John Barth (1930)

 

From Hart and Leininger, Oxford Companion to American Literature:

BARTH, John [Simmons] (1930-). Maryland-born novelist, educated at Johns Hopkins, whose fiction set on the Eastern Shore of his native state includes The Floating Opera (1956), the experiences of a man recalled on the day in 1937 when he debates suicide, and The End of the Road (1958), another existential and nihilist view of experience set in a travestied conventional love triangle. Although placed in the same setting, his third novel, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) is more fantastic and funnier in its lusty parody of an 18th-century picaresque tale re-creating the life and times of Ebenezer Cooke. This was followed by  Giles Goat-Boy (1966), another lengthy, complex, and comic novel full of ingenious parody in its satirical allegory of the modern world conceived in terms of a university campus. Lost in the Funhouse (1968) consists of 14 pieces of fiction related in part by their concern with what happens when a writer writes (he makes himself a persona) and a reader reads. Chimera (1972) is also a volume of short fiction, retelling in elaborate style tales of Scheherazade, Perseus, and Bellerophon dealing with social and psychological problems of modern life, also introducing the author Barth along the way. The last-named work won a National Book Award. Barth returned to the long novel in Letters (1979), an unusual development of epistolary fiction, in which seven more or less parallel narratives are reveales through correspondence written by seven characters from his earlier fiction, including the author himself as just another imaginary figure, the intricate story comprising an inquiry into the patterns into which the characters have been previously set and the degree of freedom they may possess. Sabbatical: A Romance (1982) tells of the adventures and ideas occasioned by a long cruise of a college professor and her husband, an aspiring novelist. The Friday Book (1984) collects essays and other nonfiction. The Tidewater Tales (1987) is a lengthy novel about a novelist who claims he cannot write a projected novel as he and his wife sail full of friction along Chesapeake Bay. The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) probes the connection between memory and reality in a postmodern style of narration.


The Sot-Weed Factor, novel by John Barth, published in 1960 and in a revised version in 1966.

In a lusty picaresque tale that satirizes conventional historical fiction, the novel creates a fictive biography of the real Ebenezer Cook, endowing him with a twin sister, Anna. After failing in his studies at Cambridge, though abetted by a tutor, Henry Bullingame, Ebenezer is ordered by his father to manage the family tobacco plantation in Maryland. There he spends most of his time writing poetry and protecting his virginity, both of which are under constant assault. Finally he achieves fame as a writer while simultaneously losing his poetic inspiration and his virginity.



Giles Goat-boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus, novel by John Barth, published in 1966.

In the metaphoric world called the University, control is held by a computer, WESAC, which is able to run itself and to tyrannize people, for it has the ability to subject them to a radiating and disintegrating force, that is, to EAT them, an acronym for its power of "Electroencephalic Amplification and Transaction." WESAC is so out of hand that one of its developers, Max Spielman, believes it can only be controlled through reprogramming by a Grand tutor, a prophet, who will bring a "New Syllabus," that is, a new philosophy. For this role and this purpose he selects George Giles, whom he had raised among goats as a goat, though he was actually a human found as an infant in the tapelift of WESAC. In his undertaking George has to contend with a troublemaker, Maurice Stoker, who alone fully understands the operation of WESAC, and with a minor poet, Harold Bray, who contends that he is a Grand Tutor. George enters the computer to destroy it, and learns to confound WESAC by answering its questions through paradoxes that paralyze the machine. When George emerges, authorities eager to put WESAC back into operation seize him and send him back to the animal site of his boyhood, for he is now the University's scapegoat.



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Later works (Wikipedia: John Barth):

• The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991)
• Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera (memoirish novel) (1994)
• On with the Story (stories) (1996)
• Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative (2001)
• The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories (2004)
• Where Three Roads Meet (three linked novellas) (2005)
• The Development: Nine Stories (2008)
• Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011)

Nonfiction

• The Friday Book (1984)
• Further Fridays (1995)
• Final Fridays (2012)

 

Postmodernity in Prose

Philip Roth (1933-2018)

 

from American Literature: A History, by Hans Bertens and Theo d'Haen

(from "After the war: 1945-80 - Jewish American novelists") (...)


Still, although Malamud's characters are not invariably Jewish, in his presentation of Jewish milieus in The Assistant and in his early stories he is the most Jewish of all Jewish American writers of the fifties and sixties. Here, mainstream America is a vague presence in the background, just like Poland and its inhabitants only feature in the distance in the ghettos and streets of I.B. Singer's stories (Gimpel  the Fool, 1957; The Spinoza of Market Street, 1961) or novels (The Family Moskat, 1950; The Magician of Lublin, 1960). Far more usual in Jewish American fiction is a continuous interaction with mainstream American culture and an unending negotiation of territorial boundaries. Such interaction even takes place when mainstream America is nowhere in sight, as in the title story of Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a wistful story about class differences within Newark's Jewish community, in which the narrator's lover-for-a-summer has had her nose 'fixed'—'I was pretty. Now I'm prettier"–to conform to mainstream standards of beauty. With this collection of stories, Roth (1933-[2018]) found himself at the center of controversy, especially because of the stories 'Defender of the Faith', in which a calculating Jeish soldier tries to exploit the loyalty he expects from a Jewish superior, and 'Eli, the Fanatic', in which suburban, assimilated Jews try to prevent orthodox co-religionists from establishin a yeshiva in their mostly gentile neighborhood. Roth's fiercest critics, supset by what seemed a cynical view of middle-class American Jewry, accused him of self-hatred, even of anti-Semitism. What Roth captures in 'Eli' is the self-censorship and the dissembling that in the 1950s were part and parcel of assimilation and the deep sense of alienation—experienced here by the lawyer hired by his fellow Jews—that such a forced way of living may bring with it. This is in fact one of the overriding themes in Jewish-American writing of the first decades after the war. In order to be accepted by mainstream America, Jewish Americans abandon much of what may characterize them as Jews—sometimes, as in 'Goodbye, Columbus', even the shape of their nose—and move out of typically Jewish neighborhoods. But that estranges them from their background while their new environment never fully accepts them, leading to a sort of alienation that differs from that felt by young mainstream Americans but is felt even more profoundly.

After two rather traditional novels featuring a more mainstream cast and dealing with the familiar themes of relationships and personal problems and ambitions (Letting Go, 1962, and When She Was Good, 1967), Roth returned to more specifically Jewish themes with Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a virtuoso rant on a psychiatrist's couch in which the novel's protagonist, Alexander Portnoy, exhaustively lists all his frustrations at having been brought up Jewish, and in between details his insatiable lusting after blonde, all-American girls. Lust would from then on return regularly in Roth's novels, as in The Professor of Desire (1977) or the fairly recent Sabbath's Theater (1995), and has contributed disproportionally to his public image, but in those novels, too, Roth is concerned with Jewishness, even if he sees himself first of all as an American writer. In the last four decades, Roth has brilliantly chronicled Jewish life in the Newark of his younger years and has through an alter ego, the Roth-like writer Nathan Zuckerman who features in for instance Zuckerman Bound (1985) and The Counterlife (1987), offered incisive meditations on what it means to be a Jewish American writer. Early in his career Roth worried that 'the actuality is continually outdoing our talents', that the technical skills of American writers were no longer a match for the outrageous images and events that the culture casually produced. Fortunately, those fears were unfounded.


(From "The End and Return of History: 1980-2010 - Philip Roth")

Philip Roth has remained extremely prolific also after 1980, even to the point of becoming perhaps the iconic American author of the entire period. To begin with, Roth wrote a third novel in the David Kepesh series with The Dying Animal. Then, he has continued the series of novels featuring Nathan Zuckerman, the first instalment of which, The Ghost Writer, appeared in 1979, and the seventh, presumably also the last given its title of Exit Ghost, in 2007, with as other titles Zukerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Prague Orgy (1985), The Counterlife (1986), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). Zuckerman has often been interrpeted as an alter ego for Roth himself, but as of 1990 there also started appearing a new series featuring a protagonist called 'Roth', comprising Deception: A Novel (1990), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) and The Plot Against America (2004). There is also a free-standing novel, Sabbath's Theatre (1995), and finally a series of short novels, Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009) and Nemesis (2010). We will here briefly treat three exemplary instances from this overwhelming oeuvre.

American Pastoral, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, starts from the premise of the good life in the country as the culmination of the American Dream and a counterweight to the chaos, oppression and misery of the Old World. This is also what the protagonist of the story, whose life Zuckerman records, seems to have been bound for all his life, until everything fell apart. The novel is set in Newark, and the turning point is the 1960s, when Newark's earlier prosperity has melted away under the onslaught of beginning globalization, the city's older population of first and second generation immigrants, many of them Jewish, like the protagonist, have moved away or been minoritized by the large numbers of African Americans that have moved in. Instead of a harmonious community Newark now is the scene of race riots and labor conflicts. On the level of the U.S. as a whole the havoc wrought in Newark repeats itself in the radical youth and political movements rocking the country. Roth returns a hard verdict on what has gone wrong with America during his own lifetime.

A similar feeling speaks from The Plot Against America, winnner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005. Roth finds his initial inspiration in a plea Charles Lindbergh, the first man to cross the Atlantic by airplane in 1927 and a national hero, made in 1941 to prevent the U.S. from entering World War II, for which he blamed the Jews, the British, and President Roosevelt. Lindbergh was in good standing with the Nazi regime and especially with Goering, the commander of the German air force. Roth takes the poetic liberty of situating Lindbergh's speech not in 1941 but in 1940, in the run-up to that year's Presidential elections, and casting Lindbergh as the Republican challenger of Roosevelt. When Lindbergh wins the election, life in the U.S. turns bitter for American Jews, and hence also for little Philip Roth. Things look even more somber when Lindbergh disappears on a solo flight with his famous Spirit of St. Louis airplane and Vice-President Wheeler, an extreme rightwing politician, assumes office. In the end, everything returns to normal, Rososevelt triumphs in a special election, Pearl Harbor signals the entry of the U.S. into World War II, and history resumes its familiar course. The Plot Against America asks some hard questions about the nature of American democracy and American politics more generally. For most commentators it was hardly a coincidence that Roth published a novel focusing on these questions, and with such characters, in the run-up to the 2004 elections, with an incumbent who in the wake of 9/11 had institued an authoritarian regime such as the U.S. had hardly ever seen before, and with a Vice-President of known conservative sympathies.

If American Pastoral and The Plot Against America address wider social and political issues, Everyman sticks to the personal level. In all of Roth's later work the consciousness of approaching death is overwhelmingly present, and particularly so in the foru short novels he published towards the end of his career (Roth in 2013 announced that he thought he had written enough and would write no more). In the futher unspecified 'he' protagonist Roth gives us a reincarnation of the medieval 'everyman' from the eponymous morality play. but whereas the medieval Everyman finds that with death all material worries and constraints dissolve and only spiritual virtues remain, because after death comes resurrection, noting of the sort happens in Roth's version. Everyman as the chronicle of a death announced, a merciless march from the cradle to the grave marked by disease, illness, the relentless deterioration of the body, deaths and funerals. Like the medieval play it holds up the mirror of our own fallibility and ephemerality, but without the consolation of faith.

La poesía intimista y confesional (NIVEL AVANZADO) - Gray

 

From the chapter "Formalists and Confessionals" (The American Century), in Richard Gray's History of American Literature. (Some paragraph divisions added).

"Be guilty of yourself in the full looking glass," a poet of slightly earlier generation, Delmore Schwartz, had said; and that injunction, to see and know the trught about oneself no matter how painful or embarrassing it might be, is clearly the enteprise, the heart of these poems.

This rediscovery of the personal in American poetry assumed many forms—as various, finally, as the poets involved. At one extreme are poets who attempted to blunge into the unconscious: in the work of Robert Bly (1926-) (whose best collection is The Light around the Body (1967)), Robert Kelly (1935-) (some of whose best work is in Finding the Measure (1968)), Galway Kinnell (1927-) (whose Selected Poems appeared in 1982), and James Wright (1927-1980) (Collected Poems (1971)), for example, the poet dives down beneath the level of rational discourse, using subliminal imagery and a logic of association to illuminate the darker areas of the self, the seabed of personal feeling, dream and intuition. 

