Fictional Creation Research Articles

The Self-Annihilating Artists of Pale Fire

The self-reflexive quality of Nabokov's Pale Fire, a fictional creation governed by its fictional creator, applies not only to the structure but also to the characters. As a group, they are self-referential, appearing as shadows, twins, and inverted images of one another. Though one may assign a central position to Kinbote as the author or manipulator, the source of his art remains in question. Critical suggestions for tracing the real Kinbote are numerous: Kinbote as a merging of Shade's artistic vision and Gradus' urge toward destruction; Kinbote as Shade's aggrandizer, with Gradus as foreshadowed doom.' In the scholarly scuffle, not enough attention has been paid to a humbler figure, the character of Hazel Shade, the poet's daughter who commits suicide. Hazel functions as an interpretive key, revealing much about Kinbote and his grand extrapolation. In her cameo role, she represents the book's confabulation in miniature, the mixed success of art and annihilation.

An Arrant Ramp and a Tomrigg: Pope’s Belinda

AN A R R A N T R A M P A N D A T O M R I G G : P O P E ’ S B E L I N D A G A R Y A . BOIRE The University of Auckland I f variety of critical discussion is any indication, Belinda is the least under­ stood, least agreed-upon of Pope’s fictional creations. Since Dennis’ cranky remarks in 1728 — “She appears an arrant Ramp and a Tomrigg” - — Belinda has been viewed alternately as demonic or divine, malignant or benign.1 She has been praised as “an artist” and an emblem of beauty; con­ demned as a coquette par excellence; and even pitied as a victim of hysteric psychoses.2 Underlying Pope’s complex presentation, however, is one aspect of utmost relevance to our own study, an aspect of Belinda over which even the most diverse critics agree: there exists a striking discrepancy between her con­ scious, external, social behaviour and her unconscious, internal, private desires. As Earl Wasserman, in his seminal essay “The Limits of Allusion in The Rape of the Lock,” remarks: “beneath the outrage over the social offense and a determination to avoid love and marriage, Belinda. . . feels a reluctant desire for the man, a passion hidden from her conscious mind.... Despite [her] conscious social artfulness Belinda is flesh and blood, not a sylph, and in the Nature of her heart lurks unconscious yearning for a mortal lover.”3 Not only is Wasserman’s analysis indebted to our post-Freudian assump­ tions regarding the unconscious, but historically his idea derives from tradi­ tional medical theories of female melancholy, an affliction which Robert Burton is careful to define as “a particular species of melancholy.”4 Most pertinent here are the facts that such a “disease” was recognized and accepted as real and that, in its prognosis and cure, “maids’ melancholy” was virtually indistinguishable from love-melancholy. Both disorders were related species of a larger genus; both persisted well into the eighteenth century; and both are of special importance to our understanding of Belinda in particular, and of The Rape of the Lock in general. To appreciate fully this aspect of Pope’s Belinda (though at the risk of painting too dark a satire), I shall consider first these traditional theories of women’s melancholy and their possible influence on Pope’s portrayal; I shall E n g l i s h S t u d i e s in C a n a d a , v iii, i , March 1982 then examine Belinda’s morning dream, the Rites of Pride section, and to a lesser degree, Umbriel’s experiences in the Cave of Spleen. * * * Apropos of Belinda, “women’s melancholy” refers to the wide variety of splenetic disorders afflicting women in general and “maids, nuns, and widows” in particular {AM i, 3, 2, 4). Burton, in his Anatomy, defines the disease in terms of women’s traditional inconstancy and changeableness; it is, he argues, “a vexation of the mind, a sudden sorrow from a small, light, or no occasion, with a kind of still dotage or grief of some part or other.” Women “are sometimes suddenly delivered, because it comes and goes by fits, and is not so permanent as other melancholy” {AM 1, 3, 2, 4). Symptoms of the disease are myriad: mental, physical, and spiritual; many recall either Belinda (both before and after her rape), the Goddess Spleen— -with “Pain at her side, and Megrim at her Head” (iv, 24) — or even the splenetic belles — to whom “each new Night-Dress gives a new Disease” (iv, 38). Burton, as usual, provides the most inclusive list of fea­ tures: Among other symptoms, women so afflicted suffer palpitations of the stomach and heart, hysterical fits, “a great pain in their heads, about their hearts and hypochondries,” and a tendency to swoon; they have terrible dreams in the night, perverse conceits and opinions, dejection, discontent, and preposterous judgement; victims loathe, dislike, disdain, and are weary of every object; everything is tedious; they pine, weep and tremble; they become timorous, sad, wish to be left alone; many become inarticulate and suffer generalized discomfort; many think they see...

