Epistolary Literature (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great 18th Century fashion for epistolary literature. From its first appearance in the 17th Century with writers like Aphra Behn, epistolary fiction, fiction in the form of letters, reached its heyday in the 18th Century with works like Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. At over a million words, it's a contender for the longest English novel. It inspired impassioned followers such as Denis Diderot who described reading Richardson's novels like this: 

“In the space of a few hours I had been through a host of situations which the longest life can scarcely provide in its whole course. I had heard the genuine language of the passions; I had seen the secret springs of self-interest and self-love operating in a hundred different ways: I had become privy to a multitude of incidents and I felt I had gained in experience.” 

This sense of the reader gaining a privileged peek into the psychology of the protagonists was a key device of the epistolary form and essential to the development of the novel. Its emphasis on moral instruction also propelled the genre into literary respectability. These novels were a publishing sensation. Philosophers like Rousseau and Montesquieu took up the style, using it to convey their ideas on morality and society.So why was letter writing so important to 18th Century authors? How did this style aid the development of the novel? And why did epistolary literature fall out of favour?With John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London; Karen O’Brien, Professor in English at the University of Warwick; and Brean Hammond, Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham.

 

 

 

 

University of Nottingham.

Gray on Nabokov (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 From A History of American Literature, by Richard Gray:

(...) 

It is difficult to think of a European émigré writer further from all this than Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). In fact, the verbal shift that seems required, from immigrant to émigré, suggests some of the difference. Nabokov was born into a wealthy, prominent family in St. Petersburg, Russia and as a youth traveled extensively. His father, a liberal aristocratic jurist, opposed the tyranny of the czar then that of the bolshevviks. He took his family into exile, then was murdered in Berlin in 1922 by a reactionary White Russian who later became a Nazi official. Nabokov lived in Berlin and Paris between the two world wars. There, he produced a critically acclaimed series of poems, short stories, and novels in Russian. Then, in 1940, in flight from various forms of totalitarianism, he emigrated to the United States where he began teaching Russian literature. His frist novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, was published in 1941; it concerns a young Russian in Paris, the narrator, who discovers the true nature of his half-brother, and English novelist, while writing his biography. This was followed by Bend Sinister in 1947, about a politically uncommitted professor in a totalitarian state who tries to maintain personal integrity. Four years later, Nabokov published his first memoir, Conclusive Evidence, later retitled Speak, Memory and, under this title, revised and expanded in 1966. Four years after that, in turn, came the book that established his fortune, his reputation for some and his notoriety for others, Lolita, published first in France then, after censorship problems were resolved, in the United States in 1958. It tells of the passion of a middle-aged European émigré, who calls himself Humbert Humbert, for what he terms "nymphets" in general and the 12-year-old girl he calls Lolita in particular, and their wanderings across America. It was Nabokov's first novel set in his new home in the New World; and its success allowed him to devote himself full time to his writing. Three more novels appeared after the first publication of Lolita: among them, Pale Fire (1962), a postmodernist tour de force purporting to be a poem about an exiled Balkan king in a New England college town and the involved critical commentary on the poem by an academic who admits to being the king himself. Along with the two other novels, Pnin (1957) and Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), there are novellas, short stories, a play, critical studies and commentary, translations of his earlier Russian novels, lectures and correspondence, and a monumental translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964). All of the work reflects, in some way, Nabokov's aesthetic of subjective idealism. All of it plays variations on an observation made by the academic commentator in Pale Fire: "'reality' is neither the subject nor the object of true art," that commentator observes, "which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average 'reality' perceived by the communal eye." 