In Robert Bly's case, exploration of the subrational has led him toward "tiny poems," in imitation of the Chinese, and prose poems that are, as he put it, "an exercise in moving against 'plural consciousness'." His aim is to uncover the "dense energy that pools in the abdomen," as he put it in a poem titled "When the Wheel Does Not Move"; the fierce, mystical forces that unite him, at the deepest level, with the looser, livelier froms of the natural world. 

Kelly and Kinnell dip perhaps even further down. "My wife is not my wife" Kelly insists in one of his poems called "Jeaousy," "/ wife is the name of a / process, an energy moving, / not an identity, / nothing in this world is / mine but my action." To articulate the process, the activity that constitutes identity, Kelly has devised a poetry that is a haunting mixture of dream, chant, and ritual: his poems are an attempt to translate the interpenetration of things into intelligible (although not necessarily paraphraseable) signs and sounds. "The organism / of the macrocosm," as he puts it in "prefix," "the organism of language / the organism of I combine in ceaseless natureing / to propagate a fourth, / the poem, / from their trinity." 

Kinnell began from a rather different base from Kelly, in that his earlier poems were informed by a traditional Christian sensibility. But, while retaining a sacramental dimension, his later work burrows ferociously into the self, away from the traditional sources of religious authority—and away too, from conventional notions of personality.. "If you could keep going deeper and deeper;" he wrote in 1978, "you'd finally not be a person ... you'd be an / animal; and if you kept going deeper and / deeper, you'd be ... / ultimately perhaps a stone. And if a stone / could read poetry would speak for it." 

The poems that issue from this conviction (as a collection like When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990)) illustrates) show Kinnell trying to strip away formal, verbal, and even surface emotional constructs, anything that might dissipate or impede the poet's continuing exploration of his deepest self and experience. "How many nights," he asks in "Another Night in the Ruins," "must it take / one such as me to learn / ... / that for a man / as he goes up in flames, his one work / is / to open himself, to be / the flames?" Short, chanting lines, a simple, declarative syntax, emphatic rhythms, bleak imagery and inssitent repetition: all turn the poet into a kind of shaman, who describes strange apocalyptic experiences in which he throws off the "sticky infusion" of speech and becomes one with the natural world ("The Bear") or participates in the primal experiences of birth ("Under the Maud Moon") and death ("How Many Nights"). 

The tone of James Wright's work is quieter, less prophetic than this, but he too attempts to unravel from his own unconscious the secret sources of despair and joy. Of another poet whom he admired, Georg Trakl, Wright said this: "In Trakl, a series of images makes a series of events.  Because these events appear out of their 'natural' order, without the connection we have learned to expect from reading the newspapers, doors silently open to unused parts of the brain." This describes the procedures of many of Wright's own poems, which evolve quietly through layers of images until they surface with the quick thrust of a striking final image or epiphany. For instance, in "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" Wright carefully annotates his surroundings. "Over my had," he begins, "I see the bronze butterfly / Asleep on the black trunk / Blowing like a leaf in green shadow." The vision of the butterfly suggests a being wholly at one with the world: entrusted, pliable, possessed of the stillness of a plant or even a mineral ("bronze"). This feeling persists into the following lines thorugh the subtle harmonizing of time and space ("The distances of afternoon") and the sense of cowbells, heard from far off, as the musical measure of both. It is growing late, however, and as "evening darkens" a succession of images toll the poet back to his sole self. The last two lines complete the series and confirm the discovery: "A chicken hawk floates over, looking for home. / I have wasted my life." The hawk, presumably, will find its home; it possesses the ease, the buoyancy and assurance, that characterize the other natural objects in this landscape. But the poet will not. He can see in the things of this world only a vivvid, subliminal reminder of ruin, his failure truly to live. Surprising though this last line may seem, it has ben carefully prepared for by the hidden agenda of the poem; the images that constitute the argument, strange and emotionally precise as they are, have opened the doors to the revelation. 

While writers such as Wright and Kinnell have tried to register the movements of the subconscious, others have dramatized the personal in more discursive, conscious forms. These include poets like Richard Hugo (1923-1982), Karl Shapiro, and Louis Simpson, who explore the self's discovery of the outer world and its reaction to it and, rather more significant, those like John Logan (1923-1987), Adrienne Rich (1929-), Anne Sexton (1923-1974), and W. D. Snodgrass (1926-2009), who incorporate elements of their personal histories in their poems.

In the poetry of Richard Hugo, collected in 1984, the personal dimension is founded on the relationship between the private self of the poet and the bleak, lonesome world he describes. The setting he favours is the Far West: not the Far West of legend, however, but a far more inhospitable, emptier place. Looking at one decaying township in Montana, he asks himself, "Isn't this your life?"; and his own poetic voice, somber and laconic, seems to answer him in the affirmative. Yet he can also learn from his surroundings; their strength of spirit, "rage" and endurance, have stamped their mark on him. "To live good, keep your life and the scene," he concludes in "Montgomery Hollow" "/ Cow, brook, hay: these are the names of coins": the currency of the West has, in fact, saved him from moral bankruptcy, helped him pay his duess to himself and the world. Hugo's poetic stance has hardly shifted over the years. 

By contrast, Shapiro and Simpson began (as we have seen) as poets of public event, and only gradually changed their interests and allegiances. As the personal element in their poetry grew, so its shape and tone altered too. "Sabotage the stylistic approach," Shapiro commanded in "Lower the standard: that's my motto," "Get off the Culture Wagon. Learn how to walk the way you wan." Attacking "the un-American-activity of the sonnet," writing pieces with titles like "Anti-Poem," he adopted a long, flowing line somewhere between free verse and prose poetry. With this, he has explored himself and his surroundings (in volumes like Poems of a Jew (1958) with sometimes embarrassing frankness: "When I say the Hail Mary I get an erection," he admits in "Priests and Freudians will understand," adding wryly, "Doesn't that prove the existence of God?" 

The alteration in Simpson's work (as a collection like At the End of the Open Road: Poems (1963) indicates) has been less radical: his verse, while becoming freer, has retained an iambic base. But he, too wants to know what it is like to be him at this moment in history, "an Amrican nurse / installed amid the kitchen ware." Like Whitman, he is concerned wit hthe representative status of his self, his Americanness; unlike Whitman, his landscapes are often suburban. "Whare are you Walt?" Simpson asks in "Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain," observing sardonically, "/ The Open Road goes to the used-car lot": that observation measures the distance, as well and the kinship, between it author and the person addressed, the first, finest poet of national identity.

Of the four poets just mentioned who insert their own stories directly into their narratives, John Logan (whose several collections include The Bridge of Change: Poems 1974-9 (1980) is the most apparently casual. His poems seem simple, informal: "Three moves in six months," begins one, "and I remain the same." But, in fact, they are carefully organized to allow for a subtle orchestration of theme and tone. In the poem just quoted, for instance, "Three Moves," he graduates from startling colloquialism ("You're all fucked up") to moments of lyricism and grace: "These foolish ducks lack a sense of guilt / and so all their multi-thousand-mile range / is too short for thee hope of change." And although, as these lines imply, Logan himself suffers from "a sense of guilt" from which the animal kingdom is blessedly free, he can occasionally participate in the vitality, the innocence of the natural world around him. "There is a freshness  / nothing can destroy in us—," he says in "Spring of the Thief"; "Perhaps that / Freshness is the changed name of God." 

The voice of W. D. Snodgrass, and his stance toward nature, is at once more controlled and intense. His finest work is "Heart's Needle" (1959), a series of poems which have as their subject his daughter and his loss of her through marital breakdown. "Child of my winter," begins the first poem: "born / When the new fallen soldiers froze / In Asia's steep ravines and fouled the snows . . . " Cynthia, the poet's child, was born during the Korean War and she is, he gently suggests, the fruit of his own cold war: the static, frozen winter campaign that is getting nowhere is also Snodgrass's marriage. The allusions to the war, and descriptions of the season, are there, not because of any intrinsic interest they may possess, historical, geographical, or whatever, but because they image the poet's inner world, his personal feelings. "We need the landscape to repeat us," Snodgrass observes later. The measured, musical quality of his verse, and his frequent attention to objects and narrative, disguise an obsessive inwardness, a ferocious preoccupation with the subjective.

"My poems ... keep right on singing thee same old song": the words could belong to Snodgrass, but in fract they were spoken by Ann Sexton, whose first two collections, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962), established both her reputation and her intensely personal stance. Even those pieces by Sexton that appear not to be concerned with herself usually turn out to be subjeective, to have to do with her predicament as a woman. "The Farmer's Wife", for instance, begins as a description of someone in rural Illinois, caught up in "that old pantomime of love," and then concludes with lines that suddenly switch the focus from farmer and wife to the poet and her lover.  Elsewhere, when the narrative mask is dropped, the tone can be painfully raw and open, and given a further edge by elaborate rhyme-schemes or tight stanzaic forms. "All My Pretty Ones" is a good illustration of this. Addressed to the poet's father, the contrast between the passion and intimacy of the address and the strictness of the given measure only intensifies the feeling of the poem. It is as if the disciplines of the poetic form, which Sexton confronts in a half-yielding, half-rebellious fashion, were part of the paternal inheritance, something else that the father she both loves and hates has left her to deal with. However, she was not only concerned with the pain of being daughter, wife, mother, lover. She also sang, as she put it, "in celebration of the woman I am." Long before it was fashionable to do so, she wrote in praise of her distinctive identity, not just as an American poet, but as an American female poet. "As the African says:" she declares in "Rowing," "This is my tale which I have told"; and for her this tale was, finally, a source of pride.

A similar pride in the condition of being a woman characterizes the poetry of Adrienne Rich. Rich's early work in A Change of World (1951) and The Diamond Cutters (1955) is decorous, formal, restrained. But even in here there is a sense of the subversive impulses that lie just below the smooth surfaces of life. In "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers", for example, the character who gives the poem its title sems to be crushed beneath patriarchal authority: "The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band / sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand." However, the tigers she has embroidered "across a screen" suggest her indomitable spirit. Even after her death, "The tigers in the panel that she made / Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid." "Sleek chivalric" and poised as they are, these animals nevertheless emblematize certain rebellious energies, turbulent emotions that will not be contained polite on the surface, passionate beneath, Aunt Jennifer's art is, at this stage, Adrienne Rich's art. Gradually, though Rich came to feel that she could "no longer go to write a poem with a neat handful of materials and express these materials according to a prior plan." "Instead of poems about experience," she argued, "I am getting poems that are experiences." A work like "Diving into the Wreck," the title poem in her 1973 collection, measures the change. In it, the poet tells of a journey under the sea, during which she has to discard all the conventional supports, the crutches on which she has leaned in the upper world. "I came to xplore the wreck," she says: "The words are purposes. / The words are maps ...." And she describes shat she calls "the thing I came for: / the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth." Diving deep into the deepest recesses of her being, exploring the "wreck" of her own life, Rich feels compelled to jettison inherited techniques and fictions. A more open, vulnerable, and tentative art is required, she feels, in order to map the geography of her self: a feling that is signaled in this poem, not only by its argument, but by its directness of speech, its stark imagery and idiomatic rhythms, above all by the urgency of its tone. The map, as it happens, is not just for her own use. "We are all confronted," Rich has declared in the preface to On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Poems 1966-1978 (1979), "with ... the failure of patriarchal politics." "To be a woman at this time," she goes on, "is to know extraordinary froms of anger, joy and impatience, love and hope."  "Poetry, words on paper, are necessary but not enough," she insists, "we need to touch the living who share ... our determination that the sexual myths underlying the human condition can and shall be ... changed." In Rich's later work, as in fact a volume like Fox: Poems 1998-2000 (2001) illustrates, the confrontation with hrself is insparable from her broader, feminist purposes; her work has become intimate, confessional, but it is an intimacy harnessed to the service of the community, the invention of a new social order.

Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers & Joyce Carol Oates (Gray) - NIVEL AVANZADO

 From A History of American Literature, by Richard Gray. (The American Century, pp. 590-94).

