Acción, Relato, Discurso

 

Han Kang

Ocurre en una academia privada de Seúl que ofrece lecciones de griego clásico. La protagonista, una mujer joven y doliente al perder la custodia de su hijo de 8 años, estudia griego antiguo para escapar al silencio, «porque quería recuperar el habla por su propia voluntad». pic.twitter.com/JZ5PN6QYgq

— Irene Vallejo (@irenevalmore) October 12, 2024

La autoficción en la práctica

 Artículo donde me citan o me nombran: 

Ceballos-Viro, Álvaro, and K. Vanden-Berghe. "La autoficción en la práctica. Un estudio de recepción empírica." Ocnos: Revista de estudios sobre lectura 23.2 (2024). https://doi.org/10.18239/ocnos_2024.23.2.446

         2024

         Online at ResearchGate.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381776444

         2024

 

—oOo—

Notes on Character and Characterization

Notas (de 1996) sobre...

 

 Daniel Schwarz,
“Character and Characterization: An Inquiry”

Approach: pro “humanistic formalism” (97) “dialogical or pluralistic aesthetic” (101), pro seeing characters in diverse ways’ “it should be a goal of ours to be as open-minded and pluralistic as possible lest we limit the possibilities of reading experience by blind adherence to a few points of view” (101). (Contra los excesos de la desconstrucción, vs. free play of meaning,  pro Iser, Bakhtin, Gelley... sin embargo, su noción de que el carácter va más allá de lo escrito podría asimilarse al free play of meaning). Criticism as disguised autobiography (Cf. Anatole France).

Main point:

104. “Because of our human interest in other humans, the reader does much of his creative work as a reader of fictional characters, including the narrative voice.”

Characterization vs. character.

Characterization:
97: “Characterization is the formal pattern by which characters are realized.” Responded to in aesthetic terms (artistry, etc.) (98).

89. “Characterization is a formal term—a term of discourse—while character belongs to content or story”
“A characterization is a trope—a figure or vehicle for a character formally realized by an author in an aesthetic structure.” Signified of this trope extends to the intended audience, readers, author, narratee..  “human figure (I use the term in its meaning as individual and trope)” Human interest makes us anthropomorphize these abstractions. 

90: “Character is an extended personification or prosopopeia, a sign endowed with human attributes”. 91: “illusion takes precedence when human behavior is being described”. Strenght of identification, especially in scenes of represented passion (desire) “because that is where for most of aus the mimetic stakes are highest” (102).

Characterization: “the idea that formal authorial and mimetic tools organize character”. (Parece contraponerlo al efecto final, character, que va más allá debido a la identificación de los lectores).

Character:
Formal pattern of characterization constructs character; “Yet because characters challenge form and assert their individuality, taking on in their imagined ontology lives of their own, character is the most difficult issue to discuss” (97)- humanistic implications.
“a dialogical or pluralistic aesthetic will see characters in diverse ways: at the same time, we see characters as determinate parts of a thematic pattern and as tentative, indeterminate signifiers whose meaning is never fully realized” (101).

Reading character

Understanding of characters in formal, mimetic, expressive, historical and metaphoric terms. 90: pro seeing character pluralistically, “in terms of its mimesis, as part of an expressive relationship in which character is a surrogate for an author  . . . a part of an historical context, and in terms of its linguistic function within a text.”  

99. Thematic/didactic vs. mimetic poles: 

89. A character is understood as being mimetic or representative of the various human groups and categories to which it belongs. (Ojo: mimetic tiene aquí otro sentido: mimetic de una estructura social, no de sí mismo).

Cartoon, caricature and character, from least to most mimetic. (cf. Forster, flat/round). “While fully developed characters change more than cartoons or caricatures, all characters are realized in partially mimetic, partially aesthetic dimensions by the action of plot presented in language” (99). 

“As we move along on continuum from cartoons to caricatures to characters, we perceive less by types or cultural modes and more by nominalistic, specific detail as individuals within psychological, sociological, and historical dimensions” (100). Or: representational vs. idiosyncratic (mimetic).

Character as metaphor

92: Characters metaphors for ourselves, for their creators and for narrators. (strong emphasis on identification and empathy, f. i. with reference to “The Dead”). 

91 “Do we not do a disservice to our students, ourselves, and literature when we say that it is naive to discuss motives, values, and emotions of characters and when we replace the life and energy of our human responses with our theoretical perspective?”
(what is necessary, rather, is to make theory explain our experience, not relinquish theory). Vs. unrealistic image of readers’ activity in many theoretical works; 

97: Pro emotions and identification with character, stronger than the free play of signifiers. Also, pro history and context, but beyond Marxist narrow analysis (98-99), pro stronger importance of personal emotions, family relationships, etc.

103. Reading: 2 directions: temporal-metonymic and spatial-metaphoric. Pattern built gradually, we organize structures of signification metaphorically. (No queda claro si no deberia haber según su teoría un elemento metonímico en el carácter complejo que resiste la traducción a esas estructuras, que no es metaforizado).

Complexity of characters

87. Mobility and flowing quality of literary characters vs. those of the plastic arts. They change as we read on, and are dependent on the process of memory which is itself selective. 96: even visual presentation of film is reductive.

Complex characters: “the more we see life through their eyes, the less we see them” (91). Complex characters resist totalization and description (92). “Leopold Bloom’s complexity refuses to submit to the patterning and plotting of Joyce’s overstylized episodes from ‘Wandering Rocks’ through ‘Circe’” (94). 

Plotlessness in life of complex modern characters causes identification; “Does not the plotting of texts—postponement, fulfillment, delays, circling back, iteration of prior patterns, reorganization of data, description of patterns, forward thrusts and lurches—echo the way we make sense of our lives?” (93). 

