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Thackeray's Secondary Fictional World

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Thackeray's Secondary Fictional World THACKERAY'S SECONDARY FICTIONAL WORLD: AH AESTHETIC STUDY OF NARRATOR AND READER ROLES IN THE NOVELS by DAVID LEWIS JAMES B.A., University of London, 1965 M.A., University of British. Columbia, 1967 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of ENGLISH We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA November, 1970 i In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and Study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada ABSTRACT Thackeray's post-1847 novels make increasing use of a complex and indecisive narrator. The clear perspectives of Thackeray's early narrators—such as the "boastful Gahagan, the cynical Yellowplush, and the sentimental Fitzboodle—are superseded by the man of many parts, who is the mature narrator of the novels from Yanity Fair to Denis Duval. This many-faceted figure keeps one eye on his reader as he moves between joyous certainty and utter bewilderment regarding his own feelings and his own fiction. He is not afraid to be fickle, and appears in many guises:—as novelist and historian, visionary and disenchanted worldling, preacher and clown. The secondary fictional world is determined by the narrator's continued changes of stance, not only towards the characters, but also towards the reader, who, too, must play many parts. In its focus upon Thackeray's secondary fictional world, this study sees Thackeray as one of a line of novelists from Cervantes and Sterne to Joyce and Nabokov. These "novelists in motley" present their fiction as an elaborate game drawing the reader into the dual process of involvement in the main story, or primary fictional world, and detachment from it. In the secondary fictional world, both narrator and reader see the primary illusion as an illusion, yet they feel also it's instinctive truth, its power to quicken their responses, and its value as a mode of self-discovery. Thus, while Thackeray's primary fictional world frequently suggests the neatness of conventional ii patterns found in heroic myth., moral fable, or the contemporary melodrama and fashionable novels, the secondary fictional world undermines these forms, even while they are being used as probes of the narrator's consciousness. These established literary conventions are the means through which the indefinite self attempts definition. In Thackeray's secondary fictional world, the reader is made to see himself playing such parts as those of hero, villain, and lover, but he is also made to understand that his whole self consists of an infinite number of potential parts, none of which defines him exclusively. Thackera-y's own vacillation and waywardness becomes increas• ingly obtrusive in his mature work until, in Philip and Lovel the Widower, the plot and setting are dwarfed by the vastness of the narrator, whose monologues, in a bewildering variety of tone, style, and viewpoint, dominate the novels. The sharp satire and detached social observation of Yellowplush and Titmarsh give way to the ironies of a later narrator, who is painfully involved with his creations. Thackeray's typical novels thus purposely present no conclusive form, but, rather, a medley of loose ends and unresolved conflicts, \.Unlike the central intelligence of the traditional novel, the Thackerayan narrator never finally sheds his illusions, never comes to see the truth about himself, and never reaches a climactic moment of ultimate vision; yet nei-fcher does he become victim of the illusion that man can live without illusions. He presents his reader not iii with a progression of events leading to self-discovery, Taut with a revelation of the forms through which the changing self "becomes manifest * iv CONTENTS Chapter Page INTRODUCTION: AUTHOR AND READER ROLES 1 I. THACKERAY AID "THACKERAY" AS ROLE-PLAYERS 13 II. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY FICTIONAL WORLDS 34 Introductory Discussion . 34 Thackeray's Shandean Narrator ........37 The Barrator's Unifying Presence .......53 III. THACKERAY AND HIS NARRATORS 73 IY. ILLUSION AS PROBE: NARRATOR-CHARACTER-READER RELATIONSHIPS 103 Masks 103 Human Variants 118 Summary 143 v Chapter Page V. ILLUSION AT WORK AND PLAT: ESMOND AMD PHILIP 147 VI. THE EXPANSIVE NOVEL: THE FUNCTION OF "UNPATTERNED" EXPERIENCE 186 Introductory Discussion .... 186 The Use of Romance and the Contingent World .... 187 Summary «... 