The Fiction of Relationship

The Fiction of Relationship

by Arnold Weinstein
The Fiction of Relationship

The Fiction of Relationship

by Arnold Weinstein

Paperback

$55.00 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Thursday, April 4
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

"A clear and straightforward discussion of the ways in which literatures and their comparative study must depend upon the problematics of interpersonal and other relations. . . . This study will prove as useful as it is wide-ranging, and indeed, comparative in the good sense."--Mary Ann Caws, Graduate School, City University of New York

"Here is a comparatist working at the peak of his powers. . . . Weinstein moves easily from Goethe and Flaubert to Kafka or Joyce or Boris Vian. Locating fictions of relationship 'at the heart of both literary criticism and human affairs' and acknowledging his own 'distinctly humanistic' concerns, Weinstein writes in an urgent tone and eloquent voice, inflecting the theme of 'relationship' in every way: in its surrender to the erotic, its frenzied drive for control of the Other, in its ability to confer identity or eclipse difference. . . . When he couples texts (e.g., William Burrough's Naked Lunch and C. de Laclos's Les liaisons dangereuses), he takes risks that bear brilliant fruit. Exploring famous texts and relatively unknown ones, Weinstein infuses the traditional study of fiction with new energy."--Choice

Originally published in 1988.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691607986
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 07/14/2014
Series: Princeton Legacy Library , #930
Pages: 338
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

Read an Excerpt

The Fiction of Relationship


By Arnold Weinstein, Dan Reed

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06751-3



CHAPTER 1

The Fiction of Relationship


The fiction of relationship" is, as may be suspected, a loaded term, a double entendre that signifies at once the narrative literature of relationship and also the notion that relationship itself may be a fiction. On the one hand, there is no doubt about it, we do have a body of literature that deals with the couple; at the same time, the most memorable of these texts are invariably problematic at the core, issuing from a conflicted attitude toward relationship itself: is it possible? Equally crucial: is it narratable? How can the theme of human connection be rendered in literary texts? More basically still, do novels have something to show us in this area that we are unequipped to see on our own, not so much because of the author's wisdom, but precisely because of the virtues of his medium, the peculiar aptness of fiction to shed light on the enterprise of coupling. This light is, at its most luminous, directed both within and without, illuminating the need for union but also rendering the composite form of the couple, the figure they make. Who can see as much in real experience? In looking at several paradigmatic and a few lesser known novels of relationship — notably two eighteenth-century texts, Prevost's Manon Lescaut and Goethe's Werther; Flaubert's Madame Bovary; and three twentieth-century fictions of marriage, Ford's The Good Soldier, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and Boris Vian's L'Ecume des jours — I would like to sketch a kind of generic history of incompatibility. It is a rich incompatibility, located sometimes between lovers, other times between the couple and their world; and finally it is to be seen, fruitfully and provocatively, in the narrative apparatus itself, the field where the text lives, a field that is both charted and mined. To be sure, my deck is stacked, and it is also very small, but I would hope that the particular discussion will buttress a larger argument about relationship and the novel tradition as we know it.

A few clarifications are in order. First, one must distinguish relationship from the more violent phenomenon of passion. In his classic study on love in the Western world, Rougemont elaborately makes the case that passion is a derived form of mysticism, that it is death-oriented, that it neither knows nor wants gratification. Relationship would seem to be the other side of things, and I would want to argue that it is profoundly life-oriented, that it, like all living phenomena, encounters death, but as nemesis, not as secret ecstasy. Relationships exist in time, they are made of time, and the pathos of much literature devoted to them has to do with the effects of time: either the cessation of love or, more poignantly still, the cessation of life. Passion may easily be construed as an individual feeling, and here too we reach the crux of relationship: it is insistently mutual, connective. The word itself suggests linkage, and this goes far in explaining why lyric poetry is a fitting locus for passion, but fiction (and, indeed, drama) is the more natural literary home for relationship. The novel has the kind of reach that is needed if relationship is to be "caught" within the artist's net: it has the requisite temporal span for depicting the curve of lives intertwined; it also does justice to that gritty societal world which may make things hard for lovers; finally, it is peculiarly suited to handle those central issues of mutuality and reciprocity, perhaps even more suited than theater, because it can at once accommodate the subjective view and still render the alterity and density of the loved one. This last dialectic is the Ariadne's thread of the argument that is to follow, because it encompasses the central tension at hand: the play between individual vision/desire and the opaqueness of the other. The rise of the novel, usually accounted for along sociological lines, is inseparably linked to this dialectic: from the eighteenth century on, fiction begins to focus more and more intensely on the inside picture, giving birth to what becomes point-of-view narrative and expressing the nature of human feeling and subjectivity with unprecedented immediacy and importance. Yet, the novel form is inherently environmental (even when it seems in the service of a despotic single vision), and it ineluctably "situates" its own speaker, delivering a world that contains that speaker, always acknowledging a reality scheme beyond that of desire. And, as if this were not enough in terms of checks and balances, the novel form also teaches us that subjectivity and blindness go hand in hand, that the single vision is every bit as cyclopic as it is delicious. We know, of course, that writers such as Ford and James exploited this dialectic for all it was worth, but so too did the earlier novelists of relationship. How could they not?

