Narrative Point Of View Research Articles

Present — Preterite: Tense and Narrative Point of View

Present — Preterite: Tense and Narrative Point of View

HOW CAN WE DEFINE THE SEQUENTIAL ORGANIZATION OF DREAMS?

Little is known about the processes of sequential organization of dreams. To conduct experiments aimed at studying how this organization compares with that of waking narrative or day-dreams and whether it is specific to individuals or to phases of sleep, a preliminary analysis must be accomplished. We must be able to define the sequential organization of reported dreams. The present paper proposes a way to define this aspect of dreams, using different categories of connection between the successive events represented and a schematic representation of the sequence of events constituting the dream. Such analyses are based on a segmentation of the dream report into units at a semiotic level which does not correspond to the linguistic units of the report. Material collected in an interview on the day following the dream recording helps us to analyze the sequential organization. Examples of the method of definition of this organization are given. An analysis of the example shows that semantic links connect successive scenes of the dream that seem completely discontinuous from a narrative point of view.

Cultural and Text Variables in Processing Personal Experiences While Reading Literature

The present study investigated the influence of reader and text variables on personal resonance while reading literature. As the reader variable, the distance between readers' cultural background and the thematic content of the text was studied. A Hungarian short story dealing with themes that are central to the cultural and historical past of that country was presented to Hungarian (culturally proximate) and Danish (culturally distant) readers. As the text style variable, narrative point of view (POV) was manipulated by changing some inside POV passages to outside POV. The findings indicate that cultural proximity did result in the generation of a larger proportion of personally experienced, contextually rich, and vividly remembered events. The occasional use of inside, psychological POV in the story enhanced this effect in the Hungarian (culturally proximate) group, but not in the Danish group. However, the phenomenal quality of remindings elicited locally by reading the inside POV text passages differed from those of the same passages written from the outside POV, irrespective of readers' cultural background. This suggests that compositional text devices, as narrative POV, may have universal effects on literary reading.

Narrative Situation in Tonomine Shosho monogatari

This paper will discuss the development of a hybrid form of poetry and prose which became the norm of prose works in classical Japanese literature and the effect such prose and the abundance of epistles and dialogue had on the narrative structure of a tenth century tale, Tonomine Shosho monogatari (The Tale of the Lesser Captain of Tonomine). At first such narrative techniques seem to yield a narration in the first person. However, upon closer examination one realizes that it is not a first person narrative in the usual sense of the term. The narrator is not a well delieneated personality, let alone a character in the tale; she is a kind of “communal story‐telling persona,”“a voice of an undifferentiated narrative self,” placed in the text more out of linguistic necessity than aesthetic, authorial choice. An ever present persona, not even effaced when her characters are on stage, the narrator has her characters speak through her, using her voice, much as the ventriloquist “talks” for his doll. One scholar terms this unique narrative point of view, “the speaker's point of view,” for the narration seems to occur only from the perspective of a narrator who necessarily sees, participates in, or hears about the events, and whose perspective exhibits a psychological, conceptual, and perceptual uniformity with character, reader, and even author.

The Polyphony of Narrative Voices in Placha

Cingiz Ajtmatov’s latest novel, Ha& (“The Executioner’s Block”) is distinguished by a great structural complexity: it is composed of three separate plot lines and several subplots, introducing a multitude of characters and depicting a multitude of events.1 It has a complex temporal structure, that relies on temporal anachronies and constantly shifts the action from the present into the past and the future. Finally, it is conveyed by different narrative voices, starting with what is generally known as an omniscient narrator, and combining it with a concealed narrator, reproducing in a third person narrative points of view of individual characters, as well as with a first person narrator, transmitting the perception and thoughts of one of the novel’s protagonists, Avdij Kalistratov.2 Among these three narrative voices, the one clearly predominating in the novel is that of the omniscient narrator who has the unrestricted knowledge of all characters and events, and can simultaneously see and describe events happening in different places, and who has at his disposal all the temporal dimensions of the story. In recent literature on narratology this kind of narrator is defined as extradiegetic, i.e. superior to the story he narrates, and heterodiegetic, i.e., not participating in the story he narrates.3 The choice of the extradiegetic narrator as the chief voice was determined, first of all, by the structure of the novel. An extradiegetic narrator, omniscient and omnipresent, was the most suitable one to give an overview panorama of events and then switch to concrete scenes, to cover the events, taking place in different places and at different times, and to provide a unifying narrative voice for the three separate plot lines. Secondly, an extradiegetic narrator provides the author with an authoritative voice, in accordance with which all the events and characters may be evaluated. In terms of his perceptibility in the text, the extradiegetic narrator appears in P&ha in both covert and overt forms.4 The relatively minimal

