The Triumph of Artifice: Treasures of Twentieth-Century Narrative

I. Old Orders Changing

The modern novel was born, so the critical commonplace used to go, with the coming together of four elements that totally altered the traditional nineteenth-century form. There was the rejection of conventional intrigue, which was replaced by inner exploration; there was the new (or newly revived or newly intensified) assumption that prose fiction could be a high art form, with appropriate attention to details and techniques of artistry such as charpente, façadeprogression d'effet, le mot juste; there was the notion of the alienation of the artist; and there was the concomitant ability and responsibility of novelists to comment on that society which they could observe from the outside, that is, objectively.

Clearly, each of these four elements had been inherent in the form from the beginning, particularly when the novel is regarded as an international development rather than the exclusive province of an English-speaking empire. Still, with the insistence on the configuration of the four, there was a compelling validity to this construction, and the names of Ford, Turgenev, Conrad, James, Flaubert, Joyce, and Proust might be marshaled in evidence. But yesterday's cliché is today's canard. When analytical perception is codified, it automatically becomes suspect and unfashionable, then is reacted against and rejected. If it is a workable formulation, it will be rediscovered. There is some Scaliger and Castelvetro in Empson, and Montaigne in Kenneth Burke. The Renaissance comes more than twice a millennium; there is renaissance every spring, every lunation, every morning.

By way of preamble, I propose to revive this commonplace briefly and to test it in two new ways. First, I would place it in a broader historical context, in which the change from the Victorian to the modern novel was just a part of larger cultural movements. Second, I would trace the separate elements further along in the developments of the twentieth century, where they illuminate the movement from the modern novel to that dominant stream in late twentieth-century narrative art that I call the triumph of artifice.

A preliminary observation should take precedence: the novel did not change from traditional to modern at all; the form expanded in new directions and dimensions, while the older patterns persisted. Thomas Mann, Anthony Powell, and Jorge Amado, to name just a few in prominence, are more easily seen to share the structures and concerns of Trollope, Tolstoy, and Stendhal than the patterns of Joyce or Proust or Virginia Woolf. What was happening was much more than the evolution of the genre; it was a basic change in the relative significance of genres. Almost from its beginnings, in that prodigious infancy in mid-eighteenth-century England, the novel had been primus inter pares of literary forms. Social factors contributed to making it more than that very soon--the single dominant narrative form.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the novel had virtually eliminated poetry as narrative art. No wonder it had to be regarded as a high art form, not only in potentia. but in fulfillment. Perhaps more significantly, the novel came to replace poetry as a vehicle of ideas. Mass literacy and the growing dominance of the middle class as the knowing class contributed to this development, but there were other factors as well. The knowledge explosion and accelerating specialization that came with socio-economic revolution required the re-introduction into the culture of an ancient, honored figure--the man of knowledge who transcended departments and spoke to the people about the people as a whole. He had been the mythologizer; he was now the novelist (and he would become the filmmaker).

When George Eliot made her great discovery about how Middlemarch should be told--that Dorothea could be viewed from vantages other than her own--and when she announced that discovery by breaking off in mid-sentence at the start of Chapter XXIX, that very concept of the relative reality of human experience was being given wide currency by the publication of Browning's The Ring and the Book. This may have been the last time in our culture, with Browning in this particular role as the successor to Tennyson, that poetry could preempt the novel in speaking of broad philosophical issues to a whole society. Though Yeats and Eliot came to have extraordinary influence over the intellectual attitudes of their times, that influence came to be felt at large only second-hand and delayed in time, filtered through the prose fiction and to some extent the drama of those who had directly received the spell of the gyres and the incantations of the wasteland. Despite the extraordinary impressiveness of his Odyssey: Modern Sequel, Kazantzakis and his views are better known through his many novels, best known as theatricalized by Anthony Quinn's portrayal of Zorba in the Cacoyannis film.