The novel is, then, especially formed for giving us the many optics we need to understand relationship. What I have called variously dialectic, tension and play, the tandem of subjective appetite and epistemological uncertainty, has a distinctly formal, generic appeal to the novelist; his is the medium in which it can be truly played out. But, we can hardly fail to observe that this dialectic between desire and knowledge is part and parcel of the motive force of love itself. Not only could it be taken as a working definition of jealousy (the loved one as unknowable), but it seems to be at the very pulse of human affection: the desire for union, for the lover to be bonded to the loved one. And the obstacles which are so congenial to the novelist (blindness, distortion, etc.) are the very real obstacles that people who love face throughout their lives.

"Throughout their lives" brings us back to the notion of time, and it allows for a final clarification of terms, this one perhaps more editorial than the others. To maintain a relationship over time (formerly known as the concept of marriage) entails energies other than passion, and indeed poses problems that are unknown to passion. The energies in question have to do with fidelity, evolving feelings, and the like; the problems involved concern the peculiar assertiveness, the quasi-insolence of imposing a human form, of stopping the entropic work of time, of making something stick. Coming together is possible for anyone; staying together is a challenge to all parties involved (the principals, perhaps the gods), for it is an act of volition, the foisting of a human-made pattern onto the heterogeneous randomness of the species. Relationship is an assertion, a construct; using this language, we are not far, as is tolerably obvious, from the view of relationship as a work of art, as a fiction: created by two people, it has a shape and may confer a meaning to the flux and atomization of individual experience. All these natural enemies — entropy, time, flux, fragmentation, change, death — make relationship a precarious affair, one easy to experience but hard to see, about which the novel has something to teach us.

To teach us these things, the novels in question must be examined in ways that are at once formal and substantive. Individuation is given, and connection is desired. That operation may bear many names and come in many colorations and hues, ranging from friendship to familial love to sexual desire; whatever the affective label is, the project itself entails an opening, an extension of the individual. This special dynamic and the meanings invested in it are at the heart of my inquiry, and it will soon enough be clear that my key notions — relationship, self, other — must be understood as both formal and thematic. Sartre once observed, with regard to Faulkner, that every aesthetic implies a metaphysic; in like manner, I want to insist that the authorial choices made in these fictions — point-of-view narrative, first-person lyricism, style indirect libre, delayed disclosures, stream of consciousness, surreal environment, even word play — both form and inform the story of relationship. Each text that I study was felt, in its time, to have broken new ground, to have created new voices and new ways of seeing; each novel, likewise, seems to be imbued with an urgency, a desire at once to take the measure of the self and to wed it to another. There is ultimately a situational drama at work here: individuals yearn to be completed by something or someone outside their precincts; once the linkage is made, the inner dynamics of the couple and the outer dynamics of the environment must be contended with. With this perhaps overly formulaic and schematic definition in mind, one can begin to look at some of the novels themselves.


1

There is no real starting point for love literature, although the troubadour lyrics and courtly romances of the medieval period certainly go a long way toward establishing its prominence. As for narrative proper, however, with its possibilities of temporal span and multiple point of view, we may properly turn to the eighteenth century, and we can begin to witness the fiction of relationship. This Age of Sensibility, moreover, was witness to a new concert of voices and needs; its literature — especially in Europe — centralizes and comes close to legitimizing human, qualities that had been largely regarded as aberrant or peripheral in the past: desire, yearning, the affective in all its guises. In 1731 the Abbé Prévost published a novel whose full title is Histoire du Chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut a distinctly and tragically connective title. Prévost's novel describes, from the perspective of the lover, a young man's desperate efforts to hold onto his mistress. The woman, Manon Lescaut, is seen almost exclusively through the eyes of Des Grieux, and she is, therefore, in all senses, an object: an object of his gaze, his appetite, and an object on the Parisian market whose favors men can buy. Manon is a courtesan, or, as Montesquieu disdainfully put it, une catin, a trollop. The novel depicts a rampantly hypocritical setting, a vicious world that mouths old values but is up to its neck in exchange and barter. Des Grieux commits the grievous sin of loving Manon, wanting to marry her; whereas his father is perfectly prepared to buy him women, he finds marriage with such a creature unthinkable. Hence, the young aristocrat is on his own, without funds, wanting only to live with Manon. She, however, needs money, and the plot is little more than a series of coups de théâtre, where Des Grieux loses the money he has either stolen or conned his friend out of, and thereby loses Manon in the bargain, for whom a wealthy suitor is always within reach.