On Narrative Studies and Narrative Genres

In the past two or three decades, students of narrative have very much consolidated and developed our knowledge by isolating, (re)characterizing, and (re)classifying a large number of features distinctive of or pertinent to (verbal) narrative (see Adam 1985; Genette 1980, 1988; Mitchell 1981; Prince 1987; Scholes and Kellogg 1966). In the area of narrative discourse (that of the narrating rather than the narrated, the representing and not the represented), for instance, Genette and others (e.g., Bal 1985; Chatman 1978; Rimmon-Kenan 1983; Todorov 1981) have described the temporal orders that a narrative text can follow, the anachronies (flashbacks and flash-forwards) that it can exhibit, the achronic (undatable) structures that it can accommodate. Furthermore, they have characterized narrative speed and its canonical tempos (ellipsis, summary, scene, stretch, and pause). They have investigated narrative frequency (the relationship between the number of times an event happens and the number of times it is recounted), examined narrative distance (the extent of narratorial mediation) and narrative point of view (the perceptual or conceptual position according to which the narrated events are depicted), studied the types of discourse that a text can adopt to report the utterances and thoughts of characters, and analyzed the major kinds of narration (posterior, anterior, simultaneous, intercalated) as well as their modes of combination (two different acts of narration can be linked through a simple

Feminine Perspectives and Narrative Points of View

The search for a unified and coherent feminine aesthetic theory could not be successful because it relies upon “universals” which do not exist and assumes simple parallels among psychological, social and aesthetic structures. However, with an apparatus of narrative points of view, one can demonstrate that individual narrative texts are organized from a feminine point of view. To this extent, the intuition that there is a feminine aesthetic can be vindicated.

Anaphor Binding and Narrative Point of View: English Reflexive Pronouns in Sentence and Discourse

This paper offers a detailed survey of occurrences of English reflexive pronouns which are marked with respect to the binding theory of Chomskyan generative grammar. Through a large corpus of attested examples found in contemporary nonlinguistic prose, English reflexive pronouns are shown to violate Chomsky's Binding Principle A in a productive way. The proposed grammar of these violations draws a clear-cut line between syntax and discourse, and shows Chomsky's Binding Principle A to be (a) essentially correct for English if it is clearly defined as a theory of sentence-internal, discourseindependent anaphora; but also (b) crucially incomplete, since it ignores a whole component of the grammar of reflexives and thus fails to account for an open set of data.*

Lyric compression in the stories of Katherine Mansfield

This paper begins by stressing the need for a more critical approach to the work of Katherine Mansfield, accounts of which tend often to rely on purely biographical material. After discussing the relative failure of In a German Pension, which is attributed to a want of focus in the narrative point of view, the essay goes on to suggest that, in the later work, the twin techniques of highlighting and epiphany (the privileging of certain lyrical moments of symbolic vision) enable Katherine Mansfield to construct more satisfactory narratives in which judgements are implied rather than stated. Without denying the importance of Mansfield's personal experiences as source material, or the relatively well-documented influence of Chekhov, the paper stresses the importance in her development of early-century literary theory and practice, especially the current of Modernism as it affected the lyric in particular. It is suggested that this helps to account for the poetic nature of Katherine Mansfield's most characteristic work.

