Bradbury, Malcolm - Towards a Poetics of Fiction

Towards a Poetics of Fiction: 1) An Approach through StructureAuthor(s): Malcolm BradburySource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1967), pp. 45-52Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345350 .

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Towards a Poetics of Fiction 1) An Approach through Structure

MALCOLM BRADBURY

The study of the novel has emerged as one of the great growth-industries of mod- em criticism. Fiction-and particularly modern fiction-has taken on a compara- tively new importance in literary study. Indeed it is effectively only over the last twenty years or so that many of the familiar reputations in the modern novel- Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, Conrad, Proust, Mann, Svevo, Faulkner, Hemingway, and so on-have really been secured. At the same time there has emerged a clearer critical consensus about the great novelists of the past, and there has tended to emerge something like an implicit aesthetics for the description and assessment of novels. Much of this has been founded on earlier work, but it has betrayed its own obsessions and interests, and the starting point of the argument that follows -an argument designed to start an argument and not conclude one-is a sense of considerable dissatisfaction with the present state of debate about the nature of the novel and the general practice of novel-criticism as it flourishes in the learned trade-journals. One important feature of the present wealth of critical activity is the comparative slowness with which it has developed. There was, as the modern period began, an abundance of sophisticated debate about fiction produced by practitioners of the novel-Flaubert, James, Howells, Conrad, Joyce, and others -of quite as good an order as the new self-consciousness in poetry, and involving similar aesthetic radicalism. But, for reasons hard to see, the new aesthetics in poetry penetrated into the academies with much greater speed than the corresponding movement in fiction. The consequences of this for novel-criticism have been considerable, and do much to account for its present disarray. For the aesthetics based on poetry made literary language, its symbol-making and tension-making power, the main new point of attention. It characteristically saw works of art as total sym- bolic objects, single concrete wholes which could not be changed in any detail without changing total meaning. This view of literature was best ascertained if the object of demonstration was a short or lyric poem. As one obvious result, many of the most pressing of modern critical assumptions are founded on the mode of working of that exemplary object.

The consequent orthodoxy about literature that developed is familiar enough and still influential enough not to require extensive discussion. But a number of central points need disentangling if we are to approach the present impasse in fictional criticism. The first point is that the New Criticism, as we call it, has been easiest with intensely concentrated works, lacking directly represented characters or anything resembling a narrative line. The second is that this criticism has tended to regard works of literature as closed systems; it is anti-causal or solipsistic. It tends to concern itself primarily with a single unit of art-the poem-and to see this existing independently of its creator or reader in its only ascertainable form:



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words on a page. This primary unit is usually studied in terms of methods for at- taining verbal coherence-processes of repetition and contrast in the use of language (hence "imagery," "theme," "tone," "tension," "paradox"). These elements are usually taken as parts of a whole whose character is normally defined by maxi- mum use of poetic language-a language of concrete instances transformed by the interplay of verbal resonances into something universal. This does not mean that the work imitates types in general nature; the theory is not neo-classic. Nor does it mean that it is the product of intense awarenesses within the creative power itself about the vital springs in things; it is not romantic. Rather the view is linguistic and neo-symbolist; it holds that language itself has the inherent power to project wide possibilities which can take the form of a concrete universal. Works of art are thus verbal constructs in which all the material necessary for their appreciation and elucidation is contained; they are distilled thought-feeling complexes in which the verbal procedures for creating progression derive from the properties of heightened, literary, non-discursive language (hence their essential features are best defined by grammatical terms, like paradox, antithesis, metaphor, symbol, not by mimetic terms like character, description or plot). The main assumptions of this aesthetic for my purposes are these: 1) that works of art are autotelic discourse, concrete representations in heightened language of an experience which can only be abstracted by criticism from the complete work, 2) that because a work of art exists in this way, we should be less interested in its structure than in its overall texture and its verbal modes of unity, and 3) that literary language is the distinctive feature of such works, and the procedures which distinguish that language from other forms of language are a crucial part of the critical accounting.

