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.
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