“Does not the gradual shift toward self-consciousness in characters as we move from the nineteenth to the twentieth century create and reflect the self-consciousness of modern readers?” (94). “Eighteenth-century and Victorian novels assert the possibility of a stable identity that can be retrieved from historical circumstances . . . whereas the modern novel shows characters in search of that self; retrospective narratives, such as Notes from Underground, The Secret Sharer, and Heart of Darkness, reveal a teller probing into a prior version of himself, a version now oblique if not incomprehensible t his present self” (95).““We look for patterns because we fear randomness and unpredictability in human behavior” (93).

Plausibility for growth and evolution within the time frame of a novel (94) - both action time and reading time. 

98 “character is always presented by another character—in the form of a narrator who self-dramatizingly reveals his values and psyche through speech, or by an author.... (vague: pero parece decir que entendemos tanto al narrador y al autor como personajes). Character understood structurally:, within “the system of other characters” and implied reader, narrator, ourselves...

89. “stereophonic voicing in text”, “the narratee is not a single entity but a complex mélange of diverse audiences which are imagined and addressed differently in every passage by the narrator.” “It may be because of our poly-auditory responses to texts that complex characters seem to elude our desire to sum them up or define their significance.”

89. “Representing human being is both more metaphorical than other kinds of representation because of how we understand characters in their typifying function, and less metaphorical because the creation of people often short-circuits their putative metaphorical function and creates odd kinds of empathy with readers”

Otherness

90: “Focus on characters in imagined worlds implies an interest in something other than ourselves: It means relinquishing our power over the text.” “Isn’t part of our reading a menas of locating ourselves within an alternative world, of perceiving through the eyes of someone not ourselves, of living as if we were another?” (93).  

Characters make us test the limits of our self, and we become somebody else (100). “Yet because each of us reads differently we always recuperate this someone else, this other, in terms of the self we are. Reading is a dialogue between this real self and anotehr self that leaves the real self behind and ventures forth only to find herself or himself” (100); “by reading we mean that imaginative activity by which we leave ourselves to find ourselves by entering the world of another” (101). 

As intended readers or narratees, we are sought by the author and become part of his/her characterization.  

Reading as a training for understanding otherness (104).

____________

Errors:

“Writerly” is attributed to Derrida instead of Barthes (90); “theoretical” terms are used rather vaguely.

Bakhtin used in a misleadingly individualistic way, as individual voice (102).

Assumption that we read novels because we identify with the characters (questionable).

103: Notion that we meet characters, as texts, mid-way between the author and our reading (!) —our previous reading? Surely we meet them at our reading!

Novelas Meta-Autobiográficas

La novela meta-autobiográfica es una de las variedades de la novela metaficcional en primera persona. Me citan en la universidad Johns Hopkins, o quizá en Grecia, en este artículo, "Retorciendo la historia":

Athanasiou-Krikelis, Lissi. "Twisting the Story: Margarita Karapanou's Rien ne va plus and Amanda Michalopoulou's Θα ήθελα as Metaautobiographical Novels." Journal of Modern Greek Studies 34.1 (2016):  Online at Project Muse / Internet Archive.*

         https://muse.jhu.edu/lockss?vid=11145

         https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2016.0018

         https://web.archive.org/web/20171025235302/https://muse.jhu.edu/article/614437/pdf

         2022

 

Título que alude a "Narrating Narrating: Twisting the Twice-Told Tale", "a thought-provoking article" of mine.

 

—oOo—

La identidad en Millás y Orejudo

Me citan en esta tesis doctoral:

Toumba Haman, Patrick. "La representación narrativa y la identidad en la novela española contemporánea: Juan José Millás y Antonio Orejudo." Ph.D. diss. U Complutense de Madrid, 2014.*

         https://eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/28202/1/T35681.pdf

         2022

 

Bueno, citan mi libro de narratología. Una cosa somos nosotros, y otra nuestros libros.

 

—oOo—

Making Time

Making Time

La narración paradójica

 

Libro de narratología y sobre metaficción en el que se me cita:

Grabe, Nina, Sabine Lang and Klaus Meyer-Minnemann, eds. La narración paradójica: "Normas narrativas" y el principio de la "transgresión." (Edicions de Iberoamericana, 38). Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt a/M: Vervuert Verlag, 2006. Online at de Gruyter.*

         https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.31819/9783964561626/html

        https://doi.org/10.31819/9783964561626

         2022

 

—oOo—

Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada

Comentamos aquí sobre la integración de algunos aspectos éticos, estéticos, psicológicos y narrativos en la novela epistolar Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady de Samuel Richardson (1747-48), en concreto la encarnación de un ideal ético-estético en el personaje de Clarissa, y la elección consciente de una técnica narrativa que va unida en esta obra a un efecto de autogénesis. 

Texto completo:

Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: 

Una narración autoengendrada

https://doi.org/10.17613/34ra-rf87

Author(s):

José Angel GARCÍA LANDA (see profile)

Date:

2021

Group(s):

English Literature, Literary theory, Narrative theory and Narratology

Subject(s):

Novel criticism, Samuel Richardson, Aesthetics, Narratology, Criticism

Item Type:

Article

Tag(s):

Clarissa, Self-begetting fiction, English Novel

Permanent URL:

https://doi.org/10.17613/34ra-rf87

English abstract: This paper deals with the integration of a number of ethical, aesthetic, psychological and narrative issues in Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (1747-48), and more specifically with the incarnation of an ethical-aesthetic ideal in the character of Clarissa, and the deliberate choice of a narrative technique associated to a self-begetting dimension in this work.

