Form and Feeling in Modern Literature

Essays in Honour of Barbara Hardy

Isobel Armstrong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781907975370
• eBook ISBN: 9781351192415
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Essays, short stories and poems by eminent creative writers, critics and scholars from three continents celebrate the literary achievements of Barbara Hardy, the foremost exponent of close critical reading in the latter half of the twentieth century and today. Her work, as the essays in the volume bear witness, encompasses 19th and 20th century British fiction, poetry, and Shakespeare. In addition to an introduction outlining and assessing Hardy's career and writing, there is an extensive bibliography of her work. Comparatively short, concise essays, stories and poems by twenty distinguished hands express the eclectic nature of Barbara Hardy's work and themselves form a many-faceted critical/creative gathering. Form and Feeling moves away from the traditional festschrift to create an innovative critical genre that reflects the variety and nature of its subject's work. In addition to Barbara Hardy's own writing, authors and subjects treated include Anglo-Welsh poetry, nineteenth century fiction, Margaret Atwood, Wilkie Collins, Ivy Compton Burnet, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. M. Hopkins, Wyndham Lewis, George Meredith, Alice Meynell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Shakespeare, and W. B. Yeats, amongst others."

PART 1
The Work of Barbara Hardy

1
Introduction

Isobel Armstrong

On 5 November 2011 a conference on the Brontës was held at the University of London Institute of English Studies. I heard the contribution Barbara made to it. Quite distinct from the mark of the formal academic paper, her contribution was a stunning reading from her recently published collection of short stories, Dorothea’s Daughter and Other Nineteenth-Century Postscripts. This collection weaves haunting narratives from the lacunae, loose ends, and unspoken possibilities in the endings of the great novels of the nineteenth century — the forever hidden narrative secrets in Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, for example. Her Jane Eyre story, the one she read on that occasion, was about the forgotten history of Adèle, Rochester’s illegitimate daughter. What happens to her? Jane and Rochester’s baby son grows apace, but what of the illegitimate child in this triad? Barbara’s story wonderfully intuits Rochester’s egocentric uneasiness about his daughter, a feeling that has been lying in Charlotte Brontë’s narrative, awaiting development. In another marvellous reading of the unsaid, she picks up on one of the final sentences in the Conclusion to The Mill on the Floss. One of the two men who visited the tomb of Tom and Maggie Tulliver ‘visited the tomb again with a sweet face beside him’. The unwary reader, and the reader longing to assuage the pain of this novel, might assume that the ‘sweet face’ was that of Lucy, accompanying Stephen Guest on his pilgrimage of love and penitence and expressing her own forgiveness. But not Barbara. She understands George Eliot’s reticence, her refusal of easy gratification, and builds imaginatively upon it.

Barbara’s presentation was not a simple, straightforward reading of her paratext. She commented upon her narrative step by step, speaking of her choices, her reading of the novel. It was a rigorous analysis of narrative art, both that of Brontë and her own, a revelation of the complexities of feeling and form. Her stories come from a lifetime of absolute immersion in the fiction of the nineteenth century, its tellers and listeners, its feeling and form, and what can only be described as the sheer joy of imaginative and analytical discovery.

Because of this buoyant, bold, and ever-present creativity, the customary words that give homage to an illustrious and majestic scholarly career are hardly adequate for this ever-inventive scholar-creator. Beginning with The Novels of George Eliot, in 1959, Barbara is the author of countless critical studies. But we need to remember, to understand the richness of her criticism, that the energy that made that first book a great and innovative work has also been the impetus for two collections of poetry, The Severn Bridge (2001) and The Yellow Carpet (2006), a novel, London Lovers (1997), an autobiography, Swansea Girl (1993), and the short stories of 2011 with which I began. She has just completed a cycle of poems on Dante, based on reading Dante in the original, a labour of six years.

It is appropriate that Barbara’s most recent post has been as a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sussex. She is a great teacher. For years she has run a very democratic Poetry Workshop at Birkbeck, and has also convened a Writers’ Workshop with a rather different remit. Birkbeck, the London college that has been her home for most of her career, both as lecturer and professor (apart from a short period as Professor of English at Royal Holloway College), is a perfect fit with her socialist and egalitarian values, since its mission is to give a new chance to students who have been excluded from higher education. Birkbeck was also a good context for breaking the mould of women academics. As a mother and a teacher when this combination was rare and even shocking, Barbara has been a role model for women working in the universities. Her feminism shines in her life and work. The Welsh background that is such a powerful part of her life as a writer and academic, gave her, I think, a liberating sense of belonging to a rich culture that was to the side of English academic mores and conventions. It meant that she could maintain a buoyant, vigorous independence that challenged the unexamined assumptions of academic life.