Which suggests the fundamental difference between Nabokov and even a writer like Singer, let alone Olsen or Ozick. "To be sure, there is an average reality, perceived by all of us," Nabokov admits in Strong Opinions (1973), a collection of his answers to questions about himself, art, and public issues. "But that is not true reality: it is only the reality of general ideas, conventional forms of humdrummery, current editorials." "Average reality," Nabokov insits, "begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture." Any book he makes, any art anyone makes that is worth reading is "a subjective and specific affair," Nabokov suggests. It is the creative act that effectively maintains reality just as—and the analogy is his—electricity binds the earth together. As a writer, a creator, he has "no purpose at all when composing the stuff except to compose it." "I work long, on a body of words," as Nabokov puts it, "until it grants me complete possession and pleasure." According to this subjective idealist creed, there can be no totalizaing, totalitarian reading of experience, no monolithic entity entitled "life." There is only the "manifold shimmer" of separate, specific lives, my life, your life, his life, or her life. As Nabokov has it, "life does not exist without a possessive epithet." Nor is there some kind of absolute truth or absolute morality attainable, a master narrative of history or ethics that the artists must discover and disclose. "Reality is an infinite succession of stops, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable," Nabokov argues. "You can never get near enough"; and so "whatever the mind grasps it does so with the assistance of creative fancy, that drop of water on a glass slide which gives distinction and relief to the observed organism." There is no place here for naturalism or didacticism. "I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction," Nabokov confesses. "Why do I write books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty." "Lolita has no moral in tow," he adds. "For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I bluntly call aesthetic bliss." That bliss is the triumph of art, for Nabokov. Its tragedy is suggested by an anecdote Nabokov tells about the original inspiration for Lolita. Which is a story about an ape, who, after months of coaxing, produced the first ever drawing by an animal. "This sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage."

Lolita is certainly Nabokov's finest book. Before it was published, he wrote of it to Edmund Wilson, "its art is pure and its fun is riotous." The purity of its art has several dimensions. Structurally, Nabokov uses traditional romance patterns only to deconstruct them. Humbert Humbert reveals how he desired Lolita, possessed her, fled with her across America after the death of her mother, Charlotte Haze, lost her to a man named Quilty, then killed her new lover. It is the elemental romance structure used here to startling, inverted effect, with elements of quest, attainment, journey, loss, pursuit, and revenge. The love plot is propelled forward in a straight line, in accordance with whose unrelateing extension Charlotte loves Humbert, who loves Lolita, who loves Quilty, who seems to love no one at all. And, as in the courtly love story, the desire of the narrator becomes a metaphor for other kinds of daring, transgression, and retribution. "Oh, My Lolita, I have only words to play with!" Humbert declares early on in the novel. And that discloses another kind of arfulness. The narrator is telling his story as he awaits trial for murder. A "foreword" by one "John Ray Jr. Ph.D." informs us that Humbert died "in legal captivity" after writing this "Confession of a white Widowed Male" "a few days before his trial was scheduled to start." Humbert is a peculiarly knowing narrator. "I shall not exist if you do not imagine me," he tells the reader. Using a style both outrageously lyrical and outrageously jokey, he is constantly teasing, eluding his audienc. Undercutting what might seem predictably valid responses, he plays on the whole litary history of dubious antiheroes and duplicitous first-person protagonists from Diderot to Dostoyevsky. "I am writing this under observation," Humbert admits. Within the narrative, this is literal, since he is in the psychiatric ward of the prison and his cell has an observation window. But Humbert is additionally, acutely aware of being under our observation as well. That helps make his story slippery, his character protean, and his language radically, magically self-referential. Like all Nabokov's novels, but even more than most, Lolita is a verbal game, a maze—what one character in Pale Fire christens a "lexical playfield."

The lexical playfield belongs, of course, to the author eventually rather than the narrator. It is Nabokov who discovers pleasure and difficulty in the complex web of allusion and verbal play—"the magic of games," as Humbert calls it—that constitutes the text. There is, in any event, a distinct difference between the games of the narrator and those of the author; or "Lolita" the confession and Lolita the novel. It is this. Humbert remains so trapped in his words, the "singposts and tombstones" of his story, that he does not realize he is using Lolita. Nabokov does. A great deal of intercultural fun is derived from the contrast between the "old-world politeness" of Humbert and what he perceives as the intriguing banality of America. This is an international novel, in one of tis dimensions, and it offers a riotously comic contrast between different languages, different voices. The verbal hauteur of Humbert ("You talk like a book, Dad," Lolita tells him) collides, in particular, with the unbuttoned slangy creativity that is a verbal element of the girl he pursues and possesses ("Yesser! The Joe-Rea marital enigma is making yaps flap"). And that collision has the dramatic advantage of allowing Lolita, as she is to herself, to escape through the chinks of the narrative. "Lolita had been safely solipsisized," Humbert claims, after he has used her as an unsuspecting aid to masturbatory fantasy. But he does not really solipsisize her, turn her as he puts it into "my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita," even for the period that he writes or we read the text. Perversely, Nabokov once claimed that "one day a reappraiser will come and and declare that I was a rigid moralist kicking sin . . . and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride." That reappraisal is celarly required here, for what we as readers witness is Humbert committing the cardinal sin in the subjective idealistic moral lexicon: he takes another human being as a means rather than an end. In the process, he commits child abuse and statutory rape. But that is subsumed, for Nabokov, under the determining, damning fact that he has acted like a moral totalitarian with Lolita. He has imprisoned her within his own reality, denying her her right to hers—and, as a corollary to that, her specific right to be an ordinary, vulgar, obnoxious but charming but not charmed or enchanted or mesmerized child. Momentarily, Humbert senses this when, in the last chapter of Lolita, he hears from his cell sounds coming from the valley below. "What I heard was the melody of children at play," he confesses; "and then I knew that the poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord." The note of longing and loss was one that Nabokov was particularly inclined to sound. He once said that "the type of artist who is always in exile" was one for whom he felt "some affinity," which was perhaps natural for someone who spent nearly all his life as an émigré. What charges it with a tragic pathos here, however, is the pain of knowing, as Humbert does for a brief, enchanted moment, that there is nothing worse than this: to rob someone of their childhood—to steal from them the chance to say, right from the start, this is my reality, my life.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Samuel Richardson