 

 

 

_____. "Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 11 July 2021.*

         https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2021/07/clarissa-la-critica-y-su-etica-del-gusto.html

         2021

_____. "Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada." Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 12 July 2021.*

         https://www.ibercampus.es/clarissa-la-critica-y-su-etica-del-buen-gusto-41329.htm

         2021 DISCONTINUED 2024 – Online at the Internet Archive:

         https://web.archive.org/web/20220214082059/https://www.ibercampus.es/clarissa-la-critica-y-su-etica-del-buen-gusto-41329.htm

         2024

_____. "Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada / Clarissa the Critic and Her Ethics of Good Taste: A Self-Begetting Narrative." SSRN 28 Dec. 2021.*

         http://ssrn.com/abstract=3946233

         2021

_____. "Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada." Academia 14 Nov. 2021.*

         https://www.academia.edu/61666121/

         2021

_____. "Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada." ResearchGate 8 Jan. 2022.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357680683

         2022

_____. "Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada." Humanities Commons 15 Jan. 2022.*

         https://doi.org/10.17613/34ra-rf87

         https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:44217/

         2022

_____. "Clarissa la crítica y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 15  Jan. 2022.*

         https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2022/01/clarissa-la-critica-y-su-etica-del-buen.html

         2022

_____. "Clarissa la crítica y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada." Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 5 Jan. 2023.*

         https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/clarissalacritica.pdf

        2023

_____. "Clarissa la crítica y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autogenerada." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 30 Jan. 2026.*

         https://blogdenotasvanityfea.blogspot.com/2026/01/clarissa-la-critica-y-su-etica-del-buen_30.html

         2026

—oOo—

El otro árabe y el otro israelí

Me citan en esta tesis sobre estereotipos en la novela israelí y palestina:

Holgado Cristeto, Mª Belén. El otro árabe y el otro israelí en la novela israelí y palestina: Los estereotipos. Ph.D. diss. U of Granada, 2007. Pub. U of Granada, 2007. Online at Academia.*

https://www.academia.edu/241889/

         2021

Lo citado es esta mesa redonda sobre metaficción que aparece en Dialnet:

Onega, Susana, Francisco Collado and José Angel García Landa. "Teoría y práctica de la metaficción: mesa redonda." Actas del XV Congreso de AEDEAN (1991). Ed Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza and Carmelo Cunchillos. Logroño: Colegio Universitario de La Rioja, 1993. 601-603.*

         http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=555160

         2014

Mª Belen Holgado Cristeto, que aparece en Academia como  "Mª Belén Tamames Holgado-Cristeto" es autora también de este libro sobre "el célebre conflicto" en la novela israelí y palestina.

Holgado, Belén. El problema político-social en la novela israelí y palestina. Sevilla: Megablum, 2005.

 

—oOo—

The Scarlet Notebook

 

From Paul Auster's novel 4321: 

 

The Scarlet Notebook was going to be difficult, far and away the most challenging work he had ever attempted, and Ferguson had serious doubts about whether he could pull it off. A book about a book, a book that one could read and also write in, a book that one could enter as if it were a three-dimensional physical space, a book that was the world and yet of the mind, a conundrum, a fraught landscape filled with beauties and dangers, and little by little a story would begin to develop inside it that would thrust the fictitious author, F., into a confrontation with the darkest elements of himself. A dream book. A book about the immediate realities in front of F.'s nose. An impossible book that could not be written and would surely devolve into a chaos of random, unconnected shards, a pile of meaninglessness. Why attempt to do such a thing? Why not simply invent another story and tell it as any other writer would? Because Ferguson was no longer interested in telling mere stories. Because Ferguson wanted to test himself against the unknown and see if he could survive the struggle.

 

(6.4, 895-96)

 

 —oOo—

 

 

Sterne and the Novel of his Times

 

(From the  

Concise Cambridge History of English Literature,  

by George Sampson, rev. R.C. Churchill, 1972)

THE AGE OF JOHNSON, III:

STERNE AND THE NOVEL OF HIS TIMES

During the twenty years that followed the death of Richardson new elements were added to the novel, and of these the chief is "sentiment" or "sensibility", the master in that kind being Sterne. Apart from him the writers of the time fall into three groups, (1) the novelists of sentiment and reflection, typified by Henry Mackenzie, (2) the novelists of home life, typified by Fanny Burney, and (3) the novelists of "Gothick" romance, typified by Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve.

Laurence Sterne (1713-68) was born at Clonmel, Tipperary [Ireland], the son of Ensign Roger Sterne and great-grandson of the Richard Sterne who was Archbishop of York 1664-83. He was educated at Cambridge, took holy orders and was made perpetual curate of Coxwold in Yorkshire in 1760. He was not the kind of priest in whom the Anglican Church can feel any pride. Little is known about his life, and even that little is not very reputable. Our concern, however, is with the writer. The publication of Tristram Shandy was begun in 1760 (Vols. I and II), and continued at intervals until the year before the author's death. In 1762 Sterne's health broke down, and he began the travels of which A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr Yorick (1768) is the delightful literary product. Save that Sterne died in London and not abroad, it will be noticed that his life roughly follows the Fielding-Smollett pattern. The author of Tristram Shandy, cool copyst of other men as he was, must be accepted as an original and originating power in literature. He showed that there were untried possibilities in the novel. He opened new fields of of humour. He created a style more subtle and a form more flexible than any found before him. The novel, as left by Fielding and Smollett, might have settled into a chronicle of contemporary life and manners. Richardson had struck memorably into tragedy, but his one great story stood alone. Sterne invented for English literature the fantasia-novel, which could be a channel for the outporing of the author's own personality, idiosyncrasy, humours and opinions. Instead of form, there was apparently formlessness; but only apparently, for Sterne was the master of his own improvisations. Sterne may therefore be called a liberator—even the first of the "expressionists". His success left the novel the most flexible of all literary forms. 

Sterne's odd humour appears in the very title of his book, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; for it has been truly remarked that the "life" is that of the gentleman's uncle and the "opinions" those of the gentleman's father. Tristram, titular hero and narrator, remains unborn during much of the story and plays no part in the rest. The undying trio, Walter Shandy, My Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are humorous both in the narrow or Jonsonian sense, and in the larger or Shakespearean sense. My Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are variations of genius upon Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They are on a lower plane, but the relation between them is full of beauty, as well as of humour.

