘collector’. Women have the samefunction in his life as butterflies do in Clegg’s. He boasts to Miranda:

I’ve met dozens of women and girls like you. Some I’ve known well, some I’ve

seduced against their better nature, two I’ve even married. Some I’ve hardly known at

all, just stood beside them at an exhibition, in the Tube, wherever.

As with Clegg, there is also an undercurrent of ‘perverse’ desire in his attitude toMiranda: ‘You’re just the daughter I’d like to have. That’s probably why I’ve wantedyou so much these last few months’. Such evidence again stresses the convergencebetween G.P. and Clegg. At one moment Miranda writes:

He shocked me, bullied me, taunted me – never in nasty ways. Obliquely. He didn’t

ever force me in any way.

While she is in fact referring to G.P., this could just as well be a description of Clegg.

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To what extent can Murdoch’s novel be described as a ‘feminist’ text? Are there

significant differences between her conception of gender politics and those of

Fowles? Deborah Johnson has deplored Murdoch’s ‘often explicit assumption of

“masculinist” perspectives and values, and its curious reluctance to deal directly or

non-ironically with women’s experience’. On the evidence of this text, do you think

that such criticisms are justified?

Class issuesFurther points of comparison between The Collector and The Unicorn include theirinterest in questions of class and their intensely self-conscious citation of, and allusionto, other, earlier literary texts. These interests coincide in the attention which each textpays to the role of ‘high’ culture in constructing social identities in modern societies.The Collector explicitly explores the way in which ‘high’ culture is a field of conflictarticulating wider class tensions. As you will no doubt have noticed, the text drawsheavily, if at times ironically, on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Despite his assumption of the name Ferdinand, Clegg is, of course, far closer to thedisadvantaged subject-position of Caliban. In Shakespeare’s text, Prospero andMiranda attempt to educate, or acculturate, their unfortunate host, before imprisoninghim. In Fowles’ text, Miranda’s attempts to ‘correct’ and develop Clegg’s aesthetictaste are expressive of her broader hostility to the somewhat indeterminate class towhich Clegg’s windfall affiliates him. She even uses the rhetoric of World War Two,describing herself as one of ‘the Few’, defending a tradition of ‘breeding’ and ‘high’culture against the barbarians represented by Clegg. In the end, she loses confidence,asserting that ‘there’s nothing to hold back the New People, they’ll grow stronger andstronger and swamp us’.

How does Miranda’s expression of such views affect the way we see her? To what

extent can Clegg be seen as a kind of Caliban, and therefore as a disadvantaged

individual, even a victim? Identify the other, more personal, circumstances in his life

which make him seem like a victim. What is the cultural/political significance of such

reversals in his status within the moral scheme of the novel?

Miranda’s attempt to provide Clegg with an aesthetic education is founded on thedelusion that access to the ‘right’ kind of culture will liberate him from the destructiveattitudes to women that have led to her imprisonment. Much modern Gothic issceptical that any distinction can be drawn between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture in thisrespect. This raises serious doubts about the status and function of ‘high’ culture, anda blurring of boundaries between culture and politics, which is symptomatic of thedecade in which these texts were written more generally.

Now consider class issues in Murdoch’s novel. What is the relationship of Dennis

Nolan to Hannah? What is the significance of his and Gerald’s class origin? How

does awareness of these facts affect our attitude to Hannah? How are gender relations

in the narratives which are cited in Murdoch’s novel characterised? Is their effect

beneficial on those who consume them, like Effingham?

Suggestions for further studyWhile we have concentrated on The Collector and The Unicorn in this chapter of thesubject guide, you need not feel obliged to stay with these texts. You can adapt thematerial above in a number of different ways. If you want to work up an author,instead of a genre study based around modern Gothic, you could read Fowles’ TheMagus (1966), or Murdoch’s A Severed Head (1961) or The Italian Girl (1964) which

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are also all modern Gothic novels. You might want to study other modern Gothicwriters – for example, Angela Carter, Muriel Spark, Jean Rhys, Emma Tennant or FayWeldon.