The Ring and the Book and Middlemarch together illustrate another cultural phenomenon of great significance to the movements that concern me here. Both are greatly influenced by dramatic modes. It is not surprising that the dramatic monologue became a leading poetic genre when the contemporary theater was stagnant and failing; and, despite mushrooming literacy, poems by the leading dramatic monologists were commonly performed in public and private. Nor is it surprising that George Eliot, in her masterpiece, should construct her scenes according to dramaturgical principles, by carefully arranging the alternation of obligatory confrontations and group scenes.¹

The drama, by the end of the nineteenth century, was in eclipse as a narrative mode, that is, a vehicle for the presentation of myth. And poetry, too, was being eclipsed by the novel. The man of knowledge, who was in the beginning inseparable from the man of power, had to be at the same time a performer. The teller of myth was also the celebrant of the ritual; the recorder of the perception was both the keeper and the broadcaster of the records. Our inability to isolate or distinguish between myth and ritual, along with those chicken-and-egg questions of genealogy, is largely a matter of failing to understand the role of mythology/ritual in society, failing to recognize the whole in the quest to pigeon-hole, and failing to perceive that the need for narrative/dramatic modes persists. Though the forms change, subdivide, and re-cohere, the phenomena endure--we register our perceptions in myths, we celebrate them in rituals, and we broadcast and preserve them in stories. We are Homo narratans.

To say that drama was dead at the turn of the century is not to deny the vitality infused by Chekhov, Strindberg, Wilde, and Ibsen. Yet why would Conrad, whose desire was to make us see (a credo he came to share with D.W. Griffith), detest the theater and revile Ibsen? Precisely because whatever was new and vital in drama was designed to make us think, not see; it dealt in concepts rather than percepts. And much of the important drama that followed failed to change that focus. In Shaw, in Brecht, in Lorca, we can trace the legacy of the nineteenth century: where spectacle had been surrendered to opera, pageant, exposition, and Victorian splendor-show, it could now be surrendered to film; where the novel had subsumed the major functions of celebrating our myth/ritual configurations, both old and new, the drama would have to struggle to reassert its integrity by reviving old modes to embody new perceptions--and here too film was a severe threat.

The novel, then, at this time if great change, was not being a shape-shifter; it was a cannibal. The novelist was the new shaman, which is what the filmmaker would become. The novel expanded as it devoured the roles of other narrative forms and as it attempted to present all myths for all people--like the monsters in Japanese science fiction horror movies. The four elements I listed in the opening paragraph, traced on into the twentieth century, should be equally applicable to other narrative forms Thus, the trends represented by those elements may be seen in the short story, the drama, and the fiction film, as well as in the novel: the triumph of artifice may be paraded in all four forms.

1. Inner exploration instead of conventional intrigue. The shift of emphasis is what is remarkable here, not a sudden shift of attention. Narrative has always had the capacity to look within. The familiar epic voyage to the underworld has long been understood--and I mean long before Freud and Jung--as an illumination of the human unconscious as much as of the dark, inexplicable side of nature. Indian and Greek heroes found their heart of darkness long before Marlow and Kurtz. Parts of the Hávamál allegorize the workings of the human mind, just as parts of the Old Testament dramatize them. Closer to home, Chaucer could use the same body of material--the courtly, chivalric ethos as refined in Italy and France--to make a glossy story of pageants and tableaux in The Knight's Tale or to make a profound study of motivational psychology in the Troilus. And in eighteenth-century England, inner exploration is not only essential to the form and focus of Tristram Shandy, it is also vital to such diverse narratives as Clarissa Harlowe, Humphry Clinker, The Man of Feeling, and The Castle of Otranto.

Dostoevsky may be the most important name to be reckoned with here. Even in the slightest of his works, it is clear that the shift in emphasis has been accomplished. He showed this way to modern novelists, and they followed it farther than he could have realized he implied. Inner exploration moved from examining the workings of the mind through streams of consciousness to a more specialized, more rarefied subject for study--the workings of the creative mind.