Who Is Boswell's Johnson?

Who Is Boswell's Johnson? WILLIAM R. SIEBENSCHUH In view of much recent scholarship this is not an idle question. The validity and value of Boswell's portrait of Johnson in the Life have come under serious attack. Boswell's once famous ability to gather facts is now debatable; his ability to understand the facts he had is being called deficient. And his marvelous dramatizations of Johnson are being called distortions.1 Although the Life has been considered one of the world's greatest biographies for nearly two centuries, it is now being argued that it is not really biography at all.2 To even begin to defend Boswell, if that is possible, each of these charges must be faced and dealt with somehow. My purpose, in this brief paper, is not to attempt ultimate statements, but to suggest some lines along with such defense of Boswell might be made. The questions concerning Boswell's ability to gather and assess his facts are the easiest to confront directly. Much has to be conceded here, but there are really no surprises. For a long time, it has been more or less clear that there was a great deal about Johnson's life that Boswell knew little about or didn't understand. The wealth of new biographical studies of Johnson simply makes it clearer than ever be­ fore exactly what and how much there was.3 Some of Boswell's blind spots are important; there is no question about it. There is, for ex­ ample, the clear evidence of severe mental breakdown, which Bos­ well dismisses as a serious possibility. There is the role of the Thrales, which Boswell does not give nearly the importance that it obviously had. There are the subjects that Boswell is known to have been aware of and that he doctored in the final version of the Life: Johnson's prob­ 347 348 / SIEBENSCHUH lems with his wife, his earthy, bawdy sides, etc. And there is John­ son's complicated psyche into which biographers such as Walter Jackson Bate have probed much further than Boswell could have. Added together, this is a substantial amount of material that is either missing from the Life or inadequately treated in it. Some would argue that the list should be longer. It is foolish to deny that these problems exist. But Boswell's ignorance of aspects of Johnson's life and character are only fatal flaws in his book if his primary achieve­ ment as a biographer is considered to be his facts. His major contri­ bution as a biographer is not his facts; it never really has been. His achievement is his vision of Johnson, the imaginative possession of him that his book allows us to have. That vision is, in fact, a "ver­ sion," not a compilation, photograph, or tape recording. It is an inter­ pretation and it will not be superseded by new facts because there is no such thing as an ultimate interpretive biography of a man like Johnson. There will always be a continuing dialogue between his life—a central core of known facts and shared assumptions—and a more or less constant succession of minds that will strike up new relationships with him and confer different degrees of significance upon his works and deeds. We don't go to the Life to get factual in­ formation to assimilate; we go to the Life to see and hear Johnson. Boswell's version can be added to but not replaced by new knowl­ edge unless it is of the sort that totally invalidates his image of Johnson. This, however, is exactly what some are willing to argue that it does. They suggest that the Johnson we see in the Life is far more a romantic and fictional creation of Boswell's, a response primarily to his own needs, than an historically accurate image. Certainly there is an element of this in the portrait of the Life, that "involuntary trib­ ute," as it has been called, "of a great human weakness to a great human strength."4 But this has been known or suspected for a long time, and to invalidate the portrait of Johnson on these grounds...

Anzia Yezierska: New Light on the "Sweatshop Cinderella"

The recent publication of The Open Cage, an Anzia Yezierska Collection,' marks an important step in the rediscovery of this woman, whose descriptions of the life of immigrant Jewish women capture their spirit and their struggles. And with the inclusion of her later stories and narrative essays, which deal with the problems of the aged, this volume will greatly increase public knowledge of the unsuspected breadth of her interests. A concomitant to this increased availability of Yezierska's writings has been the appearance of a number of critical studies which have furthered the understanding and appreciation of Yezierska's contributions to American fiction. For the most part, however, these studies have focused on autobiographical elements, assuming that the fictions reflected the author's own experience.2 Such autobiographical readings have been valuable for the emphasis they place on the struggles of an immigrant Jewish woman trying to find an identity and a place for herself in America, but as the real facts about Yezierska's life emerge-as the differences between her heroines and herself become clear-the limitations of the autobiographical approach become apparent. Yezierska was not an illiterate immigrant who miraculously found words to describe her life; she was an educated, highly conscious artist who struggled to develop the tools of her trade. She selected incidents from her own life, from the lives of friends and family, and from her own imagination which she arranged in careful order to emphasize certain themes. She modeled some of her characters on people she knew and combined them with totally fictional creations to provide the particular contrasts and tensions she wanted to dramatize. She saw herself as a spokeswoman for a group whose needs had been ignored and she struggled to present their case as strongly as she could. Yezierska's ambitions for herself as a writer were high, and she did not always achieve the goals she had set, but any full understanding of her work requires the reader to appreciate the full extent of her intentions. The confusion about Yezierska's biography was, in part, orchestrated by the writer herself and involved not so much outright deception as the MELUS, Volume 7, No. 3, Fall 1980.

