BOO K S
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perience in movement, a process of disillusion, discovery, learning, where
the characters' responses to experience allow them to reinterpret and
redefine themselves. In a traditional novel
(Emma, Jane Eyre)
a moment
comes - its favorite forms are marriage and death - when the stream is
dammed, the expansion of conscience arrested, a repose and definition
achieved, and we are not encouraged to look for. any further process, or
at least are given its definitive contours. Later in the nineteenth century
- Friedman begins with Hardy, while conceding that first signs of the
change can be found in Dickens, George Eliot and certainly Henry
James - novelists begin to refuse to close off the stream of conscience:
Conrad, Forster and Lawrence (and then Virginia Woolf, Joyce, Huxley,
Hemingway) increasingly insist upon leaving their readers with an
"unsatisfying" sense of flux, indeterminacy and future change, a sense
that nothing has been terminated and everything opened up to a con–
science which will have to face terrifyingly new developments of insight.
The argument is basically a simple, even an obvious one, but the
book is no less engaging for this. Friedman's perception about structure
permits him to read his novels with economy, freshness of vision and a
feeling for their dynamic relevance one to another.
It
seems to me
un–
fortunate, however, that Friedman is reluctant to deal resolutely with
some of the most interesting issues his study raises or implies. Chief of
these is the relation between fictional endings and the "life endings"
to which they must in some manner be related. Friedman poses the
question whether the primary term of his reality is a theory of life or a
theory of fiction, only to answer that the two are inextricable. Perhaps;
but this does not advance us toward a response to the primary question,
psychological, sociological and aesthetic, of what the sense of an ending
means to us - whether anything outside the confines of art seems to us,
subjectively, finally closed (except death, and we have spent considerable
effort definalizing that) - and hence what may be the status of the
kinds of endings provided by novels, situated on the confines of art and
experience. Do
Emma
and
Jane Eyre
betray experience (at least
our
experience) , or reveal its profound structures by a superior, and satisfy–
ing, reordering? Why does the exit line James gives to Kate Croy - "We
shall never be again as we were" - seem so perfectly responsive to some
need in us both for conclusion and suspension? The logic and quality
of Friedman's argument puts him before these questions, and his failure
to explore them limits his book to
literary
criticism in a way it should
not br - since implicitly is not - limited.
Harold Kaplan is philosophically more ambitious.
The
Passive Voice
is a reflection on the solipsism of modern fiction, its passivity, its ex–
clusive ded ication to the ironic and comic perspective. Action, Kaplan