Prévost's book, although outfitted with a proper preface that points to some kind of moral lesson in Des Grieux's tempestuous career, is nonetheless a splendidly subversive story. The young man is, to be sure, tarnished, even to the extent of becoming a cheat and a murderer, but he alone celebrates the power and the value of feeling. The first-person narration weds us to Des Grieux, grants immediacy and lushness to his affective wants, and nothing in the book remotely measures up against his new code; against everyone, he proclaims the authority of love, the nobility of love. But, these tidings are not only unheeded, they are, like those spoken by other love disciples, regarded as dangerous. The book is fueled by the most elemental plot imaginable, a bare-bones paradigm of relationship itself: will they stay together? can he keep her? Being with Manon is the goal of his life, and all social values are discarded in the process. But this society does not want this relationship, and the conflict is relentless. The older institutions of home and church function flagrantly as symbolic prisons where Des Grieux is confined; beyond that, he and Manon are whisked off to literal prisons more than once. The regularity and insistency of this kind of societal intervention begins to look like some kind of higher decree, one perhaps more metaphysical than social, a ban on connection, a green light for dalliance but an absolute denial of permanent cohabiting.

When one looks a bit more closely, one sees that the injunction to separate the lovers is writ small as well as large, written into the flesh as well as enforced by agents of authority. The pleasure-loving Manon is drawn to Des Grieux for many reasons, but one of them is indisputably sexual; he coyly informs us that she has informed him the he is "le seul qui put lui faire gouter parfaitement les douceurs de l'amour" (the only one who could make her perfectly savor the pleasures of love). Here is, of course, the region where the young man will be struck down. Three times, Prévost treats us to a replay of a thinly veiled coitus interruptus scene, and at each juncture, the young man is hauled out of bed by armed policemen. He is deprived, first, of his knife; secondly, he speaks of a blade suspended over their heads; and last of all, he jumps for his sword, which is portentously caught up in his belt. Even Des Grieux can tally it up: "Un homme en chemise est sans résistance" (A man in a nightshirt is without resistance [152]). Manon Lescaut is a diabolically cogent novel, and its subtext is clearly one of emasculation and castration, the final forms of action that society can take against the couple. The book is shot through with resonant sexual images: Des Grieux has to give Manon his pants for one of the escapes; he runs through Paris with loaded and unloaded guns, this too in the service of his mistress; he is able to open her cell door only by means of a key that is "effroyablement grande" (102); the appropriate culminating image for this history of sexual menace occurs when the young man tries to use his sword to dig a hole to bury Manon, and he breaks it. Without saying anything openly, perhaps without even knowing what he is saying, Prévost is showing us something of the scandal of coupling, and he is brilliantly bringing the lesson home, to the genitals, making it abundantly clear that the sensual education experienced by the young aristocrat carries in its wake something close to a sexual dismantling.

But, social and even sexual threats are not the only ones. The society most critical in a fiction of relationship is that smaller society of two, that Other, the genuine New World that Des Grieux has discovered but cannot colonize. For most of the book, the most perplexing enemy of relationship would appear to be Manon herself. Each time there is a shortage of cash, off she goes. Yet, she insists, honestly it would seem, that she never stops loving him. Relationship, she says in a memorable passage, is a spiritual, not a physical affair, "la fidélité du cœeur"; the connectedness that counts is less that of the body than of the heart. Des Grieux, love apostle though he is, cannot quite manage this sublimated doctrine, and consequently a great deal of the novel shows us the two lovers confused and hurt, each baffled by the principles of the other. It is important, I think, to grant each of these positions a measure of sincerity, and one might even go much further and sketch out an ideological binary system with Des Grieux at the aristocratic, idealist end, and Manon at the materialist end, with her famous quip, "crois-tu qu'on puisse etre bien tendre lorsqu'on manque de pain" (do you think one can be really tender when one is short of food [69]). For our purposes, what counts is to grasp the optical system of the novel form, to see how Prévost has presented the blindness theme most perfectly by having the blind man speak. Des Grieux never even comes close to an understanding of his mistress or his culture, and one might add that he is more than a little slack in matters of self-honesty: after all, he is a cheat, a pander, and a murderer, but the reader has to see it, since the young man never falters in his impeccable self-esteem. It is well known that Auerbach could not stomach so much self-deception, but it would seem that he missed the fun, the special fun that novels offer. Manon Lescaut is stereophonic even though Manon hardly speaks; the reader cannot avoid contrasting Des Grieux's intensely rhetorical, inflated love language with the nuts-and-bolts pragmatism of Manon. The grand imperative of the book is that of union, sexual union, maintainable sexual union over time, outfitted of course with the requisite high-flown moral sentiments. This may not be everyone's notion of relationship, but it is for real, and it commands considerable authority and pathos in Prévost's hands. What is so fine about the novel is its uncanny strategy of separation, a strategy that finds all means good, ranging from the political to the sexual to the more banal one of incomprehension. We are witnessing the algebra of relationship, and we are seeing the remarkable resources afforded by the novel form.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Fiction of Relationship by Arnold Weinstein, Dan Reed. Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

  • FrontMatter, pg. i
  • CONTENTS, pg. v
  • Preface, pg. vii
  • Introduction, pg. 1
  • Chapter One. The Fiction of Relationship, pg. 21
  • Chapter Two. Memory and Multiplicity, pg. 69
  • Chapter Three. Body Control, pg. 119
  • Chapter Four. Metamorphosis, pg. 153
  • Chapter Five. Heaven and Hell, pg. 197
  • Chapter Six. Art and Seeing Clear, pg. 245
  • Conclusion, pg. 305
  • Works Consulted, pg. 313
  • Index, pg. 321



From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews