Reading Narrative Discourse: Studies in the Novel from Cervantes to Beckett

184 Pages·1990·19.948 MB·English

by  Andrew Gibson (auth.)

READING NARRATIVE DISCOURSE
Reading Narrative
Discourse
Studies in the Novel from Cervantes to
Beckett
ANDREW GIBSON
Lecturer in English
Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
University of London
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-20547-9 ISBN 978-1-349-20545-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20545-5
©Andrew Gibson 1990
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1990
ISBN 978-0-312-03609-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gibson, Andrew, 1949-
Reading narrative discourse: studies in the novel from Cervantes
to Beckett I Andrew Gibson.
p. em.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-312-03609-6
1. Fiction -History and criticism. 2. Narration (Rhetoric)
I. Title.
PN3353.G51990 89-36453
809.3'923-dc20 CIP
In memory of my father, William,
and to my mother, Elizabeth
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 Don Quixote 26
2 Clarissa 41
3 Tristram Shandy 60
4 The 'Eumaeus' Episode in Ulysses 78
5 The Trial and The Castle 95
6 Henry Green's Novels 118
7 Beckett from Assumption to The Unnamable 140
Appendix A: Bremond, Greimas and 'Essences of
Narrative' 166
Appendix B: Richards, Empson and Lodge 168
Index 173
vii
Acknowledgements
Phillip Drummond, Ian Littlewo0d and Nigel Speight all helped me
with suggestions for the revision of early drafts of various chapters.
Isobel Grundy gave me some very useful advice about Chapter 2,
and Steve Connor, James Hansford and Katharine Worth all did the
same with Chapter 7. Stefan Gradmann provided invaluable assist
ance with Kafka. Nadine Fenouillat helped me with Beckett's
French, and William Rowe advised me on two of the translations in
Chapter 1. Edwina Conner also assisted me, and so did Zdenek
Kirschner and Martin Swatos in Prague. Robert Hampson was a
constant source of support and encouragement. I am most grateful
to them all. Any errors, of course, are my own.
Chapter 4 is a slightly revised version of an article which first
appeared in Southern Review (' "Broken Down and Fast Breaking
Up": Style, Technique and Vision in the 'Eumaeus' Episode in
Ulysses', Southern Review, vol. 17, no. 3 (1984) pp. 256-69). Portions
of Chapter 6 were first published in my essay 'Henry Green as Ex
perimental Novelist', Studies in the Novel, vol. 16, no. 2 (1984)
pp. 197-214. I am grateful to the editors of both journals for per
mission to reprint.
viii
Introduction
There are many kinds of narrative, and many kinds of novel. But
critics none the less continue to take the realist novel as the norm for
fiction, and to assimilate other forms to it. Many of them still
understand fiction in terms that have been developed in response to
the realist novel, and their reading habits are still largely those
fostered by the realist novel. As a result, forms of narrative which
actually ask to be understood in quite different terms are frequently
misread. More than twenty years ago, in The Nature of Narrative,
Scholes and Kellogg argued that 'the tendency to apply the standards
of nineteenth-century realism to all fiction naturally has dis
advantages for our understanding of every other kind of narrative'. 1
Fresh critical approaches to the novel have emerged since then, and
various critics have begun to free some of the 'other kinds of
narrative' from the alien constraints too often imposed on them. 2
But even so, a glance at much of the most recent work on Richardson
or Joyce, for instance, suggests that the old, well-established modes
of reading are still dominant. In novels - and even anti-novels -
where elements of the mimetic persist, most readers seem inclined
to understand the text in mimetic terms, or to move from the basis of
a mimetic reading to other forms of reading. It is still unusual to find
a narrative text approached primarily in terms of its intrinsic logic;
as, firstly, an activity of mind, rather than a set of representations.
In fact, different kinds of narrative in the novel contain different
kinds of logic, and are founded on principles that are very different
and sometimes opposed to each other. This is the justification for a
study that will examine particular forms of narrative logic whose
distinctiveness-in my view -is too seldom adequately recognised
or accurately described. A large number of texts are potentially
relevant, here. The postmodernist novel or nouveau roman might
seem to be a good place to start, and critics of both have sometimes
written with a similar intention to mine. 3 But, in the end, a work like
In the Labyrinth flaunts its otherness. In generat the strangeness of
much postmodernist fiction is really evident enough, and a standing
reproach to critics who would seek to convert such narrative back
into a more familiar mould. 4 Other forms of narrative, however,
have been more easily assimilated to prevailing norms, either
because they include an element of orthodox mimesis within a more
1
2 Introduction
complex whole, or because they exist in a hinterland between
different kinds of writing. They are called novels, and slotted neatly
into present formulations of the history of the novel, with its
