Literary and Philosophical Concepts: Kant to Modernism
Kant on Enlightenment and Immaturity
“What is Enlightenment?” – Immanuel Kant
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!
Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless gladly remain immature for life. For the same reasons, it is all too easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so convenient to be immature! Thus it is difficult for each separate individual to work his way out of the immaturity which has become almost second nature to him. He has even grown fond of it and is really incapable for the time being of using his own understanding, because he was never allowed to make the attempt.
Dogmas and formulas, those mechanical instruments for rational use (or rather misuse) of his natural endowments, are the ball and chain of his permanent immaturity. And if anyone did throw them off, he would still be uncertain about jumping over even the narrowest of trenches, for he would be unaccustomed to free movement of this kind. Thus only a few, by cultivating their own minds, have succeeded in freeing themselves from immaturity and in continuing boldly on their way.
There is more chance of an entire public enlightening itself. This is indeed almost inevitable, if only the public concerned is left in freedom. For there will always be a few who think for themselves, even among those appointed as guardians of the common mass. Such guardians, once they have themselves thrown off the yoke of immaturity, will disseminate the spirit of rational respect for personal value and for the duty of all men to think for themselves. The remarkable thing about this is that if the public, which was previously put under this yoke by the guardians, is suitably stirred up by some of the latter who are incapable of enlightenment, it may subsequently compel the guardians themselves to remain under the yoke. For it is very harmful to propagate prejudices, because they finally avenge themselves on the very people who first encouraged them (or whose predecessors did so). Thus a public can only achieve enlightenment slowly. A revolution may well put an end to autocratic despotism and to rapacious or power-seeking oppression, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking. Instead, new prejudices, like the ones they replaced, will serve as a leash to control the great unthinking mass.
For enlightenment of this kind, all that is needed is freedom. And the freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all—freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. But I hear on all sides the cry: Don’t argue! The officer says: Don’t argue, get on parade! The tax-official: Don’t argue, pay! The clergyman: Don’t argue, believe! (Only one ruler in the world says: Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!). All this means restrictions on freedom everywhere.
But which sort of restriction prevents enlightenment, and which, instead of hindering it, can actually promote it? I reply: The public use of man’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men; the private use of reason may quite often be very narrowly restricted, however, without undue hindrance to the progress of enlightenment. But by the public use of one’s own reason I mean that use which anyone may make of it as a man of learning addressing the entire reading public. What I term the private use of reason is that which a person may make of it in a particular civil post or office with which he is entrusted.
Kant and Marx: Modernity as Progress
According to Immanuel Kant, Enlightenment was “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another”. Kant is declaring that man needs to use his own understanding by himself, without accepting any exterior imposition. Kant is implying that ignorance cannot be the driving force of modernity; some men have to dare to use their own understanding—paraphrasing the motto of the Enlightenment—their own knowledge, their own reason, in pursuit of progress.
Even though Karl Marx was a much more radical thinker than Kant, there is a fundamental notion they share, and that is modernity understood in terms of progress, in terms of change from a previous situation. If for Kant Enlightenment was an important departure from man’s previous condition of immaturity and ignorance, for Marx it is imperative for the workers to depart from their alienated situation in which they have become estranged from their labor. We can also consider that estranged labor and capitalist political economy drive man into a pre-enlightened age by canceling the direct relationship between the worker and his production, a relation that “produces beauty—but for the worker, deformity […] It produces intelligence—but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism”.
Henry James: Style and Themes
Three Phases of Style
Critics have portrayed three stages in the advancement of Henry James’ writing. They include:
- James I
- James II
- The Old Pretender
Spectators do regularly group his works of fiction into three periods. In The Portrait of a Lady, his style was straightforward and direct. In this work, he experimented broadly with structures and strategies, describing from an ordinarily omniscient perspective.
Trans-Atlantic Style
James is one of the significant figures of trans-Atlantic writing. His works frequently compare characters from the Old World (Europe), exemplifying a primitive civilization that is wonderful, often degenerate, and appealing, with those from the New World (United States), where individuals are often reckless, open, and self-assured and embody the virtues of the new American culture. His style is particularly individual and flexible. He also developed good characters. James investigates this conflict of characters and societies in accounts of individual relationships in which power is exercised well or poorly. His heroes are often young American women facing persecution or misuse.
Psychological Approach
It is also possible to consider many of James’ accounts as psychological studies about choice. In his introduction to the New York edition of The American, he describes the development of the story in his mind precisely. He states that the situation involves an American, some powerful yet treacherously flabbergasted and double-crossed, some brutally wronged compatriot, with the focal point of the story being on the reaction of this wronged man.
The Portrait of a Lady might be an experiment to perceive what happens when a hopeful young lady suddenly becomes rich. In many of his stories, characters seem to embody alternative prospects and possibilities, as most notably in “The Jolly Corner.” In this work, the hero and a ghost doppelganger live alternative American and European lives, similar to The Ambassadors, in which an older James seems affectionately respectful of his own younger self confronting a vital moment.
