Chapter II

UNIWERSYTET MARII CURIE-SKŁODOWSKIEJ WYDZIA HUMANISTYCZNY

Leszek Kolek

Huxle’s Novel of Ideas against the Background of Modern British Fiction

Doctoral dissertation written in the Department of English Literature, UMCS, under the supervision of doc. dr Alina Szala

Lublin 1975

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Grateful acknowledgement is made to Doc. dr Alina Szala for her constant and generous assistance in writing and researching this study

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Contents

Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 4 Chapter I: Literature and Ideas ............................................................................................. 11 Part 1 On the Meaning of a Literary Idea ............................................................................. 11 Part 2 Fiction and Ideas: A Historical Survey ...................................................................... 21 Chapter II: Huxley’s Novels of Ideas .................................................................................... 53 Part 1 The Polyphonic Novels ............................................................................................. 55 Part II The Homophonic Novels ......................................................................................... 87 Part III The Novel of Ideas as a Literary Genre ................................................................... 102 a) Definition of Huxle’s Novel of Ideas .................................................... 102 b) Origin of the Term ............................................................................... 107 c) Pre-Huxleyan Novel of Ideas ................................................................ 109 d) Origin of the Genre .............................................................................. 119 Chapter III: Tentative Interpretation of Twentieth-Century English Novel .......................... 122 Part I Before 1920 ........................................................................................................... 124 Part II The 1920’s ............................................................................................................. 132 Part III Since 1930 ............................................................................................................. 137 Conclusions........................................................................................................................ 143 General Bibliography ........................................................................................................ 149

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INTRODUCTION Changes in theoretical assumptions and practical methods of literary criticism m often seem determined, even necessitated, by the constant appearance of new qualities in present-day literary works and their relationship to the literary tradition, or, if viewed in their diachronic aspect, by the choices that living novelists make among inherited patterns. Writing about the relationship between literary tradition and modern literary production Claudio Guillén states that the poet does not merely choose among the standards that are accessible to him; he makes possible their survival by choosing and determining the preferable, pertinent, or potentially ‘new’ norms. 1

This “existential” character of the poet’s choice, as opposed to the logical choice of the theorist, accounts for the constant, though gradual, transformations in modern literary works, as well as for evolution in literature. At the same time, the interrelationship between critical theory and current literature makes it necessary to verify analytical methods, theoretical assumptions and, in practice, to modify literary judgements and to create new hierarchies which are then constructed according to the newly developed criteria. As a result, the evolution of literary criticism finds a symptomatic and significant record in the permutations of the critical reception of individual writers which is reflected in the revivals of certain types of fiction and the oblivion of others. The process outlined above is clearly reflected in recent criticism of the leading 20thcentury British novelists and in the shifts of their positions in current critical classifications. Generally speaking, apart from the steady, though qualitatively changing, interest in Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, as well as a relative neglect of H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy,2 the last decade has witnessed spectacular revivals of such writers as Wyndham Lewis and Aldous Huxley.3 Of these two writers, it is perhaps the latter novelist whose literary career seems to offer the most interesting and abundant material for the aforementioned type of study in the significance of changes in critical reception of literature. One may begin by saying that the critical opinion about Huxley’s works has made an almost full circle nowadays: from the brilliant success and unmodified enthusiasm which followed the publication of his first novels in the 1920’s, through a period of anxiety and disappointment after Eyeless in Gaza [1936], harsh criticism and total rejection in the next two decades, to modified praises and a definite revival which began a few years after the novelist’s death in 1963 1

Claudio Guillén: Literature as System. Essays toward the Theory of Literary History, Princeton 1971, pp. 128-129. 2 Cf., e.g. David Daiches: The Present Age. From 1920. Introduction to English Literature, vol. V, London 1962, pp. 112-115. 3 Wyndham Lewis’s revival has been noted by: G. S. Fraser: The Modern Writer and His World, Harmondsworth 1964, pp. 103-105; John Halloway: “The Literary Scene” [in:] The Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 7 The Modern Age, ed. by B. Ford, Harmondsworth 1969, pp. 75-76. A revival of interest in Huxley is discussed by all the authors of the studies enumerated below as well as by a reviewer of these studies, B. Bergonzi in “Life’s Divisions. The Continuing Debate on Aldous Huxley”, Encounter, July 1973, XLI:1, pp. 6568.

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and which has continued until to-day. Details of this evolution are, perhaps, less relevant (anyway, they have been presented much more expertly and exhaustively elsewhere)4 than some possible reasons for all these changes, primarily for the kind of revival of interest in Huxley’s fiction nowadays. One such significant reason may be found in the constant demand of the reading public for Huxley’s novels; contrary to the predictions of some critics and to their great amazement, 5 Huxley’s novels are still being reprinted and some of them have run to twenty and more impressions. Some of Huxley’s critics also indicate another possible reason, namely, the current interest in the problems discussed in the novels of this writer, 6 which may, indeed, account for some part of this demand, but it does not explain the whole phenomenon (e.g. constant appearance of new critical studies of Huxley), so that other, equally important causes seem to be operative. A more significant reason may be found in the fact that the re-editions are most often made of Huxley’s earlier works, such as Antic Hay [1923], Those Barren Leaves [1925], Point Counter Point [1928], Brave New World [1932] or Eyeless in Gaza [1936]; this fact indicates the novels which may be regarded as Huxley’s most lasting and relevant contribution to modern British fiction. Moreover, owing to the temporal perspective which has gradually increased after the novelist’s death, it is possible to look at his literary output as an entity in which the later novels, commonly regarded as artistic failures, no longer distort or conceal the real achievement of Huxley’s early fiction. However, the most important reason of all should perhaps be sought elsewhere; in one of the recent studies of Huxley, the author, Peter Firchow, makes an interesting observation: The first half of the twentieth century, which refused to consider Swift a novelist and placed Fielding and Voltaire beyond the pale of the ‘Great Tradition’, filed Huxley away in the category of misfits. From a Jamesian perspective that insisted on rigidly delimiting a fictional world through a filtering consciousness with which the reader was asked to identify but could never wholly rely on, Huxley the novelist was inevitably unsatisfactory.7

This statement not only describes exactly the position assigned to Huxley’s fiction by the critical opinion of the last two decades, but it also indicates one of the main reasons for such a critical evaluation and, at the same time, implies a necessity of employing an approach which would differ from the “Jamesian perspective” accepted by so many older critics. Firchow perceptively indicates the enormous influence of James’s theory of fiction and his novels, which have been regarded as the sole standard by which all other works were measured. This influence, however, has led to the neglect of other possible types of novel, among others, of the whole long tradition of intellectual

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Cf. introductory chapters in the following studies: Jerome Meckier: Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure, London 1969; Peter Firchow: Aldous Huxley: Satirist and Novelist, Minneapolis 1972; Keith May: Aldous Huxley, London 1972; Peter Bowering: Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels, New York - Oxford 1969. 5 Cf., e.g., E. B. Burgum: “Aldous Huxley and His Dying Swan” [in his book:] The Novel and the World’s Dilemma, New York 1947; Sean O’Faolain: “Huxley and Waugh, or I do not think, therefore I am” [in his book:] The Vanishing Hero. Studies in the Novelists of the Twenties, London 1956; David Daiches: The Novel and the Modern World, Chicago 1939; W. Y. Tindall: Forces in Modern British Literature 1885-1956, New York 1956. See also contributions to “A Critical Symposium on Aldous Huxley”, The London Magazine, August 1955, 7:8, particularly those by Francis Wyndham: “The Teacher Emerges”, John Wain: “Tracts Against Materialism”, and Peter Quennell: “Electrifying the Audience”. 6 B. Bergonzi: “Life’s Division ...”, op.cit., p. 65. 7 P. Firchow, op.cit., p. 7.

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fiction and satire, and, in order to dissociate himself from it, Firchow decides to examine Huxley’s works primarily as satires.8 Firchow seems to represent a much more general trend in contemporary literary criticism, a trend which breaks away from the predominance of the “Jamesian perspective” and proposes an approach which, with great simplification, may be called a “total” study of literature. Northrop Frye,9 one of the first scholars to initiate this approach, has proposed a category which he calls “the Mythos of Winter” or the “Menippean satire”, i.e. a tradition of satirical and intellectual fiction, and which he places side by side with the other three categories, so that the “Jamesian perspective” has become only one of several possible types of fiction. Guillén’s formulation of his theory of the literary systems of genres, based on the opposition “genre - countergenre” as the basic binary structure of such systems,10 has greatly contributed to the process of reassessment of literary classifications and hierarchies and has led to a more objective and systematic study of the relationships between literary genres. Finally, the practical application of Guillén’s theory, which was carried out by Robert Scholes on the material of English novel,11 along with his analysis of the most recent trend in fiction which he called “fabulation”, 12 has clearly indicated the predominating role just of the “Menippean satire” in the system of genres in modern British fiction. The analyses carried out by the critics mentioned above, the revival of interest in Lewis and Huxley, as well as in the fiction of some older writers, notably Swift, Rabelais, Voltaire, Grimmelshausen and others,13 all seem to indicate a greatly heightened rank of this type of fiction nowadays. The affinities of Huxley’s novels with the Menippean satire have been noted by various critics, beginning, perhaps, with Frye’s description of this type of fiction, an outline which he finished with a conclusion: A modern development [of the Menippean satire] produces the country-houses weekends in Peacock, Huxley, and their imitators in which the opinions and ideas and cultural interests expressed are as important as the love-making.14

This opinion is also echoed by a number of other writers, such as C. S. Lewis, G. S. Fraser, or K. May.15 And yet, to my knowledge, none of these critics goes any further in the analysis of this problem than Frye’s much too general description. What seems to be lacking here is a proper validation of such an assumption which could lead to conclusions about the ways in which Huxley modified this tradition and made use of it in this modern genre of fiction. This conclusion is also connected with a more specific problem which, again, seems to have been neglected by Huxley’s critics, namely: what literary genre do his novels represent. 8

Ibid., p. 4. Northrop Frye: Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays, Princeton 1957. 10 C. Guillén, op.cit., especially Chap. 5 “Genre and Countergenre: the Discovery of the Picaresque”, Chap. 9 “Literature as System”, and Chap. 11 “On the Object of Literary Change”. 11 Robert Scholes: Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction, New Haven and London 1974, pp. 132141; see also his article “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: [4] An Approach through Genre”, Novel. A Forum on Fiction, II:2, Winter 1969, pp. 101-111. 12 Robert Scholes: The Fabulators, New York 1967. 13 See ibid., p. 39. 14 N. Frye, op.cit., pp. 310-311. 15 Cf., e.g., K. May, op.cit., p.11; C. S. Lewis: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Oxford 1962, p. 468; G. S. Fraser: “The English Novel” [in:] The Twentieth Century Mind. History, Ideas, and Literature in Britain, vol. 2 1918-1945, London 1972, pp. 405 ff. 9

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Paradoxically enough, general research on Huxley seems quite substantial: we have several studies in which the evolution of his ideas and his Weltanschauung are well examined,16 we have plenty of material about his life,17 and, most recently, there has been published his biography by a woman novelist;18 in addition, there has appeared such an extensive study on Huxley’s family background as no other novelist in English literature seems to have;19 there are also several good general introductions to his fiction,20 as well as a number of more detailed studies about his satirical techniques,21 his interest in mysticism and Hindu philosophy,22 his criticism of society,23 some single aspects of his novelistic techniques,24 and, finally, a few comparisons between his fiction

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E.g.: John Atkins: Aldous Huxley: A Critical Study, London 1967; Milton Birnbaum: Aldous Huxley’s Quest for Values, Knoxville 1971; D. S. Savage: “Aldous Huxley and the Dissociation of Personality” [in:] The Novelist as Thinker, ed. by B. Rajan, London 1947; P. Bowering, op.cit.; see also a review of Bowering’s and Meckier’s studies by Murray Roston: “Reviving Huxley”, Novel. A Forum on Fiction, Spring 1971, IV:3, pp. 270272. 17 Cf., e.g. Laura Archera Huxley: This Timeless Moment. A Personal View of Aldous Huxley, New York 1968; Grover Smith [ed.]: The Letters of Aldous Huxley, London 1969; Julian Huxley [ed.]: Aldous Huxley: A Memorial Volume, London 1966; Philip Thody: Aldous Huxley: A Biographical Introduction, London 1973. 18 Sybille Bedford: Aldous Huxley: A Biography, vols. I-II, London 1973, 1975; the biography is enthusiastically reviewed by William Abrahams: “The Distinction of Life”, The Atlantic Monthly, January 1975, 235, pp. 84-87, and, less enthusiastically, by Jerome Meckier in Novel. A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1974, VIII:1, pp. 80-84. 19 Ronald W. Clark: The Huxleys, London 1968. 20 E.g. Jocelyn Brooke: Aldous Huxley, London 1958; André Maurois: Points of View. From Kipling to Graham Greene, London 1969; Charles Rolo: Introduction to The World of Aldous Huxley, New York 1947; Bernard Bergonzi: Introduction to Great Short Works of Aldous Huxley, New York 1969; P. Palijevskij: “Gibel satirika” [in:] Sovremiennaja literatura za rubieżom, Moscow 1962; F. R. Karl and M. Magalaner: A Reader’s Guide to Great Twentieth Century English Novels, London 1959; Laurence Brander: Aldous Huxley: A Critical Study, London 1970; Alexander Henderson: Aldous Huxley, London 1935; Charles M. Holmes: Aldous Huxley and the Way to Reality, Bloomington - London 1970. However, the best introduction to Huxley’s fiction is to be found in the study by George Woodcock: Dawn and the Darkest Hour. A Study of Aldous Huxley, London 1972. 21 Apart from the studies by Meckier and Firchow see also: S. J. Greenblatt: Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell and Huxley, New Haven and London 1965; Charles I. Glicksberg: The Ironic Vision in Modern Literature, The Hague 1969; James Hall: The Tragic Comedians. Seven Modern British Novelists, Bloomington 1963; David S. Watson: “Point Counter Point: The Modern Satiric Novel a Genre?”, Satire Newsletter, 1969, 6, pp. 31-35. 22 Cf. Sisirkumar Ghose: Aldous Huxley: A Cynical Salvationist, Bombay 1962; Harvey C. Webster: After the Trauma: Representative British Novels since 1920, Lexington 1970; Geoffrey Bullough: “Aspects of Aldous Huxley”, English Studies, October 1949, XXX:5, pp. 232-243; Milton Birnbaum: “Aldous Huxley’s Quest for Values: A Study in Religious Syncretism”, Comparative Literature Studies, 1966, III. 23 E.g., Hena Maes-Jelinek: Criticism of Society in the English Novel between the Wars, Paris 1970; Frank Baldanza: “Point Counter Point: Aldous Huxley on ‘the Human Fugue’”, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 1959, 58, pp. 248-257. 24 E.g. Werner Holz: Methoden den Meinungsbeeinflussung bei George Orwell und Aldous Huxley, Hamburg 1963; Johannes Gottwald: Die Erzählformen der Romane von Aldous Huxley und D. H. Lawrence, München 1964; Charles I. Glicksberg: “Aldous Huxley. The Experimental Novelist”, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 1953, LII, pp. 98-110; Charles M. Holmes: “Aldous Huxley’s Struggle with Art”, The Western Humanities Review,1961, XV, pp. 149-156; Frederick R. Karl: “The Play Within the Novel in Antic Hay”, Renascence, 1961, XIII, pp. 59-68; Lothar Fietz: Menschenbild und Romanstruktur in Aldous Huxleys Ideenroman, Tübingen 1969; Gerald A. Noonan:, Idea and Technique in the Novels of Aldous Huxley, dissertation from University of Toronto, 1970; Cf. Dissertation Abstracts, December 1971, 6, p. 3320-A.

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and that of some other novelists. 25 And yet, although the results of these studies naturally contribute to the overall picture of the writer and his literary output, none of them offers a definite examination of his novels as representatives of a specific genre category. T. S. Eliot’s conclusion that Huxley wrote “the variety of fiction which he came to make his own”, 26 though very complimentary to Huxley, hardly suffices for genological purposes. Firchow rightly states that “the task of putting Huxley in his proper historical place can only be dealt with adequately in a separate book”,27 but it should immediately be added that such an attempt requires, first of all, a determination of the genre which his novels represents, since only then can he be placed within the diachronic and synchronic perspectives, so that his position within the evolution of a given genre may allow an objective and exact assessment of his contribution. Moreover, it seems that a simple comparative study of Huxley and some selected novelists will hardly yield satisfactory results, since Huxley is then usually presented as a mere imitator. 28 With respect to the generic category of Huxley’s novels the conclusion drawn by Keith May - “No adequate label for his [Huxley’s] novels exists”29 - seems to be equally true about most of the studies mentioned above. Huxley is commonly regarded as [1] an essayist who became novelist, [2] a satirist, and [3] a novelist of ideas, and these three approaches to him are thus evaluated by May: None of these three ways of regarding the novel is invalid, but each of them tempts the reader to fail to appreciate Huxley’s formal originality. The man who emphatically considers that Huxley attempted the novel proper with only an essayist’s gifts is likely to be overlooking Huxley’s positive aesthetic achievement. To think of Huxley simply as a satirist is to limit understanding of the purpose of his various devices. The term ‘novel of ideas’ is accurate, but needs qualifications and should not be allowed to impose the suggestion of a dwarfish offshoot of a grand phenomenon. 30

This last approach to Huxley, i.e. treating him as an author working with the genre called “novel of ideas” relates him, as the critic states, to the tradition of the Menippean satire, and it seems to be the most promising starting point for the present study whose aim, therefore, will be to provide both the necessary validation for this statement and to examine the whole genre in greater detail. Since May wrote his monograph for the series entitled “Novelists and Their World”, it is understandable that he did not pursue his conclusion about the novels of ideas and the relationship between this genre and the Menippean satire. However, he is not the only critic who calls Huxley’s works novels of ideas. Huxley himself might have asked for such a label for his fiction when in Point Counter Point he made his character-novelist write: Novel of ideas. The character of each personage must be implied, as far as possible, in the ideas of which he is the mouthpiece. In so far as theories are rationalizations of sentiments, instincts, dispositions of soul, this is feasible. The chief defect of the novel of ideas is that you must write about people who have ideas to

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Cf., e.g., Gerd Rohmann: Aldous Huxley und die franzözische Literatur, Marburg 1968; Derek P. Scales: Aldous Huxley and French Literature, Sydney 1969; S. J. Greenblatt, op.cit.; Pierre Vitoux: “Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence: An Attempt at Intellectual Sympathy”, The Modern Language Review, July 1974, 69:3, pp. 501522. 26 T. S. Eliot’s contribution to the Memorial Volume, op.cit., p. 30. 27 P. Firchow, op.cit., p. 4. 28 He is presented as such by R. C. Bald: “Aldous Huxley as a Borrower”, XI, College English, January 1950, XI, pp. 183-187; the same is at least implied in the studies by G. Rohmann and D. P. Scales, op.cit. 29 L. May, op.cit., p. 9. 30 Ibid., p. 11.

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express - which excludes all but .01 per cent of the human race. Hence the real, the congenital novelists don’t write such books. But then, I never pretended to be a congenital novelist. 31

This statement has been followed by numerous critics who then applied the term to Huxley’s own fiction; however, the critics either the meaning of the term for granted and, like F. Hoffman,32 they proceed to enumerate the formal features of Huxley’s novels without any specification of the literary context, or, like P. Bowering, they simply apply the term “for lack of any better name”. 33 This, in turn, raises objections of others who, like Bowersox, reserve the term for a quite different type of fiction, such as was written by George Eliot and E. M. Forster.34 Still others try to coin new terms: “the discussion novel”, “house-party novels”, “conversation novel”, “novel of talk”, “essayistic novel”, “ideological novel”, “fictional essays”, “novel of doctrine” etc. 35 Needless to add, no critic offers any definition or description of the genre denoted by these names, nor does any one attempt the typological approach to literary genres. The term “novel of ideas” has been accepted in this study for a slightly different reason than “lack of any better name”. Although all these terms describe different aspects of the structure of the novels examined (mode of presentation, setting, subject matter, theme), the critical descriptions of these proposed “genres” seem to have one significant feature in common: they all indicate a predominating presence of ideas, philosophical, social, scientific, political, religious, cultural etc., actually ideas from all the domains of life. Moreover, these descriptions also stress the fact that ideas in such works are presented in discussions and in an essayistic manner - thus implying similarities between these “genres” and such forms as the Platonic dialogue, essay, symposium, diatribe etc. One may, therefore, suspect that actually they are, in fact, only different names for one real type of novel whose tradition seems to reach back to antiquity. Since the term “novel of ideas” contains in itself the common denominator for all these individual “genres”, and, additionally, since a great majority of the critics, including Huxley himself, whose erudition is not to be slighted, use the term in relation to his fiction, it seems practical to accept this term as adequate and then, after providing a definition and description of the novel of ideas as a literary genre, to look for relationships between this genre and other names used by the critics. Summing up the above remarks, the aims of the present study may be formulated as follows:   

to provide a definition and description of the genre called “novel of ideas” on the basis of Huxley’s fiction and to determine the origins of the term and genre, as well as its distinctive features and its development; to examine the relationship between the novel of ideas and the tradition of the Menippean satire; to indicate the role of the Menippean tradition in a system of genres of modern British fiction, or, in other words, to determine the relationship between this tradition and other types of modern fiction.

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Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, London 1928, p. 237. Frederick J. Hoffman, “Aldous Huxley and the Novel of Ideas” [in:] Forms of Modern Fiction, ed. by William van O’Connor, Bloomington 1969. 33 P. Bowering, op.cit., p. 4. 34 Herman Bowersox, review of Bowering’s study [op.cit.] in Modern Philology, August 1970, 68:1, p. 242. 35 All these terms have been taken from the studies and articles about Huxley’s fiction quoted above. 32

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These aims of the study also partly determine the procedure to be followed. Leaving aside the problem of the definition of the term “novel”, which is much too broad for the present study, the other element in the name of the genre is “idea” and this indicates the first theoretical problem to be considered, namely, the question of the relationship between fiction and ideas, definition of the term “idea”, its ontological status within the novelistic structure, its modes of presentation etc. All these problems will be examined in Chapter I, Part 1, and the theoretical conclusions arrived at will then be subjected to a verification on the material of specific literary works in a historical survey of the problem in Part 2 of the same chapter. The survey will deal primarily with writers selected from English literature, although, in some cases it will be necessary to refer to some works of Continental novelists. The criteria of selection of these writers will be twofold: on the one hand, attention will be paid to those works which illustrate the most significant and universal phenomena and tendencies in the changing relationship between fiction and ideas, and, on the other hand - to those writers who seem most representative of the leading trends in overall systems of genres. The historical survey should provide both evidence for the theoretical assumptions from Part 1, and at the same time reveal the evolution of the relationship between fiction and ideas through ages, up to the twentieth century. Since the survey will, naturally, concentrate on the genres whose association with ideas has traditionally been close, it should also provide the diachronic co-ordinate for the location of the novel of ideas as represented by Huxley’s fiction. The analysis of Huxley’s novels, which will follow in Chapter II, will aim at the elucidation of the same problem, although in much greater detail, since the results of the analysis will then serve as a basis for the theoretical conclusions concerning the definition and description of the genre in question; this will be done in Part 3 of Chapter II, along with the determination of the origins of the term and genre, the genre’s typological position, and Huxley’s contribution to its development. Finally, the last chapter (Chapter III) will attempt to determine the position of the novel of ideas and the whole category of the Menippean satire within the general synchronic system of novelistic genres which will be reconstructed on the basis of the types of fiction represented by leading British novelists of the twentieth century.

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Chapter I

LITERATURE AND IDEAS Part 1 On the Meaning of a Literary Idea When George Santayana writes that “To turn events into ideas is the function of literature”, his statement seems clear at first sight; after a more thorough analysis of its meaning, however, it proves to be ambiguous, mainly because the author does not specify what he means by the terms “event” and “idea”: The former may denote an empirical fact (and then the statement would concern the connection between literature and reality) or a fictitious happening in a literary work (thus concerning the function of plot in the semantics of the novel). The latter term, “idea”, is even richer in possible connotations and may signify any one of the numerous dictionary definitions with their philosophical, scientific, aesthetic, or popular shades of meaning, or, else, it may represent Santayana’s own understanding of the term “idea” as “an unrealized possibility”. 1 It is only when we read further that “the fact is [poetic] only when in fancy we assimilate it to the fiction” and that “the real objects about a man must have impressed him and he must have found words fit to communicate his impression”, 2 that we may realize the full significance of Santayana’s opinion about the nature and role of literature. In other words, we must take a much broader context into consideration in order to comprehend such terms as “event” and “idea” as used by a given writer. The above analysis of a philosopher’s assertion about literature is illustrative in that it indicates the inherent ambiguity of some terms in literary terminology. Considering the nature and characteristics of terms used in literary studies Janusz Sławiński distinguishes a typically literary class of terms which he calls “quasi-names”. He writes: Quasi-names are ... such [terminological] units whose referents undergo changes in different contexts ... They are used as names but their denotation is by no means the same for all the users. In various usages of the same names there are different conceptions of the phenomena denoted and they often refer to very general theoretical assumptions. 3

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W. Tatarkiewicz: Historia filozofii, Warszawa 1970, vol. III, p. 235. George Santayana’s America. Essays on Literature and Culture, Chicago - London 1967, pp. 100-101. 3 J. Sławiński: Dzieło, język, tradycja, Warszawa 1974, p. 209: “Quasi-nazwami będą ... takie jednostki, których odniesienia przedmiotowe ulegają zmianom w kontekstach różnych użyć ... Są one używane jako nazwy, ale ich denotacja nie jest bynajmniej określona dla wszystkich użytkowników jednakowo. W różnych użyciach tych 2

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Among examples of quasi-names, such as “theme”, “plot”, “action”, “motif”, “event” and others, Sławiński also includes the term “idea”.4 Any analysis of this quasi-name, however, is bound to be a formidable and complex undertaking not only because of the great changes in its meaning that have taken place during all the centuries of its existence and its often idiosyncratic usage, but also because of the very nature of the term so susceptible to every influence of various philosophical, political, social, and literary theories in which it appears very frequently with different meanings. Evidence of such changes and influences may easily be found in the history of poetics5 and in the variety of dictionary definitions.6 At the same time at least a brief discussion of this term seems unavoidable since, when dealing with the genre called somewhat vaguely “novel of ideas”, a genre whose very name seems to illustrate the relationship between the novel and philosophy and sciences, one cannot take for granted the meaning of the term “idea” which seems to be a distinctive feature of this type of novel; still, the few studies on the genre in question, which have been mentioned in the Introduction, usually shun this basic problem and enumerate instead some formal features, i.e. they deal with the consequences of a large-scale introduction of ideas (whatever the term means to different critics) into this kind of novel rather than with ideas themselves (hence the resulting controversies about the representatives of the genre). Since a thorough examination of any quasi-name is a complex and lengthy procedure, the discussion in the present chapter will be limited to indicating the origin of the term as well as the range of its semantic field and its designates shown in some selected definitions offered in literary studies;7 this should in turn lead to the selection and determination of such a definition which, on the basis of the data obtained in the survey, would most adequately define the meaning of “idea” as used in relation to the genre in question. The origin of the term “idea” goes back to antiquity and to three trends in philosophy which developed some aesthetic conceptions. As B. Russell writes, “Plato’s doctrine of ideas ... is the first theory to emphasize the problem of universals, which, in varying forms, has persisted to the present day”.8 According to Plato, an idea (or form) was an absolute, eternal, unchangeable, and supernatural being of real existence (hence the name of the trend — “Platonic realism”).9 An idea in this sense was necessary as a sort of a model, ideal pattern, if an artist was to create a work of art, although it existed independently outside the artist. 10 The opposite conception, called samych terminów kryją się rozmaite koncepcje zjawisk oznaczanych, odsyłając niekiedy do bardzo generalnych założeń teoretycznych ...” [translation mine]. 4 Ibid., p. 210. 5 Cf., e.g., W. K. Wimsatt and C. Brooks, Literary Criticism. A Short History, New York 1959. 6 Oxford English Dictionary gives as many as twelve main definitions of the term “idea”, of which each has several submeanings. 7 The method reported by L. Koj (“On Defining Meaning Families” in Studia Logica, 1969, XXV, pp. 141-150) has been inapplicable in this case. However, he suggested to me the procedure employed in this paper, namely, the method consisting in making up a list of various definitions of the term (here over eighty definitions have been used) and determining the semantic field of the term after the designates of all the definitions have been established. Naturally, not all these definitions could be presented in the paper. 8 B. Russell: History of Western Philosophy, London 1961, p. 141. 9 A. Grava: A Structural Enquiry into the Symbolic Representation of Ideas, The Hague - Paris 1969, p. 17. 10 W. Tatarkiewicz: History of Aesthetics, The Hague - Paris - Warszawa 1970; see also J. Dawydow: “Od Platona do ‘Nowej Lewicy’”, Literatura na świecie, 1973, 10[30], pp. 210 - 231.

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nominalism, originated from the Stoics who regarded ideas as mere words or general names created as a result of the process of abstraction taking place in the human mind. In art an idea in this sense became, first, a psychological phenomenon, as, e.g. for Cicero, when he wrote that “the phenomenon which the artist sees impresses its idea upon him”, or as in Ockham’s statement: The idea is not anything real, for it is a connotative and relative name. The idea is something cognized by the active mind, which, in looking at it, can produce something in real existence. 11

Later on, during the famous controversy about universals in the Middle Ages, the term underwent a significant modification in Abélard’s theories where the idea became a meaning of a word or name,12 thus leading to the modern science of semantics. Finally, the third, intermediate, position was that of Aristotelian conceptualism (also called moderate realism) where the other two approaches are reconciled: For an Aristotelian conceptualist there is no split between the two so divergent theories, because we do not know the universal in complete isolation from its embodiment in a particular object in time and space.13

Without going into details of Aristotle’s somewhat ambiguous theory of ideas and forms,14 it should be pointed out that in his Poetics, the idea, understood as an artist’s thought, was one of the six important elements of tragedy: it governed the choice of language, although, at the same time, it was subordinated to the plot, character, and effect. 15 These three philosophical theories led to a controversy about the universals and, though the debates still continue (the conflict between the idealists and nominalists in particular), B. Russell writes that “The most modern discussions of the problem of universals have not gone much further”.16 Regardless of Russell’s discouraging opinion, the unsolved philosophical problem of the general ontological status of ideas is not an immediate concern of this study. The problem is mentioned here mainly because of the aesthetic conceptions in which the philosophical definitions of ideas are associated with the arts, artists, and their works, and because of a strong influence of these conceptions on subsequent generations of writers and literary scholars, an influence lasting till our day. Almost all modern definitions of ideas in literature and literary criticism seem to be more or less directly derived from one of the ancient conceptions referred to above. 11

W. Tatarkiewicz: History of Aesthetics, op.cit., vol. I, p. 321 and vol. II, p. 278. W. Tatarkiewicz: Historia filozofii, op.cit., vol. I, p. 224. 13 A. Grava, op.cit., p. 24. 14 On Aristotle’s troubles with the differentiation between “Ideas” and “Forms” see the following quotation from Zeller’s study: “The final explanation of Aristotle’s want of clearness on this subject is, however, to be found in the fact that he had only half emancipated himself, as we shall see, from Plato’s tendency to hypostatize ideas. The ‘Forms’ had for him, as the ‘Ideas’ had for Plato, a metaphysical existence of their own, as conditioning all individual things. As keenly as he followed the growth of ideas out of experience, it is none the less true that these ideas, especially at the point where they are farthest removed from experience and immediate perception, are metamorphosed in the end from a logical product of human thought into an immediate presentment of a supersensible world, and the object, in that sense, of an intellectual intuition”. [quoted after B. Russell, op.cit., p. 179] 15 Cf. F. L. Lucas: Tragedy. A Serious Drama in Relation to Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’, London 1957; see also R. S. Crane: “The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones” [in:] Critics and Criticism. Ancient and Modern, Chicago 1952, pp. 620-621. 16 B. Russell, op.cit., p. 430; see also Grava’s reconciliation model in Grava, op.cit., as well as J. Kotarbińska: “Kłopoty z istnieniem (rozważania z zakresu semantyki)” and I. Dąmbska, “W sprawie tzw. nazw pustych” [both in:] Semiotyka polska. 1894-1969, Warszawa 1971. 12

14

It can easily be noticed that in these three ancient theories the idea is placed in one of three consecutive stages of the creative process, e.g. as described by Ostrowski: 17 ideas and attitudes empirical world



man - writer



fictional world

namely, [a] ideas existing outside the writer, with the emphasis laid on his environment; [b] those occurring within his mind; and [c] ideas observed within the literary work itself, regardless of whether they have originated in [a] or in [b]. Thus the place of occurrence in the creative process may serve, although with some unavoidable degree of simplification, as a criterion for the division of modern definitions of a literary idea. 18 Ad [a]. Generally speaking, definitions of the first group place the idea outside the writer, in his environment, which is then regarded as a source of ideas. Particular formulations of various literary scholars reveal a gradual process of changes in the meaning of the term when the Platonic and, later on, Hegelian conceptions (idea understood as “a universal concept”, “an eternal ideal of beauty, of fullness of life”) slowly gives way to new philosophic and social doctrines so that the idea comes to mean “an element of collective consciousness”, “an eternal problem”, “a temporarily conditioned form of human understanding of life” etc. 19 A good example of such an understanding of an idea is provided by Stallknecht: The term idea refers to our more reflective or thoughtful consciousness as opposed to the immediacies of sensual or emotional experience. It is through such reflection that literature approaches philosophy ... An idea ... may be roughly defined as a theme or topic with which our reflection may be concerned. ... we are ... interested in the more general or more inclusive ideas, that are so to speak ‘writ large’ in history of literature where they recur continually ... Outstanding among these is the idea of human nature itself, ... also secondary notions such as the perfectibility of man, the depravity of man, and the dignity of man. 20

Without pausing over some serious objections that these statements may provoke, such as the ontological status of ideas (psychological, philosophical, formal, or thematic) or the discrepancy between the range of definition and the examples offered, let us add to the same group other 17

W. Ostrowski: “The Fantastic and the Realistic in Literature. Suggestions on how to Define and Analyse Fantastic Fiction”, Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, 1966, IX:1(16), p. 65. 18 It should be emphasized that this static division is offered only for the sake of clarity of the classification of modern definitions of the literary idea. The creative process should be understood in a dynamic way, i.e. as a continuous passage of ideas. This is very well illustrated in Ostrowski’s diagram, so that a philosophical idea (group [a]) may be modified by the writer’s mind (group [b]) and then appear in the novel as a conception of a character (group [c]). It is only the critic who discovers or lays stress on ideas occurring in any of these three consecutive and interrelated phases of the process which, nevertheless, may serve as a convenient criterion for this particular purpose; still, the above reservations should be borne in mind. 19 Cf. e.g., U. Eco: Dzieło otwarte. Forma i nieokreśloność w poetykach współczesnych, tr. by J. Gałuszka et al., Warszawa 1973, pp. 85-86; M. Bodkin: “Wzorce archetypowe w poezji tragicznej” [in:] Teoria badań literackich za granicą, Kraków 1974, vol. II, Part I, p. 585; N. C. Czernyszewski: “Stosunek estetyczny sztuki do rzeczywistości” [in:] Teoria badań literackich za granicą, op.cit., vol. I, Part I, p. 400; S. Żółkiewski: “Problemy socjologii literatury”, Pamiętnik Literacki, 1967, 58:3, p. 28; S. Skwarczyńska: “Rzut oka na rozwój teorii badań literackich od przełomu antypozytywistycznego do roku 1945” [in:] Teoria badań literackich za granicą, op.cit., vol. II, Part I, pp. 27-28, 207. 20 N. P. Stallknecht: “Ideas and Literature” [in:] Comparative Literature. Method and Perspective, Carbondale 1961, pp. 117-118.

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definitions such as a predominant doctrine of a literary period (“a mono-idea of the epoch”),21 or any philosophical theory, scientific conception, aesthetic trend etc., as well as various slogans, maxims, convictions and similar notions prevailing in a given society in a certain historical period.22 Apart from the once famous Zeitgeist theories and the problems of influence, the idea understood as broadly as it has been explained above occurs in studies concerned with intellectual, cultural, and scientific trends of literary periods, in comparative research on recurrent themes and motifs in various national literatures, or in studies on the origin of some conceptions found by critics in literary works. Ad [b]. The second group of definitions lays stress on the double role of the writer in connection with ideas. On the one hand, he is “a carrier” or “a relay” of ideas from his environment into his work; this process is well explained by Ostrowski: As a man [the writer] belongs to the empirical world in which he was born, brought up, and has had his ideas (or philosophy) formed. As a writer, he builds from words his world of fiction so that it becomes an expression of his ideas and attitudes.23

On the other hand, the writer may often be an original and quite independent thinker and creator of his own ideas, as is indicated by Leggett: to conceive a consistency in inconsistencies, to impose a pattern upon formlessness, to select from life just these elements that combine to produce a significance, to mean something, is to discover an ‘idea’ that may ultimately be expressed in a novel or a play ... two processes are distinct: the author conceives his idea and only then deliberately considers the problems involved in its effective presentation. 24

Similarly, to some other scholars the idea means a writer’s reflection, rationalization or generalization, his intention or purpose, or else his notion or even thought. 25 Although the concept of the writer as a thinker is sometimes questioned, it seems that such objections are raised by those who think of ideas primarily in the philosophical sense rather than in the aesthetic one. A solution of this controversy may be found in M. Janion’s distinction between “mentality” and “ideology”, in Lovejoy’s theory about “the dilution of philosophical ideas in literature”, in Kmita’s assumption about the “rational act” at the basis of every artistic creation, or, finally, in those linguistic theories where thought and language form an inseparable whole.26 Studies in which the

21

M. Janion: Romantyzm. Studia o ideach i stylu, Warszawa 1969: “Epoka, tak wspaniale zarysowana przez Krasińskiego w Irydionie, ma przecież również swoją monoideę. Jest to centralna idea schyłku, śmierci, rychłej zagłady, która dla Krasińskiego zawierać miała w sobie istotę tego okresu historycznego, p. 121. 22 M. Kridl: “Wstęp do badań nad dziełem literackim” [in:] Teoria badań literackich w Polsce, Kraków 1960, vol. II, p. 97; see also A. O. Lovejoy: “Historiografia idei” [in:] Teoria badań literackich za granicą, op.cit., vol. II, Part I, p. 707. 23 W. Ostrowski, op. cit., p. 65. 24 H. W. Leggett: Idea in Fiction, London 1934, pp. 15, 27. 25 Cf. S. O’Faolain: The Vanishing Hero. Studies in the Novelists of the Twenties, London 1956, p. 37; D. Daiches: “The Literary Use of Language” [in:] Thought in Prose, Englewood Cliffs 1962, pp. 87-88; H. Markiewicz: “O typowości w literaturze. Z historii problemu”, Pamiętnik Literacki, 1957, 48:1, p. 51. 26 See respectively: M. Janion, op.cit., p. 128; A. O. Lovejoy: The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge 1936, p. 17; J. Kmita: Z metodologicznych problemów interpretacji humanistycznej, Warszawa 1971, p. 30; statements by de Saussure and Humboldt as quoted after D. Danek: O polemice literackiej w powieści, Warszawa 1972, p. 34, and by Husserl as quoted by A. Schaff: Wstęp do semantyki, Warszawa 1960, p. 243.

16

term idea is used in this sense usually aim at a reconstruction of the writer’s Weltanschauung, a presentation of his psyche, his didactic intentions, morality etc. 27 Ad [c]. The third group of definitions includes ideas observed within the literary work itself, regardless of their origin. As could already be observed in some definitions quoted above, some scholars also indicate the place of ideas within the literary work which, naturally, is a result of the dynamic and continuous nature of the creative process (see reference 18 in this chapter). Leggett’s definition, for instance, clearly shows that for him idea means form which, in turn, brings to mind the classical formulation of Flaubert, “Idea is born of the Form”, and a similar statement of Trilling, idea is “the very form”. 28 Other scholars see the idea as a result of the combination of form and contents, matter and form, thought and style etc. 29 Sometimes this “form” is much more specific and may denote a genre,30 or, perhaps most frequently in this group of definitions, some particular aspect or element of the structure of the literary work; in the latter case it has been found to denote:         

the overall sense of the whole work, or the moral, usually called the main or general idea; the conception of the composition of the work; the design or concept underlying the design of the work; the meaning of the plot; the conception of a character, as a hero or a type; the significance of the style used; the meaning of the figures of speech; the meaning of a sentence; the meaning of a word.31 27

The methodology of such studies has been well examined by S. Eile: Światopogląd powieści, Wrocław 1973; see also R. S. Crane: The Idea of the Humanities, and Other Essays, Critical and Historical, Chicago London 1967, vol. I, Part I, Chap. “Philosophy, Literature, and the History of Ideas”, pp. 171-187. 28 E.g., H. W. Leggett, op.cit., p. 19; Flaubert as quoted by S. O’Faolain, op.cit., p. 195; see also L. Trilling: The Liberal Imagination. Essays on Literature and Society, New York 1957, Chap. “The Meaning of a Literary Idea”. 29 E.g., H. W. Leggett, op.cit., p. 18; B. Croce: “Estetyka jako nauka o ekspresji a językoznawstwo ogólne” [in:] Teoria badań literackich za granicą, op.cit., p. 414; W. G. Knight: “Muzyka Otella” [in:] Sztuka interpretacji, Wrocław 1971, vol. I, p. 56; M. Bachtin: Problemy poetyki Dostojewskiego, tr. by N. Modzelewska, Warszawa 1970, p. 126. 30 M. Bodkin, op.cit., p. 585. 31 All these definitions are very common in critical texts; representative examples may be found in the following: S. Barnet, M. Berman, W. Burto: An Introduction to Literature, Boston - Toronto 1963, p. 15; S. Skwarczyńska: Wstęp do nauki o literaturze, Warszawa 1954, vol. I, p. 287; H. Markiewicz: Nowe przekroje i zbliżenia, Warszawa 1974, especially Chap. “Literatura w ujęciu semiotycznym (na marginesie prac J. Lotmana)”, pp. 276-299; Balzac’s statement quoted after P. Palijewski: “Hadżi-Murat Lwa Tołstoja” [in:] Sztuka interpretacji, op.cit., vol. II, p. 78; R. Scholes: The Fabulators, New York 1967, p. 111; also R. S. Crane: “The Concept of Plot ...”, op.cit., p. 262; H. Markiewicz: “O typowości ...”, op.cit., p. 51; S. O’Faolain, op.cit., pp. 14-15; E. K. Brown: “The Revival of Mr. Forster” [in:] Forms of Modern Fiction, Bloomington 1969, p. 163; H. Markiewicz: Główne problemy wiedzy o literaturze, Kraków 1970, pp. 87-88; D. Danek, op.cit., pp. 95 ff.; J. Pelc: “Zastosowanie funkcji semantycznych do analizy pojęcia metafory” [in:] Problemy teorii literatury, Wrocław 1967; see also the discussion of the theories of Empson and Richards in W. K. Wimsatt and C. Brooks, op.cit., Chap. “The Semantic Principle”; see definitions of the “Formula” and “Theme” in R. Scholes and R. Kellogg: The Nature of the Narrative, New York 1966, pp. 20, 26’ J.-P. Sartre: “Zwycięstwo moje jest czysto słowne, a zawdzięczam je bogactwu wyrażeń” [in:] Antologia współczesnej krytyki literackiej we Francji, Warszawa 1974, p. 196.

17

The definitions of the third group are encountered mostly in formal studies on the structure of a literary work or its elements, i.e., studies on literary genres, stylistics, poetics etc. The above survey of definitions offered in literary studies indicates several conclusions concerning the meaning of the term “idea” as used in this field of scholarship. First of all, the semantic field of the term as marked in all the three groups of definitions is so wide that, practically speaking, its meaning is extremely general and the term becomes meaningless unless one of its multiple senses is indicated. Thus “idea” seems to be one of the terms in which the definition determines the range of studies and, vice versa, is determined by it. Secondly, as has already been indicated in the survey, the definition of the term is usually arrived at by a process of selection which, in turn, is conditioned by the type of studies carried out by the scholar. Finally, the “idea” in the first two groups of definitions usually occurs in studies on the author’s Weltanschauung or the origin of his ideas and, since both these questions have been exhaustively dealt with in some studies on Huxley’s fiction, it is just the third group of definitions, i.e. those placing the idea within the literary work, that will be of primary interest in the present dissertation. The large number of designates of the term “idea” in the structure of the literary work may be explained from the points of view of linguistics and semiotics. Since de Saussure, linguists have always stressed the fact that language is inseparable from thought as, e.g., in de Saussure’s comparison between the obverse and reverse of a sheet of paper. Some of them explicitly state that “the language is an instrument of thought” and that the verbal sign, understood as a result of the process of abstraction, is particularly useful in conceptual thinking owing to its “transparency to meaning”.32 At the same time, however, in an analysis of such terms as “meaning” and “notion, concept, or idea”, Schaff reaches the conclusion that they are all identical except for the difference in the degree of abstractness.33 From the point of view of semiotics, the literary work as a whole may be regarded as a complex sign as in Danek’s statement: ... fully supporting the objections against studying ideology of the literary work as an autonomous and independent being, one may still wonder why the work’s ideology is to be the object denoted and opposed to sign; the literary work as a whole has the nature of a sign. Why is ideology to be an external object, instead of being within the sign, within its layer of meaning?34

As any other verbal sign, the literary work has its own general, though complex meaning which, again, may be called an idea. Thus, as a construction built of words, the literary work may be seen as a complex, hierarchical structure with words-ideas at its basis and the overall meaning or general idea at its top, with several layers of meanings of intermediate elements between them. Analyses of the structure of the literary work offered, for instance, by Ingarden or Markiewicz, 35 present exactly this type of hierarchical ordering. If one could now combine any of these classifications of the semantic forms (or “great semantic figures” in Markiewicz) in the structure 32

A. Schaff, op.cit., p. 297. Ibid., p. 403. 34 “... solidaryzując się oczywiście w pełni ze sprzeciwem wobec badania ideologii dzieła jako bytu niezależnego i autonomicznego - możnaby się jednak zdziwić, dlaczego ideologia dzieła miałaby być tym co oznaczane i przeciwstawne znakowi; przecież dzieło jako całość posiada charakter znakowy. Dlaczego ideologia miałaby być przedmiotem zewnętrznym, a nie tym, co znajduje się wewnątrz znaku: w obrębie jego znaczeniowej strony?” D. Danek, op.cit., p. 34. 35 R. Ingarden: “Z teorii dzieła literackiego” [in:] Problemy teorii literatury, op.cit.; H. Markiewicz, Główne problemy ..., op.cit., Chap. “Sposób istnienia i budowa dzieła literackiego”. 33

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of the literary work with a corresponding hierarchical ordering of the numerous synonyms of the term “idea” according to the degree of abstractness (and such a possibility is implied by Schaff),36 one would obtain a list of terms denoting particular elements of the structure of the literary work, thus restricting all the too numerous connotations of the term “idea” only to one of those elements. It should be added that such classifications do exist. Apart from those in the natural sciences, Hegel constructed his well-known triad “thought - notion - idea” in philosophy, and in the plastic arts Lewitt introduced a distinction between “concept” and “idea”; a similar attempt was made by Kucharski in the field of literature. 37 However, no classification of such abstract terms as “idea”, “concept”, “notion”, “thought”, “conception” etc. in relation to the elements of the structure of the literary work seems to be applicable in literary studies. Not only would it be bound to be highly arbitrary (all the classifications referred to above are arbitrary, including those in the natural sciences), since the semantic fields of these terms are “obscure” or overlapping; but in literary studies it would be a misleading simplification since it would ignore both the qualities of the specifically literary or poetic use of language and the peculiar features of a typically literary structure. Let us illustrate it by the following example. Quoting a statement by J. J. Rousseau, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”, Arnold Kettle calls the first part of the utterance “an idea”, and the second - “a symbol”.38From the point of view of semiotics, however, one may say that there are ideas on three levels in this statement: [A] ideas of individual words, i.e. ideas of man, freedom, and chains - slavery; [B] juxtaposed ideas of the two sentences of the statement, i.e. “man is free” and “man is not free”; and [C] the overall meaning of the whole utterance, i.e., for example, “man’s freedom is illusory”. The two sentences of the statement may be said to present ideas [B] on the same level of abstractness and the main difference between them lies in different means of expression employed - the explicit technique in the first, and the implicit manner in the second sentence;39 naturally, both parts are equally important in creating the main idea [C] - communicated by the whole.40 This statement of J. J. Rousseau may thus be regarded as a simplified model of the mechanism of 36

A. Schaff, op.cit., p. 297. Hegel’s triad is taken from Oxford English Dictionary, entry - Idea; on the classification of “ideas” in plastic arts see Lewitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” quoted by P. Krakowski: “Sztuka konceptualna”, Życie literackie, February 1974, 5(1149), p. 13; see also S. Hunter: American Art of the 20th Century, New York 1973, Chap. “Art as Action and Idea”; E. Kucharski’s classification may be found in his “O metodę estetycznego rozbioru dzieł literackich” [in:] Teoria badań literackich w Polsce, op.cit., vol. I, pp. 353, 378. 38 A. Kettle: An Introduction to the English Novel, London 1963, vol. I, pp. 140-141. 39 C. Guillén enumerates the following implicit techniques: “dramatic or narrative irony; abrupt or truncated endings; dialogue not only on the stage but in the short story, ballad, poetic epistle, or epistolary novel; the use of a sequence of events to create a situation which can then be made to ‘overflow’ beyond the characters’ visible actions and articulated words; clashing themes or clusters of themes, unresolved paradoxes, dynamic metaphors, and so on”, op.cit., p. 177; apart from Guillén, the term “explicit technique” is also used by D. Danek, op.cit., p. 11; S. Eile, op.cit., pp. 143 ff, and J. Kleiner: “Reprezentatywność, symboliczność, alegoryczność (Próba nowej konstrukcji pojęć)” [in:] Problemy teorii literatury, op.cit., p. 310. 40 From the point of view of semiotics, Rousseau’s statement is an incomplete form of juxtaposition; the full version would be the following: “Man is born free [F] and on this basis we may assume [N] that he remains free [V], but he does not remain free [not-V] and he is everywhere in chains [W], because ... [C]; analysis after J. Wajszczuk: “Przeciwstawienie jako struktura właściwa szerokim kontekstom” [in:] O spójności tekstu, Wrocław 1971, pp. 141-148. 37

19

constructing the general idea; it would also account for the peculiar hierarchy of ideas in the literary work, from the simplest ideas for the semantics of the work (in the layer of meaning of words; here level [A]) up to the general idea of the whole (here level [C]). At the same time, taking into consideration a broader context of the whole work, the general idea expressed in Rousseau’s statement may undergo a number of possible modifications and in fiction it may occur in three possible forms: when put into the mouth of a character endowed with some particular features, when pronounced by the narrator as a comment (whether ironic or not) on a specific situation, and when used as a quotation (whether acknowledged or not) in a significant place in the composition of the work. Accordingly, it may have several different functions: it may be the main idea of the whole work, a thesis in the roman a thése, a means of characterization, a new point of view in a discussion, a means of a literary polemic etc. In other words, once it has occurred in a novel or a poem, it functions in a literary structure which is “manifoldly incremental”,41 i.e. it is a structure in which an addition of any new detail or event causes a change of the whole rather than of a part. As much is suggested by many scholars who write about the treatment of ideas in fiction;42 for example, speaking about philosophical ideas in the novel, Janion writes: ...philosophical ideas, functioning within a literary work, may be, and usually are, subordinated to the autonomous logic of the world of literary fiction. Hence, their mutual relationships and even their interpretation usually depend on the laws of the aesthetic structure of the poetic world. With this principle of using ideas, the fact that they may originate from widely varied systems should not be surprising nor should it raise any objects ... Contrary to an eclectic philosopher, the writer has at his disposal many means of including ideas in the literary structure, although its coherence and uniformity will not be based on logic.43

The statement that the literary structure is governed by different principles from those, say, of philosophy, may account, among other things, for an apparently paradoxical or “illogical” occurrence of a more general philosophical idea in a position (on any of the lower levels of the literary structure) in which it will be subordinated to a less general philosophical idea (at the top of the structure). In other words, the literary structure may be said to possess what, for lack of any better term, may be called an inner or relative abstractness which is different from the absolute abstractness implied be semioticians (e.g. Schaff, mentioned above in note 36); one may say that the former is governed by the principles of rhetoric, while the latter - by those of logic. Thus, the

41

The term is taken after C. Guillén, op.cit., pp. 228-231. E.g., D. Maskell: “Locke and Sterne, or Can Philosophy Influence Literature?”, Essays in Criticism, January 1973, XXIII:1, pp. 22-40; F. Jameson: “The Great American hunter, or Ideological Content in the Novel”, College English, November 1972, 34:2, pp. 195-6; I. Howe: Politics and the Novel, New York 1957; see also the whole issue 3 of New Literary History which is entirely devoted to the problem of ideology in literature [spring 1973, IV:3], especially the articles: G. A. Huaco: “Ideology and Literature”, pp. 421-436 on the methodological problems,; J. Culler: “Structure of Ideology and Ideology of Structure”, pp. 471-482, and W. Girnus: “On the Problem of Ideology in Literature”, pp. 483-500. 43 “... idee filozoficzne, funkcjonujące w obrębie utworu literackiego, poddane być mogą, a nawet przeważnie bywają, autonomicznej logice świata literackiej fikcji. Stąd też ich wzajemny stosunek, a nawet kierunek ich interpretacji, uzależniony jest przeważnie od praw estetycznej struktury świata poetyckiego. Przy takiej zasadzie operowania ideami nie może ani dziwić, ani budzić istotnych sprzeciwów fakt, że owe idee pochodzić mogą z bardzo różnych systemów ... w przeciwieństwie do filozofa eklektyka [pisarz] dysponuje bowiem wieloma środkami ujmowania ich w strukturę literacką - konsekwentną i koherentną, jakkolwiek nie logiczna zgodność będzie podstawą tej jedności”, M. Janion, op.cit., p. 128 [translation mine]. 42

20

construction of a classification of the synonyms of the term “idea” would have to take into account this “relative abstractness” or functional significance in the semantics of the literary work. Apart from explaining why there are so many designates of the term “idea” in the definitions from group [c], i.e. ideas in the formal aspects of the novelistic structure, the foregoing discussion was also to indicate the linguistic and semiotic reasons for the very existence of ideas within the literary work and specific ontological status therein, and such an indication may be useful in the process of arriving at a definition of the term. After the first stage of elimination, when the sociological and psychological approaches have been excluded from the present analysis, and on the basis of the considerations specified above, the second stage of elimination seems now possible. In the analysis of Rousseau’s statement it can easily be seen that the two extreme levels of occurrence of ideas in literature, i.e. level [A] — ideas as the meanings of words, and level [C] — the main or general idea of the whole utterance, will be common to all literary works and as such they will not be helpful in an attempt at typological differentiation among literary genres or even kinds. Since in this study we are to deal with the type of fiction in which ideas may be regarded as a distinctive feature of the genre, both extreme levels should consequently be discarded. In this way the range of meanings of the term “idea” will be limited to, on the one hand, definitions from group [c], concerning formal aspects of the literary structure, and, on the other — level [B] in the analysis of Rousseau’s statement; the difference between the two “ideas” on level [B] may now serve as a convenient criterion for the final stage of elimination. It is generally known that the most relevant quality of all literary art is usually seen just in the peculiar manner of expression which, for the sake of simplicity, may be called an “implicit” technique of writing. It is indicated not only in the large number of studies on implicit methods of writing, the techniques of “allusiveness”, “stylistics of silence”, figures of speech, symbols, metaphors etc., but also in the numerous objections against introducing explicit ideas in literature, since the latter are commonly regarded as “alien” elements in fiction or as much less “literary” or “artistic” means of expression. Such objections are raised often enough in relation to many different writers but they seem to be particularly numerous and sharp when they concern such genres as the novel of ideas, novel of doctrine, fictional essays, essayistic novel etc., in other words, such genres whose association with ideas has always been close (see Introduction). As a result, the third stage of elimination indicates the “explicit” manner of expression in fiction of the type in question and as such it will be accepted as the main object of the present study. Consequently, taking into consideration the results of the three stages of the elimination process sketched comprehensively above, as well as the three logically possible forms in which a statement analogical to that of J. J. Rousseau may appear in fiction, the following definition of the term “idea” may be offered: In the novel of ideas the idea is an abstract explicit statement which occurs in a dialectic juxtaposition with other ideas and which is analysed in essayistic utterances of the characters, the narrator’s comment or in various forms of quotations. The historical survey of this particular mode of presentation that follows will subject this definition to verification, so that the manners in which the ideas as defined above, their treatment in fiction, as well as the whole problem of the relationship between fiction and ideas as represented by this type of literature, may be traced in greater detail in its historical development.

