Church: Structure and Theme

Structure and Theme

“Don Quixote” to James Joyce

Margaret Church

Professor Church undertakes to examine the structural elements that underlie thirteen novels from various literatures and eras in order to show how each work results, not only in an art form, but also in a closely connected statement that is sociological, psychological, philosophical, or, sometimes, political in nature. The novels are Don Quixote, Joseph Andrews, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Trial, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, Jacob’s Room, and Mrs. Dalloway.

Form, Dr. Church finds, relates to subject in quite different ways in these novels. Sometimes it complements it, sometimes it contrasts with it, and sometimes it imitates it. The structures of the novels by Fielding, Flaubert, and Mann, for example, relate to matters largely exterior to the consciousnesses of the protagonists, while those of Dostoevsky and Joyce relate closely to the inner worlds of their leading figures. None of the structures is entirely exterior to context, character, or action, to which it gives shape; but in each novel, structure is more closely related to one of these than to the others.

In Don Quixote—which Dr. Church characterizes as “the ancestor, so to speak, of all fictions and of all metafictions” and which Erich Kahler has called “the first modern novel”—we have a statement about human behavior, about the relationship of the individual to his society and to himself, in which close and complex correlations among the structure of the book, the psychological development of the hero, and, as a consequence, both Renaissance and modern psychological theory, make it quite impossible to separate intrinsic from extrinsic matters—a circumstance that prompts Dr. Church to remark, in a deft aside on abrogation of time, that, in a sense, then, both Emma Bovary and Leopold Bloom can be said to have preceded and to have influenced the Quixote.

The structure of the novel since Cervantes has tended to turn inward when the emphasis is on the individual hero and psychological development, and to turn outward when the emphasis lies on exterior concerns like manners, society, or a philosophy. The eighteenth century turned its attention outward to ridicule the social animal. Romanticism turned inward to explore the feelings and emotions of that animal. Realism adapted itself to both the inner and outer modes depending on the intention, purpose, and interests of the author—on, that is, his definition of what was “real.” Impressionism (Virginia Woolf) and expressionism (Franz Kafka) turned inevitably inward in order to slowly integrate the psychology of the subject with the novelistic form. But though form has become a cohort of meaning in quite different ways in different literary periods, Dr. Church argues, structure, like literary technique, can be characterized as thematic. For the architecture of a novel, like that of a building, is informed by the total environment, and is a part of the subject matter, not something imposed from without.

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Beja, Gontarski, and Astier, eds.: Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Humanistic Perspectives

Edited by Morris Beja, S. E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier

This collection of original essays has been assembled to honor Samuel Beckett on his seventy-fifth birthday—a celebration to which the writer himself has made his own contribution in the form of a play especially written for the occasion and entitled Ohio Impromptu. This special piece appears in an appendix to the volume, where it has been reproduced, through a combination of photographic facsimile and textual transcription, in various versions through which it evolved to its final form

Samuel Becket—the Irishman who lives permanently in France and writes primarily in French (though he translates everything he writes into either English or French, depending on the original language of composition)—has achieved fame throughout the world for his work in fiction, drama, and film. A particularly multicultural writer, Beckett’s intellectual interests are so broad and so diverse that his writings in all media are best approached from a variety of disciplines; and this is the approach adopted by the editors of this collection. They have included, not only detailed treatments of literary matters, but also close examinations of such topics as, among others, Beckett’s theater in performance, the philosophical traditions against which he writes, his sense of history and politics, his close relation with the visual arts, the complex uses to which his language is put, and his effort to write “without style.” The result is a series of critical essays that come close to being the measures of the man and the artist they honor—the writer found particularly congenial to he modern sensibility as one in whose work the illusions and deceptions of the outer world resist each system that attempts a faithful, comprehensive, and coherent account, and that, in the end, must inevitably collapse under too great a weight of enigma and error.

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Ryals: Becoming Browning

Becoming Browning

The Poems and Plays of Robert Browning, 1833–1846

Clyde de L. Ryals

In his earlier book, Browning’s Later Poetry (Cornell University Press, 1975), Professor Ryals “attempted to chart the terra incognita” of the poet’ mature work. In the present volume, he undertakes “to explore land slightly better known but still . . . inadequately mapped”: the poems and plays of Browning’s earlier years.

It is Browning’s growth as an ironist that Dr. Ryals endeavors to trace. He identifies the principle of becoming that lies at the very heart of Browning’s thought and practice as a poet, and sees it as marking him as one who has embraced philosophical irony, with its denial of any absolute order in natural and human events as they occur in the bewildering abundance of the phenomenal world. Browning’s belief in dynamism and change is, in Dr. Ryal’s view, a part of his inheritance from his Romantic predecessors; but where they envisioned change as a component of a revolutionary process leading eventually to a new earth and a new heaven, Browning held change to be a process without purpose. And it is this ironic notion of nonteleological becoming that sets Browning apart from Shelley and other Romantics from whom he is traditionally said to be descended, first as an eager son and then as a rebellious heir.

Like the Romantics, Browning’s earlier work is always concerned with moral problems; but they are not rendered as such. He does not, like Shelley, present us with a world of perfect order where nature is redeemed; rather, it is the moral drama itself—the dialogue—that he invites us to witness and enjoy. For in Browning there is nothing of the apocalyptic imagination that is unleashed in visions, dreams, trance, or madness as it is, let us say, in his contemporary Tennyson. The young Browning is, in Dr. Ryal’s analysis, more like Balzac in that he pressures the phenomena that are the stuff of his poetry to make them yield meaning. His historical characters, for example, are nothing—or almost nothing—until, as he says in Sordello, he resuscitates them, molds them anew.

What the young Browning aims to do is to deal with fact—to turn, twist, and contort it, if need be, and to make it yield up the vision—and to persuade us thereby that fact and vision are so interconnected that they cannot be distinguished. This is the very essence of Browning’s drama—the drama of the body and the soul—and it is ultimately a moral drama. All life, the young Browning would have us see—all life is significant. And it is the function of the maker-see to uncover its significance, to cause us to experience the becoming of an object, and to defamiliarize the object dulled for us by habituation by lifting it out of the field of ordinary perception and placing it within a network of relationships that constitutes the work of art.

Browning’s instruction to us is that which Henry James offered to young novelists: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” And he does this by being both “subjective” and “objective,” by being “a whole poet,” and by being, in a word, an ironist.

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