Enigma as Narrative Determinant in the Novels of Juan Benet

THE first reading of a novel by Juan Benet is generally a disquieting activity. As the novel progresses and events and characters do not come into clear focus, one begins to suspect that he has not been reading carefully enough, that something important has been overlooked or misunderstood. Thus a second and perhaps subsequent readings are undertaken for the purpose of tying together loose threads and completing the complex design that Benet has created in his work. However, though subsequent readings yield new insights into the novel, the design remains incomplete, and the mysterious elements that were to be understood continue to be as enigmatic as before. That the work remains partially incoherent and never fully comprehended by the reader is perhaps the fundamental premise in the formulation of Benet's novels. Indeed, Benet values elusiveness and ambiguity more than the accurate representation of observable reality or the conveyance of a social thesis. Enigma therefore becomes both the medium and the message of Benet's narrative. The present study will examine the theoretical suppositions, as well as the practical elements that contribute to the creation of Benet's enigmatic fiction. My study is not intended to resolve the enigmas found within Benet's worksas will be shown, many of the enigmas are not resolvable-but rather to define the essential components that cause the enigmas to exist and to be sustained. In his theory Benet maintains that in order for art (specifically, the novel) to possess value as art, it must appeal to that part of the human spirit which lies beyond the rational and scientific. That is, the author must probe what Benet terms the zona de sombras,

On Character Portrayal in "O Crime do Padre Amaro"

Julien Sorel, he is more the forerunner of Gald6s' Pedro Polo and Clarin's Fermin de Pas: for all of them the Church is a salvation, but ironically not a spiritual one. The parenthetical explanation (CENAS DA VIDA DEVOTA) of the title of this novel is the first indication of some of the ironies and paradoxes to be found in it. The scenes are in actuality a provincial hypocrisy laid bare, and the life, a staggering mockery of the Christian tradition in general, and of Catholicism and its rituals in particular. Since these impressions are gained early in the work, it is very tempting to state simply that we are dealing with a thesis novel, namely, the exposure of corrupt priests and fanatic beatas, and accuse Ega of marked subjectivity and wanting in a disinterested approach. Arguments could be presented to support such a contention, beginning with the uniformly negative portrayal of the clergy of Leiria. Jose Miguhis is a notorious glutton; Dias sleeps with S. Joaneira; Amaro is concupiscent and opportunistic; Natairio is vicious and devious; Silvr Brito is a boor and a fornicator, etc. All at one time or another use some manner of treachery to further their own pleasures or to cover up their violations of morals. Eqa's subjectivity, or thesis intent, is here on open display. This single-minded approach is also evident in the beatas Josefa, D. Maria, the Gansosos): for all their countless devotions, prayers and masses, and saints and sorrows, they are devoid of Christian charity. And with the exception of Dr. Gouveia, who stands for common se se and a reasoned response to the trappings of the Church, most of the men of Leiria are hypocrites (Dr. Godinho), sycopha ts (Carlos the pharmacist), or underhanded (Agostinho Pinheiro). There is a noticeable lack of balance-no good priests and no genuinely devout Catholics. None of this, however, contributes to an understanding of one of the outstanding qualities of O crime do padre Amaro: Ega's skill in grafting lifelike traits onto his fictional creations. So great is this ability that any weakness inherent in the thesis is overcome by the believability effected in this particular cena portuguesa. Like Dickens, Balzac, and Gald6s, Ega has the dom of portraying society and its figures, and it results in the reader's becoming engrossed and captivated by a tale of passion, conflict, and dilemma. There are numerous extraordinary scenes in the novel (the beatas attempting to bumrn away all objects contaminated by Joio Ecuardo-a marvelous parody of the Inquisition and a mockery sustained by Natirio, Amaro, and the canon D;as);' superb one-line characterizations (D. Josefa Dias-cuja boca produzia o mexerico mais naturalmente que a saliva [p. 221]); and, as in the works of his Spanish contemporary, Gald6s, skillful use of the dream to give form to suppressed fears