21

Part 2. Fiction and Ideas: A Historical Survey As has already been mentioned in the Introduction to the present study, recent literary theories emphasize in particular the necessity of taking into consideration both synchronic and diachronic aspects of the theoretical construct called genre. According to such theories, a literary genre should always be placed within the constant process of evolution and modification by means of opposition and adaptation, on the one hand, and on the other - the genre should be located within the more or less complex system of literary genres existing in particular epochs and characterized by their specific laws.1 Thus, one should examine both the synchronic system of genres valid for a given period of time and the diachronic literary tradition to which that genre belongs, obtaining, in this way, the two necessary co-ordinates which determine the place of a given work in its full literary context. The present part will aim at a brief reconstruction of the diachronic co-ordinate mentioned above, namely, the literary tradition of fiction in which explicit ideas (as defined in the preceding part) play a more or less predominant role. It will also be an attempt at tracing the changeable relationship between, and interplay of, explicit ideas and implicit techniques, i.e. the mode of occurrence, treatment, and functions of explicit ideas in relation to other elements of the literary structure in fiction of particular epochs. Although the term fiction is used here - a term of wider meaning than that of the novel2 - in later literary periods, mainly since the eighteenth century, the survey will concentrate on the novel which is the proper object of this study. Naturally, a full treatment of this problem would require much more space than can be allowed in this study, since this phenomenon may be encountered almost in every great European novel; for that reason attention will be paid first of all to those works which seem most interesting and significant both for the particular purpose of this survey and literary history in general. It seems that such an attempt may employ either of the following methods: having established a representative of the genre studied, one may go backwards and trace a sequence of its possible predecessors; or else one can make use of one of the large-scale overall diachronic classifications of literary genres into broader categories which have been proposed by some literary scholars. Since the former procedure has already been applied and presented elsewhere, 3 this survey will employ the latter method. In his famous study Anatomy of Criticism N. Frye distinguishes four general categories of literary genres and, writing about one of them, The Mythos of Winter, he states: 1

Cf., e.g., C. Guillén, op.cit.; U. Margolin: “On Three Types of Deductive Models in Genre Theory”, Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, 1974, XVII:1(32), pp. 5-19; J. Sławiński: “Synchronia i diachronia w procesie historyczno-literackim” [in:] Proces historyczny w literaturze i sztuce, Warszawa 1967; R. Selden: “Objectivity and Theory in Literary Criticism”, Essays in Criticism, July 1973, 23:3, p. 287; F. A. Pottle: “Synchrony and Diachrony: A Plea for the Use in Literary Studies of Saussure’s Concepts and Terminology” [in:] Literary Theory and Structure, New Haven and London 1973, pp. 3-20. 2 Cf., e.g., H. L. Yelland et al.: A Handbook of Literary Terms, New York 1966, p. 74. 3 L. Kolek: “English Novel of Ideas. An Attempt at a Preliminary Definition and Description of the Genre”, Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, 1974, XVII:1(32), especially pp. 33-37.

22 Lucian’s attitude to Greek philosophy is repeated in the attitude of Erasmus and Rabelais to the scholastics, of Swift and Samuel Butler I to Descartes and the Royal Society, of Voltaire to the Leibnitzians, of Peacock to the Romantics, of Samuel Butler II to the Darwinians, of Aldous Huxley to the behaviorists. ... In the warfare of science against superstition, the satirists have done famously. Satire itself appears to have begun with the Greek silloi which were proscientific attacks on superstition. In English literature Chaucer and Ben Jonson riddled the alchemists with a cross-fire of their own jargon; Nash and Swift hounded astrologers into premature graves; Browning’s Sludge the Medium annihilated the spiritualists, and a rabble of occultists, numerologists, Pythagoreans and Rosicrucians lie sprawling in the wake of Hudibras. To the scientist it may seem little short of perverse that satire goes on making fun at legitimate astronomers in The Elephant in the Moon, of experimental laboratories in Gulliver’s Travels, of Darwinian and Malthusian cosmology in Erewhon, of conditional reflexes in Brave New World, of technological efficiency in 1984 ... Similarly with religion ... 4

Apart from establishing a list of “intellectual satirists”, this quotation also introduces at least two significant points: first, it indicates the literary category whose relationship with philosophy, science and religion (i.e. with ideas) is perhaps the closest;5 secondly, it suggests that some of the writers included, e.g. Butler, Swift, or Huxley, were preoccupied jointly with philosophy, religion, and science. In other words, it suggests that intellectual satire usually deals with the whole intellectual life in the given epoch using it as material for its writings. A very similar list, though based on a different criterion, was offered by C. S. Lewis when he wrote: The great works in the modern vernaculars which we usually call ‘satires’ do not descend from the ‘Satira’ of the Romans. Animal Farm, Erewhon, Voltaire’s tales, Gulliver, the Dunciad, the Rape, Absalom, and Hudibras, belong to a different family. They are all fantastic or mock-heroic narratives and their true ancestors are Rabelais, Cervantes, the Apocolocynthosis, Lucian and the Frogs and Mice.6

Perhaps one more example should suffice to establish the origin and sequence of this category called by Frye “The Mythos of Winter” or “anatomy” or “intellectual satire”. Almost the same results, though obtained by a still different analytical method, were reported by M. Bachtin in his classical study in Dostoevsky’s writings. If in his mythographic approach Frye employed primarily the thematic classification, and C. S. Lewis looked for elements of fantasy and the mock-heroic, Bachtin used mainly the formal criterion and in this way distinguished a branch of literature which, though called by still another name of “carnivalized literature”, is represented by the same writers and works as those enumerated by N. Frye and C. S. Lewis. 7 Therefore, it may be safely assumed that, if the three scholars arrived at similar conclusions by three different methods, the beginnings of this branch of literature, which is most closely connected with ideas, should be sought in antiquity, in the ancient comedy of Aristophanes and Seneca, in the Platonic dialogue, and in the Menippean satire. A closer look at the latter two genres (drama being less relevant for this study) should now reveal some more detailed and formal aspects of the mode of occurrence and functions of explicit ideas in ancient literature and, at the same time, serve as a starting point for the present survey. 4

N. Frye: Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays, Princeton 1957, pp. 230-231. It may also result from the non-fictional origin of literature; Szkłowski, for instance, finds such sources in the travel book, history, and a court trial (O prozie. Rozważania i analizy, tr. by S. Pollak, Warszawa 1964, vol. I, pp. 122 ff.). 6 C. S. Lewis: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, Oxford 1962, p. 468. 7 M. Bachtin, op.cit., Chap. 4 “Gatunkowe i fabularno-kompozycyjne właściwości utworów Dostojewskiego”, pp. 155-273. 5

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1. As its name indicates, the Platonic dialogue (also called the Socratic dialogue) is the main representative of those genres whose principal mode of presentation is that of dialogue (“the most ‘discursive’ of literary discourses”).8 Since the characters in those dialogues are invariably philosophers or thinkers (Socrates being, naturally, the most obvious example), their debates actually consist of direct clashes of ideas and views upon various subjects, mostly of ethical and aesthetic nature (cf., e.g., the Ion, Phaedrus, Meno, Philebus, Sophist, Timaeus, Cratylus and others). Thus, it is perhaps one of the oldest, if not the oldest, genres in which ideas occur in the purest form: they are always abstract and explicit, they are shown in syncretic oppositions (or, in agreement with Socrates’ methods of discussion, in anacretic positions), finally, they are logically analysed in discursive or essayistic9 utterances of characters. Moreover, the function of these ideas within particular dialogues is always structurally dominant - clashes of ideas provide the only type of action (the introductory frame of some dialogues, as in the Symposium, being fragmentary and conventional and, as such, having no bearing on the discussion); the characters are types, representative of various philosophical schools rather than fully developed characters in the modern sense of the term (taken together, the total body of dialogues contains perhaps one such character - Socrates); it is only occasionally that these works reveal some rudimentary attempts at characterization (e.g. the costume of the Rhapsode in the Ion; Socrates’ drunkenness in the Symposium) or elementary situation sketches (e.g. the all-night drinking-party in the Symposium; and an exceptional situation of one of the speakers - a kind of Schwellendialog - for instance, on his death-bed, as in Apologia or Phaedo). The implicit techniques are thus limited to the presentation of label-characters10 and juxtaposition of explicit ideas, the latter constituting the main “material” for such writings. Still, even within these limitations and owing mostly to the technique of juxtaposition, it was possible to create an “open” or “polyphonic” form, 11 although in its later development the Platonic dialogue became a vehicle for didactic expression of readymade philosophical theories (the extreme “homophonic” form of the dialogue developed later on into the form of catechism).

8

D. Danek call it “najbardziej ‘dyskursywnym’ dyskursem literackim”, op.cit., p. 122; see also W. Witwicki’s introductions to his own translations of Plato’s Dialogues, Warszawa 1958 and 1975. 9 By “essayistic” is meant this feature which is called by B. Berger “der essayistische Stil” in his Der Essay. Form und Geschichte, Bern 1964; for studies in the essay as a literary form see also W. Hilsbecher: Tragizm, absurd i paradoks, tr. by S. Błaut, Warszawa 1972; and Robert Champigny: Pour une esthétique de l’essai: analyses critiques, Paris 1967. 10 The tradition of character-labelling is perhaps best seen in Theophrastus’s Characters, a collection of thirty portraits based on contrasting pairs of vices, e.g. the obsequious man and the surly, the boaster and the mock-modest etc.; this tradition was re-introduced in Europe in the sixteenth century by Isaac Causaubon and in England in Ben Jonson’s comedy of humours, J. Hall’s Characterisms [1608], Overbury’s Characters [1616], and then further continued by Breton, Parrot, Brathwaite, Lenton, Lupton, Donne, Flecknoe, up to Hazzlit [1839]; all data from W. K. Wimsatt and C. Brookes, op.cit.; Annals of English Literature. 1475-1950, Oxford 1961; and E. C. Baldwin: “Ben Jonson’s Indebtedness to Greek Character-Sketch”, Modern Language Notes, 1901, vol. XVI, pp. 385-396. 11 M. Bachtin, op.cit., p. 170; U. Eco, op.cit., definition of the “open” form may be found on p. 10.

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Beside the Platonic dialogue in the strict sense of the term, as preserved in the works of Plato and Xenophon (Bachtin enumerates other authors whose works have perished),12 there were other dialogic forms called diatribe, symposium, and dialogue of the dead. Their importance lies in the fact that they all increased the number of implicit techniques - although they all employed the technique of dialogue, they differed mainly in the choice of disputing characters and in the type of discussion. The diatribe, or a dialogue with the absent, came close to such later genres as apology and confession, perfected by St. Augustine, the French mystics, Pascal, Rousseau, De Quincey and many others, and, assuming also the form of letters and personal essays, it is continued in our days. The same intimate and informal tone which occurs in the diatribe is typical of the symposium, a dialogue during a party or a feast, when the characters hold a conversation rather than a dispute,13 often ironic and humorous. Finally, there was the dialogue of the dead turning mainly towards history and mythology for its characters and generally retaining the abstract and speculative, though more fictitious, character of the original Platonic dialogue. Apart from revealing the possibilities of the form of dialogue and increasing the number of implicit techniques, all these genres also gave rise to the long-lasting tradition of introducing a philosopher in fiction (or a man-of-wisdom, sage, reasoner, learned wit etc.), i.e. a figure invariably associated with explicit ideas, although their syncretic or dialectic character may vary widely. All the dialogic genres mentioned above were later incorporated into a much more complex which came to be called the Menippean satire after the name of its creator, Menippus of Gadara (the third century B. C.). 14 A detailed synthesis of the formal features of this genre is provided by M. Bachtin.15 His achievement is due to the fact that it brings together the whole body of techniques, themes, and formal features of the genre. It should be stressed, however, that in this synthesis Bachtin covers a fairly long period of time (from the 3rd century B. C. to the 2nd century A. D., or even to the end of the 5th century A. D., including Boëthius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae); during this period the genre might have undergone numerous changes under various influences and might have been considerably modified. At the same time, the “primitive” techniques of the early satires might have been developed and perfected by later practitioners of the genre who exploited the potentialities of these techniques to a much higher degree. A closer look at some extant writings of one of the later writers of the Menippean satire, Lucian of Samosata (c. A. D. 115-200),16 should make this point clear. Lucian’s Dialogues, for instance, show evidence of having incorporated elements of other genres into his works. For example, the rhetorical speeches of the two allegorical women figures, 12

M. Bachtin, op.cit., p. 168. For differences between such terms as conversation, personal dialogue, discussion, or chat, see J. Mukažovski, Wśród znaków i struktur, tr. by J. Baluch et al., Warszawa 1970, pp. 197-203. 14 Menippus was a Greek cynic philosopher, born in Gadara, Syria, about the first half of the 2nd century B. C. Originally a slave, he bought his freedom and became a free Theban. In his dialogues, written in verse and prose, he satirized his contemporaries, especially Epicureans and Stoics, with extreme sarcasm. All his writings have been lost and he is known only by what later writers say of him. Meleager in his writings included some Menippus’s epigrams, Lucian made Menippus one of his characters, Varro wrote an imitation of Menippus in Saturae Menippea. Menippus may also be regarded as a predecessor of later Italian “literary adventurers or ribalds”, like F. Filelfo, A. F. Doni, and the most famous of them, P. Aretino, well known also in England and mentioned by Nash and Milton (data from M. Bachtin, W. K. Wimsatt and C. Brooks, N. Frye, op.cit.). 15 M. Bachtin, op.cit., pp. 175-185; see also reference 22 below. 16 Cf., H. J. Rose: A Handbook of Greek Literature, London 1965, pp. 418-421; Lucian’s works were translated into English by Heywood [1637] and T. Francklin [1780]. 13

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personifying science and craftsmanship in Lucian’s Dream, resemble legal speeches written by logographers for illiterate persons guilty of a misdemeanour or crime (e.g. Lysias’s speeches; examples of such orations may be found already in The Arabian Nights, originating from the 3rd century BC,17 for instance Tale 86, Nights 899-930; Tale 54, Nights 436-462; Tale 51, Nights 419-423 and others18). On the other hand, the themes of a trial or contest could be taken directly from the Greek myths, e.g. the judgement of Teiresias or Paris;19 this theme is often used by Lucian whether for satiric (dialogue IV) or for didactic aims (dialogue X, On Friendship; see also The Arabian Nights, Tale 59, Nights 578-606, where in the trial the characters use fables as their arguments, just as they do in Lucian). Sometimes, however, Lucian takes techniques or themes from Greek mythology but he modifies them to suit his own particular purpose: the myth about Icarus (Graves, p. 292) is used to allow Menippus a change of perspective, so that he could scorn from above (Icaromenippus); Charon’s ferry-boat (Graves, p. 124) is made so small as to carry only completely naked souls of people, without any luggage, and in this way they have to reveal all their vices hidden under earthly attitudes and appearances (dialogue III; the only exception is made for Menippus - “Your jokes, Menippus, are not a burden to the boat”).20 The same may be said about travel to Hades; several heroes of the Greek myths visited the country of the dead (e.g. Heracles, Odysseus or Orpheus - Graves, pp. 469, 652, 117), but the reasons for Menippus’s travel are different; on the one hand, since he finds that he cannot believe in antagonistic philosophers, he goes there in order to find out the truth for himself (and as a result he brings Teiresias’s moral - “Don’t speculate excessively; enjoy life modestly; don’t trust philosophers”); on the other hand, “It is impossible to think well about the living for they are subject to change; but after death, when everybody appears as he was during his life, one can laugh as much as one wants.” From the formal point of view, Lucian’s satires strike one as a highly heterogeneous genre, containing not only elements of many other genres, but also lacking any constant formal features (one may, in fact, say that their only constant feature is their lack of any such formal characteristics). They all vary in respect to length (from one page, as in the dialogue between Alexander and Diogenes, to a full book length, as in Veracious History), the number of speakers participating in the dialogues (from something close to a monologue, as in dialogue V, Menippus’s Return, to a well-balanced conversation, as in dialogue VII, A Ship or Desires), methods of inserting tales etc.; sometimes the satires have abrupt endings, as if they were taken out of a larger whole (dialogue XI, between Micyllus and the Cock, ends with “Let’s go home; I’ll tell you the rest later on”), or they may end with an explicit moral or a conclusion (dialogue V; dialogue VIII, A Cynic and Lycinnus, which ends with a lengthy lecture by the Cynic).

17

On dating of some of the tales see T. Lewicki’s Introduction to Księga tysiąca i jednej nocy, collective tr., Warszawa 1973, vol. I, p. 14. 18 A general classification of the generic categories to which particular tales belong may be found in ibid., pp. 37-46. 19 R. Graves: Mity greckie [The Greek Myths], tr. by H. Krzeczkowski, Warszawa 1974, pp. 345, 572-574; all further references in the text are made to this edition. 20 My English paraphrases of I. Krasicki’s translation of Lucian’s works [I. Krasicki, Dzieła, Warszawa 1879, vol. 5]: p. 93 “Menippie, twoje żarty łódce nie ciążą”; p. 101 “Nie badaj zbytnio; używaj skromnie; nie wierz filozofom”; p. 90 “Niepodobna jest rzecz dobrze o żywych sądzić, bo podlegli są odmianie; ale po śmierci, gdy się tem każdy stale wydaje, czem był za życia, można się naśmiać do woli”; p. 140 “Wróćmy do domu, resztę ci potem powiem”.

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Contrary to the Platonic dialogue, in which exchanges and clashes of explicit ideas were means of the search for truth, the Menippean satire usually employs the techniques of satire and parody and, although the treatment of explicit ideas is therefore different, the purpose remains the same, for “satire is militant irony” and “commits the attacker, if only by implication, to a moral standard”,21 which is frequently, though not always, expressed as an explicit moral. Hence the presence of elements of fantasy (fantastic events designed for testing the validity of explicit ideas) which, by changing the point of view, liberate the observer or critic from all social pressures and authorities (e.g. travels not only in the earth, to the Olympus, Hades, and other planets, but also to the lowest levels in social hierarchy). This is also reflected in the style of the Menippean satire, in its mixture of high and low styles, its alternations of moods, contrasts and oxymorons, parody of speeches and orations, and, finally, in quotations of letters and poetry, in inserted tales, as well as in “a play with the form”; in this respect the Menippean satire appears as a mixture of several literary kinds and genres, a fact which demonstrates the writers’ liberation from such forms as history or diary and which indicates their ability to apply any available literary form for the philosophical purpose (the connection between characters and ideas being still as loose as in earlier genres). In contrast to the Platonic dialogue, explicit ideas, which also serve as material for the Menippean satire, undergo there a significant qualitative change and become more elementary questions concerning the “human condition”, morality, even psychology, rather than more abstract and speculative philosophical problems; this is seen in the Menippean satire encompassing, for instance, all philosophical schools (cf. Lucian’s dialogue Auction of Philosophers). As a result of this change, the Menippean satire is also more strongly connected with its social milieu and problems current in a given period than the Platonic dialogue. Generally speaking, that lack of strict formal requirements (such rules being typical mainly of the classical drama and epic) made the Menippean satire a form which easily handled a wide variety of more or less current topics from every realm of life (problems of ethical and intellectual character being perhaps most frequent), which could serve every aim of the writer, from pure entertainment to explicit didacticism, by every technique of writing. For these reasons, it seems, the Menippean satire did not easily yield to strict critical analysis and for ages has been unfavourably compared with “serious” literature. It is also because of that variety of techniques and unrestricted freedom of fantasy, label-characters, and plots subordinated to philosophical and hypothetical speculations, that the main formal feature may be found in the constant presence of explicit ideas which, similarly to the Platonic dialogue, seem to predominate in the structure of these works; in the Menippean satire, however, they seem to be subjected to more varied and numerous implicit techniques as described by Bachtin. 22

21

N. Frye, op.cit., pp. 223, 225. Bachtin enumerates such features of the Menippean satire as: humour and laughter, freedom of philosophical fiction and plot construction, fantasy used as a means for testing truths or word-ideas, adventures of an idea in the world - earth, hell, Olympus, naturalism, philosophical speculations, moral or psychological experiments such as unusual and strange states of mind, extravagance and scandals, contrasts and oxymorons, mixture of prose and poetry, numerous quotations, multitude of styles and moods, topicality of problems; op.cit., pp. 175-182; in Polish literature Łukasz Opaliński is regarded as an author of the Menippean satire - cf. Sierotwiński’s Słownik terminów literackich, Warszawa 1868. 22

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2. After the decline of antiquity, European literature immediately reveals great changes in respect to explicit ideas as compared with the works of the writers mentioned above. Among various influences which brought about changes both in kind and in treatment of explicit ideas in fiction, the impact of Christianity was perhaps the strongest. This influence was manifold and it concerned philosophy, sciences, arts, as well as all forms of literature. In the latter case, among the most relevant effects of that impact one should mention a very strong element of didacticism which caused an almost total disappearance of the dialectic or “polyphonic” quality of literary works – a change which seems quite natural for the transition from polytheism to monotheism. 23 At the same time, however, Christianity brought a richness of plots and themes (particularly in the very popular lives of the saints) and techniques of writing; seeking the most effective possible means for spreading and popularizing Christian dogmas, the monks and preachers prolonged the existence of many a genre (such as a parable, exemplum, dream allegory etc.) by including them for didactic purposes in their sermons and treatises and in this way modifying them and developing their potential expressiveness in new literary contexts (in this case, didactic writings reveal almost the same ease of incorporating elements of other genres as does the Menippean satire). Christianity was also responsible, more or less directly, for other types of influences. Crusades and the contacts of European knights with Eastern countries brought the Oriental influence which turned out to be a rich source of material in fables, legends, books of proverbs,24 and romances. A more direct influence was that exerted by the numerous and anonymous monks scribes, collectors of folk-tales, songs and legends, as well as translators of some classical works. Thus, two distinct processes can be observed in medieval literature: on the one hand, with the discovery of new sources of material and influences mentioned above, the number of implicit techniques greatly increased; on the other hand, with the supremacy of Christian monistic theology and cosmology in almost all medieval genres explicit ideas predominate in their “homophonic” function (medieval writings are rarely “polyphonic”, since, it seems, the search for dialogic truth, which was the primary aim of the Platonic dialogue, becomes superficial and insignificant; in other words, the “truth” is already well known and writers concentrate mainly on inventing new methods and finding new illustrations for that truth); exceptions to this statement may be found in some fables without explicit morals25and in some romances stressing “pure” 23

The impact of Christianity on medieval literature is discussed, among others, by A. Hauser: Społeczna historia sztuki i literatury, tr. by J. Ruszczycówna, Warszawa 1974, vol. I, pp. 143, 206-207, 266, and by R. W. Southern: Kształtowanie Średniowiecza [The Making of the Middle Ages], tr. by H. Pręczkowska, Warszawa 1970, Chap. V “Od epiki do romansu”. 24 A history of proverbs in English literature is briefly summarized by P. J. C. Field: in his Romance and Chronicle. A Study in Malory’s Prose Style, London 1971, where he writes: “The proverb proper, which has been defined as a generalization not completely separated from a specific example, has a history of varied acceptability in literature. Most medieval and Renaissance writers found it a pleasing and persuasive way of expressing truth ... The Augustans began a reaction against the proverb, banishing it first from polite conversation and then from polite literature. As inhabitants of the Age of Reason, they preferred their generalizations pure rather than applied ... After this time, proverbs came to have associations with the uneducated, which continue, though to a lesser degree, to our own day. The twentieth-century preference for the concrete rather than the abstract, or at least for a symbol rather than unadorned concept, has allowed us a renewed sympathy with proverbs”, p. 125. 25 Cf., R. Scholes: The Fabulators, op.cit., pp. 36-37.

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action (e.g. The Book of Alexander and The Book of Appollonius, popular in the whole Europe, which contain descriptions of fantastic travels to the bottom of the sea in a glass barrel or to the Moon in a canoe). The increase in the number of implicit techniques and their subordination to explicit ideas can well be seen in one of the most popular medieval genres, in allegory. In his dream travel the protagonist (often the author himself) meets characters from various worlds who may discuss some problems among themselves, or with the traveller, or else, may deliver an explicit moralizing lecture and in this way they serve as means for expressing explicit ideas. At its greatest, however, the medieval allegory sometimes transcends this description as may be seen, for instance, in two masterpieces of the genre, namely, Le Roman de la Rose (c. 1280) and Divina Commedia (begun in 1307, written before 1314). The author of the second part of the French version of Roman de la Rose, Jean de Meung, largely reduced the allegorical action of the book and made his lover-protagonist a listener to countless speeches delivered by such “characters” as Love, Reason, Gossip, Appearance, Friend etc. As a result the work becomes a vehicle for an explicit presentation of its author’s knowledge and opinion on a wide variety of subjects, like poverty, unequal distribution of property, the origin of king’s authority and power, the origin of state, marriage, justice, relationship between nature and art, descriptions of “scientific” experiments with the rainbow and mirrors, visions, magic etc. (this part was radically shortened in the English translation). The writer frequently refers to various authorities in particular subjects and thus the work is filled with quotations and paraphrases, a tradition to be continued for many centuries in European writings. Owing to such techniques of writing and the book’s content of such a variety of philosophical, social, religious and scientific problems expressed explicitly and often satirically, Lanson and Tuffrau regard Roman de la Rose as the first link in the sequence which leads through Rabelais, Montaigne and Moliére, to Voltaire and his followers.26 Obviously, explicit ideas thus expressed are only very loosely connected with the allegorical action of the book, the latter being only a convenient and fashionable pretext for the presentation of the former. Dante’s Divina Commedia employs the well-known theme of a visionary travel through the three kingdoms or worlds, a device also popular among classic writers, like Lucian or Ovid. Although the work has an orthodox Christian character, it also contains numerous explicit ideas and, as Sapegno writes, science and philosophy, theology and political ideas, history and reality, are often included in the Commedia not as elements to be isolated as evaluated individually but as specific poetic material;27 it is precisely this fusion and organic integration of explicit ideas into the whole structure that makes the work a masterpiece, moreover, the allegorical elements are very slight and subtle. Apart from explicit ideas and their importance as “material” for the book, its other features, such as the use of fantasy, inserted tales or mixture of various styles, indicate a possibility of some influence of the Menippean tradition, although the satire seems tempered by Christian theology.

26

“... to pierwsze ogniwo łańcucha, który poprzez Rabelaisego, Montaigne’a, Moliera dochodzi do Woltera” - G. Lanson and P. Tuffrau: Historia literatury francuskiej w zarysie [1953], tr. by W. Bieńkowska, Warszawa 1971, p. 53. 27 “Nauka i filozofia, teologia i idee polityczne, historia i życie zawarte są najczęściej w Komedii nie jako elementy, które można wyodrębnić i ocenić każdy z osobna, lecz jako konkretne tworzywo poetyckie”, N. Sapegno: Historia literatury włoskiej w zarysie [1948], tr. by Z. Matuszewicz and K. Kasprzyk, Warszawa 1969, p. 60.

29

It is even more interesting to observe the continuance and development of the form of the Platonic dialogue together with its sub-types; apart from dialogues in allegories, it remained a favourite mode of presentation employed by writers of both fiction and non-fiction. In English literature there is an uninterrupted tradition of various dialogues from the earliest surviving manuscripts (e.g. Salomon and Saturn in the Cambridge manuscript) up to the twentieth century (e.g. G. L. Dickinson’s A Modern Symposium, 1905). We have already observed allegorical disguises of the “characters” in some dialogues but the influence of satire was even greater: it can be seen in Spain in some disputes of Bercea (e.g. his oxymoronic dialogues, like The Pregnant Prioress or The Pious Robber); in Germany, where there was the anonymous Ackermann aus Böhme (a court trial) and Freudenleere’s Der Wiener Meerfahrt (a drinking-party with the participants mistaking their inn for a ship28) and later on a very popular narrative by Brant entitled Narrenschiff, whose English translation by J. Barcley appeared in 1509 (cf. also a modern version in C. A. Porter’s A Ship of Fools, 1945); in Italy, where there also occur dialogues in laudas, eclogues and pastorals. Finally, dialogues were commonly used by the greatest thinkers and scientists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in the whole Europe for completely nonfictional purposes (cf. the dialogues by Galileo Galilei, Thomas More, Niccolo Machiavelli, Baldassare Castiglione, Giordano Bruno, Don Juan Manuel, Robert Burton, Thomas Hobbes, George Berkeley and many others). It seems pertinent to recall the opinion of T. Tasso who called the dialogue a work of imitation, that is, of poetry, and regarded the author of dialogues as “something between a poet and a dialectician”, i.e. a poet who takes the varied development and shaping of the process of reasoning though discussion for the theme of his work 29; in this Tasso not only changed the conception of dialogue by regarding it as a form of art, but in his stress on the dialectic approach also represented the spirit of the next epoch, with its love of reasoning, its return to classical ideals, its dialectic search for truth, and its freedom from dogmatic and monolithic Christian world views. From the point of view of explicit ideas the period of the Middle Ages may thus be characterized by an abundance of such forms in all kinds of literature, although they were generally treated in a “homophonic” way and thus they lost their syncretic nature; at the same time, however, there occurred an evident increase in the number of implicit techniques, though they still seem subordinated to explicit ideas.

28

M. Szyrocki: Dzieje literatury niemieckiej, Warszawa 1969, vol. I, p. 95. Tasso “określał dialog jako dzieło naśladownictwa, to znaczy poezji, a autora dialogów jako ‘coś pośredniego pomiędzy poetą a dialektykiem’, to znaczy jako poetę, który za temat dzieła bierze różnorodny rozwój i kształtowanie się toku rozumowania poprzez dyskusję”, N. Sapegno, op.cit., p. 277. 29

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3. The situation of explicit ideas, so strictly connected with liberal and unlimited speculations, underwent radical changes in the Renaissance, with the gradual rebirth of classical ideals and the consequent loosening of Christian dogmas. Initially, with the re-introduction of classical writings we naturally find a number of imitations of ancient genres with a difference in the more topical subject matters. In France, for instance, there appeared a pamphlet entitled exactly Satyre Menippée, in Italy - a continuance of the symposium in Lasci’s Banquets, in Germany - the socalled “humanistic drama” modelled directly on rhetoric dialogues (e.g. by Wimpheling, Locher, Reuchlin and others). But the decline of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the new era in Europe was perhaps most spectacularly signalled in the best example of the Menippean satire of the sixteenth century, written by the “father” of French literature, François Rabelais, in his gigantic masterpiece, Gargantua and Pantagruel [1532-1552, 1564]. This great work of fantasy, satire and contemporary knowledge, which has become an inexhaustible source of themes and techniques for all the generations of writers to follow almost till our days (it was translated into English by Sir Thomas Urquhart in 1653, and reprinted in 1693, 1694, 1708], emphatically evidences a total rebellion against the chains of scholastic thought, asceticism, inadequate education and restricted scientific methods; it is, at the same time, an enthusiastic affirmation of liberalism and classical spirit in science and education. This can be best illustrated by Gargantuan’s letter to his son, Pantagruel: But although my deceased father of happy memory, Grangousier, had bent his best endeavours to make me profit in all perfection and political knowledge, and that my labour and study was fully correspondent to, yea, went beyond his desire, nevertheless, as thou mayst well understand, the time then was not so proper and fit for learning as it is at present, neither had I plenty of such good masters as thou hast had. For that time was darksome, obscured with clouds of ignorance, and savouring a little of the infelicity and calamity of the Goths, who had, wherever they set footing, destroyed all good literature, which in my age hath by the divine goodness been restored unto its former light and dignity ... Now it is, that the minds of men are qualified with all manner of discipline and the old sciences revived, which for many centuries were extinct ... the learned languages are to their pristine purity restored ... All the world is full of knowing men, of most learned schoolmasters, and vast libraries. [Book II, Chap. 8, pp. 81—82]30

It is not difficult to understand why the necessary requirement for such a kind of writing as the Menippean satire was freedom from any monistic pattern of belief. Rabelais’s debt to many classical writers, and especially to the representatives of the Menippean tradition, has already been stressed by numerous scholars31 so we do not have to go into details. Still, it seems relevant to mention the fact that he not only quoted, for instance, from Lucian (e.g. Book III, Chap. 19; IV, 15 - Lucian’s Symposium) but he probably translated parts of Lucian’s Dionissos and included the translation in his work (V: 39, 40). Apart from this evidence, there are numerous formal similarities between the Menippean satire and Gargantua and Pantagruel; they are reflected in particular in the latter’s loose and free construction, overwhelming humour and biting satire, diversity of styles and moods, elements and techniques of various literary kinds and genres (Rabelais’s work is all-inclusive in this respect and contains a 30

F. Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel, tr. by T. Urquhart and P. Motteux, Chicago-London-Toronto 1952; all subsequent references are made to this edition and indicate book, chapter and page numbers. 31 Cf., e.g., D. G. Coleman: Rabelais. A Critical Study in Prose Fiction, Cambridge 1971, pp. 84-109.

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mixture of prose, poetry, and even drama - Moliére is supposed to have written a play based on dialogue in II, 36 - symposium, debate, travel book, fantastic narrative, letters, quotations etc.) and, finally, a truly ingenious and colourful use of language. What is most relevant for the present survey, however, is Rabelais’s free and abundant use of explicit ideas which, owing to the writer’s wide learning, encompassing almost the whole knowledge of his epoch, could serve as a target of ridicule or model of conduct. T. Boy-Żeleński seems right in stressing the basic ambivalence of Rabelais’s attitude to knowledge which, in spite of being a frequent target of his satire, constantly appears on the pages of his book also as a problem discussed seriously.32 Explicit ideas appear in the book in all possible forms: there are the well-known disputes between the well-educated protagonists, mentioned in the title, and their interlocutors - teachers, philosophers, rhetoricians, doctors, historians, philologists etc. - an obvious continuation of the tradition of philosophers in fiction (to be later continued by Voltaire and Diderot). There are also innumerable quotations from a number of classical, medieval, and contemporary writers - Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Lucian, Juvenal, Duns Scotus, Ockham, Becket, More, Antonio Guevara, Castiglione - as well as quotations from writings by authors invented by Rabelais (cf., e.g., the list of books in the library of St. Victor in Paris, II, 7, which caused so much trouble to the pedantic commentators on the work); there are various types of letters both didactic (e.g., II, 8) and satirical (II, 24); there are numerous famous Rabelaisian enumerations or “litanies” (I, 22; II, 1, 7, 30, 33; III, 25, 26, 28, 38; IV, 30-32, 40, 59, 60; V, 21, 22), fragments written in thirteen different languages (II, 9), distorted proverbs (I, 11) and a wide choice of poetry (e.g., poems written under the inspiration of a wild poetic “fury”, V, 46-47; a funny juxtaposition of a poem by Pantagruel and its satirical counterpart by Panurge, II, 27; long poems taking whole chapters, I, 2, 54, and short bawdy and satirical riddles, oracles, songs etc.). Moreover, the author does not adhere too strictly to his main plot, i.e. the life and sayings of Pantagruel, as one third of the work is devoted to Panurge’s troubles with marriage; he freely changes his topics and methods of their presentation, so that the book lacks that unity of construction which will be observed in some later representatives of the Menippean tradition. The main unifying principle is the attitude of the author - the philosophy of “Pantagruelism”, a kind of cheerful liberal stoicism (a similar term was later coined from a novel by another writer greatly influenced by Rabelais, namely, Sterne “Shandyism”). By this attitude, owing to the immense popularity of his work, Rabelais not only revived the classical genre but also prolonged and extended its existence till our days.33 Apart from Rabelais’s work, the sixteenth century in France saw the publication of another masterpiece, though of a different sort, a book which was to influence at least as great a number of writers as that of Rabelais. Some thirty years after the appearance of the last part of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Montaigne published the first two books of his Essais [1580; book III appeared in 1592; first English translations were done by Florio, 1603, and Cotton, 1685]. If in Rabelais we have seen the treatment of explicit ideas which is typical of the Menippean satire, in Montaigne they are treated in a way resembling rather the Platonic dialogue; i.e. they are seriously discussed and factually analysed rather than ridiculed. In view of the wide influence of Montaigne’s peculiar style of writing and the appearance of the so-called “essayistic elements” in fiction, a few words should be said about this significant work. 32

T. Boy-Żeleński: Szkice o literaturze francuskiej, Warszawa 1956, vol. 1, pp. 58-59, 70. Apart from evidence provided by Lanson and Tuffrau, and T. Boy-Żeleński, op.cit., see also M. Głowiński: “Witkacy jako pantagruelista” [in his:] Gry powieściowe, Warszawa 1973. 33

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Although grouped in three books, the Essais are not ordered according to any preconceived plan and they differ widely from one another in respect to both length and subjectmatter. Those first-person prose pieces combine to produce a narrative of the author’s thoughts which originated from his comments written on the margins of the books he had been reading. T. Boy-Żeleński writes that Montaigne essays should be regarded as “a stream of the states of soul, as a play of thoughts, glittering with the whole variety of lights and shadows”. 34 And for Montaigne himself this flow of ideas is an object of pride: Meditation is a powerful and full study to such as can effectually taste and employ themselves; I had rather fashion my soul than furnish it. There is no employment either more weak or more strong, than that of entertaining a man’s thoughts, according as the soul is; the greatest men make it their whole business, quibus vivere est cogitare ... I have a pensive way that withdraws me into myself. [III, 3, pp. 395-396]35

It seems rights, then, to call the Essais “a monograph of the soul”. However, the above quotation is also illustrative of Montaigne’s manner of writing. Its characteristic features are: frequent use of quotations which both prove the author’s erudition and repeatedly serve as starting points for the stream of his thoughts; also, a highly personal “conversational” way of using that erudition, of which he writes “I speak on paper as I do to the first person I meet” [III, 1, p. 381]. His book presents thus a learned man who subjects almost every aspect of life to a thorough intellectual analysis, full of striking paradoxes, aphorisms and gnomic sententiae (which may be regarded as potential topics to be developed into separate essays), everything being included in a kind of dialogue with an assumed listener. This is a truly Socratic notion of the dialogic nature of truth, the right use of philosophy and knowledge. Although there is no uniform overall construction of the essays, the structure of any individual piece is always carefully ordered and logically developed. They usually begin with a more or less trifling observation, which is followed by an analysis, developed by an addition of a variety of striking associations, enriched by quotations, anecdotes, and short tales, to end with a more or less ingenious conclusion; the whole proceeds peacefully, with clear reasoning free from any agitation usually connected with fanaticism, and reveals great psychological depth and humane understanding. Thus, the two French writers, Rabelais and Montaigne, seem, therefore, to reflect the two basic kinds of treatment of explicit ideas in Renaissance literature, strictly parallel to the two genres in the classical epoch. The Menippean satire and its follower Rabelais include explicit ideas for the sake of satire (which always at least implies a more or less explicit moral), while the Platonic dialogue and Montaigne subject explicit ideas to a “serious”, intellectual analysis and make them a means of searching for some kind of truth about life in general or some of its aspects. However, the same sixteenth century in Europe also saw the appearance of some writings which are now regarded as antecedents of the novel, a genre which is primary interest for this study. Apart from France, the most important works in the Continent appeared in Italy and Spain. In the former one should mention such works as Pulci’s Morgante [1483], Bembo’s Asolani [1497], and Folengo’s Baldus [1517-1552] - a grotesque and fantastic parody of a travel book 34

T. Boy-Żeleński, op.cit.: “Trzeba przyjmować ją [tę książkę] taką, jaka jest, jak powstała: nie jako jakiś zwarty system filozoficzny lub moralny, jednolicie obmyślony i przeprowadzony, ale jako płynną falę stanów duszy, jako grę myśli mieniącą się kolejno całym mnóstwem świateł i cieni”, vol. 1, p. 98. 35 M. E. Montaigne: The Essays, tr. by Ch. Cotton, Chicago-London-Toronto 1952; all references are made to this edition.

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which contains some picaresque characters, a tradition to be fully developed in Spain. The most important books published in Spain include: Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina [1500; translated into English by Rastell in 1525], a tragi-comic novel in dialogues, almost “modern” in respect to psychological characterization; Montemayor’s Diana [1559; tr. by Young in 1598], one of the best examples of the pastoral tradition in fiction written in both prose and poetry and full of typically pastoral, mythological and fantastic characters; Antonio Guevara’s Relox de Principes and Epistolas familiares [1529, 1539; tr. into English by Bourdier in 1535, 1556, 1574, 1575, 1578], works famous throughout Europe because of their erudition, fantasy and didacticism; and, finally, the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes [c. 1554; tr. by Rowland in 1586], the first, generally accepted representative of the picaresque tradition. This brief enumeration must also include the internationally famous Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose The Praise of Folly [1509], Colloquia and Adagia were generally known and frequently imitated (English translation by Taverner, 1539, Udall, 1542, 1548, and L’Estrange, 1680). All these works exerted a very strong influence on a generation of English Elizabethan writers, such as Sidney, Lyly, Greene, Nash, and many others, as is emphasized in W. R. Davies’s study Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction. Apart from demonstrating the impact of Continental writers, this author also provides “evidence of a coherent and continuous tradition, with shared aims and techniques”36 from Lucian and Apuleius to Elizabethan fiction. Because of his somewhat vague notion of “idea” in literature, explicit ideas are important in all kinds of fiction for Davies, e.g. when he writes about the accommodation of ideas and experience in pastoral romance, their conflict in courtly fiction, their disjunction in Neo-Hellenic romance, the destruction of ideas by experience in satirical fiction, and the use of experience to structure systems of values in middle class fiction. 37

Still, since Davies makes frequent references to the formal aspects of Elizabethan fiction, some of his observations on the modes of presentation and the interplay of explicit and implicit techniques of writing are quite relevant for this study. Davies distinguishes two basic methods of writing available to the Elizabethans: ... the writers of prose fiction in the 1580’s, faced with the opposed models of Euphuistic mode and Greek romance, were essentially confronted with the choice between dialogue expressive of character and ideas but devoid of action, and action devoid of meaning. 38

In this he not only confirms the statement made earlier in this chapter on the importance of dialogue as a mode of presentation and lack of explicit ideas in some romances in the Middle Ages, but he also gives support to the thesis of C. S. Lewis who suggested the name “rhetorical genre”39 for the specific kind of Elizabethan prose fiction. The writers representative of this genre are Lyly and his followers, Gosson, Munday, Saker, Melbancke, Riche and Greene, while the main feature distinguishing “the rhetorical genre” from the “realistic” and “romantic” genres was to be found in the subordination of the narrative to dialogue and soliloquy with stress laid on the dialectic of explicit ideas.

36

W. R. Davies: Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction, Princeton 1969, p.12; see also M. Schlauch: Antecedents of the English Novel. 1400-1600, Warszawa-London 1963. 37 W. R. Davies, op.cit., p. VI. 38 Ibid., p. 166. 39 C. S. Lewis, op.cit., pp. 418-421.

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The form of dialogue in Elizabethan fiction was perhaps the most popular method of presenting explicit ideas, although types of this form varied. The dialogue could be openly didactic and satirical, as in Gascoigne’s Steele Glas, or dialectic and syncretic, as in The Anatomy of Wit by Lyly, of whom Davies writes that “he dealt with ideas ... explicitly ... he tended to play with them ... to present them from a variety of viewpoints in order to show a spectrum of possible attitudes”;40 it could also assume the form of the diatribe in Sidney’s Arcadia or Greene Philomela; it could include inserted stories used to prove a point in an argument or a “trial” as in Elyot’s The Governor; it could become a formal debate, as in Sidney’s Arcadia and in Greene’s Morando; or an intimate conversation during a banquet in the symposium, as in Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F. J., or Greene’s Planetomachia. However, almost as frequently there appeared evidently non-dialectic treatises (Sidney described Arcadia as “at once a romance and a treatise”), lectures (in Markham or Dickenson), direct moralizing, letters, inserted pamphlets, digressions, moral sententiae, speeches, oracles, philosophical lyrics etc. Naturally, all the latter forms of a-syncretic explicit ideas are quite separated from the proper action of the works (the best evidence of this may be found in the writers placing the moral sententiae beside the text proper, in the margin, as did Greene in Perimides or The Adventures of Ladie Egeria). If in comparison with medieval writings, the number of explicit techniques did not show any changes, the Elizabethans had a much wider range of implicit techniques by means of which a remarkable modification of explicit ideas could often be obtained. The most interesting “techniques of allusiveness” included:  a juxtaposition in the construction of the work, either for the sake of the so-called narrative analogy or for satirical purposes;  a relationship between the characters and ideas held by them, which is marked by the use of masks and costumes;  a significant choice of the setting which may explicitly express ideas (particularly elements of ecphrasis41) and which accounts for the type and number of characters gathered in one place;  a scheme of the plot, mainly in the “Arcadian” fiction, where the action begins with the hero’s acceptance of an idea, signalled by his putting on a mask, and which continues in the ideal country where he changes his character before returning to normal life;  a mixture of styles, both high and low, and of literary kinds - prose and poetry - with frequent elements of literary polemics.42 This enumeration of implicit techniques seems significant chiefly in view of later developments in fiction and the novel. Although the above summary includes methods used by several writers and in different types of writing, it is also indicative of a possibility of keeping under control both explicit ideas and other elements of the literary structure, a possibility of obtaining a kind of balance between all the modes of presentation. Such balance would bring about an artistically unified construction in which explicit ideas could retain their importance and, instead of being separated from the rest as “alien” elements in fiction, would be included within the whole as 40

W. R. Davies, op.cit. p. 103. For a detailed treatment of this device see G. Kurman: “Ecphrasis in Epic Poetry”, Comparative Literature, Winter 1974, XXVI:1, pp. 1-13. 42 The best example of literary polemic in the Elizabethan fiction may perhaps be found in Riche’s The Second Tome of the Travailes and Adventures of Don Simonides, where the author introduces Euphues as a character whom Simonides meets and then Lyly himself is allowed to direct Riche’s plot. 41

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“organic” constituents. No such balance seems to have been attained in the Elizabethan fiction but the next century in England witnessed the appearance of numerous translations of a work which Lionel Trilling has called the most important “ancestor of the modern novel”. 43 It was Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the novel in which ideas expressed explicitly are organically connected with the characters, plots, setting etc. and all these elements are integrated into an “ideal” artistically unified structure. Moreover, the two types of treatment of explicit ideas, as exemplified by the Platonic dialogue and the Menippean satire and, later, by Montaigne and Rabelais, were reconciled in this novel, mainly owing to the element of “realism”, a trend which marked a new phase in the development of European fiction in the eighteenth century and which was to flourish most spectacularly in French and English novel. Although some traces of the rejection of chivalric romance could be seen much earlier (even in Gargantua and Pantagruel), it is convincingly argued that it was only Cervantes’s masterpiece that finally began the new phase. 44 The popularity of Don Quixote was so great that only in England it was translated and republished several times and, moreover, it was as often adapted for the stage, and continually imitated and referred to by the greatest English and Continental writers. 45 It would be unnecessary in this survey to attempt another analysis of this novel and add one more interpretation to those offered plentifully in critical literature; still, some remarks on the role of explicit ideas in the structure of this novel seem unavoidable. According to Sklovsky, Don Quixote came into being as a result of technical interaction between novelistic patterns and contemporary knowledge; as if subconsciously, Cervantes provided his mad hero with materials from various dictionaries and handbooks; thus, collecting the material and mechanically contrasting wisdom with madness, he created a type which was formed similarly to a double picture resulting from two exposures of the same photographic plate. 46

This statement is particularly relevant if one bears in mind the numerous instances when “this knowledge from dictionaries and handbooks” is presented explicitly and often syncretically in the novel; the best example may be found in the lengthy dispute between the Canon, the Parson, and Don Quixote in Book IV, Chapters 48-50; one may also add debates between the characters (often as lengthy), the critical comments of the narrator who calls himself “the foster-father” of the novel, Don Quixote’s speculative monologues, the characters’ critical comments on numerous inserted tales, all kinds and types of quotations (mainly those introduced for the sake of literary

43

L. Trilling, op.cit., p. 250. Apart from Trilling’s arguments, see also Szkłowski, op.cit., pp. 273 ff., and R. Scholes and R. Kellogg, The Nature of the Narrative, op.cit., p. 15. 45 It was translated into English by Phillips [1687], Motteux [1700. 1712], Shelton [1612, 1620], Smollett [1755]’ cf. also D’Urfey’s Comical History of Don Quixote [1694], Lennox’s Female Quixote [1752], Grave’s Spiritual Quixote [1772]. For the novel’s reception by and influence on Heine and Dostoevsky see Szkłowski, op.cit., pp. 287-291. 46 “... w wyniku technicznego współoddziaływania schematów powieściowych i przekazów ówczesnej wiedzy, powiązanych ze sobą w utworze. Cervantes, jak gdyby nieświadomie obdarzył swego szalonego bohatera materiałami z różnych słowników i podręczników; gromadząc materiał i mechanicznie przeciwstawiając mądrość szaleństwu, stworzył typ, który ukształtował się podobnie jak powstaje obraz podwójny w wyniku dwóch zdjęć na jednej kliszy”: Szkłowski, op.cit., p. 273; this double origin of Don Quixote is quite similarly described by G. Lucács: Teoria powieści, tr. by J. Goślicki, Warszawa 1968, pp. 92-93, 97. 44

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polemics47), lists of proverbs (particularly in Sancho Panza’s monologues), enumerations of names, scientific and technical terms etc. (e.g. the whole conversation in Part II, Chapter 3, is based on Aristotle’s Poetics, Chapter IX). Shklovsky’s metaphorical statement indicates thus the right place and role of all these explicit ideas in the whole structure of the work. The greatness and originality of Cervantes’s novel consists in keeping a perfect balance between explicit ideas pronounced by a character and his acts (e.g. Don Quixote as an embodiment and “advocate” of the chivalric convention which is ridiculed in the novel, and as a fully developed figure experiencing reality), between intellectual considerations and realistic details, between explicit and implicit techniques of writing. In each case both elements motivate and explain one another and the final result is a harmonious co-existence and interplay of both “pictures on the same photographic plate” in creating an artistically satisfactory literary work. Since they constitute “one half” of the material of the novel, explicit ideas play many important roles; they provide the basis and the starting point for the whole work (parody of chivalric romances), they also determine the choice of characters (mainly Don Quixote and the other learned figures as opposed to Sancho Panza), and the choice of language and style. Finally, they motivate the action of the novel. The importance of explicit ideas is stressed by Cervantes himself when he states that a good writer may demonstrate the subtlety of Ulysses, the piety of Aeneas, the valour of Achilles, the misfortunes of Hector, the treachery of Sinon, the amity of Eurysalus, the liberality of Alexander, the resolution of Caesar, the clemency and truth of Trajan, the fidelity of Zopyrus, the prudence of Cato, and finally, all those parts that make a worthy man perfect; one whiles by placing them all in one subject, another by distributing them among many; and this being done, and set out in a pleasing style and a witty fashion, that approacheth as near as is possible unto the truth, will questionless remain a work of many fair drafts, which being accomplished will represent such beauty and perfection as shall fully attain to the best end aimed at in all writing; that is, as I have said, jointly to instruct and delight: for the irregularity and liberality of those books give[s] to the author the means to show himself an epic, lyric, tragedian, and comedian, with all other things which the most graceful and pleasant sciences of poetry and oratory include in themselves; for epics may be as well written in prose as in verse. [Part II, Chap. XX, pp. 500-501]48

This lengthy quotation seems justified in that it not only shows Cervantes’s own style (e.g. enumerations), his ideal of the novel and his stress on truth, edification and entertainment, but also reveals the author’s awareness of the possibilities of the form designed by him and the freedom with which he can make use of the achievements of all other literary kinds, conventions and genres in order to realize his aim. Moreover, this ideal is being realized in the novel since the book contains almost all the techniques encountered in Elizabethan fiction and, as a result of using them all in one work, Cervantes’s achievement is quite new and unknown to earlier writings. However, one has to wait for the results of the strong influence of Don Quixote in English fiction till the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, intellectual satire flourished mainly in poetry and drama,49 while English prose writers continued and developed genres practised earlier, such as 47

For an exceptionally good and exhaustive analysis of all types of quotations in Don Quixote see D. Danek, op.cit., pp. 98-108; see also H. Meyer: Das Zitat in der Erzählkunst. Zur Geschichte und Poetik des europäische Romans, Stuttgart 1961. 48 Miguel de Cervantes: The Delightful History of the Most Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of the Mancha, tr. by Thomas Shelton, New York 1909. 49 In poetry - Cleveland, Butler, Marvell, Dryden, Pope; in drama - Dryden, Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve; cf. J. Strzetelski’s introduction to Butler’s Hudibras [Wrocław 1970] and G. Sinko’s introduction to Angielska komedia Restauracji [Wrocław 1962]; other writers influenced by the tradition include J. Hales, J.