A selection of such texts might include Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1969) or ThePassion of New Eve (1975); Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) or TheDriver’s Seat (1970); Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1975) or Wild Nights (1979);Weldon’s Praxis (1978) or The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1982); Jean Rhys’sWide Sargasso Sea (1966); David Storey’s Radcliffe (1963).If you are interested in thehistorical development of Gothic, you might want to compare an example of modernGothic with an example of Romantic or Victorian Gothic – for instance, M.G. Lewis’sThe Monk (1796) or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847),

Learning outcomesBy the end of this chapter, having studied the essential reading and some of the

associated critical texts which have been recommended, you should be able to:

• discuss the conventions and thematic preoccupations of modern Gothic

• compare modern variants of Gothic with earlier phases of the genre

• answer the sample essay questions with reasonable confidence and see how such

a topic study might form part of your larger course of study to ensure successful

preparation for the examination.

Sample essay questionsYou are unlikely to get questions in the examination specifically on modern Gothic;see the sample examination paper at the end of this subject guide for a clearer idea ofhow you would have to adapt your knowledge of Gothic to answer examinationquestions.

1. In what ways and to what effect does the contemporary novel borrow from

popular culture?

2. Taking two novels of your own choice, attempt a definition of the characteristics

of modern Gothic.

3. ‘Modern Gothic derives its effects from disturbing received conceptions of

normality and perversity.’ Discuss in relation to two novels.

4. In what ways does contemporary Gothic both recycle and challenge the

conventions and assumptions of earlier phases of the genre?

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Notes

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Chapter 4: Section B topic study: post-modernism

Chapter 4

Section B topic study: post-modernism1

Essential readingIn order to provide a comparative perspective on different post-modernist styles, whilemaintaining a manageable field of study, in this chapter we will focus on:

Don Delillo’s White Noise. (London: Picador, 1985) [ISBN 0-330-29109-2; 0-330-

29108-4].

Paul Auster’s City of Glass. Book One of The New York Trilogy. (London: Faber and

Faber, 1987) [ISBN 0-571-15223-6].

But some of the other novels you might wish to focus on include:

• Italo Calvino If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller

• Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49

• Angela Carter Nights at the Circus

• Robert Coover Pricksongs and Descants

• William Gibson Neuromancer

• Philip Roth The Counterlife.

Recommended secondary readingOn DeLillo

LeClair, Tom In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. (Chicago: University

of Illinois Press, 1987) [ISBN 0252014839].

Lentricchia, Frank (ed.) Introducing Don DeLillo. (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 1991) [ISBN 0822311445; 0822311356]. The essays by John McClure and

Eugene Goodheart are especially worthwhile.

Lentricchia, Frank (ed.) New Essays on White Noise. (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1991) [ISBN 0-521-39893-2 (pbk); 0-521-39291-8 (hbk)].

On Auster

Borone, Dennis (ed.) Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster.

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995)

[ISBN 0812215567 (pbk); 0812233174 (hbk)].

On post-modernism

Annesley, James Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary

American Novel. (London: Pluto, 1998) [ISBN 0745310907 (pbk); 0745310915].

A very readable and insightful examination of the theme of consumption in

contemporary fiction.

Barth, John ‘The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction’, Atlantic

245(1):65–71.

Baudrillard, Jean Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip

Beitchman. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) [ISBN 0936756020]. The best

introduction to Baudrillard’s writing.

1 Remember that you mustanswer on at least two texts bydifferent authors for Section B

questions.

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Brooker, Peter (ed.) Modernism/Postmodernism. (London and New York: Longman,

1992) [ISBN 0-582-06358-2 (hbk); 0-582-06357-4 (pbk)]. A strong selection of

essays that illuminate the key differences and similarities between modernism

and post-modernism.

Cohen, Josh Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics

of Seeing. (London: Pluto, 1998) [ISBN 0745312071 (pbk); 0745312128]. A

theoretically informed treatment of post-modernism, focused on the relationship

between writing and visual culture.

Connor, Stephen Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the

Contemporary. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997) [ISBN 0-631-20052-5]. A very

good general introduction.

Foster, Hal (ed.) Postmodern Culture. (aka The Anti-Aesthetic.) (London and Sidney:

Pluto, 1985) [ISBN 0745300030]. An excellent collection featuring many brief

but seminal analyses of post-modernism.

Graff, Gerald ‘The Myth of The Postmodernist Breakthrough’ in Literature Against

Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society. (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 1995)

[ISBN 1566630975]. Forceful refutation of the very distinction between

modernism and post-modernism – a useful counterpoint to the other texts.

