Kellman The Self-Begetting Novel (1980)
Kellman The Self-Begetting Novel (1980)
Steven G. Kellman
© Steven G. Kellman 1980
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1980
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
Preface IX
Novelists, like those who write about them, come into this world at the
initiative of others. Some, en revanche, grimly seek to control their exit.
Authors and parrots all have parents, though books are seldom dedi-
cated to them. This book examines the Modernist ideal of autogeny as
embodied in a sub-genre of French, British and American fiction. That
ideal is, of course, a childish illusion, but it has been a compelling one for
those Western cultures in which meritocracy has supplanted heritocracy
as communal dteam. Respect for the autonomy of the text restrains us
from speculating about Lady Macbeth's children; and the mere thought
of Jake Barnes's mother is ludicrous because it clashes with his, anci our,
esteem for cool self-sufficiency. We would like to believe that faber est
quisque fortunae suae. This study was born of fascination with a kind of
novel whose very form demonstrates radical longing to overcome a
generation gap by merging parent and child into one enduring unit.
For the benefit of those whose French is not truly their own, I have
provided my own translations of quoted passages. Whenever practi-
cable, these supplement the French originals. Samuel Beckett ha$ ren-
dered his own novels back into his native English, and I have quoted
from his versions.
Versions of some of my material have appeared as follows: "Imagin-
ing the Novel Dead: Recent Variations on a Theme by Proust," Modern
Language Quarterly, XXXV, 1 (Mar 1974), 45-55; "La Nausee as
Self-Begetting Novel," Symposium, XXVIU, 4 (Winter 1974), 303-14;
"Beckett's Fatal Dual," Romance Notes, XVI, 2 (Winter 1975), 268-73;
"Raising the Net: Iris Murdoch and the Tradition of the Self-Begetting
Novel," English Studies, LVII, 1 (Feb 1976), 43-50; "The Self-Begetting
Novel," Western Humanities Review, XXX, 2 (Spring 1976), 119-28;
X PREFACE
The Oedipus myth, according to Otto Rank, is not primarily the savage
family romance projecting each son's dreadful wish to kill his father and
ravish his mother. Instead, he contends that "incest is a symbol of a
man's self-creative urge." 1 Sex is terrifying to the individual because it
means renouncing personal immortality and assuming the communal
and doomed role of sire. Laius, wamed by the oracle that his son will
succeed him, avoids sex until, tricked into it, he breeds his own mur-
derer. Oedipus likewise has immortal longings, and, when he usurps
Laius's position, he attempts to perpetuate himself as simultaneously
father and son. To be forever both begetter and begotten is one way,
short of sailing to Byzantium, to avoid those dying generations; yet
Aristotle's verdict is that the result is still tragic. That the child can take
charge of his own destiny by being father of the man is Romantic
delusion, and Rank recognizes in the House of Cadmus cycle "the
transition - accomplished in Greek civilization - from heroic self-
perpetuation to man's reluctant acceptance of his biologic role as father
and his perpetuation through the generations." 2 Rank's insight into the
ambivalence of masculine sexuality, as both egotistical pleasure and "a
coercion to propagate - hence, feared as a symbol of man's mortality" 3
finds a literary echo in Temple's assertion to Stephen Dedalus that:
"The most profound sentence ever written ... is the sentence at the end
of the zoology. Reproduction is the beginning of death." 4
2 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
Oats boxes on which Aldous Huxley's Philip Quarles wants to model his
own book.
Put a novelist into the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalization, which may
be interesting - at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his
work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if
you have him telling parts of the same story as you are, you can make a
variation on the theme. But why draw the line at one novelist inside your
novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second?
And so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there's a
Quaker holding a box of oats, on which is a picture of another Quaker holding
another box of oats, on which etc., etc. 10
son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his
race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson ... 18
III
Folk wit has it that "Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin which he
helped his father to build." The project of the self-begetting novel is to
create a structure within which its main character and his fiction come to
life. Perhaps Dredalus, the artist as builder, can serve here "as exemplum
of the artist's vocation. As construction became more and more tyrannical
in determining the life of the novel, the artist-architect who imposed the
autotelic pattern built the labyrinth which was to be his own prison." 27
Whether nest or dungeon, the self-begetting novel begets both 12 self and
itself. It recounts the creation of a work very much like itself, but it is also
the portrait of a fictive artist being born. Like so much of the art of the
past two centuries, it is a self-portrttit. self-portrait not just in the sense of
the portrait of a self, as with Van Gogh's myriad studies of Van Gogh,
but a portrait of the portrait itself.
The self-begetting hero typically occupies center stage throughout this
drama, and the story is, in several important senses, his story. It is
literature as self-expression, and the acquisition of a name becomes an
8 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people- his imagination had
never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gats by
of West Egg, Long Island sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. 29
IV
Its central protagonist a novelist and its central action the conception of
a novel, the self-begetting novel is supremely reflexive. Demonstrating
"a consistent effort to· convey to us a sense of the fictional world as an
authorial construct set up against a background of literary tradition and
convention," 33 it easily satisfies Robert Alter's criterion for self-
consciousness. Like slapstick farce in which the side of a building
collapses to expose a demure gentleman at his bath, the self-begetting
novel deliberately lays bare all its working parts. It is particularly suited
for the analysis of literary theory and technique which a work like Tom
Jones segregates in introductory chapters.
Ars poetica is, of course, at least as venerable as Horace, and the
novelistic tradition had been reflexive long before "the age of suspicion"
observed by Nathalie Sarraute after World War II. Harry Levin con-
tends: "Cervantes continues to be the exemplary novelist ... he created
a new form by criticizing the old forms," 34 And for Lionel Trilling, "all
prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote." 35 That theme is
the relationship between art and reality- studied within a self-conscious
work of art. In various ways, Shakespeare's play-within-a-play (Pyramus
and Thisbe, The Murder of Gonzago, Portia's courtroom, Prospero's
masque), the action of Die Meistersinger, and Alfred Hitchcock's
ingenious cameo appearances in his own films all foreground their
works and prevent us from ignoring the sophisticated artifice. The
painter's signature in the corner of his canvas might alert even naive
Attic birds that these grapes are not edible.
We admittedly spend much of Sterne's Tristram Shandy waiting for our
narrator to be born. But in extending the classical novel's ambivalent
approach to art, the modern self-begetting novel inverts the quixotic
pattern; instead of a progression from the fantasies of Amad£s to the
"real" world, its hero characteristically moves from the contingencies of
life to apotheosis as novelist and within a novel. Yet the cycle of
movement from life to literature begins anew with each ending, which,
itself a consummation, directs us back to the flux from which it arose.
Calls by various versions of Formalism for an autonomous text and by
10 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
All criticism must include within its discourse (whether it be in the most
indirect and modest manner) an implicit commentary on itself; all criticism is
criticism of the work and criticism of itself; to echo Claudel's pun, it is
ronnaissance of the other and ro-naissance of itself in the world. 36
v
Das macht, ich bin kein ausgekliigelt Buch.
lch bin ein Mensch mit seinem Widerspruch.
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, "Huttens letze Tage"
The Beckett trilogy- Molloy (1951), Malone mmrt (1952) and L'Innomm-
able (1953) - provides a thematic, but not chronological, limit to this
novelistic tradition. Within the span of three decades, the self-begetting
novel moves from paradigm to parody. Beginning with the wretched
figure of Molloy on his death bed writing pages as they are snatched from
him, Beckett's fiction rehearses the assassination of the poet presaged by
Apollinaire and enacted by Charles Kinbote. Each successive
narrator-author is aware of his predecessors. But all are inadequate,
because onymous, avatars of an unnamahle voice who scoffs at his circus
animals in the act of parading them before us. When art examines itself
here, both physician and patient are exposed as fools.
The self-begetting novel hegins with an urge toward immortality.
Mortal father yields to mortal son, but the life of the autonomous
father-son can still shine bright in and through black ink. Proust
proclaims the permanent triumph of literature over time; A Ia recnerche
succeeds in the creation of an enduring identity and fiction. However,
with Beckett we move from the exuberance of Pygmalion to the despair
of Frankenstein. Mauriac's novel hegins with "The marquise went out at
five o'clock" and concludes with the retraction "The marquise did not go
out at five o'clock." Similarly, like Yves Tinguely's machine engineered
to self-destruct, Beckett's Moran constructs a fiction at the outset of his
narrative- "It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows" -only to
demolish it in his final lines- "It was not midnight. It was not raining."
THE FICTION OF SELF-BEGETTING 11
From Proust to Sartre to Beckett, the entire project of novel-writing
becomes increasingly suspect. Our revels now are ended, and we are left,
like Alice, with the biblioclasmic realization that the elaborate artifice
constructed before our eyes is "nothing but a pack of cards."
However, each Beckett narrator prolongs his existence and that of the
work in which he appears in the very act of assailing both. The joumeys
of Molloy and Moran describe a circle, and their stories recount how
they came to write what we read. The reader is again returned to the first
page after he has reached the last, insuring etemal life for a suicidal
narrative. While Marcel's faith in the powers of art perennially begets a
new self and a new novel, Beckett's Liehestodis a cry of contempt for the
individual and his fiction. Ironically and, for the narrators, frustratingly,
such scam provides no less egographic than Marcel's aesthetic creed.
From Proust to Beckett, we move from the House of Cadmus to the
House of Atreus, from autogamy to autophagy. But fathers and sons
have always been problems for the novel. Tithonus chirping for death
only demonstrates his continuing vitality. Despite and by means of its
renunciations, the trilogy augments the patrimony of self-begetting
fiction.
2 Marcel's Self-Begetting
Novel
I THERETURNTOCOMBRAY
It is this other self which ultimately redeems Marcel's lost time and is
responsible for producing the novel we read: an objective account of the
discovery and strengthening of a self capable of presenting an objective
account of itself. Marcel's vocation as novelist, dimly present from the
beginning of his life and demonstrated through the existence of the life,
takes definitive form at the triumphant conclusion of Le Temps r~trouvi.
The veritable return to Combray, however, occurs not in Le Temjll
relrouvi but in the introductory "Combray" section of Du Cote tie eke~
Swann. To the jaded and ailing protagonist at the outset of the final
volume, Combray is le temps perdu he is incapable of recovering. But the
existence of Com bray back at the beginning of the first volume demon-
MARCEL'S SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL 15
strates that Marcel has found his calling, his past, and his self. Protagon-
ist and narrator, distinct throughout, finally merge.
Marcel has already lived in the idyllic Combray, and we have already
read about it. But in the Proustian world, relationships, not objects,
possess substantive reality, 2 and it is only through a juxtaposition of past
and present, me and not-me that any of the separate terms- vacuous in
isolation -acquires meaning. Thus, the quest for knowledge of the self, of
the world, and of time which A Ia recherche du temps perdu both describes
and exemplifies can only succeed by returning on its own tracks.
Cognition requires re-cognition; as Georges Poulet affirms, "La seule
connaissance de soi possible, c'est done la re-connaissance." 3 We must
become re-readers, and Marcel must write the novel which begins again
at Combray, which in fact never ceases to begin again at Combray.
II ENFLAGRANTDELIT
A Ia recherche teems with a more motley cast of artists of all sorts than
Paradise Lost does with angels. Bergotte, Vinteuil, and Elstir, represent-
ing literature, music and painting. respectively, are the three most
important influences on the young Marcel. But the actresses la Berma
and Rachel, the violinist Morel, the poetaster Bloch, the art critic manque
Swann, the cook Fran~oise, the diplomat Norpois, and even the various
salon impressarios each represent an attempt to impose an artistic order
on life. The protagonist learns his lessons from all of these sources and is
ultimately able to assimilate them into a comprehensive artistic vision
which is in fact A Ia recherche.
Marcel's contacts with literature in particular could be traced from
beginning to end of the book. There is Franfois le champi, which,
significantly, his mother reads to him on the evening he takes the bold
step of writing a note to her; the recit he writes in Percepied's carriage
while gazing at the steeples of Martinville and Vieuxvicq; his relation-
ship with Bergotte; his own article in le Figaro; the Goncourt journal;
Franfois le champi, which he opens in the Prince de Guermantes's library;
his final determination to write his own novel. Writing, like any artistic
activity, and like love, becomes for Proust emblematic of cognition. It is a
means of discovering and expressing the relationship between self and
world.
In any case, the pointillist profusion of artist figures and discussions
about art from one end of the novel to the other, from the narrator's
opening reference to falling asleep reading a book to his closing remarks
about the novel he will write, introduces an element of emphatic
self-consciousness. A Ia recherche is a highly sophisticated artifice which
incorporates an awareness of its problematic status vis-a-vis "reality':
into almost every page and certainly into its total design. The occurrence
16 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
C'est ainsi que bailie d'avance d'ennui un lettre a qui on parle d'un nouveau
"beau livre," parce qu'il imagine une sorte de compose de tous les beaux livres
qu'il a lu, tandis qu'un beau livre est particulier, imprevisible, et n'est pas fait
de Ia somme de tousles chefs-d'oeuvres precedents, mais de quelquechose
que s'etre parfaitement assimile cette somme ne suffit nullement a faire
trouver, car c'est justement en dehors d'elle (1, 656).
[It is thus that an experienced reader yawns immediately when he hears of a
new "good book," because he imagines a sort of amalgam of all the good books
he has read, whereas a good book is special, unforeseeable, and not the sum
total of all preceding masterpieces, but something which the most perfect
assimilation of the parts would not help him to discover, since it is precisely
something outside the sum.)
fictive creator flagrante delicto. Not only are we revealed a portrait of the
artist as young and old man, but we see the portrait being created by its
subject, as the work becomes both process and product. We assist at a
birth, and it is awesome.
Ainsi Ia vie de Fabrice del Dongo fut racontee a Stendhal par un chanoine de
Padoue. Combien nous voudrions, quand nous aimons, c'est-a-dire quand
!'existence d'une autre personne nous semble mysterieuse, trouver un tel
narrateur informe! Et certes il existe (III, 551).
[Thus the life of Fabrice del Dongo was told to Stendhal by a canon irorn
Padua. How much would we like when we are in love, in other words when
someone else's existence seems mysterious to us, to find such an informed
narrator! And certainly he exists.]
. . . car tandis que se rectifie Ia vision que nous avons de lui, lui-meme, qui
n'est pas un objectif inerte, change pour son compte, nous pensons le
rattraper, il se deplace, et, croyant le voir enfin plus clairement, ce n'est que les
images anciennes que nous en avions prises que nous avons reussi aeclaircir,
mais qui ne Ie representent plus (1, 874).
[ ... for while the vision which we have of it is adjusted, it, not being an inert
object, changes for its part; we think we can catch it, it moves on, and,
believing we will at least see it more clearly, we only succeed in clearing up the
old images which we had acquired but which no longer represent it]
... je n'avais pas cesse en dormant de faire des reflexions sur ce que je venais
de lire, mais ces reflexions avaient pris un tour un peu particulier; il me
semblait que j'etais moi-meme ce dont parlait l'ouvrage: une eglise, un
qua tour, la rivalite de Francois Ier et de Charles Quint (I, 3).
[ ... I had not stopped thinking, while sleeping, about what I had just read,
but these thoughts had taken a direction of their own; I imagined that I was
myself the subject of the work: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between
Francois I and Charles V.)
No, for it is necessary to take into account the fact that this passage occurs in
the part which was not corrected by Proust. Death came to put an end to his
MARCEL'S SELF-BEGETIING NOVEL 21
maniacal desire to perfect and revise without end. Otherwise, he would have
modified the passage and would have inserted some sort of sentence to call
attention to the appearance of the name .... 13
Waters arrives at the conclusion that: "if Proust had had time to revise
'La Prisonniere' satisfactorily, the quotation in question would have no
longer mentioned Marcel." 14
According to Suzuki and Waters, Proust's main concern in suppres-
sing the name was to avoid any possible confusion between himself and
the character he created in a novel. This is compatible with his insistence
in Contre Sainte-Beuve that a work of literature not be confounded with
the life of its author. A la recherche remains, by circumstances and by
design, a great unfinished cathedral. Yet for convenience critics will
continue to refer to its protagonist and narrator as "Marcel," as if
possession of a name did not suggest that character and creation were in
fact finished.
Proust's Marcel becomes somewhat similar to Geoffrey Chaucer's
narrator-protagonist Geoffrey, who is as infrequently mentioned by
name in The Canterbury Tales and The House of Fame. Geoffrey is likewise a
passive figure who is more sinned against than sinning, and his timor-
ousness is exaggerated for comic effect. Yet, with both Marcel and
Geoffrey, there is an implicit sense that their experiences and observa-
tions will be transformed into a work of art, the one in fact which we read.
A denial of self ultimately leads to the assertion of a self integrated into an
objectified world.
As the sections "Nom de pays: Le Nom" in Du Coti de chez Swann and
"Nom de pays: Le Pays" in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs testify, names
are as vital in the novel as they are in Genesis. Such names as Balbec and
Venice or Guermantes and Bergotte are as infinitely suggestive to the
young Marcel as the etymology of French names is to the Combray priest
who visits Leonie. In effect never abandoning "the age at which one
believes that he creates what he names" (1, 91), Marcel endows words
with mystical properties. Passing through the Champs-Elysees, he
overhears the name "Gilberte," which instantly furnishes nebulous
impressions with substantial reality. "Ainsi passa pres de moi ce nom de
Gilberte, donne comme un talisman qui me permettrait peut-etre de
retrouver un jour celle dont il venait de faire une personne et qui,
!'instant d'avant, n'etait qu'une image incertaine" [Thus passed near
me the name of Gilberte, provided like a talisman which would perhaps
permit me someday to rediscover the one whom it had just brought into
existence and who, just an instant earlier, was only a dim image] (1, 142),
Adam asserts his dominion over beast and fowl by naming them, and the
narrator, beginning with Guermantes and Meseglise as the two
categories under which everything is subsumed, proceeds to bring a
complex world of titles, genealogies and place names under his control.
22 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
Marcel attempts to seize both the day and eternity, le jour and toujours, in
his novelist's way. He undertakes the epic task of coming to terms with
reality, whether reality be something within or beyond, a function of the
self or of the external world. The structure of Ala recherche suggests the
novel is a search for the truth which it itself is. And such expressions as
"en realite," "certes," "il est vrai que," or "a vrai dire" recur frequently
enough to reinforce the epistemological concerns implicit in the form of
the fiction.
One of the most pervasive notions in A la rt!Cherche is that of something
beyond, "au-dela." A propos of his investigations after the fugitive
Albertine, Marcel speaks of:
[Falsehoods, errol"li on this side of the profound reality which we were not
aware of, the transcendent truth, truth about our characters whose essential
MARCEL'S SELF-BEGETIING NOVEL 23
laws have been escaping us and require Time to reveal themselves, truth also
of ourfates]
D'ailleurs que nous occupions une place sans cesse accrue dans le Temps, tout
le monde le sent, et cette universalite ne pouvait que me rejouir puisque c'est
la verite, la verite soupc;onnee par chacun, que je devais chercher a elucider
(III, 1046).
