4.1. Two Concepts of Narrative Distance
4.2. The Theory of the Novel before James; Besant's Art of Fiction
4.3. James and the Art of the Novel
4.4. The Novel as an Organic Unit
4.6. The Revaluation of Narrative
Genette, with a somewhat different aim in mind, reformulates the Platonic opposition between diegesis and mimesis, "pure narration" and "imitiative narration" in order to measure the distance between the fabula and the narrative text. Pure narrative is more "distant" than mimetic narration. But narrative, being linguistic, can imitate directly nothing but language. Genette therefore splits narrative into two modes of distance: narrative of events and narrative of words, and characterizes direct dialogue as the minimum distance between the narrative and the fabula.
According
to this view, the notion of a "dramatic" narrative is a contradiction
in terms. Narrative is essentially
distant, a mediation through language, and reaches immediacy only when language
becomes the object of its imitation.
However, there is a whole current in early modernist fiction which
argues precisely the contrary: that fiction has a dramatic potential it should
exploit, that it should not be content with "telling"--the domain of
plain language--but should aim at "showing" its subject, giving it
the immediacy that becomes a lived experience for the audience. The difference is not only a theoretical
one: Genette's--and Plato's views are abstract and theoretical, they are aimed
at discovering the essence of narrative, while dramatic theories of narrative
are developed by practising novelists, who seek new ways to write and are
comparing not so much the essence of genres as the possibilities of
manipulating language in order to create specific impressions. We shall trace to some extent the
development of dramatic theories of fiction in the English tradition, above all
around the figure of Henry James.
The theory of the
novel had been neglected during the emergence of the genre in the 17th and 18th
centuries. It is not to be
found in the classifications of Boileau or in the criticism of Dryden: the most
interesting statements come from the novelists themselves, such as Fielding's
definition of his "new province of writing" as a comic epic poem
written in prose. In the 18th and early 19th centuries the critical
statements which are found are usually far behind the theorical developent of
the criticism of poetry. Soon,
however, the novel will claim a place as an art form, in the works of Walter
Besant, Henry James, or Friedrich Spielhagen. One central statement about technique in all of these
theorists is that the novel should try to attain the status of a dramatic
experience: that it should escape in some way the bounds of narrative in order
to provide the reader with a direct, unmediated experience. The most forceful theory in this
respect comes from the German theorist and novelist Spielhagen, perhaps the
first explicit proponent of the doctrine that the author should disappear
behind the tale--or, more specifically, that the narrator should not be given
any personality, relevance or protagonism of his own; that he should not
explicitly comment on the action or impose an arbitrary structure on it; that
he should not use omniscient panoramas, narrative summaries or descriptive
accounts. A more moderate view,
though still in the same general line, appears in Besant and James. This
emphasis on dramatization, on an experiential narrative technique, is based on
their conceptions of the novel as a moral force and on their realit creed. James's conceptions are more attractive
and paradoxical than Besant's statements, which seem at times somewhat
naive. But they probably agree on
most basic respects.
Statements
by Richardson, Stendhal or Dickens are interesting forerunners of these
theories because of the value they set on the dramatic elements of the novel:
the writer must not tell the whole of the story in his own person: he must
rather show, make his characters tell the story by themselves through the use
of dialogue and action. Stendhal
proudly notes that all other novelists tell the story, while only he shows it
to the reader. Richardson
distinguishes three narrative techniques:
„ 1st person
narration, in which the writer tells of his own adventures;
„ the narrative or
epic narration: "in this the author relates himself the whole
adventure," he may know everything about his characters, "he can be
concise or diffuse, according as the diferent parts of his story require
it."
„ The "dramatic
mode", using the characters' own words: "But his narration will not
be lively, except he frequently drops himself and runs into dialogue: all good
writers therefore have thrown as much as possible of the dramatic mode into
their narrative "[1]
The most finished form
of this dramatic narration in the 18th century will be the epistolary technique
which Richardson himself used in Pamela
or Clarissa; in the
twentieth century, the equivalent would be the interior monologue.