 

"Ours is the century of unreason," Eudora Welty declared once, "the stamp of our behavior is violence and isolation: nonmeaning is looked upon with some solemnity." Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) would have agreed with some of this, but not all. What troubled her was not lack of reason but absence of faith. "The two circumstances that have given character to my writing," O'Connor admitted in her collection of essays, Mystery and Manners (1969), "have been those of being Southern and being Catholic"; and it was the mixture of these two, in the crucible of her own eccentric personality, that helped produce the strangely intoxicating atmosphere of her work—at once brutal and farcical, like somebody else's bad dream. A devout if highly unorthodox Roman Catholic in a predominantly Protestant region, O'Connor interpreted experience according to her own reading of Christian eschatology — a reading that was, on her admission, tough, uncompromising, and without any of "the hazy compassion" that "excuses all human weakness" on the ground that "human weakness is human." "For me," she declared, "the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ"; and to this she might well have added that she neither saw humankind as worthy of being redeemed, nor Redemption itself as anything other than a painful act of divorce from this world. With rare exceptions, the world she explores in her work—in her novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and her stories gathered in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything that Rises Must Converge (1965) — is one of corrosion and decay. It is a world invested with evil, apparently forsaken by God and saved only in the last analysis by His incalculable grace. It is a netherworld, in  fact, a place of nightmare, comic because absurd, and (as in early Christian allegory) the one path by which its inhabitants can travel beyond it is that of renunciation, penance, and extreme suffering.

O'Connor herself was inclined to talk in a distinctly equivocal way about the relationship between the two circumstances that shaped her life, her region and her faith. Sometimes, she suggested, it was her "contact with mystery" that saved her from being stereotypically Southern and "just doing badly what has already been done to completion." In the Bible Belt, after all, Roman Catholics wre and still are in a distinct, occasionally distrusted minority. Other times, she argud that there was a perfect confluence, or at least congruity. "To know oneself," she said once, "is to know one's region." And her region, in particular, enaled her to know herself as a Catholic writer precisely because it was "a good place for Catholic literature." It had, she pointed out, "a sacramental view of life": belief there could "still be made believable and in relation to a large part of society"; and, "The Bible being generally known and revered in the section," it provided the writer with "that broad mythical base to refer to what he needs to extend his meaning in depth." Whatever the truth here—and it probably has to do with a creative tension between her education in Southern manners and her absorption in Catholic mystery — there is no doubt that, out of this potent mixture, O'Connor produced a fictional world the significance of which lied precisely in it apparent aberrations, its Gothic deviance from the norm. Her South is in many ways the same one other writers have been interested in — a wasteland, savage and empty, full of decaying towns and villages crisscrossed by endless tobacco roads. And, like Twain, she borrows from the Southwestern humorists, showing a bizarre comic inventiveness in describing it. Her characters — the protagonist Haze Motes in Wise Blood, for instance — are not so much human beings as grotesque parodies of humanity. As O'Connor herself has suggested, they are "literal in the same sense that a child's drawing is literal": people seen with an untamed and alien eye. Where she parts company with most other writers, however, is in what she intends by all this, and in the subtle changes wrought in her work by this difference of intention.

O'Connor herself explained that difference by saying that "the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him." His or her audience, though, will find those distortions "natural." So such a novelist has to make his or her vision "apparent by shock." "To the hard of hearing you shout," she says, "and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." Her figures are grotesque, in other words, because she wants us to see them as spiritual primitives. In order to describe to us a society that is unnatural by her own Christian standards — and to make us feel its unnaturalness — she creates a fictional world that is unnatural by almost any accepted standards at all. O'Connor's characters are distorted in some way, social or physical, mental or material, because their distortions are intended to mirror their guilt, original sin, and the spiritual poverty of the times and places they inhabit. That is only half the story, though. From close-up, these characters may seem stubbornly foolish and perverse, ignorant witnesses to the power of evil. But ultimately against their will, they reveal the workings of eternal redemption as well. They are the children of God, O'Connor believes, as well as the children of Adam; and through their lives shines dimly the possibility that they may, after all, be saved. So an extra twist of irony is added to everything that happens in O'Connor's stories. Absurd as her people are, their absurdity serves as much as it does anything else, as a measure of God's mercy in caring for them. Corrupt and violent as their behavior may be, its very corruption can act as a proof, a way of suggesting the scope of His extraordinary forgiveness and love. As, for instance, O'Connor shows us Haze Motes preaching "the Church without Christ" and declaring "Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar," she practices a comedy of savage paradox. Motes, after all, relies on belief for the power of his blasphemy: Christ-haunted, he perversely admits the sway over him of the very faith he struggles to deny. Every incident in Wise Blood,  and all O'Connor's fiction, acquires a double edge because it reminds us, at one and the same time, that man is worthless and yet the favoured of God — negligible but the instrument of Divine Will. The irremediable wickedness of humanity and the undeniable grace of God are opposites that meet head on in her writing, and it is in the humor, finally, that they find their issue, or appropriate point of release. What we are offered on the surface is a broken world, the truth of a fractured picture. But the finely edged character of O'Connor's approach offers an "act of seeing" (to use her own phrase) that goes beyond that surface: turning what would otherwise be a comedy of the absurd into the laughter of the saints. 

 A writer whose fictional world wa as strange yet instantly recognizable as O'Connor''s was Carson McCullers (1917-1967). "I have my own reality," McCullers said once toward the end of her life, "of language and voices and foliage." And it was this reality, her ghostly private world that she tried to reproduce in her stories (collected in The Mortgaged Heart (1971)), her novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), and her four novels: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946), and Clock without Hands (1961). She gave it many names, over the years, and placed it consstently in the South. Southern though its geographical location might be, however, it was like no South ever seen before. It was another country altogether, created out of all that the author had found haunting, soft, and lonely in her childhood surroundings in Georgia. It was also evolved out of her own experience of melancholy, isolation, and occasional if often illusory happiness. "Everything that happens in my fiction has happened to me," she confessed in her unfinished autobiography (Illumination and Night Glare (2000)). Her life, she believed, was composed of "illumination," moments of miraculous insight, and "night glare," long periods of dejection, depression, frustration—feelings of enclosure within herslf. So are the lives of her characters. The people she writes about may seem or feel strange or freakish because of their anomalous desires, aberrant behavior, or grotesque appearance. But in their freakishness they chart the coordinates of all our lives; their strangeness simply brings to the surface the secret sense of strangeness all of us share in what McCullers sometimes called our "lonesomeness." So, for example, The Ballad of the Sad Café revolves around a dance macabre of frustrated love, thwarted communication "There are the lover and the beloved," the narrator tells us, "but these two come from different countries." Similarly, The Member of the Wedding is an initiation novel in which the lonely, sensitive, 12-yar-old protagonist, Frankie Adams, is initiated into the simple ineradicable fact of human isolation: the perception that she can, finally, be "a member of nothing." At the heart of McCullers's work lies the perception Frankie comes to, just as the protagonist of Clock Without Hands, J. J. Malone does when he learns that he has a few months to live. Each of us, as Malone feels it, is "surrounded by a zone of loneliness"; each of us lives and dies unaccompanied by anyone else; which is why, when we contemplate McCullers's awkward and aberrant characters, we exchange what she called "a little glance of grief and lonely recognition." 

Whereas McCullers published only four novels in her short life, and O'Connor only two, Joyce Carol Oates (1938-) has produced more than fifty. In addition, she has written hundreds of shorter works, including short stories and critical and cultural essays, and several of her plays have been produced off Broadway. Often classified as a realist writer, she is certainly a social critic concerned in partiular with the violence of contemporary American culture. But she is equally drawn toward the Gothic, and toward testing the limits of classical myth, popular tales and fairy stories, and established literary conventions Many of her novels are set in Eden Country, based on the area of New York State where she was born. And in her early fiction, With Shuddering Fall (1964) and A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) she focuses her attention on rural America with its migrants, social strays, ragged prophets, and automobile wrecking yards. In Expensive People (1968), by contrast she moved to a satirical meditation on suburbia; and in Them (1969) she explored the often brutal lives of the urban poor. Other, later fiction, has shown a continued willingness to experiment with subject and forms. Wonderland (1971), a novel about the gaps between generations, is structured around the stories of Lewis Carroll. Childwold (1976) is a lyrical portrait of the artist as a young woman. Unholy Loves (1979), Solstice (1985), and Maya: A Life (1986) cast a cold eye on the American professional classes. You Must Remember This (1987) commemorates the conspiratorial obsessions of the 1950s; Because it is Bitter, and Because it is My Heart (1991) dramatizes the explosive nature of American race relations. Blonde (2000) is an imaginative rewriting of the life of the movie icon Marilyn Monroe, while My Sister, My Love (2008) reimagines an actual murder case, focusing on how ambitious parents alternately push and ignore their unhappy children. Her fiction is richly various in form and focus; common to most of it, however, including recent works like Missing Mom (2005) and The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007), is a preoccupation with crisis. She shows people at risk: apparently ordinary characters whose lives are vulnerable to threats from society or their inner selves or, more likely, both. In Oates's much anthologized short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1970), for instance, the central character, Connie, is an all-American girl, fatally at ease with the blandness of her adolescent life. She becomes the helpless victim of a caller, realistically presented yet somehow demonic, whom she mistakes for a friend. Her sense of security, it is intimated, is a dangerous illusion. The stories and novels of Oates are full of such characters. Some, like Connie, find violence erupting from their surroundings; others, frustrated by the barren or grotesque nature of their lives and social circumstances, erupt into violence themselves. With all of them, there is the sense that they are the victims of forces beyond their control or comprehension. Whatever many of them may believe to the contrary, they are dwellers in a dark and destructive element.

 

 

 

 

 

Prose After Postmodernism (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 From Hans Bertens and Theo d'Haen's American Literature: A History (Routledge, 2014)

(The American Century: World War I to the Present - The End and Return of History: 1980-2010)

Prose 'after' postmodernism

Few of the 'classical' postmodernists who continued writing into the new millennium succeeded in repeating their earlier successes. This applies particularly to Barth, whose many novels, some of them very voluminous, like The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), and story collections endelessly keep turning over themes and techniques identical to those of his earlier work. Gaddis did pretty much the same in A Frolic of His Own (1994), a book harping on the difference between what is true justice and what the judicial system makes of it, while in Carpenter's Gothic (1985) he satirized religious fundamentalism and personal greed. The postmodern fame of Stanley Elkin (1930-95) rests mainly on the combination of exuberant language and black humor in The Dick Gibson Show (1971), about a boy who is enthralled to the voices coming out of the radio, and The Franchiser (1976), about a man who builds a fast food chain but finds the meaning of life thorugh the multiple sclerosis he suffers from, and from which Elkin himself also died. In his later work Elkin took a more and more tragic view of things. George Mills (1982) is about a man who feels betrayed by God. In The Magic Kingdom (1985) a man who has lost his son takes a group of terminally ill children on a trip to Disneyland. In The Rabbi of Lud (1987) a New Jersey rabbi struggles with his faith.

With Slow Learner (1984) Pynchon published a collection of his early stories, and he brought new work with Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006). Although both Vineland, set in Northern California in a milieu of over-age hippies, and Mason & Dixon, about the two men, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, that drew the famous line that divided the Northern, non-slave holding parts of the U.S. from the Southern slave-holding parts, and recounted in eighteenth-century English, sported all kinds of peculiarities (zany ditties, fantastic events, a cavalier treatment of history) also typical of Pynchon's earlier fiction, they both received mixed reviews, the later novel faring somewhat better than the earlier. Against the Day, though was an immediate hit with the critics. A massive affair, like V. A Novel and Gravity's Rainbow, Against the Day plays intricate games with history, with language, with its characters, and with the reader. A central plotline features the anarchist Webb Traverse in his fight against capitalism, his murder on behalf of the industrialist Scarsdale Vibe, and the desire on the part of his three sons to revenge their father's death. Set around the turn of the twentieth century the novel indulges in all kinds of eccentrics, including a dog that reads Henry James, travel through the center of the earth, and countless subplots, all of it brought in a welter of styles, varying from the language of juvenile adventure to tough guy hard-boiled and everything in between. Like Pynchon's earliest books, Against the Day finally leaves the reader with more questions than answers, but also with the feeling that something important has been touched upon.

