The Language of Fiction

Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel

David Lodge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136751387
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Language of Fiction was the first book of criticism by the renowned novelist and critic David Lodge. His uniquely informed perspective - he was already the author of three successful novels at the time of its first publication in 1966 - and lucid exposition meant that the work proved a landmark of literary criticism, not least because it succeeded

Part I

The Novelist’s Medium and the Novelist’s Art: Problems in Criticism

1

Introductory

Literary theory and criticism concerned with the novel are much inferior in both quantity and quality to theory and criticism of poetry.*

In the modem period, as far as English studies are concerned, critical theory and practice have been dominated by what may be called the New Criticism, in the widest sense of that term—that is, the critical effort extending from T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards to, say, W. K. Wimsatt, characterized by the belief that a poem acquires its meaning and unique identity by virtue of its verbal organization, and that good critical practice depends above all on close and sensitive reading. We might say, therefore, that if what Wellek and Warren alleged in 1949 was true, it was because the New Criticism had not shown its principles and procedures to be as effective when applied to prose fiction as when applied to poetry. At that time, however, there was some disagreement about whether (to borrow Chesterton’s epigram on Christianity) the application had been tried and found wanting, or simply not tried. Mark Schorer, writing in 1948, was of the latter opinion. Summarizing the principles of modem criticism, founded on the ‘exacting scrutiny of literary texts’, and leading to a view of form (or ‘technique’) and content as inseparable, he says:

We are no longer able to regard as seriously intended criticism of poetry which does not assume these generalisations; but the case for fiction has not yet been established. The novel is still read as though its content has some value in itself, as though the subject matter of fiction has greater or lesser value in itself, and as though technique were not a primary but a supplementary element, capable perhaps of not unattractive embellishments upon the surface of the subject, but hardly of its essence. Or technique is thought of in blunter terms than those which one associates with poetry, as such relatively obvious matters as the arrangement of events to create plot; or, within plot, of suspense and climax; or as the means of revealing character motivation, relationship and development, or as the use of point of view…. As for the resources of language, these, somehow, we almost never think of as part of the technique of fiction—language as used to create a certain texture and tone which in themselves state and define themes and meanings; or language, the counters of our ordinary speech, as forced, through conscious manipulation, into all those larger meanings which our ordinary speech almost never intends.1

Philip Rahv, however, while he agrees that criticism of the novel is in an unsatisfactory state—

20th Century criticism has as yet failed to evolve a theory and a set of practical procedures dealing with the prose-medium that are as satisfactory in their exactness, subtlety and variety as the theory and procedures worked out in the past few decades by the critics of poetry2

—argues that what has caused the trouble is the very application of neo-critical theories and procedures for which Schorer pleads:

the commanding position assumed by poetic analysis has led to the indiscriminate importation of its characteristic assumptions and approaches into a field [i.e. prose fiction] which requires generic critical terms and criteria of value that are unmistakably its owns3

Rahv gives three examples of this pernicious influence: an obsession with tracing allegories, symbols, and mythic patterns in novels; the suggestion that style is the essential activity of imaginative prose; and the attempt to reduce a novel to the sum of its techniques. This sounds like a direct counterblast to Schorer, but is in fact part of a debate with J. C. Ransom, who had said:

Let it be proposed to Mr Rahv, therefore, that we should not approve any fictionist who does not possess a prose style. Running over in our minds some memorable fiction, I believe we are likely to identify it with certain instances, or at least with certain remembered kinds, of complexes, or concentrations, which consist in linguistic manoeuvres in the first place (i.e. on the surface) and of feeling-tones or affects in the second place (when it comes to our responses); and not with gross or overall effects such as plots or ideologies. We do not make this discovery any more truly about a play by Shakespeare. And if we are challenged to defend our judgment of the work we do not take up the book in order to refresh ourselves on the plot or moral, but in order to find specific passages, the right passages, for our peculiar evidence. Can we not say that fiction, in being literature, will have style for its essential activity?4

Some of the characteristic postures of the debate about literary criticism and the language of prose fiction here come into focus. We see that it is a new version of the venerable form-content argument. The protagonists are agreed that form and content are inseparable in poetry, but they differ with regard to prose fiction. Rahv warns us against ‘confusing the intensive speech proper to poetry with the more openly communicative, functional and extensive language proper to prose’.5 ‘All that we can legitimately ask of a novelist in the matter of language,’ he says, ‘is that it be appropriate to the matter in hand. What is said must not stand in a contradictory relation to the way it is said, for that would be to dispel the illusion of life, and with it the credibility of fiction.’6 From this point of view it would appear that life, not language, is the novelist’s medium: that it is the way he manipulates and organizes and evaluates the life or, more precisely, the imitation-life of his fictions, that constitutes his literary activity; that his language is merely a transparent window through which the reader regards this life—the writer’s responsibility being merely to keep the glass clean. The function of the critic then becomes that of discerning and assessing the quality of life in a given novel—the plausibility and interest of its characters and their actions, and the nature of its moral discriminations and values.

Since the late ’40s and early ’50s, when the views quoted above were first expressed, there has been a sufficiently striking shift in criticism to make one question whether the assertion of Wellek and Warren can stand unqualified. Of a growth in the quantity of novel-criticism there can be no doubt, and much of it has been of high quality. Several critics (such as those mentioned in my Preface) have made valuable contributions to the critical study of language in fiction. But it would be hard to say that we are any nearer to a resolution of the debate outlined above.