In a letter to a prospective lady
writer, Dickens makes a similar point:
It strikes me that you constantly hurry your narrative (and yet without getting on) by telling it, in a sort of impetuous breathless way, in your own person, when the people should tell it and act it for themselves . My notion always is, that when I have made the people to play out the play, it is, as it were, their own business to do it, and not mine.[2]
In connection with the
doctrine that literature must be direct and dramatic we may also remember
Aristotle's and Lessing's praise of Homer's dramatic style and Coleridge's
denunciation of Wordsworth's "ventriloquism." But as late as the Romantic
age the theorists are concerned almost exclusively with poetry. Even those who
are sympathetic to the novel, like John Stuart Mill, consider it as a minor and
somewhat childish genre. Only in
the second half of the 19th century do we find a purposive aesthetic theory of
the novel. Flaubert, Maupassant, Henry James and Zola put forward the view that
the novel is a serious form of art.
In England, the most important essays in the defense of the novel are
two essays called "The Art of Fiction," the first by Walter Besant, the second a riposte by Henry
James.
For
Besant, a novel is a genre which gives a fuller experience of life than the
other arts, because its privileged material is human psychology and
relationships, "men and women in action and passions", and its effect
the development of human sympathy:
The modern sympathy includes not only the power to pity the sufferings of others, but also that of understanding their very souls; it is the reverence for man, the respect for his personality, the recognition of his individuality, and the enormous value of the one man, the perception of one's man relation to another, his duties and responsibilities.[3]
This is the aim of
realistic techniques, of observation, of note-taking, which feature prominently
in Besant's essay: through precision and verisimilitude to produce conviction,
and through conviction to provide a fuller experience of life than we would
otherwise enjoy, to endow us with the "power of vision and of
feeling" (Besant 14).
Besant
also anticipates to some extent James's organic concepton of the novel, in his
insistence that all elements of a novel must contribute to that experiential
quality, that none is to be irrelevant.
Every part of the novel must accomplish its explicit function while it
prepares the ground for other elements, creating in the reader by means of a
skilful art the impression of something lively, consonant and spontaneous:
In romance, while nothing should be allowed which does not carry on the story, so everything as it occurs must be accentuated and yet deprived of needlessly accesory details. The gestures of the characters at an important juncture, their looks, their voices, may all be noted if they help to impress the situation. . . .
In Fiction the power of selection requires a large share of the dramatic sense. Those who already possess this faculty will not go wrong if they bear in mind the simple rule that nothing should be admitted which does not advance the story, illustrate the characters, bring into stronger relief the hidden forces which act upon them, their emotions, their passions, and their intentions. All descriptions which hinder instead of helping the action, all episodes of whatever kind, all conversation which does not either advance the story or illustrate the characters, ought to be rigidly suppressed.
(Besant 15, 24)
This conception, James
will complain, is plot-centered and smacks too much of a ready-made recipe; but
still it introduces an organic standard which James himself will use.
Besant
further specifies his dramatic ideal with an explicit image of theatricals and
with a reference to the audience--the test for dramatic presentation is to be
full in the interest aroused in the audience:
Closely connected with selection is dramatic presentation. Given a situation, it should be the first care of the writer to present it as dramatically, that is to say as forcibly, as possible. The grouping and setting of the picture, the due subordination of description to dialogue, the rapidity of the action, those things which naturally suggest themselves to the practised eye, deserve to be very carefully considered by the beginner. In fact, a novel is like a play: it may be divided into scenes and acts, tableaus and situations, separated by the end of the chapter instead of the drop-scene: the writer is the dramatist, stage-manager, scene-painter, actor, and carpenter, all in one; it is his single business to see that none of the scenes flag or fall flat: he must never for one moment forget to consider how the piece is looking from the front. (Besant 24-25)
The depiction of
character deserves special mention: it is the test for the dramatic ability of
the writer. Clumsy writers will
tell us about their characters, without allowing us the direct experience of
their personality. Or they will
give flat characterizations (here Besant anticipates Forster's classification
of characters into flat and round) by means of a single trait of personality
which allows the reader to recognize the character, albeit in a mechanic
way. The ideal is to describe full
characters through their spontaneous action, to let themselves act in front of
the reader so that he will get to know their personality, instead of being
informed about them. In good
dramatic characterization,
there
is not a single word to emphasize or explain the attitude, manner, and look of
the speakers, yet they are as intelligible as if they were written down and
described. That is the highest art
which carries the reader along and makes him see, without being told, the
changing expressions, the gestures of the speakers, and hear the varying tones
of the voice. . . . The only
writer who can do this is he who makes his characters intelligible from the
very outset, causes them first to stand before the reader in clear outline, and
then with every additional line brings out the figure, fills up the face, and
makes his creature grow from the simple outline more and more to the perfect
and rounded figure. (Besant 27-28)
Henry James
(1843-1916) has been called "the best reader of Henry James." A great deal of his best criticism is
found in the prefaces to his novels, in which he comments on the works and the
technique of the novel.