Of Sterne's indecency too much can be made. That he has not the broad humour of his other master, Rabelais—that his fun in this kind provokes the snigger rather than the hearty laugh, can be at once admitted. What is unfortunate about Sterne is that much of his own personal life seems to give unpleasant point to the least pleasant parts of his writing. We should like a priest to be more priestly. But actually the most offensive quality in Sterne is the new "sensibility" or "sentimentalism". When the "spot-lights" are manipulated with design so palpable as in the death of Le Fever or in the story of the dead ass, the author goes far to defeat his own purpose; for he at once calls in question his own artistic sincerity. The pathos of Dickens is naturally poured out; the pathos of Sterne is unnaturally put on. But his artistic sins can be forgiven for the sake of an insinuating, irresistible humour in which no English writer has excelled him. His Sermons of Mr Yorick (1760-9) and Letters from Yorick to Eliza (1775) have a biographical rather than a literary importance. 

Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831) carried the eighteenth century well into the nineteenth. After the publication of The Man of Feeling in 1771, the year of Scott's birth, he was recognized as the literary leader of Edinburgh society. The novel, intrinsically unremarkable, is notewworthy as a reversion to the Coverly type invented by Addison. The story is purely episodic. It is completely without humour, and owes nothing in form or in spirit to Fielding or Smollett. Mackenzie was, as Scott called him, "the northern Addison," though he comes near to Sterne in his working of the "sentimental" vein. in his next bok, The Man of the World (1773), Mackenzie achieved both a plot and a villain, though neither can be called important. His last and best book, Julia de Roubigné (1777), strikes a wholly different note and places him in the straight line of descent from Richardson. It owes much to Clarissa, and is one of the few tragedies to be found in the early stages of the English novel.

More genuinely important is Henry Brooke (1703-83), an Irishman, whose best known book The Fool of Quality (1766) has already been mentioned (pp. 397, 412). Brooke was a man of many activities, and deserves serious study. In The Fool of Quality the "free fantasia" form of discussion, diversion and sentiment indicates a debt to Sterne; the substance of the social discourses shows clear understanding of Rousseau; and the strain of exaltation comes from Law and the mystics. It is a remarkable compound. Brooke's other novel, Juliet Greenville (1774) does not call for notice.

From the novel of sentiment to the tale that sought to five both a sense of terror and a sense of the past is a startling transition. It began with The Castle of Otranto (1765) struck off at fever heat by Horace Walpole (1719-97). Though slight and more than a little absurd, it has the importance of being the first thing of its kind in English. It was written in conscious reaction against the domesticities of Richardson, and sought both to substitute for the interest of the present the appeal of the past, and to extend the wrold of experience by the addition of the mysterious and the supernatural. The performance is bungling; but the design is original and effective. Walpole gave us the first "Gothick" romance. He was followed by Clara Reeve (1729-1807) who wrote several stories of which only one is remembered, The Champion of Virtue, A Gothic Story (1777), the foolish title of which was happily changed to The Old English Baron in the second edition (1778). When it is remembered that another of her production is called Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon, a Natural Son of Edward the Black Prince (1793), it will be seen that Clara Reeve through she had her feet firmly in the past, though, in fact, her fifteenth century conducts itself singularly like the eighteenth. Still, the attempt to recapture romance was made. If Horace Walpole and Clara Reee had done no more than claim that the boundaries of the novel might be extended to include the glamour of the past and the thrill of the supernatural, they would deserve remembrance; but their actual performances are not entirely contemptible. 

Wit hthe novels of Frances (Fanny) Burney (1752-1840) we pass into another world. Fanny was the daughter of Dr Burney, the amiable historian of music. During her youth, and until some years after the publication of her second novel, she lived in the most brilliant literary society of her day. In 1786 she was appointed second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, a post which she held for four years, to her own great discomfort, but to the delight of those who read her fascinating Diary. After her release, she married (1793) General d'Arblay, an emigrant of the Revolution, and from 1802 to 1812 she lived in France, returning only to publish her last novel, The Wanderer (1814). In Evelina Fanny Burney wrote the first English novel of home life. The motherless Evelina goes out into the world, and her adventures are related in a series of letters with a vivacity and swift succession of incidents entierely original. Her way is beset with comic characters who are new creations in English fiction and foreshadow the far-off Dickens. Jonson aptly called Burney his "little character-monger". She was the first to give flesh and blood to sheer vulgarity. Her best qualities are seen in Evelina (1778). Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796) have stiffened into something unnatural, and The Wanderer (1814) scared even Macaulay, who was not easily frightened by anything in the shape of a book. Spontaneity is among the best gifts of the novelist; and few books are more spontaneous than Fanny's first novel. The same gift appears in her Diary with its brilliant and easy succession of characters and incidents. Fanny Burney was the first writer to see that the ordinary embarrassments of a girl's life would bear to be taken for the main theme of a novel. Macaulay justly saluted her as the first English novelist of her sex; he forgot that she was the first novelist of her kind, without respect of sex.

