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his peculiarly modern tedium - is in his blandness about the work–
ings of time. Knowing that its mere passage can dispel any dramatic
accumulations, any gatherings of disaster, that even the chance opera–
tions of daily living, like a good breakfast or a change in the weather,
can ameliorate the anguish of romance or failure, he actually tried to
make his novels duller than they potentially needed to have been.
Time does indeed give the lie to the imagination of apocalypse or
endings, and in
this
conviction Howells is apt to seem especially, if
eccentrically, a precursor of some contemporary fashions. This is
hardly a reason to revive interest in most of his novels, however. He
achieved what he called "the art of not arriving" - of not reaching
for melodramatic and symbolic summaries - at disastrous cost for
any continuing interest in most of his fiction. What he did was done
out of literary convictions that are a child's version of novelistic
practices like those of Iris Murdoch in
The Red and the Green:
if
novels are to be like life, she tediously insists, then of course they
should foreswear any "false" shapings of material toward a pre–
scribed and therefore unnecessarily fictitious finale.
Howells' parodies of literary summation, his refusal to exploit the
dramatic heightening of the forces he brings into play (as in the little
masterpiece
Indian Summer,
where past and present, youth and age,
Italy and America are given a nearly Jamesian development), his op–
position to whatever he recognized as belonging to literary romance -
these reticences are all at the service of "reality" and "American
life." Until the mid-eighties he couldn't see that what he called
reality and American life were fictions manufactured out of his own
placid and uninterrupted personal success. He read his life as the
history of his times. But again, was he much different, in his way
of proceeding, from critics who now celebrate the fact, as did Zola
in his novels about the various industries and occupations, that a
new book has at last "made available" some aspect of reality hitherto
sequestered? The novel has been called many things, but is it at
last only a procurer? It was for this reason, among others, that
Leslie Fiedler praised
The Sot-Weed Factor:
it made, said Fiedler,
Western Maryland available to American fiction. And it is for
this
kind of accomplishment, too, that Joyce has become academically
digestible: for the yield of meanings
now
recognized as reality.
As
a
result, Joyce has seldom been given credit for his real and heroic
achievement: as a writer who parodies the very productions of