The most overtly technically postmodern early work of Don DeLillo (1936-) is Ratner's Star (1974), in which a fourteen-year-old mathematical genius decodes an alien message announcing that the earth is about to enter a zone in which the laws of physics no longer apply, and which at the time was often likened to the work of Pynchon. DeLillo's other early novels focused, often satirically, on American popular culture phenomena such as American football or rock and roll. White Noise (1985) established DeLillo as a major author. The novel features a university professor in 'Hitler Studies' (yet who cannot read German), who gets caught in an environmental disaster, but who also is confronted with his own fears of death. The novel is a satire of university life, but even more so of how important events are hijacked by the media and turned into spectacle for an audience bent on sensation. Undoubtedly it is not a coincidence that the cable network CNN was launched in 1980, and that this was also the period in which French thinkers such as Guy Debord (1931-94) and Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) were busily discussed in American literary circles for the relathionship they posited between consumer society, the cult of the spectacle, and the simulacrisation or simulation of reality in the media. DeLille continued this line of thought in Libra (1988), with as protagonist the murderer of President Kennedy, Mao II (1991), and especially the massive Underworld (1997). Waste, and the problems it causes  in a consumerist society, are a central topic in this novel, the action of which spans the 1950s to the 1990s, with many interlocking plots, settings ranging from the New York Giants' baseball grounds to an artist's studio, and both fictional and historical characters. The novel's title refers to how waste is buried, to the criminal underworld, to the things hidden in history, and to how all of this refuses to remain buried and leads a life of its own. On appearance Underworld was hailed as a major achievement and as one of the most important works of American fiction of the final quarter of the twentieth century. Since Underworld DeLillo has delivered shorter fictions. In Cosmopolis (2003) he once again addresses issues of mediatisation, the world of advertising, and the fads dominating American life. Falling Man (2007) describes how a man who has been wounded in the 9/11 World Trade Center attack looks for new meaning in life. Unlike other first generation postmodernists DeLillo does not use metafiction to approach the postmodern life-world, but meticulously mirrors the latter's emptiness and artificiality in the smooth, stylized, polished but clichéd dialogue of his protagonists, who seem to be unable to go beyond the surface of things. His latter works, though, clearly also engage more directly with both human and social reality.

As of the 1980s a new generation of writers started putting postmodern techniques to new ends. Kathy Acker (1947-97; née Karen Lehmann) from the mid-1970s to her death in 1997 published a number of texts that combine the experimentalism of Burroughs, Sukenick and Federman with a militant feminism. Paul Auster (1947-) is most classically postmodern in his early The New York Trilogy, consisting of City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), and in the late Travels in the Scriptorium (2007), which is not only metafictional but likewise heavily intertextual and self-reflective in that all characters, except for the narrator 'Mr. Blank' issue from earlier novels by Auster. Central to the three novels gathered in The New York Trilogy are questions of language, reality and identity. In City of Glass the protagonist, Quinn, on a whim takes on the role of 'the detective Paul Auster' to investigate a case loosely based on the histories of Caspar Hauser and the wild boy of Aveyron, later meets 'the author Paul Auster', gradually loses all his possessions and his identity, and in the end turns out to have literally dissolved into thin  air, the only evidence of his ever having been anywhere being a little red notebook. In Ghosts  a private detective called 'Blue' is hired by 'White' to observe 'Black'. But Black is a detective too, hired to observe someone. Moreover, it begins to look more and more as if White was actually Black in disguise. The story ends with a violent confrontation between Black and Blue. Blue wins, puts on his hat, and departs, leaving the reader totally confused. Quinn and the red notebook from City of Glass return in The Locked Room, be it that the notebook here belonged to Fanshawe, a writer who has disappeared without a trace and whom Quinn is hired to find, without result. The narrator, a friend of Fanshawe's, then gradually assumes the role and identity of Fanshawe, until it appears that Fanshawe is still alive and the narrator has one last conversation with him, though a locked door. Fanshawe is a character from the eponymous novel by Hawthorne, and this is only one of the many intertextual references to literary canonicals throughout The New York Trilogy. Moreover, a number of episodes in the life of Fanshawe, as we get to hear it, correspond with events in the life of Auster himself. In all, The New York Trilogy is a beguiling play with narrative paradoxes, names and identities, the borderlines between fiction and reality, and the literary canon, raising the familiar postmodern issues of language, identity, power, reality, and the (im)possibility of knowing the latter. 

Auster's many novels following The New York Trilogy all in one way or another pose the same questions as did his first and still most popular work. A number of them feature recurring characters, with Quinn for instance resurfacing in In the Country of Last Things (1987) while the protagonest of that novel, Anna Blume, reappears in Moon Palace (1989). Most of them have most unlikely plots, The Music of Chance (1990) being concerned with the building of an endlessly long and useless wall, and Timbuktu (1999) being narrated by a dog. The majority of Auster's characters suffer from one obsession or another. The protagonist of The Book of Illusions (2002), for instance, is obsessed by a movie actor that disappeared in the 1920s. These, and most other fictions by Auster, such as Leviathan (1992) or Oracle Nights (2004), offer a very grim outlook on life, the exception being Mr. Vertigo (1994), in which a nine-year-old orphan learns how to fly. IN some of his later fictions Auster casts characters that after a serious disease or mishap have to get their life back on the rails and make a new beginning. This is so in Oracle Nights, but also in The Brooklyn Follies (2005). Man in the Dark (2008) sees the U.S. torn apart by a new Civil War, while Invisible (2009), a novel in four parts modeled on the seasons, harps on Auster's usual questions about the reliability of language to capture reality, including memories of the past, and authorship. Sunset Park (2010), finally, seems less convoluted, perhaps less 'postmodern' than his earlier work, and once again reflects on how to make a new start in life.

With Richard Powers (1957-) we turn to a set of authors, sometimes referred to as 'The New American School', who have clearly grown up with postmodernism as a major influence, but who in various ways go beyond it. With Powers, as with David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), Mark Z. Danielewski (1966-), Dave Eggers (1970-) and Jonathan Safran Foer (1977-), the postmodern connnection most clearly shows in their fascination with themes of language and identity, and with how they fashion their narratives to reflect them. Powers made his debut with Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), which is undeniably postmodern in both technique and themes. We are first given a series of reflections on art, and specifically photography in the modern era, what the German writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), who is quoted by Powers, called 'the era of mechanical reproduction', followed by episodes in the lives of three young men photographed on their way to a dance in August 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I, and by how a Boston editor of a computer magazine discovers that one of the young men pictured in the photograph is his grandfater. Finally, however, everything turns out to be a verbal construct raised on a photograph of three unknown young men on a country road. Prisoner's Dilemma (1988) likewise plays with postmodern constructions and masquerades, and alternative realities, giving Walt Disney Japanese ancestors, for instance. The Gold Bug Variations (1991) via its title to a story by Edgar Allan Poe, but also to J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations as played by the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, and to the structure of DNA, the discovery or near-discovery of which by the scientist-narrator provides the backbone of the novel. Although undeniably inventive, The Gold Bug Variation risks sacrificing story and character to erudition, and this applies even more to Operation Wandering Soul (1993). In Galatea 2.2 (1995) Powers himself admits that with his two previous books he had reached a dead end. He does so by mouth of 'the author Richard Powers' who, after having written a couple of books (that is to say Prisoner's Dilemma and The Gold Bug Variations) during a prolonged stay in The Netherlands, on his return to the U.S. discovers that he has nothing left to say. Like Barth in his 1960s fictions, though Powers in Galatea 2.2 turns this defeat into a triumph by having his author Richard Powers narrate the genesis of his earlier Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. If this still sounds very classically postmodern, with his next novel Powers broke out of this mold. Gain (1998) draws a powerful picture of the rise of corporate America, and of how the individualistic and visionary entrepreneurism of the nineteenth century has developed into the nameless and faceless executive leadership of the late twentieth century. In Plowing the Dark (2000) computer-generated virtual reality in the service of the military is juxtaposed to an American being held hostage by guerrillas in Lebanon, the connecting factor between the two being the threat they both pose to man's mental sanity. The Time of our Singing (2003) addresses problems of racial inequality and discrimination via the marriage and offspring of a German-Jewish immigrnat and an African American woman. In The Echo Maker (2006) Powers raises questions about the about the relationship between reality, memory and identity via a protagonist who, as the result of a car accident, suffers from Capgras syndrome, the unfounded conviction that someone familiar is in fact an impostor. At the same time Powers also addresses issues of nature conservation and land and water use vua a refuge of sandhill cranes in Nebraska, the setting of the novel. In Generosity: An Enhancement (2009) the possible discovery of a genetic source of happiness and its possible or potential commercial misuse provide the central strand. 

In several of his essays, collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), Consider the Lobster (2005) and Both Flesh and Not (2012), David Foster Wallace denounced postmodernism for its ironical anti-humanism and metafictional pirouettes, and for the disrespect it showed its characters. Instead, he argued for '"real", albeit pop-mediated characters'. Especially John Barth seems to have served as Wallace's prime target, as can be seen from the parody of the latter in the story 'Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way', from the collection Girl with Curious Hair (1989). A look at his own work, though, and particularly at his debut, The Broom of the System (1987), leads us to suspect that with these denunciations of his immediate predecessors Wallace was primarily trying to lay his own literary ghosts. With characters named Rick Vigorous, Candy Mandible, Wang-Dang Lang, a talking parrot called 'Vlad the Impaler', a publishing company that goes by the name 'Frequent and Vigorous' (the director of which cannot live up to that motto in the bed of the novel's protagonist Lenore Beardsman), and the zany plan of the Ohio state authorities to create a 'Great Ohio Desert' to foster recreation, the shadow of Pynchon looms heavily over The Broom of the System. Add to this that the plot concerns a search for truth and identity by Lenore, which also involves a search for her great-grandmother also called Lenore, the latter having been a student of Wittgenstein, and the relationship between languasge and reality that is the holy grail of classical postmodernism reappears again here too.

Wallace's massive (1079 pages) second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), definitively established him as one of the most important voices of his generation. In this novel Wallace, in his own words, tries to describe 'what it's like to live in America around the millennium'. The book is set in a near future in which the U.S., Canada and mexico have united to form the Organization of North American Nations, also known as O.N.A.N., with a clear Biblical reference. The President of O.N.A.N. is a former pop-singer and actor, the larger part of New England and South-Eastern Canada is used as a dump for toxic waste, transported there by rocket, and society has become commercialized to the extent that calendar years no longer go by digits but by sponsor advertisements: 'Year of the Whopper', 'Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad'. There is a gang of French-Canadian terrorists ('Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents' [sic]) chasing a movie, 'The Entertainment', that is so impossible to tear oneself away from that its spectators die from dehydration, and with which the assassins plan to bring down the hated American society. Infinite Jest also sports 388 endnotes. All of this sounds very Pynchonesque, but other than his postmodernist predecessors, and unlike his own earlier work, Wallace in Infinite Jest focuses on the existential anxieties life in such a disorienting and disoriented society engenders. What matters, Wallace insists, is that notwithstanding all the linguistic frolics and jests his characters are 'real' people, with 'real' problems, even if the environment in which they find themselves is recognizably postmodern. To use postmodern irony in these conditions would be unforgivable and stand in the way of real human communication and compassion. Notwithstanding their often comical use of language and situations, the same move toward what we can broadly call a variation of psychological realism can also be noted in the stories collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion (2004), with the tone of the latter colelction getting grimmer, influenced by the events of 9/11, which are also referred to a few times. 

Mark Z. Danielewski's The House of Leaves created a major stir upon publication in 2000. Of all the more recent publications this is probably the most orthodoxly postmodern. The novel's central given is a report of a documentary movie registering how movie producer Navidson and his crew explore the enormous spaces that without warning have attached themselves ot his house and that, like the house itself, can just as unpredictably change shape. The report, written up by a certain Zampanó, after the latters death is found by Johnny Truant, an assistant in a tattoo shop and on the brink of succumbing to his drug addiction. To Zampanó's already copious notes Truant adds his own, which clearly show him to be sliding into paranoia. All of this is edited and edited again by nameless further editors that themselves add the occasional further footnote. Zampanó's notes refer to both existing and non-existing articles and books, to scholarly and pseudo-scholarly discussions, and to pseudo-commentaries by Douglas Hofstadter, Stephen King, and Jacques Derrida. Add o this that the novel's page lay-out mirrors Navidson's moves, thereby forcing the reader to sometimes hold the book upside down or at an anlge, uses different colors, and sports a great number of different fonts, including braille and musical notations, as well as photobraphs, drawings, and poems, and that an exhaustive index concludes it all. House of Leaves is hilariously and irrepresibly inventive in its use of techniques yet at the same time extremely menacing in atmosphere, even to the point of horror. As a result, the reader is constantly torn between a distancing reading of what after all could only be sheer linguistic construction—literally a 'house of leaves', that is to say leaves of a book or pages—and a strong emotional response called forth by the reality of the situations and the characters. It is this tension that finally yields the meaning, and the greatness, of House of Leaves. In his second novel, Only Revolutions (2006), loosely modeled on the genre of the road novel, but also involving a trip through American history, Danielewski tried to outdo the experimentalism even of House of Leaves.

