Ford Madox Ford's the Good Soldier [1 ed.] 9789004344143, 9789004344136

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Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier

Dialogue Critical Works on Anglophone Literature after 1900

Executive Series Editor Henry Veggian (unc Chapel Hill) Editorial Board Manisha Basu (University of lllinois at Champaign-Urbana) Jennifer Keating-Miller (Carnegie Mellon University) Jason Stevens (University of Maryland, Baltimore) Richard Purcell (Carnegie Mellon University) Thomas Reinert (unc Chapel Hill) Founding Editor Michael J. Meyer† (DePaul University, Chicago)

volume 21

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/dial

Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier Edited by

Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis

leiden | boston

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Terzieva-Artemis, Rossitsa editor. Title: Ford Madox Ford’s The good soldier / edited by Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, 2018. | Series: Dialogue ; volume 21 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017032125 (print) | lccn 2017037110 (ebook) | isbn 9789004344143 (E-book) | isbn 9789004344136 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Ford, Ford Madox, 1873-1939. Good soldier. Classification: lcc pr6011.o53 (ebook) | lcc pr6011.o53 g5215 2018 (print) | ddc 823/.912--dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032125

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1574-9630 isbn 978-90-04-34413-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-34414-3 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations viii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction 1 Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis 1 The Good Soldier: Tragic, Comic, Ironic 10 Joseph Wiesenfarth 2 Tory-Papists and Ford’s The Good Soldier 18 Timothy Sutton 3 The Definition of Modernity in The Good Soldier 36 Edward Lobb 4 The Silences of Modernism in The Good Soldier 53 Dean Bowers 5 A Tale of Two Babies – One Dead, the Other Powerless to Be Born: Ambivalent Beginnings in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier 72 Aimee L. Pozorski 6 The Motive for Metaphor: The Words of a Sentimentalist in The Good Soldier 91 J. Fitzpatrick Smith 7 Rewriting Trauma: A Study of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier as Modernist Chronicle 111 Asunción López-Varela Azcárate 8 “Nearly as Bright as in Provençe!”: An Episode of Dowell’s Narrative Passion 126 Lucie Boukalova 9 Not Just Another Perplexity 144 Gabrielle Moyer

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“Like Chasing a Scrap of Paper”: Hysterical Detection in The Good Soldier 175 Allan Pero

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“Of the Question of the Sex-Instinct I Know Very Little”: The Good Soldier and the Discourse of Indecency 192 Chris Forster

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“A Family Romance”: Oedipal Melancholia and Masochism in The Good Soldier 212 Marc Ouellette

Index 229

Acknowledgments With this book I would like to remember the late Prof. Michael Meyer, my first series editor at Rodopi. If I could thank him, it would be for the incredible support he showed a young researcher in the selection and the preliminary editorial work on the first drafts of this volume. No doubt, his intellectual generosity and wisdom will be treasured by many. A big “thank you” to Henry Veggian, Masja Horn, and Kim Fiona Plas at Brill Rodopi for their insightful reading and help with the finishing touches and the transformation of this text into a book. My sincere gratitude to all the contributors in the volume for their incredible patience and persistence in the completion of the project, and, most of all, for sharing their interest in The Good Soldier with me. It was a long labor of love and so much worth it! Finally, I would like to thank my family who made time and space available for me to work on the manuscript. For Penelope and Stephanos who do not read “this kind” of book, yet.

Abbreviations The following abbreviations of Ford’s works have been used: ca ee gs iwn jc ml ry

The Critical Attitude England and the English The Good Soldier It Was the Nightingale Joseph Conrad The March of Literature Return to Yesterday

Notes on Contributors Lucie Boukalova is a graduate of the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Northern Iowa. Her areas of research are British Modernism and neo-modernist experiment in poetry and fiction, transatlantic and continental Modernism, and Czech-English/English-Czech translation of literature. Dean Bowers is Assistant Professor of English at Anne Arundel Community College teaching composition and literature. He received his PhD from Texas Tech University in 2006. His primary literary interest is early twentieth century European literature, particularly British. Other literary interests include science fiction, utopian literature, supernatural literature, and war literature. Dr. Bowers is also engaged in developing strategies for online composition instruction and in exploring the writing process as a form of meditation. J. Fitzpatrick Smith is Associate Professor at Wittenberg University where he teaches twentiethcentury British and Irish literature, and pursues his research in various modernist subjects. He has written on a variety of subjects, and is currently at work on the intersections of visual and literary art in the early twentieth century. Chris Forster is Assistant Professor of English at Syracuse University where he specializes in twentieth-century British literature and culture. He sometimes blogs at http:// cforster.com. He is currently working on a book on modernist obscenity and the media landscape of the early twentieth century Edward Lobb is Professor of English Emeritus at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of T.S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition (Routledge, 1981) and of many articles on English, American, African, and Canadian literature. In 1993 he edited Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s Four Quartets (Athlone). Asunción López-Varela Azcaráte is Professor of English at Complutense University Madrid. Her interests in research and publication include the semiotics of space and time in literary and

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cultural representation, multimodality and intermediality, interculturalism, (comparative) cultural studies, education, and the use of hypermedia technologies in teaching and scholarship. She is a member of the Complutense University research group of educational innovation. López-Varela coordinates the area of comparative literature and cultural studies in the project E-excellence in the Humanities Gateway Liceus and is one of the organizers of the multi-university research project The Politics of Culture: Nationhood, Interculturalism, and Citizenship in the New Europe. López-Varela is Review Editor (Europe) for the peer-reviewed quarterly of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture published by Purdue University. Gabrielle Moyer is Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. She works in the fields of modernist literature and analytic philosophy. Her published essays include “Style as Endgame” (Lettres Internationale, 2010) and “Taking Ourselves for Poetry: An Essay on Love and the Ethics of Hermeneutic Attention” (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008). Marc A. Ouellette is Managing Editor of Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture. He received the 2009 McMaster Student Union Award for Outstanding Teaching. With Jason C. Thompson, he has edited The Game Culture Reader. Allan Pero is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. He has published in the fields of modernist literature and drama, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. He is currently working on The Encyclopedia of Cultural Theory for the University of Toronto Press (completion date 2015). He is also working on a book-length study of Camp in Modernism. Aimee L. Pozorski is Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University where she teaches contemporary American literature. Her research interests include twentieth century literature, trans-Atlantic Modernism and trauma theory. Aimee is the author of Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995–2010) (Continuum, 2011) and the forthcoming Falling After 9–11: Crisis in American Art and Literature also with Continuum. Aimee has edited

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Roth and Celebrity (Lexington, 2012) and the Critical Insights volume on Philip Roth (ebsco/Salem, 2013). Timothy J. Sutton is Assistant Professor of English at Samford University and Director of Communication Arts. He earned his Ph. D. in English from the University of Miami in 2007. His first book, Catholic Modernists, English Nationalists, was published in 2010 with the University of Delaware Press. He has served as the Managing Editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement and organized the 2006 and 2013 James Joyce Birthday Conferences in Coral Gables, Florida. He has taught at the University of Miami, Nova Southeastern University, Miami-Dade College, Auburn University, and fgcu. Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus. She works in the fields of modern literature, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy. Terzieva-Artemis is the author of the book Stories of the Unconscious: Sub-versions in Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva (Peter Lang, 2009) and the guest-editor of a special journal issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination on Julia Kristeva published in 2015. She has been Visiting Scholar at the library of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Joseph Wiesenfarth is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he held a tenured position from September 1970 to May 2000, having taught previously at Manhattan College, La Salle University, and Catholic University of America. He has published seven books on English and American novelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as more than one hundred articles and reviews. Scholarship on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, and Katherine Anne Porter is prominent in his publications. He is a Founding Patron of the Jane Austen Society of North America and a founding member of the Ford Madox Ford Society. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities. He has been Visiting Scholar at the Bologna Istituto di Studi Avanzati (March 2004), and Germany, where he held a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Freiburg in 1981–82; he also taught at the University of Giessen in 1993. Among his recent publications are editions of Jane Austen’s early stories Jack & Alice (2001) and

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The Three Sisters (2004) and a collection of essays, History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s Writings (2004). His monograph Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women: Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, and Janice Biala was published in 2005. Professor Wiesenfarth received the Wisconsin Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1979. Catholic University of America presented him its Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Research and Scholarship in 1996. The University of Wisconsin named him Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Professor in 1992 and Nathan S. Blount Professor of English in 1994.

Introduction Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis As one of the most prolific modernist writers of the twentieth century, Ford Madox Ford challenged established literary forms and social expectations in his works by contemplating subjects such as duty, adultery, loyalty and betrayal in his novels. Ford dealt with moral issues which were frequently neglected or hushed by society in the beginning of the century, but were very close to his own heart and experience, as numerous biographical and literary studies have shown. His novel The Good Soldier (1915), a work he considered to be his “great auk’s egg […] something of a race that will have no successors,” most conspicuously delves in these issues (lvi). Probably Ford’s most popular work, the book firmly established him in the literary world as an author with ultimately modern perception. In 2015, a hundred years after the publication of The Good Soldier, readers still admire Ford’s unsurpassed talent in this modern oeuvre of lies, passions, and moral relativism. Ford Madox Ford was born in 1873 in Surrey, England, as Ford Hermann Hueffer. His mother, Catherine Madox Brown, was the daughter of the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, and his father was the German music critic Francis Hueffer who had moved to England in 1869. Ford often visited France and Germany with his parents and those impressions were later employed in most of his writings as cultural references, settings, and continental sensibility for the quirks of character. Brought up with such significant literary and artistic influences, Ford showed talent and imagination for creative writing early in life. His first book, The Brown Owl (1891), was a children’s story illustrated by his grandfather. After the death of Ford Madox Brown in 1893, he also published a biography of the great Pre-Raphaelite painter. That first collaboration with his renowned grandfather was probably the most important incentive for Ford to continue his literary pursuits and eventually to insert “Madox” in his name. Up until 1919 Ford signed his work as Ford Madox Hueffer, which he later changed to the well-known name Ford Madox Ford. In terms of literary influence, Ford’s friendship with another literary giant of the times, the novelist Joseph Conrad, proved to be a life-long lesson and inspiration. Having met for the first time in 1898, Ford and Conrad quite successfully collaborated on the novels The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903), The Nature of a Crime (1924). Those collaborations, but even more the accompanying long, productive discussions on language, character and narration proved to be master classes in writing for both Conrad and Ford. Their intellectual relationship weathered some temporary bitterness through the years, yet ­ultimately proved © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004344143_002

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to be indispensable for each writer’s creative output and revival through the years. The other major influence on Ford would be Arthur Marwood, a well-to-do, knowledgeable gentleman whom Ford met in a critical moment in his life in 1905. After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1904 due to the public humiliation that his failed marriage had brought and visiting various European spas in search of peace rather than a cure, Ford met Marwood, who later inspired the writer to create the unforgettable character of the English gentleman Edward Ashburnham in The Good Soldier. Besides novels, Ford published also numerous poems and essays and in 1908 he founded The English Review. By attracting contributions from well-known writers such as Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Henry James, but also from new names such as Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, Ford established The English Review as one of the most influential literary journals at the time. Unfortunately, he lost editorial control in 1910 due to the journal’s financial losses. Ford’s personal life or, more precisely, his complicated relationship with women, has been discussed at length by scholars. As one of the contributors to this volume, Joseph Wiesenfarth, has explored in Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women (2005), in 1894 young Ford married his school sweetheart Elsie Martindale, but the marriage did not succeed. Even after an affair with his wife’s sister and despite Ford’s efforts through the years, the marriage was not dissolved officially, so Elsie remained his only legal wife. His quite indiscreet romance with the writer Violet Hunt brought more troubles when his wife sued him in 1910 for the restitution of marital rights and against the illegal use of the name “Hueffer” by Violet. Ford was horrified that the public scandal would destroy his reputation, yet he continued the difficult relationship with Hunt until 1919. In 1922 Ford moved with his new love, the artist Stella Bowen, to France. He also addressed to her his 1927 dedicatory letter in The Good Soldier with the following statement: “What I am now I owe to you: what I was when I wrote The Good Soldier I owed to the concatenation of circumstances of a rather purposeless and wayward life” (lv). In 1924 he started another journal in Paris, The Transatlantic Review, and collaborated in it with writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, and Jean Rhys. Ford was also working on his tetralogy Parade’s End, the other great work for which he is known. About that time he had a brief affair with Rhys too: later she vividly embodied her view of the failed relationship in her novel Quartet (1929), while Ford wrote in response When the Wicked Man (1932). Towards the end of his life, Ford met a much younger woman, the artist Janice Biala, and he lived with her probably the happiest years of his life up until his death in Deauville, France,

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in 1939. Ford died of a heart condition after crossing the Atlantic from America en route to his home, a somewhat ironic reminder of the various “heart conditions” from which his characters suffer (and die) in The Good Soldier. Overall, as Julian Barnes points out, “His emotional life was deeply c­ omplicated and overlapping, and made worse for all concerned by his indecisiveness, self-­ indulgence and economy with the truth.” The Good Soldier, a novel about betrayal and deceit, reflects incredibly well Ford’s unorthodox views of morality in an utmost volatile century but also his own troublesome life.

...

The contributors in the present volume of the Rodopi “Dialogue” series approached this classic text of Modernism with eagerness and awareness of the on-going prolific discussions among scholars and common readers of Ford’s oeuvre. Our attempt here is to provide some new perspectives for the understanding of The Good Soldier and, hopefully, to spark further debates on the novel which has been inspiring generation of readers for a century now. The Good Soldier is about the narrator’s struggle to make sense of a world in discordance, of moral chaos, from the distance and safety to be found in a “tale.” The introduction of a very modern narrator, John Dowell, spared Ford the need to condemn immoral acts through authorial intrusion according to the traditions of the popular narratives of adultery. To achieve the desired immediacy in the representation of Dowell’s confusion, Ford employs several modernist techniques: the plot is not just non-chronological, but it is conspicuously disjointed and infused with the ambiguous reflections of Dowell. His unreliable tale is the result of Ford’s attempt to mirror introspection in an impressionist way, to the point even of using stories within a story within a novel. Because it challenges traditional social mores and literary forms, The Good Soldier is regarded by most readers as his masterpiece, a book which signaled a revolution in the genre of the novel and the advance of modernist aesthetics in the beginning of the twentieth century.

Ford Madox Ford and His Times But the essence of my self-appointed task is to record my own time, my own world, as I see it. ford madox ford, 1914

In 1915, at the age of forty-two, Ford published The Good Soldier, which is generally considered to be his best work. In the same year, he left to serve in

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World War i as an infantry officer. After being gassed in the infamous battle of Somme, France, he returned to England and published between the years 1924 and 1928 his elaborate four-volume novel Parade’s End. In the minds of many, though, The Good Soldier is Ford’s unquestionable masterpiece for its brevity and stylistic perfection, not to mention for its philosophical implications. In his essay “The Good Soldier: Tragic, Comic Ironic,” Joseph Wiesenfarth examines these philosophical implications and argues the perennial value of the novel for it “is a rendering of the abominable tortures of sex, of lost honour, commercial ruin, and of death itself” (2). He goes on to point the ways the novel opens to both the impressionist and the realist readers: as a text of realism, The Good Soldier offers us a vista of life and mores at the turn of the century continental Europe, while as an impressionist novel it contemplates the epistemological value and the narrative power of impressions and interpretations rather than facts. Overall though, as Wiesenfarth succinctly concludes, the novel presents us “with a picture of the inescapable conditions in which we, as we strive to be something a bit more than “the stuff to fill graveyards,” try to work out our salvation” (2). In “Tory-Papists and Ford’s The Good Soldier,” Timothy Sutton explores the Catholic identity of the writer which is indispensable for the understanding of the novel itself. From Ford’s conversion to Catholicism in 1892 to his occasional professions on religion, Ford used the term “Papist” to denote “a cultural Catholic who still professed his faith and believed in its potency as a transcendental answer to the problems of modernity, but did not judge others according to their religious orthodoxy,” while, on the other hand, the “Roman Catholics” who “[…] viewed the Roman religion as an elitist club open only to those able to follow its strict dogmatic tenets” (20–21). As Sutton points out, this view probably is wellexpressed in Ford’s famous 1911 essay “On Impressionism,” in which he advances the idea that the artists must “adopt a frame of mind, less Catholic possibly, but certainly more Papist when seeking to earn sympathy with his audience” (274). The Good Soldier certainly embodies this philosophy in Sutton’s view: he argues that Ford “has little interest in traditional religious morality, especially with regard to sexuality, and thus Dowell’s biases may well be Ford’s also” (24).

Modernity and Modernism The ocular and phonetic break between today and the historic ages is incredible. ford madox ford, 1915

Introduction

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Edward Lobb’s essay “The Definition of Modernity in The Good Soldier” explores what he considers “a general modern sense of fragmentation and ­formlessness” (29). As the author argues, the two words that summarize the novel are “uncertainty” and “indeterminacy.” With this in mind, Lobb outlines the conditions under which “such relativism came to dominate modern consciousness” (30). Among the features of modernity that he finds embedded in the texture of the novel are the sense of fragmentation, formlessness (and ignorance), fatigue, and the loss of the sensus communis so palpable with the onslaught of the World War i in Europe. As Lobb further argues, “The Good Soldier is a book – the book – of the Edwardian twilight, that period of deceptive stability and calm in which the forces of radical change are already at work” (42). In his contribution to this volume, “The Silences of Modernism in The Good Soldier,” Dean Bowers explores what he terms “a fractal consciousness” of the protagonist John Dowell and Ford’s attempt to incorporate silence to render experiences in narration (48). An interesting point that Bowers raises is the fact that “The struggle of the characters mirrors the struggles of the modernist artists to depict this dynamics as they cope with developing fractal perspectives themselves in the modern fragmented world” (49–50). Thus Ford is seen as a modernist writer with such fractal consciousness who provides only fragments of experience and insights into the equally challenging fractal consciousness of the narrator. This impressionist mode of representation ultimately challenges the reader’s comprehension.

Language and Metaphor For I speak – we all speak – a forcible, nervous, excellent, and subtle language. We express very well what we want to express. But when we take our pens in hand what a timid, literary jargon issues out in the ink. ford madox ford, 1908

It seems that one of Ford’s early stylistic lessons was summarized by his schoolmaster in the laconic German expression “Schreib wie du sprichst!” (1908: 52) Ford embraced that maxim and worked through his life on “the abandoning of derivative verbiage” (53). His fascination with language and expression is one of the trademarks of all his fiction and non-fiction works. The concerns of the scholars with the socio-historical aspects of Modernism in the first two sections of this volume are matched by Ford’s insight that,

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The greatest victories of mankind are over and done with by the next autumn, when the stubble is over the graveyards; but we shall only make a decent thing of peace when we can see human issues clearly, and we shall only see human issues clearly when we have learnt to effect their just expression. (1915: 173) In the novel, the concern with expression, language and modernity crystallizes in the metaphor of the murdered unnamed baby. In her paper “A Tale of Two Babies – One Dead, the Other Powerless to be Born: Ambivalent Beginnings in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier,” Aimee L. Pozorski investigates the underlying ambivalence of the novel as a modernist text through the exploration of the issues of fertility, reproduction and barrenness. The author argues that “the novel betrays a profound concern about the future – the future of society and of literary Modernism itself – as it grows out of the wasteland of a past: one is dead, the other powerless to be born” (70). She concludes that literary Modernism was not “simply ambivalent about modernity, but rather it grew up out of ambivalence […]” (85). “The Motive for Metaphor: the Words of a Sentimentalist in The Good Soldier” is J. Fitzpatrick Smith’s take on the much-debated opacity of language of the novel’s narrator. Smith analyzes how Dowell’s “calculated interruptions and manipulations of figurative language and metaphor” convey the narrator’s anxieties over the motivation of the characters, but also over his double position as a narrator and a protagonist in his own story (90). Smith demonstrates that the novel displays “radical awareness of its linguistic instability” through “Dowell’s ostensibly extravagant language” to produce “a tale in which every metaphor has a paradoxical motive to conceal” (91). Ford’s “just expression” of the human issues then has highly metaphorical, opaque nature which further frustrates our comprehension.

Narrative Passions Yet, really the whole concern of art is the telling of a good tale in a rattling sort of way. ford madox ford, 1913

Asunción López-Varela Azcárate’s essay “Rewriting Trauma: a Study of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier as Modernist Chronicle” studies the novel as an example of a genre hybridity popular between World War i and ii. She analyzes the blurring of the difference between “fact” and “event,” “memory”

Introduction

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and “symbolization” in order to produce “history/story” through rewriting of ­trauma and maintains that “The Good Soldier is not so much an escape from meaning as an escape from emotion” (117). Thus the novel is read as “a ‘chronicle’ of Dowell’s search for clarifications and a memoir of passion, with trauma lurking backstage” (118). In her essay “‘Nearly as bright as in Provençe!’: an Episode of Dowell’s Narrative Passion,” Lucie Boukalova focuses on a brief but prominent section of the novel where folklore blends with cultural memory. The author explores the heritage and interest in Mediterranean history that Ford shared with his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, in conjunction with the narrative impact of the Peire Vidal episode upon the structure of the novel. Boukalova argues that, “Even though Dowell’s rendering of the story is brief and laconic, it shows certain sympathy with the passion of the troubadour, whose legendary love ­survived the centuries in the vidas of the region” (144). Such sympathy probably is an extension of Dowell’s longing for the unachieved (and unachievable) narrative permanence of his own story.

Puzzle and Detection It is not enough to say that every man is homo duplex; every man is homo x-plex. And this complexity pursues every man into the minutest transactions of his daily life. ford madox ford, 1922

Gabrielle Moyer’s essay “Not Just Another Perplexity” addresses the metaphysical and epistemological discourses at the beginning of the twentieth century in which Ford’s The Good Soldier and Conrad’s Lord Jim are embedded. The author maintains that these two novels “provide examples of two early experiments with prose, where characters’ efforts to narrate their way out of the mystery of a person fall short and where the text’s aesthetics both demonstrate and engage with the limits of language and narration” (151). Dowell’s methods in his search for the truth are juxtaposed to the methods of another brilliant detective, Sherlock Holmes; unlike Dowell, though, Holmes manages to tell a meaningful story about aberrant human behavior, thus ultimately producing knowledge. Moyer concludes that the “fragmented, inconclusive narratives still leave us, as much as the characters who relate them, with a lack of trust and prone to paranoia” (175). In “‘Like Chasing a Scrap of Paper’: Hysterical Detection in The Good Soldier,” Allan Pero investigates the famous “time-shift” technique which Ford

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uses and, more importantly, the similarities between Ford and a mystery writer like Dashiell Hammett. Such a comparison is somewhat expected in the ­author’s view, since Hammett’s detective Sam Spade, like Dowell, is motivated by two concerns: first, how to make sense of human behavior in a sensible story and, second, how to make sense of his own desire for the femme fatale. From a Lacanian perspective then, as Pero argues persuasively, “[…] we realize that Dowell’s involvement in the narrative, together with the disavowal of his desire, blurs, in a modernist way, the tidy distinction between the detective and the femme fatale” (185).

Sexual Instincts and Oedipal Melancholy Sex is, I suppose, one phenomenon in a chain of the phenomena of growth and of reproduction. It has its importance along with eating and other physical processes. One should – the novelist, above all, should – regard it with composure. But so few do. ford madox ford, 1922

The matter-of-fact tone of the above motto might be surprising for the readers who know the ups and downs of Ford’s private life. Yet, as Chris Forster shows in his essay “‘Of the question of the sex-instinct I know very little’: The Good Soldier and the Discourse of Indecency,” Ford, the novelist, “seems to willfully avoid such explicitness, favoring euphemism and circumlocution […]” in his novel (203). A precursor of such works as Ulysses (1922) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), The Good Soldier was never at the center of indecency trials, but was still faulted by critics for its “sex-morbid atmosphere.” However, as Forster argues, if the novel is read together with Ford’s famous 1922 essay “Ulysses and the Handling of Indecencies,” it becomes clear that, Dowell emerges as an articulation of Ford’s vexed attitude towards the representation of sexuality in literature, and the eroding division between the properly “literary” and the “obscene” (204). The result is that Ford’s novel, unlike Ulysses, “can never achieve full representation of desire but only gesture toward it” (221). Marc Ouellette’s essay ““A Family Romance”: Oedipal” Melancholia and Masochism in The Good Soldier” delves into the problematic issue of Dowell’s reliability vis-à-vis his Oedipal motivation. Using a Freudian approach in his reading of Dowell’s tale, the author points out that Dowell’s narrative is mostly about repetitively “acknowledging his own failure to grieve: the very definition of melancholy” (226). Ouellette further investigates how Dowell deals, quite unsuccessfully, with ambivalence and denial which in its turn produces an

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unreliable narrative. The conclusion is that, in dealing with Edward, Leonora, and Nancy, “To successfully conceal his own desires, Dowell must also avoid the truth about their desires, most notably Edward’s. Thus, Dowell’s unreliable narration and his sexless marriage are more than connected; they are part of the same process” (227).

... Over the years, the ongoing interest in Ford’s work has produced many impressive readings and interpretations of his fiction and non-fiction. This interest has also created a productive “niche” in literary criticism dedicated to Ford studies. Across continents, scholars, students, and common readers alike have acknowledged the perennial value to be found in his oeuvre. Closely following the centennial of the publication of The Good Soldier, the present volume would like to engage readers of various walks of life in a lively discussion of some complex aspects of Ford’s novel. It is our hope that the reader, yet again, will embark on a fascinating journey of personal exploration and insight into this masterpiece of Modernist literature. Works Cited Barnes, Julian. “The Saddest Story.” The Guardian, 7 June 2008. Web. 11 Dec. 2012. Ford, Ford Madox. Critical Essays. Ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang. Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2002. Ford, Ford Madox. “Mr Charles Doughty” (1908) in Saunders and Stang (2002): 52–55. Ford, Ford Madox. “Mr Percival Gibbon and The Second-Class Passenger” (1913) in Saunders and Stang (2002): 118–22. Ford, Ford Madox. “Fydor Dostoevsky and The Idiot” (1914) in Saunders and Stang (2002): 126–29. Ford, Ford Madox. “On a Notice of Blast” (1915) in Saunders and Stang (2002): 182–85. Ford, Ford Madox. “France, 1915” (1915) in Saunders and Stang (2002): 170–73. Ford, Ford Madox. “A Haughty and Proud Generation” (1922) in Saunders and Stang (2002): 208–18. Ford, Ford Madox. “Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford” in The Good Soldier. London, UK: David Campbell Publishers, 1991.

chapter 1

The Good Soldier: Tragic, Comic, Ironic Joseph Wiesenfarth Abstract Beginning with a brief survey of the novel’s initial reception by critics, this paper argues that The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion is the saddest story for Ford because it is the story of human life itself. The paper also argues that the novel’s aesthetic design proposes a concealed optimism. With emphasis on Dowell’s narration, the paper discusses how The Good Soldier uses the tension between impressionism and realism in order to elaborate that optimism but also complicate it. It does not matter whether Dowell is a reliable or an unreliable narrator. It matters that Dowell shows us that one human being finds it almost impossible to understand another human being. In sum, by discussing the novel’s aesthetic design, the paper argues that while Dowell dwells in darkness, he sheds light on the shape of human life itself.

Keywords The Good Soldier – “On Impressionism,” tragedy – comedy – Cézanne

When John Lane published Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion in 1915, the reviewers were mostly hostile. They reluctantly recognized a master of style and technique – “all very cleverly done”1 – but criticized the “sex-morbid atmosphere.”2 They found adultery, madness, and suicide to be loathsome topics for public consumption: “His book would have had distinct claims to great value had he only chosen a less sordid theme,”3 said the reviewer for the Athenaeum. Others were certain that Ford’s theme had “little bearing 1 Saturday Review (Supplement); reprinted in The Good Soldier, Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Martin Stannard. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1995. 234. Theodore Dreiser was a notable exception. He thought that Ford’s was simply “a bad method” for telling a story (Stannard 231). 2 Boston Transcript (17 March 1915): 24, quoted in Stannard, 221. 3 Athenaeum (10 April 1915): 334, quoted in Stannard, 225.

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on the joys and sorrows of normal human life”; thus the novel could appeal only to “the specialist in pathology.”4 And for Ford to call Edward ­Ashburnham a “good soldier,” a title that belonged to Laurence Sterne’s Uncle Toby alone, provoked naked outrage: in Tristram Shandy “we have the good soldier,” wrote Thomas Seccombe in New Witness. “Surely the finest that lives in Fiction, and the u ­ surpation of such a title by Mr. Hueffer’s hero is nothing short of profanation.”5 Although The New York Times found that “The Good Soldier is a novel which extorts admiration,”6 Ford didn’t extort many admiring words from the critics. And Rebecca West knew why: “Indeed, this is a much, much better book than any of us deserve.”7 She knew that masterpieces are most often misunderstood. Ford could not have been surprised by the reception of his novel either. After all, from his window in the house of fiction, he saw life this way: […] Since the great majority of mankind are, on the surface, vulgar and trivial – the stuff to fill graveyards – the great majority of mankind will be easily and quickly affected by art which is vulgar and trivial. But, inasmuch as this world is a very miserable purgatory for most of us sons of men – who remain stuff with which graveyards are filled – inasmuch as horror, despair and incessant strivings are the lot of the most trivial of humanity, who endure them as a rule with commonsense and c­ heerfulness – so, if a really great master strike the note of horror, of despair, of striving, and so on, he will stir chords in the hearts of a larger number of people than those who are moved by the merely vulgar and the merely trivial. This is probably why Madame Bovary has sold more copies than any book ever published, except, of course, books purely religious. But the appeal of ­religious books is exactly similar. It may be said that the appeal of Madame Bovary is largely sexual. So it is, but it is only in countries like England and the United States that the abominable tortures of sex – or, if you will, the abominable interests of sex – are not supposed to take rank alongside of the horrors of lost ­honour, commercial ruin, or death itself. For all these things are the components of life, and each is of equal importance.8 4 5 6 7 8

Bookman 47 (July 1915): 117; quoted in Stannard, 235. “The Good Soldier.” New Witness (3 June 1915): 112–14, quoted in Stannard, 230. The New York Times Book Review (7 March 1915): 86, quoted in Stannard, 220. Daily News and Leader (1 April 1915): 6, quoted in Stannard, 224. “On Impressionism,” rpt. in Frank MacShane, ed. The Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964. 48–49.

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This passage is from Ford’s essay “On Impressionism” which was written while he was writing The Good Soldier. It can be taken as a running commentary on the novel and as the best elucidation of its subject that we can hope to have. The Good Soldier is a rendering of the “abominable tortures of sex,” of “lost honour,” “commercial ruin,” and of death itself. Horror, despair, and incessant strivings are the staples in the lives of its characters, who are the stuff to fill grave yards. A very miserable purgatory is more likely their lot than happiness; this is true of his readers too. No wonder that his epigraph to the novel is “Beati Immaculati,” the beginning of Psalm 119: “Happy are they whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord.” The Good Soldier shows how difficult it is to be happy when vulgar and trivial people – people like many of his readers, presumably, and his characters, certainly – fail to walk in the law of the Lord. When I first wrote about The Good Soldier some fifty-four years ago,9 I suggested that no matter how problematic the reliability of John Dowell as its narrator may be, his story made one thing certain: that the word “passion” in the novel’s subtitle referred not only to sexual desire but also to suffering. In that way it is like Ford’s earlier novel, A Call – it bears the subtitle The Tale of Two Passions10– which one reviewer pegged as showing us “that people are becoming too subtle now to do anything but the wrong thing in an unexpected way and at the wrong time.”11 Consequently, those two passions get beyond love and into suffering. Since first writing about The Good Soldier, I have reread that novel many times and I have also read nearly all of Ford’s eighty-one printed books as well as some of his works in manuscript. And, in the light of my reading, I have come to the conclusion that Ford wanted to present us in The Good Soldier, at the very minimum, a picture of the inescapable conditions in which we, as we strive to be something a bit more than “the stuff to fill graveyards,” try to work out our salvation. And that is one excruciating job, to say the least. Ford does this by allowing us to take two perspectives on the novel. We can read it as realists or as impressionists. As realists, we concentrate on Edward Ashburnham and his string of women as the principal subject. Then we try to determine Edward’s relation to each of these women. As impressionists, we concentrate on Dowell’s trying to sort out his impressions and interpretations of events and determine what they mean. Frequently we move from one to the other epistemological standpoint as we make our way through the novel. It is impossible not to shift our feet over and over again when faced with iterations

9 10 11

“Criticism and the Semiosis of The Good Soldier.” Modern Fiction Studies 9:1 (1963): 30–49. Ford Madox Hueffer, A Call: The Tale of Two Passions. London: Chatto & Windus, 1910. The Saturday Review (5 March 1910): 306.

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of “I don’t know” that sometimes refer to events and sometimes to Dowell’s understanding of events.12 Dowell is puzzled because he is trying to solve a “riddle”: What is a woman? And we know from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King that either you solve a riddle or you suffer the deadly consequences of a mistaken solution.13 Florence was a riddle; “but then, all other women are riddles” too.14 Are women then “decent” or are they “harlot[s]” (gs 14)? Depending on how you as a reader answer this question, you determine the genre of The Good Soldier. If women are harlots, then men are stallions, and the world is “a prison full of screaming ­hysterics” (11). Edward is a tragic hero trying to overcome his animal passions while ­Leonora is a villain who alternately thwarts him and pimps for him; a typical tragic ending of madness and suicide for Nancy and Edward concludes this reading of the riddle. If, on the other hand, women are decent, then men are eunuchs, and life is a “minuet de la cour” (gs 10). Leonora is a comic heroine and Edward a villain giving way to sexual desires that destroy him; a typical comedic ending of regeneration through marriage and children for Leonora concludes this reading of the riddle. So depending on your point of view, Edward and Leonora’s story can be either tragic or comic. If your point of view shifts now and then, it can be both. But Dowell’s story is certainly ironic. He is the self-deprecator who becomes the total loser: he begins the story as a eunuch and nursemaid, and he ends the story as a eunuch and nursemaid. Having suffered greatly, he, in the end, understands men and women only a little bit better than he did when he began: “Who in this world knows anything of any other heart – or of his own?” (gs 182). Dowell, for instance, cannot determine the reason for his disliking Leonora as he brings his story to a conclusion:

12

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Ann Barr Snitow describes the problem of having a sure footing in The Good Soldier from a different perspective. Speaking of Dowell, she writes that “first he is reliable judge, then execrable fool, then properly self-deprecating ironist, then condescending failure. All these partially true images of him must constantly be vying with each other in the reader’s mind, a different one coming uppermost with each twist of the narrative.” Ford Madox Ford and the Voice of Uncertainty. Baton Rouge and London: University of Louisiana Press, 1984, 166. For a complete discussion of riddles, see André Jolles, Einfache Formen. Trans. André ­Marie Buguet as Formes simples. Paris: Seuil, 1972, 103–20. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion, The World’s Classics. Ed. Thomas C. Moser. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990 – henceforth gs; p. 29. All references will be given parenthetically within the body of the text.

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I cannot conceal from myself the fact that I now dislike Leonora. ­Without a doubt I am jealous of Rodney Bayham. But I don’t know whether it is merely a jealousy arising from the fact that I desired myself to p ­ ossess ­Leonora or whether it is because to her were sacrificed the only two ­persons that I have ever loved – Edward Ashburnham and Nancy ­Ruffford. (290) He is also unable to improve his own situation: “So here I am very much where I started thirteen years ago” (272). Whereas Dowell’s struggle to improve his own situation by understanding the human heart may be deemed admirable, its result is certainly not enviable: “I only know that I am alone – horribly alone” (11). Well, it is all over. Not one of us has got what he really wanted. Leonora wanted Edward, and she has got Rodney Bayham, a pleasant enough short of sheep. Florence wanted Branshaw, and it is I who have bought it from Leonora. I didn’t really want it; what I wanted mostly was to cease being a nurse-attendant. Well, I am a nurse-attendant. Edward wanted Nancy Rufford and I got her. Only she is mad. It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me. (272–73) Is it also beyond us? It need not be if we understand what Dowell does not. That for Ford the underlying riddle is not woman – various as she may be – but life itself. Ford wrote The Good Soldier so that any reader could see that life, at any moment or succession of moments, can be tragic, comic, and ironic depending on one’s point of view. First there is this: The villains – for obviously Edward and the girl were villains – have been punished by suicide and madness. The heroine – the perfectly normal, virtuous and slightly deceitful heroine – has become the happy wife of a perfectly normal, virtuous and slightly-deceitful husband. (gs 289) Then there is this: Leonora, as I have said, was the perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in normal circumstances her desires were those of the woman who is needed by society. She desired children, decorum, an establishment; she desired to avoid waste, she desired to keep up appearances. She was

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utterly and entirely normal even in her utterly undeniable beauty. But I don’t mean to say that she acted perfectly normally in their perfectly abnormal situation. All the world was mad around her and she herself, agonised, took on the complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked; of the villain of the piece. (275–76) From one point of view, Edward and Nancy are the villains; from another, a maddened Leonora is the villain. And even though Edward and Nancy “were splendid personalities” (gs 268), Leonora outlasts them. Why? Because “society must go on” (291). Dowell sees that society shapes human life, but Ford sees the shape of life itself. A novel by Ford shows us what he sees as the basic shapes of life in the way that a painting by Cézanne shows us what he sees as the basic shapes of life. As Ford wrote in Provençe, “If … you lived in Provençe…you could afford to look at life and make patterns out of it – as did Cézanne at ­Aix-en-Provençe” (225).15 As Michael Hoog writes, a typical painting by Cézanne will have m ­ ultiple points of view, tiers of planes, hard uniform light, and people and objects “simplified into geometric lines:” See in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, putting everything in proper perspective, so that each side of an object or a plane is directed toward a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, that is a section of nature, or if you prefer, of the spectacle which the pater omnipotens aeterne deus spreads before our eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth.16 Whether Cézanne is painting a landscape, a still life, or a portrait, it does not matter. These basic shapes structure what he is doing because they are the forms of life itself. Whether Ford is writing a novel, a memoir, or an essay, his basic shapes also structure them. They transcend Edward Ashburnham and his problems with women and John Dowell and his problems without them. These very basic things are: differences in family and upbringing; the imperious nature of sexual desire and its different manifestations in men and 15

16

Provence from Minstrels to the Machine. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1935. When Janice Biala painted Ford in Toulon in 1932, she showed him reading a book about Cézanne. See ­Joseph Wiesenfarth, Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, 138, for a black and white reproduction of this painting. Michael Hoog, Cézanne: Father of 20th-Century Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, 91, 98.