[I was becoming aware that for this essential book, the only real book, a great
writer does not, in the current sense, have to invent, since it already exists in
each of us, but rather to translate it. The duty and the task of a writer are those
of a translator]
The task is immense and exhausting, and the more of a cipher the
laborer is the better, since he can then surrender himself fully to the
work.
De meme ceux qui produisent des ceuvres geniales ne sont pas ceux qui vivent
dans le milieu le plus delicat, qui ont la conversation la plus brillante, la
culture la plus etendue, mais ceux qui ont eu le pouvoir, cessant brusquement
de vivre pour eux-memes, de rendre leur personnalite pareille a un miroir, de
telle sorte que leur vie, si mediocre d' ailleurs qu'elle pouvait etre mondaine-
ment et meme dans uncertain sens, intellectuellement parlant, s'y reflete ....
(I, 554- 5).
[Likewise those who produce works of genius are not those who live in the
most refined setting, who have the most brilliant conversation, who are the
most extensively cultivated, but those who have the ability, abruptly ceasing
to live for themselves, to render their personality identical to a mirror, so that
their life, however mediocre it might otherwise be in worldly and even, in a
certain sense, in intellectual terms, is reflected there]
C'est a lui de trouver la verite. Mais comment? Grave incertitude, toutes les
fois que !'esprit se sent depasse par lui-meme; quand lui, le chercheur, est tout
ensemble le pays obscur ou il doit chercher et ou tout son bagage ne lui sera de
rien. Chercher? pas seulement: creer. II est en face de quelque chose qui n'est
pas encore et que seul il peut realiser, puis faire entrer dans la lumiere (I, 45).
26 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
[It is up to it to discover the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty every time the
mind feels surpassed by itself- when it, the seeker, is simultaneously the dark
country where it must seek and where all its baggage is useless. Seek? Not just
that but: create. It confronts something which as yet is not and which it alone
can realize and then bring into the light]
Rather than the pre-existent and independent noumenon which one can
only attempt to illuminate, reality according to this becomes the creation
of the artist. What matters is the searcher and not what he seeks, since it
is the quest which creates its own goal.
From one end of A Ia recherche to the other, these two conceptions
contend. One insists on the object and the pilgrim's need to sacrifice
himself, while the other emphasizes the creative function of actualizing
what previously did not exist. Even Marcel's aesthetic theories do not
escape this ostensible contradiction. At one point, he declares:
Ce livre, le plus penible de to us a dechiffrer, est aussi le seul que nous ait dicte
la realite, le seul dont "!'impression" ait ete faite en nous par la realite meme.
De quelque idee laissee en nous par la vie qu'il s'agisse, sa figure materielle,
trace de !'impression qu'elle nous a faite, est encore le gage de sa verite
necessaire (III, 880).
[This book, the most difficult of all to decipher, is also the only one which
reality has dictated to us, the only one "impressed" on us by reality itself. No
matter what idea life has left in us, its material form, traced out of the imprint
it made in us, is still the proof of its necessary truth]
V FINAGAIN
Germaine Bree declares that: "No other novelist has, like Proust, linked
within a single book the story of the spiritual genesis of a vocation, the
story of the genesis of a work, and the very embodiment of that work. " 15
And her former student George Stambolian affirms:
Actually, the point at which the narrator leaves off at the end of the novel can
in no way in the world be superimposed on his starting point. The contrary
would have presented a considerable aesthetic problem. The title of the novel
indicates that it is a matter of a "quest," and what would this quest be if the
narrator himself knew its outcome? What would be the "revelation" of the end
if not a specious revelation which would destroy the value of the narrator's
account and of the long discouragement which it cancels? 18
Et dans ces grands Iivres-Ia, il y a des parties qui n'ont eu le temps que d'etre
esquissees, et qui ne seront sans doute jamais finies, a cause de l'ampleur
meme du plan de l'architecte. Combien de grandes cathedrales restent
inachevees! (III, 1033).
[And in those great books, there are parts which have only had time to be
sketched and which will doubtless never be finished, because of the very scope
of the architect's plan. How many great cathedrals remain unfinished!]
But is it sure of having found the truth? And in its acceptance, in its apparent
joy, in the artificial exaltation of its last book, is there not still a shudder of
uneasiness? "Yes or no," it seems to say to itself, "have I been deceived? But it
is too late; I have chosen. "23
MARCEL'S SELF-BEGE'ITING NOVEL 31
Uncertainty and suffering, inevitable for anyone rooted in time, certain-
ly plague Marcel every step of the way. But "c'est le chagrin qui
developpe les forces de I' esprit" [it is sorrow which develops the powers
of the mind] (III, 906), and "on peut presque dire que les reuvres,
comme dans les puits artesiens, montent d'autant plus haut que Ia
souffrance a plus profondement creuse le creur" [it can almost be said
that works of art, as in artesian wells, climb higher as suffering digs more
deeply into the heart] (III, 908). Anxiety and conflict, as with each of the
polarities in the novel's rich dialectic, are necessary stages in the
movement toward final unity, a movement, however, which in A la
recherche can never fully end.
Confident in his methode of substantiating self and world, Descartes, at
least in light of Beckett, was no skeptic. Recent novelists, adapting the
Proustian paradigm to their own visions, will begin the process of
reduction emphasizing the self-doubts inherent in the reflexive form. But
A la recherche still posits a Romantic faith in the sublime affirmation of
artistic creation. The only irony in the Bergotte funeral scene resides in
the disparity between the pettiness of the author's life and the grandeur
of his immortal works:
On l'enterra, I:Ilais toute Ia nuit funebre, aux vitrines eclairees, ses livres
disposes trois par trois, veillaient comme des anges aux ailes eployees et
semblaient, pour celui qui n'etait plus, le symbole de la resurrection (III,
188).
[They buried him, but throughout the mournful night, in the bright windows
his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with wings unfurled
and seemed, for the one who no longer was, the symbol of resurrection)
A la recherche is immortal not because its author has been dead fifty-seven
years and it has since been assimilated as a "classic" and not simply
because it is the semblance of a life in time lifted out of time. "Perpetuel
devenir," perpetual becoming, is an oxymoron emblematic of the many
dualities through which the novel's unity is achieved. The work projects
an image of constant renewal through its plot and, more significantly,
through its own example. As long as it is re-read it does not die.
3 LaNausee
Pour obtenir cet effet, suivez-moi, j'invente un personnage
de romancier, que je pose en figure centrale; et le sujet du
livre, si vous voulez, c'est precisement lalutte entre ce que
lui offre la realite et ce que, lui, pretend en faire.
Andre Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs, p.233
Like the ascesis which moral and religious systems have always prescribed,
this depersonalization and stripping away of all social elements are not
undertaken for their own sake. They are justified only because they serve as
preparatory to something else. They permit us a contact with certain aspects
of reality which we might otherwise never know. 2
Ce ne sont pas les documents qui font defaut: lettres, fragments de memoires,
rapports secrets, archives de police. J'en ai presque trop, au contraire. Cequi
manque dans tous ces temoignages, c'est Ia fermete, Ia consistence. lis ne se
contredisent pas, mais ils ne s'accordent pas non plus: ils n'ont pas I' air de
concerner Ia meme personne (p.25).
[It is not the documents which are at fault: letters, fragments of memoirs,
secret reports, police archives. On the contrary, I almost have too much of
them. What is missing in all this testimony is stability, consistency. They do
not contradict each other, but they do not agree either; they do not seem to be
about the same person]
Ma pensee, c'est moi: voila pourquoi je ne peux pas m'arreter. J'existe par ce
que je pense ... etje nepeuxpasm'empecherdepenser. Encemomentmeme
- c'est affreux- si j'existe, c'est parce que j'ai horreur d'exister (p.143).
[My thought is me- that's why I cannot stop. I exist by means of what I think
... and I cannot prevent myself from thinking. At this very moment -it is
frightful- if I exist, it is because I have a horror of existing]
Je suis, j' existe, je pense done je suis, je suis parce que je pense, pourquoi est-ce
que je pense? je ne veux plus penser, je suis parce que je pense que je ne veux
pas etre, je pense que je ... parce que ... pouah! (p.144).
C'est moi, c'est moi qui me tire du neant auquel j'aspire: la haine, le degout
d'exister, ce sont autant de manieres de me jaire exister, de m'enfoncer dans
!'existence. Les pensees naissent par-derriere moi comme un vertige, je les
sens naitre derriere rna tete ... si je cede, elles vont venir la devant, entre mes
yeux- et je cede toujours, la pensee grossit, grossit et la voila, !'immense, qui
me remplit tout entier et renouvelle mon existence (p.143).
[It is me, it is me who pulls myself out of the nothingness to which I aspire; the
hatred, the disgust for existing, these are so many means of making me exist, of
LA NAUSEE 37
immersing me in existence. Thoughts are born behind me like a dizziness, I
feel them being born behind my head ... if I give in, they are going to come in
front there, between my eyes- and I always give in, the thought grows, grows,
and there it is, immense, completely filling me and renewing my existence]
En voila deux qui sont sauves: le juif et la Negresse. Sauves. Ils se sont
peut-etre crus perdus jusqu'au bout, noyes dans l'existence. Et pourtant
personne ne pourrait penser a moi comme je pense a eux, avec cette douceur.
Personne, pas meme Anny. Ils sont un peu pour moi comme des morts, un peu
comme des heros de roman; ils se sont laves du peche d'exister (pp. 247-8).
[There are two who may be saved: the Jew and the Negress. Saved. They
might have believed themselves lost until the end, drowned in existence. And
yet no one could think of me the way I think of them, with this fondness. No
one, notevenAnny. They are for mea bitlikedeadpeople, a bitlikeheroesof a
novel; they have been cleansed of the sin of existing]
This is not merely salvation through art, but rebirth. Each time Roquen-
tin listens to the record he speculates on the lives of its composer and
singer and the extent to which, out of whatever motivations and misery,
they have succeeded in creating more enduring lives through the music.
Voila, je suppose que ~a ne lui ferait ni chaud ni foid, ace type, si on lui disait
qu'il y a, dans la septieme ville de France, aux abords de la gare, quelqu'un
qui pense a lui. Mais moi je serais heureux, si j'etais a sa place, je l'envie
(p.247).
[There, I suppose that this guy would not care one way or the other if he were
told that there is, in the seventh city of France, in the area of the station,
someone who thinks about him. I, though, I would be happy, if I were in his
place; I envy him]
At the end of the novel La Nausie, boarding his train and escaping from
Bouville, Roquentin resolves to create a novel.
[A book. A novel. And there would be people who would read this novel and
who would say: "It's Antoine Roquentin who wrote it. He was a red-headed
fellow who used to hang around cafes." And they would think about my life
the way I think about that Negress's: as if about something precious and half
legendary]
LA NAUSEE 39
As in fact does occur when we read La Nausie, Roquentin hopes that his
novel, unlike a book of history, will succeed in projecting a Roquentin
who will live as the Negress lives through the song. Although it is not
explicitly to be autobiographical and La Nausie, while a portrait of
Roquentin, lacks the broad Bildrmgsroman sweep of A Ia recherche, his
expectations are not radically different from those of Marcel:
Mais il viendrait bien un moment ou le livre serait ecrit, serait derriere moi et
je pense qu'un peu de clarte tomberait sur mon passe. Alors peut-etre que je
pourrais, a travers lui, me rappeler rna vie sans repugnance {p.249).
[But there would surely come a moment when the book would be written,
would be behind me, and I think a little light would be shed on my past.
Perhaps then I would be able, through it, to recall my life without disgust]
for La Nausee. It seems closer in spirit, but not function, to the song which
Sam plays again - and again - and which evokes a pre-war romance in
the film Casablanca. Henry A. Grubbs, after considering a few of the
similarities between the nature and role of the two musical creations, can
thus conclude with the following generalization about the novels in
which they appear:
I think rather that Sartre was familiar with Proust's work, that he found
interesting and significant at least two elements in it: the theme of the effect of
a work of music, and the conclusions involving the relation of artistic creation
to the discovery of hidden reality and the recovery of lost time. May I suggest
that Sartre was taking a wry pleasure in making La Nausee an ironic counter-
part of A la recherche du temps perdu; a reduced model, ironic, modern, realistic, a
little sordid- in a word, a poor man's Proust. 15
where portraits of the town's social giants hang "larger than life" (the
painting of Olivier Blevigne almost succeeds in camouflaging his height,
a mere 1.53 meters), Roquentin becomes aware of art's power to
transform mean, mortal lives into timeless exemplars.
[Admirable power of art. From this little man with the high-pitched voice, all
that would pass on to posterity would be a menacing face, a superb gesture,
and the brutal eyes of a bull. The student terrorized by the Commune, the
tiny, irascible deputy - death has purged these. But thanks to Bordurin, the
President of the Club de l'Ordre, the orator of "Moral Forces" was immortal]
The tone here is one of derision toward the bad faith of the society's
bogus standards. Yet the novel Roquentin is to write will succeed in
immortalizing a roquentin.
Marcel receives random visitations from involuntary memory, and
the feeling of "adventure" seizes Roquentin briefly from time to time,
intensifying and unifying his experience within a meaningful framework.
Un soleil torride, dans rna tete, glisse roidement, comme une plaque de
lanterne magique. II est suivi d'un morceau de ciel bleu; apres quelques
secousses il s'immobilise, j'en suis tout dore en dedans. De quelle journee
marocaine (ou algerienne? ou syrienne?) cet eclat s'est-il soudain detache? Je
me laisse couler dans le passe (p.51).
[A torrid sun, in my head, shifts stiffly, like a magic lantern slide. I tis followed
by a patch of blue sky; after a few shakes, it comes to a stop, and I am all
radiant inside from it. From what Moroccan (or Algerian? or Syrian?) day has
this splendor suddenly broken away? I let myself sink into the past]
For the most part, Roquentin fails to recover his past through
memory, and Anny, emblematic of his past and of the possibility of a life
of adventure (because of her ideas and because of the promise of a
romantic encounter with her), proves as elusive as Marcel's Albertine
disparue; "je cesse de rechercher une Anny disparue" [I have given up
seeking a missing Anny] (p.202). "Adventures are in books," (p.58),
complains Roquentin. And in that lament is a forecast of the manner in
which his anguished existence will in truth be projected as an adventure.
On a smaller scale than A la recherche, with its panoply of fictional
sonatas, paintings, plays and poems, La Nausie likewise features ele-
ments which remind the reader that he is reading a work of art concerned
with the relationship between art and life. Most prominent of these
devices is, of course, the jazz song "Some of These Days," to which
Roquentin listens early in the novel (p.36), as well as at its conclusion. At
one point, immediately following the abandonment of the Rollebon
enterprise (as historian despairing of voluntary memory), Roquentin
also describes the experience of listening to a song with the words "When
the low moon begins to beam/Every night I dream a little dream" in the
Bar de la Marine (p.147). The portraits hanging in the Bouville Museum
represent a bourgeois exploitation of the creative potential of art.
Furthermore, images of literature appear at various points before
Roquentin's climactic decision to create his own work of literature.
During one of his working days in the Bouville Library, Roquentin
discovers a copy of Balzac's Euginie Grandet lying open on a table. Simply
to relieve the boredom of his own activities, he begins reading the novel
from the page at which it happens to be open, page twenty-seven (p.47).
Later, he carries the book with him into the Vezelize restaurant, where,
surrounded by the chatter of old men playing cards and the gossip of a
middle-aged couple, he begins reading, for want of anything better to do.
"It's not that I derive much pleasure from it; but it is quite necessary to
do something" (p. 72). At this point, the text of La Nausie alternates
LA NAUSEE 45
between the dreary contemporary reality and the scene in Eugenie Grandet
in which mother and daughter discuss the latter's burgeoning love for
her cousin.
Later, Roquentin encounters a copy of La Chartreuse de Parme in the
Bouville Library and unsuccessfully attempts to find refuge in Stend-
hal's novel from the burden of his existence. "J'essayais de m'absorber
dans rna lecture, de trouver un refuge dans Ia claire Italie de Stendhal.
J'y parvenais par a-coups, par courtes hallucinations, puis je retombais
dans cette journee mena~ante ... " [I was trying to become absorbed in
my reading, to find a refuge in Stendhal's bright Italy. I was succeeding
at it sporadically, through brief hallucinations, and then I would fall
back again into this dreadful day] (p.116). Anny, who has been an
actress in London, hangs a reproduction of the portrait of Emily Bronte
by the novelist's brother in every room in which she stays. Moreover, it is
in leafing through the Satirique Bouvillois, whose compiler was accused of
treason, that Roquentin begins to question the authority of the town's
exemplars (p.119). Roquentin originally referred to a medieval satirical
singer, and not the least ofthe purposes of Roquentin's own novel will be
subversion.
As will be the case in Butor's La Modification, where the main
protagonist carries an unopened novel with him throughout, the various
allusions to writers and books in La Nausee prepare the way for Roquen-
tin's determination to construct his own novel. And they also pose the
question of the relationship between art and life. Roquentin must come
to terms with the question before the end of this novel.
The reader, or re-reader, of La Nausee detects clues all along to what
Roquentin's final choice of vocation will be, a choice which is perhaps
responsible for the presence of La Nausee. While still working on his
historical study of the Marquis de Rolle bon, Roquentin finds his random
data recalcitrant to any unity and observes that a figure in a novel might
be more satisfactory. "Encore suis-je bien sur que des personnages de
roman auraient !'air plus vrais, seraient, en tout cas, plus plaisants" [I
am still quite sure that the characters of a novel would seem more real,
would in any case be more pleasant] (p.26). Later, after speculating on
an hypothesis which would subsume all of the contradictory information
he has assembled on the elusive Rolle bon, Roquentin concludes a diary
entry with the remark: "Seulement, si c' etait pour en venir la, il fallait
plutot que j' ecrive un roman sur le marquis de Rolle bon" [But if it was in
order to arrive at that, I should instead have written a novel about the
Marquis de Rolle bon] (p.87). From history to historical novel to novel,
Roquentin gradually abandons the world of existence for something
beyond it. He will write a book, but not a work of history, since that
would once again enmire him in existence. And he is incapable of
providing the necessity for someone else's existence. He will, instead,
compose:
46 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
Une autre espece de livre. Je ne sais pas tres bien laquelle- mais il faudrait
qu'on devine, derriere les mots imprimes, derriere les pages, quelque chose
qui n'existerait pas, qui serait au-dessus de l'existence. Une histoire, par
exemple, comme il ne peut en arriver, une aventure (p.248).
[Another kind of book. I do not especially know which - but it would be
necessary to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, something
which would not exist, which would be above existence. A story, for example,
which could never happen, an adventure]
Dire qu'il y a des imbeciles pour puiser des consolations dans les beaux-arts.