As the modern novel moves on toward more contemporary narrative forms, we can detect the phenomena of the artist as protagonist and the creative process as plot. The traditional Bildungsroman becomes a portrait of the artist in the making. Joyce's Portrait is unique as it leads to Ulysses, but it is also just as typical of a mainstream flow as Compton Mackenzie's Michael Fane novels, which may indeed have influenced the redaction of Stephen Hero. Gide's The Counterfeiters and Muriel Spark's The Comforters are homophonous landmarks for this flow as the ancient element of inner exploration; having once come to dominate, it funnels into a newly specialized channel. The artist as protagonist and the creative process as plot are central concerns of those work that exemplify the triumph of artifice, and together they form one of the four elements by which we may characterize this dominant narrative mode.

2. Prose fiction as high art form, with technical accoutrements. This is the easiest element of the four to account for. In art forms, importance automatically produces self-consciousness, and currency breeds convention. We tend to think now that it goes without saying that prose fiction may be a high art form, but a century or so ago that would have been thought a revolutionary aesthetic concept. Despite a long history of attention to technique in prose, and a centuries-long amassing of conventions for fictional narratives in drama and verse, the combining phrase prose fiction was still considered déclassé. (In English there has been an interesting tradition of the historian as landmark prose stylist, consciously so, particularly in a sequence beginning with Clarendon's History of the Rebellion and extending to Macauley. Like the novel, this kind of history is prose narrative, and both look back to common ancestry in chronicle romance. The Old Norse tradition is probably the clearest demonstration of the phenomenon--history as fiction, fiction as history, and verse giving way to prose.) The change, when it came, was largely a matter of waking up to the already established significance of the genre. The same process has taken place recently in our culture with regard to film. When television assumed the burdens of truly mass art, movies were free to fulfill their potential as a high art form.

What concerns me here is what happens in narrative art once the concern with technique is established as appropriate to cultural eminence. In the novel, the focus of attention falls on broad, structural techniques of point of view. With artist as protagonist and the creative process as plot, technical considerations center on how the story may be told. There is self-conscious examination of the filters through which action is seen, the instruments by which narratives are illuminated and revised. There is awareness, too, that the very means of observation cause distortion (the indeterminacy or uncertainty principle enunciated in physical terms by Heisenberg); and this leads to much experimentation with multiple and fragmented points of view. Examples may be found in the widely disparate personae used by Joyce, Faulkner, Durrell, and Joyce Cary. Further afield, there are the camera-eye vantage of Isherwood, the stationary peephole of Robbe-Grillet and Beckett, and the recording microphone of Nathalie Sarraute. Even where the overriding techniques are quite separate formal patterns (sonata-form, with every movement a fugue, in Broch's Sleepwalkers; rhythms of time and tide in Virginia Woolf; deliberate evocations of myth in Tolkien, Barth, Welty, Updike, and C.S. Lewis), attention is called to point of view.

Again, there is nothing new in art forms conventionally calling attention to their techniques. The ritualized formalizations of East Asian performances, the masks of classical Greek drama and Melanesian dance, the Old Germanic scop's signal that he is about to begin a piece (Hwæt), and the role of Prologue in Elizabethan theater are all arrant artifices. They say, We are ready to do our special thing; you must now join us in the sacred world and time of art. Concern with technique is much more obvious in other recent narrative forms--short story, drama, film--but is no less dominant in the novel. Indeed, recognition of the techniques themselves contributes to the identification of those fictions that comprise the triumph of artifice.

3. The alienation of the artist from society. This is a cliché all by itself. It is described as the modern universal angst or malaise as applied to high culture. And it is attributed directly to the Romantic Revolution, even called the corollary or embodiment of the romantic paradox. It was Coleridge, after all, who codified it: Weave a circle round him thrice.... Yet all the primitive cultures that we know or can reconstruct reflect the same alienation, nearly all their ritual practices involving a distinction between the sacred and the profane. Whether we are talking about a shamanic priest, astronomer, dancer, healer, or law-prophet, we are talking about a special person who has been separated out of the profane world of socio-economic conditions as they are, by a process of divestiture/celebration/invocation/intoxication/inspiration/initinitiation, investiture, into a world of transcendent conditions as they have always been. Industry and urbanization, anonymity and repression, these are merely altered manifestations of profane existence, from which artists (whatever shamanic discipline they profess) must be alienated if they are to function.

