Margaret Church Structure and Theme "Don Quixote" to James Joyce $15.00 Structure and Theme "Don Quixote" to James Joyce By Margaret Church Professor Church undertakes to examine the structural elements that underlie thirteen novels from various literatures and eras in order to show how each work results, not only in an art form, but also in a closely con­ nected statement that is sociological, psycho­ logical, philosophical, or, sometimes, political in nature. The novels are Don Quixote, Joseph Andrews, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Ka­ ramazov, The Trial, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, Jacob's Room, and Mrs. Dalloway. Form, Dr. Church finds, relates to subject in quite different ways in these novels. Some­ times it complements it, sometimes it con­ trasts with it, and sometimes it imitates it. The structures of the novels by Fielding, Flaubert, and Mann, for example, relate to matters largely exterior to the conscious­ nesses of the protagonists, while those of Dostoevsky and Joyce relate closely to the in­ ner worlds of their leading figures. None of the structures is entirely exterior to context, character, or action, to which it gives shape; but in each novel, structure is more closely related to one of these than to the others. In Don Quixote—which Dr. Church charac­ terizes as "the ancestor, so to speak, of all fictions and of all metafictions" and which Erich Kahler has called "the first modern novel"—we have a statement about human behavior, about the relationship of the indi­ vidual to his society and to himself, in which close and complex correlations among the structure of the book, the psychological de­ velopment of the hero, and, as a conse­ quence, both Renaissance and modern psychological theory, make it quite impossi­ ble to separate intrinsic from extrinsic mat­ ters—a circumstance that prompts Dr. Church to remark, in a deft aside on abroga­ tion of time, that, in a sense, then, both Emma Bovary and Leopold Bloom can be said to have preceded and to have influenced the Quixote. (Continued on back flap) Structure and Theme Structure and Theme Don Quixote to James Joyce Margaret Church Ohio State University Press : Columbus Copyright © 1983 by the Ohio State University Press All rights reserved. The portion of the Introduction devoted to the structure of Don Quixote has been condensed and reprinted by permission of the New York University Press from Don Quixote—The Knight of La Mancha, by Margaret Church. Copyright (C) 1971 by New York University. Chapter 3 has been revised from an article entitled "A Triad of Images: Nature in Madame Bovary" that originally appeared in Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas, published by The University of Manitoba, vol. 5, no. 3 (spring 1972), pp. 203-13, to which acknowledgment is herewith made. Chapter 5 has been revised from an article of the same title published originally in the fall 1969 issue of Literature and Psychology. Used by permission. Portions of chapters 6 and 7 have been revised from a paper entitled "Fiction: The Language of Time, Thomas Mann and James Joyce" published originally in 1978 by Springer Verlag in Study of Time III. Used by permission. The portion of chapter 7 devoted to James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has been revised from a paper that originally appeared as "A Portrait and Giambattista Vico: A Source Study" in Approaches to Joyce's "Portrait": Ten Essays, edited by Thomas F. Staley and Bernard Benstock, published in 1976 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Used by permission. The portion of chapter 7 devoted to James Joyce's Dubliners has been revised from an article entitled "Dubliners and Vico" published originally in the winter 1968 issue of the James Joyce Quarterly. Used by permission. Chapter 8 has been revised from an article of the same title published originally in the July 1977 issue of the International Fiction Revietv. Used by permission. Quotations from: Virginia Woolf. [Mrs. Dalloway]. Holograph notes, unsigned, dated 9 November 1922-2 August 1923. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Used by permission of the New York Public Library and Professor Quentin Bell. Quotations from personal letters to Margaret Church from Marina Bergelson Raskin, of the Department of English at Purdue University, and Richard Pearce, of the Department of English at Wheaton College, are used by permission. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Church, Margaret, 1920­ Structure and theme—Don Quixote to James Joyce. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Fiction—Technique. 