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allegory (the prominent example being, obviously, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, 1676), symposia, banquets and sessions of the poets (e.g. Bachelor’s Banquet, 1603, and the books by Coryate, Peacham, Suckling, Coppinger, and others up to Hunt’s Feast of the Poets, 1811), dialogues (e.g., an imitation of Lucian in King’s Dialogues of the Dead, 1699), “characters” (cf. note 10 above), and, finally, “anatomies” (from those of Stubbes, Nash, Harington, through Donne, Andrews, Butler, Hutton, Denham, Halifax, up to Macnish’s Anatomy of Drunkenness, 1827). Among the latter, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy [1621] gained perhaps the greatest popularity and it should be mentioned on account of its influence, among others, on Laurence Sterne. Its full title sufficiently describes its content and structure: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What It Is. With all the Kindes, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostickes, and Severall Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their Severall Sections, Members and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut up. By Demecritus Junior. What strikes one in this curious work of learning is the precision and order of the whole book, its encyclopaedic knowledge and sense of humour, the great freedom with which the author moves from one subject to another, so that in spite of the form of a treatise and the pretense of a scientific medical work, The Anatomy of Melancholy covers the whole life of man, including the problems of social and political reform which are discussed side by side with remarks concerning bodily and mental health. From the point of view of this study, the book is interesting mainly owing to its orderly presentation of vast scientific knowledge and its author’s erudition shown in innumerable quotations from the Bible and Church Fathers, from Greek and Roman writers, up to Renaissance authors, free digressions and occasional satirical touches. All these features exemplified still another possibility of the treatment of explicit ideas, an example to be followed by many writers of fiction and ridiculed later on by the famous members of the Scriblerus Club. 4. Passing on to the eighteenth century in England one enters the age which witnessed the unquestionable birth of the new genre which was given the name of “the novel” only at the end of the century. It seems significant, however, that already in the first decades of its existence the novel developed two basic types which are clearly opposed to one another thus illustrating the thesis about the opposition of genre - countergenre as a principle of constructing systems of literary genres suggested by C. Guillén.50 This opposition is demonstrated by Swift’s attitude to Defoe, and then by Fielding’s attitude to Richardson. Even in such a classical study on the beginning of the novel as Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, the author is always forced to stress numerous exceptions to his criterion of “formal realism” and, as a result, Swift is totally excluded from the study, while the case of Fielding is a constant source of trouble - hence the continuous recurrence of the phrase “except Fielding” and then the unavoidable conclusion that Fielding’s Tom Jones is a novel only to some extent, since it contains many features of other genres, such as the picaresque narrative, comic drama and occasional essay. 51 Taylor, F. Godwin and others - cf. D. Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century. 1600-1660, Oxford 1948, pp. 54-56, 314-351. 50 C. Guillén, op.cit., Chap. 5 “Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque”, especially pp. 146-158. 51 I. Watt: The Rise of the Novel, Berkeley 1957, Chap. I; it is interesting to compare Watt’s own opinion about this study presented under the title “Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel”, Novel. A Forum on

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It should be obvious by now that it is precisely the group of those novels which are excluded from Watt’s criterion of “formal realism” that would be of main interest in this paper, i.e., the novels which constitute an exact “opposition” to the main stream of “realistic” fiction, primarily because of the lack of any significant functions of explicit ideas in the latter category. The works of Defoe and Richardson, although they do contain some explicit ideas owing chiefly to the technique of the first-person narrative (either in the form of a diary or in the epistolary form), are too much focused on character study, chronological development of “natural” (as opposed to a “contrived”) plot, and undisguised moralizing to permit speaking about the dialectic occurrence of ideas which are generally reduced to plain didacticism. The characters in these novels usually represent social classes with relatively little education and, apart from dwelling on some more or less obvious moral issues, they rarely employ their limited intellectual resources in speculative considerations of abstract matters, the material world being of much greater importance to them. In other words, this trend of “realistic” novel represents almost a complete reversal of the relationship between explicit and implicit techniques of writing; while in the Platonic dialogue implicit techniques were almost non-existent, here they certainly predominate over explicit ideas as the material for a literary work. Something similar may be said about the novels of Smallett, though for slightly different reasons. The writer, who acknowledged Lesage’s Gil Blas, a typical picaresque narrative, as a predecessor and model for his Roderick Random, seems more interested in realistic depiction of rascaldom, travel and adventure than in explicit ideas; as such, he belongs to the same group with Defoe and Richardson, although he lacks their constant drive to moralizing. (Only in his Adventures of an Atom, a brutal satire on British public affairs, may one look for some elements of Rabelais and the Menippean satire; moreover, Smallett also translated Cervantes [1755] and Voltaire [1761-1764].) Since the realistic novel of the eighteenth century is very distant from any writings which were preoccupied with ideas presented explicitly, attention will be paid mainly to the second trend of the English eighteenth-century novel, a trend which seems much more representative of the Age of Reason and which continued the tradition of intellectual satire. A pure embodiment of the Menippean satire is encountered already in the first work to be mentioned here, in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels [1726]. Many of his critics have indicated numerous similarities between this tradition and Swift’s book; for instance, Donoghue writes: We think of Swift’s book as a travel book with the difference of parody; an anatomy; a comedy of Humours; an evening of variety turns, in four parts; a spoof of ‘the extraordinary voyage’; a new Satyricon; another Golden Ass.52

However, apart from making his book more topical, Swift also modified the form and one of such modifications may be found in the conception of the protagonist, Lemuel Gulliver, the apparent author of the manuscript, who plays a double role in it. The same narrative convention was used earlier by Defoe; however, Gulliver, “a simple plain teachable man of unspoiled intelligence”, can show the absurdity of some facts (e.g. the fantastic laboratories in Book III),53 owing to his Fiction, Spring 1968, I:3, pp. 205-218, where he confesses to an omission of a whole literary category which he calls “Augustan fiction”, p. 216. 52 Cf., e.g., D. Donoghue: Jonathan Swift. A Critical Introduction, Cambridge 1969, pp. 163, 161-2; see also J. M. Bullitt: Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire, Cambridge 1961, p. 41; W. E. Yeomans: “The Houyhnhnm as Menippean Horse”, College English, March 1966, XXVII:6, pp. 449-455. 53 Cf. R. S. Crane: The Idea of the Humanities, op.cit., vol. II, Chap. “The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the History of Ideas”.

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common sense, but, at the same time, his own naiveté and ungrounded optimistic illusions are also revealed to make him different from Robinson Crusoe. These features of Gulliver can be seen in Book III, Chapter 10, or the whole “brain-washing” fragment of Book IV. In other words, Swift showed both sides of the first-person narrative technique. One should also mention the technique by which Gulliver’s disillusionment is disclosed and this is, again, mostly the technique of dialogue which is one of the most important modes of presentation used with extreme brilliance particularly in the last two Books of the novel. Simplifying the problem, one may say that the plot follows the pattern: arrival at a new place (mostly as a result of a ship-wreck or some other accident which is always described in a matterof-fact manner), and a sequence of visits or sightseeing trips always accompanied by long discussions, events of other kinds or unusual adventures becoming less and less frequent in subsequent parts of the novel. It should be stressed that all the interlocutors of Gulliver come from the upper, well-educated classes, including kings and monarchs, and that they all are fairly talkative. As a result of the employment of this mode of presentation and such a choice of characters, the novel is full of explicit and syncretic ideas (to give a few examples: the offer of Gulliver to the kind of the Brobdingnags concerning gun powder, II, 7; the discussion about the Immortals, III, 10; or the dispute about lying, IV, 4). Since the theme of a voyage, as in classical satire, is obviously a pretext only, and the character of Gulliver remains a two-dimensional figure throughout the book,54 while the construction is loose and episodic, the structurally unifying element can be seen primarily in explicit ideas and original methods of writing, as Bullitt rightly points out: “the greatness of Swift’s writing lies both in the intellectual content of his satire and in his technical and inventive brilliance”.55 He then enumerates Swift’s techniques of satire such as: exposure by ridicule, invective, diminution, irony, mechanization, artifice, use of puppets etc. The importance of explicit ideas will be even more strongly emphasized if one recalls G. K. Chesterton’s statement that “True satire is always, so to speak, a variation or fantasia upon the air of pure logic” 56 and then one encounters in the novel numerous examples of Swift’s use of the “razor” of his logic in the whole realm of human life and thought, although the results of such an “operation” proved extremely unpleasant for humanity. Almost as broad a range of topics and as keen an interest in the basic problems of human existence may be found in the works of the second great satirist and humorist of the eighteenth century in England, Henry Fielding, although the comparison of the two writers may be misleading if applied to their novelistic techniques. Fielding’s concern with various kinds of comedy and satire and his interest in abstract ideas can be seen already in his earliest writings and, since like Smollett, he began his career as a dramatist, evidence of it may be found in such plays as e.g. The Author’s Farce And the Pleasures of the Town, Tom Thumb the Great, The Covent Garden Tragedy, as well as in his translations and imitations of Moliére and Cervantes (e.g. Don Quixote in England). The latter title indicates perhaps the strongest literary influence exerted on Fielding, the influence which Fielding acknowledged in the title of his first novel: The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr Abraham Adams. Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote [1742]. The same year saw the publication of A Journey from the World to the Next, a work written “in imitation of the manner” of Fielding’s 54

Cf. H. Davies: Jonathan Swift. Essays on his Satire and Other Studies, New York 1964, pp. 162-163. J. M. Bullitt, op.cit., p. VII. 56 Quoted after Bullitt, op.cit., p. 68. 55

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favourite classical writer, Lucian. In Tom Jones [1749] Fielding provided a list of his literary influences in one of his famous invocations: Come, thou that has inspired thy Aristophanes, thy Lucian, thy Rabelais, thy Moliére, thy Shakespeare, thy Swift, thy Marivaux, fill my pages with humour; till mankind learn the good nature to laugh only the follies of others, and the humility to grieve at their own. [XIII, 1, p. 157] 57

It should not seem surprising that with the inspiration of such masters, Fielding’s comedies, novels, satires, and brilliant essays, may be regarded in many respects as at least partial continuation of the tradition of the Menippean satire. Paradoxically enough, it was just the influence of this literary convention that turned out to be the source of numerous objections against some aspects of Fielding’s writings. It has already been mentioned that many critics place Fielding apart from the main stream of the realistic novel in England or that they even question the use of the term “novel” in relation to his works. Even in the case of Fielding’s masterpiece, Tom Jones, they object to his use of twodimensional characters or the lack of depth and height in their presentation, not to mention the faults of the morality of his characters which are often pointed out. Fielding’s intrusive narrative technique which breaks the realistic convention and turns the novel into something like “an intimate conversation” has also been criticised, as has been too much “telling” instead of “showing”, his longueurs, lack of motivation for the tale of the Man of the Hill etc. 58 All these objections seem to indicate precisely those features of Tom Jones which are also typical of the Menippean satire, i.e., a genre which usually ignores the question of “depth” in characters and which employs all possible means for the expression of an intellectual purpose. All such criticism seems to be caused by the evaluation of the novel as realistic fiction and by the failure of the critics to see elements of the Menippean tradition as well as the place and functions of explicit ideas in the whole structure and the consequences of their introduction for particular aspects of the novel. Generally speaking, explicit ideas appear mainly in the author’s “prefaces” (i.e., the first chapters of each Book), narrator’s digressions and direct addresses to the reader, quotations, inserted tales, and in monologues and dialogues of those characters who may be said to possess some “Learning”, i.e., in the “lectures” of Mr. Allworthy, quarrels between Thwackum and Square and their various theories, and debates between Tom Jones and Partridge (the latter being very similar to those between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza). The importance and functions and these explicit ideas vary according to the means of their presentation. As “Learning” is one of the four necessary features of a good novelist and a criterion for the evaluation of characters (cf. II, 1), it is used in some characters to reveal their false aspirations and vanity (e.g. in Thwackum and Square), in others - as a means of comic characterization (e.g. Partridge and his Latin), and in still others - to prove that knowledge alone does not suffice in life and that other features (in this case - experience) are also necessary (e.g. Allworthy, the Man of the Hill) - i.e. to indicate a moral. However, when presented by the narrator, explicit ideas become a kind of a generalizing commentary, often parodic or humorous, and in the prefaces they constitute almost an explicit theory of novel-writing (in this respect

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H. Fielding: The History of Tom Jones, London 1955; all references are made to this edition. A list of such objections is provided by G. Saintsbury in his introduction to Tom Jones [op.cit.] and by I. Watt [The Rise of the Novel, Chap. IX] and by R. S. Crane in “The Concept of Plot ...”, op.cit. 58

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Fielding continues Cervantes’s practice of including reflections on the process of writing, although he differs from Cervantes, since these parts are separated from the rest of the novel). Contrary to the opinions presented by some critics,59 one should stress the importance of the prefaces, which are “essentially necessary to this kind of writing”, as Fielding claims [V, 1, p. 151]. According to F. Kaplan there are two plots in Tom Jones. The first is that sequence of events that Coleridge thought so perfectly contrived and that R. S. Crane analyzed in his essay on the theory of plot. The second is contained in the development of a series of ideas in each of the first chapters of the eighteen books of the novel. Together they form a subject, which in its progress is always related to the progress of the main plot, whose major theme is how and why the author writers the novel as he does ... Without a thoughtful understanding of the relationship between the prefaces and the remainder of the novel, Tom Jones hardly shows to its intended advantage.60

The “two plots” seem thus parallel to the “two pictures on the same photographic plate” in Don Quixote. Moreover, this is further supported by Fielding’s theory of contrast (presented in the preface to Book V), according to which the prefaces “are so many scenes of serious artfully interwoven, in order to contrast and set off the rest” [V, 1, p. 154]. A good analysis of the prefaces and the connection between them and other chapters may be found in a detailed and convincing article by F. Kaplan, mentioned above; what may be added is that the prefaces not only explain some basic problems of writing the novel - such as the questions concerning the choice of style, the relationship between romantic and realistic elements, time construction, use of quotations and explicit ideas in the novel, but they also include essays on some moral problems under the general heading of “Human Nature”. As a result, the reader is carefully guided by the narrator in his understanding of, and attitude to, the characters and events throughout the whole novel, the general framework of which provides the universal meaning of the whole work expressed explicitly. As Kaplan writes: The fable is made meaningful by being embedded in a realistic context, and the contrivances, the rewards, the allegorical aspects, the idealizations, the rhetoric, the caricature, in short, all the artifices of Tom Jones are tools in a larger scheme of balancing fact and fable that the prefaces are part of and help to explain.61

This is precisely the kind of balance mentioned in the description of Don Quixote. However, the excellence of plot construction and the isolation of explicit ideas from the rest of the novel seem to indicate the presence of some “new” elements added to the tradition of the Menippean satire. One of these new elements is an increase in the importance of implicit techniques which brings about a relative independence of the presented world from the material of explicit ideas. It should also be added that, like Swift and unlike Richardson, Fielding introduced into the novel his wide knowledge which allowed him to attempt an analysis of the whole society, instead of a study in individual psychology. Before passing on to the third great English satirist of this fruitful period in the history of English novel, a short remark must be made about one of the most influential French writers of the age, namely, Voltaire and his contes philosophiques. Before the Revolution, French prose writers were primarily philosophers and this feature can best be seen in the works of Voltaire. Very well educated, so popular in the whole Europe as to be an adviser to kings, well known in 59

A list of such writers is given by F. Kaplan: “Fielding’s Novel and Novels: The Prefaces and the Plot of Tom Jones”, Studies in English Literature. 1500-1900, Summer 1973, XIII:3, p. 536. 60 Ibid., pp. 535-536. 61 Ibid., p. 549.

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England which he visited and described in his Lettres philosophique or Lettres anglaises [1734], Voltaire survives today owing mainly to his contes philosophiques, such as Zadig [1747], Le Monde come il va [1748], Candide [1759] or L’Ingenu [1767], while his tragedies and various kinds of poetry are generally forgotten. The most important feature of his philosophical fables is their great precision of construction. As Lanson and Tuffrau write, everything appeals to reason in these fables and everything is meant to prove an argument, 62 while the author’s inventiveness in devising events to illustrate his thesis is amazing. These works are of interest for this survey and its main problem of the place and role of explicit ideas in fiction, primarily because in order to achieve his aim Voltaire makes his male characters philosophers, thus continuing the ancient tradition of reasoners in literature. The abstract, explicit theories and debates of these philosophers, however, are always subjected to various experiments and tests of “reality”, so that there is usually a kind of moral to be expressed explicitly at the end of the fables; Candide, for instance, ends with a conclusion: “Travaillons sans raisonner, dit Martin; c’est le seul moyen de rendre la vie supportable”, and so does Le Monde comme il va: “si tout n’est pas bien, tout est passable”. 63 Owing to the relative freedom of form in which “illustrativeness” was the main criterion of selecting events and in which dialogue was frequent, because debates between philosophers made possible a dialectic presentation of abstract problems, Voltaire could deal with every topic current in his epoch in an almost journalistic manner (the debates finding resolution in illustrative events). Voltaire’s frequent use of fantasy, e.g., the six kings in one inn in Candide, Chapter 26, the theme of travel through real and invented lands, inserted tales, bawdy jokes and obscenities, all these features indicate again the Menippean satire as the literary tradition to which his contes philosophiques rightfully belong. The influence of Voltaire can already be seen in an English work which appeared only a year after the publication of Candide, and in which in one of the numerous invocations the author wrote: Bright Goddess! If thou art not too busy with Candid and Cunegund’s affairs, - take Tristram Shandy’s under thy protection also. [I, 9, p. 13]64

This author was Laurence Sterne who published the first two books of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. in January, 1760. As in Fielding’s Tom Jones, Sterne’s invocations indicate the literary tradition to which he was indebted and his awareness of that tradition. At one point Sterne wrote: My father in one of his best explanatory moods - in eager pursuit of a metaphysical point into the very regions, where clouds and thick darkness would soon have encompassed it about; - my uncle Toby in one of the finest dispositions for it in the world; - his head like a smack-jack; - the funnel unswept, and the ideas whirling round and round about in it, all obfuscated and darkened over with fuliginous matter! - By the tomb-stone of LUCIAN - if it is in being - if not, why then by his ashes! by the ashes of my dear RABELAIS, and dearer CERVANTES! - my father and my uncle Toby’s discourse upon TIME and ETERNITY - was a discourse devoutly to be wished for! ... [III, 19, p. 137]

Apart from indicating the literary convention in which Sterne himself placed his work, the quotation also explains the structural status and role of explicit ideas in the novel. In Sterne’s 62

Lanson and Tuffrau, op.cit., p. 337. Voltaire: Romans, Paris 1929, vol. I; all references are made to this edition. 64 L. Sterne: Tristram Shandy, London 1956; all references are made to this edition. 63

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work once again they become the material for the construction of the novel although their ontological status was determined there both by the peculiar use of the novelistic tradition or, to call it more precisely, a parody of several literary conventions, and by the significant role of Locke’s theory of the association of ideas,65 which the novel illustrates; as a result of both, the whole structure of the work undergoes remarkable changes. First of all, technically speaking, the direct presentation of explicit ideas is made possible owing to a specific type of the narrator. As in Fielding, the narrator here constantly and directly addresses the reader, makes numerous digressions, and explains the process of writing the novel, which is in agreement with Sterne’s conception: “Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation” [II, 11, p. 79]. Moreover, the narrator may be regarded as a perfect example of “a learned wit” (a tradition unbroken since antiquity and in the eighteenth century continued in England in the famous Scriblerus Club, founded in 1713 by Arbuthnot, Gay, Parnell, Congreve, Lord Oxford, Atterbury, Pope and Swift)66 and the book contains copious evidence of his erudition in the form of quotations and paraphrases in various languages,67 long lists of names, titles, both real and invented, arguments, scientific data, logical reasoning etc. in the best Rabelaisian manner, brilliant generalizations provoked by trifling details, treatises, literary polemics and arguments, all introduced there intentionally by Sterne who wrote to Dr. John Eustace in 1768: “Tristram Shandy, my friend, was made and formed to baffle all criticism”.68 All such digressions become one of the most characteristic features of Sterne’s narrative; like other elements of the novel, their role is directly explained by the narrator: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; - they are the life, the soul of reading! - take them out of this book, for instance, - you might as well take the book along with them ... restore them to the writer; - he steps forth like a bridegroom, - bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail. ... For, if he begins a digression, - from that moment, I observe, his whole work stands stock still; and if he goes on with his main work, - then there is an end of his digression ... [I] have so complicated and involved the digressive and progressive movements, ..., that the whole machine, in general, has been kept a-going”. [I, 23, pp. 53-54]

Apart from showing the role of digressions and their relation to the division of the book into chapters (cf. the chapter about chapters, IV, 10) the quotation confirms the author’s understanding of the nature of time and his awareness of the interrelationship between action and narration; in fact, the latter consists mainly of digressions which interrupt the action, although, as W. Chwalewik writes, there is always a perfect balance between the digressions and the plot. 69 Since Sterne is not much interested in facts or events, which traditionally constitute the plot of the novel, but concentrates on the opinions which these facts provoke in the minds of his characters and his narrator, the action of the whole work is both constantly interrupted and 65

See a highly controversial study by Maskell Duke: “Locke and Sterne, or Can Philosophy Influence Literature?”, Essays in Criticism, January 1973, XXIII:1, pp. 22-40, and his conclusion: “Locke influenced Sterne, but it was not a philosophical influence, but rhetorical, just like influence of Rabelais, Cervantes, Burton, Montaigne, Erasmus, Bacon, Swift”, p. 39. 66 G. Sampson: The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, Cambridge 1970, pp. 392-393. 67 For sources of Sterne’s quotations and the problem of his “stealing” from other writers see G. Saintsbury’s introduction to the above edition of Tristram Shandy, op.cit. 68 Quoted after H. Moglen’s review of a book by W. V. Holtz, Image and Immortality: A Study of ‘Tristram Shandy’ [Providence 1970] published in College English, April 1972, XXXIII:7, p. 848. 69 Cf. his introduction to the Polish translation of Tristram Shandy, Warszawa 1974, p. 344.

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greatly reduced. Because of all the interruptions one may even say that the action, in the traditional sense of the term, consists mainly of the retardation of events since “thought” is measured by a different kind of time than “life”, or, in other words, “life” is constantly interrupted by “thought” [III, 18]. The same concepts about association of ideas and time are applied both to the narrator and to the characters. Like the narrator, all the characters have their own private “streams” of associations of ideas regardless of their education, although they, naturally, differ according to their own “Hobby-Horses” [I, 8]. Let us compare, for instance, Sterne’s own presentation of the different ways of thinking of Walter Shandy and Corporal Trim: “My father - a man of deep reading - prompt memory - with Cato, and Seneca, and Epictetus, at his fingers ends. - The corporal - with nothing - to remember - of no deeper reading than his master-roll - or greater names at his fingers ends, than the contents of it. The one proceeding from period to period, by metaphor and allusion, and striking the fancy as he went along (as men of wit and fancy do) with the entertainment and pleasantry of his pictures and images. The other, without wit or antithesis, or point, or turn, this way of that; but leaving the images on one side, and the picture on the other, going straight forwards as nature could lead him ...” [V, 6, pp. 263-264]

All the characters in Sterne are thus primarily thinking and reasoning human beings, whether they use their knowledge and intellect, like Walter Shandy, or their commonsense, like Corporal Trim or Uncle Toby. As such, they stand, however, somewhere between Fielding’s types and Richardson’s psychologically developed figures. With the first-person narration justifying the narrator’s ironic distance from his eccentric characters and his omniscience about what goes on in their minds on the one hand, and on the other - with his external observation of, and approach to, their oddities, Sterne may be said to have offered a reconciliation between the mutually contrasted techniques of Richardson and Fielding: Sterne brought explicit ideas back into the structure of the novel on the basis of a new theoretical foundation. In this way Tristram Shandy seems to combine the features of the Menippean satire with those of the novel of manners, psychological novel and personal essay.70 Sterne’s role in the history of English literature seems quite similar to that of Diderot’s in French literature, although this time it was the Englishman who influenced the Frenchman, and not vice versa - “half a page of Sterne becomes the three hundred pages of Jacques le Fataliste” as the authors of the history of French literature modestly admit. 71 Nevertheless, regardless of the question of influence, a statement of the Goncourt brothers seems as valid to-day as it did in 1855: comparing Voltaire and Diderot, the French critics wrote that the former brought to an end the epic, fable, epigram, tragedy, and that he was the last brain of old France, while Diderot was the first genius of new France because he began the modern novel, drama, and art criticism. 72 Contrary to the “mathematical” precision of construction in Voltaire, the fictional works of Diderot, mainly Jacques le Fataliste et so Maître [1773] and Le Neveu de Rameau [1760], seem very chaotic and their didacticism, though always present, is better hidden under implicit 70

Cf. Z. Sinko’s preface to the Polish translation of Podróż sentymentalna, Wrocław 1973, p. 28. Cf. Lanson and Tuffrau, op.cit., p. 349; see also the following fragment by Diderot: “Voici le second paragraphe, copie de la vie de Tristram Shandy, a moins que l’entretien de Jacques le Fataliste et de son maitre ne soit anterieur a cet ouvrage, et que le ministre Sterne ne soit le plagiaire, ce que je ne crois pas, mais par une estime toute particuliere de M. Sterne, que je distingue de la plupart des litterateurs de sa nation, dont l’usage assez frequent est de nous voler et de nous dire des injures”, Jacques le Fataliste in his Oeuvres romanesques, Paris 1959, p. 778. 72 Cf. T. Boy-Żeleński, op.cit., p. 56. 71

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techniques. First of all, Diderot’s works are written wholly in the form of dialogue, a brilliant, lively and capricious discussion between a master and his servant which, in respect to the choice of characters and the method of writing, resembles some medieval debates (e.g. Spanish Libro de los exemplos del conde Lucanor, 1335, by Don Juan Manuel, where Lucanor always asks for advice his servant Patronio who answers by telling a tale or fable with a short moral at the end).73 The narrator in Diderot is much more active and intrusive then in the medieval work yet he uses the same digressive method of telling his tale as in Sterne’s novel; e.g., “n’ont pas assez compris, lecteur, causons ensemble jusqu’á ce soient rejoints”74 and he then begins a different tale which is again interrupted by the action or dialogue of the main plot and characters who, when, for instance, going to bed, allow the narrator to continue his tale and so on. The narrator sometimes becomes so talkative or so much absorbed by the problems discussed that he must stop and give a description of the situation: Lecteur, j’avais oublié de vous peindre le site de trois personnages dont il s’agit ici, Jacques, son maître et l’hôtesse; faut de cette attention, vous les avez entendus parler, mais vous ne les avez point vus. [p. 133]

As we see, he also explains some aspects of the process of the writing of his tale (e.g. his reasons for the use of dirty words and stories, for not quoting letters or speeches, for the author’s vocabulary in the mouths of his characters - “j’ai été moins vrai, mais plus court”, p. 763, etc.). It is also interesting to observe how Diderot constantly tries to break the literary convention and give his tale the status of empirical reality;75 this is seen in his constant emphasis on the truth of his tale, e.g.: Il est bien évident que je ne fais pas un roman, puisque je néglige ce qu’un romancier ne manquerait pas d’employer. Celui qui prendrait ce que j’ecris pour la vérité, serait peutìtre moins dans l’erreur que celui qui le prendrait pour une fable. [. 505]

or Mon projet est d’etre vrai, je l’ai rempli. [p. 731]

This is also seen in the choice of topics discussed which are much closer to the problems currents at that time in France than the more speculative and absurd issues in Sterne. Finally, the presence of some lyrical elements, strong realistic tendencies, as well as a much fuller and clearer delineation of characters, also make Diderot different from Sterne and, at the same time, indicate those developments in the form of the novel which were to become more and more important in the years to follow. It should be added that the tradition continued and modified by Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot, was further pursued in Germany in the so-called “verwilderte Roman”, a genre characterized by “a play with the novelistic forms”, a mixture of prose and poetry, and of different literary genres, as well as discourses about the methods of novel writing and their criticism.76 73

Cf. Angel del Rio: Historia literatury hiszpańskiej, [1963], tr. by K. Piekarec, Warszawa 1970, vol. I,

p. 103. 74

All page references are made to Diderot’s Oeuvres romanesques, op. cit. D. Danek, op.cit., p. 150 76 D. Danek writes about the theory of “der verwilderte Roman”: “Teoria ta, która wysuwa powieść na naczelne miejsce w hierarchii współczesnych gatunków literackich, z jednej strony, postuluje mieszanie różnych gatunków literackich w powieści, i to zarówno prozaicznych jak wierszowanych (można by powiedzieć, że jest to prawie Bachtinowska ‘menipejska’ koncepcja powieści, ma ona jednak oczywiście charakter nie opisowy, jak u 75

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5. With Sterne and Diderot, however, the period of the greatest development and flourishing of the Menippean tradition in prose fiction came to an end. The Augustan Age, with its belief in reason and intellect, provided a new theoretical basis and literary techniques for the inclusion and organic integration of explicit ideas into the literary structure, and was particularly conducive to this kind of writing. The next century, however, did not choose the profit by those achievements of the novel of the eighteenth century which dealt with explicit ideas; the predominance of reason gave way to the general supremacy of emotion. Explicit ideas, if present at all, were usually connected with the narrator and appeared as his generalizations and moralizing. According to S. Eile, the English model of novel (as different from the French) is characterized by the primary importance of character, lack of abstract ideas and the “representation” based on richness of details and multiplication of examples rather than on the “intensification” of the phenomena described. 77 Sticking to the point of view adopted here, one should add that there occurred a definite break in the nineteenth century between explicit ideas and the world presented. As J. McCormick writes, the general practice of the novelist was to say “I shall now allow my characters to go along by themselves while I describe an Idea, reader”, and, as he further states with some exaggeration, The continental novel in the nineteenth century was more hospitable to ideas than either the English or the American; the work of Rousseau and Constant, Goethe, Stendhal, Dostoevsky and Flaubert was most frequently dominated by ideas, by a discernible intellectual purpose that was quite literally foreign to Anglo-American practice. An occasional writer like George Eliot could cope with ideas, though even she failed more often than she succeeded.78

Naturally, with such conspicuous lack of interest in explicit ideas, there is not much material in the main stream of the nineteenth century English novel for this survey, although in some secondary Victorian novels, like Disraeli’s Sybil or Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere explicit ideas did predominate. That is why attention will be paid rather to the novels less characteristic of the English novel in that epoch, namely, the novels of T. L. Peacock and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Peacock fits here exceptionally well. An anonymous reviewer of The Literary Gazette wrote: It would be difficult to say what his books are; for they are neither romances, novels, tales, nor treatises, but a mixture of all these combined. 79

The author of Nightmare Abbey [1818, the novel which provoked the above remarks], Headlong Hall [1816], or Gryll Grange [1860], T. L. Peacock, wrote works which are now called “novels of talk” and “satirical romances”. His characters, who always remain schematic, are invariably tego badacza, ale programowy), z drugiej strony, formułuje żądanie, aby powieść zawierała swą własną metodologię: refleksję nad sobą samą i własną swoją krytykę”, op.cit., p. 202; see also W. K. Wimsatt and C. Brooks, op.cit., p. 751; Heinrich Spiero, Geschichte des Deutschen Romans, Berlin 1950, pp. 71 ff, 101; also M. Szyrocki, op.cit., pp. 347-351. 77 S. Eile: Światopogląd powieści, op.cit., p. 184. 78 J. McCormick: Catastrophe and Imagination. An Interpretation of the Recent English and American Novel, London 1957, pp. 78, 40. 79 Quoted after C. Dawson: His Fine Wit. A Study of Thomas Love Peacock, London 1970, p. 159.

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philosophers, scientists, artists, and gentlemen of leisure. They are characterized, first of all, by their names of Greek and Latin origin, the meanings of which are carefully explained by the author in footnotes (an ancient tradition, continued much earlier, among others, by Boccaccio).80 They discourse on a number of subjects in long, essayistic monologues abundantly quoting ancient and contemporary authorities, in the best tradition of the Scriblerus Club. The setting, as the titles of these novels indicate, is usually a castle or a country residence to which various characters pay visits, where they participate in meals, parties, walks, but, above all, talk. Time and action have a constant framework of a love-affair ending with a wedding, while the narrator is always omniscient and omnipresent, though not intrusive. The style is changeable: from poetic descriptions of nature and inserted ballads and poems, to a scientific and learned language of academic scholars. When C. Dawson writes that Peacock ... gradually lets his characters, especially the ‘select party of philosophers and dilettanti’, the developing social group, enact the traditional roles of comedy. They continue to spout their ideas, while what they say becomes increasingly severed from what they do. 81

by “traditional” he means following the model created by writers earlier than Peacock when he mentions Amory, Graves, Bage, Hurd, Athenaeus, as well as Petronius, Lucian, and Plato. This indicates a return exactly to the Menippean satire and the Platonic dialogue. As can easily be seen even in this brief sketch, Peacock’s novels, which belong roughly to Romanticism and to the early Victorian Era, are completely different from the conventional novel of that epoch because instead of concentrating on character-study, the development of “the ladder-like motion of the plot”82 and richness of realistic details, he offers label-characters (Dawson argues convincingly that these novels belong to the category of roman á clef),83 a schematic and thus insignificant action, and a mixture of styles and literary genres. The statement about the importance of various literary conventions may also be made in relation to W. M. Thackeray’s greatest novel, Vanity Fair [1847]. The relationship between elements of such genres as the novel of sentiment, chivalric romance, novel of manners, classical epic and the pastoral, as well as the characters and plots in Vanity Fair have been studied in great detail by J. Loofbourow; he also examined the novelist’s use of the so-called romantic style which, according to him, Thackeray owes partly to Sterne and Carlyle. 84 What is interesting for the purpose of this survey, however, is the fact that in Vanity Fair “the characters do not think” and the whole “thinking” is done by the reflective narrator; thus the novel confirms the earlier statement about the separation of explicit ideas from the presented world and their transfer to the narrator who explains the motives of the characters’ behaviour, or on the ethics of their conduct, and comments on the process of writing the novel; for instance: I know that the tune I am piping is a very mild one (although there are some terrific chapters coming presently) ... We might have treated this subject in a genteel, or in the romantic, or in the facetious manner. Suppose ... 80

Cf. M. Brahmer’s introduction to the Polish edition of Dekameron, Warszawa 1972, vol. I, p. 13; see also J. H. Whitfield: A Short History of Italian Literature, Harmondsworth 1969, pp. 601-672. 81 C. Dawson, op.cit., p. 173. 82 This metaphor is used by Alain Friedman in his article about the English novel included in The Twentieth Century Mind. History, Ideas, and Literature in Britain, London 1972, vol. I 1900-1918, pp. 414-415. 83 C. Dawson, op.cit., pp. 160-161; among others, Dawson identifies Coleridge and Shelley among Peacock’s characters. 84 J. Loofbourow: Thackeray and the Form of Fiction, Princeton 1964, pp. 3-13, 73-91.

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But my readers must hope for no such romance, only a homely story ... Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history? 85

The narrative tradition points thus directly to the conversational manner of Sterne and Diderot (cf. the very beginning of Chapter 16 in Vanity Fair: “How they were married is not of the slightest consequence to anybody”, p. 157, and almost the same statement in the first sentences of Jacques le Fataliste), while the convention of the puppet-show presented in the preface “Before the Curtain” is a traditional association between life and theatre (cf. the discussion of this by Fielding, VII, 1, entitled “A Comparison between the World and the Stage”). In agreement with this narrative tradition, Thackeray’s narrator subjects several literary genres to a critical analysis and introduces his own modifications, e.g.: Oh brother wearer of motley! Are there not moments when one grows sick of grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells? This, dear friends and companions, is my amiable object - to walk with you through the Fair, to examine the shops there; and that we should all come home after the flare, and the noise, and the gaiety, and be perfectly miserable in private. [p. 191]

Apart from this correction to Sterne, other differences are much more important since they concern such features of the novel as: indirect characterization and characters who are regarded as “refractions of allusive colour rather than instruments of rational insight”; realism and richness of details in depicting the social aspects of the panoramic display of English society; lack of elements of fantasy and idealization; use of poetic devices, for instance, the so-called “cumulative” metaphor with emphasis on expression rather than illustration; lack of dialogue containing logical analysis or reasoning; and, finally, the so-called “language of emotional”, a technique to be perfected by some later novelists,86 among others, by George Eliot of whom E. K. Brown writes that she was “our first, and I should argue, our greatest novelist of ideas”. 87 Regardless of Brown’s reasons for using the term “novel of ideas” in relation to the writings of George Eliot (the question of the generic category will be discussed in greater detail in Part 3, Chapter II below), it may be added that she in fact re-introduced intelligence and knowledge in the form of explicit ideas into fiction, thus giving rise to a long series of “more speculative” novelists till our days, when intellectuality has become a distinctive feature of the 20th-century novel. 6. It seems appropriate to finish this fairly general and selective survey of the relationship between explicit ideas and fiction with George Eliot’s novels, which David Cecil calls “the point of junction between the old novel and the new”, 88 since this remarkable woman originated numerous and significant changes which gradually developed in the last decades of the nineteenth century and flourished fully only in our century, requiring thus a separate discussion in the next chapter. At the same time, the influence of some French, German, and Russian writers also became operative in England mainly at the turn of the century but this problem will be postponed till Chapter III, devoted entirely to the situation of the novel and explicit ideas in the twentieth century. 85

W. M. Thackeray: Vanity Fair, New York 1958; all references are made to this edition. J. Loofbourow, op.cit., pp. 76, 84. 87 E. K. Brown, op.cit., p. 163. 88 Quoted after ibid., p. 163. 86

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On the basis of the first part of this survey, brought to the closing decades of the nineteenth century, it seems possible to draw some conclusions and seek answers to the questions formulated at the beginning of this Part. These questions concern the relationship between fiction and explicit ideas in historical perspective. Generally speaking, this relationship has turned out to be a constant phenomenon accompanying literature in various changeable forms since its oldest origins. Historically, this relationship seems to illustrate the well-known theory about the alternation of classical and romantic styles in the arts, with explicit ideas, i.e. something closely connected with reason, becoming more important in the “classical” periods of literary history. And thus in this survey we have observed the supremacy of explicit and syncretic ideas mostly in the periods of liberal attitudes, pluralistic world views, general freedom of sciences and arts, such as Antiquity, Renaissance, and Neoclassicism. In the Middle Ages explicit ideas, though quite important (particularly those of Christian origin), lost one of their most characteristic features, i.e. their syncretic or dialectic nature because of their subjection to a didactic purpose. Similarly, such ideas generally disappeared from English Romantic and Victorian fiction mainly because of the writers’ appeal to emotion rather than reason and because of the commonly shared antiintellectual stable ideology. It is only at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries that explicit ideas reappeared in the English novel. It is evident that their reappearance there was much later than in the continental fiction. As J. McCormick writes: [At the turn of the nineteenth century] the novel of ideas, particularly for the English and American novelists, to whom ideas were traditionally distinct from literature, took on particular importance ... The history of the novel in English differs considerably from the history of the continental novel in that the catastrophe which was brought home to England and America in 1914 had been apprehended on the Continent from Napoleonic times. This meant that intellectual content - ideas - became prominent in the continental novel long before they did in the English novel. 89

The statement about the ideas being “traditionally distinct from literature” needs a slight modification by taking into consideration the problem of modes of presentation by means of which explicit ideas could be perfectly well integrated into the literary structure or separated from other elements of that structure when imposed by the narrator. Generally speaking, explicit ideas appear in fiction as presented in [i] characters’ utterances; [ii] narrator’s commentary; [iii] quotations cited by either the former or the latter; and [iv] notes on the margin in older fiction, though the latter method was discarded later on and taken over by the narrator or charactersreasoners. According to the means of presentation, on the one hand, and on the other - the role of the narrator and characters in the whole literary structure and the type of fiction (comp., e.g., the dramatic novel, the novel of characters, the novel of action etc.), the functions of explicit ideas vary widely. When explicit ideas are presented mainly by characters, their occurrence is motivated by the conception and choice of characters, and they may have three different functions: 1.

2.

they may constitute the “material” of the whole work, when the characters are thinkers, philosophers, or, more generally, types preoccupied with abstract and explicit speculations (the Platonic dialogue, “polyphonic” medieval debates, Rabelais, Voltaire, Peacock), or, else, when the writer concentrates on the intellectual processes taking place in the characters’ minds (Sterne); they may provide a part of the “material” when the characters are advocates or 89

J. McCormick, op.cit., pp. 41, 77.

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3.

“incarnations” of an abstract theory which is one of the subjects of the work (Cervantes) or when they are the writer’s porte paroles, reasoners, men-of-wisdom etc., allowed to comment on the behaviour of other characters, expounding on some moral, philosophical or scientific problems etc. (the Menippean satire, “homophonic” medieval debates, Elizabethan fiction, and most of the others); they may serve as a means of satirical, humorous, or “serious” characterization when they appear in the utterances of some characters (the Menippean satire, Sancho Panza in Cervantes or Partridge in Fielding).

When ideas are presented by the narrator, their functions again depend on the type of the narrator and on the problems which these ideas concern. In this survey we have encountered almost exclusively various forms of the first-person narrator (Peacock being an obvious exception), such as the strictly authorial narrator (Fielding, Rabelais, Montaigne, Thackeray), the author’s stylized first-person narrator or the stylized personal narrator. The author disguised as the editor of a manuscript stands somewhere between the first two types (Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire). This type of narrator has a complete freedom of inserting any kind of digressions and generalizations wherever he finds it appropriate (Sterne provided quite valid theoretical foundations for such a procedure which can be observed in all the works mentioned in the survey). As to the problems presented by means of explicit ideas, when they concern the reflections and criticism of the work being written, explicit ideas offer the theoretical basis for the whole work presented as a positive programme or as a literary polemic (Riche in Elizabethan fiction, Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, Diderot, der verwilderte Roman); when they appear as moral, sociological, or philosophical generalizations, they have the function of a commentary concerning more (Voltaire) or less (Thackeray) illustrative events, sequences of events, the characters’ conduct or, finally, a total thesis illustrated by the whole work. In the form of acknowledged or unacknowledged quotations, explicit ideas usually serve as additional material providing new and authoritative arguments in a discussion in which they support or oppose other views. The same form of explicit ideas may also indicate some features of the narrator (a learned wit in Sterne, one full of auto-irony in Fielding etc.) and characters (to prove or ridicule their erudition; comic and satirical characterization being also practised in the form of misquotations or distorted proverbs). Finally, inclusion of fragments from invented works, quotations of letters, treatises, speeches etc., also varies the narrative procedure. Thus, since the functions of explicit ideas are so strictly connected with their modes of presentation, or the functions and shapes of such elements as the narrator and characters in the whole literary structure, explicit ideas may be structurally dominating or they may be subjected to other elements of the literary structure. However, when they are dominant, their large-scale introduction to fiction is not without some influence on the shape of other elements which, in consequence, undergo some changes typical of this kind of fiction. Generally speaking, characters usually become two-dimensional figures, presenters of ideas, or representatives of some types, while the means of characterization are limited to various kinds of labelling, i.e. indicating the occupation, good education, good birth, and, in older fiction, direct masks, meaningful names, and disguises; it is only sometimes when explicit ideas are given some “realistic” opposition of implicit techniques, that the characters reveal some psychological depth (Don Quixote being the best example here). The main role of the setting is to account for a group of characters gathered in one place, the latter being one room (symposium, a party - Peacock), a building (the inn in Cervantes, a

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country residence in Peacock, also the inns and their function as centres of meetings of various characters in Fielding, Voltaire, Diderot), a town (Paris in Rabelais), a country or a land (Arcadia, Swift). Occasionally, the setting may include objects for the “narrative analogy” (ecphrasis in Apuleius and Elizabethan fiction) and for discussion (library in Rabelais). Action, traditionally understood as a sequence of events in the presented world, is either greatly reduced or made illustrative, or, else, it follows a schematic pattern. In some extreme cases (the Platonic dialogue, Sterne, Diderot), however, it seems necessary to extend this traditional meaning of the term “action” in order to include the most significant elements, such as clashes of ideas, opinions and facts about “streams of associations of thoughts) (i.e. explicit ideas). Purposefulness and causation of the action should be sought primarily in “the search for truth” either by reaching a more or less explicit solution by means of dialogue and discussion or by ridiculing and rejecting absurd theories. This seems thus parallel to Socratic “syncretic” and “anacretic” methods of discussion, although in some later fiction both methods may be combined and their mutual relationship becomes more and more ambivalent. Time construction in this kind of fiction is relatively unimportant (unless it indicates elements of fantasy), although already in Elizabethan fiction prose writers were vaguely aware of the two different kinds of time, time of narration and dialogue and time of action proper (see pp. 57-58 ibid.), but it was only Sterne who most explicitly illustrated and made use of this double nature of time in the novel. As to the question of style in this kind of fiction, one should stress two important features: first, a mixture of almost all possible kinds of style in individual works, and, secondly, what is perhaps most relevant for this study, the constant presence of what may be called “essayistic” style in a rational, intellectual analysis of a variety of more or less trifling problems in the utterances of characters and in the narrator’s commentary; this kind of style is invariably connected with explicit ideas which may well be seen in the inner structure of individual essays by Montaigne and in the “conversational” kind of narration in Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot. Apart from the general summary of formal features of this type of fiction, this survey aimed at demonstrating a gradual increase in the number and variety of implicit techniques and their taking over the original roles of explicit methods of writing. The first implicit techniques began to appear already in the Platonic dialogue (juxtaposition in construction and labelcharacters) and then gradually, with the development of the form of dialogue, in the symposium, diatribe and the dialogue of the dead, the characters became more and more differentiated, the tone and type of their discussion changed according to the situation in which the debate took place, and such situations were also more and more varied and described in greater detail. Having thus sketched a possible beginning of the process of increase in implicit techniques, one could observe its further development in subsequent epochs, owing mainly to the inclusion of elements of other genres, so that a kind of balance was reached in the 17th and 18th-centuries fiction of Cervantes, Fielding, and Sterne. Naturally enough, from the point of view of the principle of opposition “genre - countergenre”, the same writers also contributed to the development of the “realistic” trend in fiction which was practised in the same epoch primarily by Defoe, Richardson, and Jane Austen. This latter trend was to predominate in the next literary epochs and was to eliminate explicit ideas from the fictional world, which came to be constructed from such

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“material” as manners, characters’ psychology, their situation in the material world and society etc. This survey aimed at pointing out the formal features and describing the evolution of the diachronic co-ordinate, i.e. of the literary tradition to which the so-called novel of ideas seems to belong. This statement, however, will be more fully substantiated after a more detailed analysis of Huxley’s novels, because the findings of this survey will then serve as a background for the determination of the elements taken over and the contribution of Huxley’s novel of ideas to this particular literary tradition.

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Chapter II

HUXLEY’S NOVELS OF IDEAS In the preceding chapter the interrelationship between explicit ideas and fiction in historical perspective was examined on some selected examples of works belonging to the general category of literature called, among others, “intellectual fiction”. In this chapter the material analysed will be limited to a sequence of novels by Aldous Huxley, i.e. works known as representative of the literary genre called “novels of ideas”. As the name of this genre already indicates, these works may be said to illustrate the whole problem of the relationship between explicit ideas and fiction in the twentieth century. As such, they offer abundant material for the study of the most recent developments of the phenomenon in question. The theoretical definition of the novel of ideas, which will be formulated after the analysis of Huxley’s fiction, broadened by the conclusions reached in the preceding chapter, will thus complete the diachronic co-ordinate describing the evolution of this type of literature. At the same time, this analysis should provide sufficient material for the synchronic examination of the place of the novel of ideas within the system of literary genres existing in 20th-century English fiction. In addition, the chronological order adopted in the analysis should help in determining some possible general tendencies and further potentialities in the development of this genre. All the eleven novels by Huxley have been divided into two main groups in respect to the treatment and functions of explicit ideas in these works, i.e. into “polyphonic” and “homophonic” novels. The metaphorical meanings of these adjectives are explained by M. Bachtin in the following way: a literary work is “homophonic” when it can be characterized by “ideological mono-emphasis” [“ideologiczna jednoakcentowość utworu”]1, i.e. when the idea governs the approach to the presented world, the selection and organization of the material, when it is a conclusion suggested by the whole work or when it defines the ideological position of the main protagonist;2 on the other hand, in the “polyphonic” novel the idea acquires a “dialogic” character and it always occurs in syncretic juxtaposition with other ideas or, in other words, it is only one of several equally valid ideas presented in the literary work. 3 Although it is an extremely simplified paraphrase of Bachtin’s argument, it still seems sufficient to explain the meanings of these terms which describe the basic features of Huxley’s two groups of novels in the most adequate way; 1

M. Bachtin, Problemy poetyki Dostojewskiego, tr. by N. Modzelewska, Warszawa 1970, p. 125. “W pełni zaaprobowana ważka idea autorska może pełnić w utworach typu homofonicznego funkcję potrójną. Po pierwsze, prezentuje ona zasadę ujmowania i przedstawiania świata, zasadę selekcji i organizacji materiału, zasadę jednakowej tonacji we wszystkich elementach utworu. Po drugie, idea może prezentować mniej lub bardziej świadomą konkluzję z przedstawionej całości. I wreszcie, idea autorska może znaleźć bezpośredni wyraz w pozycji ideologicznej głównego bohatera”; ibid., pp. 125-6; italics Bachtin’s. 3 [In a “polyphonic” novel] “By idea mogła żyć, czyli kształtować się, rozwijać, przybierać wyraz słowny i go odnawiać, by mogła powołać do życia nowe idee - nieodzowne jest rzetelne dialogowe obcowanie jej z innymi, cudzymi ideami”; ibid., p. 133; italics Bachtin’s. 2

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anyway, the analysis that follows should help in providing support for this statement and thus elucidate the meanings of these terms as applied to Huxley’s fiction. It seems significant that the two groups of Huxley’s novels correspond roughly to the different phases of the writer’s literary career whose twofold division has often been indicated by his critics.4 Generally speaking, the analysis that follows will emphasize such problems as: 1. the modes of presentation (Darbietungsformen)5 of explicit ideas and techniques motivating their occurrence (or means of integrating them within the literary structure); 2. the relationships between explicit ideas and the other elements of the literary structure (Vertextungweisen)6; 3. the participation of explicit ideas in generating the total meaning of the whole literary work. The first part of this chapter is thus devoted to the analysis of Huxley’s first six novels, i.e. Crome Yellow [1921], Antic Hay [1923], Those Barren Leaves [1925], Point Counter Point [1928], Brave New World [1932], and Eyeless in Gaza [1936], while the second part contains the discussion of his later works, such as After Many a Summer Dies the Swan [1939], Time Must Have A Stop [1944], Ape and Essence [1949], The Genius and the Goddess [1955], and Island [1962]. In some cases, however, references are made to Huxley’s other literary works, poetry, short stories and essays, whenever the comparison with the novels seems illustrative of some statements concerning explicit ideas. Finally, Part 3 of this chapter will attempt a definition and formal description of the genre, its origin, typological position, Huxley’s contribution to its development, as well as the origin of the term “novel of ideas”. For the sake of simplicity, page references to Huxley’s works will be made to the editions listed in the General Bibliography. At the same time, in order to avoid multiplying references, the most relevant critical studies in Huxley’s fiction will be cited in the text, giving the name of the critic and page number; these studies include: J. Atkins, Aldous Huxley. A Critical Study [London 1967]; P. Bowering, Aldous Huxley. A Study of the Major Novels [London 1969]; J. Brooke, Aldous Huxley [London 1968]; P. Firchow, Aldous Huxley. Satirist and Novelist [Minneapolis 1972]; K. May, Aldous Huxley [London 1972]; J. Meckier, Aldous Huxley. Satire and Structure [London 1969]; C. Rolo, Introduction to The World of Aldous Huxley [New York 1947]; and G. Woodcock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour. A Study of Aldous Huxley [London 1972].

4

May speaks about “the novels of exploration” and “the novels of certainty” in which he takes the development of Huxley’s “philosophy” as a criterion, while Firchow offers a fourfold division into “the music of Pan”, “the music of humanity”, “the American Dream” and “the music of eternity”, with the thematic content used as the basis of the differentiation. This study, however, does not concentrate either on the development of the writer’s philosophy or on the sources of his ideas or the biographical facts that might have influenced Huxley and, as a result, the shape of his novels. 5 “... the so called radicals of presentation or Darbietungsformen, namely, monologue, dialogue, and dialogues intercallated within a monologic report”; Uri Margolin, “On Three Types of Deductive Models in Genre Thheory”, Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, 1974, XVII:1(32), p. 8. 6 Ibid., p. 9.

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Part 1

The Polyphonic Novels It is evident from the beginning of Huxley’s career as a writer that he was primarily interested in ideas. They play an important role in his verse, of slight poetic merit, 7 and also in his stories. Already his poetry may, in fact, be regarded as a kind of dialogue between explicit ideas and implicit techniques; consider the following brief example: “God needs no christening,” Pantheist mutters, “Love opens shutters On heaven’s glistening, Flesh, key-hole listening, Hear what God utters” ... Yes, but God stutters. (“Philosophy”) The poem begins with an explicit idea expressed in the first line, an idea which is made more specific by the fact that it is pronounced by the “pantheist”; the explicit statement is then juxtaposed with the image - a kind of a test of temptation for God - and then finally contradicted by the implicit technique, i.e. God’s reaction described in the last line; the explicit statement of the pantheist is thus denied by God’s impious emotions. And this method may actually be encountered in most of Huxley’s poetry. Firchow seems quite right when he states that, contrary to T. S. Eliot, Huxley does not look for an “objective correlative” but instead he “works more by the rational knife of argument than by way of symbolic nets ... A good many of his poems ... are built up as arguments, even to the point of culminating with some kind of clincher” [p. 32]. Similarly, explicit ideas play as important roles in Huxley’s short stories. Owing to a wide variety of problems, themes, images, and techniques of writing, which appeared in such collections as Limbo [1920], Mortal Coils [1922], Little Mexican [1924], Two or Three Graces [1926], and Brief Candles [1930], the connections between these stories and his novels are multiple and they may be studied on all the levels of the literary structure. From the point of view of this study, these stories illustrate many features of Huxley’s craftsmanship, e.g. his handling of character (division according to the aspect of the problem represented), his exploitation of the 7

Huxley published the following collections of his poetry: The Burning Wheel [1916], Jonah [1917], The Defeat of Youth [1918], Leda [1920], Arabia Infelix [1929], The Cicadas [1932]; data from J. C. Eschelbach and J. L. Schober, Aldous Huxley. A Bibliography. 1916-1959, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1961. For a critical reception of Huxley’s poetry see Firchow, p. 29; compare also Virginia Woolf’s prophetic verdict and her advice to Huxley: “[he should] cease to use poetry in the serious, traditional manner and ... use it instead to explore those fantastic, amusing or ironic aspects of life which can only be expressed by people of high technical skill and great sensibility”; quoted after Woodcock, p. 54.

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possibilities of the setting, ironic “twists” in the reduced action, his use of brilliant and witty dialogue, as well as the mixture of the tragic with comedy and farce, or the wide spectrum of generic “styles” - from fantasy, through symbolism, up to realism. If the stories may be said to examine each of these methods of writing individually, the novels frequently contain a combination of several such techniques in one long and complex construction. Evidence can be found already in Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow. In fact, the connection between Huxley’s short stories and Crome Yellow is so close that it has led some critics to the conclusion that the novel actually is a collection of tales. 8 However, the episodic construction which suggested these statements is only apparent, since the novel is given a significant unifying element on a different level of its literary structure, which will be discussed in detail later on. The similarity is much closer on another plane: as the stories from Limbo, the novel continues the writer’s life-long attempts at “liberation from the tyranny of the realistic novel” so that Crome Yellow comes close to the realization of the ideal represented by the fantastic “Tales of Knockespotch”; Scogan’s description of these “Tales” may thus refer both to Huxley’s short stories and to Crome Yellow: Tales! How shall I describe them? Fabulous characters shoot across his pages like gaily dressed performers on the trapeze. There are extraordinary adventures and still more extraordinary speculations. Intelligence and emotions, relieved of all the imbecile preoccupations of civilized life, move in intricate and subtle dances, crossing and recrossing, advancing, retreating, impinging. An immense erudition and an immense fancy go hand in hand. All the ideas of the present and of the past, on every possible subject, bob up among the Tales, smile gravely or grimace a caricature of themselves, then disappear to make place for something new. The verbal surface of his writing is rich and fantastically diversified. The wit is incessant. [p. 71]

This description, however, appears right in the middle of the novel (Chapter XV), so that its full significance can be understood only after one has examined its context, the character of Mr. Scogan, and all the action which has preceded it. The novel begins naturally enough with Denis Stone, a young poet and an “intellectual” by which Huxley means that he is “more capable of theorizing than of experiencing” - who, after some meditation on the constant waste of time in his life, decides to become a “man of action” during his journey from London to Crome. But in the very next paragraph, when he tries to recover his bicycle as quickly as possible, he is effectively pacified by the guard in a tone in which “he must have spoken to his children when they were tiresome” [p. 2]; as a result, “Denis’s man of action collapsed, punctured” [p. 2]. In this way the first scene brings forward the problem which Huxley earlier presented in his poetry, e.g. in “The Life Theoretic” or “Soles Occidere et Redere Possunt”, 9 and which will 8 9

E.g., A. Maurois, op.cit., p. 201; Firchow, op.cit., p. 58. Cf. this fragment from “Soles Occidere et Redere Possunt”: “Action, action! First of all He spent three pounds he couldn’t afford In buying a book he didn’t want, For the mere sake of having been Irrevocably extravagant. Then feeling very bold, he pressed The bell of a chance house; it might Disclose some New Arabian Night Behind its grimy husk, who knows?