I would not deny that there are degrees of separation; nor that there is variation in the sources of, the demand for, the motivation for, and the awareness of the distance; nor that there was egregious polarization in conditions at the turn of the century. The point is that if this is Romanticism, then Romanticism has always been a facet of the human condition as societies recognize and respond to it. Again, what we are talking about is a shift in degree of emphasis. And this emphasis, too, shares the new consciousness of novelist as artist, alienated from society therefore by new definitions.

The philosophical concept, then, or perhaps I should simply call it an awareness of a state of mind, leads to a formal construct for the presentation of narrative. The polarization is conceived to be in a dynamic state, and the tensiveness of the situation and the artist's awareness of it yield a dialectical form. From the alienation of the artist from society it is a short step to a dialectic of life and art. So thoroughly had this dialectic pervaded the works of the late twentieth century that it is very nearly part of the mise-en-scène for any narrative scenario, part of the donnée for any fictional construct. More important for the purposes of this investigation, the dialectic of life and art becomes a primary topic of stories in the triumph of artifice--another demonstration of form as function (in Dorothy Van Ghent's terms) or technique as discovery (in Mark Schorer's).²

I don't think it is reasonable to say that the central concerns of artist as protagonist and creative process as plot plus the consciousness of technique focused on point-of-view experimentation were either causes for or caused by the emergence of the dialectic of life and art. Nor is it plausible to say that the dialectic grew naturally from the alienation, without regard to the parallel emergence of these central concerns and techniques from other elements. Influences work in both directions at every point of contact, producing a new configuration of elements out of the old configurations. And it must never be forgotten that massive forces outside the immediate domain of the arts were also at work and worked upon. Instead, if the society from which the artist was alienated was undergoing great change, the nature of that alienation and the art that it produced would have to react.

The alienation of the artist yielded a dialectical form, and that form could become a subject for artistic attention--natural steps--but another theme was yielded as well--and just as naturally: illusion versus reality. The old appearance-reality game began to be played with a vengeance, as if it were newly discovered, as if it hadn't been one of the most basic concerns of all myth and ritual and of all the arts derived therefrom. Perhaps the metaphors for playing this game (dream, trance, fantasy, madness, and revived allegories of voyage, quest, magical realism) are only vehicles for the working out of the dialectic. But it is sometimes difficult to separate vehicle from tenor in metaphor. Inevitably, art-life tension touches an appearance-reality dichotomy at many points, but I prefer to separate them for the purposes of identification and analysis. Fellini's 8 1/2, for example, deals explicitly with appearance and reality but is more readily accessible to analysis in terms of life and art, while his Juliet of the Spirits, which refers overtly to art versus life, lends itself ideally to a discussion of appearance versus reality.

4. Attitude toward society. This is implicit in all art, all reconstructions of human experience. The point is the growing explicitness of social comment. What happened was the ultimate long-suffering death of satire as a separate narrative genre. The satiric impulses and functions were cannibalized by the novel. At times the satiric tone dominates an entire narrative, as in early Evelyn Waugh and Huxley, in some of Ray Bradbury's and Harlan Ellison's short stories, in Albee's Zoo Story, or in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. But for the most part satire per se has been relegated to the comic strip, guerilla and improvisational theater, and cabaret comedy. Nevertheless, in all contemporary narrative, I think without exception, some social commentary underlies even the basic choices of form and material. Moreover, the audiences for narrative expect the attitudes and seek out the inferences of commentary. The overt conventions of satire, then, have been driven underground and elsewhere from fiction and drama, while the satiric impulse has conventionally become part of the very framework of narrative, perhaps most apparently in sub-genres like science fiction, fantasy fiction, detective fiction, and the western.