Daiches on Sterne

—oOo—

 

The New Novelists of the 1950s

(from The Short Oxford History of English Literature, by Andrew Sanders)

Samuel Beckett's trilogy, pulished together in London in 1959 under the English titles Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, was in every sense the most radically innovative fictional statement of the 1950s. The edition bore the announcement that the three novels had been 'translated from the original French by the author'. Beckett's pre-war fiction in English—the episodic novel A Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written in 1932, but published posthumously in 1992), the ten interconnected stories derived from it and given the title More Pricks than Kicks (1934) and the novel Murphy (1938)—had responded with a gauche confidence to the challenge of Joyce's experimental 'work in progress', Finnegans Wake. The titles of the first two of his pre-war works (one being loosely adapted from Chaucer, the other bawdily punning on a phrase of St. Paul's) also suggest the degree to which Beckett was self-consciously attempting to regenerate and re-energize the literary traditions of his native language. Murphy is the most substantial of the three. Its solitary title character, who 'sat it out, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton', is an Irishman in London, precisely placed in time and space (it is Thursday, 12 September 1935) and he has an unbroken view from his window to the northwest). His 'mew' (a bird-coop, originally one designed for moultin falcomry) is condemned (we presume as unfit for human habitation) and Murphy must contemplate the upheaval of removal ('Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings'). Ostensibly, Murphy is constructed around the drab rituals and the vacuous repetitions of a largely inert life passed in a confined urban space. More profoundly, it seeks to represent a man's energetic inner life which finds its own repetitive rhythms and patterns and its own time-scheme distinct from those of the outside world.

When Beckett returned to fiction after the Second World War, he opted for the discipline of writing in French rather than in English. He also chose the form of a fluid monologue, a positively gushing 'stream of consciousness', rather than that of a third-person narrative. Molloy (written in 1947, published in Paris in 1951, and subsequently translated into English in 1955) shares a deliberate ambiguity of telling with its two successors. Each of the ageing narrators in the trilogy habitually contradicts himself, stumbles over the contortions of his syntax, and is obliged to pause in order to reflect on precisely how he has to express himself or on what he feels pressed to say. Both the flow of narrative and the language employed threaten to break under the strain. Beginnings are vexed or subverted, tenses shift between past and present, and what seem to be digressions or interpolations assume a vital momentum. Molloy (the very title of which may possibly, with the addition of one simple vowel, glance back to Joyce's superlatively fluid consciousness, Molly) is built around two self-explorative consciousnesses, the one seeking the other. Much as the disabled Molloy melts disconcertingly into his contemporary other half, the self-abused, decayed Moran, in the first novel, so both Molloy and Moran are subsumed in the other compulsive story-tellers of the trilogy, Malone and the isolated, unnamed narrator of The Unnamable. The last anguished and lachrymose teller recognizes the extent to which he has assimilated and now disowns the experiences of his narrative forebears: 'All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing . . . I though I was right in enlisting these sufferers in my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it . . . these creatures have never been, only I and this black void have ever been.' Whereas Murphy sits it out 'as though he were free', this man of sorrows, the Unnamable, wrenches phrases from himself in his isolation and probes the implications of the perception that he is neither truly alone nor free of a larger humanity ('the little murmur of unconsenting man, to murmur what it is their humanity stifles'). The trilogy ends with an ultimate contradiction in terms: 'in silence you don't know, you must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.' 

Beckett's experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narrative form had few immediate echoes in the more popular fiction of the 1950s. The one British writer of the period who keenly responded to the idea of creating an avowedly 'Modernist' fiction, and whose experiments were enthusiastically received by a wide public, was Lawrence Durrell (1912-90). Durrell was born in India of parents whose families had made the sub-continent their home for several generations. Although he became briefly acclimatized to bohemian (as opposed to 'respectable') England in the early 1930s, Durrell found what he regarded as his spiritual home in the Mediterranean, moving first to Corfu and then, after the German invasion of Greece, to Egypt. As a young man he also responded to the liberating influence of two modern writers in particular, D. H. Lawrence (with whom he shared an antipathy to British reserve as much as to British rain) and the Paris-based American novelist Henry Miller (with whom he embarked on a long correspondence). Miller's influence can be felt on Durrell's The Black Book: An Agon, 'a savage charcoa sketch of spiritual and sexual etiolation', which was privately printed in Paris in 1938 (its overt eroticism precluded its publication in Britain until 1973). In 1944, as Press Officer of the British Information Service in Egypt, Durrell was posted to Alexandria, the city of 'five races, five languages, a dozen creeds' which inspired the four novels of his 'Alexandria Quartet'— Justine (1957), Balthazar, Mountolive (both 1958), and Clea (1960). Durrell's dusty, sweaty, multi-layered Aleandria, a city he described in Balthazar as 'half-imagined (yet wholly real), [which] begins and ends in us', is a phantasmagoric, Eliotic place in which men and women dissolve into one another and ancient splendours melt into modern inconveniences. The city's real and imagined disconnections provide the setting for a series of interlocked fictions describing interconnected, unfulfilling love-affairs. The narrator, Darley, is both a self-conscious, self-referential teller and an incorporator of the narrative voices of other tellers, notably that of a fellow-writer, Pursewarden. In one of the 'workpoints'—sentences, ideas, and occasionally poems or translations seemingly discarded from the main narrative of Justine and then appended to it as a kind of afterthought—Pursewarden's 'n-dimensional novel' is described by its author as having a forward narrative momentum which is 'counter-sprung by references backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern'. Readers are doubtless meant to read Darley's actual narrative as somehow shadowing Pursewarden's speculative one. The Alexandria Quartet, in common with Durrell's yet more ambitious 'Avignon Quintet'—Monsieur (1974), Livia (1978), Constance (1982), Sebastian (1983), and Quincx (1985)—attempts to break down preconceptions of time as much as it assaults inherited prejudices in favour of fictional realism. Durrell's literary reputation, so buoyant in the breezy, liberal climate of the early 1960s, tended to sag thereafter. Where his contemporary, Beckett, was economical, he was prodigal; where Beckett saw the force of scrupulous compression, he indulged in a passion for words which is more often libertine than it is liberating.

William Golding's first and most enduringly popular novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), gives a surer indication of his continuing concern with moral allegory than it does of his subsequent experiments with fictional form. Golding (1911-93) set the novel on a desert island on which a marooned party of boys from an English cathedral choir-school gradually falls away from the genteel civilization that has so far shaped it and regresses into dirt, barbarism, and murder. The island is cut off both from the disciplined harmony of the boys' musical background and from a disharmonious world of grown-ups at war. The novel is shaped intellectually by an intermixture of the Christian concept of original sin, a post-Darwinist and post-Wellsian pessimism, and a systematic undoing of R. M. Ballantyne's adventure story of plucky and resourceful boys, The Coral Island (1857). At the end of the story an officer from the warship that rescues the boys dejectedly remarks, 'I should have thought that a pack of British boys . . . would have been able to put up a better show than that'. The sudden shift of viewpoint and the dejection were re-explored, with subtle variations and darker ramifications, in each of Golding's subsequent novels. As the range of his fiction shows, Golding emerged as a major successor to an established line of Modernist mythopoeists. Unlike Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, or Jones, however, he was not content with a reanimation of ancient myth; he was intent on overturning and superseding a variety of modern rationalist formulations and on replacing them with charged, unorthodox moral shapes. It is not just British boys who reveal their innate depravity, but the whole human race. The Inheritors (1955) moves back into an anthropological, rather than Adamic, prehistory in which the talented, if thoroughly nasty and brutish, progenitors of Homo sapiens exterminate their gentler, simpler-minded Neanderthal precursors. The dense, difficult Pincher Martin (1956) has as its greedy egotistical 'hero' a drowned sailor, lost from a torpedoed destroyer, whose body is rolled by the Atlantic. But the 'Pincher' is also a survivor, one whose consciousness tries desperately to hold on to its fragmented identity in a watery purgatory. This identity attaches itslf to an imagined rock, one that Martin names 'Rocall' and one which he also recognized in its rhymed naval transmogrification as 'Buggerall' (a hellish nothing). Golding experimented with a similar metaphorical structue in Free Fall (1959), a tortuous exploration of free will and fallen humanity in relation to the scientific idea of the unrestrained movement of a body under the force of gravity. The subject of  The Spire of 1964 was both more concrete and more elusive. Jocelin, the ambitious Dean of an unnamed English cathedral at an unspecified point in the Middle Ages, is a fallen man obsessed with raising a tall stone spire above his cathedral. His obsession is determined by a serpentine knot of motives—architectural, theological, visionary, psychological, sexual, self-deprecating, and self-aggrandizing. Jocelin both achieves his desire and fails in it; he builds and awe-inspiring structure on shaky foundations, but he is also forced to experience its maiming; he erects an airy reflection of heavenly glory, but he is also obliged to recognize the hot, distracting force of the phallus; he periodically escapes upwards, with a vertiginous thrill, into a Gothic fretwork, but he is held earthbound by the overloaded, creaking pillars that have to support his aspiration. Finally struck down by a mortal paralysis, and attended by a priest known as Father Adam, the dying Jocelin struggles to find the meaning of his life's work, a meaning which gradually forms itself around the metaphoric core of the lost earthly paradise: 'In the tide, flying like a bluebird, struggling, shouting, screaing to leave behind the words of magic and incomprehension—It's like the appletree!'

Golding's The Pyramid (1967) was followed by what appeared to be an abstention from fiction, an abstention broken in 1979 by Darkness Visible. All Goldint's opening scenes, suggestions, and sentences are disconcertingly striking. None is more so than that of Darkness  Visible, a compelling evocation of an intense fire-storm in the London Blitz out of which walks a fearfully burned child: 'He was naked and the miles o light lit him variously . . . The brighness of his left side was not an effect of light. The burn was even more visible on the left side of his head.' From the terrible beauty of this beginning there develops an intense and sometimes confusing exploration of the polarities of redemptive saintliness and destructive malignity, of disinterested love and calculated terrorism. The four novels published since Darkness Visible—Rites of Passage (1980), its sequels Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989), and The Paper Men (1984)—have extended what can be seen as an established rhythm of contrasted sea-stories and land-stories all of which are concerned with extremity and isolation. The most successful is Rites of Passage, the first volume of a sea-trilogy set on a decayed man-of-war bound for Australia in the opening years of the nineteenth-century. Its cocky, journal-writing narrator, Edmund Talbot, is alerted to the problems of 'too much understanding' but can himself comprehend littls of 'all that is monstrous under the sun'. Talbot, like all Golding's central characters, is rawly exposed both to his darker self and to the grinding despair of one of his fellow-passengers. Although Golding's work has sometimes been compared to that of Conrad, it is often closer in spirit, and in its aspirations to the condition of poetry, to that of Eliot. Each of Golding's male protagonists seemes obliged to re-articulate the agonized, incomprehending, unspecific question of Gerontion: 'After such knowledge, what forgiveness?'