Comme rna tante Bigeois: "Les Priludesde Chopin m'ont ete d'un tel secours a
Ia mort de ton pauvre oncle." Et les salles de concert regorgent d'humilies,
d'offenses qui, les yeux clos, cherchent a transformer leurs pales visages en
antennes receptrices. lis se figurent que les sons captes coulent en eux, doux et
nourrissants et que leurs souffrances deviennent musique, comme celles du
jeune Werther; ils croient que Ia beaute leur est compatissante. Les cons
{p.243).
[Admit that there are imbeciles who draw consolation from the fine arts. Like
my Aunt Bigeois: "Chopin's Preludes were such an aid to me after the death of
your poor uncle." And concert halls are bloated with the humble, with the
injured who, eyes closed, seek to transform their pallid faces into receiving
antennas. They imagine that the sounds they pick up pass through them,
sweet and nourishing, and that their sufferings become music, like those of
young Werther. They believe that beauty is compassionate toward them. The
assholes]
through art. Perhaps his novel, far from being a reassuring crutch for
dotards like Aunt Bigeois, will open onto still further works by likewise
shocking and inciting others. Murdoch's Under the Net suggests that it
has. Et toutle reste est littirature.
As befits a work which has attempted to embody raw existence but
which has also consistently been pointing beyond itself, La Nausie
concludes somewhat provisionally in the future tense: "Tomorrow it will
rain on Bouville" (p.249). The tone is one of expectation, as we look
forward to Roquentin's departure from Bouville to Paris and to the first
page of the novel he will write, a perfectly ordered form which will
embody an awareness of the very existence it is transcending. However,
also suggested is a traditional kind of novel-ending: a tentative opening
outward after certain complications are resolved and characters in a
work like Germinal can begin to look to the future.
"Demain il pleuvra sur Bouville." On the one hand, this statement
suggests a sort of baptismal cleansing promised in a non-empiricist
certainty about what will occur in the future. However, on the other
hand, rain in Bouville will bring nothing more than mud, the emblem of
dirty superfluousness in that city of mud.
La Nausie is thus open to the future, and Roquentin has the freedom
which Sartre regrets is missing in the case of Fran($ois Mauriac's
characters. 17 Although the presence of editors suggests his disappear-
ance or death, Roquentin has been born again. And, although the novel
has come to an end, a new one is being born. Furthermore, if, as
Roquentin insists, art's value is instrumental, then its life only begins
with its death, the final page.
The question of whether La Nausee is itself the novel that Roquentin
will write is probably unresolvable. It certainly successfully illustrates
the criteria that Roquentin establishes. In addition, it does permit us to
understand something of Roquentin's development, consistent with his
vision of "the moment when the book would be completed and his life
would take on some clarity" (p.249). To that extent, as with Ala reclzerclze,
the conclusion of La Nausie propels us back to the beginning. Yet the
work we return to remains open and lacks the finished form of a
conventional novel. Cast in the mode of a journal, it might suggest
scattered notes toward a novel rather than a novel which its author lived
to complete. However, Roquentin's program calls for a fundamentally
disquieting sort of creation, and this novel La Nausie, with its vivid
present tense perspective on an unmasked reality, is certainly that.
Whether the cunning required to devise La Nausie in its given form is
ascribed to Jean-Paul Sartre or to his fictive author Antoine Roquentin,
La Nausie self-consciously extends the tradition of the self-begetting
novel. Time spent with it is not time lost.
4 La Modification and
Beyond
Moi je serais devenu fou s'il avait fallu que Ia femme que
j'aimais habitat Paris pendant que j'etais retenu a Rome.
Marcel Proust, Ala recherche (I, 563)
a.m., Friday to the time he prepares to walk out into Rome on Saturday
at 5:45 a.m. He is the director of French operations for the Rome-based
Seabelli typewriter company, and his wife Henrietta lives in Paris, while
his lover Cecile lives in Rome. His trip from Paris to Rome is begun with
the intention of leaving his family and bringing Cecile back to Paris to
live with him.
We are told that his valise, a birthday gift from his family, is inscribed
with the initials "L. D." (p.12). 2 Much later there is a recollection of the
time when Cecile, returning from a trip to Paris, sees him on the train
and shouts: "Leon!" (p.210). And, at another point, a clergyman also
traveling in the compartment is portrayed as a teacher, and he is thought
of as assigning the following topic: "Imagine that you are M. Leon
Delmont and that you are writing to your mistress Cecile Darcella to tell
her that you have found a job for her in Paris" (p.l18). These constitute
the only three references, indirect as they are, to the name of the
principal character of the novel. Like Proust's Marcel, Durrell's Darley
or Beckett's The Unnamable, Leon Delmont emerges as yet another
anonymous or semi-onymous protagonist. Once again, the novel which
portrays him provides him with a sort of begetting and christening. The
modification in La Modification occurs in and through the identity of
Leon Delmont. His identity is inseparable from that of the novel in which
he appears, and until it is complete neither is he.
The most remarkable technical feature of Butor's novel is its use
throughout of the formal second-person pronoun. 3 Instead of the con-
ventional device of first-person or third-person narration, the central
protagonist of La Modification, this typewriter bureaucrat named Leon
Delmont pulled between Paris and Rome and between Henrietta and
Cecile, is consistently, except for brief excursions into dreams, referred to
as "vous." Numerous critics, including Butor himself, have called
attention to the intermediary status of the second person as a provisional
attempt to fuse objective and subjective perspectives. 4 Vous stands
between je and il on more than a grammatical chart.
In addition, the second person introduces accusatory, hortatory, and
interrogatory elements into the discourse. More so than je or il, vous
suggests the paradigms of a courtroom and a schoolroom, and both
dream sequences and fictional projections within the novel reinforce
this. The rhetorical stance of La Modification serves insistently toques-
tion, admonish, and advise the main character about the very nature of
his existence. This is certainly the case, for example, in the recurring
image of the huntsman in the Fontainebleau forest, le grand veneur, whose
challenges are later assembled and reasserted by a phantom police
interrogator: "Qui etes-vous? Ou allez-vous? Que cherchez-vous? Qui
aimez-vous? Que voulez-vous? Qu'attendez-vous? Que sentez-vous? Me
voyez-vous? M'entendez-vous?" [Who are you? Where are you going?
What are you looking for? Whom do you love? What do you want? What
LA MODIFICATION AND BEYOND 51
are you waiting for? What are you feeling? Do you see me? Do you hear
me?] (p.252). Like the conventional epic and like L'Innommable, which
begin with questions, or like Robert Pinget's L'Inquisitoire, La Modifica-
tion proceeds as an inquiry, an inquest, if not a quest. Henriette is
characterized by "that perpetual air of accusation" (p.109), and even
"the King of Judgment" puts in a spectral appearance (p.259). The
stern, direct address of vous satisfies Roquentin's dictum that a novel
"make people ashamed of their existence" and thereby assists in the
realization of the modification that occurs.
Furthermore, the prolonged apostrophe to a "vous" whom we may
conditionally label "Leon Delmont" serves to create the novel's hero
right before our eyes and while the work is in progress. It is as if a
disembodied voice is generating the world in the act of naming it,
miraculously endowing Leon Delmont with certain attributes as soon as
it tells him what they are. One of the dreams in the text is of a
Charon-like ferryman who, waiting to row Leon to the opposite shore,
states: "I see clearly that you are dead" (p.219). The novel serves to
guide Leon across that symbolic river and restore hm to life. In an essay
contrasting Alain Robbe-Grillet's chosisme with Butor's humanism, Ro-
land Barthes draws attention to the manner in which the narrative
begets its protagonist, in which "a new man is ceaselessly being bam":
awareness, which is nothing less than the growth in self, comprising the
novel. Ultimately, both reader and principal personage- if there is a
distinction - grow to so lucid an awareness of the circumstances in
which they find themselves that they are prepared to write the novel
which will formalize this enlightenment.
The second-person point of view in La Modification thus functions as a
means of projecting a self-begetting novel. In Albert Camus's La Chute
(1956), we are forced to become something like defendant-confessor to
complement Jean-Baptiste Clemence, the "judge-penitent." And in
Robert Pinget's Quelqu'un (1965), "quelqu'un" refers both to the main
character, an Everyman, and hence an emblem for us, and to the
Someone he is seeking, a reader, "someone who would read over my
shoulder." 6 Butor's La Modification insists even more emphatically than
do these examples on the active, creative participation of the reader in
the fate and genesis of hero and novel. Without the reader's complicity,
the work is sterile. But with it, we once again share in the twin births of a
novel and its major protagonist.
This insistence on reader collusion is not entirely absent from earlier
French examples of the self-begetting novel. Proust emphasizes the fact
that learning to read a novel is tantamount to learning to read oneself
when, in the final volume of his self-begetting novel, the narrator affirms:
[In the narrative that they will constitute, I would like these events to appear
slightly distorted; there is a kind of interest for the reader in the mere fact that
he has to reconstruct. The story requires his collaboration in order to be set up
properly]
J'essaie de m'imaginer que je suis mon propre lecteur- tousles auteurs font
cela; travailler consiste a se couler idealement et critiquement dans la peau
d'un autre, le lecteur, qui est au fond celui qui saisira completement I' objet,
celui qui sera le createur. 9
I have lately been studying the works of Diderot a bit. In Ceci n'est pas un conte,
he tells us that when you tell a story you always tell it to an interlocutor who
answers. He likewise introduces into his text someone to play the role of
interlocutor. By playing the role of interlocutor he also plays the role of reader.
When you write something there is always a reader present. 10
II DETERMINED LIBERATION
Non, ce n'est pas seulement l'heure, a peine matinale, qui est responsable de
cette faiblesse habituelle, c'est deja I' age qui cherche a vous convaincre de sa
domination sur votre corps, et pourtant, vous venez seulement d'atteindre les
quarante-cinq ans (p. 9) _
LA MODIFICATION AND BEYOND 55
[No, it is not the hour, barely morning, that is responsible for this habitual
weakness, it is already age which seeks to convince you of its domination over
your body, and yet you have only just reached forty-five years]
. . . vous avez eu !'impression qu'ils s'etaient taus entendus pour vous tendre
un piege, que ces cadeaux sur votre assiette etaient un appat, que tout ce repas
avait ete soigneusement compose pour vous seduire (comment n'aurait-elle
pas appris a les connaitre, vos gouts, depuis pres de vingt ans que vous vivez
ensemble), tout combine pour vous persuader que vous etiez desormais un
homme age, range, dompte, alors qu'il y avait si peu de temps que s'etait
ouverte a vous cette vie tout autre, cette vie que vous ne meniez encore que
quelques jours a Rome, cette autre vie dont celle-ci, celle de l'appartement
parisien, n'etait que l'ombre ... (p.38).
[ ... you have had the impression that they had all gotten together to set a trap
for you, that those gifts on your plate were bait, that this entire meal was
carefully arranged to seduce you (how could she have not learned to know
your tastes during the twenty years you have been living together), all
combined to persuade you that henceforth you were an aged, orderly, beaten
56 THE SELF-BEGETIING NOVEL
man, while there was so little time to become available to you this entirely
other, this life that you have as yet only led for a few days in Rome, this other
life of which this one, of the Parisian apartment, was only a shadow]
Mais il n'est plus temps maintenant, leurs chaines solidement affermies par ce
voyage se deroulent avec le siir mouvement meme du train, et malgre tous vos
efforts pour vous en degager, pour toumer votre attention ailleurs, vers cette
decision que vous sentez vous echapper, les voici qui vous entrainent dans
leurs engrenages (p.163).
LA MODIFICATION AND BEYOND 57
[But there is no longer any time now, their chains solidly strengthened by this
trip unroll with the sure movement even of the train, and despite all your
efforts to disengage yourself, to tum your attention elsewhere, toward that
decision that you feel escaping you, here they are dragging you into their
gears]
Vous vous dites: s'il n'y avait pas eu ces gens, s'il n'y avait pas eu ces objets
et ces images auxquels se sont accrochees mes pensees de telle sorte qu'une
machine mentale s'est constituee, faisant glisser l'une sur I' autre les regions de
mon existence au cours de ce voyage different des autres, detache de Ia
sequence habituelle de mes joumees et de mes actes, me dechiquetant
s'il n'y avait pas eu cet ensemble de circonstances, cette donne du jeu,
peut-etre cette fissure beante en rna personne ne se serait-elle pas produite
cette nuit, mes illusions auraient-elles pu tenir encore quelque temps {p.274).
[You tell yourself: if there had not been those people, if there had not been
those objects and those images on which my thoughts have been hung in such
a way that a mental machine was formed, making the regions of my existence
slide over each other during this trip which is different from others, detached
from the usual pattern of my days and my acts, shredding me
If there had not been this combination of circumstances, this deal of cards,
perhaps this benign fissure in my personality would not have occurred
tonight, my illusions could still have remained intact for some time]
il me faut ecrire un livre; ce serait pour moi le moyen de combler le vide qui
s'est creuse, n'ayant plus d'autre liberte, emporte dans ce train jusqu'a la
gare, de toute facon lie, oblige de suivre ces rails (p.272).
[I must write a book; this would be for me the way to fill the vacuum which has
been created, no longer having any other freedom, carried in this train until
the terminal, in any event linked, forced to follow these rails]
Leon will remain in Rome until Monday evening to begin writing his
novel. For the first time in his life, he will be absolutely free. No one in the
world - not Henriette, not Cecile, not Signor Scabelli -will know where
he is or how to get in touch to continue demands on him. Instead, like the
traditional solitary novelist figure and unlike a corporation executive, he
will remain in creative confinement in his Roman hotel room composing
his roman. He does recognize: "I cannot hope to save myself alone"
(p.274); but the novel, a product of solitude, will be a means both of
reaching toward "that future liberty out of our reach" (p.274) and of
re-composing a sundered community. It will implicate uousin every stage
of its enlightenment.
Leon recognizes that he will continue to live with his family at 15 place
du Pantheon, will continue in "this false, damaging work at Scabelli's"
(p.272), and will even continue to see Cecile during monthly visits to
Rome. The modification which occurs in the novel and by means of a
novel is more momentous than a mere change in plans. The truth has set
Leon free. He learns to view his illusions and actions with total clarity by
means of a novel, and the novel becomes an assertion of his freedom. The
final sentence of La Modification, which is only the beginning of another
novel, reveals an emancipation: "You leave the compartment" (p.283).
Whether in Paris or Rome, it is invigorating to stretch our legs.
Ce que vous avez amoureusement detaille, ce vers quoi vos pas vous avaient
mene, ce sont deux grands tableaux d'un peintre de troisieme ordre, Pannini,
representant deux collections imaginaires exposees dans de tres hautes salles
largement ouvertes ou des personnages de qualite, ecclesiastiques ou gentils-
hommes, se promenent parmi les sculptures entre les murs couverts de
paysages, en faisant des gestes d'admiration, d'interet, de surprise, de perple-
xite, comme les visiteurs dans Ia Sixtine ... (p.66).
[What you have lovingly detailed, what your steps had led you toward, are
two large pictures by a third-rate painter, Pannini, representing two imagi-
nary collections exhibited in very high, spacious rooms where figures of
quality, clergy or gentlemen, walk among the sculptures between the walls
covered with landscapes, while making gestures of admiration, of interest, of
surprise, of perplexity, like visitors in the Sistine ... ]
... ceci de remarquable qu'il n'y a aucune difference de matiere sensible entre
les objets representes comme reels et ceux representes comme peints, comme
s'il avait voulu figurer sur ses toiles Ia reussite de ce projet commun a tant
d'artistes de son temps: donner un equivalent absolu de Ia realite, le chapiteau
peint devenant indiscernable du chapiteau reel, a part le cadre qui l'entoure,
de meme que les grands architectes illusionistes du baroque romain peignant
62 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
[ ... the remarkable feature that there is no perceptible difference between the
objects represented as real and those represented as painted, as if he had
wanted his canvases to portray the success of that ambition common to so
many artists of his time: to provide an absolute equivalent of reality, the
painted capital becoming indistinguishable from the real capital, aside from
the frame surrounding it, in the same way as the great illusionist architects of
the Roman Baroque paint in space and lead you to imagine, thanks to their
marvelous systems of signs, their collections of pilasters, and their voluptuous
curves, monuments ultimately rivaling in effect and prestige the enormous
real masses of ancient ruins which they had forever under their eyes and which
humbled them, methodically assimilating the details of the ornamentation as
the very foundation of their language]
il faudrait qu'il soit question par exemple d'un homme perdu dans une foret
qui se referme derriere lui sans qu'il arrive, meme pour decider de quel rote il
lui convient d'aller maintenant, a retrouver quel est le chemin qui l'a conduit
Ia, parce que ses pas ne laissent nulle trace sur les feuilles mortes accumulees
dans lesquelles il enfonce (p.202).
[it would have to deal, for example, with a man lost in a forest which closes in
behind him without his succeeding, even in order to decide which direction he
should take now, in finding again which path took him there, because his steps
do not leave any trace in the mass of dead leaves into which he sinks]
[Wedged into that groove between the seat and the back is that book that you
had bought on leaving, not read but saved throughout the trip as a marker for
yourself, which you had forgotten on leaving the compartment earlier, which
you had let go of while sleeping, and which had gradually slipped under your
bodr.]
Une marque de vous-mime, the book Loon holds is also a temporary proxy
for the novel he will write at the end of his trip, "that future and
necessary book whose form you hold in your hand" {p.283). In effect a
blank slate silently recording all that occurs during the momentous train
journey, the book is both an image of Leon's future novel and a stimulus
for its conception:
vous retoumez entre vos doigts ce livre que vous n'avez pas lu, mais par Ia
presence duquel commence a s'imposer si fortement a vous un autre livre que
vous imaginez, ce livre dont vous desireriez tant qu'il rut pour vous, dans les
circonstances presentes, ce guide bleu des egares ... (p.231) .
LA MODIFICATION AND BEYOND 65
[you tum over between your fingers that book you have not read, but by whose
presence another book which you are imagining, that book which you wish so
much could be, in the present circumstances, that blue guide to the perplexed,
begins to assert itself so forcefully]
Leon will learn to use words in a manner for which Scabelli's machines
only suggest the potential. Similarly, the book which he holds and which
is in effect empty will come to be filled with his identity. Who touches
that book touches Leon Delmont, and not simply because it marks his
presence on the train.
Ultimately, just as the novel on the train serves as a double for the
novel Leon will write, his gradual development as a writer will be the
basis for the novel in which he appears, La Modification. The protagonist
becomes the book he carries, and the novel he writes becomes the life of
its principal character. La Modification again, it is the begetting of a vous.
Recognizing "it would be necessary to show in this book the role which
Rome can play in the life of a man in Paris" (p.277), Leon outlines the
program of his projected novel:
[It would doubtless be best for these two cities to retain their real geographi-
cal relations,
and to attempt to revive in the method of reading that crucial episode of
your adventure, the movement produced in your mind accompanying your
body's joumey from one station to the other through all the landscapes along
the way]
The descriptions apply quite well to the novel we have just concluded
reading, and an anonymous novel has finally found a name, La Modifica-
tion. Once again we have witnessed - or rather participated in - the
begetting of a novel. La Modification is no exception to Jean Roudaut's
assertion: "No work of Butor's ever concludes." 15 To read Leon's- and
our- novel, we must turn back to the first page to begin the account of a
change in outlook whose manifestation is a work of literature. After their
disappointing vacation in Rome, Leon promises Henriette: "As soon as
we can, we will come back" (p.282), Leon will return to his family and
job after his trip, and La Modification arches back to its origins. The novel
does not conclude with the exit from the compartment. Instead, as soon
as we are able we must return to read the novel Leon writes.