Harvey, David The Condition of Postmodernity. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)

[ISBN 0-631-16294-1 (pbk); 0-631-16294-1; 0-631-16292-5]. A superb, very

expansive analysis of post-modern culture, taking in historical, economic,

geographical and sociological perspectives.

Hassan, Ihab The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. (Ohio

State University Press, 1987) [ISBN 0814204287 (pbk); 0814204198 (hbk)].

Hutcheon, Linda The Politics of Postmodernism. (London and New York: Routledge,

1989) [ISBN 0-415-03992-4 (pbk); 0-415-03991-6].

Hutcheon, Linda Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. (Methuen, 1984)

[ISBN 0-416-37140-X (pbk)]. On ‘self-reflexive’ or ‘meta’ fiction.

Huyssen, Andreas After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and

Postmodernism. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986)

[ISBN 0-333-45533-9 (pbk); 0-333-45532-0 (hbk)]. A fascinating treatment of the

transition from modern to post-modern culture in terms of the rise of mass culture.

Jameson, Fredric Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

(London: Verso, 1991) [ISBN 0860915379 (pbk); 0860913147]. A demanding but

seminal analysis of post-modern culture in terms of the development of

multinational capitalism.

Kroker, Arthur and David Cook The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and

Hyperaesthetics. (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988)

[ISBN 0-333-46180-0 (pbk); 0-333-46179-7 (hbk)]. Focuses on idea of hyper-

reality – some may find it a little too delirious!

Lyotard, Jean-François The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) [ISBN 0816611734 (pbk);

0816611661 (hbk)]. Very worthwhile for those who want to probe more deeply

into the subject.

McCaffrey, Brian (ed.) Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-bibliographic Guide. (New York:

Greenwood Press, 1986). A very useful pointer to other writings and interesting

essays on the subject.

McHale, Brian Postmodernist Fiction. (London: Routledge, 1989)

[ISBN 0-415-04513-4].

McHale, Brian Constructing Postmodernism. (London and New York: Routledge,

1992) [ISBN 0-415-06014-1 (pbk); 0-415-06013-3 (hbk)]. The author covers

broad cultural field of post-modernism.

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Pfeil, Fred Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture.

(London: Verso, 1990) [ISBN 0860919927 (pbk); 0860912779 (hbk)]. A diverse

and entertaining collection of essays.

Ross, Andrew (ed.) Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism. (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 1993) [ISBN 0852246544; 0852246471].

Wilde, Alan Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Ironic

Imagination. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) [ISBN

0801824494]. A useful discussion of post-modern irony.

IntroductionThe aim of this chapter is to introduce and explain some of the key concepts in post-modernist theory and cultural practice, and to demonstrate their relevance to anunderstanding of developments in the contemporary novel.

Post-modernism: problems of definitionThe terms ‘post-modern’ and ‘post-modernism’ have become part of the mainstreamlanguage of our culture, employed frequently by radio, TV and print mediacommentators, usually with a great deal of imprecision. Far from clarifying the term,this overusage seems to have succeeded only in rendering it yet more obscure andconfusing.

This chapter will try to make some sense of this term, first of all by pointing to themany different ideas and practices associated with it – for one of the only points ofconsensus among those who have attempted to define post-modernism is how difficultit is to define! There are so many competing versions of post-modernism, generatedby disciplines as diverse as literature, philosophy, architecture, history and sociology,that a single and authoritative account of it is impossible. More to the point, we shallsee that any such account, for most theorists of post-modernism, is undesirable; for ifthere is anything that can be said to characterise the post-modern sensibility, it may bea resistance to fixed definitions and externally imposed dogmas.

Nevertheless, if we are to attain some insight into the post-modern, it is worthbeginning by making a distinction between two different usages of the term, the onedescriptive, the other prescriptive. For some commentators, ‘post-modernism’ hasbeen useful as a term primarily as a way of describing and accounting for the manydifferent social, cultural, political and economic transformations that have occurred inrecent years.

If the phrase ‘recent years’ seems a little vague, it is because yet another disputeamong theorists centres on when post-modernism started. Although most theoristsdate the ‘post-modern turn’ somewhere about the 60s, others, such as Dale Carter,identify the emergence of the Cold War (i.e. after World War Two), when Americaand the West transformed into ‘consumer societies’, as the beginning of the period.Others still, such as Frank Kermode and Gerald Graff, deny the very term ‘post-modernist’ itself, insisting that ‘modernism’ never ended!