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761), the son of a joiner, born near Derby, where his parents lived briefly before returning to London. Little is known of his boyhood, but because of his father's comparative poverty he appears to have received (in his own words) 'only common School-learning'. The tradition that he attended either Merchant Taylors' or *Christ's Hospital cannot be substantiated. As a boy he read widely, told stories to his friends, and by the age of 13 was employed writing letters for young lovers. In 1706 he was apprenticed to a printer (as his father could not afford to enter him to the Church), and in 1715 he was admitted a freeman of the *Stationers' Company. He set up in business on his own in 1721, in which year he married Martha Wilde, the daughter of his former master. All his working life he was extremely industrious, and his business prospered and expanded steadily. Like all printers of his time, he combined printing and publishing, producing books, journals, advertisement posters, and much miscellaneous work. In 1723 he took over the printing of an influential Tory journal, the True Briton, and by 1727 was sufficiently established in his profession to be appointed renter warden of the Stationers' Company. In the 1720s and early 1730s he suffered the early deaths of all his six children, and in 1731 that of his wife. He attributed the nervous disorders of his later life to the shock of these deaths. In 1733 he married Elizabeth Leake, the daughter of a fellow printer, and four of the daughters of their marriage survived. In the same year he published his The Apprentice's Vade Mecum, a book of advice on morals and conduct. In 1738 he purchased in Fulham a weekend 'country' house, which he always referred to as 'North End' , and which later became famous for his readings and literary parties. He published in 1739 his own version, pointedly moral, of Aesop's Fables, and more importantly, he began Pamela.

Inspiration for the novel initially came from a series of 'familiar letters' which fellow printers had encouraged him to write on the problems and concerns of everyday life. While these eventually grew into Pamela, they were also published separately as Letters . . . to and for Particular Friends (1741). Pamela was written in two months, between November 1739 and January 1740, and was published later that year, to very considerable acclaim. The morality and realism of the work were particularly praised, as Richardson had hoped. However, complaints of its impropriety persuaded him to revise his second edition considerably. The work had a great vogue abroad, and was soon adapted for the stage in France. Imitations and forged 'continuations' persuaded Richardson to go on with the story, and volumes iii and iv (Pamela II) were published in 1741. In that year, there appeared a stinging parody called An Apology for the Life of Mrs *Shamela Andrews, which Richardson believed to be by Fielding (as it almost certainly was) and which he never forgave. Fielding's *Joseph Andrews, which begins as a parody of Pamela, was published in 1742 but did not affect the popularity of Pamela II.

Richardson's business continued to prosper, although his health was beginning to cause him great concern, and he extended his publications in religion, history, biography, and literature. In 1733 he had begun printing for the House of Commons and in 1742 he secured the lucrative post of printer of its journals. His circle of friends had by now vastly increased, and included many admiring young ladies, known as his 'songbirds' or 'honorary daughters'.