Pre-Modern Elements
James was one of the last great pre-modern authors, and his style can appear curious and antique next to the forceful experimentalism of James Joyce, the oddity of Franz Kafka, and the sexual libertarianism of D. H. Lawrence. However, none of these authors can fully approach the pleasurable wealth of Henry James’ exposition, because it offers sentences of jewel-like lucidity and surprising distinct influence. James’ psychological focus is also unmatched. His older brother wrote The Principles of Psychology, and these same principles were the subject of Henry’s accounts, where conflicting motivations and societies confront one another and reveal astounding yet subtle certainties.
James’ Main Theme: Americans in Europe
James’ primary subject was the situation of the American in Europe. As a young American would-be author traveling Europe in pursuit of the legacies of great European writers like Balzac, Dickens, and Turgenev, Henry must have felt absurd and dominated. He portrayed this feeling of relocation again and again in books. For example, in The American, a reckless new-world agent becomes enmeshed in the plans of a great yet destroyed European family. Again, in Portrait of a Lady, Isabel represents female virtue imperiled by male sexuality, but also American honesty jeopardized by European double-dealing. This odd allegory—America as a little youngster and Europe as a lustful older man—would later be used by Vladimir Nabokov in his Jamesian masterpiece Lolita.
Analysis of Henry James’ *Daisy Miller*
To start with, it is necessary to state that the work by Henry James, Daisy Miller, is a story about a young American girl who finds herself in the different culture of Europe and tries to adjust to it. Another major character of the story, Mr. Winterbourne, is in love with the heroine. He always tries to show her that her deeds are unacceptable in European culture, but his attempts prove vain. Daisy Miller feels free to communicate with men whom she hardly knows and feels no shame for this. Moreover, she willingly agrees to have a walk with Mr. Winterbourne after only half an hour of communication with him.
At their final meeting in Rome, Daisy Miller and Mr. Winterbourne have a talk about her behavior which also turns out to be vain – in this case because Daisy dies of a fever. After her death, Mr. Winterbourne comes to know that Daisy loved him, but has nothing to do but return to Switzerland.
Thus, having considered the details of the story, it is necessary to analyze Daisy’s behavior. First of all, it is obvious that 19th-century Europe was not the place for such a young woman as Daisy to openly flirt with men. The cultural and behavioral traditions of European countries did not allow women to privately communicate with unfamiliar men. Moreover, dating these men without the girl’s parents’ consent was also inappropriate. However, Daisy did this with no shame as far as her upbringing allowed her to. She represented the American culture, which has always been less conservative than the European one.
Finally, after Daisy’s death, her mother described her as a simple young flirt who never meant to offend traditions of any country or behave improperly. Daisy just lived as she felt she had to, and the society of her epoch considered this lifestyle to be wrong.
There are many symbols that describe the innocent nature of Daisy. One symbol is when Daisy and Winterbourne first meet in the hotel garden. As they are talking, the sun is beaming down on her head. The sunlight beaming on her symbolizes Daisy as a pure, innocent young woman. When Daisy and Winterbourne meet, she is standing alone wearing a vivid white dress. Her dress and hat symbolize how pure Daisy really is. She doesn’t realize her failure to rescue him, “Her ejection from Eden” (Childress 2). This foreshadows a loss of purity and innocence.
The way people view her is as impure because she has intimate gentleman friends. Although all she is doing is talking to them, many Europeans view her as acting in a scandalous way. This led the Europeans to believe that her death was consequential because she was out in the streets with so many men. They presumed that Daisy was completely responsible for her own death because she was acting so recklessly. Europeans thought that if Daisy had acted with class and shown more respect for herself and others, she would have never been out so late in the evenings.
On the other hand, Daisy’s death was considered by others as being a coincidence that could have happened to anyone. There were several different illnesses spreading throughout Europe. There were no given facts that being out late was the cause of her death. After Daisy becomes ill, Winterbourne begins to realize how pure she actually is. He begins to feel sorry for the way he and others viewed and judged her. The sad fact is that like many of the Europeans who judged Daisy, we all tend to look at others based on their actions and the way we portray them.
Accordingly, it is obvious that according to modern standards, there was nothing wrong with Daisy Miller. Her behavior is common to modern females, and society does not prohibit it. The only wrong point about Daisy was that she adopted such behavior in the wrong epoch. In other words, she went ahead of her time in establishing behavioral standards and moral norms.
So, to conclude, it is necessary to state that cultural differences are major reasons for forming stereotypes against some nations. The major character of Henry James’ story, Daisy Miller, was one of the first people who contributed to the formation of prejudice about Americans. What was wrong about her was that she acted in contradiction to the demands of her time. The society of 19th-century Europe was not ready for free relations between men and women, and Daisy Miller had enough courage to go against public opinion.
