Visionary Closure in the Modern Novel PDF
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VISIONARY CLOSURE IN THE MODERN NOVEL Visionary Closure in the Modern Novel William R. Thickstun M MACMILLAN PRESS ©WiIliam R. Thickstun 1988 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 978-0-333-41403-3 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 1988 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by Vine & Gortin Ltd, Exmouth, Devon British Library Cataloguing in Publication data Thickstun, William R. Visionary closure in the modem novel. I. English fiction-20th century History and criticism I. Title 823'.912'09 PR88 I ISBN 978-1-349-19165-9 ISBN 978-1-349-19163-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19163-5 For Margaret Contents Acknowledgements viii Visionary Closure and the Embodied Muse 2 Ideas of Order in Howards End 30 3 The Rainbow and the Flood of Consciousness 52 4 Unweaving the Wind: Penelope and Claritas in Ulysses 77 5 To the Lighthouse: Reshaping the Single Vision 109 6 Tragic Vision in The Sound and the Fury 143 Notes 171 Selected Bibliography 195 Index 203 Vll Acknowledgetnents The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material. From Howards End by E. M. Forster, copyright 1921 by E. M. Forster; reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. and Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd. From The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence, copyright 1915 by David Herbert Lawrence, copyright 1943 by Frieda Lawrence; reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, Inc., Laurence Pollinger Ltd. and the Estate of Mrs. Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. From Ulysses by James Joyce, copyright 1914, 1918 by Margaret Caroline Anderson, copyright renewed 1942, 1946 byNoraJosephJoyce, copyright 1934 by the Modern Library, Inc., copyright renewed 1961 by Lucia and George Joyce; reprinted by permission of Random House Inc., The Bodley Head, and The Society of Authors on behalf of the literary Executors of the Estate of James Joyce. From To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, copyright 1927 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright renewed 1955 by Leonard Woolf; reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., the author's estate and The Hogarth Press. From The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, copyright 1929 by William Faulkner, copyright renewed 1956 by William Faulkner, copyright 1946 by Random House, Inc., reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. and Curtis Brown Ltd. From Two Cheers for Democracy by E. M. Forster, copyright 1951 by E. M. Forster, renewed 1979 by Donald Parry; reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. and Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd. From The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., the author's estate and The Hogarth Press. From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, copyright 1916 by B. W. Huebsch, copyright renewed 1944 by Nora Joyce, definitive text copyright (c) 1964 by The Estate of}a mes Joyce, reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, Inc., Jonathan Cape Ltd., the Executors of the James Joyce Estate, and The Society of Authors as the literary Executors of the Estate of James Joyce. From 'The Idea of Order at Key West' from The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1967, 1969, 1971 by Holly Stevens; reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. and Faber & Faber Ltd. Vlll Acknowledgements IX From William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill; reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., Copyright© 1979 byW. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and A. D. Peters & Co. Ltd. In the course of my work on this project I have received help and advice from numerous people. Daniel R. Schwarz has provided unwearying support from !he beginning; he helped to shape my understanding of the English novel, and his incisive commentary on successive drafts of the study has been invaluable. I am grateful toM. H. Abrams for sharing his vast and detailed knowledge of Romantic literature and intellectual history, and to James McConkey for responding with sensitivity and perceptiveness to my work from the perspective of a working creative writer. Phillip L. Marcus has also read most ofthe book at various stages; I have profited from his extensive knowledge of the historical contexts of modernism. Walter Slatoff read my chapter on Faulkner with a generous if skeptical eye, helping me to anticipate many potential challenges. I owe less easily definable gratitude to the other teachers, colleagues and friends who have read chapters of the book, contributed useful suggestions, or influenced my growth as reader, writer, and critic: John Elder, Robert Hill, Stephen Parrish, Scott Elledge, Evan Radcliffe, Richard DuRocher, Nancy Shaw, Karen Cherewatuk, Megan Macomber, Paul Russell, Kim Noling, Stephen Sicari, Richard Johnson, and William Quillian. I am deeply grateful to my editor at Macmillan, Frances Arnold, for her advice, support and patience in helping me prepare the book for publication. My largest debt, both personal and professional, is acknowledged in the dedication. 