Beckett’s Major Plays and the Trilogy

Beckett’s Major Plays and the Trilogy Charles R. Lyons Despite the complexity of his texts and the diversity of his imagery Samuel Beckett maintains a unity and coherence in his work which is singular. Rarely, of course, does a novelist move into playwriting with success. The dramas of Henry James and James Joyce’s Exiles are plays which come to mind immediately to document the typical failure of the novelist in the theater. The success of En attendant Godot, however, provided the motive for a critical re-evaluation which brought attention to Beckett’s earlier novels, Watt and Murphy. The later trilogy—Molloy, Malone meurt, and I’Innommable—shares the same general period as the major plays.1 Here Beckett’s basic exploration of consciousness moves skillfully between play and novel, exploit­ ing his keen sense of the possibilities of each form. In both the novels and the plays Samuel Beckett sounds a central experience. The protagonist is engaged in a strange journey, quest, or course of action which involves the gradual releasing or denying of commitments to phenomenal experience, equivocally both as a failure of the body and as a willed action. He suffers a progressive loss of objects, control of bodily func­ tions—sight, hearing, speech, mobility, urination, defecation; he becomes detached from any thing or interaction which would relate his consciousness to that which is external to it. Simul­ taneously, he finds satisfaction in the repetition of a formal exer­ cise—a story, for example, or a repeated pattern of action—■ with some understanding that this exercise is a created thing, an invented object or behavior. Molloy is in the form of a memoire, a record of the thoughts of an old poet as he attempts to reconstruct his quest and in the matching report of Moran as he explores his memory of his search for Molloy. Molloy is confined to a room, perhaps that 254 Charles R. Lyons 255 of his mother, and he writes of his journey to that place. He could not remember the name of the town in which she lives and in which he was raised, but he moves with the hope that his travel would take him to familiar paths. In his memory, he sets out on a bicycle, is apprehended by the police, set free, runs over a dog and kills him. The owner of the dog, a Sophie Loy or Lousse, pities him (she was taking the old animal to the vet to be killed), and takes Molloy in. He stays in her home, tended by her servants, for an indeterminate period of time, and then he sets out again, without the bicycle. His legs fail him, and eventually he is reduced to tedious crawling towards his mother’s room. He is found and taken to a room which may be the object of his search. There he writes the story of his journey, and a man comes once a week to take his pages. In the second half of the novel Beckett projects the story of an investigator, Moran, who is assigned the task of finding Molloy. He sets forth with his son, is alienated and then separated from the boy, and con­ tinues the search alone. Eventually he loses his bicycle and is reduced to crawling towards his object, becoming in his search almost identical to the Molloy whom he seeks. Malone, like Molloy, confined to a room, tended by an obscure figure, recon­ structs incidents in a dense and complex narrative which may or may not be autobiographical. In Vlnnommable there is less sense that the words are as formally structured in a created nar­ rative by the speaking consciousness within the jar, but the words seem to be the direct voicing of that consciousness. The form of the third novel, however, provides a kind of narrative frame for the trilogy as a whole through that creature’s claim that Molloy, Moran, Malone, and other fictional creations of Samuel Beckett are the products of his imagination. The most obvious difference in form between the trilogy and the plays is the question of voice. Each of the novels in the trilogy consists of the words of...

Deeming Fiction: The Statutory Intendment of Affixing Corporate Criminal Liability in India

This article discusses the statutory intendment pursued by the Indian judiciary in order to avoid the standstill issue of corporate criminal liability, by proper mechanism of fastening legal responsibility through the creation of a legal fiction. Far from giving corporations a shield to commit fraud, this concept narrows down the scope of escape by rejecting the plea that no one is to be held criminally liable for an act of another. This article studies the issue of how the judiciary has disallowed the notion that a body corporate cannot commit a criminal offence by reasoning out the scope of deeming fiction. This article also discusses the issue of one principle being compromised for another, arraigning the corporation along with the functionaries of the corporation. The authors argue that the principle of deeming fiction can capture the desirable features of other principles such as identification, attribution and lifting of the corporate veil. Further the authors demonstrate as to how this principle renders all other theories meaningless in the light of a plain statutory intendment, when put to use in its complete sense to have full effect. The application and use of various UK, USA, Canada, and Indian case laws has been adopted in order to understand and compare the above mentioned machinery of fastening culpability to the money making corporations, for the offences committed by them. Lastly, the authors feel that the courts, upon proper application of mind, have considered the issues of participation, responsibility and enforceability in each case, without which it would have been a futile exercise. The article concludes on the note that a blanket application of either principle would prove to be detrimental and statutory intendment would fasten the liability of deemed culpability, and proceeds against the corporation or the director or both, accordingly.