In consequence, the critical approach derived from this view is not conceived as a means of reference to objects imitated by literature; it finds no inherent univer- sals in the external world-only those in the metaphoric or symbolizing function of language itself. Thus "content" must be subsumed into "form" and be seen usually as a species of verbal or thematic recurrence. The general inference is, therefore, that when we confront human experience and relationships in literature, we do so within a broad framework of composition which creates a sense of uni- versality through the given powers of language itself. Hence, inevitably, this kind of criticism concerns itself more and more with devices of presentation, rather than representation, and in doing so has claimed superior critical logicality. This logicality has rightly enough been applied to the criticism of fiction, as of longer poems, and it has in many respects proved profitable. Though New Critics often tend to distinguish poetic from prose language categorically, it has become more and more familiar to suppose that there are close analogies between the modes. In- deed, in a recent excellent book (Language of Fiction, 1966), David Lodge has ar- gued that most of the attributes the New Criticism applies to poetic language apply quite precisely to prose language in fiction as well. Hence, he argues, it is only logi- cal to regard novels as pieces of autotelic discourse; if they differ from poems by virtue of their dimension and their prose form, they do not differ radically and we must therefore apply the same kind of stylistic analysis to them as we have to poetry. In fact, many of the assumptions about the unitary nature of the work of art, the relation of form to content, and parts to wholes, have been long adopted

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into the study of fiction. The two main consequences of this fact have been that a) much of the criticism of fiction has had a submerged symbolist aesthetic behind it, and b) a large amount of fictional criticism has devoted itself to finding stylistic or verbal unities in literary matter inherently more discursive than most poetry.

But since novels do have an enhanced referential dimension, and since any discussion of linguistic unity is likely to leave that dimension unsubsumed, so there is, in criticism of this sympathy, a tendency to see a kind of subtext of representation beneath the process of presentation. The compositional scale must be one appropriate to the complexity of life; technique must be discovery. Hence the effort of such essays as Mark Schorer's justly influential "Technique as Discovery" to capture as much for rhetoric and composition as can be got without sacrificing some mimetic or representational dimension altogether. But the presence of an un- reconciled element-the element of empiricism, of attention to workaday reality, that we associate with the novelty of the novel, for instance-makes the case seem incomplete and leaves us divided between two divergent poetics. However, the compensatory emphasis provided by critics who stress the referential quality of fiction, its capacity to particularize, its closeness to life, seems often equally mislead- ing. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel (1957), advances an argument of this kind, finding the distinctive nature of the novel in its empirical disregard of traditional conventions and structures. Other critics have intensified the possibilities of this approach by suggesting that what most typifies the form is what Henry James would call its "illustrative" nature-its singular attentiveness to life, its empirical curiosity, its instinct for the luminous rendering of the particular. But whether this emphasis moves toward Barbara Hardy's view (in The Appropriate Form, 1964) that the ideal form for the novel is like that of Anna Karenina-"an assertion of dogma in an undogmatic form, the last pulse of a slow and irregular rhythm which is a faithful record of the abrupt, the difficult, the inconclusive"-or whether it moves toward F. R. Leavis's view (in The Great Tradition, 1948) that "an unu- sually developed interest in life," a humane and moral concern, constitutes fineness in a novel, such arguments tend to be weakened first by the fact that there are many novels which have other ends in view (so Ian Watt stumbles with Fielding, Leavis with late James and Joyce) and second by the fact that lifelikeness is only one as- pect of mimesis, and hence is conditioned by larger purposes operative in the novel. Further, by attributing the capacity to render life to some moral quality in the author, Leavis tends to see the novel as a literary situation in which the author transfers sincerity or maturity by direct correspondence to the reader. The ontolog- ical argument, on the other hand, tends to divest itself entirely of questions about the way in which fiction affects us, and also ignores questions about the imitative function of literature, its relation to that which inherently it must imitate.

These two views, the two most familiar views of the novel we have, thus diverge in a variety of respects. But they are alike in their unwillingness to describe the novel formally, and to determine the disposition of elements other than verbal structure or the incremental addition of scene to scene. The neo-symbolist view, which sees all literature as verbal procedure, finds difficulty in suggesting any features which make novels recognizably novels; and the realistic view, which typifies novels by their special degree of interest in life, tends to classify them as an

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a-generic genre. Yet a full description of the novel is not really possible if we concentrate only on those characteristics which create an effect of verbal unity, nor if we concentrate only on those which make for lifelikeness and solidity of specifica- tion, or regard the novel as an undefinable because empirical species. At the same time both of these views have an implicit poetics-one symbolist, the other realist -which can only lead to radically different critical emphases and preferences; and this in itself must create the desire for a more inclusive typology.