During the writing of *Clarissa, which was probably begun in 1744, he endlessly asked his friends for comment and advice, and read passages aloud to them in his 'grotto' (or summer house) at Norht End. The first two volumes of Clarissa appeared in 1747 and were very favourably received. After heavy revision, and determined efforts to prune, a further five volumes appeared in 1748. Correspondents and the circle of friends continued to grow and now included the *Bluestocking ladies Mrs *Delany, Mrs *Carter, and later Mrs *Chapone. Clarissa was an undoubted success but there were complaints about both its length and its indecency, and it was not reprinted as often as Pamela. However, it also became very popular abroad and was translated into French, Dutch, and German.

Urged by friends, Richardson began thinking, in about 1750, of the portrayal of a 'Good Man'. He asked for the views of his extensive acquaintance and began experimenting with the 'letters' of Harriet, who was to become one of the heroines of his next novels. His illnesses and general malaise, which appear to have included a form of Parkinson's disease, increased steadily but he persevered strenuously both with his business and his writing. His authors in the 1750s included Charlotte *Lennox, Sarah *Fielding, Edward *Young and George *Lyttelton. He had now become friendly with Dr *Johnson, to whose *Rambler he contributed in 1750 and whom he helped with money in 1751. In 1752 Johnson (together with many of Richardson's other friends) read the draft of Sir Charles *Grandison, and Richardson printed the fourth volume of the Rambler. In 1753 he travelled to Bath and Cheltenham, which was as far as he had ever gone, and in 1753-4 he published the seven volumes of Sir Charles Grandison. The book sold well and rapidly became fashionable, but was assailed in various critical pamphlets for length, tedium, and doubtful morality.

In 1754-5 Richardson was master of the Stationers' Company. He published in 1755 A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments . . . in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, a book which he considered contained the pith of all his work.  In the same year Dr Johnson published the Dictionary, which contained 97 citations from Clarissa. In 1756  Richardson was asked by *Blackstone for adevice on the reform of the *Oxford University Press. Towards the end of his life Richarson wrote a few 'letters' to, from, and about Mrs Beaumont, a minor character from Sir Charles Grandison, who had been someone of mysterious importance in his early life. He continued to revise his novels heavily, and remained active in his business until his death.

Richarson is generally agreed to be one of the chief founders of the modern novel. All his novels were *epistolary, a form he took from earlier works in English and French, which he appreciated for its immediacy ('writing to the moment' as he called it), and which he reaised to a level not attained by any of his predecessors. The 'letters', of which his novels consist, contain many long transcriptions of conversations, and the kinship with drama seems very strong. He was acutely aware of the problems of prolixity ('Length, is my principle Disgust') and worked hard to prune his original drafts, but his interest in minute analysis led inevitably to an expansive style.

A selection of his letters (6 vols, 1804) was edited by Mrs *Barbauld: see also Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. J. Carroll (1964). There is a life by T. C. D. Eaves and B. D. Kimpel (1971); see also M. Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson, Dramatic Novelist (1973); M. A. Doody, A Natural Passion (1974). 






Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, a novel by Samuel *Richardson, published 1740-1.

The first of Richardson's three novels, Pamela consists, like them, entirely of letters and journals, of which Richardson presents himself as the 'editor'. He believed he had hit upon 'a new species of writing' but he was not the inventor of the *epistolary novel, several of which already existed in English and French. He did however raise the form to a level hitherto unknown, and transformed it to display his own particular skills.

There are six correspondents in Pamela, most with their own particular style and point of view, but Pamela herself provides most of the letters and journals, with the 'her', Mr B., having only two. Pamela Andrews is a hansome, intelligent girl of 15 when her kind employer Lady B. dies. Penniless and without protection, Pamela is pursued by Mr B., Lady B.'s son, but she repulses him and remains determined to retain her chastity and unsullied conscience. Letters reveal Mr B.'s cruel dominance and pride, but also Pamela's half-acknowledged tenderness for him, as well as her vanity, prudence, and calculation. Angrily Mr B. separates her from her friends, Mrs Jervis the housekeeper and Mr Longman the steward, and dispatches her to B— Hall, his remote house in Lincolnshire, where she is imprisoned, guarded, and threatened by the cruel Mrs. Jewkes.  Only the chaplain, Mr Williams, is her friend, but he is powerless to help. For 40 days, allowed no visits or correspondence, she keeps a detailed journal, analysing her situation and her feelings, and at the same time revealing her faults of prudence and pride. She despairs, and begins to think of suicide. Mr B., supposing her spirit must now be broken, arrives at B— Hall, and, thinking himself generous, offers to make her his mistress and keep her in style. She refuses indignantly, and he later attempts to rape her and then to arrange a mock-marriage. Two scenes by the pond mark a turning point in their relationship. Both begin to be aware of their faults, and of the genuine nature of their affection. However, Pamela again retreats and refuses his proposal of marriage. She is sent away from B— Hall, but a message gives her a last chance. Overcoming her pride and caution, she decides to trust him, accepts his offer, and they are married. In the remaining third of the book Pamela's goodness wins over even Lady Davers, Mr B.'s supercilious sister, and becomes a model of virtue to her circle of admiring friends; but (as in Pamela, Part II) the author's creative drive becomes overwhelmed by his urge to moralize.

