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The Double Thread of Fiction: Voice and Vision in the Novels of Henry Green

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The Double Thread of Fiction: Voice and Vision in the Novels of Henry Green The Double Thread of Fiction: Voice and Vision in the Novels of Henry Green Author Poacher, Jeffrey James Published 2009 Thesis Type Thesis (PhD Doctorate) School School of Humanities DOI https://doi.org/10.25904/1912/1749 Copyright Statement The author owns the copyright in this thesis, unless stated otherwise. Downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/10072/367393 Griffith Research Online https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au The Double Thread of Fiction: Voice and Vision in the Novels of Henry Green Jeffrey James Poacher LLB (Hons), MA UQ School of Humanities Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Griffith University Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy April 2009 ABSTRACT Between 1926 and 1952, the English writer Henry Green published nine novels. From the outset, his work showed a particular fascination with the relationship between voice and vision. Green’s early novels, in particular, were characterised by various forms of visual failure – blindness, hallucinations, impenetrable fogs, wartime blackouts – yet at the same time his work contained many striking passages of visual description. There are also contradictions in the way voice is represented throughout his writing. Conversations in Green’s novels are often confused affairs, in which characters lie or dissemble, or simply garble their words; this complete unreliability of the spoken word is a major part of his fiction’s comedy. On the other hand, there are also moments in his novels when voices seem to possess an almost rapturous power, enchanting their listeners with the beauty of song. This dissertation shows that Green’s writing possessed a double character. It is not simply the case that his novels preferred orality over visuality (though they sometimes did do that). Rather, his work demonstrated the paradoxes of both voice and vision – their powers and their limitations, their clashes and their complementarities. Green’s success as a novelist came from this sense of duality; his finest work was concerned with the nuances of both sight and sound. Only in his last two novels did he abandon the richness of visually-oriented description in favour of a narrative style that consisted almost wholly of reported speech. Though this final phase of his career might be considered in some respects a failure, Green deserves to be regarded as one of the most important English-language novelists of the twentieth century. His work, however, has received much less critical attention than that of his contemporaries. This dissertation undertakes a close reading of his major novels, concentrating on their language and formal elements in order to suggest a new approach to his work that recognises its fundamental duality. STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself. ………………………………………………………………………………………….. Jeffrey James Poacher THE DOUBLE THREAD OF FICTION VOICE AND VISION IN THE NOVELS OF HENRY GREEN Jeffrey Poacher CONTENTS Acknowledgements xi Introduction The Double Thread of Fiction 1 One Blindness (1926) and Living (1929) 17 Two Party Going (1939) 55 Three Caught (1943) 91 Four Loving (1945) 119 Five Back (1946) 159 Six Concluding (1948), Nothing (1950), and Doting (1952) 197 Coda The Narrow Bridge of Art 227 Bibliography 231 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Parts of this dissertation have previously been published as “Chancing: The Strange Fictions of Henry Green”, HEAT 13: Harper’s Gold, ed. Ivor Indyk (Sydney: Giramondo, 2007), pp. 113–26. INTRODUCTION THE DOUBLE THREAD OF FICTION Novels were born yesterday, someone once said, so perhaps the best starting-point for any inquiry into their nature lies much further back.1 In the Phaedrus, there is a recognition that all writing has both a vocal and a visual dimension. Written words, Socrates explains in that dialogue, are like paintings in that they always look unchanged and “outwardly preserve a solemn silence”; yet, at the same time, those words can somehow be heard inside their reader’s head.2 Mulling over this point, Phaedrus suggests that writing should therefore be thought of as having a phantasmal quality – that, in essence, it should be considered a picture of the speaking voice. Phaedrus was right: when we read, sight and sound work together to produce meaning, though the relation between the two can sometimes seem mysterious. A suitable metaphor for this process – for our capacity to hear the silent words we see on the page – might be one that acknowledges the doubleness of written language: two sides of the same coin, so to speak, or a fabric woven from a double thread. Many of our assumptions about how novels work have been greatly influenced by these somewhat abstract notions