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appear in Crome Yellow in all of Denis Stone’s undertakings including the last ironic “twist” Denis’s decision to depart is taken right at the moment when he could have been successful in winning Anne’s favour. Techniqcally speaking, the explicit idea of the “man of action” is contradicted by the implicit technique (action), thus forming a “superior” concept of futility and bareness of all action or of attempts at an intellectual change of one’s nature. Moreover, this idea of futility is then extended in the development of the novel so as to concern all other characters from Crome. The country residence of the Wimbushes houses a collection of typically Huxleyan characters: among the women there is Anne, Mr. Wimbush’s niece, cold and “pagan” in her hedonism; Mary Bracegirdle, a “hot lover” and a “moon-like innocence”; Priscilla Wimbush, masculine, interested in horoscopes and gambling; and Jenny Mullion, a mysterious deaf artist drawing caricatures of everybody. The male characters are Henry Wimbush, the owner of the house, interested in the past of Crome and in the Primitivists; Mr. Scogan, a man of wisdom, who significantly becomes a fortune-teller during the Fair; Gombould, a “Byronic” painter; Mr. Barbecue-Smith, a teacher, writer, and prophet; and, finally, Ivor, “the virtuoso in love-making” as well as a poet, musician, and painter at the same time. Huxley’s methods of characterization are numerous: the appearance of the characters, especially when comic or satirized, is always described in a very detailed and perceptive way as if seen by an artist drawing caricatures or portraits to reveal the basic features of a character (particularly when it is important for an implicit expression of ideas; compare Denis’s white trousers and Anne’s reaction to them in Chapter IV with a parallel scene in Chapter XXX when Anne mentions the trousers again but, this time, to Denis’s dissatisfaction); the same may be said about the manner of speaking and pronouncing (e.g. the “deep and masculine voice and laughter of Mrs. Wimbush”, p. 9; “... Mr. Scogan’s fluty voice”, p. 28; “‘Four thousand’, he repeated, opening his mouth very wide on the ou of thousand”, p. 17). Moreover, some of the characters bear significant names: e.g. Scogan - “a device for automatically opening valves in a steam engine”; Wimbush - “to separate, to winnow”; Budge - “to move or stir in spite of inertia”, 10 etc. It should be added that this latter device is used in all of Huxley’s novels. Instances of indirect characterization are also numerous: people are characterized by their gestures (cf. pp. 32, 86, 83), attitudes towards the arts, science, culture, religion etc., expressed either by the narrator or by their participation in numerous discussions, when individual utterance may be expanded into long monologues resembling essays (cf. Chapters XVI and XXII, in particular). Frequent quotations and misquotations from poetry and scientific works also function as a means of characterization (cf. pp. 22, 35, 42). Additionally, the characters often talk about other characters and in this way Huxley may present both the speakers and the objects of their The seconds passed; all was dead. Arrogantly he rang once more. His heart thumped on sheer silence, but at last There was a shuffling; something behind the door Became approaching panic and he fled”. 10 Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary; no more attempts to explain the “meaningful” names in Huxley’s novels will be made since, on the one hand, he constantly employed this method, and, on the other hand, it would be superfluous, as B. Bergonzi rightly stressed in his article “Life’s Divisions. The Continuing Debate on Aldous Huxley”, Encounter, July 1973, XLI:1, p. 67. Besides, this “decoding” is always carefully done by Firchow; one should perhaps mention an opinion by G. Overton, that “Mr Huxley is not so much engaged in hitting heads as hitting what is in the heads”, Cargoes for Crusoes, New York 1924, p. 110.

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discussion (cf. Chapter VII devoted to a conversation between Anne and Mary about the choice of the most appropriate candidate for a lover). Finally, they are also characterized by the kind of setting in which they appear; thus, a detailed description of Crome, with its galleries of pictures and its rich library, also speaks for the owner; the same may be said about the severity of the room in which Mr. Bodiham prepares his lashing sermons; Anne’s coldness is emphasized by her bed shaped like a sarcophagus; Mary’s sadness after the departure of Ivor is accompanied by “a pleasantly comic version of the Medici Venus”, and so on. However, not only in its relation to the characters is the setting functional. As often as not it offers a good chance for a long discussion and a direct clash of explicit ideas according to the points of view represented by particular characters: such is the function of the library during the description of which Huxley shows his own erudition by giving a long list of titles and names; at the same time, however, this fragment gives an opportunity to Mr. Scogan to present his theories about art and literature in particular; such is also the function of the Home Farm and the large sow which had a litter of fourteen, this being the pretext for a clash of ideas about breeding and birthcontrol. Sometimes the setting assumes a symbolic function: old Crome is a place where “among the accumulations of ten generations the living had left but few traces”, thus indicating the main theme of futility in the action of the characters of the novel (this is later stressed further by the symbolic significance of extracts taken from the history of Crome). The setting is also an important factor creating atmosphere - e.g. the “palpitating” atmosphere of the garden where a kind of “comedy of errors” takes place (Chapter XVII) and the opposite mood of the church and Mr. Bodiham’s sermon in the very next chapter. In contrast to the setting, time does not seem to be an important element governing the development of the action, as it sometimes does in other novels (for instance, Eyeless in Gaza). The action covers roughly about two weeks in summer, with several “excursions” into the past, most frequently to the history of Crome; the sequence of days is not marked and Huxley is satisfied with specifying a particular time of the day, e.g. “morning”, “dinner”, “after-lunch coffee” etc. The only significant feature about time construction is the fact that some events, although presented one after another, seem to take place simultaneously. For instance, Chapter XXI describes Anne and Gombauld painting her portrait, while Chapter XXII shows Denis Stone hearing their laughter which prevents him from writing a poem because of a fit of jealousy; a similar example may be found in Chapters XI and XII, when some characters go to see Mr. Barbecue-Smith off, while in the latter chapter, happening “at the same time”, Mary pays a visit to Gombauld in his studio. Later on the same method is developed into the technique of counterpoint. It is significant, however, that the effect of an illusion of simultaneity is not achieved here by a careful marking of the passage of time, as it is in Huxley’s later novels (notably in Chapters XXXII-XXXIV of Point Counter Point), but by the exploitation of the general contemporaneity and the appropriate setting: Denis is close enough to the duck-yard to hear Anne and Gombauld, while Mary takes the opportunity to carry a letter to Gombauld, because there is nobody else in the house. While the first instance seems important, as the method makes it possible to present two situations taking place “simultaneously” and, by juxtaposition, to stress Denis’s next failure, no such significant correlation seems to exist in the second example. If one leaves aside the substance of numerous discussions and lengthy monologues (out of thirty chapters, twelve contain mainly debates), since they do not constitute “events” in the traditional meaning of the term, the action of the novel seems to be so much reduced that it may actually be summed up in a few words: arrivals and departures, meals and walks of which two are

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connected with love-making, and the most important event, the Fair, in which one may eventually look for the climax of the whole novel (another possible climax may be indicated in Chapter XXIX, when Denis contemplates the idea of committing suicide, but this, again, is a kind of “interior monologue” rather than “event”). The framework of the plot is clear and consists of Denis’s stay in Crome: his arrival is described in the first chapter, while his hasty, though unwilling, departure - in the last. Such an approach, however, would be unfair because, if one looks for the “purposefulness” or “causation” which usually determine the development of the action,11 one must examine the logical development of explicit ideas expressed by all the characters and the narrator, and their relationship to implicit techniques. In other words, it is on the level of discussions and conversations that one may find the actual causation which is much more significant than the traditional framework of Denis’s stay in Crome. This is further stressed by the division of the novel into chapters: one chapter is usually devoted to one event (e.g. Chapter I Denis’s arrival and his first failure), which is a conventional method. What is new, however, is the fact that a chapter may be entirely devoted to a single discussion or a clash of explicit ideas (e.g. Chapter V); the same Chapter V also provides an example for the fact that a controversy usually finds no solution - it ends with Scogan’s escape into the future, when such matters as breeding, which happens to be discussed here, will depend entirely on man and his will (thus Scogan summarizes the substance of Huxley’s later novel, Brave New World); it should also be noted that none of the characters participating in the quarrel seems offended - which is indicative of the loose relationship between characters and explicit ideas. Contrary to the opinions of some critics mentioned at the beginning of the analysis of Crome Yellow (cf. p. 56), the chapters are not only relatively independent (May writes about “a pattern of linked independence”, p. 27), since they are always connected either by developing the fortunes, or misfortunes, of the main protagonist, Denis Stone, or by means of thematic correlation of explicit ideas. The former device, being traditional, needs no explanation, while the latter may be illustrated by the following examples. Chapter III ends with a remark by Scogan who ironically describes Mary as “femme superieure”, and Mary takes it in; the next chapter opens with a misunderstanding between Denis and Henry and the former’s remark about “parallel straight lines” which signify lack of communication, “femme superieure” being mentioned again. A much more complex example may be found in Chapters VIII-X. During a Sunday breakfast at Crome there is the usual conversation of some characters, each talking about his own “Hobby-Horse” - Priscilla Wimbush tells Mr. Barbecue-Smith about the recent location of stars and horoscopes for the approaching races, Mary Bracegirdle, in an attempt at winning Denis’s favour, tries to discuss poetry with him, while Scogan, on the occasion of Sunday, delivers a long monologue about church uniforms. Finally, there is Mr. Wimbush’s question about going to church and listening to Mr. Bodiham’s sermon, and the chapter ends with a misquotation from Shakespeare in a speech of Mr. Barbecue-Smith. Passing abruptly to Chapter IX we encounter Mr. Bodiham who regrets the polite but passive attitude of his parishioners. After Mr. Bodiham’s sermon has been quoted in extenso, his wife brings him the recent catalogue of the most fashionable church uniforms. The chapter ends with Mrs. Bodiham’s pronouncement that in Crome “Sodom and Gomorrah had come to a second

11

Terms taken after W. Ostrowski, “Towards a More Systematic and Exact Analysis of the Novel and Related Genres”, typescript - personal communication.

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birth” [p. 43], while the first sentences directly following this “dire portent” constitute the very beginning of Chapter X: Denis did not dance, but when ragtime came squirting out of the pianola in gushes of treacle and hot perfume, in jets of Bengal light, then things began to dance inside him. Little black nigger corpuscles jigged and drummed in his arteries. He became a cage of movement, a walking palais de danse. It was very uncomfortable, like the preliminary symptoms of a disease. [p. 43] This lengthy summary of the three chapters seems justified in that it shows how explicit ideas function in the composition of the novel and how the explicit and implicit techniques are juxtaposed. After some action [implicit device], here a Sunday breakfast, there is a discussion [explicit device] about church uniforms and Mr. Bodiham; this is followed by a commentary and the sermon [explicit device], then by the action again [implicit device] - the reception of the catalogue of uniforms, and the final juxtaposition of the comment on the life in the village [explicit device] and the description of the dance [implicit device]. It should be added that the way of describing music and Denis’s reaction are functional in emphasizing the contrast. In the above example the role of action consists in justifying the occurrence of explicit ideas, illustrating them, and providing an implicit commentary. It should be stressed that the subject of the discussion, the church and uniforms, is not connected with the action of the main characters - it neither explains their acts nor has any consequences. However, it motivates the selection of particular “events” and it also answers the question why after breakfast we move suddenly in time to the evening dances. In other instances explicit ideas may frequently push the action forward: a talk about sex precedes Ivor’s arrival; a discussion about the necessity of “mental carminative” precedes Denis’s fit of jealousy and so on. The almost perfect integration of all these elements discussed so far has certainly contributed to the high rank granted to this novel by most of its critics. However, apart from the person of the protagonist and the thematic-ideological correlation, all these elements are also further integrated by the omniscient and omnipresent narrator, with his frequent implicit comments mostly of satirical nature. Moreover, as in the case of the variety of means of characterization, the level of the narrative is also greatly varied, mainly be means of different forms of quotations, a technique which deserves some attention since it appears in almost all the novels by Huxley. The quotations in this novel may be roughly divided according to their relation to explicit ideas. The first group of quotation includes those cited by characters in order to support their argument or for the sake of illustration. This seems to be the function of a fragment from Shelley’s Epipsychidion quoted by Scogan [p. 47] to prove that the architecture of Crome is a work of art, or a fragment from Mallarmé’s poem cited by Denis [p. 106] who speaks about the beauty of poetry which can be appreciated only by some people. The same group of quotations explicitly expressing ideas also includes narrator’s quotations and then they function as a new point of view in a general discussion - this is the case of Mr. Bodiham’s sermon which turns out to be a reproduction of a speech delivered by the Reverend E. H. Horne in 1916, as Huxley explains in a footnote. The other group of quotations might be called “implicit”. Some of them serve as means of auto-characterization or characterization; for instance, the poems written by Denis Stone and Ivor, Priscilla Wimbush’s “portrait” in a popular song, or the Butlerian form of misquotation

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employed most frequently by Mr. Barbecue-Smith. Some other quotations may constitute a means a literary polemics - Scogan’s monologue about the novels of young authors [p. 12] does not only concern Denis but also popular fiction of the second decade of the twentieth century in England; Scogan’s description functions then as a quasi-quotation of a literary structure in the form of summary on the level of a fictional model, as D. Danek calls such a technique. 12 However, the most significant role of the quotations from the second group is played by the two long fragments quoted from the history of Crome, the stories about Sir Hercules and the three Lapith sisters. They are highly independent structures (published later on separately in collections of short stories13) but at the same time they are organically connected with the whole novel. The story of Sir Hercules, for example, symbolically represents the world of Crome presented in the novel; it is a kind of implicit comment on the action of Crome Yellow and on the main theme expressed in the poem by Sir Hercules and then by the sad end of the dwarf. Finally, one should mention the question of Huxley’s style in this novel. Apart from the essayistic fragments which have already been mentioned above, Huxley presents highly poetic descriptions of the countryside and landscapes (e.g. pp. 11, 21; Chapter XVII), although some poetic devices, such as metaphors - single and recurrent - are used mainly for satirical aims (e.g. Ivor’s song, pp. 91-94 and 140; Priscilla Wimbush imagined as Wilkie Bard, a cantatrice, pp. 9 and 13; expressions like “Black ladders lack bladders”, or Mrs. Budge described as “a blown black bladder”, p. 157). In this way the lyrical element is mixed with humour and irony, this “mixture” effectively balancing explicit ideas in discussions and monologues, lists of scientific data (pp. 38, 90), enumerations of names and titles (pp. 10, 60, 79, 157) and frequent aphorisms and epigrams. Summing up the analysis of Huxley’s first novel it seems possible to make some broader generalizations concerning the function of explicit ideas in Crome Yellow. Presented primarily by means of dialogues and monologues of the characters and in quotations, explicit ideas are thus justified by all the main elements of the novelistic structure, i.e. by the choice of appropriate characters who have ideas to express and to defend in discussions, by the shape of the setting which groups all the different characters together and provides pretexts for an exchange of ideas, and by the action which justifies the presence of such ideas. In other words, explicit ideas are not imposed on the fictional world but, on the contrary, they result from it. But the other elements of the novelistic structure do not merely justify the occurrence of explicit ideas; sometimes they are shaped in such a way as to contradict all explicit statements - this is the additional function of the action, of the whole variety of means of characterization, juxtapositions in the construction of the novel, and of the rich mixture of styles. As a result, since the direct clashes of explicit ideas never bring any single valid solution on the one hand, and, on the other - since all explicit ideas are always rejected or contradicted by means of appropriate implicit techniques, it may be said that the total meaning of the whole work is thus generated in the process of rejecting the potential validity of explicit ideas within the structure of the literary work. Consider the final example: One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one’s philosophy to fit life ... Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, 12

D. Danek, O polemice literackiej w powieści, Warszawa 1972, p. 105. The story of Sir Hercules appeared independently forst as “The Dwarfs” in Rotunda [1932], then as “Sir Hercules” in Twice Seven [1944] and in Collected Short Stories [1957]. 13

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embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy? Denis came to a halt in front of the bench, and as he asked this last question he stretched out his arms and stood for an instant in an attitude of crucifixion, then let them fall again to his sides. ‘My poor Denis!’ Anne was touched. He was really too pathetic as he stood there in front of her in his white flannel trousers. [p. 17]

The whole exposition of Denis’s attitude to ideas and life is quiet valid: it has been illustrated by the action preceding this scene and will be even more significantly illustrated by all the events to follow. At the same time Denis is genuinely miserable, so much so that he will soon contemplate the possibility of committing suicide. And yet the validity of these statements and Denis’s personal despair are immediately modified by his all too pathetic gesture and his unfortunate white trousers. In this way, what seemed an important exposition of one of the main problems of the whole novel (for the other characters, Wimbush, Scogan, Barbecue-Smith and others, also escape from reality into the world of ideas) acquires an ambivalent meaning: it is ridiculed or abolished on the personal level of each single character, but it retains its validity on a higher level in the novel’s structure. And this technique will be used in almost all the “polyphonic” novels. 2. Huxley’s second novel, Antic Hay [1923], is, on some levels of its structure, very similar to Crome Yellow. For instance, as far as the choice of characters is concerned, Huxley seems to follow the same procedure as that suggested by Scogan in Crome Yellow, when the latter tries to imagine which of the first six Ceasars he may resemble: I take each trait of character, each mental and emotional bias, each little oddity and magnify them a thousand times ... I am potentially all of them ... with the possible exception of Claudius who was much too stupid to be a development of anything in my character. [p. 87]

Accordingly, Denis Stone becomes a slightly older and more cynical Gumbril Jr., an idealist poet, who experiences the same split into “the man of action” and “the man of thought”; Pelvey, the preacher, is just as severe as Mr. Bodiham; Mr. Boldero, for whom “other people’s ideas, other people’s knowledge - they were his food”, closely resembles Mr. Barbecue-Smith; Ivor reappears in a more complex personality of Lypiatt; while women character, Myra Viveash and Rosie Shearwater, are similar to Anne and Mary. The means of characterization remain virtually the same, including meaningful names; new elements may be seen here only in the appearance of animal imagery14 and a more technical style of some descriptions. 15 Although moved to London, a 14

Myra Viveash is compared to a tigress (and her first victim was Lamb]; Shearwater’s assistant is seen as a dog; Shearwater himself - as a cow or w whale; Gumbril Jr. sees himself as an earwig; the Monster sees people as apes and asses, while Coleman - as beasts and cattle etc. 15 E.g., the “phonetic” descriptions of the characters’ manner of speaking: Mr Mercaptan “complained hissing on the c, labiating lingeringly on the v of ‘civilized’ and giving the first two i-s their fullest value”; cf. also the technical descirption of the hymn: [f] For slack hands and [dim.] idle minds [mf] Mischief still the Tempter finds. [ff] Keep him captive in his lair. [f] Work will blind him. [dim.] Work is [pp] prayer.” p.12. See also the rhythmic pattern of the hymn in Huxley’s own notation: “One, two, three, four; one, two, THREE - 4.

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change observed already in some short stories, 16 the setting still retains the functions of providing objects for discussion (Lypiatt’s exhibition, Gumbril’s model, the concert), extension of character (Mercaptan and his room), and motivation for several characters to be grouped in one place (the restaurant, cabaret, parties, visits etc.). Finally, the action of Antic Hay has the same conventional framework as that in the previous novel: Gumbril’s arrival in London and his “last ride” with Myra Viveash before he goes abroad constitute the beginning and ending of the action. And yet, in spite of all these similarities in form, Antic Hay reveals in a closer analysis several significant differences. Huxley himself regarded it as “a very serious book” and he added that Artistically, too, it has a certain novelty, being a work in which all the ordinarily separated categories tragic, comic, fantastic, realistic - are combined so to say chemically into a single entity, whose unfamiliar character makes it appear at first sight rather repulsive. 17

Evidence supporting this statement may be found in abundance already in the first chapter of the novel which presents in miniature all the major techniques of writing used in the book. The omniscient narrator in this chapter assumes the point of view of Gumbril Jr. and reports his thoughts and reactions to everything that is happening in the school chapel. Gumbril’s turn of mind is described already in the first paragraph when he sat in his oaken stall on the north side of the School Chapel and wondered, as he listened through the uneasy silence of half a thousand schoolboys to the First Lesson, pondered, as he looked up at the vast window opposite, all blue and jaundiced and bloody with nineteenth-century glass, speculated in his rapid and rambling way about the existence and the nature of God. [p. 7]

The repetition of verbs is quite justified when in the third paragraph the narrator gives an example of Gumbril’s speculations: If theology and theosophy, then why not theography and theometry, why not theognomy, theotrophy, theotomy, theogamy? Why not theophysics and theo-chemistry? Why not the ingenious toy, the theotrope or wheel of gods? Why not a monumental theodrome? ... No, but seriously ... the problem was very troublesome indeed. [. 7]

The whole scene that follows has exactly this dialogic nature: Gumbril’s thoughts are directed by the fragments from the Gospel, and in this way Huxley achieves both serious effects (e.g. when Gumbril, provoked by “thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children”, thinks about the tragic death of his mother) and numerous humorous effects: Benedictus, for instance, makes Gumbril feel great relief to stand up, so that the tortured part of his body (unprotected by pneumatic trousers as yet) loses contact with the hard oaken bench; “Lord have mercy on us” becomes his commentary on the stupidity of his schoolboys; “Work is prayer” makes him realize “how passionately he disliked work”, and so on. After correcting several essays on Pope Pius IX, One, two-and three-and four-and; One, two THREE - 4. ONE - 2, THREE - 4; ONE - 2 - 3 - 4. and-ONE - 2, THREE - 4; ONE - 2 - 3 - 4. One, two-and, three, four; One, two, THREE - 4”. p. 11. 16 E.g., in “The Tillotson Banquet” or “The Gioconda Smile” in Mortal Coils [1922]. 17 Quoted after Woodcock, op.cit., p. 96; compare also Huxley’s remarks about Donne and the latter’s mixture of “the heights of scholastic philosophy and the heights of carnal passion”, “the contemplation of divinity to the contemplation of the flea”, “the rapt examination of self to an enumeration of the most remote external facts of science, and make all, by his strongly passionate apprehension, into an intensely lyrical poetry”, cf. “SubjectMatter of Poetry” in On the Margin.

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illustrated by abundant quotations from the papers, Gumbril’s decision to leave the school is actually determined by the infirmity of his posterior and the hardness of oak, his love of “the plushy floors” and dislike of work. It is for these reasons that he becomes “a man of action”. Moreover, this mixture of modes in miniature recurs throughout the novel: tragedy and comedy are mixed in such characters as Lypiatt, the Monster, Shearwater, or Gumbril Senior; fantasy is represented by Gumbril’s pneumatic trousers, his false beard, and Shearwater’s absurd experiments (so that “the cock into which Shearwater had engrafted an ovary” did not know “whether to crow or cluck”, p. 252); finally, realism is seen not only in the hard reality of the oaken benches but also in the scene with the unemployed driver and his hungry family (an almost unique appearance of workers in Huxley’s fiction). Apart from this mixture of “the ordinarily separated categories”, another difference can be observed in the discussion scenes, one of the main sources of explicit ideas in the novel. If in Crome Yellow discussions have Peacockian lightness of play with ideas and, in spite of the clashes of different opinions, nobody ever feels offended, in Antic Hay they become much more fierce and bitter, so much so that they may lead to acts of violence (e.g. Lypiatt beating Mercaptan, Chapter XVIII). This, naturally, indicates a much closer connection between ideas and the characters who profess them, although, at the same time, this closer connection results in an even greater isolation of the characters in their respective “home-made universes” so that communication becomes impossible; this is best seen in the discussion in Chapter IV, where Denis Stone’s comparison to “parallel straight lines” is fully realized. The most significant change, however, may be seen in two events presented in the central chapters of the novel: one of them is a visit of Gumbril Jr. and Shearwater to Gumbril Senior connected with the presentation of the model of London, and the other is the concert of Mozart’s Quintet in G Minor. Not only do these events take place right in the middle of the book, which gives them a privileged position in the construction, but they also concern the total meaning of the novel and the functions of explicit ideas in it. The model of London constructed by Gumbril Senior is a representation of the utopian ideal which could have been realized if in the seventeenth century the architectural genius, Christopher Wren, had been allowed to continue his work. But his contemporaries did not agree with him and, as Gumbril Senior explains, We can’t blame them ... People offer us reason and beauty; but we will have none of them, because they don’t happen to square with the notions that were grafted into our souls in youth, that have grown there and became part of us ... we must not be too hard on these honest citizens of London who, fully appreciating the inconveniencies of darkness, disorder and dirt, manfully resisted any attempt to alter conditions which they had been taught from childhood onwards to consider as necessary, right and belonging inevitably to the order of things. [pp. 135-6]

It should be added that the long monologue of Gumbril Senior in Chapter XI is actually an almost direct reproduction of Huxley’s own essay entitled “Sir Christopher Wren” and published in On the Margin [1923], before the appearance of the novel; thus it offers a good example for the examination of the general relationship between Huxley’s novels and his essays. 18 The substance and style of the essay are fully retained in the novel as well as its clear message: Wren’s plans of London offer an example of an ideal which was available to people but 18

Apart from the essay about Christopher Wren, other pieces may also be connected with some monologues in the novel; for instance: democracy in “pleasures”, woman fashion in “Beauty in 1920”, music in “Water Music”, trade in “Advertisements” etc.

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the chance was wasted because they were incapable of changing their inbred habits. When placed within the novel, however, the meaning of this essayistic monologue is radically changed in much the same way as the speech of Denis Stone quoted above (cf. ibid., p. 61). First of all, the monologue is delivered by Gumbril Senior, an elderly eccentric engaged in an absurd task of constructing a toy-model according to the plans of the seventeenth-century architect. The immediate validity of these explicit ideas is thus apparently contradicted when they appear only in this scene. But if seen in the context of the neighbouring chapters, these ideas begin to regain their validity when related to some elements of the novel: the theme of the available idea appears in the very next chapter [Chapter XII], when Gumbril Jr. meets Emily. However, much like the citizens of the seventeenth-century London, Gumbril has a chance of achieving an ideal and salvation from the barrenness of his wasted life in the person of Emily, but he loses his opportunity because he is unable to break away from Myra Viveash and the aimlessness of her circle of friends. In other words, the explicit ideas in the monologue of Gumbril Senior are significant in the novel not in relation to the toy-model but to the love-affair between Gumbril Jr. and Emily and, even more generally, to the total meaning of the whole novel. This is further supported, by implication, at the end of the last-but-one chapter of the book [Chapter XXI] when, long after Gumbril Jr. has lost his contact with Emily, his father loses contact with his model - Gumbril Senior sells his model in order to save from bankruptcy his friend who had to pay off the debts of his drunkard son. The theme of a potentially available ideal is further developed in Chapter XIII when Emily and Gumbril Jr. go to a concert. In this case, Antic Hay is the first novel to contain a multifunctional description of a piece of music. The functionality of this description results both from the choice of the piece of music and from the dialogic method of its presentation. Since Emily and Gumbril are late for the concert, they hear only a part of the whole Quintet, its last three parts: minuetto [allegretto], adagio ma non tropppo [consordini], and adagio passing into allegro in G major. As Gumbril listens to the music he remembers that for Mercaptan classical minuetto meant the whole civilization, “Ladies and precious gentlemen, fresh from the wit and gallantry of Crebillon-haunted sofas, stepping gracefully to a pattern of airy notes” [p. 150]. This leads Gumbril to the question how such people would deal with a tragic passion of the artist (e.g. Lypiatt), and the answer is provided by the second part of the Quintet. Pure and deep sadness and passionate suffering of the artist make Gumbril realize that “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God; they shall make God visible, too, to other eyes” [p. 151], a conclusion which refers to Gumbril’s stay at school, and school masses, to Lypiatt’s conception of artistic creation and the vocation of the artist, and, finally and most directly, to the “lecture” of Gumbril Senior; in the latter case the reference is indicated by the terms in which music is described: The instruments come together and part again. Long silver threads hang aerially over a murmur of waters; in the midst of muffled sobbing a cry. The fountains blow their architecture of slender pillars, and from basin to basin the waters fall; from basin to basin, and every fall makes somehow possible a higher leaping of the jet and at last fall the mounting column springs up into the sunlight, and from water the music has modulated up into a rainbow. [p. 151]

At the same time and contrary to the characters mentioned above, Gumbril is perfectly aware of the “impurity” of his own heart and of the inability to sustain this ephemeral feeling created by the music. And, at once, this is supported by the description of the last part of the Quintet: The introduction to the last movement comes to its suspended, throbbing close. There is an instant of expectation, and then with a series of mounting trochees and a downward hurrying, step after tiny step, in triple time, the dance begins. Irrelevant, irreverent, out of key with all that has gone before. But man’s

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greatest strength lies in his capacity for irrelevance. In the midst of pestilences, wars and famines, he builds cathedrals; and a slave, he can think the irrelevant and unsuitable thoughts of a free man. The spirit is slave to fever and beating blood, at the mercy of a tyrannous misfortune. But irrelevantly, it elects to dance in triple measure - a mounting skip, a patter of descending feet. [p. 151]

The whole fragment quoted above is the music’s “answer” - in this place the narrator has left Gumbril’s point of view and he presents his own metaphorical description. Thus the finale of the Quintet becomes a condensed commentary on the whole novel, but, again, the whole scene ends with a typically Huxleyan ironic “twist” - the very next long paragraph, half as long as the whole description of music, is devoted to a thoroughly satirical description of the bowing musicians and Gumbril’s reflection - “Strange to think that those ridiculous creatures could have produced what we’ve just been hearing” [p. 152].19 The whole presentation of the concert is constructed in what has been called a “dialogic” manner in order to place ideas in Gumbril’s mind and then to comment on them in an implicit manner by using images, terminology, and metaphors from many kinds of art. Both the explicit ideas and the way in which they are commented upon are strictly connected with the whole novel and several elements of its structure: God, architecture, the artist’s passions, his vocation etc. Additionally, the theme of the dance in the final allegro of the Quintet directly refers to the title of the novel and to its motto: My men like satyrs grazing on the lawns Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay. [Marlowe, Edward II, 1:ii]

(where hay means an Elizabethan ring dance, while antic means foolish or idiotic in Middle English).20 Finally, the episode appears in Chapter XIII, the last one of the three central chapters which depict the available ideal as opposed to the aimlessness in the lives of all the characters. What follows these three chapters is just despair and unhappiness resulting from wasted opportunities. For the presentation of the latter Huxley employs the “interior duplication” technique,21 although instead of a story-within-the novel as in Crome Yellow, there is a farcical play in the cabaret to which Gumbril goes with Myra Viveash. As in the first novel, the play in Antic Hay clearly reflects in grotesque terms (the Monster) the problems of the characters in the main plot in its later phase, i.e. after the opportunities have been lost. In view of what has been said above about the significance of the architectural model and the description of music it seems an obvious exaggeration to say that the unity of construction of the novel is obtained “only because of the short drama which reflects in miniature the situation of the entire novel”. 22 The play seems merely the third event in which the major images, problems and themes are again merged. As a result the unity of construction seems to be obtained primarily by means of what has been called “an ironic 19

A similar image appeared already in “The Merry-Go-Round” where pleasure is created by “a slobbering

cretin”. 20

Definitions from Old English Dictionary. The term taken after Leon Livingstone, “Interior Duplication in the Modern Spanish Novel”, PMLA, September 1958, 4, p. 396; a story-within-the-novel or a narrator-within-the-novel become then “a symbolical statement of the singularity of the plural universe, a universe whose component parts are permutable. The symbol is that of the part which is equal to the whole, for in interior duplication the small scale reproduction within the original stands in relation to the complete picture as does microcosm to macrocosm”. 22 Cf., Frederick R. Karl, “The Play within the Novel in Antic Hay”, Renascence, 1961, XIII, p. 67. 21

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recurrence and reflexive reference”;23 for instance, musical terminology and metaphors appear first in the title, then in the technical description of the theme sung in the school chapel, in Gumbril’s Senior’s metaphor, “the one street that was really like a symphony by Mozart - how busily and gleefully they’re pulling it down now” [p. 133], which precedes the descriptions of Mozart’s Quintet, then in Gumbril’s Jr. comparison, “he was learning her arm ... his fingers knew it, as they knew Mozart’s Twelfth Sonata” [p. 156], the recurrence of the same motif when Gumbril is with Myra [pp. 163, 165-6], the song “What’s He to Hecuba?”, the Monster’s monologue beginning with “Somewhere there must be love like music ...” [p. 179]; and the same may be said about the thematic and formal correlation of explicit ideas (e.g. the idea of proportion), the motif of escape, and the symbolical “last ride” again indicating the motif of dance. This unity of construction obtained by all the aforementioned methods, seems to be the major development of Huxley’s novelistic craftsmanship. At the same time, however, this better unification in construction brings about some changes in the functions and treatment of explicit ideas. On the one hand, their thematic range becomes wider, possibly owing to Huxley’s own widened interests as seen in his essays, and a number of characters are allowed to discourse on their respective subjects sometimes at considerable length. But on the other hand, as seen in the above comparison between Huxley’s essay and its inclusion in the novel, all these ideas are perhaps much better integrated within the structure of Antic Hay than in Crome Yellow. This may be seen mainly in their functioning on several levels of the novelistic structure or, in other words, in the well organized “dialogue” between the ideas and the personal features of the characters and the development of the plot, which has been demonstrated on the example of the central events described above. In more general terms, however, the total meaning of the whole novel is again a result of the interplay between the “essay” element and the fictional elements, much like in Crome Yellow. Further changes will also be noted in Huxley’s third novel. 3. Several of the short stories from Huxley’s two collections, Mortal Coils [1922] and Little Mexican [1924], for instance “Young Archimedes” and “Permutations among the Nightingales”, to give two contrasted examples, already anticipated a change in the setting of Huxley’s fiction, that is, a change in that element of the structure of his novels which has already proved so manifoldly functional, particularly in Antic Hay. Although it is perhaps an exaggeration to say that, besides “comedy” and “personal problems”, the setting is one of the three main components [May, p. 62], yet, in comparison with the previous novels, the fact that the action of Those Barren Leaves [1925] takes place mainly in Italy, does affect the form of the book. As a country exceptionally rich in ancient relics, well-singing men and nightingales necessary for the creation of the “palpitating” atmosphere invariably connected with love, beautiful sights and landscapes of “theatrical splendour” for contemplation etc., it becomes particularly effective for a satirical presentation of characters (e.g. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s possessiveness) as well as for serious purposes

23

Terms taken after Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, 1962, p. 132.

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(e.g. Calamy’s meditations).24 Bearing in mind the analyses of the earlier fiction, however, one may say that it is mainly a difference in kind rather than in functionality. The general outline of the novel was provided by Huxley himself, soon after the publication of Crome Yellow, when he wrote that he wanted to do a gigantic Peacock in an Italian scene. An incredibly large castle - like the Sitwells’ at Monte Gufone, the most amazing place I have ever seen in my life - divided up, as Monte Gufone was divided till recently, into scores of separate habitations, which will be occupied, for the purposes of my story, by the most improbably people of every species and nationality. Here one has the essential Peacockian datum - a houseful of oddities ... I am giving Realismus a little holiday: these descriptions of middle class homes are really too unspeakably boring. [Letters, p. 202]

Four years later, however, not much remained from the original plan: the “incredibly large castle”, the Cybo Malaspina, is there with its “scores of separate habitations”, but it is used mainly in Parts I and III of the novel, while the action of the other two Parts is removed to the neighbouring villages and hills, to the road to Rome, including the Italian capital, and London. If the setting is thus extended in comparison with the original plan, the number and variety of characters are, in turn, reduced: there is the usual gallery of Huxleyan types with a modest addition of new figures (e.g. the congenital idiot, Grace Elver; a home-made socialist , Mr. Falx). It should also be added that the means of characterization as well as the conventional framework of the action remain virtually the same as in the previous novels with one important exception: Huxley’s employment of one of his favourite modes of presentation in a highly developed form brings about a much deeper characterization of his protagonist, Francis Chelifer, and, at the same time, a much greater complexity of the construction of this novel. This mode of presentation is a modified form of the “interior duplication” technique which in Those Barren Leaves appears as the “Autobiography of Francis Chelifer” and takes the whole Part II of the novel and Chapter 7 in Part IV. The whole “Autobiography” in Part II is carefully linked with the main plot, although all appearances of an “independent” work are preserved; for instance, the sentence: But I run too fast. I have begun to talk of Mrs. Aldwinkle and you do not know who Mrs. Aldwinkle is. Nor did I, for that matter, as I reclined that morning along the soft resilient water ... [p. 79]

while actually the lady has already been presented by the omniscient narrator in Part I; similarly, the free movement of the author of the “Autobiography” into the past and the future also suggests that the work has been written some time during Part III. The “Autobiography” is still linked with the main plot by means of explicit ideas and action. In Part I, entitled “An Evening at Mrs. Aldwinkle’s”, all the characters are presented (except Chelifer, his mother and the Elvers). The action of Part I is typically limited to the arrival of Calamy, his looking over the villa under the guidance of Mrs. Aldwinkle and several discussions; it ends with a quotation from Mary Thriplow’s letter to her dead cousin: “Do you remember, Jim, that time we went out in the canoe together and nearly got drowned? ...” [p. 73]. This is abruptly followed by Part II which begins with Chelifer’s description of the Mediterranean Sea where he is floating on a “pellucid mattress”; immersed in meditation and self-praising, with his eyes shut most of the time, Chelifer hears a discussion of a group of people in a boat passing close to him; naturally, the topic of the 24

The importance of the appropriate atmosphere for meditation is stressed by Huxley in the novel, for instance, in the following fragment: “the spiritual atmosphere in which these ideas had been ruminated was dissipated, and it was in the void, so to speak, in the empty cold that his thoughts now gasped for breath ...”, p. 290.

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discussion (the clouds, Shelley’s “The Cloud” misquoted, a tune from Don Giovanni), the manner of speaking and the appearance of the persons clearly indicate some guests of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s; however, only after the mattress has been overturned, Chelifer almost drowned and then saved, does he meet Mrs. Aldwinkle. What follows closely resembles the arrival of Calamy in Part I: Chelifer is brought to the villa, shown around by the hostess, but, this time, during the premature sightseeing he faints. On the other hand, the first chapter of Part III begins with Hovenden’s remarks about the change in his relationship with Irene which has begun after the appearance of “that creature, Chelifer”, so that from this moment the author of the “Autobiography” is “reduced” to the role of a character, the main narrator going on with his tale as if there was no interruption. (The same may be said about the other fragment of the “Autobiography”, in Chapter 7, Part IV, which is similarly integrated into the whole novel.) It is easy to see the parallels between ideas, motifs and events which link the “Autobiography” with the main plot of the novel but, from the point of view of this study, it is the content of Part II that is of particular interest: out of seven chapters only the first one and the last two chapters develop the action of the main plot, i.e. the happenings described above, and presented by the first-person narration of Chelifer. The central chapters contain Chelifer’s memories (his love-affairs, recollections from childhood etc.) inserted in one long essay on such various subjects as “a catechism to be read through in office hours whenever time hangs a little heavy”, discussions of the functions of language in poetry illustrated by examples from his own poems,25 literary polemics, and art criticism - “we still cling pathetically to art. Quite unreasonably; ... It is time to smash the last and silliest of the idols!” [p. 78].26 As a whole, the “Autobiography” has many more functions within the context of the whole book than any other forms of “interior duplication” in the earlier novels. On the one hand, it symbolically represents “the world within the world”, i.e. the juxtaposition of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s guests and the lodgers of Miss Carruthers, and then it is analogical to the short stories inserted in Crome Yellow and the closet play in Antic Hay. But on the other hand, it has such additional functions as: [a] characterization of Francis Chelifer which, owing to the considerable space devoted to the “Autobiography”, is much deeper than in the cases of other characters-poets and writers, Denis Stone, Lypiatt, Mary Thriplow; [b] presentation of the characters of the novel from the point of view of another narrator and showing Chelifer as a much more cynical and ruthless critic than the omniscient narrator; and [c] inclusion of a large body of explicit ideas owing to the form of essay of the “Autobiography”. As in other cases, the validity of these explicit ideas is somewhat weakened by the fairly unpleasant personality and the conceit of Chelifer, but on the higher level of the whole book the ideas are again as functional as in the previous novels. Moreover, some of them reappear again in later chapters in order to be directly opposed and contradicted by the opinions of other characters, mainly Mr. Cardan and Calamy (cf. particularly Part V, Chapter 4, the final “symposium” of Cardan, Calamy, and Chelifer, the latter being aptly described as “a sentimentalist inside out”).

25

The method of combining fragments of poetry with explanatory essays is later on used by Huxley himself in his Texts and Pretexts. An Anthology with Commentaries [1932]. 26 A useful survey of Huxley’s changing attitude towards art as expressed in his works may be found in an otherwise poor article by Charles M. Holmes, “Aldous Huxley’s Struggle with Art”, The Western Humanities Review, 1961, XV, pp. 149-156.

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On another plane, two of the longest chapters of the “Autobiography” (Chapter 5 in Part II and Chapter 7 in Part IV) are devoted entirely to the subject of love which is one of the major themes of the novel. As far as Chelifer is concerned, he admirably describes his love-affairs himself: ... I was learning the difficult art of this exclusive concentration on the relevant. They were painful lessons. War had prepared me to receive them; Love was the lecturer. Her name was Barbara Waters ... [p. 113] That she preferred me to the Syrian was due to the fact that I was quite unattached and far more hopelessly in love with Barbara than he ... From me Barbara got passion of a kind she could not have hoped for from the Syrian - a passion which, in spite of my reluctance, in spite of my efforts to resist it, reduced me to a state of abjection at her feet ... It was the Syrian who in the end displaced me. [pp. 129130] If loving without being loved in return may be ranked as one of the most painful experiences, being loved without loving is certainly one of the most boring ... Twice in my life have I experienced these salutary horrors of boredom - once by my own fault, because I asked to be loved without loving; and once because I had the misfortune to be picked up on the beach ...” [p. 270]

The latter instance, obviously, concerns Mrs. Aldwinkle and the whole affair is presented through the action by the omniscient narrator, although without the biting commentary which Chelifer offers. But the relationship between Chelifer and Mrs. Aldwinkle is to be seen in comparison with those of the three other couples in the novel: Irene and Hovendon, Mary Thriplow and Calamy, Grace Elver and Cardan; needless to say, each of these love-affairs is entirely different. In order to juxtapose all these dissimilar kinds of love Huxley employs the technique which has already appeared in a rudimentary form in Crome Yellow (cf. ibidem., pp. 58-59) and which will appear in his subsequent novel, Point Counter Point, to constitute the main principle of the construction of the whole book. Its appearance in Those Barren Leaves, however, seems significant enough to deserve mentioning. For instance, in Part I, Chapter 7, Cardan, Calamy and Hovendon discuss the topic of “women” in the large parlour, while above them, in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s bedroom, the hostess talks to Irene about the latter’s love to Hovendon (Chapter 8), and, “at the same time”, in her own room Mary Thriplow writes a letter to her dead cousin and moves herself to tears (Chapter 9). A similar example may be found in Part III, significantly entitled “The Loves of the Parallels”, when Cardan and Falx talk about love inside the palace (Chapter 2), Chelifer and Mrs. Aldwinkle discuss the question of feeling and sensibility on a terrace below (Chapter 3), on a still lower terrace Calamy and Mary Thriplow “explore the theory and practice of love” (Chapter 3), while Irene and Hovendon are engaged in the same occupation out in the hills (Chapter 4). In all these cases there are several “events” taking place “at the same time” in different places. Similarly to Crome Yellow, the time of action is indicated only in very general terms and it is the action and the setting that imply simultaneity. In the first example mentioned above it is the end of an evening and some characters go upstairs to their rooms, while others remain in the saloon and continue their debate. In the second example simultaneity is implied in the following paragraph: [Mr. Cardan] looked down over the balustrade. On the next terrace below, Chelifer and Mrs. Aldwinkle were walking slowly up and down. On the terrace below that strolled the diminished and foreshortened figures of Calamy and Miss Thriplow. ‘And the other two,’ said Mr. Cardan, as if continuing aloud the enumeration which he and his companion had made in silence, with the eyes alone, ‘your young pupil and the little niece, have gone for a walk in the hills. Can you ask what we’re left out of?’ [p. 162]

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so that at the end of Chapter 4 all the characters are re-united. All these events do not seem chaotic but, on the contrary, they are strictly united by the same theme of love or man-woman relationship, while the differences between them are either qualitative or formal, i.e. either two opposed acts are reported by the narrator, or a debate is juxtaposed to a practical illustration of some thesis pronounced in the debate. The latter case offers therefore another technique used for the modification of explicit ideas. It is also interesting to observe the places in which these sequences of “contrapuntal” chapters are located within the whole construction of the novel. The first sequence occurs at the end of Part I, so that after the presentation of the characters and the setting, the “contrapuntal” chapters (7, 8, 9) introduce the question of love and the variety of attitudes to love as represented by the characters. After Part II, the “Autobiography” in which Chelifer presents his first unsuccessful love-affair with Barbara Waters, Part III, “The Loves of the Parallels”, contains two “contrapuntal” sequences, at the beginning (Chapters 2, 3, 4) and at the end (Chapters 11, 12, 13), where all the various kinds of love are presented simultaneously and, additionally, both sequences in this Part are separated by the tale about the love-affair of Cardan and Grace Elver. Finally, Part IV27 is roughly chronological with the exception of Chapter 7, the other fragment of Chelifer’s “Autobiography” which presents the end of its author’s relationship with Mrs. Aldwinkle, and Chapter 1, Part V, “Conclusion”, covers some time of the action of the preceding Part; by the end of this Part all love-affairs are solved and the narrator depicts the results of this “devastating passion” in the characters. The symmetrical distribution of the “contrapuntal” sequences and the regular alternations of chronological action with contrapuntal chapters, have made some critics look for a “musical” analogy explaining the construction of Those Barren Leaves. Rolo writes about “modulations” [p. XII], while May - about a “symphony” [p. 63]. The novel certainly represents a much higher degree of structural complexity than its predecessors, although, with one exception, there are no signals that would justify the search for a musical analogy. This exception may be found in the following fragment: There was a silence. From the open-air dancing-floor, a hundred yards away beneath the trees, came a sound, little dimmed by the intervening distance and the pervading Roman noise, of the jazz band. Monotonously, unceasingly, the banjos throbbed out the dance rhythms. An occasional squeak indicated the presence of a violin. The trumpet could be heard tooting away with a dreary persistence of the tonic and dominant; and clear above all the rest the saxophone voluptuously caterwauled. At this distance every tune sounded exactly the same. Suddenly, from the band-stand of the tea-gardens a pianist, two fiddlers and a ‘cellist began to play the Pilgrim’s Chorus out of Tannhäuser. Irene and Lord Hovendon, locked in one another’s arms, were stepping lightly, meanwhile, lightly and accurately over the concrete dance-floor. Obedient to the music of the jazz band, forty other couples stepped lightly round them. Percolating insidiously through the palisade that separated the dance-floor from the rest of the world, thin wafts of the Pilgrim’s Chorus intruded faintly upon the jazz. ‘Listen’, said Hovendon. Dancing, they listened. ‘Funny it sounds when you hear bof at ve same time!’ But the music from beyond the palisade was not strong enough to spoil their rhythm. They listened for a while, smiling at the absurdity of this other music from outside; but they danced on uninterruptedly. After a time they did not even take the trouble to listen. [pp. 251-2]

27

The method used in Part IV, “Journey”, is analogous to that in Huxley’s travel-book, published right after the novel, Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist [1925].

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This is one of the perfect miniature examples of counterpoint in Huxley’s fiction: two contradictory offers suggested by the opposed kinds of music are heard at the same time by the young couple who are to make their choice. The offers are only implied in the style used in the description: physical and direct side of life whose immediacy of experience appeals to the primitive senses of larger masses, as opposed to the spiritual and intellectual appeal of the classic music. The same problem, the overwhelming power of the senses which usually triumph over reason and spirit, is confronted by Calamy and, as a result, he escapes into meditation alone in the mountains; Irene and Hovendon, in their search for the “prelapsarian bliss”, naturally, choose the second alternative. The whole fragment is indicative of Huxley’s general interest in music, an interest which has already been observed in Antic Hay and which will require a more thorough discussion in the case of his next novel, Point Counter Point. 4.

As has already been mentioned, Huxley frequently tested some of his techniques of writing before employing them in his longer works. The same correlation seems to exist between “Two or Three Graces”, a short story published in a collection under the same title in 1926, and his subsequent novel, Point Counter Point which appeared two years later. Because of several significant parallels between both works it seems worthwhile to examine the novella briefly. The title itself indicates “two or three” portraits of the same person, two or three changes which Grace Peddley, the heroine, undergoes in the development of the plot. At the beginning Grace is shown in her normal, everyday life. It is an uneventful and peaceful existence of a mother, who is not interested very much in her children, and of a wife, whose husband is “the most active bore”, with his long and dull discussions on any subject with the exception of that of his wife. The first change in Grace begins with the appearance of Richard Wilkes, a music critic and the narrator of the story at the same time. He takes Grace to concert halls and thus introduces her to music. So far she has known very little about it and it is a revelation to her, so much so, that she begins to regard herself as a music critic identifying herself with Wilkes, although she is organically incapable of understanding or appreciating music as an art. The first change is completed when Grace makes the acquaintance of Rodney Clegg, a painter, and, again, starts to regard herself as a connoisseur of art, a muse and protectress of artists, her notion of protection being quite special - “she was too hospitable - she kept open bed, you know” [p. 83]. The last picture of Grace presents her in a still different situation. In contrast to the previous ones, she does not identify herself with anybody this time, but she is true to her own self and thus becomes a victim of her own deep emotions. For the first time she is head over heels in love and this leads almost to a tragedy when she tries to commit suicide after her lover, Kingham, has left her. The first-person narrator presents the conclusion metaphorically at the end of the story. Thinking about all the events that have happened, Wilkes considers Grace’s future and, playing Beethoven’s Arietta, Op. III, he finds an answer to the question of “what would become of Grace now?” “Da capo,” - he says. - “John Peddley, the children, the house, the blank existence of one who does not know how to live unassisted. Then another musical critic, a second me - introduction to the second theme. Then the second theme, scherzando, another Rodney. Or molto agitato, the equivalent of Kingham. And

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then inevitably, when the agitation has agitated itself to the climax of silence, da capo again to Peddley, the house, the children, the blankness of her unassisted life”. [p. 194]

Although Huxley did not follow the exact construction of the musical piece quoted (the original consists of five variations),28 still many parallels may be noticed. Both works have the same technique of variation governing their development. After the first theme every next variation gets emotionally stronger than the preceding one, up to the last theme, when the climax is reached and then the repetition of the first motif follows. Finally, both works have love as their main theme. 29 The final conclusion of da capo (again, from the beginning) may be regarded as an indication of the cyclic pattern of some human lives. The parallels between “Two or Three Graces” and Point Counter Point are thus quite numerous: the same setting of fashionable and artistic circles of London society, the theme of changes taking place in a character, the first-person narrator similar to Philip Quarles, and, finally, the important role of the descriptions of music. From the point of view of this study the last two examples seem especially important since they indicate another method of interplay between explicit ideas and fictional elements; moreover, this interplay takes place on another level of the structure of the novel. Huxley achieves this by modifying the “interior duplication” technique. Philip Quarles, the character-novelist in Point Counter Point, explicitly formulates the functions of a device called “the novelist-within-the novel” who, as Quarles writes, justifies aesthetic generalizations [and] he also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible and impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him telling parts of the same story as you are, you can make a variation on the theme. [p. 298]

These functions are being carefully realized by Philip Quarles in the novel, although he rarely presents parts of the main action - the very beginning of Chapter XXII, a short fragment in Chapter XXVI, or a report from the parade in Chapter XXVI. Most frequently Quarles writes long essays on subjects more or less related to the incidents in the action, for instance, about “possessiveness” which becomes perverted more easily than sexual instincts, about the facility of intellectual life, or about man’s achievements in one domain of life which do not guarantee corresponding achievements in other domains, etc. In this, however, Quarles would not differ from other characters-writers in the earlier novels, for his “essays” can still be regarded as generalized commentaries on particular events in the book. The new element appears in those of his remarks which concern some theoretical aspects of the process of writing a novel, for instance his discussion of the conception of “the novel of ideas” or of making “his” [Quarles’s] novelist a zoologist. The latter example is illustrative of Quarles’s double function in the novel: on the one hand, he is a commentator on some events of the main plot and a novelist who designs methods of writing which are followed by the main narrator; but on the other hand, he is also one of the characters in the novel and sometimes both functions overlap. Such an instance may be found in Chapter XXI, when Philip is reading about female Angler fishes which carry dwarf parasitic males attached to their bodies and he makes a comparison between the animals and the relationship between Walter Bidlake and Lucy Tantamount. He makes a note about the fictional situation when Walter and Lucy

28 29

Cf. W. Hulewicz, Przybłęda Boży. Beethoven: Czyn i człowiek, Kraków 1959, p. 261. Ibid., p. 261.