What is it, if anything, that you think distinguishes the culture of the late twentieth

century from previous cultures? Is it the dominance of consumerism and mass

culture? A scepticism about grand political projects such as communism? Is it the

economic and technological interconnectedness of different parts of the world? Or is

it the instability of cultural, social and sexual identities? Look at the novels under

discussion and identify which of these features they most clearly place in the

foreground.

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Others, especially contemporary French thinkers, have taken up the term not merelyfor the purpose of neutral historical description, but as a means of developing adistinct philosophical attitude appropriate to the fragmented and accelerated consumersociety of the late twentieth century.

It’s worth noting from the outset that the ‘descriptive’ and ‘prescriptive’ approaches

to post-modernism set out below are by no means mutually exclusive. A descriptive

account such as Jameson’s will have clear implications as to how the culture of the

future should work, while a prescriptive version like Lyotard’s will be grounded in a

specific set of social and historical observations.

Describing post-modernism: Harvey andJameson

We’ll begin by examining the descriptive, historical account of the post-modern,associated with thinkers such as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, as well asAndreas Huyssen, Linda Hutcheon and Brian McHale. We will then see how some ofthe phenomena associated with post-modernity are dramatised in Don DeLillo’s novelWhite Noise. This will be followed by a summary of Lyotard’s prescriptive model ofpost-modernism, illustrated by Paul Auster’s City of Glass.

Each of the writers cited above highlights different aspects of the culture of post-

modernity. We’ll discuss Harvey and Jameson below; for further reading, however,

Huyssen’s After the Great Divide provides a cultural–historical approach to post-

modernism, emphasising the importance of gender and mass culture to the emergence

of a post-modern culture. Hutcheon’s two texts, The Poetics of Postmodernism and

The Politics of Postmodernism, provide good overviews of the diverse fields of

contemporary culture, whereas McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction concentrates on

literature, and so may ultimately be the most useful for students of English.

David Harvey identifies the roots of the ‘post-modern condition’ in a series of majoreconomic shifts that took place during the early 70s. With the collapse of the BrettonWoods agreement (which fixed the price of gold and the convertibility of the dollar)in 1971, and the Oil Crisis of 1973, came the new global economic regime of ‘flexibleaccumulation’. The relatively regulated, state-managed economy that had prevailed inthe West up to this point gave way to one characterised by perpetual flux in labourmarkets, a new diversity and instability in patterns of production and consumption,and constant technological innovation. Harvey, employing an essentially Marxistmethodology, argues that these economic shifts produced parallel cultural shifts,whereby the ‘relatively stable aesthetic’ of the modernist period is succeeded by ‘apost-modern aesthetic that celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle and thecommodification of cultural forms’.

Identifying similar changes in the global economy, Jameson’s work on post-modernism offers a more expansive account of the new cultural forms to which thosechanges gave rise. The unstable, fractured world of multinational capitalism, heargues, has given rise to a number of tendencies in contemporary cultural life. Theseinclude what he calls ‘the waning of affect’, by which he means the loss of any realemotional or psychological investment in the work of art by the artist. Compare, forexample, a modernist text such as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with apost-modern text like Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero. Joyce’s deeply personalexploration of the anxiety and alienation of the young Stephen Daedalus contrastsstarkly with the flat, disinterested and amoral tone of Ellis’s narrator Troy. It is as if

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the post-modern sensibility is too disaffected to express authentic human emotion andexperience, producing a literary style that critic James Annesley has described as‘blank’.

A further, related, feature of post-modern culture identified by Jameson is what hecalls a tendency to ‘pastiche’ – the imitation of ‘dead’ or redundant literary,architectural, filmic or other styles, not for the sake of parodying them, which wouldimply a specific moral or political intent, but simply to celebrate the diversity of stylesfor their own sake. Post-modernism refuses to privilege the style of any one period –whether Classical, Romantic or Modern – as the ultimate and authoritative one. JeffNoon’s recent novel, Automated Alice, which acutely imitates Lewis Carroll’s style totell a third, ‘cyberpunk’Alice story, illustrates this tendency very clearly, fusing as itdoes Carroll’s Victorian style with a distinctly 1990s’ sensibility.