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women; ­manners, money, and class; the difficulty of knowing something about anything; and the volatility of the mixture of these things in the emotionally intense relationship of marriage. The Good Soldier presents this mixture to John Dowell for him to sort out, but he is precisely the wrong person to do this job. He is an American from Philadelphia who tells the story of an Englishman, his Anglo-Irish wife, and his Connecticut Yankee mistress. Dowell is a Quaker who is trying to understand how an Anglican is working out his differences with a Roman Catholic who hates the Protestant who is bewitching her husband. Dowell is a rich man from a capitalist society who has no responsibilities. He confronts a landed aristocrat devoted to a collectivist ideal who has a wife from an impoverished family that has imbued her with an individualist ethic. Dowell is a passionless man trying to sort out the lives of intensely passionate people. He is someone who seeks to tell us what he knows even as he tells us “it is all a darkness” (16). Dowell does nonetheless show us vividly that the lives of these people whom he so little understands are shaped by their birth, class, money, religion, tradition, gender, and sexual drives. They are people driven by instinctual needs within a society that is so organized to contain those needs that the tension in their lives becomes unbearable and they torture each other, go mad, and kill themselves. And the point at which all these forces meet most destructively is ­marriage where gender differences, family traditions, money problems, religious imperatives, and sexual desires starkly manifest themselves as a microcosm of the human condition. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion is the saddest story for Ford because it is his story of human life itself. It does not matter whether Dowell is a reliable or an unreliable narrator. It matters that Dowell shows us that one human being finds it almost impossible to understand another human being. That is the most basic fact of life that Dowell lives with and cannot transcend. What matters, further, is that while Dowell dwells in darkness he sheds light on the shape of human life itself. We can say of Ford’s novel what Ford said of François Villon’s poetry: “Cela vous donne une fière idée de l’homme”17 (“That gives you a spirited idea of man”). And because it gives us such a striking idea of what it means to be human, The Good Soldier, like all supreme masterpieces, “will always stimulate”18 – will always tease us out of thought.19 17 18 19

Ford attributes these words to Maubougon in The March of Literature from Confucius’ Day to Our Own. New York: Dial Press, 1938, 440. In discussing Villon’s poetry, Ford writes that “the supreme tragic masterpiece … will never be harrowing; it will always stimulate” (The March of Literature, 438). Parts of this essay are drawn from a review of the Norton Critical Edition of The Good Soldier that I wrote for Review, ed. James O. Hoge, vol. 19 (1997): 65–83.

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Works Cited Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier, Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Martin Stannard. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1995. Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion, The World’s Classics. Ed. Thomas C. Moser. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Ford, Ford Madox. The March of Literature from Confucius’ Day to Our Own. New York: Dial Press, 1938. Hoog, Michael. Cézanne: Father of 20th-Century Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994. Hueffer, Ford Madox. A Call: The Tale of Two Passions. London: Chatto & Windus, 1910. Jolles, André. Einfache Formen. Trans. André Marie Buguet as Formes simples. Paris: Seuil, 1972. MacShane, Frank (ed). The Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964. Snitow, Ann Barr. Ford Madox Ford and the Voice of Uncertainty. Baton Rouge and ­London: University of Louisiana Press, 1984. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. Review of The Norton Critical Edition of The Good Soldier. Review, ed. James O. Hoge, vol. 19 (1997): 65–83. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. “Criticism and the Semiosis of The Good Soldier.” Modern Fiction Studies 9:1 (1963): 30–49.

chapter 2

Tory-Papists and Ford’s The Good Soldier Timothy Sutton Abstract This essay discusses Ford’s frustration with the religious and political views of the English and how it influences his portrayal of the English in The Good Soldier. The essay examines Ford’s political writings and memoirs in which he explicitly distinguishes between English “Roman Catholics,” strict dogmatic moralists like Hilaire Belloc who viewed Catholicism in pseudo-Calvinistic terms, and “Tory-Papists” like himself, who embraced the influence of European culture on Catholic aesthetic sensibility and saw the Church as an inclusive spiritual family. The Good Soldier represents Ford’s attempt to explore what happens to a society that has no sense of Catholicism and that the ­narrator of The Good Soldier, Dowell, a culturally and spiritually obtuse American, gives voice to Ford’s inherited Catholic sympathies.

Keywords Belloc – Catholicism – The English Review – Parade’s End – The Transatlantic Review – The Good Soldier



Catholic Ford before The Good Soldier

Few critics consider Ford Madox Ford a Catholic novelist in the vein of Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene. Ford would have been just as uncomfortable with the designation as was Greene or Waugh. Yet Ford’s major works – The Fifth Queen, The Good Soldier, and Parade’s End – are no less concerned with the social dynamics of English Catholicism than Waugh’s most heralded novels, and Ford embraced his Catholic identity more willfully than Greene ever did. Ford’s last mistress, Janice Biala, probably articulated what many critics ­already suspected when she claimed: “I don’t remember any talk about religion. It didn’t play any role in our life” (Saunders 357). Nevertheless, she also admitted Ford “believed in Catholicism philosophically” (Saunders 357). For a man of Ford’s historical sensitivity to insist on professing a faith even ­“philosophically”

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deserves more critical attention than it presently has received. Ford certainly conceived of himself as a genuine Catholic, a fact confirmed by his both jubilant and defensive reaction to meeting Pope Pius x in 1911: He was the kind and dear head of my family – of my own family. I was listening. I never felt so at home. We are a great family, we Catholics, and I was in the private room of the head of us all, and I had a right to be there, and we all had the right to the blessing of the good and kindly head of our family, who will surely not refuse it to them that be of good will. saunders 356

The passage summarizes Ford’s Catholicism: he embraced its inclusiveness and emphasized the importance of “good will” rather than a life of holiness, but he simultaneously maintained a somewhat defensive insistence on his belonging. Rarely did Ford lay claim to any part of his identity so unabashedly. It is my contention that a thorough understanding of how Ford envisioned his Catholic identity will yield a great deal of insight into his critical view of English religion and culture, particularly as expressed in his most acclaimed novel, The Good Soldier. In order to trace how that novel became a depository for Ford’s frustrations with the English and their approach to religion, it is ­necessary to first recapture the circumstances that surrounded Ford’s conversion and examine his cultural writings concerning the English in the years before he wrote The Good Soldier. It is also necessary to address the fact that Ford was a grand liar – or at least a stylist of the truth. He believed a writer should not convey facts, plots or morality to his reader but rather should reveal his “impression” of a moment, sentiment, belief, or relationship. If that portrayal required an exaggeration, a reordering of certain events or circumstances, or an addition or subtraction of seemingly vital information, then Ford advocated making the adjustment. Ford thought these amendments created a more accurate impression than the strict truth: “I have for facts the most profound contempt. I try to give you the spirit of an age, of a town, of a movement. This cannot be done with facts.”1 Few would have difficulty with Ford’s use of what he calls “impressionism” if he confined its use to his fiction, but he employed it in writing history, political tracts, biography and memoir as well. In fact, Ford’s penchant for misrepresentation has led many critics to dismiss his sporadic religious professions as imaginative visions of a self-portrait that likely came nowhere near reality. Yet Ford’s most recent biographer, Max Saunders, convincingly argues that dismissing Ford’s claims because he 1 Ford, Memories and Impressions, xvii.

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­ isrepresents the truth in non-fictive mediums serves only to “belittle the m writing, by seeing it only as neurotic distortion rather than conscious elaboration and transformation of reality” (9). Allen Tate also has insisted famously that “Ford himself must be approached as a character in a novel, and that novel a novel by Ford” (qtd in Saunders 1996: 440). In his own imagination, Ford considered his Catholic identity as an important part of his persona; therefore, any critical assessment of his work must consider his faith seriously, even if he practiced it only intermittently. Ford’s faith also explains why he never considered himself authentically English. He converted to the traditional Catholic faith of the Hueffer family while visiting his father’s relatives in Germany in 1892. Unlike nationalistic Catholics in Ireland or Poland, German Catholics like those in Ford’s family were similar to the recusant English Catholics in that they attempted to keep their faith separate from their domestic politics. Both Francis Hueffer, Ford’s father and one time music critic of The Times, and his maternal grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, stressed the importance of moving “above and beyond national rivalries” in religion, politics and art (Saunders 18). This catholic ­attitude influenced Ford’s formation of both the English Review and Transatlantic ­Review, in which he desired to create transcontinental journals that represented young European writers. But it also explains a primary reason for his ­becoming and his insistence on identifying himself as Catholic throughout his life. Ford undoubtedly loved England, but the Anglican faith was too nationalistic to complement his conception of the Western world. In England and the English (1907), he outlines this difficulty with England’s Protestant faiths: “[S]peaking broadly, we may say that the simple faith, the simple, earnest intolerance of small or large knots of allied worshipers – the Protestant-Puritan spirit, is precisely ‘provincial.’”2 Consequently, Ford consistently resisted concentrated “alliances” in his own faith as well as in his work; for him a valid religion, like a valid literature, must transcend provincialism. Ford conceived of faith as something that should not only transcend national boundaries, but historical ones as well. His conversion tied him to his past, and it was inspired in part by what he called the ­Tory-Papist-Socialist-Anarchism of his beloved grandfather, Ford Madox Brown (Saunders 28). While Ford never adopted the Socialist-Anarchist aspect of the equation, he certainly embraced the Tory-Papist label. Ford’s spiritual and political views were also influenced by his aunt, Christina Rossetti, and other Pre-Raphaelite artists in Madox Brown’s circle. In addition to providing a valuable aesthetic influence, Ford’s 2 Ford, England and the English, New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1907 – henceforth ee; p. 301. All references will be given parenthetically within the body of the text.

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association with the Pre-Raphaelites gave him an appreciation for the historical culture and art of continental Catholicism. The Catholic conception of an intercontinental community that transcends time was also attractive to a man with Ford’s sentimentality. In fact, the lives of the saints often reflect Ford’s “impressionistic” model of constructing narratives: where no information is available, tales of great sacrifices, miracles and visions often surface in order to convey holiness. A continental Catholic would not be concerned with the historical veracity of hagiography, but would seek to be entertained and inspired (probably in that order) by the legend. Ford’s sentimentality often led him into certain conceptual contradictions regarding his faith. For example, while he believed religion should transcend national boundaries, he also thought all men – including those born into the “provincial” Protestant faith – should uphold their inherited cultural and spiritual traditions. The nature of his Catholic conversion therefore suggests that Ford considered himself more culturally German than English, or, as Ford himself explained, he was “not of the English manner born” (ee 336) Though he was raised in England, the German identity of the Hueffer family dominated the culture of Ford’s childhood environment. In an attempt to establish his German identity, Ford went so far as half-heartedly to seek German citizenship shortly after his reception into the Church.3 However, Ford quickly abandoned the idea of becoming a German citizen, professed his loyalty to the empire, and wrote When Blood is Their Argument in response to the brewing militarism in Germany before the Great War. Yet while at times he could be virulently nationalistic, Ford still never considered himself authentically English, primarily because of his ancestor’s culture and religion. Because Ford was comfortable with paradox, even contradiction, he did not agonize over the conflict between his newly adopted Catholic faith and support for the British Empire. After his conversion, Ford openly confessed, I consider there are only two organisations that are nearly perfect for their disparate functions. They are the Church of Rome and His Brittanic Majesty’s Army. I would cheerfully offer my life for either if it would do them any good and supposing them not arrayed the one against the other.4 3 Saunders recounts Ford’s brief flirtation with becoming a German citizen. Apparently, Ford’s visit to Westminster Abbey in 1911 left him proclaiming “[T]his is the very heart of England; this is the very heart of Britain; this is the heart of hearts of the Empire,” and he took no more steps towards renouncing his English citizenship (Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, 340). 4 Ford, Return to Yesterday, New York: Horace Liverright, Inc., 1932 – henceforth ry; p. 367. All references will be given parenthetically within the body of the text.

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Not surprisingly, Ford does not explain which side he might favor in the event of the hypothetical conflict. Despite the problematic political implications of his dual loyalties, Ford felt he could remain emotionally constant to both the Catholic Church and the British Empire. And one’s emotional constitution was important to Ford because he believed it helped provide the foundation of a people’s religious faith and artistic views. For example, in England and the English he argues that, due to a religious and emotional error, “The Englishman has sacrificed the arts – which are concerned with expressions of emotion” (297) Accordingly, it is along emotional lines that Ford most virulently criticized and distanced himself from the English people. In England and the English, Ford unequivocally stated “The defects of the Englishman’s qualities are … simply that [he] feels very deeply and reasons very little” (293) This fault forces the English to value a composed exterior that conceals their true feelings and prevents them from ever making changes in their lives and relationships that would be beneficial to them. They maintain this social grace “at the cost of sufferings that may be life-long” (ee 294). According to Ford, the only potentially redeeming quality of the English on an emotional level is their ability to simply “muddle through” moral conflicts. In England and the English, Ford maintains that, when faced with his own moral failure, a true Englishman “will protest, and it will be true: ‘This is not the real I; this is not the nominal I; I am, really, a man of high standards. This is an accident that, set against my whole record, does not really count’” (343). While Ford condoned such moral leniency in the English, he lamented their need for a firm resolution that answered all political and religious conflicts. The Englishman’s insistence on “high standards” prevented him from embracing a spirit of religious tolerance and envisioning a politically and artistically diverse but unified Europe. These ideas were at the forefront of Ford’s mind when he founded the English Review, in which he continued to develop his view that the Catholic faith predisposed men to a critical open-mindedness in art and literature. He eventually defined this concept as “the critical attitude.” Ford intended the English Review to promote the “catholicity” of European literature and embody “the critical attitude,” a phrase he later used to title his collection of writings published in the journal during its short existence. He founded the journal under “a splendid, forlorn hope” that it might influence the English’s ability to approach art critically; but he later admitted that this transformation was impossible and complained that “an English Review is a contradiction in terms.”5 Ford explicitly wanted the journal to reflect a ­Roman Catholic critical standpoint, an approach Ford defined in opposition to the 5 Ford, The Critical Attitude, London: Duckworth & Co., 1911 – henceforth ca; p. 4. All references will be given parenthetically within the body of the text.

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critical practices of a typical Englishman who, because he is Protestant, looks at his faith and art in too principled terms and thereby opens the door for easy compromise. Ford observed that the English derive “teachings from their birth” from the Bible and by these general “standards measure good and evil,” whereas “Roman Catholics and other free-thinkers approach the Bible with an attitude more critical, and find in it barbarisms, crudenesses, disproportions, and revelations of sickening cruelties” (ca 7). The passage likewise stems from Ford’s emotional critique of the English, who as good Protestants try to clean up the contradictions and ugliness not only in the Bible but in life and art, while the Catholic embraces the uncertainty and even the violence of religion and life. Through the publications in the Review, Ford wanted to promote this more realistic, critical, and in his eyes, more Catholic view of the world.6 Despite Ford’s self-assurance that the journal helped propel the career of many artists who would become seminal in the modernist movement in England (and it did accomplish that), the journal failed to achieve Ford’s grand objective of changing the English’s simple-mindedness in terms of art and religion. He bitterly ascribed the journal’s failure in less than two years to the fact that “nothing will make the Englishman adopt a critical attitude,” which Ford also believed was the reason the Englishman “has founded three hundred and forty-seven religions. And each of these religions is founded on a compromise. That is what the Englishman does to, that is how he floors – the critical attitude” (ca 5). The “compromise” is enacted each time a Protestant creates a new, more simplistic and allegedly pure form of the Christian faith because the previous creed still contains the “crudenesses” and “disproportions” of life – the very things that Ford believed made religion and art interesting and relevant. This statement also highlights Ford’s notion that religion, with its cultural and emotional influence, plays the central formative role in a society’s attitudes towards nearly all philosophy and art. Ford’s explanation for the failure of the English Review reveals the extent to which he believed his artistic vision was dependent on religious conceptions and loyalties, even if most of his English audience was not conscious of its prejudices and ignorance. After the failure of the Review, Ford knew writing any direct apology of his Catholic outlook would be fruitless in a nation that cared less about religion than at any previous point in its history, and he was not concerned with the 6 Ford’s views on politics as expressed in the journal were commensurate with his religious and aesthetic aims. For example, he explains that his editorial positions at the English Review would uphold “a greater comprehension of international characteristics” in both art and politics (Qtd. in Peppis, Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde, 25). Not surprisingly, the English Review ultimately reads as a non-partisan literary journal rather than one reflecting “progressive Toryism.”

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dogmatic beliefs of religion anyway. Ford was, however, very concerned with demonstrating that Catholic culture was not only compatible with, but a necessary component of, his artistic and (less importantly) political vision. Since The English Review failed to articulate that vision, Ford attempted a different strategy in writing The Good Soldier. The novel represents Ford’s attempt to explore and lament what happens to a society that has no sense of Catholicism and no grasp of “the critical attitude.” Throughout The Good Soldier, Ford manifests his frustration with the Protestants in England who “floor the critical attitude,” as well as with the pretentious non-modernist English Catholic converts of the twentieth century. He advocates a more lenient and culturally sensitive version of Catholicism in England. Ultimately, Ford uses the novel to delineate his notion of the proper way to practice Catholicism in the twentieth century and thereby implicitly justify his own approach to the faith.

“Papist” Heroism in The Good Soldier

The Good Soldier is a model work of impressionism in which the American narrator, John Dowell, attempts to make sense of the numerous lies, affairs, and deaths that have marked almost a decade of interaction between him and his American wife, Florence Hurlbird, and the superficially model English couple, Edward and Leonora Ashburnham. From a critical standpoint, Dowell’s ­impressions – and the novel as a whole – have frequently and accurately been read as a nostalgic apology for Toryism or even feudalism, a reflection on the complexity and destruction of sexuality in the modern world, or a harsh criticism of pragmatic and aesthetically deprived modern society; in fact, Dowell engages in some of this critical work himself. But Ford structures Dowell’s narrative in a manner that connects each of these themes to Protestant and ­secular culture’s triumph over Catholic culture and faith in Europe. As expected, this victory occurs not on a doctrinal plane, but on an emotional, aesthetic, and sexual one. Ironically, the Tory-Papist hero of the novel is none other than Edward, who, to all initial appearances, is the classic Englishman, complete with severe ­emotional reserve and an impeccable sense of social duty. Because Dowell’s narrative unfolds with a fragmented chronology in keeping with his desire to allow his memory to guide him as if he were speaking to a listener beside a fire, it is initially difficult to determine that it is to Edward and not Leonora that Dowell will offer his sympathy and loyalty. In the opening pages, Dowell seems preoccupied with the Ashburnham’s Englishness and how it has prevented him from making accurate judgments of the couple. He insists: “Six

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months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of the English heart” and notes that the Ashburnhams were “what in England it is the custom to call ‘quite good people.’”7 These observances initially sound innocuous, but Dowell eventually perceives that this superficial English composure has not only clouded his eyes from Edward’s numerous affairs and Leonora’s painstaking and ruthless attempts to control her husband, but it has prevented the Ashburnhams from discerning resolutions for their silent conflicts. As the fissures in the couple’s relationship become evident to Dowell years later, he begins to make accusations against “the modern English habit of taking everyone for granted,” a trait that clouds meaningful communication and the possibility of self-knowledge (gs 36) The same problems exist between Dowell and his New England-born wife. Florence affects to have a heart problem to avoid sexual relations with her husband and intends to use Dowell in order to achieve her dream of settling on an English estate. She wants to return permanently to Fordingbridge in E ­ ngland, where the Hurlbird family was established until 1688. And while Dowell eventually comes to despise his wife for lying and cheating on him with a young attendant and then with Edward, thereby damaging the Ashburnham’s marriage beyond repair, he never consciously notes that Florence embodies many of the culturally English traits he finds most intolerable. For example, Dowell has to keep the conversation off topics that involve “what the English call ‘things’ – off love, poverty, crime, religion, and the rest of it” (gs 22) Like the English, Florence wants to avoid these unsettling topics and only pretends to care about religion in order to draw a line between her and Edward, who are both Protestants, and the Irish Catholic Leonora. Many of Ford’s criticisms of the English in The Good Soldier were drawn from personal experiences he recounted in his memoirs and social commentaries. For example, Florence’s fear of “things” is derived from a passage in England and the English in which Ford recalls when an Englishwoman warned him against speaking to her daughter about “things.” He explains, I did not know just what ‘things’ were … Nowadays I know very well what ‘things’ are; they include, in fact, religious topics, questions of relations of the sexes; the conditions of poverty-stricken districts – every subject from which one can digress into anything moving (ee 336)

7 Ford, The Good Soldier, Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2003 – henceforth gs; pp. 13; 14. All references will be given parenthetically within the body of the text.

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Not coincidentally, these also are the three matters that most concern ­Edward Ashburnham. In addition to transforming into an emotional Catholic (a process I will describe later), Edward embarks on a never-ending search for the woman who will completely satisfy his need for emotional identification, and he is ready to ruin himself financially or publicly to assist those in need. Through Dowell, Ford implies that if Edward were permitted to follow his d­ esires in each of these matters, he might help create a tolerable world. Of course, this culture would have its “barbarisms, crudenesses, and ­disproportions,” but those unavoidable problems constitute the meaningful essence of humanity. In trying to conceal them, the English only prolong the agony of socio-cultural instability and inhibit the resolutions that might bring happiness. This sense of social fragmentation is one of the most prevalent motifs throughout Dowell’s narrative and points to the culturally shattering effect of a people who have no sense of the critical attitude. Like Ford after the failure of the English Review, Dowell has given up trying to fit the broken pieces back together, and he can only marvel that the cultural fabric with so much potential for beauty is rotting. Even in his prefatory frame for the story, Dowell ponders his confusion: “Permanence? Stability! I can’t believe it’s gone” (gs 15). Despite his sense of desperation, Dowell does manage to identify the much less self-conscious Edward as the embodiment of the values Dowell (and Ford) believe might preserve his ideal of a Papist-feudalistic society. In accordance with Ford’s sense of irony, Edward is the unlikeliest of heroes, since in his manners and emotions he possesses “all the virtues that are usually accounted English” and his very face “in the wonderful English fashion, expressed nothing whatever” (123, 28). Nevertheless, Edward’s excessive sentimentality and his feudalistic historical-political views earn him Dowell’s devotion. Unlike Dowell, Edward is a compassionate man with “a sentimental yearning” for “all children, puppies, and the feeble generally” (gs 30). But what Dowell identifies behind this sentimentality is Edward’s instinct to preserve, and preservation is precisely what Dowell seeks when confronted with the ubiquitous decay of English (or even Western) society. Dowell insists Edward was not “a promiscuous libertine” but simply a “sentimentalist” who serves as the “painstaking guardian” of society’s weakest members, from drunkards to delinquent tenants. This role sometimes leads Edward to express too much affection, such as in the “Kilsyte case” when he kisses a crying young servant girl on a train not to make a sexual advance, but because “he had desired rather to comfort her” (18, 51) Dowell judges these promiscuities as excusable aftereffects of Edward’s generosity. For Dowell, Edward’s value lies in the fact that he represents a political, cultural, and religious remnant of the past. In many ways, Edward embodies what

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Ford wished an Englishman could be, but his downfall suggests that Ford knew the English could never tolerate such a man. The English were too emotionally reserved, too insensitive to history and art, and too practical in economic and religious matters to preserve a meaningful sense of culture. Other artists and intellectuals issued a similar diagnosis of modern society’s ills in the first ­decades of the twentieth century. Specifically, Max Weber’s 1904 sociological treatise, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, represents the most well-known articulation of the theory that modern man’s difficulties stemmed from religious change. Although Weber never converted to Catholicism, he regarded the Reformation as the key event that propelled the alienating economic and social systems of the early twentieth century. He even blamed the Reformation for causing man to experience “a feeling of unprecedented loneliness” owing mostly to the fact that, [In] the most important thing in his life, his eternal salvation, he was forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him from eternity. No one could help him. No priest, for the chosen one can understand the word of God only in his own heart. No ­sacraments … they are not the means to the attainment of grace, but only the subjective externa subsidia of faith. No Church … even no God. weber 104

Weber blames Calvinistic Protestantism specifically, with its emphasis on predestination and its pseudo-monastic approach to social and economic life, for fueling the West’s depersonalized modern economic machine.8 Of course, Edward is incapable of articulating Weber’s assessment of the West’s cultural decline, though he certainly senses this loss on an emotional level. Dowell further surmises that Florence and Leonora cannot comprehend the beauty and effectiveness of Edward’s “own theory – the feudal effort of an over-lord doing his best by his dependents, the dependents meanwhile doing their best for the over-lord” (119). Dowell even imagines Edward explaining to La Dolciquita –another of his mistresses – that “salvation can only be found in true love and the feudal system” (130). The English feudal system, which significantly thrived in the medieval Catholic period, would allow Edward to treat his tenants like they were part of his family and participants in a larger 8 Weber frames his text with his theory of “The rule of Calvinism,” which extends from sixteenth century to England and New England in the seventeenth century. According to Weber, Calvinism comprises “the most absolutely unbearable form of ecclesiastical control of the individual which could possibly exist” (Weber, Protestant Ethic, 37).

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social and religious project. For Edward, therein lies salvation. In accordance with Weber’s conclusions in The Protestant Ethic, Ford uses Edward to suggest that the modern economic system, which contains no religious foundation and in which the landowners view their tenants as mere cogs in a financial machine, underscores the lack of community and substantial communication that ­Edward despises but the English value. By creating a sentimental character with a strong sympathy for the feudal system, Ford could more seamlessly portray Edward as a figure increasingly drawn to the Catholic Church. This process can be inferred through D ­ owell’s narration, but Dowell himself does not initially seem to find it remarkably significant, especially in light of his later preoccupation with the harmful ­effect Catholicism has on Leonora. Edward’s instinct for cultural preservation leads him to propose building a Catholic chapel for his Irish Catholic wife just after their marriage, a suggestion Leonora –thinking economically and not s­ entimentally – declines because she can easily drive to a nearby parish. Dowell also recalls that Edward was willing to allow any prospective female children in the family to be Catholic like their mother. However, in a decision that reflects Ford’s own religious opinions, the boys must remain Anglican to preserve the family’s spiritual tradition. In a fascinating twist, however, Edward himself “was perfectly ready to become a Romanist” and rather regrets that Leonora’s relatives did not try to ­convert him (gs 120). Even Dowell, although moderately uncomfortable with religious topics, confesses that Edward “was quite ready to become an emotional Catholic” (117). Edward’s identification with Catholicism grows stronger after he falls in love with the young Catholic, Nancy. Nancy has lived with the Ashburnham’s since her childhood, and her friendship with Edward develops into an intimate affair that is never sexually consummated. Edward’s ­emotional devotion to Nancy inspires his sentimental attachment to Catholicism. A ­ fter one particularly happy night together that ends without physical intimacy, Edward’s yearning for Nancy causes him to weep “convulsively” while holding “out before him a little image of the blessed virgin” (110) The statue represents the beauty and joy he might possess if he did not have to preserve his public image and pretend to love his wife; moreover, it signifies the freedom of being a Papist and not an English gentleman. Ford depicts Edward as an emotional Papist trapped inside the skin of a calculating, reserved Englishman, and it is not presumptuous to suggest that Ford felt something of the same about his own life after the failure the English R ­ eview and the resultant rejection of his religious and cultural views. Edward is a ­soldier committed to the British Empire’s expansion, and he therefore defends the two organizations Ford found most worthy of self-sacrifice, “the Church of

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Rome and His Brittanic Majestey’s Army.” Of course, Edward must, like Ford, renounce or ignore the legalistic side of the Church and the aggressively imperial nature of the British Army, but those were not the elements of faith and nation that inspired Ford’s devotion. Unfortunately, the social parameters of English society, fiercely guarded by Leonora, thwart Edward’s Papist development. The torture of this experience is what leads to Edward’s suicide.

“Roman Catholic” Antagonists

While Dowell’s professed loyalty to Edward increases dramatically as he reconstructs the narrative, his opinion of Leonora declines rapidly. It is easy to forget at the conclusion of Dowell’s narration that one of his first comments about Leonora professes a deep commitment: “I loved Leonora always and, to-day, I would very cheerfully lay down my life, what is left of it, in her service” (gs 33) But as he makes sense of Leonora’s destructiveness, Dowell pegs her as a “woman of strong, cold conscience, like all English Catholics” who no longer loves her unfaithful husband but remains with him in order to win “a victory for all wives and for her Church” (53, 148–49). The passage follows the (moderately consistent) distinction Ford began to make after his conversion between open-minded “Papists” and ruthless “Roman Catholics.” He predictably ­employed the difference between these approaches to the same religion in his art. For example, in Ford’s 1911 essay “On Impressionism,” he explained that an artist must “adopt a frame of mind, less Catholic possibly, but certainly more Papist” when seeking to earn sympathy with his audience (274). A “­Papist” for Ford was a cultural Catholic who still professed the faith and believed in its potency as a transcendental answer to the problems of modernity, but did not judge others according to their religious orthodoxy or ability to attain personal sanctification.9 Ford implies that the “Roman Catholics” were legalists like so many English Catholics who treated their faith as if it was simply another sect in the innumerable, culturally vacant forms of English Christianity or who viewed the Roman religion as an elitist club open only to those able to follow its strict dogmatic tenets. 9 Ford regularly used the distinction between “Roman Catholics” and “Papists,” as a marker of the reasons they professed the Catholic faith. For example, in Ford’s “Literary Portrait” of Thomas Hardy, he recounts meeting a group at Hardy’s house consisting of “a Cambridge professor of classics … two lady novelists – one, like our host, an atheist of the eighties; one a Roman Catholic” and a “Servian representative of the Press … like myself for that matter … a Papist” (Ford, The Ford Madox Ford Reader, 169).

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Ford singled out Hilaire Belloc as a typical “Roman Catholic” whose pretentious faith bothered Ford immensely. Ford remembers meeting Belloc and G.K. Chesterton at a political dinner and finding the former “filled with all the woes of the world” (ry 369). Belloc supposedly chastised a member of the party, crying: “Our Lord! What do you know about Our Lord? Our Lord was a gentleman” (368). Such a comment would instantly make Ford defensive, even if it was not directed at him. Ford expresses his distaste for Belloc’s judgmental attitude by ironically asserting, “Heaven forbid that I should set myself down as good a Papist as Mr. Belloc, but I dislike to think of myself as a worse” (367). For a man whose attraction to Catholicism centered on its inclusiveness, Ford revolted against Belloc’s demanding style of faith and rhetoric of exclusiveness. Ford claims to have admired some aspects of Belloc’s works, and the two would later meet regularly with G.K. Chesterton, who was less brash but just as definitive about his religious views as Belloc. But Ford said conspicuously little about either figure (collectively and derisively called “Chesterbelloc” by George Bernard Shaw); despite the fact that they were Ford’s English Catholic contemporaries and held some of Ford’s romantic economic views – Belloc and Chesterton tirelessly advocated for the institution of a Distributist ­economic system in England that was similar to Edward Ashburnham’s anachronistic pseudo-feudalism – Ford kept his distance from their extremely conservative Catholic beliefs. Ford’s disagreements with Belloc and Chesterton were not only economic and religious but also aesthetic. Both Belloc and Chesterton practiced a rhetoric of certainty that was antithetical to Ford’s Impressionistic and Tory-Papist project. In particular, Belloc’s faith left no room for questioning, and his polemical writing was condescending to his opponents at its friendliest. Because he viewed Catholicism primarily as a system of doctrines and paid too little attention to its emotional and cultural value, a self-righteous Catholic like Belloc could not write The Good Soldier; it took a nostalgic Papist such as Ford to do so. As The Good Soldier unfolds, Leonora becomes a female manifestation of what Ford condemned in pious Catholics like Belloc. Leonora has no sense of her religion’s emotional and artistic wealth. Therefore, she cannot appreciate private chapels or tacky, windowsill Virgin Mary statues. Even Dowell, who continually insists on his religious ignorance, comments on the Protestantlike behavior of English Catholics: “I suppose that Papists in England are even technically Nonconformists. Continental Papists are a dirty, jovial and unscrupulous crew” (gs 53). Of course, Irish Catholics could be moralistic also, but at least the faith of most Irish Catholic laypersons was romantically tied to the desire for Irish independence. Contrary to this stance, the Irish Leonora is too concerned with maximizing the profitability of Edward’s estates and

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d­ esperately trying to protect the couple’s public image after each of his affairs to be concerned with a matter as romantic as Irish nationalism or religious persecution. However, Ford subtly and misleadingly suggests otherwise in the crucial scene in which Florence brings the two couples to Marburg to see a Protestant document signed by Luther, Zwingli, and other central figures in the Reformation, outlining their common anti-Catholic principles. Leonora insists that this document is the source of all modern ills and runs from the room exclaiming to Dowell: “Don’t you see that that’s the cause of the whole miserable affair; of the whole sorrow of the world? And of the eternal damnation of you and me and of them” (gs 43). Her violent response might imply Ford’s sentimental sympathy, but the truth is that Leonora is not taking an emotional public stance for her religion but responding to Florence’s flaunting of her affair with Edward. Although the melodrama of the scene focuses on Leonora, Florence initiates all actions until that final moment. There is no previous evidence that Florence lives her Protestant faith with any seriousness, but she compels her uninterested friends to acquiesce in joining her on this Protestant pilgrimage nonetheless. Through the apparently harmless visit, the manipulative Florence intends to dismantle Leonora’s Catholic conscience. Florence even reads anti-Catholic books such as “Ranke’s History of the Popes … and Luther’s ­Table Talk” to prepare for her assault on Leonora. Florence’s primary objective, which Dowell never explicitly articulates, is not to make a Protestant apologetic attack on Leonora’s faith, but theatrically to lay claim to Edward along religious lines (gs 39). Florence looks into Edward’s eyes and cruelly explains, “If it weren’t for that piece of paper you’d be like the Irish or Italians, but particularly the Irish” (gs 42). The Anglophile Florence uses the last phrase to emphasize Edward’s national and religious difference from Leonora, and Florence then deviously places “one finger on Captain Ashburnham’s wrist” (42). This final act provokes Leonora’s outbreak. However, in accordance with the English manners she emulates so well, she recomposes herself before the ignorant Dowell – who has no notion of his wife’s affair with Edward and only admits to having been “aware of something evil in the day” – and with a “clear hard voice” clarifies her outburst: “Don’t you know … don’t you know that I’m an Irish Catholic?” (43).10 Like Florence, Leonora uses religion to mask her intended meaning. 10

Whether Ford intends for Dowell to mistakenly call Leonora “English Catholic” when she is in fact Irish Catholic or if Ford was deliberately comparing the Irish Leonora to legalistic English Catholics, Ford expresses his disillusion with the somber faith of English Catholics who did not accept the relaxed, continental style of his own faith.