James'
main statement on this subject is his essay "The Art of Fiction"
(1884).[4]
He knows that he opens a new era in the English novel: the novel in the earlier
19th century, he says, was "unselfconscious,"
"pre-theoretical," "nave." Accordingly, its claims were
modest, and it did not set itself any purposive ideals. It was assumed to be a
"make-believe," a fiction unable to represent the complexity of
life. But this must not be so.
"The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to
represent life" (662). In order to do this, the novel must
above all change its tone. The
recognition of fictionality, the intrusiveness of 19th century authors must
disappear. There the Victorian novelists gave themselves away:
Certain accomplished novelists have a habit of giving themselves away which must often bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously. I was lately struck, in reading over many pages of Antony Trollope, with his want of discretion in this particular. In a digression, a parenthesis or an aside he concedes to the reader that he and his trusting friend are only "making believe". He admits that the events he narrates have not really happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime. (662)
James does not want to give himself
away. The novelist must speak with the assurance of a historian. To do
otherwise is a "betrayal of a sacred office"¾a religious metaphor
which is often used by the aestheticist propounders of art for art's sake.
James
discusses above all this sacred office, the activity of the novelist, but
incidentally he develops a formalist theory of the novel seen as a completed
aesthetic object (as the aim of the novelist). The artist is a central presence in all of James' criticism,
sharply contrasting with his assertion that this presence must not be felt.
James opposes abstract theoretical analysis of the elements in the novel. He sees the novel as an organic whole: for him there is no sense in dividing action from character, or description from dialogue, etc.: they are all fused as the flesh and the blood in a living being; they melt into each other:
A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts. The critic who over the closed texture of a finished work shall pretend to trace a geography of items will mark some frontiers as artificial, I fear, as any that have been known to history. . . . (666)
You cannot divide, as
other critics were doing, a novel of characters from a novel of incidents. In all good novels, character and incident
define one another. As James says
in one of the famous prefaces he wrote for a later edition of his works,
I might envy, though I couldn't emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable first and to make out its agents afterwards: I could think so little of any fable that didn't need its agents positively to launch it; I could think so little of any situation that didn't depend for its interest on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on their way of taking it.[5]
And in "The Art
of Fiction":
There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures, but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture one says of character, when one says novel one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed at will. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is either a picture or a novel that is not of character? (665)
James opposes Besant's
reductive definition of the novel as something ultimately concerned with
telling a good story full of action, as well as Trollope's idea that character
is all in the novel, that the plot is something unimportant, and something which is not necessarily
linked with character. The
relationship between action and character is defined as an organic one, but
perhaps it could best be defined as a relation of organic subordination of
action to character. Here James is
arguing not only for an adequate description of the unity of a novel, but also
for the novel of character and
psychology against a narrow notion
of the novel of action:
There are few things more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason, and yet, I protest, the novel seems to me the most magnificent form of art . . . . The other arts, in comparison, appear confined and hampered; the various conditions under which they are exercised are so rigid and definite. (668)
The novel (unlike
drama) can reveal to us the inner life of characters, and this is the essence
of the genre, which otherwise must follow, in James' opinion, a dramatic ideal
of concentration (cf. Aristotle on tragedy). But the novel is a free form, he says. It has no grammar which can be defined,
no rules that can be taught. "A novel is in its broadest definition a
personal, a direct impression of life " ("Art" 664). The intensity of the impression and the
execution are the grounds of its value, and they cannot be defined. They stem directly from the personal
way each novelist sees life. This
in some contrast with all we have said of his criticism of the Victorian
novels. His own novels are thoughtful, concentrated, calculated works of art,
while Victorian novels are "loose, baggy monsters" without technique
or design. James thinks there are no rules, but he also thinks his own way is
superior, his own technique more refined, his own vision more adequate. Still,
we have here a profession of tolerance and catholicity.
It is an irony of
destiny that the theory of the novel should have profited so much from James'
own analyses of his novels, given the little faith he has in theoretical
definitions and analysis. In his prefaces, we find some of the most clear and
influential statements of the nineteenth century on point of view and narrative
voice, as well as on action and character.