Finally, Jameson speaks of the ‘derealisation’ of the world in post-modernist culture,the constant blurring of the boundaries between reality and fantasy. His example isDisneyland, both a ‘real’ and a ‘fictional’ space. Examples of ‘derealisation’ abound inpost-modern fiction, for example in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, whose firstsentence describes the sky as ‘the colour of television tuned to a dead channel’. WhatGibson achieves through such a description is the confusion of ‘nature’, or reality (thesky), with ‘culture’, or unreality (television), pointing to the ways in which the mediahave penetrated everyday life to such an extent that they are now an inextricable partof our reality.

This last point has been taken up with particular force by the French cultural theoristJean Baudrillard. In post-modern culture, Baudrillard argues, cultural products ‘areconceived from the point of view of their own reproducibility’, by which he meansthat today’s mass cultural objects have never existed other than as copies, or what heterms ‘simulations’.

Try to locate some examples within contemporary culture of what Baudrillard means

by ‘simulations’. What would it mean, for instance, to speak of the ‘original’ Mickey

Mouse or the ‘original’ Big Mac?

This concept of simulation, as we will now see, is particularly central to our firstillustrative text, White Noise.

White Noise: the simulated culture of post-modernity

White Noise is narrated by Jack Gladney, a professor of ‘Hitler Studies’ at a smallAmerican campus university. The novel recounts a series of encounters with death anddisaster experienced by Jack and his family. In the first part of the novel, we areintroduced to Jack’s family and friends, specifically to their experiences with, andideas about, the television, shopping malls, supermarkets and college that make up lifein the small town of Blacksmith. Taken together, these spaces form an illuminatingpicture of post-modern American culture.

Early on in the novel, Jack and his friend, Murray Jay Siskind, a visiting professorwith a special interest in ‘Elvis Studies’, visit a tourist attraction near Blacksmithknown as ‘The Most Photographed Barn in America’. The incident establishes one ofthe novel’s most insistent preoccupations: the ‘derealisation’ of experience describedby Jameson. The barn is deemed worth visiting not for any notable historical orarchitectural features, but simply because it is ‘most photographed’. In other words,it’s not the barn in itself that gives it meaning, but the camera-snapping tourists that

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The Novel

surround it. Murray suggests that it is impossible to ‘see’ the barn except through itsmediation by the cameras: ‘Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomesimpossible to see the barn’.

In the second part of the novel, Jack and his family are forced to evacuate Blacksmithbecause of a toxic chemical cloud, named ‘The Airborne Toxic Event’ by the media,floating over the town. Again, the event takes on meaning only through itsrepresentation by the media, a point comically illustrated by the responses of Jack’sdaughter and stepdaughter, Denise and Steffie, to the radio reports. The girls developthe ‘symptoms’ of exposure to the cloud only after the radio announces what thosesymptoms are. Thus, when they begin to develop sweaty palms after the relevantannouncement, Jack’s son Heinrich informs his stepmother Babette that ‘There’s beena correction…They ought to be throwing up’.

What is it that DeLillo is trying to convey about the nature of reality in contemporary

culture and society through these incidents? Try to locate other incidents of the novel

that expose a gap between appearance and reality. Do you feel that DeLillo is critical

of society’s increasing ‘derealisation’? Does he find anything in this tendency to

celebrate?

In particular, examine the effect of simulated culture on the family. What kind of a

family are the Gladneys? In what ways do they conform to the stereotypical

American nuclear family, and in what ways do they differ from it?

Despite the comedy, DeLillo’s point is profoundly serious. He is suggesting that evena momentous and terrible event such as a chemical disaster can be stripped of anymeaningful reality by the mass media and technology. In the final part of the novel,Jack becomes embroiled in a plot sparked by his wife’s secret consumption of anexperimental drug named Dylar, which claims to ward off the fear of death. Babette’sneed for Dylar implies that in a culture in which every aspect of life, from food to thefamily, is simulated, the ultimate ‘authentic’ experience, death, becomes too terrifyingto contemplate.

Why do you think DeLillo is so preoccupied with death in White Noise? Why does

the thought of death so insistently disturb his central characters? What does he seem

to be suggesting about our relationship to death and dying in a ‘simulated’ culture?