Henry James on *The Art of Fiction*
The Art of Fiction was a response to remarks by English critic Walter Besant, who wrote an article that literally attempted to lay down the “laws of fiction.” For instance, Besant insisted that novelists should confine themselves to their own experience: “A young lady brought up in a quiet country village should avoid descriptions of garrison life.”
James argued that a sufficiently alert novelist could catch knowledge from everywhere and use it to good purpose: “The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military. Greater miracles have been seen than that, imagination assisting, she should speak the truth about some of these gentlemen.”
James continually argues for the fullest freedom in the novelist’s choice of subject and method of treatment: “The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.” In particular, James is suspicious of restraining fiction with specific moral guidelines: “No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind; that seems to me an axiom which, for the artist in fiction, will cover all needful moral ground.”
James followed his own advice in criticizing the various writers included in Partial Portraits. In his long, engrossing essay on Maupassant, for instance, he couldn’t help noticing the Frenchman’s propensity for what James called the “monkeys’ cage” view of human existence. But that didn’t stop James from approving wholeheartedly of Maupassant’s vigor, precision, and conciseness in describing life as he saw it. Similarly, James found much to appreciate in the intellectual force of George Eliot, the stolid but comprehensive detail-work of Anthony Trollope, the unbounded imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the genial common sense of Alphonse Daudet. All very different writers, but all speak with validity from their personal view on life.
This wide range presages the “house of fiction” image James would include in the New York Edition preface to The Portrait of a Lady, where each novelist looks at life from a particular window of the house and thus composes a unique and personally characteristic account.
D.H. Lawrence’s *The Prussian Officer* Explained
Whether “The Prussian Officer” is, as some critics claim, “one of the world’s masterpieces of short fiction,” most agree that it is one of the best stories of D. H. Lawrence. It is representative of his favorite theme of so-called blood consciousness and of his customary narrative technique of combining the realistic with the mythic.
The plot of the story is so simple and its two characters are so stark as to be archetypal. An aristocratic Prussian captain becomes obsessed with his uncomplicated young orderly but deals with the obsession by repressing it, humiliating and physically mistreating the young man. The story reaches its climax when the orderly kills the officer, an act that destroys the world of everyday reality for the young man, launching him into an alienated psychic state that eventually leads to his own death.
Just as the officer seems driven by forces outside his control and understanding, the orderly responds in a primitive, unthinking manner. In fact, as is usual in Lawrence’s stories, it is not rational thought but rather primitive instinct that motivates the action of “The Prussian Officer.”
Although the Prussian officer’s sadistic treatment of the young man is a result of his repressed sexual desire for him, as in other Lawrence works of fiction in which homosexuality seems to play a role, sex is a metaphor for something deeper. As Aldous Huxley once wrote about Lawrence, his special gift was for “unknown modes of being.” The significance of sexuality for Lawrence, suggested Huxley, was that in it “the immediate, non-mental knowledge of divine otherness is brought, so to speak, to a focus—a focus of darkness.”
Indeed, the most basic myth substratum of “The Prussian Officer” is the story of Paradise Lost, in which Satan, tormented by thought, yearns for the innocent and instinctive Adam; frustrated by the impossibility of regaining that lost innocence, however, he can only scorn it and try to destroy it. As opposed to the officer, who is bound to the rules of the aristocracy and the military, the orderly is one who seems “never to have thought, only to have received life directly through his senses, and acted straight from instinct.” It is this “blind instinctive sureness of movement of an unhampered young animal” that so irritates the officer. Realizing this, the orderly feels like “a wild thing caught,” and his hatred in response to the officer’s passion grows; as the officer seems to be going irritably insane, the youth becomes deeply frightened.
Whereas the first half of the story focuses on the consciousness of the officer, who tries not to admit the passion that has seized him, gradually the focus shifts to the orderly, as the captain begins to grow vague and unreal. The officer’s passion makes the orderly feel similarly unreal, however. He has a sense of being “disemboweled, made empty, like an empty shell. He felt himself as nothing, a shadow creeping under the sunshine.” More and more he feels in a “blackish dream,” and all those around him seem to be “dream people.” This movement toward unreality in which the two characters become transformed by their very passion is a typical Lawrentian structural device by which conventional characters are transfigured into depersonalized representatives of states of mind.
The orderly’s murder of the captain is presented in unmistakable sexual terms. He leaps on the older man, pressing his knee against his chest and forcing the officer’s head over a tree stump, “pressing, with all his heart behind in a passion of relief, the tension of his wrists exquisite with relief.” Exulting in his “thrust,” he shoves the officer’s head back until there is a little “cluck” and a crunching sensation and heavy convulsions shake his body, horrifying the young soldier yet pleasing him too.
The murder completes the young man’s alienation from the ordinary world: “He had gone out from everyday life into the unknown, and he could not, he even did not want to go back.” As he wanders alone through the forest, the world becomes a ghostly shadow to him. His actual death seems an inevitable and even anticlimactic consequence of his complete distancing from the world.