66 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
Any literature which does not assist us in this plan, even if despite its author, is
at a more or less crucial deadline (and the press of events creates such urgency,
the disorder of the world is so acute that I tend more and more to believe that it
is a very imminent deadline) inevitably condemned. 16
If it is true that there exists an intimate connection between form and content,
as they used to say in our schools, I believe it is right to insist on the fact that in
reflecting on form the novelist finds a privileged means of attack, a means of
forcing the real to reveal itself, to conduct its own activity. 21
There are some impostures which criticism is obliged to denounce, for such
works, despite their charms and their merits, support and deepen the dark-
ness, maintain the consciousness in its contradictions, in its blindness risking
to lead it toward more fatal disorders. 24
For, far from neglecting it, the author today proclaims the absolute need he
has for his cooperation, a cooperation which is active, conscious, and creative.
What he asks of him is no longer to receive ready-made a world that is
completed, full, self-contained; it is, rather, to participate in a creation, to take
his turn in inventing the work. 36
He will overcome this failing by inserting into his novel someone capable
of providing the store of "non-literary" details he desires, someone who
will in fact resemble Claude Desprez. "II serait bon que dans mon
prochain livre, je choisisse parmi mes heros quelque bonhomme passion-
ne du vieux Paris et qui n'en ignorait rien" [It would be a good idea for
my next book to choose among my heroes some fellow who is excited
about Paris and knows everything about it] (p.58).
The resultant of these two converging forces is the novel we read.
Toward its conclusion, in an extended soliloquy of several pages, earlier
elements are recapitulated telegraphically in a final feu d'artifice, as
details of Paris past and present are put on record. The novel seems to
have returned to its pre-technological role as compendium of informa-
tion, encyclopedic data bank. A gap in the recitation intrudes at this
point, and a blank space yawns at us, suggesting the infinite possibility of
references that could be inserted in the future book. In "Le Temps
immobile," Mauriac refers to it as "a blank which I put there to mark the
potential place of one or several- surely several, innumerable- forgotten
citations. " 41
Yet it is the novelist Camejoux who is apparently in charge, although
he has abjured the factitiousness of a craft which leads him to contrive a
sentence like "La marquise sortit a cinq heures." Another highly
self-conscious example of "a writer-heroin theworksofwriters" (p.78),
Camejoux, like Leon Delmont, envisions the reactions which his novel,
the one in which he in fact appears, will elicit. "Gageons qu'il se trouvera
un critique (il ne m'aura pas lu jusqu'ici) pour dire que le meilleur, dans
mon livre, ce sont les citations, en quoi il n'aura pas tort" [You can bet
that there will be a critic (who will not have read this far) who will claim
that the best thing about my book is its citations, and he will not be
wrong] (p.293). He seems content that his novel will succeed to the
extent that it no longer appears a fiction, and he frankly admits that the
character of the dying Mathilde is in reality based on his own cousin
Agnes.
74 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
[Thus, Bertrand Camejoux records in his novel, and I record in the novel in
which I have given speech and life to Bertrand Camejoux, that impossibility
of conceiving what appears so natural with others and what a whole life has
been passed in fearing, knowing that those you love and you yourself are
unavoidably threatened by it - death. Out of his cousin Agnes, he has made
the Mathilde of his book, and I myself know very well that the true name of
this sufferer was no more Agnes than Mathilde. Bertrand Carnejoux, triple
character, since he is supposed to be writing the books in which he himself
plays the part of hero. A novelist has been brought to life by a novelist, and I,
myself a novelist, have put into a novel, in which nothing though has been
invented, a mirror game which catches in its snares sensations, feelings, and
thoughts which have been experienced]
Le bruit eteint, Ia fureur morte, il reste Ia liberte. Ainsi le roman s'est-il dans
ses avant-dernieres pages peu a peu evanoui, eta-t-il disparu, sans feintes ni
LA MODIFICATION AND BEYOND 75
masques, au profit du romancier qui, s'il s'est mis directement dans son livre,
!'a purifie a Ia fin de ses dernieres traces de fiction en le faisant accooer a une
verite oii !'exactitude litterale rut preferee a Ia litterature. La marquise ne
sortit pas a cinq heures ... (p.313).
[When the noise dims and the fury dies, what remains is freedom. Little by
little in its concluding pages the novel thus has faded and disappeared,
without feints or masks, in favor of the novelist who, if he has put himself
directly into his book, has finally purified it of its last traces of fiction by
making it surrender to a truth in which literal exactitude is preferable to
literature. The marquise did not go out at five o'clock ... ]
It is a matter of the novel contesting itself, of destroying it before our eyes while
it is apparently being constructed, of writing the novel of a novel which does
not come about, of creating a fiction which would be to the great works
composed by Dostoevsky or by Meredith what that canvas by Miro
entitled "Murder of Painting" was to the pictures of Rembrandt and Rubens.
Those strange and nearly unclassifiable works do not demonstrate the
weakness of the genre of the novel; they merely indicate that we live in an era of
reflection and that the novel is in the process of reflecting on itself. 44
Alittlrature (i.e., literature freed of the devices which have given that word a
pejorative sense) is an extreme never reached, but it is in that direction that
trustworthy authors have been moving ever since men began to write.
Therefore, the history of literature and that of alittirature are parallel. 49
But you're like every man who was ever born into this
world, Martin. You'd like to pretend that you made
yourself, that it was you who made you- and not the body
of a woman and another man.
I LA DIFFERENCE
was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in
extreme fatigue, I have had my vision." With this, the novel, too, is
finished, and we are invited to consider the entire work as an artistic
vision which encompasses Lily's.
However, despite such illustrations of reflexivity, despite the fact that
it was in analyzing Tristram Shandy that Viktor Shklovsky provided
Russian Formalism with its principle of "laying bare the literary de-
vice," and despite meticulous exploration of the genre exhibited by
Fielding's introductory chapters or James's prefaces, the English novel
in general lacks the sense of being "in the laboratory of narrative." The
reflexive, self-begetting tradition is not as central to Anglo-Saxon fiction
as it is to French. Like Aldous Huxley's Philip Quarles, British novelists
have been apprehensive about focusing their works on introspective
eccentrics. "The chief defect of the novel of ideas is that you must write
about people who have ideas to express -which excludes all but about
.01 of the human race." 1 Fielding's Square and Sterne's Phutatorius are
not flattering portraits of the thinker. British- and especially American-
fiction has been deeply suspicious of those who bear what Andre
Malraux terms "the complex mark of the intellectual."
Of modern novelists who employ the resources of the reflexive tradi-
tion, such writers as Joyce, Durrell, Murdoch and Beckett have served
French apprenticeships. Each is of Irish background, thereby setting
these outsiders somewhat apart from the factory and cathedral concerns
'Of the English novel. Durrell's Pursewarden envisions hordes of London
publishers "tall hawk-featured men perched on balconies and high
places, scanning the city with heavy binoculars." Not especially in-
terested in the likes of Sterne or Joyce, "They are waiting for the new Trollope
to be born! " 2
Distilling the essence of a "national character" is a frustratingly
elusive task. Mirage is an optical illusion, an hallucination, and it is
appropriately also the technical term for the manner in which one
culture views another. French literature, or at least a major branch of it,
has, in the eyes of an American, been characterized "by the self-
knowledge of Montaigne and the introspection of Pascal, by the maxims
of La Rochefoucauld and the memoirs of Saint-Simon." 3 It is an
embodiment of what is, next to wine and cheese, the most versatile and
revered of French national resources, esprit. The outstanding qualities of
French prose thereby emerge as individualism and introspection, lead-
ing Harry Levin to generalize: "No land has been more self-critical or
more individualistic than France, and no literature has spoken for all of
Europe with more authority." 4 French literature has been either invigo-
rated or sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and, in a less buoyant
tone than Levin's, Victor Brombert refers to "a tradition which, from
Pascal to Sartre, is haunted by the mirror-disease of thought, the
solipsistic awareness of 'others,' the walled-in quality of experience. " 5
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION 79
In Conrad's The Secret Agent, it is the belief of Winnie Verloc, who
"wasted no portion of this life in seeking for fundamental information, " 6
that things "did not stand looking into very much." 7 This is surely an
extreme formulation, but it does express an orientation distinguishing
French from English fiction, where the virtues of esprit are less often
projected into the fictional universe itself. Certainly, Conrad wasted no
portion of his life in seeking for fundamental information; he productive-
ly devoted all of it to that recherche. But his Winnie Verloc, her flaccid
husband Adolf, and her idiot brother Stevie are a different story.
Winnie's obscurantist declaration is inconceivable coming from Marcel
or Roquentin. Unlike Philip Quarles, French reflexive novelists do not
consider it a liability to stock their domains with artists and thinkers, a
scant minority of the population at large. If, in John Cruickshank's
formulation, 8 French novelists from Sartre to Beckett have been
"philosophers," it has also been possible to conceive a ·relatively rep-
resentative study of modern French fictional characters under the title
The Intellectual Hero. Citing the striking, and now dated, statistic that "85
per cent of the protagonists in today's French novel have at least their
baccalauriat, " 9 Victor Brombert asserted: "Particularly since the thirties,
French literature has been dominated by the figure of the intellectual. " 10
By contrast, the Anglo-Saxon protagonist is more often l'homme moyen
sensuel.
Racine is the root of many French achievements of import - and
export. The tradition of the neoclassical theater, with its dedication to
economy of means and to lucidity and with its fastidious concern for
form, is perpetuated in the novel of Laclos, Constant and Flaubert and
especially in the French reflexive novel. At least such is the mirage in
terms of which the English reader, slighting Balzac and Zola, tends to
view "the French novel." A consequence of this distinction between
fiction in French and English is John Rodker's bon mot that Ford's The
Good Soldier is "the finest French novel in the English language. " 11
Lacking the same tyranny of the neoclassical and somewhat impatient
with introspectives, Britain will be less congenial soil for the self-
begetting novel.
From Flaubert to Structuralism, France has served as a grand narra-
tive laboratory. It has pioneered such vital literary movements as
Naturalism, Symbolism, Surrealism and Existentialism, and its inces-
sant manifestos and artistic coalitions cast it in the role of trial run for
technical innovation subsequently assimilated in its own way by the rest
of Europe. The term avant-garde did, after all, enter our language by
swimming the Channel. Such a pioneering role endows virtually every
French novel with the quality of roman expirimental. From the perspective
of the English-speaking world, if French literature, that breeding ground
of revolutionary forms and gestures, did not exist, it would have had to
be invented, which is precisely what is constantly recurring within its
80 THE SELF-BEGETIING NOVEL
- 0, he'll remember all this when he grows up, said Dante hotly- the language
he heard against God and religion and priests in his own home.
- Let him remember too, cried Mr Casey to her from across the table, the
language with which the priests and the priests' pawns broke Parnell's heart
and hounded him into his grave. Let him remember that too when he grows
up.12
major figures independently of each other created work which has much
in common. In an unpublished letter to The Times (London), T. S. Eliot
declared "Ulysses still seems the most considerable work of imagination
in English in our time, comparable in importance (though in little else)
with the work of Marcel Proust." 15 Proust arid Joyce do occupy ana-
logous positions of aloof dominion in their respective literatures. But
they are comparable in more than "little else." Joyce exploited many of
the same themes and techniques out of which Proust fashioned his
self-begetting novel.
Stephen Dedalus, whose "destiny was to be elusive of social or
religious orders" (A Portrait, p.162), struggles, like the Decadent des
Esseintes or the bastard Lafcadio, "To discover the mode of life or of art
whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom" (A
Portrait,"p.246). The most effective method of revolting against the claims
of father and homeland is to reconstruct himself from the beginning as if
those determinants had never existed. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man - as well as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake - is a celebration of the
miracle of self-begetting. A child is to be father of the man. Through
dedication to "silence, exile, and cunning" (A Portrait, p.247), the
self-proclaimed artist attempts to create himself.
A Portrait begins in baby prattle and concludes with the hero's
separation from his mother. Beckett noted that Mr Joyce does not take
birth for granted, and birth is indeed as central an event. in this
Geburtsroman as it is in the maternity hospital in which Mrs Purefoy
suffers her labor in Ulysses. Stephen's apprenticeship is depicted in terms
of explicit birth imagery, and when he visits his father's old anatomy
classroom, "On the desk he read the word Foetus cut several times in the
dark stained wood" (A Portrait, p.89). A foetus throughout this novel of
education, Stephen is struggling to be born.
According to Johnny Cashman "not his father's son," Stephen rejects
Simon Dedalus as father. Seeking a new begetter, it is a miglior fabbro, the
fabulous artificer Dedalus, whom he, as Icarus, invokes at the end of A
Portrait. "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead"
(p.253). In Ulysses, Stephen obviously finds a new father in Leopold
Bloom, just as Leopold regards Stephen as a means of resurrecting his
dead son Rudy. In the novel's mythological scaffolding, Telemachus
seeks his father Odysseus. And Stephen's extended discussion of Hamlet
in the National Library emphasizes the father-son relationship between
the murdered King and his son, as well as the relationship between
Shakespeare and his dead son Hamlet.
Yet Stephen's theory, which Buck Mulligan mockingly claims
"proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grand-
father and that he himself is the ghost of his own father" (Ulysses, p.18),
contends that Shakespeare projected himself as both King Hamlet and
Prince Hamlet. The willed quest for father and son reveals that both
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION 83
goals reside in the seeker. Literary creation, the pattern of such a quest, is
also the creation of a new self as both father and son.
It is significant that, walking the Dublin streets, young Paddy Dignam
is mistaken for his father who has just been buried. The patron saint of
Joyce's fictions of self-begetting is Sabellius, and it is precisely the
consubstantiality of Father and Son upon which the self-begetting novel
insists when it depicts an individual authoring himself and a work of art
serving as its own parent and offspring. The mystery of the Incarnation,
"The Father contemplating from all eternity as in a mirror His Divine
Perfections and thereby begetting eternally the Eternal Son" (A Portrait,
p.149), makes a lasting impression on the devout young Dedalus, who
eventually enters the holy calling of art rather than of religion. Rejecting
the vocation of priesthood, Stephen reenacts the sins of both Lucifer and
Sabellius in the arrogant belief that he can become a self-made man,
both father and son.
It is out of the labyrinth of words and literature that Dedalus is to be
born. Throughout his development, he is struck by such odd words as
"suck," "tundish," and his own first and last names. As with Marcel and
his "noms de pays," words function as talisman for the would-be artist.
Both a human being and a literary creation await birth, and the two are
interdependent. In his celebrated fingernail-paring simile (A Portrait,
p.214), Stephen pairs the writer with the God of the Creation, later
referring to Him in Ulysses as "The playwright who wrote the folio of this
world and wrote it badly" (p.213). "In the virgin womb of the imagina-
tion the word was made flesh" (A Portrait, p.217).
Stephen Dedalus is the artist as a young man, the definite article
serving both to undercut his grand pretensions and to emphasize the
representative nature of the novel's hero. Extending the traditions of the
Bildungsroman and Kunstlerroman, Joyce is quite explicit in his treatment of
the problem of the artist. Both A Portrait and Ulysses feature, in addition
to detailed discussions of the role of art and the artist and allusions to
Ovid, Byron, Homer, Shakespeare and many, many others, a character
who wants to dedicate himself to the kind of activity which produces a
work resembling the one in which he appears. Finnegans Wake has its
Shem the Penman.
In A Portrait, Stephen lectures the less than totally sympathetic Lynch
on his aesthetic theories. He defines the key terms truth and beauty thus:
The first step in the direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of
the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection .... The first step
in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the
imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension (p.208).
It is a defense of the reflexive novel. Truth and beauty are attained only
in a self-conscious act which incorporates an awareness of the mech-
84 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
anism for attaining truth and beauty. Such a view is a justification for
Joyce's own technique, which calls attention to itself in almost every
sentence. It is a reflexivity characteristic of the self-begetting novel,
which, through - and only through- an exploration of the possibilities of
art, succeeds in becoming art. The ostentatious verbal density present in
A Portrait, intensifying in Ulysses and reaching its limit in Finnegans Wake,
foregrounds these highly sophisticated works of art. Joyce, supreme
master of parody and pastiche, creates literature in the act of examining
it.
But Joyce deliberately establishes considerable distance between
himself and his protagonist Stephen Dedalus, who often poses more as
an aesthete than an artist. Stephen is the victim of his author's Olympian
irony, and, as critics have noted, he is "priggish, humourless" 16 and
"sometimes laughable, sometimes pathetic, and nearly always what we
should call 'difficult!"' 17 In Ulysses, Stephen's opening posturings soon
pale beside the vital presence of Leopold and Molly Bloom.
A Portrait, then, is no self-portrait. If a self is begotten, a novel does not
beget itself. William York Tindall has sharp scom for the aspiring
novelist Dedalus, believing: "whatever Stephen says, he is no Joyce.
Talking about art is no substitute for art. " 18 And Ellsworth Mason
peremptorily dismisses "a confusion of the character Stephen with the
writer Joyce (a booby trap which has led one commentator to the
astounding conclusion that Stephen goes off at the end of Ulysses to write
Ulysses). " 19 At the end of Ulysses, despite the benign influence of Bloom
and the promise of rebirth, he is still Icarus, the headstrong, unsuccessful
son. And toward the end of A Portrait, his 21 March diary entry
proclaims: "Free. Soul free and fancy free" (p.248). This conclusion on a
note of liberation is also found in the novels of Sartre, Butor and
Mauriac. Its invocation here by an isolated figure whom we never do see
succeed as artist is at least as ironic as in the French novels.
If reproduction is, as Temple reminds Stephen, the beginning of
death, the moment of procreation marks the midpoint of an organism's
parabolic career from birth to reproduction to death. But death is a
necessary condition of rebirth, and reproduction, the beginning of death,
is likewise the beginning of life. Finnegans Wake, whose subject is Fin-
negans Wake, begins in mid-sentence and stops at the start of the same
sentence, so that we are propelled back to the first page, as in A Ia
recherche. A recurrent ending, fin again, is also a beginning.
In a characteristically reflexive reference to the design of Ulysses itself,
16 June 1904, plucked from the crannied wall, Stephen declares:
Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting
robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love.
But always meeting ourselves (Ulysses, p.213).
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION 85
Joyce's work demonstrates that the creation of a self entails the creation
of much more. As the artificer steps back from his handiwork, it
continues to reverberate within itself autonomously. But the clock has
already been wound. In Tristram Shandy, this fact would have prevented
the interruption of procreation. Here it restricts the kind of textual
self-begetting present in Proust. Stephen neither creates the novel in
which he appears nor a self large enough to embody that novel.
