Abstract
‘La Recherche du temps perdu, en fait, est une recherche de la vérité.’1 The same applies to A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75), a semiological novel whose primary allegiance is also to truth. ‘All men by nature desire to know’,2 contended Aristotle. This certainly provides a key to the analysis of Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, whose gigantic effort in an obsessive search for certitude, for universals, for unconditional knowledge and for eidetic insight underlies the whole series. Powell problematizes the realm of the intellect by questioning the very possibility of understanding reality. What is at stake is not the suspension of judgement over the truth of any specific claim but over the very ability of our cognitive faculties to arrive at any kind of truth. Cardinal Newman’s motto: ‘ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem’ sums up the gist of the roman-fleuve very aptly. The narrator Nicholas Jenkins devotes all his energies to gaining access to the hard core of mystery behind individuals and events. In this respect, one could relate A Dance to the Music of Time to the tradition of novels of initiation in the vein of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. The development of youthful and inexperienced Nicholas Jenkins into a wiser man, the recurrent imagery of circles, the innumerable references to the occult and the use of vocabulary related to rituals, all testify to this interpretation.
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Notes
Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), p. 23. ‘The Search for lost time is in fact a search for truth.’ (Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, 1972 (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1973), p. 15.
Lawrence Durrell, Clea in The Alexandria Quartet (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), p. 693.
Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle (New York: Scribner’s, 1931), p. 189.
Lawrence Durrell, Mountolive in The Alexandria Quartet (Faber & Faber, 1986), p. 581.
David Cecil. Max. A Biography (Constable.1964). pp.176-7.
Lawrence Durrell, ‘The Kneller Tape (Hamburg)’ in The World of Lawrence Durrell, ed. Harry T. Moore (Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1962), p. 164.
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (Picador, 1982), p. 429.
John Russell, ‘The War Trilogies of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh’, Modern Age, 16 (1972), p. 292.
Douglas M. Davis, ‘An Interview with Anthony Powell’, College English, 24 (1963), p. 535.
Wilfred De’Ath, ‘Episodes in Time’, Illustrated London News (June 1963), p. 52.
Alan Brownjohn, ‘Anthony Powell’, The New Review (September 1974), p. 25.
Anthony Powell, quoted in The New Yorker (3 July 1965), p. 18.
James J. Zigerell, ‘Anthony Powell’s Music of Time: Chronicle of a Declining Establishment’, Twentieth Century Literature, 12, no. 3 (October 1966), 138–46 (p. 146).
Arthur Mizener, ‘A Dance to the Music of Time: The Novels of Anthony Powell’, Kenyon Review, 22 (Winter 1960), 79–92 (p. 79).
Anthony Powell, John Aubrey and His Friends (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1948), p. 14.
Norman Friedman, ‘Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept’, PMLA, 70 (December 1955) 1160–84.
L. P. Hartley, ‘Jenkins at War’, Spectator (20 March 1964), p. 383.
Logan P. Smith, All Trivia (1918) (Constable, 1933), p. 97.
E. R. Curtius, ‘T. S. Eliot: 1’, Kritische Essays zur europaischen Literatur, second edition (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1950), p. 326.
James Tucker, The Novels of Anthony Powell (Macmillan, 1976), p. 130.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1926) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 7.
André Gide, Journal 1939–1949, Souvenirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 584. ‘I cannot remember and I have vowed not to be tempted into furnishing the vacant rooms of my memory.’ (André Gide, If I die…, trans. Dorothy Bussy, Secker and Warburg, 1950, p. 272).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), Proposition 7, p. 150.
Pierre Vitoux, ‘Le jeu de la focalisation’, Poetique, 51 (September 1982), pp. 359–68.
Evelyn Waugh, ‘Bioscope’, Spectator, 29 June 1962, p. 863.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 187–8.
José Ortega y Gasset, The Modern Theme, translated by James Cleugh (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1931). See Chapter 10, ‘The Doctrine of the Point of View’, p. 90.
See S. J. Tapscott, ‘The Epistemology of Gossip’, Texas Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1978), pp. 104–16.
Nelson Goodman, ‘The Way the World Is’, Review of Metaphysics, 14 (1960), pp. 48–56 (p. 55).
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plains, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (Chatto & Windus, 1934), p. 318.
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, in Intentions (New York: Brentano’s, 1907), p. 55.
André Gide, Journal 1939–1949, Souvenirs, (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 549. ‘And now I have to relate facts, motions of my heart and mind, which I desire to set in the same light in which I first saw them, without letting the judgment I afterwards brought to bear on them be too apparent.’ (André Gide, If I Die &, trans. Dorothy Bussy (Secker & Warburg, 1950), p. 233.
James Hall, ‘The Uses of Polite Surprise: Anthony Powell’, Essays in Criticism, 12 (April 1962), 167–83 (p. 171).
Julien Gracq, ‘Pourquoi la littérature respire mal’, Préférences (Librairie José Corti, 1961), p. 82. ‘All books, as we know, feed on the materials provided by life but also, and maybe above all, on the thick humus of the literature that has preceded them.’
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York, 1963), p. 130.
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© 1994 Isabelle Joyau
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Joyau, I. (1994). The First-Person Narrator. In: Investigating Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23284-0_1
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