The Symbolist Contamination of Gor'kij's “Realistic” Style

I am concerned in this paper with investigating the complex relationship of Maksim Gor'kii with the literature of his day, including the so-called realists, but particularly with the decadents, the symbolists, and other writers generally thought of alien to Russian whether critical or socialist. The stereotype of Gor'kii still dominant in some quarters presents him walled off from decadent and bourgeois literary styles and from the carriers of such contamination. But Gor'kii was much more complex and more interesting than we have supposed, and he functioned during much of his career part of a literary world in which symbolism, rather loosely defined, was the dominant literary tendency. I would like to adduce evidence of the effect on his writing of symbolist and other modern influences and of his close relationship, at the same time, to the popular culture of the day. A striking illustration of such contamination, and one of Gor'kii's best stories by any criterion was the one entitled zhizn', first published in 1925 in Rome, in an Italian version translated from the author's manuscript and entitled La vita azzura, with an introduction by E. Lo Gatto. During the same year it was published in an English translation in New York and in the original Russian in Berlin. Until recently an English translation by George Reavey was available in a collection entitled The Sky Blue Life and Selected Stories, one that I eagerly ordered for my students to read, when it had become clear to me a number of years ago that Gor'kii's Mother, the perennial fare of long-suffering undergraduates, had been a thing of contempt for many knowledgeable critics, including some Marxists and even Gor'kii himself; that it was probably not at all the prototype of socialist realism, Soviet critics had designated it; and that Lenin's enthusiastic endorsement of the novel might in itself have given cause for misgivings. So we began reading and students, who, having been weaned on modern novels, had no difficulty with Andrei Belyi or James Joyce and who were free of any preconceptions about Gor'kii, found in that story a symbolic structure that seemed to place it in the company of modern western literature. The story shattered all the well-worn cliches about Gor'kii as man and writer and invited a new approach, unhampered by the old stereotypes that had obscured Gor'kii: the realist who is somehow a romantic, the naturalist, the barefoot Nietzschean, the healthy, robust proletarian. The central character in Golubaia zhizn' is Konstantin Mironov, a householder, whom we meet in the very first lines sitting at his window, looking out at the street, and trying not to think. The figure of Mironov, withdrawn from the real world, utterly holed up in himself so to speak-in fact a powerful image of the rejection of life-is the dominant symbol in the work. The narrative viewpoint of Mironov shapes and dominates the story. The usually very much present Gor'kii narrator, full of sententious asides and helpful comments, is absent until the very end, when he makes, we shall see, a rather surprising and cryptic comment. Mironov ie not quite sane, in fact is fi-

Antelope Springs by G. Clifton Wisler

Reviews 375 In 1982, illuminated by civil rights and women’s lib, Yoshiko Uchida wrote Desert Exile, in which she described the intolerable suffering of her family as victims of prejudice in an all-white neighborhood in Berkeley, and their eventual incarceration in Topaz Camp. Sone and Uchida, both born circa 1920, had immigrant mothers who were daughters of Samurai and whose marriages were arranged for them. Now, in Picture Bride, Uchida has written in a language today’s reader can more easily identify with. The beautiful Hana is a daughter of a Samurai, a composite of the author’s mother and other women who arrived before 1920 and survived the years of public misunderstanding. With insight, pathos, and deep understanding, the author, in her graceful, dignified way, dares to expose Hana as a long-suffering, independent, assertive woman who is frustrated and stifled as she struggles to adjust to a hostile culture that is blind to her sense of values. For the reader who does not wish to be drowned in historical detail, this novel is a welcome diversion from the ethnic oral histories and non-fiction books now on the market. SUSAN SUNADA Logan, Utah Antelope Springs. By G. Clifton Wisler. (New York: Walker and Company, 1986. 187 pages, $14.95.) This juvenile Western deserves praise on three counts. First, it introduces young people up to the age of fifteen to superior western fiction; second, it teaches them a western American ethic; and third, it shows adult readers and writers how a good juvenile Western may hold its own against the trashy paperback productions in the field. The action is laid in 1881 in an area west of Fort Worth, Texas, with verifiable names of places and historical events preceding the action proper. Only the novel’s central locale, the Overland way station at Antelope Springs, is a fictional blend of the real Antelope and Mineral Wells. Since the land was wrested from the Comanches seven years before and the wild days of the cattle drives belong to the past, the next step for the consolidation of civilization is the establishment of law and order. The religious overtones in the setting (“Calvary Hill,” “Trinity,” “three perpetually bubbling springs”) steer the plot in a direction which makes this a Sunday school Western couched in the format of a morality play or a Puritan captivity tale with genre-specific stereo­ typed characters and touches of realism and psychology. Though the narrative point of view is largely third-person omniscient, the central intelligence parts enable the reader to share the thoughts, dreams, visions and nightmares of the family in captivity on Calvary Hill, aptly named for their trial and anguish. Much of the book is taken up by slow-paced delib­ 376 Western American Literature erations, as well as tears and prayers. Where point of view creates psycho­ logical suspense, language adds a realistic touch, especially in western phrases and imagery. The book combines narrative technique with ideological message in such a way that the young reader can both enjoy a good story and be imbued with major ideas of the American creed. PETER BISCHOFF University of Munster, Germany The Haunted Mesa. By Louis L’Amour. (New York: Bantam Books, 1987. 357 pages, $18.95.) This is Louis L’Amour’s 86th novel (and 102nd book), and is in the tradition of his supernatural novels The Californios and The Lonesome Gods. But it is unique, with a grounding in science fiction and Latin-American mythology as well: its hero, a present-day illusion-debunker, must jump through a kiva time window—out of L’Amour’s beloved Four Corners area and into “the Other Side,” populated not only by good Indians whom the Navajos called the Anasazi but also by evil ones with Mayan connections. The good Indians have survived the mysterious disappearance of the Mesa Verde cliffdwellers, or are L’Amour’s beautiful heroine Kawasi and her ilk timewarpers from the thirteenth century? Hero Mike Raglan’s mission is to storm the City of the Forbidden and rescue his friend Erik Hokart, kidnapped from his mesa digs by Kawasi’s foes because they want his electronics expertise to update their...