What surely is needed is an approach to fiction which concerns itself with the special complexities of novels and the distinctive kinds of artifice and imitation employed in their creation. We can only achieve this by recognizing that the novel is not a traditional literary genre, like tragedy or comedy, but a general form like poetry or drama; a form recognizable, moreover, to writers when they write one and to readers when they read one, but subject to broad and narrow uses and not to be defined even as clearly as poetry and drama. There is no generic theory which will enable us to define closely the kind of matter it is likely to imitate or the kind of effect it seeks to produce; nor can we define it clearly by its diction or mode of presentation, as we can define poetry and drama. Though we can say that novels are usually presented to us in prose, as bound books for private reading, and are fictive and hence autotelic, this will give us little guide to the matter presented in them, to the kind of action they will contain or the kind of effect they will produce. The result is that any attempt at generic classification is likely to end up with some monstrosity of definition, like Henry Fielding's "comic epic poem in prose." On the other hand, if we deduce from this that novels are intrinsically a-generic, typified by their revolutionary nature, their freedom from convention, and their stress on the novel and the individual in human experience, as some critics have, we are apt to define them rather by their place in history, in a history of style or the evolution of modes. So we can, following Ian Watt's lead, identify them socially with the middle class, see them as literary vehicles of burgher indi- vidualism, and characterize them further by a complex of realism founded in philosophic empiricism, fascination with material environment, and a new kind of demanding intercourse between the individual and society. We can thus find a place for them in history and the social world, see their method of depiction as low mimetic, and their prevailing obsession, the unveiling of illusion and hypoc- risy. But from the point of view of a poetics, a more profitable approach is to recognize that while the novel has no typical action, certain compositional problems and features do exist, distinctively and inherently, in novels, in their fictive nature, their character as prose, and their magnitude or epic dimension.

A novel is a fictional prose discourse that is, in the Aristotelian formulation, "necessarily of a certain magnitude." The problems of the magnitude and hence of the necessary range of the novel-the problems that derive from "our inability to possess a novel as a picture or a lyric can be possessed," as E. K. Brown puts it- seem fundamental, since they determine the essential conditions of our engagement with the medium, whether we are readers or writers. They oblige the critic to possess larger terms than many have for talking about the spatial and temporal extension of novels and the full worlds they explore. Equally they commit the

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writer to a certain scale of attention, an epical dimension whose action, as Henry Fielding describes it, is "more extended and comprehensive" than that of tragedy, contains "a much larger circle of incidents," and introduces "a greater variety of characters." The fact that the novel is written in prose also significantly determines its matter. Prose, as compared with poetry, has an accentuated referential dimension: it is our normal instrument of discursive communication, is associated with our ways of verifying factuality, and is thereby subject to a complex of social uses not imposed on verse. In compositional terms, an extended piece of prose will inevitably use forms of discursiveness and persuasion not normally available to poetry, will have a different tonal and structural engagement with the reader, and so will emerge as a different species of persuasion, usually involving extremely varied use of language (ranging from reportage to extreme poetic effects) and large-scale rhetorical strategies of the kind explored so well in Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). As for the fictive nature of novels, this can indeed be seen as a feature common to all forms of invented discourse, but it can also be distinguished as that matter for invention appropriate to this scale and this mode of discourse, so that a writer will choose to develop it through prose fiction and no other form: and that matter is typically characters and events, presented to us by verbal means and shown in extended interaction. Thus the novel is a complex structure by virtue of its scale, prose-character, and matter, being more extended than most poems, deal- ing with a wider range of life, appealing to the reader through a broader variety of approaches, having a different relationship to working language, and above all stating its character, intentions and conventions with less immediate clarity and a greater degree of gradual, worked persuasion. It will tend, then, to be more discursive than poetry, and its stronger referential dimension will be shown not only by attentiveness to people as they talk and think and act, and places as they look and institutions as they work, but also to large processes of human interaction as they take place over a long chronological span, or spatially over a large area of ground or a large sector of society.