As more than one critic has suggested, “The Prussian Officer” is about the “divided self,” for the two central characters represent the split between fallen intellect and pre-Fall innocence, or between repressed consciousness and the instinctive unconscious. This basic tension between life as stiff and repressed and life as vital and dynamic can be seen in the final image of the story; the two men lie side by side in the mortuary—the officer frozen and rigid and the orderly looking as if at any moment he might rouse into life again.
Modernism’s Connection to Urban Life
Modernism is very much a phenomenon of the city. Writers from previous generations, Dickens, Gissing, and Wells, had all written about London. However, as realist writers, they created narratives driven by plot and character. London was, thus, the backdrop against which these writers’ characters acted out their lives, rather than the city itself being an integral part of the story.
Dickens and Gissing’s characters were clearly affected by their experience of urban life. However, early modernist writers, such as Woolf, Eliot, Joyce, and Richardson, took this further by exploring, through their writing, the psychological impact that metropolitan life had upon their protagonists; the effect of what Walter Benjamin referred to as the ‘shock’ of life in a modern city.
Modernist writers saw the city as a space to be conceptualized and understood; cities in all their complexity, where spaces overlap and coalesce and are defined variously by economic function, social class, history, and topographical character. Thus, modernist writing had a strong tendency to encapsulate the experience of life within the city, and to make the city-novel or the city-poem one of its main forms.
In England, modernism took the form of a reaction by predominantly metropolitan writers against the strictures of Victorianism. London was important to the development of modernism for several key reasons: it was the world’s biggest city in the early part of the twentieth century, having expanded with extraordinary rapidity, and it was the locus of a burgeoning growth of technology and increased mobility.
In the nineteenth century, with writers like Dickens and Baudelaire, artists saw that the city informed the consciousness of its inhabitants. This tradition continued in the twentieth century with, for example, Joyce’s Ulysses and Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. But this was a tradition both embraced and transformed by women modernist writers, most notably Richardson and Woolf. Exploring female personality and the very nature of consciousness itself, they adopted Walter Benjamin’s maxim that ‘life in all its variety and inexhaustible wealth of variations thrives among the gray cobblestones.’ (Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism)
In the time in which Woolf was writing, London established itself as the point of concentration for English national culture and established dominance over communication, journalism, and the arts. From the 1890s onwards, the average age of marriage increased, women began to enter the universities and the workplace and became more evident on the streets of the commercial centers of major cities. The numbers of such women were not great, but their impact was major and the New Woman was a prominent social and cultural figure of this era.
Initially, this new breed of educated, single working woman was represented only in the works of male writers such as H.G. Wells, with Anna Veronica in 1909 being his most notable example. Whilst there was some support for the New Woman from male writers, many of them had an almost voyeuristic fascination with her sexuality and agonized about her supposed loss of femininity and her reduced prospects of marriage.
However, the early years of the twentieth century saw an explosion in women’s autobiography and fiction that represented an increased sense of empowerment and self-actualization by women. Alongside this came increased physical mobility for women; not just in terms of opportunities to travel independently outside the family home, but by other changes such as simply being able to wear less constricting clothing. The New Woman became adept at using train timetables and bicycles, and a number of, mainly educated Edwardian women, took part in street marches in support of women’s suffrage. By the time of the Great War, women writers, such as Mansfield, Richardson, and Woolf, began to write about the types of metropolitan women with whom they were familiar; to write about women from a woman’s perspective.
Virginia Woolf: Reception and Literary Vision
From the appearance of her first novel in 1915, Virginia Woolf’s work was received with respect—an important point, since she was extremely sensitive to criticism. Descendant of a distinguished literary family, member of the avant-garde Bloomsbury Group, herself an experienced critic and reviewer, she was taken seriously as an artist. Nevertheless, her early works were not financially successful; she was forty before she earned a living from her writing.
From the start, the rather narrow territory of her novels precluded broad popularity, peopled as they were with sophisticated, sexually reserved, upper-middle-class characters, finely attuned to their sensibilities and relatively insulated from the demands of mundane existence. During the 1930s, Woolf became the subject of critical essays and two book-length studies; some of her works were translated into French. At the same time, however, her novels began to be judged as irrelevant to a world beset by growing economic and political chaos.
At her death in 1941, she was widely regarded as a pioneer of modernism but also reviewed by many as the effete, melancholic “invalid priestess of Bloomsbury,” a stereotype her friend and fellow novelist E. M. Forster dismissed at the time as wholly inaccurate; she was, he insisted, “tough, sensitive but tough.”