Dave Eggers gained immediate fame with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) a deeply moving and at the same time hilariously funny metafictional recount of the period immediately following the decease of the parents of the protagonist Dave Eggers. When father and mother Eggers die within a month of one another the three older Eggers children, but in the first instance Dave, take upon themselves the care of the much younger Toph. Although based in fact, Eggers' account is thoroughly fictionalized. The book shows many postmodern features, but the pain the Eggers children feel is undeniably real and authentic. Not surprisingly, then, in interviews Eggers has consistently declined to be identified as a postmodernist, a position borne out by his later books, such as You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), in which two friends find out how difficult it is to give away money on reasonable gounds, even in desperately poor places, or What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Dent (2006), the true story of a Sudanese refuge. In A Hologram for the King (2012) Eggers tackles the excesses of globalization and the personal and collective dramas they lead to.

In Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Jonathan, a young Jewish American, visits the Ukraine in search of the village where his ancestors emighrated to the U.S. He meets a young Ukrainian, Alex, who, along with his grandfather, the latter's unbelievable dog ('Sammy Davis, Junior, called Junior') and equally incredible car, takes Jonathan to his destination. All this is being recounted by Alex in a hilarious—and occasionally belabored—varian of the English language. Alex also keeps up a running correspondence with Jonathan. The true beginning of the story, thouh, lies in Trachimbrod, the village Jonathan is looking for. It soon transpires that the history of Trachibrod is being reconstructed, or better, construed, by Jonathan , who sends chapters to Alex for the latter's comment. For the longest time the history of Trachimbrod remains as hilarious as Alex's usage of English, but it assumes a grimmer outleook when it becomes clear that Alex's grandfather himself comes from Trachimbrod, that the village has been wiped off the face of the earth by the Nazis, and that the grandfather in question has played a less than heroic role in this event. Issues of memory, reality, and language, and the thin line between fact and fiction, play a major role in Everything Is Illuminated, and give the novel a postmodern tinge, but the latter, as with Eggers, Danielewski, and the later works of  Powers, is here again gainsid by the authenticity of the tragic events and the reality of the characters. This is less the case in Foer's second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), notwithstanding the fact that this novel is rooted in the events of 9/11, one of the first novels to do so. Foer's use of typographical and other tricks recalls Danielewski's House of Leaves, but his protagonist oscar Schell, a nine-year-old who has lost his father in the 9/11 attacks, is obviously modeled on Oskar Matzerath in The Tin Drum (1959) by German writer Günther Grass (1927-[2015]). And a number of characters and episodes further recall earlier instances of inhuman behavior, such as the bombardment of Dresden and the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima by the Allies in World War II. With Eating Animals (2009) Foer made a plea against present-day commercial practices around food, such as factory farming and commercial fishing. 

The work of Nicole Krauss (1974-) shares a number of characteristics and topics with that of Foer. Her first novel, Man Walks into a Room (2002), although not immediately referring to 9/11 itself, has nevertheless been seen as expressing the mood of desolation and despair caused by those events. A novel about memory, the hopelessness and passing of love, and the loneliness of life, all tied together by a nuclear experiment conducted in the Mojave desert in 1957, Man Walks into a Room is an extended symbolical reflection on good and evil, and on the need for the U.S. to leave the trauma of 9/11 behind while at the same time searching for its causes. Krauss has listed DeLillo as one of her main influences, but the mood of Man Walks into a Room, the apparently aimless conversations, the games with language and memory, the role of coincidence, and how man suffers all this without understanding why and without a hold on her or his own existence, also recall the work of Paul Auster. In fact, the book obliquely refers to Auster when the desert is compared to a 'hunger artist', a thematic constant of much of auster's work, especially in his middle period. The History of Love (2005) is concerned with the Holocaust, features a character from Slonim, in present-day Belarus, from which one of Krauss's Jewish grandparents originated, and its plot at least partially truns upon a manuscript. The Great House (2010), with magical realist traits, again is rooted in Jewish history, and links the lives of characters living as far apart as Chile, the U.S. London and Jerusalem via a desk of many drawers. 

 

 

 

Postmodernity in Prose

 

Tom Stoppard, ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Tom Stoppard's play, re-scripted and directed by himself.






Subtitled in Spanish, also here:

Queen Anne Prose

From George Saintsbury's Short History of English Literature (1907):

(From BOOK VIII - THE AUGUSTAN AGES )

CHAPTER IV

QUEEN ANNE PROSE

Swift—His life—His verse—His prose—His quality and achievement—The Essayists—Steele—His plays—Addison's life—His miscellaneous work—His and Steele's Essays—Bentley—Middleton—Arbuthnot—Atterbury—Bolingbroke—Butler and other divines—Shaftesbury—Mandeville—Berkeley—Excellence of his style—Defoe.

Swift.

 JOHN DUNTON, the eccentric bookseller mentioned at the close of the last chapter, refers to a certain "scoffing Tubman," with whose identity neither he, extensive and peculiar as was his knowledge of literary London, nor almost any one else, was then acquainted. The reference is, of course, to the Tale of a Tub, published anonymously in 1704—the first great book, either in prose or verse, of the eighteenth century, and in more ways than one the herald and champion of its special achievements in literature. Jonathan Swift,¹ its author, one of the very greatest names in English literature, was, like his connections Dryden and Herrick, a plant of no very early development. He had been born as far back as 1667, and his earlier literary productions had been confined to wretched Pindaric odes, some of them contributed to Dunton's own papers, and drawing down upon him that traditional and variously quoted sentence of his great relative, "Cousin Swift, you will never be a [Pindaric] poet," which is said to have occasioned certain ill-natured retorts on Dryden later. Swift's origin, like his character and genius, was purely English, but an accident caused him to be born in Dublin, and other accidents brought about his education in Ireland. His father died before his birth, and his mother was very poor: but his paternal uncle paid for his education at Kilkenny Grammar School and Trinity College, Dublin. He entered Trinity very early, in 1682, and seems to have been neither happy nor successful there, though there may have been less disgrace than has sometimes been thought in his graduation speciali gratia, and not by the ordinary way of right, in 1686.

His life.

He was still under twenty, and for some years found no better connection than a secretaryship in the house of his distant connection, Sir William Temple. In 1694 he went to Ireland, was ordained, and received a small living, but in two years returned to Temple, in whose house he met "Stella," Esther Johnson, his lifelong friend and, as seems most probable, latterly his wife. Temple died in 1699, leaving Swift a small legacy and his literary executorship. He once more returned to Ireland, acted as secretary to Lord-Deputy Berkeley, received some more small preferments, though not such as he wanted, and spent the first decade of the century at Laracor, his chief benefice, and London, where he was a sort of agent for the Archbishop of Dublin. He had all this time been a kind of Whig in politics, but with a strong dislike to Whig anti-clericalism and some other differences; and about 1710 he joined the new Tory party under Harley and St. John, and carried on vigorous war against the Whigs in The Examiner, though he did not break personal friendship with Addison and others. His inestimable services during the four last years of Queen Anne were rewarded only with the Deanery of Dublin—it is said owing to the Queen's pious horror of the Tale of a Tub. Swift lived chiefly in Dublin, but with occasional visits to his friends in England, for more than thirty years longer, and the events of his life, the contests of "Vanessa" and "Stella" for his hand, or at least his heart, his interference with Irish politics, his bodily sufferings, and the end which, after five terrible years of madness, painful or lethargic, came in October 1745, are always interesting and sometimes mysterious. But we cannot dwell on them here, though they have more to do with his actual literary characteristics than is often the case. His dependency in youth, his long sojourn in lettered leisure, though in bitterness of spirit, with a household the master of which was a dilettante but a distinctly remarkable man of letters, his suppressed but evidently ardent affections, his disappointment when at last he reached fame and the chance of power, and his long residence, with failing health, in a country which he hated—all these things must be taken into account, though cautiously, in considering his work.

His verse

This [His work] is of very great bulk, and in parts of rather uncertain genuineness, for Swift was strangely careless of literary reputation, published for the most part anonymously, and, intense as is his idiosyncrasy, contrived to impress it on one or two of his intimate friends, notably on Arbuthnot. It consists of both verse and prose, but the former is rarely poetry and is at its best in easy vers de société, such as Cadenus and Vanessa (the record of his passion or fancy for Esther Vanhomrigh), "Vanbrugh's House," the pieces to Harley and others, and above all, the lines on his own death; or else in sheer burlesque or grotesque, where he has seldom been equalled, as in the famous "Mrs. Harris's Petition," and a hundred trifles, long and short, of the same general kind. Poetry, in the strict and rare sense, Swift seldom or never touches; his chief example of it—an example not absolutely authenticated, seeing that we only possess it as quoted by Lord Chesterfield—is a magnificent fragment about the Last Judgment. Here, and perhaps only here in verse, his characteristic indignation rises to poetic heat. Elsewhere he is infinitely ingenious and humorous in fanciful whim, and, sometimes at least, infinitely happy in expression of it, the pains which, do doubt partly owing to Temple's influence and example, he spent upon correct prose-writing being here extended and reflected in verse. For Swift, although not pedantically, or in the sense of manuals of composition, a correct writer, is so in the higher and better sense to a very unusual degree; and we know that he was better sense to a very unusual degree; and we know that he was so deliberately. Several passages, especially one in the Tatler,² express his views on the point, and his dislike at once of the other luxuriance which it was impossible for a man of his time to relish, and of the inroad of slovenly colloquialism which we have noticed in the last chapter.


His prose

Yet if Swift had been, like his patron, and perhaps in some sort exemplar, Temple, nothing more, or little more, than a master of form in prose, his prosition in literature would be very different from that which he actually holds. His first published prose piece, the Dissenssions of Athens and Rome (an application, according to the way of the times, to contempoarary politics), contains, except in point of style, nothing very noticeable. But the anonymous volume of 1704 is compact of very different stuff. The Battle of the Books, a contribution to the "Ancient and Modern" debate on Temple's side and in Temple's honour, is not supreme, though very clever, admirably written and arranged, and such as no Englishman recently living, save Butler and Dryden, could have written, while Butler would have done it with more clumsiness of form, and Dryden with less lightness of fancy. The Tale of a Tub has supremacy. It may be peremptorily asserted that irreligion is neither intended nor involved in it. For nearly two centuries the ferocious controversies, first between Rome and Protestantism, then between different bodies of Protestants, had entirely blinded men to the extreme danger that the rough handling which they bestowed upon their enemies would recoil on the religion which underlay those enemies' beliefs as well as their own. Adn this, as well as the other danger of the excessive condemnation of "enthusiasm," was not seen till long after Swift's death. But the satire on Peter (Rome), Jack (Calvinism, or rather the extremer Protestant sects generally), and Martin (Lutheranism and Anglicanism) displays an all-pervading irony of thought, and a felicity of expressing that irony, which had never been seen in English prose before. The irony, it must be added, goes, as far as things human are concerned, very deep and very wide, and its zigzag glances at politics, philosophy, manners, the hopes and desires and pursuits and pleasures and pains of man, leave very little unscathed. There is a famous and not necessarily false story that Swift, in his sad latter days, once exclaimed, in reference to the Tale, "What a genius I had when I wrote that book!" The exclamation, if made, was amply justified. The Tale of a Tub is one of the very greatest books of the world, one of those in which a great drift of universal thought receives consummate literary form.

