PMLA, Vol. 70, No. 5 (Dec., 1955), pp. 1160-1184
Modern Language Association
1160) Joseph Warren Beach could write: "In a bird's eye view of the English novel from Fielding to Ford, the one thing that will impress you more than any other is the disappearance of the author.
[저자의 사라짐]
- Bradford A. Booth wrote in 1950: "It has been said that the most significant change in the fiction of our time is the disappearance of the author. Conversely, the trade mark of the Victorian novel is the presence of the author, ever poised to intrude a comment, to interpret the characters, or to write an essay on cabbages and kings." For better or for worse, then, it seems that our "squeamishness" has won the day.
- 헨리 제임스의 영향
1161) From the ancient rhetorician's directions regarding "vividness" (enargia) to the modern aestheti- cian's study of "projection" (empathy), the relationship between the author's values and attitudes, their embodiment in his work, and their effect upon the reader, have been and continue to be of crucial concern.
1162) simple narration- the poet everywhere appears and never conceals himself
imitation - the poet speaks in the person of another we may say that he assimilates his style to that person's manner of talking; this assimila- tion of himself to another, either by the use of voice or gesture
- "The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the actions like a vital sea.... The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life." There follows the by now famous passage about the disappearance of the author: "The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood [lyric] and then a fluid and lambent [부드럽게 빛나는] narrative [epic], finally refines itself out of existence [drama], impersonalizes itself, so to speak.
[Joyce - A Portrait]
1163) Regarding the particular problem of the relation between the author, the narrator, and the story subject, Edith Wharton complained in 1925, "It seems as though such a question must precede any study of the subject chosen, since the subject is conditioned by the answer; but no critic appears to have propounded it, and it was left to Henry James to do so in one of those entangled prefaces to the Definitive Edition from which the technical axioms ought some day to be piously detached.
- James in his prefaces (1907-09) tells us he was obsessed by the problem of finding a "centre," a "focus," for his stories, and that it was in large measure solved by considering how the narrative vehicle could be limited by framing the action inside the consciousness of one of the characters within the plot itself.
[중심화자]
- Thus, since the irresponsible illusion-breaking of the garrulous omniscient author, who tells the story as he perceives it rather than as one of his characters perceives it, is eliminated by this device, the story gains in intensity, vividness and coherence.
[전지적 화자 시점 대신에 중심 화자 기법 이용. 헨리 제임스]
1164) "The art of fiction," he claims, "does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself [rather than being told by the author] .... the thing has to look true, and that is all. It is not made to look true by simple stat
ement.
[제임스 계속]
- 사실감이라는 환영을 주기 위해
One of the chief means to this end, the one James himself not only announced in theory but followed in practice, is to have the story told as if by a character in the story, but told in the third person. In this way the reader perceives the action as it filters through the consciousness of one of the characters involved, yet perceives it directly as it impinges upon that consciousness, thus avoiding that removal to a distance necessitated by retrospective first-person narration:
[말로라는 화자의 발명에는 제임스의 이론과 소설에서의 실천이 많은 영향을 주었다고 보아야 할 것이다.]
1165) Selden L. Whitcomb, entitled The Study of a Novel (1905), the first to my knowledge which devotes a formal section to the rubric, "The Narrator. His Point of View."
1167) Accordingly, Phyllis Bentley, in 1947, is constrained to remark: "The gradual decline in the use of direct comment, till at last heaved overboard with a splash by the twentieth century, is a fas- cinating study which should be attempted by a contemporary critic in the interest of ... [that rather neglected aesthetics of fiction] I men- tioned in my introduction.