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She knows that the imperceptive Dowell will conclude she is offended because of Florence’s assault on her faith or national identity. But this conclusion makes little sense, because if she was so sensitive to those issues, she would have prevented the pilgrimage before it commenced. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which her explanation to Dowell is honest: as an Irish Catholic, she does not condone extramarital affairs, and in a tone of private bitter irony she reveals that she is particularly concerned with an affair that involves her husband and Dowell’s wife. While Leonora is primarily concerned with her husband’s infidelity, her lament that the Protest document is “the cause of the whole miserable affair; of the whole sorrow of the world” represents more than a veiled reference to Florence’s adulterous performance. In keeping with Ford’s socio-religious themes in the novel, the document does in fact form part of the Protestant foundation that Ford believed “floors the critical attitude.” John A. Meixner argues that Ford is saying the rise of Protestantism, which symbolizes the entire modern, skeptical, fragmenting impulse, is the source of the destruction of the old consoling religious framework and the whole present sorrow of the world. (186) In short, Ford intends the reader to look beyond Leonora’s private torture and witness the religious activity that destroys the traditional, inclusive, Papist worldview and culture. Florence represents those who have no emotional or spiritual commitment to faith, but who continue to use it to hide behind a façade of morality and to create strict lines of cultural division. In retrospect, Dowell concludes that this terrible scene presented L­ eonora with a chance to adopt a Papist mentality by emotionally and publicly defending her faith and confronting her husband. He thinks, “If there was a fine point about Leonora it was that she was proud and silent. But that pride and silence broke when she made that extraordinary outburst, in the shadowy room that contained the Protest” (gs 148). Dowell actually believes that Leonora’s fit might have proved a fruitful opportunity for the Ashburnhams to confront their problems. A painful and un-English discussion might have ended the relationship or saved it, but at least it would have resulted in some resolution. Despite knowing of Edward’s previous affairs, Leonora had at that point not given up on her marriage and even slapped the young Maisie Maiden before she ever had a physical affair with Edward – an act Dowell approves because it led to a growing intimacy between Leonora and Edward. Like good Papists, they might be able to fight through their problems. However, Dowell realizes that this momentum “went to pieces at the moment when Florence laid her

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hand upon Edward’s wrist” (151). Leonora’s breakdown only leads her more conscientiously to repress her frustrations. She meticulously begins to monitor Edward’s finances and limit his allowances so as to prevent affairs and blackmail payments to his lovers. When Edward’s intimacy with Nancy grows, Dowell believes Leonora wants to torture them by allowing them time together but preventing a meaningful relationship. Leonora becomes, in the Fordian sense, much more of a judgmental R ­ oman Catholic concerned with moral strictness than an emotionally and culturally sensitive Papist. But Dowell cannot decide whether to blame Leonora’s Catholicism or her subsequent lack of faith. At one point he reflects: “[H]aving­ been cut off from the restraints of her religion … she acted along the lines of her instinctive desires,” which suggests that her loss of faith has led to a loss of her humanity (gs 161). But he also implies, in accordance with Ford’s theory, that her specific type of Catholicism is to blame for her behavior. After Edward has committed suicide and Leonora remarries a classic English gentleman, Dowell’s final thoughts evoke his disgust with the superficial, “perfectly normal type” like Leonora who secretly embody the “not very straight methods that Roman Catholics seem to adopt in dealing with matters of this world” (186, 193). In this passage, Dowell uses “Roman Catholics” in the Fordian sense to define the type of Catholic he despised. However, Dowell’s inconsistent view of Catholicism as both a check on Leonora and an instigator of her behavior only further reveals his ignorance of that religion. Dowell reads each of Leonora’s actions in the worst possible light, and he argues that Leonora’s primary intentions were to torture Edward and to convince Nancy of his moral failures. Ford, as I have argued, has little interest in traditional religious morality, especially with regard to sexuality, and thus Dowell’s biases may well be Ford’s also. Ford’s primary concern is social and emotional justice, and, through Dowell, he condemns legalistic Catholics like Leonora. From a social and emotional perspective, Leonora foolishly and harmfully aims to preserve an immaculate social façade, the integrity of her marriage, and the edicts of her Church, instead of finding a plausible resolution with Edward and possibly developing and satisfying her own sentimental passions.

Ford and Tradition

Ford does not portray any woman positively in The Good Soldier. In addition to condemning Leonora’s unforgivable tactics, Dowell reviles his devious wife, Florence, not because of her affairs but because of her duplicity and English concern with her reputation. She does not love her husband, but when

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F­ lorence mistakenly believes that Dowell learns of her affair with Jimmy, a lower-class deck hand on the ship that brought them to Europe after the marriage, she drinks prussic acid. She commits suicide simply because she cannot live with the shame of anyone knowing she slept with such an unworthy figure. If she had killed herself out of remorse or love, Dowell might have approved of the act for its romantic quality, but Florence, like the English she emulates, has no such motivation. Dowell also faults Nancy for participating with Leonora in torturing Edward. When Nancy offers herself to Edward, she adopts Leonora’s tone and says coldly: “I will belong to you to save your life. But I can never love you” (gs 189). This comment reveals as much about Leonora as it does about Nancy, and it proves that neither figure understands that Edward’s promiscuity is rooted not in an insatiable sexual desire but in his overpowering sentimental attachments. Only Dowell understands this aspect of Edward’s character. Consequently, only Dowell can claim to know Edward on emotional and religious grounds, although his knowledge seems impotent. Ford’s portrayal of the women in The Good Soldier has its roots in his belief that women were the key to maintaining authentic Catholic culture when confronted with the values of legalistic Catholics, Protestants, or secularists. He explains in England and the English: “Catholicism – with its female saints, with its female religious, with its feminine element in the Divine Concord – has its chief safeguard in women” (ee 314). Such was the Catholic faith of Nancy’s and Leonora’s youth, and it is that faith Edward admires. That is why Nancy initially had great camaraderie with the more truly Papist Edward. Nevertheless, Nancy’s faith in what Ford constitutes as traditional Catholicism – a comprehensive moral, emotional, and cultural system – proves naïve and inadequate when confronted with modernity. Dowell believes that if she were not corrupted by Leonora, Nancy might have provided Edward what he needed because Edward has groomed Nancy to cultivate his Papist approach to the world. Still, Leonora’s control over Nancy is not complete: Nancy’s madness suggests that she was incapable of modeling Leonora’s emotionless Catholic rationalism. Through Ford’s depiction of Edward and Nancy’s fate, he emphasizes his own sense of alienation in England as he tried to preserve his obsolete form of faith, economics, and emotional sensibility. The Good Soldier echoes Ford’s argument in England and the English that modern societies, and the English in particular, have embraced reason and principles and sacrificed “a great deal of [religion’s] theological traditions and of its popular comprehensibility” (ee 315). Ford’s novel does little to regain a social “comprehensibility” that no longer exists, but The Good Soldier at least serves as a remnant of the dying but not quite extinct feudal-Papist values. In bidding adieu to that world, however, Ford took recourse in a very modern form of the novel: complete with a

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d­ isjointed narrative, ironic tone, and unconsummated resolutions. The Great War would speed the death of Ford’s ideal culture, and likewise accelerate the modernist style of literature that The Good Soldier models. Acknowledgement A version of this chapter appears in Catholic Modernists, English Nationalists. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010 by Timothy J. Sutton. It is reprinted here with kind permission of Associated University Presses. Works Cited Ford (Hueffer), Ford Madox. The Critical Attitude. London: Duckworth & Co., 1911. Ford (Hueffer), Ford Madox. England and the English: An Interpretation. New York: ­McClure, Phillips & Co., 1907. Ford (Hueffer), Ford Madox. The Ford Madox Ford Reader. Ed. Sondra Stang. New York: Ecco Press, 1986. Ford (Hueffer), Ford Madox. The Good Soldier. London: Penguin, 2002. Ford (Hueffer), Ford Madox. Memories and Impressions. London: Harper, 1911. Ford (Hueffer), Ford Madox. “On Impressionism,” reprinted in The Good Soldier, 260–80. Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2003. Ford (Hueffer), Ford Madox. Return to Yesterday. New York: Horace Liverright, Inc., 1932. Meixner, John A. Ford Madox Ford’s Novels: A Critical Study. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962. Peppis, Paul. Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Saunders, Max. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Saunders, Max. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons. London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1948.

chapter 3

The Definition of Modernity in The Good Soldier Edward Lobb Abstract Discussion of Ford’s most famous novel has tended to focus on technique and the ­depiction of the characters’ psychology rather than on the novel’s larger historical and contemporary themes. The Good Soldier is extraordinary, however, precisely in its detailed anatomy of the principal features of modernity, and its analysis of how these features are related. Beginning with Dowell’s professed ignorance of the meaning of the story he tells, Ford shows how the narrator’s incomprehension is shared by the other characters and how it reflects a general modern sense of fragmentation and formlessness.

Keywords Modernism – modernity – sensus communis – Catholicism – fragmentation – fatigue – The Good Soldier

After a long period of obscurity, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) has assumed, during the last thirty years, its rightful place as one of the central works of Modernism in English. It is recognized both as a technical tour de force and a prescient analysis of the break-up of the world its characters ­inhabit, and it has finally received the critical attention it deserves and abundantly rewards. In his “Dedicatory Letter” to Stella Ford, written in 1927, Ford immodestly records (or imagines) John Rodker’s description of the book as “‘the finest French novel in the English language.’”1 He also notes his own reaction when he began to translate the book into French: 1 Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion. New York: Vintage International, 1989; subsequent references are to this edition, except where noted, and will be made ­parenthetically. The Vintage and Penguin editions are the most widely available; Martin Stannard’s superb edition includes a scrupulously edited and footnoted text, textual appendices, contemporary reviews, and relevant biographical and critical material.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004344143_005

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And I will permit myself to say that I was astounded at the work I must have put into the construction of the book, at the intricate tangle of references and cross-references. Nor is that to be wondered at, for though I wrote it with comparative rapidity, I had it hatching within myself for fully another decade. (5) Although Ford is notoriously unreliable, the discernible facts bear him out: it is likely that he wrote The Good Soldier in about a year, between the summer of 1913 and September 1914 (Stannard 181–83). As Ford suggests, the novel has the concentration and unity of a book long planned, and part of the difficulty of discussing it is the fact that every element in it is linked to every other in subtle and sometimes equivocal ways. This is particularly true of Ford’s analysis of the characteristics of modernity. The definition of modernity is a central concern of the book, one that reinforces and complicates the issues of subjectivity and the possibility of knowledge and is in turn reinforced and complicated by them. Beginning with the epistemological problem, Ford shows the destabilizing effects of uncertainty and their consequences in the social and moral world of his characters – ­consequences which further undermine their ability to understand their world and to make moral choices. If one were to summarize the novel in a single word, that word would be “uncertainty” or “indeterminacy.” Perhaps for this reason, critics of The Good Soldier have often avoided detailed discussions of theme and concentrated on technique, as if Ford’s impressionism and his use of an unreliable narrator make authorial statement impossible, or possible only on the impossibility of knowledge.2 Robert Green, for example, notes the novel’s affinities with Cubism and states that “Irresolution, intellectual and moral relativism … dominate The Good Soldier, a novel whose form renders it impossible for us to elicit any clear-cut authorial ideology” (93). This is strictly true: we cannot make authoritative statements about a book that has uncertainty as its subject. On the other hand, I would argue (and Green, I believe, would agree) that part of Ford’s project in The Good Soldier is a historical analysis of how such relativism came to dominate modern consciousness. This analysis goes far beyond the mere fact of uncertainty and ­provides a historical genealogy and description of modernity through the novel’s structure, symbolism, and allusions. The “willed inconclusiveness” of the novel (Green 94), and that of Modernism generally, do not prevent us from

2 Even Max Saunders’s exhaustive and fascinating treatment of the novel in the first volume of his biography (The World Before the War, 402–60) does not entirely escape this tendency.

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­speculating or even from making statements: they merely substitute hypothesis for the illusion of absolute truth. The features of modernity that Ford identifies are not described here in any order of priority, but with the idea of making their connections apparent. Each is a cause as well as an effect; the proper arrangement of them would not be a list but a circle.

Ignorance and Incomprehension

Dowell’s most notable feature, of course, is his professed ignorance of the meaning of things. He has also been unaware of facts – notably of his wife’s serial adultery – but even when he learns the facts, he is candid about not knowing their meaning. As he tells us, “I know nothing – nothing in the world – of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone – horribly alone.” (gs 16) His profession of ignorance is repeated twice in the first section of Part One: I don’t know; I don’t know; was that last remark of hers the remark of a harlot, or is it what every decent woman, county family or not county family, thinks at the bottom of her heart? […] Who knows? (17) I don’t know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness. (19) The reiteration of this idea establishes Dowell as an unreliable narrator even before he begins correcting himself on various matters, and the mention of “darkness” is surely intended to evoke Ford’s old collaborator Joseph Conrad. Ford does not belabor the point once it is made, and Dowell’s professions of ignorance largely disappear from the narrative until its last pages. The question of whether he learns anything in the process of telling the story is a subject of critical debate in itself, but it is clear that Dowell himself does not believe he has done so: shortly before he concludes the story, he says “I don’t know. I know nothing. I am very tired” (gs 191). The other characters’ ability to understand is hardly greater than Dowell’s own. Edward endures his trials without any real awareness of their significance (a point we shall return to); Nancy goes mad; Florence is never really concerned with anything more than appearances. Leonora shows signs of understanding, particularly in the “Protest” scene, but seems to settle into obliviousness with her marriage to

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the safe and featureless Rodney Bayham. There are plausible reasons for each character’s inability to understand – Edward is not terribly bright, Nancy is naïve, Florence is self-absorbed – but we are left to infer that the condition is a general one. Its chief cause is another feature of modernity as Ford describes it.

Fragmentation, Formlessness, and the Loss of the Sensus Communis

Dowell’s elegiac tone is that of the survivor. He can say, with Job’s informants, “And I only am escaped to tell thee” (kjv 1:15, 16, 17, 19), and he often sounds the note of the Anglo-Saxon “Wanderer,” mourning the loss of his lord and the joys of the hall: “No hearthstone will ever again witness, for me, friendly intercourse. No smoking-room will ever be other than peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths” (gs 16). He is vaguely aware that the social break-up derives from an intellectual one, and his fragmented narrative neatly reflects both – one in its plot, the other in its apparently incoherent form. The consequences of the intellectual break-up are apparent. There is no longer a shared view of the world, a sensus communis, nor agreement on ­particular moral issues. This is clear in the conflicts among the principal characters discussed below; it also explains the fact that The Good Soldier, despite the assertions of various critics, is neither a comedy nor a tragedy, nor a comedy that apparently elides into a tragedy.3 Both comedy and tragedy, in their classic English (Shakespearean) forms, depend on characters’ separation from a moral norm and their reintegration with it – in one case happily, in the other too late to prevent catastrophe. But if there is no moral norm, there can be no comedy or tragedy – only happy or sad stories. Dowell’s first sentence is “This is the saddest story I have ever heard” (gs 13), and he later explicitly denies that the story is tragic. I call this the Saddest Story rather than “The Ashburnham Tragedy,” just because it is so sad, just because there was no current to draw things along to a swift and inevitable end. There is about this story none of the 3 Mark Schorer argues that The Good Soldier is a comedy; his original essay, reprinted under various titles, appears as the “Introduction” to the Vintage edition. John A. Meixner contends that the novel is a tragedy. David Eggenschwiler maintains that the novel moves from comic to tragic effect with a steady emphasis on partial and illusory perception. Excerpts from Schorer, Meixner, and Eggenschwiler are included in Stannard, 305–10, 318–22, and 344–51.

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e­ levation that accompanies tragedy; there is about it no nemesis, no destiny. Here were two noble people – for I am convinced that both Edward and Leonora had noble natures – here, then, were two noble natures, drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heartaches, agony of the mind, and death. […] And why? For what purpose? To point what lesson? It is all a darkness. (gs 132)4 The story involves neither tragic fate nor the inevitable consequences of wrong actions; it has no easily recognizable, i.e. traditional, form; it is neither Greek nor Elizabethan. The characters merely “drift” and the completed story yields, at least to Dowell, no coherent meaning. As a result, “tragic” events can be narrated as macabre comedy. Maisie Maidan’s death, for example, is sheer absurdity: “She had died so grotesquely that her little body had fallen forward into the trunk, and it had closed upon her, like the jaws of a gigantic alligator. […] She was smiling, as if she had just scored a goal in a hockey match” (64). Even the dramatic effect of Edward’s last appearance, as he leaves to commit suicide, is undercut by his banal and laconic final speech and by Dowell’s discreet silence; the eloquence of Othello or Macbeth has no place here. The r­ esolution reveals not the restoration of moral order but its utter absence – Dowell’s “darkness.” How the sensus communis began to break down is debatable, but Ford is precise about when. The advent of Protestantism represents, in Ford’s symbolic historiography, a Great Divide which can be described in various ways: the fall from the One to the Many; from community to isolated individuals; from authority and tradition to radical subjectivity; from the unity of medieval Catholic Europe to the plurality of modern nation-states after the Reformation; from feudalism to capitalism. All of these are brilliantly evoked in the “Protest” scene as Florence simultaneously proclaims the moral superiority of Protestantism and begins her seduction of Edward. Dowell, unaware of what Florence is doing, is nevertheless conscious of “something treacherous, something frightful, something evil in the day” (gs 42). He has trouble coming up with a simile for his sense of panic, but finally settles, significantly, on an image of radical dispersion: “It was as if we were going to run and cry out; all four of us in separate directions, averting our heads” (42). If Florence, as modern Protestant individualist, symbolically breaks up the “little four-square coterie” (gs 14), Edward appears to be a sentimentalist who

4 Still later, Dowell does refer to “the Ashburnham tragedy” (258), but this is what we would expect from a narrator as confused and conflicted as Dowell. The phrase is not elaborated and does not constitute a real denial of his previous position.

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believes, according to Dowell, that “salvation can only be found in true love and the feudal system” (130). If Ashburnham were simply an absurd anachronism, he would be less interesting than he is; it is, in fact, his divided loyalties that make him a significant figure. His development in the course of the novel is worked out symbolically in terms of the battle between clusters of associated ideas – Catholic, communal, and medieval on the one hand; Protestant, individualist, and modern on the other.

Conflicting Social and Personal Moralities

It is apparent early on, both from Dowell’s descriptions and the characters’ actions, that Edward and Leonora are at odds both in their social and in their personal moralities. In his social duties as landlord, magistrate, and soldier, Edward adheres to standards and traditions that are “entirely collective,” Dowell tells us (gs 119), while Leonora herself admits that “‘there is not a more splendid fellow in any three counties, pick them where you will – along those lines’” (80). The pause and the qualifier make the point which is obvious to us but not yet to Dowell: that Edward in his personal relations is a thoroughgoing individualist who does as he pleases. This is most apparent in his gambling and philandering, but it also manifests itself in his willingness to convert to Catholicism for Leonora’s sake while insisting that any future sons be raised as Anglicans. As Dowell explains, Edward, that is to say, regarded himself as having his own body and soul at his own disposal. But his loyalty to the traditions of his family would not permit him to bind any future inheritors of his name or b­ eneficiaries […]. About the girls it did not so much matter. They would know o­ ther homes and other circumstances. […] But the boys must be given the ­opportunity of choosing – and they must have first of all the Anglican teaching. (120–21) It is not immediately clear, in part because Dowell does not spell it out in so many words, that Leonora’s morality is opposed to her husband’s in both areas. The daughter of an Irish landowner who was shot at by his tenants (gs 117), she has no sense of a community or shared social bond. When Edward’s debts become crippling, she cuts off the charities, sells family portraits and silver, and rents Bramshaw Teleragh to a tenant for seven years (134). In the social realm, then, Leonora is a “sheer individualist” (119), but in the area of personal relations, she subscribes to external, “collective” standards like those

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which govern Edward in the social sphere. As a Catholic, she refuses to divorce Edward, and she “seriously and naively” believes, to Dowell’s Quaker exasperation, “that her church could be such a monstrous and imbecile institution as to expect her to take on the impossible job of making Edward Ashburnham a faithful husband” (53). Like some other great novels (Wuthering Heights and Les liaisons dangereuses come to mind), The Good Soldier is almost schematic in outline. Edward’s and Leonora’s conflicts can be arranged in a chart: Social Morality

Personal Morality

Edward: collective, traditional Leonora: individualist

individualist collective, traditional

The chart is a simplification, but not a distortion, of the first part of a complex narrative. It makes clear that Edward and Leonora are not only at odds with each other in the two great areas of moral life – our duties to those we love and to society as a whole – but that they are at odds with themselves in adhering to different standards in each area. The impossibility of maintaining this separation of personal life from social role is one theme of the Arthurian story, which is alluded to in The Good Soldier along with other medieval narratives.5 The sexual sins of Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere come home to roost, and destroy Camelot in the process; in Ford’s novel, both Edward and Leonora resolve their inner conflicts, but it is, ironically, Edward’s final achievement of virtue that brings about the catastrophe. I shall discuss later why this happens, but how it happens is just as important. Faced with his last and greatest temptation, to seduce his ward Nancy, Edward brings together his conflicting moral codes and imposes the social on the personal. He is able to do this in part because Nancy exists on the cusp between the two areas: to Edward as a dutiful member of society – a good soldier – she is a responsibility, a charge, and this takes precedence over what she represents to him as an individual man; his last love is his first chaste one. At the same time, Leonora’s fundamental self-interest, already apparent in her social policy, overrules her Catholic morality, and she becomes a Fury of 5 When the Ashburnhams and Dowells first sit down to lunch, at a round table in Nauheim, Florence says, “‘And so the whole round table is begun’” (gs 37), and Dowell refers several times to Edward as “the Cid, … Lohengrin, … the Chevalier Bayard” (246) – all medieval heroes.

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v­ indictiveness, actively encouraging an affair because she knows it will destroy both Edward and Nancy. Each character has resolved the inner conflict, and by the same means, imposing the social on the personal; but these resolutions leave them opposed to each other in both spheres. Social and Personal Morality Edward: collective, traditional Leonora: individualist The characters’ transformations are implicitly religious, and take us back to the novel’s symbolic use of Catholicism and Protestantism, centered on the master-image of the Protest and the advent, on a large scale, of individual judgment and radical subjectivity. The Protestant Edward essentially becomes a Catholic, adhering to a standard of morality outside himself and praying to the Virgin (gs 110); the Catholic Leonora becomes a radical Protestant, relying on no judgment but her own. For dramatic purposes, the contrast is stark and almost absolute, an either/or; in historical terms, it seems likely that Ford saw the advent of Protestantism more moderately as the beginning of a long p ­ rocess of decay which would culminate either in modern agnosticism (­Dowell’s perpetual “I don’t know”) or the nihilism of Conrad’s Kurtz.6

The Extinction of the Exceptional

Catholicism and Protestantism both continue to exist in the modern world, but there is no question as to which, in symbolic terms, has triumphed. Leonora survives, remarries, and becomes pregnant; Edward is driven to suicide, and the novel’s other exceptional character, Nancy Rufford, goes mad. As in The Great Gatsby, another novel about the cost of idealism and the perils of nostalgia, there is a sense that the protagonist, for all his faults, really is too good for this world. In a way, this simply dramatizes the truism that the ideal is unattainable, that Camelot cannot be realized for more than a moment in a fallen world. One aspect of Dowell’s self-proclaimed “sentimentalism” is the belief that this is a shame, that it should be otherwise; another is his belief that the ideal can be embodied, for a heterosexual male, in the figure of a “perfect” young girl like Nancy. This, too, is a medieval idea, and Dowell’s veneration of 6 The same sort of historical mythography is apparent in John Osborne’s play Luther (1961).

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Nancy is a sentimental modern version of Dante’s idealization of Beatrice or Petrarch’s of Laura. Dowell explains Edward’s idealism to us in a remarkable passage which tells us much about both men: “the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man,” he tells us, “is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves” (gs 97) – that is, with what she represents in his romantic imagination. He goes on to explain that this passion usually dies down in time, and that this is part of the sadness of life. “And yet,” he continues, I do believe that for every man there comes at last a woman – or, no, that is the wrong way of formulating it. For every man there comes at last a time of life when the woman who then sets her seal upon his imagination has set her seal for good. He will travel over no more horizons; he will never again set the knapsack over his shoulders; he will retire from those scenes. He will have gone out of the business. That, at any rate, was the case with Edward and the poor girl. (97–98) The reticent and inarticulate Edward would never have put such a thought into words, and probably never had the thought, at least on a conscious level. We wonder how Dowell, who has never consummated his own marriage, can know these things; a few pages later, however, we realize that Dowell can understand Edward because he saw Nancy in the same way, and the “seal” she set upon his imagination is associated with her Catholicism. I don’t, of course, like the tradition, but I am bound to say it gave Nancy – or at any rate Nancy had – a sense of rectitude that I have never seen surpassed. It was a thing like a knife that looked out of her eyes and spoke with her voice, just now and then. It positively frightened me. I suppose that I was almost afraid to be in a world where there could be so fine a standard. (gs 104) It is just this fine standard, with its implicit criticism of human imperfection, which cannot be allowed to survive in the modern world. Dowell refers to Edward and Nancy as “splendid personalities” (gs 182), but sees, in an atypical moment of perception, that this is exactly the problem: “Conventions and traditions, I suppose, work blindly but surely for the preservation of the normal type; for the extinction of proud, resolute, and unusual individuals” (186). It is Leonora who survives, of course, and Dowell later refers to her as “­perfectly normal” (gs 196). After her horrific actions in the latter half of the novel, it seems fantastic to describe Leonora as normal in any way at all, but

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she ­appears to become so. Exactly what constitutes normality, however, becomes ­apparent in Ford’s description of the society that will emerge when people like Edward and Nancy have been eliminated.

Pseudo-Individualism, Promiscuity, and Conformity

As I suggested above, the emerging world of The Good Soldier is one of radical subjectivity and individualism, but this involves a paradox. A world of genuine individuals could conceivably be full of “splendid personalities” like Edward and Nancy, but it is not, and Ford suggests why in a beautifully subtle passage. Ten days after Edward’s death, Dowell is having tea with Leonora and notices a couple of rabbits on the lawn. Leonora notices them, too: “Edward has been dead only ten days and yet there are rabbits on the lawn.” I understand that rabbits do a great deal of harm to the short grass in England. And then she turned round to me and said without any adornment at all, for I remember her exact words: “I think it was stupid of Florence to commit suicide.” (gs 90) The dramatic focus of this scene as a whole is Dowell’s discovery that Florence had an affair with Edward and that she killed herself, but the imagery in this excerpt is equally important. Edward is defined here in opposition to the rabbits: they would not be there if he were alive, but they are encroaching on the estate now that he is dead. Famously fecund, they are traditional and obvious symbols of sexual desire, but also of conformity; all rabbits look and act alike. Similarly, in a world without standards, pseudo-individuals follow their common desires or fall in with their neighbors and become, paradoxically, an indistinguishable mass. Leonora clearly implies that Florence, wanton as a bunny, has killed herself needlessly just as her kind are poised to take over the world. Dowell perhaps misses the point in the scene with Leonora, but mentions later that Leonora’s new husband, Rodney Bayham, “is rather like a rabbit and I hear that Leonora is expected to have a baby in three months’ time” (gs 186). A few pages later, Dowell declares that “society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits” (197).7

7 An example of what Ford calls his “intricate tangle of … cross-references” is the fact that Maisie Maidan’s husband is nicknamed Bunny (gs 79).

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Role-Playing and Lack of Identity

Before the rabbit warren comes fully into being – in the transitional period between “splendid personalities” and interchangeable units – there is unease about personal identity, a sense of dissonance between appearance and reality, assigned role and essence. Identity becomes what is now called, particularly in gender studies, “performance,” and The Good Soldier is rich in characters who seem uncertain of themselves and adopt roles based on whatever comes to hand, most often recognizable social and cultural types. The novel is full of theatrical imagery, and words like “acting” (gs 15), “scene” (189), and “spectacle” (192) recur unobtrusively, their everyday meanings often concealing their metaphorical significance. Ford suggests that each of us has a whole repertory of roles and the ability to shift from one to another. Dowell is aware of his absurd generic roles as expatriate American millionaire, naïf, and cuckold, and retains a sense of humor about them; when he imagines himself and his friends at the Last Judgment, he notes dryly that “perhaps they will find me an elevator to run” (gs 61). Despite his generally limited ability to understand, he is well positioned as outsider and observer to assess the essential emptiness of modern identity: You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just heavens, I do not know. It feels just nothing at all. It is not hell, certainly it is not necessarily heaven. So I suppose it is the intermediate stage. What do they call it? Limbo. No, I feel nothing at all about that. (60) It is characteristic of Dowell to confuse Purgatory and Limbo, and his insistence that he feels nothing is likely to strike the reader as defensive, but Dowell  is ­consistent in pointing out that Florence’s life, like his own, was based on role-playing: “She wanted to marry a gentleman of leisure; she wanted a European establishment. She wanted her husband to have an English accent, an income of fifty thousand a year from real estate and no ambitions to increase that income” (gs 68). Dowell’s fate is sealed, significantly, when he is cast in the wrong role: “I fancy that, if I had shown warmth then, she would have acted the proper wife to me, or would have put me back again. But, because I acted like a Philadelphia gentleman, she made me, I suppose, go through with the part of a male nurse” (71; my emphasis). During their marriage, Florence plays the parts – none of them genuine – of heart patient, cultural lecturer, and concerned friend. Even her affair with Edward, Dowell realizes, was essentially histrionic: Indeed, the chief trouble of poor Leonora in those days was to keep Florence from making, before me, theatrical displays, on one line or another,

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of [her relationship with Edward]. She wanted, in one mood, to come rushing to me, to cast herself on her knees at my feet, and to declaim a carefully arranged, frightfully emotional outpouring as to her passion. That was to show that she was like one of the great erotic women of whom history tells us. In another mood she would desire to come to me disdainfully and to tell me that what had happened was what must happen when a real male came along. […] That was when she wished to appear like the heroine of a French comedy. Because of course she was always play-acting. (100) The characters’ lack of identity, like the lack of a shared moral code, makes tragedy impossible,8 but role-playing is not without positive effects. Edward as landlord, magistrate, and soldier is purely conventional, and his success in these roles is explicitly a matter of conforming to type; the title of the novel itself, with its suggestion of the good shepherd, reminds us that virtue has traditionally been conceived as a matter of imitating good models. Leonora’s initial patience in suffering likewise stems from her determination to be a type – the perfect Catholic wife. Edward’s “final virtue,” as Dowell calls it (gs 161), is a state in which Edward is and is not playing a role. He conforms to type, but is not, actor-like, pretending to be what he is not; entirely devoid of irony and largely without selfawareness, Edward is, at the end of the novel, one of that dying breed in whom appearance and reality coincide completely. His virtue is self-defeating, however, because the roles he chooses are anachronistic or unavailable. The Cid, Lohengrin, and the Chevalier Bayard have no place in the modern world, and Edward’s agony is that of the medieval knight in his vigil and of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane: Edward was kneeling beside his bed with his head hidden in the counterpane. His arms, outstretched, held out before him a little image of the blessed virgin […]. His shoulders heaved convulsively three times, and heavy sobs came from him before [Leonora] could close the door. (110–11) Even so, he might survive if he could hold on to his last and most cherished role, that of the chaste courtly lover. If Nancy were suffering for love of him 8 Ford’s sometime collaborator Conrad is the great explorer of willed illusion and role-playing as sources of personal stability in a chaotic world, and it is his sense that modern identity is largely empty that makes The Secret Agent, like The Good Soldier, a black comedy rather than a tragedy.

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as he is for her, his sentimentality would be satisfied and he could carry on; her cheerful telegram from Brindisi deprives him of his illusion and, as Dowell says, “I didn’t think he was wanted in the world” (gs 198). Part of the pathos of the novel’s last scene is that Edward dies with his first role, that of the stoic and laconic English gentleman, intact. If he has endured his sufferings with no knowledge of their meaning, he remains in character to the end, and this “role” is perfectly genuine. Other characters are similarly destroyed by the loss of their roles or the recognition that appearance and reality are at odds. Florence commits suicide when her adultery is about to be revealed, giving the lie to her public role as model wife, and Nancy goes mad when she realizes the reality that lay behind the façade of the Ashburnhams’ marriage. Leonora alone is able to move smoothly into a new role, wife to Rodney Bayham, with an awareness of her acting: “The heroine – the perfectly normal, virtuous and slightly deceitful ­heroine – has become the happy wife of a perfectly normal, virtuous, and slightly deceitful husband” (gs 196). The parallel with Florence as the “heroine of a French comedy” is telling.

Powerlessness and Passivity

A few pages before the end of the novel, Dowell reports on Nancy’s current mental condition: And as for Nancy … Well, yesterday at lunch she said suddenly: “Shuttlecocks!” And she repeated the word “shuttlecocks” three times. I know what was passing in her mind, if she can be said to have a mind, for Leonora has told me that, once, the poor girl said she felt like a shuttlecock being tossed backwards and forwards between the violent personalities of ­Edward and his wife. Leonora, she said, was always trying to deliver her over to Edward, and Edward tacitly and silently forced her back again. And the odd thing was that Edward himself considered that those two women used him like a shuttlecock. Or, rather, he said that they sent him backwards and forwards like a blooming parcel that someone didn’t want to pay the postage on. And Leonora also imagined that Edward and Nancy picked her up and threw her down as suited their purely vagrant moods. (gs 196) Dowell does not mention his own feelings, but we know that he, as much as any of the other characters, has been acted upon; he has been a patient rather

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than an agent. Ford may well have borrowed the image from Webster’s Duchess of Malfi: “We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and bandied/Which way please them” (v: 4). Ford’s revision of Webster’s image retains the sense of passivity and powerlessness, but introduces an element of the absurd; there are no stars acting upon the characters here, and badminton, as opposed to tennis, is a game that is hard to take very seriously.9 Florence, the other major character not mentioned in Dowell’s description, had the maiden name Hurlbird, which might be seen as evidence that she was in charge of the game – she certainly tried to be – but she too is finally a patient rather than an agent. Ford’s subtitle, A Tale of Passion, suggests reasons for the characters’ sense of being acted upon. The word “passion” derives etymologically from the Latin passio, which in turn comes from the verb patior (pati, passus sum): I suffer, undergo, am acted upon. The Good Soldier is the story of people “drifting down life” (132) – people who cannot control, or choose not to control, the forces that act upon them. The most obvious of these forces is sexual desire, “passion” in a particular but obviously related sense: something that often appears to act upon us without our volition. Other senses of the word are appropriate as well. A passion can be an overwhelming interest in or enthusiasm for something, such as Edward’s (and Dowell’s) obsession with Nancy as the embodiment of a certain moral ideal; the word can also indicate any overpowering emotion or affliction – both appropriate in The Good Soldier. With a capital, “Passion” is also the term used to denote the final stage of Christ’s life, from Gethsemane to his death, during which he is acted upon; this underlines Edward’s role, noted above, as sufferer and sacrificial victim.10 Whether people with education, money, and free will are in fact under the sway of forces so irresistible as to deprive them of agency, and what those forces might be, are questions Ford wisely does not address; what matters in the experience of modernity is that people feel powerless and acted upon. Like ­Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial and Leda in Yeats’s sonnet “Leda and the Swan,” they endure without understanding, and their bafflement brings us back full circle to the first feature of modernity –incomprehension. But if Dowell in the end cannot understand his situation, the reader can. Dowell has provided, for the most part unwittingly, a precise and detailed anatomy of the modern condition, with a multitude of examples, and we see his situation more clearly than he himself is able to do. Impressionism denies the possibility of certainty,

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Kenneth Womack and William Baker, the editors of the Broadview edition of The Good Soldier, note that in Henry James (1914), Ford addresses James’s use of the shuttlecock image to describe his heroine in What Maisie Knew (1897). Hynes (233) notes the meanings of sexual desire and sacrificial suffering.

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but there are obviously degrees of knowledge, and as readers we have a broader perspective, and less stake in the outcome, than Dowell.11

Fatigue – and a Modicum of Hope

The Good Soldier is a book – the book – of the Edwardian twilight, that period of deceptive stability and calm in which the forces of radical change are already at work. Many of the novel’s important events take place on August 4th in various years, and the repetition of this ominous date suggests that the cataclysm of the Great War was simply the culmination of events in smaller spheres.12 “Someone has said,” notes Dowell with typical vagueness, “that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking-up of our little four-square coterie was such another unthinkable event” (gs 14). Part of the brilliance of Ford’s accomplishment is his ability to show convincingly in the lives of a few characters the tensions of the larger pre-war world, and to provide a brilliant taxonomy of the emerging features of modernity. The picture he draws in such compelling detail is not a cheerful one, and the notes of comedy are black, as we would expect in a world that has moved beyond tragedy and comedy into sadness and the absurd. There is nevertheless an element of hope in The Good Soldier, and not just for the Leonoras and Rodney Bayhams of this world. Dowell tells us at the end of the novel that he is “very tired” (gs 191), and Edward’s last words are “So long, old man, I must have a bit of a rest, you know” (199). The novel concludes with fatigue, another characteristically modern element, but Edward’s name and Dowell’s relationship with Edward suggest that idealism will survive in the modern world. It has been noted often enough that Edward Ashburnham’s first name suggests Edward vii, and that his surname suggests the impending destruction of the old Victorian/Edwardian order in the Great War. What 11

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As Saunders notes, The Good Soldier is “ambivalent in the politics of its form” (433), “its modernity of subject and technique restrained by impeccably Edwardian decorum and cadence” (434). This applies, I would argue, not only to the style of the novel but to its traditional use of dramatic irony, which affirms the possibility of relatively reliable knowledge. Ford’s great master was James, and The Good Soldier recalls James’s use of imperceptive narrators in stories like The Aspern Papers. The Good Soldier is also a prime example of the “winter” narrative of irony as Northrop Frye describes it in Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Ford apparently settled on 4 August as a significant date in the novel long before the ­German invasion of Belgium on 4 August 1914: see Stannard 182–83.

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has not been noted, so far as I know, is the specific resonance of the name ­Ashburnham.13 That which is reduced to ashes is not simply burned or charred but wholly consumed, and the Greek-derived word for that process is “holocaust.” Originally applied to the burnt offerings of the Jews, the word is now most often used to refer to the near-extinction of the European Jews in the Nazi death-camps, but Ford, writing thirty years earlier, is obviously thinking of the Great War, a holocaust which had just begun when he finished The Good Soldier, and its destruction of pre-war society. The first use of the word “holocaust” to mean something other than a burnt sacrifice, according to the oed, occurs in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, and I want to quote a few lines from that poem because I think Ford had it in mind when naming Ashburnham, and it certainly helps to make the name something other than entirely pessimistic. Ll. 1697–1707, spoken by a Semichorus near the end of the poem, refer to Samson himself, now dead: So virtue given for lost, Depressed, and overthrown, as seemed, Like that self-begotten bird In the Arabian woods embossed, That no second knows nor third, And lay erewhile a holocaust, From out her ashy womb now teemed, Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most When most unactive deemed, And though her body die, her fame survives, A secular bird ages of lives. “Secular” here means “lasting for ages,”14 and the bird is of course the phoenix, which rises from its own ashes. What is suggested here is not physical resurrection but the survival of the idealism that Edward embodied, and this survives – if nowhere else in the novel – in the unlikely figure of Dowell, who claims to be a “sentimentalist” like Edward; who, despite his dimness, tells Edward’s story; and who, most importantly, has caught something of Edward’s spirit, if not his habits. As Dowell himself suggests, “In my fainter sort of way I seem to perceive myself following the lines of Edward Ashburnham” (gs 185).