James
makes a distinction between voice and point of view in his novelistic practice
as well as in his theoretical statements.
This distinction comes from his concern with the ability of the novel to
depict experience and psychological life.
First-person novel will not do for this, because James is not looking
for a conscious revelation of the person, or for a kind of novel based on
recollection of past experience, which is what 1st person narrative implies.
His novels are usually written in the 3rd person, which is less
"intrusive," more "dramatic." Where James does otherwise, he makes sure that the result
will be equally dramatic¾for instance, using an unreliable narrator in the main
narrative of The Turn of the Screw.
The action should in any case unfold in a transparent way, without the
writer stepping in to make his own comments. We are shown its development through significant scenes, we
are not simply told. Percy
Lubbock will develop in his The Craft of Fiction (1922) some of James' insights
in this particular. Lubbock
analyzes the practice of James and gives it more explicit theorical
formulation. He privileges scenic
presentation and the use of an unified point of view. His central tenet will be highly influential:
The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself. . . . The thing has to look true, and that is all. It is not made to look true by simple statement.[6]
There is, according to
James and Lubbock, an ideal way of "showing" in third person
narration which is at once dramatic and psychologically immediate. This is what
James usually calls narration through "centers of consciousness" (preface
to The Portrait of a Lady),
"vessels of sensibility" or "reflectors" (preface to The
Wings of the Dove), and which we now
usually call focalizer characters.
The scenes usually act on a perceiving character, an reflector or
focalizer, whose psychological reaction, the development of his understanding
of the action, helps give the plot an organic unity. This is the role of Strether in The Ambassadors, of Maisie in What Maisie Knew.
James does not require, as some of his followers, that there be no
changes of perspective during the narrative; but he does seek to cut the story
into perspectival blocks that are internally coherent. For instance, in The
Wings of the Dove, the story of Milly Theale is seen
mainly through the eyes of two characters, Merton Densher and Kate Croy, as
well as her own. Every change or
apparent incoherence of point of view, James says, has its aesthetic
justification, its dramatic coherence:
There was the "fun", to begin with, of establishing one's succesive centres- of fixing them so exactly that the ortions of the subject commanded by them as from happy points of view, and accordingly treated from them, would constitute, so to speak, sufficiently solid blocks of wrought material, squared to the sharp edge, as to have weight and mass and carrying power; to make for construction, that is, to conduce to effect and to provide for beauty. . . .
Do
I sometimes in fact forfeit the advantage of that distinctness? Do I ever
abandon one center for another after the former has been postulated? From the
moment wer proceed by "centres"¾and I have never, I confess, embraced
the logic of any superior process¾they must be , each as a basis, selected and
fixed; after which it is that, in the high interest of economy of treatment,
they determine and rule. There is
no economy of treatment without an adopted, a related point of view, and though
I understand, under certain degrees of pressure, a represented community of
vision between several parties to the action when it makes for concentration, I
understand no breaking-up of the register, no sacrifice of the recording
consistency, that doesn't scatter and weaken.[7]
Just as in Aristotle
we found that an action or praxis
had to be treated artistically before it became the plot or mythos,
we find in James a distinction between the "subject" and the
"wrought material" or novel, and in Tomashevski we found a related
opposition between fabula and
siuzhet. A series of rules
on the use of point of view define which is the relationship between the
material and the finished novel.
We see that James conceives of these "rules" he formulates on
the use of point of view as organic, internal rules, which spring from the very
nature of the psychological material of the novel. They will be transformed by some critics in the 20th
century into external, a priori
rules to decide on the quality of any novel, irrespective of its internal
economy. The influence of James's
ideas is readily apparent in most important twentieth-century writers on point
of view : Percy Lubbock (The Craft of Fiction, 1921), Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (Understanding
Fiction, 1943), Jean Pouillon (Temps
et roman, 1947), F. K. Stanzel (Typische
Erzhlsituationen, 1954), Norman
Friedman ("Point of View in Fiction," 1955); Mieke Bal (Narratologie, 1977).
James
also experimented with a concept of dramatic narrative which would be closer to
the idea of inmediacy held by Genette.
A novel like The Awkward Age consists
almost entirely of dialogue, the narrator being completely unobstrusive and
limiting himself to introducing the words of the characters and sparingly
describing some of their actions in the way they are described in a play's
stage directions. Here the
distance between novel and drama--at least, closet drama--is at its
minimum.
