A NOVELLA with a CRITICAL INTRODUCTION By
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TURNBUCKLE: A NOVELLA WITH A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION By MICHAEL OSCAR HARTMAN 1'1 Bachelor of Arts Oklahoma Baptist University Shawnee, Oklahoma 1983 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS May, 1986 -7~~4>~ /'j9!,; H 33.3-t c~r·Z- Thesis Approved: --n~~~ ~ Dean oftheGraduati College i i Preface After more than a year 1 s work, my novella with its introduction is now complete, a thing I once despaired of seeing come to pass. That it did is entirely the result of the ever-bountiful support, encouragement, and prodding on the part of my friends and well wishers. I think Gordon Weaver, teacher, friend, advisor, mentor; Edward Walkiewicz and Paul Klemp, staunch defenders of the literary faith and boon companions besides; William H. Pixton, without whom the numerous grammatical oddities and bizarre constructions herein would probably have been unintentional; and my parents, William and Retha Hartman, without whose love and assistance this entire project would have been worse than useless. Thanks, too, to my friends Michael Briggs, R. K. Nandyal, Suzanne Goodwin, Jo Allen, and the hosts of other fine folks at the OSU English Department, without whose illimitable support during the gestation and birth of this work I would have sunk irrevocably into utter profligacy and despair. Selah. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page EXAMINING THE ELEPHANT: AN OBLIQUE LOOK AT THE NOVELLA 1 WORKS CITED 12 ONE 13 TWO 23 THREE 39 FOUR 56 FIVE 72 SIX . 94 SEVEN 112 EIGHT 123 NINE 135 TEN . 147 EPILOGUE 172 iv EXAMINING THE ELEPHANT: AN OBLIQUE LOOK AT THE NOVELLA There is in literature an indescribable entity, a poor relation of the traditional genres of literature, a chameleon of fiction. It is the novella, short novel., or novelette, and it is very like the elephant as described by the six blind men; everyone seems to detect some new feature of the form, but no one has an absolutely complete picture of the whole. Although Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and Joseph Conrad have all written extensively in this form, English language studies of the novella have been rare as honest men. Since a novella generally runs longer than a short story and shorter than a novel, some theorists have not surprisingly tried to define it by length. In his lively survey of scholarship, Marvin Felheim mentions Richard Ludwig and Marvin Perry•s classic definition of a novella as a fictional work between 15,000 and 50,000 words long (22). He also draws on Irving Howe, however, to point out that a novella is much more dependent upon 11 a single line of action 11 which lends a 11 rhythm 11 to the story, but these are nebulous terms at best (22-3). The refreshing font of Mary Springer•s vibrant study in the novella bears the 15,000 to 50,000 word limit along, but flows inevi tably to the conclusion that this highly arbitrary length limit is important only insofar as it helps the author to .. realize several distinct formal functions better than any other length, .. a factor which may 11 cause authors intuitively or consciously to choose that 2 length 11 (9). Neither author argues that length is a very important criterion to be applied to an anatomy of the novella, compared to the infinitely more subtle and complex artistic components of the whole. If I may be permitted a reprehensible cliche, the novella's unique flavor is not a matter of how long the author makes it; rather, it's how he makes it long. With typical angst, the Germans have been pondering the solution to the novella question for well over a century. Kleist, Tiecke, and Goethe struggled with this chimerical creature, and although they brought excellent examples of the form forth from the fray, they found precious few universal insights into what makes up a Novelle. Further generations have studied the German masters to slightly better advan tage. Thus, much of the material I present hereafter comes from these studies of the German Novella, but may be applied with equal benefit to any novella worthy of the name. There are several features peculiar to the novella which are absolutely essential to the form. The foremost is absolute unity of theme centering upon one spectacular person, event, or thing which galvanizes the characters into action. Although other characteristics such as the typical ''frame 11 of the nineteenth century and a distinctive narrative voice convention may also typically characterize the novella, this unity, Heyse's Falkon-theorie, is paramount. As Bennett admir ably summarizes, Heyse's theory refers to the ninth tale of the fifth day in the Decamerone, in