The Perdido as a Type in Some Spanish-American Novels

In his prologue to the first Argentine edition of Eduardo Barrios' novel Un perdido, Manuel Gálvez sets forth a number of germinal ideas. One of these is that Lucho Bernales, the perdido of Barrios' fictional creation, is a “brother” to Gálvez' own Carlos Riga of El mal metafísico; and furthermore he proposes certain literary sources for both characters. It is the present purpose to examine these two suggestions, testing their adequacy, then passing on to inquire whether a pattern of thought may not be detected and whether other important novels may not be related to the questions thus raised.

The Conflict of Culture in Africa

&F the spate of books published on Africa in I953, the most signicant to my mind was a novel called Blanket Boy's Moon. It tells the story of Monare of Lomontsa, a member of the Basuto tribe. As a child he had lived in the old tribal ways. With other young boys he had herded cattle on the hillsides. He had gone to the tribal circumcision school. Then, later, he had become a Christian. Christianity allows a man only one wife: the tribal society as many as he can afford. Thus the first conflict, the first set of personal tensions come into play: the new ways against the old, the influence of the priest pulling one way and that of the tribal elders another. Still later Monare goes to Johannesburg, the city of gold, where the ways of the priest, which are the ways of the white man, are in full mastery over all. When he returns to his village after his spell in the city he is conscious of going from the present into the past. And then his chief orders him to participate in a ritual murder. Monare the Christian is revolted. By Christian standards ritual murder is a crime against both God and man. But tribal pressure wins in the end and Monare takes part in the murder. The personality of Monare, the man, is now split beyond repair. He leaves the tribe because it is responsible for the evil thing he was forced to do. He wanders in fear through the cities of the Union of South Africa finding no peace, no resting place because in serving his tribal chief he has put himself outside the law and ethics of the Christian present. When arrest and death finally come his fear is matched and mastered by his relief. The long and terrible conflict is over at last. Now there can be peace. Let us allow for the fact that Monare is a fictional creation and therefore more consciously articulate than a man in real life might be. Let us further allow that ritual murder poses the problem in highly dramatic form. But having made those allowances the book still retains its validity as a serious attempt to throw light on what is, to my mind, the most pressing problem of Africa today: the problem of the African's transition from the tribal past into the technological present. There has been much discussion of tribalism in the past. The policy of indirect rule did, in a sense, endorse tribalism. It was often found most convenient not to interfere in any way with the structure of the tribal society but rather to bolster it up and to reinforce the authority of the chiefs and to rule through them. In some cases, the Kikuyu in Kenya are an example, the colonial government even introduced chiefs where these had not been part of the social structure before. To this day there exists an attitude that can be best expressed by the oft repeated statement, 'We do

The Conflict of Culture in Africa

&F the spate of books published on Africa in I953, the most signicant to my mind was a novel called Blanket Boy's Moon. It tells the story of Monare of Lomontsa, a member of the Basuto tribe. As a child he had lived in the old tribal ways. With other young boys he had herded cattle on the hillsides. He had gone to the tribal circumcision school. Then, later, he had become a Christian. Christianity allows a man only one wife: the tribal society as many as he can afford. Thus the first conflict, the first set of personal tensions come into play: the new ways against the old, the influence of the priest pulling one way and that of the tribal elders another. Still later Monare goes to Johannesburg, the city of gold, where the ways of the priest, which are the ways of the white man, are in full mastery over all. When he returns to his village after his spell in the city he is conscious of going from the present into the past. And then his chief orders him to participate in a ritual murder. Monare the Christian is revolted. By Christian standards ritual murder is a crime against both God and man. But tribal pressure wins in the end and Monare takes part in the murder. The personality of Monare, the man, is now split beyond repair. He leaves the tribe because it is responsible for the evil thing he was forced to do. He wanders in fear through the cities of the Union of South Africa finding no peace, no resting place because in serving his tribal chief he has put himself outside the law and ethics of the Christian present. When arrest and death finally come his fear is matched and mastered by his relief. The long and terrible conflict is over at last. Now there can be peace. Let us allow for the fact that Monare is a fictional creation and therefore more consciously articulate than a man in real life might be. Let us further allow that ritual murder poses the problem in highly dramatic form. But having made those allowances the book still retains its validity as a serious attempt to throw light on what is, to my mind, the most pressing problem of Africa today: the problem of the African's transition from the tribal past into the technological present. There has been much discussion of tribalism in the past. The policy of indirect rule did, in a sense, endorse tribalism. It was often found most convenient not to interfere in any way with the structure of the tribal society but rather to bolster it up and to reinforce the authority of the chiefs and to rule through them. In some cases, the Kikuyu in Kenya are an example, the colonial government even introduced chiefs where these had not been part of the social structure before. To this day there exists an attitude that can be best expressed by the oft repeated statement, 'We do