The structural principles deriving from these features are various and cannot be closely defined in terms of a subject-matter. There is no necessary kind of hero, though there is usually a hero; and there is no necessary kind of action, either in substance or shape, as in tragedy or comedy; but frequently there are structures like those of classical comedy, in that the diction tends to be mean, the range of characters wide in classes and social types, and the social and moral worlds dis- cordant, though moving toward harmonious resolution. Still, if there is no necessary structure, almost any fictional structure must necessarily consist of certain things-primarily a chain of interlinked events unified by persuasive discourse and by those materials in life which, transliterated as discourse, take on for the author a character of interconnectedness. We cannot provide a total typology of such a structure, but we can, and need to, seek empirical means for describing what is inevitably present in a novel. Now it seems to me that any effective account of such structures, which are not prior typologies but compositional constructs deriving from rhetorical and mimetic sources, must be concerned both with discourse, in this particular form, and that which in life determines and organizes an author's interest in such discourse. For if we say that the character of a work of fiction is pri-

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marily verbal, is a linguistic effect, we will tend to be committed to questions about the role of language, and find the order and unity of the work lying in that; and if we say that the nature of the novel is primarily to render, to make vivid, to give a sense of life as lived, we may primarily be involved in judgments about life and society, and find order and unity lying in some typology in the world. But if we say that the novel is determined by conditions within the medium itself and outside it in life, then we may move freely between language and life, and find order and unity in the kind of working that a novel has to have, and that any given novel has had, in achieving its persuasive ends; and we may further allow, by this approach, for the book's referential dimension as an account of life, its rhetorical dimension as a species of language, its sociological dimension as an exploration and crystalli- zation of a cultural situation, and its psychological or mythic dimension as an exploration of personal or social psychic experience.

Let me now make it clear that I have no wish to disparage or reject stylistic questions, or the analysis of verbal and rhetorical procedures. I believe that they have done much to enlarge our sense of the workings of fiction, and to dissipate many traditional illogicalities in the criticism of literature. My gratitude is only tempered by the fact that they have made us suspicious of talking about the referential dimensions of literature at all. There is a quiver of unease that comes over us when we sit down to talk about a novel and use mimetic words like "plot," "character" or "incident"-a fear that we are imposing unwarranted demands upon what is, after all, essentially a block of words. We are therefore inclined to assume that if we can show that the imagery of cash and legality runs through a Jane Austen novel, or that a whiteness-blackness opposition runs through Moby-Dick, we can show more about the real being of the book than by showing that it deals with a society, with dispositions of character and relationship, so as to create a coherent moral and social world and an attitude toward it, steadily worked from page to page, which condition our responses. We may be interested in such things, but we will be tempted to regard them as more diffuse versions of the essential linguistic relationship which words create between writer and reader. It is perhaps not unfair to claim, at this point, that there are very few writers who appear to have felt that it is only through language that they communicate. They are, I would suppose, always conscious that they are mediating verbally a devised succession of events; and that the organization of those events, their relations one to another, their selection and their disposition are primary to their task as writers and are utterly crucial to the effect of their work. Most writers would consider, I think, that they are making verbal approaches to the reader which engage him with a shared reality, and which create in him expectations and values, sympathies and repulsions, appropriate to the comprehension of that reality. We may then take the writer's language in this essential activity as an enabling feature, one of a variety of elements which the writer must dispose of in producing a work. If we take this position, we will find the author's signature not simply in stylistics, as neo-symbolists do, but in his urging upon us, through verbal means, a particular complex of matter for persuasion.

To provide an adequate account of the structure of fiction, then, we must honor the fundamental recognition of modern criticism that all things in a novel are me-

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diated through words, yet acknowledge that certain things are logically prior to those words, a matter which they mediate. We cannot, I think, isolate these things as a species of prior content seeking an appropriate form, since they will include ideas, insights and compositional commitments not definable as content. Rather we are concerned with the process of inventing or making a world, with the dynamics by which that world is shown and evaluated by forms of rendering and distancing, ordering and urging, which are the larger blocks of fictional persuasion. The trou- ble with such matters for enquiry is that, though we may accept them as a necessary condition of literary creation, there is no really satisfactory method of ascer- taining what they are except through the words which finally express them. On the other hand, our successful reading of those words is surely a kind of process by which we hypothesize the sort of decisions of relevance made in order to put this material to us in this way. What we are concerned with, then, is not the projection of some matter or action prior to the writing which has produced it, but a steady appreciation of the way in which a writer has shaped and been shaped by his un- dertaking. We might project the situation back in Aristotelian terms, or neo-Aris- totelian terms, in the form of a prior working out of the action in the mind of the writer, which the compositional process then imitates; but it is only meaningful to do this if we say that the action imitated exists simultaneously as that which has to be written (that which motivates and directs the compositional process) and that which is worked, achieved, realized in the writing. For any novelist will admit that the prefigured novel is not the same as the novel achieved, but that none- theless it is the interaction between what is prefigured and the obligations of achieving it that "create" a novel. A novel is inevitably determined by prior intentions and choices (the most significant being the choice of the novel as the right narrative form), but the crucial selection, and rejection, lies in finding a means for persuasion compatible with the author's prior interests and the conditions of the novel-form itself as a species of working and persuading. Hence we will not want to define the structure of a novel as a prior typology, but on the other hand we will not want to say, I believe, that it is formed only by the aesthetic logic of the literary structure alone, which is the neo-symbolist tendency.