As his novels of the 1950s suggest, Angus Wilson (1913-91) seems to have been intent on restoring Victorian narrative styles to English fiction in opposition to what he saw as the errant experimentalism of the Modernists. In contrast to the slim, even anorexic, shapes accepted by his contemporaries, he steadily swelled the physical shape of the novel to something approaching its nineteenth-century proportions. As a means of emphasizing where his artistic loyalties lay, he published a fine, but decidedly untheoretical, study of Émile Zola in 1952 (though revised in 1965); in 1970 he added an observant, semi-biographical, critical introduction to Deickens and in 1977 an essay on Kipling  Wilson recognized in Dickens a writer who combined 'art and entertainment' and whose works made up 'a complete whole—the World of Charles Dickens'. In 1961 he also proclaimed his continuing confidence in the 'God's eye view', the omniscient narrative stance of many of many of the Victorian novelists that he admired. Although some critics have attempted to draw parallels between Wilson's own work and that of Zola, Dickens, and even George Eliot, the parallels cannot really be sustained. He was, it is true, a convinced realist who occasionally indulged in grotesquerie and fantasy and a finely tuned comic writer who habitually allowed for the intrusions of tragedy and cruelty, but the world of his own novels is idiosyncratic and decidedly that of the mid-twentieth century. Wilson, who began his literary career with two volumes of short stories, The Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950), had a talent more developed for creating scenes, set pieces, and characters than for the spruce and ordered fictional shapes that defined themselves against what Henry James had dismissed as 'loose baggy monsters'. Wilson's novels, from his first, Hemlock and After (1952) to his last, Setting the World on Fire (1980), are essentially comedies of manners in which the comedy winces, sometimes gratuitously, with pain. As an observer and mimic, Wilson also had an exceptionally sharp ear and eye for the whims, voices, vogues, pretensions, and pomposities of his time. He had a particularly fastidious distaste for the kind of social gatherings which represent what he called in his essay The Wild Garden, or Speaking of Writing (1963) 'the hell of the human failure to communicate', where the damned are 'the social climbers, those wanting to be loved, the unloved women who push people around, the organization men who fall to pieces when they are alone'. His two most 'traditional' novels, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) and The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958), are also probably his surest comments on the cultural, social, and sexual tensions of a period struggling to come to terms with the conflicting claims of tradition and novelty. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is especially adept in its panoramic movement from scene to scene and in its gradual establishment of connections between a disparate number of characters. Wilson beds his novel in an archaeological fraud (perpetrated in 1912 before the narrative begins) whose ramifications return to darken the present of Gerald Middleton, an ageing historian. Late Call (1964) also introduces the idea of historical determination (its opening 'Prologue' is set in 1911) but it narrows the scope of its plot to an account of the alienation of the retired Sylvia Calvert amid the affected liberalism and the engineered environment of one of the 'New Towns' (social experiments much promoted by government planners in the late 1950s). The latter part of Wilson's career was marked by an increasing experimentalism, not all of it successful. Late Call is notable for its deliberate use of pastiche and its undercutting of cliché; Old Men at the Zoo (1961, but set in an 'utterly improbable' 1970-3) for its juxtapositions of men and beasts against a background of 'wars, domestic and foreign'; No Laughing Matter (1967) for its long time-span (1912-67), for its parodies, and for the introduction of scenes presented as if they were written for the stage. Neither the capricious As If By Magic (1973) nor the yet wilder Setting the World on Fire (1980), however, exhibit quite the vivacious panache of Wilson's earlier work.

Iris Murdoch (born in Dublin in 1919) was, in the early part of her career, to remain equally faithful to traditional fictional shapes. Unlike Wilson, however, she underpinned her novels with arguments derived from a scrupulous investigation of the problems posed by moral philosophy. This underpinning has been consstently enhanced by a series of independent philosophical studies, notably Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953), The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). If Murdoch was amongst the earliest readers to respond positively to Beckett's fiction (she read Murphy as an undergraduate at Oxford and paid homage to it in her own first published novel, Under the Net, in 1954), her only work of fiction whih can be said to draw directly from Beckett's example is Bruno's Dream (1969), a study of the atrophying consciousness of an old man. Murdoch sketched the nature of her own philosophical and literary standpoint in an article entitled 'Against Dryness' in 1961. 'We live in a scientific and anti-metaphysical age, she argued, an age in which 'we have been left with far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality' and in which the connection between art and the ora life had languished 'because we are losing our sense of form and structure in the moral world itself'. The problem with much modern writing, as she saw it, lay in 'our tendeny to produce works which are either crystalline or journalistic'; writers needed to turn away from 'the dry symbol, the bogus individual, the false whole, towards the real impenetrable human person'. Against the 'consolations of form, the clean crystalline work, the simplified fantasy-myth', writers should pit 'the destructive power of the now so unfashionable naturalistic idea of character'.

None of Murdoch's own novels could remotely be called 'dry', despite the determining concern with ethical dilemmas that each betrays.  All of them are carefully patterned, though the rules of the obscure game which decide these patterns often seem to be broken, reformed, and realigned by the very nature of the freedom which she allows her characters. Jake Donaghue, the male narrator of Under the Net, both resists and creates theoretical patterns with words which, like nets, entrap and constrain perceptions of a larger and expanding reality. As a range of novels from The Flight from the Enchater (1955) to The Sea, The Sea (1978) and The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) suggest, those characters who attempt to impose nets, theories, mystical enchantments, 'artistic' arrangements, or restrictive myths upon reality must themselves adapt to a world which of necessity eludes predetermined human systems of control. In The Bell (1958) and A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) the loss or fragmentation of objects also seems to suggest why established patterns of relationships between characters must themselves be removed and reordered. As Rupert warns in the latter novel, 'some general view . . . makes you blind to obvious immediate things in human life'. In some senses, Murdoch's fascination with spiritually gifted outsiders, androgynes, and foreigners (particularly East Europeans) further emphasizes the fictional significance she places on inteterminacy, difference, and strangeness. The Bell, set in a lay religious community established in a country mansion near to a convent of enclosed nuns, begins with a fragmenting marriage and gradually explores the emotional, sexual, and moral tensions which force the community itself to break up and re-form. The convent bell, from which the novel takes its title, bears the inscription 'Vox ego sum amoris' ('I am the voice of Love'); it is at once an aesthetic focus and a disturbing catalyst, an ideal and a breaker of ideals. It proves to be less of a link back to a restrictive and legendary past, than an announcer of new freedoms and the rightness of new contingencies. As the Abbess, one of Murdoch's first spiritually gifted outsiders, has announced, 'all our failures are failures in love'. New contingencies also determine the nature and the structure of what remains Murdoch's most experimental novel, The Black Prince (1973). Its narrator, Bradley Pearson, a novelist, both tells the story and, in as sense, is the story. 'Art', he remarks, is telling the truth, and is the only available method for telling certain truths. Yet how almost impossibly difficult it is not to let the marvels of the instrument itself interfere with the task to which it is dedicated'. The Black Prince is, on one level, a contrived intellectual thriller; on another it is an equally contrived multiple and untrustworthy narrative. It opens with two Forewords, the first by a supposed editor, Loxias (whose name is derived from the Greek word for 'oblique'); the second by Pearson himself. As the narrative line develops, so do different ways of approaching and understanding 'truth' and 'reality'. It ends with six separate, disparate and, to some degree, conflicting postscripts, four of them written by different members of what Murdoch describes as her 'dramatis personae'. The use of this theatrical term serves as a deliberate reminder of the Shakespearian echoes and connections with which the narrrative has played and with which it finally fragments ('Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you, nothing'). If Loxias, the supposed editor of the manuscript, is here echoing Pearson's own sentiments, he is also playing a Horatio to a dead Hamlet, an uncloaked Prospero, deprived of his charms, asking for the indulgence of an audience.