which one Federigo degli Alberti feeds his prized falcon to the woman he loves, lacking other fare, and so wins her heart and hand. Bennett explains that Heyse believes the falcon to be the central symbol or 11 Silhouette 11 around which the entire story 3 revolves. Such a "silhouette" appears in every true novella and con trols the entire work (13-19). Once such a symbol is formulated, the novella writer must endeavor to "so treat it as to exhaust all its potentialities, particularly on the psychological side ... each fruitful theme is capable of really successful development only in one general direction," as Mitchell says in his retrospective look at Heyse's theories (95). Such a tightly-woven unity of theme and direction then assists the writer in "that fine sense of selection, which to Heyse's thinking is a sine~ non for any poet, but parti cularly for the writer of Novellen" (Mitchell, 98). This emphasis on absolutely fanatically-fashioned Gestaltung dominates all critical approaches to the novella. Martin Swales certainly subscribes to the "singular event, unified direction" theory of the novella. He sees Heyse's Falkon-theories, however, not as mere symbolism, but also as a sign of Heyse's times, with the "silhouette" as "the expression of the extreme individualism of late nineteenth-century bourgeois society" (10). He then finds the central event or theme to be, after all, a phenomenal ogical device; in its unfamiliarity, it provokes the creative response by its transmis sion to the artist's mind. Swales believes the raison d'etre of the novella to be the blend of "chance and fate as causing events that lend themselves to the artistic temperament" (27). The attempt to portray an unusual event in a realistic setting, then, is the supreme challenge of the novella writer, the effort "to make an ordered statement of that which by definition resists the ordering intention," as Swales has it (27). The tension between the poetic and the prosaic, the subjective and objective universes brings 4 the creative genius of the best novella writers into the light of day, Swales avers (34-38). The unique pathos of Ivan Ilyich, the dark journey of Marlow, and the alien world of the man without a country would all fit Swales• criteria, in addition to the plethora of German examples he provides. Swales also mentions the narrative 11 frame 11 common to the vast majority of nineteenth-century novellas as an important device for anchoring the discursive moment firmly in time and space (45-58); this particular principle seems to me a bit superfluous. Some stories, in my opinion, deserve a frame; others do not. His case for the frame is admirable, but as a universal convention, it simply will not do; while it certainly may apply to Kleist, Conrad, and James, the 11 frame 11 theory will not fit such modern practitioners as Mann, Kafka, and Nobokov. Robert Roseler takes much the same approach as Swales. He also believes the sine qua non of a novella is 11 an incident which might or might not be of great import and which, even though it could conceiv ably take place, would yet appear strange and perhaps unique and which should emphasize a striking, central idea 11 (ix). Roseler is even more of a purist than Swales, who admist a wide range of variants in the structure of individual novellas, while Roseler has one further, and excessively restrictive, organizing principle for the novella: 11 No episodes or sub-plots, such as are to be found in a Roman, may disturb the complete unity of the plot 11 (xii). It seems to me, however, that such a devastating limitation is more appropriate for the short story than the novella; indeed, it is from that type of short-story restric tion that the novella liberates the author. One cannot, of course, allow oneself the sweeping freedom of the novel •s broad descriptive and 5 slowly-coursing discursive panoramas, but at the same time the writer is not bound to the total linear compactness of the short story, as Roseler suggests; if the latter were the case, many novellas would be short stories (as some may well deserve to be). E. K. Bennett has performed the best dissection of the German Novella to date, sectioning it for the modern audience•s edification with a clinical precision that enables his criteria to make the tran sition to the universal novella in fine form. Whether a novella takes the classic form exemplified by Goethe, ascends into the metaphysical realm of Kleist, or burns with the Romantic fire of Tiecke, it still adheres, as always, to a unifying principle of "One center of interest" (1) .. Bennett•s constant emphasis falls on this unifying focus, usually a single concrete symbol, be it a falcon, a heart, or a pot of basil ( 15).