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Janet Gurkin Altman Approaches to a Form Janet Gurkin Altman Approaches to a Form EPISTOLARITY Approaches to a Form By Janet Gurkin Altman Though the letter's potential as an artistic form and a narrative vehicle has been recog­ nized by writers of nearly every nationality and period from Ovid, in the Epistulae Heroidum, to Saul Bellow, in Herzog, episto­ lary literature has only recently become the object of close and sustained critical scrutiny as a result of the revival of the letter form in contemporary fiction, and a growing recogni­ tion that the genre was not, in fact, abandoned following the period of its greatest popularity in the eighteenth century. This was the age that produced such classics as Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, Smollett's Humphry Clinker, Goethe's Werth­ er, and Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses. Such well-known works, Professor Altman suggests, though they represent a wide di­ versity in style, plot, and characterization, re­ veal a surprising number of similar literary structures or intriguingly persistent patterns when read together with other examples of the epistolary genre. And these structures — re­ curring thematic relations, character types, narrative events and organization — can, in turn, be related to properties inherent in the letter itself. For in numerous instances, these basic formal and functional characteristics of the letter, far from being purely ornamental, significantly affect the way in which meaning is constructed, consciously and unconscious­ ly, by both writers and readers. The epistolary novel. Dr. Altman points out, was born in an age when novelists like Diderot and Sterne had moved beyond story­ telling to indulge in playful reflection upon history and fiction, and the means by which historical and fictional events are recounted. (Continued on back flap) Epistolarity JANET GURKIN ALTMAN Approaches to a Form OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS : COLUMBUS Quotations from HERZOG by Saul Bellow are copy­ right © 1961, 1963, 1964 by Saul Bellow and are re­ printed by permission of Viking Penguin Inc. and the author. Copyright©1982 by the Ohio State University Press All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Altman, Janet Gurkin, 1945­ Epistolarity: approaches to a form. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Epistolary fiction— History and criticism. 1. Title. PN3448.E6A4 809.3 81-16866 ISBN 0-8142-0313-2 AACR2 Cöhtefiis Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3 CHAPTER ONE Epistolary Mediation 13 CHAPTER TWO Of Confidence and Confidants 47 CHAPTER THREE The Weight of the Reader 87 CHAPTER FOUR Epistolary Discourse 117 CHAPTER FIVE The Dynamics of Epistolary Closure 143 CHAPTER SIX The Epistolary Mosaic 167 Conclusion: The Parameters and Paradoxes of Epistolarity 185 Selected Bibliography 217 Index 229 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The most traceable inspiration for this book on episto­ lary literature is Jean Rousset's article "Le Roman par lettres," which drew me toward both a corpus of literature and an initial strategy for reading. My own subsequent readings of epistolary fiction have particularly benefited from stimulating discussion with Georges May (with whom I originated this work at Yale), Ronald Rosbottom (similarly drawn to write about this curious form), and the students of my comparative literature seminar on letter narrative at the University of Iowa in 1977. Special thanks also go to Félix Martinez-Bonati, Rick Altman, Paul de Man, Charles Porter, Jean Boorsch, and Philip Lewis for their astute criticism and helpful suggestions at various stages of my writing. Carol Sykes at Ohio State University Press has been a model editor for lucidity and care in manuscript preparation, and Kim Smith's talent and wit assisted me immeasurably during the proofing and indexing processes. To all of these colleagues I am extremely grateful. The following pages constitute an attempt to push a certain kind of formalist reading to its limits on a particularly intriguing "form." I have tried to sketch out the gains of this kind of reading while remaining aware of its problematics and limitations. Al­ though my methodology is very much one of my own creation, I owe a clear debt to Jean Rousset, François Jost, the Russian for­ malists, and the German and French narratologists who have practiced and theorized about formalist reading. I also owe a more hidden debt to Jacques Derrida and others who have cri­ tiqued this type of reading. I wish to acknowledge here, therefore, all of the writers and readers, past and future, who are drawn to wrestle with the problematic relationship between "form" and "meaning," those slippery and unstable terms that we seem forever condemned to reify in order to talk about them. I dedicate this book to my remarkable mother and to the mem­ ory of my father—to Sylvia and Roy Gurkin. Epistolarity Die leichte Möglichkeit des Briefschreibens muss—bloss theoretisch angesehn—eine