Her first book, The Novels of George Eliot, burst upon a critical community preoccupied either with belles lettrist criticism or with highly prescriptive empirical historical scholarship. It had a liberating effect. No one before this had attempted to take the close reading strategies of Leavisian criticism into a detailed and comprehensive reading of the fictional oeuvre of a nineteenth-century novelist. It was a first, an imaginative and original work that initiated the now enormous field of George Eliot studies. This book has been such a profound influence on the reading of George Eliot and its canonical views have been so assimilated into critical discussion that people quote them without realizing their source in Barbara’s critical imagination. The famous paired scenes in Adam Bede, for instance, when Dinah looks outward through her window, and Hetty gazes into the mirror, were first discussed in detail by Barbara. Likewise, her formal analysis of Middlemarch in terms of rotating plots and parallelism was the first to understand this pattern.

The Novels of George Eliot was sub-titled A Study in Form. Form and what it means has fascinated Barbara throughout her writing life. A pre-established account of form as a kind of skeleton was not to her purpose, but she insisted that James’s image of the nineteenth-century novel as a loose baggy monster was also misleading: instead it was necessary to elicit the ‘highly complicated and intricate organizations’ and patterns of Eliot’s novels from the ‘human material it is shaping’.¹ To recognize Eliot’s formal power ‘we must put aside the simple notions of the lucid or single well-made story, and recognize that the form of the novel can mean the cooperation of a large number of forms within the novel. The form of the novel must certainly be thought of in terms of its flow and continuity, though this is by no means the only way of approaching narrative form’ (p. 5). The arousal of ‘narrative curiosity’ (p. 5) is bound up with narrative form. Barbara’s interest has always been in a double relationship, the writer and the reader. This commitment to the reader accounts for the exemplary clarity and boldness of her writing style, which always honours the reader’s need to be invited into discussion.

Her book on Eliot went way beyond the accepted categories of character and plot current at the time. She considered the novel as tragedy, for instance, the patterning of character, and its moral implications (not merely character as psychological Bildung), the status of the authorial voice, and the scene as image — the pathetic and the ironical image. In this way her ground-breaking writing opened out for critics a multitude of ways of reading and thinking that have found their place in critical analysis of the nineteenth-century novel ever since.

Barbara is a prolific critic. She has written on individual writers and poets throughout her career. William Baker’s bibliography shows the range of her concerns. She will always be identified with George Eliot, but another of her loves is Charles Dickens, on whom she has produced two critical books (1970 and 2008). She has written books on Thackeray (one of the few books to catch Thackeray’s strange mixture of satire and sensuousness, and one of the few that see him as a radical writer), Jane Austen, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Dylan Thomas. She has written Introductions and edited texts, from Helen Zenna Smith’s war novel, Not so Quiet: Stepdaughters of the War, to Lawrence’s The Rainbow. We should not be surprised by the amplitude and range of these interests: The Novels of George Eliot begins with a comparison between James Joyce and Eliot.

Over and above these wonderfully particular studies, Barbara has conducted a long enquiry into the nature of form, the narrative imagination, form and feeling, form and lyric, the teller of stories and the listener to those stories. Culminating in Shakespeare’s Storytellers in 1996, this enquiry crosses the novel, drama, and lyric poetry. Every ten years or so, this intense concern generated another book. She developed a tripartite relationship between the form of the text, the feeling bound up with form, and the listener’s part in responding to the creation of narrative and story. The affective grip of the tale and its structure, whether in fiction or lyric (for a lyric is a condensed story) is at the heart of her work. This group of studies begins with The Appropriate Form in 1964, a title that picks up on this phrase in the Introduction to her first book on Eliot. Tellers and Listeners followed in 1975, The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry, in 1977, and Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction in 1985. Throughout this enquiry, what Barbara termed the ‘human material’ shaped and shaping form, is a pre-eminent concern.

The first book in what I have called Barbara’s enquiry, The Appropriate Form, together with Tellers and Listeners, and The Advantage of Lyric, are particularly arresting. The Appropriate Form ranges from Defoe to Anna Karenina, and takes in Henry James Hardy, Charlotte Brontë, George Meredith, D. H. Lawrence, and E. M. Forster. It is almost impossible to detail the figures in Tellers and Listeners as it sweeps from Milton to Joyce, taking in Waugh and Huxley, Proust, Woolf and Wordsworth, wonderfully embracing prose and poetry. I can only give the briefest account of these unique studies here, but all of them begin from the seemingly simple premise of The Appropriate Form — ‘The novelist [and we might include the narrative of the poet], whoever he is and whenever he is writing, is giving form to a story’ (p. 1) — and proceed to deepen and elaborate this statement.² In The Appropriate Form she again differentiates herself from a Jamesian account of form as unity: ‘Looked at another way, it is an assertive display of form which is common in music and the plastic arts, and rare in fiction’ (p. 5). And form, if it can be appropriate, can also be inappropriate, wrenched, as when she discusses the dogma of the providential plot.