It was not only property that was menaced, not only the material interests of a
class; it was the English tradition, it was personal initiative, it was intelli-
86 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
gence, it was all natural distinction of any kind. The Freemen were banded to
resist the dictatorship of the stupid; they were armed to protect individuality
from the mass man, the mob; they were fighting for the recognition of natural
superiority in every sphere (p.58).
There was something amoeboid about Philip Quarles's mind. It was like a sea
of spiritual protoplasm, capable of flowing in all directions, of engulfing every
object in its path, of trickling into every crevice, of filling every mould, and,
having engulfed, having filled, of flowing on toward other obstacles, other
receptacles, leaving the first empty and dry (p.l99).
However, like Edouard and unlike Marcel, Philip's amoebic self does not
absorb the entire novel. Point Counter Point, like Les Faux-Monnayeurs, is
narrated in the third person, and Philip is merely one of several
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION 87
The work of the philosophy don Iris Murdoch, bom in Dublin and an
unabashed francophile, is more plainly related to the French reflexive
tradition. Her first published book was an examination of Jean-Paul
Sartre, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) .22 As could be expected, it
devotes a chapter to that French author's self-begetting novel, La Nausee.
Iris Murdoch's own first novel, Under the Net, was published in the
following year. Dedicated to the contemporary French novelist
Raymond Queneau, the text of Under the Net sparkles with an abundance
of italicized French expressions- par exemple, melie, frisson, tour de force,
tete atete, bien renseigne, dereglement de tous lessens, je m 'en fichais and au fond.
Some important scenes in the novel are set in Paris, and its narrator and
central protagonist, Jake Donaghue, is English translator of the fictive
French novelist Jean Pierre Breteuil. A discussion of Marcel Proust with
Hugo Belfounder has significant consequences for Jake, 23 while Jake's
description of "a suburb of sou them London where contingency reaches
the point of nausea" (p.150) recalls Sartre's distinctive terminology. On
88 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
the very first page of Murdoch's very first novel, published soon after her
study of Sartre, the narrator presents himself as, perhaps like his creator,
arriving in England "with the smell of France still fresh in my nostrils"
(p.3). His suitcases are heavy with French books.
Jake Donaghue never relinquishes the center of attention in this
narrative, which is consistently related to us from his first-person
perspective. Although he admits "I can't bear being alone for long"
(p.19) and "I hate solitude" (p.30), Jake is in effect "a connoisseur of
solitude" (p.204), as the moving scene of him alone in Paris during the
mass celebration of Bastille Day indicates. A taciturn Irishman named
Finn is Jake's constant companion, even valet, but Jake treats Finn more
as a mirror for himself than as an independent human being. Finn's
otherness, demonstrated by his removal to Dublin, eventually strikes
Jake with the force of profound revelation. Meanwhile, though, Jake
declares: "The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself
and to tum it into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction"
(p.30). However, his introspective narrative will prove to be self-creative
precisely through its recognition of the dense contingency of the external
world.
Just the right age for a self-begetting hero, Jake introduces himself as
"something over thirty, and talented, but lazy" (p.19). Jake is scarcely
one of Sartre's bourgeois salauds. A confirmed bachelor ("It is not my
nature to make myself responsible for other people" (p.9) ), Jake is
perpetually homeless and on the move. A recurrent element in the novel
is his quest for a place to spend the night.
And Jake is as rootless in his thinking as he is in his housing. A
Cartesian of sorts whose first reaction to any situation is: "That would
need some thinking out" (p.6), Jake delights in "the sort of dreamy
unlucrative reflection which is what I enjoy more than anything in the
world" (6.6). His tendency to examine the self, the world, fiction, and the
relationships among the three is one of the marks of the self-begetting
novel.
Jake gets a job as an orderly in a hospital but remains an outsider in
that rigid society. "I exuded an aroma which, although we got on so
splendidly, in some way kept them off; perhaps some obscure instinct
warned them that I was an intellectual" (p.223). Although he is a reader
of James and Conrad (p.27), Jake most resembles Amis's Jim Dixon
brand of roguish intellectualism. If he is a peripatetic philosopher, Jake
is also a picaro. Throughout the novel, he demonstrates uncommon
mastery of the art of picking locks, cracking safes, and pilfering money
and property.
Like any self-respecting self-begetting novel, Under the Net has its own
cast of artist figures. Anne Quentin is a singer, and her sister Sadie is an
actress. Hugo Belfounder begins as the inventor of elaborate fireworks
and later becomes a film producer; the scene at the Bounty Belfounder
studio in which the cardboard movie set of ancient Rome collapses
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION 89
The business of my life lay elsewhere. There was a path which awaited me and
which, if I failed to take it, would lie untrodden forever. How much longer
would I delay? (p.l99).
90 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
Jean Pierre had no right to turn himself surreptitiously into a good writer. I
felt that I had been the victim of an imposture, a swindle. For years I had
worked for this man, using my knowledge and sensibility to turn his junk into
the sweet English tongue; and now, without warning me, he sets up shop as a
good writer. I pictured Jean Pierre, with his plump hands and his short grey
hair. How could I introduce into this picture, which I had known so well for so
long, the notion of a good novelist? It wrenched me, like the changing of a
fundamental category. A man whom I had taken on as a business partner had
turned out to be a rival in love (pp.185-6).
Breteuil's artistic birth forces Jake to question his own neatly formu-
lated conceptions of reality. In the process, it inspires him to attempt to
rival the Frenchman by producing his own novel. He resolves that he will
never waste his time translating Nous les vainqueurs when he could be
creating his own original work of art. Ironically, as long as Breteuil
turned out worthless books, Jake was content to translate them and
thereby commit himself to imitation of trash. However, as soon as
Breteuil challenges Jake's notion of "a bad novelist" and actually writes
something of value, the newly enlightened Jake can no longer settle for
the role of mere translator.
Eventually, Jake also arrives at some understanding of the romantic
rectangle- Hugo tells him: "I love Sadie, who's keen on you, and you
love Anna, who's keen on me" (p.249) -involving himself, Anna, Hugo,
and Sadie. But, with his novel awaiting birth, he is now a new man.
It was the first day of the world. I was full of that strength which is better than
happiness, better than the weak wish for happiness which women can awaken
in a man to rot his fibres. It was the morning of the first day (p.276).
... the movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards
truth. All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself, and this
is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get
close enough, however hard we may try, as it were, to crawl under the net
(p.87).
Sartre has an impatience, which is fatal to a novelist proper, with the stuff of
human life. He has, on the one hand, a lively interest, often slightly morbid, in
the details of contemporary living, and on the other a passionate desire to
analyse, to build intellectually pleasing schemes and patterns. But the feature
which might enable these two talents to fuse into the work of a great novelist is
absent, namely an apprehension of the absurd irreducible uniqueness of
people and their relations with each other. 24
92 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold
it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try
to fly by those nets (p.203).
... benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and
overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. Our current picture of free-
dom encourages a dream-like facility; whereas what we require is a renewed
sense of the difficulty and the complexity of the moral life and the opacity of
persons. 26
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION 93
Literature, as evident in the example of Jake Donaghue, can be an
effective means of accommodating the contingent world. Murdoch
promises: "Through literature we can re-discover a sense of the density
of our lives. Literature can arm us against consolation and fantasy and
can help us to recover from the ailments of Romanticism." 27 And Under
the Net is a striking portrait of its central protagonist's moral progress.
Although its narrator confesses, "I'm not telling you the story of my
life" (p.19), Under the Net creates the illusion of an extended Bildungsro-
man. The narrative is defined by two visits to Mrs Tinckham's. When he
returns to her shop at the end, Jake receives the following greeting:
"'Hello, dearie,' said Mrs. Tinck. 'You've been a longtime'" (p.269). In
terms of clock-time, it has not been especially long - a matter of days
rather than the years usually encompassed by novels about the making
of a novelist. However, much has happened. Jake's life has undergone a
transformation, one that, presented in a novel, is made possible by his
commitment to the complexities of novel-writing. Begetting itself and a
new self for Jake, Under the Net avoids flight. It returns for a candid
assessment of itself and the world in which it is enmeshed.
Among more recent fiction, The Alexandria Quartet ( 1961 ) and The Golden
Notebook (1 %2) are further British variations on the self-begetting
theme. Lawrence Durrell, an Irishman born in India, claims to feel at
home in France. A constant traveler to Greece, Durrell impresses one
Frenchman as "that unique phenomenon, a naturally Mediterranean
Englishman." 28 If he is a Briton at all, Durrell, according to Gerald
Sykes, "belongs to the great British tradition of imaginative travelers
who realized their best talents by getting as far from Britain as they
could." 29
Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet is both Bildungsroman and Kiinstlerro-
man: "the whole business of the four books, apart from other things,
shows the way an artist grows up. " 30 As the musical term "quartet," like
Huxley's "counterpoint," immediately warns us, we once again have to
do with a highly self-conscious treatment of the relationship between art
and life. Durrell's fictional tetralogy features no less than three novelists
within the novel: Darley, narrator of three of the four volumes, Justine,
Balthazar and Clea; Arnauti, Justine's first husband and the author of
Moeurs, which contains valuable information about their marriage; and
Pursewarden, eminent but eccentric English author whose works in-
clude God Is a Humorist. Another potential novelist is the hack journalist
whimsically named John Keats, who is shown undergoing a conversion
to art and discovering in the final volume: "I've become a writer at last!"
94 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
( Clea, p.172). And Clea is a painter. Her spiritual and aesthetic pilgrim's
progress parallels that of the writer Darley. Looking forward to reunion
with him, her concluding, triumphant words are: "I wait, quite serene
and happy, a real human being, an artist at last" (Clea, p.275).
The novel's curious band of angels is quite well-read, among each
other's manuscripts and in Literature in general, and they delight in the
opportunity to parade their literary views. Even on a rugged expedition
into the desert, Keats is as concerned about the copy of The Pickwick
Papers he brings along, "a sodden, dog-eared little book with a bullet hole
in the cover, smeared with oil" (Clea, p.171), as about anything else.
When, after alluding to Petronius, the physician Balthazar exclaims:
"The part that literature plays in our lives!" (Clea, p.61), it is an
understatement.
The Alexandria Quartet is constructed in terms of the elaborate machin-
ery of diaries, notebooks, epigraphs from the Marquis de Sade, prefaces,
"Consequential Data," and "Workpoints." After Darley narrates his
version of events in Justine, Balthazar, dissatisfied with the account, even
furnishes his own critical commentary, referred to as the "Interlinear."
All of these exposed structures, as well as the multiple presentations of
the same incident in the manner of The Ring and the Book or Rashomon,
serve to remind us that we are once again in the laboratory of the novel.
Not exactly a finished product, Durrell's fiction gives at least one French
critic "the i&npression of a novel not completely finished, but being
made." 31
The novel's characters are perpetually analyzing themselves and each
other, and the work itself is certainly as thoroughly reflexive as any
self-begetting novel. The style of The Alexandria Quartet, a consequence of
employing self-conscious novelists to create its points of view, is man-
nered and ornate, what Pursewarden terms "touched with plum pud-
ding" (Balthazar, p.241). It is difficult to forget that words are being
massively deployed to create a baroque fiction about fiction.
Mirrors are prominent throughout this introspective quartet, and,
while gazing at herself in her dressmaker's mirrors, Justine declares:
Look! five different pictures of the same subject. Now if I wrote I would try for
a multi-dimensional effect in character, a sort of prism-sightedness. Why
should not people show more than one profile at a time? Uustine, p.18).
... if you wished somehow to incorporate all I am telling you into your own
Justine manuscript now, you would find yourself with a curious sort of book-
the story would be told, so to speak, in layers. Unwittingly I may have
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION 95
supplied you with a form, something out of the way! Not unlike Pursewarden's
idea of a series of novels with "sliding panels" as he called them. Or else,
perhaps, like some medieval palimpsest where different sorts of truth are
thrown down one upon the other, the one obliterating or perhaps supplement-
ing another (Balthazar, p.177).
... you might try a four-card trick in the form of a novel; passing a common
axis through four stories, say, and dedicating each to one of t4e four winds of
heaven. A continuum, forsooth, embodying not a temps retrouvi but a temps
detivre. The curvature of space itself would give you stereoscopic narrative,
while human personality seen across a continuum would perhaps become
prismatic? (Clea, p.126).
announces that he has finally found himself and his calling. He has
begun to write something that will succeed in capturing the inner reality
of the self. And, once again, the metaphor of gestation is employed to
depict the work of art toward whose conception the conclusion of The
Alexandria Quartet points. According to Darley:
It has been so long in forming inside me, this precious image, that I too was as
unprepared as she had been. It came on a blue day, quite unpremeditated,
quite unannounced, and with such ease I would not have believed it. I had
been until then like some timid girl, scared of the birth of her first child ( Clea,
p.275).
Darley's projected novel will begin with the portentous words "Once
upon a time ... " ( Clea, p.275). Such an opening sentence ensures that it
will differ from The Alexandria Quartet, at the same time as it perpetuates
this novel's concern with time. Durrell's fiction thereby does not circle
back into itself. At the end of the volumes Balthazar and Clea, Durrell
appends what he terms "Workpoints." These constitute suggestions for
further developments in the plot, "a number of possible ways of continu-
ing to deploy these characters and situations in further instalments"
(Clea, "Author's Note"). The extrapolations of "Workpoints" and
Darley's new novel suggest a movement outward, a transcendence of the
given work of art, a shedding of the snakeskin.
Although he narrates three-quarters of it, The Alexandria Quartet is not
Darley's novel. It is not an expression of the self in the same way A la
recherche is of Marcel's. Darley is only one of several creative figures and,
although he attempts to translate Alexandria into literature, his efforts
are assisted and supplemented by others, so that The Alexandria Quartet
we witness being born is something of a communal achievement. In the
third volume, Mountolive, which is cast entirety in an objective, third-
person form, Darley is, in fact, merely a peripheral figure. Durrell
attempts "to turn the novel through both subjective and objective
modes" (Balthazar, "Note"), but the final effect can only be to subsume
the subjective beneath the objective. Joyce, as usual, anticipates some-
thing similar when he has Stephen discuss the evolution from lyric to
dramatic modes, likening it to the pattern in Turpin Hero. "This progress
you will see easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero which begins in
the first person and ends in the third person" (A Portrait. p.214). This is
the reverse of what occurs in Camus's La Peste, where we belatedly
discover that the entire account is the individual expression of Dr Rieux.
Despite Durrell's elaborate explanations of his Einsteinian rather
than Bergsonian system, so that "This is not Proustian or Joycean
method" (Balthazar, "Note"), The Alexandria Quartet is self-consciously a
product of a self-conscious tradition. The tetralogy is a neo-Proustian
demonstration of the proposition "life is really an artistic problem, all
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION 97
men being sleeping artists.'' 32 The Alexandria Quartet does not beget itself
in the manner of A la recherche, but it does not assent to its characters or
readers nodding.
Lessing's The Golden Notebook is yet another work whose major charac-
ters are artists who do not hesitate to discuss their craft and, in the
process, the novel in which they appear. It is primarily the story of Anna
Wulf's attempts to overcome a writer's block, to give birth to the novel
which will endow her fragmented life with some degree of unity. She is a
successful first novelist and, apart from much else, we are provided an
account of the genesis of and reactions to her earlier creation, Frontiers of
War. In one of her notebooks, Anna, despairing over both The Golden
Notebook and the entire reflexive tradition of which it is a part, notes that
the fictional theme of art and the artist, "the subject matter of art for this
century, when it has become such a monster of a cliche," "has become so
debased, the property of every sloppy-minded amateur. " 33 The Golden
Notebook will be a professional job.
Although she is able to live off the income from Frontiers of War, Anna
goes to work reading manuscripts for the Communist Party, thereby
adding to the stock of novelists within this novel. "I have not yet met one
Party member, anywhere, who has not written, half-written, or is
planning to write a novel, short stories, or a play" (p.168), the author
Anna remarks. And she herself offers what appears to be a pastiche of the
Henry Miller school of writing, in which a group of males is portrayed
cultivating experiences so that one of their number will be able to
transform them into literature:
Dave scratched his crotch, slow, owl-scratching pure Dave. "Jeez, Mike," he
said, "you'll write it someday, for us all." He stammered, inarticulate,
not-winged-with words, "You'll write it, hey feller? And how our souls were
ruined here on the snow-white Manhattan pavement, the capitalist-money-
mammon hound-of-hell hot on our heels?" (p.541).
I see Ella, walking slowly about a big empty room, thinking, waiting. I, Anna,
see Ella. Who is of course Anna. But that is the point, for she is not. The
moment I, Anna, write: Ella rings up Julia to announce, etc., then Ella floats
away from me and becomes someone else. I don't understand what happens at
the moment Ella separates herself from me and becomes Ella (p.393).
Ego cogitans remains aloof from its own grasp, despite the subtle nets of
fiction, which ironically succeed in conveying a portrait of this failure.
Anna's progress toward artistic expression and self-mastery is punc-
tuated with all of the usual misgivings and feelings of unworthiness. The
author of a well-received first novel, Anna imagines herself reviewing
Frontiers of War as "A first novel which shows a genuine minor talent"
(p.59). She is nevertheless dissatisfied with herself.
Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book
powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order,
to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have
decided never to write another novel (p.61).'
First I created the room I sat in, object by object, "naming" everything, bed,
chair, curtains, till it was whole in my mind, then move out of the room,
creating the street, then rise into the air, looking down on London, at the
enormous sprawling wastes of London, but holding at the same time the room
and the house and the street in my mind, and then England, the shape of
England in Britain, then the little group of islands lying against the continent,
then slowly, slowly, I would create the world, continent by continent, ocean
by ocean (but the point of "the game" was to create this vastness while
holding the bedroom, the house, the street in their littleness in my mind at the
same time) until the point was reached where I moved out into space, and
watched the world, a sunlit ball in the sky, turning and rolling beneath me
(p.548).
The literary artist is a creator, and Anna will beget both herself and the
rest of the universe through The Golden Notebook.
Excerpts from Anna's notebooks alternate with five objectively nar-
rated sections entitled "Free Women." In addition to the theme of
liberation through narration present in the tradition from Proust to
Beckett, Lessing's novel is directly concerned with portraying women
who challenge the roles society imposes on them. Hovering over the
same incident from different perspectives, The Golden Notebook features
an elaborate counterpoint of first and third-person presentations in an
effort to examine contemporary feminist themes from every conceivable
angle. At times the novel resembles a kind of Congressional Record, as
newspaper reports of the fifties are inserted without commentary into the
blue notebook. At other times, the novel is dominated by the bizarre
fantasies of Anna Wulf, significantly nee Freeman.