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Dowell mentions that Ashburnham was descended “from the Ashburnham who accompanied Charles i to the scaffold” (7); I am concerned here rather with the suggestiveness of the name in itself. See Carey and Fowler’s edition, 400.

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The phoenix of idealism is never destroyed, no matter how ­anachronistic it may seem and no matter how flawed individual idealists may be.15 The question of how much Dowell learns in narrating “the saddest story” (gs 13) is itself a subject of critical debate and beyond the scope of this essay, but I think ­Dowell has learned enough to know that the story is not quite “a picture ­without a meaning” (197). Works Cited Eggenschwiler, David. “Very Like a Whale: The Comical-Tragical Illusions of The Good Soldier.” Genre 12:3 (Fall 1979): 401–14. Ford, Ford Madox, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion. Ed. Kenneth Womack and ­William Baker. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2003. Ford, Ford Madox, The Good Soldier: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Martin Stannard. New York: Norton, 1995. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Green, Robert. Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Hynes, Samuel. “The Epistemology of The Good Soldier.” Sewanee Review 69.2 (Spring 1961): 225–35. Meixner, John A. Ford Madox Ford’s Novels: A Critical Study. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press and Oxford University Press, 1962. Milton, John. The Poems of John Milton. Ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler. London: Longmans, 1968. Saunders, Max. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life. 2 volumes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

15

The Great Gatsby deals with this idea, too, especially in its last couple of pages, and there are many striking similarities in detail between the two novels. I have already mentioned the cost of idealism and the perils of nostalgia, but there are other parallels. Both Ford and Fitzgerald employ adultery as a symbol of a certain kind of idealism; both deal with the impossible desire to return to the past; both conclude with the destruction of the flawed idealist; and both employ a complex narration of the idealist’s story by a friend who shares something of the idealist’s vision.

chapter 4

The Silences of Modernism in The Good Soldier Dean Bowers Abstract This paper engages the debate regarding Dowell’s iconic status as a representative of modernism. In his article “The Good Soldier and the War for British Modernism” Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy claims that John Dowell is a representation of modernism, or at least of one type of modernism that he claims Ford felt would not satisfactorily represent the modern condition and dilemma. By contrast, this paper argues that John D ­ owell is not a modernist at all. The narrative could be called modernist, in the sense that it is a record of Dowell’s thoughts as they come to him; it is a reflection of consciousness. However, Dowell claims that he is merely trying to report to a silent auditor; the character has no aspirations of creating a new literary form. The modernist intentions are those of Ford; he is re-constructing the consciousness of his character.

Keywords Modernism – fractal consciousness – fragmentation – passion – convention – The Good Soldier

The interpretation of Ford Madox Ford’s character John Dowell from The Good Soldier has historically been a point of contention among critics. Quite simply, Dowell, and Ford through his portrayal of Dowell, keep us guessing. The ambiguity of Dowell’s character makes him fascinating; the reader finds new problems with his perception of his experiences with the Ashburnhams and must make new guesses about his motives with each reading. Along with the pleasure of reading Ford’s cadenced prose, the puzzle of Dowell is a primary enticement to keep coming back to The Good Soldier. What allows Dowell to remain so enigmatic? John Dowell sets for himself the seemingly ordinary task of recounting his life, or at least a nine-year portion of it. What makes this process more complex, and thus more interesting, is that he must use at least two accounts of the events in question, his and Leonora Ashburnham’s, and sometimes even three, if we include Edward

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004344143_006

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­Ashburnham’s version of what happened with Nancy. As if this is not complicated enough for Dowell, he must contend with silences in these accounts. As Dowell reflects on his time with the group that has included himself, his wife Florence Dowell, along with Edward and Leonora Ashburnham, he discovers, and we as readers discover, silences that Dowell must now interpret. The entire reason Dowell must engage in this reflection is because of silence; he had, or claims to have had, no idea about what was occurring beneath the tranquil surface of the everyday group interactions. He did not suspect that Florence was having an affair with Edward, did not perceive that Edward and Leonora were severely estranged, and did not fathom that a bizarre love triangle had developed between Edward, Leonora, and Nancy. These silences leave Dowell without pertinent information and thus leave us without pertinent information, both about what has actually occurred and about what Dowell really knows and/or understands. There are also Dowell’s own potential silences as narrator, the things he may not be telling us out of propriety, out of sheer ignorance, or out of a need to fulfill a deceptive agenda. We can never be quite sure whether Dowell has heard information that he refuses to relate to us, his intimate listener. Considering Dowell’s confessional style, revealing events to us as they come to him, we ­cannot be sure that he has not simply forgotten to relate an important detail. After all, Edward Ashburnham’s suicide is related almost as an afterthought. Or perhaps, as some critics have argued, Dowell, in coming to terms with this traumatic experience, has chosen to defer any direct mention of certain details, such as Edward’s death, as a way of distancing himself from the pain that these details may cause him.1 One of the primary characteristics of Modernism is the attempt of authors to accurately portray consciousness. This attempt is what leads, for example, to the stream-of-consciousness method and other experimental styles adopted by other modernist writers like Woolf, Lawrence, Rhys, and Joyce. I would argue that Ford’s literary impressionism, perfected in this novel, is another form of this kind of modernist expression. This technique of Ford’s has in common 1 The reasons for Dowell’s unreliable and often contradictory narrative have been debated since Mark Shorer’s introduction to 1951 Knopf edition of The Good Soldier. Roger Poole suggests the idea of Dowell having an intentionally deceptive agenda. See Poole, “The Real PlotLine of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: An Essay in Applied Deconstruction,” 391–427; see also Poole, “The Unknown Ford Madox Ford,” 117–36. Miriam Bailin suggests that Dowell may be distancing himself from the traumatic events that he has experienced by deferring them in his narrative. See Bailin, “‘An Extraordinarily Safe Castle’: Aesthetics as Refuge in The Good Soldier,” 621–36.

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with the style of the others the use of a particular portrayal of consciousness in its characters. These writers are all attempting to show the world through the filter of not just consciousness, but specifically modern consciousness, a kind of consciousness I call ‘fractal.’ Ford uses silences in his novel as a means of portraying Dowell’s fractal consciousness; silence becomes a space where conventional meanings disappear and where new meaning can potentially be created. Ford’s impressionism allows for any detail from the character’s perception to be important in the telling of a story, and thus it would allow even silences to have potential value in rendering an experience. Dowell develops a fractal consciousness in attempting to tell his story using the competing versions: his own, Leonora’s, and even Edward’s. The attempt to tell the story is, in effect, an attempt to fill the silences of those nine years. Dowell can be certain of no single version, since each account both confirms and contradicts aspects of the others. So Dowell, and Ford, use an impressionistic technique to render Dowell’s reconstruction of events, since he does not have objective facts to draw upon. I intend to demonstrate the operation of fractal consciousness in Dowell’s process of reconstruction, in his process of filling the silences.

Fractal Consciousness

Because of his fractal consciousness, no one approach will “solve” Dowell. In using my approach, I will, however, provide some insights into Dowell’s motivations and how we can read Dowell’s individualistic version of events. This approach will also clarify the nature of Ford’s modernism in The Good Soldier. Before beginning a more in-depth discussion of how silences operate in this novel, I should briefly explain the term fractal consciousness. The term describes the dynamic I see operating in modernist texts, and, by extension, in the minds of modernist authors themselves. One of the agreed upon characteristics of modernity is the fragmentation of experience. This fragmentation of perception is the initial facet of fractal consciousness. In order to be considered fractal, however, the perceiving consciousness must attempt to find a way to make the fragments coherent. In modernism, this striving for coherence is what brings authors to experiment with new forms for portraying what they see as a more accurate, or true, perception of modern reality. The other characteristic of a fractal condition is that this striving for coherence takes place without the benefit of being able to identify with any solid reference points. The fragmentation of experience dislocates the character from accepted or prescribed values. As the character continues to try to

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i­ dentify with these values, the more he/she becomes aware of an utter inability to do so. This heightening self-consciousness operates as a kind of iterative vicious circle. The character becomes caught in a space between previously established and/or accepted values. Characters are modernist not only because they find themselves in this predicament, but also because they strive to overcome it by making an effort to develop their own individual values. In these spaces between values, they must formulate their own viable perspective on the world. Although I have been speaking primarily of characters, this dynamic also applies to the modernist writers themselves. The struggle of the characters mirrors the struggles of the modernist artists to depict this dynamic as they cope with developing fractal perspectives themselves in the modern fragmented world. Ford manifests this dynamic of fractal consciousness through Dowell. ­Dowell’s fractal consciousness evolves through his primary struggle to create a record of the nine years of his relationship with the Ashburnhams using the competing versions of the events. More precisely, he must develop the ­re-creation because of the competing versions. After Leonora discloses to him what had been occurring during those nine years, Dowell can no longer trust his own interpretation of these experiences. His perspective becomes dislodged from any certainties. Considering this new position, he cannot fully trust Leonora’s account because certainty has become impossible for him, and because her version is, after all, a subjective account based on her own impressions. The same dilemma for Dowell applies in the case of E ­ dward’s version. Although he tends to believe Edward, and though Edward’s and ­Leonora’s accounts are complementary in many respects, Dowell finds himself in a position where no version is authoritative, none can be taken for granted; he can completely identify with no existing version. All Dowell has are fragments that include his own impressions and the fragments of information from the other accounts. Since he does not have an authoritative version, if Dowell wants to understand the situation, he must create a new version. This new account will be more comprehensive than either previous version because more information is available to Dowell. However, since the information consists of only the fragments of Leonora’s, Edward’s and Dowell’s impressions, Dowell’s created version will retain a great deal of uncertainty because he has no absolute version to which he can refer. The more Dowell seeks and learns, the more he recognizes that definitive answers may never be forthcoming. The silences in his initial experiencing of the events, and the silences left by the unanswered questions leave spaces where Dowell must create a perspective on these events; Dowell develops a fractal condition in these spaces of silence.

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Ford’s impressionism is a perfect demonstration of how his method itself was the product of a fractal perspective. Impressionism consists of only giving the impressions, or fragments of experience, of the narrator or of a character. As Ford explains, the impressionist “must write his books as if he were rendering the impressions of a person present at a scene; he must remember that a person present at a scene does not see everything.”2 But, as Ford claims, it is “perfectly possible that a piece of Impressionism should give a sense of two, of three, of as many as you will, places, persons, emotions, all going on simultaneously in the emotions of the writer.”3 And yet these fragments must cohere somehow to make an impression on the reader, otherwise they are only so many detached details. Ford insists that what must be conveyed is “the impression of the moment … not the corrected chronicle.”4 If there is no corrected chronicle of the products of the emotions of the writer, then the reader, or other characters, have no definitive version, no particular, conspicuous perspective to adopt. The other characters and the reader find themselves among “those superimposed emotions” of another person and thus immersed in a perspective they cannot directly identify with, so they must assemble the details into a workable perspective without a definitive guiding influence. Through his impressionistic method, Ford allows the reader to inhabit Dowell’s fractal consciousness as Dowell attempts to assemble the fragments of his emotions and of the different versions of events into a coherent narrative. While the fractal condition promotes this creativity, it also provokes the anxiety of being uncertain since Dowell must explain events satisfactorily to himself using impressions of others and of himself that he cannot rely upon to be accurate. Looking at Dowell’s dilemma as specifically impressionist, Dowell must understand his own impressions, and because the accounts are contradictory, he can have no settled emotions about them. Dowell gives us his impressions, the impressions comprising and producing his fractal dilemma, and we, in turn, find ourselves without settled emotions about his experience. In expressing this situation that is so perplexing for him, Dowell tries to orient himself with a struggle that is pervasive in English cultural and literary thought: the conflict between convention and passion. Dowell attempts to define the whole experience of the narrative and to situate himself within it by using these two identifiable poles of perspective. But as we soon see, this established tension becomes itself uncertain as Dowell attempts to apply it to

2 Ford, “Techniques,” 60. 3 Ford, “On Impressionism,” 40. 4 Ford, “On Impressionism,” 41.

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his narrative, and Dowell himself is aware of this deficiency. This awareness of the futility of this established framework reinforces Dowell’s fractal perplexity. As he concludes the novel, Dowell reminds us wearily, in a kind of moral to the story: “Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to m ­ adness” (gs 197).5 Edward and Nancy fall into the latter category; they become the “villains” of the story. And yet Dowell claims they are the two whom he truly loves. Leonora, falling into the former category, becomes the heroine as she attains her “happy ending” with the marriage to Rodney Bayham, and gains her measure of stability. By violating convention Edward and Nancy become the villains, and yet by being the objects of Dowell’s affection, they become the individuals we should sympathize with. So what is the answer? If Edward and Nancy are to be villains in strictly an ironic sense, and implicitly the actual hero and heroine, then does this make Leonora the villain? Dowell claims during the novel that he loves Leonora as well, so is she a villain or a heroine? Dowell further complicates this process through his own perception as narrator. We cannot trust values assigned by Dowell because, as we have seen, the information he is using to develop and ascribe values is contradictory. He ­certainly seems genuine while lamenting the misfortunes of Edward and ­Nancy as well as the estrangement from Leonora. But we must remember that he did nothing passionate with regard to any of these people prior to Leonora’s disclosure of the true state of affairs. He did not try to stop Edward’s suicide. He could calmly go to America to put things in order before courting Nancy. He never shows Leonora any passionate side, even as a brother figure. Certainly, there are exclamations throughout the narrative that seem to express Dowell’s genuine regret and sadness, but Dowell can only discuss passion and cannot embrace it. He criticizes convention, yet he has approached life, and his narrative, according to convention, and this has left him merely imagining himself passionate. He has not been able to completely identify with either idea. The application of the convention/passion tension fails to provide a viable framework for Dowell’s narrative; not even an ironic reading can be sustained with any certainty within its parameters. So the uncertainty persists in terms of how the other characters, and as a result, how the experience as a whole, can be interpreted. Because the tension between passion and convention is itself conventional, and because Dowell is coping with his experience as an individual, this established set of values cannot provide him with absolute definitions of his experience. 5 gs will refer to the 2002 Penguin edition of The Good Soldier.

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This narrative itself is Dowell’s attempt to take the fragments of his experience and assemble them to make meaning. However, he must assemble them for himself, without the benefit of any ideological framework that he can take for granted. The difficulty Dowell faces, and which also characterizes fractal consciousness, is that while the effort to make fragments cohere using one’s own value system is a creative and perhaps heroic act, it implies that the character has found himself unable to rely upon pre-existing ideological frameworks. Dowell, in most readings, is no closer to understanding his situation at the end of the narrative than he was at the beginning. But, if Dowell is left without a definite resolution, without a definite value system to use in this re-construction of experience, he has also avoided the fates of madness or suicide to which the “villains” have succumbed. He has also avoided the insipid normalcy achieved by Leonora, which he seems to despise, though his own relationship can be said to be different in only a tragic way. Dowell’s rendering of his disquieting conversation with Leonora at the ruins demonstrates his fractal predicament as a narrator. After Florence insults the Irish, touches Edward’s wrist, and Leonora pulls Dowell to another part of the ruins, Dowell remarks how intensely disturbed Leonora looks: “She ran her hand with a singular clawing motion upwards over her forehead. Her eyes were enormously distended; her face was exactly that of a person looking into the pit of hell and seeing horrors there” (gs 43). Dowell explains how this scene frightens him, and how, when Leonora announces that she is Irish Catholic, Dowell felt that those “words gave me the greatest relief that I have ever had in my life” (43). At that particular moment, Dowell attributes the whole episode to “Florence’s mere silly jibes at the Irish and at the Catholics” (58). At that moment, Dowell explains that he could handle anything but jealousy from ­Leonora; he does not want to go on without the company of the Ashburnhams. He does not even suspect Edward and Florence despite Leonora’s desperate question about whether he sees what is really going on (42) or her cryptic remark about accepting the situation if he can (58). Dowell interrupts the account of this scene with Leonora with an overview of Edward’s previous affairs and Leonora’s trials in coping with them. Of course, Dowell does not find out about the marital difficulties of the Ashburnhams until after Edward’s death. Leonora’s silence at the ruins about Edward and Florence had left Dowell with one impression of this conversation; her revelation after Edward’s death gives him a new impression. He must fill in her initial silence about Edward and Florence with a new understanding of the experience, which is what he literally does in his construction of a new version. Leonora’s silence, in this new version, is filled by Dowell with the information about Edward’s affairs. With this information, Leonora’s behavior

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and remark about accepting the situation make more sense. If Dowell could conceive that Leonora would be looking into the pit of hell and seeing horrors over a slight of her religion, we can see, and perhaps Dowell can see, that he would certainly, in his inability to understand people, not be able to formulate a dependable version of reality. Dowell could not interpret his own initial impressions to make an accurate version, so he must now incorporate Leonora’s as well. This combination of impressions would seem to solve the problem of giving Dowell a clear perspective on his relationship with the Ashburnhams. However, the different versions of his experience create a fractal condition in Dowell because even if he knows all of the facts, he now has conflicting emotions about the parties involved. He admires Edward and can still consider spitting on his grave. He loves Leonora and still wants nothing to do with her. He can alternately hate and pity Florence. At the time of this encounter at the ruins, Dowell had definite feelings towards the Ashburnhams and Florence. Leonora’s version makes him unable to find a definite emotion. The emotions from both experiences remain superimposed, to use Ford’s words. As he struggles to construct this new version, Dowell cannot settle on one definite perspective for his experiences; his fractal condition keeps all of these ­emotions ­available as ­potentially authentic. This maintenance of emotional possibilities keeps Dowell, and us, suspended in a state of uncertainty, but it also helps Dowell, and Ford, provide a convincing impression of the complexity of actual relationships. Silences Modernists can use a variety of motifs as a means of creating the textual spaces for fractal dynamics to occur, spaces without definite values where the character must develop a perspective from fragments. The method of creating the spaces for fractal consciousness to operate can vary depending on the story, but the dynamic of fractal consciousness remains essentially the same. I ­consider this dynamic to be a defining element of modernist prose texts; I have discussed elsewhere, for instance, how this dynamic has operated through hosting interactions in various modernist novels.6 In the case of The Good Soldier, Ford uses Dowell’s engagement with silences to show the difficult process of assembling a perspective from impressionistic fragments. The device of silence 6 See Bowers, Hosting Textual Spaces of Modernism: Fractal Consciousness Shaping Modern(ist) Perspectives in Woolf, Barnes, Rhys, and Fitzgerald.

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has been used in other modernist novels for a similar purpose. For example, in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, some of the most passionate and destructive interactions, such as Gudrun’s annihilation of Gerald, occur in silence. Robin Vote in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is a mostly silent entity whereon characters inscribe their feelings and from which they receive only the fruits of their own passions and flaws. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa and Peter need no words to communicate on a level of shared consciousness. In all of these novels, silences are both the products of and fuel for fractal dynamics of communication, and this is the case of The Good Soldier as well. The silences that Dowell must contend with involve specifically what is left unspoken. Since characters and their developing perspectives drive modernist novels, according to my definition, their interactions are of the utmost importance. How they respond to the world around them, to each other, and to themselves determines the shape of their perspective. Considering the importance of interaction, the lack of verbal communication is as integral to character development as is conversation. In a perception that is more and more in tune with attaching value to fragments, silences become meaningful fragments; absence becomes a presence that can be considered significant. When we consider Ford’s impressionism, we notice that any impression can be ­important to what he calls rendering the experience. Silence can be just as valid of an impression as any detail in a conversation. In fact, Ford emphasizes that long, intricate conversations are unrealistic since they would be difficult, if not impossible, to repeat verbatim. Ford’s conversations are as important for what is not said as for what is actually recalled by the auditor. The most obvious silence that Dowell must contend with involves what is not spoken. Or more specifically, he must contend with what is not spoken to him. We know from Dowell that associating with good people means that one will not discuss the personal. He has no idea that Edward and Leonora do not speak in private. He is not privy to the tensions at Bramshaw between E ­ dward, Leonora, and Nancy when he arrives there. At the ruins, Leonora chooses not to tell him about Edward and Florence. In general, the interactions of the group “were characterized by an extraordinary want of any communicativeness on the part of the Ashburnhams to which [Dowell and Florence] […] replied by leaving out quite as extraordinarily, and nearly as completely, the personal note” (gs 34). While direct silence has an important bearing on the plot of the novel and leaves Dowell and the reader with questions about the other characters, silence through the exclusion of information is more pervasive. The characters in Dowell’s circle use the language of good form, which is a language of omissions. The exclusion of information can be the result of ­intentional

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­self-censorship, whether the motive is to deceive, to avoid conflict, to intentionally hide information for a personal agenda, or to observe the rules of propriety. All of these motives are present in The Good Soldier. Exclusion can also result, as in the case of Dowell’s narration, from lack of memory or a lack of information. Since vital information has come to him from other sources, we can never be sure of the accuracy of this information. Also, since much of the tale involves looking back after this information has been imparted to him, we can never be sure how accurate Dowell’s memory is. And, of course, Dowell, like the other characters, may be refusing to divulge information from many motives: because he must observe propriety, because the details are too painful, because he has a hidden agenda himself. This is the more pervasive kind of silence because it occurs within the spaces of actual conversation. Dowell must fill these silences in order to construct his account, and it is these types of silences that have placed him in the position of having to re-interpret his experience in the first place. Dowell describes how Florence talks constantly, and yet she must remain on topics of little import, so the doctors have told Dowell. There seems to be nothing vital exchanged between the two. The most interesting interaction that we see is the provocative glance that Florence gives Dowell when e­ ntering the spa. Dowell describes how she was “looking over her shoulder […] so that her eyes flashed very blue” (gs 27). This exchange is itself non-verbal, and Dowell reflects, For whose benefit did she do it? For that of the bath attendant? of the passers-by? I don’t know. Anyhow, it can’t have been for me, for never, in all the years of her life, never on any possible occasion, or in any other place did she so smile to me, mockingly, invitingly. Ah, she was a riddle; but then, all other women are riddles. (27) If he does not know what the glance means, it reinforces the idea that nothing intimate or even significant is being exchanged by these two verbally. Of course, any interaction between them will involve Florence’s omission of her affairs. And the utter failure of Dowell to consider Florence’s death to be a suicide until Leonora reveals this to him demonstrates the lack of intimacy involved in the conversations between the Dowells, on both sides. The Dowells and Ashburnhams, as far as Dowell knows, until Leonora’s disclosure, speak only in terms of conventional conversation. For these couples, there are two options: silence or the language of good form. It was, as Dowell explains, “the modern civilized habit – the modern English habit of taking every one for granted” (gs 36). When he considers associating with good people, he refers to those who “will go rigidly through the whole programme from the

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underdone beef to the Anglicanism” (37). Dowell laments that after all the years associating with good people, one has “nothing whatever to show for it,” especially not any “knowledge of one’s fellow beings” (36). From the interactions of nine years, there has only been the silence of omission. We have only to look at Dowell’s relationship with Edward to see this dynamic exemplified. Dowell claims that other than the confession near the end and when he occasionally “blurted out something that gave an insight into the sentimental view of the cosmos that was his,” Edward had only talked about the most everyday things, such as where to get a good tie (28–9). When he finally does talk intimately to Dowell, it is suggestive that Dowell feels Edward is confiding in him as he would a “woman or a solicitor” (194), not as a fellow good man. And considering that Leonora’s revelations about the group after Edward’s death are so surprising, we have to imagine that other than the brief, intense encounter at the ruins, Leonora, at least in front of Dowell, adheres to the policy of using good form until her disclosure. However, perhaps more significant are the silences of exclusion imposed on others. The prime example of this is Leonora’s injunction to Edward that Dowell never hear a word about Florence’s and Edward’s affair (gs 82–83). This ordered silence perpetuates the entire scenario. Edward is trapped in the affair; he must attend to Florence fearing that if he neglects her, she will reveal all to Dowell. In making the injunction, Leonora has effectively doomed herself to Florence’s impertinences since Edward cannot leave Florence. This injunction, this imposed silence of exclusion, ultimately leads to Dowell’s fractal condition. If the truth about the affair had come out earlier, Dowell might have been shocked and outraged, perhaps even relieved. Despite the immediate ramifications, Dowell could have continued to follow his more or less conventional line on life. Since Dowell’s dilemma stems from his realization that his perspective on events has not been accurate, we can imagine that if he had known about Florence and Edward from the outset, he would have no reason to need another version of the experience since he would have had the correct one in the first place. The longer the affair continues, the longer reality does not match Dowell’s perception of it, and thus a larger portion of Dowell’s life and experience comes into question; it follows that the more he needs an alternate version of reality, and the less he can trust his own version. Leonora’s injunction also has a significant impact on Leonora herself. If Leonora had allowed an early confession of the affair to Dowell by Edward, or told him herself at the beginning, she might have had a chance to get Edward back. She feels that as the affair with Maisie Maidan dwindles, she might be next in his affections until Florence comes into the picture. When Edward begins the affair with Florence, Nancy is only a child. If Leonora had allowed Edward to confess to the affair .

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or had revealed it herself before Nancy’s coming of age, she might have had a chance to secure Edward’s love. What would happen with Leonora and Edward had Dowell found out can only be speculation of course, but the question it does lead us to is why ­Leonora decides not to share the information with Dowell. She could have ended the entire affair between Edward and Florence at the ruins by telling Dowell, though Dowell explains that she assumed he “had been suffering all that she had been suffering, or, at least, that [Dowell] had permitted all that she had permitted” in terms of Edward’s and Florence’s affair (gs 89). Either way, why remain silent? Why not reveal the truth there and then? Dowell explains how Leonora, “even in her madness … was afraid to go as far as that. She was afraid that, if she did, Edward and Florence would make a bolt of it, and that, if they did that, she would lose forever all chance of getting him back in the end” (152). Clearly here we see how silences lead to erroneous assumptions and continuing dilemmas. Leonora’s and Dowell’s silences by omission perpetuate Dowell’s fractal condition in the sense that her silences allowed the deception of Dowell to continue, leading Dowell, once he discovers the truth, or her truth, to have no authoritative version of events that he can trust. While silence itself becomes a space for erroneous assumptions much of the time, direct speech creates problematic situations as well. Maintaining silences can be seen as justifiable if we look closer at some of these predicaments. For example, Nancy confronts Edward openly, offering herself to him. This directness does not solve the problem, but only heightens it. Edward swims among vague notions of a gentlemanly duty as protector, an idea of himself as a romantic, and an overwhelming passionate feeling for Nancy. Edward is in a kind of amorphous dilemma; his only resolution is to refrain from pursuit. When Nancy explicitly offers herself to him, this direct speech forces him to confront the situation, not just of his relationship to her, but also his complete lack of understanding of himself. If Edward cannot act, perhaps it is because he does not truly have a reason for acting or not acting. Direct speech that does not follow the guidelines of good form forces Edward to choose a value system that is not his own, for he does not have one. The destructive intrigues at Bramshaw begin because of direct speech, according to Dowell’s version of Edward’s account. Edward had explained to Dowell that until he actually told Nancy that she was “the person he cared most for in the world” (gs 96), he had no inkling of any romantic feeling for her. His speech manifests his unconscious feelings (94). Without this verbal revelation, Edward might not have experienced his particular suffering over his feelings for Nancy. Direct speech, as these examples show, has developed in characters particular damaging emotions. And direct speech, in the form

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of L­ eonora’s disturbing revelations, reveal the problem of silences for D ­ owell. While silences have created the potentiality of a fractal consciousness for Dowell, direct speech has served as the catalyst for the development of this dilemma for him. Direct speech has revealed the flaws in Dowell’s perspective on events, prompting his need to re-examine his past. It seems clear that he would prefer the silences to the consequences of direct speech. It is the direct speech that has ruined the “uninterrupted tranquility” of his nine years with the Ashburnhams (34) while the silences had preserved it.

The Saddest Story

As Dowell attempts to formulate a coherent version of his experiences, trying to cope with the gaps left by the silences, we learn a great deal about his character. Following Ford’s idea of impressionism, the reader, or in this case auditor, understands the author because by choosing certain impressions to disclose, the author shows us his or her perspective. Perhaps one of the most intriguing questions left unanswered by Dowell, and the novel, is why this is the saddest story. Or to be more specific, why it is the saddest story Dowell ever heard. One could posit the most direct answer: Dowell’s experience with anything but good form through his own oblivious perspective has given him a limited range of events with which to compare his own “tragedy.” While Dowell does seem to feel genuine anguish, as I have mentioned, he does not respond to the situations as they occur with much emotion. I would suggest that the saddest part of the saddest story is that Dowell loses what he values most with the dissolution of the group – not a sense of conventionality in the abstract as some might claim, but the actual group itself. Dowell values the stability of the group so that he can have only one version, one stable version of reality. Then he would not have to cope with the fractal condition he is struggling with now, trying to explain his experience using different, unreliable, fragmentary versions. If one argues that Dowell feels for the individuals in the group, one has only to look at his interactions with them to see how little anything beyond the group interactions has impacted Dowell. As Dowell proclaims, “My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them” (gs 13). The irony, of course, is that Florence and the Ashburnhams know more about each other on a personal level than the narrator does. The question we have to ask is what Dowell means by “knowing each other.” Does he mean having an intimate understanding of a person or does he mean simply having

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knowledge of what happens beneath the veneer of good society, more specifically the truth about the sordid dynamic of the other three. Considering the implications of any deeper knowledge about the Ashburnhams, knowing nothing at all about them is the only way that Dowell can enjoy their company. Throughout the novel, Dowell is not reticent about what the group meant to him. As he explains to his silent auditor, “if for me, we were four people with the same tastes, with the same desires, acting – or, no, not acting – sitting here and there unanimously, isn’t that the truth?” (15). And this arrangement, as long as Dowell is in ignorance, is for him bliss: “Oh God, they made me so happy that I doubt if even paradise, that shall smooth out all temporal wrongs, shall ever give me the like” (60). In discussing the dissolution of the group, Dowell bemoans specifically the end of permanence and stability. He can’t believe that “that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks” (15). He likens this dissolution to an “unthinkable event” comparable to great tragedies in history. It seems feasible that the tragic element for Dowell seems to have less to do with the unfortunate fates of Edward and Nancy than with the end of this “long, tranquil life” (14–15). In retrospect, Dowell can paradoxically call their group a prison, but he certainly could not reach this conclusion before Leonora’s disclosure. When ­considering the events from this vantage point, Dowell can ask, in terms of making him happy, in terms of preserving the surface placidity of the group: “And what could they have done better, or what could they have done that could have been worse?” (gs 60). Certainly Dowell mourns for the loss of ­Edward to suicide and the loss of Nancy to insanity. He is even sad over his and Leonora’s estrangement. But we are left with the question of how sad he is over the individuals, and how sad he is over the disruption of his tranquility, that the actions of the others in the group ironically caused. Since he has already shown that “with all the taking for granted, you never really get an inch deeper” (37) than the superficialities of good society, one has to wonder if he could value them more as individuals than as the providers of the tranquility which he truly cherishes. If one concedes that Dowell places a limited value on the individuals, one might still make the established argument that Dowell’s love of convention has been disrupted by passion. This explanation, using the struggle within the convention/passion framework, remains inadequate for interpreting Dowell. In a sense, the characters have been acting along more or less conventional lines. And reticence about feelings, as Dowell has explained, is an English trait. While the silences among the members of the circle are problematic in themselves, they become fractal when Dowell begins attempting to re-construct them in

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his narrative, and Dowell’s own nature frustrates any imposition of this framework. During Dowell’s attempt to interpret and explain the silences, he must strive to understand motives that he sees as not conventional. As I have already shown, Dowell thought of Nancy and Edward as ­non-conventional, so much so that they were annihilated, as his theory goes. He claims to love Leonora, at least on some level, despite their current estrangement, so he has feelings for her that he is unaccustomed to. He makes no mention of feeling this way about Florence. So, in striving to give a meaning to all of these events, Dowell discovers that he cannot definitively ascribe motives as he works to fill in the silences himself. He must attempt to understand the motivations of passion, even if the passions are clothed in convention. Yet, by his own admission, Dowell is not a passionate man at all; he swears by “the absolute chastity of [his] life” (gs 19). The need to understand passion, as he sees it, after Leonora’s disclosures, unsettles him from the comfort in convention that he enjoyed as part of the group. After Leonora’s disclosure, Dowell cannot now understand social conventions, which were second-nature for him during the nine years with the Ashburnhams. If the Ashburnhams, as he associated with them, did not ­ultimately provide stability, then convention is not the route to follow. If that is not the route, then he must understand passion, which appears to be the cause for all of the problems. Dowell can identify with neither. He makes a feeble attempt to identify with Edward Ashburnham, but it is a very qualified identification: “[…] he was just myself. If I had had the courage and virility and possibly the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did” (gs 197). In his fractal condition, he can attempt this identification even though he can also all but admit that he is nothing like Ashburnham. He says he loves Nancy, but he is prevented from marrying her by the law of the land, and he is certainly not prepared to kill himself over his inability to marry her, or for her to love him. He cannot emulate Edward, and he despises Leonora’s lifestyle. Dowell’s love for Leonora and Nancy are nothing close to passion; instead, these feelings seem more staid than even Edward’s conventional affairs. The true crux of the problem, however, is not that Dowell is caught between convention and passion, but that convention now involves passion in the sense that it requires the stifling of passion. Even if we try to keep Dowell within a framework of convention and passion, Dowell becomes fractal because he must contend with two versions of what it means to be conventional: his original passionless idea of convention and the idea of convention that requires preserving silences in regard to passion. Since convention now involves passion, it is no longer an established value Dowell can identify with. He cannot simply fill the spaces of silence using either of these ideas because both have

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facets that he cannot identify with. How is he to understand these characters and the situation since he cannot identify with them? He must view them as they are important to him, for better or for worse. So that leads to the inevitable question: what do these characters mean to Dowell? As I have already discussed, Dowell values the relationship because of how comfortable and predictable it is, or at least how predictable he thought it was. Dowell’s admitted complete chastity, and his confessed inability to understand people, leave us to wonder exactly how capable he will be at filling in the spaces of the silences that have confronted him. It seems that as he settles on one interpretation, he questions it, and proposes another. So the only way that he can interpret the events, that he can fill the silences, is to create a perspective that is his, and his alone, developed from his attempt to work between the differing versions of his experience. Dowell’s passion is the stability and permanence that he had found with the Ashburnhams. It is not convention per se that Dowell is immersed in, for he falls short of fulfilling a conventional role, if Edward is the measuring stick of success. We can see Dowell’s love of the group, along with his love of the programme it had peacefully followed, in his reflections on human character: For who in this world can give anyone a character? Who in this world knows anything of any other heart – or of his own? I don’t mean to say that one cannot form an average estimate of the way a person will behave. But one cannot be certain of the way any man will behave in every case – and until one can do that a ‘character’ is of no use to anyone. (gs 126) We have already seen how Dowell loves the Ashburnhams for being good people, and how being one of the good people means sharing the same tastes and abiding by the tastes of the proper social programme. Dowell can only e­ stimate character according to predictable, consistent tendencies. He laments the loss of the group because before he was privy to another version, he had what was for him an adequate estimate of the value of the Ashburnhams. Now, with conflicting versions, that tranquility is gone; now it is, as he says periodically, all a darkness. As simple as that sounds, it explains quite a bit about how Dowell both creates and comments on his tale. Dowell harshly condemns Florence for entering the affair with Edward. If Dowell truly did not feel anything for Florence as he claims, even after she dies, then why speak of his hatred of her. In a sense, the knowledge of her infidelity ruins the memory of those years, whether it is truly because she made a fool of him, or because she has sullied Edward. The hatred seems to arise from the knowledge that Florence undermined the

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whole group, and the indifference arises from the fact that she has done all the damage she can, and her place in the group is all that really mattered to him anyway. Dowell’s remarks about Edward’s death, given almost as an afterthought, could be explained as Dowell’s loss of interest in Edward now that the group had disbanded. And finally, Dowell has no need to maintain relations with Leonora since half of the group is dead. And it would be difficult in any case considering that Leonora was the primary source of knowledge that has led him to his current sadness at having to cope with multiple versions of his experience.

