13 posts tagged “interbellum”
Lukács, György. Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (Theorie des Romans: eine Geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik). Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971 (1920).
I know, what was I expecting. It'll be useful for something or other, and I do like that it's a young Lukács; his default setting is not yet "Cranky" but the more entertaining "Hölderinesque Nostalgia for Absent Gods."
Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths - ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for the fire is the soul of all light and clothes itself in light.
It's understandable that Lubbock should idolize James after becoming a friend of the Master in his later years, but strange that a book first published in 1921 should stop at 1903. The Ambassadors is his example of completely dramatized mental life, and
he seems to think the technique couldn't possibly be carried any farther. So maybe it would be unlikely for him to run across Stein, but Lubbock was living in Cambridge society; Woolf gave her "Modern Fiction" lecture in 1919; he must have known something about a certain Irishman living in Paris. I guess that guy was just a crank.
The 1926 edition belongs to a series of small paperbacks called "The Traveler's Library" (also in the series, "The Intimate Journals of Paul Gaugin" and "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields" by Lafcadio Hearn), and thus conjures the image of people taking this treatise on carriages to broadcast their intellectual currency. After accepting a cigar from your traveling companion, you may use the presence of the book as an occasion for remarks such as "While Tolstoy's genius is undeniable, War and Peace lacks a centre of consciousness, while Anna Karenina suffers from an over-utilization of the dramatic method and under-utilization of the pictorial..."
Early on Shklovksy says that he'll have to stop multiplying examples to keep the book from becoming a chrestomathy; but a chrestomathy is basically what it is. He's trying to write a version of Aristotle's Poetics and loves sharing his examples, is happy to summarize entire novels and is constantly regretting that he can't include a passage because it runs to twenty-eight pages. The theory loosely binding all this together is directed against a contemporary kind of proto-structuralism which sought origins for various literary devices in the social conditions of primitive man; on the contrary, says Shklovsky, form is its own end. Fair enough, and his extension of the "mystery plot" to cover most of nineteenth-century literature will have me thinking for a bit. But really it should be read for the examples, especially the weird Russian examples you won't find elsewhere.
Grandma and Grandpa had a slave hen. She laid a basketful of eggs. Grandpa beat on them, beat on them but didn't break them; Grandma beat on them, beat on them but didn't break them. A mouse passed by, wagged its tail and broke them... Grandpa wept, Grandma wept, the hen cackled, the gate creaked, the fire crackled, the geese honked, people yelled.
A wolf came along and said: "Grandpa, why are you crying?"
Grandpa answered: "Why should I not be crying? Grandma and I were living peacefully. We had a slave hen. She laid a basketful of eggs. I beat on them, beat on them but didn't break them. Grandma beat on them, beat on them but didn't break them. A mouse passed by, wagged its tail and broke them... Grandpa cried, the hen cackled, the gate creaked, the fire crackled, the geese honked, people yelled...."
The wolf howled. Along came a bear who said: "Why are you howling, oh wolf?"
"Why should I not be howling?" said the wolf. "Once there was a Grandpa and a Grandma. They had a slave hen...."
A well-wrought urn if ever a novel was: a compact structure and really admirable prose. The first half had me completely engrossed; after that there was a falling off, and I couldn't quite figure out why until the last chapter, which rockets decades into the future so that the protagonist's son can tell him:
This is a pretty good description of a Henry James novel, but no one in a James novel would ever give such a direct description. For James, suggestion and inference are always a part of being with others, whereas for Wharton they're a contingent trait of a particular repressive society. It's that complaint that ramps up in the second half of the book; Wharton wants some kind of individualistic ethic to prop against convention, but her protagonist just comes off as selfish and wussy to boot. I thought often of Virginia Woolf's note on a passage in Charlotte Bronte, that a personal complaint intrudes and throws the harmony of the work off balance. Detachment isn't the only ideal, but lapses of consistency do stand out.You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing more about each other's private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about our own.
The ending of this book creeped me out more than anything I've read lately, and I'm still puzzling about how it happened. A lot of it comes from a disorienting change of genre; the first two thirds of the book are recognizable as consummate, deliciously cold Flaubertian satire (half of it is Waugh's way of tracking the minute fluctuations of vanity), and the form isn't disrupted even by the major tragedy at the book's midpoint. It's afterward that things turn Gothic and exotic, adding continual degrees of weirdness; first you ask about the author - Is he doing this on purpose? He does know what he's doing, right? - and then you forget the author and simply watch the protagonist's fate close around him, a fate that would be a sour joke if it weren't so terrible, and thinking only Can't he get out? There must be a way out, if I were him I would have found a way out -
So the whole last third of the book comes out gratuitous and inexplicable as measured by the modernist formal standards evoked in its title and epigraph (I will show you fear in a...). But it kept me up that night.