The Golden Notebook artfully alternates between subjective and objec-
tive approaches in a compound of strict diary reportage, stream of
consciousness, deliberate fictionalization, and theoretical discourse. Yet
Lessing's allegiance is not entirely to the French reflexive tradition,
certainly not to its later ironic developments. She appears to share
Murdoch's implicit assessment of the modern French novel as overly
formalistic, lacking in the rich "human" concerns to which she attempts
100 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
to adapt its devices. "If writers like Camus, Sartre, Genet, Beckett feel
anything but a tired pity for human beings, then it is not evident from
their work." 34 Refusing to accept the paradigm of the novelist as
laboratory technician, Lessing exploits the resources of the self-begetting
novel in order to be able to explore the problems of a "free" woman in a
thorough manner worthy of the nineteenth-century realistic novel. "For
me the highest point of literature was the novel of the nineteenth century,
the work of Tolstoy, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Turgenev, Chekhov,
the work of the great realists." 35
Toward the conclusion of The Golden Notebook and of an intense,
consuming relationship with the American Saul Green, Anna provides
him with the first sentence of a novel - "On a dry hillside in Algeria, a
soldier watched the moonlight glinting on his rifle" (p.642). We are told
that he completed the novel, that it was published, and that it "did
rather well" (p.643). At the same time, Saul devises a sentence to serve
as the beginning for the novel Anna has had such difficulty writing-
"The two women were alone in the London flat" (p.639). Returning to
the first page of The Golden Notebook, we discover that this is precisely the
same sentence which begins the book in which Anna herself, one of the
two women in the London flat, appears. This account of Anna's frag-
mented personality is thus apparently also objective testimony to the fact
that she has succeeded in reintegrating herself. Alchemy has been
performed, and the leaden, discordant elements of a character's life are
transmuted into The Golden Notebook.
6 The Self-Begetting Novel
and American Literature
If the reflexive tradition is less than central to the British novel, it might
seem irrelevant to American fiction. After the writers, aesthetes and
intellectuals who people French literature, the American novel appears
as peculiarly the preserve of idiots, children, savages, miscreants, and
other miscellaneous naifs. Characters like Natty Bumppo, Huckleberry
Finn, Henry Fleming, Clyde Griffiths, Frederic Henry and Lena Grove
are a vast ocean apart from the jaded, introverted likes of des Esseintes,
Marcel, Edouard and Roquentin. More often a dramatization of uncon-
sciousness, American literature has been almost synonymous with "the
novel of violence" among Europeans. Whether in the manner of the
pragmatist Hank Morgan challenging the fossilized conventions of the
Arthurian court or of Lambert Strether bravely confronting Parisian
worldliness, American literature is the drama of innocents abroad, the
New World encountering the complexities of history. It is the story
re-enacted, in varying forms, in the abandonment of America by Henry
James, T. S. Eliot and the post-War "lost generation."
Richard Hofstadter cites an 1899letter of William James as the first
occurrence of the term intellectual in the United States. 2 Appropriately
102 THE SELF-BEGETIING NOVEL
James's critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his
baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the
last test of a superior intelligence .... James in his novels is like the best
French critics in maintaining a point of view, a viewpoint untouched by the
parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation. 5 ·
Both James and Eliot exchanged America for England. But their
shared disdain for the crudity of English literature on both sides of the
Atlantic suggests England as their Mount Nebo overlooking Calais.
Eliot was a close student of French Symbolist poetry, and like Pound's
Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, James's "true Penelope was Flaubert." If, like
Mauberly and Pound, they regarded themselves as "born/ In a half
savage country, out of date," France, where the nuances of form were
taken seriously, was their true Ithaca.
More recently, Philip Rahv attempted to account for what he consi-
dered "the peculiar shallowness of a good deal of American literary
expression. " 6 Although he divides American literature into the opposing
camps of "Paleface" and "Redskin," Rahv regards their respective
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND AMERICAN LITERATURE 103
standard bearers, James and Whitman, as both dedicated to what he
terms "the cult of experience," the immersion into unfiltered life. As a
result, he contends: "The intellectual is the only character missing in the
American novel. . . . Everything is contained in the American novel
except ideas." 7 Instead of Marcel's enlightened discourses on painting,
music and literature, and his attention to nuances of form, American
literature settles for Billy Budd's cherubic smile and Benjy Compson's
pathetic brayings.
Such a context would appear uniquely forbidding to the self-begetting
novel and its reflexive tradition so elaborately developed in France.
American mistrust of the autonomy of art and the intellect would seem to
offer stiff resistance to a novel whose central protagonist is himself a
highly self-conscious novelist and who ultimately constructs the work in
which he appears. Henry Adams, intensely aware of the victory of
vibrant Philistines in the America of the Dynamo, admits: "He knew no
tragedy so heartrending as introspection. " 8
Tragedy and introspection are certainly recurrent elements in French
literature. Yet the symbiosis of the two does not seem nearly so inevitable
as in American fiction - and life. The United States obviously has not
lacked introspectives, notably a sequence of Henrys-Adams, Thoreau,
James and Miller. 9 But if introspection has been the French national
pastime, it has been an American mania. French thinkers, even in
extremis, have been able to fish in the mainstream of society. Even when
breaking with their culture, they have still managed, with the charac-
teristic French talent for liaison, to group themselves into opposition
parties.
In contrast, the energies of the New World were directed exclusively
toward taming and settling a rugged continent. Under such circum-
stances, intellectual activity became at best an idle luxury. At worst, it
was subversive of national priorities and conducive to the kind of
self-doubt evident in the biographies of literary figures like Melville and
Twain. When the clerisy itself was indoctrinated with a mistrust of its
own role, it did not encourage the kind of unified affirmation of dissent
found in the land of Voltaire and Zola. Emily Dickinson is almost a
caricature of introspection forcing itself to skulk in attic corners. She
sardonically envisions the consequences of defying consensus in the new
positivistic democracy.
'Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,- you're straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain. 10
Trial, Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace, American fiction has had
to await the likes of Moses Herzog for a successful portrait of a European
sort of intellectual. But it has not been totally devoid of the kind of
reflexiveness conveyed through the figure of an intellectual in other
literatures. In fact, defensiveness about the frivolousness of art and
attention to formal subtleties has served to create rich tensions in
American works. The result has often been a compelling awareness of
the limitations, and possibilities, of literature incorporated into litera-
ture itself.
Henry Adams's thoughtful portrait of the thinker superannuated and
aware of it endures. And Henry James, so critical of Anglo-Saxon
doltishness, is almost himself sufficient refutation of the charge.
Dramatizing the encounter of innocent Milly Theale or Maggie Verver
with the complexities of Europe, James displays his own highly refined
intelligence. Positioned strategically as "posts of consciousness," even
his noble savages demonstrate dizzying powers of analysis. And James's
own critical prefaces, written for the definitive New York edition of his
works, function as stories-of-stories while exhibiting a sensitivity to the
nuances of his art.
American literature, if not American society, has not been overpopu-
lated by the figure of the intellectual, the character who considers himself
heir to the wisdom of the ages. According to the formula of R. W. B.
Lewis, much more representative has been the hero free of both history
and the pale cast of thought, the "American Adam." 11 However, fre-
quent appearance of the artist, if not the intellectual, has introduced an
element of self-consciousness also found in French and British fiction.
Henry James again, for example, composed a number of stories, notably
"The Lesson of the Master," "The Real Thing," "The Death of the
Lion," and "The Figure in the Carpet," in which the principal charac-
ters are novelists, painters, and critics. As in his prefaces, their actions
and theoretical discussions enable James to examine the nature of his
own art.
James's American master, Nathaniel Hawthorne, set the artists
Miriam, Kenyon and Hilda against the background of Rome in The
Marble Faun. In addition, Hawthorne's scientists and physicians, like
Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter, Aylmer in "The Birthmark," and
Rappaccini in "Rappaccini's Daughter," are artists of sorts, obsessed
with imposing their designs on the temporal human realm. Art thereby
becomes cognizant of itself.
However, even more reflexive are the prefatory paragraphs of "Rap-
paccini's Daughter." The story that is to follow is there attributed to a
foreign author, aM. de l'Aubepine. Auhipine is, of course, the French
world for hawthorne. Aubepine's fictive editor mentions the title of some of
his other works, among them Contes deux jois raconties and Le Voyage Celeste
a Chemin de Fer. Hawthorne exploits this droll mask to summarize his
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND AMERICAN LITERATURE 105
own career and clarify the themes and techniques of his own work. In the
process, Hawthorne is also able to acknowledge personal weaknesses
and the reasons for limited popular success.
His writings, to do them justice, are not altogether destitute of fancy and
originality; they might have won him greater reputation but for an inveterate
love of allegory, which is apt to invest his plots and characters with the aspect
of scenery and people in the clouds and to steal away the human warmth out of
his conceptions .... In any case, he generally contents himself with a very
slight embroidery of outward manners, - the faintest possible counterfeit of
real life,- and endeavors to create an interest by some less obvious peculiarity
of the subject .... We will only add to this very cursory notice that M. de
l'Aubepine's productions, if the reader chance to take them in precisely the
proper point of view, may amuse a leisure hour as well as those of a brighter
man; if otherwise, they can hardly fail to look excessively like nonsense. 12
3. Have you understood, in reading to this point, that Paul is the prince-
figure? Yes ( )No ( )
4. That Jane is the wicked stepmother-figure? Yes ( ) No ( )
5. In the further development of the story, would you like more emotion (
orless emotion ( )?
6. Is there too much hlaguein the narration? ( ) Not enough hlague? ( )
7. Do you feel that the creation of new modes of hysteria is a valid undertak-
ing for the artist of today? Yes ( ) No ( )
8. Wouldyoulikeawar?Yes( )No( )
9. Has the work, for you, a metaphysical dimension? Yes ( ) No ( ) 16
a self where nothing had existed before. Such an orientation has much in
common with the self-begetting novel's attempt to beget a novel self
where a dying one had existed before.
The word individualism is yet another import from France. However, in
this case, significantly, it was coined by a Frenchman, Alexis de Toc-
queville, in an attempt to interpret, in his book De La dimocratie en
Amerique, what he observed in the youthful United States of the 1830s. It
seemed a spirited, enterprising world of private initiative dedicated to
constructing new institutions and new lives. Frederick Jackson Turner's
influential 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American
History" likewise stresses the individual as central to the national
mystique. Turner regards the pioneer mentality as a major force in
American history and culture. Like Huck Finn, the folk myth posits the
existence of a "territory ahead" free of the hierarchies and conventions of
Aunt Sally's civilization. There individual worth and effort determine
success. The frontier psychology implies a radical egalitarianism in
which the individual, building his own life, constructs the community,
and not vice versa.
Related to this is the popular, and populist, notion of "the self-made
man." George Herman Ruth shared its qualities with Benjamin Frank-
lin and Abraham Lincoln. Born again as "Babe," he batted himself out
of an orphan home into a new stadium still known as "The House That
Ruth Built." The rapid ascent from humble origins to captainship of
industry and/or government reenacts the" American dream," the patent
delusion that any child can grow up to be President of the United States.
The resourceful narrator of Ralph Waldo Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) is
an acid caricature of this myth of the self-made man. An outcast even
among blacks, he is forced to depend on his own wits for mere survival.
Yet that does not prevent him from declaring: "Though invisible, I am in
the great American tradition of thinkers. That makes me kin to Ford,
Edison, and Franklin. '' 23 Valid or not, though, the American dream, like
the self-begetting novel, insists on the self as sovereign and creator.
The product of a society which extols the values of individualism,
American literature is often a portrait of solitude. The protagonist in
American fiction- Natty Bumppo, Ishmael, Huck Finn, Jake Barnes, or
the Invisible Man- is characteristically a lone wanderer, celibate and
aloof from the web of society. He is thus, like des Esseintes, Roquentin or
Jake Donaghue, responsible for himself only to himself. This emphasis
on the individual outside of a social context is what leads Richard Chase
to claim that the tradition of the American novel is in truth that of the
romance rather than the novel; 24 and in his Preface to The House of the
Seven Gables, Hawthorne, more concerned with the distinction between
imagination and the community, proudly agrees that he writes ro-
mances. According to Lionel Trilling's criterion of "manners," "a
culture's hum and buzz of implication," 25 American fiction, examining
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND AMERICAN LITERATURE 109
the enterprising individual, is generally not novelistic. Leslie Fiedler's
clinical analysis of the psychopathology of American culture and litera-
ture proceeds from a similar starting point. 26 American literature be-
comes a dramatization of the fantasies of an adolescent not yet integrated
into the community.
The theme of initiation is certainly widespread, found in such works as
The Deerslayer, Huckleberry Finn, In Our Time, The Bear, The Catcher In The
Rye and The Adventures of Augie March, However, the individual is
generally more often confirmed in his autonomy than assimilated into a
larger structure. A sequence including The Declaration of Independence, the
Hartford Convention and the Doctrine of Nullification could be inter-
preted to demonstrate "the proposition, implicit in much American
writing from Poe and Cooper to Anderson and Hemingway, that the
valid rite of initiation for the individual in the new world is not an
initiation into society, but, given the character of society, an initiation
away from it. " 27 The dense complexities of civilization east of the Atlantic
or the Alleghenies are rejected in favor of a sovereign self emancipated
from the burden of history.
An Easterner, Henry David Thoreau, is nevertheless a striking exam-
ple of this kind of self. Walden (1854) is the account of its narrator's
solitary self-sustaining life in the woods: "When I wrote the following
pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from
any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of
Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the
labor of my hands only." 28 By retiring from society, Thoreau is able to
reconstruct himself entirely on his own. Like Descartes, he recognizes
the necessity of simplifying, of wilfully paring away everything for which
he is not responsible, and "Economy" is appropriately the first chapter
of his record. There is to be nothing accidental about his existence, and,
fully conscious of his intentions, he declares as his program "to live deep
and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as
to put to rout all that was not life" (p.62).
To impress us with his mastery over his own renovated existence,
Thoreau constructs a persona who is clearly but "a sojourner in civilized
life" (p.1) and who is distinct from the portrait of Thoreau available in
contemporary documents. He insists on the need to be extra vagant,
dividing the word thus to stress its Latin etymology in "wandering
beyond." Marching to the beat of a different drummer, the narrator of
Walden is a magnificent eccentric. Distancing himself from us through
shocking opinions and outrageous puns, the cantankerous speaker is an
original and proud of it.
A study of the extensive textual revisions in Walden reveals that not
only did the historical Thoreau become a sovereign self but the literary
representation of that identity is a conscious contrivance. 29 For the
purposes of the narrative, the entire experience of more than two years is
110 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
very neatly shaped into one year. We follow the course of the seasons
and, at the conclusion of the work, we hear the pond ice cracking and
look forward to the rebirth of spring and the self. Horatio Alger never
succeeded so well.
Similarly, Nick Carraway, narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great
Gatsby (1925), is quite American in his reverence for individual au-
tonomy: "Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a
stunned tribute from me. " 30 Nick's West Egg neighbor, who inhabits an
enormous mansion all by himself, has managed to succeed entirely on his
own, becoming in the process something of an outlaw. Reminiscent of
the self-begetting novel's autogenous heroes, Jay Gatsby is a self-made
pioneer. He debuted obscurely as James Gatz of North Dakota but was
able to transform himself brilliantly. An awesome example of auto-
creation, this great Gatsby incarnates the frontier spirit. Reluctant to
concentrate on the past {it is difficult for the narrator to piece together
details of Gatsby's personal history), he directs his individual efforts
toward realities yet to be constructed. "Gatsby believed in the green
light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. " 31 Coming
as the naive extension into the twentieth-century of a long American
tradition, his belief proves tragic.
Gats by's self-propelled transformation from James Gatz to Jay Gats-
by is somewhat similar to the onymity Marcel, Leon Delmont and
Darley attain through their narratives. And James Fenimore Cooper's
leather-stockinged stalker of the wilderness goes beyond the Ap-
palachian region and its decreasing elbow room, in the process outgrow-
ing such appellations as Natty Bumppo, Deerslayer and Hawkeye. The
Deerslayer (1841) is an account of the young frontiersman's initiation in
battle, and in solo combat he earns the right to be called Hawkeye rather
than Deerslayer. Each avatar demands a fresh christening. A recogni-
tion of this fact impelled the earliest European settlers, preparing to
commence their lives, to labor at devising names for landmarks within
their New England, their New Amsterdam, or their New Spain. The
"New Deal," "New Frontier," and "New American Revolution" were
fashioned later.
It is appropriate that a number of American authors in the nineteenth-
century began to adopt pseudonyms. The decision to concoct another
name for themselves in truth announces an attempt to create another
self. "Mark Twain" was Samuel Langhorne Clemens's most formidable
invention. Van Wyck Brooks, in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920),
contends that Twain, beset by the crass Gilded Age culture represented
by Olivia Clemens and Elmira, New York, was only partially successful
in remaking himself; and Justin Kaplan's Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain
(1966) traces the struggle between Samuel Clemens and his personally
fashioned proxy, Mark Twain, for control of his identity.
As Roger Asselineau demonstrates, 32 when the young Walter Whit-
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND AMERICAN LITERATURE 111
man began to project himself as "Walt Whitman," he was creating a
persona in his own life as much as "Song of Myself" does in his poetry.
Whitman's eccentric dress and behavior suggest as self-willed a manner
as that of a Parisian dandy. Facing the title page of the first edition of
Leaves of Grass- its author's name, incidentally, appeared only within the
text of "Song of Myself"- Whitman insisted on placing an engraving of
his inimitable hirsute self, hat on and collar open. In A Vision, William
Butler Yeats suitably selects Whitman as an example of what he labels
"artificial individuality. " 33
Asselineau divides his study into two major sections: "The Creation of
Personality" and "The Creation of a Work." When Whitman transfig-
ured himself into "Walt," he was simultaneously constructing an ego
and an opus. Furthermore, the two activities were closely complemen-
tary; through his writing, the Whitman of 1850-55 was able to assume
the identity of poet at the same time as his poetry concemed itself with
the theme of self-begetting.
Let us simply say that Whitman decided to create a book and in the same
stroke he created himself. His entire life was thereby changed. Nature has
imitated art, thus verifying Oscar Wilde's paradox. He was tormented,
unstable, frustrated, and his work permitted him to recover his equilibrium
and attain serenity. Poetry saved him. Thanks to it he could emerge from the
dark and tempestuous chaos in which he was struggling and gain access to an
orderly, peaceful universe where light triumphs over shadows. 34
In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be, -
free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, "without any hindrance
that does not arise out of his own constitution." Brave; forfearis a thing which
112 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from
ignorance. 35
... the new importance given to the single person. Every thing that tends to
insulate the individual, -to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so
that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a
sovereign state with a sovereign state, - tends to true union as well as
greatness. 36
I look in vain for the poet whom I describe .... We have yet had no genius in
America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable
materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another
carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in
the Middle Age; then in Calvinism. 39
I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet
contributed .... I give you joy of your free and brave thought .... I'greet you
at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground
somewhere, for such a start. 41
This characterization is, at least in part, a fiction, but, like the rest of the
poem, it represents an effort to construct a self, an activity inseparable
from the construction of the poem. The personality of the poem, "a
kosmos," emerges as the sum total of all the disparate experience evoked.
