Brian Moore: The Realist’s Progress

Abstract

B R I A N M O O R E : T H E R E A L I S T ’ S P R O G R E S S BRUCE STOVEL Dalhousie University B ria n Moore has written eleven novels in a career that now extends over a quarter-century. It is a distinguished body of work, and one distinguished, more than anything else, by its realism. Elusive as the term is, some sense of its meaning for Moore emerges from his own views on fiction. He has said, “ I think we’re in a sort of camp period with novels.” 1 Calling himself “antianti -roman,” he believes most experimental writing fails because it does not portray actual life: “Life is all about very mundane things. It is all about ambition, jobs, worries about your children’s health, fear of death.. . . There are no jobs in modem novels; everybody lives in some limbo” (Sale, pp. 79, 76). In fact, though, “most people still live in the old-fashioned world of the nineteenth-century novels.”2 What makes the great novelists great for Moore is their realism: “Faulkner’s gothic America is based on real people, real relationships between white and Negro, real feelings of hunters.. . . The finest things in Ulysses and in the Portrait rest on a naturalistic basis, on character and on [Joyce’s] ability to write about ordinary people and ordin­ ary — even banal — situations. I think that is strength; take that away and the books disappear” (Sale, pp. 79, 77). These beliefs are interesting, not so much in themselves, but for what they imply about Moore’s plots and narrative methods. For realism is not a mat­ ter of content, nor a credo, but a formal term describing a certain kind of story told in a certain way. I would like to define Moore’s realism in these terms and suggest the changing uses he has made of it. Moore’s fiction does change in important ways. He employs a traditional social realism in his first five novels; the fifth, The Emperor of Ice Cream (1966), is highly autobiographical and seems to have laid many ghosts, formal as well as per­ sonal. The next two novels, I Am Mary Dunne (1968) and Fergus (1970), present a subjective realism new to Moore. After two works which reveal an uneasy compromise between parable and realism, Catholics (1972) and The Great Victorian Collection (1975), Moore returns, a little exhausted from his travels, perhaps, to traditional realism in his two most recent novels, The Doctor’s Wife (1976), and The Mangan Inheritance (1979). Moore’s E n g lish Studies in C anada, vii, 2, Summer 1981 growth from traditional realism to what Wayne Booth calls the impersonal novel to fable recapitulates the major changes in fiction itself within the last century or so; it also reflects our diminished belief in a shared reality. “The nineteenth-century novelist was a part of his community, a recorder of a world he knew and understood. But today’s writer, particularly if he is an exile, tends to become what Mary McCarthy called a machine à écrire.”3 Moore is indeed an exile, in time as well as in space. He says defiantly, “I believe in a real world because I was brought up in it” (Sale, p. 76), but time and change have made that world increasingly distant. Tracing this realist’s progress, then, not only helps to understand Moore’s fiction, but also offers some hints about the changing nature of realism itself. Moore’s first five novels all employ a traditional, objective realism. The cen­ tral drama, in each case, lies in the conflicts between the characters’ inner demands and the fixed social framework in which they find themselves. This framework, in other words, is necessary for presenting the dramatic move­ ment from self-delusion to self-recognition and self-acceptance. Speaking in 1971, Moore said, “When I wrote most of my novels I was interested — I’m not sure that I’m much interested now — in presenting the moment in a person’s life, the crucial few weeks or months, when one suddenly con­ fronts the reality or unreality of...