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go in with a scientific friend who shows them the Female Anglers and their husbands ... Make it the aquarium at Monaco and describe Monte Carlo and the whole Riviera in the terms of deep-sea monstrosity. [pp. 294-5]

The action does not move to the French Riviera, but the main narrator uses the method of describing human relationships in zoological terms in reference to Philip himself. Quarles is a man who lives alone in his intellectual world and has few connections with reality. His wife, Elinor, is necessary to him not only to bring some reality into his novels but also to help him live. Therefore, when we see Quarles reading further on about Bonellia viridis - “the male is microscopic and lives in what may be called the reproductive duct ... of the female” [p. 296] - this is exactly the description of Quarles’s own situation in terms of animal life. Obviously, the implied comparison between the Elinor - Philip relationship and the animals is understandable owing to the earlier characterization of Philip and Elinor. But in our terms, the explicit ideas used by Philip are modified by the same kind of explicit ideas (both taken from the same zoology handbook) used by the main narrator.30 Another method of writing described and explained by Quarles and then followed by the main narrator is connected with the much-discussed device of the “musicalization of fiction”, or with the more general question of the role of music in literature, and it deserves more attention. The whole theoretical explanation appears in the following fragment: Musicalization of fiction ... on a large scale in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven. The change of moods, the abrupt transitions. (Majesty alternating with a joke, for example in the first movement of the B flat major quartet. Comedy suddenly hinting at prodigious and tragic solemnities in the scherzo of the C sharp minor quartet.) More interesting still the modulations, not merely from one key to another, but from mood to mood. A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different. In sets of variations the process is carried a step further. Those incredible Diabelli variations, for example. The whole range of thought and feeling, yet all in organic relation to a ridiculous little waltz tune. Get this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough. All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Jones is murdering his wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the park. You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulations and variations are also more difficult. A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways - dissimilars solving the same problem. Or, vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems. In this way you can modulate through all the aspects of your theme, you can write variations in any number of different moods. Another way: the novelist may assume the god-like creative privilege and simply elect to consider the events of the story in their various aspects - emotional, scientific, economic, religious, metaphysical etc. He will modulate from one to the other - as from the aesthetic to the physico-chemical aspect of things, from the religious to the physiological or financial. [pp. 297-8]

Let us explain briefly the musical techniques referred to in the above fragment. In musical terminology “variation” consists in developing each section “from either the thematic or harmonic content of the original theme or from some more subtle form of association” 31 and it is possible in many ways: “on a more or less set progression of harmonies, on a melody, on a rhythm or group of rhythms”. The device of modulation is applied in music when there is “a smooth harmonic transition from one key to another ... [it] has supplied music with one of its psychologically most forceful methods of providing variety. It not only presents ways of showing melodies, chords, and 30

A reversed example of the same form of “interior duplication” was used by Huxley later on in his short story “After the Fireworks” [Brief Candles, 1931]; it is not the novelist, Miles Fanning, who keeps the notebook, but Pamela Tarn; the story examines thus the relationship between the artist and his works. 31 H. Carter, A Popular History of Music, New York 1966, p. 332.

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comments upon them in different pitches but alters the functions and relative weights of individual tones”.32 If these two techniques pose no difficulties for the novelist since they require only “a sufficiency of character” and problems as well as an appropriate correlation between the two, i.e. those features which have repeatedly been emphasized in the analysis of all Huxley’s novels and short stories presented above, the situation of the third technique, that of counterpoint, is slightly more complex. Carter writes that music is said to be contrapuntal when “its several voices appear to follow separate courses simultaneously”, 33 so that counterpoint in music is accomplished owing to the purposeful selection and shape of three main components: [a] a group of differentiated instruments; [b] creation of different melodies but within one harmony; and [c] simultaneity of presentation and reception; in other words, different instruments playing different harmonized melodies are heard at the same time. The first two requirements are easily fulfilled by the same methods used in the two previous musical techniques, but it is impossible to meet the third requirement since, by its very nature, the verbal medium is always linear and sequential, as Huxley himself recognized later on.34 In spite of this “shortcoming” of the literary medium, writers have designed several methods to overcome the difficulty: all these techniques aim at creating an illusion of simultaneity and, although things are described one after another, there are some signals that they should be seen as taking place simultaneously. One of such techniques is a method of abrupt moving from one scene to another so that, owing to general contemporaneity, all the events seem to be taking place at the same time. The method is usually called “the shots”, after its popular use by film producers and it was used by Huxley in the earlier novels, a fact which, like the whole problem of simultaneity in counterpoint, is totally neglected by his critics. General contemporaneity has been marked by several means, for instance by the appropriate choice of setting, so that the characters in various places can be seen at one glance (Those Barren Leaves, ibid., pp. 70-71), or when what happens in one place can be heard in another (Crome Yellow, ibid., pp. 58), or by the action when the narrator follows the movements of the characters when they separate, for instance, after a meal, and then re-unite again (Those Barren Leaves, ibid., pp. 71). If in these earlier novels instances of counterpoint have usually been accomplished on the level of chapters, the divisions in the construction of Point Counter Point are much subtler, so that almost every chapter is subdivided into several sections (sometimes as many as thirteen), or, as Baldanza calls them - “scenes”.35 The sections differ in respect to contents and functions: some of them are devoted entirely to the presentation of explicit ideas in various forms, discussions, notebook, letters, meditation, while others contain more or less “traditional events” presented by the omniscient narrator. A good example of such a division and of typical links between particular scenes may be found, for instance, in Chapter XXI 32

H. Weinstock, What Music Is?, New York 1966, pp. 273, 124. H. Carter, op.cit., p. 231. 34 In his preface to On Art and Artists [ed. by M. Philipson, Chatto and Windus, London 1960] Huxley wrote: “We can see more than one thing at a time, and we can hear more than one thing at a time. But unfortunately we cannot read more than one thing at a time. In any good metaphor, it is true, there is a blending, almost at a point and almost in one instant, of differences harmonized into a single expressive whole. But metaphors cannot be drawn out, and there is no equivalent in literature of sustained counterpoint or the spatial unity of diverse elements brought together so that they can be perceived at one glance as a significant whole” [p. 7]. 35 Frank Baldanza, “Point Counter Point: Aldous Huxley on ‘The Human Fugue’”, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 1959, LVIII, p. 254. 33

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which consists of five scenes: the central section of the chapter (the third scene) presents a general discussion of all the main characters of the novel (except Rampion) about Providence and chance happenings or about the influence of other people on our lives, i.e. about problems which are illustrated by many episodes in the whole book and, in this particular chapter, by the first scene the illness of John Bidlake, or the fifth scene - the breakdown of the relationship between Elinor and Philip Quarles, as a result of her meeting with Webley. In the same chapter an even better example of the interplay between the explicit and implicit methods of writing may be seen in scenes two and four, when in the former Elinor feels strongly attracted to Webley, while in the latter she tries to explain to Marjorie in theoretical terms Walter’s fascination with Lucy, both scenes containing the same statement that “power always attracts”. On a higher place, the sections form “clusters” or “units of scenes”, linkage being provided by the same explicit ideas, themes, metaphors, places mentioned etc. Generally speaking, the inner structure of such “clusters of scenes” is based on one of the following patterns:  the narrator follows the doings of a single character, e.g. Walter Bidlake in Chapter XIII, who goes from one place to another, meets other characters, and the narrator sometimes leaves him, in order to describe the doings of those people whom Walter has just left or will seen meet;  the narrator follows two or three characters, e.g. Sidney, Elinor and Philip in Chapters XX and XXI, who together arrive at one place (here Liverpool Street Station) and separate there, the narrator following first one character (Sidney Quarles) and then coming back to the other two left at the same place and describing their doings in turn; in the same chapter, Philip and Elinor separate, she meeting first Webley and then Marjorie, Philip meeting Walter and others in his club, and then in the last scene Elinor and Philip come together again;  the narrator describes a group of characters in one place, e.g. Sbisa’s restaurant in Chapter XI, and the action in this place provides a constant reference point for the doings of other characters in different places; in other words, instead of a continuous description of the discussion taking place at Sbisa’s we encounter several sections of this discussion separated by inserted scenes of other people in other places at the same time;  finally, the time of action may be specified as, for instance, in Chapters XXXII - XXXIV, when Elinor presents her plans for the next few hours thus determining the time of particular events. Needless to say, the whole resulting variety of juxtapositions, explicit ideas versus explicit ideas, explicit ideas versus “events”, “event” versus “event” both opposed to an explicit idea etc., including all possible combinations of these two basic techniques of writing, i.e. explicit and implicit, is developed to a much greater extent in Point Counter Point than in the earlier novels. And yet, even with the technical advance described above, Huxley’s novelistic methods remain essentially the same as those in the previous books where no reference to music is made. In other words, the whole experiment in “musicalization of fiction”, as presented theoretically by Quarles and as demonstrated practically by Huxley, seems to be realized by strictly novelistic devices. This statement directly concerns a much wider problem of the phenomenon called “the correspondence of arts”, a question frequently studied by literary critics and historians of art. 36 Naturally, the problem is much too complex to be discussed here in detail; let it suffice to say that this phenomenon is possible precisely owing to the process of “transformation”. According to S. 36

A more detailed treatment of this subject as well as a bibliography may be found in my article “Music in Literature - Presentation of Huxley’s Experiment in ‘Musicalization of Fiction’”, Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, 1972, XIV:2, pp. 111-123; see also E. K. Brown, Rhythm in the Novel, Toronto 1950, pp. 8-9.

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K. Langer it is a method of “transforming the appearance of the model into sensory structures of another sort” and she further adds that among the forthright and familiar conventions of imitation, a sensuous transformation acts much as a strong metaphor does among the well understood conventions of a literary speech. 37

The appearance of some “musical transformations” was mentioned in the course of the discussion of Huxley’s early novels, where architecture is described in terms of music, or, vice versa, where music is presented in architectural terminology, or where musical terminology occurs in remarks some characters’ manner of speaking etc.; in all these cases music appeared as a kind of “vehicle” in metaphors and symbols. These “transformations” naturally recur again in abundance in Point Counter Point, e.g. the aesthetic and acoustic description of music, or death from physiological, religious, and economic points of view; the new feature in this novel is the application of the musical transformation to such a high structural level as the technique of writing and the modes of presentation. Obviously, explicit ideas lose their explicitness and potential validity in the immediate context by the very fact of being reduced to the function of one possible attitude or, to use Huxley’s terminology, of one “instrument” in the whole orchestra. As much is expressed by Quarles: ... the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. For instance, one person interprets events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles ... And then there is the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once. [p. 196]

On a still higher plane, however, the construction of the novel as a whole does not seem to be modelled on the construction of any musical piece. Contrary to the basic principle of counterpoint which is presented explicitly, the aim of the whole construction is only implied in the novel and, again, it is done with the help of a description of music. The novel begins with a concert of Bach’s Suite in B minor and ends with Beethoven’s “die heilige Dankgesang”. It is the choice of the composers and pieces of music which is significant: in his fugues developed from a single theme, as Goethe said,38 Bach formed a microcosm of the creation of the world, while Beethoven - a microcosm of the existing world. The choice of Bach for the beginning of the novel is thus significant and, moreover, it is supported by the image in Chapter I - a description of the foetus developing in Marjorie’s womb. In the case of the last chapter of the novel, Spandrel dies when convinced of the existence of God by the piece of music with a very meaningful title, “die heilige Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit in der lydischen Tonart”. 39 This is contrasted with the scene in which Burlap, finally freed from his previous mistress who has committed suicide, enjoys himself with the freshly seduced virgin in the bathroom; this last “counterpoint” may be regarded as the final “statement” of the novelist about the world presented in the novel, or the total meaning of the book. The aim of the whole construction is therefore a presentation of a

37

Susanne K. Langer, Problems of Art: The Philosophical Lectures, New York 1957, p. 104. Quoted after Józef Koffler, “Historia muzyki w zarysie”, Muzyk Wojskowy, January 1, 1928, 2, p. 8; see also Historia muzyki powszechnej, Kraków 1965, p. 197. 39 The title is significant since the Quartet was composed when Beethoven felt a temporary improvement in his deafness; cf. Hulewicz, op.cit., p. 601. 38

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multiple picture of life, as Huxley himself confirms: “I work away on a long and complicated novel, which I want to make a picture of life in its different aspects ...” [Letters, p. 276]40 As far as explicit ideas are concerned, an evident advancement in their treatment and functions may be noted in Point Counter Point in relation to the earlier novels. Bodiham’s sermon or Scogan’s speculations about the future world made their appearance once in the novel and in one formulation, so that having played their more or less important roles, they were soon forgotten. Moreover, as has already been mentioned, they did not bring about anything of significance to the lives of the characters or the action of the novel. There were only some individual characters whose connections with explicit ideas were stronger, e.g. Denis in Crome Yellow, Calamy and Chelifer in Those Barren Leaves, Lypiatt and Gumbril in Antic Hay. But in Pointer Counter Point all the characters are strictly connected with their ideas, so much so that they are ready to die or to kill for their sake (Webley, Spandrell), which is obviously reflected in a very serious tone of the discussions. This is also seen in a changed character of events (physical suffering, illness, work) which is accompanied by a parallel increase in the range of ideas and the appearance of less abstract and more basic problems of human existence. Moreover, as has been mentioned before, from the formal point of view explicit ideas may function on several different levels of the literary structure and the same idea may be expressed by different modes of presentation and recur in ever new formulation which gives it a dynamic quality usually associated with people rather than with abstract constructions. It is in this way that Huxley has achieved a remarkable integration of the various modes of presentation and a perfect balance between the explicit and implicit methods of writing in Point Counter Point, the novel which seems to mark the peak of its author’s maturity as a novelist. 5. The importance of Huxley’s essays for the understanding of his novels seems sometimes overestimated, for instance, in a statement that Music at Night [1931] may be read as a “notebook for Brave New World” [Woodcock, p. 176; Meckier, p. 177]. As has already been said and - it is hoped - demonstrated, there is usually a similarity of topics and style but in fiction these essayistic parts may undergo numerous and significant modifications by being dramatized, embedded in a situation, or juxtaposed with the “purely” fictional elements, so that the explicit thesis of an essay never preserves its immediate and explicit validity in a novel. Regardless of the origin of Huxley’s ideas expressed in Brave New World [1932]41 in respect to the modes of presentation and 40

This is further stressed by Huxley’s essay, “The One and the Many”, Do What You Will [1929] and by the motto to the novel; Burgum’s opinion that the novel is based on the assumption that “class distinctions are vanishing” does not seem valid: E. B. Burgum, The Novel and the World’s Dilemma, New York 1947, p. 150. 41 Apart from Huxley’s essays in Music at Night [1931], e.g., “To the Puritan All Things are Impure”, “Foreheads Villanous Low”, “Wanted, a New Pleasure” and others, one may mention other possible sources of ideas for Brave New World, such as Scogan’s monologue in Crome Yellow [p. 22], Gumbril’s conception of the “complete man” in Antic Hay, and Huxley’s own statements about his intention of writing a parody of “the Wellsian Utopia” [Letters, p. 348] or the opinion in his interview: “Well, that started out as a parody of H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods, but gradually it got out of hand and turned into something quite different from what I’d originally intended. As I became more and more interested in the subject, I wandered farther and farther away from my orginal purpose”, Writers at Work, op.cit., p. 165.

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functions of explicit ideas, the novel again provides evidence confirming the continuity of Huxley’s favourite techniques of writing, choice of characters, plot and time constructions, while the fact that the book is an anti-Utopia (or dystopia) shows relatively little influence on the total structure of the work. Any writer undertaking the task of creating a Utopian or anti-Utopian novel is confronted by the necessity of presenting the fantastic world, its theoretical foundations, historical background etc. simultaneously with the fictional characters, conflict and plot, so that the book would not turn into a treatise. In Huxley’s case, however, this task required virtually no additional fictional devices: the above analyses have already demonstrated his skillful exploitation of the possibilities of his setting, or the techniques of integrating the essayistic element with his fictional structures.42 In Brave New World he returned again to the constant element of his plots, namely, that of arrival and visiting various places of interest, a method employed already in Crome Yellow, Those Barren Leaves and Antic Hay. In Brave New World there are three basic scenes of this kind: at the beginning of the novel, Chapters I - III, a group of students visits the Conditioning Centre; in Chapters VII - IX Bernard Marx and Lenina pay a visit to the Reservation; and, finally, the Savage arrives at the new world and is shown around in Chapters X - XII. Thus over one half of the novel is devoted to visiting both world, although in each case the method is supplemented by several devices perfected by Huxley in his earlier novels, so that the abundant body of explicit ideas is again well integrated. The first visit is made much more complex owing to the technique of “counterpoint” and the device of “shots” in particular, the latter device reaching perhaps its extreme form in this novel. The new world is presented by: 1. the lecture of the Director of the Centre in which he explains not only all the processes that take place in the Centre but also a number of aspects of life in the new world; his lecture is then supplemented by that of Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, who imparts a lot of historical and philosophical information; 2. fragments from the course of hypnopaedic teaching from the loudspeakers; 3. a talk of some men working at the Centre, including Henry Foster and Bernard Marx; 4. the conversation between Lenina and Fanny, two girls also working in the Centre. Owing to the fact that all the main characters have already been casually mentioned in Chapter I, all the fragments of talks enumerated above become shorter and shorter so that the final fourteen pages in Chapter III look like this: “’I’ve had it nearly three months’. ‘Chosen as the opening date of the new era’, ‘Ending is better than mending; ending is better’ ‘There was a thing, as I’ve said before, called Christianity’. ‘Ending is better than mending’. ‘The ethics and philosophy of under-consumption’ ‘I love new clothes; I love new clothes, I love ...’ ‘So essential when there was under-production; but in an age of machines and the 42

[4] [1] [2] [1] [2] [1] [2] [1]

A different argument is provided by Meckier: “The difference between the satirist and the writer of utopias is somewhat minimal to begin with, since the second, like the first, intends to expose the difference between what he beholds and he would prefer to see. Once the anti-utopian novel is written, its counterpart already exists by implication”, pp. 177-8.

80 fixation of nitrogen - positively a crime against society’. ‘Henry Foster gave it me’. ‘All crosses had their tops cut and became T’s. There was a thing called God’. ‘It’s real morocco-surrogate’. ‘We have the World State now. And Ford’s Day celebrations, and Community Sings, and Solidarity Services’. ‘Ford, how I hate them, Bernard Marx was thinking’. ‘There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol’. ‘Like meat, like so much meat’.

[4] [1] [4] [1] [3] [1] [3] [pp. 43-4]

As a result of the application of “counterpoint” Huxley effectively realized the task of the Utopian novelist, because the technique allowed him to achieve several aims. First of all, the new world is presented from several points of view: there is the official version [1] presented exclusively by means of explicit ideas in the lectures; the practical application of the conditioning methods and subjects taught in sleep [2], also by means of explicit ideas in the form of epigrams and maxims and aphorisms; and there is an illustration of practical life in the new world from personal and individual points of view [3 and 4]. This presentation reveals not only some imperfections of the system, since both Lenina and Marx are somewhat “deviated” from the standard, but also the ironic attitude of the narrator, which is seen mainly in the juxtaposition of the explicit ideas in the lectures and those in the hypnopaedic lesson. In this way explicit ideas become at once “embodied” in the characters and the setting and their validity is questioned. At the same time, apart from describing the new world, Huxley also introduces the main characters, Marx and Lenina, whose doings are then followed in the next three chapters [IV-VI] in the same contrapuntal way, each chapter being subdivided into two or three sections. These latter chapters describe some further aspects of life in the new world and, at the same time, differences in the acts and reactions of these two characters develop the main conflict to be illustrated in the plot and they imply the main problem, that of rebellion against the compulsory happiness in the new world. In a different form the same problem reappears in the second visit, that of Marx and Lenina in the Reservation and their contact with a completely different reality. This visit serves a double purpose: on the one hand it is a dramatic description of life banished from the new world and on the other - introduction of John the Savage who will now take over the function of the protagonist and keep it till the end of the novel. In both cases “dramatic” methods are used instead of a lecture, i.e. the omniscient narrator describes mainly the reactions of his characters (Marx’s fascination and Lenina’s disgust - she is much less deviated than Marx) and in the case of the Savage he uses the technique of the “flashback” (Chapter VIII). With the introduction of the Savage Huxley completes his set of characters each of whom is in disagreement with the compulsory happiness of the new world although each has different reasons for his rebellion: the Savage’s deviation may be called idealistic-emotional, Marx’s is mainly physiological, while that of Helmholtz Watson - intellectual. The third visit serves mainly the purpose of demonstrating the relationship of all these “deviated” characters with their environment. The juxtaposition of various points of view recurs in subsequent chapters when the Savage visits a number of places, such as the Charing-T Tower of the Weather Department, the Electrical Equipment Corporation, Eton, TV-Corporation, the feelies etc. and when he openly criticizes some aspects of life in the new world. Thus, if in the first visit the comment on explicit ideas (the lectures) was mainly implicit, in the third visit it becomes

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explicit (the criticism of the Savage, Marx’s reports, remarks of Mustapha Mond about the reports, the Savage’s discussions with Helmholtz Watson) while the previously explicit ideas are presented implicitly, as embodied in the elements of the fictional world. Owing to these three series of visits Huxley achieved all his main aims: the new world, its history and scientific foundations, as well as various aspects of life, are all presented both theoretically and practically, and commented upon from various points of view, according to the variety of characters and their conflict with the environment. At the same time, the main problem of the novel becomes clear: the rebellion against the tyranny of happiness because of the price that humanity must pay for it; as usually in Huxley’s fiction, the problem is not embodied in one character, but it is divided by aspects among several persons. The subsequent chapters are devoted mainly to the development of the plot which consists of two main tests for the Savage: there are two attempts of Lenina to seduce the Savage but he, armed with Shakespeare,43 resists the temptation, although the problem of physical aspect of love is never wholly resolved by him; the other test is that of death, when the Savage witnesses the manner in which his mother dies and provokes a riot in a completely unrealistic protest. All these events lead to the climax of the novel which, like that in Point Counter Point, takes place in a discussion or “symposium” in Chapters XVI and XVII, in which Mustapha Mond analyzes all the problems of the novel with all the “deviated” characters, i.e. Marx, Watson, and the Savage. As in all debates of Huxley’s “polyphonic” novels, the problem is analyzed explicitly and exhaustively but no solution is reached either explicitly or by implication - as Huxley writes: “You pays your money and you takes your choice”, even though all the choices offered are unacceptable. As such, the novel obviously belongs to the group of “polyphonic” novels, in spite of the opinions ventured by some critics;44 it should come out very clearly when Brave New World is compared with Island, or Ape and Essence. 6. If Woodcock’s statement that Brave New World is Huxley’s “first totally didactic novel” [p. 175] seems hardly justified, much stronger argument for such an opinion may be found in the writer’s subsequent novel, Eyeless in Gaza [1936]. And yet, the same critic quite rightly states that “More than any other of Huxley’s novels Eyeless in Gaza fitted his requirements for a literature of the Whole Truth” and that the novel “has a psychological complexity Huxley had not before achieved in fiction and would never repeat” [p. 204]. Undoubtedly, Eyeless in Gaza has a unique position in the sequence of Huxley’s novels: on the one hand, it contains a full exploitation of the potential possibilities of all the devices and techniques of writing developed in the earlier novels; but on the other hand, there appeared a new feature which becomes predominant in the later stage of his novelistic career, since for the first time the novel contains a body of explicit ideas which, although fully dramatized and thoroughly integrated into the novelistic structure, still remains unquestionably valid. In other words, for the first time, a definite solution is implied and 43

Not only is the title taken from The Tempest, but there are numerous quotations from Shakespeare in the text of the novel; for a detailed examination of the connections between Brave New World and The Tempest see: Iza Grushev: “Brave New World and The Tempest”, College English, October 1962, no. 1. 44 E.g. Woodcock, op.cit., p.175; an opposite opinion is convincingly agued by May, op.cit., p.111.

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demonstrated as a necessity, owing to some sanctions of the author. These supported explicit ideas are presented in the novel in a way which is a combination of two favourite techniques of Huxley’s, the “counterpoint” and the “interior duplication”. Although it is not the purpose of this study to deal with the critical objections of various scholars writing about Huxley, it might be pointed out that most probably very few critics would have noticed the “musicality” of Point Counter Point if Huxley had not provoked them by using musical terminology, and, analogically, probably there would have been no such strong objections45 to the disrupted chronology of Eyeless in Gaza, had Huxley used some linking paragraphs instead of abrupt “shots” and straightforward dates as titles of his chapters. Leaving aside the above remarks in the realm of speculation, 46 however, it should be stressed that seen in the context of the earlier novels, Eyeless in Gaza seems to be based on much the same principle as the technique of counterpoint, although instead of musical terminology the method is justified by an image of Anthony Beavis looking at “a pack of snapshots” shuffled “in the hands of a lunatic” [p. 17]. This is a perfect example of Huxley provoking his critics, for on closer analysis the time construction of the novel appears the reverse of chaotic and the disruption of chronology proves only apparent. The novel actually consists of five streams of event,47 within their respective and separate spans of time, which are presented in strictly chronological order. As a result there emerges a technique very similar to that one which has already been described in the discussion of the patterns of contrapuntal scenes in Point Counter Point [cf. ibid. pp. 153-4]; in one of those patterns Huxley used one “scene” as a kind of “base line” or reference for several other juxtaposed events so that instead of a continuous description the scene was cut into several 45

Eyeless in Gaza “would have been much more effective as a straight autobiography or as the straightforward history of the development of his hero” wrote David Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World, Chicago 1939, p. 210. The novel could “be rearranged into exact sequence without losing in the process any essential meaning” according to Harold Watts, Aldous Huxley, New York 1969, 30; “It must be admitted that the device of the time shift is too mechanical; that the events of the past are recorded from outside by an impersonal narrator, whereas the treatment of time in the first chapter suggests a psychological method more after the manner of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, in which ‘the remembrance of things past’ takes place in the mind of the protagonist” opines P. Bowering, op.cit., p.117. 46 It seems instructive to compare the above remarks with what Huxley wrote in the first chapter of his unfinished novel: “How easy it would be to construct a linear narrative, a straightforward tale that would read like the simple truth! But the truth is never simple. If the straightforward tale carries conviction it is precisely because it is not the truth, but an elegantly streamlined novelette. At the risk of seeming confused and digressive, I shall stick as closely as I can to the complex realities of the autobiographical process – a process that supplements facts with pseudo-facts, inference and rationalization, because it is not the truth but an elegantly streamlined falsehood”; quoted after Laura Archera Huxley: This Timeless Moment. A Personal View of Aldous Huxley, New York 1971, p. 198. 46 It seems instructive to compare the above remarks with what Huxley wrote in the first chapter of his unfinished novel: “How easy it would be to construct a linear narrative, a straightforward tale that would read like the simple truth! But the truth is never simple. If the straightforward tale carries conviction it is precisely because it is not the truth, but an elegantly streamlined novelette. At the risk of seeming confused and digressive, I shall stick as closely as I can to the complex realities of the autobiographical process – a process that supplements facts with pseudo-facts, inference and rationalization, because it is not the truth but an elegantly streamlined falsehood”; quoted after Laura Archera Huxley: This Timeless Moment. A Personal View of Aldous Huxley, New York 1971, p. 198. 47 Woodcock’s division into six sequences hardly seems justified since the two events in Chaps. XXV and XXIX constitute a direct continuation of his sequence 3 (pp. 199-201); May’s division into four blocs of time is inaccurate in that it combines events from two distinct periods of August 1933 – February 1934, with April 1934 – February 1935 (pp.118-119); cf. also Meckier, op. cit., pp. 147-148.

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sections with fragments of other scenes inserted in the cuts. Eyeless in Gaza is constructed on the basis of a very similar principle: in this novel the “base line” is provided by selective and consecutive entries in Anthony Beavis’s diary - from April 1934 to February 1935, Chapters 2, 7, 13, 17, 23, 28, 32, 35, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 50 and 54 - the last chapter in the succession, which is also the last one in the book, is written by the omniscient narrator, although it contains mainly Beavis’s reflections. As a result, we encounter a “simultaneous” juxtaposition of various events and “scenes” from the life of the protagonist and instead of a “simultaneous multiplicity of life” embodied in a series of different characters, we are given a number of different portraits of Anthony Beavis in some crucial periods of his life, all these pictures being brought together and interrelated by the use of the “interior duplication” technique in the form of Beavis’s diary. Beavis himself writes about it: “A chalk pit, a picture gallery, a brown figure in the sun, a skin, here, redolent of salt and smoke, and here (like Mary’s he remembered) savagely musky. Somewhere in the mind a lunatic shuffled a pack of snapshots and dealt them out at random, shuffled once more and dealt them out in different order, again and again, indefinitely. There was no chronology. The idiot remembered no distinction between before and after”. [pp. 17-18]

While at the end of the novel, we encounter again a description containing similar images, although the attitude has changed: “Unity even in diversity, even in separation. Separate patterns, but everywhere alike. Everywhere the same constellations of the ultimate units of energy. The same on the surface of the sun as in the living flesh warmed by the sun’s radiance; in the scented cluster of buddleia flowers as in the blue sea and the clouds on the horizon; in the drunken Mexican’s pistol as in the dark dried blood on that mangled face among the rocks, the fresh blood spattered scarlet over Helen’s naked body, the drops oozing from the raw contusion of Mark’s knee. Identical patterns, and identical patternings of patterns. He held the thought of them in his mind, and along with it, the thought of life incessantly moving among the patterns, selecting and rejecting for its own purposes.” [p. 378]

When compared, both quotations cited above illustrated precisely the way in which the form of “interior duplication” functions in the novel: consecutive entries in Beavis’s diary gradually reveal changes taking place in the protagonist’s thoughts and attitudes. This is undoubtedly a new element in a novel by Huxley. The series of fragments from Anthony Beavis’s diary conveys the whole main theme of the book, i.e. his conversion from a cynical and detached aesthete and amateur scientist to an active pacifist and a mystic. 48 Individual chapters in this series differ from each other in contents: some are pure essays on such subjects as “God - a person or not a person” [Chapter L], “Remarks by St Teresa” [Chapter XLIV], or “Stiggins in modern dress” [Chapter XXVIII]; other chapters contain an explicit comment on and reports from numerous discussions of which some have the form of a conversation during a party, as in Huxley’s early novels (cf. e.g. Chapters XI, XIV, XVIII, XX, XII) or of a “symposium”, particularly those in which Dr Miller participates (e.g. Chapters XLIX, LI). All these chapters contain an abundance of explicit ideas but it seems significant that changes in these ideas constitute an effective implicit technique for the presentation of the “conversion” theme (this is well seen when one compares the earlier entries in Beavis’s diary with the later ones, as in the two 48

The same problems are discussed by Huxley in his non-fictional works, for instance, Ends and Means. An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for their Realization [1937] or What are you going to do about it? The Case for Constructive Pacifism [1936].

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quotations cited above). Explicit ideas thus become a kind of “material” in these chapters although, contrary to the earlier novels, this material serves to illustrate the main theme of the book and concerns only one character. From another point of view, Beavis’s diary can be regarded as a new kind of framework for the novel; examples of notebooks and diaries have already been observed in the earlier book but never before has there been a diary of the main protagonist, in whom the whole main theme of the novel is focused and who is not a poet or a novelist. Finally, the choice of the “conversion” theme by its very nature implies a solution if this theme is to be fully stated. In the earlier novels Huxley was satisfied with the presentation of the problem from various points of view, embodied in several equally important characters, and with the indication of the possible choices with their respective consequences. But in Eyeless in Gaza for the first time a definite solution is reached and analysed both theoretically and practically. Another novelty, though quite in keeping with the “conversion” theme and its solution, is the introduction of scenes of meditation in which the omniscient narrator enters the consciousness of some characters and describes their visions. It is in such scenes that there occurs a complete merging of explicit ideas with emotions and sensuous experiences of the characters. The meditation are provoked by some images, works of art, or explicit ideas - examples may be found in Helen’s visions in Chapters XXIX and XXXIX, or in Anthony’s meditation provoked by a quotation from William Penn, “Force may subdue, but Love gains; and he who forgives first wins the laurel” [p. 309]. This merging of intellect with physical experience is the realization of the ideal advocated by Dr Miller who offers the following criticism of all the characters: “You’ve artificially transformed the unity [of man] into a trinity. One clever man and two idiots - that’s what you’ve made yourself. An admirable manipulator of ideas, linked with a person who, as far as selfknowledge and feeling are concerned, is just a moron; and the pair of you associated with a half-witted body ... Two imbeciles and one intellectual”. [p. 13]

This description fits the major characters in all of Huxley’s novels, including Anthony before his conversion. What is more significant, however, is the fact that such statements by Dr Miller, and they are fairly numerous in the novel, are not in any way modified or contradicted but, on the contrary, are embodied in Anthony’s consecutive stages of awareness leading to his conversion. In the earlier novels we have already met types of men-of-wisdom, or reasoners, such as Scogan, Cardan, Mustapha Mond, but in all these cases their theories have been proved inadequate by satirical characterization, significant action or events which proved them wrong, juxtaposition with other characters, incidents or ideas. Nothing like this happens to Miller’s theories: his ideas are strongly supported both in practice, when they are unquestioningly accepted by the protagonist, and in theory, when Miller is triumphant in all the discussions (compare the “symposia” in Brave New World, Chapters XVI and XVII, and in Eyeless in Gaza, Chapter LI). The validity of Miller’s theories in thus very strongly emphasized by such means as [a] their separation in Anthony’s diary; [b] connection between the protagonist and Dr Miller; and [c] total acceptability of all other ideas presented in other characters. If accepted without any modification, the last statement would certainly permit a classification of Eyeless in Gaza as a “homophonic” novel, typical of Huxley’s later phase. Therefore, it should immediately be added that the novel is not oriented towards the conclusion, as presented in abstract terms above, but rather on the process which leads to such a conclusion, the process which, as in the earlier novels, is presented in a “polyphonic” way. This is the purpose of the “contrapuntal” technique mentioned above and, speaking most generally, of the opposition

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between Anthony after his conversion (fourteen chapters out of the total number of fifty four chapters) and Anthony before his conversion, taking part in all other subplots. The subplots in which, apart from Anthony, the major roles are played by Brian Foxe, Helene Amberley, and Mark Staithes, run parallel to that of Anthony’s conversion and they are much more complete in themselves than in the earlier novels; every character reaches a significant point of his or her life so that at the end of the novel each subplot reaches its climax: Brian Foxe, much like the Savage in Brave New World, potentially Denis Stone in Crome Yellow, and Lypiatt in Antic Hay, commits suicide; typically of all earlier novels, Helen is disgusted with herself and feels like “a lump of dirt”, while Mark Staithes remains hateful and cynical with his “entomological” attitude to people till the end, till he is “huddled in dirt”, as he appropriately quotes from Rochester [p. 359]. In other words, it is precisely the world of Huxley’s earlier novels, but, unlike Gumbril Jr. in Antic Hay, Anthony Beavis is spared the latter’s fate owing to his acceptance of the help of Dr Miller, on the one hand, and on the other - owing to the “conditioning” of his earlier life. The idea of conditioning, which appears in Anthony essays [Chapter VII], is very similar both to that presented in Brave New World and to the understanding of human character as an outcome of the earlier stages of life; it could be seen in Point Counter Point, when Elinor Quarles watches her son and wonders which features of his ancestors her son will develop [Chapter XIX]. Apart from the continuation and development of ideas expressed already in the earlier novels, Huxley also continues his favourite methods of writing, other than those discussed above. For instance, he presents contrasted reaction of characters to Othello [Chapter XXXIII], describes a party at Mrs. Amberley’s in much the same contrapuntal way as in Point Counter Point [cf. Chapters XIV, XVIII, XX], and shows how the party ends with a long discussion between Anthony and Mark [Chapter XXII], or employs counterpoints of scenes within individual chapters [Chapter VI]. There are also numerous allusions to various writers and their works [cf. lists of books in Chapters X, XI, XIV], quotations from Anthony’s Elements of Sociology [the whole Chapter XI], and typical Huxleyan aphorisms: “... if one only had two sets of eyes! Janus would be able to read Candide and the Imitations simultaneously” [p. 73], or “People would insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest” [p. 253]. Apart from these, there is sensuous imagery which is, perhaps, stronger than ever. Huxley frequently included scenes of violence and physical disgust, ever early in his poetry, 49 but never before had there been so many such scenes as, for instance, the bloody “bath” of Anthony and Helen in the incident with the dog, the amputation of Mark’s leg, Anthony’s repulsive experiences in the church, sickness of children etc.; moreover, similar images appear in the characters’ thoughts, e.g. Helen imagining that she would have to take the stolen kidney, “raw as it was an oozy with some unspeakable slime” into her mouth [p. 35], or Anthony’s meditation - “try to imagine, in my own body, the pain of a crushed finger, of blows with a stick or lash across the face, the searing touch of red-hot iron” [pp. 309-310]. This stress on sensuous experiences, on pain and repulsion, is quite in keeping with the main theme of the novel, the necessity of achieving a balance between the various aspects of human nature enumerated by Miller in the passage cited above. But at the same time this forceful examination of the character’s feelings supplemented with the sensuous experience and rational thoughts greatly contributes to a deep penetration of the psychology of the character, an

49

E.g. the physiological disgusting imagery in “Topiary”, where flesh looks like “carrion puffed with noisome steam / Fly-blown tp the eye that looks on it, / Fly-blown to the touch of hand’.

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achievement often encountered in Huxley’s short stories50 but, as Woodcock rightly indicated in the statement quoted above, quite rare in Huxley’s novels. All these observations are adequately summed up by May, when he writes that Huxley “pushed the novel of ideas as far as possible in the direction of the novel proper without losing the distinctive characteristics of the former or dealing less than ably with the requirements of the latter”. [p. 138]

although a more detailed discussion of such terms as “the novel of ideas” and “the novel proper” will have to be postponed to the third Part of this chapter. It may only be added that Eyeless in Gaza seems to be both the peak achievement of the first stage of Huxley’s literary career and the most complex of his “polyphonic” novels. At the same time it seems to be an indication of significant changes which were to occur in the later novels and which justify the application of the term “homophonic” to them.

50

Particularly in his long novellas like “Uncle Spencer”, “Two or Three Graces” or “After the Fireworks”.

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Part 2 The Homophonic Novels

The tendency observed in Eyeless in Gaza to present an unmodified and absolutely valid body of explicit ideas came to flourish most spectacularly already in Huxley’s next novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan [1939], a book which can rightly be included among Huxley’s “homophonic” novels. The number and significance of explicit ideas increase so much here that almost one half of the novel is devoted to an elaborate intellectual analysis of a wide variety of problems, including those which directly concern the total meaning of the book. Explicit ideas appear, first of all, in the lengthy “lectures” of Mr. Propter, perhaps the wisest and most talkative character in all Huxley’s novels. His theories are most often delivered by himself, in discussions in which, obviously, he is the leader (e.g. Part II, Chapters 8, 9, 11, 12; Part II, Chapter 7; Part III, Chapter 1); the monotony of this method is diminished only slightly by some infrequent accounts of Propter’s ideas in the reflections of other characters, Pete Boon (Part II, Chapter 5) and Jeremy Pordgage (Part I, Chapter 13; Part II, Chapter 1). Ethical problems, questions of good and evil, the best way to live, politics, sociology, religion, economy, as well as the basic problem of death and attitude to time - are all discussed in Propter’s “philosophical divagations” (Brooke, p. 26). In his review of this novel Derek Verschoyle writes that Huxley’s failure with Propter is a matter of proportion, for while there can be no two opinions of the interest of what he says, the effect of his monologues, which occur too frequently and at infinitely too great length, is to make the book profoundly static and to destroy the effect of what has preceded them. It does not matter that his philosophical lectures would not be credible in a person in real life; it does matter that they have the effect, not of elements in a work of fiction, but a series of casual tracts. 51

The critic is quite right in emphasizing the tract-like character of Propter’s monologues. For as in tracts, where rational analysis leads to the only possible valid conclusion, Propter’s theories are never questioned or modified; moreover, his monologues are presented, so to say, en bloc, in long series, while in Huxley’s earlier fiction such “symposia” have usually been cut into smaller units and juxtaposed with the scenes of action strictly connected with utterances of the characters, so that the association between an abstract statement and a fictional element was much more immediate and direct. The distance between the essayistic element of Propter’s monologues and

51

Quoted after May, op.cit., pp. 142-143; cf. also John Wain: “Tracts against Materialism” [in:] “A Critical Symposium on Aldous Huxley”, The London Magazine, August 1955, VII, no. 8, where he writes: “Aldous Huxley […] is a pseudo-novelist; I use the expression not harshly, but merely to describe an author who finds himself using the form of the novel for some alien purpose. Mr. Huxley’s purpose is to write tracts. But these books [i.e. After Many a Summer and Brave New World] are tracts against materialism”, pp. 58-59.

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the fictional world is also much greater, since his theories are too general to concern anything in the main plot but the main “message” of the whole book. This universality of Propter’s conceptions may well be compared with the body of ideas presented in the novel by Dr Obispo, a character in many ways related to Propter. Obispo is fairly talkative, though interested in less abstract matters, and cynical, but he is also egoistic and destructive, whereas Propter is disinterested and constructive; from this point of view, Obispo illustrates some of Propter’s theories in reversal. It is significant, however, that Huxley does not exploit this potential “counterpoint” here - the character never meet in the novel, there is no simultaneity or implied direct comparison. 52 At the same time, Obispo’s conceptions more often concern concrete objects and they are directly connected with the main plot in which he himself plays a significant role. As a physician of Stoyte, Obispo is working on biological means for prolonging life and rejuvenation and his discoveries are presented on many pages in the novel (e.g. Part I, Chapter 5; Part II, Chapters 6, 8). The same body of scientific ideas is also supplemented by means of the “interior duplication” technique, namely, extracts and summaries of the diary of the Fifth Earl of Gonister (Part II, Chapters 4, 6, 8). Finally, in order to complete this list of explicit ideas in this novel, one should mention the narrator himself who also writes equally long essays containing opinions roughly resembling those of Propter (cf. e.g. Part II, Chapters 2, 10). In comparison with the explicit ideas developed so markedly in the novel, the other elements of the novel’s structure function merely as illustrations. According to Propter’s criticism and attitude to life, the novel achieves additional semantic dimensions which may be called satirical and allegorical. Satire is by no means a novelty in Huxley’s fiction and in the case of After Many a Summer the writer uses all the methods employed in the earlier novels, exploiting mainly the possibilities of the setting and the characters, both of which represent the American Way of Life, the main target of Huxley’s satire. In the case of the setting, we are offered a survey of posters when Pordage travels to Stoyte (Part I, Chapter 1), quite similar to the scene in Eyeless in Gaza (Chapter IV); the Gothic architecture of the castle, the location of reproductions of works by Old Masters - Vermeer’s picture in the lift, in the hall El Greco’s Crucifixion of St Peter hanging on the wall opposite to the nude by Rubens; or the Beverley Pantheon. In the same way the representatives of the American Way of Life, mainly Stoyte and Virginia, are ridiculed and the absurdity of their beliefs and attitudes is fully revealed: Stoyte, with his pathological fear of death and old age, ready to accept a fantastic possibility of prolonging his life at the cost of becoming an ape; Virginia, with her hypocrisy and naive innocence, her piety and chastity, are both shattered by Obispo with the help of Le Portier des Carmes and Cent-Vingt de Sodome. It is precisely the satanic role of Obispo, the seducer in both literal and metaphorical senses of the word, that points to the allegorical dimension of the novel. Bowering describes it in the following way: Delineated with an almost allegorical simplicity, they [i.e. Obispo and Propter] hover around Stoyte like the good and evil angels round a tottering Faustus, Obispo tempting him with his promise of rejuvenation, while Propter offers the more permanent, if less immediate, attractions of enlightenment. [p. 149]

52

The relationship between these two characters is implied only when they are both made to comment on the same quotation from Molinos’s letters: “Ame a diescome es en si y no come se lo dice y forma su imaginacion” – “Love God as He is in Himself and not as He is in your Imagination”, pp. 64, 177.

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Other characters can also be regarded as allegorical figures, Virginia representing innocence - as her name indicates, Pete Boon, the idealistic Platonic lover, and Gonifer - Lucifer. Further support is provided by elements of the setting, such as the cemetery, the chapel with the mummies of nuns, and by the action which often takes place below the ground level - Obispo’s laboratory, Pordage’s cellar, Gonister’s cave, while the whole house may be regarded as the equivalent of an allegorical painting. In the centre foreground, so to speak, is a fantastic building. A little to one side of this building is a small and decent house [Propter’s] which somehow demonstrates the absurdity of its neighbour. [May, p. 147]

Finally, one may also add the style of the architecture of Stoyte’s castle which refers to the Middle Ages and the title of the novel; the latter is a quotation from Tennyson’s poem Tithonus and evokes the myth of a man made immortal but lacking the ability to preserve his youth. 53 Leaving aside the satirical element which only confirms the validity of Propter’s criticism, the above analysis of the relationship between explicit ideas and other elements of the structure of After Many a Summer seems to indicate the essential incompatibility of explicit ideas and allegory, the latter being so completely explained by the former. As a result, the total meaning of the book is plainly expressed on the level of explicit ideas, the latter creating a distinctive a-syncretic tendency which completely predominates in the whole structure of the novel, and which totally disturbs the balance typical of Huxley’s earlier novels. The same statement can also be made about Huxley’s subsequent novel, Time Must Have a Stop [1944], although at the same time in respect to form it is perhaps the most complex work written in the later period of his life. This is partly explained by Meckier: Huxley briefly revives the counterpoint method of both Eyeless in Gaza and Point Counter Point. The novel is, in fact, a curious fusion of Huxley’s two finest novels. The first twenty-nine chapters, dealing with pre-mystical Sebastian Barnack, proceed by means of Sebastian’s exposure to the conflicting theories of the other characters. But the last chapter or ‘Epilogue’, in which the youth has adopted the outlook of the mystic, Bruno Rontini, switches to Sebastian’s notebook and becomes an extended essay in the style of Anthony Beavis.54

This statement, though accurate, is only partly valid. In the strict sense of the term as defined above [cf. ibid, p. 151], counterpoint is used mainly in the part of the novel which follows the death of Eustace Barnack, since “the conflicting theories of the other characters” are presented chronologically rather than simultaneously. In comparison with Point Counter Point the technique of counterpoint in Time Must Have a Stop is again modified because the juxtaposition takes place between the “post-mortem” experiences of Eustace (Chapters XIII, XV, XVII, XX, XXV, XXVIII) and the earthly occurrences or the activities of the living. Nevertheless, the results of the technique remain very similar; for instance, Chapters XV and XVII contain Eustace’s recollections of some significant moments of his life, including his love-affair with Laurine, while Chapter XVI describes Veronica Thwale’s sexual theories and their practical application.

53

Cf. R. Graves: Mity greckie, tr. by H. Krzeczkowski, Warszawa 1974, p. 149. Cf. Meckier, op.cit., p. 160; this statement may be further supported by another example, namely, Huxley’s continuation of “musical transformations”; e.g.: “Forbidden themes, repulsively fascinating, disgustingoly attractive! Sebastian would embark on them with a quiet casualness – pianissimo, so to speak, and senza espressione, as though he were hurrying over some boring transitional passage, some patch of mere five-finger exercises interpolated into the romantic rhapsody of Odyssey. Pianissimo, senza espressione – and then, bang! like a chord by Scriabin in the middle of a Haydn quartet, out he’d come with some frightful enormity!”, p. 16. 54

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Thus the mutual relationship between the two types of chapters is analogical to that in Point Counter Point, but there is an obvious difference in kind: in a way typical of the later phase Huxley makes use of fantasy attempting to describe his character’s “after-death life”. When applied to Huxley’s fiction, however, the term fantasy again needs a slight modification, for it is never “pure” fantasy, fantasy for its own sake, and the novel as a whole has not the character of science-fiction or Utopia (or anti-Utopia). The fantastic elements in Huxley’s novels are always most carefully documented and theoretically explained within the novels. As in the case of After Many a Simmer, where the theory of rejuvenation is documented by recent advances in biology, physiology and chemistry, the “post-mortem” experiences are based on Bardo Thödol or the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Bowering has made a comparison between this source and the novel and has concluded that The Bardo Thödol is divided into three parts, all of which are easily recognizable in Huxley’s novel: first, the Chikhai Bardo which describes the happenings immediately after death; then the Chönyid Bardo which deals with karmic visions and hallucinations; and finally, the Sidpa Bardo which is concerned with the events leading up to reincarnation. [p. 167]

The three stages are illustrated in Chapter XIII, then Chapters XV, XVII, XX, and finally in Chapters XV and XVIII, respectively. It should be added that the whole process of death, karmic visions and reincarnation are explained indirectly in Sebastian’s discussions with Bruno Rontini and then in his notebook in the Epilogue. From the point of view of this study the “post-mortem” experiences are interesting because of the treatment of explicit ideas in these chapters, particularly in Chapter XIII describing the process immediately following physical death. After the first bodily sensations, such as “gasping for breath”, feeling the coldness and hardness of “the tiled floor of the lavatory”, the body is completely forgotten and what follows is a description of abstract and explicit ideas which become personified: There was no pain any longer, no more need to gasp for breath, and the tiled floor of the lavatory has ceased to be cold and hard [...] The awareness knew only itself, and itself only as the absence of something else. Knowledge reached out into the absence that was its object. Reached out into the darkness, further and further. Reached out into the silence. Illimitably. There were no bounds. The knowledge knew itself as a boundless absence within another boundless absence, which was not even aware [...] Brighter and brighter, through succeeding durations, that expanded at last into an eternity of joy. An eternity of radiant knowledge, of bliss unchanging in its ultimate intensity. For ever, for ever. [pp. 136-8]

In this way complete impersonality is obtained while the abstract nouns, “awareness”, “knowledge”, “absence”, that is, the attributes and sensations of the spirit are separated from the person of Eustace and, so to say, come to live independently, passing from one notion to another, and then into images of darkness and light. Commenting on the style of this description, May perceptively compares it to “watching some chemical process which one has never watched before and scribbling down notes” [p. 173] but the “chemical reagents” are replaced by abstract ideas and images of darkness and light which have already appeared in Anthony Beavis’s meditation in Eyeless in Gaza.55 In the subsequent “post-mortem” chapters, when the abstract 55

Cf. e.g.: “Cone reversed from the broken and shifting light of the surface, cone reversed and descending to a point of concentrated darkness; thence in another cone, expanding and expanding through the darkness, yes!

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ideas become much more closely connected with Eustace as a person, they again appear in the well-known forms of aphorisms, epigrams, quotations, gnomic sententiae etc., and they then become comments on the actions of the living. This takes place in the chapters which describe the Chönyid Bardo; for example: Then suddenly within the framework of the lattice. There was an abrupt displacement of awareness, and he was discovering another fragment of himself [...] They were sitting in that church at Nice, and the choir was singing Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus - the men’s voices filling all the hollow darkness with a passion of grief and yearning, and the boyish trebles passing back and forth between them, harmonious but beautifully irrelevant with the virginal otherness of things before the Fall, before the discovery of good and evil. Effortlessly, the music moved on from loveliness to loveliness. There was the knowledge of perfection, ecstatically blissful and at the same time sad, sad to the point of despair. Ave Verum, Verum Corpus. Before the motet was half over, the tears were streaming down his cheeks. And when he and Laurina left the church, the sun had set and above the dark house tops the sky was luminous and serene. They found the car and drove back to Monte Carlo along the Corniche. At a bend of the road, between two tall cypresses, he saw the evening star. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘Like the boys singing!’ But twenty minutes later they were in the Casino. It was the evening Laurina had her extraordinary run of luck. Twenty-two thousand francs. And in her room, at midnight, she had spread the money all over the carpet - hundreds of gold pieces, dozens and dozens of hundred-franc notes. He sat down beside her on the floor, put an arm round her shoulders and drew her close. ‘Ave Verum Corpus,’ he said, laughing. This was the true body. [pp. 156-7]

The parallels are clear: there is again another “displacement of awareness”, the same image of light and darkness, even the same abstract nouns are repeated. But at the same time the recollection is typical of Eustace as it illustrates his hedonism and cynicism, his knowledge of available perfection and his conscious choice of the wrong thing or, in other words, Video meliora proboque; deteriora sequor; the proverb which recurs in almost all Huxley’s novels from Antic Hay onwards - Eustace Barnack is still on the same level of awareness as Huxley’s idealistic youths. On the other hand, the phrase about “the virginal otherness of things before the Fall” in the boys’ voices anticipates the approaching rape of Sebastian by Veronica. Another similar example of the relationship between explicit ideas presented in the “post-mortem” chapters and the main action may be found in a quotation from Eustace’s letter to Laurina, “God alone is commensurate with the cravings you inspire” [p. 97], a statement which functions as a lover’s hyperbole, a source of amusement to Eustace when he remembers this letter written twenty years earlier, and as an indication of the “Platonic or Dantesque” way of life chosen by him [May, p. 161]. As earlier in Antic Hay [cf. ibid., pp. 130 ff] explicit ideas function on several levels of the structure of the novel, their significance depending on the context in which they are seen. The plot of Time Must Have a Stop is again fairly condensed similarly to Huxley’s earlier novels and the main theme may be formulated as “an offence and retribution for the offence” with the ensuing conversion which is supported by the explicit explanation of the title: ... Hotspur’s summary has a final clause: time must have a stop. And not only must, as an ethical imperative and an eschatological hope, but also does have a stop, in the indicative sense, as a matter of brute experience. It is only by taking the fact of eternity into account that we can deliver the thought from its slavery to life. [p. 292]56

some other light, steady, untroubled, as utterly calm as the darkness out of which it emerges …”, Eyeless in Gaza, p. 382. 56 Cf.: “But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool;

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However, as in all novels from the second phase in Huxley’s literary career, there appears another man-of-wisdom, Bruno Rontini, whose function is very much like that of Dr Miller and Mr. Propter, even though Huxley introduced several changes in the position of the reasoner in Time Must Have a Stop. First of all, Bruno is strictly connected with the action of the novel: indeed, it is Bruno who makes an effort to convert and save Eustace but fails; it is Bruno who saves Sebastian, both literally, by regaining the drawing, and metaphorically, by pointing to him the way to salvation; as a consequence of his help to Sebastian Bruno becomes the victim of the Fascists. However, this last example gives additional strength to the rightness of his theories which, as in the previous cases, are not only presented as the only valid ideas but are also embodied in the final conversion of Sebastian. The theme of “conversion”, however, is described in a different way than that in Eyeless in Gaza. Instead of a series of fragments from the protagonist’s diary which reveal gradual changes in his thoughts and attitudes, in Time Must Have a Stop we encounter a thirty-page essay in the Epilogue in the form of Sebastian’s notebook written some fifteen years after all the events have taken place. It is undoubtedly the richest source of “homophonic” or a-syncretic ideas which sum up all the problems of the whole novel and present Sebastian’s final solution: No working hypothesis means no motive for starting the research, no reason for making one experiment rather than another, no rational theory for bringing senses or order to the observed facts. Contrariwise, too much working hypothesis means finding only what you know, dogmatically, to be there and ignoring all the rest [...] For those of us who are not congenitally the members of any organized church, who have found that humanism and blue-domeism are not enough, who are not content to remain in the darkness of spiritual ignorance, the squalor of vice or that other squalor of mere respectability, the minimum working hypothesis would seem to be about as follows: That there is a Godhead or Ground, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestation. That the Ground is transcendent and immanent. That it is possible for human beings to love, know, and from virtually, to become actually identified with the Ground. That to achieve this unitive knowledge ...” [p. 335]

This is the conclusion which Sebastian reaches as a result of his earlier experiences and meetings with characters who represented various facets of this main problem. All the other characters, however, have either “no working hypothesis” or “too much working hypothesis” but Sebastian’s solution, based mainly on the teachings of Bruno Rontini, is his conscious choice and synthesis from a variety of theories. Nevertheless, Woodcock seems right again when he states that Sebastian’s conversion lacks the inevitability of Anthony’s and that it remains “an unassimilated afterthought” [p. 230], mainly because the process of conversion has been left out. On the other hand, the essayistic formulation of the main theory of the whole novel, the theoretical explanation of the preceding part, and the summing up closing with a definitive conclusion are necessary for the didactic rather than the novelistic point of view. It is precisely for this reason that the novel clearly belongs to the later phase of Huxley’s writings, to the group of “homophonic” novels. A similar kind of a “homophonic” theory predominates in the structure of the next novel, Ape and Essence [1949]. A spectacular display of a wide variety of techniques of writing in this book, one of Huxley’s shortest novels, clearly indicates that the writer never really “lost interest in And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop.” Henry IV, Part I, V:iv, ll. 81-83.