2. Fiction—History and criticism. I. Title. PN3365.C49 1983 809.3 83-2292 ISBN 0-8142-0348-5 Contents Foreword by Thomas P. Adler vii Preface ix Introduction. Don Quixote as Prototype 3 Chapter One. The Art of Life: The Comic Epic Poem in Prose 11 Chapter Two. The Sorrows of Young Werther: The Structure of Sturm und Drang 39 Chapter Three. A Triad of Images: Nature as Structure in Madame Bovary 61 Chapter Four. Spatial Patterns in The Brothers Karamazov 81 Chapter Five. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Kafka's The Trial 103 Chapter Six. The Interplay of Circular and Spiral Form in Mann's The Magic Mountain 121 Chapter Seven. How the Vicociclometer Works: The Fiction of James Joyce 135 Chapter Eight. Joycean Structure in Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway 169 Conclusion. The More or Less Inward Turn of Post- Renaissance Fiction 185 Bibliography 193 Index 201 Foreword Margaret Church died unexpectedly on 30 August 1982. At the time of her death, work on Structure and Theme was substantially complete. The manuscript, including the bib­ liography, had been copy edited. All that remained for me when I undertook seeing the book through press was to read the galleys and page proofs and prepare the index. Everything in these pages about the thirteen novels Margaret Church has chosen to discuss appears exactly as she wrote it, and all of the very substantial credit for this work belongs to her. Each author prepares an index differ­ ently, and I can only guess what form this one might have taken had the author herself completed it. In deciding which terms and titles to index here, I have gone back to Margaret Church's first book and adopted it as my model. Naturally, I take full responsibility for whatever deficien­ cies the resultant index may have. For almost thirty years, Margaret Church was a member of the Purdue University English Department. Born at Boston in 1920, she received her A.B. from Radcliffe (1941) and her M.A. from Columbia (1942) before returning to Radcliffe for the Ph.D. (1944). After teaching at Temple (1944-46) and Duke (1946-53), she came to Purdue, where she became a full professor in 1965—the same year she VII Vlll assumed the chairmanship of the then newly established program in comparative literature. She helped found Modern Fiction Studies, of which she became coeditor in 1971. An internationally eminent scholar, widely known for her work with the James Joyce Foundation, she had published, before her death, more than a dozen articles and two books: Time and Reality: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (1963) and Don Quixote: The Knight of La Manclm (1971). Just as Margaret Church applied diligence, thorough­ ness, and energy to all her endeavors both inside the class­ room and without, she bore her many accomplishments with modesty and grace. This present book, ranging widely over works she loved—and many of which she taught in her seminars on Joyce and Virginia Woolf and in her courses in literature and psychology and the Continen­ tal novel—reveals the mind of the continually inquiring scholar while capturing the voice of the discerning teacher. In the dozen years since I arrived at Purdue, I came to know Margaret Church as a warm and witty colleague, and I feel fortunate to be able to repay her friendship and support. I appreciate the unquestioning confidence of Margaret Church's family, as well as the unfailing assistance of her editor at Ohio State University Press, Robert Demorest, for doing everything possible to ease my task. I acknowledge once again the helpful advice and support of my col­ leagues—especially of Margaret Moan Rowe—and, as al­ ways, of my dear wife Winnie during the completion of this work. But most of all, I am thankful for this opportu­ nity to reaffirm something to which Margaret Church de­ voted her professional life: the existence of a community of scholars and teachers. The sadness of loss is tempered by this book, through which she continues to teach us all. Thomas P. Adler West Lafayette, Indiana 30 October 1982 Preface The structures of the novels that I discuss in the following pages provide a means of perspective on the development of the genre since Don Quixote and an ongoing thesis for this book. I trust that they will also provide a sense of wholeness, despite what may at first glance be mere heter­ ogeneity. Although individual chapters may appear to be discrete, closer scrutiny will show a common concern, summed up in the final chapter where I point out that although in none of the novels discussed is structure en­ tirely dissociated from content, character, and action, in each of them structure is more closely related to one of these elements than to the others. Form becomes then a cohort of meaning in different ways in different literary periods, fluctuating from the Renaissance, to neoclassi­ cism, to romanticism, to realism, and to impressionism and expressionism.