DeLillo’s novel, then, very acutely dramatises the experience of post-modern culture.Unlike the novel we’ll discuss below, City of Glass, it is not especially experimentalin form – one might say it is a novel ‘about’ post-modernity rather than a post-modernist novel, exploring post-modern themes without necessarily expressing a post-modernist sensibility. Nonetheless, the element of pastiche that Jameson identifies isclearly present in the novel, in its ironic employment of mass cultural genres. PartOne reads like a family sitcom (like the ‘Brady Bunch’ , the Gladneys are not an‘organic’ family – of the four children, only one belongs to both parents), Part Twolike a disaster movie and Part Three like a thriller.

How do the novels you have read compare with other post-modern cultural products?

Watch the Coen Brothers’ movies, some of the finest examples of post-modernist

pastiche; look at Andy Warhol’s silkscreen portraits and Bruce Nauman’s neon

installations, which illustrate very clearly the idea of the ‘waning of affect’; and try to

find a photograph of John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, which

Jameson regards as the exemplary post-modern building. Which aspects of narrative

and imagery in these cultural forms can be identified in DeLillo and Auster?

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Prescribing post-modernism: LyotardWe now come to Jean-François Lyotard’s philosophy of post-modernism, which hesets out in his book The Postmodern Condition. Lyotard’s argument can be summedup by his description of the prevailing attitude of contemporary society as being oneof ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. By this rather daunting phrase, he means thatwe no longer believe in grand ideological projects that claim they can resolve allhuman problems and create a utopia.

How do the novels you have read undermine the idea that tensions and contradictions

in society can be ‘resolved’? To what extent can the Dylar narrative in White Noise

and the story of Peter Stillman’s experiment on his son in City of Glass be seen as

implicit critiques of utopian thinking?

The major political systems, or ‘metanarratives’ of ‘modernity’, fascism, communismand global capitalism, all impose one model of ethics, politics and society onindividuals. History, and most obviously the Nazi Holocaust, shows that such imposedsystems can wreak unspeakable horror. In contrast to the modernist illusion that allconflicts can be resolved by a single system, Lyotard argues for a world of ‘small’, ormicro-narratives, ideas and activities coexisting not in absolute harmony but increative tension. Against the assumption that all thought and action can be driven in asingle direction, he suggests they can take many paths from many different groupsand individuals.

Both the French theorists discussed in this chapter, Baudrillard and Lyotard, are

complex and demanding writers. If you want to find out more about them, it may be

worth reading an introductory text first: Bill Readings’ Understanding Lyotard and

Douglas Kellner’s Jean Baudrillard are both recommended. If you’re more ambitious

and want to read the writers themselves, start with Baudrillard’s short volume,

Simulations, and Lyotard’s The Postmodern Explained to Children.

Lyotard’s argument for social and political diversity, in which a plurality of socialvoices can coexist creatively even when in conflict, can be seen at work in a differentform in a number of post-modernist literary texts. From the French nouveau roman ofthe 1960s (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras) to the playful workof Italians Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, to experimental American writers JohnBarth, Donalde Barthelme and Robert Coover, literature in the last few decades hasrejected the idea of a single, authoritative narrative voice (or ‘metanarrative’) that canorganise and ‘explain’ the events recounted.

Where a classic realist such as Dickens imposes the authority of his own narrativevoice on the diverse range of characters and attitudes in his novels, giving them acertain ideological and moral coherence, the narrators of post-modern novels aretypically unreliable, unstable, multiple or a combination of the three. Even JamesJoyce’s great experimental work, Ulysses, despite its celebration of a plurality ofdifferent speech registers and literary styles, ultimately imposes a unifying mythicpattern on that plurality.

A central feature of post-modern fiction, which arises out of its distrust of narrativeauthority, is what is called ‘self-reflexivity’, or ‘metafiction’, in which the authorshatters the storytelling illusion by being self-conscious about how the text we arereading is written. In so doing, he or she unmasks the ‘realism’ of the traditional novelas an illusion. As we’ll now see, City of Glass illustrates this tendency very clearly.

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What other examples of ‘self-reflexivity’ can you identify in contemporary literature

and culture? Can you think of instances of self-consciousness in recent films or

television programmes, for example? What effect does such self-consciousness have

on our reading or viewing of the text? Does it simply intrude upon the ‘straight’ telling

of a story, or does it make the story more interesting and unpredictable to read?