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the form of his novels”, as Bowering writes [p. 142], but that there must have occurred a permanent shift in the significance of the explicit and implicit methods of writing so that the balance typical of the “polyphonic” novels was never again regained. As in the previous anti-Utopian novel, Huxley had here the same task of presenting the fantastic world seen as a result of some tendencies observed in his contemporary environment and of telling his “tale” at the same time. Contrary to Brave New World, however, where both tasks were cleverly interconnected, in Ape and Essence the usual technique of arrival-and-sightseeing is preceded by a double introduction and, although the main part is written in the form of a filmscript, there is an ever-present voice of the omniscient narrator commenting and explaining anything that is taking place. The first introduction in Part I consists of three main episodes: a conversation between the first-person authorial narrator and Bob Briggs, the finding of the manuscript, and a visit to Tallis’s house in order to find out that the author of the manuscript died six weeks earlier. The action takes place on the day of Gandhi’s assassination57 and the thought of the possible significance of the death of Gandhi is juxtaposed throughout Part I with Bob’s confession about his troubles with women and difficult financial situation. The narrator’s particular turn of mind is revealed when Bob quotes the answer to Lou Lublin that “In his Studio, at this time, not even Jesus Christ himself could get a raise” [p. 3], and then the narrator imagines a series of pictures of Christ begging Lublin as painted by Rembrandt, then by Breughel and by Piero, while a few pages later we learn that Gandhi was killed because he was interested “neither in art nor in science” [p. 6]. When, further on, Gandhi is compared to Catherine of Siena58 and the narrator passes on to Goya’s drawings and the monsters in his pictures, the implication is obvious; and yet, the narrative explains everything directly and at some length: [Gandhi] who believed only in people had got himself involved in the subhuman mass-madness of nationalism, in the would-be superhuman, but actually diabolic, institutions of the nation-state. He got himself involved in these things, imagining that he could mitigate the madness and convert what was satanic in the state to something like humanity [...] We killed him because, after having briefly (and fatally) played the political game, he refused any longer to go on dreaming our dream of a national Order, a social and economic Beauty; because he tried to bring us back to the concrete and cosmic facts of real people and the inner Light [...] The headlines I had seen this morning were parables; the event they recorded, an allegory and a prophesy. In that symbolic act we who so longed for peace had rejected the only possible means to peace and had issued a warning to all who, in the future, might advocate any courses but those which lead inevitably to war. [pp. 6-7]

These extracts have been quoted in full because they contain the germ of the whole fantasy to follow: allegory and prophesy, the turn towards Satan or Belial, insufficiency of art and science, and the need for “the inner Light” and peace. Besides that, these quotations not only indicate the relationship between the fantasy and the world of 1947, but they also exemplify the didacticessayistic element which is particularly extensive in this novel. The procedure is always the same: presentation of a direct and complete explanation of the main problem from the philosophical point of view instead of an implication or juxtaposition; needless to say, such explicit ideas are never put in doubt or contradicted by implicit techniques.

57

Part I of the novel is said to have been written after Part II; cf. Woodcock, p. 255. For several years Huxley had worked on a novel about Catherine of Siena but, unfortunately, the manuscript was destroyed in the fire of his house; cf. Woodcock, p. 252. 58

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Moreover, the same role is taken over in Part II “The Script” by the omniscient narrator of Tallis’s screen-play; his first speech already points out the didactic aim: Out of the sublime in Nature Art all too often manufactures Only the ludicrous. But the risk must be run; For you there, you in the audience, Somehow and at any price, Wilcox or worse, Somehow you must be reminded, Be induced to remember, Be implored to be willing to Understand what’s what. [pp. 24-5]

In this way (sometimes in prose) the narrator goes on with his teaching and explanations of the reasons for the war and the role of science in it, the significance of the images of apes and baboons, while the screen illustrates all his statements. Owing to this form of screen-play59 Huxley can use all the devices of film production, such as cuts and shots, close-up, dissolving and fading, while additional effects are achieved by means of appropriately chosen and described pieces of music on the sound track.60 The allegorical character of this second introduction is created by references to famous scientists, Faraday, Pasteur, and Einstein, puppet-figures of marshals, generals, bishops, symbols of nationalistic movements (flags and emblems), and baboons. Finally, the same section also contains the “interior duplication” technique in the form of film-within-thefilm and the narrator’s quotations;61 in the latter case the quotations serve the purpose of supporting the opinions of the narrator, as, for instance, the following fragment from Pascal:

59

Huxley had a life-long desire, much like Henry James, “to shine as a dramatist” (Woodcock, p. 52); apart from some short stories written in the form of plays, e.g. “Happy Families” or “Permutations among the Nightingales”, and a play The World of Light, staged in 1933, Huxley also tried to adapt his prose works for the stage or film-scripts, e.g. “The Gioconda Smile”, Point Counter Point, The Devil of Loudun, and Brave New World as an operetta with Stravisky’s music, and he planned for adaptation “The Tillotson Banquet”. While in the United States, Huxley wrote scripts for Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Alice in Wonderland, Don Quixote, and a script about the life Madame Curie. 60 E.g. scenes leading to the explosion of the A-bomb: “On the sound track there is reminiscence of the baboon-girl. ‘Give me, give me, give me, give me detumescence ...’ Then these voluptuous strains modulate into ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, played by massed brass bands, and sung by a choir of fourteen thousand voices” (p. 30); “The brass bands give place to the most glutinous of Wurlitzers, ‘Land of Hope and Glory” to ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ [...] On the sound track it is all vox humana and the angel voices of the choristers. ‘With the (dim.) Cross of (pp.) Jesus, (ff) going on before’.” [p. 33]; “They eat and drink with gusto, while the first two bars of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ are repeated again and again, faster and faster, louder and louder. Suddenly the music is interrupted by the first of a succession of enormous explosions. Darkness. A long-drawn, deafening noise of crashing, rending, screaming, moaning. Then silence and increased light, and once again it is the hour before sunrise, with the morning star and the delicate, pure music” [pp. 37-38]. 61 Since the narrator quotes Socrates and Plato (p. 5), some critics indicate the Platonic dialogues and the Republic as possible sources for this novel - cf. Meckier, p. 193; May, p. 190; one should however mention another possibility, namely, Swift, indicated by Huxley himself: “I confess that I find peace with atomic bombs hanging overhead a rather disquieting prospect. National states armed by science with superhuman military powers always remind me of Swift’s description of Gulliver being carried up to the roof of the King Brobdingnah’s palace y a gigantic monkey: reason, human decency and spirituality, which are strictly individual matters, find themselves in

95 ‘We make an idol of truth; for truth without charity is not God, but his image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship’. You [i.e. the two Einsteins] lived for the worhip of an idol. But in the last analysis, the name of every idol is Moloch. [pp. 38-9]

The technique employed in the main action is again the well-known device of arrival, in this case supplemented by a capture, which is followed by sightseeing and explanations. Apart from the omniscient narrator who continues his commentary with the same frequency, there are two additional characters to provide explanations: one of them is the Chief, the first guide to Dr Poole [cf. pp. 67-73] and his lecture is supplemented, like in Brave New World, by quotations from the Catechism taught at a local school [pp. 68, 69, 70]; if the Chief’s explanations have a more practical nature, those of the other commentator, the Arch-Vicar, are much more extensive and theoretical [pp. 91-99, 101-104]. Additionally, there are scenes which clearly resemble the “symposia” of the earlier novels [e.g. pp. 129-132, 136-140] and “interior duplication” technique in the form of quotations from Dr Poole’s lecture [pp. 129-132] and from poetry. With this amount of explicit ideas in such a short work, the action is most drastically reduced and consists of Dr Poole’s arrival, his participation in the orgy during the Belial Day, his discovery of Loola, unsuccessful scientific experiments, and, finally, his escape with Loola from Los Angeles. As everything is fully explained the plot is actually reduced to episodes which have functions of parables inserted into a long essay on the future of mankind. The “parabolic” function of the plot is supported by the allegorical nature of characters who, in this novel, are not even mouthpieces for the author’s ideas but passive instruments in the hands of the omniscient narrator. Although the novel is undoubtedly very interesting from the philosophical point of view, it offer little material for the study of fiction from the formal point of view. Nevertheless, it seems interesting to compare Ape and Essence with Huxley’s next study in the phenomenon of “possession”, namely, The Devils of Loudun [1952], a strange mixture of non-fictional elements (social and philosophical history, biography), of semi-fictional essays, and purely fictional methods of writing. The comparison seems interesting because in the case of The Devils of Loudun Huxley was provided with a “ready-made” historical “plot” about the “possession” of a group of bored and hysterical nuns, an accusation and then execution of the innocent though irresponsible and worldly priest, Urbain Grandier, as well as the mystical exorcist, Jean-Joseph Surin. The story offered numerous possibilities: it was a mixture of tragedy and a comic farce and, at the same time, it dealt with the subject of mysticism - all the elements so frequently met in Huxley’s fiction. Thus provided with his favourite themes Huxley wrote a book which, strangely enough, achieves almost a balance between the essayistic element and the novelistic plot and background. The essayistic fragments are quite numerous, e.g. pp. 72-8, 7898, 158-170, or the Appendix. But, at the same time, some scenes have a purely novelistic character, for instance Grandier’s courtship and seduction of Philippe while translating Latin poetry [pp. 32 ff] or the following description of the execution: For the thousandth time Grandier answered that he had nothing to confess. ‘And now,’ he added, ‘give me the kiss of peace and let me die.’ At first Lactance refused; but when the crowd protested against such un-Christian malignity, he climbed on to the pile of faggots and kissed the parson’s cheek. ‘Judas!’ cried a voice, and a score of others took up refrain. the clutches of the collective will, which has the mentality of a delinquent boy of fourteen in conjunction with the physical power of a god” (Letters, p. 532).

96 ‘Judas, Judas ...’ Lactance heard them shout and, in a passion of uncontrollable rage, jumped down from the pyre, seized a twist of straw and, lighting it in the brazier, waved the flame in the victim’s face. Let him confess who he was - the devil’s servant. Let him confess, let him renounce his master! ‘Father,’ said Grandier with a calm and gentle dignity that contrasted strangely with the almost hysterical malice of his accusers, ‘I am about to meet the God who is my witness that I have spoken the truth.’ ‘Confess,’ the friar screamed. ‘Confess! ... You have only a moment to live.’ ‘Only a moment,’ the parson repeated slowly, ‘only a moment - and then I go to that just and fearful judgement, to which, Reverend Father, you too must soon be called.’ Without waiting to hear anything more, Father Lactance threw his torch on to the straw of the pyre. Hardly visible in the bright afternoon sunshine, a little flame appeared and began to creep, growing larger as it advanced, towards the bundles of dry kindling. [p. 220]

It should be added that before this crucial event Huxley has carefully described the character of Grandier, and those of his opponents, enemies and religious fanatics, also the motives of the Prioress’s behaviour, as well as the whole social and religious background of all the events; moreover, as far as the depth of characterization and a detailed depiction of the social milieu are concerned, in this book they are realistic to the extent rarely encountered in Huxley’s novels. The characters are almost never mere presenters of ideas - this is the domain reserved for the narrator and a variety of authorities cited - but it is through the action that we are shown the truly pathetic and tragic flaw in Grandier’s character, the cynicism and sinister hysteria of the Prioress, particularly during her journey following Grandier’s execution [Chapter X], the saintliness of Surin and his mystic visions, or the basic wickedness of the politics of Lauberdemont, the “controller” of the “herd-intoxication” so well described in the Appendix. Although it is perhaps a slight exaggeration to compare the figures from The Devils of Loudun to novelistic characters, Woodcock’s conclusion seems basically right: Dozens of characters play out plausible roles, and the tragedy of Grandier, which in its bare facts seems too monstrous for a man outside the age to understand, is presented as a struggle of wills so convincing that one feels drawn into the collective mind of the time, and experiences the priest’s last agonies as immediately as one experiences the mental agonies of characters in a Tolstoy novel. Certainly, if Huxley failed to incorporate the didactic element convincingly into his last novels, he succeeded admirably in The Devils of Loudun even more than in Grey Eminence, in infusing the biographer’s didactic craft with a novelist’s imagination. [p. 260]

Huxley’s difficulties with the maintaining of structural balance between the essayistic elements and dramatic action come out again in his last non-Utopian novel, The Genius and the Goddess [1955], even though the discursive layer of explicit ideas is presented here by still another technique, reminiscent of them method used much earlier in some short stories, notably in “Nuns at Luncheon” [Mortal Coils, 1922]. The short story may be said to have three subject-matters: the history of Melpomene and her tragic-comic “toothless death”, a study in the character of Miss Penny, and, finally, an autoironic comment on the narrator’s novelistic profession. The story of Melpomene (or sister Agatha) is told by Miss Penny to the narrator during a lunch they have together. Their dialogue is interrupted by the narrator’s attempts at describing his interlocutor - Miss Penny “brassy” laugh, her eyes like “a hare’s”, her generally unattractive appearance and “high Scotch colouring”, her size, formidableness, and her ear-rings which “swung and rattled - corpses hanging in chains; an agreeable literary simile” [p. 199]; thus we witness a story “in the making”. But a few pages later

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Miss Penny becomes “a literary critic” and the narrator has to answer some troublesome questions; for instance: “I wish you’d tell me something. Do you really - honestly, I mean - do you seriously believe in literature?” [p. 220] “You can write that up easily and convincingly enough. But it’s the sort of thing that bores me frightfully to death. That’s why I can never bring myself to write fiction. What is the point of it all? And the way you literary men think yourself so important - particularly if you write tragedies. It’s all very queer, very queer indeed”. [p. 224]

As a result, the narrator, instead of following the story, is not only haunted by her questions but his abilities of a writer are subjected by Miss Penny to a severe test when he is made to tell fragments of the story made up by himself. In The Genius and the Goddess exactly the same narrative situation is used but there are significant differences in both the narrator and in Miss Penny’s equivalent, John Rivers. The narrator in the novel is also a writer [p. 3] but he has lost the auto-ironic attitude, so that his functions are limited to relating the few events which interrupt the conversation (Bimbo, the return of Molly), describing Rivers’s gestures and asking some questions (including “nonsense” questions, p. 20). In the case of John Rivers the differences are much more remarkable. In comparison with Miss Penny he is less humorous but more earnest in offering his theories. Contrary to Miss Penny, he is telling about events from his own life which is significant in that it brings out the contrast between young Rivers and old Rivers or, in other words, the contrast between the experience of the “raw material” and the final “product”. This is, then, another link in Huxley’s sequence of Bildungsromans, another embodiment of the “conversion” theme with the same lack of phases between the causally important facts and the final decision. The temporal distance of thirty years, which separates young Rivers from his old self, makes the latter a detached and reflective observer and commentator, in much the same way as the omniscient narrator in Ape and Essence. In The Genius and the Goddess Rivers himself makes a comparison to the puppet-theatre and sees himself when young as one of the puppets [cf. pp. 48-9]; this feature is further emphasized by the original titles of the novel: Through the Wrong End of the Telescope [Woodcock, p. 278] and The Past is Prelude [Firchow, p. 173]. His old age with its accompanying wisdom and lack of sentimental involvement on the one hand, and on the other - the fact that he is the protagonist of the main story, make Rivers a curious mixture of Huxley’s young intellectuals before conversion and of his men-of-wisdom, mostly from the later novels, such as Dr Miller, Propter, Bruno Rontini. The combination of both types in one character was thus meant to balance the essayistic fragments with the dramatic action, a device meant to embody explicit ideas in a character and thus to integrate them within the whole structure of the novel. And yet, Rivers’s wisdom and detachment, the unquestionable validity of his theories, create a very extensive layer of purely “homophonic” or a-syncretic ideas which govern all the elements in the structure of this novel. As in Ape and Essence, explicit ideas appear exclusively in the commentary of old Rivers who explains everything in the book: the characters are “anatomized rather than dramatized” [May, p. 198] and the motives of their acts are also theoretically analyzed. Even the most pivotal events, like, for instance, the scene of love-making of young Rivers and Katy Maartens, are provided with an explicit commentary: ‘Maybe one could a hint from the geometers.’ - says old Rivers. – ‘Describe the events in relation to three co-ordinates.’ In the air before him Rivers traced with the stem of his pipe two lines at right angles to one

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another, then from their point of intersection, added a vertical that took his hand above the level of his head. ‘Let one of these lines represent Katy, another the John Rivers of thirty years ago, and the third John Rivers as I am today. Now, within this frame of reference, what can we say about the night of April twenty-third, 1922?’ [pp. 89-90]

and he goes on to discuss in detail each “co-ordinate” in turn, explicitly explaining the motives and reactions of Katy and young Rivers and then drawing conclusions and morals from the position of old Rivers [pp. 90-6]. The main action of this novel could well be compared with Huxley’s early novels: all the events take place in the house of the Maartens or its neighbourhood, and the action, in fact, begins with Rivers’s arrival and ends with the catastrophe followed by his departure. The most striking difference, however, is almost a total lack of discussion scenes. As a result, instead of clashes of explicit ideas supplemented by implicit juxtaposition of the type “discussion versus setting” or “scene versus scene”, we encounter a layer of “homophonic” explicit ideas with all other elements subordinated to them and reduced to the function of illustration. From the philosophical point of view, The Genius and the Goddess contains a number of very interesting ideas, such as changes in one’s personality, the nature of love, insufficiency of the intellectual attitude to life, inadequacy of language and suggestions for its improvement. As a commentator Rivers is certainly much more impressive and intellectually stimulating than his counterparts in other novels while his manner of expressing ideas is frequently “dramatic” in itself [cf. e.g. pp. 102-3]. In spite of that feature, however, it seems an insufficient compensation for the reduced action of the novel, the action which is too slight to support or even illustrate such statements. A similar situation has already been observed in Antic Hay, where a trifle provoked a similarly broad generalization, but the explicit idea recurred again and again in the novel in new formulations and embodiments, some of them mutually opposed, others ridiculed, so that the idea preserved its “dialogic” character. In The Genius and the Goddess this situation is reversed: it is the action that provides “trifles” for generalizations, the latter becoming totally “homophonic” and being unmodified by any implicit techniques or opposed explicit ideas. The same statement may be made about Huxley’s last novel, Island [1962], although for his biographers and authors of monographic studies this is certainly the most important work. In this book Huxley fully presented his positive constructive message to humanity and the final results of his intellectual search: it is a complete synthesis of all the ideas, problems, and themes which had previously appeared in his poetry, short stories, novels, but first of all in his essays - a genre which clearly predominated in the later phase of his literary career. Because of this synthetic character the novel cannot be ignored by anybody dealing with the development of Huxley’s philosophy. Nevertheless, from the point of view of this study in which only the formal novelistic use of ideas is taken into consideration, Island offers little interesting material: there are no new techniques of writing, while the abundance of strictly a-syncretic ideas, their treatment and predominating functions, all remain the same as in the previous “homophonic” novels. If a synthesis was to be achieved Huxley had to present an exceptionally large body of explicit ideas but the techniques of their presentation did not increase in number or variety: actually they are even reduced to monologues and explanations of the Palanese, an example of the “interior duplication” technique in the form of quotations from a booklet by the old Raja under a somewhat unfortunate titles “Notes on What’s What and on What It Might be Reasonable to do about What’s What” (the title is not satirical). The motivation of the display of the whole variety of explicit ideas is provided, as usually, by the plot and the conventional method of introducing an

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outsider, a method used in most novels by Huxley. However, in comparison with the Savage and Dr Poole, Will Farnaby is a relatively new type of character to be employed in the role of the outsider, mainly because of his experiences as an accomplished journalist engaged in a conspiracy against Pala. Farnaby’s initial scepticism serves well as a provocation for the Palanese’s explanations and descriptions of all the main aspects of life and history of the island. Moreover, as a result of the shipwreck, Farnaby is in a very poor state of health which is a good opportunity for the Palanese both to present their effective methods of curing or diminishing pain, as well as to pay him numerous visits, all of which are accompanied by “lectures”.62 All this is followed by sightseeing and visits to various places of interest, continued till the last chapters of the novel. Additionally, through Farnaby’s recollections, we also learn about his background, upbringing, complexes, feeling of guilt, so that when we witness his increasing interest in the Palanese way of life, we become gradually aware that the novel again returns to the theme of conversion, which does indeed take place at the end of the book. When compared to Brave New World, Island proves to be entirely static. All the monologues of various characters have the nature of “lectures” or “tracts”, much like those of Propter; they appear as shorter or longer treatises on different subjects which are not opposed to one another and which are connected very superficially with other elements of the novelistic structure; moreover, some of the “lectures” are delivered by inadequate characters; for instance, the eighteen-year-old nurse Apu who discusses the spiritual quality of orgasms [Chapter IV] and the constant preoccupation of all the Palanese with their “mental and spiritual development while prescribing that for all around them”, which Meckier rightly finds “neurotic” [p. 204]. The “lecture” of the Director and Mustapha Mond in Brave New World was not only embedded in the setting and in some characters, but was also modified by the narrator’s ironical style and, even more significantly, by the presence of “deviated” characters, so that the conflict appeared at the very beginning of the novel and it concerned the ideas which were thus fully “dialogic” and syncretic. Nothing like this appears in Island: in spite of his scepticism Farnaby becomes convinced only too eagerly, while the danger of the conspiracy is never sufficiently developed. Both these facts only additionally stress the rightness of the Palanese ideals: the conflict never appears as a possible danger to ideas, even though the country is to be destroyed. Dramatic action, almost free from commentary, appears only in the last two chapters of the novel [Chapters XIV and XV] which contain two important events: the death of Lakshmi and Farnaby’s experience after taking the moksha-medicine. In the case of the former, instead of a theoretical discussion of the way in which we should approach the question of death, Susila and Dr MacPhail are shown as they assist the dying Lakshmi;63 for instance: ‘It’s dark because you’re trying too hard,’ said Susila. ‘Dark because you want it to be light. Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. ‘Lightly, child, lightly. You’ve got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.’ I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humourless little prig. Lightly, lightly - it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I’m going to say the same thing to you, Lakshmi ...” [p. 257]

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Atkins quite rightly states: “I am not denying that characters in novels speak to each other, and that through their speech they express their philisophies, but nearly all the speech in Island is lecturing”, p. XXXIV. 63 The description in Island closely resembles Huxley’s own description of the death of his wife as he presented it in a small booklet sent to his closest friends; cf. L. A. Huxley, op.cit., pp. 18-22.

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Theorizing is thus substituted by personal experience and evidence, while additional contrast is provided by Farnaby’s recollections of the deaths he had witnessed in England. The same dramatic manner of description is used in the scene when Farnaby takes the moksha-medicine.64 In the first phase he experiences the supernatural beauty of material objects in their essence, directly, without the unavoidable distortion that words always bring; that is why the objects are being personified and instead of abstract terms the description offers images strengthened by allusions to painters. The second phase evokes the opposed feeling, horror, and Huxley uses here pictures of war, murders, the Fascists, concentration camps, in other words, Farnaby’s personal nightmares, which reach the climax when Farnaby sees the mantis: And now one of the nightmare machines, the female, had turned the small flat head, all mouth and bulging eyes, at the end of its long neck - had turned it and (dear God!) had begun to devour the head of the male machine. First a purple eye was chewed out, then half the bluish face. What was left of the head fell to the ground. Unrestrained by the weight of the eyes and jaws, the severed neck waved wildly. The female machine snapped at the oozing stump, caught it and, while the headless male uninterruptedly kept up his parody of Ares in the arms of Aphrodite, methodically chewed. [p. 273]

It is only after the effects of the drug have worn off that Farnaby experiences the fusion of both previous stages, a synthesis of beauty and horror in one, and this is again presented by a carefully and purposefully selected imagery: a charned house and a Christmas tree, Charteres and a concentration camp, light as painted by Rembrandt and the darkness of an “infernal bargain basement”. This synthesis of the opposites helps Farnaby to become aware of the essential interconnectedness of all things, to realize that man is not alone in the world but he is part of all creation - “One touches and, in the act of touching, one’s touched. Complete communication, but nothing communicated”. [p. 278]. The total structure of the novel does not undergo any significant change under the impact of these last two chapters65 and Island remains a purely “homophonic” novel even to a larger extent than the previous works, since the body of explicit ideas is here exceptionally large and asyncretic. One is therefore inclined to agree with the conclusion presented by Meckier: Despite Pala, however, Brave New World remains Huxley’s most convincing picture of the future and his best blending of utopian concerns with novelistic format. Brave New World is also Huxley’s most plausible excuse for writing Island as a corrective vision, even if many readers will regard the latter as his ‘compensatory dream’. [p. 205]

The foregoing analysis of Huxley’s novels revealed an exceptionally large number of elements called “explicit ideas”, a number of techniques for their presentation and inclusion in fiction, as 64

The description again is very similar to the experiments with drugs which Huxley presented in The Doors of Perception (1954) and which L. A. Huxley reported in her book, op. cit., Chap. “Love and Work”, pp. 148-173. 65 The original outline of Island seems to contain more action and less dialogue, as well as a possible conflict of ideas; Firchow describes the original plan in the following way: “In March 1956, Huxley outlined his plans for a novel which, substantially the same as Island, differed markedly in a number of important respects. To begin with, the whole business with Dr Andrew MacPhail and the Raja of the Reform is missing. In their stead, there is an enterprising and somewhat unethical Englishman who, after helping himself to the spoils of India, comes to Pala, endergoes ‘a kind of psychological conversion’ (Letters, p. 791), and remains. He is still alive when another Englishman, with quite a different background, comes to the island. This second stranger has recently been released from an asylum for the insane. His mental problems have their roots in an Evangelical upbringing, here resembling somewhat MacPhail’s Calvinistic childhood. On the island he becomes for the first time ‘a really sane and fully developed human being’ (Letters, p. 791), a circumstance which causes him, once he returns to England, to be locked up again” (p. 187).

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well as a changeable relationship between explicit ideas and other elements of the novelistic structure, such as characters, setting, action, time construction, implicit modes of presentation etc. At the same time, an examination of this relationship determined the whole range of possible functions of explicit ideas and their participation in generating the total meaning of each individual novel. In this respect, a comparison between the two groups of works called here “polyphonic” and “homophonic” novels clearly reveals a remarkable change: although explicit ideas do not seem to increase perceptibly in number, their contribution to the total meaning of the work becomes significantly greater in the later novels; as a result, the functional balance between explicit ideas and implicit modes of presentation, typical of the earlier novels (hence the name “polyphonic”), gives way to the predominance of the essayistic element in the later works, so much so that the total meaning is indeed presented by means of a-syncretic explicit ideas which form a theory governing all other elements in the literary structure (hence the name “homophonic”). The approach to Huxley’s novels chosen in the present chapter seems to account adequately for the changes that took place in his works and it makes it unnecessary to refer to various extra-literary facts and sources in order to explain the so-called breakdown of Huxley as a novelist.66 Therefore, a statement that “a novelist gave place to an essayist” seems much more meaningful that “the novelist has become a teacher”. 67 Still, more general conclusions concerning the genre category will be presented in the next part of this chapter, when the findings of Chapter I are combined with the results obtained in this chapter.

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Mysticism is seen to be the main reason for Huxley’s “breakdown” as a novelist; cf. e.g. Ch. I. Glicksberg: “Aldous Huxley. The Experimental Novelist”, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 1953, LII, pp. 98-110; also G. Bullough: “Aspects of Aldous Huxley”, English Studies, 1949, XXX:5, pp. 233-243; while B. Burgum states that Huxley’s “failure is rooted in his original alienation from the workaday world, and its disastrous consequences he now seeks to avert through making that alienation the more thoroughgoing”, p. 142. Another explanation is offered by C. G. Hoffmann in his article “The Change in Huxley’s Approach to the Novel of Ideas”, The Personalist, January 1961, XLII:1, pp. 85-90; the critic regards the change as a result of Huxley’s loss of control over three elements – allegory, essay, and satire – which should all be belanaced in the novel of ideas. 67 Cf. e.g. Francis Wyndham: “The Teacher Emerges” [in:] “The Critical Symposium on Aldous Huxley”, op.cit, pp. 56-58 (about Point Counter Point and Eyeless in Gaza); cf. also Sean O’Faolain: The Vanishing Hero, London 1956, p. 37.

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Part 3. The Novel of Ideas as a Literary Genre The preceding analysis of Huxley’s novels seems to have provided sufficient material for some more general conclusions concerning the category of the literary genre to which these works may belong. The foregoing examination has revealed several formal features of the novels which, when taken as a whole, seem to form a kind of an abstract hypothetical model representative of a certain stage in the historical development of the genre called “novel of ideas”. The summary of the formal and distinctive features of Huxley’s “polyphonic” novels should, therefore, allow the formulation of a working definition of this genre which may then serve as a starting point for the determination of the evolutionary stage of the genre’s development as represented by Huxley’s works or, in other words, Huxley’s position in the succession of “the novelists of ideas”; at the same time, the position of the whole genre in one of the broad literary categories, namely, in the tradition of the Menippean satire, may be established. A. Definition of Huxley’s Novel of Ideas Following the method suggested by Ostrowski,68 the formal features of Huxley’s novels as revealed in the preceding analysis may be summed up in the following way:  the NARRATOR in these works is usually omniscient and detached; rarely does he offer any explicit or direct comments on the characters or the action, but he usually implies some statements by juxtaposition and contrasts - the characters’ thoughts and emotions are contrasted with their appearance, manner of speaking, elements of setting etc. Instead of direct comments the omniscient narrator frequently enters the minds of his characters and describes their reactions, thoughts, and feelings, or he presents some events as seen through the eyes of his characters. In his main task of telling a tale he is often assisted by other characters when the “interior duplication” technique is used in any of its forms: diaries, letters, notebooks, inserted tales and plays, autobiographies, as well as numerous quotations; as a result the usual thirdperson narration is often replaced by first-person accounts, a method which becomes more and more frequent in Huxley’s later novels. Particularly in this latter form, the narrative level becomes a rich source of explicit ideas usually in the form of more or less developed essays.  in his function of presenting explicit ideas the narrator is often replaced by the CHARACTERS. In Huxley’s novels the characters are almost invariably well-educated, as befits members of the 68

W. Ostrowski: “Towards a More Systematic and Exact Analysis of the Novel and Related Genres”, typescript - personal communication.

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upper class, often eccentric, and always highly articulate. Owing to this latter feature and also to the fact that they mostly live in their separate “worlds of ideas” rather than in reality, all of Huxley’s characters may be regarded as “reasoners”, although their debates do not lead to any significant and valid conclusions in the “polyphonic” novels; contrariwise, the “homophonic” novels always contain some real or “traditional” reasoners, whose participation in discussions always brings about conclusions confirmed as valid by various sanctions of the author. 69 The means of characterisation vary greatly and this feature does not seem helpful in answering the question concerning the characters’ “flatness” or “roundness” since in this respect the range of characters in Huxley’s works is very wide: all the novels contain some purely “flat” characters delineated with an almost “allegorical” simplicity but, at the same time, there are frequently well-developed figures, especially in Those Barren Leaves, Point Counter Point and Eyeless in Gaza. Another criterion seems to be provided by the relationship between the characters and the ideas they hold: the characters seem to become more “rounded” when their connection with ideas is closer; this can easily be seen if one compares Crome Yellow with the novels that followed, up to Eyeless in Gaza. The choice of the characters seems to be determined by the attitudes and theories which they represent so that they may offer contrasted points of view in discussion or illustrations of different aspects of the same problem; it may be added, that the continuity of the same types of characters in all Huxley’s novels becomes an almost explicit technique for the presentation of ideas, but only when all his works are seen as one whole; meaningful names and characters modelled on real people are also the two methods that indicate Huxley’s attitude to his characters. Generally speaking, instead of an in-depth study of individual characters (a method used repeatedly in his short stories), Huxley presents a broad range and a wide variety of characters.  The characters operate in a SETTING which may again be characterized by a great variety of kinds and functions. On the one hand, the setting provides a motivation for a group of characters staying together in one place and talking. But on the other hand, it also plays several important functions in characterization (“extension” of characters), providing objects for discussions, symbolic representation and implicit commentary - in this latter role it offers a convenient and frequently exploited means for the interplay between explicit ideas and implicit meaning of some elements of the setting, so much so that a kind of “dialogue” may result between a character’s thoughts and an appropriate description of an element of the setting; in other words, the setting often provides images which are juxtaposed with explicit ideas. Finally, an appropriate selection of the setting is functional in implying time of action, making it possible to achieve the illusion of simultaneity in the contrapuntal technique used mainly in the early novels.  In contrast to the variety of functions of the setting, the ACTION seems to be greatly reduced in these novels, if the term is understood in the traditional sense. It has often been stressed that action usually has a conventional framework of arrival - departure with few events in between. Although it becomes much richer in traditional events in Point Counter Point and in Eyeless in Gaza (losing the conventional framework in the former and assuming the Bildungsroman form in the latter), it never becomes a predominating structural element, its functions being virtually limited to justifying the occurrence of discussions, illustrating explicit ideas “in practice”, and 69

For a detailed description and definition of the term “reasoner” see S. Eile: Światopogląd powieści, Wrocław 1973, pp. 130 ff.

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providing an implicit commentary on them. The action is mostly episodic and individual events are linked by means of ironic recurrence and reflexive reference of explicit ideas. As a result, discussions become at least as important semantically and structurally as presentation of traditional events.  CAUSATION of the action is to be found primarily in the thematic and ideological correlations provided by explicit ideas; speaking more precisely, it is the “purposefulness” of the action rather than the “causation” that one encounters in these novels since the events do not seem to follow one another as necessary or unavoidable consequences, but as contrasted incidents presented in a meaningful order for the sake of juxtaposition. To put it differently: the selection of events seems to be determined not so much by “natural” causes as by a purposeful contrivance: an event is always related to what precedes and follows it on the principles of contrast, illustration, modification, supplementation etc.  An interesting development of the increasing functionality of one element in the whole structure of the novel may be found if one examines TIME CONSTRUCTION in Huxley’s works. In the early novels time is a relatively insignificant element, the main important feature in its construction being shifts in time of action; in subsequent novels, however, these shifts gradually become more and more purposeful and significant leading to the contrapuntal technique in Those Barren Leaves, Point Counter Point, Brave New World and Eyeless in Gaza. This increasing structural importance of time is accompanied by the more exact marking of the passage of time in the novels, up to precise dates used as chapter titles in Eyeless in Gaza. Moreover, if in Point Counter Point time marking is important structurally in achieving contrapuntal effects, in Eyeless in Gaza it gains in semantic importance since time becomes here one of the main problems of the novel, indicating the influence of the past of the present; even in later “homophonic” novels, time appears as a subject-matter in itself, e.g., in After Many a Summer, Time Must Have a Stop or The Genius and the Goddess.  In both the narrower and wider meaning of the term, STYLE is perhaps the most complex element in Huxley’s novels, because in every work we encounter a rich mixture of various styles, this mixture being one of the most typical features of these novels. Huxley freely moves from tragedy to comedy, from comic fantasy and gross naturalism, from essayistic fragments to poetic and intensely lyrical prose, from cynicism and satire to sentimentality, from melodrama to bitter irony etc., all of these “ordinarily separated categories” being really combined “chemically into a single entity”. This brief and general summary of the major formal aspects of Huxley’s novels was to reveal one significant and general feature: the novels contain an unusually rich variety of styles, multifunctional settings, numerous characters and means of characterization, and, finally, greatly diversified techniques of writing, as well as mutually contrasted modes of presentation, but, at the same time, those elements, which have usually been most important in the structure of the traditional novels, i.e., characters and plots, are both fairly reduced. 70 Expressing it in another way, one might say that there is in Huxley a mixture of diverse elements from various types of novels rather than a uniformity of style, treatment of characters, methods of writing etc. 70

This point will be much clearer if one compares Huxley’s novels with any representatives of such categories as “the novel of character” or “the novel of action” which are distinguished by E. Muir: The Structure of the Novel, London 1946.

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Uniformity, on the other hand, may be more often found in Huxley’s short stories rather than in his novels. And yet all these diverse elements seem to be unified, although on a different plane of the literary structure than is usual, on the level of the “general senses” or “total meanings” or “general ideas” of these works.71 But in order to arrive at conclusions concerning these “total meanings” of Huxley’s novels, it seems necessary to examine the functions and treatment of the elements called “explicit ideas”, their relationships with other elements of the literary structures discussed above, and finally, their share in generating these “total meanings”. First of all, the presence of explicit ideas is unquestionable in all Huxley’s novels in great abundance and variety; this has been shown in the foregoing analysis of his works; this feature has also been emphasized by a large number of studies and articles by those critics who take pains to establish the multiple sources of Huxley’s ideas, in order to prove their validity, absurdity, probability etc., i.e., problems which are beyond the scope of this study. 72 From the formal point of view, however, the modes of presentation of explicit ideas remain virtually the same in all the novels, i.e., the narrator’s comments, the characters’ dialogues and monologues, and the whole variety of quotations and “interior duplication” techniques. In the “polyphonic” novels the explicit ideas as such are not imposed on the fictional world but result from it, that is, from the appropriate choice of characters, elements of the setting and action, kind of narrator and the forms of quotations he uses etc.; all these aspects of the fictional reality (a term of wider meaning than “the fictional world”73) justify and motivate the appearance of explicit ideas and, moreover, they themselves generate such ideas. As a result, explicit ideas become a constant and typical feature of the fictional reality in Huxley’s novels; they become one of the distinctive features of his works. The most elementary role played by these explicit ideas is thus that of providing “material” for these novels, material which, in many respects, may be regarded as analogous to facts from history in the historical novel, politics in the political novel, sociology in the novel of manners etc. If the statement were left at that, however, there would be no difference between the “polyphonic” and the “homophonic” novels, since both are written on the basis of the same material of explicit ideas whose occurrence is motivated by particular elements of the fictional reality. The difference will come out only when we examine the relationship between explicit ideas and the other elements of the literary structure in both groups of novels. In the “polyphonic” novels individual elements of the fictional reality are not functionally limited only to the motivation of the occurrence of explicit ideas, but they may also contradict the validity of these ideas by ironic juxtaposition, transform them by re-formulation and presentation in different terms, oppose them in a dialogue, develop them by showing different aspects of the same problem etc. As a result, there is a constant dynamic tension between explicit ideas and other elements of the fictional reality. In consequence of this “dialogic” relationship explicit ideas 71

In order to avoid confusion between “explicit ideas” and the so-called “general idea” of the work, the term “total meaning” has been accepted through this study. 72 Apart from the monographic studies by Atkins and Bowering, op.cit., whose authors deal mainly with the sources of Huxley’s ideas, see also: S. Ghose: Aldous Huxley. A Cynical Salvationist, Bombay 1962; M. Birnbaum: “Aldous Huxley’s Quest for Values: A Study in Religious Syncratism”, Comparative Literature Studies, 1966, III; J. H. Quina: “The Philosophical Phases of Aldous Huxley”, College English, May 1962, no. 8. 73 “Fictional reality” is a term of a wider meaning than “fictional world”, since the latter does not include the narrator; cf. H. Markiewicz: Główne problemy wiedzy o literaturze, Kraków 1970; the Polish terms are “świat przedstawiony” and “rzeczywistość przedstawiona”.

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never lose their syncretic character but, on the contrary, by constant transformations and reformulations they acquire dynamic qualities which are usually typical of persons. 74 The ironic recurrence and reflexive reference make explicit ideas appear on several levels of the structures of these works, their validity being alternately questioned and re-affirmed, but always modified, always concerning a different aspect of the reality presented, always changing their functions and significance in the rhetoric of the novel; actually, a final statement about the structural and semantic significance of a given explicit idea may be made only after it has been placed in the full context of the whole novel. In such a situation, explicit ideas do not only provide unity in the constructions of these novels, so that the uniformity mentioned above should be sought right here, but they also significantly contribute to the total meaning of the novel. This total meaning seems thus to be a result of a fairly complex process: since no solution is reached in discussions or direct clashes of explicit ideas, and since in every individual scene or event the validity of explicit ideas is usually contradicted by implicit techniques, it may be said that the total meaning is generated from the contradiction of explicit ideas on the level of individual character or event and by their transformation and re-formulation in different terms on the same level of a single character, element of setting, event etc., so that through such repetitions explicit ideas regain their modified validity on a higher level of construction. This “higher” or “superior” meaning seems thus analogous to that presented above in the analysis of Rousseau’s statement - “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains” [cf. ibid., pp. 18-19]; the mechanism of creating the “general idea” or the total meaning from the dialogic interplay of explicit and implicit modes of presentation seems the same, on this high level of generalization. The difference between the “polyphonic” novels and the “homophonic” works seems now obvious: in the latter explicit ideas lose their dialogic and synretic character, other elements are functionally reduced to the role of “illustration”, and the total meaning may be easily seen on the level of explicit and a-syncretic ideas. In other words, with the same formal features, such as generally “flat” characters and reduced plots, the “homophonic” novels become representatives of the well-known genre called roman á thése and, as such, they do not offer any interesting material for this study. On the basis of the above findings from the analysis of Huxley’s “polyphonic” works, the following definition of the genre may be formulated: if by an explicit idea we mean “an abstract, syncretic and explicit statement analysed in essayistic utterances of the characters, the narrator’s comments, and in various forms of quotations” [cf. ibid. p. 20], then the novel of ideas can be characterized by a semantic and structural balance between explicit and implicit modes of presentation, i.e., by a dialogic interplay between explicit ideas constituting the material and other elements of the structure of this type of novel. The distinctive features of the novel of ideas may thus be found in:  the “material” of these works, i.e., explicit ideas appearing in the fictional reality;  reduction of semantic significance of character and plot;  semantic and structural balance between explicit and implicit modes of presentation. 74

Cf. F. Hoffman: “Aldous Huxley and the Novel of Ideas” [in:] Forms of Modern Fiction, ed. by William van O’Connor, Bloomington 1969, p. 190.

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The above distinctive features seem to allow a typological differentiation between the novel of ideas and several other kinds of fiction; to give a few examples, one may say that the novel of ideas differs from the essay and other semi-fictional writings owing to its structurally significant implicit techniques and lack of a “thesis” to be proved; the symbolical or allegorical novel because of the lack of predomination of implicit techniques over explicit modes of presentation and owing to the explicitly expressed ideas in the fictional reality; the philosophical novel owing to the syncretic character of explicit ideas and, again, lack of a “thesis”; the realistic or naturalistic novel because of the reduced semantic functions of character and plot, the presence of “purposefulness” rather than “causation”, lack of uniformity of style and methods of writing, and, finally, much greater importance of explicit ideas in the semantics of the novel. Naturally, since we lack precise definitions of the other types of fiction mentioned above, these distinctions have a relative and approximate character, although they seem to indicate the most elementary differences between particular types of fiction. The question of typological differentiation will again be mentioned in the next chapter of this study; meanwhile let us examine the origin of the term “novel of ideas” and the evolution of this genre before Huxley contributed to its development in his early “polyphonic” novels. B. Origin of the Term

Having established the distinctive features and the working definition of the novel of ideas, we have also obtained a set of criteria on the basis of which it seems possible to trace the development of the genre, going backwards to the earlier stages of its evolution and reconstructing a separate tradition of this kind of novel. As far as it was possible to find out, the earliest remarks about this type of novel seem to come from France, from the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, i.e., from a period in which there occurred an almost total disappearance of syncretic explicit ideas in English fiction, or at least in the main trend of the Victorian novel. On the Continent, however, the close connection between explicit ideas and fiction did not die out, as may be seen, among others, in this apparently paradoxical statement by Honore Balzac: There are active souls who like rapidity, conciseness, sudden shocks, action, drama, who avoid discussion, who have little fondness for meditation and take pleasure in results. From such people comes what I should call the Literature of Ideas. 75

Balzac presented this opinion in his preface to Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme [1839] and the origin of this term is further confirmed by Paul Bourget, Lionel Trilling, and E. K. Brown. 76 The

75

Quoted after Lionel Trilling: The Liberal Imagination. Essays on Literature and Society, New York, 1957, p. 265. 76 E. K. Brown: “The Revival of E. M. Forster” [in:] Forms of Modern Fiction, op.cit., p. 163; P. Bourget quoted after Brown; Trilling, op.cit., p. 265.

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latter critic transfers Balzac’s statement to the domain of English literature and makes up a list of English “novelists of ideas” in a longish fragment which deserves full quotation: By the novel of ideas Balzac, I think, understood something much more definite: for him it was a novel illustrating a theory about what goes on within the mind and indeed about life in general. Such an approach to fiction, rare among our less speculative English novelists, has its particular dangers - dangers clearly seen and strongly felt by George Eliot, our first, and I should argue, our greatest novelist of ideas [...] Since the time of George Eliot the novel of ideas has had honour in England; [...] In her novels the way to salvation is always neatly codified. And so it has been with Meredith, with Hardy, with Samuel Butler, with Wells, and with Forster [...] [The novelist of ideas has] a state of mind in which ideas are more important than the characters, the plots, or the settings. It is very near to the state of mind reflected in the letter from George Eliot to Frederic Harrison. Such are the struggles of the novelist of ideas. I do not think it is hard to understand why such a person should cease to be a novelist.77

Borrowing Brown’s terms one might say that his statements clearly reflect the shortcomings of this type of literary criticism and that it is not hard to understand why there is such a chaos in literary terminology, particularly in connection with literary genres.78 It is further illustrative to add that Brown’s article form which the above quotation is taken appeared in an anthology entitled Forms of Modern Fiction, a book which also contains an article by Frederick Hoffman, “Aldous Huxley and the Novel of Ideas”, where one meets such statements as that the characters “are not allegorical figures, for there is no single thing which the drama of their interaction is designed to illustrate” and “one cannot repeat too often that there is no ‘moral’ to be drawn from the career and fate of ideas in such a novel”, and, further, “The novel of ideas requires a poise, a balance, and most of all an eclectic faith in the democracy of ideas”;79 the contradictions seem evident enough and, from a more general point of view, they clearly reflect the long-lasting controversy about the representatives of the novel of ideas, distinctive features of this genre, its history etc.80 Naturally, the reasons for the controversy may ultimately be found in the criteria which various critics employ in establishing literary genres. The inadequacy of Brown’s criterion, namely, the presence of “a theory about life in general” can easily be shown: even if one adds such additional aspects of form as “embodiment” or “incarnation” of ideas in characters, “codification of the way to salvation”, and the fact that to a writer ideas more important than other elements of the literary structure, the criterion is very far from satisfactory for genological studies. On the one hand, the presence of such a “theory” can be detected in every ambitious novel in its more or less explicit “general idea”, total meaning etc., which, when extracted by the critic from the fictional reality, may clearly be called a “theory” illustrated in the novel; as much was suggested by Leggett in a statement mentioned earlier in this study when discussing the meaning of the term “idea” in fiction [cf. ibid., p. 15]. Brown’s fault in this case is his lack of distinguishing between a theory 77

E. K. Brown, op.cit., pp. 163-164, 174. Let it suffice to say that a single critic uses no less than over fifty different names of novels in a single study; cf. J. McCormick: Catastrophe and Imagination, London - New York – Toronto, 1957. 79 F. Hoffman, op.cit., p.193. 80 O’Connor and Harvey make contradictory statements concerning the origin of the genre; there is a general disagreement concenring the novelist’s commitment; there are also discussions as to which novels can be regarded as novels of ideas and which cannot. Cf. : William van O’Connor: “The Novel in our Time” [in:] Forms of Modern Fiction, op. cit., p. 5; Harvey’s statement quoted in his Character and the Novel, London 1956, p. 24; see also Greenlees’s opinion about the novel of Norman Douglas and Pritchett’s opinion about Musil’s novel (The Working Novelist, London 1965); compare also statements by Moravia, Hoffman, O’Connor, with those by Bowering, Harvey and Geistein. 78

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explicitly presented in a novel and a theory implied in this novel but extracted by the critic, so that, as a result, such different novelists as Hardy and Butler are placed side by side in the same generic category.81 On the other hand, the question of importance of particular elements for the novelist requires a strictly psychological approach which, again, is hardly helpful in genological studies. The question of importance of particular elements of the literary structure has already appeared on the pages of this study several times but, as in Hoffman’s article, it always concerned the importance of various modes of presentation and structural elements in relation to the whole structure and the semantic system of the novel itself and not of the individual hierarchy of values of the novelist. Because of this radical difference in typological criteria, it seems necessary to verify the statements that Brown and several other critics made in relation to the fiction of those writers who are traditionally regarded as “novelists of ideas” examining, at the same time, the evolution of the pre-Huxleyan novel of ideas.

C. Pre-Huxleyan Novel of Ideas In comparison with Brown’s somewhat hasty generalizations, Bourget’s opinion that Stendhal’s novel of ideas is “the novel preoccupied with what goes on within the mind”82 seems much more precise and justified: in both The Charterhouse of Parma and The Red and the Black, explicit ideas, as defined above in this study, are fairly numerous and Bourget rightly indicates their place of occurrence, namely, the minds of the characters. Prevost states that Julien has the “reflectiveness of an ideologist” and undoubtedly the protagonist’s thoughts constitute a major part of the contents of the novel. 83 But at the same time, Trilling makes an important reservation that “these ideas are not to be separated from the passions of Julien and Fabrice; they are reciprocally expressive of each other”.84 This, in turn, indicates the treatment and functions of explicit ideas in Stendhal’s novels: contained in the characters’ inner monologues and in the form of more or less theoretical speculations, these explicit ideas almost always describe the characters’ intentions and purposes which are immediately put into action, so that the explicit ideas are invariably semantically subordinated to such elements of the literary structure as the character and action. The often repeated observation that the technique of self-analysis was derived from some eighteenth-century philosophers and logicians, so that Stendhal remained a faithful pupil of the French thinkers from the previous epoch. 85 seems here approximately as relevant as similar 81

For the same reason the statements of McCormick seem unsatisfactory; his classification of “the novel of ideas” into three categories called “the novel of ideas proper or pure”, roman fleuve, and “the cognitive novel of ideas”, is based on an inadequate criterion, namely, the so-called “sense of society”; cf. op.cit., pp. 83-85. 82 Quoted after E. K. Brown, op.cit., p. 163. 83 “Julian od początku swej kariery guwernera posiada refleksyjność ideologa” and “Najbogatszą treść Czerwonego stanowią myśli Juliana”: Jean Prevost: “Czerwone i czarne” [in:] Sztuka interpretacji, tr. by J. Lekczyńska, Wrocław 1971, vol. I, pp. 429, 432; see also M. Dramińska-Joczowa: Wpływ ideologów na młodego Stendhala, Wrocław 1970. 84 L. Trilling, op.cit., p. 265. 85 Stendhal “był obdarzony niezwykłą zdolnością pogłębiania swoich wrażeń za pomocą analizy. Tę umiejętność zawdzięczał swoim mistrzom w zakresie filozofii, sensualistom i logikom XVIII wieku, którzy go

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statements concerning the use of Locke’s theory of association of ideas by Laurence Sterne; it is one more example of some critics’ approach, i.e., extracting a theory from its literary context and referring it to some extra-literary source. Stendhal’s works, however, contain some new elements which in respect to explicit ideas distinguish them from some other novels written in the same epoch, for instance, by Balzac and Thackeray. Instead of frequently breaking the narrative in the least expected and appropriate moments in order to present long moralizing or philosophical divagations in the manner practised by these two writers, Stendhal significantly limited his narrator’s privileges and presented rather the reflections of his characters. It seems true, that in such fragments “experiences are named rather than evoked”,86 but the method will eventually be developed and will re-appear in the twentieth century as the fully personal “stream-of-consciousness” technique as practised for instance by Virginia Woolf. By this method, however, Stendhal indicated the rightful place of explicit ideas in his “objective” psychological novel of ideas. Therefore, if we accept the critics’ claim that Stendhal’s fiction may be regarded as the first representative of the novel of ideas, we notice that at its beginning the genre did contain explicit ideas as a small portion of the novel’s material, the precise and objective record of the characters’ thoughts, juxtaposed, however, with the generally predominating implicit modes of presentation, mainly characterization and action. When the term “novel of ideas” is applied to the fiction of George Eliot, however, it again requires some modifications because, first of all, the treatment and functions of explicit ideas, which are numerous, vary greatly in individual works of this English “first and greatest novelist of ideas”. Strikingly enough, her novels as a whole seem to reveal a gradual process of increase in the semantic importance of explicit ideas, a process so thoroughly discussed and observed in Huxley’s literary career. This statement may well be illustrated by a comparison between an early novel, such as, for example, The Mill on the Floss [1860], and a later work, for instance, Daniel Deronda [1876].87 In the early novel explicit ideas appear infrequently in the characters’ utterances and reflections, but they are most numerous in the omniscient narrator’s comments. In the first case, explicit ideas have primarily the functions of means of characterization; for instance, the characters’ attitudes to knowledge and education seems to constitute an important criterion for the choice and division of characters.88 In the latter case, they are universal generalizations presented before or after the events which are thus described in abstract terms; their length may vary from two or three sentences to longish essays covering whole chapters [cf., e.g., I:12; II:4; IV:1]. In the latter case, explicit ideas are only slightly more important in the semantics of the novel. With the reduction of explicit ideas within the fictional world, these ideas which are expressed by the narrator do not seem to constitute a uniform “theory” mentioned by Brown, a theory which would be imposed on the fictional world with the resulting subordination of the uczynili jednym z najbardziej przenikliwych filozofów jakich znamy”, p. 511; and furthre on: “Stendhal nie dba o artystyczną stronę swoich utworów. Chodzi mu jedynie o precyzyjne zapisywanie myśli. Styl kodeksu cywilnego był dla niego wzorem. Z tego także względu ten oryginalny pisarz nie należy właściwie do swoich czasów; jest wierny swoim nauczycielom, filozofom osiemnastowiecznym”: G. Lanson and P. Tuffrau, Historia literatury francuskiej w zarysie, tr. by W. Bieńkowska, Warszawa 1971, pp. 511, 515. 86 Cf. S. Eile, op.cit., p. 147. 87 Page references are made in the text to the following editions: The Mill on the Floss, Thomas Nelson and Sons (no date); Daniel Deronda, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1973. 88 Cf. Maggie’s talk about her books – I:3; her quarrel with Tom about Latin and grammar – II:1; her conversations with Philip Wakem – II:6 or V:4.

