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Theory and In T e r p r e T a ti o n o f n a r r ati v e James phelan and peter J. rabinowitz, Series editors Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction Narratives of Cultural Remission LEona TokEr T h e O h i O S T a T e U n i v e r S i T y P r e ss • C O l U m b us Copyright © 2010 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Toker, Leona. Towards the ethics of form in fiction : narratives of cultural remission / Leona Toker. p. cm.—(Theory and interpretation of narrative) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1122-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8142-9220-4 (cd-rom) 1. Literary form. 2. Literature—Aesthetics. 3. Ethics in literature. 4. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804–1864— Criticism and interpretation. 5. Fielding, Henry, 1707–1754—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Sterne, Laurence, 1713–1768—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817—Criti- cism and interpretation. 8. Dickens, Charles, 1812–1870—Criticism and interpretation. 9. Eliot, George, 1819–1880—Criticism and interpretation. 10. Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928—Criticism and interpretation. 11. Conrad, Joseph, 1857–1924—Criticism and interpretation. 12. Joyce, James, 1882–1941—Criticism and interpretation. 13. Kafka, Franz, 1883–1924—Criticism and interpretation. 14. Shalamov, Varlam Tikhonovich—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series: Theory and interpretation of narrative series. PN45.5.T65 2010 808.8—dc22 2009046695 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1122-9) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9220-4) Cover design by Juliet Williams and Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Garamond Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Iris Nadler, born July 19, 2009 C o n T e n ts Acknowledgments ix Introduction Remissions/Reprieves 1 Chapter One Carnival and Crisis in Three Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne 21 Chapter Two Oppositionality in Fielding’s Tom Jones 35 Chapter Three Carnival Diminished: The Secret Springs of Tristram Shandy 49 Chapter Four Non-Carnivalesque Oppositionality: Jane Austen and the Golden Mean 67 Chapter Five Checks and Balances: Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities 94 Chapter Six Across the Boundaries of Self: George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda 116 Chapter Seven Carnival Reversals: Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge 131 Chapter Eight Morphology of the Test: Non-Contact Measurement of Self in Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” 143 Chapter Nine Carnivalization: Throwaways in Joyce’s Ulysses 157 . Break, Pause Caesura 175 Varlam Shalamov “The Artist of the Spade,” trans. N. Strazhas 179 . Chapter Ten Discourse of Lent: Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” and Shalamov’s “The Artist of the Spade” 191 Concluding Remarks 202 Works Cited 211 Index 231 a C knowledgmen ts The book is a product of reading, teaching, research, thinking, and changes of mind that I have gone through over more than a decade. The work alter- nated with studies of the narratives of Gulag and Holocaust survivors; in the end, those narratives gave my reading of classical English literature a new perspective. All this time I have been fortunate to benefit from consultations with my teacher and colleague Professor H. M. Daleski, sometimes engaging in minor controversies but always radically improving the results of my work with the help of his critical attention (for over thirty years). Separate parts of this project have been amended as a result of construc- tive responses from June Sturrock (Simon Frazer University), Inge Leimberg (Münster University), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University), Gen- nady Barabtarlo (State University of Missouri), Zephyra Porat and Meir Sternberg (Tel Aviv University), Amit Yahav (Haifa University), and my Hebrew University colleagues Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Emily Budick, Ruben Borg, and Yael Shapira. The work on this project also received intel- lectual stimulus from cooperation with Pekka Tammi (University of Tam- pere), Christine Raguet (Université Paris III), Matthias Bauer (Tübingen University), James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz of The Ohio State Univer- sity, as well as from the notes of the anonymous reviewer for The Ohio State University Press. ix x / acknowledgments Special thanks go to my research assistants, Irina Lyan and Philip Podol- sky, without whose thoughtful help the project would have taken several more years. The necessary financial assistance was provided by a grant from the Faculty of Humanities of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Rec- tor’s Prize, and—in