Two Forms of Montage in Babel's Konarmija

The cycle Konarmija, written by Isaak Babel' in the first half of the 192Os, is undoubtedly a modernist w-ork of art. It can be seen as an episodic novel in the Modernist tradition (cf. Mendelson 1983:114). The cycle involves thirty-five separate stories ('chapterepisodes', ibid.), each of which in its turn contains a series of loosely connected episodes. Konarmija is a fragmentary work full of thematic divergences and dissonances. The action pattern of the military campaign which provides a spatial and temporal skeleton to the cycle is but remotely visible. Facts are presented in an incomplete manner, frequently not in accordance with the order of tim.e. Effects of deletion, creating puzzling gaps of information, demand the full attention and cooperation of the reader. Indeed, at many points, a supplementary knowledge of the facts to which the work alludes is needed by the reader in order to reach a satisfactory interpretation. The thematic heterogeneity of the stories is not balanced by uniformity in narrative point of view. On the contrary, the narrative structure of Konarmija can well be defined as polyphonic.' The central point of view of the first person narrator, Ljutov, is broken down into contradictory emotional and evaluative positions. Moreover, Ljutov's multifaceted perspective is in turn opposed to a multitude of external points of view expressed by characters. Every evaluative position in the cycle becomes a separate voice. Due to the hiqhly ambiguous structure of Konarmija, the reader is prevented from taking conventional moral and ideological sides.

Vertellersperspektief en die 'temporele' funksie van die Ou Testament in die Matteusevangelie

Narrative point of view and the 'temporal' function of the Old Testament in Matthew's gospel Matthew's gospel has to be read as a narration with an ongoing plot and an open-end. The plot commences with a reference to the Old Testament and ends with an allusion to the consummation of time at the parousia. And yet, the Old Testament isn't present in Matthew as a separate timesequence. The plot consists of two explicit time-sequences, namely the 'time' of the pre-Easter Jesus-commisiion and the 'time' of the post-Easter disciples-commission. To convey his point of view to his readers, the narrator creates a correlative analogy between these two sequences. The thesis of the article is that the Old Testament functions as the point of analogy and continuity between the two commissions. This thesis is debated against the purport of the various opinions of Matthaean scholars concerning the 'temporal' function of the Old Testament.