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particular elements of the literary structure to that “theory”. The functions of these explicit ideas seem to be restricted only to the significance of individual events and they seem to be important in relation to universal truths rather than to the fictional world. Consider, for instance, the following fragment: The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it; the question whether the moment has come in which a man has fallen below the possibility of a renunciation that will carry any efficacy, and must accept the sway of passion against which he had struggled as a trespass, is one for which we have no master-key that will fit all cases. The casuists have become a by-word of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are too often fatally sealed - the truth that moral judgements must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot. All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims, because such people clearly discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgement solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality, without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardearned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellowfeeling with all that is human. [pp. 560-1]

The essayistic quality of this fragment is obvious, but these statements are “provoked” in the narrator’s mind by Dr. Kenn’s “ruminations” after his conversation with Maggie, and they do not seem to constitute fragments of any uniform “theory” about life in general. Offered in this way, the explicit ideas first of all characterize the narrator himself (or herself), as a reflective person meditating on a given problem of life. George Eliot seems to have transferred the reflective nature of Stendhal’s characters to her narrator, with this important difference, however, that her narrator’s ideas do not lead to action. In other words, instead of following the train of thoughts in Dr. Kenn’s mind (as would be the case of a novel by Stendhal), we follow the narrator’s “ruminations”. The same explicit ideas could equally well appear in either form but, as has already been mentioned above, they would change according to the context and the level of structure in which they are presented: if pronounced by a character they would occur on a lower structural level, within the fictional world, and their significance would be determined by the type of the character who presents them, by the treatment of that character by the narrator, his position in the fictional world etc. But when presented by the narrator these explicit ideas appear “above” or “beyond” the fictional world and they might have been imposed on this world if they constituted a “theory” to be illustrated; in this case, however, since no such theory seems to exist within the novel, these explicit ideas are only prompted by the fictional world and their significance, so to say, moves away from it. The validity of these ideas is unquestioned just because of their loose connection with the fictional world and, as such, their contribution to the total meaning of the novel seems slight. Even if one collected all such essayistic fragments from the novel, one would hardly get a uniform whole: it would be a collection of abstract statements from somebody’s essays on such subjects as “public opinion is of the feminine gender” [p. 551], “dark ages of education” [pp. 187 ff], “a variation of protestantism unknown to Bossuet” [pp. 301 ff], “the young idea” [p. 185] etc., all of them connected only by the fact that they have been suggested by the same fictional world and appeared in the mind of the reflective narrator. In other words, all these explicit ideas are generalizations concerning only some aspects of the fictional reality (first of all the narrator) and the total meaning seems to be generated by other elements of the novel,

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by characters and action, rather than by the one-sided relationship between explicit ideas and implicit modes of presentation. The same can hardly be said, however, about the other novel of George Eliot mentioned above, namely, Daniel Deronda, since explicit ideas do not only greatly increase in number, but also in functionality. First of all, they appear in extended mottos to each of the seventy chapters of the novel and also in the narrator’s extended comments which become much longer in this novel [cf., e.g., pp. 315-18, 411-18, 430-3, 525-33 etc.]. What is more significant, however, is the fact that they have lost their character of objective generalizations and become explicit evaluations of the fictional world and the characters’ ideas and acts. This is connected with still another novelty, namely, the appearance of characters who have numerous explicit ideas to present and these ideas directly concern the total meaning of the whole book. The connection between explicit ideas and characters is indicated in the novel: ‘But the hidden reasons why I need you began afar off’, said Mordecai; ‘began in my early years when I was studying in another land. Then ideas, beloved ideas, came to me, because I was jew. They were a trust to fulfil, because I was a Jew. They were an inspiration, because I was a Jew, and felt the heart of my race beating within me. They were my life; I was not fully born till then’. [p. 554]

Barbara Hardy is right when she says that “it is not a novel in which we can skip the ideas and simply enjoy certain aspects of the story and the psychological analysis”89 and we cannot do it precisely because some of the characters can be seen only through the ideas they pronounce; leaving the ideas, we would have to leave out the characters along with them. Moreover, this concerns the title character, Daniel Deronda, as well as the other representatives of the Jews, like Klesmer and Mordecai. All these characters are typical men-of-wisdom, expounding unquestionably valid theories, ordering and teaching all other characters in the novel, and explicitly stating the total meaning of the whole book. In spite of Barbara Hardy’s reservations - “I am not suggesting that Daniel Deronda is a kind of Victorian variation of Island”90 - this conclusion seems unavoidable if one compares some fragments from Huxley’s last novel with the following example from George Eliot’s work: Gwendolyn began again ‘You said affection was the best thing; and I have hardly any - none about me. If I could, I would have mamma; but that is impossible. Things have changed to me so - in such a short time. What I used not to like, I long for now. I think I am almost getting fond of the old things now they are gone.’ Her lip trembled. ‘Take the present suffering as a painful letting in of light,’ said Deronda, more gently. ‘You are conscious of more beyond the round of your own inclinations - you know of the way in which your life presses on others, and their life on yours. I don’t think you could have escaped the painful process in some form or other.’ [...] ‘Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed on the idea of increasing that remorse which is so bitter to you. Fixed meditation may do a great deal towards defining our longing or dread. We are not always in a state of strong emotion, and when we are calm we can use our memories and gradually change the bias of our fear, as we do our tastes. Take your fear as a safeguard. It is like quickness of hearing. It may make consequences passionately present to you. Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision.’ [pp. 508-9]

In this way, and it is only one of numerous possible examples, the protagonist becomes a typical “reasoner” or “teacher”, a figure so frequently encountered in Huxley’s later novels; it is mainly 89 90

Barbara Hardy’s Introduction to the above edition of Daniel Deronda, p. 21. Ibid., p. 10.

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for this reason that Daniel Deronda may be regarded as a perfect example not only of a “homophonic” novel, but even of the roman á thése. There is never any balance between the two worlds contrasted in the novel and their respective ideas: the Jewish society is constantly presented as something to be admired and approved, while the English Gentile society is very sharply criticised. From another point of view, Daniel Deronda seems to offer additional evidence for one of the statements made above, namely, that a large body of explicit ideas somehow acquires a greater variety of implicit techniques for their presentation. This phenomenon has already been presented in Huxley’s novels and now a comparison between the two novels by George Eliot shows not only an increase in the number and functionality of explicit ideas but also an accompanying differentiation of narrative techniques. To the extended comments of the omniscient narrator, George Eliot added numerous mottos, 91 quotations, shifts in time construction, a specific form of “interior duplication”,92 and several discussion scenes which should more properly be called “symposia”; for example, consider the following debate on the nature of ideas: ‘I don’t hold with you there, Miller,’ said Goodwin ... ‘For either you mean so many sorts of things that I get no knowledge by what you say, any more than if you said light was a cause; or else you mean a particular sort of ideas, and then I go against your meaning as too narrow. For look at it in one way, all actions men put a bit of thought into are ideas - say, sowing seed, or making a canoe, or baking clay; and such ideas as these work themselves into life and go on growing with it, but they can’t go apart from the material that set them to work and makes a medium for them. It’s the nature of wood and stone yielding to the knife that raises the idea of shaping them, and with plenty of wood and stone the shaping will go on. I look at it, that such ideas are mixed straight away with all the other elements of life are powerful along with ‘em. The slower the mixing, the less power they have. And as to the causes of social change, I look at it in this way - ideas are a sort of parliament, but there’s a commonwealth outside, and a good deal of commonwealth is working at change without knowing what the parliament is doing.’ ‘But if you take ready mixing as your test of power,’ said Pash, ‘some of the least practical ideas beat everything. They spread without being understood, and enter into the language without being thought of.’ ‘They may act by changing the distribution of gases,’ said Marrables; ‘instruments are getting so fine now, man may come to register the spread of a theory of observed changes in the atmosphere and corresponding changes in the nerves.’ ‘Yes,’ said Pash ... ‘there is the idea of nationalities; I daresay the wild asses are snuffing it, and getting more gregarious.’ ‘You don’t share that idea?’ said Deronda ... ‘Say rather, he does not share the spirit,’ said Mordecai, who had turned a melancholy glance on Pash. ‘Unless nationality is a feeling, what force can it have as an idea?’ [pp. 583-4]

and such a debate is thus allowed to go on for the next twenty pages. Needless to say, Mordecai and Deronda are triumphant in every discussion of this type. It seems easy to understand now why George Eliot’s fiction is regarded as representative of the novel of ideas: her more “speculative” works can clearly be distinguished from those of her contemporaries and it may be said that she actually begins this genre in English literature. Like Stendhal in French literature, George Eliot combined a realistic presentation of her fictional world 91

Apart from revealing George Eliot’s erudition, since the mottos are taken from a wide variety of writers from various countries since antiquity till her contemporaries, the mottos, sometimes in prose and sometimes in verse, are particularly interesting when they deal with some theoretical problems of the craft of fiction; e.g. on beginning in medias res, Chap. 1; on the way of describing human actions, Chap. 16; on “the fight” with art, Chap. 23; on the motives of characters’ acts, Chap. 25; on the probability of the plot, Chap. 41 etc. 92 The whole of Chap. 20 is actually the first-person narrative of Mirah’s own life story.

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with explicit ideas, placing the latter in the characters’ minds; however, she also increased the semantic importance of explicit ideas so much so that there is no balance between explicit and implicit modes of presentation and Daniel Deronda comes close to the category of roman á thése. Yet, the two novels discussed above may be viewed as the two extreme poles marking the range available to the novelist of ideas, from fairly loose reflections to a thesis. In comparison with Huxley’s novels, Daniel Deronda shows very numerous similarities to his “homophonic” novels, while The Mill on the Floss seems similar to the “polyphonic” novels only in one respect: some characters from Huxley’s early novels deal with explicit ideas in much the same way as the reflective narrator in George Eliot’s novel, in the latter case, however, explicit ideas appear on different levels and, as a result, their ontological status and functions greatly differ from those in Huxley. Passing on to the other writers mentioned by Brown, namely, Meredith, Hardy, Butler, Wells, and Forster, one is immediately aware of the necessity of taking into consideration differences in modes of presentation which are perhaps the principal element showing the differences between the various types of fiction written by these novelists. All these writers created mostly “homophonic” novels in which the fictional worlds are more or less subordinated to a body of ideas which are a-syncretic but it should immediately be added that in some works the predominating “theory” is a product of the critics’ abstraction, while in others it is explicitly presented within the novels. A definitive shift in the modes of presentation can be seen in the novels of Hardy and Forster where the most significant ideas are always carefully “embodied” in characters, action, the “diagrammatic” construction,93 and expressed by numerous extended symbols and metaphors becoming symbols through their recurrence. The strict connection between ideas and allegories has already been stressed above [cf., ibid., pp. 28-30] but it is perhaps worth recalling a more recent statement made by Robert Scholes: In the great allegories, tension between the ideas illustrated by the characters and the human qualities in their characterization makes for a much richer and more powerful kind of meaning. The great allegories are never entirely allegorical, just as the great realistic novels are never entirely real [...] Allegory amounts to seeing life through ideational filters provided by philosophy or theology ... . 94

The critic makes these statements about the most recent examples of allegories in the writings of Isaac Dinesen, Iris Murdoch and William Golding, but almost the same may also be said about the works of Hardy and Forster; both of them seem to have written symbolic novels of the “heterophoric” rather than “homeophoric” type, 95 i.e., novels whose literal meaning refers to the “ideational filters”, to determinism in Hardy,96 and to the Indian philosophy in Forster. 97 However, in view of the definition of the literary idea accepted in this study, i.e., the definition based mainly 93

Henry James’s opinion that George Eliot’s novels were “diagrams” rather than “pictures of life” (quoted after B. Hardy, op.cit., p. 21), can equally well be made about the fiction of all these writers; see also the onception of the so-called “dogmatic form” in B. Hardy’s study entitled The Appropriate Form. An Essay on the Novel, London 1964, especially Chap. III. 94 R. Scholes, The Fabulators, New York 1967, pp. 99-101. 95 Terms taken from Ian Watt: “Fabuła i myśl w Smudze cienia Conrada” [in:] Conrad w oczach krytyki światowej, tr. by E. Krasnowolska, Warszawa 1974, p. 641. 96 Cf. R. C. Carpenter: Thomas Hardy, New York 1964, especially pp. 135-138; also A. Styczyńska: Realizm powieści Tomasza Hardy’ego, Toruń 1967. 97 W. Stone: The Cave and the Mountain. A Study of E. M. Forster, Stanford – London 1966, especially Chap. 12 “A Passage to India: The Great Round”, pp. 298-346.

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on the modes of presentation, the novels of Hardy and Forster seem to move away from the novel of ideas proper, because of the unquestionable predominance of implicit techniques of writing. Of the other writers enumerated by Brown, Samuel Butler and H. G. Wells deserve much more attention, since in their works they moved in the opposite direction, namely, towards greater explicitness of their ideas. Generally speaking, explicit ideas in their novels still seem to preserve a-syncretic or homophonic character, but particular techniques of writing undergo further development in comparison with the fiction of George Eliot. In the case of Butler it is mostly the construction of the narrator that is developed, while in Wells - an extensive use of dialogue and discussion scenes. Leaving aside Butler’s anti-Utopia, Erewhon [1872] since, by its very nature, this type of novel determines the type and treatment of explicit ideas, the other most popular novel by this writer, Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh [1903] offers an interesting case for the illustration of some of the above statements. The narrator, Mr. Overton, appears as a friend of the family whose member, Ernest Pontifex, is the protagonist of the whole novel. Overton is thus a type of the narrator-witness, to some extent engaged in the action, and he is writing a chronicle of almost three generations of the family, while additional effects are achieved by the occasional presence of the mature Ernest who is sometimes consulted by Overton about the inclusion of some letters, fragments from diaries, essays and articles written by the members of the family etc.98 Overton is also a reflective and intrusive narrator; hence, there are his frequent addresses to the reader, discourses on some aspects of the book he is writing, essays on a wide variety of problems etc. The manner in which this type of narrator affects the explicit ideas present in the novel can well be seen if one examines any of the stages of Ernest’s development, for instance, the protagonist’s attitude to religion and his choice of the Church described in a sequence of Chapters from 49 to 53 [Vol. II, Part II]. The first of these chapters contains a presentation of the Evangelical movement and the sermon of the Rev. Gideon Hawke on the text “Saul, Saul, why kickest thou against the pricks?” [p. 191],99 a text meaningful in view of the controversy between the “Ernest set” and the Sims (the Simeonites); having quoted the full version of the sermon, Overton presents his explicit comment on the reactions of the listeners and the reasons for such a reaction. This is followed in the next chapter [Chapter 50] by a description of Ernest’s conversion which is subjected to a test “to smoke or not to smoke” - naturally, with a negative result. The conversion is also illustrated by Ernest’s letters to his family and the reaction of Ernest’s father to the decision of his son concerning the choice of the Low Church; Theobald’s reaction is again directly explained by Overton in the latter’s description of the religious situation in the country. Chapter 51 begins with Overton’s comments on the changes which have taken place in Ernest’s character and then he introduces the senior curate, Pryer; significantly, we get Overton’s impression after his meeting with Pryer first, and only then does he present Ernest’s impressions. The chapter ends with Overton speaking about the arguments of the High Church which were soon to convince Ernest again and thus change his “snipe-like flight” [p. 202], while the whole next chapter [Chapter 52] contains an explicit presentation of these arguments in one long debate between Pryer and Ernest. 98

Ernest tells Overton: “if good-natured friends have kept more records of my follies, pick out any plums that may amuse the reader, and let him have his laugh over them”; S. Butler: Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh, London 1968, p. 199. 99 All page references are made to the above edition; this text is a combination of two passages from the story of Saul’s conversion.

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The whole sequence is summed up by Overton in the next chapter [Chapter 53] in the following way: The foregoing conversation and others like it made a deep impression upon my hero. If next day he had taken a walk with Mr. Hawke ... he would have been just as much struck ... Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange metamorphoses before they adopt their final stage. It is no more to be wondered at that one who is going to turn out a Roman Catholic should have passed through the stages of being first a Methodist, and then a free thinker, than that a man should at some former time have been a mere cell, and later on an invertebrate animal. Ernest however could not be expected to know this. Embryos never do. Embryos, as I have said already, think that each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition which really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call Death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another. It is the making us consider the points of difference ... . [p. 207]

and so on, a theoretical summary which is then again further documented by the letters of Ernest, quoted, as Overton says, so that they “would make the reader see for himself how things were going in half the time that it would take [him] to explain them to [the reader]” [p. 209]. Thus Overton is not only “a window through which the reader watches Ernest’s struggle with his heredity”,100 but he is primarily a conscious manipulator of argument and illustration, of explicit lecture and implicit event, of abstract statement and a document, so that the result superficially resembles the interplay of the explicit and implicit modes of presentation in Huxley’s novels; moreover, Butler uses several devices which will later on again appear also in Huxley’s writings, for instance, “interior duplication”, quotations and misquotations, meaningful names, and even juxtaposition - for instance the long quotation from the Bible contrasted with Overton’s parable about bees on the wall-paper [Chapter 23]. And yet, the total effect of such a narrator resembles that of Mr. Propter in After Many a Summer or old John Rivers in The Genius and the Goddess rather than any “men-of-wisdom” from Huxley’s “polyphonic” novels; Overton turns his tale into a document proving the validity of the theory of evolution, the theory which is explicitly presented in the novel and which clearly determines the selection and shape of all other elements of the literary structure. The same “homophonic” type of fiction may be found in the novels of H. G. Wells, particularly in the later period of literary career when he turned to writing “novels of ideas” or “novels of discussion”, both terms being used by various critics in describing Wells’s works, 101 such as Ann Veronica [1909], The New Machiavelli [1911], The Research Magnificent [1915], Mr. Britling Sees It Through [1916], The Undying Fire [1919] or Christina Alberta’s Father [1925] and some twenty other books up to The Happy Turning [1945]. Dialogue has always been an effective and popular method of dealing with explicit ideas in fiction and, in the past, in non-fiction too [cf., ibid., p. 29]. Moreover, this technique was revived at the end of the nineteenth century by W. H. Mallock in The New Republic, or Culture, Faith, 100

Cf. D. F. Howard’s introduction to the above edition of Butler’s novel, p. XIV. Burgum, Bergonzi, and Meckier use the term “novel of ideas”, while Nicholson – “novels of discussions”; the latter term seems to be more often used in relation to the workds of Peacock and Mallock, but at the same time other terms are introduced, e.g. “novel of conversation”, “novel of talk”, “discussion novels”. Cf. N. Nicholson: H. G. Wells, London (no date); Bergonzi, op.cit., p. 195; Burgum, op. cit., p. 120; Meckier, op.cit., pp. 119, 158-159; I. Greenlees: Norman Douglas, London 19157, pp. 22-23; A. Wilson: “The House Party Novels” [in:] “The Critical Symposium on Aldous Huxley”, op.cit., pp. 53-56. 101

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and Philosophy in an English Country House [1877] and then again by G. Lowes Dickinson in A Modern Symposium [1909]; in both works the writers collected several thinly disguised personages of the epoch and made them discuss some current problems. 102 The origin of this kind of writing was also discussed by Wells himself in his preface to Babes in the Darkling Wood [1940]103 where indeed he looks for a predecessor in Plato’s Dialogues as his model. Some of Wells’s novel are written almost entirely in dialogue, e.g., Apropos of Dolores, Mr. Britling ..., or Marriage; the latter example, however, clearly shows the “homophonic” character of Wells’s dialogues and the general discrepancy between the type of theoretical discussion and the other structural elements of the novel - Richard Trafford, after his elopement with Marjorie, sets in Labrador and, living in a tent, he leads endless discussions with his wife about the problem of marriage and life, so that she may gain the right conception of the vocation of a wife; she is to be a “help-mate” to the Wellsian cave-man, dreaming of his world-state before the camp fire. Generally speaking, Wells rarely achieves a balance between the explicit and implicit techniques of writing; most often his novels are clearly “homophonic”, with a very feeble connection between the theory being proved and the plot of the book. In some cases, however, Wells succeeds in achieving a kind of balance when his explicit ideas are mixed with other elements. This can be noted in Mr. Britling, whose protagonist loved to write and talk. He talked about everything, he had ideas about everything; he could no more help having ideas about everything than a dog can resist smelling at your heels. He sniffed at the heels of reality ... That was a trick of Mr. Britling’s mind. It had this tendency to spread outward from himself to generalized issues. Many minds are like that nowadays”. 104

Mr. Britling’s reflections concern mostly the impossibility of any conflict or war, and in this way Wells cleverly analyses the attitudes and reactions to the war and then he achieves a juxtaposition between Mr. Britling’s ideas and the letters of his son, Hugh, who is later on killed in the trenches in France. In another novel, Christina Alberta’s Father, Wells successfully turns the idea of reincarnation into an extended symbol; finally, one may mention Wells’s use of allegory in The Undying Fire, the whole novel being based on the book of Job. However, Wells makes equally frequent use of the first-person digressive narrator, for instance in The New Machiavelli or The World of William Clissold, although the general effect is then even more “homophonic” than in his “novels of discussion”. Writing about the latter novel, Nicholson states that The book ... while taking the general form of a discursive memoir, is actually a series of essays and articles, notes and sketches, neither woven together nor strung together, but rather piled up heterogeneously ... There is every reason to believe that Wells thought he was widening the scope of the novel by including a sort of anatomy of the mind of his character ... This is not the Wells of Mr. Britling, playing with ideas like a fountain, but the earnest and inspired arguer, presenting his case with the aptest illustration and analogy. 105

Before finishing this survey of pre-Huxleyan novel of ideas one should mention still another book in which a variety of techniques of writing is employed for the realization of a single 102

Cf. A. B. Adams: “The Novels of William Hurrell Mallock”, The Maine Bulletin, 1931, 30; E. M. Forster: Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, London 1962. 103 Cf. H. G. Wells: Babes in the Darkling Wood, London 1940: “Introduction: The Novel of Ideas”, pp. 511. 104 H. G. Wells: Mr Britling Sees it Through, Leeds 1969, pp. 14, 99. 105 Nicholson, op.cit., pp. 101-102.

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abstract idea. Writing about his most popular novel, South Wind [1916], Norman Douglas stressed mainly the importance of the plot in the book but, at the same time, his argument is illustrative of the role of explicit ideas in its structure: ... it would be nearer the truth to say that it is nothing but plot from the beginning to end. How to make murder palatable to a bishop: that is the plot. How? You must unconventionalize him and instil into his mind the seeds of doubt and revolt. You must shatter his old notions of what was right. It is the only way to achieve this result, and I would defy the critic to point to a single incident or character or conversation in the book which does not further the object in view. The good Bishop soon finds himself among new influences; his sensations, his intellect, are assailed from within and without. Figures such as those in Chapters 11, 18 and 35, the endless dialogue in the boat, the even more tedious happenings in the local law-court, the very externals - the jovial immoderation of everything and everybody: they foster a sense of violence and insecurity; they all tend to make the soil receptive to new ideas”. 106

This description with its stress on the abstract main idea, on the functionality of several elements of its structure, including explicit ideas and dialogues, closely resembles many statements made by Aldous Huxley about his own novels. Besides, one should also add that South Wind contains an example of the “interior duplication” in the form of “Antiquities of Nepenthe”, a chronicle of the island, which is very similar to that used by Huxley, and there are obvious similarities between some characters in Douglas’s and Huxlet’s novels, for instance, Denis Phipps and Denis Stone, or Keith and Mr. Scogan; moreover, Huxley himself stated that Scogan in Crome Yellow has indeed been modelled on Norman Douglas.107 In this way we come very close to the first early works of Huxley in respect both to the novelistic form and to the literary epoch. It seems that this brief survey of pre-Huxleyan novel of ideas has revealed three general facts. First of all, it has shown the origin of the genre in the novels of George Eliot, the first English novelist (after the eighteenth century) to make possible a combination between the longlasting and predominating tradition of the realistic novel and explicit ideas emerging from the fictional world. Secondly, it has indicated the two basic ways of dealing with ideas in fiction; these ways differ almost exclusively in the modes of presentation, i.e., explicit and implicit techniques of writing. Thirdly, it has perhaps determined the most significant contribution of Huxley to the genre, which consists in his showing that explicitness does not necessarily commit a novelist to a concrete ideology or any monistic pattern of belief, but that it is possible to use explicit ideas in a “polyphonic” way, provided, as Hoffman writes, that the novelist has “an eclectic faith in the democracy of ideas”. Huxley’s contribution to the novel of ideas may yet be seen from another point of view, namely, from the sociological angle, as represented, for instance, by O’Connor who writes: The sense certain novelists, among them André Gide and Aldous Huxley, have had of living in a world of conflicting or at least complementary ideas, has given rise to the novel of ideas ... Like many of his contemporaries Gide was aware that in a world of ideas he could not safely commit himself to a single idea ... We may object, as older Huxley apparently has, that this way of seeing encourages us to view all things as meaningless flux - but we must also admit that since the vision of world and man as flux is so considerable a part of the contemporary mind, the novelist cannot ignore it”. 108

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Quoted after Greenlees, op.cit., pp. 22-23. P. Firchow, op. cit., p. 58. 108 O’Connor, op.cit., p. 5; cf. also E. Muir: Literature and Society, Cambridge, Mass., 1965, pp. 143-144; L. Eustachiewicz: “Nowatorskie tendencje we współczesnej dramaturgii”, Życie Literackie, 1974, 1041, pp. 3-4; A. Hutnikiewicz: Od czystej formy fo literatury faktu, Warszawa 1974, Chaps. 1-3; H. Dubowik: “Wspólne 107

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Though O’Connor suggests that the novel of ideas came into existence much later than it really did, his merit is that he points out an important correlation between literature and its social milieu. It seems that the history of the novel of ideas, and its gradual change from developing a single idea to dealing with many ideas, from purely “homophonic” to “polyphonic” manner of writing, clearly reflects the gradual breakdown of Victorian ideals, Victorian morality and social philosophy, a rebellion which had begun in the last four decades of the nineteenth century, and was completed at the beginning of our century. This observation, however, seems to belong rather to the next section of the present chapter, i.e., to a brief discussion of the broader literary category to which the novel of ideas seems to belong.

D. Origin of the Genre In his study on Huxley’s novels Peter Firchow writes that “the task of putting Huxley in his proper historical place be only dealt with adequately in a separate book”. 109 Attempts at a partial realization of this task have already been made by G. Rohmann and D. P. Scales, who wrote comparative studies on Huxley and French literature.110 However, the conclusions reached by them seem hardly satisfactory since, generally speaking, they all indicate and demonstrate a possibility of finding innumerable similarities between the novels (and personal interests) of Huxley and a large number of French writers, from Rabelais and Montaigne, through Bourget and Baudelaire, up to France, Gide, Proust, Romain Rolland; some of these writers are said to have provided Huxley with some techniques of writing, others - with problems and ideas discussed in his novels.111 Rohmann’s study has been aptly summarized by May: “exhaustive and exhausting”;112 the main fault of such studies is the lack of any clearly defined plane on which such a comparison is made which, consequently, leads to indiscriminate enumerations of possible and impossible contacts and influences. elementy w kierunkach literackich XX stulecia” [in:] Z problematyki gatunków i prądów literackich XIX i XX wieku, Warszawa – Poznań 1972, pp. 25-38. 109 P. Firchow, op.cit., p. 4. 110 Gerd Rohmann: Aldous Huxley und die französische Literatur, Marburg 1968; Derek P. Scales: Aldous Huxley and French Literature ,Sydney 1969. 111 Cf. e.g.: “Huxley erwähnt in seinem Gesamtwerk eine Reihe bedeutender und auch einige weniger bekannte Autoren der französische Literatur des 16. bis 20. Jahrhunderts, da er originelle Entwicklungen des Geistesgutes un der Geshichte Frankreichs zur treffenden Charakterisierung seiner Personen und zur schlaglichtartigen Aufhellung spezieller Situationen verwendet. Sein Persönlichkeitsideal ist in der Renaissance begründet, und Huxley zeigt sich uns als geistiger Nachfahre der französische Moralisten, während er aus der Aufklärung nur einige selbstskritische Züge aufgrieft. Ausgeglichen-ganz-heitliche Persönlichkeiten das Humanismus wie Rabelais, Montaigne, der die Selbstsucht denunzierende La Rochefoucauld und Voltaire als Kritiker von Intoleranz und Fortschritsgläubigkeit dienen Untermeuerung des eigenen Persönlichkeitsideal eines ‘equilibrium of balanced excess’. Die einseitigen Menschenbilder Pascals und Prousts stossen auf scharfe Ablehnung. So entschpricht auch die klassische Tragödie von Corneille und Racine weniger seiner Auffasung von der Kunst als Mittlerin der ganzen Lebenswahrheit als die Rousseau, Musset, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud and Bourget illustrieren die verschiedenen Kinflikte des dualistischen Menschen”; Rohman, op. cit., p. 177. 112 K. May, op.cit., p. 135.

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It has already been mentioned that the novel of ideas reveals many similarities to some writings regarded as representative of the broad literary category called “the Menippean satire” or “intellectual fiction”. This statement may now be verified when we view together the conclusions reached in the second part of the first chapter in this study and those reached in the analysis of Huxley’s novels and the history of the genre. It has already been stressed that the Menippean satire had flourished mainly in the socalled “classical” epochs in literary history, in periods of liberal attitudes, pluralistic world views, and the general freedom of science and philosophy, epochs which were usually lacking any stable poetics. Similarly, as Hoffman writes, “the novel of ideas is a narrative form peculiar to an ‘unstable’ age - one in which standards are not fixed beyond removal or alteration”, 113 and we have seen that the origin of the novel of ideas coincides with the beginning of a rebellion against Victorian morals and literary models, which eventually led to the chaos so typical of the first decades of our century. From the formal point of view, the similarities between the tradition of the Menippean satire and the novel of ideas are even more striking. Generally speaking, the modes of presentation of explicit ideas have remained unchanged almost since antiquity: these ideas still appear in the utterances of the characters, in the narrator’s comments, and in various forms of quotations. The basic changes, however, occur in the interrelationship between explicit ideas and other elements of the literary structure and in the functions of these ideas. Explicit ideas have all the functions enumerated after the discussion of the Menippean tradition, i.e., they appear as “material” of the fictional reality, means of characterization, literary polemics, commentaries and “thesis” in homophonic works. A new function seems to appear in Huxley’s “polyphonic” novels, namely, the function of providing unity of construction and links between chapters, this novelty being perhaps a result of the application of “transformations” and re-formulations of ideas in different terms and contexts. This, in turn, leads to the question of the relationship between explicit ideas and other elements of the literary structure. In this historical survey presented in the first chapter we have seen a gradual increase in implicit techniques of writing and their taking over several functions of explicit ideas; a kind of balance between these two modes of presentation was reached, however, in the writings of Cervantes, Fielding and Sterne, while the analysis of Huxley’s “polyphonic” fiction also revealed the same kind of balance in the structure and semantics of the novel. Finally, there are numerous similarities between elements of the fictional world in the Menippean satire and in the novel of ideas: in both cases characters are often “flat” and two-dimensional, although, since Cervantes, some characters could be “rounded” owing to the deepened study in psychology and realistic presentation; the same may be said about means of characterization and the novel of ideas revived such traditional devices as meaningful names, labels and even masks. Final similarities may be found in the mixture of various styles with frequent occurrence of essayistic fragments, time remaining fairly unimportant, action reduced, while setting retaining all its traditional roles and appearing in very similar kinds. All these findings seem to indicate the most general conclusion, namely, that the tradition of the Menippean satire once again proved its vitality when it reappeared in our century in the form called novel of ideas. However, its role in modern literature, as well as its shape, seem to be significantly altered. The present-day position of the novel of ideas will require at least a brief

113

F. Hoffman, op.cit., p. 192.

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examination of the synchronic system of literary genres which exists in our century, so that we may obtain the other co-ordinate in this way.

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Chapter III

TENTATIVE INTERPRETATION OF THE 20TH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL

The aim of the present chapter is to locate the genre called “novel of ideas”, as represented by Huxley’s early or “polyphonic” fiction, within the broad spectrum of different kinds of novels written in the twentieth century in England. Such an attempt seems necessary since, if a study of a genre is to be complete, it should take into account both its diachronical and synchronical literary contexts. Regarding the twentieth century as one literary epoch one may hope to reconstruct a synchronic order of genres in which Huxley’s novels may adequately be placed. Although two parts of this task, namely, the reconstruction of the diachronic co-ordinate and the definition of the novel of ideas, have already been realized above, the remaining part still seems complex and formidable enough to require a book-length study instead of a single chapter. If such an attempt is made here, it is only owing to the possibility of taking advantage of the research in this field done so far, and owing to rigid theoretical assumptions about the systematic approach which makes it possible to limit the vast material to be dealt with. As a result, the statements offered in this chapter will have mainly the character of deductive hypotheses or theoretical propositions rather than that of valid and well-documented assertions based on a thorough analysis of literary works. The material for the hypotheses proposed below will be of two kinds. On the one hand, it will be provided by a large body of historical and theoretical observations presented in the following works: J. W. Beach, The Twentieth Century novel: Studies in Technique [New York, 1932]; D. Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World [Chicago, 1939] and The Present Age. From 1920 [London, 1962]; W. Allen, The English Novel [Harmondsworth, 1970] and Tradition and Dream [Harmondsworth, 1964]; W. Y. Tindall, Forces in Modern British Literature. 18851956 [New York, 1956]; A. C. Ward, The Nineteen-Twenties [London, 1930] and TwentiethCentury English Literature. 1900-1960 [London, 1966]; G. S. Fraser, The Modern Writer and His World [Harmondsworth, 1964]; W. W. Robson, Modern English Literature [London, 1970]; R.-M. Albéres, Metomarphoses du roman [Paris, 1965] and L’aventure intellectuel du XXe siecle [Paris, 1969]; B. Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel [London, 1969]; R. Scholes, The Fabulators [New York, 1967]; D. Lodge, The Novelist at a Crossroads [London, 1971], and two anthologies of critical and historical articles published as The Pelican Guide to English Literature. 7 - The Modern Age [ed. by B. Ford; Harmondsworth, 1969] and Sphere History of Literature in the English Language. 7 - The Twentieth Century [ed. by B. Bergonzi; London 1970]. (In order to avoid multiplying footnotes, references to the above books will be made in the text, specifying the name of the author and page number.)

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On the other hand, the chapter will deal mainly with those novelists who are recognized by the critics mentioned above as important and influential in the history of modern British fiction and as representative of individual trends in its development, i.e., with the novels of such writers as H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham P. Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, Angus Wilson and others. The theoretical basis for the construction of a literary system of genres has been taken from Claudio Guillén.1 The same critic also provided a good example of an overall systematization in his study on the Moorish novel, the pastoral and the picaresque, in which the elementary opposition of genre-countergenre has served as the principle (or structure) for the reconstruction of the system of genres valid for that epoch. 2 A similar procedure has already been employed in this study above, in relation to the eighteenth-century English novel as a supplementation of the criteria used by Ian Watt. Finally, another example of the same approach may be found in R. Scholes’s attempt at a classification of the English novel.3 It should be added, however, that it is much easier to apply the criterion “genrecountergenre” to those literary periods which are fairly distant in time; not only are individual works much less numerous then, but, first of all, they may be seen in a full context of their “predecessors” and, which is perhaps even more important, their “successors”. The interpretation of such works and the evaluation of their roles in whole systems of genres can be carried out much more precisely and objectively. In the case of modern British fiction, however, it is primarily the “successors” that are lacking and, as a result, there arises a serious difficulty with the selection of the most relevant binary oppositions for the construction of the literary system. An additional difficulty arises when one takes into account the characteristics of the period in question. Although not much space need be devoted to all the revolutionary changes in the intellectual and cultural patterns of the epoch, since it has been done much more expertly and exhaustively in numerous historical, sociological, and literary studies, 4 it should, nevertheless, be generally emphasized that the multiple changes in all domains of life, as well as the discoveries in science, have had a decisive influence on the whole generation of writers and they must also have affected the whole system of literary genres. “English thought in this period”, writes Graham Hough about the years 1900-1918, “was a muddle, as it has ever been since”. 5 A dynamic development of science, conflicting social movements and theories, all contributed to the feeling of instability and chaos. Under the influence of Bergson and Moore in philosophy, of Freud, Darwin, William James and Einstein in sciences, of socialism and Fascism, there appeared new aesthetic trends which, in turn, brought about radical changes in the form and subject-matter of literature, in the opinions about its functions in society, or about the position of a writer in his social milieu. In the case of the novel critics usually enumerate such changes as: rejection of Victorian novels and morality, experiment, breakdown of genre categories, increased interest in 1

C. Guillén, Literature as System. Essays toward the Theory of Literary History, Princeton 1971, pp. 8,

131. 2

Ibid., Chap. 5 "Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque". R. Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction, New Haven and London 1974, pp. 132-138; see also his article "Towards a Poetics of Fiction: [4] An Approach Through Genre", Novel. A Forum on Fiction, Winter 1969, II:2, pp. 101-111. 4 The best studies of this type may be found in individual essays by various contributors which have been edited by C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson under the title The Twentieth Century Mind. History, Ideas, and Literature in Britain, vols.: 1:1900-1918; 2:1918-1945; 3:1945-1965; London 1972. 5 Graham Hugh, "English Criticism" [in:] ibid., vol.1, p. 476. 3

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characters’ psychology, subjective and multiple interpretations, intellectuality, ambiguity of the main idea, disturbed chronology, diminished importance of plot and characters, abrupt endings etc.6 This incomplete list of changes shows not only the wide range and radical character of the developments in modern fiction but it also indicates a variety of possible criteria and approaches which may be used by the critics for the purpose of introducing some kind of order into the vast material of contemporary fiction. In the case of the present study, however, its very purpose indicates the set of criteria developed in the course of the analysis of the novel of ideas carried out above as a consequent plane of oppositions for the construction of the system of genres. Analogically to Robert Scholes, who developed his system on the basis of the “possible relation between any fictional world and the world of experience” and then constructed his frame of reference in the shape of a triangle,7 our criteria may be formulated in the following way:  absence or presence of ideas in a given work;  when present, then whether their modes of presentation are explicit or implicit;  if explicit, then how they function in the novelistic structure. These aspects will be examined in the novels of the leading English novelists mentioned above, in each of the three periods distinguished in respect to the years in which Huxley’s “polyphonic” novels were published, i.e., before 1920, the 1920’s, and after 1930. The positions taken by the leading novelists in respect to the possible answers to the above criteria will thus determine theoretical categories which will then function as reference points for the system of genres in the given plane of oppositions; such reference points should then make it possible to locate other writers within this system.

Part 1 Before 1920 In the previous chapter the part entitled “Pre-Huxleyan Novel of Ideas” already contained a discussion of some novels which may be regarded as representative of the Menippean satire or intellectual fiction in the period from the last decades of the previous century to the 1920’s. However, the novel of ideas as practised by such writers as George Eliot, Samuel Butler, H. G. Wells, or Norman Douglas, did not become a major literary genre during that time. In fact, even in the case of H. G. Wells, a novelist who is never omitted from any survey of modern English fiction, his high reputation seems to be based on his “scientific romances” and social novels rather than on his “discussion novels” which are the most typical examples of intellectual fiction. In that period the novel of ideas seemed to develop in the shadow of the predominating and still powerful tradition of realism. 6

Apart from the critics mentioned in the text above [p.248], see also: Artur Hutnikiewicz, Od czystej formy do literatury faktu, Warszawa 1974; Peter Westland, Contemporary Literature. 1880-1950, London 1961; R. A. Scott-James, Fifty Years of English Literature. 1900-1950, London 1960. 7 R. Scholes, Structuralism ..., op.cit., p. 132.

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This realistic trend can be seen both as the main stream of the continuance of the fiction from the previous century and, from the point of view of this study, as this trend of the twentiethcentury fiction in which explicit ideas are usually rare and insignificant; that is to say, they still function more or less clearly on the highest semantic level of the novelistic structure as “the main ideas”, but they virtually disappear from the level of the fictional world. this disappearance is further motivated by a theory which, in that period, constituted the basis for this trend and its possible direction of development, namely, the theory of naturalism, as represented on the Continent mainly by French writers, Zola and Flaubert, as well as by the Russian novelist Turgenev. Such English writers as John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett are usually classified among realistic and naturalistic novelists, i.e., generally speaking, the novelists interested primarily in attempting a faithful and realistic description of their social milieu without imposing any significance on this reality. A. C. Ward writes that “With Bennett and Galsworthy the English novel reached its terminus in one direction” [The Nineteen-Twenties, p. 35], and in this case the direction led to a theoretical, at least, exclusion of explicit ideas from fiction. For instance, John Galsworthy, in his greatest work, presents with minute details a wide picture of commercial upper-middle classes and their problems, financial troubles, disappearance of affection, wealth, and moral code. But, as Fraser writes: Religion - except as a convention or a sentiment - philosophy, art, scholarship, even politics in any expert sense (a basically conservative attitude will be taken for granted), lie outside the boundaries of this world [...] The Forsyte Saga is a study, at first with harsh satirical undertone, but later more warm and tolerant, and finally distinctly sentimental, of this world. [p. 83]

In other words, ideas, in any significant form, do not appear to play any important role in Galsworthy’s greatest work. The writer justified this in allegorical terms in his story “The Novelist’s Allegory” in The Inn of Tranquility [1912]8 where he emphasized the necessity of striving for total objectivity and impartiality of presentation. This brings him close to other representatives of the naturalistic trend in English fiction, such as Arnold Bennett and George Moore. Bennett himself frequently wrote about the naturalistic doctrine in his Journal; for example: The novelist of contemporary manners needs to be saturated with a sense of the picturesque in modern things ... Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time; in its own right, authentic colours; without making comparisons. The novelist should cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes the present by no remembrance of the past”. 9

Bennett’s reliance on the commonplace, on exact and detailed descriptions of the externals of life, and, additionally, the emphasis on the attitude of “a baby or a lunatic”, who are objective, 8

In this story the character-novelist, Cethru [See-Through] goes all his life up and down the dark street bearing a lantern; the light of the lantern compels the ctizens to act against the evils unseen, but it also disturbs the complacent. When Cethru is brought to the judge accused of disturbing “the good citizens by showing them without provocation disagreeable sights”, he defends himself by saying that his lantern distorted nothing, that is “did but show that which was there, both fair and faul, no more, no less.” John Galsworthy, “The Novelist's Allegory” [in:] The Inn of Tranquility. Studies and Essays, London 1912, pp. 185-187. 9 Arnold Bennett, The Journals of Arnold Bennett, selected and edited by Frank Swinnerton, Penguin, London 1954, p. 28.

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detached and thoughtless, from the start excludes any possibility of ideas, explicit or even implicit, in his fiction. Bennett’s well-known interests in making approaches to fiction more intellectual10 concerned, it seems, the novelists and their theories of writing, not fiction itself, and, as such, they do not seem to invalidate the general argument about the axiomatic lack of ideas in naturalistic fiction. A writer of this kind will thus attempt an objective and exact description of whatever is or happens in his field of observation, much like a camera which passively records facts and occurrences, without imposing any significance on them. The theory is valid, however, only as long as it remains a theory - in practice, even the very position of the camera indicates the criteria of selection at work and hence an implied hierarchy of values. Nevertheless, the practical application of these assumptions by Bennett in his novels, raised many objections from his contemporary writers; for instance, Henry James complained on aesthetic grounds of Bennett’s excessive and irrelevant materials, while Virginia Woolf frankly accused Bennett of materialism. 11 Regardless of that, however, from the point of view of this study, the theoretical assumptions of naturalism offer an extremely contrasted example of fiction devoid of ideas and, as such, they clearly indicate the opposition between the novel of ideas and the naturalistic novel. Parallelly with the development of the realistic tradition towards naturalism, the first two decades of the twentieth century also witnessed developments of other trends in fiction. If in the naturalistic trend, as we have seen, the writers at least theoretically ruled out the presence of ideas in their fiction, the other trends moved in just the opposite direction, i.e., they did include semantically significant ideas in their works, although the manners of including them again differed in respect to the explicit and implicit modes of presentation. Frequently considered an heir of Henry James (e.g., Tindall, pp. 126-9), Joseph Conrad wrote about the first draft of his novel entitled The Rescue: “The idea has the bluish tenuity of dry wood smoke. It is lost in the words as the smoke is lost in the air”. 12 It is just this ability to disperse or diffuse an idea in fiction that has become one of the most typical features of this great writer. At the same time, however, Conrad is often regarded as a moralist rather than psychologist. The apparent paradox resulting from the two statements made above was resolved by Conrad with the help of two essential methods taken over from James, but which were developed and adapted for Conrad’s own purposes: these methods are the so-called “impressionistic” technique and symbolism. The first method consists in employing first-person narrators and in the resulting corrective juxtaposition of points of view, as well as secondary aspects derived from this, such as time shifts, appeal to the senses, ambiguity etc.13 On the other 10

E.g., the following statement by Bennett: “Herbert Spencer's First Principles, by filling me up with the sense of causation everywhere, has altered my whole view of life [...] you can see First Principles in nearly every line I write” - quoted after John Halloway, “The Literary Scene” [in:] The Pelican Guide..., op.cit., p. 59. 11 Henry James, Notes on Novelists with Some Other Notes, Dent, Bedford 1914, pp. 249-287, especially pp. 261-262; Virginia Woolf, “Modern Novels” in The Times Literary Supplement, April 10, 1919, No. 899, pp. 189-190; she writes: “If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should say that these three writers [i.e., Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy] are materialists and for that reason have disappointed us and left us with a feeling that the sooner English fiction turns it back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul. Of course, no single word reaches the centre of three separate targets. In the case of Mr Wells it falls notably wide of the mark [...] But Mr Bennett is perhaps the worst culprit of the three ...”, p. 189. See also Samuel Hynes, “The Whole Contention between Mr Bennett and Mrs Woolf”, Novel. A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1967, I:1, pp. 34-44. 12 Quoted after Ward, Twentieth Century Literature, op.cit., p. 49. 13 Cf. Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass., 1962, pp. 126-129.

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hand, as Fraser writes, “Conrad works like a poet in grand symbols and fluent supple shifts of perspective and tone” [p. 88]. Both methods allowed Conrad to avoid open moralizing - even though his first-person narrator often presents long commentaries of philosophical or moral character, the significance of these monologues is usually modified or blurred not only by the highly idiosyncratic manner of speaking of these narrators, by the very form of their utterances (e.g., Marlow’s use of metaphors), but also by a juxtaposition with other points of view of other narrators within the same book (e.g. compare multiple narrators in Lord Jim). This, in turn, indicates another feature of his novels, namely, the almost Jamesian precision of constructions of his books - Allen calls Nostromo “the most highly organized novel in English” [p. 312] - a conscious effort of the artist to make every element in his work function within the whole literary structure. In this way Conrad went very far away from the naturalistic or realistic types of fiction: instead of seeing art as a faithful and objective record of life, he saw it as an “intensification” of life and, moreover, he implied some strong though subjective meaning of his picture of life by means of “image, pattern and rhythm”. As a result, Conrad’s novels may be regarded as an almost pure example of fiction in which ideas will appear primarily in the implicit form. Generally speaking, Claudio Guillén seems right when he states that In the history of modern literature since the sixteenth century, the novel is an important subsystem, while the opposition ‘symbolism - naturalism’ has been one of its leading structures since the end of the nineteenth century.14

This opposition, however, should now be supplemented by the addition of the distinct trend which has been called intellectual fiction. As a result it seems that in the above survey of the main trends in British novel, three new currents have been distinguished, namely, naturalism, symbolism and intellectual fiction, apart from the continuation of realism. In respect to the criteria accepted in the introduction to this chapter, i.e., presence or absence of ideas, and, then, their explicit or implicit character, these four trends may be regarded as the main theoretical categories which demarcate the binary polarities of the literary system. It should be strongly emphasized that, when used for the derivation of such oppositions, these terms become strictly theoretical models as opposed to historical terms concerning real literary works; actual works do not only embody a large number of the features of the theoretical model, but they also contain elements of other categories - there are no naturalistic novels which can be entirely free of intellectual contents, nor can there be symbolic novels without realistic descriptions. Therefore, these models should be regarded as purely theoretical abstractions constructed on the basis of the predominating features of groups of novels classified in a given trend. In order to stress this abstract quality, the terms will be used in inverted commas henceforth. The two oppositions between the trends mentioned above, i.e., [1] the absence of ideas in “naturalism” - presence of ideas in “symbolism” and in “intellectual fiction”, and [2] implicit character of ideas in “symbolism” and explicit ideas in “intellectual fiction”, may be presented graphically in the form of a triangle, in which each angle denotes a different direction of departure from the realistic tradition, named here “realism”. When each of the extreme positions is represented by the novels of such writers as, for example, Bennett [“Naturalism”], Conrad [“symbolism”], Wells [“intellectual fiction”], and Galsworthy [“realism”], we obtain the following figure:

14

C. Guillén, op.cit., p. 327.

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However, we have so far left out from this survey three major English novelists of this period, namely, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis, for reasons which should become clear when we try to locate their works within the above system of literary genres. Nobody can deny the presence of explicit ideas in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916]; it seems sufficient to quote the sequence of three sermons, discussion scenes, and a fragment from the protagonist’s diary.15 At the same time, however, the same novel also contains numerous and significant symbols (e.g. the images of the road, bird, or water) and, on the other hand, it is written largely by means of a strictly realistic technique which Tindall calls “infant stream of consciousness, if not the stream itself” [p. 196]. In spite of the presence of the elements of all the three diverse trends, the novel achieves a perfect unity owing, perhaps, to the general traditional pattern of a Bildungsroman or even Künstlerroman;16 actually, the Portrait resembles a nineteenth-century fictional biography, Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean [1885]. At a closer analysis, however, the functionality of all these diverse elements within the conventional structure of the Bildungsroman helps to establish the hierarchy of significance of these three trends. The explicit ideas in this novel do not seem to have a predominating function: theology and the theories of Aristotle and Aquinas, as well as the political movement of Parnell, seem to function here analogically to “secondary characters” in any traditional Bildungsroman, e.g. in Dickens’s Great Expectations, i.e., they exert a temporary influence on the protagonist in order to disappear after he has made his decision about the problems imposed on him by these “influences”. The significance of explicit ideas seems thus totally subordinated to the person of the protagonist, to the process of his growth and mental development. The elements of the other two trends seem to play much more important roles. The artist’s credo expressed by Stephen Dedalus has many features in common with the aesthetic movement (e.g., the transfer of Imagism in poetry to fiction, in the famous theory of epiphany), which motivates the appearance of symbols and metaphors in the novel. These symbols, however, as well as epiphanies, appear in a peculiar place - in the protagonist’s mind, in his own stream of associations and emotions - which indicates the functions of the elements of the realistic technique 15

Cf. Chapters 3 and 5 and pp. 248-253, respectively, in James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, Harmondsworth 1973. 16 For a definition and description of Bildungsroman cf. Z. Żygulski, "Bildungsroman — Materiały do Słownika Rodzajów Literackich", Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, 1968, XI:1[20], pp. 155-157.

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of writing. In fact, the stream-of-consciousness technique, after Joyce has developed it in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, becomes the most naturalistic manner of describing the workings of consciousness and even sub-consciousness. In this way Joyce solved the vitally important problem of selection and significance, since anything may be important depending on the idiosyncratic point of view of the protagonist. At the same time, Joyce seems to have combined both trends, symbolism and naturalism, and then pushed them both to their potential extremes, actually to the boundaries of fiction itself. This statement also indicated the position which Joyce’s novels should take in our system of genres, just between the two angles marked “naturalism” and “symbolism”. For the sake of convenience, this position may be roughly denoted by the term “stream of consciousness” since it implies both the extremely naturalistic technique of writing and, at least by implication, the presence of symbolic and archetypal patterns in human mind. The novels of the second writer mentioned above, namely, D. H. Lawrence, also seem to exemplify a combination of two other trends, although they are different from those in Joyce’s fiction. The critics point out numerous virtues and faults of Lawrence’s novels which can conveniently serve as indications of their main characteristics for our summary. For instance, as Robson writes, didacticism was “his worst fault as an artist” [p. 82], while Daiches calls his novels “quasi-realistic social-cum-psychological fables” [The Present Age, p. 113]; other objections include melodrama, obscenity and pornography, moralizing, pathos, propaganda etc. As his virtues, in turn, the critics usually mention the symbolic and poetic presentation, his frankness, the fact that he managed to fuse in his novels social awareness and philosophical speculations. (Anyway, all these opinions are still being verified. 17) However, let us pay attention to the question most relevant for the considerations of this chapter: if Lawrence’s novels contain a certain “philosophy” and if they employ symbolic means of presentation, does he really belong to the symbolist trend in fiction, a trend in which ideas are presented implicitly and usually by means of an “impressionistic” technique of narration, typical of such symbolist writers as Conrad? The answer seems negative for two main reasons: one of them concerns the kind of symbols used by Lawrence, while the other - the presence and functions of explicit ideas in his works. Nobody can deny the presence of significant symbols in Lawrence’s novels but, when compared with those in Conrad’s works, they seem to belong to a different type. According to Watt’s terminology [cf., ibid., p. 223], we may say that if Forster makes use of the so-called “heterophoric” symbols, Lawrence develops the “homeophoric” type, i.e., symbols which result from an expansion and generalization of the meanings hidden in things, events or people presented in the story, as opposed to the heterophoric symbols which have their referends outside literature, in some theories of philosophers, theologians, scientists etc. 18 Yet, the statement that Lawrence used the homeophoric type of symbols again needs some qualifications. The same critic, Ian Watt, observes in Conrad’s novel lack of any open or polemical interest of the writer in philosophical problems, lack of a constant desire to show the world from a special point of view, or, generally speaking, lack of such features which are clearly present in every novel by Lawrence;19 it may be added that E. M. Forster, who thought it useless to attempt any explanation of Conrad’s philosophy because there was none, regarded Lawrence as “the only prophetic novelist writing to-

17

Cf. individual contributions to Critics on D. H. Lawrence, ed. by W. T. Andrews, London 1971. Ian Watt, “Fabuła i myśl w Smudze cienia Conrada” in: Conrad w oczach krytyki światowej, tr. by E. Krasnowolska, Warszawa 1974, pp. 640-641. 19 Ibid., p. 622. 18

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day”.20 In Lawrence’s novels there seems to be a double process going on between his symbols and explicit ideas, a process in which one helps to explain and deepen the meaning of the other, so that they both create a kind of balance of explicit and implicit modes of presentation; a disturbance of this balance produces effects which have been rightly described by Bayley in the following statement: [Lawrence] cannot leave the ideas alone, and their tyranny increases the mental effect, so that the ‘phallic consciousness’ seems a hyper-intellectual, hyper-aesthetic affair, making Lady Chatterley one of the most inflexibly highbrow novels ever written. 21

This opinion seems right in that it accurately describes a situation when symbols are explained to such an extent that they entirely lose their symbolic qualities and become a special type of explicit ideas instead. Both methods, implicit and explicit, aim at a presentation, analysis, and solution of one central problem, through a half-intellectual and half-poetic quest of the protagonist. In answering the question asked at the beginning of this brief discussion of Lawrence’s fiction, which is also a question about his place in the literary system of genres derived in the preceding section, one may say that Lawrence does not quite belong to the “symbolist” movement (lack of “impressionistic” technique and “semi-symbols”), nor does he represent “intellectual fiction” either (modification of explicit ideas by symbols); for these reasons his fiction should be placed somewhere between the two trends. A combination of these two trends usually yields the type of fiction called “allegory”, a term which seems inapplicable to Lawrence's novels where “symbolism” and “intellectual fiction” are combined in a different way. In the diagram, however, the terms denote extreme positions of the abstract models of trends and, therefore, Lawrence’s fiction should be placed between the marks of “realism” and “allegory” in one plane, and between “symbolism” and “intellectual fiction” in the other. Finally, the third novelist mentioned above is a friend of Joyce and Ezra Pound, a member of the avant-garde movement in literature and plastic arts, Wyndham Lewis. His first novel, Tarr [1918], appeared at the end of the period discussed here, but already this work offers sufficient evidence revealing later developments of Lewis's craftsmanship. Like the fiction of both novelists mentioned above, Lewis's novel may again be regarded as a combination of two other trends. As a representative of the so-called “anti-humanistic” trend [Robson, p. 138], Lewis himself wrote that the external approach to things (relying on the evidence of the eye rather than of the more emotional organs of sense) can make of the ‘grotesque’ a healthy and attractive companion ... Dogmatically, then, I am for the Great Without, for the method of external approach.22

In agreement with that declaration, Lewis’s novels are full of very detailed, almost naturalistic descriptions and images, so much so that Ford Madox Ford once said that Lewis is “so great a realist he makes you shiver”.23 At the same time, however, these descriptions are only halfnaturalistic, for there is always an element of a conscious and purposeful distortion, so that anything described, both objects and characters, turns into a mechanical thing, “a monstrous 20

E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, Harmondsworth 1971, p. 146. Cf. J. Bayley, The Characters of Love. A Study in the Literature of Personality, London 1960, p. 25; see also Francis Fergusson, “D. H. Lawrence's Sensibility” [in:] Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction. 1920-1951, ed. by J. W. Aldridge, New York 1952, pp. 328-339. 22 Quoted after Allen, Tradition ..., op.cit., p. 53. 23 Quoted after Robson, op.cit., p. 138. 21

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creaking mechanism”. These grotesque results seem to be produced primarily by the ironic comments of the narrator. The comments, however, abound in explicit ideas, various theories, moral considerations, and, when one adds to them the long discussions of characters, one finds out the reasons for Allen's opinion about Lewis's novels: Lewis's are novels of ideas rather than of characters; his characters are largely embodiments of points of view, way of life; they are intellectually conceived, intellectually controlled. [Tradition and Dream, p. 56]

According to these two prevailing trends in Lewis's novel, and, it may be added, his subsequent works develop these two trends to a much greater extent, 24 the fiction of this writer seems to fit the place just between the angles marked “naturalism” and “intellectual fiction”; for the sake of convenience, this final point in the system of genres may be called “grotesque”, using the term that Lewis himself indicated in the above quotation. Summing up the above survey of the main trends of English novel as represented by the works commonly regarded as greatest in the first two decades of the twentieth century seems to form the final system of novelistic genres which, after the addition of the writers discussed above, may be graphically presented in the following diagram:

It seems that the diagram faithfully reflects the theoretical relationships between individual trends of fiction in respect to the treatment, mode of occurrence, and functions of ideas in the literature of this period. This can clearly be seen when one examines each side of the figure of the triangle: the upper side, denoted by “naturalism” and “symbolism” shows the opposition between the fiction roughly devoid of ideas in any form, as represented by the naturalistic novels, and the fiction in which ideas do occur, although mostly in an implicit form, which is typical of the symbolist movement; the borderline situation, marked by “stream of consciousness”, shows the type of fiction in which ideas do occur but they are either submerged in the total flux of consciousness and subconsciousness, in the naturalistic technique of writing, or they are implied by references to mythology, archetypes, myths etc., typical of the symbolist novel; the lower side of the triangle, marked by “naturalism” and “intellectual fiction”, represents the opposition between the naturalistic fiction, axiomatically devoid of ideas, and the novels which contain 24

Cf. Hugh Kenner's “Afterword” to Lewis's The Human Age, Calder, London 1966, pp. 231-240.

