MODULE: English Literature in the 20th century

TUTOR: Prof. dr. Sanda Berce

L4b. Canonicity (Shift of perspective): Exploration of reflective properties (the

visual/painting)
Thesis:
(I) Canonicity:
a) Evaluative judgments are necessary but not sufficient for the process of canon
formation;
b) What is called canon formation is a problem of access to the means of literary
production and consumption (i.e context, background, age, aesthetic movement/Reader,
readership, publishing policies);
c) Canon debate signifies crisis in the institution of literature;
d) Canonicity is historical crisis in literature (J.Guillory, 1994).

(II) Exploration of reflective properties (the visual/painting): the influence of

painting on literature (Impressionism; Post-impressionism; construction of
perspective/perspectivism) transferring pictural methods into writing; avant-garde
movements and Modernism.
- Realistic subject matter: challenge to the three - dimensional perspectivalism;
- the individual viewer mentally constructs the viewed object (fidelity to visual
experience);
- focus on HOW the work of art ORDERS (organizes) experience, i.e toward
FORM(interplay of perspectives, perspectivalism);
-------the roots of Modernism can be found in the mid-19th century avant-garde works,
charged with realism but viewed as an attack on realism.

Lord Jim. A Tale/1900

Paratext:
1) Subtitle/TALE: a) narrative: a narrative account of events; b) short piece of fiction: a
short piece of fiction, often one of a connected series; c) piece of gossip or of malicious
rumour).
2) Epigraph: It is certain any conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will
believe in it/Novalis;
3) AUTHORS NOTE:
When this novel first appeared in book form a notion got about that I had been bolted
away with. Some reviewers maintained that the work starting as a short story had got
beyond the writers control. One or two discovered internal evidence of the fact, which
seemed to amuse them. They pointed out the limitations of the narrative form. They
argued that no man could have been expected to talk all that time, and other men to listen
so long. It was not, they said, very credible.
After thinking it over for something like sixteen years I am not so sure about that. Men
have been known, both in the tropics and in the temperate zone, to sit up half the night
swapping yarns. This, however, is but one yarn, yet with interruptions affording some
measure of relief; and in regard to the listeners endurance, the postulate must be

1
accepted that the story was [authors emphasis] interesting. It is the necessary preliminary
assumption. If I hadnt believed that it was interesting I could never had begun to write it.
As to the mere physical possibility we all know that some speeches in Parliament have
taken nearer six than three hours in delivery; whereas all that part of the book, which is
Marrlows narrative, can be read through aloud, I should say, in less than three hours.
Besides - though I have kept strictly all such insignificant details out of the tale we may
presume that there must have been refreshments on that night, a glass of mineral water of
some sort to help the narrator on.
But, seriously, the truth of the matter is, that my first thought was of a short - story,
concerned only with the pilgrim ship episode; nothing more. And that was a legitimate
conception. After writing a few pages, however, I became for some reason discontented
and I laid them aside for a time. I didnt take them out of the drawer till the late Mr
William Blackwood suggested I should give something again to his magazine.
It was only then that I perceived that the pilgrim ship episode was a good starting-point
for a free and wandering tale; that it was an event, two, which could conceivably
colour the whole sentiment of existence in a simple and sensitive character. But all
these preliminary moods and stirrings of the spirit were rather obscure at the time, and
they do not appear clearer to me now after the lapse of so many years.
The few pages I laid aside were not without their weight in the choice of subject. But
the whole was re-written deliberately. When I sat down to it I knew it would be a long
book, though I didnt foresee that it would spread itself over thirteen numbers of Maga
(i.e magazine).
I had been asked at times whether this was not the book of mine I liked best. I am a
great foe to favoritism in public life, in private life, and even ion the delicate relationship
of an author to his works. As a matter of principle I will have no favorites; but I dont go
so far as to feel grieved and annoyed by the preference some people give to my Lord Jim.
I wont even say that I fail to understand No! But once I had occasion to be puzzled
and surprised.
A friend of mine returning from Italy had talked with a lady there who did not like the
book. I regretted that, of course, but what surprised me was the ground of her dislike.
You know, she said, its all so morbid [i. e. morbid: suggesting an unhealthy mental
state or attitude; gloomy, sensitive, extreme, gruesome].
The pronouncement gave me food for an hours anxious thought. Finally I arrived at
the conclusion that, making due allowances for the subject itself being rather foreign to
womens normal sensibilities, the lady could not have been an Italian. I wonder
whether she was European at all? In any case, no Latin temperament would have
perceived anything morbid in the acute consciousness of lost honour. Such a
consciousness may be wrong, or it may be right, or it may be condemned as artificial;
and, perhaps, my Jim is not a type of wide commonness. But I can safely assure my
readers that he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking. He is not a figure of
Northern Mists either. One sunny morning in the commonplace surroundings of an
Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by appealing significant under a cloud
perfectly silent. Which is as it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I
was capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was one of us.
June, 1917 J. C.

2
Lecture task: Read The Creative Reader in Modernist Fiction (2008)/to be found in the
hand-out. To be discussed in the class.