Reaction against the
dramatic ideal for the art of fiction takes the form of a revaluation of the
figure of the narrator and the full range of effects which can be achieved
through evaluation, directness, explicit comment and other forms of
mediation. The narrator comes to
the fore again and is appreciated as an important constuctive element in
storytelling. At the same time,
there is a certain reaction against the favourite techniques of modernist
fiction: neutrality, ambiguity, restricted use of viewpoints, etc. The classical novel--Victorian or
eighteenth-century--is celebrated again together with its outspoken and
obstrusive narrators. This
reaction appears in Germany as early as 1910 in Kte Friedemann's Die Rolle
des Erzhlers in der Epik, but the Anglo-American tradition has to
wait until 1960 and Wayne C. Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction.
Booth's main tenet is that narrative cannot show, that showing is just a way of telling, and consequently that the opposition between them is misguided. According to Booth, the concept of showing is used in a vague and impressionistic way by James's followers. He points out that there is to start with a difference between a situation which is dramatic and a dramatic presentation of a situation. There are, he argues, two ways to show a scene in a dramatic way:
„ "To show characters dramatically engaged with each other, motive clashing upon motive, the outcome depending on the resolution of motives."
„ "To give the impression that the story is taking place by itself, with the characters existing in a dramatic relationship vis--vis the spectator, unmediated by a narrator and decipherable only through inferential matching of word to word and word to deed."[8]
There would be, then,
a dramatism of the fabula and a dramatism of the presentation, of the
story. Booth exemplifies the
limitations of the Modernist concept of "dramatism" through an
analysis of Joseph Andrews (I.12) where there is an obvious dramatism of
the first kind in spite of the obvious presence of the narrator and the
indirect presentation of the characters' attitudes.
However,
if we examine that passage, we see that its dramatism is not so intrinsic, and
that it owes much to its presentation.
That is, there are different kinds of dramatic presentation, to the
extent that we can speak of "showing" a scene in spite of the absence
of direct speech, detailed presentation, or subjective focalization on the part
of the characters. Fielding, or
Fielding's narrator, in spite of being a prominent presence who mediates and
summarises the situation, deliberately avoids any explicit value judgments, and
simply mentions the attitudes of the various characters towards Joseph. Of course, the value judgments are
implied since the passage is highly ironic, but the reader is left to evaluate
the situation and reach a conclusion, and even to construct the different
characters and the narrator's attitude towards them. Characters are not explicitly described in their moral
being: they perform dramatically to some extent when the reader knows them from
their actions.
Therefore,
all kinds of actions, verbal or otherwise, can be presented dramatically as
long as the reader is given an interpretive role, as long as there is a
possibility of greater significance coming from greater attention to the
situation. The meaning of acts is
not self-evident and univocal, but contextual: the same act, or the same speech
act, can assume different senses depending on the situation in which it is
performed. And, just as drama can
be said to be a narrative genre in one sense, narrative is aptly described as
dramatic in the sense that its unfolding requires constant interpretive
attention.
We have chosen a less
analytical essay to illustrate the concept of distance, and this is partly due
to the difficulty of giving a univocal definition of narrative distance. If we define it provisionally as the
greater or lesser dramatic quality of the novel we are still left with the task
of defining those techniques or elements which have a bearing on distance. Actually, we have already witnessed
some implicit distinctions at work in the essays by James or Besant. Distance increases as the narrator is
more arbitrary, obstrusive or manipulative, and decreases when the story is
presented in a non-evaluative way, and if possible through the perspective of
the characters themselves.
Distance decreases the more we are given a scenic, experiential approach
to characterization and event. The
more experiential the reading of the story, the lesser the distance. It increases the more a story is
conventional, and decreases with the "feel" of reality. In conclusion, we cannot but say
that distance is an effect, not a technique or a specific structure. It is the result of the whole texture
of the narrative and the way it is experienced by the reader.
[1] Samuel Richardson; excerpt in Allott, Novelists on the Novel 258.
[2] Rpt. in Allott 270.
[3] Walter Besant, The Art of Fiction 13-14.
[4] Rpt. in Adams 661-670.
[5] Henry James, preface to The Portrait of a Lady (Penguin, 1963) viii.
[6] Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction 62.
[7] Henry James, preface to The Wings of the Dove.
[8] W. C. Booth, "Distance and Point-of-View: An
Essay in Classification" 185-186.