Muriel Spark (b. 1918), a Catholic convert of Jewish descent and Scottish birth, shares with Murdoch and Golding a pressing commitment to moral issues and to their relation to fictional form. Her first novel, The Comforters (1957), is concerned with a neurotic woman writer, Caroline Rose, having to come to terms with her new-found Catholicism, with her hallucinations, and with her God-like status as a creator. Rose, is not merely working on a study of contemporary fiction entitled Form in the Modern Novel (and having particular difficulty with the chapter on realism), she has also resolved to write a novel about writing a novel. Spark has been as consistently fascinated by the narrative problems posed by self-consciously literary texts as she has been preoccupied with the theological problem of evil. As the opening paragraph of her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1992), serves to suggest, she has been equally determined to explore the potential of light to dispel darkness and to illuminate the creatures, the thoughts, the motives, and the sins that dwell in darkness.

It is not insignificant that in 1951, before she had embarked on her own career as a novelist, Spark published a critical reassessment of the work of Mary Shelley under the title Child of Light. Her own early novels marked new advances in the often distinctly British exploration of the Gothic. If, on one level, she revealed herself as the Scots heir to the tradition of Burns, Hogg, and Stevenson, on another, hers is a Gothic enlivened by a decidedly post-Calvinist glee. Memento Mori (1959), which was recommended to readers as a 'brilliant and singularly gruesome achievement' by Evelyn Waugh, is concerned with a diverse group of London geriatrics who receive anonymous telephone calls telling them to remember the inevitable fact of their impending deaths. Spark's title recalls the skulls and funerary desk ornaments favoured by baroque meditators on mortality, but her own narrative is wry, blunt, and provocatively funny. She ends the novel with dry medical case histories as one of her characters, paralysed by a stroke, searches through his mind, 'as through a card-index', for the causes of his friends' mortal sicknesses: 'Leslie colston, he recited to himself, comminuted fractures of the skull; Godfrey Colston, hypostatic pneumonia; Charmian Colston, uraemia; Jean Taylor, myocardial degeneration; Tempest Sidebottome, cancirnoma of the bronchus; Guy Lees, arteriosclerosis; Hanry Mortimer, coronary thrombosis . . . ' His litany is broken by the third-person narrator turning to a separate meditation, one that finally turns on the reader with the words of a children's catechism: 'Jean Taylor lingered for a time, employing her pain to magnify the Lord, and meditating sometimes confidently upon Death, the first of the four last things to be ever remembered.' The Gothic of The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) is quite distinct in its comic chill. both novels are, in their different ways, concerned with possession; the first with necromancy in a south London suburb in the 1950s, the second with the peculiar exercise of psychological power in an Edinburgh's girls' school in the 1930s. Miss Brodie's superbly poised and precisely defined moral sway over her favourite pupils is compared by one of her protégées to that of 'the God of Calvin'; the narrator, however, suggests a more delationary contemporary parallel, based on Miss Brodie's fondness for pointing out the common Latin root of the words 'educare' and 'Duce': 'Mussolini stood on a platform like a gym teacher or a Guides mistress . . . the Brodie set was Miss Brodie's fascisti.' 

The dispassionate, sometimes ironic, sometimes disingenuous tone of Spark's narrators helps her to create a sense of discordance between the aberrance of what happens and its cool, precise delineation. This is particularly true of her 'metaphysical shocker', The Driver's Seat (1970), a carefully ordered, even meticulous, present-tense account of a woman with a death-wish who plots the circumstances of her own violent murder. The novel undermines easy assumptions about cause and effect as much as it challenges ideas of authorial authority and control. If Not to Disturb (1971)—with its opening quotation from The Duchess of Malfi, its foul weather, and its 'zestful' aristocratic cretin imprisoned in a wing of a Swiss château—is Gothic in the traditional sense of the term, Spark's The Abbess of Crewe (1974), a brusque investigagion of an upper-crust English convent, completely avoids the prurience traditionally inspirational to earlier Gothic novelists. The convent is ruled by an Abbess adept in expoiting all the technological and propagandist skills of the twentieth century in order to manipulate her sisters into compliance with her will. She not only appreciates the state of the art, she is also, like so many of Spark's protagonists, something of an artist herself. 'Scenarios', the Abbess tells the nuns, 'are an art-form . . . based on facts. A good scenario is a garble. A bad one is a bungle. They need not be plausible, only hypnotic, like all good art'. Throughout the narrative, she has revealed a remarkable taste for secular literature. (Machiavelli jostles with a wide range of poetry). At the end, when she meets her Watergate, she gives orders 'for the selection and orchestration of the transcripts of her tape-recordings'. At certain points in the transcripts she includes the explanatory instruction 'Poetry deleted'. It is distinctly more elegant, but no less polite, than the phrase it echoes, Richard Nixon's 'Expletive deleted'.

Bunting and Larkin

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To be continued...

El Policial Negro

 

Me citan en esta tesis argentina sobre la novela negra o policíaca. En red la tienen, los amantes de.

Ibáñez, Susana. "Variaciones en el policial negro: El deseo de los héroes y la infelicidad en la cultura." Ph.D. diss. U Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, 2013. Online at Academia.*

         https://www.academia.edu/29281567/

         2020

 

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