222 CONCLUSION: VISION THROUGH PLAY 225 BIBLIOGRAPHY 232 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish, to acknowledge a debt to Dr. John Hulcoop for his help with and encouragement of this project over the past three years. Dr. Hulcoop's enthusiasm for the subject never waned even though, on occasion, my own did. Many of the ideas developed in this study were originally sparked by his stimulating lectures on the novel and by our private discussions. Thanks also are due to my wife, Wendy, who bore the burden of typing the final draft. vii BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE The editions of Thackeray's works and letters used in quotations and subsequently documented internally, are as follows: The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, 32 vols. (New York: Scribner's 1904)5 Vanity Fair, ed. Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963); The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray, 4 vols. (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, I945-I946). Apart from Vanity Fair, which will be cited as VF, citations of the works will consist of volume and page references. Quotations from Thackeray's correspondence will be cited as Letters. The Scribner's edition includes almost all the illustrations made for the original part issues of the novels and the serialized works. Quotations have been checked against the Biographical edition (London: Harper & Bros., 1898-99), and only minor variations of spelling and punctuation were revealed. Scribner's is retained because the initial illustrations to the chapters frequently make ironic comment on the text and make a significant contribution to Thackeray's secondary fictional world. Useful accounts of the early illustrations to Thackeray's work are provided in Lewis Melville's Some Aspects of Thackeray, pp. 124-139. v'i'ii INTRODUCTION: AUTHOR AND READER ROLES In reality, every reader, as he reads, is the reader of himself. The work of a writer is only a sort of optic instrument which he offers to the reader so that he may discern in the book what he would probably not have seen in himself. —Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past It is generally true that "the novelist moves cautiously from the real to the fictional world, and takes pains to conceal the movement.""*" However,, certain novelists, among whom are Cervantes, Sterne and Thackeray, conceal this movement, either by emphasizing the fictional nature of their stories, or in giving them an inconclusiveness by recourse to a vacillating or bungling narrator, who painfully admits his incapacity. While in Don Quixote Part II, The Don and Sancho Panza offer comments and criticism on their biographer, in Tristram Shandy and Vanity Fair, the narrator comments upon and criticizes himself; he is aware of his own inadequacies, biases, and the ultimate impossibility of telling a clear and straightforward tale, which both he and his reader can take seriously. Thus, while the typical novelist (concealing the movement between the fictional and the real world) creates one coherent fictional world, the "novelist in motley" (typified by Cervantes, Sterne and Thackeray) through his self-conscious narrator, moves adroitly between a fictional world of characters and a fictional world where he addresses a reader who must play a variety of roles. It is therefore clear that the "novelist in motley" offers his reader ^David Lodge, Language of Fiction; Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 42. 1 2 two fictional worlds, and that his predominant concern is to reveal the distance between the quasi-real world of narrator and reader and the fictional world of the characters. The essential factor contributing to the secondary fictional world is the reader's understanding of a dimension above and beyond the simple story. It offers a kind of sub-plot on the difficulties of reading and writing a novel, and is vitally concerned with the relation between illusion and reality. For the reader who is predominantly concerned with the sequence of the hero's adventures, the various guises and tricks of the narrator will inevitably seem tedious and frustrating. The narrator, the reader, or even the characters may see the ineffectiveness or the flaws of the story, but the story is not the main issue — rather, the light which falls upon it. Don Quixote is sure that his narrator "is no sage but some ignorant prater who set himself blindly and aimlessly to write it £b.is story] down and let it turn out anyhow."^ For the "novelist in motley," the story is a minor affair, and, as Sterne's incompetent narrator has it, "digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; — they are the life, the soul of reading!"^ This study attempts to show that the typical digressions and narrative anarchy of the "novelist in motley," as employed by Thackeray, lend greater verisimilitude to his novels. His secondary fictional Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote of La Mancha, trans, with Introd. Walter Starkie (New York: lew American Library, 1964), P.
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