As in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," distance and time avail not, and the
114 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
speaker's vignettes present him walking the hills of Judea with Jesus
(sect. 33), defending the Alamo (sect.34), and sailing beside John Paul
Jones (sect.35). Whitman's poet thrives through absorption. Like his
child who went forth every day, everything he looks upon he becomes.
And his vision comprehends a huge range of reality- president, trapper,
fugitive slave, prostitute. Walt's interminable lists define himself. If his
incorporation of old and young, rich and poor, North and South, life and
death, city and wilderness seems contradictory, the speaker serenely
accepts this.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes) (sect.51)
Both Walt and his poem contain multitudes which, paradoxically, are
simply extensions of the self. "One's-self I sing, a simple separate
person,/Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse." 45 Whit-
man's protagonist is an individual whose distinct identity, like Blake's
grain of sand, entails everything. The "I" is inescapable in almost every
line of Whitman's poetry. But he is also directly addressing a "you"
whom he persistently attempts to embrace in a fusion of the subjective
and the objective. Once that is achieved and we are able to catch up with
him, the self, as in A la recherche, becomes the world, and both are
comprised in a work of literature.
Walt also resembles his "noiseless, patient spider" who builds the
surrounding universe by launching forth filaments out of himself. The
spider image portrays the individual as engendering the world. And
Walt explicitly projects himself as a poet creating the work we are
reading. At the conclusion of one of his extensive catalogues of motley
occupations, this "poet of the woman the same as the man" (sect.21)
self-consciously proclaims: ''And of these one and all I weave the song of
myself" (sect.15) .
But as author of "Song of Myself" and numerous other poems in
which the self is celebrated, Walt is also explicitly and triumphantly the
author of himself. He thereby becomes what Stephen Dedalus longs to
be, both creator and creation, parent and offspring- "Maternal as well
as paternal, a child as well as a man" (sect.16). Walt, "hankering, gross,
mystical, nude" (sect.20) often depicts himself in sensual detail cast in
the role of lover. However, he just as frequently becomes an embryo or an
eternal child passively nursed by the land or the sea and set in a cradle
endlessly rocking.
As both father and son, active and passive, poet and poem, Walt
blends the tradition of the self-begetting author with that of the Ameri-
can self-made man. Whitman's strophes depict the neo-Biblical drama
of a world and an Adam being created. But the American poet goes on to
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND AMERICAN LITERATURE 115
commit the pantheist heresy of asserting absolute identity between
creator and creation. If the self comes to comprise all of the world, the
vehicle for this act of comprehension, the poem, becomes indistinguish-
able from the self it creates. And Whitman is able to conclude convinc-
ingly: "this is no book/Who touches this touches a man." 46
In Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, the speaker, confident of the life-
preserving powers of his verse, declares: "So long as men can breathe or
eyes can see,/So long lives this and this gives life to thee." Whitman's
poetry endows his only begotten narrator with life. At the same time, the
objective existence of "Song of Myself" and the other compohents of
Leaves of Grass demonstrates the continuing vitality of that created self.
In "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," the speaker, in an
apostrophe to a thrush, confides: "for well dear brother I know,/If thou
wast not granted to sing thou would'st surely die." Walt the chanter
portrays himself not only as begetting himself but as sustaining and
nourishing that self through poetry.
The metaphor of the journey informs "Song of Myself." Walt con-
ceives of himself as a walker- "I tramp a perpetual journey" (sect.46)-
and everything he encounters during his imagined travels contributes to
his poem and to his personality. Although he is later to glance backward
o'er travel'd roads, Whitman is even more thoroughly committed to the
unexplored "open road" than is his descendant Jack Kerouac.
This notion of the journey emphasizes the dynamic nature of the ego
which the poet projects. Whitman's self is a nomad, forever in motion.
No distinction exists between traveler and road, and as long as the
possibilities of experience are not exhausted the wanderer - and his
embodiment, the poem - must remain incomplete. "There is no stop-
page and never can be stoppage" (sect.45), we are told, but then, in one
of his multitudinous contradictions, the poet provisionally halts "Song of
-Myself" with the statement "I stop somewhere waiting for you"
(sect.52). Presumably when we have overtaken the impetuous poet he
will begin moving once more.
In this journey which we are invited to share and a record of which we
at the same time read in the poem, Walt emerges as a journeyman more
than a master. We see his vocation formingbutneverfullyformed. After
all, "a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work ofthe stars" {sect.31).
Leaves of Grass is the happy title Whitman applied to his growing mass
of collected poems, from the first edition in 1855 through each successive
edition until his death in 1892. Duringthosefourdecades, Whitman was
regularly composing new poems, revising old ones, and readjusting their
positions within the dynamic framework of his always incomplete book.
The organic metaphor implied by Leaves of Grass conveys this sense of the
book as process rather than static product. Since the expanding volume
is designed to be an incarnation of Walt Whitman, its title appropriately
emphasizes the vitality of its subject and reinforces the idea of journey
116 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
down an open road. Leaves of Grass was, and is, a perpetual Work in
Progress. It is a loose cluster of primitive lays which eventually cohere as
an epic.
Continually begetting itself, it is likewise author of a sizeable family in
American literature. Ezra Pound reluctantly made his famous "pact"
with Walt Whitman and, in 1909, admitted:
Mentaly I am a Walt Whitman who has learned to wear a collar and a dress
shirt (although at times inimical to both). Personaly I might be very glad to
conceal my relationship to my spiritual father and brag about my more
congenial ancestry- Dante, Shakespeare, Theocritus, Villon, but the descent
is a bit difficult to establish. 47
The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of
races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other
continents arrive as contributions ... he gives them reception for their sake
and his own sake. His spirit responds to his country's spirit ... he incarnates
its geography and national life and rivers and lakes. Mississippi Columbia
and Ohio and Saint Lawrence with the falls and beautiful masculine Hudson,
do not embouchure where they spend themselves more than they embouchure
into him. 5 1
kept for thirty years. The present tense perspective of Homer's diary
forces us to see how flagrantly obtuse he is. His total inability to
understand himself or Frances Harbach causes him to marry the wrong
girl, and again and again, not content with merely suggesting his
unreliability to us, Homer comes out with judgments on public issues
which we, with our wider perspective, recognize as outrageously
wrongheaded. Shortly before the 1908 presidential election, he naively
anounces: "I am confident that Taft will be the worst defeated presiden-
tial candidate in history." 58 Later, in July 1914, Homer is confident: "It
is apparent now to thinking people that science has advanced so far that
another giant war is practically impossible" {p.178). Dramatic irony can
be more subtle.
Despite Homer's artlessness, he does undergo a development, one
which is connected to his education as an artist. From the time he is
thirteen, Homer cherishes the hope of writing fiction. And the existence
of his diary is evidence of his interest in literature. It is to serve as a kind
of training ground for him. In his first journal entry, Homer notes:
It isn't that I am afraid of dying, but I must admit, of course, there always is
danger in a serious operation of this sort. I really am not worrying about my
operation at all. I know I shan't die because I am only beginning to live. I am
now only starting my life's work (p.309).
Homer thus views his expected debut as novelist through the conven-
tional image of rebirth through art. However, Brutal Dynasty does not
materialize for us, and it is questionable whether Homer does in fact
survive his operation. His assurance that he is only now beginning to live
and to undertake his life's work may be as ill-founded as his political
predictions. Yet Homer's literary legacy is preserved in the form of his
diary, the work we have just finished reading. The diary embodies him,
and if we want Homer to recommence his pathetic life we need only tum
back to the first page of "The Great American Novel--".
In a freakish coincidence, "The Great American Novel --" was pub-
lished in the same year as La Nausee. Despite vast differences in style,
tone, and achievement, both novels are set in diary form. Both center on
narrators who eventually decide to write a novel but both also conclude
in ambiguity over death and rebirth. Roquentin's diary is found and
presented to us by anonymous editors, and it is perhaps Syra Morris who
is responsible for the preservation of this account of Homer Zigler's life.
Davis and Sartre each create a novel whose self-begetting remains in
question.
Homer's ambitions for The Great American Novel cannot be satisfied
by Brutal Dynasty, which we never see, but rather, if at all, by the journal
which he leaves behind and ~hich becomes the text of "The Great
Amen"can Novel--". Homer, whose life in some ways parallels that of his
author, has, as a newspaperman in cities throughout the United States,
been a "post of consciousness" for most of the significant events of early
twentieth-century American history. According to the folk notion of The
122 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
IV MILLER'S TALE
I have painstakingly indicated throughout the book that the hero is myself. I
don't use "heroes,' incidentally, nor do I write novels. I am the hero, and the
book is myself ... 59
And inevitably there always crept into our discussions the figure of Whitman,
that one lone figure which America has produced in the course of her brief life.
In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future,
her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has
expressed, and there is nothing more to be said. The future belongs to the
machine, to the robots. He was the Poet of the Body and the Soul, Whitman.
The first and the last poet (Cancer, p.216).
But a kid like that thinking about becoming a writer! Well, why not?
Everybody had illusions of one sort or another. Monica too wanted to be a
writer. Everybody was becoming a writer. A writer! Jesus, how futile it
seemed! (Caprirom, p.81).
I think someday you're going to be a great writer .... Listen, when I hear you
talk sometimes, I think to myself- if only that guy would put it down on paper!
Why you could write a book that would make a guy like Dreiser hang his head
(Capricorn, pp.86-7).
This rehearsal for Tropic of Capricorn itself suggests some of the monu-
mental qualities of The Great American Novel.
Later, in the setting of Paris, Henry conceives an even more universal
project. He and Boris brazenly dream of composing the conclusive
literary work that will do for the modern world what the G.A.N. would
for America.
It is to be a new Bible- The Last Book. All those who have anything to say will
say it here- anonymously. We will exhaust the age. After us not another book-
not for a generation, at least. Heretofore we had been digging in the dark, with
nothing but instinct to guide us. Now we shall have a vessel in which to pour
the vital fluid, a bomb which, when we throw it, will set off the world. We shall
put into it enough to give the writers of tomorrow their plots, their dramas,
their poems, their myths, their sciences. The world will be able to feed onitfor
a thousand years to come. It is colossal in its pretentiousness. The thought of it
almost shatters us (Cancer, p.24).
Tropic of Cancer certainly is not the last word in literature. But its
structure of permanent digression into a wide range of human experience
and thought suggests the kind of encyclopedic, resourceful work that
would be. It is hyperbole to declare that nothing that is human is alien to
Henry: but this vernacular hero does succeed in humanizing much that
was previously alien to literature. And the effort is integrally related to
the narrator's pervasive reminder that what we read is contrived. It is
closer to naive reflexiveness than to naive realism.
Henry liberally employs the familiar metaphor of the artist giving
birth to a work of art. For example, in the description of the moment in
Far Rockaway when he suddenly perceives his kinship with Dostoevsky
and begins "to realize that there must come a time when I should begin,
when I should put down the first word, the first real word," Henry
explains: "I felt all the books I would one day write myself germinating
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND AMERICAN LITERATURE 125
inside me: they were bursting inside like ripe cocoons" (Capricorn,
p.211). This conceit- poetic and personal- of literature gestating within
him becomes a veritable epic simile in Cancer.
Women get up to offer me their seats. Nobody pushes me rudely any more. I
am pregnant. I waddle awkwardly, my big stomach pressed against the
weight of the world (Cancer, p.23).
I call him Joe because he calls me Joe. When Carl is with us he is Joe too.
Everybody is Joe because it's easier that way. It's also a pleasant reminder not
to take yourself too seriously (Cancer, p.93).
To some this may seem like an invention, but whatever I imagine to have
happened did actually happen, at least to me. History may deny it, since I have
played no part in the history of my people, but even if everything I say is
wrong, is prejudiced, spiteful, malevolent, even if I am a liar and a poisoner, it
is nevertheless the truth and it will have to be swallowed (Capricorn, p.13).
THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL AND AMERICAN LITERATURE 127
The book becomes Henry's body as much as it does for Whitman, or
even for Marcel. He swallows the world in order to feed his new self.
The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts. On whatever crumb my eye
fastens, I will pounce and devour.... If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry
one: I go forth to fatten myself (Cancer, p.90).
This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a
book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of
spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love,
Beauty ... what you will (pp.1- 2).
When, several years after abandoning his native Ireland, Samuel Beck-
ett began writing novels, plays and poems in a foreign language, French,
he was creating a new self as wilfully as was Walter Whitman when he
begot "Walt." Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, also linguistic
refugees, were more or less forced out of Polish and Russian, respective-
ly, if not into English. But Beckett's transition from English to French
was a freely determined, deliberate action. If he did not invent his own
language, as he praises both Dante and Joyce for having done, 1 Beckett
did at least consciously re-position himself within a self-begetting liter-
ary tradition. His enthusiasm for both Descartes and Proust was demon-
strated anew when, after having lived for some time in France and as a
disciple of James Joyce, he composed his extraordinary fictional trilogy.
Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1952) and L'Innommable (1953) are highly
self-consCious extensions of the French tradition. It is true that Beckett's
novels are "an amalgam of Joyce and Proust" 2 and that "three major
deities presided, Janus-like, at the birth of Beckett the artist: Joyce,
Descartes, and Proust." 3 However, if Beckett's trilogy adopts the themes
and strategies of the self-begetting novel, it also represents a reductio ad
absurdum of it.
Long before he became a French novelist and entered the stable of Les
Editions de minuit, Beckett's preoccupations matched those of Discours
de la methode and A la recherche. Beckett did considerable research on Rene
Descartes for his 1931 M.A. from Trinity, and the extensive footnotes to
his first published creation, the 1930 poem "Whoroscope," I]lake it clear
that its narrator is Descartes and that abtruse allusions throughout the
work are to details of the seventeenth-century self-begetting
philosopher's life. Beckett characteristically alters the Cartesian em-
130 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
phasis and has his protagonist declare: "Failor, ergo sum!" (1.73). Egg
imagery pervades the poem. The poet is fascinated with the odd fact,
culled from Adrien Baillet's La Vie de Monsieur Descartes, that the author
of De La Formation du foetus "liked his omelette made of eggs hatched from
eight to ten days; shorter or longer under the hen and the result, he says,
is disgusting" ("Whoroscope," Notes). As Beckett presents Descartes,
"The shuttle of a ripening egg combs the warp of his days" (Notes), and
this poem, which begins with reference to a rotten egg and concludes
with the narrator on his deathbed in Sweden, anticipates the obsession
with creation and extinction in Beckett's self-begetting trilogy.
In addition, just as Iris Murdoch's critical study of Sartre preceded
her own Under the Net, Beckett's first book, published in 1931, was
appropriately a monograph entitled Proust. The young literary scholar
traces, among other things, how "The whole of Proust's world comes out
of a teacup"; 4 but the epigraph he borrows from Leopardi, E fango eiL
mondo, would reduce everything to mud, years before Bouville was
begotten and The Unnamable, covered with "liquefied brain," 5 became
conscious of a dense reality defying consciousness.
Molloy, Malone meurt and L'InnommabLe are thoroughly conscious of
their status as works of literature, of their place in literary history, and of
their relationships to one another. Each is a first-person account, and the
narrator of each novel explicitly presents himself as a writer. Molloy, in
his mother's bed, scribbles the pages that we read; Moran, at the behest
of Youdi, writes a report on his activities; Malone creates his world by
means of his pencil and his exercise book; and The Unnamable admits:
"It is I who write, who cannot raise my hand from my knee" (p.301). As
much as for Dante and Joyce, these are portraits of the artist.
Although Moran moves from his bed to his desk to compose the
second half of Molloy, both Molloy and Malone lie in bed as they write
their stories. These "horizontal narrators" 6 recall Proust and Descartes.
Molloy's obsession with his mother, whom he spends the first half of the
novel seeking and in whose bed he finally awaits death, is perhaps
suggestive of Proust's attachment to his mother. In any case, Molloy,
cloistered, bedridden and dying, is regularly visited by a mysterious
stranger who pays him and snatches away his manuscripts as rapidly as
they are completed. Molloy's situation and that of Malone, in a hospital
room filling his exercise book in order to occupy the time before his
impending death, clearly echo Proust's deathbed race to finish his huge
novel, whose separate volumes were appropriated by the publisher
before thorough revisions.
And if Molloy and Malone suggest Proust's devotion to his sheets,
they likewise carry to extremes Descarte's tendency to jaire La grasse
matinee; "Whoroscope" emphasizes the fact that the French philosopher
"remained in bed till midday all his life" (Notes). Moran describes his as
"a methodical mind" (p.98), and Malone, outlining a deliberate pro-
BECKETT'S TRILOGY 131
gram of inventory and narration for the remainder of his life, similarly
revives Des carte's celebrated methode. But Molloy, seeking to understand
the self and its relationship to the universe, concludes that clear and
distinct ideas, the amino acids of Descarte's universe, are inadequate for
the task. Ultimately even more reductive than Roquentin's direct
parody of the rognito, Molloy's variations on the Cartesian theme subvert
confidence in the self's ability to reconstruct the world: "I think so, yes, I
think that all that is false may more readily be reduced, to notions clear
and distinct, distinct from all other notions. But I may be wrong" (p.82).
Often reading like philosophical meditations, Beckett's three novels
force us again and again to examine their status as works of art. The four
author figures who narrate these three volumes self-consciously inter-
rupt - or delay - their stories with reflections on procedure and with
value judgments on their own performances, so that the works often
resemble a discourse on the possibilities for fiction. Like Butor's Leon,
who consciously devises fictions to personalize his unknown fellow
passengers, Malone and The Unnamable concoct stories which they
recognize as mere stories but which they nevertheless intend as aids to
self-knowledge. Malone, in particular, is quite disgusted by the blatant
sham of his Saposcat narrative, and he halts it at various points with
such exclamations as "What tedium" (p.189) and "This is awful"
(p.191). Huxley and Durrell introduce musical terminology into their
"counterpoints" and "quartets" in order to draw attention to the power
of their artifices. But Molloy, likening his reflexive narrative to a musical
form, "the long sonata of the dead" (p.31), thereby mocks the preten-
sions of art instead of asserting poetry's conventional claim to be an
immortalizer.
Furthermore, the trilogy form of Molloy, Malone meurt and L'Innomm-
able is inherently reflexive. Each of the novels points outside of itself to
the other two. Yet in doing so it exposes its own artifice and the vanity of
all fiction. For such novelists as Balzac, Zola and Faulkner, the creation
of multiple works sharing identical themes, characters and settings
augments the realistic illusion. La Comidie humaine, the Rougon-
Macquart cycle, and the Yoknapatawpha series create the semblance of
an autonomous, sprawling universe. Their characters lead lives inde-
pendent of ours, and we may occasionally catch a glimpse of their careers
as we move from book to book. Even in Proust's seven-volume novel, this
device of retour des personnages serves primarily to underscore the effects of
time on various individuals. Through the full spatial and temporal span
of Proust's work, we are struck by the changes in Marcel and the many
figures he encounters during a complete career.