The book was highly successful and fashionable, and further editions were soon called for. Richardson felt obliged to continue his story, not only because of the success of Pamela but because of the number of forged continuations that began to appear. Pamela, Part II appeared in 1741. Here Pamela is exhibited, through various small and separate instances, as the perfect wife, patiently leading her profligate husband to reform; a mother who adores (and breastfeeds) her children; and a friend who is at the disposal of all, and who brings about the penitence of the wicked. Much space is given over to discussion of moral, domestic, and general subjects. 

*Shamela (1741, almost certainly by *Fielding) vigorously mocked what the author regarded as the hypocritical morality of Pamela; and Fielding's *Joseph Andrews, which begins as a parody of Pamela, appeared in 1742.




Clarissa: or The History of a Young Lady, an *epistolary novel by Samuel *Richardson, published 1748 (for 1747)-1749, in eight volumes. About one-third of the work (which is in all over a million words) consists of the letters of Clarissa and Lovelace, mainly written to Anna Howe and John Belford respectively, but there are over 20 correspondents in all, displaying many points of view and variations in style. 


Lovelace, a handsome, dashing rake, is courting Arabella Harlowe, the elder sister of Clarissa. The Harlowes are an acquisitive, ambitious, 'narrow-souled' family, and when Lovelace transfers his affections to Clarissa they decide he is not good enough and that Clarissa must marry the wealthy but ugly Solmes, whom she detests. When she refuses she is locked up and humiliated. Lovelace, cleverly representing himself as her deliverer, plays on her fears, convinces her that he is forwarding her reconciliation with her family, and persuades her to escape under his protection to London. There he establishes her in a superior brothel, which she at first supposes to be respectable lodgings. She unwaveringly resists his advances and he, enraged by her intransigence, is also attracted by it and finds his love and respect for her increase. Her emotions are likewise deeply confused; she is fascinated by his charm and wit, but distrusts him and refuses his eventual proposals of marriage. In his growing insistence, Lovelace overreaches himself, interfering with her letters, deceiving her over a supposed emissary from her family, violently assalulting her, and cunningly ensnaring her after he escapes. As she unhappily but stubbornly resists, he becomes more obsessive in his determination to conquer, and makes an attempt to rape her. He claims to believe that her resistance is no more than prudery and that, once subdued, she will turn to him: 'Is not this  the hour of trial—And in her, of the trial of the virtue of her whole Sex, so long premeditated, so long threatened? —Whether her frost be frost indeed? Whether her virtue be principle?' (vol. V, Letter 31). To Clarissa chastity represents identity, and the climax of her tragedy comes when Lovelace, abetted by the women of the house, drugs and rapes her, an event he reports in one of the shortest letters of the work: 'And now, Belford, I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives.' (Vol. V, Letter 32). 


Slowly Clarissa loses grip of her reason, and Lovelace realizes that he has lost the very dominance he had hoped to establish. Cut off from family, friends, and even correspondence, Clarissa eventually escapes, only to find herself trapped in a debtor's prison. She is rescued by Belford, who looks after her with affectionate care. Lovelace is overwhelmed by remorse. Clarissa recovers her sanity, but almost ceases to write, and her long decline and Christian preparation for death are reported largely in letters by Belford. After her death her cousin, Colonel Morden, kills Lovelace in a duel. Because of its great length, the novel has been more admired than read, but it has always been held in high critical esteem; the characters of the protagonists are developed with great sutblety, and the irresolvable nature of their conflict takes on an emblematic and tragic quality unique for its author and its period.

Bibliografía sobre Samuel Richardson

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