Implications of Fractal Silences

Understanding Dowell’s fractal condition, and how it develops as he tries to fill silences, gives us insights into his character. It also gives us insights into Dowell as narrator and to the novel as a whole. Because Dowell is interpreting events without any definite criteria, his characterizations remain ambiguous. We must remain aware that Edward is a romantic but ultimately has behaved as a cad. We can sympathize with Leonora while realizing her manipulative nature. We can perhaps even understand Florence’s lack of affection for Dowell while being tutored in her flawed character. Without definitive versions of any of the characters, Dowell must leave us with multiple versions of each. And we must remember that Dowell can be many narrators and may be them all at the same time. Who is to say that Dowell is not in some ways inept or flawed as an individual? How can we decide whether he chooses not to confront certain aspects of his experience on purpose or whether he simply is not equipped to face his experience? Who is to say that at the same time he is not deliberately deceiving the reader, whether to consciously hide his true feelings and i­ ntentions, or because he shares the human trait of not wanting to look any worse than he has to, or both? Through Dowell’s struggle with fractal consciousness, we are left not with mutually exclusive possibilities, but with multiple possibilities that are all plausible. One might argue that since we are left with multiple possible meanings, that approaching literature, and specifically this novel, through an understanding of fractal consciousness has no effective or viable results. I would argue that understanding fractal consciousness shows the reader what Ford and other modernists are striving to demonstrate: the challenge of understanding and expressing the fragmentation of modern experience. The struggle to make the fragments cohere is the main point, the struggle to use impressions to ­construct reality. The fact that the results of this struggle remain ambiguous, that they remain confusing, both to the reader and to the writer, is the key

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point. The lesson, if there is one, in The Good Soldier, is that multiple versions exist, and that one must rely on oneself to reconcile them, that the individual must impose his own order because in modern experience the individual will find himself unable to identify with the established rules of order. Ford certainly fits into this scheme of having a fractal consciousness. As I mention above, a modernist character is enacting the fractal consciousness of the author. Or one might say that the author has created a character with fractal consciousness as a product, intentionally or implicitly, of his or her own struggle within the fractal dynamic. The famous story of Ford presenting a lecture at Wyndham Lewis’s Rebel Art Centre in traditional evening wear epitomizes his struggle to be both a man of his time and a gentleman.7 He has often been characterized, even by himself, as helping to transition from the old to the new.8 And while he would claim that the author should be of his own time, he was still wearing what would be considered in that context the outmoded uniform of the English gentleman. Indeed, Dowell becomes an ideal demonstration of this extension considering that Dowell is actually writing his experience; he is constructing experience in the same manner that Ford is. Ford is struggling with multiple versions of how to create art. That struggle involves negotiating different versions of reality. Dowell’s narration demonstrating Ford’s impressionism not merely qualifies as modernist, but in utilizing fractal consciousness to develop new perspectives, epitomizes the modernist creative process. Dowell exemplifies the modern man caught between values, unable to identify with them, struggling to make sense of them. Often the character-asextension is experiencing reality with fractal consciousness, yet Dowell not only demonstrates Ford’s parallel condition, but Ford’s artistic struggle in using that condition for expression. Works Cited Bailin, Miriam. “‘An Extraordinarily Safe Castle’: Aesthetics as Refuge in The Good Soldier.” Modern Fiction Studies 30.4 (1984): 621–36. Berberich, Christine. “A Modernist Elegy to the Gentleman? Englishness and the Idea of the Gentleman in Ford’s The Good Soldier.” Ford Madox Ford and Englishness. Ed. Dennis Brown and Jenny Plastow. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 195–209. 7 For one account of this event see McCarthy, “The Good Soldier and the War for British Modernism,” 303–39. 8 See Berberich, “A Modernist Elegy to the Gentleman? Englishness and the Idea of the Gentleman in Ford’s The Good Soldier,” 195–209.

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Bowers, Dean. Hosting Textual Spaces of Modernism: Fractal Consciousness Shaping Modern(ist) Perspectives in Woolf, Barnes, Rhys, and Fitzgerald. PhD thesis. Texas Tech University, 2006. Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier. New York: Penguin, 2002. Ford, Ford Madox. “On Impressionism.” Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford. Ed. Frank MacShane. Regents Critics Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964. 33–55. Ford, Ford Madox. “Techniques.” Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford. Ed. Frank MacShane. Regents Critics Series. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964. 56–71. McCarthy, Jeffrey Mathes. “The Good Soldier and the War for British Modernism.” Modern Fiction Studies 54.2 (1999): 303–39. Poole, Roger. “The Real Plot-Line of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: An Essay in Applied Deconstruction.” Textual Practice 4.3 (1990): 391–427. Poole, Roger. “The Unknown Ford Madox Ford.” Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity. Ed. ­Robert Hampson and Max Saunders. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. 117–36.

chapter 5

A Tale of Two Babies – One Dead, the Other Powerless to Be Born: Ambivalent Beginnings in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier Aimee L. Pozorski Abstract Canonical readings of The Good Soldier interpret this new modernism through the novel’s unreliable narrator, its achronological view of time, its weary fascination with the sordid affairs of the wealthy, and its self-consciousness about the conventions of masculinity. Such attributes make Ford’s novel, in these readings, an exemplary modernist text – a text that looks back at the nineteenth century and its conventional plots as safely in the past. However, I propose that the novel is much more ­ambivalent as a modernist text than a surface reading reveals. I argue here that the novel’s repeated figure of infanticide connotes the simultaneous birth and death of modernism as a new and threatening literary form.

Keywords Modernism – Victorian/Edwardian England – ambivalence – The Good Soldier

Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then, I don’t like society – much. ford madox ford, 1915

∵ In 1855, Matthew Arnold conveyed his dismay over a changing Victorian England, one apparently shifting away from faith in God and choosing, instead, the path toward reason and science. Caught “wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born,” Arnold reveals simultaneously hope © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004344143_007

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and ambivalence about progress. For him, the modern subject was trapped – the verb “wandering” here suggests he has nowhere to turn – looking back toward the world of faith, on the one hand, and looking forward to an unknown new world that must exist in spite of itself. Several decades later, Gertrude Stein emerged as an experimental modernist in her own right, famously quipping: “I was there to kill what was not dead, the Nineteenth Century which was so sure of evolution and prayers” (1945: 21). Here, too, Stein laments the status of the modern subject, actively hoping for a “new world” that privileged an alternative way of depicting and confronting the burden of humanity. Like Arnold before him, and Stein, his contemporary, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (1915) seems similarly caught wandering these two worlds: the world of Victorian ideals, religious faith, and propriety, on the one hand; and the modern, indeed, modernist world that would eventually privilege not faith but skepticism in a world order of anomie, and alienation. Considering as they do the place of alienation in The Good Soldier, scholarly readings of this work generally conceive of the novel’s status as a high modernist text by focusing on its unreliable narrator, achronological view of time, weary fascination with the sordid affairs of the wealthy, and self-consciousness about the conventions of masculinity. Such attributes allow critics to conclude that this novel is not simply a modernist text, but an exemplary one at that: a text that looks back at the nineteenth century and its conventional plots as safely in the past. However, I propose in in this essay that the novel is much more ambivalent as a modernist text than a surface reading reveals. With the repeated, apparently gratuitous, references to the birth and death of a baby, the novel betrays a profound concern about the future – the future of society and of literary Modernism itself – as it grows out of the wasteland of a past: one is dead, the other powerless to be born. The dead baby, the reader learns on three different occasions, belonged to “the daughter of one of his tenants who had been accused of murdering [it]” (gs 30). The novel’s narrator, John Dowell refers to this murder, or accusations of murder, during three pivotal moments in the text (30, 155, 195). Often linked with Edward Ashburnham’s sentimentality, the repeated references to infanticide also convey a significant concern of our narrator that society – as proven by this saddest story – isn’t much worth propagating. In the end, however, just before the third mention of this poor tenant girl, Dowell gives the final blow about Leonora: she is expecting the baby of Rodney Bayham (“another rabbit”) in three months (186). And so it goes: one baby has been murdered, or so we are given to think, while the other baby is doomed to be born into society that doesn’t seem to be worth saving in the first place.

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Writing on the eve of World War i, during the birth of a new way of writing, Ford Madox Ford here, too, seems ambivalent about humanity at the turn of the century. His often unreliable – but also believably misanthropic – narrator tells us toward the end of The Good Soldier: “Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then, I don’t like society – much” (197). Here the propagation of humanity and of society that Dowell, by this moment, has written himself into loathing is akin to the mindless drive toward reproduction as practiced by rabbits, an image repeatedly tied to the contemptuously uncivilized Rodney Bayham. But this “new life” – the modernist impulse to “Make It New” following the command of Ezra Pound – might just as easily be considered, from Ford’s point of view, as too closely related to the repopulation of uncivilized society. In linking the birth of Modernism to the propagation of a species, Ford writes in the novel’s Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford in 1927 about the years during which he drafted The Good Soldier: “Those were the passionate days of the literary Cubists, Vorticists, Imagistes, and the rest of the tapageur and riotous Jeunes of that young decade” (4). During this time, he says, he thought of himself simultaneously as an eel or as “the Great Auk,” a sea-bird that had long since been extinct: two images of animals giving birth that are ­inextricably bound up with death. For Ford: “I regarded myself as an Eel which, having reached the deep sea, brings forth its young and dies – or as the Great Auk I considered that, having reached my allotted, I had lain my one egg and might as well die” (4). Curiously, in writing this dedicatory letter of 1927, a letter intended to celebrate belatedly the influence of Stella Ford in addition to the success of this great novel, Ford emphasizes not simply the birth of something amazing, but a kind of ambivalent death associated rather uncomfortably with this new life as well. On the one hand, Ford reports here a kind of necessary death of the older generation of artists, himself included – and yet, with this odd focus on animals and extinction, he seems not yet ready to die himself. And, perhaps, that is a sad story of its own and one still worth telling: not merely the tale the novel tells of the downfall of a transnational friendship and of the charming good soldier, but also of the profound ambivalence surrounding Modernism and its project to reclaim both art and life itself. In this essay, I propose that one way readers might confront additional signs of the novel’s ambivalence about the state of humanity as well as its own place in the modernist tradition is through close readings of the otherwise gratuitous details associated with the murder of an unnamed and unheard infant within the text. Such inexplicable references point up a kind of “traumatic modernity” we have now come to associate with The Good Soldier – not simply

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in terms of the traumatic history of World War i and the knowledge of the Armenian genocide at the beginning of the last century, but also in terms of literary Modernism itself. Such a reading of the infant who is born and dead, almost simultaneously, might help explain how, like the infant in Ford’s text, this literary tradition in which the child finds itself was traumatic in its own emergence. The unheard infant in the text draws on the rhetorical figure of the infans – “without speech” – as doubly signifying the unspeakable act of killing a child as well as the sudden foreclosure of futurity in modern narrative forms. And, to complicate matters still, we ultimately learn of the novel’s namesake that: “he could not bear to see a child cry” (gs 79). It might also be worth noting here that Ford’s un-discussed figure of ­infanticide is not alone in this literary tradition, especially considering the trans-Atlantic influences of the time: such canonical works as Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), Robert Frost’s “Home Burial” (1914) and “The Impulse” (1916), E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear To Tread (1920), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), May Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriet Frean (1922), William Carlos ­Williams’s “The Dead Baby” (1927), and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), to name only a few, also betray significant worries about sustaining new life through references to babies who are murdered, born dead, or die inexplicably and prematurely. Given its close thematic proximity with genocide and the World War i that nearly killed an entire generation of young men, the unexpected death or murder of a child in canonical modernist literature requires critical and collective attention that has been met only with silence. The double instance of silence – both the silence in the criticism, as well as the inaudible cry of infants who die in these modernist texts – perhaps reveals something about modern culture that has become too easy to overlook. The Good Soldier reveals much about human consciousness, about love, about the risks of sentimentality, about experimentations with time and modernist form, but it also asks significant questions about new life, particularly about the inextricable nature of birth and death through the unheard infant buried in the text. While critics consistently attach the birth of the new underwriting modernist style and content with Ford, culminating, perhaps in Joseph Wiesenfarth’s proclamation that Ford “is not only a voice of Modernism but a conduit for it into a new century that is seeking new ways of expressing the human condition” (2005: 23), I would like to track briefly the ways in which both the “new century” and the “new ways of expressing the human condition” are figured as problematic through representations of fertility and reproduction in The Good Soldier.

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One early reference suggesting Dowell’s own inability to reproduce – a reference usually read in terms of masculinity, is his rhetorical question: “‘Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man – the man with the right to existence – a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour’s womenkind?’” (gs 19). Karen A. Hoffman reads this line in keeping with the Victorian ideals surrounding imperialism, arguing that “Throughout the novel, Ford presents the operative definition of patriarchal masculinity in late Victorian/ Edwardian England as inextricably linked to the assumptions about practices of imperialism” (30). Understandably, Dowell utters this frustrated remark in the context of the sexual exploits and conquests of Ashburnham; surely, in this reading, Ashburnham has actually taken over the body of Dowell’s wife. But, I think this early statement questions more than masculinity and power. It also questions, quite literally here through the direct reference to an emasculated male, the possibility of producing new life and new forms. More uncomfortably still is the fact that Dowell’s urgent question remains unanswered: “I don’t know,” he answers. “And there is nothing to guide us” (gs  19). He refers, later in this paragraph to social morals, but there is also something here about biology as well, in keeping with Dowell’s worry about the sexual practices of rabbits as well as the general undesirability of the entire human population. Dowell continues: And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary about the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness. (19) While this passage seems to draw attention to such key words as “morals” and “morality,” I am also interested in references to “sex” – the biological and reproductive counterpart to love and morals – and “impulse,” specifically: that quality that separates animals like rabbits from mankind in terms of reproductive drives. This worry comes back when Dowell considers the relationship between Ashburnham and Leonora, repeatedly revealing that Ashburnham, on the one hand “was a perfect maniac about children” (gs 52), while Leonora was “childless herself” (52). This latter statement is repeated twice on page 52, when it is introduced, and it returns about seventy-five pages later, when Dowell indicates that “Leonora was not well – she was beginning to fear that their union might be sterile” (117). Perhaps more interesting still, however, is Dowell’s return to this question not four pages later, when he goes on:

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I don’t know why they never had any children – not that I really believe that children would have made any difference. The dissimilarity of ­Edward and Leonora was too profound. It will give you some idea of the extraordinary naïveté of Edward Ashburnham that, at the time of his marriage and for perhaps a couple of years after, he did not really know how children are produced. Neither did Leonora. I don’t mean to say that this state of things continued, but there it was. I daresay it had a good deal of influence on their mentalities. At any rate they never had a child. It was the Will of God. (120) On the one hand, these remarks about Edward’s and Leonora’s sexual inexperience could further emphasize Dowell’s own naïveté as well has his curious investment in Edward’s sex life, clarified, perhaps, with the knowledge of Edward’s affair with Florence. However, the language of (re)production comes back here, culminating with one of the few confident statements Dowell makes throughout the entire book: “It was the Will of God” (gs 120). At this mid-way point in the novel, such a proclamation might be read as a statement about humanity generally. Clearly, for Dowell, such individuals as these ought not to populate the earth; but, again, here, too, he is ­withholding information: Leonora herself is pregnant by the time Dowell sits down to write his story. All he tells us as this point, however, by way of “­hammering the nail in the coffin,” so to speak, is that Leonora “was just trying to keep things together for the sake of the children who did not come” (gs 121). Considered together with other such apparently inappropriate or misplaced phrases in the novel such as Dowell’s description of rejecting Florence’s trip to Fordingbridge and Leonora’s affair with Bayham, I believe that repeated references to the loss or absence of a child are no accident. When Dowell describes the effects of his refusal to allow Florence to travel with such language as “It fixed her and it frightened her … I tell you it fixed her … It fixed her beautifully … Yes it was a bad fix for her,” Dowell again seems to have eunuchs or neutered animals on his mind – and, for him, this effect is the desired result. (gs 75–76) Further, Old Uncle Hurlbird, we learn just a few pages earlier, said that Paris was full of snakes in the grass, of which he had had bitter experience. He concluded, as they always do, poor, dear old things,

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with the aspiration that all American women should one day be sexless – though that is not the way they put it. (73) And later, still, Dowell refers to Leonora’s early attempted love affair with Bayham as “abortive,” conjuring images here stronger than that of a failed or rejected love affair (gs 162). For Dowell, crucially, this affair was not given new life. I raise the points about Dowell’s rhetoric in order to further situate the three repeated narrations of the death of an infant – an infant of the daughter of one of Ashburnham’s tenants who is accused of murdering her baby. If Dowell is trying to make a point here about Ashburnham’s generosity or sentimentality, his way of squandering resources to Leonora’s dismay, or his potentially scandalous love affairs, Dowell (through Ford) could easily provide any number of examples to satisfy these descriptions. In fact, his repeated references to Maisie Maidan, the Kilsyte affair, and Nancy Rufford do more than enough work to call into question the character of Edward Ashburnham. However, by offering an additional example, and by narrating it similarly on three different occasions in the next, he fixates on an infant – and not just any infant. He fixates on an infant who has been murdered by his mother. The first reference to this murdered baby appears in Part i, Chapter iii of the novel and is used by Dowell to provide some background to the goings on in the year 1904. Further, this reference is apparently used to emphasize Ashburnham’s sentimental side. Immediately preceding the reference to the infanticide, Dowell tells us that Ashburnham “loved, with a sentimental yearning, all children, puppies, and the feeble generally” (gs 30). Again, in the next paragraph, Dowell reports that Ashburnham, when describing Nancy’s trip to Brindisi, “talked like a good book”; his expressions, for Dowell, were surprisingly “literary” and “just” (30). And now, suddenly, the memory of this friend is not “cheaply sentimental” (30). Does this mean he is still sentimental, but not “cheaply” so … or does this story, the “fatal Brindisi” story entangled as it is in a mother’s murder, appear as somehow more elevated, more serious? Dowell reports: And I was quite astonished, during his final burst out to me – at the very end of things, when the poor girl was on her way to that fatal Brindisi and he was trying to persuade himself and me that he had never really cared for her – I was quite astonished to observe how literary and how just his expressions were. He talked like quite a good book – a book not in the least cheaply sentimental. You see, I suppose he regarded me not so much as a man. I had to be regarded as a woman or a solicitor. Anyway, it burst out of him on that horrible night. And then, next morning, he took

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me over to the Assizes and I saw how, in a perfectly calm and businesslike way he set to work to secure a verdict of not guilty for a poor girl, the daughter of one of his tenants who had been accused of murdering her baby. He spent two hundred pounds on her defence … Well, that was ­Edward Ashburnham. (gs 30) It is difficult not to place our narrator Dowell in the position of a sentimental reader such as Madame Bovary, a character trapped between the death of Romanticism, on the one hand, and the birth of Realism, on the other hand. In the middle of that passage, Dowell himself reflects upon his gender role – again, returning to the eunuch question – in considering why Ashburnham was so straightforward about his vexed love for Nancy. There are two moments in this passage that are astonishing, that leave questions open: the first is the emotional outburst of Ashburnham himself, and the second is, by contrast, the “perfectly calm and business-like way” he secured a verdict of not guilty for this murderous mother. Instead of following up on the details of this case (and we know that Dowell has the details because he tells us that he was there at the High Court of Justice during the proceedings) he tells us the personal financial cost to Ashburnham: two hundred pounds. As Ann Barr Snitow has argued of these “Dowell” moments, we are asked to wonder: “Is Edward ‘the good landlord and father of his people’ or is he an absurd sentimentalist who expresses his disaffection with decaying traditions through a series of irresponsible sexual affairs? Of course the double image is intended” (gs 180). With his Impressionistic style, Ford makes clear that D ­ owell himself does not know how he feels about Edward, making it all the more difficult for the reader to discern the fine points of his character. In ­Dowell’s reading of this moment in the High Court, however, at least in this first reference, the girl on trial is “poor” – probably both because she’s financially unable to defend herself as well as generally put upon by society at large – and she has merely been “accused” of murdering the baby. The phrase “poor girl” here, however, returns our attention to Maisie, who is also repeatedly described as a “poor child” (gs 55, 58) and Nancy, presumably, who is described as the “other lover [who] came along … the poor girl who was just as straight, as splendid, as upright as he” (78). In linking these three young women with the descriptor “poor” (in one sense or another) it is difficult not to wonder whether this girl on trial, whom he defended, has been another one of Ashburnham’s sexual conquests. Further, the young woman on trial here is linked to the only other moment in the novel when the word “murder” is uttered, that moment when Florence speaks with Leonora about the death of Mrs. Maisie Maidan: “‘Never do

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you dare to mention Mrs. Maidan’s name again. You murdered her. You and I ­murdered her between us. I am as much a scoundrel as you. I don’t like to be reminded of it’” (gs 62). One reading of these parallel moments, then, could introduce a reading of the dead baby as symbolic of Maisie Maidan, a poor murdered baby who is victimized by the cruel world in which she finds herself. However, there is also the factor of Nancy, and her explicit innocence throughout the text. As Dowell clarifies, in case the question of Nancy’s character has not been fully understood by the reader to this point: You see, the position was extremely complicated. It was as complicated as it well could be, along delicate lines. There was the complication caused by the fact that Edward and Leonora never spoke to each other except when other people were present. Then, as I have said, their demeanours were quite perfect. There was the complication caused by the girl’s entire innocence; there was the further complication that both Edward and Leonora really regarded the girl as their daughter. Or it might be more precise to say that they regarded her as being Leonora’s daughter. (gs 103) Here, Dowell uses a form of the word “complicate” no less than five times. For an otherwise fairly articulate narrator, Dowell struggles to pin down the relational details of this threesome, reducing matters to the unhelpful word “complicated.” Here, too, we have the parent/child rhetoric, but – more striking still, in the context of a young girl’s guilt – Nancy herself is described as “entirely” “innocent”: a commentary, along with the perfect public demeanors of ­Leonora and Edward, on the repressive Edwardian society in which they live. When the reference to the trial of the daughter of one of Ashburnham’s gardeners returns, it is still linked closely in Dowell’s mind with Nancy’s trip to India. The fact of two hundred pounds comes back as well – this time, in the beginning of the passage rather than the ending—and the moment leaves us, instead, with another lingering thought about the work and function of this good soldier. Dowell goes on, with the charming rhetorical gesture, “I have told you, I think”: that Edward spent a great deal of time, and about two hundred pounds for law fees on getting a poor girl, the daughter of one of his gardeners, acquitted of a charge of murdering her baby. That was positively the last act of Edward’s life. It came at a time when Nancy Rufford was on her way to India; when the most horrible gloom was over the household; when Edward himself was in an agony and behaving as prettily as he knew how.

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Yet even then Leonora made him a terrible scene about this expenditure of time and trouble. She sort of had the vague idea that what had passed with the girl and the rest of it ought to have taught Edward a lesson – the lesson of economy. She threatened to take his banking account away from him again. I guess that made him cut his throat. He might have stuck it out otherwise – but the thought that he had lost his Nancy and that, in addition, there was nothing left for him but a dreary, dreary succession of days in which he could be of no public service … Well, it finished him. (gs 155–56) Just as in the earlier passage, Dowell trails off here. The ellipses are his, both on page 30, ending with “… Well, that was Edward Ashburnham” as well on page 156 with: “… Well, it finished him” (gs 156). It is as if Dowell can go no further with his story – the story of Edward and Nancy or Edward and the gardener’s girl or Edward’s suicide, wrapped up in the stories of both girls somehow – and so he cuts it short with the completely unsatisfactory “well.” It is a precious conversational tic, by this time, but also a defense against difficult emotional content, as Dowell again impedes the telling of these crucial details about the end of Edward’s life. We as readers have to wait for another repeated attempt at setting the record straight, later in the novel. Along with the provocatively placed “well,” the phrase “poor girl” and references to both murder (guilt) and acquittal (innocence) return, but this time with a twist. Dowell now tells us that this defense of the young girl, the girl too easily confused with Nancy here, was “positively the last act of Edward’s life.” The narrative gets even more confusing, though, when Dowell uses the phrase “the girl” without specifying its antecedent. When reporting that Leonora “sort of had the vague idea that what had passed with the girl and the rest of it ought to have taught Edward a lesson – the lesson of economy. She threatened to take his banking account away from him again. I guess that made him cut his throat,” she could as easily refer to Nancy as the unnamed girl with the unnamed, and now deceased, infant. Is the “lesson of economy” here the lesson learned from the time and trouble it took to defend a woman perhaps guilty of killing her infant, or is it the lesson learned from falling in love with Nancy? Further, what would be the difference in Dowell’s understanding? Now, left as we are in the depths of Dowell’s own gloom, the literal “finishing” of Ashburnham’s life, questions remain about the fate of the unnamed girl and the past of her unwanted child. The third time the girl comes back into the story, she is no longer described as “the accused” or discussed in any way as possibly innocent. While some details remain consistent (details to which the reader can cling in the absence of

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other, more stable meanings) a few turns of phrase further complicate this story. The third mention begins with Ashburnham telling his own story – ­Dowell’s memory (or, so we think) of Ashburnham’s exact words during this crucial conversation: “It’s very odd. I think I ought to tell you, Dowell, that I haven’t any feelings at all about the girl now it’s all over. Don’t you worry about me. I’m all right.” A long time afterwards he said: “I guess it was only a flash in the pan.” He began to look after the estates again; he took all that trouble over getting off the gardener’s daughter who had murdered her baby. He shook hands smilingly with every farmer in the market-place. He addressed two political meetings; he hunted twice. Leonora made him a frightful scene about spending the two hundred pounds on getting the gardener’s daughter acquitted. Everything went on as if the girl had never existed. It was very still weather. (gs 195) Again, the central theme of the passage is apparently Edward’s love for Nancy. Whereas Dowell once told us of Edward’s undying love for her, before his death it seems to be all but gone. Here, with his own words revealed, Edward is neither the sentimental man we are given to believe, nor is he the talented writer with literary and just expressions. Rather, he, like Dowell during his weakest moments, draws on clichés in order to convey his deepest feelings: “It was only a flash in the pan” is a cliché used to convey what it means to be fooled by the appearance of gold-colored dust during the days of the Gold Rush. But, a “flash in the pan” tells us nothing, really, about Ashburnham’s feelings about Nancy, nor do they tell us any more about the story of this murdered infant. Here, too, Dowell tells us that the gardener’s daughter “had murdered her baby” (my emphasis). She has been acquitted, and “everything went on as if the girl had never existed.” Which girl? Presumably, Nancy is the girl on everyone’s mind, the girl who makes men’s thoughts turn to more comfortable insights regarding weather, rather than the messy affairs of love. But, still: this gardener’s daughter is the last girl to be mentioned in this passage with any specificity at all. What of the gardener’s daughter, then – and why does her baby have to die in order to tell more forcefully the story of Ashburnham? As Dowell blatantly points out, we will never know; for, that is the very moment he tells us (with the signature “well”): “well, that is the end of the story” (gs 196). One might easily argue that Ford thought he was symbolically killing off an idea or making a point about class or suggesting that, for Ashburnham, all of these “poor

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girls” were the same. But the symbol of the murdered baby is a bit odd in this ­context, if not striking, especially given the other unwanted child (from Dowell’s perspective) at the end of the novel: The baby that Leonora is expecting with Rodney Bayham. If Edward Ashburnham is not the clear villain of The Good Soldier, then surely a contender could be Rodney Bayham, in part because he is perceived as a rival to our narrator. It is no accident, then, that Bayham, along with other general unpleasantness, is associated in the novel with rabbits. And Dowell is pretty specific with his imagery: he is not talking about bunnies, but rather, rabbits. The first mention of rabbits emerges in Dowell’s tale when he reports an earlier conversation he had with Leonora. Leonora says: “‘Edward has been dead only ten days and yet there are rabbits on the lawn’” (gs 90). The next statement comes in a new paragraph without any quotation marks, so presumably it is Dowell reflecting on this insight – not for the reference to Edward’s death, but rather for the mention of rabbits. Dowell reports: I understand that rabbits do a great deal of harm to the short grass in ­ ngland. And then she turned round to me and said without any adornE ment at all, for I remember her exact words: ‘I think it was stupid of ­Florence to commit suicide.’ (90) So, here, paradoxically, the image of rabbits (borrowed, perhaps, from the belief about the reproductive habits of rabbits) is bound up with two deaths: the first being Edward’s death ten days prior, and the second being Florence’s suicide. Further, Dowell tells us later that this is the first indication that Florence has committed suicide (91). When the rabbits come back, however, it is to signal not death, but new life. Just a few pages before the third mention of the gardener’s daughter, D ­ owell tells us, rather belatedly, that while Edward and Florence are dead by the novel’s end, and Nancy has gone mad, “Leonora survives, the perfectly normal type, married to a man who is rather like a rabbit. For Rodney Bayham is rather like a rabbit, and I hear that Leonora is expected to have a baby in three months’ time” (gs 186). When Dowell goes on to describe Leonora as the heroine here, in the end, it is hard not to hear him also grinding his teeth: surely, he cannot mean it. If he dislikes humanity generally, then he certainly cannot bear the idea of Leonora not only surviving, but giving birth to her lineage – Roman Catholicism and all (198). Dowell concludes that the “heroine – the perfectly normal, virtuous and slightly deceitful heroine … will shortly become a mother of a perfectly normal, virtuous, slightly deceitful son or daughter. A happy ending, that is what it works out at” (196).

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But, surely Dowell does not mean it. Or, perhaps, as I contend here, Ford does not mean it. When Dowell, a few paragraphs later, says, “there you have the pretty picture,” those of us readers who have followed Dowell’s story from the beginning do not see a pretty picture at all. On the one hand, there is much to disbelieve in Dowell’s narrative. We cannot trust him, as many astute readers have observed before. But, I do believe that his misanthropy, especially regarding the “perfectly normal” among us, is well assigned. And here, in the end, is where Dowell’s real ambivalence comes to the forefront: if humanity is to continue, if artists are to give birth to a new art form, what might it look like? What are its values? The new life conceived at the end of this novel comes from “two slightly deceitful, perfectly normal” individuals whom the narrator does not like. As Dowell admits, finally, by novel’s end: Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness. But I guess that I myself, in my fainter way, come into the category of the passionate, of the headstrong, and the too-truthful. For I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham – and that I love him because he was just myself. If I had had the courage and the virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did. He seems to me like a large elder brother who took me out on several excursions and did many dashing things whilst I just watched him robbing the orchards, from a distance. And, you see, I am just as much of a sentimentalist as he was … Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then, I don’t like society – much. (gs 197) Here, Dowell tells us that the mediocre must survive while the “too-truthful” and “passionate” must be “condemned to suicide and to madness.” But what is modernist literature if not slightly too truthful and passionate – about art and new forms, the hope for a new vision of the world that looks beyond the provincial attitudes of Leonora and her rabbit-like Ashburnham? Dowell tells us that, he, too, like the modernist consciousness in Ford who created him, is “passionate, headstrong, and too-truthful.” After this admission, one of the most often-quoted lines in recent criticism appears: “for I can’t conceal from myself that I loved Edward Ashburnham.” Rather than read this as homoerotic in keeping with most recent criticism, however, or as a statement about power generally, I tend to read this as about

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the potential for reproducing the passionate, truthful mentality required for all artists. The key words here are “courage” and “virility,” if cloaked in a bit of sentimentality from time to time. But, sadly, and this is the saddest part of the tale for me: Ashburnham does not leave an artistic legacy, nor does he father children. Dowell does not father a child. The people who are “creating” and “giving birth” in the most straightforward and traditional senses of these words are Leonora and Rodney. Even the infant of the gardener’s daughter has to die – in fact, must be murdered – as a kind of commentary on the potential of new life during this time and the problem of sustaining a life, one that cannot even be cultivated by the progeny of a gardener. Reading The Good Soldier in this way, with a focus on the hidden infanticide at the heart of the text, might help reposition the novel in terms of previous readings of its unreliable narrator (Brooks, Henstra); weary fascination with the subjectivity of class difference (Mickalites); self-consciousness about the conventions of masculinity (Foss, Hoffman); literary impressionism and ­Cubism (Gay, Mickalites, Nigro). And it may also help complicate what some additional critics have seen in terms of the novel’s concerns on the eve of World War i (Snitow, Stannard, Witowsky, and Womack). Perhaps risking contradiction with interpretive truisms aligning The Good Soldier with an unquestioning acceptance of Modernism as an art form, I would like to question the novel’s commitment to Modernism, given these dissociated references to infanticide embodying significant ambivalence. Peter Brooker, for example, argues that literary impressionists of the time believed strongly in rendering […] the world dispassionately as it appeared to the perceiving mind of the individual artist [and that the] writer should accordingly eschew the overtly moralizing role of the Victorian novelist in the interests of an accurate and succinct portrayal of incident and character. (2007: 35) On the one hand, this seems entirely in keeping with Ford’s modernist aesthetic. But in my reading of Ford’s project in The Good Soldier, I am closer to the thinking of David Lodge, who defines modern fiction as experimental in form; concerned with consciousness; and which “tends toward complex or fluid ­handling of time” (1976: 481). For Lodge: If we now summon up the names of those English-language novelists whom orthodox literary history tells us are the ‘moderns,’ we will find that some – James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein – exhibit all of these qualities, while others exhibit only some, or exhibit them in modified form: either because – like Henry James and Joseph Conrad – they belong

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to an early phase of Modernism and retain some of the conventions and assumptions of traditional fiction, or because – like D.H. ­Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway – they disagreed with certain Modernist aims and assumptions, or – like E.M. Forster or Ford Madox Ford – for a combination of those reasons. (1976: 482) In Lodge’s reading of Ford’s aesthetic, Ford was unsure about the modernist project given the value he found in some conventional of traditional fiction as well as his disagreement with certain modernist assumptions. In recasting Ford as not simply a modernist, but as a “traumatic modernist” at this moment in history, we might see more clearly that his 1915 novel calls for a reconsideration of the beginnings of modernism: a literary tradition particularly admired for its radical break from past history and literary predecessors. When interpreting the figure of Ford’s dead, indeed, murdered, infant alongside other modernist texts featuring such vexing images, modernism appears deeply ambivalent about its new artistic life. As The Good Soldier dramatizes, modernist discourse necessarily fails to separate figurative language from history, as well as historical language from figures. In other words, the death of the infant in countless modernist texts both is and is not a figure: it simultaneously represents the unspeaking and unspeakable – the infans – as well as the residue of history depicting the literal murder of infants in the first couple of decades of the new century. While a figure for a certain ambivalence toward the frightening new life of a literary form, the dead infant also functions literally, even realistically, by ­recalling past deaths of infants in history – from the selling and murder of infants in the 19th century, to the aftermath of the Armenian genocide Ernest Hemingway later reported for the Toronto Star and the International News ­Service, to the Nazi genocidal project that these figures uncannily foretell. The literal and the figurative dimensions of Ford’s exemplary infants illustrate how the figures of infanticide in modernist discourse mark limits in historical and literary representation. In their simultaneous embodiment of beginnings and endings, these figures challenge us to reconsider how we conceive of the figurative and the literal, and to account for such literary excesses that haunt this very tradition. The story this infant tells is not simply one of endings, but of beginnings – further adding to its complicated status within the modernist tradition. In fact, this figure signals the ambivalent beginnings of modernism’s new way of living and of writing: the problem of not being able to speak, which is itself a figure for modernism. The transition to the modernist literary aesthetic was not an

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easy transition, despite how adamantly such modernists as Ezra Pound and F.T. Marinetti have claimed it as such. According to Astradur Eysteinsson, the fact that “modernist literature has severed ties with society, reality, or history has indeed been a basic assumption behind a great deal of criticism in modernism” (1990: 12). For James ­McFarlane, “The assault on the old guard in literature – and the new became the old with a speed which to some was astounding – was no mere stylistic swing but a vociferous demand for fundamental change: new attitudes, new areas of exploration, new values” (1976: 78). In fact, the mantras of the artists themselves seem to declare in earnest a new literary project that would prevent them from looking back to past forms. For example, in “The New ­Sculpture,” Pound argues: Realism in literature has had its run. For thirty or more years, we have had in deluge, the analyses of the fatty degeneration of life. A generation has been content to analyse. They were necessary […] We have heard all that the ‘realists’ have to say. (1914: 68) More poignantly still, F.T. Marinetti in “Vital English Art” published in The Observer in 1914 commands artists to “cure English art of that most grave of all maladies – passéism” (7). Marinetti in particular became well known for such revolutionary statements in the collection, Let’s Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings (1991), where he continuously calls for the birth of the new at the cost of murdering the old. What, then, becomes of a literary tradition rooted in a rhetorical glorification of war or “call to arms” – a search for the new, a command to “murder” the old – after so many lives, in fact, had been lost in the very wars celebrated in rhetorical fantasy? While it seems likely that Modernism may have kept its new formal qualities while disavowing the content – or call – upon which it was founded, this newly imagined Modernism was difficult to produce. Instead, ambivalence came to the forefront to underwrite Modernism as a field; before, but especially, after the First World War, modernist literature was not simply ambivalent about modernity, but rather it grew up out of ambivalence – with the two appearing inextricable via the repressed, overlooked, and unreadable figure of the dead infant. This unreadable figure seems to mark a significant crisis in the field of ­Modernism, one that is symptomatically ignored as such. What would it mean for a re-reading of Modernism to posit the field itself as a kind of murdered infant at the crisis point of its own self-realization, a realization that its ­founding

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beliefs in technological and artistic advancement, in the dangerousness of such genres as the manifesto, depended upon a logic of murder and warfare? Bradbury and McFarlane describe Modernism’s ambivalence by underscoring it as “a celebration of a technological age and a condemnation of it; an excited acceptance of the belief that the old regimes of culture were over and a deep despairing in the face of that fear” (1976: 46). At this point of crisis, where the new Modernism was still in its infancy, it seems impossible to kill it – or to do away with it all together. And as a result, Modernism grew up, despite itself. But still lurking within its passages of poetry and prose, the kernel of the past that cannot be so easily integrated resides: that figure of the dead, the murdered, the lost, the still-born infant. As Bradbury and McFarlane understood so well over twenty years ago, “modernism might mean not only a new mode or mannerism in the arts, but a certain magnificent disaster for them” (1976: 26). And this disaster formed an impasse – between literature and history, between the figurative and the literal: the crisis point at which it became impossible to determine whether the language of literature produced the facts of history, or the facts of history produced the language of literature. For, within both discourses lies the figure of the infant whose cry is unheard: a muffled farewell still trying to speak. As Dowell’s question reverberates throughout The Good Soldier, from one reading, to the next, to the next: “are all men’s lives like the lives of us good people – like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords – broken, tumultuous, agonised, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?” (185–86). If I were to wager an answer, however, I’d say: Yes, they are. All men’s lives, from 1914 on, are “broken, tumultuous, agonized … punctuated by screams … by deaths,” then silence. If the murdered infant in the beginning and ending of The Good Soldier tells us anything, it is that. Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” (1885). The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold. Ed. C.B. Tinker and H.F. Lowry. London: Oxford University Press, 1909. 299–305. Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane. “The Name and Nature of Modernism.” Modernism: 1890–1930. Pelican Guides to European Literature. Ed. Malcolm ­Bradbury and James McFarlane. New York: Penguin, 1976. 19–56. Brooker, Peter. “Early Modernism.” The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. Ed. Morag Shiach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 32–47.

