Fictional Discourse and Historical Space PDF
Preview Fictional Discourse and Historical Space
FICTIONAL DISCOURSE AND HISTORICAL SPACE Also by Andrew Wright JANE AUSTEN'S NOVELS: A STUDY IN S1RUCTURE JOYCE CARY: A PREFACE TO HIS NOVELS HENRY FIELDING: MASK AND FEAST BLAKE'S 'JOB': A COMMENTARY ANTHONY 1ROLLOPE: DREAM AND ART FICTIONAL DISCOURSE AND HISTORICAL SPACE Andrew Wright Professor of English University of California San Diego M MACMILLAN PRESS © Andrew Wright 1987 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1987 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1987 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG212XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Wright, Andrew, 1923- Fictional discourse and historical space. 1. English fiction-History and criticism I. Title 823' .009 PR821 ISBN 978-1-349-18566-5 ISBN 978-1-349-18564-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18564-1 For Daphne, Peter, Evangeline, and Tenniel Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. Crusoe Then and Now: Robinson Crusoe (1719) and The 13 Mosquito Coast (1981) I Robinson Crusoe: or, Do It Yourself 13 II The Mosquito Coast: Isolation as Madness 27 3. The Emergent Woman: Emma (1816) and Howards End (1910) 44 I Emma: Perfection under Threat 44 II Howards End and the Denial of Doom 58 4. Anarchy and Apocalypse: The Secret Agent (1907) and The 74 Human Factor (1978) I The Secret Agent: The Beginning of the End 74 II The Human Factor and Hope without Hope 88 References 105 Index 111 Note Several sentences of the introduction have been borrowed from a lecture, 'The Novel as a Conspiracy', published in Essays by Divers Hands: Being the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, n.s. 37 (1972), 122-33. 1 Introduction While reading The Mosquito Coast, that frightening but ultimately hopeful Crusoe novel of the 1980s, I thought back to Defoe's great original of 1719; and, when I re-read that novel, I learned from the juxtaposition something more about the work of both Defoe and Theroux. From that point other contiguities suggested themselves. The outcome is the present study: there are three pairs of novels, each pair treating a similar subject, and each member of the pair being removed in time from the other-263 years divide Defoe's novel from that of Theroux; nearly a century Emma from Howards End, and three quarters of a century The Secret Agent from The Human Factor. Common sense raises a preliminary objection to this way of proceeding, and common sense also meets the objection, which is that there are hazards in making such comparisons: each of the six writers under scrutiny is unique. Granted; but each work in speaking for itself speaks also for its age in that each embodies more fully its age's possibilities, and each sketches the lineaments of that age, the more so in that each is generally representative and on the highest level. To choose six other great writers and six other novels would be to make necessary a different series of findings, a dif ferent picture from what appears in these pages. Yes, a somewhat different picture, but not one altogether different, unless one were to select works of the second rank. For I do claim importance for my writers and their texts - by which I mean that they are of such stature as to embody claims to comprehensiveness, though not of course exhaustiveness. Obviously, there is more than one way to write a history, and there are other important novelists than the six I have chosen; if instead of Defoe and Theroux, Jane Austen and Forster, Conrad and Graham Greene, I had selected Richardson and Virginia Woolf, Walter Scott and Hardy, Dickens and Naipaul, this would have been a different book, but it would bear recognizable resemblances to what the reader has before him. Nor do I think exhaustive treatment is either desirable or necessary; the aim here is exemplary and explanatory rather than encompassing. Mainly, the aim here is practical, to elucidate the novels under consideration. My highest hope is that the readers of this book will 1 2 Fictional Discourse and Historical Space regard the interpretations offered in the following pages as helpful. If they are so, part at least of the cause will be because of a sense of new discovery that stems from a reading of a number of literary and historical critics of the present day, especially Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, and Hayden White, all of whom have taught me much about history, about narrative, and about the place of literature in thought. Others too have taken me back to school: Robert Alter, Robert Caserio, Jacques Derrida, Suzanne Gearhart, Gerard Genette, Frank Kermode, Murray Krieger, Frank Lentricchia, David Lodge, Walter J. Ong, Roy Pascal, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Walter Slatoff, Tzvetan Todorov, Harold Toliver, and Marianna Torgovnick. If I have failed to include on this list the names of Wayne C. Booth and Ian Watt, the reason is that they are so much a part of the critical air we breathe, so indispensable to all readers at every point, that they belong in a separate category. And Watt's work on Conrad will find special application here. My indebtedness to the others will emerge in the following pages. But I want to begin by sketching my way of proceeding. The writing of history is a literary enterprise, as Gibbon himself indicated; by the same token, all literature belongs to history - a claim, or truism even, that would not need to be repeated except for the fact that it has been intermittently contested or ignored in literary criticism for the last forty years, to the considerable detriment of our understanding. The divorce between the writing of history and the writing that is avowedly fictional cannot take place because the two are not separate imaginative endeavours but a single entity, despite the efforts of the New Criticism of the 1940s and 1950s, which I was brought up on. Such confusion as exists stems from another, and actual, difference, that between events that have indisputably or supposedly happened and the accounts of those events that constitute what is called history, the former being the materials out of which the historian makes his constructions, which are the literary product of the historian's practice of his art. As historical writing is a rationalization after the event, historians make plots out of what they think has really happened, imposing a pattern on what they have discerned by selecting certain events out of the undifferentiated mass of facts and suppositions, and arranging them in a certain order. Those who compose avowedly fictional narratives are -deceptively- somewhat more free, but they too take the materials that observation furnishes, and try to make sense of them by arranging them into discourses. All men of
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