City of Glass: post-modernism and metafictionCity of Glass is a classic example of the post-modernist approach to narrative, raisingquestions about its own status as a text and about the nature of authorship. It questionsthe very possibility of narrative realism, ingeniously undercutting the illusion of areliable narrator through its self-reflexive strategies. The first book in Auster’s NewYork Trilogy, it is a pastiche of the detective story, which subverts the conventions ofthe crime genre by failing to resolve the web of events in a neatly resolved pattern.

At the start of the novel the central character, Daniel Quinn, a detective writer whosewife has died, is phoned in the middle of the night by an unknown person asking for‘The Paul Auster Detective Agency’. Initially he informs the caller that he has thewrong number. However, when the same caller rings and asks for Auster again, hereplies, ‘This is Auster speaking’, a decision that leads him to assume the role ofdetective in a strange and elaborate case. Quinn/Auster’s brief is to find and tail thefather of his employer, Peter Stillman. Stillman is the victim of an experimentperformed on him by his philosopher father, who locked his son in a room throughouthis childhood in order to test an obscure theological thesis about the ‘original’, ‘pure’language of God.

During the course of the novel, Quinn tracks down and visits the ‘real’ Paul Austerand tells him of the events that have taken place. ‘Auster’ turns out to be a writerwhose biography very closely resembles that of the Auster we know to be the authorof City of Glass! However, ‘Auster’ the character claims to know nothing of theStillman case and, when told by Quinn of what has happened, remarks, ‘If I had beenin your place, I probably would have done the same thing’.

How does the encounter between Quinn and ‘Auster’ illustrate the strategy of

metafictional play? Consider how, by relegating himself to the status of a minor

character in his own text, at the mercy of contingency, chance and randomness,

Auster undermines the traditional conception of the author as the invisible but all-

knowing ‘God-like’ force at the centre of the book. What is the novel suggesting

about the relationship between ‘authorship’ and authority or control?

The novel’s plot plays consistently with the ideas of contingency and chance. Waitingin secret for the elder Stillman at Grand Central Station, Quinn spots him coming offa train, only to find seconds later that a second man is walking directly behind thefirst, ‘his face the exact twin of Stillman’s’. Quinn finally decides to follow the ‘first’Stillman, but the arbitrariness of this decision offers a sly self-reflexive comment onthe arbitrariness of the novelist’s choices. Auster demonstrates that at every point, thenovelist is forced to carry his story at random in one direction rather than another, sothat every actual plot is haunted by the ‘ghosts’ of other, unrealised plots.

The elder Stillman’s curious ideas about, and experiments with, language furtherexplore the theme of contingency. Stillman finds that the existing form of humanlanguage is inadequate because it is imprecise. For example, we continue to call abroken umbrella an umbrella, even though ‘“it can no longer perform its function”and has therefore “ceased to be an umbrella”’. Stillman’s project is to iron thisimprecision out of language, to make our words ‘at last say what we have to say’.

57


This is his apparent motivation for isolating his son from the world for his first nineyears; he believes that, cut off from the world’s corrupting influence, the boy willspeak the perfect, uncorrupted language of God. In fact, however, the experimentfails, and the boy grows up to speak incomprehensible gibberish such as ‘Wimbleclick crumblechaw beloo’. The attempt to remove indeterminacy from language, toput ourselves in absolute control of our words, Auster implies, is doomed to fail. InLyotard’s terms, we might say that the attempt to impose a single, authoritative ‘meta-narrative’ on the inherent diversity and complexity of language will inevitablycollapse.

You may find it useful to compare City of Glass with a more traditional detective

story such as Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. What are the central differences

between the two authors’ approaches to the genre? How do the methods of

Chandler’s detective, Marlowe, compare with those of Quinn? By responding to these

questions, you should glean some instructive insights into the differences between

traditional-realist and post-modernist fiction.

Suggestions for further studyAfter studying the aspects of post-modernism covered in this chapter of the subject

guide, you may wish to go on to study other topics that might overlap with post-

modernism and could be applied to other questions of section B of the examination.

The following list is by no means exhaustive:

• gender and post-modernism

• race and post-modernism

• genre and post-modernism.