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Brooks, Neil. “Interred Textuality: The Good Soldier and Flaubert’s Parrot.” Critique 41.1 (1999): 45–51. Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca and London: Cornell ­University Press, 1990. Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier. Ed. David Bradshaw. New York, NY: Penguin ­Classics, 2002. Foss, Chris. “Abjection and Appropriation: Male Subjectivity in The Good Soldier.” LIT 9 (1998): 225–44. Fynsk, Christopher. Infant Figures: The Death of the “Infans” and Other Scenes of Origin. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000. Gay, Peter. Modernism: The Lure of Heresy. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008. Henstra, Sarah. “Ford and the Costs of Englishness: ‘Good Soldiering’ as Performative Practice.” Studies in the Novel 39.2 (2007): 177–95. Hoffman, Karen A. “‘Am I no better than a eunuch?’: Narrating Masculinity and Empire in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.” Journal of Modern Literature 27.3 (2004): 30–46. Levenson, Michael H. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Lodge, David. “The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy.” Modernism: 1890–1930. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. New York: Penguin, 1976. 481–96. Marinetti, F.T. Let’s Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings. Ed. R.W. Flint. Trans. R.W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1991. Marinetti, F.T. “Vital English Art.” Observer. 7 June 1914. 7. McFarlane, James. “The Mind of Modernism.” Modernism: 1890–1930. Pelican Guides to European Literature. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. New York: Penguin, 1976. 71–94. Mickalites, Carey J. “The Good Soldier and Capital’s Interiority Complex.” Studies in the Novel 38.3 (2006): 288–303. Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1995. Nigro, Frank G. “Who Framed The Good Soldier? Dowell’s Story in Search of a Form.” Studies in the Novel 24.4 (1992): 381–91. Ohmann, Carol Burke. Ford Madox Ford: From Apprentice to Craftsman. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1964. Pound, Ezra. “The New Sculpture.” The Egoist, 16 February 1914. 67–68. Ross, Charles R. “‘The Saddest Story’ Part Two: The Good Soldier and The Sun Also Rises.” The Hemingway Review 12.1 (1992): 26–34. Snitow, Ann Barr. Ford Madox Ford and the Voice of Uncertainty. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.

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Stannard, Martin. “Essay-Review: Tales of Passion.” Studies in the Novel 39.1 (2007): 105–13. Stein, Gertrude. Wars I Have Seen. New York: Random House, 1945. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. Ford Madox Ford and the Regiment of Women. Madison: ­University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Witkowsky, Peter. “Cranford Revisited: Ford’s Debt to Mrs. Gaskell in The Good Soldier.” Twentieth Century Literature 44.3 (1998): 291–305. Womack, Kenneth. “‘It is All a Darkness’: Death, Narrative Therapy, and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.” Papers on Language and Literature 38.3 (2002): 316–33.

chapter 6

The Motive for Metaphor: The Words of a Sentimentalist in The Good Soldier J. Fitzpatrick Smith Abstract This paper argues that Dowell enjoys a curious talent for making even clear language opaque. Such opacity is not without significance in this densely patterned novel. Many readers have noted the exorbitance of Dowell’s figurative language, but few have actually considered the implications of such metaphoricity. Whether Dowell is the dupe or the deceiver of the novel remains always an insoluble riddle; yet what remains after these narrative convolutions is Ford’s peculiar treatment of language, what he observes in the explanatory letter to Stella Ford as the “tangle of references and cross-references.”

Keywords narrative – figurative language – linguistic instability – motif – metaphor – irony – The Good Soldier

The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon, The A B C of being … wallace stevens

∵ Of the many ideas that elude John Dowell in the recountings that compose Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel, The Good Soldier, none is more significant than motivation. He frequently interrupts, contradicts, and rearranges his narrative in an effort to find the motives behind his friends’ and his own actions. In a © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004344143_008

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vivid passage early in the novel, Dowell considers the best approach to detailing the events in such a way that an audience might best appreciate his tale: I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down – whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me … So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars. From time to time we shall get up and go to the door and look out at the great moon and say: ‘Why it is nearly as bright as in Provençe!’ and then we shall come back to the fireside, with just the touch of a sigh because we are not in that Provençe where even the saddest stories are gay.1 An impressive scene for an impressionist work, this image of Dowell’s attempts to tell his story about love, betrayal, and death immediately draws attention to one of Ford’s overriding concerns: the relationship between the story and the language in which it appears. We need only return to that passage’s first sentence to hear the hiccups: “I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down – whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me” (gs 119). The tautological construction tells all here: to tell the story as if it were a story? Dowell seems skeptical – or worse, unaware – of the very language that he’s using to describe his sympathetic conversations in front of the blazing fireplace. Like its high modernist successors – Ulysses and To the Lighthouse, to name only two – The Good Soldier invites as many readings as there are readers. Elusive in tone and humblingly complicated in narrative arrangement, Ford’s masterwork thrusts its narrator’s confusion into the fore; by doing so, the novel makes the reader complicit in the making of its meaning. Such a technique, of course, invites debate, and the novel’s history of reception does not disappoint. These competing interpretations range from plausible to risible, since they regularly turn on the reliability of Dowell’s narration: is he complicit in the events that he describes? Is he aware of what he’s saying? Is he even sane? These questions extend far beyond one essay’s scope so I do not wish to revisit them further than others have already done, in some cases with ­admirable skill. Instead, my reading of the novel approaches Dowell’s “story” with a 1 Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier. London: Penguin Books, 2002. 19. All subsequent citations refer to this edition.

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s­ impler goal: by paying careful attention to his calculated interruptions with and manipulations of figurative language and metaphor, we can reconsider Dowell’s anxieties over characters’ motivations. Rather than reading motive as a psychological or personal directive, we can read this term more figuratively. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Dowell does not wish to learn “the hearts of men”; he’s less interested in motivation than in motif, what the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us as being “a short, usually recurrent, melodic or rhythmic unit.” Even at his most earnest, then, the abstract Dowell enjoys a curious talent for making even clear language opaque, an artist manqué whose language is directed by the very artificiality that he purportedly wishes to dissolve. Such opacity is not without significance in this densely patterned novel. While many readers have noted the exorbitance of Dowell’s figurative language, few have actually considered the implications of such metaphoricity. Whether Dowell is the dupe or the deceiver of the novel remains always an insoluble riddle; yet what remains after these narrative convolutions is Ford’s peculiar treatment of language, which he describes in the explanatory l­etter to Stella Ford as the “intricate tangle of references and cross-references” (“­Dedicatory Letter to Stella Ford”: 5). Reflexively drawing attention to this tangle of references and c­ ross-references, The Good Soldier explores a new form of narrative language. Distractingly ­self-conscious, John Dowell’s metaphors draw attention to their double-edged ability to conceal meaning with the intent to reveal it. My essay explores The Good Soldier’s radical awareness of its linguistic instability by considering how ­Dowell’s ostensibly extravagant language reveals the ultimate indeterminacy of words, facts, and memory – a tale in which every metaphor has a paradoxical motive to conceal. This novel is about control and agency, and the laughable losses of both elements as Dowell relates through a figurative language that reveals the impossibility of order, control, and understanding. Though a discussion of Dowell’s peculiar metaphors hardly breaks new ground in the conversations about The Good Soldier, many of these previous debates read too overtly – if not altogether trustingly – Dowell’s use of figurative language. We can trace the schism about Dowell’s metaphors’ usefulness as a barometer of his narrative trustworthiness back to the famous disputes between Mark Schorer and Samuel Hynes, both of whom offer compelling though ultimately irreconcilable ideas about Dowell’s capacities. More recently, critics have observed in Dowell’s use of metaphor a paranoiac need to abstract himself from experience. And when abstraction enters the discussion, deconstruction cannot be too far behind: Carol Jacobs reads Dowell’s narrative as an instance in which “the text itself is a kind of adulterer, continually turning from the straight line of narration in which it might remain true to what

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it said before” (1978: 35). Such readings provide exciting points of departure from which to consider the indeterminacies at the novel’s heart (an unfortunate pun), but they also tend to overlook how Dowell deploys his metaphors. In discussing a slightly related point, Paul Armstrong contends that, At a loss for beliefs to organize his world, Dowell invokes metaphor as a substitute. His hysterical multiplication of metaphors is simultaneously a symptom of his confusion and an effort to get beyond it. Each of his tropes is an interpretive scheme, a way of seeing some aspect of his ­history, a proposal for organizing his past according to a certain configuration. (1987: 204) These critical assessments develop what I believe to be the most significant element of the novel’s dense pattern of “references and cross-references,” its awareness of itself as an illogical statement of an illogical identity. As ­Armstrong continues, Dowell takes advantage of a metaphor’s ability to assimilate the unlike to the like through the ‘as if’ process, which his example explicitly and repeatedly mentions. Grafting the unfamiliar onto the familiar, the ‘as if’ invokes both similarity and difference; it suggests that something both is and is not so. This similarity aids assimilation, but so also does the difference, inasmuch as it clarifies what something is by distinguishing what it is not. (204) Armstrong concludes his argument summarily: “Whether his new metaphors are convincing or not, this step in itself asks us to recognize that our sense of ‘reality’ is metaphorical at base because it is configurative” (204). The efforts that lie behind such a reading are illuminating in that they suggest the desire for meaning that aligns Dowell with the reader herself. Indeed, Dowell appears in many readers’ eyes to be only a co-interpreter of his ­experience: he delights in the ostensible power of storytelling, yet suffers from a frighteningly wooly understanding of the events he describes. This tension between clarity and obfuscation – or what I am terming “motivation” and ­“motif” provides an interpretive (if not altogether defensive) screen through which Dowell and the reader can experience the events that compose this ­saddest story.2 2 Armstrong develops this point further: “The irony of his assertion that the ‘facts’ are there if we only look is, of course, that his presentation of incompatible perspectives radically

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These readings, however, tend to overlook the methods by which Dowell’s metaphors take a form of their own. His interest lies neither in his growing discovery of meaning in his past nor his ink-stained flailings in écriture. ­Instead, Dowell’s uses a few patterns of metaphor less to point up the indeterminacy of an abstracted language than to stress the double-edge of any statement of identity. Read in this manner, The Good Soldier is a metaphor about metaphor; it is a novel that rewards those readers patient enough with Dowell to ­consider how he tells his story rather than how his words, ideas, and, yes, metaphors tell of him. He is at once agent and object, reader and raconteur. ­Dowell’s ­frustrations and confusions might precipitate our own, but in the end he ­reminds us, as every metaphor does, that such usage embodies a contradiction of identity – it is one thing while being another. This convolution of identity might help align the novel’s reception from even its earliest readers, since they, like Dowell, remain uncertain just how best to proceed. Opponents to this digressive, self-interrupting, and often misleading style found their voice in Theodore Dreiser’s blasting dismissal that, Every scene of any importance has been blinked or passed over with a few words or cross references. I am not now referring to any moral fact. ­Every conversation which should have appeared, every storm which should have contained revealing flashes, making clear the minds, the hearts, and the agonies of those concerned has been avoided […] You are never really stirred. You are never hurt. You are merely told and referred. It is all cold narrative, never truly poignant. qtd. in macshane 50

Though decidedly humorous, Dreiser’s confident dismissal of an author that he suspects suffers from “his formal British leanings – whatever his birth – that leaning which Mr. Dowell seems to think so important, which will not let him loosen up and sing.” Dreiser’s rejection of Ford’s work returns us, seemingly unintentionally, to those very words that Ford used to describe the work himself, as a tangle of references. “But to what do such references refer?” generations of critics have lamented.

q­ uestions the ‘thereness’ of reality. Dowell’s desire to reconstruct these ‘several points of view’ testifies to his newfound awareness that no observer enjoys a privileged position that embraces all the rest and thus displays the ‘real’ in all its aspects. His narrative procedure enacts in the telling of his tale the semantic multiplicity of a universe of opposing interpretations” (gs 209).

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Indeed, one of the challenges in any reading of The Good Soldier is, simply put, what happens. A sketching of the narrative, then, is in order. John Dowell, a wealthy Philadelphia trustafarian, discovers in the tenth year of his marriage that his marriage was a false front for nearly decade-long affair between his wife and the title character, Edward Ashburnham. Florence’s and Edward’s affair, however, is not the only complication in this “Tale of Passion.” As ­Dowell begins to talk with Edward’s wife, Leonora, he discovers that Florence was only one in a series of adulterous affairs in which the ostensibly “good soldier” engaged. With a determination that she attributes to her staunch Anglo-Irish Catholicism, Leonora regularly righted Edward’s affairs, even though they’ve ended in near bankruptcy, blackmail, and suicides. By the novel’s close, Dowell still is puzzling out his experiences in the gunroom of Edward’s estate. He has recently purchased Branshaw Teleragh after Edward’s suicide, which he committed in order to prevent the possibility of becoming the lover of Leonora’s twenty-one-year-old ward, Nancy Rufford. If this summary fails to clarify entirely the action and events of the novel, then I share the blame with Dowell himself, a narrator of supreme evasion. In an argument that worked to establish the terms of discussion regarding the novel, Samuel Hynes describes the novel’s “plot” usefully: These are melodramatic materials; yet the novel is not a melodrama, because the action of which it is an imitation is not the sequence of passionate gestures which in another novel we would call the plot, but rather the action of the narrator’s mind as it gropes for the meaning, the reality of what has occurred. (1972: 98) In a sense, Hynes recovers the novel on the very same ground that Dreiser found fault: the events pique interest, and perhaps they might even thrill the reader. The reading of the novel, however, is less an experience of drama than the dubious recounting of a person whom you might trust reservedly. Dowell shares his story, but one remains always uncertain about whether Dowell has made the connections that he reveals in his recounting. Granted, he seems to admit this potential failure at several points in his story. At the start of the novel’s fourth section, for example, Dowell reflects on his story and makes the observation that the reader has known since the first page: I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of being a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes. And when one

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d­ iscusses an affair – a long, sad affair – one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real. (gs 147) This problem of “seeming real” lies at the very center of Ford’s novel as well as Dowell’s sense of his narrating agency. Miriam Bailin makes a similar point when she contends that Dowell “is denying an agency as participant, observer, or even teller of the tale” (1987: 76). Bailin’s reading of Dowell’s narrative necessarily distinguishes Ford’s voice from his narrator’s, though I disagree with her final conclusions about Dowell’s aesthetic turn: while there’s little question in any reader’s mind that Dowell remains attentive to form (both social and aesthetic), Dowell’s attempts at refuge reveal Ford’s more subtly crafted arrangement of figures that undo Dowell’s work. Though “the inconsistent versions of character and event scattered throughout the narrative allow him to have things both ways,” Bailin’s notion of a balance or equipoise seems to avoid the more conflicting relationships between Dowell and his works. He speaks in artistic terms, but his view is more blindness than insight, more threat than refuge. These readings of Dowell’s inconsistencies – as well as his evasions – have situated Ford in many different versions of modernism, yet Ford’s novel continues to evade characterization. Damon Marcel DeCoste argues p ­ ersuasively, for example, that Ford actually manages to keep feet in various camps of ­emergent modernism: though devastatingly critical of the Edwardian emotionalism against which the Vorticists and other movements protested, Ford nevertheless shied from the absolute immersion in formal, sterile silence that he saw as the logical end result of Ezra Pound’s and Wyndham Lewis’s projects (2007: 102). DeCoste also develops Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy’s argument about Ford’s contributions to – and debates with – the often-vitriolic strains of Modernism at the start of the century. For McCarthy, Ford’s The Good Soldier “bears the marks of that conflict and helps us to understand it” (1999: 134). These historical readings provocatively complicate Ford’s status as a member of the literary avant-garde, but they tend in the process to overlook on their analyses Ford’s rather liquid sense of fact and history. His early collaborations with Joseph Conrad emphasized for Ford the unwavering importance of ­technique, which above all is meant to impart impressions; as he confesses in an early work,

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This book, in short, is full of inaccuracies as to facts, but its accuracy as to impressions is absolute … My business in life, in short, is to attempt to discover, and to try to let you see, where we stand. I don’t really deal in facts, I have for facts a most profound contempt. I try to give you what I see to be the spirit of an age, of a town, of a movement. This cannot be done with facts. qtd. in macshane 9

But it can, it seems, be done with figurative language. As is well-appreciated, this novel turns on a complicated sense of Ford’s notions of impressionism. In his famous exposition, “On Impressionism,” Ford provides an exciting image for this idea: I suppose that Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass – through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere other. (267) This sense of mental alienation – “we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere other” – reads as a template for Ford’s unstable narration in The Good Soldier. Dowell tries to recount the disastrous deceits of his life, but the only conclusion that he can draw from his efforts is, as he puts it multiple times, “It is all a darkness.” This epistemological shrugging of shoulders has led many readers to conclude that Dowell is the forerunner of Modernism’s great narrators of alienation; John Meixner even declares that the Dowell is the voice of the blasted twentieth century, “Prufrock before Prufrock […] a man who, incapable of acting is almost entirely feeling – a creature of pure pathos” (1962: 159). But as a creature of pure pathos, John Dowell displays a disturbing distance between himself and his experiences, since he’s desperately aware of himself as cuckold … and narrator. Dowell’s motivation for telling the story strikes many as a desperate, manic, or even hysterical grasping for reason. For many critics, Dowell’s narration is an evasive technique whereby he attempts to contain the pain of his losses either with rationalization (Womack 318) or with a sometimes insulting treatment of his characters. But even his rationalizations tend toward the oblique and ­self-conscious. Early in the novel, for example, Dowell outlines his problem:

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You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads. (gs 14) As a writing cure, Dowell’s narrative traces the convolutions of his mind with exceeding keenness. Particularly given that Dowell’s story provides much in the way of a traumatized subject recounting a life misread, therapy seems to be one practice that Dowell might seriously consider. Though attractive for a first interpretation, this reading seems to overlook the complexities of Dowell’s – and Ford’s – self-conscious presentation in the novel. For instance, Dowell’s entire relationship with Florence turns on his role as a “nurse” to her. After their particularly loveless and secret wedding in Connecticut, they set out on a honeymoon to Europe; only hours into the voyage, Florence develops a trouble with her heart – and thus commences a decade of Dowell’s nursing her. Her troublesome heart, of course, is a ruse to keep her husband at bay and to ensure her privacy as she conducts her affair with Edward Ashburnham. Dowell dutifully protects his wife and transports her medicines, but all the while his treatment of her heart has been based on a literal understanding of the term, when in fact the reader laughs at the obvious figurative sense of the word. It is truly an “affair of the heart,” but one that he woefully misunderstands. This play between the literal and figurative introduces a level of wry humor that destabilizes Dowell’s tone and his already shaky story. After this false confession of motive – he claims to provide a reason for writing, yet he lists possibilities rather than explanations – he reflects further on his confusions and misunderstandings: And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was true sunshine; the true music; the true splash of the fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me we were four people with the same tastes, with the same desires, acting – or, no, not acting – sitting here and there unanimously, isn’t that the truth? If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn’t it true to say that I possessed a goodly apple? So it may well be with Edward Ashburnham, with Leonora his wife and with poor dear Florence. And, if you come to think of it, isn’t it a little odd that the physical rottenness of at least two pillars

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of our foursquare house never presented itself to my mind as a menace to its security? It doesn’t so present itself now though the two of them are actually dead. I don’t know. (gs 16) This image of an apple rotten at the core connects several of the narrative themes, most notably the religious divisions that distinguish Leonora’s Catholicism from Edward’s Anglicanism and the Quakerism of Dowell and Florence. Less overt, though, is the significance of these religious divisions. The entire novel rests on, as I’ve noted earlier, the tension between seeming and being. Read differently, though, the tension arises between word and deed – between, that is, the possibility for any sincere or factual utterance whatsoever. In this musing about the reliability or certainty of surfaces, Dowell actually wonders about the permanence, solidity, and stability of marriage – a contract that’s bound by vows, by a verbal utterance that appears self-evident but conceals a deep uncertainty about others’ understandings of that word. So Dowell turns to metaphor. This apple image introduces a q­ uasi-theological strain of imagery that helps untie Ford’s masterful “tangle of references and cross-references.” Not long after this meditation on permanence and stability, Dowell recounts the couples’ visit to the room housing Martin Luther’s draft of his Protest. Ford’s treatment of this scene is a model of misreading, as Dowell and Leonora speak at cross purposes in their discussion about the recent discovery of Edward’s and Florence’s affair. To heighten this sense of misprecision, though, is the ironic balance of these revelations over a text, the Protest, that inaugurates a religious schism based, in one sense, on the primacy of reading itself. And just as the Protest in effect decentralized the act of reading from the priest to the laity, so too does Dowell replace his ordering presence as author with a refracted, multiplied perspective of half-understood near misses. More to Ford’s ironic treatment of coincidence and order, though, is the date on which this visit occurs. The date on which every major event occurs within the novel, 4 August aligns otherwise divergent events: Florence’s birthday, the visit to Luther’s protest, the day of Maisie’s death and Florence’s suicide. Seeming coincidences thus take on grave significance as Dowell tries, unsuccessfully, to make sense of the nine years that composed his deception. An attention to the metaphorical patterning of the novel illuminates Dowell’s obscurities, though. One characteristic of Dowell’s metaphoricity is his colorful bestiary.3 He likens, for example, the trunk into which the dead Maisie Maidan falls to the jaws of an alligator; in another famous instance he likens 3 Jo-Ann Baernstein reads persuasively but quite differently the novel’s repeated animal imagery in “Image, Identity, and Insight in The Good Soldier.” Ford Madox Ford: Modern Judgements. Ed. Richard A. Cassell. London: MacMillan, 1972. 106–28.

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Edward to “a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbor’s womankind” (gs 19). These animal images crisscross the novel, but one image recurs, and acts as a nexus for the various religious and linguistic themes. As Leonora and Florence discuss the significance of the castle that houses the Protest, Dowell describes Florence’s inabilities to keep abreast of Leonora’s swift intellect in another zoological trope: Have you even seen a retriever dashing in play after a greyhound? You see the two running over a green field, almost side by side, and suddenly the retriever makes a friendly snap at the other. And the greyhound simply isn’t there. You haven’t observed it quicken its speed or strain a limb; but there it is, just two yards in front of the retriever’s outstretched muzzle. So it was with Florence and Leonora in matters of culture. (gs 16) Vivid and lively, this canine imagery illustrates at once the differences between Florence and Leonora and the level of understanding in Dowell’s imagination. Like an experienced handler, Dowell sees his world not in terms of human interaction, but animal spirits. This canine metaphor – as well as its implications – strings together several disparate scenes and characters (one might recall, for example, Edward’s inordinate love of puppies), including Dowell himself. In this final lines of the novel, he describes himself in distinctly dog-like terms: “But I thought that would not be quite English good form, so I trotted off with the telegram to Leonora. She was quite pleased with it” (gs 199). A retriever of messages he fails to comprehend, Dowell reduces himself in absurd canine metaphors, and he marvels, like any good puppy would, at his trick well done. Dowell’s metaphors reinforce a larger point about the stark disparity between his metaphors and his ideas. The reader might laugh with Dowell – or at Dowell, depending upon circumstances – but as narrator he remains the only conduit through which we receive the story. Ford has demonstrated that a writer need not have a knowing narrator to compose a knowing novel; at this point, then, Ford’s delicate handling of Dowell’s indelicacies comes to the surface. By aligning the tangential imagery of a dog with each character, as well as their fateful visit to Martin Luther’s protest, Ford plays a game Dowell could never fully apprehend. Because this is a game of knowing stories, Dowell will inevitably lose, but so might the too-impatient reader. As the good Irish Catholic Leonora, at least, would know, 4 August is the feast day of Saint S­ ithney, a sixth century British monk who crossed, like all of these characters, the Channel to France. As the legend continues, Sithney declined to pray for young woman and marriage, preferring instead to devote his efforts to less troublesome ­matter – namely, rabid dogs. For this reason, Sithney became the patron saint of rabid dogs.

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Madness and metaphor, then, combine at one of the most significant points in the novel. Dowell reinforces these conjunctions – in this instance, between the repeated date 4 August, his canine metaphors, and the novel’s larger themes of instability – and yet remains curiously aloof of his metaphors’ meaning. In this way, then, his motivation is simply in the construction of ornate surfaces: his motives, as we see, become motifs of metaphor. Frank Nigro makes a similar point when he argues that Dowell wants to stifle narration; Dowell is a “narrator who pretends to seek both a solid ground and a way to overcome his incompetence” (1992: 388). Granted, Dowell’s competence remains a debatable topic within any conversation of the novel. By pointing out, however, the sorts of intricate allusions and patternings made by Dowell’s metaphors, though, we gain a new perspective on the novel’s broader claims to accuracy and storytelling. For example, in the scene in which Dowell pleads for the truth of his clearly erroneous ­account, he curses to prove the certainty of a story whose conclusion he confesses he doesn’t know: “And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true.” “This sacred name of his creator,” of course, had changed between the first and second editions of the novel: “Ford Madox Hueffer” had become, by the second edition, “Ford Madox Ford.” Similarly, the title of the novel had changed by happenstance. When he had finished this manuscript, into which he claimed to have put everything he knew about writing, Ford sent it off under the title that it had originally held in Wyndham Lewis’s first edition of Blast: “The Saddest Story.” Sagely perhaps, the editor observed that a title promising the saddest story wouldn’t sell particularly well after World War i had begun in earnest, so Ford offhandedly suggested The Good Soldier as an ironic substitute – one that, to his chagrin, the editor embraced wholeheartedly. Who wouldn’t love a story about a good soldier as English troops – Ford among them – are preparing to be sent to the French front? But what, exactly, might this title’s terms really signify? In both the earlier manifestation as a “The Saddest Story” and its later version The Good Soldier, the novel carries a subtitle: “A Tale of Passion.” By renaming a novel a “story” and then a “tale,” Ford introduces a nettlesome problem of genre: he’s already complicated the narrative structure, and yet he wrongfoots the reader before the story’s even begun. As a “tale” of “passion” and a “good soldier,” Dowell’s account sounds less comfortable with the avant-garde’s interest in “making it new” that alongside bodice-rippers, penny dreadfuls, and romances of the most sentimental degree.4 4 Nigro reaches a different conclusion about these same tensions. For Nigro, Dowell’s maddening narrative aligns with Cubism’s interest in multiple surfaces and simultaneous

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These connotations are not lost on Dowell, of course, who seems to believe that these are precisely the sorts of chivalric and sensuous texts that actually make up a good soldier. He makes this point many times when describing the strange allure of Edward: he has flaxen hair with a bristle-stiff moustache, impeccable taste in clothing, and, in Dowell’s words, “eyes as blue as the sides of a certain type of box of matches. When you looked at them carefully you saw that they were perfectly honest, perfectly straightforward, perfectly, perfectly stupid” (gs 31). Edward’s “perfection” seems apparent, and yet also simply too good to be true. Indeed, such complications are exactly Dowell’s intent: perfection, after all, is not only “of the highest order” but also “completed, ended, or finished.” Such perfection is not dissimilar from the other seemingly transparent terms that Dowell uses. “Good,” “sad,” “passion” – they all evoke broad attributes but conceal their import through abstraction. Indeed, at the moments that the reader most craves precision, Dowell provides blanket generalities and bland qualifications. But of course, such is always the greatest danger of sentimentalism: that it invites abstractions that are neither readily apparent nor readily understood. Dowell explains this point in the same description of Edward: For all good soldiers are sentimentalists – all good soldiers of that type. Their profession, for one thing, is full of the big words, courage, loyalty, honour, constancy […] And yet, I must add that poor dear Edward was a great reader – he would pass hours lost in novels of a sentimental type – novels in which typewriter girls married Marquises and governesses Earls. And in his books, as a rule, the course of true love ran as smooth as buttered honey. And he was fond of poetry, of a certain type – and he could even read a perfect sad love story. I have seen his eyes filled with tears reading of a hopeless parting. And he loved, with a sentimental yearning, all children, puppies, and the feeble generally. (gs 30) Dowell’s skepticism of these “big words” aligns his narrative with many of the other great wartime texts that challenges these notions of “goodness” – what Wilfred Owen, in his dooming and damning poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” would call only three years later “the Old Lie.” ­ erspectives: “Through Dowell’s apparent need for a structure, through this attempt to create p a non-novelistic, though not narrowly ‘realistic’ tale, Ford’s The Good Soldier effectively mirrors what was happening in contemporary art: Ford created a pictorial, even Cubist, novel.” My argument departs from Nigro’s on precisely this point of pictorialism. In my reading, Dowell is not painting a “word portrait”; he’s setting a trap.

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Dowell’s wariness about sentimentalism, like so many other ideas in the novel, tends to vacillate. He attributes Edward’s failings in finances and gross, gross missteps in his many affairs to this sentimentalism: in Dowell’s view, Edward failed to see the world realistically, but instead as a hero in a novel of his own composing. Not unlike a latter-day Quixote, Edward blunders into the lowest situations with the highest of ideals. Unlike the Cervantes’ hero, though, Edward resists surrendering his illusions about sentimentality, even when his entire life has fallen around him. As Dowell notes in the final pages of the novel, “Well, Edward was the English gentleman; but he was also, to the last, a sentimentalist, whose mind was compounded of indifferent poems and novels” (gs 198). Scholars tend to read Dowell’s and Ford’s treatment of sentimentalism as part and parcel with the ongoing tensions in the early century between “literature” and what Ford termed the “nuvvles” of bourgeois life.5 These readings certainly have their merit, since they develop their ideas against a middle-class Edwardian complacency, concluding that “sentimentality” threatens feeling precisely because it obstructs actual feeling with pre-made forms of expression. In other words, the sentimentalist sees the world not “as it is, but as he wants it to be.”6 Though compelling, these readings of sentimentality in The Good Soldier tend to misread Dowell’s final assessment of his motives for writing the “saddest story.” As Dowell is finishing his tale, he admits that Convention – the normality that opposes sentimentalism – must triumph: Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and madness. But I guess that I myself, in my fainter way, come into the category of the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful. For I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham – and that I love him because he was just myself. If I had had the courage and virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did […] And you see, I am just as much of a sentimentalist as he was (gs 197).

5 See DeCoste and McCarthy. 6 These are the words of Northrop Frye – an unfashionable voice in current conversations, but one whose clarity remains unimpeachable. The Educated Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964.

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This confession reads to many like a wish since Dowell lists all of the attributes that differentiate Edward from himself. Additionally, and more than one reader has picked up the homoerotic desires that Dowell reveals in this intensified notions of identity.7 There’s more to Dowell’s admission, here, than just his desire to identify himself with Edward. His words are particularly troubling here, since, at these moments of confession, his narrative tends to lapse into double speak and tautology: “For I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward ­Ashburnham – and that I love him because he was just myself.” Dowell repeatedly draws attention to himself as both writer and reader – or, as he would have it earlier, speaker and auditor. He notes this dual position at the beginning of the Section iii. At this point in the narrative, Dowell’s wife Florence has mistakenly read a chance encounter between Dowell and another man as a revelation of her previous affairs, and she’s raced up to her bedroom. Flinging herself on the bed, she’s drunk from the vial that Dowell had always assumed contained the remedy for her heart ailment, but which in truth contained prussic acid. Her ­suicide, however, leaves little impression on Dowell. It is only when ­Ashburnham’s wife, Leonora, observes that he is now free to marry someone else that he notes his lack of feeling: I must have talked in an odd way, as people do who are recovering from an anaesthetic. It is as if one had a dual personality, the one I being entirely unconscious of the other. I had thought nothing; I had said such an extraordinary thing. (gs 89) “Anaesthetic” is a nice touch here by Ford, since this literal “lack of feeling” almost immediately invalidates any of Dowell’s claims to being a sentimentalist like Edward. His claim to “dual personality,” however, helps us rethink both the narrative and his peculiarly elliptical diction, since Dowell at least imaginatively occupies two subject positions at the same time. Indeed, this point might help clarify the novel’s famous opening sentence: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” In other words, he positions himself as both speaker and listener, writer and reader – two things at once, the very definition of a metaphor. 7 Karen Hoffman, for example, aligns the desires here with anxieties over masculinity as they inform her reading of the novel’s imperial subtext. See “‘Am I no better than a eunuch’: Narrative Masculinity and Empire in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.” Journal of Modern Literature, 27.3 (Winter 2004) 30–46.

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Dowell’s tale of passion – his own suffering as well as other more amatory senses of the term – continues to evade categorization precisely because of Dowell’s metaphoricity. Shakespeare’s observation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is apt here, since his ideas triangulate the three most common readings of Dowell’s motives for writing: “The lover, the lunatic, and the poet, are of imagination all compact” (V.i.7–8). He’s either a failed writer, a lovelorn interlocutor, or the voice of a specific dissociation of sensibilities, the modern mind made paranoid narrator (Trotter 187–220). Such disjunctive approaches, however, overlook the very argument of Dowell’s own metaphors. Ford specifically refracts Dowell’s identity into these different positions – lover, lunatic, and poet – to challenge dominant orthodoxies regarding both sentimentalism and “normal” behavior. Dowell questions the possibility that anything can actually bear meaning except insofar as he works to make it mean. For Dowell, then, metaphors imply the provisionality of reality; life can always be otherwise, since it’s only a metaphor away from meaning. But, far from metaphors’ providing an escape from experience, Ford demonstrates that each metaphor leads onto another. The novel might have at its center questions of character, but it creates in its patternings a view of the world as constituted by language’s attempts at fixing identity between word and world. Madness, of course, is not far from the novel’s conclusion, either. By the ­novel’s end, Florence has drunk prussic acid, an early lover of Edward’s has died of a heart attack, Leonora has married the “rabbit-like” Rodney Bayham, and Edward’s last love – whom he sentimentally sent away lest he defile her virtue – now lives under Dowell’s care in Edward’s home. Read figuratively, this ­placement draws our attention closely to this “dual personality” that ­Dowell repeatedly emphasizes. Indeed, much of Dowell’s narration – and Ford’s treatment of this narration – emphasizes splits, divisions, and dualities. We might consider, for instance, the almost Jamesian narrative of Americans and ­Europeans, of Protestants and Catholics, of “normal” and “sentimental” minds, even of “good” and “bad” people. Many readers, in fact, observe that Dowell’s name suggests the making of connections and the spanning of distances: a dowel, after all, is a short rod used to connect two separate materials. Though useful as a starting point, this reading underplays the tensions within Dowell’s metaphors. He might “connect” ideas, but he does not unite them. Instead, Dowell’s story works by juxtaposition, by paradox, and most importantly, by irony – namely, the occupying of two perspectives simultaneously. We might hear, for instance, in Dowell’s name the near-homophone of “dual,” a point that reinforces Ford’s insistence on perspectival refraction. This refracted identity, then, redefines Dowell’s own name: unlike the soldier who

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is ­intrinsically “good,” “Dowell” underscores not connection but action – his name literally spells out the mandate “do well.”8 Orthography aside, though, Ford draws attention not only to the instability of Dowell’s narrative, but also to the inadequacy of his own metaphors to describe it. At once sentimentalist and anesthete, Dowell fails to connect word or deed. One could note, for example, how carefully he has bracketed his story with two numbingly abstract and unspecified pronouns: the novel’s first word is the ambiguous pronoun “this,” the final word, the unspecified “it.” This reading underscores Dowell’s metaphor-making, his web of images that and claims to identity that at once compose and complicate his story. This interest in ­modernity’s futile rage for order asks us, then, to consider not the story, but the words on the page. He reminds the reader not simply that she’s following a story, but that the story’s being constructed by a narrator who has plenty of motive behind his metaphors. After all, a metaphor is a statement of identity: it does not simply draw attention to similarities; a metaphor explicitly – and illogically – states that one thing is another. This point might thus illuminate, for example, his emphasis that “Edward is myself.” Far from simply a story told by a lunatic, a lover, and a poet, The Good Soldier is a text radical in its attention to the subterranean workings of metaphor. Dowell asks us to follow a story whose meaning itself is unclear, so he shrugs his shoulders – as he does in the final pages – with the submission, “I don’t know. I leave it to you.” But if Dowell doesn’t know the meaning, Ford does; this work ask us to consider not only technique, but also the “exhaustive studies into how words should be handled” (“Dedicatory Letter to Stella” 4). The Good Soldier, then, is an exercise in technique, a novel that makes metaphor its meaning. With this more nuanced sense of metaphor, the novel’s ironic title warrants further scrutiny than it has previously received. The irony obviously turns on its qualitative but dangerously obscure judgment: a good soldier is, after all, a sentimental term – by Dowell’s own admission. While the “goodness” is considered at great length in the novel, the notion of “soldier” is readily taken for granted. Yet Ashburnham receives medals for his service, but he does not ever fight. He’s a soldier, in other words, for reasons beyond military valor. He 8 Baernstein notes this detail, as well, but she situates it within her larger reading of the sexual identities at work in the novel (Baernstein 128). For an alternate reading of identity as practice, Sarah Henstra’s provocative article aligns Ford’s ironic treatment of Englishness with Freud’s readings of mourning, melancholia, and “how repudiated desire generates the symbolic structures of Englishness, shaping and infusing good form as well as threatening its stability” (Henstra 178).