Wise-Guy Narrator and Trickster Out-Tricked in Hemingway's " Fifty Grand "

NOTES WISE-GUY NARRATOR AND TRICKSTER OUT-TRICKED IN HEMINGWAY'S "FIFTY GRAND" Robert P. Weeks University of Michigan Although "Fifty Grand" is generally considered one of Hemingway 's finest short stories, the relatively small amount of critical and scholarly attention it has received sets it apart from other Hemingway stories of the first rank. Stories like "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and "The Killers" have been studied with remarkable thoroughness.1 In contrast, not only has there been less published criticism of "Fifty Grand," but much of it focuses on extrinsic matters. The problem that most effectively sidetracks scholarly attention from the story itself is the long-standing effort to link the boxing match in the story to a specific championship fight. The efforts to solve that problem make it clear that the story was probably based not on one fight but at least two.2 But this finding throws little or no light on the story itself or the process by which Hemingway wrote it. In contrast, two aspects of "Fifty Grand" that contribute substantially to the story's effectiveness as a work of narrative art have been virtually ignored: its innovative use of point of view and its rich comedy. Perhaps they have been for the most part ignored because no one has shown the remarkably interesting process through which "Fifty Grand" evolved. When this process is examined, one gets a revealing look at Hemingway's growing skill, particularly in his handling of narrative point of view and the motif of the trickster out-tricked. And, most important, "Fifty Grand" is revealed, as a consequence, to be far more than a grim account of the sordid world of professional boxing. It stands, instead, as a minor comic masterpiece. When Hemingway was sixteen years old, he wrote what is in effect the first version of "Fifty Grand." It is a humorous story of a fixed prize fight entitled "A Matter of Colour."3 From his high school years until his early twenties, Hemingway thought of himself as primarily a humorist. Much of what he wrote during this period has a comic intent : fiction, journalism, and occasional writing. His column in the school newspaper, for example, was an undisguised imitation of the humorist he most admired, Ring Lardner. "A Matter of Colour" resembles Lardner's work in several ways: it focuses,p,n the seamy side 84Notes of professional sport, uses a vernacular narrator, relies on dialog, and exploits the stupidity of athletes for comic effect.4 "A Matter of Colour" appeared in the April, 1916, issue of the Oak Park (Illinois) High School literary magazine, Tabula.5 Its first-person narrator is not the protagonist but a "character" in the story. It is not without significance that "A Matter of Colour" and "Fifty Grand" are the only two pieces of fiction by Hemingway narrated in this way, a fact that has hitherto escaped notice. The link between the two is strengthened in two additonal ways: the narrators in the two stories are nearly identical; each is a prize fighter's handler with the outlook and speech of a tough, seasoned professional, a wise guy; the central episode in each story involves a trickster being amusingly out-tricked. The narrator of "A Matter of Colour," Bob Armstrong, a handler, tells of a scheme to fix a fight. The boxer he handles, Danny, is not in shape to win because of an injury incurred in training, yet he has bet heavily on himself. To make his money safe, Danny and the handler devise a ridiculous but seemingly foolproof way of fixing the fight. The ring in which the fight will take place is on a stage at the back of which is a curtain just behind the ropes. They place a Swede with a baseball bat behind the curtain and instruct him to watch through a peephole until Danny's black opponent is against the ropes, then to swing on the black man's head with the bat from behind the curtain. When the fight begins, Danny rushes his opponent to the ropes at the rear of the ring...

Point of View in Los de Abajo

THE critical attention that has been given to point of view in Los de abajo (1915) is minimal in comparison to proliferation of studies concerning characterization, theme and structure.' However, a careful reading of Los de abajo will reveal importance of narrative viewpoint in novel. Point of view is vantage point from which story is seen and told. According to Mier Sternberg, point of view is the most comprehensive principle motivating selection, combination and distribution of elements in narrative text.2 Norman Friedman, problem of point of view has always been one of subjectivity, that is, interference of an authorial narrator, versus objectivity, or disappearance of author.3 Friedman provides technical framework to show distinction between two poles, one of subjective telling and other of objective showing. He devises a specific and identifiable set of narrative modes through which an author progressively removes himself from story. Wayne C. Booth this problem is not clearly defined; point of view is not just a technique for subjectivizing and objectivizing but a narrative element which is concerned with manipulative effects of author on reader, creating different types of narrative distance between two. Booth says that authors affect our perceptions by using reliable or unreliable narrators: For practical criticism probably most important of these kinds of distance is that between fallible or unreliable narrator and implied author who carries reader with him in judging narrator.4 In order to provide some background to critical aspects under consideration in this article, it is necessary to point out that concept of narrative viewpoint encompasses two dimensions, one that exists in real world and another that exists in imaginative world of art-work. Cleanth Brooks and R. P. Warren state that one dimension-point of view-carries basic attitude or idea of author and other-focus of narration' --describes method of narration.5 Robert Weimann has taken problem of definition and terminology one step further by suggesting existence of a fusion of two types of point of view, historical and structural, within a work of literature:

