The Novel in Motion

The Novel in Motion THE NOVEL IN MOTION An Approach to Modern Fiction Richard Pearce OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS : COLUMBUS Copyright © 1983 by the Ohio State University Press All rights reserved Excerpts from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce. Copyright 1916 by B. W. Huebsch. Copyright renewed 1944 by Nora Joyce. Definitive Text Copyright © 1964 by the Estate of James Joyce. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, Inc., the Society of Authors as the literary representative of the Estate of James Joyce, the Executors of the James Joyce Estate, and Jonathan Cape, Ltd. Excerpts from Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, are copyright © 1955 by Vladimir Nabokov. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the Putnam Publishing Group and Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov. Excerpts from Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov, are copyright © 1962 by G. P. Putnam's Sons. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the Putnam Publishing Group and Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov. Excerpts from 98.6, by Ronald Suckenick, are reprinted by permission of Fiction Collective, Inc. Chapter 3, "Reeling through Faulkner," appeared under the title "Reeling through Faulkner: Pictures of Motion, Pictures in Motion" in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4, © 1979 by Purdue Research Foundation, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907. Reprinted by permission. The portion of Chapter 4, "From Joyce to Beckett: The Tale that Wags the Telling," entitled "Ulysses" was published in an earlier version entitled "Experimentation with the Grotesque: Comic Collisions in the Grotesque World of Ulysses" in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3, © 1974 by Purdue Research Foundation, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907. Reprinted by permission. The portion of Chapter 4, "From Joyce to Beckett: The Tale That Wags the Telling," entitled "Samuel Beckett's Watt and His Trilogy" was published twice in an earlier version under the chapter title: in the Journal of Beckett Studies, No. 7 (Spring, 1982), and in The Seventh of Joyce, edited by Bernard Benstock, published in 1982 by the Indiana University Press. Reprinted by permission of the Journal of Beckett Studies, the Indiana University Press, and the Harvester Press, Ltd., London. An earlier version of Chapter 5 was published as "Enter the Frame" in the Spring, 1974 (No. 42), issue of TriQuarterly. An earlier version of Chapter 6 was published as "Nabokov's Black (Hole) Humor: Lolita and Pale Fire" in Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Sarah Blacher Cohen (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1978). © 1978 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Reprinted by permission. An earlier version of Chapter 7 was published as "Thomas Pynchon & the Novel of Motion: Where're They At, Where're They Going?" in the Massachusetts Review, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Spring, 1980), © 1980 The Massachusetts Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission. (Continued on page vi) FOR ! KARIN EMILY -AN D JEAN (Continued from page iv) An earlier version of Chapter 10 was published as "Bring Back That Line Bring Back That Time" in the Spring, 1978 (No. 30), issue of TriQuarterly. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pearce, Richard, 1932 The novel in motion. Includes index. 1. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PS379.P36 1983 813'.5'09 82-24565 ISBN 0-8142-0345-0 CONTENTS Introduction: The Novel in Motion ix CHAPTER ONE Toward the Novel in Motion: Movement and the Narrative Eye 3 CHAPTER TWO From Realism to Modernism: Two Pictures in Joyce's Portrait 11 CHAPTER THREE Reeling through Faulkner 24 CHAPTER FOUR From Joyce to Beckett: The Tale That Wags the Telling 38 CHAPTER FIVE Enter the Frame: The Loss of Clarity 56 CHAPTER SIX Dislocation in Nabokov's Black (Hole) Humor: Lolita and Pale Fire 66 CHAPTER SEVEN Where're They At, Where're They Going?: Thomas Pynchon and the American Novel in Motion 83 CHAPTER EIGHT Robert Coover's Kaleidoscopic Spectacle 102 CHAPTER NINE Riding the Surf: Raymond Federman, Walter Abish, and Ronald Sukenick 118 CHAPTER TEN Bring Back That Line, Bring Back That Time 131 Notes 145 Index 153 INTRODUCTION The Novel in Motion "We shall sing of the man at the steering wheel." F. T. Marinetti The dynamo—revolving "at some vertiginous speed" within arm's length of Henry Adams—makes the very earth seem unim pressive "in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolu tion." And Henry Adams begins to see M story as governed by the law of acceleration. Everyone wants to see moving pictures—of people, horses, trains, but especially of the chase in Edwin Porter's Great Train Robbery and the "last-minute rescues" of D. W. Griffith. Collision, says Sergei Eisenstein, is the key to montage. Ragtime derives its energy from syncopation—from