divisions and subdivisions. In fact, however, they raise awkward
questions about critics' clear and precise distinctions.
These novels belong to what Kermode calls the 'problematical'
middle ground between the 'classic realist text' and 'the scriptible'. 5
It might be argued that Conrad and Ford's novels or the psycho
logical realism of Woolf or Faulkner belong there too. But such forms
of fiction can be defined in comparatively straightforward terms.
The novels I have in mind do not just say ambiguous things, but
work in ambiguous ways. They are unstable compounds. To a
greater or lesser extent, they appear to be at odds with themselves as
narratives. In some ways, this is quite obvious. Don Quixote, for
instance, is often thought of as the first great realist novel. But it also
questions the most fundamental assumptions underlying its own
'realism'. Clarissa, too, is often taken to be an early form of realist
novel. But it also anticipates the point-of-view techniques of much
modern fiction. Tristram Shandy is a sentimental novel that both
looks back to early forms of narrative and forwards to modern ones. 6
Ulysses, The Trial, The Castle and Beckett's earlier prose all overlap
with but cannot wholly be accommodated within clear definitions of
modernist and postmodernist experiments in narrative. Similarly,
Henry Green's Living was dubbed a 'proletarian novel' when it came
out. But the styles and narrative methods Green adopts in it
frequently seem closer to the work of Wilde, Fir bank and even James
and Woolf than to 'proletarian fiction'. Such novels also have
another form of double existence. Each of them sometimes seems to
be proceeding simultaneously from different and even opposed
assumptions. Effectively, they lack the epistemological certainties of
other forms of narrative.
Partly because of that, a neo-Aristotelian emphasis on fiction as
mimesis cannot wholly come to terms with them. For Aristotle
himself, mimesis seems to have been a complex word. It could mean
something closer to 'expression' than 'imitation'. In both the Poetics
and the Politics, Aristotle actually refers to music as a mimetic form.
But modern neo-Aristotelianism commonly shrinks the significance
of the word to a single connotation. Mimetic art is, more or less
simply, a representational art. Narratives are not to be read in
themselves, but read through. The habit is very deeply engrained
not just embedded in discourse about novels, but inextricable from a
Introduction 3
whole society's way of imagining itself. As much as the Divine
Comedy, Balzac's human one is a remote, grand fiction, product of a
vanished era with vanished certainties. So is Middlemarch. But we
are still likely to catch ourselves supposing that they are about
creatures like us, in a world like ours. The corollary of this is that
there is still a continuing struggle to find modes of reading that are
truly appropriate to works such as Ulysses or The Trial. For, to adapt
Beckett's remark about Finnegans Wake, such works are not, or not
principally, 'about something'. They are 'that something' them
selves, as lyric poems might be said to be?
Auden once said that works of art have life more than they are
about this or that kind of life. A text such as Tristram Shandy provides
an excellent demonstration of the point. Neo-Aristotelian pro
cedures, however, will scarcely do justice to such a work. In a novel
such as Clarissa, for example, there is nothing that readers can read
through to with any certainty, not an 'actual state of affairs', nor
even states of mind. The letters in Clarissa are themselves commonly
formal representations, with designs on their readers. For the more
part, they do not contain a reality or truth clearly and unequivocally
given to the reader by the novel itself. Like Don Quixote or Beckett's
trilogy, then, Clarissa requires a different kind of reading to those
proposed to the mind by neo-Aristotelian habits. Such texts demand
an approach that is perhaps rather closer to 'new critical' approaches
to lyric poetry, not only in the kinds of complexity it notices and the
quality of its attention to them, but in its ability to deal with the
conceptual and expressive content of narrative itself. 8
Aristotle's influence on modern approaches to the novel, how
ever, has not been confined to an emphasis on mimesis. He also
stressed the value of unity, harmony, consistency and coherence,
especially logical coherence. Newman provides us with a usefully
precise and effective summary of Aristotle's views. According to
Aristotle, says Newman, 'by confining the attention to one series of
events and scene of action', tragedy 'bounds and finishes off the
confused luxuriance of real nature; while by a skilful adjustment of
circumstances, it brings into sight the connexion of cause and effect,
completes the dependence of the parts one on another, and harmon
izes the proportions of the whole'. 9 In novel criticism, this stress
reaches us partly through James, with his distaste for formlessness
and 'waste', his fondness for unity of effect, for 'a deep-breathing
economy and an organic form'. 10 Many critics of the novel still seem
to proceed according to the James-like assumption that to show the