Over the next twenty-five years, respectful attention to Woolf’s work continued, but in the late 1960s, critical interest accelerated dramatically and has remained strong. Two reasons for this renewed notice seem particularly apparent. First, Woolf’s feminist essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas became rallying documents in the growing women’s movement; readers who might not otherwise have discovered her novels were drawn to them via her nonfiction and tended to read them primarily as validations of her feminist thinking. Second, with the appearance of her husband Leonard Woolf’s five-volume autobiography from 1965-1969, her nephew Quentin Bell’s definitive two-volume biography of her in 1972, and the full-scale editions of her own diaries and letters commencing in the mid-1970s, Woolf’s life has become one of the most thoroughly documented of any modern author. Marked by intellectual and sexual unconventionality, madness, and suicide, it is for today’s readers also one of the most fascinating; the steady demand for memoirs, reminiscences, and photograph collections relating to her has generated what is sometimes disparagingly labeled “the Virginia Woolf industry.”
In one of her most famous pronouncements on the nature of fiction—as a practicing critic, she had much to say on the subject—Virginia Woolf insists that “life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” In an ordinary day, she argues, “thousands of ideas” course through the human brain; “thousands of emotions” meet, collide, and disappear “in astonishing disorder.” Amid this hectic interior flux, the trivial and the vital, the past and the present, are constantly interacting; there is endless tension between the multitude of ideas and emotions rushing through one’s consciousness and the numerous impressions scoring on it from the external world. Thus, even personal identity becomes evanescent, continually reordering itself as “the atoms of experience . . . fall upon the mind.” It follows, then, that human beings must have great difficulty communicating with one another, for of this welter of perceptions that define individual personality, only a tiny fraction can ever be externalized in word or gesture.
Given the complex phenomenon of human subjectivity, Woolf asks, “Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit . . . with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?” The conventional novel form is plainly inadequate for such a purpose, she maintains. Dealing sequentially with a logical set of completed past actions that occur in a coherent, densely detailed physical and social environment, presided over by an omniscient narrator interpreting the significance of it all, the traditional novel trims and shapes experience into a rational but falsified pattern. “Is life like this?” Woolf demands rhetorically. “Must novels be like this?”
William Faulkner: Themes, Style, and Technique
All of Faulkner’s greatest works were written before the first explosion of the atomic bomb, yet in all of them there is an awareness of the threat of annihilation of which the bomb may be only a symptom: a kind of spiritual annihilation. One critic argues that Faulkner, like the greatest of his contemporaries, dramatizes in most of his novels some version of the central problem of modern man in the West: how to respond to the recognition that man has no certain knowledge of a stable transcendent power that assures the meaning of human history.
Panthea Broughton makes this view of Faulkner more concrete: In Faulkner’s world, characters struggle to find or make meaning, exposing themselves in various ways to the danger of spiritual self-destruction, of losing their own souls in the effort to find a way of living in a universe that does not provide meaning. The immense quantity of critical commentary on Faulkner provides several satisfying ways of viewing and ordering the central concerns of his novels. Although the way into Faulkner suggested by Simpson and Broughton is only one of many, it seems particularly helpful to the reader who wishes to begin thinking about Faulkner’s whole literary career.
Broughton demonstrates that the Faulknerian universe is characterized essentially by motion. Human beings need meaning; they need to impose patterns on the motion of life. Out of this need spring human capacities for mature moral freedom as well as for tragic destructiveness. Closely related to this pattern that Broughton sees in Faulkner’s stories are his tireless experimentation with form and his characteristic style.
In an essay published in 1960, Conrad Aiken notes the similarities between Faulkner’s characteristic style and that of Henry James. The comparison is apt in some ways, for both in their greatest novels seem especially concerned with capturing in the sentence the complexity of experience and of reflection on experience. As Walter Slatoff, in the same volume, and others have shown, Faulkner seems especially drawn to paradox and oxymorons, kinds of verbal juxtaposition particularly suited to conveying the tension between the motion of life and the human need for pattern. When one notices these aspects of Faulkner’s style in a complex novel such as Absalom, Absalom!, in which Faulkner’s characteristic style finds its ideal subject, much that initially seems obscure becomes clearer.
Faulkner seems to have found most instructive the “loose” forms characteristic of the Victorian panoramic novel as it was developed, for example, by his favorite author, Charles Dickens. Faulkner’s novels generally contain juxtapositions of attitudes, narrative lines, voices, modes of representation, and emotional tones. His more radical and probably less successful experiments in this vein include the alternation of chapters from two quite separate stories in The Wild Palms and the alternation of fictionalized historical narrative with dramatic acts in Requiem for a Nun, a kind of sequel to Sanctuary. Light in August is his most successful work in this direction.
Somewhat less radical and more successful experiments involved the incorporation of Faulkner’s previously published stories into “collections” and sustained narratives in such a way as to produce the unity of a novel. Parts of The Unvanquished, the Snopes trilogy, and A Fable have led dual lives as stories and as parts of novels. Go Down, Moses is probably the most successful experiment in this direction.
