Narrative Progression and Receptivity: John Cowper Powys's A Glastonbury Romance

Abstract

In the course of arguing Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag claims that [i]n place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art (14). This challenge appears for the first time, without gloss or elaboration, as the last line of her essay. It is a com pelling but vague call for literary scholars?and good readers in general?to do something outside their ken: take a work on its own terms without constructing a paratext in which all the symbols are unpacked, all the meanings laid bare. Sontag identifies as presupposing] a discrepancy between the clear mean ing of the text and the demands of (later) readers.... The modern style of interpreta tion excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs 'behind' the text, to find a subtext which is the true one (6). She also notes that of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else (10). Many authors whom John Cowper Powys particularly admired, such as James Joyce and Henry James, wrote novels that invite and reward careful hermeneutic ex plication. Sontag names Joyce and James in her short list of authors around whom thick encrustations of interpretation have taken hold (8). Their novels operate on several levels of significance simultaneously, developing intricate, intellectual rela tions between implied author and authorial audience, prompting the latter's interpre tation largely through their progressive exploitation and resolution of various tensions and instabilities.1 But in response to the influence of his contemporaries, Powys composed several digressive, improbable, ecstatic fictions that employ a con spicuously unfamiliar system of narrative progression, baffling his authorial audi ence's efforts at interpretation. The neglect shown to Powys's work by most scholars and teachers alike may be seen as a symptom of this bafflement.