The Creative reader:

Conrads authorial (authoritative?) awareness about the suggestiveness of his
fiction (the letter to Cunningham Graham (on 5 Aug. 1897: To know that You
could read me for one writes only half the book; the other half is with the
Reader.
Idem Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1908, The Preface to The Aspern
Papers:
I need scarcely add after this that it is a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of
cold artistic calculation, an amusette [ i.e puzzle, enigma] to catch those not easily
caught, the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious. Otherwise expressed, the study
is of a conceived tone. The tone of suspected and felt trouble, of an inordinate
and incalculable sort - the tone of tragic, yet of exquisite mythification[]The
essence of the matter was the villainy of motive in the evoked predatory creatures;
so that the result would be ignoble by which I mean would be trivial were this
element of evil but feebly or inanely suggested[]. What would be then, on
reflection, this utmost conceivability? There is for such a case no eligible absolute
of the wrong; it remains relative to fifty other elements, a matter of
appreciation, speculation, imagination these things moreover quite exactly in
the light of the spectators, the critics, the readers experience. Only make
the readers general vision of evil intense enough, I said to myself and that
already is a charming job - and his own experience, his own imagination, his
own sympathy (with the children) and horror (with false friends) will supply him
quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think evil, make him
think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications(pp.98,
101).

II. From the late- and post-Victorian novel to the early Modernist novel.

1) Late- and Post-Victorian novelists/writers and intellectuals initiated a

century long debate about the ethical and the aesthetic nature of the
novel.

The Victorian novels central questions:

(a) whether the novel should retain its racy affiliations with Romance;
(b) whether the novel should teach moral lessons and educate readers about a
rapidly changing society;
(c) whether the novel should provide aesthetic correlation for the domestic
realism that ruled the form.
The Victorian novel questioned - from new perspectives - important
societal issues (sexual repression, middle-class family, visions about
womens lives).
The Victorian novel engaged actively in debates about:
(a) the value of reading;

3
 (b) the proper aesthetic rules for fiction;
(c) the integration of changing ideas about religion into the national life.

H.G.Wells, 1911: the novel is a clipped and limited form------H.James:

interventions in the discussion about realism and elegant form (the
presence of an air of reality defined by James as the solidity of
specification:
The supreme virtue of a novel the merit in which all its other merits
helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there, they are all as nothing, and
if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has
produced the illusion of life.

(illusion of life - George Eliots narrator in Adam Bede, 1859: to give a

faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my
mindI feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection
is, as if it were in the witness box, narrating my experience on oath.).
Authorial self-awareness Modernity.
Narrative-awareness of duplicity;
The Authors assumption of authority.

The Victorian novel participated in the construction of Individual

and National identity (as it assisted in the making of powerful
ideologies of self, race, gender and sexuality).
(a) the Victorian novel inherited the fantastic and the sensationalistic aspects of
the 19th century Gothic narratives (to undermine formal realism;
(b) the monstruous of the Victorian novel is located (i) in the novels FORM
(imperfect, irregular, de-formed, re-formed), (ii) in the CONTENT (inhuman
working conditions; domestic reality: the use of the womans body;
manipulation by male villains of female fragility) and in (iii)
PERSPECTIVALISM (the psychological misery inflicted upon characters by
Others):Self Other relationship (masters, husbands, etc.), monstruous,
deformation from the decent.

(2) Historically grounded difference between Dickens and Conrad

Charles Dickens: sentimentalism, unambiguous narrative voice(omniscience),

straightforward narrative structure;
v the sincere commitment to fiction as a morally transforming force.

Joseph Conrad: nihilism, narrative complexity, political interest in a world

outside England;
v Authorial self-awareness: painful struggle to create appropriate
aesthetic form for a dense and complicated narrative.
1897, The Nigger of the Narcissus: by the power of the word, to make you
hear, to make you feel, to make you see[];

4
 v What is writing?
Writing is an attempt to snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless
rush of time, a passing phase of life[]. The task approached in tenderness ans
faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued
fragment before all eyes and in the light of sincere mood;

v The Voice of the Novelist

Aware of himself as novelist (conscious of the impossibility of rescuing
from experience a fragment that can be placed before the Readers
senses;
A loss of Self in the world imagined by the Author (venturing ona distant
and toilsome journey into a land full of intrigues and revolutions);
The sentimental eye is replaced by an imperial politics and the
forming of a nation together with the formation of Subjectivity
(explicitly connected with the formation of nation).

Conrads novels are an epistemological inquiry into questions of

national identity and individual subjectivity (increasingly
visible beginning with the second half of the Victorian period------the
change of dominant from axiological (What is the value of?) to
epistemological (Who am I?) problems.
Conrads novels are about the rise of Individual and of the
Individual responsibility( i.e ethics/ moral) and a challenge to
societal organicism---------the meaning of Solidarity (the latent
feeling of fellowship with all creationwhich binds together all
humanitythe invincible conviction of solidarity:

Confronted with the same enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within himself[]
The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in
us which is a gift not an acquisition - and, therefore, permanently enduring. He speaks to
our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our
sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation-
and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knots together the loneliness
of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions,
in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity- the
dead for the living and the living for the unborn. (The Nigger of the Narcissus, 1897)