Most attempts to apply neo-critical techniques to prose fiction have taken the form of studying patterns of imagery and symbolism in novels. But too often one feels that the listing of images has not been controlled by an active engagement with the text and the wider critical challenges it presents. Such work brings the verbal analysis of fiction into disrepute, as Philip Rahv’s protest indicates; and the good examples of such criticism are generally lacking in a sound theoretical defence of the method. On the whole, the tide seems to be turning against the orthodoxies of the New Criticism, and such enterprises as Northrop Frye’s systematic theory of myths and genres, or Leslie Fiedler’s essays in bold cultural and psychological interpretation of fiction, have been welcomed in the name of a reaction against the narrow and myopic procedures associated with those orthodoxies.7

It is my own opinion that we are in danger of jettisoning the principles of the New Criticism before we have fully exploited their possibilities. The temptation to do so, however, is strong, particularly in the case of the novel, where, it still seems to me as it seemed to Mark Schorer, modern criticism has never approached the general level of achievement in the close and subtle analysis of language which it attained in the case of poetry. Indeed, in some ways, it has actually inhibited the useful analysis of the function of language in fiction. It is worth inquiring why this should be so; and I believe we may obtain a partial answer by reference to two characteristic assumptions implicit or explicit in the mainstream of modern criticism: that the lyric poem is the literary norm, or the proper basis for generalizing about literature; and that there are two quite different kinds of language, the literary and the non-literary.

Modern Criticism and Literary Language

M. H. Abrams and Frank Kermode have shown clearly and perceptively (in The Mirror and the Lamp and Romantic Image respectively1) how the idea of the lyric poem as the literary norm evolved out of the theory and practice of the English Romantic poets and, later, of the French Symbol-ist poets, contributing to the modern critical doctrine that a poem is autotelic, non-paraphrasable, non-translatable, a verbal object in which every part is organically related to every other part and to the whole, something which ‘should not mean but be’. Closely associated with this doctrine are a number of theories about the difference between literary and non-literary language. These theories also go back to the Romantics, and even earlier, but for modern criticism I. A. Richards’s formulation has probably been the most influential:

A statement may be used for the sake of the reference, true or false, which it causes. This is the scientific use of language. But it may also be used for the sake of the effects in emotion and attitude produced by the reference it occasions. This is the emotive use of language2

Richards’s formulation is coloured by his own psychological and affective theory of literary value, which is not universally shared. But the notion of two basic types of discourse is pervasive in modern criticism. Northrop Frye, for example, despite his declared dissatisfaction with the concepts of modern criticism, is making basically the same distinction in talking of ‘inward-’ and ‘outward-pointing structures’:

Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or in practice to our memory of the conventional associations between them. The other direction is inward, or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make…. In all literary structures the final direction of meaning is inward.3

Examples of other critics formulating similar views could be multiplied. Empson’s ‘ambiguity’, Blackmur’s ‘gesture’, Ransom’s ‘texture’, Brooks’s ‘irony’, are essentially concepts offered to define the peculiar qualities of literary language, and to distinguish it from other kinds of language.4

Now, none of these critics is concerned to deny prose fiction the status of literature, but its claims to be so considered can appear somewhat tenuous in the light of their poetics. Richards’s distinction is valid in so far as it states that we may use language for different purposes, i.e. to assert different orders of truth. But there is a temptation, to which many critics have yielded, to look for reflections of linguistic purpose in linguistic form. Because of the dominance of the lyric in post-Romantic poetics, we then get a concentration of attention on a particular kind of verbal intensity, on paradox, irony, ambiguity, and metaphorical density. Literature which does not manifest these qualities to any striking extent tends to be subjected either to disparagement (as in the notorious case of Milton) or to a critical approach which does not concern itself closely with language (as in the case of the novel).

In Richards’s scheme, ‘the supreme form of emotive language is poetry’,5 while referential language is typified by scientific description. The novel, however, comes nearer to the latter than to the former in the formal character of its language, which is prose; and this has been a source of much confusion about the genre’s literary identity. It will be useful, therefore, to glance briefly at literary thinking about poetry and prose from the Romantic period to modern times.

Poetry and Prose

‘The difference between verse and prose is self-evident, but it is a sheer waste of time to look for a definition of the difference between poetry and prose.’1 Auden’s advice is sound, but unlikely to discourage discussion of a problem which has perennial fascination.

To the Romantics, ‘poetry’ was a qualitative and not merely a descriptive term. It referred to a special way of perceiving things, as well as to a special way of saying things. ‘Poetry’ was the rallying-cry of a campaign against the claims of scientific materialism to the sole title of knowledge. Thus Wordsworth suggests two new antitheses in place of the conventional one of poetry: prose, namely, poetry: science (a distinction much like Richards’s) and metrical composition: prose (two formally differentiated kinds of ‘poetry’).2 But he does not show much real interest in the properties of imaginative prose; in fact his anxiety to establish a united front for all imaginative writing, and his special concern to break away from ‘poetic diction’, lead him to minimize the differences between metrical composition and prose, and he explains his own choice of the former, rather lamely, on the grounds that it provides an added ‘charm’ and helps to temper the distress that can be caused by painful subject matter.3

Shelley, in his Defence of Poetry, also seeks to make ‘poetry’ a term which will include everything of literary interest and value. The prose-writers whom he dignifies with the title of ‘poet’, however, ten...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword to Routledge Classics Edition
• Preface
• Part I: The Novelist’s Medium and the Novelist’s Art: Problems in Criticism
• Part II
• Afterword to the Second Edition (1984)
• References
• Index