So much for the old configuration. In the new configuration I have identified (again) four elements: central concerns with the artist as protagonist and the creative process as plot; technical experimentation and advances in point of view; the theme of appearance versus reality; and life and art conceived as thesis and antithesis in a dialectical construct.

If these four are taken separately, three will be seen as critical commonplaces. The other, the dialectic of life and art, is what gives coherence to the whole pattern. But because it is also relatively unfamiliar in contemporary criticism, I'll begin by isolating it from the configuration and demonstrating the way it works in exemplary narratives, extreme examples of the three basic ways in which a proposed resolution or synthesis can inform an entire work. Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! cries out art out of life; Durrell's Alexandria Quartet orchestrates life and art they interchange; and Resnais' and Robbe-Grillet's Last Year at Marienbad and Fellini's 8 1/2 image forth life out of art. Analysis of these works occupies the next three chapters.

If this element of the configuration is understood, the whole triumph of artifice will begin to reveal its meaning. In an oversimplified form it is merely art as play. According to Ortega y Gasset,

All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world. Other styles must be interpreted in connection with dramatic social or political movements, or with profound religious and philosophical currents. The new style only asks to be linked to the triumph of sports and games. It is of the same kind and origin with them.³

But it is important to understand that games are a form of order, superimposed upon experience. Games are civilized patterns or formulas with more or less sophisticated sets of conventions.

Take a simple, dramatic Hollywood version of a formula: White man speak with tongue of snake; Indian speak with tongue of arrow. Abstract this into another, less offensive if equally condescending, kind of jargon and it becomes, Sophisticated, civilized man lives in accordance with a system of conventions, that is, workable lies, while primitive man lives in terms of perceptible truths. Society develops from simple truth or perception to complex lie or construction. The lie or convention takes many forms, the earliest of which are the symbology of language (including gesture) and games and primitive art forms, both plastic and lively. Some of the succeeding lies are metaphor, myth, marriage, religion, law, and government; any ritual, any art, any system that is formal; anything that seeks to impose a sense of form or order upon the chaos, formlessness, randomness, disorder of human experience; anything that attempts to give a semblance of meaning to the apparent meaninglessness of life.

The course of this development, however, is never onward and upward. A point is inevitably reached at which humans turn around and begin to re-seek or research the truth. Thus, for example, science reaches a point where it considers its own formalizations as the Truth, then inevitably re-examines itself and realizes its own manifold limitations, that by definition it can only see what it allows itself to see in its own terms of seeing, that at best it is only an ordered method of looking at disorder with good and increasingly favorable odds on its side as it measures and predicts probability. (Think of quantum physics, chaos theory, or the quest for a unifying theory.)

For other examples, governments move toward consolidation and centralized power only to move back in the direction of diffusion or to seem to invert the power pyramid, and law progresses from causality to highly formalized systems of principle and precedent only to break up (or down) in the quest for higher law or natural law. The struggle toward social good inevitably gives way at its maturity to a renewed struggle for personal good, and the good fight for civil liberty reverts or reacts to the noble (and savage) struggle for individual freedom.

For the most pertinent example here, poetry develops through simple metaphorical statement to refined, polished, sophisticated similes, only to turn around in search of natural, organic, naive metaphorical communication or even simple, direct imagistic evocation. When art develops through a Renaissance to a Neo-Classicism, a sophisticated refinement of technique, a generalized conception of Humankind; then inevitably a Romantic Revolution will lead art back to a realistic concept of humanity. The Romantic Movement, viewed broadly, demonstrates the reversion process on many levels. The movement goes on, of course, and we are still in it, but it is possible to see even from our limited vantage some of the re-searching for truth. One aspect shifts the emphasis in art from the problem of art, which is the Classical way, to the problem of the artists. Many of the most successful artistic works of our time, however, combine the two problems, working often in a formal construct that approximates a dialectic.