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multiple ideas presented explicitly and which predominate in the whole novelistic structure; the borderline case, marked by “grotesque”, denotes the type of novel in which explicit ideas are imposed on the fictional world presented by naturalistic techniques of writing; the element of distortion, typical of grotesque fiction, seems to be caused by the semantic predominance of explicit ideas; finally, the vertical side, marked by “symbolism” and “intellectual fiction” represents a spectrum of possibilities of introducing ideas into fiction, from extremely explicit presentation, as in the novel of ideas, to extremely implicit expression, as in the symbolist novel; the intermediate stage, represented here by “allegory”, denotes the kind of fiction in which ideas are half-implicit, since they may be decoded by reference to philosophy or theology, or, in other words, to the “ideational” filters through which the fictional world has been presented. It should again be added that the novels of the writers discussed above are, naturally, only approximations in respect to the theoretical models used for the construction of the above system of genres; in other words, not all the novels of these writers can be classified in this way and not all the categories are represented by these novelists. This abstract scheme, however, seems helpful in an examination of the positions of subsequent writers and the relationships between their works and the general trends in modern novel. Part 2 The 1920's

Much has already been written about the third decade of the twentieth century, a period of crucial importance in social, political, as well as literary history of the world. “The gay 20’s”, “Era of Wonderful Nonsense”, the time of the “Lost Generation”, the “Jazz Age”, the “fervent 20's”25 - all these names of the period indicate the prevailing atmosphere and paradoxical features of life in that epoch. Clearly marked off from other decades by such significant events as the end of World War I, followed by Versailles, the Irish troubles, the General Strike, and finally the Great Depression, the period is generally characterized by such features as iconoclasm and despairing revolt against traditional values and ideals, a deepening gulf between generations, speedy social changes (mainly in the situation of women and the working classes), distrust in science, unregenerate bohemianism, sexual freedom and a breakdown of stable ethics, and, finally, the prevailing intellectual and moral chaos which often led to an escape into the pleasures of private life, to cheap hedonism and cynicism mixed with sentimentality, and the feeling of futility and waste. And yet, in spite of the accusations of escapism and evasion of responsibility, of naiveté and grotesqueness, the period also had some positive features; as Hoffman concludes his valuable study, the epoch can be characterized by a free, casual intimacy of intellectual and aesthetic exchange. There was generally a willingness to allow for 'intellectual waste'; waste or a margin of error was not then so disastrous to contemplate. Further, social balances were more helpfully maintained by a shrew sense of ridiculous and harmful extremes of idiocy. A remarkable, graceful, and useful flexibility in matters of human judgement was an immense advantage. All of these qualities contributed to the successful career of 1920’s intellectual life, in its sustaining a 'poetic', critical, ironic, and complex vision of the human condition. 26 25 26

F. J. Hoffman, The 20's, New York 1962, p. 418. Ibid., p. 449.

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As R. P. Blackmur stated, the literature of this period was marked by “an explosion of talent” and this opinion may easily be confirmed when one remembers that the epoch saw either the creation or publication of such world masterpieces of literature as: in France – Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu [since 1913, but the last five volumes appeared in the 1920’s, while the English translation by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff appeared in 1922-1930], Gide’s Les Faux Monnayeurs [1925] and Malraux’s Les Conquérants [1928]; in Germany – Mann’s Der Zauberberg [1924] and Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf [1927]; in Austria - Kafka wrote all his novels, while Robert Musil began to publish his work of life, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften [1st vol. 1930]; in the United States – Faulkner’s The Sound and Fury [1929], Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby [1925], Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises [1926] and A Farewell to Arms [1929]; and in England – Joyce’s Ulysses [1922] and fragments of Finnegans Wake [1928], Wyndham Lewis’s The Childermas [1928] and The Apes of God [1930], and, finally, a number of novels by the three writers who clearly predominated in that period in English literary life, namely, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Aldous Huxley. This creative “abundance” admitted “all forms of rebellion, protest, satire and experiment”, as the critic writes.28 Speaking most generally, however, all these masterpieces still seem to fit the pattern of genres developed for the previous epoch, even though the techniques of writing underwent advanced changes and transformations. The variety of experiments carried out in the novels mentioned above, still seems to follow the main courses of departure from the realistic tradition, although at a lower level of the novelistic structures one may observe some modifications and “mutations” of the earlier patterns. These modifications may generally be described as consisting primarily of creating new forms out of the elements of the main trends of symbolism, naturalism, and intellectual fiction, much in the manner of the novelists discussed at the end of the previous section, i.e. Joyce, Lawrence, and Lewis. Thus, one may say that Hemingway will be close to “naturalism”, Proust and later Faulkner - to “stream of consciousness”, Kafka - to “allegory”, Gide, Mann and Hesse - to “intellectual fiction” etc. This phenomenon and similar character of changes is also evident in the novels of the three English writers who predominated in English literature of the 1920’s. Even from statistical point of view, these writers, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley, were unquestionably the most prolific novelists of the decade, although, significantly enough, some critics hesitate when applying the name “novelists” to them. This point is presented, among others, by Hugh Walpole, who writes that 27

Lawrence in his later years was interested in his philosophy and not in the novel at all; that Virginia Woolf does not consider that her works are novels in any accepted term; that she would, if she could, find some new word for her art; and that Aldous Huxley does not care whether he is a novelist or not.29

However, for the purpose of locating these writers within the whole system of novelistic genres, and as a kind of verification of Walpole’s statements, we need some more data about the modes of presentation employed by these novelists and the situation of ideas in their works. The general outlook of Virginia Woolf’s novels seems to confirm the critical opinion (e.g. Robson, p. 99) about her works which means that she should be placed between the marks 27

Quoted after ibid., p. 443. Ibid., p. 441. 29 Hugh Walpole, Tendencies of the Modern Novel, London 1934, pp. 15-16; see an almost exactly the same statement by g. S. Fraser, op.cit., p. 115. 28

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“stream of consciousness” and “symbolism” in our system of genres. Her own version of “stream of consciousness”, which made its appearance first in Jacob’s Room [1922], is much more ordered and intelligible than Joyce’s - it can be characterizsed by personal sensibility, lyrical abstractions and poetic images. On the other hand, there are virtually no direct violent clashes of character or dramatic events in the plot; even if they do occur, as for instance the death of Mrs. Ramsay, the heroine of To the Lighthouse [1927], they are described completely undramatically as a critic writes, “she kills her main personage in a single clause in the middle of a long sentence which is set off from the main clause by brackets”.30 The accusations of the critics against Virginia Woolf’s art of fiction, such as the fact that “she avoids not only deep feelings and thought and even commitment to a moral viewpoint”31 or that her characters are limited intellectually, seem to support the classification of her fiction between the novels of Joyce and Conrad, between “stream of consciousness” and “symbolism”, a classification which indicates the originality and unique features of her works. Therefore, the novels of Virginia Woolf radically differ from those of the other two writers that belong to the decade discussed in this section, namely, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. If her fiction has raised objections as to the lack of commitment and intellectual content, the novels of the other writers, in turn, are often accused of containing just too many ideas and of didacticism. On the basis of the analysis of Huxley’s novels carried out in the previous chapter and the characterization of Lawrence’s fiction presented above, one may now afford a brief comparison of the works of these two writers. Personal friendship between these two novelists has given rise to numerous speculations and studies in influence32 but according to the criteria accepted in this study we shall be limited to a comparison of strictly formal aspects of their works. The similarities are quite numerous: both novelists introduce numerous explicit ideas which emerge mainly from the fictional world; their occurrence in discussion scenes which are again very frequent in both writers is often provoked by some elements of the setting; the division into chapters seems often subordinated to ideas - there are chapters totally devoted to discussion scenes in both writers; finally, both novelists try to dispense, to some extent, with the traditional device of the plot. (Additionally, it should be mentioned that both writers often modelled some of their characters on living people, hence, the slight quality of the roman a clef in their novels, a feature which, according to Meckier, who also provides sufficient evidence, may be regarded as typical of the whole period.33) 30

E. K. Brown, “The Revival of Mr Forster”, [in:] Forms of Modern Fiction, Bloomington 1969, p. 172; see also Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse, London 1963, p. 200. 31 Cf. Critics on Virginia Woolf, ed. by J. E. M. Latham, London 1970, p. VII. 32 A comparison between the novels of Lawrence and Huxley is a complex undertaking for several reasons. First of all, the status of each writer is uneven in the critical opinion, so that Lawrence, commonly regarded as a much greater writer, is usually seen as a “teacher”, while Huxley - as “Lawrence’s disciple” (Tindall, op.cit., p. 172). Secondly, the personal friendship between the novelists, though never quite intimate, tempts the critics to search for some possible psychological influence and, naturally, it is always Lawrence who influenced Huxley. Thirdly, both writers included “portraits” of each other in their novels (Huxley's “portrait” is seen in Hammond in Lady Chatterley's Lover). As a result, such attempts at comparison usually lack objectivity and abound in psychological speculations, accusations of personal animosities and jealousy etc. The best analysis of this problem, although not on the plane of formal aspects of the novels, may be found in Jerome Meckier, Aldous Huxley. Satire and Structure, London 1969, Chap. IV “Huxley’s Lawrencian Interlude: The ‘Latin’ Compromise that Failed”; and in Pierre Vitoux, “Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence: An Attempt at Intellectual Sympathy”, The Modern Language Review, July 1974, 69:3. 33 J. Meckier, op.cit., pp. 119-122.

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The differences, however, seem equally numerous and perhaps even more significant than similarities. In respect to treatment and functions of explicit ideas, the main difference seems to lie in the generally homophonic character of Lawrence’s ideology as opposed to the polyphonic philosophy of Huxley, at least in the latter’s early novels from the 1920’s. When Lawrence presents explicit ideas they usually center around one main problem with a more or less acceptable solution arrived at by the “positive” character who is deeply engaged in his intellectual analysis and who is usually successful in every discussion (even if he does not know the answers to all the questions, the validity of his attitude is usually more than implied by the narrator). Huxley’s early fiction, to the contrary, deals with numerous ideas concerning a wide variety of problems from many domains of life, problems whose possible solutions are usually rendered unacceptable, with the “positive” speaker ridiculed, and with an evident ironic detachment of the narrator. This may further be seen in the various techniques employed for the treatment of explicit ideas in their fiction, and in the relationships between explicit ideas and individual elements of the structure of their works. If in Lawrence explicit ideas are usually connected with symbols, in Huxley they are juxtaposed with one another; hence, a resulting greater importance of the setting in Lawrence (as a source of symbols), and the narrative technique in Huxley (counterpoint and interior duplication); consequently, the method of setting up explicit ideas with symbols in Lawrence seems to aim at deepening and varying the meanings of both, while in Huxley the method of juxtaposition of more numerous explicit ideas presented by multiple narrative techniques seems to aim at arriving at some higher meaning, by implication and by satire. Another important difference may be seen in the relationship between explicit ideas and the action of their novels: in Lawrence the discussion scenes seem to stop the action, since they may explain the significance of particular events and motivate the behaviour of individual characters (as a result of attitudes revealed during the discussion); in Huxley, various clashes of ideas (not only in discussion scenes) constitute the whole action, whose explanation and significance may be found on a much higher level of the novelistic structure than a mere discussion scene. Accordingly, these differences determine the positions of both novelists in the general system of genres: if Lawrence has been located between “realism” and “allegory”, Huxley would be much closer to “intellectual fiction” and “grotesque”. (The latter is also supported by the numerous similarities between Huxley’s early works and those of Wyndham Lewis.) This longish comparison between the novels of Lawrence and Huxley seems to be justified by the fact that Huxley’s early fiction has been in the centre of our interest throughout this study; the reasons for this concentration on his early fiction seem now clearer: like the works of most of the novelists discussed here, Huxley’s form of the polyphonic novel of ideas, as a whole, seems unique; he developed the traditional homophonic novel of ideas to the extreme and, as other extreme forms of, for instance, naturalism or stream of consciousness, this form has virtually no imitators, as will be seen in the next section of this survey. Meanwhile, in order to see his position within the literary system of genres of this epoch more precisely and in greater detail a few words should be said about the relationships between his fiction and the whole literary epoch. Generally speaking, Huxley shares with other writers of this period several themes and techniques of writing. First of all, his interest in ideas seems typical not only of the writers enumerated above as representatives of intellectual fiction, such as Wells or Douglas, but, in different forms, also of the works of D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis; moreover, this tendency towards intellectualization of fiction is even better seen in Continental writers, such as André Gide in France or Thomas Mann in Germany, in whose works, e.g. Les Faux Mannayeurs [1925] and Der

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Zauberberg [1924], numerous explicit ideas are treated in much the same way as in Huxley’s novels.34 On the other hand, Huxley’s interest in, and use of, music in his works also seems typical of a number of other writers. Since Walter Pater, and, later on, Bergson, many novelists tried to make use of this art in their works; suffice it to mention here Proust’s treatment of music in his gigantic masterpiece, Conrad’s high opinion about this art, Virginia Woolf’s discussion of music in Jacob’s Room, Forster’s famous analogy between music and the novel, Gide’s attempts to achieve “the symphonic effect” in his books, and finally Mann’s treatment of music in Der Zauberberg and Doktor Faustus35. It seems that music is capable of serving a number of purposes in fiction; it can provide, for instance, symbolic descriptions, it can serve as a pretext for an intellectual dispute and it can offer models for analogical constructions or techniques of writing. As such, music cannot be limited to any single trend in fiction since it may serve the purpose of all literary currents. Finally, in his writings one may encounter Huxley's perceptive criticism of some leading writers, e.g. of Conrad, Joyce, Woolf and Proust,36 but at the same time, one observes in his own fiction instances of Conradian or Jamesian narrative techniques, Proustian forms of autobiography and use of extended metaphors etc. It seems, therefore, that this type of “influence” may be observed first of all on the plane of the technique of writing, although these “borrowings” seem only to serve the purpose of varying narrative methods and providing new means of expression for a material of a different type than that of the original; in other words, these influences are always transformed in the novel of ideas since, first, they are applied on a fairly low structural level, that of technique of writing, secondly, they are used for the purpose of a new way of

34

Cf. on Gide’s treatment of ideas, E. W. Knight, Literature Considered as Philosophy. The French Example, New York 1962, pp. 134-135; a comparison between the novels of Gide and Huxley may be found in Meckier, op.cit., pp. 137-141, and in G. Woodcock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour. A Study of Aldous Huxley, London 1972, pp. 154-155. On Mann’s treatment of ideas see: A. Werner, “Wokół funkcji społecznych powieści dwudziestowiecznej (Na przykładzie Doktora Faustusa)” [in:] Społeczne funkcje tekstów literackich i paraliterackich, Wrocław 1974, pp. 211-246; A. Starzycki, “Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: A Contribution to the Studies of Musical Facts in Literature”, Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, 1964, VII:1[12]; R. P. Blackmur, Eleven Essays in the European Novel, New York 1964, Part I, Chap. 4 “The Lord of Small Counterpositions: Mann’s The Magic Mountain” and Chap. 5 “Parody and Critique: Mann's Doctor Faustus”. 35 Walter Pater presented his high opinion about music in The Renaissance, London 1873; Bergson’s statements are discussed by G. H. Bantock in “The Social and Intellectual Background”, The Pelican Guide ..., op.cit., p. 46. On Proust’s treatment of music see: M. Butor, “Septet Venteuila” [in:] Proust w oczach krytyki światowej, Warszawa 1970, pp. 365-379; also A. Sonnenfeld, “Tristan for Pianoforte: Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust”, The Southern Review, October 1969, V:4, pp. 1004-1018. Conrad’s opinion on music is stated in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus; Forster’s analogy may be found in his Aspects of the Novel, op.cit., pp. 165-166. Flaubert’s and Gide’s statements are taken from Novelists on the Novel, ed. by M. Allott, Routledge, London 1959, p. 240. 36 Huxley thought that Conrad could not penetrate his characters and that he did not understand them, while Virginia Woolf's characters could not break out of themselves; as Meckier writes: “Huxley thus feels that Conrad knows as little about other people as the typical Huxley character does and that Mrs. Woolf’s novels celebrate individuals who are as content with their own impressions as the typical Huxley eccentric. Far from being an attempt simply to seem as modern as some of his contemporaries, Huxley’s experimental method is something of a satire on theirs. His structural technique and intent stress the futility and disaster of resting content with one’s own point of view, for the multiplication of viewpoints satirizes those who equate their subjective opinion with objective reality”, op.cit., p. 60.

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presenting a new material, that of explicit ideas, and, thirdly, they are finally subordinated to the particular aims of “intellectual fiction”. For all these reasons, Huxley seems to fit well the literary epoch discussed here, i.e., the 1920's; although he shared several themes and techniques of writing, he was also able to create a unique form of his own in his polyphonic novel of ideas. Part 3 Since 1930

The survey of the fiction published after the third decade of the twentieth century will be even briefer for several reasons. First of all, if in the case of the leading novelists of the first three decades of our century it was possible to see the general outline of the whole system of genres gradually developing and taking shape as has been described above, this convenient situation no longer exists when we pass on to the subsequent decades - the temporal perspective gradually comes to nil, most of the leading writers, as well as potentially leading novelists, are still living and writing fiction, so that as a result, no followers can be seen as yet. Secondly, the general features of the fiction written in the subsequent decades, as summarized by the critics, are not very promising and they do not offer much diversity; there was a gradual departure from any radical experiments in practice and theory of the novel; the influence of the earlier writers was fragmentary, it can be seen in individual devices, in construction, but never in the whole; a much greater perfection of the craft of fiction, or a consolidation of the techniques of writing, was accompanied by a simultaneous lack of interest in the theory of fiction, a reliance on new contents rather than new form; finally, as Bergonzi puts it, there was “no sense of development or advance in the period 1930-1970 in comparison to 1890-1930” since the novel “abandoned freedom to genre” by which he means that “experience is mediated through the existing literary patterns and types” [p. 192]. Thirdly, for practical reasons, we have concentrated on the first three decades, since at that period the system of genres seems to have been generated, while the later decades add little to the pattern of genres already existing. We have already mentioned a gradual disappearance of the naturalistic trend (which, however, has never been very strong in England) and the “short life” of the “stream of consciousness” technique which, as Daiches writes, “was born and it declined within a decade”, i.e. the 1920’s [The Present Age, p. 2]. Besides that, however, it still seems possible to discern two other shifts in the whole system: a rejection of extreme experimental forms, which led to more traditional kinds of fiction, rooted in the conventions of the nineteenth century although enriched by single devices taken over from its immediate “experimental” predecessors; and, on the other hand, a distinctive movement towards combinations of “realism” with some forms of “intellectual fiction” and “allegory”, which also means a continued interest in ideas expressed both implicitly and explicitly. The first tendency may be represented by the “documentary fiction” of Ch. Isherwood, anti-modern and anti-experimental early novels of Kingsley Amis, dogmatically anti-ideological works of C. P. Snow, and the general traditionalism of such writers as E. Bowen or L. P. Hartley. The second movement is both much more interesting for us, because of its close connection with ideas, and because it is much more diversified; moreover, it is just in this second trend that some new developments may be observed.

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A continuance of some of Huxley's techniques of writing, though not of his material of explicit ideas, may be observed in the early works of three comic novelists, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and Angus Wilson. major similarities to Huxley may be found in Waugh’s patterns of characters, plots, and setting,37 and in his satirical techniques which have been exhaustively examined by Greenblatt;38 Powell’s early works also reveal similar general atmosphere, elements of grotesque and satire, the same settings and sets of characters - as Bergonzi writes: In this novel [Afternoon Men, 1931] Powell first established the fictional territory that he continues to occupy nearly forty years later: it is a world where members of aristocracy, often slightly eccentric or seedy and never of the first brilliance, associate with writers, artists or musicians, and other, less clearly talented, inhabitants of bohemia [...] the London circles, partly fashionable, partly artistic, that had been more cheerfully described and exposed in the early works of Aldous Huxley. [pp. 118-119]

Finally, Angus Wilson’s novels, mainly Anglo-Saxon Attitudes [1956] or The Old Men at the Zoo [1958], frequently contain significant discussion scenes as well as examples of the technique of “counterpoint” and “shots”. These similarities, however, concern mainly the methods of writing which are employed for purposes different from those of the novel of ideas; all the three writers attempted a largely realistic, though comic, portrayal of their contemporary life, or of the life of the past few decades. As a result, their position in the diagram will be much closer to the mark “realism” than to that of “intellectual fiction”; moreover, their later works, such as Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited [1945] or The Sword of Honour [1952-1961], Powell’s sequence A Dance to the Music of Time [19511975], and Angus Wilson’s The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot [1958] or Late Call [1964], move even closer to the realistic tradition. Bergonzi’s observation about Wilson’s novel – “it is, above all, a novel of manners, and not at all of ideas, and ideas are what No Laughing Matter conspicuously lacks” [p. 161] - can be generally made about most works of these writers. A writer who is very close to the novel of ideas, although these ideas are of one kind mostly, is George Orwell [Eric Blair], whose novels, Animal Farm [1945] and 1984 [1949], again contain a large body of structurally predominating explicit ideas enriched by elements of fantasy, allegory, and satire. In comparison with Huxley’s novels, however, Orwell’s fiction seems to lack the rich variety of ideas and a detachment, so typical of Huxley. One may, in fact, say that Orwell turned Huxley’s novel of ideas into a form of political fight for some ideals and against the evils observed in contemporary life, so that the abstract quality of Huxley’s fiction is generally lost in Orwell’s homophonic Utopias.39 It should perhaps be added that the term novel of ideas differs from the so-called Science Fiction, fantasy or Utopia, in that it does not take into account the type of the fictional world presented or the relationship between the presented world and empirical reality. From the point of view of explicit ideas, the distinctive feature of this genre, a number of novels representing any of the types of fiction mentioned above may also belong to the category of the novel of ideas, provided, however, that, like Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984, the ideas are 37

Cf. G. Martin, “Novelists of Three Decades: Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, C. P. Snow” in: The Pelican Guide..., op.cit., p. 400. 38 S. J. Greenblatt, Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell and Huxley, New Haven and London 1965, pp. 105-117. 39 For a comparison between the novels of Orwell, Huxley and Zamyatin, see Erich Fromm's “Afterword” to Orwell's 1984, New York 1961, pp. 257-267.

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expressed explicitly in discussion scenes, monologues and essayistic fragments. The subsequent decades also provided interesting examples of this kind of novels of ideas; for example, Kingsley Amis write a novel entitled The Anti-Death League [1966] which, as Bergonzi writes, is a novel of ideas, its theme is the inevitability of death. The ideas dominate the action, and tend to lead us away from the novel as ‘felt life’ towards the moral fable, or even the Platonic dialogue ... [p. 172]

Similarly, in the same category one may also include another novel by Kingsley Amis, The Green Man [1969], several books by Anthony Burgess, e.g. A Clockwork Orange [1962] or The Wanting Seed [1962], or Julian Mitchell’s The Undiscovered Country (at least Part II, entitled “The New Satyricon”, 1968). One should also mention another trend within the category of “intellectual fiction”, a trend which has been called “the essayistic novel” and which developed simultaneously with the writers discussed above since the 1920’s. The presence of essayistic elements in the twentieth-century fiction has already been mentioned several times in this survey and it may be observed in the novels of Wells, Huxley, Lawrence, Mann, or Gide, but perhaps the best example of this kind of fiction may be found in Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, an unfinished gigantic work whose first two parts appeared in 1930 and 1933, while the reconstructed whole was published posthumously only in 1952. Musil went much further than any of the aforementioned novelists in making his work discursive and essay-like, and the predominance of most numerous explicit ideas is so overwhelming mainly because essayism lies at the very basis of the whole conception of this work.40 The fact that the “essayistic novel” has become one of the most modern genres which flourished and developed in the decades following the year 1930, can easily be proved by making references to the works of such writers as Hermann Hesse (especially his Glassperlenspiel), Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, or a group of Italian novelists with Alberto Moravia. For all these writers, as Bellow states, “the human intellect is one of the great forces of the universe. It can’t safely remain unused.”41 Although already Musil called our epoch the “siécle de l’essayisme”42 and Thomas Mann supported this statement,43 it was only Moravia who has actually created the term “essayistic novel” and introduced it to our critical terminology. It is significant, however, that Moravia used the two terms, “novel of ideas” and “essayistic novel” interchangeably (romanzo saggistico o ideologico),44 thus implying lack of any fundamental differences between these two types of novel. This brief survey will be finished with a few remarks about the novelists of the last two decades and with a presentation of an interesting theory of Robert Scholes described in his stimulating, though controversial, study entitled The Fabulators. Some remarks of this perceptive critic directly concern the problems of ideas in the modern novel and, as such, they are directly relevant for the present study.

40

Cf. R. Musil, Człowiek bez właściwości, tr. by K. Radziwiłł, K. Truchanowski, J. Zeltzer, Warszawa 1971, vol. I, Chap. 62: „Cały świat, a Ulrich w szczególności, hołduje utopii eseizmu”. 41 Saul Bellow, Herzog, New York 1965, p. 279. 42 Cf. Józef Heistein, “Le roman d’idée et le roman-essai”, Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich 1968, XI:1[20], p. 32; cf. also Alberto Moravia, Man as an End. A Defence of Humanism. Literary, Social, and Political Essays, tr. by B. Wall, London 1965, p. 167. 43 E. Naganowski, “Drogi życia i twórczości Roberta Musila”, an afterword to Musil’s Człowiek bez właściwości, op. cit., vol. IV, p. 542. 44 Quoted after Heistein, op.cit., p. 28.

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Almost echoing an earlier prediction of Lionel Trilling, Scholes presents his theory of “fabulation”: Fabulation, then, means a return to a more verbal kind of fiction. It also means a return to a more fictional kind. By this I mean less realistic and more artistic kind of narrative: more shapely, more evocative, more concerned with ideas and ideals, less concerned with things. 45

Naturally, this rejection of, or departure from, the realistic tradition is a process which we have already traced since the final decades of the previous century. Scholes’s statements, however, concern the period following the 1930’s and 1940’s, i.e. he deals with the last two decades. In that period he distinguished three main trends in “fabulation” (by which he also means “myth” combined with “philosophy”), and these trends are: (a) return to romance, represented mainly by Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or John Fowles’s The Magus; (b) violent satire or “black humour”, exemplified primarily by the works of American writers from the so-called “ComicApocalyptic School”; and (c) modern allegory, discussed on the example of the novels by Iris Murdoch and John Barth. Without going into details of this classification, it should be stated that in all these categories ideas in both explicit and implicit forms play important roles. Moreover, Scholes’s findings have recently been examined by a British critic, David Lodge, in his study The Novelist at a Crossroads,46 where, apart from accepting and providing new evidence for Scholes’s conception of “fabulation”, he describes two other trends which, along with the realistic tradition, seem to predominate in British fiction in the last decade. These two trends are “the non-fiction novel”, similar to the type also known under the name of “the literature of the fact”, and the “problemmatic novel”, i.e. “a novel which exploits more than one of these modes without fully committing itself to any, the novel-about-itself, the trick-novel, the game-novel ...”47 Both categories distinguished by Lodge again indicate other possibilities of including explicit ideas in the novel, in the form of documents quoted or as reflections on the craft of fiction, and, at the same time, they provide further support for the statement about the continuance of the interests of the modern British novelists in this important domain of intellectual life.

Summing up this brief and largely hypothetical survey of modern British fiction, let us indicate again the role of the whole category of “intellectual fiction” within the literary system of genres of this epoch and then the role of Huxley’s novels of ideas in the development of this category. Generally speaking, the trend makes its appearance quite early, in the last decades of the previous century, and, along with “symbolism” and “naturalism”, it constituted one of the directions of departures from the realistic tradition. At first it is represented by the fairly simple and homophonic novels of H. G. Wells and Samuel Butler, although some potential possibilities of this type of fiction have been exploited in the more intellectually sophisticated fables of G. K. Chesterton and in the major works of Norman Douglas and Wyndham Lewis. In spite of a much more spectacular development of “intellectual fiction” abroad (Gide, Mann), other trends, mainly 45

R. Scholes, The Fabulators, op.cit., pp. 11-12; a similar prediction had been made by Lionel Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, New York 1957, pp. 251-258. Scholes’s statements have been recently examined on the material of American novel by M. R. Olderman in his book Beyond the Waste Land. The American Novel in the Nineteen-Sixties, New Haven and London 1972. 46 D. Lodge, The Novelist at a Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism, London 1971. 47 Ibid., pp. 9-15, 22.

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“symbolism” and “naturalism”, seem to predominate in the whole system of genres of the English novel. It is only in the 1920’s that in the works of Huxley the novel of ideas reaches perhaps the highest stage in its development and becomes a major literary genre; the same, naturally, may be said about the whole category of “intellectual fiction”. Within the whole system of genres in modern British novel we have traced three general shifts:

These shifts, illustrated graphically above, may be described in the following way: [1] before the 1920’s, the genres were all located very close to the extreme positions marked by “naturalism”, “symbolism”, “intellectual fiction”, and the categories marked between these three trends, so that the overall movement seems to have been directed away from the centre of “realism” towards the angles; [2] in the 1920’s, after the rejection of “naturalism”, the genres seem to concentrate near intermediate positions between the position of “realism” and those of “symbolism”, “allegory”, and “intellectual fiction”; [3] finally, nowadays, we seem to witness a total concentration of the leading novelistic genres within the area marked by the four categories, “realism”, “allegory”, “intellectual fiction”, and “grotesque”. It should perhaps be added that the “intellectual fiction”, after the period of the 1930’s and 1940’s, seems to regain its high position from the 1920’s in the last two decades in a variety of “mutations”, such as allegory, the essayistic novel, “the problemmatic novel”, and others, as indicated in the studies of Scholes and Lodge. In view of the above statements, Huxley’s early novels, which most rightfully belong to the category of “intellectual fiction”, greatly contributed to this trend, mainly by making it a major and original literary genre. Huxley thoroughly modified the traditional form of the novel of ideas and turned it into a unique type of fiction ideally suited for his satire and, more significantly, for a serious examination of all the major current problems as well as universal questions. In fact, the novel of ideas as represented by Huxley’s best works is never merely a satirical genre, but also the so-called “quest-novel”.48 In his study in the modern novel, Métamorphoses du roman, the French critic, R.-M. Albéres, writes about the “classical status” of such writers as Huxley and 48

The term is taken from M. Butor, Powieść jako poszukiwanie, tr. by J. Guze, Warszawa 1971, the first essay, pp. 5-11.

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Gide in respect to the most recent developments in fiction; he emphasizes the similarity between Huxley’s idea of the multiplication of characters-novelists and the “nouveau roman”, and finally comments on Huxley’s conception of “modulation” in fiction writing Une fois de plus, un romancier de 1928 — bien passé de mode aujourd’hui — définit trés exactement ce que feront les romancier des années 1950 ou 1960. [p. 37]

At the same time, Huxley has come very close to the type of fiction called by Moravia “the essayistic novel”, although the fact that “the inner explorations of the author” - as Moravia describes this kind of fiction - in Huxley often assumed the forms of the grotesque, the absurd, or the “black humour”, which, in turn, brings him close to the main trends distinguished both by Scholes and by Lodge in the most recent fiction. Even if most of the present-day trends in British fiction may, in one way or another, be related to Huxley’s novels, none of them seems to imitate the whole form of the polyphonic novel of ideas, the form whose uniqueness seems to indicate Huxley’s greatest achievement as a novelist.

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CONCLUSIONS Throughout the course of the present study particular conclusions of theoretical and historical character have been drawn in each of the foregoing chapters which, consecutively, contained considerations of such problems as: the definition of the term “idea” in formal literary studies, forms of occurrence of explicit ideas in fiction and their functions within the novelistic structures examined, the definition of the novel of ideas along with the determination of the origin and development of this genre, and, finally, a discussion of its position in the system of novelistic genres constructed theoretically on the basis of the twentieth-century British fiction. On the basis of all these detailed and specific conclusions reached in the individual chapters it seems possible to make some more general statements about the novel of ideas as one of the genres of the whole broad category of literature as well as about the general relationship between fiction and philosophy or ideas as examined by the method derived in this study. The existence of the category, which has been called here “intellectual fiction”, seems to have been well evidenced in the foregoing analyses of such genres as the Platonic dialogue, Menippean satire, essay, symposium, debate, conte philosophique, and, of course, with a remarkable modification of form, the novel of ideas and the essayistic novel, i.e., genres practised in various national literatures and in many different literary periods. Obviously, the material examined in this study had to be quite drastically limited to the most representative instances of the more general historical trends in fiction, although, at the same time, constant attention has always been paid to the presentation of the selected examples against a wider background of particular epochs for two main reasons: on the one hand, this approach has made it possible to examine the relationships between the works chosen and other literary trends, while, on the other hand - to reduce the unavoidable arbitrariness of selection as far as possible. 1 The present study seems to prove that it is not precise to say that the category of “intellectual fiction” belongs to a class of definitely minor genres of literature. There seems to exist a particularly significant correlation between some special features of the epochs in which this category appears and its status in literary hierarchies. Generally speaking, “intellectual fiction” certainly functions as a minor and clearly secondary kind of literature in epochs of monistic patterns of belief and stable anti-intellectual ideologies and aesthetic conceptions, e.g. in such periods as the antiquity, the Middle Ages, Romanticism, or the Victorian Age. However, the same category does rise almost to the top of generic hierarchies in period of liberal tradition, intellectual restlessness, freedom of thought and expression, such as, for instance, the periods between the 1

Such arbirariness, among other things, seems to be a major shortcoming of a doctoral dissertation by J. R. Bilder, entitled The Minor Tradition in English Prose Fiction: The Novel of Ideas [University of Pennsylvania, 1964]; taking as a starting point F. R. Leavis’s classical study The Great Tradition, the author chooses random examples rejected from Leavis’s book, and he includes such questionable writers as Choderlos de Laclos, Aleman, or Meredith, as well as such genres as the “anti-novel” in the category of the novel of ideas; cf. Dissertation Abstracts, December 1964, XXV:6, p. 3565.

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epochs mentioned above, or Neoclassicism. The general history of this category seems thus divided into the following stages: [1] In antiquity, “intellectual fiction” was certainly a minor category, in comparison with poetry, drama, or even romance; it was only at the end of the epoch and the decline of the Roman Empire, that it gradually increases in importance and actually becomes one of the leading genres, especially in the writings of Lucian, Apuleius or Petronius; explicit ideas, as defined in this study, parallelly increase in functional importance and also proportional quantity. [2] Explicit ideas retain their importance in the Middle Ages, although they lose their typical syncretic character, as they are limited in range and functionally subordinated to the monistic theology of Christianity; in such genres as the didactic parable, exemplum, allegory, or fables with explicit morals, “intellectual fiction” virtually disappears since it is transformed into strictly homophonic propaganda writings and often included in nonfictional homilies and treatises, even if the form of the debate or argument is preserved. [3] The breakdown of the Middle Ages, which was brought about with a substantial contribution of “intellectual fiction” (medieval satires, Tasso, Rabelais, Montaigne), renewed people’s interest in philosophy and science (i.e. in ideas) which is clearly reflected in the flourishment of this literary category; as Beach writes: “It is worth having in mind, however, that the eighteenth century was particularly rich in philosophic novels - witness Goethe or Rousseau - as if, in its origins, the novel were not well differentiated from philosophy nor constituted a literary form in its own right”2; the fact that the liberalism and pluralism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were undoubtedly conducive to the development of “intellectual fiction” can also be seen in the achievements of Cervantes, Swift, Fielding, or Sterne, although, at the same time, there already appeared the trends which were to take over the leading position in the next literary periods. [4] The next stage in the history of “intellectual fiction”, Romanticism and the Victorian Era, seems to witness a general disappearance of this category, which seems to have been brought about by the flourishment of such trends as “realism”, “sentimentalism”, or “irrationalism”, or, generally speaking, a shift of interests away from reason and towards emotion; obvious exceptions from this characterization of the epoch may be found in the novels of T. L. Peacock, but even they contain poems and songs of clearly Romantic character. [5] At the end of the nineteenth century “intellectual fiction” again makes its appearance and from a homophonic didactic form it gradually moves towards polyphony and syncretism (compare George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda or Butler’s and Wells’s novels with those of Norman Douglas, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, and others); in this latest stage, “intellectual fiction” has become a much more perfected form, mainly by employing the contrapuntal technique of simultaneous juxtaposition, the first-person diary in an essay form, concentration on some aspects of novel-writing within the novel etc.

2

J. W. Beach, The Twentieth Century Novel: Studies in Technique, New York - London 1932, p. 55.

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On the basis of the above summary of the history of this category the flourishment of “intellectual fiction” in the first half of our century should then be followed either by a “homophonization” of this type of writing or by a reduction of its significance to a minor and secondary genre. The former would take place as a result of the “death” of liberalism, tribalization, “choral voice of humanity”, proclaimed in the writings of Steiner, McLuhan, Ortega y Gasset, Scholes and others, a phenomenon which, in these statements, is bound to bring about the “death” of the novel as an art form;3 on the other hand, the latter would take place if there appeared a powerful and uniform literary trend (as in the Romanticism), a trend opposed to rationalism and intellectuality, which would then replace “intellectual fiction” as a leading literary category; however, the discovery of such a radical tendency has not been made yet, and the critics usually point out the unusual diversity of modern fiction. The definition of the term “idea” offered in this study leads to another problem of literary research, namely, the question of the uses of language in literature and the functions and types of language in fiction. In spite of Lodge’s objections,4 the classical statement by Bateson, that words are the media of poetry while in prose this role is played by ideas, or that “in prose [...] the words tend to be submerged in the ideas or things they represent”,5 does seem to contain at least a partial truth, the other half of this truth being in Lodge’s argument that language in prose is something “more than the transparent container of Ideas”.6 Language in prose seem to have a double role in this respect: on the one hand, it conveys a specific “vision of experience [...] which is communicated to us through a special kind of language”,7 but, on the other hand, it also renders “explanations, definitions, and conclusions”,8 as well as objects or things, in much the same manner as the language of everyday speech or of scientific writings. A total literary analysis of prose fiction should thus take into account both “types” of language, called by Wheelwright “expressive and literal”,9 without the exclusion of one or the other, since it is primarily the relationship between all such functions of language in literature that creates the final and unified artistic whole in which they are equally important, just as in the statement of J. J. Rousseau, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”, which has been analysed in Part 1, Chapter 1 of this study; for these reasons it was exactly this particular relationship between these “types” of language in fiction that has been examined in the present study. The same problem is also seen on a higher structural level. When Kuhns writes that “Since philosophical modes of presentation are arguments, and poetic modes of presentation are performances, it is difficult for philosophy and poetry to inhabit the same consciousness”10, his opinion certainly does not hold true in the case of the novel, especially of the category of “intellectual fiction”, where it is just arguments that serve as a material for the construction of the whole novelistic structure; it should immediately be added that, when included in such a structure, 3

Cf. B. Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel, London 1970, pp. 13-15, 41; see also R. Scholes, “The Illiberal Imagination” , New Literary History, Spring 1973, IV:3, p. 534. 4 D. Lodge, Language of Fiction. Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel, London 1966, p. 15. 5 Quoted after ibid., p. 13. 6 Ibid., p. 15. 7 Ibid., p. 15. 8 Ibid., pp. 12-13. 9 P. Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain. A Study of the Language of Symbolism, Bloomington 1954, pp. 48-75. 10 R. Kuhns, Literature and Philosophy. Studies of Experience, London 1971, p. 104.

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these arguments are at once confronted by another type of “arguments”, expressed implicitly, so that, as a result, both types of “arguments” constantly interact and modify each other. A different solution has been offered by Cruickshank, when he writes about the exploration and illustration of philosophical theories in literature. 11 As can be seen in the present study, since the very origins of “intellectual fiction”, in such genres as the Menippean satire, early Platonic dialogues, in the original meaning and form of the “essay”, and finally in the novel of ideas, philosophical theories have always been subjected to a thorough examination and critical analysis, juxtaposed with other contrasted theories, abolished by satire etc. In other words, it was just “intellectual fiction” that was perhaps one of the first literary categories to explore the significance and consequences of particular philosophical theories for humanity in literary terms, instead of merely illustrating them. The whole argument about the relationship between literature and philosophy or ideas, may, perhaps, be adequately closed with a very conclusive statement by R. S. Crane: The peculiarly literary value of literary works, however, is a function not of their presuppositions or of their materials of ideas and images as such but of these as formed into fully realized and beautiful individual wholes. We can indeed say of such wholes, with Trilling, that they give us a kind of pleasure that is hard to distinguish psychologically from the pleasure of ‘cogency’ we experience in reading successfully a philosophical argument; in both cases our delight is dependent on our perception of certain things following, necessarily or probably, from certain things laid down. I shall not pursue this point, but it is essential to remark that the cogency achieved in an excellent literary work is not, as in philosophy, a matter of adequate proof but rather of the sustained efficiency of what is done in the component quality of the imagined human activity that is being represented. Whatever ideas or argument are good for this whether as parts of the activity itself, as signs of character or thought and emotion, or as choral commentary, or as congruous embellishment - are good ideas or arguments, regardless of what might be said of them as elements in a philosophical demonstration; and their meanings, as ‘literary ideas’, are bound up with that fact. A merely referential or logical or ‘philosophical’ consideration of them is never sufficient to tell us what they are, and it is likely, besides, to lead to irrelevant judgements of value. 12

It is exactly this “merely referential or logical or ‘philosophical’” consideration of such ideas that has been avoided, as it seems, in the present study, owing to the selection of one of the possible meanings of the term “idea” in literature, the formal definition of the term, and the examination of this form within the literary structures of the works examined, or, in other words, the analysis of the relationship between the two types of “arguments” in fiction. It should be emphasized again that the “explicit idea”, as defined in this study, is only one of a wide range of possible “literary ideas” - Crane enumerates five broad groups of ideas in literary works, 13 while in Part I, Chapter 1, of the present study, we have given a fairly exhaustive list of almost all such possibilities. This limitation, however, seems to have been necessitated primarily by the features of the genre under consideration and the need to establish its distinctive quality. Although in the present paper, the range of material has been limited to the English novel and few works of writers from the Continent, from France, Germany, Austria, and Russia, the same criterion of “explicit ideas” may be applied to Polish “intellectual fiction”, particularly from the first decades of the twentieth century. An authoritative opinion would, naturally, require an extensive study, but even the fragmentary and random evidence may indicate several examples of 11

J. Cruickshank, “Some Aspects of French Fiction” [in:] The Novelist as Philosopher. Studies in French Fiction. 1935-1960, London 1962, p. 11. 12 R. S. Crane, “Philosophy, Literature, and the History of Ideas” [in:] The Idea of Humanities and Other Essays, Critical and Historical, Chicago-London 1967, vol. 1, p. 187. 13 Ibid., pp. 185-186.

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Polish novels of ideas. These examples would primarily include the novels of such writers as Berent and Brzozowski, and, later on, S. I. Witkiewicz, B. Schulz or W. Gombrowicz. Both K. Wyka and L. Eustachiewicz regard these novelists as the most experimental writers in Polish fiction of this period and, at the same time, as representatives of the major trends in a broader European context.14 The similarities between the works of these novelists and the category of “intellectual fiction” are numerous and significant. Głowiński15 rightly emphasizes the reduction of plot, intellectual construction, elements of irony and grotesque, and, obviously, the constant presence and dominance of explicit ideas in the novels of Wacław Berent, but many other critics indicate the same features in the works of the other novelists mentioned above, 16 features which are also typical of Huxley’s novels of ideas. In view of the development of “intellectual fiction” in the Continent, it is even more surprising that the English novel comes to deal with ideas fairly late and, even to-day, many English novelists continue to write in a conventional realistic manner, not to mention the period 1930-1960 marked by a total rejection of all experiment in fiction and by conscious “programmatic” traditionalism. Various reasons have been offered for this phenomenon in English literature. For example, J. McCormick, writing about the turn of the century, stresses the lack of wars and almost two centuries of uninterrupted stability;17 B. Bergonzi indicates the decrease in political and economical importance of England in the last few decades leading to neurotic symptoms of withdrawal and disengagement, looking within themselves, or back to a more secure period in their [i.e. novelists’] own lives or the history of their culture, making occasional guesses about a grim and apocalyptic future.18

He also stresses the essential conservatism of the English as a typical feature of English character, which is reflected in the undisturbed ancient traditions and continued conventions, which, in 14

K. Wyka, “Literattura polska lat 1890-1939 w kontekście europejskim” [in:] O potrzebie historii literatury, Warszawa 1969; L. Eustachiewicz, Między współczesnością a historią, Warszawa 1973, p. 306; see also R.-M. Alberes, L'avanture intellectuelle du XX e siécle, Paris 1969, pp. 18, 6; S. Brzozowski, Współczesna powieść i krytyka literacka, Warszawa 1971. 15 M. Głowiński, introduction to Berent’s Ozimina, Wrocław 1974, pp. III-LXXVII. 16 Cf. J. Z. Maciejewski, W kłębowisku przeciwieństw. Obraz idei w prozie narracyjnej Stanisława Brzozowskiego, Warszawa-Poznań 1974, esp. p. 57; M. Głowiński, Gry powieściowe, Warszawa 1973, Chap. “Parodia konstruktywna [O Pornografii Gombrowicza]”; A. Micińska, introduction to S. I. Witkiewicz's 622 upadki Bunga, Warszawa 1974, pp. 5-46; J. Ficowski, Regiony wielkiej herezji. Szkice o życiu i twórczości Brunona Schulza, Kraków 1967, esp. p. 186; W. Panas, “Bruno Schulz - Noc wielkiego sezonu” [in:] Nowela, opowiadanie, gawęda, Warszawa 1974, pp. 191-205; see also Prozaicy dwudziestolecia międzywojennego, Warszawa 1974, especially the articles: J. Błoński, “Prawodawca sztuki i prorok zagłady - Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz”, pp. 751-769, and J. Jarzębski, “Między chaosem a formą - Witold Gombrowicz”, pp. 181-218. It seems relevant to quote the following opinion of Gombrowicz about this period: “Otóż czas Brzozowskiego, to okres triumfalny intelektu, gwałtownej jego ofensywy na wszystkich polach - zdawało się wtedy, iż głupota może być wypleniona upartym wysiłkiem rozumu. Sądzę, że ten napór intelektualny wzrósł w latach następnych i chyba osiągnął apogeum bezpośrednio po drugiej wojnie - gdy marksizm z jednej strony, egzystencjalism z drugiej, wylały się na Europę jak wrzątek z kipiącego garnka (nie mówiąc o innych zaborczych ideach). Pociągnęło to za sobą niesłychane rozszerzenie horyzontów ludzi, zajmujących się myśleniem. [...] dziś w moim mniemaniu, ten okres się kończy i już zarysowują się czasy Wielkiego Rozczarowania. Spostrzegliśmy, że wprawdzie dawna głupota zanika, ale na jej miejsce pojawia się nowa - którą właśnie intelekt rodzi, będąca jego subproduktem, głupota, niestety, intelektualna.” Dziennik. 1961-1966, Paryż 1966, pp. 50-51. 17 J. McCormick, Catastrophe and Imagination. An Interpretation of the Recent English and American Novel, London 1957, pp. 41, 77. 18 B. Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel, op.cit., pp. 57-58.

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literature, may be seen in the fact that English novelists and reading public “like the character too much”.19 Finally, David Lodge writes that There is a good deal of evidence that the English literary mind is peculiarly committed to realism, and resistant to non-realistic literary modes to an extent that might be described as prejudice. It is something of a commonplace of recent literary history, for instance, that the ‘modern’ experimental novel [...] was repudiated by two subsequent generations of English novelists. [...] The unexamined assumptions behind this critique, that allegory is necessarily a literary vice, because it makes the action of the book ‘unnatural’, undermining the essential criterion of ‘it could be like that’, without the satisfaction of which all ‘skill’ is vain - these essential realist assumptions are entirely typical of the post-war English literary temper.20

However, in the last decade, in the 1960's, the same critic, as well as some others, begin to observe the second period - after the first decades of this century - characterized by a movement away from realism. Still, taking into consideration all the directions indicated by Lodge or Scholes, one should also stress the fact of a much greater awareness of the novelists in this decade of ideas, of greater functionality of explicit ideas in their works, than in the previous literary period. Naturally, a critical appreciation of the opinions and hypotheses offered by the critics would require an extensive study and no such attempt has been made in this paper. This phenomenon, however, seems to indicate, among other things, the fact that, in spite of their conservatism, commitment to realism and love of character, the majority of English novelists have recently begun to deal with intellectual ideas. This, in turn, points out the contribution of the novel of ideas and, naturally, the whole category of “intellectual fiction”, to the development of the English novel. It also indicates the role played by Huxley and other writers discussed in this study. As Malcolm Bradbury writes about them - "their forms of writing, their habits and manners, have more to do with the modern forms than we have often understood”.21 The present paper may thus be regarded as a contribution to the process of better understanding of the roles played by these novelists.

19

B. Bergonzi’s statement in a symposium “Realism, Reality, and the Novel”, reported by Park Honan, Novel. A Forum on Fiction, Spring 1969, II:3, p. 209. 20 D. Lodge, The Novelist at a Crossroads, London 1971, pp. 7-8. 21 M. Bradbury, Possibilities. Essays on the State of the Novel, London 1973, p. 145.

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Fowles, John: The Collector, PAN Books, London 1968. Fowles, John: The Magus, A Dell Book, New York 1970. Fowles, John: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, A Dell Book, New York 1972. France, Anatole: Gospoda pod Królową Gęsią Nóżką [La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque] and Poglądy księdza Hieronima Coignarda [Les opinions de M. Jérome Coignard], tr. by J. Sten and F. Mirandela, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1975. Galsworthy, John: The Inn of Tranquility. Studies and Essays, Heinemann, London 1912. Gide, André: Lochy Watykanu [Les caves du Vatican], tr. by T. Boy-Żeleński, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1973. Gide, André: Fałszerze [Les faux-monnayeurs], tr. by H. and J. Iwaszkiewicz, Czytelnik, Warszawa 1958. Golding, William: Lord of the Flies, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1967. Golding, William: The Spire, Faber, London 1964. Gombrowicz, Witold: Ferdydurke, PIW, Warszawa 1956. Gombrowicz, Witold: Trans-Atlantyk. Ślub, Czytelnik, Warszawa 1957. Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Macmillan, London 1965. Hardy, Thomas: Jude the Obscure, Macmillan, London 1964. Hesse, Herman: The Glass Bead Game [Das Glasperlenspiel], tr. by E. and C. Winstons, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1973. Hesse, Herman: Steppenwolf, tr. by B. Creighton, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1973. Hesse, Herman: Narcissus and Goldmund, tr. by G. Dunlop, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1973. Huxley, Aldous: Limbo, Chatto and WIndus, London 1929. Huxley, Aldous: Crome Yellow, Bantam Books, New York 1959. Huxley, Aldous: Mortal Coils, Chatto and Windus, London 1958. Huxley, Aldous: On the Margin, Chatto and Windus, London 1948. Huxley, Aldous: Antic Hay, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1948. Huxley, Aldous: Little Mexican, Chatto and Windus, London 1959. Huxley, Aldous: Those Barren Leaves, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1967. Huxley, Aldous: Along the Road, Chatto and Windus, London 1925. Huxley, Aldous: Two or Three Graces, Tauchnitz, Leipzig 1932. Huxley, Aldous: Proper Studies, Chatto and Windus, London 1949. Huxley, Aldous: Point Counter Point, Chatto and Windus, London 1963. Huxley, Aldous: Do What You Will, Watts, London 1936. Huxley, Aldous: Brief Candles, Penguin, Hardmondsworth 1971. Huxley, Aldous: Music at Night, Chatto and Windus, London 1960. Huxley, Aldous: Texts and Pretexts, Chatto and Windus, London 1932. Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1971. Huxley, Aldous: What Are You Going To Do About It?, Chatto and Windus, London 1936. Huxley, Aldous: Eyeless in Gaza, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1959. Huxley, Aldous: Ends and Means, Harper, New York 1937. Huxley, Aldous: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1971. Huxley, Aldous: Time Must Have a Stop, Chatto and Windus, London 1953. Huxley, Aldous: Science, Liberty, and Peace, Fellowship Pub., New York 1946. Huxley, Aldous: The Perennial Philosophy, Chatto and Windus, London 1947. Huxley, Aldous: Ape and Essence, Chatto and Windus, London 1949.

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