We had a tasty Catalan wine the other night, which reminded me that this had been sitting on the shelf - and I can't imagine Orwell would have minded the circumstance, because he's such a humane writer, just as interested in the wine and cold and lice as he is passionate about the politics. He wants more than anything to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not:
Being hit in the throat with a bullet is, he notes, a highly interesting experience; and it is indeed, as he describes it, most interesting. The saddest part of the book is his political speculation about what kind of government Spain might expect if Franco was beaten back; that still seemed possible as he was writing, and what he feared most was infighting among the Left.Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings. And I hope the account I have given is not too misleading. I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war.
Hammett, Dashiell. The Glass Key. New York: Vintage, 1972 (1931).
It's a lot like Austen, really; brief, economical, and relentless in working its causal structure to a finish. Only from our contemporary vantage, it's easier to grasp Hammett's ethics without strain. Which ought to be disquieting.
These late stories were recommended to me, and I thought okay, if he's not being an ass about India in here. But oh, the dialect!
Ack! Ten demerits for each of those apostrophes! But if you do want to read some late Kipling, "Mary Postgate" and "Dayspring Mishandled" are in fact very good; the first a genuinely unsettling wartime piece and the second a literary hoax story with a fine comic touch.I was workin' for Mus' Dockett at Pounds Farm that summer, but I was obligin' Jim that evenin' muckin' out his pig-pen. I seed a stranger come traipsin' over the bridge agin' Wickenden's door-stones. 'Twadn't the new County Council bridge with the hand-rail.
I too dislike putting corpses on the couch, but even apart from the biography it's damned hard to get through Parade's End without confronting the portly specter of Henry James as the father that Ford's trying to kill. In his self-congratulatory phase, James points us to Isabel Archer's fireside meditation in Portrait of a Lady as a scene in which the highest dramatic interest is achieved solely through presenting the young lady's own consciousness; but of course this is a disingenuous description, since at this point in the novel we've been out of Isabel's head for years, have access only to rumors traded by the other characters, and want only to know how it is with her. Ford gives us the same desire, but--take this, Harry!--no corresponding satisfaction. All we want from Last Post is to be told how it is with Tietjens and Valentine; whether they have succeeded in their joint escape from a poisoned society. We barely see them. Instead we spend half the book with Tietjens's brother, who for complex and implausible reasons has been pretending for years to be a speechless stroke victim, and half with Tietjens's hateful wife--and I cannot remember a fictional character whose company I've enjoyed less.
By the end of the book, one does at least understand the design of marrying a war novel to an excruciating marriage plot; political and social forces alike are arbitrary and tormenting holdovers from an obsolete past, no more comprehensible to their victims than the sordid adult world is to James's Maisie. Tietjens, the most perceptive of the lot, is also a statistician by training and understands the futility of trying to graft causal laws onto a rudderless world. At its best, which is very good, Parade's End does homage to those brave enough to nonetheless attempt some version of a moral life. At its worst, conviction turns into caprice and the plane takes a nosedive. My edition's earnest afterword explains the thematic closure and valediction which the weird and hasty ending is meant to imply; and indeed, if you check the accounting the balance does work out. But any reader who accepts that kind of resolution has got to be a Martian.
Oh, but the Martian books I've read in my time.
Ford, Ford Madox. No More Parades (Parade's End, Volume Two). New York: Signet Classics, 1964 (1925).
Tietjens losing his memory turns out to be a red herring; this volume is narrated a little more chaotically, but that's because the whole world is falling apart -- we're on the Western Front now, which means, as we are reminded perhaps slightly too often, that there are no more parades. Tietjens's marital life overshadows the blood and guts; for murky reasons his wife desires only to torment him, and follows him all the way to France simply to twist the knife. It's to Ford's credit that this unpromising premise actually yields a lot of good writing.
Ford's conceiving of the tetralogy, as recounted in his autobiography, is an associative episode weird enough to be right at home in the fiction; a chance encounter with Sir Edward Elgar reminds him of Henry James and suggests the idea of writing the war à la "What Maisie Knew" -- history not described from a remove but registered at ground level, in all its disorder, with no explanations imposed. Ford likes to throw bizarre situations at the reader and then loop backward for their causes; but since his characters always seem to act slightly in excess of any possible justification, Tietjens's mess of a private life ends up seeming as wrongheaded and inexplicable as the war itself. Public parade, private parade; it's all in bad shape.