The decade of his Whiggery (or, as it has been more accurately described, of his neutral state with Whig leanings) saw no great bulk of work, but some exquisite examples of this same irony in a lighter kind. This was the time of the charming Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1708) and of Swift's contributions to the Tatler, which periodical indeed owed him a great deal more than the mere borrowing of the nom de guerre—Isaac Bickerstaffe—which he had used in a seris of ingenious persecutions of the almanack-maker, Partridge. The shorter period of Tory domination was very much more prolific in bulk of work, but except in the wonderful Journal to Stella (1710-13), which was never intended for any eye but hers (and the faithful "Dingley's"), the literary interest is a littel inferior. The Examiners are of extraordinary force and vigour; the Remarks on the Barrier Treaty (1712), the Public Spirit of the Whigs (1714), and above all the Conduct of the Allies (1711), which Johnson so strangely decried, are masterly specimens of the political pamphlet. The largest work of this time, the History of the Four Last Years of Queen Anne, is sometimes regarded as doubtfully genuine, though there is no conclusive reason for ruling it out.

His very greatest prose work, however, dates from the last thirty years of his life, and especially from the third, fourth and firth lustres of this time, for the last was darkened by his final agony, and in the first decade he was too marked a man to venture on writing what might have brought upon him the exile of Atterbury or the prison of Harley and Prior. He began at once, however, a curious kind of Irish patriotism, which was in fact nothing but an English Fronde. In 1724 some jobbery about a new copper coinage in Ireland gave him a subject, and he availed himself of this in the Drapier's Letters with almost miraculous skill; while two years later came the greatest of all his books, greater for method, range, and quiet mastery than even the Tale, that is to say Gulliver's Travels. The short but consummate Modest Proposal for eating Irish children, the pair to the Argument against Abolishing Christianity, as a short example of the Swiftian irony, came in 1729; and the chief of his important works later were the delightful Polite Conversation (1738), probably written or at least begun much earlier, in which the ways and speeches of ordinary good society are reproduced with infinite humour and spirit, and the Directions to Servants, almost as witty, but more marked with Swift's ugliest fault, a coarseness of idea and language, which seems rather the result of positive and individual disease than the survival of Restoration license.

His quality and achievement

There is no doubt that on the whole Swift's peculiar powers, temper, and style are shown in his one generally known book as well as anywhere else. The absence of the fresher, more whimsical, and perhaps even deeper, irony and pessimism of the Tale of a Tub, and the loss of self-control indicated in the savage misanthropy of the Hoyhnhnms finale, are compensated by a more methodical and intelligible scheme, by the charm of narrative, by range and variety of subject, and by the abundance of little lively touches which that narrative suggests and facilitates. The mere question of the originality of the scheme is, as usual, one of the very slightest importance. Swift had predecessors, if he had not patterns, in Lucian and in scores of other writers down to and beyond Cyrano de Bergerac. The idea, indeed, of combining the interest and novelty of foreign travel with an obvious satire on "travellers' tales," and a somewhat less obvious one on the follies, vices, and contrasted foibles of mankind, is not beyond tthe range of an extremely moderate intellect, and could never be regarded as the property or copyright even of the greatest. It is the astonishing vigour and variety of Swift's dealing with this public stuff that craves notice: and twenty times the space here available would be too little to do justice to that. The versatility with which the picture—it can hardly even at its worst be called the caricature—of mankind is adjusted to the different meridians of the little people the giants, the pedants, the unhappy inmortals, and the horses—the dexterous relief of the satirists' lash with the mere tickling of the humourist—the wonderful prodigality of power and the more wonderful economy of words and mere decorations—all these things deserve the most careful study, and the most careful study will not in the least intefere with, but will only enhance, the perpetual enjoyment of them.

It only remains to point out very briefly the suitableness of the style to the work. Swift's style is extremely unadorned, though the unfailing spirit of irony prevents it from being, exept to the most poor and unhappy tastes, in the very least degree flat. Though not free from grammatical licenses, it is on the whole corret enough, and is perfectly straightforward and clear. There may be a very different meaning lurking by way of innuendo behind Swift's literal and grammatical sense, but that sense itself can never be mistaken. Further, he has—unless he deliberately assumes them as the costumes of a part he is playing—absolutely no distinguishing tricks or manners, no catchwords, and in especial no unusual phrases or vocables either imitated or invented. In objecting to neologisms, as he did very strongly, he was perhaps critically in the wrong; for a language which ceases to grow dies. But, like some, though by no means all, similar objectors, he has justified his theory by his practice. In fact, if intellectual genius and literary art be taken together, no prose-writer, who is a prose-writer mainly, is Swift's superior, and a man might be hard put to it to say who among such writers in the plainer English can be pronounced his equal.

The Essayists

It has been said that it is hard to settle the credit of the invention of the Queen Anne Essay, in which the characteristic of the later Augustan period was chiefly shown. For years before it appeared, the essay-writers, from Bacon to Temple on the one hand, and the journalists, of whom the most remarkable were mentioned at the close of the last chapter, on the other, had been bearing down nearr and nearer to this particular point. The actual starting is usually assigned to the Review of a greater than any of these journalists, Daniel Defoe, who will, however, find a more suitable place later in this chapter. And it is noteworthy that Swift, whose fertility in ideas was no less remarkable than the nonchalance with which he abandoned them or suggested them to his friends, was most intimate with Steele and Addison just at the time of the appearance of the Tatler, lent it a nom de guerre, wrote for it, and may in different metaphors be said to have given it inspiration, atmosphere, motive power, launch. But it was undoubtedly set agoing under the management of another person, Steele, and he need not be deprived of the honour.

Richard Steele was born in Dublin in March 1672, but he had little to do with Ireland afterwards. His school was the Charterhouse, and from it he went to Merton College at Oxford, where he was postmaster. But though he made some stay at the University he took no degree, and left it for the army, beginning as a cadet or gentlemen volunteer in the second Life Guards, whence he passed as an ensign to the Coldstreams and as a captain to Lucas's foot. He became Gazetteer in 1707, and a little later engaged, with more zeal than discretion, in Whig politics, being expelled from the House of Commons in the turbulent last years of Anne. The success of the Hanoverians restored him to fortune, or the chance of it, and he was knighted and made patentee of Drury Lane. But he was always a spendthrift and a speculator, and in his later years he had to retire to an estate which his second wife (an heiress in Wales as the first had been in the West Indies) had brougth him near Caermarthen. He died there in 1729. His letters and even his regular works tell us a great deal about his personality, which, especially as contrasted with that of Addison, has occasioned much writing.

Steele's desertion of the University for the army might not seem to argue a devotion to the Muses. But he began³ while still a soldier by a book of devotion, The Christian Hero (1701), and it was not in him, whatever it might have been in another, at all inconsistent to turn to play-writing, in which occupation he observed, though not excessively, the warnings of Jeremy Collier. The Tatler (1709) opened his true vein, and in it, in the Spectator, in the Guardian, in the Englishman, Lover, and other periodicals, he displayed a faculty for miscellany more engaging, though much less accomplished, than Addison's own. In the political articles of this series, and still more in his political pamphlets, he is at his worst, for he had no argumentative faculty, and was utterly at the mercy of such an opponent as Swift. The Conscious Lovers, his most famous play, was late (1722) and is distinguished, amid the poor plays between Farquhar and Sheridan, for its mixture of briskness and amiability. There was a third ingredient, sentimentality, which is indeed sufficiently prominent in Steele's earlier comedies, The Funeral (1701), The Lying Lover (1703), and The Tender Husband (1705), and by no means absent from his essays. But, with a little allowance, it adds to these latter a charm which, though it may be less perceptible to later generations than it was to those who had sickened at the ineffable brutality of the time immediately preceding, can still be felt.

His plays

Of the plays, though all endeavor to carry out Collier's principles, The Conscious Lovers is the only one which deserves Fielding's raillery, through Parson Adams, as to its being "as good as a sermon," which Hazlitt has rather unfairly extended to all. Even The Conscious Lovers contains, in the scenes between Tom and Phyllis, pictures of flirtation below stairs which, with all Steele's tenderness and good feeling, have nearly as much vivacity as any between the most brazen varlets and baggages of the Restoration dramatists. The Lying Lover, an adaptation of Le Menteur, is of no great merit, perhaps because it also has a slight tendency to sermonising. But The Funeral, though very unnatural in plot and decidedly unequal in character, contains a famous passage of farcical comedy between an undertaker and his mates, and a good though rascally lawyer. The most uniformly amusing of the four is The Tender Husband, though the appropriateness of the title is open to question. The pair of innocents, the romantic heiress Biddy Tipkin and the clumsy heir Humphry Gubbin, are really diverting, and in the first case to no small extent original; while they have furnished hints to no less successors than Fielding, Goldsmith, Sheridan, and Miss Austen. The lawyer and the gallant are also distinctly good, and the aunt has again furnished hints for Mrs. Malaprop, as Biddy has for Lydia. Steele, who always confessed, and probably as a rule exaggerated, his debts to Addison, acknowledges them here; and there is a certain Addisonian tone about some of the humours, though Steele was quite able to have supplied them. Fond as he was of the theatre, however, and familiar with it, he had little notion of constructing a play, and his morals constantly tripped up his art. The essay, not the drama, was his real field.

The almost inextricable entanglement of the work of Steele with Addison's, and the close connection of the two in life, have always occasioned a set of comparison, not to the advantage of one, now to that of the other, in literary history; and there is probably more loss than gain in the endeavour to separate them sternly. We may therefore best give Addison's life, and such short sketch of his books as is possible now, and then consider together the work, still in parts not very clearly attributable to one more than to the other, which gives them, and must always give them, an exalted place in English literature.

Addison's life

Joseph Addison⁴ was born, like Steele, in 1672, but in May instead of March. His father, Lancelot Addison, was a divine of parts and position, who became Dean of Lichfield. His mother's name was Jane Gulston. After experience of some country schools, at one of which he is said to have shared in a "barring-out," he, like Steele, went to the Charterhouse and then to Oxford, where he was first at Queen's then at Magdalen, holding a demyship, taking his Master's degree in 1693, and being elected to a Fellowship in 1697, at the latter college, where "Addison's Walk" preserves his name. He made early acquaintance with Dryden, but adopted Whig politics; and, by the influence of Montague, obtained in 1699 a travelling pension of £300 a year. He discharged the obligation loyally, remaining four years abroad, visiting most parts of the Continent, and preparing, if not finishing, his only prose works of bulk, the Remarks on Italy (1704) and the Dialogues on Medals, not published till later. But when he came back in 1703, Halifax was out of favour, his pension was stopped, and, having broken off his University career by his failure to take orders, he was for some time in doubtful prospects. But his poem of The Campaign, in which he celebrated Blenheim (1704), with one fine passage and a good deal of platitude, gained high reputation in the dearth of poetical accomplishment, and the short summer of favour for men of letters, which followed Dryden's death; and he was made a Commissioner of Excise.

This was the first of a long series of appointments, official and diplomatic, which was not, thanks to Swift, entirely interrupted even during the Tory triumph, and which enabled Addison, who had been in 1703 nearly penniless, to lay out, in 1711, £10,000 on an estate in Warwickshire. It culminated in 1717, after the Hanoverian triumph, by his being appointed Secretary of State, which office he held but a short time, resigning it for a large pension. He had a year before married the Countess Dowager of Warwick, and he died of dropsy at Holland House in 1719, aged only forty-seven. His character has been discussed, not with acrimony, for no one can dislike Addison, but with some heat. He had none of the numerous foibles of which Steele was guilty, except a rather too great devotion to wine. But the famous and magnificent "Character of Atticus," by Pope, is generally supposed by all but partisans to be at best a poisoned dart, which hit true. His correct morality —the Bohemian philosopher Mandeville called him "a parson in a tie-wig"—has been set down to cold-bloodedness, and there has even been noticeable dissension about the relative amount of literary genius in him and in Steele.

His miscellaneous work

As noticed already, Addison's literary work outside periodicals is by no means small. His early Latin poems are very clever, and very happy in their artificial way. Of his English verse nothing has survived, except his really beautiful hymns, where the combination of sincere religious feelings (of the sincerity of Addison's religion there is absolutely no doubt, though it was of a kind now out of fashion) and of critical restraint produced things of real, though modest and quiet, excellence. "The Lord my pasture shall prepare," "The spacious firmament on high," and "How are thy servants blest! O Lord," may lack the mystical inspiration of the greatest hymns, but their cheerful piety, their graceful use of images, which, though common, are never mean, their finish and even, for the time, their fervour make them singularly pleasant. The man who wrote them may have had foibles and shortcomings, but he can have had no very grave faults, as the authors of more hysterical and glowing compositions easily might.