of voice and vision. To some extent, this is true of literature in general – it is not uncommon for writers and readers to use these terms when referring, for example, to matters of literary style (“voice”) or philosophical outlook (“vision”). The problem with this, of course, is that such concepts are very large ones indeed – so airy, so protean, that any attempt to record their disparate usages would seem an impossible task. At the same time, it is well to remember that the novel had specifically vocal origins (the word novel appears to have come into English from the Romance languages during the fifteenth century with the meaning of news or the 1 It was Flaubert. Actually he said, “La prose est née d’hier”, but it is clear from the context that he was talking about novelistic prose. See his letter to Louise Colet dated 24 April 1852: Correspondance, 4 vols, ed. by Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), vol. 2, p. 79. 2 Phaedrus, trans. Christopher Rowe (London: Penguin, 2005), 275 d5, p. 63. 2 recounting of recent events).3 Some of the genre’s most distinguished practitioners have emphasised this vocal heritage. E.M. Forster, for instance, once suggested that novels were descended from the tales exchanged by our neolithic forebears (whom he memorably described as “shock-heads, gaping round the camp-fire”).4 Novels with first- person narrators most obviously resemble this kind of story-telling, since they simulate a direct address to a captive audience. But fiction’s vocality has also been conceived in less monological terms – Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia is one well-known attempt to explain how novels can be thought of as a play of many voices.5 Indeed, there are those who would claim the novel as the literary form that comes closest to “a conversation, whether between friends or acquaintances”.6 Yet this vocal lineage has also attracted its share of opprobrium. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, there was a concerted effort by some literary avant-gardists “to expel the ghost of the living voice from the machinic structures of modernist writing”, as the philosopher Jonathan Rée put it in his history of the human senses.7 Even as recently as 2000, the American writer Cynthia Ozick could dismiss the concept of voice altogether as a “term overgrown with academic fungus and by now nearly useless”.8 But ghosts can prove difficult to exorcise and fungus hard to eradicate. It is still a deeply ingrained habit (and not just in the English-speaking world) to refer to a novel’s character or narrator as having a distinctive voice. In short, our assumptions about the vocal aspects of narrative continue to influence the ways in which novels come to be written and read. The same, of course, can be said for vision. Before it is anything else, reading is a visual act. This is what the Phaedrus acknowledges: we first meet any written word with 3 Jack Goody, “From Oral to Written: An Anthropological Breakthrough in Storytelling”, The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), vol. 1, pp. 18–19; Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987), pp. 50–51, 278–79. 4 Aspects of the Novel and Related Writings, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Edwin Arnold, 1974), p. 18. 5 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981), pp. 301–31. 6 Gabriel Josipovici, The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 286. 7 I See A Voice: Deafness, Language and the Senses: A Philosophical History (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), p. 367. 8 “Throwing Away the Clef”, The New Republic (22 May 2000), vol. 222, no. 21, p. 29. 3 our eyes. But, in the case of novels, notions of visuality carry a heavier freight. We are by now well accustomed to descriptions of the novel-reader’s imagination as something that works in visual terms – that novels (unlike, say, company reports or Hansard) have a particular capacity to make their readers see. Novelists themselves like to emphasise this point. Flaubert, for instance, made extensive use of optical metaphors whenever he discussed the practice and processes of literary fiction; in the same vein, Joseph Conrad once declared that enabling the reader’s vision should be considered the supreme task of the novel.9 The rise of literary realism in the nineteenth century coincided with a decisive visual turn in Western culture.10 Fiction came to seem more visually oriented, especially in its attempt to record the countless details of the world as the eye might see them. The barometer hanging on the wall in Flaubert’s “Un Coeur Simple” is a well- known example of this sort of realist convention (though Roland Barthes considered this little more than a trick – in his terms, a “reality effect”).11 Nevertheless, the inclusion of such a seemingly irrelevant detail as the barometer in Flaubert’s conte marked the growing influence of visuality on the writing of fiction.
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