A Constant Reality: The Presentation of Character in the Fiction of John Fowles

In her essay Dryness, Iris Murdoch set the terms of what is one of the central dichotomies in recent fiction. We must overcome, she suggested there, our desire for as seen in our sense of form: the consolation of form, the clean work, the simplified fantasy-myth, we must pit the destructive power of the now so unfashionable naturalistic idea of character. 2 But in later discussion with Frank Kermode, she points out the difficulty of creating character, when often it turns out in the end that something about the structure of the work itself, the myth as it were of the work, has drawn all these people into a sort of spiral, or into a kind of form which ultimately is the form of one's own mind. 3 Much post-war fiction is testimony to this latter comment, and many novelists, certainly those practitioners of the nouveau roman and their progeny, have adopted the hermeticism of the crystalline work with its self-referential stance, subsuming character into function or pattern, person into participle in the sentence of the text. Against this, however, we can posit the attempts of John Fowles to foreground character, to open the character out to the tragedy of the human situation in acceptance of his suffering freedom, to struggle against what Fowles sees as the twentieth century's retreat into form and Lamaism.4 Humanity and morality are important to Fowles, and he refuses the retreat into the formal mythoi of his novels, emphasizing instead the content and human character rather than the medium of the artifice. His method chiefly involves three stratagems: manipulation of narrative points of view; an attempted negation of the print medium itself; and the adroit use of the proper name. The aim is to present character in the way that Nicholas comes to see Alison in The Magus: as a constant reality. Fowles wants to create the illusion that his characters are as real as we who read-not just like people we know, but of the same ontological

Narrative Point of View in "The Last of the Flock" and "Old Man Travelling"

Narrative Point of View in "The Last of the Flock" and "Old Man Travelling"

Keller's "Kleider machen Leute" as Novelle and Film

Despite the rapidly growing popularity of film courses in American universities in general and German departments in particular,1 as yet no widely used methodology for the study of the German film has been developed. Germanists, traditionally best trained in literature with relatively little formal film study, often use an essentially literary approach to cinema, despite a number of serious problems. A literary approach is even more likely to be employed when is dealing with the movie version of an established literary as is the case in this study. Students are not yet widely familiar with the language of although such familiarity is an integral part of almost any film course. It is not enough to take as a point of departure the fact that most motion pictures tell a story, and then proceed to treat movies as nothing more than visual literature, or literature where the reader's imagination has been supplanted by the imagination of the filmmaker. Students of literature learn about many techniques and devices which seem to be used similarly in both literature and film, such as the flashback, interior monologue (voice-over), contraction and extension of time, different levels and intensities of focus, and different narrative points of view. It is tempting and easy to transfer these techniques from the printed text to the visual text, but runs the risk of misunderstanding aspects of film art which have no exact literary counterparts. A number of substantial differences exist between literature and film, and of these is the difference in production and reception of each medium. Prose fiction is a on one medium with a single author and a single reader; the circumstances of production and reception are normally those of solitude. Film, on the other hand, is a collectively produced medium with a large number of specialized skills involved in making the finished product. The audience in a darkened auditorium has both collective and individual aspects which may be brought out by a specific film (e.g., a horror film). A full understanding of how a film does or does not achieve the intentions of the production team can be had only through an appreciation of how films are made, with special attention paid to the effects which the various constituent elements can have upon each other, such as lighting, editing, sound track, special effects, different lenses, and so forth. These are largely elements which fit into categories of inquiry

