Paperback Fiction
UNTERECKER, JOHN
WRITERS and WRITING Paperback Fiction By John Unterecker Instructor of English, CCNY There is one aspect of the novel about which almost all its critics are agreed: It is an enormously...
...Eventually her characters are educated—by their actions, if not their words...
...propped up against a sand dune or suspended in a hammock, they "get away from reality" by reading one of those good books they had always intended to read...
...Most novelists would have stopped at this point...
...a structure reared with an 'architectural' competence...
...Yet how is her reality achieved...
...As Elisabeth sheds her prejudice and Darcy sheds his pride, each discovers the essential humanity of the other...
...Jude (Compass Books...
...Elizabeth is given the essential insight: "We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing...
...And eventually she begins to take shape as a composite figure seen from many points of view...
...Miguel de Unamuno's brilliant books Abel Sanchez and Other Stories (Gateway, $1.25) and Three Exemplary Novels (Evergreen, $1.43) are almost exclusively concerned with that communication, with man's effort to break down the barrier of his own self, to be "known" to another...
...Both Steinbeck and Jane Austen see their little, isolated worlds through very rose-colored glasses...
...gives us an image of what Ortega had defined as "pure living...
...One point of view, ours, arranges them against the horizon of the world...
...And it is here her reality begins to exceed the reality of our friends...
...Like her character Elizabeth, Jane Austen might well have said of her work: "I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good...
...65), a wonderfully entertaining book which (read out of school) seems quite as "modern" and certainly as lively as, say...
...Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (Houghton Mifflin Riverside Editions...
...Though broken here and there by his own "love to instruct...
...Not in the invention of plots but in the invention of interesting characters lies the best hope of the novel...
...Though at first glance nothing could seem further from Pride and Prejudice than John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday (Bantam Books, $.35), the novels have some remarkable similarities...
...Most readers, naturally, are only incidentally concerned with such matters as...
...Every important character in the book has the opportunity to study her, to talk about her, and to make some sort of a judgment...
...This certainly is the major part of it...
...A Candle for St...
...The caricature each has made both of the other and of himself begins to lose definition, and living faces—by the end of the novel—confront each other...
...95...
...James felt it came from placing "the center of the subject in the young woman's own consciousness...
...Superficially a comedy of middle-class blunders in high society, it is fundamentally a study of the double education of two peoples—middle-class Elizabeh Bennet and upper-class Fitzwilliam Darcy...
...Henry James...
...And finally, in both books there are no really evil characters...
...A great inventor of such characters is, of course...
...of course, satire in the novel—but it is a satire designed always to unmask, to reveal life behind the false faces men in their vanity construct for themselves...
...For we are able to see her from the viewpoint of many pairs of eyes...
...His "portrait" of Isabel Archer is so meticulously drawn as to make her more real than one's friends, more real...
...This notion of the secret form of the novel is the concern also of Jose Ortega y Gasset in "Notes on the Novel," the second essay in his gloomy survey of modern art and literature...
...My own vacation reading—a group of paperback novels conveniently reissued in time for summertime relaxation—has served only to confirm, however, the essentially serious object of most novelists...
...Yet Steinbeck's most enduring work—for summer reading or any reading—is perhaps collected in the short stories of The Long Valley (Compass Books, $1.25...
...Then such meaning as there can be suddenly seems to exist...
...Ortega, like Frederick J. Hoffman (The Modern Novel in America, Gateway, $1.25...
...Here, particularly in "The Red Pony," Steinbeck allows us to see thinking man as an extension rather than an opponent of nature...
...In "The Madness of Doctor Montarco," Unamuno describes a story much like his own: "a story half-way between fantasy and humor, without descriptive writing and without a moral...
...Her portrait ultimately was to be the study of "her relation to herself...
...What is worth knowing evolves in the design of experience...
...Take, for example...
...For a novel," he writes, "in contrast to other literary works, must, while it is read, not be conceived as a novel: the reader must not be conscious of curtain and stage-lights...
...The most accurate way of looking at Sweet Thursday is...
...The Dehumanization of Art (Anchor Books, $.85...
...Steinbeck's very funny book manages to catch the quality of a form Jane Austen had made very much her own...
...Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can...
...something we can never recognize so well in life itself, where, trapped in one body, we must observe men in perpetual profile...
...We may want to see them as they see themselves, yet we have only our own eyes to see with...
...Yet he has no illusions that his reader will see it in the same light...
...Rumer Godden's warm-hearted studv of the ballet...
...In both novels, the minor figures who conspire to further or defeat the unlikely match are extreme types rather than fully developed figures...
...The most he can do is to remember they are extravagances...
...Yet minor details give it roundness...
...Unamuno's characters fulfill completely Ortega's test of greatness: In their "pure living" they valiantly battle life's meaninglessness: they give us an idea of order...
...WRITERS and WRITING Paperback Fiction By John Unterecker Instructor of English, CCNY There is one aspect of the novel about which almost all its critics are agreed: It is an enormously difficult literary form which, if successfully brought off, so disguises its form as to seem formless—a mere record of life...
...James, aware of this all too human tendency, capitalizes on it: He circles Isabel Archer with an examining jury of outsiders each of whom looks at her from his own point of view...
...For its author, "ideas were a point of departure, mere raw material, and had as much importance in his writing as earth used by Velasquez in making the pigments had to do with his painting...
...Like Jane Austen, Steinbeck is describing the efforts of a girl on a lower social plane to prepare herself for marriage with an older man on a higher social and educational level...
...The artist may of course, in wanton moods, dream of some Paradise (for art) where the direct appeal to the intelligence might be legalized: for to such extravagances as these his yearning mind can scarce hope ever completely to close itself...
...Because a thinker, man is "lonely" (the word echoes through both books): yet because he has emotion, because he is tied to nature, sometimes a communication can be established between one man and another, one man and a woman, rarely—but possibly (as in "The Leader of the People") —between a man and his part of the world...
...Powerful and gaunt...
...But the whole structure is not complete until Isabel has the opportunity to examine each of her examiners, to evaluate them...
...Far from wanting to let their readers escape reality, their almost-too-obvious project seems to be to force those readers to examine man's essential nature...
...Moreover, their judgments are revised, redefined, as the novel progresses...
...I think, to see it as a flophouse comedy of manners built around the courtship of Suzy and Doc...
...From her evaluation of her critics we are eventually able to fill in all the light and shadow of her mind, to see her at last in her full complexity, simultaneously "as others see her" and as she sees herself and them...
...Henry James, in the introduction to his great novel The Portrait of a Lady (Houghton Mifflin Riverside Editions, $.80), sees his own work as a "neat and careful and proportioned pile of bricks...
...To give them meaning, to "fix" them in our minds, we turn men as complicated, as contradictory as ourselves into convenient caricatures...
...Though each of her acquaintances is prejudiced, their prejudices balance each other out...
...certainly—than James himself...
...We look at our friends with prejudiced eyes...
...James's achievement in showing us a "whole" character, in letting us see Isabel in a much clearer light than either she or her observers can see her...
...sees the path of the novel to be moving away from plot and action: "The essence of the novel . . . does not lie in 'what happens' but precisely in the opposite: in the personages' pure living...
Vol. 39 • August 1956 • No. 32