Faulkner was particularly interested in the juxtaposition of voices. His career as a novelist blossomed when he juxtaposed the voices and, therefore, the points of view of several characters in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. In Absalom, Absalom!, the juxtaposition of voices also becomes the placing together of narrative lines, comparable episodes, points of view, modes of narration, attitudes, and emotional tones. This one novel brings together everything of which Faulkner was capable, demonstrating a technical virtuosity that in some ways is the fruit of the entire tradition of the novel. Absalom, Absalom! also realizes to some extent a special potential of Faulkner’s interest in juxtaposition, the conception of his Yoknapatawpha novels as a saga that displays a unity of its own.
The technique of juxtaposition, like Faulkner’s characteristic style, reflects his concern with the problems of living meaningfully within the apparently meaningless flow of time. Because life will not stand still or even move consistently according to patterns of meaning, it becomes necessary to use multiple points of view to avoid the complete falsification of his subject. Juxtaposition, the multileveled and open-ended sentence, and the oxymoronic style heighten the reader’s awareness of the fluidity of the “reality” that the text attempts to portray.
Faulkner’s most tragic characters are those who feel driven to impose such a rigid pattern upon their lives and on the lives of others as to invite destruction from the overwhelming forces of motion and change. These characters experience the heart in conflict with itself as the simultaneous need for living motion and meaningful pattern.
Jane Bowles’ *Everything Is Nice*: Cultural Space
“Everything Is Nice” is about the handling of space in a setting that pits two different kinds of societies against each other. The Moroccan women in the story constitute a homosocial group, and Jane Bowles is carefully attentive to the nuances of cross-cultural misunderstanding. Alice Toklas was no admirer of Jane, but she made the shrewd observation that “Jane is strange as an American but not as an Oriental…. If accepting this makes her more foreign it at least relieves the strain— that morbidity—she originally seemed at first to be consumed by.”
The great wall along the highest street of the “blue Moslem town,” where Jeanie walks freely, alone, is a protective wall, but it cuts the wanderer off from the scene below even as it allows her to see it. The rocks, the dog slipping into the sea, the skinny boys, the woman washing her legs—the people in immediate, if dangerous, contact with the natural world—are observed with a clarity that dissipates once Jeanie crosses over into the life-world of Moroccan women. The crossing-over is most obvious when she is taken through a narrow alley and a door is opened to her and Zodelia, a door marked by a “heavy brass knocker in the form of a fist” (316). The conflict is already, though, a matter of struggling for space and power.
Jeanie is drawn into the women’s world by Zodelia. The Moslem woman leads her, and Jeanie seems almost helpless to resist. Hall first noticed the conflict between Americans’ and Arabs’ sense of privacy when, in a hotel in Washington, a man violated “the small sphere of privacy” which balloons around an American in a public place.
The story is filled with puzzling and odd details that are never clarified. Zodelia carries a basket with a “large dead porcupine” in it, “a pair of new yellow socks folded on top of it”. Talk of this porcupine leads the two around. At one point the porcupine seems to be on its way to Zodelia’s aunt. But when Jeanie asks about it later, Zodelia tells her, “The porcupine sits here … in my own house”. More obviously of cultural importance is the talk about family. Old Tetum wants to know where Jeanie’s husband is. Zodelia adds to Jeanie’s answer—that her husband is “traveling in the desert”—an explanation that, though false, seemed reasonable enough to the group. Jeanie’s husband is “selling things.” More puzzling to the group is the absence of Jeanie’s mother.
The reader of “Everything Is Nice” is as disoriented as the main character. The locale is most likely unfamiliar; customs and cultural expectations of the Oriental women in the story are puzzling. Conflict and resolution (if the ending can in any way be seen as a resolution) are decentered. As usual, Jane Bowles does not provide explicit authorial comment to dispel questions the reader might have. Still, “Everything Is Nice” is a brilliant depiction of an exotic cityscape and a thoroughly honest presentation of a woman among women in a homosocial community. Led ever more deeply into the Orient, Jeanie remains disoriented. Conversations do not work. But far from adopting a superior attitude, the main character and the work as a whole establish a rapport with the cultural Other that is indeed rare in Western literature.
A second story, “The Iron Table,” isolates a woman with her husband, and the rapport so evident in “Everything Is Nice” quickly falls away.
Nella Larsen’s *Passing*: Identity Performance
Nella Larsen’s novel, Passing, centers around the experience of two biracial women whose identities are primarily performative as they navigate life with the privilege of “passing” as White. Through this narrative, Larsen suggests that both racial and gender/sexual identities are as largely performative as they are inherent. Passing explores the ideas of both these identities as they exist in a world where passing is possible. Larsen calls into question the very nature of such concepts and their intersections: how identity shapes the experiences of individuals, and how those individuals shape those identities in turn.
The novel evaluates racial identity in several ways, but centers upon the socially-enforced performative nature of biracialism. In one of the opening scenes, Irene is waited upon in a rooftop cafe where she is passing as White in order to exist within the space and receive the service she desires. This is one of the first moments in which the reader sees Irene engage in the activity of “passing”, and it emphasizes the nature of race as a performative identity in the case of “mulatto” or lighter skinned Black individuals, whose biracial identity is largely ignored, forcing such individuals to “choose” to perform one race or another.
In this moment, Irene’s choice to pass, while it does afford her the desired effect of being treated as a White citizen, necessitates her to temporarily deny her racial identity. This choice is inherently ironic, as Irene becomes obsessed with the idea of racial “loyalty” as the novel continues, in relation to her perceptions of Clare’s decision to pass as White. Irene focuses heavily on the idea of “uplifting the race”, referencing and engaging with her identity as a Black woman, but in doing so is also ignoring the fact that her identity is inherently Black and White, due to the fact that society forces her to choose between one of these labels in her performance of identity.
In contrast, Irene criticizes Clare’s decision to pass and lead the privileged life of a White person in America, while also sporadically engaging with her Black identity when it suited her. Irene’s frustration with Clare comes from her understanding of Clare’s positioning within the social hierarchy, and the way in which Clare manipulates her performed identity to best suit her interests. Clare chooses the privileges of a White lifestyle rather than making an earnest attempt to be a good representative of the Black race and attempting to uplift it in the “talented tenth” sense as established by W.E.B. Du Bois. Here, Irene is struggling with the core issue of biracial identity: how one occupies two identities that are widely considered to be contradictory or opposing.
Both Clare and Irene represent opposing ends of this ideological spectrum in their performances of their racial identities, and in doing so further perpetuate the socially enforced idea that biracial individuals must “choose a side” to perform, rather than embracing and performing their biracial identity. However, the idea that biracial individuals embody two contradicting identities is inherently problematic. There is no logical reasoning for such identities to entail an inherently antagonistic relationship. In asking biracial individuals to choose a race to perform, society additionally asks them to ignore an aspect of their identity while also being excluded from both communities as they occupy their biracial identity, which is widely perceived by American culture to be nonexistent. Due to the historical establishment of ideas such as the “one drop rule”, wherein a White individual with even “one drop of black blood” could and should be racially categorized as Black, American society has embraced the idea that an identity that is both Black and White is impossible.
Additionally, Larsen emphasizes the hypocrisy of Irene’s criticism of Clare through her actions as a Black woman in the domestic setting. Whereas many Black upper-middle class citizens of this era employed White servants (due to the fact that many Black individuals would refuse to work for Black families), Irene’s servant is Black and incapable of passing. When this character, Zulena, is introduced, she is immediately objectified and dehumanized in her description as a “small, mahogany-coloured creature”.
One of the most important aspects of Passing in terms of its role in the American canon is its expression of intersectionality in the American experience, particularly in terms of gender/sexuality and race. As Irene and Clare’s narratives develop, the moments in which issues of race and gender intersect are critical to understanding Larsen’s depiction of how one’s expression of their identity shapes their experience. In many ways, Clare serves as the uncanny doppelganger to Irene in the Freudian psychoanalytic sense. Both women reflect different aspects of the African-American experience, as they experience their racial identities in inverse manners. Part of the crisis that Clare forces Irene to face is the hypocrisy of passing, as she reflects the subverted versions of the same beliefs Irene holds. In this way Larsen identifies the ways in which “identical” experiences of race can also be inverse of one another.
Passing is a novel highly concerned with the reality of uncertainty, specifically in terms of identity. With the understanding that identity shapes experience, Nella Larsen creates a narrative in which characters are forced by society to choose their experience. By identifying those aspects of identity that are performative, Larsen asks her readers to consider the ways in which they also perform their own identities. Through the inverted images of Clare and Irene, Larsen explores performances of identity and their effects on the individual experiences of race, gender, and sexuality.
Virginia Woolf’s *Orlando*: Time and Identity
Orlando defies the quintessentially modern ways of thinking about temporality and change: she doesn’t change over time in the way she’s supposed to—that is, she doesn’t age—yet she does change in one way (her sex) that most of Woolf’s readers at the time would have found incomprehensible. Orlando’s life makes no sense from the conventional perspective of clock and calendar, according to which certain things never change and other things never stop changing.
Woolf’s transhistorical biography of Orlando thus uses literary convention against itself, turning the biographical form inside out in order to ask, What, really, is the time of a life? In what more complex ways might our lives be subject to time? Woolf finds the answer in what she calls the “extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind.” The way we measure time in the world doesn’t necessarily jibe with the way we experience time in our heads. And our heads, Woolf asserts, “work with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.”
Orlando is the literary invention that embodies this: the longer she lives, the more memories she accrues, the more timelines she finds herself living on. “Time has passed over me,” Orlando realizes at the end of the novel. “Nothing is any longer one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in the ice. Someone lights a candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers.” Memory is a thousand wormholes strewn across the present, just waiting for us to fall in and find ourselves transported to a different time.
One of the most famous wormholes in modern literature is a piece of cake. In Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the young Marcel takes a bite of a petite madeleine and finds himself overwhelmed by the visceral, sensual force of the past that is hidden “in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect.” Proust’s term for this experience is involuntary memory: a “visual memory” attached to sense impressions like tastes and smells. In Marcel’s case, the taste of a small cake dipped in lime-blossom tea causes the suppressed memory of his entire childhood in Combray to burst unexpectedly to the surface. Thus, hidden within a taste, a memory, and within that memory, a different experience of time.
J.D. Salinger’s *Bananafish*: Post-War Alienation
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is one of J. D. Salinger’s best-known and most widely studied short stories. First published in the New Yorker in 1948, the story is a masterclass in how to reveal both character and plot through elliptical and suggestive dialogue, with the ‘action’ largely focusing on two scenes: one in a hotel room and the other on a beach. These two scenes are then brought together for the story’s tragic denouement.
Among other things, ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ is a powerful depiction of alienation in the immediate post-war world of the late 1940s. The story is about a man, Seymour, who has returned from the war and feels disconnected from the world around him, including his wife.
‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ has been compared to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: another post-war fiction which focuses (in one of its plotlines or character arcs) on a soldier who has recently returned from the war and who struggles to adjust to post-war life. Seymour Glass is Salinger’s own version of Septimus Smith, Woolf’s shell-shocked First World War veteran whose patient wife Lucrezia feels powerless to help her troubled husband, much as Muriel feels unable (though willing) to help Seymour. (Oddly enough, Seymour’s statement about Sharon Lipschutz, ‘mixing memory and desire’, is an allusion to another post-WWI modernist work which features shell-shocked soldiers: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land).
It is clear that Muriel’s mother is concerned for her daughter’s safety when in the company of her husband, and it’s also clear that Seymour has been acting erratically and even dangerously (such as crashing his father-in-law’s car). He also refuses to take his bathrobe off because he doesn’t want anyone to see his tattoo – even though, according to Muriel, he doesn’t have a tattoo. He is evidently scarred by his war experiences. But it is Sybil for whom he takes off his robe, partly, perhaps, because such an act has none of the adult connotations it carries with his wife (with whom he is expected to perform his marital duties) and is instead a regression to childhood.
With this in mind, we might also compare ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ with another post-war story, albeit one that is, like Mrs Dalloway, about the aftermath of the First World War rather than the second. Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 story “Soldier’s Home”, in which a young man named Harold Krebs returns from fighting in the First World War and can no longer relate to the people in his hometown in Oklahoma.
The alienation of the war-scarred male character is not the only thing which unites these two stories: Seymour’s playful conversation (indeed, borderline flirtation) with Sybil recalls Krebs’ relationship with his younger sister (where he talks to her as though they are courting boyfriend and girlfriend rather than siblings). Both male protagonists can only truly relate to women – or rather, girls – who are much younger than they are, and who are, indeed, still children. It is not that the adult males in either story wish to objectify the girls: indeed, the point is that the men are themselves children, who have retreated back into childhood to avoid the unbearable strain of adult life.
Indeed, the one character in ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ who seems to understand Seymour is the child, Sybil, whose very name summons the prophetesses of Greek mythology who made elliptical, but wise, pronouncements by scattering fragments of their prophecies which those who consulted them had to piece together themselves to discover their (potential) meanings. Salinger’s story is similarly full of elliptical statements and exchanges (‘elliptical’ meaning that parts of the meaning are left out, leaving us to deduce the full meaning for ourselves).
But how sibylline is Sybil? Salinger’s child-characters are often the wisest, while the adults are too corrupted by the weight of the world and the realities of day-to-day living to be in touch with the true meaning of life. We might recall, in Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield’s disgust, when he visits his younger sister Phoebe’s school to say goodbye, upon finding that a swear word has been scrawled on the walls, corrupting the innocence of childhood. For Holden, many adults are ‘phonies’ and childhood is a pure state which we leave behind at our peril, for then we are truly lost. There is something deeply Romantic, in the Wordsworthian sense, about Salinger’s view of children and childhood.
In this connection, Sybil’s breaking down Seymour Glass’s name into three distinct syllables (sibylline syllables?) suggests that Seymour views Sybil as a kind of mirror or reflection of himself: hence the punning potential of his full name which she liberates, ‘see more glass’, because he can see more of himself in the looking-glass that she represents than he can with anyone else, including his wife (whose name, Muriel, means ‘sparkling or shining sea’: an ironic touch given that she is the one person out of the three of them who doesn’t join them in the water: hers is one watery mirror in which he cannot locate himself).
Observe how Seymour initially mistakes Sybil’s yellow bathing suit for a blue one, mirroring his own royal blue shorts. But the yellow bananafish also recalls the yellow bathing suit Sybil is wearing: ‘bananafish’ thus combines her yellow attire with her proximity to the sea. But if she is the bananafish, so is Seymour: he has been squeezed through the hole and is unable to make his way out again. For ‘banana fever’, read PTSD following his war experiences.