1 Visionary Closure and the Embodied Muse I Between 1910 and 1929, five writers ended major novels with moments of vision. The novels are E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910), D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915), James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse (1927), and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929). In the final section ofeachofthesenovels, a woman has a visionary experience that transcends full expression in language and that seems to make possible a concluding affirmation or image of order. Many critics have found these endings feeble, artificially positive, or inconsistent with the works in which they appear; such dismissals stand up well enough in studies of individual novels and authors, but cannot adequately explain what led five writers to employ such endings in major novels written within a span of twenty years. I believe that these writers created in these novels an altogether new fictional form, drawing upon religious and Romantic traditions to attempt endings that would combine unconstricted vitality of character with the aesthetic demands of closure. In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster identifies marriage and death as the two most common ways of ending a novel. The 'average novelist' relies on these events, he argues, because they are 'almost his only connection between his characters and his plot' .1 If this observation now seems less self-evident than it would have in 1927, it is because Forster and the other English modernists did more than any previous group of writers to challenge the inevitability of these two patterns. Forster's generalization applies to earlier novels with considerable aptness, though many novelists attempted to vary the two patterns in unexpected ways. I would like to approach the modernist experiment with visionary endings by briefly surveying the earlier forms of closure that the modernists rejected. In the two early works that helped to create the English novel, Samuel Richardson offers his successors models for what would become the two dominant modes of novelistic closure. The plot of Pamela (1740) is 2 Visionary Closure in the Modern Novel essentially completed in the marriage of its heroine, though it is characteristic of Richardson's concerns and values that the text continues for many pages after this event until Pamela is acknowledged by her husband's family and written into his will. In Clarissa ( 17 48 ), Richardson structures the ending around his heroine's death; again, however, the narrative continues beyond the main climax, until moral justice is achieved in the death of Lovelace. Most readers have agreed that Richardson's high moral seriousness is more effectively embodied in the tragic form and closure of Clarissa. At the same time, Richardson's contemporary Henry Fielding, in Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), established marriage as the dominant form of closure in comic novels. In Fielding the denouement also involves a rise in the fortunes of the hero and a discovery of his true birth; these elements occasionally recur in the endings of later novels, often in company with a culminating marriage. The greatest novelist of culminating marriage, however, eschewed such high comic improbabilities in order to create the kind of morally serious comedy that Richardson had failed to achieve in Pamela. All of Jane Austen's novels end in the marriage of their heroines; the first two-Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813)- provide double plots that revolve around two sisters and end in two marriages. These and Austen's later novels-Northanger Abbey (1818), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and Persuasion (1818) - delight in proposing an almost infinite variety of ways to the most unsurprising of ends.2 Even when later nineteenth-century novelists experimented exten sively with fictional form, they rarely abandoned entirely the alternatives of marriage and death as culminating events. Despite their innovations in narrative perspective and structure, the Brontes employed essentially conventional endings: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) ends with the marriage of Jane and Rochester; Emily Bronte's W ut hering Heights (184 7) with the death of Heathcliff. A variant on the marital ending emerges in novels which conclude with the second marriages of their protagonists: in Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) Amelia Sedley remarries to William Dobbin; in Dickens's David Copperfield (1850) David remarries to Agnes Wickfield; in Eliot's Middlemarch (1872) Dorothea Brooke remarries to Will Ladislaw. But this variant pattern created its own special problems. The writers intend these second marriages to be better than the characters' first ones, yet readers have found all three second marriages in one way or other dissatisfying, perhaps because they inevitably proceed from dislocations of the original narrative direction and thus seem sentimentally imposed rather than natural resolutions of the plots. The form of Vanity Fair, for example, is essentially that of two inverted
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