Ironist and Moralist: The Two Readers of Tom Jones

Ironist and Moralist: The Two Readers of Tom Jones WILLIAM PARK Commenting on William Empson’s essay “Tom Jones,” C. J. Rawson remarked that “the overall effect of the essay is misleading... in so far as it suggests that the main doctrinal points are made by means of an essentially evasive irony rather than by what is often an em­ phatic explicitness.”1 Rawson was speaking of sexual morality, and perhaps we have all come into complete agreement on that subject. Yet on another “doctrinal” point—the relationship between the plot of the novel and a providential design—there have appeared in recent years two contradictory and opposed readings. On the one hand we find Ian Watt, Martin Battestin, Aubrey Williams, and Henry Knight Miller, who see the well-ordered plot as being somehow related to Fielding’s vision of a well-ordered universe.2 As Watt says, the plot “reflects the general literary strategy of neoclas­ sicism; just as the creation of a field of force makes visible the universal law of magnetism, so the supreme task of the writer was to make visible in the human scene the operations of universal order.”3 On the other hand we discover Sheridan Baker, John Preston, Leo Braudy, and David Goldknopf, who see the plot as an artifice, a kind of irony, a recognition of confusion, or a failure having no real significance in itself but possibly working as an aesthetic device that enables Fielding 233 234 / WILLIAM PARK to achieve other ends.4 According to Braudy, “In Tom Jones Fielding asserts that the most obvious and artificial structure (the plot) is also the most liberating. Because it does not claim to be necessary, it therefore allows the material the freest play and gives the truest and most relevant representation of life. ” Braudy further claims that since only the Man of the Hill, Partridge, and Blifil believe in Providence, “the providential view in Tom Jones is at best supererogatory and at worst ignorantly or meretriciously self serving.”5 I believe this conflict may to some extent be resolved if we return to Empson’s concept of “double irony” in Fielding and the two readers which that irony involves.6 According to Empson, Fielding poses as the man of the world, the one who winks tolerantly at sexual mis­ behavior. This is his first irony, made at the expense of stuffy moralists. The second irony, however, trips up the worldly reader when either chastity or sexual license no longer appears to be a joke. Thus Fielding moves closer to a Richardsonian view, though one which has become highly qualified. Now I would argue that the plot ofTom Jones is one double irony.7 As narrator, Fielding on numerous occasions insists that the world is governed by accident and Fortune, that virtue is not rewarded by happiness in this world (XV, i), and that he will not intervene to help Tom (XVII, i). He appeals directly to the realist like Braudy and seems to be laughing at the theologically orthodox like Battestin. As he says, he is confined to “natural Means alone” (XVII, i).8 At first, the hodgepodge of events seems to support this first irony, but as order and happiness begin to emerge out of the random and episodic world, as Tom’s fortunes are reversed, the comic action contradicts this particu­ lar narrative viewpoint and reveals the second irony, namely that Fortune is but Providence improperly understood. At this point the realist who accepted all the statements about chance, accident, For­ tune, and history as absolute has been revealed to be as literal-minded as his moralistic counterpart. By a careful counterpoint between statement about the plot and the plot itself, Fielding has by the last book reversed his initial position; and as he withdraws from direct commentary, the novel as a whole affirms an orthodoxy which be­ comes more interesting and acceptable than the simpleminded version preached by the prigs. Instead of talking about the plot ofTom Jones as Two Readers of Tom Jones / 235 an artifice, then, it might be more appropriate to notice how Fielding’s pretense at being a naturalistic narrator is an even greater artifice...

Marlow, Henry James, and "Heart of Darkness"

IN the 1917 Author's Note to the volume in which Heart of Darkness appeared, Youth-A Narrative: and Two Other Stories, Conrad devoted three of his eight paragraphs to Marlow, with whom my relations have grown very intimate in the course of years. terms in which this intimacy is expressed are both ironic and touching: haunts my hours of solitude, when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great comfort and harmony. . .. About the origins of their relationship, however, Conrad says virtually nothing; he merely disclaims having had anymeditated plan for his capture, and adds: The man Marlow and I came together in the casual manner of those health-resort acquaintances which sometimes ripen into friendships. This one has. ripened. Conrad is equally noncommittal about Marlow's literary function. He limits himself to reporting without comment that others had supposed him to be all sorts of things: a clever screen, a mere device, a 'personator,' a familiar spirit, a whispering 'daemon.' We must, then, inquire into Marlow's origins and functions: without any help from Conrad; and one way to begin is to consider how Conrad had handled the narrative point of view in his earlier