The two principal prose works are little read now, but they are worth reading. They show respectable learning (with limitations admitted by such a well-qualified and well-affected critic as Macaulay), they are excellent examples (though not so excellent as the Essays) of Addison's justly famous prose, and they exhibit, in the opening of the Medals and in all the descriptive passages of the Italy, the curious insensibility of the time to natural beauty, or else its almost more curious inability to express what it felt, save in the merest generalities and commonplaces.

The three plays at least indicate Addison's possession, though in a much less degree, of his master Dryden's general faculty of literary craftsmanship. The opera of Rosamond is, indeed, clearly modelled on Dryden in its serious parts, but is no great success there. The lighter and more whimsical quality of Addison's humour enabled him to do better in the farcical passages, which, especially in the speeches of Sir Trusty, sometimes have a singularly modern and almost Gilbertian quality to them. The comedy of The Drummer, where a Wiltshire tradition is used to make a play on a theme not entirely different from Steele's Funeral (in each a husband is thought to be dead when he is not), contains, like Steele's own pieces, some smart "words," but no very good dramatic situation or handling. It is, also like Steele's, an attempt to write Restoration drama in the fear of Jeremy Collier. Cato, the most famous, is at this time of day by far the least interesting. Its universally known stock-pieces give almost all that it has of merit in versification and style; as a drama it has an uninteresting plot, wooden characters, and a great absence of life and idiosyncrasy.

His and Steele's Essays

It is very different when we turn to the Essays. The so-called Essay which Steele launched in the Tatler, which was taken up and perfected in the Spectator, which had numerous immediate followers, and a succession of the greatest importance at intervals throughout the century, and which at once expressed and influenced the tone and thought of that century after a fashion rarely paralleled, was not originally started in quite the form which it soon assumed, and never, for the greater part of a hundred years, wholly lost. Naturally enough, Steele at first endeavoured to make it a newspaper, as well as a miscellany and review. But by degrees, and before very long, news was dropped, and comment, in the form of special essays, of "letters to the editor," sometimes real, oftener manufactured, of tales and articles of all the various kinds which have subsisted with no such great change till the present day, reigned alone. As Addison's hand prevailed—though literature, religion, and even politics now and then, the theatre very often, and other things were not neglected—the main feature of the two papers, and especially of the Spectator, became a kind of light but distinctly firm censorship of manners, especially the part of them nearest to morals, and of morals, especially the part of them nearest to manners. Steele, always zealous and always generous, but a little wanting in criticism, not infrequently diverged into sentimentality. Addison's tendency, though he, too, was unflinchingly on virtue's side, was rather towards a very mellow and not unindulgent but still quite distinctly cynical cynicism—a smile too demure ever to be a grin, but sometimes, except on religious subjects, faintly and distantly approaching a sneer. This appears even in the most elaborate and kindly of the imaginative creations of the double series, Sir Roger de Coverley, whom Steele indeed seems to have invented, but whom Addison adopted, perfected, and (some, perhaps without reason, say) even killed out of kindness, lest a less delicate touch should take the bloom out of him. This great creation, which comes nearer than anything out of prose fiction or drama to the masterpieces of the novelists and dramatists, is accompanied by others hardly less masterly; while Addison is constantly, and Steele not seldom, has sketches or touches as perfect in their way, though less elaborate. It is scarcely too much to say that these papers, and especially the Spectator, taught the eighteenth century how it should, and especially how it should not, behave in public places, from churches to theatres; what books it should like, and how it should like them; how it should treat its lovers, mistresses, husbands, wives, parents, and friends; that it might politely sneer at operas, and must not take any art except literature too seriously; that a moderate and refined devotion to the Protestant religion and the Hanoverian succession was the duty, though not the whole duty, of a gentleman. It is still a little astonishing to find with what docility the century obeyed and learnt its lesson. Addison died a little before, Steele not much after, its first quarter closed; yet in the lighter work of sixty or seventy years later we shall find, with the slightest differences of external fashion, the laws of the Spectator held still by "the town" with hardly a murmur, by the country without the slightest hesitation. In particular, those papers taught the century how to write; and the lesson was accepted on this point with almost more unhesitating obedience than on any other. The magnificent eulogy of Johnson, who had himself deviated not a little, though perhaps unconsciously, from Addisonian practice, would have been disputed by hardly any one who reached manhood in England between the Peace of Utrecht and the French Revolution; and, abating its exclusiveness a little, it remains true still.

Steele, though he has some rarer flights than his friend, is much less correct, and much less polished; while, though he had started with equal chances, his rambling life had stored him with far less learning than Addison possessed. The latter, while he never reached the massive strength and fiery force of Swift, did even more than Swift himself to lift English prose out of the rut, or rather quagmire, of colloquialism and slovenliness in which, as we have seen, it was sinking. He could even though he rarely did, rise to a certain solemnity—caught, it may be, from Temple, who must have had much influence on him. But, like Temple's, though with a more modern, as well as a more varied and completely polished, touch, his style was chiefly devoted to the "middle" subjects and manners. He very rarely attempts sheer whimsical fooling. But he can treat all the subjects that come within the purview and interests of a well-bred man of this world, who by no means forgets the next, in a style quite inimitable in its golden mediocrity—well-informed, without being in the least pedantic; moral, without direct preaching (unless he gives forewarning); slightly superior, but with no provoking condescension in it; polite, without being frivolous or finicking; neat, but not overdressed; easy, but, as Johnson justly states, never familiar in any offensive degree. It is easier to feel enthusiasm about Steele, who had so much, than about Addison, who at any rate shows so little; and on the character, the genius, the originality, of the two there may always be room for dispute. But it seems incredible that any one should deny to Addison the credit of being by far the greater artist, and of having brought his own rather special, rather limited, but peculiar and admirable division of art to a perfection seldom elsewhere attained in letters. These three greatest writers were surrounded by others hardly less than great. Arbuthnot, Atterbury, Bentley, Bolingbroke, Mandeville, the younger Shaftesbury, Berkeley, Butler, Middleton, were all either actual contributors to the great periodical series, or intimately connected with those who wrote these, or (which is of equal importance to us) at any rate exponents of the extremely plain prose style, which required the exquisite concinnity of Addison, the volcanic and Titanic force and fire of Swift, or the more than Attic stateliness and grace of Berkeley, to sabe it from being too plain. The order in which they are to be mentioned is unimportant, and few can have more than very brief space, but none must pass unnoticed.

Bentley

Richard Bentley, a very great classical scholar, and no mean writer of English, was a Yorkshire man, born in 1662, and educated at Wakefield. He went early to St. John's College, Cambridge, was taken as a private tutor into the household of Stillingfleet, took orders not very early, was made King's Librarian in 1694, engaged, and was completely victorious, in the Ancient and Modern Controversy, especially in reference to the Epistles of Phalaris; was made Master of Trinity in 1699, and passed nearly the whole of his more than forty years of mastership, till his death in 1742, in a desperate struggle with his college, wherein, if his adversaries were unscrupulous, he was no less so, while the right was on the whole rather against him, though his bull-dog tenacity has won most commentators on the matter to his side. There is at any rate no doubt of his learning, his logical power, and his very real, though gruff and horseplayful, humour. To merely English literature he stands⁶ in two very different relations. His almost incredibly absurd emendations on Milton would, if the thing were not totally alien from the spirit of the man, seem like a designed parody on classical scholarship itself. But his writing, especially in the famous Phalaris dissertation, and in the remarks of the Deist Collins, is extraordinarily vigorous and vivid. His birth-date, probably even more than a design to avoid the reproach of pedantry, made him colloquial, homely, and familiar down to the very level from which Swift and Addison tried to lift, and to a great extent succeeded in lifting prose; but his native force and his wide learning save him, though sometimes with difficulty, from the merely vulgar.

Middleton

Conyers Middleton, Bentley's most deadly enemy, was, like Bentley, a Yorkshireman, but was much younger, having been born at Richmond in 1683. He went to Trinity young, and was not only a Fellow thereof, but connected throughout his life with Cambridge, by his tenure of the offices of University Librarian from 1722 onwards, and Woodwardian Professor of Geology for a time. He was a man of property, was thrice married, and held several livings till his death in 1750, though his orthodoxy was, in his own times and afterwards, seriously impugned.

This does not concern us here, though it may be observed that Middleton may be cleared from anything but a rather advanced stage of the latitudinarianism and dislike of "enthusiasm" which was generally felt by the men of his time, and which invited—indeed necessitated—the Evangelical and Methodist revolt. So, too, we need not busy ourselves much with the question whether he directly plagiarised, or only rather breely borrowed from the Scotch Latinist, Bellenden, in his longest and most famous prose work, the Life of Cicero (1741). Besides this, he wrote two controversial works of length—ostensibly directed against Popery, certainly against extreme supernaturalism, and, as his enemies will have it, covertly against Christianity—entitled A Letter from Rome, showing an exact Conformity between Popery and Paganism (1729), and A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are supposed to have existed in the Christian Church (1748); with a large number of small pamphlets on a variety of subjects, in treating which he showed wide culture and intelligence. His place here, however, is that of the most distinguished representative of the absolutely plain style—not colloquial and vernacular like Bentley's, but on the other hand attempting none of the graces which Addison and Berkeley in their different ways achieved—a style more like the plainer Latin or French styles than like anything else in English.

Arbuthnot

John Arbuthnot,⁸ the "moon" of Swift, born 1667, came of the noble family of that name in Kincardineshire, but went to Oxford, and spent all the latter part of his life in London, where he was physician to Queen Anne, a strong Tory, and an intimate friend of Swift and Pope. He died in 1735, much respected and beloved. Arbuthnot's literary fate, or rather the position which he deliberately chose, was peculiar. It is very difficult to identify much of his work, and what seems certainly his (especially the famous History of John Bull and The Memoirs of Scriblerus) is exceedingly like Swift, and was pretty certainly produced in concert with that strange genius, who, unlike some animals, never took colour from his surroundings, but always gave them his own. It is, however, high enough praise that Arbuthnot, at the best of his variable work, is not inferior to anything but the very best of Swift. There is the same fertility and the same unerringness of irony; and, if we can distinguish, it is only that a half or wholly good-natured amusement takes the place of Swift's indignation.

Atterbury

Francis Atterbury,⁹ born in Buckinghamshire in 1672, a distinguished Christ Church man, who, after being head of his house, obtained the bishopric of Rochester and the Deanery of Westminster in succession to Sprat, was the divine and scholar of the extreme Tory party, as Arbuthnot was their man of science. He has been accused not merely of conspiring after the Hanoverian succession, but of denying it, and sailing too near perjury in this denial. Of this there is no sufficient proof, and we must remember that the political ethics of the age were extremely accomodating. He was at any rate attained, and banished (in 1723) to France, where he died nine years later. A brilliant and popular preacher, a pleasant letter-writer, a most dangerous controversialist and debater, and a good critic (though he made the usual mistakes of his age about poetry before Waller), Atterbury wrote in a style not very unlike Addison's, though inferior to it.

Bolingbroke

The huge contemporary fame of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke,¹⁰ and its rapid and lasting decline after his death, are among the commonplaces of literary history. He was born in 1678, passed through Eton and Christ Church, entered Parliament very early, was Secretary for War at six-and-twenty, climbed with Harley to power, and contrived to edge his companion "out," but remained "in" himself only a few days, fled to the Continent, returned to England and recovered his estates, but not his seat in Parliament, in 1723, organised and carried out the English Fronde  against Walpole, and died in 1751. His career—for he was as famous for "wildness" as for success—was one of those which specially appeal to the vulgar, and are not uninteresting even to unvulgar tastes. He was beyond question one of the greatest orators of his day, and he was extravagantly praised by his friends, who happened to include the chief poet and the greatest prose writer of the time. Yet hardly any one who for generations has opened the not few volumes of his works has closed them without more or less than profound disappointment. Bolinbroke, more than any other English writer, is a rhetorician pure and simple; and it was his misfortune, first, that the subjects of his rhetoric were not the great and perennial subjects, but puny ephemeral forms of them—the partisan and personal politics of his day, the singularly shallow form of infidelity called Deism, and the like—and, secondly, that his time deprived him of many, if not most, of the rhetorician's most telling weapons. The Letter to Windham (1716), a sort of apologia, and the Ideal of a Patriot King (1749) exhibit him at his best.