schreckliche Zerrüttung der Seelen in die Welt gebracht haben. Es ist ja ein Verkehr mit Gespenstern und zwar nicht nur mit dem Gespenst des Adressaten, sondern auch mit dem eigenen Gespenst, das sich einem unter der Hand in dem Brief, den man schreibt, entwickelt oder gar in einer Folge von Briefen, wo ein Brief den andern erhärtet und sich auf ihn als Zeugen berufen kann. The great feasibility of letter writing must have produced—from a purely theoretical point of view—a terrible dislocation of souls in the world. It is truly a communication with spectres, not only with the spectre of the addressee but also with one's own phantom, which evolves underneath one's own hand in the very letter one is writing or even in a series of letters, where one letter reinforces the other and can refer to it as a witness. Franz Kafka, Briefe an Milena INTRODUCTION When I first began reading epistolary novels, there was little visible critical or artistic interest in the letter form. It was commonly assumed that the form was a historically limited, archaic one, describable in terms of its "rise and fall." The last decade, however, has seen the development of a new critical interest in letter fiction and a clear revival of the form by creative writers. Demonstrably, the epistolary novel is a hardy species that continues to produce lively strains in various parts of the world. Recently, writers of as diverse sensibilities as Michel Butor in the "half-dead letters" ("missives mi-vives") of Illustrations III (1973), the three Marias in Portugal who coauthored the feminist New Portuguese Letters (1972), and Bob Randall in his popular American suspense novel The Fan (1977) have reinvented the letter form for equally diverse readerships.1 Although historically speaking the epistolary genre peaked in eighteenth-century Eu­ rope, producing such classics as Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, Smollett's Humphry Clinker, Goethe's Werther, and Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, the letter's potential as artistic form and narrative vehicle has been explored by writers of many nationalities and periods—from Ovid in the Epistulae Heroidum to Saul Bellow in Herzog. Such well-known works present obvious diversity in style and content; yet they reveal a surprising number of similar literary 4 EPISTOLARITY structures and intriguingly persistent patterns when read together with other examples of the epistolary genre. These structures— recurring thematic relations, character types, narrative events, and organization—can in turn be related to properties inherent to the letter itself. In numerous instances the basic formal and functional characteristics of the letter, far from being merely ornamental, significantly influence the way meaning is conscious­ ly and unconsciously constructed by writers and readers of epistolary works. In the following chapters I use the concept of a work's "episto­ larity'' (working definition: the use of the letter's formal proper­ ties to create meaning) as a parameter for reading epistolary literature. At this point the notions of "epistolarity" and "mean­ ing" must remain partially vacant terms, since the framework in which they acquire cumulative value is constituted by the analyses that follow. It should be clear, however, that the concept of epistolarity is primarily a frame for reading. A work's epistolarity cannot be scientifically measured. It can only be argued by an interpretative act, which involves the critic's description of a letter novel's epistolarity as much as the novelist's or novel's actualiza­ tion of the letter's potential to create narrative, figurative, and other types of meaning. Epistolary novels make meaning in a variety of ways. The production of meaning may be directly dependent on the episto­ lary form of the novel or it may depend on the multitude of other factors that make novels such complex artifacts. Conversely, novels that at first appear not to be epistolary may in fact create meaning through the literary structures particular to the letter or the letter form. By concentrating on epistolarity I am focusing on those occasions, wherever they may be found, when the creation of meaning derives from the structures and potential specific to the letter form. In following this strategy I am seeking to offer interpretative approaches to individual works (including many not traditionally called "epistolary novels" and excluding many that traditionally have been), as well as a reading of a genre as a whole. Within the field of phenomena susceptible to "interpreta­ tion'7 I include not only the more covert, "obscure," and proble­ matic aspects of complex epistolary works but also the overtly INTRODUCTION 5 exploited conventions that structure letter fiction as narrative and make it possible to specify the epistolary novel as a genre. Epistolary literature has only recently become the object of close critical scrutiny, but it has already proven a fertile field for a variety of approaches different from mine.
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