Unexpected Parallel: Fowles and Melville

In chapter 14 of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, the narrator intrudes to tell the readers not to blame the author for creating an inconsistent character, for in the real world, most people are inconsistent. The narrator then shares some reflections on human nature and on characters, in fiction and reality.

And in chapter 13 of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, the narrator intrudes to admit he doesn't know what his characters are thinking and that he can't fully control them. He then shares some reflections on writing, reading, and human beings in fiction and reality.

It's rather clear that metafiction is not any post-modern development, even if it is post-modern writers who relish in it. The seeds can be traced far back, at least to Cervantes in the novel. And so too have many novelists swung it back to blur the lines between fiction and reality. I leave you with a wonderful passage from Fowles' 13th chapter:

"But this is preposterous? A character is either 'real' or 'imaginary'? If you think that, hypocrite lecteur, I can only smile. You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf--your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens."

All of Western literature is but a retelling of Don Quixote

Re-reading Shaw's Arms and the Man, I'm struck by how familiar the story really is. It's the story of the confrontation between an Ideal and Reality.

I've read it in Don Quixote, in Madame Bovary, in Death of a Salesman, in M. Butterfly. I've seen it in Main Street, I've encountered it in Faulkner and Steinbeck. It's in "Dulce Et Decorum Est" and a lot of other war poetry. It's even in The French Lieutenant's Woman, though treated a bit differently. I suppose it pre-dates Cervantes: you can sense it in Chaucer. And if you want, you can add to the list of books about it.

Over and over we see these characters deluded with a fantasy, with an outrageous ideal, with a cherished image. And over and over again, we see the comic and tragic consequences when these characters are forced to face reality. I suppose it's a natural theme for literature, for made up stories.

Summer Reading: Son of a Witch, and what is Romanticism?

Gregory Maguire's Son of a Witch
If you check my profile, you'll see that Maguire's Wicked is listed as one of my favorite books, right there among Hamlet and Crime and Punishment.

As you might imagine, I looked to Son of a Witch, Wicked's sequel, with high hopes. For the most part, these high hopes were disappointed. Why?

The protagonist is rather dull; there's nothing terribly interesting about Liir at all. As I neared the end of the novel, I began to see that Liir's lack of personality throughout may have been intentional, a critical element of the themes of maturation and growth into individuality. However, it remains that he is dull.

The middle portion of the book, "The Service," is very, very boring. It was during this section I considered giving the book up.

But I could live with that. The sad thing is, what worked in Wicked just didn't work in Son of a Witch (or wasn't attempted). The ambiguities are there, but whereas Wicked's mysteries feel like deep, soul-wrenching truths, Son of a Witch's mysteries feel like forced ambiguity. The lack of action through large portions that helps give Wicked its strength was Son of a Witch's weakness.

Still, it has its good points. It is frequently surprising, the last long section of the book is very good, and there seems to be a parallel in the Apostle Emperor to the way Christianity is fused with American imperialism. But if Wicked is an A, Son of a Witch is a C: enjoyable in parts, but often dull, some good writing and interesting theme, but without the stirring depths.

pre-Romanticism
The typical narrative of literary history has British Romanticism beginning with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Of course, as in all intellectual history, there can be an arbitrary nature to how we define epochs of thinking. I've heard critics say that the threads of Romanticism appear in Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," which is true. I can also see its threads further back, in a poem like Sir Edward Dyer's "My Mind to Me a Kingdom is" (which seems to have deliberate correlation to Shakespeare's "I could be bound in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space). But of course, given that the Romantics adored Milton and often fused the spirit Milton's poetry into their own poetry, Romanticism can go further back.

Defining literary eras has a certain usefulness; the generalization helps us to make sense of literary history in a broad sense. But of course, we have to remember that we are partly CREATING these eras; it's not that they exist in and of themselves, but we examine the work produced in an era and decide what is significant, what should be read now, what had influence. There were non-Romantic poets writing in early 19th century England, I'm sure--it's just that we haven't deemed them worth the study in a survey of English poetry. As with history, we create it--we pick and choose what is worth defining an era by.

Generational Tastes and All-time Evaluation

Re-reading Frankenstein, it strikes me that many contemporary readers must see the style, language, and general writing as second-rate. The book was written with the conventions and language of Romanticism; it came before the Realism Revolution of the novel and well before the subsequent Modernist Revolution. The twentieth-century reader's tastes for what is good writing and good fiction were formed by realism and modernism; indeed, from the perspective of realism and modernism, the language of Romanticism is second-rate.

But that's the thing about tastes. The preference for the twentieth century style of writing (invented, some would say, but people like Flaubert, Twain, and James) is a preference, a taste. It doesn't necessarily mean that this is an inherently superior style of writing. A contemporary of Shelley would not have appreciated the novel written in the style of Flaubert (and indeed, if Shelley were born a hundred years later and written the same book, she may have written it entirely in the style of realism. Or not at all. But then, considering Frankenstein's impact, it's hard to really predict the history of literary tastes and moods without it).

In the 19th century, there was a critic who said that the slave narrative was the only authentic American literary genre; the implication was that the slave narrative was superior literature. This is the century that gave us Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickenson, and other titans of American literature. These are now more respected names than the authors of any slave narratives. Tastses change. A literary critic of one generation cannot possibly predict what writers will be thought well of by future generations, or what writers will be forgotten in a century, or what books will be considered masterpieces to the ages. We don't know; tastes change too quickly.

So if you read a Gothic novel, don't assess it by the standards of what makes good writing today.

Indeed, sometimes tastes change to such a degree that writers forgotten for decades or centuries suddenly come back into vogue. T.S. Eliot brought back Donne and the metaphysics; that type of poetry fit the tastes of modernism. Post-modernist thinkers look backward to literature before realism/modernism to works like Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy to find earlier examples of post-modernism. Tastes evolve, styles evolve, and it is difficult to know what will last.