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has vaguely retained his post throughout the novel, but he nevertheless keeps the moniker of “soldier” – even as he descends into his alcoholic, suicidal melancholy. The demise of this ironic good soldier is narrated, of course, in a peculiar setting. Dowell reminds not simply that he’s now occupying Edward’s home, but that he’s writing at the very desk where Edward killed himself. This good soldier, after all, cut his throat with a penknife – and Dowell subtly reveals his complicity in the act: Then he put two fingers into the waistcoat pocket of his grey, frieze suit; they came out with a little neat penknife – quite a small penknife […] When he saw that I did not intend to interfere with him his eyes became soft and almost affectionate. He remarked: ‘So long, old man, I must have a bit of a rest, you know.’ I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to say, ‘God bless, you,’ for I also am a sentimentalist. (gs 199) This final scene closes heavy with questions about tone, feeling, and even meaning. The story is told at the desk where the “soldier” cuts his throat with an edge specifically used to sharpen a writing implement. Writing and death are thus aligned, not simply by imagery, but also by etymology: we have little doubt that Ashburnham was a literal “soldier,” but ­Dowell invites scrutiny of this term – an investigation well-rewarded by the term’s etymological connection to “solidus,” both an ancient monetary unit and, provocatively a term from printing, a virgule. Commonly known as a slash mark, the virgule denotes breaks, pauses, and caesurae. Not accidentally, Ashburnham dies by his own hand with another form of a slash mark, that which he makes with a pen knife, a tool used in writing that is ultimately used for ­self-sundering – which is Dowell’s project, after all. He sees a metaphorical identification, however disparate, between himself and Edward; but this connection only foregrounds the violent divisions that separate Dowell’s words from his experience. Identity becomes just another sentimental “big word.” It is all a darkness, Dowell laments: an ontological as well as intellectual judgment that returns Dowell to the very inadequacy of his language to describe it. Dowell’s assessment carries significant implications for his project, however. Almost in passing, Dowell recognizes that his attempts to relate his ideas only amount to making of metaphors a motif: For who in this world can give anyone a character? Who in this world knows anything of any other heart – or of his own? I don’t mean to say that one cannot form an average estimate of the way a person will

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b­ ehave. But one cannot be certain of the way any man will behave in every case – and until one can do that a ‘character’ is of no use to anyone. (gs 126) Dowell’s notion of character is fitting, after all, since he means the integral essence of a person, but obliviously reveals the more fictional, constructed, and verbal elements of literature and writing, a “character.” And like any good detective novel reminds us, we cannot fix motive until we’ve fixed character, so we remain with Dowell, listening, sentimentally, metaphorically, to the saddest story he’s ever heard. Works Cited Armstrong, Paul. The Challenge of Bewilderment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Baernstein, Jo-Ann. “Image, Identity, and Insight in The Good Soldier” in Ford Madox Ford: Modern Judgements. Ed. Richard A. Cassell. London: MacMillan, 1972. 106–28. Bailin, Miriam. “‘An Extraordinarily Safe Castle’: Aesthetics as Refuge in The Good Soldier.” Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford. Ed. Richard Cassell. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987. 68–82. Brown, Dennis and Jenny Plastow, eds. Ford Madox Ford and Englishness. International Ford Madox Ford Studies 5. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. DeCoste, Damon Marcel. “‘A Frank Expression of Personality’: Sentimentality, Silence, and Early Modernist Aesthetics in The Good Soldier.” Journal of Modern Literature, 31.1 (2007): 101–23. Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier. Ed. David Bradshaw. London: Penguin Books, 2002. Ford, Ford Madox. “On Impressionism.” The Good Soldier. Ed. Kenneth Womack. ­Appendix C. London: Broadview, 2003. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964. Henstra, Sarah. “Ford and The Costs of Englishness: ‘Good Soldiering’ as Performative Practice.” Studies in the Novel 39.2 (2007): 176–95. Hoffman, Karen. “‘Am I no better than a eunuch’: Narrative Masculinity and Empire in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.” Journal of Modern Literature 27.3 (2004): 30–46. Hynes, Samuel. “The Epistemology of The Good Soldier.” Ford Madox Ford: Modern Judgements. Ed. Richard Cassell. London: MacMillan, 1972. 97–106. Jacobs, Carol. “The (Too) Good Soldier: ‘A Real Story’.” Glyph 3 (1978): 32–51. MacShane, Frank, Ed. Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge, 1972.

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McCarthy, Jeffrey Mathes. “The Good Soldier and the War for British Modernism.” Modern Fiction Studies 45.2 (1999): 303–39. McCarthy, Patrick A. “In Search of Lost Time: Chronology and Narration in The Good Soldier.” ELT 40.2 (1997): 133–49. Meixner, John. Ford Madox Ford’s Novels. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962. Mickalites, Carey. “The Good Soldier and Capital’s Interiority Complex.” Studies in the Novel 38.3 (2006): 288–303. Nigro, Frank. “Who Framed The Good Soldier?: Dowell’s Story in Search of a Form.” Studies in the Novel 24.4 (1992): 381–91. Schorer, Mark. “The Good Soldier: An Interpretation.” Ford Madox Ford: Modern Judgements. Ed. Richard Cassell. London: MacMillan, 1972. 63–70. Trotter, David. Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Womack, Kenneth. “‘It is All a Darkness’: Death, Narrative Therapy, and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 38.3 (2002): 316–33.

chapter 7

Rewriting Trauma: A Study of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier as Modernist Chronicle Asunción López-Varela Azcárate Abstract This essay is a study of modernist chronicle, a hybrid genre that became particularly popular in the period between World War i and World War ii. A number of modernist writers embarked on this endeavour of “chronicling” or rewriting the historical record and writing themselves into public memory, among them Ford Madox Ford. These texts move between memoir, autobiography, fiction and chronicle and, thus, they blur the distinction between fact and fiction, real and imaginary events. This generic hybridism and ambiguity may be used to hide traumatic experiences, as in the case of Ford’s novel The Good Soldier.

Keywords modernist chronicle – hybridism – history – memory – trauma – Ford Madox Ford – The Good Soldier

Introduction The term “chronicle” originally referred to an extended account in prose or verse of historical events, sometimes including legendary material, ­presented in chronological order and without authorial interpretation or comment. Growing emphasis on style and the rules of rhetoric began to introduce ­embellishments and anecdotes, imposing narratological patterns on the events of a selected period so as to achieve a sense of dramatic unity and stress moral lessons by, for instance, inventing speeches for the protagonists of the stories, as Thucydides does. History has had a fundamental role in the preservation of the collective memories of many itinerant cultures, such as the Jewish people.1 1 See Paul Ricoeur; Claude Larre; Raymond, Panikkar; Bettina, Bäumer; Alexis, Kagame; G.E.R. Lloyd; André, Neher; Germano, Pàttaro; Louis, Gardet; Abdelmajid, Meziane; A.Y. G ­ ourevitch. Les cultures et le temps. Paris: Payot, 1975. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004344143_009

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In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, historical chronicles played an important role in the establishment of European nation states and their ideas of cultural unity, patriotism and nationalism. During the first half of the twentieth century, modernist practice began to experiment by breaking the limits between fact and fiction, a tendency that became much more prominent in the second half of the century under deconstructionist, poststructuralist and postmodernist trends. Attempts to provide criteria for discriminating historical from fictional narratives include those by Dorrit Cohn2 who, following Käte Hamburger, argues that this separation can be done by drawing attention to narrative point of view. Cohn points out that in first person narratives epistemology is similar to that of historical narratives in the same regime (that is, autobiography) because both are based on the narrator’s inability to penetrate the consciousness of characters. The author identifies three principal signposts: the first is fiction’s adherence to a bi-level story/discourse model that assumes emancipation from the enforcement of a referential database external to the text, and which operates in historical texts. The second signpost offered by Cohn is the employment of narrative situations that open to inside views of the characters’ minds. The last is the articulation of narratorial voices that can be detached from their authorial origin, in contrast to the fundamental identity between narrator and author that characterizes historical texts. However, the absence of a referential database external to the text, and the separation of the narrative voice from its authorial origin can both be seen as consequences (rather than causes) of fictionality because of the existing pact (Coleridge’s“suspension of disbelief”) between author and reader, a pact that is context dependent. Therefore, the last signpost, that is, the articulation of narratorial voices, becomes fundamental, particular in the case of (un)reliable narrators, as it occurs in Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier. This is so because the essential characteristic of historical writing is not its true value, but its claim to truth, for it is a record of “facts.” Fictional writing, on the other hand, is characterized by a built-in license to create and imagine a world as one thinks fit. Yet another criterion for distinction between historical and fictional texts is the overall configuration of the time sequence of events. Historical narratives are generally chronological in a forward-looking prospective, moving from

2 See Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 30.

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cause to effect (teleology). In fictional narratives the characters’ recollection and memory may preserve only some of the reported order. A retrospective non chronological memory-based narrative moves from effect to cause and the characters might eventually be disclosed in opposition to the reader’s previous assumptions, as it occurs, for instance, in The Good Soldier.3 However, autobiography, a genre that preserves real memories, might also be predicated on a necessary forgetting or distancing. Thus, while potentially a source for remembrance, the material traces of the past might be structured by omissions, restrictions, repressions, and exclusions that incite, even as they thwart, total recall. As such, they expose the ever present relations of power inherent in processes of selection, assemblage and ordering whereby events are made into facts, and also into linguistic signs (symbols in C.S. Peirce’s distinction). The fact is that which is affirmed (statement) of the event, and events need to be described so as to appear as facts. An event is a fact subject to description that is, telling. Fictionalization is involved in this process, since it can be considered the provision of a description that transforms an event in a possible object of analysis, that is, a fact. Hayden White’s classic Metahistory works on the idea of “emplotment,” a literary re-writing of events interwoven in figurative speech, where the play between selection, organization of events, tropes and figures of speech problematize the borders between fact and fiction. White observes the tendency towards event dissolution as a basic temporal occurrence in modernist narrative.4 Historian and literary critic, Dominick LaCapra has also questioned the borderland between historical discourse and fiction in an attempt to unveil the so-called “historicist phallacy” that alludes to the impossibility of ­explaining historical texts simply as contextual.5 LaCapra considers two ­levels, ­intra-textual and extra-textual, and questions if the opposition between fact and fiction is a polarity that excludes or, if, on the contrary, both exist in a continuum of complex mutual interrelations. Similarly, Michel De Certeau proposed to “de-familiarize” history as a consequence of writing, and examined the role of fiction and the unconscious in the production of a historical text. According to him, the notion of “anecdote” 3 A classical study on time and narrative is Paul Ricoeur’s Temps et récit i, ii, iii. Ed. Seuil, París, 1983; See also Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. 4 White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. 66–67. 5 LaCapra, Dominick. History and Criticism. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1985.

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is fundamental because it allows for the creation of a gap in the narrative continuity of a larger story (grand narrative vs. petite histoire). Anecdote allows the eruption of chance events and discursive contingencies, bringing forth a break in temporal flux, a point of retrospection. For De Certeau, history can only be understood as a “lieux de memoires,” a social space that translates the exercise of memorializing in monuments to remember the past.6 Finally, the work of Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever focused his deconstructive work on temporality and linearity, pointing out the presentness of the past and the rupture that takes place at the moment when the subject makes use of the “usable past” and projects it onto the future.7 The present discussion allows for the theorizing of modernist chronicle, a crossbred genre that contains traces of life-writing narratives, journalist chronicle and fiction, and that problematizes the differences between “fact” and “event” and between the re-workings of recollection8 and the symbolization process implied in the valuation of events in order to write a history or a story. Memories are, in fact, the traces of “webs of significance,” to use Max Weber’s expression, of the cultural activities of human groups, which include systems of beliefs, symbols, rituals, intellectual and artistic activities (Geertz 5). Many of these recollections recover forgotten memories and cover up emotional and traumatic aspects, which are discouraged from making sense as historical narratives. Thus, Walter Benjamin’s “A Berlin Chronicle” (1932) was written against the specter of Nazi occupation, at a time when he was about to become an exile. He had drafted the first notes of a childhood memoir while in Berlin between January and February 1932, and wrote the rest during his stay at the island of Ibiza in Spain, before moving to Nice and Paris in 1933. In Nice, he had contemplated suicide for the first time, but the crisis passed and he reworked the chronicle for publication seeking to understand how the narration of an individual past could illuminate the history of an epoch. In his foreword, Benjamin wrote that the biographical features of his recollections retreated in the depths of memory, and that he could not recall the physiognomies of his family and friends. In his essays, Benjamin discusses the porous state of mind that allows a connection of past memory with the future by means of the 6 De Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia U ­ niversity Press, 1988. 7 Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 8 Attention to time and memory processes is persistent in works generally included within the modernist movement. See, for instance, narratives by Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. However, this interest in time processes occurs simultaneously in distinct areas of knowledge. See López-Varela, Asunción. Embers of Time: A Pluridisciplinary Exploration of the Crisis of Representational Time in Science and Narrative. Universidad Complutense, 2004.

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substitution of the mechanisms of explanation, present in logical thought, by fragmentary elements that mix childhood fancy and fantasy with real experience (for a detailed discussion, see López-Varela 2013). English philosopher and historian, Robin George Collingwood described historical events as having an inside and an outside; the outside of a historical event consisting on the placement and movement of human actors in the past; the inside component encompassing the thoughts of the historical agents, who relate the events imaginatively but who are motivated by c­onscious thought processes. Collingwood was not alone in considering unconscious motivations, emotions and passions as marginal elements, placing emphasis on rationality. A decade ago, Meir Sternberg complained that “cognitive” was almost exclusively associated with perceiving, conceiving and knowing as a mental act, and a faculty distinct from emotion and the capacity for value judgment. Sternberg wondered if any theory of knowledge will eventually incorporate the emotive domain when the world’s literary heritage shows precisely a protean inter-dynamics that enables the interpenetration of processes of feeling and understanding, evaluating and remembering (Sternberg 356, 360). Much of Sternberg’s research has established relations between cognition and the study of emotions in order to unveil the connections and distinctions within literary genres; between fictional and non-fictional texts, such as history or autobiography, for instance. Sternberg also notes that inference-making relies on objective knowledge as much as in anticipation, prediction and other affective and interpersonal qualities. He explains that Aristotle’s theory of catharsis builds emotions into a poetics of impact, chiefly regulated by affects; from the pleasure given by all mimesis as such, to tragic pity and fear. In the process, the mind is shaped into a desired like-mindness (or intersubjective experience) with the persuader. Sternberg adds that impact (comic, tragic, persuasive, illusionist, sublime, etc.), rather than the emphasis on the pragmatism of meaning, is what began to separate literary texts from non-fiction. Finally, he explains that the dynamics of narrative reading stages the complex interpenetration between cognitive and affective.9 Paul Eakin is particularly concerned with “the fictions that structure autobiography” and the ways in which these help to chart the “relation between narrative and the fundamental structures of consciousness,”10 that is, the 9 10

Sternberg, Meir. “Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (i).” Poetics Today 24. 2 (2003): 356 & 522, respectively. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self Invention. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1985, p. 9.

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relationship between the ideas of “self and presence” and identity formation, because autobiography explores both conscious and unconscious structures of the mind. Fiction, Eakin asserts, is an inevitable and even essential ingredient of autobiography, generated as much by the unconscious workings of memory as it is by the conscious agency of imagination. Similarly, H. Porter Abbott, notes that “The identity [autobiography] seeks to express is always blurred, for the narrative can only bring the autobiographer to that continual “passing” in which he writes. Such writing is an undermining of the mythos that characterizes fiction.”11 Trudi Tate also indicates that historians frequently need to make use of memoirs that enable them to re-experience the affective and cognitive inside of the historical moment. In order to recreate the feeling of past events, historians need to reconstruct the way events (direct experiences), thoughts and emotions intermingle. Thus, historical reality is comprised of a multitude of varied life experiences (events) which need to be negotiated into common experience (facts). Events take the symbolic form of values that can be applicable to other times and other context, carrying several levels of meaning. In order to explain the evolution of cultural values it is necessary to explore the semiotic forms used to represent them. Their repetition and interiorization by means of narrative structures affects psychic and non-explicit levels. American historian James Clifford has also noted the importance of allegory and metaphor in the construction of cultural meaning.12 Consequently, it seems possible to defend that fictionalization is essential to the creation of the transitional realm that renders the representation of affective life experience in terms of narrative hybridism.13

The Good Soldier as Modernist Chronicle

In June 1914, Ford Madox Hueffer published the first part of his novel, The Saddest Story, in Blast magazine. The full version, re-titled The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion, appeared in 1915. Originally the novel was interpreted as a nostalgic 11 12

13

Abbott, H. Porter. “Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories.” New Literary History 19 (1988): 609. Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Allegory.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, p. 100. For more on the movement towards ambiguity and hybridism that manifests itself in many disciplines during the 20th century, see López-Varela, Asunción. “Cultural Sceneries of the Fantastic,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4. Purdue University Press, December, 2008.

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pastoral of conservative ideology. However, recent criticism has come to contemplate the novel as a demystification of English identity in the face of postimperial and global expansion. These interpretations speak of double-voiced hybrid texts that lament the passing of tradition and trace the path by which it fell.14 The study of Ford’s critical reception is symptomatic of this trend towards hybrid approaches built around the argument of a generalized epistemological crisis and fragmentation of experience taking place in the modern period and exemplified in the figure of Dowell, the unreliable narrator of Ford’s story.15 His lament “I know nothing – nothing in the world – of the hearts of men,” not only registers the sadness of a cuckolded husband and betrayed friend; it also “raises uncertainty about the nature of truth and reality to the level of a structural principle […] a resigned admission of the limits of human knowledge.”16 It was agreed that the theme of disintegration was pursued in formal terms in two ways in the novel: through structural disorganization of experience (and, therefore, discourse) and through perceptual (visual) confusion, often identified as “impressionistic.” However, this paper argues that these formal aspects can also be seen to constitute the scene of trauma. From the beginning of the story Dowell remains psychologically unable to grasp the events he has witnessed. He even doubts his own capacity to understand, and insists that it is the saddest story he has ever heard. The verb “know” appears at least six times in the first lines. Dowell’s assertions are often followed by clarifications, questionings and contradictions, as well as ­confessions of his own ignorance. His bewilderment is not only the result of his incapacity to organize memories and recollections into an understandable reality. It also stems from his continuous attempts to impose order on what he sees as chaotic impressions and experiences, “reflecting longer and longer upon these affairs,” he explains in Part iv of the novel, and after “writing away at this story 14 15

16

Marantz Cohen, Paula. Writing Life/Writing Fiction. Special Issue. Journal of Modern Literature 27. 3 (2004). See, for instance, Atkins, Jonathan. War of Individuals. Bloomsbury Attitudes to the Great War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002; Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; Tate, Trudi Modernism, History and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998; Williams, Louise B. Modernism & the Ideology of History. Literature, Politics and the War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002; On Ford’s work, see Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy’s Impressions of Disorder: Ford Madox Ford and the Politics of British Modernism. University of Oregon, 1997; see also Sara Haslam’s Fragmenting Modernism, Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002; Hynes, Samuel. “The Epistemology of The Good Soldier.” Sewanee Review 69 (1961): 225–35. Hynes, Samuel. “The Epistemology of The Good Soldier.” Sewanee Review 69 (1961): 226.

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now for six months.”17 Jeffrey McCarthy has noted Dowell’s repeated preoccupation with the shape of his tale, as if he believed that understanding events is only possible if they are reconfigured in narrative form. Dowell’s “understanding of the world is possible only if it is reconfigured as a story first, but the novel shows that his aesthetic practice is more a means of escape than of understanding.”18 McCarthy claims that this detached and apparently passive approach to life is the first of many clues that show that the narrator is inclined to aestheticize experience before considering it. He argues that Dowell turns to meta-commentary about form whenever the narrative approaches emotional territory, and that this is perhaps indicative of Ford’s position against Roger Fry’s aesthetics. However, the problem is not just the relationship between knowing and language, that is, how to express thoughts and ideas in aesthetic language. The novel is about expressing “passion,” that is, how to tell the experience of emotion; and this is exactly what Dowell is unable to do. Dowell concentrates on form not only because Ford may be exploring contemporary aesthetics, but because he may be willing to hint at the relationship between emotional and aesthetic experiences. The Good Soldier is not so much an escape from meaning as an escape from emotion. It is not surprising that “bad hearts” are at the centre of the narrative. In the novel, Dowell’s telling takes the form of recollection, and thus, a written form of re-telling: “You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people […]” (gs 11). The story becomes the staging of trauma, for “It wasn’t a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison full of screaming hysterics,” Dowell insists. (gs 13) He then goes on to describe his state of confusion by means of the metaphor of the apple, discovering it to be rotten after nine years and four months, in allusion to both his marriage and knowledge of epistemology. His confusion arises from his own inaccurate perceptions, the revelations made by the Ashbumhams, and his own d­ iscoveries as he interprets the different versions upon his telling, a form of written catharsis in which he attempts “to put this thing down.” (gs 18) Yet, Dowell imagines himself by the fireplace in a country cottage with a sympathetic soul who listens while he speaks. This causes the reader to become empathically immersed in Dowell’s discourse in a kind of common search for explanations. 17

18

Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2002, p. 146. Hereby the title will be abbreviated to gs and the page references will be given in parenthesis. McCarthy, Jeffrey Mathes. Impressions of Disorder: Ford Madox Ford and the Politics of British Modernism. University of Oregon, 1997, p. 323.

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However, the story ends up becoming not an explanation of what has happened, but a kind of justification of the narrator and his past. The Good Soldier is a “chronicle” of Dowell’s search for clarifications and a memoir of passion, with trauma lurking backstage. The representation of psychological depth is one of the defining traits of modernist fiction. It is generally used to expose the disorder of consciousness and the tumult of perceptions and memories, with characters frequently embodying real people. The extent to which modernist fiction remains anchored in realism is still an object of debate, a controversy which extends to the very conception of modernism as a unified movement. Jeffrey McCarthy’s work has shown how Ford’s journalism in the English Review was immersed in these debates about the nature of modernism. The life likeness or full realization of characters was almost invariably a major criterion for the success of a work of fiction. For some critics (McCarthy mentions Wyndham Lewis and José Ortega) this preoccupation with the human content of the work was, in principle, incompatible with aesthetic enjoyment. McCarthy sees Ford’s The Good Soldier as a way to resolve the modernist debate by choosing escape into aesthetic form over engagement, in the person of a detached aesthete narrator. McCarthy also mentions that by means of Dowell’s sensitive reporting consciousness, Ford embraces the impressionist precept of “showing” rather than “telling.” This interpretation might seem to exclude my reading of The Good Soldier as an inter-genre modernist chronicle. However, I hope to show that the novel stages a tension between those impressionistic moments and fragments of “showing” and “telling,” and that Dowell’s speech can also be read as a hidden site of passion and displaced affections. Ford’s novel, like Walter Benjamin’s “A Berlin Chronicle,” would exemplify a new way of unveiling trauma, inscribing it within the unstable fact-fiction hybrid genre of the chronicle-memoir.

Rewriting Trauma in The Good Soldier

Trauma is brought about by absence and loss. It is generally triggered by the death of a beloved person, but it can also refer to his or her psychological absence. Sigmund Freud’s own research on loss and trauma, Mourning & M ­ elancholia (1917), published only a couple of years after The Good Soldier, was developed in the context of Freud’s personal experience in mourning the death of his father in 1896. Two years before, he had written about the traumatic experiences of the war in Thoughts for the Times on War & Death, and his study On Narcissism was published in 1914.

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Freud puts states of mourning and melancholia in relation to chronic depression and as the long-term outcome of trauma, where the sufferer cuts off from social reality and experiences a regression into narcissistic identification in reaction to real loss. He distinguishes between mourning, when the external world becomes empty, and melancholia, where the ego itself feels the void: “even if the patient is aware of the loss that has given rise to his melancholia […] (it’s) only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.”19 With these insights Freud reaches right to the unconscious meaning of the experience and what it is that the external loss represents internally. In his essay “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Dominick LaCapra introduced a distinction in the notions of “lack/absence” and “loss.” For LaCapra, “absence” involves the perception of something that was never present to begin with, while “loss” refers to a particular thing/person/event. But “when loss is converted into (or encrypted in) an indiscriminately generalized rhetoric of absence, one faces the impasse of endless melancholy, impossible mourning”20 that seems to characterize Modernism. For a book containing two suicides, two ruined lives, a death, and a girl driven insane, Dowell’s position of restraint has struck many readers. His apparently controlled and distanced poise frequently hides signs of real anguish and distress about the facts he is narrating. This tension is sensed between the events he narrates, which are obviously very upsetting for him, and the way he narrates them, pretending to control his emotions. This paradox is also present in the title of the novel, The Good Soldier, with the subtitle “a tale of passion.” The story vacillates between a deeply ironic tone, and a more tragic sense of life in the telling of the adultery of Dowell’s friend, Edward, and his wife, Florence, and of her suicide after Edward falls in love with his own wife’s young ward, Nancy. Dowell’s tone is deliberately detached and at times even casual, often narrating events with a touch of comic satire so that they are perceived more poignantly. Mrs. Maidan’s death, Edward’s suicide to avoid further emotional involvement with Nancy, and Nancy’s madness as a result of her incapacity to control her own passion for Edward are told by Dowell with an absence of emotion that strikes the reader as artificial. His first assertion, “the saddest story I have ever heard” sounds as if nothing goes with him; yet, he returns time and time again to his own inability to understand and to feel: “You ask how it

19 20

Freud, Sigmund. Mourning & Melancholia. P.F.L. 11. London: Penguin Books, 1917, p. 254. LaCapra, Dominick. “Trauma, Absence, Loss.” Critical Inquiry 25 (1999): 698.

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feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do not know. It feels just nothing at all.” (gs 60) People suffering from trauma may speak repetitively about it, as Dowell does. Dori Laub, for example, mentions the temporal delay that carries one beyond the shock of a first moment of trauma to what inevitably follows: a repeated suffering of the event. At the same time trauma sufferers may also experience withdrawal reactions to protect themselves. These include efforts to avoid having feelings about the traumatic event and reminders of it, including places and people connected to what happened. This would also explain Dowell’s frequent lapses of memory. Jacques Lacan has indicated that the anxiety accompanying a trauma is not just the doubt but, rather, the cause of doubt. Thus, characteristic features of trauma are the secrecy and silence which surround it. And, insofar as secrecy and silence are symptomatic of an event whose core meaning has been permanently displaced, until the time when the truth of the unbearable can be spoken and be heard by others, the trauma can only enunciate itself as an enigma. Geoffrey Hartman also describes this feature of the symptom as the kind of perpetual search of a memory that “is inscribed with a force proportional to the mediations punctured or evaded.”21 Dowell’s persistent lapses and “I don’t know,” “I suppose,” etc., point in this direction. Lacan argued that the void can itself be reduced to a kind of object which appears when the imaginary order ceases to fill up the concrete holes in signifying chains with illusions of wholeness, so that fragmentation becomes the rule. Only when the real appears in a stark encounter with anxiety, it becomes knowable, but not as a historical “fact”; rather as a narrated “event.” Indeed, such an encounter with the void causes the relief of the trauma, precisely because unconscious meanings cease to produce signifying chains of unknowable – but ever-functioning – fantasy interpretations of reality. Trauma can also cause emotions to become restricted, even numb, in order to protect against distressing thoughts or reminders of what happened. Feelings of detachment and estrangement from others may also lead to social withdrawal. Dowell’s emotional insensibility is persistent, and it makes him sound detached, as if he was not part of it all. Physical reactions to trauma can include depressed or irritable mood, broken sleep patterns, fatigue and loss of energy, difficulty in concentration, and feelings of guilt and hopelessness. Some people continue to encounter places, people, sights, sounds, smells, and inner feelings that remind them of past traumatic experiences, as they 21

See Geoffrey Hartman’s “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.” New Literary History 26.3 (1995): 537.

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try to block them. Dowell’s account of the events is full of such. He is unable to remember and relies on others’ impressions and on their renderings of the events. Cathy Caruth also suggests that one exits from a trauma through speaking and being listened to.22 The sympathetic listener to Dowell’s story may represent social order; the other who attempts to make sense of the imaginary dimensions of the history/story, where trauma is not so much the accurate rendering of events, but rather the hearer/reader’s awareness that the events have produced unthinkable unspeakable memories. The self-repressions of Edward and Nancy’s mutual passion are versions of Dowell’s own alienation and emotional concealment. Dowell’s insistence on his love for his friend, despite the illicit love affair between Edward and his own wife, suggests that Dowell has been in the habit of repressing his feelings and passions for a long time. In fact, this is one of the reasons why the American Dowell has been seen as a true inheritor of English culture, with “Englishness” indoctrinated into a code of conduct and manners defined by the necessity to exercise emotional restraint in public. In contrast, Edward, the good English soldier, is not alienated from himself. His desire and passion for Nancy are presented as pure but not legitimate. The two are attracted to each other, but their social connections make the passion between them impossible to realize. Edward’s suicide represents an extreme form of self-repression, similar to Nancy’s madness. Ford’s characters accede to their society’s demand and repress themselves, but they also break the rules by pointing to their inflexibility. In the case of Dowell, the emotional repression that comes from following the “norm” only adds on to his psychological trauma. Ford’s novel does not look back to any kind of nostalgic Victorian order. Rather, it continually re-defines “normality.” Dowell’s confusion and unreliability are beyond categories like normal or abnormal, passionate or restrained. In the novel, normality is not associated with the lack of passion, exemplified for instance in Leonora’s behaviour against the more passionate nature of ­Edward and Florence. Dowell’s confusion stems from the irresolvable pluralism of views. Cultural roots no longer hold, for it is Irish Leonora and American Dowell who show restraint, while Edward, the English soldier, has a true passionate nature, and La Dolciquita, the supposedly emotional Spanish dancer, is really only interested in money. Ambiguity, ambivalence, and the contrast between appearance and reality, dreams, expectations and real occurrences are the stuff that makes up Ford’s hybrid narrative.23 22 23

Caruth, Cathy. “Trauma and Experience: Introduction.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. 11. See Green, Robert. Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

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Celia M. Kingsbury has argued that if definitions of sanity and madness are subjective, then it is difficult to describe pervasive war circumstances as “irrational” or “insane” when the sudden vilification of the enemy was necessary. In her analysis of the role social conventions, the fear of gossip and the peculiar sanity exhibited by the characters in The Good Soldier at the outset of the war, Kingsbury shows how Ford’s family ties could have made him feel particularly threatened and forced to write several works of anti-German propaganda.24 The role of gossip is indeed very important in The Good Soldier. All the characters, not only Edward, but also his wife Leonora, and Florence and her cuckold husband, Dowell, struggle to maintain their reputation and the appearance of “normality” in the face of passionate affairs and emotional breakdowns. This argument could be made extensive to the figure of the author. Without space to develop this thread further, I will just mention Annette Gilson’s study of Jean Rhys’s novels which shows that Rhys’s portraits imply that although Ford protests the social rules that demand repression, his books seem to affirm the necessity of that repression. Gilson explains that Rhys’s accounts are themselves the stage of the trauma of her relationship with Ford, and show a Ford unable to move beyond the past and “terrified of passion and emotional intimacy.”25 To conclude my argument I return briefly to Jacques Lacan’s conception of the symbolic, structured as a fiction where traumas produce holes, gaps, voids and enigmas in the narration of memorized and recollected events. In particular, such traumas emerge at times when the imaginary consistency of body and unified identity is threatened, for instance by war or other extreme experiences. The “fictive” aspects that might be present in autobiographical memoirs do not point towards illusory or deceptive aspects. Rather, they reveal the complex paradoxes involved in recollection, particularly following traumatic events. Possibly, this is also the reason why generic hybridism becomes commonplace in modernism, where it stages the crossings between rational and irrational experiences and memories, both personal and social. In this sense, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier not only epitomizes the modernist condition of failed epistemology. It is itself the site of trauma of modernist changing sensibilities. If the void opens up and the trauma becomes apparent, it does so by means of ambiguous forms which cross between fact and fiction and characterize the hybrid inter-genre of modernist chronicle. 24

25

Con Coroneos speaks of a “criticism of suspicion” that produces a text which encodes “a fall from presence” where the text becomes simultaneously “the scene of a ‘crime’” and “the site of redemption.” Coroneos, Con. Space, Conrad and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 94 and 95 respectively. See Gilson, Annette. “Internalizing Mastery: Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, and the Fiction of Autobiography.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.3 (2004): 650.

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Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. “Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories.” New Literary History 19 (1988): 597–615. Atkins, Jonathan. War of Individuals. Bloomsbury Attitudes to the Great War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Caruth, Cathy. “Trauma and Experience: Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. 3–12. Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Allegory.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Collingwood, Roger. G. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946. Coroneos, Con. Space, Conrad and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. De Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2002. Freud, Sigmund. Mourning & Melancholia. P. F. L. 11. London: Penguin Books, 1917. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Gilson, Annette. “Internalizing Mastery: Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, and the Fiction of Autobiography.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.3 (2004): 632–56. Green, Robert. Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Hamburger, Käte. The Logic of Literature. 2nd rev. ed. Trans. Merilynn J. Rose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973 [1968]. Hartman, Geoffrey. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.” New Literary History 26.3 (1995): 537–63. Haslam, Sara. Fragmenting Modernism, Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Hynes, Samuel. “The Epistemology of The Good Soldier.” Sewanee Review 69 (1961): 225–35.

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Kingsbury, Celia Malone. The Peculiar Sanity of War: Hysteria in the Literature of World War I. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2002. LaCapra, Dominick. “Trauma, Absence, Loss.” Critical Inquiry 25 (1999): 696–727. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Criticism. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1985. Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire, livre 10: L’angoisse. Paris: Seuil, 2004. López-Varela Azcárate, Asunción. “The Itineraries of Memory: Textual Hybrids and Intersubjective Experiences.” In Carmen Andras and Cornel Sigmirean (coord.), Inbetween Difference and Diversity: Studies of Cultural and Intellectual History, Sibiu: Astra Museum, 2013, 88–110. López-Varela Azcárate, Asunción. Embers of Time: A Pluridisciplinary Exploration of the Crisis of Representational Time in Science and Narrative Universidad Complutense, 2004. López-Varela Azcárate, Asunción. “Cultural Sceneries of the Fantastic” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4, Purdue University Press, December, 2008.

Marantz Cohen, Paula, ed. Writing Life/Writing Fiction. Special issue of Journal of Modern Literature 27. 3 (2004). McCarthy, Jeffrey Mathes. “The Good Soldier and the War for British Modernism.” Modern Fiction Studies 45.2 (1999): 303–39. Minsky, Marvin. The Society of Mind. London: Heinemann, 1987. Ricoeur, Paul. Temps et récit I, II, III. Paris: Seuil, 1983. Ricoeur, Paul; Claude Larre; Raymond, Panikkar; Bettina, Bäumer; Alexis, Kagame; G.E.R. Lloyd; André, Neher; Germano, Pàttaro; Louis, Gardet; Abdelmajid, Meziane; A.Y. Gourevitch. Les cultures et le temps. Paris: Payot, 1975. Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Sternberg, Meir. “Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (I).” Poetics Today 24.2 (2003): 297–395. Sternberg, Meir. “Telling in Time (II): Chronology,Teleology, Narrativity.” Poetics Today 13 (1992): 463–541. Tate, Trudi. Modernism, History and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester ­University Press, 1998. Williams, Louise B. Modernism and the Ideology of History: Literature, Politics and the War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. White, Hayden. Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

chapter 8

“Nearly as Bright as in Provençe!”: An Episode of Dowell’s Narrative Passion Lucie Boukalova Abstract The focus of this study is the second section of Part i of the novel, more specifically Dowell’s brief account of his visit in Provençe and a piece of local folklore and cultural memory – the story of the medieval troubadour Peire Vidal and his passionate pursuit of the rather “ferocious” lady of his dreams. Even though several critical studies were devoted to a closer exploration of the influence of Mediterranean history and sensibility upon Ford’s imagination regarding The Good Soldier and other pieces of fiction and non-fiction, the textual resonance of this particular episode has not been yet ­addressed and fully assessed.