She seeks a reading of form that does not become distorted by dogma and rigid classification. She works inwards from the novel rather than prescriptively outwards to it. In the course of this she rejects the term ‘realism’ and looks to ‘truthfulness’ instead. This truthfulness means that we ‘look also for the form of particularity’ (p. 3). This does not mean emptying form of its meaning, but finding a new way to give what she calls ‘individual presences and moments’ (p. 3) in the novel a structural significance. I will set out two quotations from this fruitful book to indicate how Barbara can move from particularity in an individual moment to particularity organized in larger patterns. The first is when she writes of Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch, the second is when she speaks of the inconspicuous patterns of Anna Karenina.

Those critics who find Ladislaw a weak romantic conception, the under-distanced product of the author’s fantasy, might reflect on the fact that few Victorian heroes are shown as contemplating adultery [with Rosamond], and so coolly and miserably, in the moment of passionate commitment to the pure heroine.

(p. 129)

Not only is the novel inconspicuously divided, not only does it constantly compare as well as contrast, it cannot be said to insist even on the pattern which does emerge. It is a pattern which we may very well not be strongly aware of until the end, when we may go back and see it embedded in action which strikes us in its particularity rather than its resonance. Levin’s reaction to his child does not remind us of Karenin’s, both are striking in themselves. It is rather that all the characters are subjected to similar tests, the common tests of fatherhood, profession, and faith, and that the parallelism is often scarcely noticeable.

(p. 198)

The packed and fecund discussions of Tellers and Listeners start from categories of tales embraced by the narrative imagination rather than from particularities, the other way on from the previous book. But her fresh narrative categories always lead to specificity and not to abstraction. These are Fantasy and Dream, Memory and Memories, Abuses of Narrative, Good Stories, Good Listeners — yet these new formal categories do not of themselves convey the fertility of the forms of narrative imagination, which include rhetoric, confession, gossip, the yarn, the lyrical story, the collective myth, community tales, the fairy tale, autobiography. Her intricate readings of the teller’s tale and the listener’s response, not forgetting that our stories gratify ‘the listener within ourselves’ have a specificity and detail that is always gripping.³ The juxtaposition of references and comparison is often thrilling. On a single page one can encounter Fanny of Mansfield Park, Mrs Dalloway, Krapp of Krapp’s Last Tape, William Carlos Williams, and The Mill on the Floss (p. 61). Rival stories, the painfulness of listening, memory and fantasy — the book documents and explores an almost infinite number of forms of telling and listening. The condensed and eloquent chapter on Dickens illustrates something of the richness of this book.

Just as a dramatist tries to squeeze in as many histrionic opportunities as possible, so a great story-teller naturally seizes every chance to tell a story. Dickens’s novels are full of travellers’ tales, confessions, lies, reports, warnings, autobiographies, tall stories, anecdotes, narrative jokes, books, readings and fairy tales.

(p. 165)

Barbara’s criticism is the work of a critic who is a great storyteller herself. In The Advantage of Lyric (1977) she continues to meditate on what defines form, but here the lyric is her theme. Form in the lyric is constituted by ‘its concentrated and patterned expression of feeling’.₄ She writes unequivocally of lyric that ‘what it does provide is feeling alone, without histories or characters’ (p. 1). Nevertheless, in clarifying that feeling, which is the project of lyric, a form of ‘buried narrative’ (p. 3) can be present. ‘Although lyric poetry is not discursive, it is capable of speaking its feelings intelligently, so as to speak about them. The double voice of feeling can speak in a single form, fusing reflection or even analysis with the stirring passion’ (p. 3). The phases of feeling in a lyric poem, its oblique allusion and unfolding of metaphor, create an indirect narrative structure even when we are presented with ‘feelings without histories’ (p. 4). In her introduction to this book she discusses what no one has done before or since, the poems made and thought about by characters in novels, Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch and Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where we see...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• PART I: THE WORK OF BARBARA HARDY
• PART II: THE ART OF NARRATIVE
• PART III: THE ART OF POETRY
• PART IV: WRITING WOMEN AND CHILDREN
• PART V: FICTIONS
• APPENDIX: BARBARA HARDY
• Index