Abstract
Between 1910 and 1929, five writers ended major novels with moments of vision. The novels are E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). In the final section of each of these novels, a woman has a visionary experience that transcends full expression in language and that seems to make possible a concluding affirmation or image of order. Many critics have found these endings feeble, artificially positive, or inconsistent with the works in which they appear; such dismissals stand up well enough in studies of individual novels and authors, but cannot adequately explain what led five writers to employ such endings in major novels written within a span of twenty years. I believe that these writers created in these novels an altogether new fictional form, drawing upon religious and Romantic traditions to attempt endings that would combine unconstricted vitality of character with the aesthetic demands of closure.
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Notes
In The Turn of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), Alan Friedman structures his history of novelistic endings around a distinction (which I shall challenge later) between closed and open form. His argument that ‘experience’ in Bleak House is left open in the omniscient narrative, and closed in Esther’s, would appear unexceptionable (p. 25). Yet the narrative that is repeatedly closed (Esther’s) is left, on the novel’s final page, rhetorically open:
Dickens, note on the conclusion, in Angus Calder, ed., Great Expectations (New York: Penguin, 1965) p. 495.
Anna Karenina, trans. Louise and Alymer Maude, ed. George Gibian (New York: Norton, 1970) pp. 722, 739, 740.
Return of the Native, ed. James Gindin (New York: Norton, 1969) p. 307.
‘The Art of Fiction’, 1884, rpt. in Theory of Fiction: Henry James, ed. James E. Miller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972) p. 32.
Preface to Roderick Hudson, in The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Scribner’s, 1934) pp. 6, 5, 14.
The Ambassadors, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (New York: Norton, 1964) pp. 344–5).
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981) pp. 182–4.
In Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), Martin Price argues that increasingly, as the novel evolves, ‘plot is internalized, so that external event seems more a vehicle than the action proper’ (p. xii).
Smith, Poetic Closure (University of Chicago Press, 1968) pp. viii, 1–6, 10–12, 33–6.
See also Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) p. 212.
Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967) pp. 17–18, 44–7.
The Divine Comedy, trans. John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939, rpt. 1976), Paradiso, XXXIII. 145, 43, 61–3; subsequent references appear in the text.
Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge (New York: Norton, 1975) XI.377–8 and 763; XII.469 and 573.
See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971) and Kermode for extended discussions how the Romantics secularize religious vision and apocalypse. Abrams shows that God is almost entirely inactive in The Prelude; in the poetry of Wordsworth and his heirs, as in Romantic philosophy, the traditional cosmological trinity of God, Man, and Nature becomes a duality of Man and Nature, subject and object, with the attributes of divinity shared between the two remaining elements (pp. 89 ff.). Abrams also defines and discusses the ‘Moment’ in Romantic and modern literature, pp. 385–90, 418–27.
For the past thirty years, critics have been revising earlier views that modernism reacts against or rejects Romanticism. Those who discuss modernism as it emerges from and interacts with Romantic traditions include Robert Langbaum in The Poetry of Experience (New York: Norton, 1957)
Kermode in Romantic Image (New York: Macmillan, 1957)
Morris Beja in Epiphany in the Modern Novel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971)
Charles Schug in The Romantic Genesis of the Modern Novel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979).
The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979) XIII.2. Subsequent references to The Prelude appear in the text; they are, except where noted, to Book XIII and to the 1805 version. The modernists of course could not have known this version, first published in 1926; I have employed it here because Wordsworth’s meaning, while not essentially changed in the 1850 text, is generally clearer in the 1805. References in subsequent chapters, where Wordsworth is considered explicitly as an influence, will be to the 1850 text.
On the dating of the episode, see R. D. Havens, The Mind of a Poet II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1941) pp. 607–8.
Augustine’s literary reshaping of his experience is discussed by Abrams, p. 85; by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957) p. 307; and by Scholes and Kellogg, p. 169.
From The Recluse, in Wordsworth: Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965) 11. 754, 778–80, 793–4; pp. 45–7.
Graves, The White Goddess (rpt. New York: Octagon, 1972) pp. 9–12, 24, 386,390–1.
Illiad, trans. Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf, Ernest Myers (London: Macmillan, 1883) I.1
Odyssey, trans. S. H. Butcher and A. Lang (New York: Macmillan, 1895) I.1.
The Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 1951) 202a–212c.
Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961) VI.5; subsequent references appear in the text.
Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977) I.50–9, 303–5; I.152–86, 272–5; II.iv.116; IV. 164–5.
Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959) I.61 ff.; I.245; I.256–62.
Many Stevens critics discuss Wordsworth’s general influence on Stevens, and several note the particular similarity of this poem to The Solitary Reaper, see, for example, A. Walton Litz, Introspective Voyager: The Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) p. 195
Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: the Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) p. 103.
Stevens himself discusses Wordsworth in ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’, The Necessary Angel (New York: Vintage, 1951) pp. 13, 21, 31.
Auerbach, Mimesis (1946), trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton University Press, 1953) p. 555.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), trans. Gregory Rabossa (New York: Avon, 1971) p. 383.
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© 1988 William R. Thickstun
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Thickstun, W.R. (1988). Visionary Closure and the Embodied Muse. In: Visionary Closure in the Modern Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19163-5_1
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