But if, therefore, we avoid looking for a prior action, a story to be told, we can still derive from a novel a causative hypothesis, a unifying purposefulness which sets the aesthetic logic into action and which perpetually shapes it. In this way we may discover how the novelist limits, by formalizing it, the total environment of- fered by life, how he creates a conditioned world with its own laws and probabili- ties, a world in which experience can only assume certain shapes and characters only assume certain dimensions, in order that "structure" may have its existence. By this view structure would be that devised chain of events that, presented by narration, conditions the successive choices, made sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, and constitutes not only an entire narrative but an attitude toward it; it is thus the substantive myth that we can derive from the novel without regarding it as something independent of it. It is therefore a compositional achievement, this action existing in that social and moral environment and in that context of rhetorical effects designed to control and represent that world for us. These effects thus exist less in the realm of style per se than in the realm of per-

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suasion, to the end of producing a logic or a response in readers which is the proper outcome of the ordering and selecting process, those decisions about technique and stylistic base and pattern about which criticism is capable of talking so well (e.g., Booth). Now in novels this synthesizing process will normally, though not always, emerge as a dynamic action about persons in a society (frequently one we recognize as analogous to our own) and will usually advance through unfolding events to which we are continually being given an attitude, a response (so that they are never neutrally events). And since each novel is, for reasons already given, a unique conjunction of variables, not having a definable generic nature, we must be particularly attentive and responsive if we are to project our sense of what this structure might be.

In any novel of more than incidental interest, then, we must assimilate and re- spond to a world with its own defined conditions and conventions (however lifelike these may seem), and at the same time judge, estimate and evaluate what is being urged to us. In a complex way, we must dispose and relate parts and elements in order to form a growing hypothesis about the total action, and we must group blocks of experience according to standards of judgment whose aesthetic and evaluative terms are given by the text. We are guided in this process by a narrative pattern which both places and conceals elements in the action. So we are encour- aged to make all sorts of provisional assessments, and provisional classifications; so we assemble characters in groups and classes, estimate the status of particular values in relation to other values, and acquire a conditioned sense of moral appro- priateness, a conditioned sense of choice. In doing all this we are not, I think, engaged with life as such, nor committed only to tests of realization, by which pas- sages or scenes may be analyzed for lifelike texture. Nor, I think, are we engaged only with something that can be described simply as discourse and analyzed only as an image-system or a rhetoric independent of writers and readers. My case is that, while there is no single dynamic that is generically characteristic of the novel, its main structural characteristic lies in a developing action about characters and events conducted in a closed-that is to say, an authorially conditioned-world containing principles, values and attitudes by which we may evaluate those events. To talk about this structural dimension, we need to be able to open up that closed world by asking questions about causation and effect, a procedure that does not seem at all fallacious if we raise the questions and answer them from cruxes within the work. To do this is to elevate into prominence those conscious or intuitive choices which every writer must perpetually make, and to regard not only the discourse but the structure-which can be distinguished from the discourse as a species of imitation-as part of the matter to be persuaded. It also means that, while we regard novels as verbal constructs, we must see the nature of what is con- structed not as a self-sustaining entity but a species of persuasion, the writer handling material for the reader so as to engage him properly with the world of this single work. And one point now needs firm restatement: it is only if we have some such theory of structure, however empirical, that we are likely to acquire a meaningful descriptive poetics of fiction; and the absence of that, the current weak- ness of critical terminology, is a central cause of the inadequacy of much of the present wealth of novel criticism.

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Bradbury, Malcolm - Towards a Poetics of Fiction

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