particular—by a generous grant (#903/01) from the Israel Science Foundation. I take this opportunity to thank my husband, Gregory Toker, for his unflagging moral support—as well as massive help with computer technol- ogy. The younger generation of the family—Joni, Dana, and Moshe—have created a background of happiness that made many things possible. I am particularly grateful to my mother, Nedda Strazhas, philologist by profession, who has read, critiqued, and proofread every part of this work repeatedly, and whose help attained particular value and profundity during our years of grief over the illness and death of my father, Aba Strazhas, whose own work on the period of World War I remained unfinished. Earlier or partial versions of chapters 1, 4, 6, and 10 were published in, respectively, Éclats de voix: Crises en représentation dans la littérature nord- américaine, ed. Christine Raguet-Bouvart (La Rochelle: Rumeur des Ages, 1995); Connotations; Victorian Literature and Culture; and Cold Fusion: Aspects of the German Cultural Presence in Russia, ed. G. Barabtarlo (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000). I thank the editors and publishers of these journals and essay collections for permissions to reprint. Exploration of a theoretical issue with the help of a variety of narratives ranging between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries leads to lagging behind the newest scholarship on one writer while catching up with the advances in the studies of another. This is my apology for possible oversights. Ars longa vita brevis est; but the length of art is not a burden—it is a source of the never-ending joy of discovery. I n T r o d u cti o n remissions/reprieves it is in fact peculiar to man to combine the highest and the lowest in his nature, and if his dignity depends upon a rigid distinction between the two, his happiness depends upon a skilful removal of the distinction. —Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Twenty Fourth letter C u lT u r e m u st S o m e ti m e S pa u S e. A non-genetically transmit- ted system of relationships that mediates between individuals and their world,1 culture evolves more slowly than the conditions that it processes; as a result, cultural patterns tend to become inimical to individual human life. One of the correctives to the gelling of these patterns is aesthetic experience. By aesthetic experience I mean moments of self-forgetful aesthetic height- ening; I do not use this term in the broad sense of aesthetic practice (see Levinson 2003: 4–7). The latter, whether as active attention to the aesthetic side of everyday life or as joining the audience of the arts, is a part of cultural constraints rather than a remission, though it contributes to the conditions under which a remission can take place. When not reduced to complacent contemplation of personal possessions or skills or of collective cultural products, aesthetic experience is a “time- out” from the consolidation of sociocultural determinacies, a space of inner freedom. Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo” ends with the sense that “[y]ou must change your life”: according to Rilke, in response to great works of visual art, offspring of individual creativity and cultural semiotics, one halts. One then reflects and backtracks before moving on. 1. See Lotman and Uspenskij 1984: x–xi, 3. 1 2 / introduction Great works of literature (which are not necessarily the same as canoni- cal works) likewise constitute conditions for slowing down,2 for moments of aesthetic self-liberation from the linear temporality of the perception- process. Such conditions are, I believe, a proper object for the study of the ethics of literary form,3 though their actual fulfillment in individual reading is a matter of contingencies. By the term “form” I mean not only style and those aspects of narrative structure that have been studied by descriptive poetics (Sternberg 1978, Genette 1980, Rimmon-Kenan 1983) but also what, following Hjelmslev, one might call “the form of content” in terms of the so-called Hjelmslev net:4 the substance of content vs. the form of content and the substance of expression vs. the form of expression. The distinctions between these four coordinates cannot be watertight when applied to literary works, such as novels,5 but they are, nevertheless, helpful as correctives to the traditional juxtaposition of subject matter and technique or even of the “fabula,” as the sum total of information about the fictional world, and the “sjuzhet,” as the sum total of all the devices that render this information (see Toker 1993a: 5–7). The substance of content can be roughly identified with the subject matter, the fields of reference (mainly, the External Field of Reference; see Harshaw 19846), and the ideas that enter a narrative’s “repertoire” (Iser 1978: 69). The form of content is to be sought in 2.