Table Of ContentTHENOVEL
Novels by Andre Brink
The Ambassador
Looking on Darkness
An Instant in the Wind
Rumours of Rain
A Dry White Season
A Chain of Voices
The Wall of the Plague
States of Emergency
The First Life of Adamastor
An Act of Terror
On the Contrary
Imaginings of Sand
The Novel
Language and Narrative from Cervantes
to Calvino
Andre Brink
© Andre Brink 1998
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Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 1998 by
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ISBN 978-0-333-68409-2 ISBN 978-1-349-26514-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-26514-5
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10987654321
07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98
Literature is, and cannot be anything but, a kind of extension and
application of certain properties of language
- Paul Vah~ry
Literature knows [ .. .] that in writing one cannot say anything
extraneous to writing, or express any truth that is not a truth
having to do with the art of writing
- Halo Calvino
Contents
Introduction: Languages of the Novel 1
1 The Wrong Side of the Tapestry
Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote de la Mancha 20
2 Courtly Love, Private Anguish
Madame de la Fayette: La Princesse de Cleues 46
3 'The Woman's Snare'
Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders 65
4 The Dialogic Pact
Denis Diderot: Jacques the Fatalist and His Master 86
5 Charades
Jane Austen: Emma 104
6 The Language of Scandal
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary 126
7 Quoted in Slang
George Eliot: Middlemarch 147
8 The Tiger's Revenge
Thomas Mann: Death in Venice 173
9 A Room without a View
Franz Kafka: The Trial 189
10 The Perfect Crime
Alain Robbe-Grillet: Le Voyeur 207
11 Making and Unmaking
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of
Solitude 231
12 Withdrawal and Return
Margaret Atwood: Surfacing 253
13 Taking the Gap
Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being 269
vü
viii Contents
14 Possessed by Language
A. S. Byatt: Possession 288
15 The Pranks of Hermes
Italo Calvino: If on a Winter' s Night a Traveller 309
Notes 330
References 358
Index 369
Introduction:
Languages of the N ovel
1
The Age of Realism, in many ways the last great affirmation of the
Enlightenment with its impressively self-confident faith in reason
and in reason' s access to the real, drew to an end as the nineteenth
century began to spill into the twentieth. In a turmoil of uncertainty
prefiguring Eliot's later wry convietion that 'human kind / Cannot
bear very much reality', Modernism was born. A remarkable revolu
tion swept through all the arts. The faith in representation, whieh for
so long had shaped Western culture, was wavering; and, in Santa
yana's famous phrase, mankind started dreaming in a different key.
In the arts this new key was determined by a widespread dis
covery - or, in some cases, rediscovery - of the medium as the
message. From Cezanne onwards, painting tums its back on a long
tradition of 'truth to nature' as it begins to focus on the materiality
of paint on canvas. The theatre renounces its earlier attempts to
create the perfect illusion and in the plays of Pirandello and his
contemporaries embraces the space of the stage as stage (which to
Shakespeare would have been nothing new). In Stravinsky, and
even more so in Schönberg, musie is no longer to be enjoyed
simply as a melodie system but turns its attention to the very
processes which produce melody.
And so it is only to be expected that literature, too, begins to
foreground its own medium, language, first in the poetry of Mal
larme and Rimbaud, and the fiction of Flaubert and Henry James.
Soon, from the ranks of early Modernists, amplified by that time by
what Kundera (1988:63) calls the 'polyhistoricism' of Broch and the
conjuring acts of memory performed by Proust, rose the definitive
figure of James Joyce. As McGee (1988:2) phrases it, 'At every
phase in the development of recent literary theory, Joyce appears
as an example and an authentie symptom of his and our historieal
moment.'
Starting with the early dissolution and reassembling of sentence
structures to accompany the emotional ebb and flow in A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man, moving with dizzying virtuosity through
1
2 Introduction
the ever-changing languagescapes in Ulysses, Joyce finally pushes
language to an extreme in Finnegan's Wake, perhaps the single
greatest narrative monument of the twentieth century, comparable
to Picasso' s achievement in Les DemoiselIes d' Avignon or Guernica.
As MacCabe, a pivotal critic in Joyce criticism, so convincingly
demonstrated, Joyce's writing radically changes the entire relation
ship between text and reader, moving from one of passive
consumption to active engagement and transformation. Reading
becomes 'an active appropriation of the material of language'
(MacCabe 1978:11). In opposition to the nineteenth-century mani
pulation of 'metalanguage' by Eliot and others, (that is, an author
ial language through which the many languages of different
characters in the text are ultimately controlled in order to guide
the reader in establishing what is real or true and what not)}
Joyce offers no correctives, no final truths, and forces the reader
to become actively involved in the free play of language through
the various discourses of the novel. Even if, as McGee and
many others have since indicated, MacCabe underestimates
the functions of interpretation, his watershed reading of Joyce
firmly established the primacy of language as language in
the Modernist (and later the Postmodernist) novel. In many
respects the whole of the Poshnodernist novel - from Beckett
to Nabokov, from Robbe-Grillet to Marquez, from Calvino to
Barth, from Pynchon to Kundera - may be said to be spinoffs
from Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. This is particularly important
in the sense that 'Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are concerned not
with representing experience through language hut with experiencing
language through a destruction 01 representation' (MacCabe 1978:4,
myemphasis).
Not that one should underestimate the 'story' level in these two
novels: there are magnificent narrative impulses throughout both
of them, and purely in terms of an old-fashioned 'plot' they are
among the richest texts in the genre. But ultimately all these vari
ous stories collapse, like old stars into a Black Hole, within the
language in which they are told. Language becomes its own great
est story. In Ulysses, among so many other things, 'the story of
language' is told in the hospital chapter, where the reader wit
nesses, and is drawn into, the evolution of the English language
from Anglo-Saxon to American jazz-speak; and in Finnegan's Wake
the whole history of Ireland, telescoped into that of a hod-carrier,
assumes the form of language. This must be understood quite