what were once called "driving notes," or a rhythm that displaces the regular beat and seems to run away from the steady bass. Im provisation, the "break" or "hot lick," is the driving force of jazz. In painting, fixed vantage gives way to shifting perspectives. For Einstein matter is always in motion, and motion determines the size and weight of material objects. Yeats portrays the modern experience in terms of centrifugal force—the falcon "turning in a widening gyre." Leopold Bloom is always on the move, physically and mentally, and the reader of Ulysses leaps back and forth be tween modern and Homeric times. Dos Passos centers on the new automobile, airplane, and movie industries, but, even more, on America's aimless and uncontrollable energy. Hemingway and Fitzgerald picture the ceaseless movement of the Lost Generation. Faulkner's characters run, hunt, gallop, fly, raid, chase, and escape throughout Yoknapatawpha County. The picaro travels through the novel of the fifties. Robbe-Grillet creates a world of shifting landscapes and inscapes. "Where we going?" asks Benny x / Introduction Profane in Thomas Pynchon's V. "The way we're heading," answers Pig Bodine. "Move your ass." Movement—a creative ideal and a destructive obsession of modern consciousness—dominates the modern novel, especially in America. But what is it that actually moves? Dos Passos relates twentieth-century history to the development of the automobile, the airplane, and the movies. But, except for Charlie Anderson's suicidal race with the speeding train, there is little actual move ment in U.S.A. Most of the scenes are static, and a thousand pages of pedestrian narrative clog the spirited tempo of the newsreels, biographies, and camera eye. Fitzgerald's characters are restless; and, speeding in Gatsby's yellow roadster, Daisy Buchanan runs over her husband's mistress. But we never see the climactic scene. Among the most memorable images are Daisy and Jordan "buoyed up" on an enormous white couch, the director and his star holding for a kiss beneath the white plum tree, and the enor mous eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg staring out from a faded bill board. Hemingway mastered the pure sequence of movement in bullfights and fishing; but there is far more talk than action in The Sun Also Rises, and "Big Two-Hearted River" conveys far more inner tension than outward movement. Movement is the continuous going from point to point, the pro cess of changing places, or displacement. But a writer cannot con tinually focus on the going or changing without sacrificing a density that traditional readers expect in a novel. Faulkner's Pylon contains pages and pages where nothing happens except that the reporter—sometimes alone, sometimes with the flyers whose story he is covering—crosses town from the newspaper office to the hotel to his apartment to the airport, always against the current of the Mardi Gras crowds. This movement dominates the novel after the hero crashes. It is intensified by the descrip tions of eating and drinking, and it intensifies the dramatically central descriptions of the air races.1 But Pylon has been one of Faulkner's least-read or -discussed novels because it does not satisfy conventional expectations for characters with deeper motivations or richer complexities. Faulkner could satisfy these expectations in his portrayals of such flat characters as Jason Compson and the Snopeses. And he could evoke the sensation of motion not only by focusing on the continual movement of his characters but through his continual and disorienting shifts of focus—even upon motionless subjects. Indeed, we can distinguish between his pictures o/"motion (where his subjects run, ride, chase, Introduction / xi or flee) and his pictures in motion (where the narrative eye con tinually shifts, fragments, and flashes). I hope to show that the sensation of motion is greater when we are directly engaged by the kinetic power of the medium than when we are indirectly engaged by the movement of characters. First, we must ask how we sense and detect movement—and we should be aware that to sense (or simply feel) and to detect (or find information) are not the same, nor do they necessarily accompany one another. We sense and detect movement when our equilibrium is disturbed and we feel that movement directly in our bodies (this is called proprioception). We detect movement but sense it with less intensity when we perceive a displacement outside or at a distance (this is called exteroception). The most sensitive detector of direct movement is the complex system in our inner ear, where specialized organs are designed to move and, therefore, to directly convey each movement of the head: turning, lifting, and lowering movements are conveyed directly by organs that drag and bend tiny hairs. Equally direct is the movement conveyed through changing bone and muscle relations, and through the displace ment of stimuli on the skin surface.2 Seeing is a more complex process.

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