The separate units of Durrell's tetralogy, on the other hand, hover
about the same personalities and incidents but thereby assault each
other's reliability through conflicting perspectives. However, The Alex-
andria Quartet ultimately posits the reality of Alexandria, a state of mind
132 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
The solitude of des Esseintes and kin ends in the solipsism of Beckett's
Ms. It is "talking of the craving for a fellow" (p.lS) that Molloy begins
BECKETI'S TRILOGY 133
his epic quest for his mother. But journey's end - and narrative's
beginning- finds him alone in his mother's bed and as aloof from human
contact as he was when imprisoned in a room in Lousse's house. The
fable of A and B inserted at the very outset of Molloy suggests isolated,
anonymous figures who can at best stop to gaze at each other before
continuing their separate ways. Malone is truly man alone. He and
Macmann are quarantined from all but a very few visitors more effec-
tively than if they had merely retired to a cork-lined chamber. When
Macmann is finally removed from his bed, Lemuel takes him to an
island, and Mahood, who finishes his life ensconced by himself in a jar, is
an islander, if not an island: "The island, that's all the earth I know"
(p.327). No man is anything but an island here, and both Molloy and
Moran appropriately recount masturbation experiences.
In his study of Proust, Beckett observed: "For the artist, who does not
deal in surfaces, the rejection of friendship is not only reasonable, but a
necessity .... And art is the apotheosis of solitude." 7 Beckett's own
portraits of the artist therefore proceed toward The Unnamable's real-
ization that "there was never anyone but me" (p.403). Marcel's retire-
ment from the world is merely the starting point for his resurrection of
the self and the world, but the isolated individual manipulating his
private alphabet is both the alpha and the omega of the trilogy's
solipsistic world.
In the self-begetting tradition, the lone artist's withdrawal is in
preparation for a jubilant birth to follow. However, for Beckett's unfer-
tile protagonists birth is a remote trauma and death a tease. More so
than for the Proustian characters Beckett employed the phrase to
describe, the narrators of the trilogy suffer from "the sin of having been
born."8 Family life and the continuity of generations is depicted in the
novels through the figures of Molloy and his mother, Moran and his son,
and the Louis and Mahood households. The attitude here toward the
bonds of kinship is more akin to that of W. C. Fields than, for example, to
Renaissance reverence for the family as exemplar of the ethic "From
fairest creatures we desire increase." Moran's disgust for his neighbor's
aberdeen Zoulou, in fact, suggests Fields's misanthropic hostility toward
pets and children, and he even confesses: "It's a strange thing, I don't
like men and I don't like animals" (p.105).
Moran has an adolescent son with precisely the same name as his, a
parody of reproduction as perpetuation of the self. Very conscientious in
the paternal role he adopts toward young Jacques, Moran scrupulously
disciplines his son for the least breach of conduct, such as violating the
prohibition against bringing his stamp collection along on the journey.
And Moran sternly but dutifully administers an enema when he believes
that, whether appreciated or not, it is for Jacques's own good. Moran
pictures himself as fulfilling the responsibilities of fatherhood; he sac-
rifices his own comfort for the sake of a child who will be enriched with all
134 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
of the advantages his author never enjoyed: "I had not struggled, toiled,
suffered, made good, lived like a Hottentot, so that my son should do the
same" (p.122). It is the bourgeois ideal of selflessly creating a better
world for one's offspring, and in the novel it is demolished as thoroughly
as is Moran's systematic life of regular meals, weekly church services,
and a cultivated garden.
Moran as father sees himself imparting wisdom through discipline.
But I was a better judge than he of what he could and could not. For I knew
what he did not yet know, among other things that this ordeal would be of
profit to him. Sollst entbehren, that was the lesson I desired to impress upon him,
while he was still young and tender (p.110).
He asked me where to. He was lost. To the Turdy Madonna, I said. The
Turdy Madonna? he said, as if he knew Turdy like the back of his hand and
there was no Madonna in the length and breadth of it. But where is the place
in which there is no Madonna? Herself, I said .... It's thanks to her I lost my
infant boy, I said, and kept his mamma. Such sentiments could not fail to
please a cattle breeder. Had he but known! I told him more fully what alas had
never happened. Not that I miss Ninette. But she, at least, who knows, in any
case, yes, a pity, no matter. She is the Madonna of pregnant women, I said, of
BECKETI'S TRILOGY 135
pregnant married women, and I have vowed to drag myself miserably to her
niche, and thank her (p.173).
. . . perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle,
perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one
side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither
one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces
and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the
tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong
to either (p.383).
And in spite of all the pains I had lavished on these problems, I was more than
ever stupefied by the complexity of this innumerable dance, involving doubt-
less other determinants of which I had not the slightest idea. And I said, with
rapture, Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand....
But for me, sitting near my sun-drenched hives, it would always be a noble
thing to contemplate, too noble ever to be sullied by the cogitations of a man
like me, exiled in his manhood. And I would never do my bees the wrong I had
done my God, to whom I had been taught to ascribe my angers, fears, desires,
and even my body (p.169).
BECKETT'S TRILOGY 139
Like the God of the Old Testament, the inexhaustible phenomenon is
what it is. The Lord is One, and reality is only distorted when it is
anthropomorphized with two arms, two legs and two horns.
A major dualism for the novels' epistemology is that of subject and
object, observer and observed: Moran and Molloy. As Moran asymp-
totically turns into Molloy, this distinction collapses. As any mystic
knows, subject and object are identical. However, when it becomes a
question of accommodating such a vision, of translating it into the
language of a divisive mind, lines are drawn and lies are told. As long as
Moran continues to accept the cognitive paradigm of subject and object
to be apprehended, he can no more know Molloy than A can know B.
Although the "real" Molloy exists somewhere, he must settle for "my
caricature of same" (p.178).
When knowledge becomes self-knowledge, as it is in fact throughout
the trilogy, the individual futilely attempts the epic action of transposing
himself totally into the object of his own consciousness. Yet the self
remains as much an inaccessible fugitive from its own grasp as Albertine
is from Marcel's. Whenever one of Beckett's narrators tries to depict
himself fully, something escapes, namely the element which does the
depicting. However persistently the self tries to represent itself as object,
a residue remains as subject. Genuine self-consciousness becomes a
fiction, a truth of which the novels are quite conscious.
The Unnamable is the trilogy's most complete portrait of the neces-
sarily incomprehensible identity. Unlike Marcel, Leon, Darley or
Henry, The Unnamable never does earn a name for himself. He truly
contains multitudes, and to define him would be to limit him. The
mother of his predecessor calls her son "Dan," but Molloy claims: "I
don't know why, my name is not Dan" (p.17). When asked by the
policeman, Molloy is unable to provide his name. And, anticipating The
Unnamable's resistance to language, Molloy acknowledges: "And even
my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to
penetrate, as we have just seen I think" (p.31). Each of the narrators in
the cumulative trilogy fails at capturing all of himself in language. A later
narrator must replace him and thereby add to what little he has
accomplished. The Unnamable is aware that he comes along as the
outermost in a series of voxes within voxes. He recognizes that the
self-portraits of Molloy, Moran and Malone are inadequate approxi-
mations of the same self. Like Mahood and Worm, each has served,
without complete success, as The Unnamable's "vice-exister" (p.315),
his "surrogate" (p.392). Yet no mere proxy is more than an approxima-
tion, and The Unnamable stands as the representation of that which
cannot be represented. Moran speaks of "the inenarrable contraption I
called my existence" (p.114), but the phrase most directly applies to The
Unnamable. He is an integral, transcendent reality whom no arbitrary
categories can fully enclose. He can never begin to tell us about himself.
But neither can he end.
140 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
IV NOT MIDNIGHT
I called her Mag when I had to call her something. And I called her Mag
because for me, without my knowing why, the letter g abolished the syllable
Ma, and as it were spat on it, better than any other letter would have done.
And at the same time I satisfied a deep and doubtless unacknowledged need,
the need to have a Ma, thatis a mother, and to proclaim it, audibly. For before
you say mag you say rna, inevitably (p.17).
According to Molloy, the abusive title "Mag" also contains within it the
affectionate "Ma." Similarly, in the process of attempting to destroy art,
Beckett's narrators also create it.
Writing his report, Moran echoes Symbolist and Dadaist scorn for
mere "literature" when he states: "But it is not at this late stage of my
relation that I intend to give way to literature" (p.151). He even
contends: "It seemed to me that alllanguagewas an excess oflanguage"
(p.116). Definition is, by definition, an abomination, and Molloy sees
himself a victim of the false dilemma either falsify or remain quiet: "I am
merely complying with the convention that demands that you either lie
or hold your peace" (p.88}. "Reality" emerges as pre-verbal; in Moran's
words, "Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen,
no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then can you
detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is
made" (p.121). If the universe is, indeed, naturally silent, then all
literature becomes mere sound and fury or even blasphemy. Under such
conditions, Molloy's text declares "that you would do better, at least no
worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of
words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like
what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery" (p.13}. Fiction once
again becomes falsehood, a fact which both Plato and the fictive authors
of the trilogy fill their manuscripts to explain.
Beckett's novels project a mistrust of art even more radical than
Roquentin's contempt for the consolation his Aunt Bigeois derives
from Chopin. If art is traditionally a creator and an immortalizer, it is
also a murderer here. Life is dynamic and ineffable, and fixed literary
BECKETI'S TRILOGY 141
forms become lethal. In its succession of acid self-portraits of the artist,
the trilogy reenacts the stoning of Orpheus.
These novels are as obsessed with a self-effacing authenticity as is
Mauriac's Camejoux. The fictional context of La Marquise is shattered at
the end, and the novelist Camejoux merges with the historian Desprez as
admittedly inadequate chroniclers of Parisian experience. Malon self-
consciously arranges it so that his life and his death coincide with those of
his creation, Macmann. But The Unnamable's later, larger perspective
makes it clear that, despite his lucidity, Malone is merely artful.
What remains is a commitment to the non-human, non-verbal world
of objects. Like Whitman's animals ("they are so placid and self-
contained .... They do not sweat and whine about their condition"),
objects are genuine because they are aloof from man's artificial systems.
Molloy arranges his sixteen sucking stones in various intricate patterns
in his pockets and according to what he calls "the principle of trim"
{p. 71). Yet despite his ingenious efforts,- Molloy admits that one sucking
stone is as good, or as bad, as another: "deep down it was all the same to
me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same
stone, until the end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same" {p.74).
And so he proceeds to demolish the elaborate design he has spent the
previous eight pages constructing: "And the solution to which I rallied in
the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one
pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away,
or gave away, or swallowed" {p.74).
The Ms worship, or at least are obsessed by, such objects as sucking
stones, sticks, hats, and bicycles. The curious trinket, resembling a
crucifix, which Molloy pilfers from Lousse, induces awe precisely be-
cause it, like Moran's bees, is hopelessly unintelligible .
. . . I could never understand what possible purpose it could serve, nor even
contrive the faintest hypothesis on the subject. And from time to time I took it
from my pocket and gazed upon it, with an astonished and affectionate gaze, if
I had not been incapable of affection. But for a certain time I think it inspired
me with a kind of veneration, for there was no doubt in my mind that it was not
an object of virtu, but that it had a most specific function always to be hidden
from me. I could therefore puzzle overit endlessly without the least risk. For to
know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be
beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is
when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker {pp.63 -4).
Les choses se sont delivrees de leurs noms. Elles sont hi, grotesques, tetues,
geantes et ~a parait imbecile de les appeler des banquettes ou de dire quoi que
ce soit sur elles: je suis au milieu des Choses, les innommables. (La Nausie,
p.177).
[Things are freed from their names. They are there, grotesque, stubborn,
huge, and it seems idiotic to call them benches or to say anything about them.
I am in the middle of Things, the unnamables]
CHAPTER2
1. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Pierre Clarac & Andre Ferre
(Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1954), I, 64. All references to the novel are to
volume and page number of this three-volume Pleiade edition.
2. Hence the scorn for "realistic" fiction, "qui se contente de 'decrire les
choses,' d'en donner seulement un miserable releve de lignes et de surfaces"
[which contents itself with "describing things," with merely giving a
wretched list of lines and surfaces] (III, 885). The focus of the novel's
attention and style is on juxtapositions. Consequently, relationships take
precedence over that which they relate, a reversal of the preoccupations of
classic Western philosophy.
3. Etudes surles temps humain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1949),
p.392.
4. Thomas Mann: The Ironic German (Cleveland: World Publishing Company,
1961), p.272.
5. Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Of Art (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1965), p.194.
6. "Tradition and the Individual Talent,'' TheSacredWoo¢(NewYork: Barnes
& Noble, 1960), p.52.
7. See The Maxims of Marcel Proust, edited and translated by Justin O'Brien
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1948).
8. A PorlraitoftheArlistasa Young Man, p.215.
9. Mensonge romantique et viriti romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961 ), p.235.
10. Les Voix narratives dans "A Ia recherche du temps perdu" (Geneva: Droz, 1965),
p.16.
11. "Le 'je' proustien," Bulletin de Ia Sociiti des Amir de Marcel Proust et des Amis de
Combray, No.9 (1959), 69-82.
12. "The Narrator, Not Marcel," The French Review, XXXIII, No.4 (Feb 1960),
389-92.
13. Suzuki, p.74.
14. Waters, p.390.
148 THE SELF-BEGETTING NOVEL
15. Du Temps perdu au Temps retrouue. Introduction al'tmure de Marcel Proust (Paris:
Belles Lettres, 1950), p.248.
16. Marcel Proust and the Creative Encounter (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1972), p.3.
17. Ibid., p.241. However, in the later An Age of Fiction, co-authored with
Margaret Guiton (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1957), Bree
appears to recant. There, contending that La Naush is not a self-begetting
work, she nevertheless suggests that Proust's novel is. "Sartre, unlike
Proust, does not imply his own novel is the very novel his narrator will
write" (p.207).
18. Bree, Du Temps perdu, p.27.
19. Ibid., p.29.
20. Muller, p.22.
21. Bree, Du Temps perdu, p.28.
22. Poulet, p. 400.
23. "Quatre Images de Marcel Proust," Portraits in CEuures completes de Robert
Brasillach (Paris: Club de l'honnete homme, 1964), p.211.
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER4
CHAPTERS
31. Jacques Vallette, "Mountolive," Mercure de France, No. 1147 (Mar 1959),
p.518.
32. Lawrence Durrell, "The Kneller Tape," in The World of Lawrence Durrell,
p.167.
33. The Golden Notebook (New York: Ballantine Books, 1 %8), p.62. All refer-
ences are to this edition.
34. Doris Lessing, "The small personal voice," in Declaration, ed. Tom Mas-
chler (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1958), pp.193-4.
35. Ibid., p.188.
CHAPTER 6
pamphlet: Herbert Gorman, The Man With The Seeing Eye (New York:
Rinehart and Company, 1946).
58. Clyde Brion Davis, "The Great American Novel--" (New York: Farrar and
Rinehart, 1938), p.76.
59. New Republic, LXXXV, No. 1224 (18 May 1938), p.49.
60. See Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1970).
61. "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," op. cit., p.487.
62. The Books In My Life, p.12.
63. "The Poet," op. cit., p.237.
64. "Preface to 1855 Edition," op. cit., p.470.
CHAPTER 7
1. "Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce," in Our Exagmination Round His Factifica-
tion For lncamination of Work in Progress, pp.1-22.
2. Melvin J. Friedman, "The Novels of Samuel Beckett: An Amalgam of Joyce
and Proust," Comparative Literature, XII, 1 (Winter 1960), pp.47-58.
3. Lawrence E. Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1970), p.406n.
4. Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues, p.34.
5. Samuel Beckett, Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1%5), p.293. All
references are to this one-volume edition of the Trilogy, in which Beckett
himself translated Malone Dies and The Unnamable and translated Molloy in
collaboration with Patrick Bowles.
6. Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study, p.199.
7. Proust and Three Dialogues, p.64.
8. Ibid., p.67.
9. Kenner, pp.117f.
10. See Stanley Fish, "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics," New
Literary History, II, 1 (Autumn1970), pp.137-8.
11. Le Degri ;;iro de l'icriture suivi de Eliments de simiologie (Paris: Gonthier, 1965),
65-6.
12. Ibid., p.66.
Index
Adams, Henry, 103, 104, 116, 144, Beckett, Samuel, 6, 7, 8, 31, 69, 70, 75,
152n 76, 78, 79,80, 100,129
Agnon, S. Y., 144 "Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce," 2,
Alberes, Rene-Marill, 151 n 82, 129
Alger, Horatio, 8, 124 Proust and Three Dialogues, 5, 6, 130,
Alter, Robert, 9 133
AmadlsdeGaula, 9,16 Trilogy, 8, 10, 11, 19,24, 36, 39, 50,
Amis, Kingsley 51,70,98.99, 129.130-43.144
Luclcy jim, 88 "Whoroscope," 5, 129-30, 135
Anderson, Sherwood, 120 Bede,80
Winesburg, Ohio, 105-6 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 85
Anthony, Saint, 33 Bellow, Saul
anti-intellectualism, 102-4 The Adventures of Augie Marek, 109
anti-novels, 69, 75-6 Her~og, 104
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 61 Bergsonian narration, 96
Le Poete assassini, 10 Berryman, John, 116
"Zone," 51 Bersani, Leo, 16
The Arabian Nights, 17 Bildungsroman, 4, 32, 39, 69, 80, 83, 93,
Aristotle, 1, 60 119
Artaud, Antonio, 75 Blake, William, 114
Asselineau, Roger, 110-11 Bloom, Harold, 76
Atreus, House of, 11 Borges, Jorge Luis, 144
Augustine, Saint, 60 Bowles, Patrick, 154n
autobiography, 116-17 Brasillach, Robert, 30
Bree, Germaine, 27-9,39, 148n
Bacheller, Irving, 120 Breton, Andre
Baillet, Adrien, 130 Premier manifeste du su"ialisme, 71
Balzac, Honorede,67-8, 79,100,131, Brombert, Victor, 78, 79, 146n
132 Brooks, Shelton, 37
"L'Avant-Propos" of 1842,68 Brooks, VanWyck, 107,110
Etudes analytiques, 68 Browning, Robert
Etudes pkilosopkiques, 6 7 -8 The Ring and the Book, 94
Euginie Grandet, 44-5 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 144
Un Grand komme de province aParis, 67 Butor, Michel, 69, 70, 75
Barth, John, 144 "Une autobiographie dialectique,"
The Sot- Weed Factor, 119 66
Barthelme, Donald "Balzac et Ia n!alite," 67-8
Snow White, 106-7 "Claude Monet ou le monde reo-
Barthes, Roland, 10, 51, 68-9, 70, verse", 149n
142-3 "La Critique et !'invention", 68
Baudelaire, Charles, 23, 30, 61, 127 Hirold, 149n
156 INDEX