Butler and Other Divines

Benjamin Hoadly (1676-1761), a pluralist courtier, and more than doubtfully orthodox divine on the Whig side, held four sees in succession, in one at least of which he was the cause of much literature, or at least many books, by provoking the famous "Bangorian" controversy. He himself wroter clearly and well. Nor can the same praise be denied to Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) philosopher, physicist, and divine. There is more diversity of opinion about the purely literary merites, as distinguished from the unquestioned claims in religious philosophy, of Bishop Joseph Butler, who was born at Wantage in 1692, left Nonconformity for the Church, went to Oriel, became preacher at the Rolls Chapel, Rector of Stanhope, Bishop of Bristol, Dean of St. Paul's, and, lastly, Bishop of Durham, owing these appointments to no cringing or intrigue, but to his own great learning, piety, wisdom, and churchmanship, fortunately backed by Queen Caroline's fancy for philosophy. Butler's Sermons, published in 1726, and his Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion ten years later, occasionally contain aphorisms of beauty equal to their depth; but it is too much to claim "crispness and clearness" for his general style,¹¹ which is, on the contrary, too often obscure and tough.

Shaftesbury

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, the third of his names and title, the grandson of "Achitophel," and the son of the "shapeless lump" (a phrase for which he never forgave Dryden), was born in 1671. His mother was Lady Dorothy Manners. He was brought up partly by a learned lady, and partly by Locke. He was for three years at Winchester, went to no University , and travelled a good deal abroad. He sat for a short time in the House of Commons, but made no figure there or in the House of Lords, where, during nearly the whole time of his tenure of the earldom (1699-1713), politics, whether Whig or Tory, were of too rough a cast for his dilettantism. He died, after more foreign travel, in 1713. His writings, scattered and not extensive, had been collected two years before as Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.¹² Shaftesbury was an original and almost powerful thinker and writer, spoilt by an irregular education, a sort of morbid aversion from English thought generally, an early attack of Deism, and a strong touch of affectation. Much harm has been done to him by Lamb's description of his style as "genteel," a word in Lamb's time and later not connoting the snobbishness which has for half a century been associated with it. "Superfine," the usual epithet, is truer; though Dr. George Cambpell, an excellent critic, was somewhat too severe¹³ on Shaftesbury's Gallicisms, and his imprudent and rather amateurish engagement in the Deist controversy of the time caused him to be broken a little too ruthlessly on the wheel, adamantine in polish as in strength, of Berkeley in Alciphron. His central doctrine, that ridicule is the test of truth, as well as his style, are in reality caricatures of Addison, though the dates preclude any notion of plagiarism. He is full of suggestion, and might have been a great thinker and writer.


Mandeville

Shaftesbury's superfineness and his optimism seem to have had at least a considerable share in provoking the cynical pessimism of another remarkable thinker of this time, Bernard Mandeville, or de Mandeville,¹⁴ a Dutchman, born at Dordrecht about 1670, who came early to London, attained a singular mastery in English, practised physic, and died in 1733. There is some mystery, and probably some mystification, about the origin of The Grumbling Hive, better known by its later title of The Fable of the Bees. No edition earlier than 1705 is known, but Mandeville claimed a much earlier date for it. About nine years later a reprint, in 1714, drew attention, and after yet another nine years another was "presented" by the Grand Jury of Middlesex, and fiercely denounced by men of such importance as law and Berkeley. The book, which was constantly enlarged, is in its final form a cluster of prose tractates, with a verse nucleus (the original piece) showing how vice made some bees happy, and virtue made them miserable. A good deal of other work, some certainly and some probably spurious, is attributed to Mandeville, who is the Diogenes of English philosophy. An exceedingly charitable judgment may impute to deliberate paradox, and to irritation at Shaftesbury's airy gentility, his doctrine that private vices are public benefits; but the gusto with which he caricatures and debases everything pure and noble and of good report is, unluckily, too genuine. He thought, however, with great force and acuteness, despite his moral twist; he had a strong, fertile, and whimsical humour; and his style, plebeian as it is, may challenge comparison with the most famous literary vernaculars in English for racy individuality.

Berkeley

If, however, Shaftesbury has rather too much of the peacock, and Mandeville a great deal too much of the polecat, about him, no depreciatory animal comparison need be sought or feared for George Berkeley, the best-praised man of his time, and among the most deserving of praise. He was born in 1685 near Kilkenny, and was educated first, like swift and Congreve earlier, at its famous grammar school, and then at Trinity College, Dublin, where he made a long residence, and wrote his chief purely philosophical works. In 1713 he went to London , and was introduced to the wits by Swift, after which he travelled on the Continent for several years. He was made Dean of Derry in 1724, went with missionary schemes, which were defeated, to North America, but returned, in 1731, and published the admirable dialogues of Alciphron. He was made Bishop of Cloyne in 1714, and for eighteen years resided in his diocese. A few months before his death, in 1753, he had gone, in bad health, to Oxford, and he died there.

Berkeley's principal works,¹⁵ or groups of works, are first—The Theory of Vision (1709), The Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), and the Dialogues of Hylas [Materialist] and Philonous [partisan of mind], in which, continuing the Lockian process of argument against innate ideas, he practically re-established them by a further process of destruction, and brought down on himself a great deal of very ignorant attack or banter for his supposed denial of matter. The above-mentioned Alciphron; or, the Minute Philosopher, is a series of dialogues, in which the popular infidelity of the day, whether optimist like Shaftesbury's, pessimistical like Mandeville's, or one-sidedly critical like that of the Deists  proper, is attacked in a fashion which those who sympathise with the victims accuse of occasional unfairness, but which has extraordinay cogency as polemic, and extraordinary brilliance as literature. His last important work was Siris, and odd miscellany, advocating tar-water for the body, and administering much excellent mysticism to the soul; but he wrote some minor things, and a good many letters, diaries, etc., which were not fully published till the later years of the present century [19th].

Excellence of his style

Unusually good as a man, and unusually great as a philosopher, Berkeley would have stood in the first rank as a mere writer had his character been bad or unknown, and the matter of his writings unimportant. The charm of his style is at once so subtle and so pervading that it is extremely difficult to separate and define it. He has no mannerisms; although he is a most accomplished ironist, he does not depend upon irony for the seasoning of his style, as, in different ways, do Addison and Swift; he can give the plainest and most unadorned exposition of an abstruse, philosophical doctrine with perfect literary grace. And (as, for instance, in Lysicles' version of Mandeville's vices-and-benefits argument) he can saturate a long passage with satiric innuendo, never once breaking out into direct tirade or direct burlesque. He can illustrate admirably, but he is never the dupe of his illustrations. He is clearer even than Hobbes and infinitely more elegant, while his dialect and arrangement, though originally arrived at for argumentative purposes, or at least in argumentative works, are equally suited for narrative, for dialogue, for description, for almost every literary end. Were it not for the intangibleness, and therefore the inimitableness, of his style, he would be an even better general model than Addison; and, as it is, he is unquestionably the best model in English, if not in any language, for philsoophical,  and indeed for argumentative, writing generally.

Defoe

Daniel Defoe,¹⁶ the link between the great essayists of the earlier and the great novelists of the middle years of the eighteenth century—one of the most voluminous and problematical of English writers, as well as one of all but the greatest—a man, too, of very questionable life and character—could not be fully discussed in any compendious history of English literature. But luckily it is by no means necessary that he should be so discussed, the strictly literary lines of his work being broad and clear, and the problems both of it and of his life being such as may, without any loss, be left to the specialist. He was born, it would seem, in 1659 (not , as used to be though, 1661) in the heart of London, St. Giles's, Cripplegate, where his father (whose name was certainly Foe) was a butcher. It is not known for what reason or cause Daniel, when more than fifty, assumed the "de," sometimes as separate particle, sometimes in composition. He was well educated, but instead of becoming a Nonconformist minister, took to trade, which at intervals and in various forms (stocking-selling, tile-making, etc.) he pursued with no great luck. He seems to have been a partaker in Monmouth's rebellion, and was certainly a good deal abroad in the later years of the seventeenth century, but he early took to the vocation of pamphleteering, which, with journalism and novel-writing, gave his three great literary courses. The chief among the many results of this was the famous Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), a statement of the views of the extreme "Highflying" or High Church party, in which some have seen irony, but which really is the exact analogue in argument of his future fictions, that is to say, an imitation of what he wanted to represent so close that it looks exactly like fact. He was prosecuted, fined, pilloried, and imprisoned, but in the growing Whig temper of the nation, the piece was undoubtedly very effective.

For the greater part of the reign of Queen Anne, and at first in prison, Defoe carried on, from 1704 to 1713, his famous Review, the prototype to some extent of the great later periodicals, but written entirely by himself. Before he had been long in prison he was liberated by Harley, of whose statesmanship, shifting in method, and strangely compounded of Toryism and Whiggery in principle, Defoe became a zealous secret agent. He had a great deal to do with negotiating the Union with Scotland. Nor did Harley's fall put an end to his engagement in subterranean branches of the public service; for it has long been known that under the House of Hanover he discharged the delicate, or indelicate, part ofa Tory journalist, secretly paid by the Whig Government to tone down and take the sting out of Mist's Journal and other opposition papers. He lived for a good many years longer, and did his best literary work in his latest period; but at the last he experienced some unexplained revolution of fortune, and died at Moorfields, in concealment and distress, in 1731.

Of Defoe's, in the strictest sense, innumerable works the following catalogue of the most importan may serve:  —Essay on Projects (1698), an instance of the restless tendency of the time towards commercial and social improvements, and of Defoe's own fertility; The True-Born Englishman (1701), an argument in vigorous though most unpoetical verse to clear William from the disability of his foreign origin; the Hymn to the Pillory (1703), composed on the occasion of his exhibition in that implement, still more vigorous and a little less unpoetical; the curious political satire of the Consolidator (1705); the masterly Relation of Mrs. Veal, the first instance of his wonderful "lies like truth"; Jure Divino (1706), worse verse and also worse sense than The True-Born Englishman. But the best of these is poor compared with the great group of fiction of his later years — Robinson Crusoe (1719), Duncan Campbell, Memoirs of a Cavalier, and Captain Singleton (all produced in 1720), Moll Flanders, the History of the Plague, and Colonel Jack (all in 1722), Roxana (1724), and A New Voyage Round the World (1725). Besides these, he published in his later years, as he had in his earlier, a crowd of works, small and great, political, topographical, historical, moral, and miscellaneous.

It is not of much use to discuss Defoe's moral character, and it is sincerely to be hoped that no more revelations concerning it will turn up, inasmuch as each is more damaging than the last, except to those, who have succeeded in taking his true measure once for all. It is that of a man who, with no high, fine, or poetical sentiment to save him, shared to the full the partisan enthusiasm of his time, and its belief that all was fair in politics. His literary idiosyncrasy is more comfortable to handle. He was a man of extraordinary industry and versatility, who took an interest, subject to the limitations of his temperament, in almost everything, whose brain was wonderfully fertile, and who had a style, if not of the finest or most exquisite, singularly well suited to the multifarious duties to which he put it. Also, he could give, as hardly even Bunyan had given before him, and as nobody has since, absolute verisimilitude to fictitious presentations. He seems to have done this mainly by a certain chameleon-like faculty of assuming the atmosphere and colour of his subject, and by a cunning profusion of exactly suited and selected detail. It is enough that in Robinson Crusoe he has produced, by help of this gift, a book which is, throughout its first two parts, one of the great books of the world in its particular kind; and that parts of Moll Flanders, Captain Singleton, and Colonel Jack, at least, are not inferior. Further, the "lift" which Defoe gave to the novel was enormous. He was still dependent on adventure; he did not advance mucho, if at all, beyond the more prosaic romantic scheme. But the extraordinary verisimilitude of his action could not but show the way to the last step that remained to be taken, the final projection of character.

Prose in the Age of Reason