Learning outcomesBy the end of this chapter and having read the recommended primary texts and

associated critical material, you should:

• be able to discuss what is involved in the concept ‘post-modernism’

• have some sense of the debate over the term and the complexities involved, as

well as where to read more about it

• have a grasp of how post-modernism has helped to shape contemporary literature

at the levels of both theme and form, as well as their interrelation.

Sample essay questions1. Compare and contrast the use of post-modernist fictional strategies in the work of

two authors of your choice.

2. In what ways does post-modernist fiction undermine conventional realist

conceptions of plot and character? Discuss with reference to at least two novels

by different authors.

3. Explain how writings in other disciplines, such as geography, architecture, film

studies, art history and so on, may prove useful in studying post-modernist

fiction. You must focus on at least two novels by different authors.

4. How does post-modern fiction treat the theme of consumer culture and its social

and personal effects? Discuss in relation to at least two authors.

The Novel

58

Notes

59

Appendix: Sample examination paper

Appendix

Sample examination paperAnswer three questions, choosing at least one from each section. Candidates maynot discuss the same text more than once, in this examination or in any otherAdvanced level unit examination.

Section A1. ‘In what you are writing you have only to make use of imitation and the more

perfect the imitation the better your writing will be.’ (MIGUEL DE CERVANTES,Don Quixote) Discuss this quotation with reference to one novelist you havestudied.

2. ‘The total subordination of the plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoiris a defiant assertion of the primacy of individual experience.’ Discuss, withreference to one novelist you have read.

3. ‘I have dropped the curtain over this scene for a minute, to remind you of onething, and to inform you of another.’ (LAURENCE STERNE, The Life andOpinions of Tristram Shandy) Discuss the significance of intrusive narrators in thework of one novelist you have read.

4. ‘It is truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a goodfortune, must be in want of a wife.’ (JANE AUSTEN, Pride and Prejudice)Discuss the significance of irony in one author you have studied.

5. ‘We novelists are the examining magistrates of men and their passions.’ (EMILEZOLA) Discuss how one novelist you have studied uses their work to examinesocial problems.

6. ‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but theillustration of character?’ (HENRY JAMES) Discuss the relationship betweencharacter and incident in the work of one novelist you have studied.

7. Discuss the significance of one of the following in the work of one novelist youhave studied: embedded narratives, dialogue, letters, allusions to other novels.

8. ‘Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small,which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna.’ Discuss thisstatement with reference to the work of one novelist you have studied.

9. ‘The novel begins in a railway station…a cloud of smoke hides the first part of theparagraph.’ (ITALO CALVINO, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller) Discuss thesignificance of narrational self-consciousness in the work of one novelist you havestudied.

10. Discuss the significance of endings in the work of one novelist you have studied.

Section BAnswers in this section must refer to the work of at least two different writers.

11. Explain how the formal innovations of any two or more novelists you havestudied had a significant impact on the form as a whole.

12. With reference to two or more writers, discuss how the social and economicconditions of the eighteenth century affected the rise of the novel.

13. Discuss the treatment of one of the following themes in at least two novelists youhave studied: forbidden love, alienation, murder, childhood, the double.

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The Novel

14. ‘I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to sayupon woman’s inconstancy…But perhaps you will say, these were all written bymen.’ (JANE AUSTEN, Captain Harville in Persuasion) Discuss the contributionof at least two woman novelists from the eighteenth or nineteenth century to theart of fiction.

15. ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’(LEO TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina) Discuss the role of tragedy with reference to atleast two novelists you have studied.

16. With reference to the work of two or more novelists you have studied, discusswhat is distinctive about the representation of subjectivity in ‘modernist’ or ‘post-modernist’ novels.

17. Discuss the significance of either satire or parody with reference to two or morenovelists you have studied.

18. ‘Genre conventions establish a kind of contract between the text and the reader, sothat some expectations are rendered plausible, others ruled out, and elementswhich would seem strange in another context are made intelligible with the genre.’Discuss this statement with reference to two or more novelists you have studied.

19. Curricula for the study of the novel are often organised chronologically. Explainhow a different system of organisation might be productive with reference to twoor more novelists you have studied.

20. Discuss the contribution to the novel form of two or more novelists who are ofneither European nor American origin.

Notes

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Notes

The Novel

62

Notes

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