I have referred to clichés from the traditional Western, which I called simple, direct statements, products of a primitive concern for perceptible truth. And I pointed out the contrast, explicit therein. with sophisticated, civilized people and their conventional lies. But there is something of a paradox here: both parts of the formulaic speech are lies themselves. Tongue of snake and tongue of arrow are metaphors, literally untrue. There is no such thing as tongue of snake or arrow in a human mouth, no such thing even as a straight or forked human tongue. So the straight-tongued, tongue-of-arrow Indian speaks his truth in a conventional or formal untruth. That is to say, he is uttering his straight arrows with the snake-forked tongue of the artist. For art is truth only in the sense that one's empirical experience of life is not truth.

I am reminded of another phrase from the movies, with Jonathan Swift or C.S. Lewis as original screenwriter and a film context that could have been Brazilian jungle, Tibetan mountain, Polynesian aboriginal enclave, or yet another Amerind powwow. The white man interloper, attempting to bridge the language barrier to communicate with the natives, uses the word lie. But the innocents have no word for lie, and it is translated as the thing-which-is-not. The thing-which-is-not is art, and art may be defined as the imaginative reconstruction of experience, the imposition of a formal order on life.

Depending on one's critical or creative bias, the controlling aspect of art may be called myth, archetypal pattern, symbol, metaphor, tension or tensiveness, paradox, ambiguity, irony, structure, form, dominant contrast, Other-speak, icon, allegory, or even plot. It may even be called game. My own bias has been for structural principle, which has allowed me to use many of the other terms by demonstrating that the structural principle of a particular work is a particular archetypal pattern, a particular ironic tensiveness, or, as in the present case, a dialectic.

Clearly, more than one structural principle may be involved in any given work. For example, in Absalom, Absalom!, which is to be my first model of the dialectic, one other is important enough to be mentioned here--the principle of separation/involvement. In a work employing this structural device the audience is invited to become directly involved with the action and emotion by an initial separation of the teller from the told. Artificially but effectively this places the artist in the position of the audience; q.e.d., audience identifies with artist. This leads inevitably to more effective and complete identification of audience with action and emotion when the teller becomes involved with the action and emotion of the told. And in a skillful work this seems to happen naturally and inevitably.

Thus, in the Old English Dream of the Rood, the poet carefully separates the dreamer/speaker from the dreamed speaker, giving us four persons (five if we distinguish between poet from dreamer): audience, dreamer, rood (dreamed speaker), and Christ. This separation leads inevitably to total integration: when the cross identifies itself with Christ, the dreamer and the audience--having been brought into identity with each other and then with the cross--are also brought to a (mystical) oneness with Christ. And this is the apparent intention of the poem.⁴ Thus, because of the separations, audience identifies with the wedding-guest who identifies with Ancient Mariner (who identifies with Everyman). Thus, audience identifies with Shelley who identifies with traveller who identifies with sculptor (who identifies with his statue and, ironically, with King Ozymandias himself). Thus, readers can identify with Kurtz because of the careful, deliberate processes of separation and identification involving the group on the deck of the Nellie, Conrad himself, and Marlow. Among the host of other instances of this device at work are Gatsby, Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence. and much detective fiction.

In my discussion of this device I have used terms like intention and reader-involvement and place-by-identification to such an extent that I fear charges of both intentional and affective heresies. Let me try briefly to forestall such attacks. A structural principle is employed to enable a work of art to do what it has to do. Sometimes the purpose necessarily involves inducing active participation on the part of the audience (this is the function of artistic conventions: convention = agreement to understand, as seen most clearly in oral-formulaic traditions). If the design of a work of art appeals for involvement, that design, that appeal, and that involvement are in the work, not in individual impressionistic responses of sensitive audiences; only an objective critic can see such a design, any subjective approach by its very nature ruling out the validity of such discernment. And of course such a design, such an appeal, and such involvement may be present, and may or may not work, whether or not the creator intends to use it or is even aware of its presence in the work or its very existence as a possible device.

Since these critical biases that I have been announcing imply critical influences, this may be an appropriate place to discuss them--particularly since I do not in the following pages give anything like ample documentation, either theoretical or practical. As a student, I was trained in some rigorous literary disciplines: Myron Brightfield's neo-Aristotelianism; the vigorous analysis of a