Keywords Provençe – Peire Vidal – troubadours – literary comparativism – narratology – The Good Soldier

Car aital via tenc Qe lai, on ieu plus prenc D’ancta ni d’encombrier Torni plus volentier.1

Peire Vidal, “Son ben apoderatz”

∵ 1 “For I keep to such a path That there, where I receive the most Shame and suffering, I go by choice.” Peire Vidal, “I am greatly weakened” (Pender 98). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004344143_010

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Critical exegeses of The Good Soldier (1915), the masterpiece of Ford Madox Ford’s quarantaine (Ford, Letter 6; Moser 61), have mostly analyzed the novel in terms of epistemology, psychoanalysis or rhetoric. These studies, though progressively refined in focus and methodological tools, have significantly contributed to the popular and scholarly survival of Ford’s work over the decades and brought a lasting appreciation of its formal ingenuity and psychological radicalism, but they cannot truly provide a complete critical perspective on the novel’s accomplishment.2 In spite of its conspicuous novelty of manner and timeliness of matter, The Good Soldier resonates with notes of yore, incorporating in its subtly crafted lines the cultural and social cadences of distant days and regions. This tonality, present in the novel as a persistent echo of some extra-textual memory and fascination, has been detected several times by scholars who pointed out Ford’s lifelong passion for the south of France and for the legendary Provençe immortalized in the bittersweet airs of the troubadours as crucial imaginative influences on his work. However, these interpretative inquiries either focused purely on the historical-social analogies between the two codes of conduct,3 interpreted Ford’s regional attachments within broader context of the genre study,4 or drew specific intertextual connections on the background of literary comparativism.5 As a result, the integration of these critical pieces into the larger body of academic work dealing with The Good Soldier has thus remained highly precarious. The following study has been conceived as a reflection that may mitigate this problematic critical divergence. It will attempt to alleviate some of the consequences of this schism. Relying for a full thematic and formal support on a narrative element, centrifugal in its historico-cultural reference yet imaginatively wholly absorbed and integrated, this discussion of The Good Soldier will bring together a serious acknowledgement of Ford’s ingenuous craftsmanship and a recontextualized assessment of his enduring socio-cultural passion. To fully appreciate Ford’s singular dedication to his craft, this study will focus on what appears to be only an inconspicuous and inconsequent detail in the larger design of the novel, yet upon closer examination vibrant with formal and emotional charge. 2 As a fairly representative illustration of this assessment, see the Norton edition of The Good Soldier (1995). Another similarly comprehensive source on Ford scholarship is the collection of Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford edited by Richard A. Cassell. Boston: Hall, 1987. 3 Trammell Cox, James. “Ford’s Passion for Provence.” elh 28 (1961): 383–98. 4 Weiss, Timothy. Fairy Tale and Romance in Works of Ford Madox Ford. Lanham: University Press of America, 1984. 5 Cohen, Mary. “The Good Soldier: Outworn Codes.” Studies in the Novel 5 (1973): 284–97.

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As a silent yet inquisitive listener, I will follow one of the most specific yet intriguingly elusive traces of narrative (self-)reflection in the account of John Dowell. “The lamentable history” of Peire Vidal (19), one of the most accomplished troubadours of the Occitan Golden Age, which he passionately grasps yet references rather less dramatically at the opening of the second section of Part i (19–23), will become the referential pivot of my inquiry. Upon first ­reading, this episode appears marginal, showing a conspicuously low index of narrative relevance. It seriously fails in terms of “progression d’effet” (Ford, Theory 285), one of the major tenets of Ford’s composition creed. However, ­reconsidered on deep textual level, in terms of its structural symptoms and psychological potential within the narrative framework, the rudimentary “vida” emerges as more than an early medieval curio.6 By inquiring about its complex integration in The Good Soldier, the following study will stir double critical interest and will hopefully offer a productive combination of both. Although the analytical expectations of a high imaginative and narrative import might at first seem seriously incommensurate with the laconism and trifling nature of Vidal’s biography presented by Dowell, this abbreviated treatment of the troubadour’s amatory escapades does not necessarily have to be dismissed from the reader’s memory as a mere anecdote or caricature, inconsequentially appended to the main narrative line. Ever-honoring the oral/aural cultural heritage of his beloved Provençe, Ford could hardly ignore some of the specific features of the direct communication unyielding to the imperative of the written lines. He must have realized how differently the emphasis falls and rhythm flows in the spoken narrative. The urgency and anxiety of the moment easily expiate the sin of an episode or the lapse of a parenthesis. Overwhelmed by the incongruities and intractability of its experience, Dowell’s mind, caught in the vortex of composition, seeks relief by embracing an “oral mode” of narration, its immediacy, flexibility, and improvising character: “So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage… And I shall go on talking” (gs 19). Expounding his poetics, Ford explicitly espouses the criterion of “interest” as the key to an accomplished composition (Theory 281) and envisages the writing process as gathering and patterning of multicolored “little shreds” and petals of perceptions and images flooding one’s mind in discursive association (280). Only this strategy of impressionist badinage and inclusion can produce 6 Defined within the cultural and narrative context of this essay, “vida” is typically a brief biography mapping life and work of the troubadour poet. As Simon Pender explains in his study of Vidal and his biographical persona, majority of these pieces were written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by various authors (anonymously, with two exceptions), “loosely modeled on the accessus ad auctores texts used to teach Classical texts in schools” (95).

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a “life-like” and “animated” text which can “convey a profoundly significant ­lesson… of humanity” (280). For Ford, the panorama of the modern ethical and emotional fragmentation would not have been complete without the intriguingly minimalist sketch of Vidal’s desperate “mating” in the days of the Provençal high courtoisie (Denomy 63). The curious condensation of the Las Tours episode can be seen not only as a result and index of Ford’s deliberate “technique,”7 but also as a confident narrative projection of his private literary and cultural orientation. With a few precise strokes, he stylizes and summarizes, through the words of his unsuspecting narrator, the scholarly and cultural memory of the passion of one of the greatest composers of Occitan courtly verse.8 Thus the brief resumé of Peire Vidal’s life and career represents a refined, condensed product of Ford’s lifelong research and reflection upon the cultivated wholeness and wholesome spirituality of the Provençal civilization.9 His art of portraiture reveals a passionate, knowledgeable economy of an “adept” initiate in the Mediterranean cult (Weiss 69). Significantly, this technique can be perceived as Ford’s individualizing ­expression of his complex familial heritage. Ford’s maternal grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, was born in France and made his living as a painter, inspiring undoubtedly Ford’s notorious literary concern with “pictoriality” and stimulating his interest in the Southern sensibility (Gordon 38). Even more importantly, his father, Franz Xaver Hueffer, formed by the philological vigor of ­German academia, published at the age of twenty-four a critical edition of the works of Guillem de Cabestan (Ludwig 3), a charming Rouissillon g­ allant 7 For Ford’s special creative attachment to this word and craftsman’s lament of its abuse see his essay “Techniques” in Southern Review 1 (1935): 20–35, also reprinted in the Norton edition of The Good Soldier (1995): 285–300. Bound to contrast the advanced state of the French novel in terms of craft and structure with the content-oriented abandon of the “English nuvvle” (292), he opens his reflection with the following constatation: “Technique is perhaps the most odious word in the English language” (285). 8 Consult the oed for the complex (and contextually resonant) semantic content of “passion,” reflecting emotional and physical intensity of experience in terms religious and ­psychological (i. “Senses relating to physical suffering and pain”; ii. “Senses relating to emotional or mental states”). 9 Ford’s cultural scholarship resulted later in his life in two publications surprising in their Poundesque economic emphasis: Provence (1935) and Great Trade Route (1937). In Provence, Ford identifies the south of France with the civilization itself: “Chivalric generosity, frugality, pure thought and the arts are the first requisites of a Civilization – and the only requisites of a Civilization… Such traces… European civilization could exhibit came to us from the district of Southern France on the shores of the Mediterranean where flourished the Courts of ­Toulouse, olive trees, the mistral, the Romance tradition, Bertran de Born, the Courts of love and the only really amiable Heresy of which I know” (quoted in MacShane 240).

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of a truly l­ amentable fate (Egan 53). In 1878 he completed his major work, The ­Troubadours, a History of Provençal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages, which survived for several generations as the touchstone of scholarly expertise and creative source, inspiring numerous translations including thematic variations by Ezra Pound (Stang 13). Clearly, Ford’s delightful miniature distills the artistic and scholarly spirit of his ancestors, endowing it with a complex structural and psychological resonance through narrative incorporation.10 The structural importance, the specific narrative impact and the contrast of the Peire Vidal episode emerge very clearly when considered in terms of its integration within the novel’s framework and its drifting path and presence amidst the ebb and flow of Dowell’s narrative. The short vita appears, as it associatively surfaces in Dowell’s mind and words, in the second section of Part i of the novel. This point of emergence might at first seem largely inconsequential, especially with regard to the rather perfunctory sketchiness of the episode mentioned above. At first, it shows no orienting value in the work which so prominently and self-consciously relies on the free layering and variation of colors. However, its structural positioning and verbal rendering have a singular significance that is symptomatic of the narrator’s predicament. As indicated, the Peire Vidal story enriches and briefly diverts the narrative flow in the second discursive sequence of the first part. It is imaginatively foregrounded as the shock and abrupt upheavals of the opening pages gradually subside as Dowell wakes up to his urgent psychological need to grasp narratively the previous years that have suddenly collapsed in lie and dishonor, and to simultaneously contain and control his rueful retrospection. Even though one might cursorily pass the six or seven pages of the second section of the first book as essentially static and subdued, this part of the novel and Dowell’s narration emerges as the most crucial moment determining their structural and representational poetics. In fact, the interpolation of Vidal’s vita can be seen as a most vivid individual symptom of this dynamic intratextual dilemma. While the second sequence of the first book thus does not contain any climactic middles or consuming ends, it represents in more than one respect an 10

To fully appreciate Ford’s structural and thematic subtlety in his novelistic treatment of Peire Vidal’s story, it might prove revealing if the readers accompany their reading and reflections of The Good Soldier by a perusal of Ezra Pound’s passionate monologue “Peire Vidal Old” (published as a part of his Exultations and introduced by a pithy biographical note evoking Ford’s own treatment of the “in furs” episode), of the poet’s further exploration of the theme in Canto iv (where Vidal’s story becomes a thread in a rich tapestry of love’s sufferings in the centuries of Europe’s passionate youth), or of W.S. Merwin’s gentle elegy “Peire Vidal” (The New Yorker, Dec.11, 1995: 80).

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initiation, an opening. While the tumultuous crescendo of the testimony of the complete emotional and epistemological collapse of the first sequence presents an exceedingly suggestive vision of a civilization’s collapse, in this section a collateral emergency appears and progresses escaping the explicit imagery and demanding a more subtle and composed tracing. As his readers’ ears resonate with the rueful rhetoric (“Where better could one take refuge? Where better? Permanence? Stability? I can’t believe it’s gone” [gs 15]) and devastating imagery (“the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths” [14]) of Dowell’s jeremiad, they may not necessarily realize that the narrator’s wasteland-scaping in the first section represents more than one of the most resonant and definite objective correlatives of the modern spiritual disillusionment. Not only ethos is afflicted in Dowell’s narrative, but also logos suffers a direct and no less ravaging blow. The second sequence, incorporating the glimpse of Vidal’s Provençe, appears, in the light of these fully realized consequences of the initial collapse, highly symptomatic of the post-traumatic narrative disorder and phantom pain. As he struggles to rescue the previous decade from the amnesia of his m ­ arital stupor and self-perpetuating naïveté and pursues with rising passion psychological and social truth and complexity, Dowell finds himself without a single tangible psycho-historical token of the nine years of the fourfold intimacy in Nauheim: “How is it possible to have achieved nine years and to have nothing whatever to show for it?” (gs 36). Even more poignantly and painfully, he also discovers that he lacks an adequate mode of expression that could reconstruct the “Ashburnham years,” or find a substitute for their decorous rite, and organically connect this past with his troubled present. The only vestige of the previous years of the high-class continental luxury (Dowell’s “bone penholder, carved to resemble a chessman and with a hole in the top through which you could see four views of Nauheim” (36) is suggestive of his narrative predicament; of his urge to a retrospective visiting that is paralyzed by the complete lack of a usable form. The first stages of his search for a living structure, adequate to his shattering experience and recapitulating effort, emerge in the second sequence of the first book. The noticeable tension between alternative narrative models within Dowell’s mind, reflected in this part of the novel, signals the first stage of his quest for the textual form that would unite the new awareness with the sequence of the previous years, and that would become the apple that’s continually threatened with corruption yet remains whole. The deep social stasis and emotional stagnation of the nine seasons have been shattered by Dowell’s fall into experience. As a result, his retrospective inquiry and pain of disillusionment act as powerful psychological vectors that

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r­equire dynamical narrative form. The ignorance turns into knowledge, the high-society sleeper’s den turns hollow. Time’s dimension and ravage can no longer be ignored by Dowell who awakes to the sounds of its winged chariot, to the “rolling of the carriage wheels” hurtling the bright foursome along “the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald” amidst the “screaming hysterics” and full blast of the social and emotional outcry (gs 14). The narrative imperative of disclosure and desire perturb the commemorative immobility and repetitive observation of the high society rites. Dowell’s pain and disorientation release him from the patterned inertia of his previous existence that has negated time’s flow in social intricacies. In an occasional shudder of disbelief, Dowell’s mind calls for the sedative of the previous years. He recalls the unthinking ease of “stepping” in the rhythm and figure of the “minuet de la cour” (15); he envisions the two couples as “one of those tall ships with the white sails upon a blue sea,” “proud and safe” (15), immobilized in the distance on the horizon. The opening of the second part of the first book finds Dowell largely past the arresting simplifications of the nostalgic expressionism, increasingly engaged in the passionate search for a reconstitutive narrative form in the full acknowledgement of time’s imperative. Its pages present his mind caught between two powerful organizing alternatives and narrative approaches. The brief escapade of Peire Vidal’s courtly love vividly dramatizes the lingering duality. Judging from the several explicit clues and discursive instances in this section, readers may discover that Dowell’s narrative temperament intensively, though often subconsciously, assesses and tests the available narrative patterns, shifting from the “prescriptive” orientation towards linearity and relative isochrony (Genette 86) to the “descriptiveness” and discursiveness of the simulated oral immediacy. The opening lines of this section show Dowell’s intense awareness of the urgency of the structuring choice. For the first time, he consciously acknowledges and articulates his narrative role, an action which in turn motivates his closer focus on the ontology and morphology of his “artifice.” After the ­self-positioning as a listener in the first section, someone who just had heard “the saddest story” (gs 13), he emerges now as an active agent in the narrative shaping and reproduction: I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down – whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself. (19) Not only can readers interpret the previous lines as Dowell’s narrative ­self-interrogation and self-exhortation, but the words also very succinctly ­present the two divergent modes of fictional transposition and organization

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he is negotiating both theoretically and practically in this section: the relatively uncomplicated chronology of a “story” versus the yet unnamable form which could emerge from the synthesis of several viewpoints, time levels and inter-temporal shifts as well as narrator’s epistemological self-involvement. Still hurting under the pain of his disillusionment, Dowell realizes very early on in his narrative endeavor that the complexity, impact and memory of his experience simply resist the fluent chronology of a narrative rarified and directed by the writing impulse. This is the moment when he adopts the rhetoric of the direct verbal transmission, focusing on the immediacy and intelligibility of the given moment and relying on a particular image or narrative twist, shared and silently reflected by “a sympathetic soul opposite” him (gs 19). However, in the doubt of his narrative inexperience, Dowell still tends to transgress this narrative “situatedness,” instinctively suppressing the fragmentariness of his startled monologue in order to adopt a more comforting and familiar shape of narrative progression and wholeness. This lack of personal (re)creative precedence turns his mind to the “lamentable history” of Peire Vidal (19). S­ earching for a narrative analogue that could anchor the vertiginous multitude of his thoughts and impressions, Dowell initially reaches after a historically approved and sealed model of a narrative sequence. Elsewhere in the novel, Dowell dreams of the diary-like simplicity and lucidity that is in direct contrast with the chronological churning and opacity of his narrative. Trying to match up his tumultuous account of the Ashburnham affair with the rhythm and dates of his diary (gs 174–75), he, for a brief moment, stretches the condensed sujet to match the daily rubric of the fabula. However, it is only the story of Piere Vidal’s life and love that presents a single more sustained instance of such accord in the novel (22). The historical account, condensed through centuries of cultural transmission, is presented in a regular, unrelenting chronological rhythm without much narrative interpolation or discursive peripateticism. The verbal texture of the episode fully submits to the imperative of the linear progressiveness: it relies almost exclusively on the structurally unmarked connective versatility and simple cumulativeness of the paratactic “and” with an occasional alternation of “so” characterized by a virtually zero degree of causality and consequence. The resulting anacrustic echo of the passage develops a certain air of narrative determinism and sequential necessity in its resonance. It seems that by adopting the uncomplicated narrative morphology and exegesis of the historical instance, Dowell negates his own lamentable story. He avoids the patient shoring of the fragments against his ruin by simply embracing and reproducing a complete narrative template. However, it is crucial to note that several pages intervene between the initial mention of Vidal’s story and the actual account of his aventures. While

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the troubadour’s story is first evoked as a foremost analog and a most powerful association with Dowell’s narrative (gs 19), when the moment of its narrative distension and focalization finally comes it becomes “nothing more” than a vivid digression (22). The relatively inconspicuous second section of the first part thus becomes a narrative field dramatically redesigning and ­resignifying some of Dowell’s compositional assumptions. Completing Vidal’s vita, the narrator asks with confidence, rejuvenated by the historical example, “Isn’t that a story?” (22), while his brief revisitation of the medieval Provençe has devolved into an excursus par excellence. Reflecting upon the divergent ­nature of his and his wife’s sensibilities, he asks with anxiety, “Is all this digression or isn’t it digression?” (21), while the disbalance in his marital psychology and epistemology has gradually introduced itself as the story of his narrative. Highly resonant and memorable for its passionate adventures and accidents (directly inspiring Pound’s lines of both his early and mature period), the ­Vidal ­episode also becomes an unsuspected crux in the formation of Dowell’s narrative relief.11 What is thus clearly suggested is that the episode reflects Dowell’s ultimate embrace of the episodic morphology of narrative, a technique that will enable him to transcend the expressive limitations of a more strictly chronological structure. Not only does the story of Peire Vidal in itself indicate Dowell’s identification and adoption of the narrative mode based on spontaneous discursiveness and the uncontested freedom of analeptic and proleptic syncopation, but it also, in its disjointed textual presence, becomes a confirmative frame for the narrator’s cogitative and epistemological inclination. As in the previous instance, the vindication of Dowell’s instinct and sensibility emerges through the confrontation with the Provençal sketch of Peire Vidal still young. As a “digression” within the sunlit narrative from the Midi past comes ­Dowell’s brief yet poignant reflection upon his habits and the dynamics of observation corresponding to those of his wife (gs 20). While his mind shows an emphatically retrospective bent, reveling and unraveling upon revisiting, Florence’s memory and thought do not thrive upon such reminders. As a “gay tremulous beam” (21) she darts and flitters across surfaces, across the multilayered regional history. While for Dowell “the world is full of places to which [he] want[s] to return,” caught by the retina of his eye like “spots of color in an immense canvas” and awaiting the stroke of his recollecting mind to gain their 11 “relief 3” (oed): “ in the plastic arts, the elevation or projection of a design, or parts of a design, from a plane surface in order to give a natural and solid appearance, the degree of such projection, the part which so projects”; fig. “vividness, distinctness, or prominence due to contrast or artistic presentation.”

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shape and intensity, Florence evidently “got all she wanted out of one look at a place” resisting her husband’s re-creating epistemology (20–21). Florence and her rapid narrative skimming, reflected in the dispassionate yet impeccable informativeness of the Vidal story, thereby eliminating the vivid dimension of its “laugh” and “love” (gs 22) emerge as the very emblem of the linearity principle and its tyrannical presence in Dowell’s married life. Only ­after Florence’s death can Dowell escape the numbing dictate of the diary, actively shaping its bare factuality into dramatic narrative generating its own reminiscing dynamism. Florence’s obsessive fascination with the date of A ­ ugust 4 (67) is reshaped by significant moral implications of Dowell’s narrative.12 Further, only after he moves beyond Florence’s death in his story is Dowell’s mind completely released from the dictates of the strict chronological principle that regulate the memory of his past existence. As his wife, personification of the unreflective progression, disappears from his existence and his narrative like “yesterday’s newspaper” (101), Dowell’s mind can finally acknowledge and embrace his long-stirring passion for Nancy. Consequently, his narrative is able to articulate the facts of his life that resist the rubric of the diary and its uncomplicated fabula. The narrator’s ultimate victory over the chronological vectoriality is most vividly presented by the structuring of the very ending of his narrative. Rather than a mere lapse of Dowell’s memory, the scene of Edward’s stoical suicide, appended to the text rather surprisingly as an afterthought, should be interpreted as the final submission of the fabula trajectory to the dramatic twists and turns of the narrator’s sujet. Dowell’s account of Ashburnham’s death decisively turns against the narrative grain introduced by the linear story of Peire Vidal. The structural distance of the two moments in Dowell’s narrative can be seen as the very index of the narrator’s recreating power and confidence. While Edward’s end can be intuited from the first pages of the novel and the fact of his suicide becomes known prior to the more detailed account at the end, the memory of his last moments still presents a momentous culmination of the narrative. Unlike the turbulent yet simply progressive and predictably climactic story of Peire Vidal, Dowell’s narrative resonates with proleptic echoes forming fresh cadences of impact and interest. Readers can experience the ultimate inadequacy of the chronological principle regarding Dowell’s narrative not only through the mentioned confrontation of the narrative philosophies but also when reflecting upon the 12

For an enlightening discussion of the significance and fatality of the date see “Journal du cours de capes – Agrégation de G. Cingal,” a class discussion forum, at

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­occasional critical attempts to restore the time sequence underlying his presentation of the events.13 Even though undeniably instructive and encouraging in the reading process, The Good Soldier timeline, converting the narrative flux into a linear representation of chronological units, cannot illuminate the elements of the story any further than the original text. Fabula, as Richard Welsh ­perceptively reminds us, should not be seen as the primary order, a narrative essence preceding the existence of the text, but regarded rather as a “function of interpretation” (2001: 603), a high-contrast interpretative presence “diagnostic of the rhetorical weight and distribution of salient values in the narrative itself” (604). Considered in the light of the illuminating tension within narrative ontology, the Peire Vidal episode might seem rather lack-luster as it eliminates the slippage between the narrative fabula and sujet14 and gravitates towards the “objective narrative core” (603). However, it decisively indicates and enables Dowell’s imaginative engagement in his narration.15 The seemingly inconspicuous secular legend of the amorous escapades of the twelfth-century troubadour not only contributes to the actualization of Dowell’s choice of his narrative procedure, but it also thematically underlines his interpretative and emotional self-positioning in relation to his ­impressionist reminiscence. This critical claim, similar to the previous discussion of narrative meandering versus linearity, derives primarily from the highly significant position of the Vidal episode within the novel’s structure. Its appearance within the second sequence should be regarded as a crucial turn in the narrator’s personal perspective of his story (or an identification of the imminence of such turn). However, also similar to the previous analysis, the significance of this shift and its textual surfacing has frequently gone unrecognized by readers and critics, appearing as it does at a point of dramatic 13 14

15

As an illustrative example of the fabula-oriented (re)constructive effort, see Vincent J. Cheng’s “Chronology of The Good Soldier.” English Language Notes 24 (1986): 91–7. For a terminological substitution and equivalence for the fabula/sujet dichotomy introduced by the formalist narratology, see Dorrit Cohn’s “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narrative Perspective.” Poetics Today 11.4 (1990): 775–804. The intriguing dialogue between the linear orderliness, distance and closure on one hand, and the troubling cyclicality of narrative revisiting and inquiry on the other strikes no less forcefully Ford’s younger contemporary, Virginia Woolf. She reflects in her diary: “How beautiful they were, those old people – I mean father and mother – how simple, how clear, how untroubled… He loved her – and was so candid & reasonable & transparent – and had such a fastidious delicate mind, educated & transparent. How serene and gay even their life seems to me… But if I read as a contemporary I shall lose my child’s vision & so must stop. Nothing turbulent; nothing involved: no introspection” (December 22, 1940).

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­depression of the novel. The following discussion will reassess this interpretation of the novel’s dramatic curvature. Coming between the tumultuous introduction and the later vivid scenes of passion of the Ashburnham tragedy, the second section of Part i is a crucial psychological juncture of Dowell’s narrative intention and self-positioning. The previous study of Dowell’s structural choices and decisions already directed critical attention to the fact that it is only in the second section of the first part that Dowell emerges as a narrative agent molding his story, actively acknowledging and negotiating the terms of its fictionality. However, the causes and conditions of Dowell’s initial disorientation and creative passivity are more complex. The sheer power of the rhetoric characterizing the opening pages, suggestive of his disillusionment and sudden psycho-social deprivation, tend to obscure the amorphousness and panicking withdrawal regarding Dowell’s narrative position. Even though his frame looms no smaller in the narrative perspective of the opening section than the silhouette on Munch’s canvas and his scream seems all-drowning, it soon wastes its resonance in the repetitiveness of its reverberation. Dowell’s is a predicament of traumatic solipsism. The shock of recognition that prompted him to start the narrative has resulted in Dowell’s severe social isolationism and dissociation from the familiar “actant model” (Greimas, 172). This violent defamiliarization of his previous social role and rite results in a pronounced crisis in terms of Dowell’s narrative identification and self-positioning. Even though the opening section of Part i presents Dowell in a lively rhetorical engagement with the last nine years and six weeks of his life, exploded in “four crashing days” (gs 15), his narrative position and intervention seem highly precarious. Early on in his writing, questioning himself as to his penning motives, Dowell views himself as one “who ha[s] witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people” propelled by the “desire to set down what [he] ha[s] witnessed,” or simply by the wish “to get the sight out of [his] head” (gs 14). Such a revisiting and transcribing process requires a direct inner access to and engagement with the lived experience. However, Dowell’s psychological predicament in the first section of Part i undermines his chance of a creative imaginative interchange with his past. In the opening section of the first book, readers observe Dowell expressing himself and defining his position in relation to the past and others in terms highly confrontational as he struggles with his anger, disillusionment and r­ esentment. All of a sudden, after the years of living within a clearly defined social and marital role, he finds himself questioning and severing all such binding. A modern wonderer, he feels “horribly alone,” having lost all hope of a meaningful social interaction: “No hearthstone will ever again witness, for

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me, friendly intercourse. No smoking room will ever be other than peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths” (gs 16). After a “belle decade” spent in the midst of the leisured high society nonchalantly and safely circumscribing one’s philosophical horizon, Dowell shudders in the sudden panic of nihilism (“I know nothing – nothing in the world[…]” (16) and shattering agnosticism, negating the foundations of his previous existence (“Yet, in the name of God, what should I know if I don’t know the life of the hearth and the smoking-room, since my whole life has been passed in those places” (16). To incorporate both his past and present life, both innocence and experience, in his narrative Dowell inevitably has to do so in terms and relations inherent to his social position; he has to work using shards of the collapsed social narrative. In spite of his refusal and resentment, he cannot, in his narrative impulse, simply eliminate his previous associations or transcend the ontological and epistemological borders of his experience. Two blind narrative paths are briefly taken and quickly abandoned by Dowell in the opening section, a decision that testifies to his personal honesty and to the seriousness of his narrative intent. Dowell’s shock and disillusionment understandably result in his retrogressive paranoia ravaging the originally tranquil memory of the other three dancers of the Nauheim minuet. Filled with bitterness as he sees himself, looking over the last nine years, completely abused and dishonored as “the sedulous, strained nurse” (gs 16), Dowell dissociates himself in disgust, despair and disbelief from his wife and the Ashburnhams, the three “hardened gamblers” (60). Picking the apple of knowledge, he finds it hopelessly rotten to the core (15–16). Even though such social severing can prove therapeutically beneficial, Dowell’s narrative is not prospectively oriented. In order to understand, he has to revisit and to recognize the fact that, in his past, his life will always be intricately connected with the existence of the other three individuals. In spite of his resentment, his innocence will always be intimately tied with their experience. In order to narratively recreate “the falling to pieces of a people,” Dowell will have to create his own character in his narrative fully interacting with the others. Even though the opening lines indicate his personal withdrawal from the drama of his previous life after shocking discoveries (“This is the saddest story I have ever heard[…]” (13), the closing paragraphs of the first section testify to Dowell’s waking sense of inquisitive self-involvement: “And yet again you have me. If poor Edward was dangerous because of the chastity of his expressions… what about myself?” (19). In yet another way, Dowell reacts to his lost and betrayed innocence and strives to reconfigure his previous psychological and social position in narrative terms. The shock of the recent disclosure and recognition of his disastrous

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naïveté lead Dowell to a serious reflection upon the possibility of the innate depravity of humankind, upon the shared codes and secrets insidiously spreading and animating society at large. Deeply disturbed by the extremity of the suddenly revealed polarity of the human psyche, Dowell ponders the disturbing monstrosities and contradictions haunting human character “at this pitch of civilization” (17). While in the past he was able to “find [his] way blindfolded” (26), moving in familiar places and circles, now wherever he looks, he finds only highly ambiguous social signifiers. Seen from Dowell’s perspective, human character becomes a dispiriting riddle. Leonora’s confession of her affair is ridden with ambiguity: “I don’t know; I don’t know; was that last remark of hers the remark of a harlot, or is it what every decent woman, county family or not county family, thinks at the bottom of her heart? Or thinks all the time for the matter of that?” (gs 17). Similarly, man’s motivation is viewed as no less problematic in the light of Dowell’s new knowledge and precarious freedom of judgment: “Is the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man – the man with the right to existence – a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour’s womankind?” (19). Dowell’s discomfiting realization of his inadequate awareness regarding the principles the socio-psychological animation might briefly suggest the perspicacity of the omniscient narrator as the desirable creative position. However, unable to transcend the limits of his individual epistemology and psychology regarding his past life, he realizes his utter ignorance of the projected narrative universe: “I don’t know. And there is nothing to guide us… It is all a darkness.” (gs 19) Dowell has yet to develop a more adequate narrative perspective and define more emphatically his position towards/within his story in order to creatively (and therapeutically) revisit the previous decade. It is the second section of the first book which, in spite of its relatively low dramatic impact, brings a more satisfying answer to this search; it is within the textual frame of the Provençal geo-cultural inspiration that Dowell’s narrative presence emerges in distinct and tenable contours. His nebulous ­narrative consciousness, stirred by primary emotional instinct in the first sequence, shapes and solidifies into dual textual role and responsibility. Settling comfortably at “the side of the fireplace of a country cottage” in front of his imagined listener (gs 19), Dowell makes a decisive move towards the narrator’s position and control. Turning from the immediate setting of the projected “interchange,” he directs his listener’s attention to the region of Provençe and a vivid specimen of its cultural heritage: “…we are not in that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay. Consider the lamentable history of Peire Vidal” (gs 19). Drawing

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upon diverse regional and historical narrative tonalities, Dowell introduces the emotional key and complexity of his narrative. After the emotional and epistemological confusion of the first section, he sets out to establish (employing this association) a certain controlling, modal frame of his narrative. The distance he gains as a narrator from his experience brings him into an illustrative proximity of historical narrative examples. His emerging narrative confidence inspires the imaginative relocation of his experience, traditionally associated with narrative openings. At the same time, within the modest scope of the second sequence, Dowell also emerges more definitely as one of the dominant characters of his narrative. This declaration of narrative participation is also enabled and realized by the associative extension oriented towards Provençe, for it is by tracing Vidal’s steps in the southern France that Dowell and his wife Florence are introduced into his narrative. It is their brief cultural pilgrimage that first situates Dowell’s monologue of the fireside in time and place: “Two years ago Florence and I motored from Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in the Black Mountains…” (gs 20). It is the associative complexity of this journey which presents Dowell’s character as more than an episodic appearance viz. his serious reflection upon his epistemological experience and temperament. The search for the cultural and regional memory of Peire Vidal thus reflects Dowell’s refined sense of his narrative position. Further, focusing on the vita itself, readers can identify the dominant psychological principle that will characterize his presence as a narrator and a character within the novel as it emerges in the second chapter of Part i. As I have noted above, throughout the opening section Dowell struggles not only defining his narrative position within the projected text and testimony, but also with his feeling of resentment and rejection regarding his previous life, emotions which unavoidably result in a narrative stance based on psychological conflict, social confrontation and distancing. Since Dowell’s expressive sensibility and narrative strategy fluctuate between the negation and erasure of his former social interaction and the extreme questioning striving for the mastery of psycho-social universals, the brief Provençal intermezzo signals a crucial development in Dowell’s narrative perspective. Whether Dowell’s reference to the amorous escapades of “senher Vidal” (Cronyn 13) is an associative act and fully conscious choice or not, the story becomes a rich repository of his conflicted feelings. In its therapeutic flight southward, his imagination is strongly drawn to cultural examples and archetypes. For Dowell, still smarting under the pain and humiliation of the recent disclosure, the story of Peire Vidal’s adventures can offer a welcome solace and a noble example of marital suffering. In his resentment regarding Edward’s

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amorous attachments and decorous deceptiveness, Dowell remarks: “You would have said that he was just exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine and it was madness” (gs 17–8). Thus Dowell creates a narrative arena for imaginative jousting; the dramatic rhetoric of the opening part finds an effective channeling in the laconicism of the Vidal episode. However, the brief vita does not represent merely an imaginative correlative for psychological confrontation. The account of Vidal’s passion connects Dowell and Edward in a more subtle way. Even though Dowell’s rendering of the story is brief and laconic, it shows certain sympathy with the passion of the troubadour, whose legendary love survived for centuries in the vidas of the region. Dowell’s ear proves sensitive to its longing tonality. “It’s so full of love,” Dowell says, introducing the story to his listener (gs 22). The diction of the episode appears detached, but is not completely void of personal sentiment. In this respect, Dowell’s most explicit interpolation (“But I suppose La Louve was the more ferocious[…]” (22) becomes highly suggestive of the potential redistribution of Dowell’s sympathy within his personal love triangle (especially when the previous consideration of Florence’s narrative (in)sensitivity is taken into joint consideration). The Peire Vidal episode can thus be regarded as a psychological crux of the narrative: a projective climax of Dowell’s confrontation and, at the same time, one of the first explicit indications of Dowell’s stirring sympathy with Edward and his passionate chivalry. In summary, the mode of narrative sympathy and identification prevailing over the initial conflict and isolation, which characterizes Dowell’s attitude later in the novel, thus first emerges through the associative mediation of the story of Peire Vidal’s passion. Dowell’s self-inscription into this episode and his identification with Edward’s courtoisie (still rather inconspicuous in the second section of the Part i) will become more definite as he recalls his rather bathetic courting and marriage in Part ii, and especially when he reveals his passion for Nancy in Part iii. The complexity of Dowell’s identifying narrative projection indicated by the Provençal vita thus progressively suppresses his earlier confrontational retrospective stance, reconnecting him with his previous experience and relations, and initiating a truly therapeutic and reconstitutive narrative experience. No less important is the fact that the progress of Dowell’s sympathizing sensibility affects his role as narrator. While earlier attracted by the position of omniscience and dramatically thwarted by the collapse of his e­ pistemological and psychological perspective, his narrative sympathy and identification represent an unexpected, authentic way of enlarging the individual ­consciousness. While initially Dowell feels threatened by other voices, revealing the shocking

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facts and negating in a way his existence, he can master (or at least temporarily harness) through his narrating sympathy and identification the social heteroglossia, recognizing the paths and patterns of passion in the multiple narratives historical and contemporary. While his initial feeling of social resentment, ethical and emotional exclusion stimulate his frantic desire to penetrate the unsettling mystery of human relations, his sympathizing retrospective quest does not result in any explicit diagnosis of such universals. Searching for the secrets and desires of other lives, he realizes his own.16 Behind the finery of his age, he catches a glimpse of simpler times, southern clime. “He loved the Loba of Pueinautier…The Loba was from the Carcases and Peire Vidal called himself “Lop” in her honor and the arms he carried were decorated with wolves…” (Pender 102). Works Cited Cronyn, George. The Fool of Venus: the Story of Peire Vidal. New York: Covici-Friede, 1934. Denomy, Alexander J. “Courtly Love and Courtliness.” Speculum 28.1 (1953): 44–63. Egan, Margarite. The Vidas of the Troubadours. New York: Garland, 1984. Ford, Ford Madox. “Dedicatory letter to Stella Ford.” The Good Soldier. London: ­Penguin, 1990. 5–9. Ford, Ford Madox. “Developing the Theory of Impressionism with Conrad.” The Good Soldier. Ed. Martin Stannard. New York: Norton, 1995. 274–85. Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier. London: Penguin, 1990. Ford, Ford Madox. “Techniques.” The Good Soldier. Ed. Martin Stannard. New York: ­Norton, 1995. 285–300. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method . Trans. Jane E. Levin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972. Gordon, Ambrose, Jr. The Invisible Tent: The War Novels of Ford Madox Ford. Austin: University of Texas Pres, 1964. 16

In spite of the narrative and psychological impulse of identification (culminating in the claim “I love him because he was just myself” (227), Dowell might not in the end emerge as more than a dutiful biographer of Edward Ashburnham, the good soldier and loyal courtier, as the surviving cultural transcriber fully absorbed in the vita of his character, “scarcely believ[ing] he was writing such things…” (Pender 101). However, bound by its specific thematic and structural focus, this essay does not aim at the perpetuation of the critical debate regarding Dowell’s agency and narrative potency. It is primarily concerned with the identification of the origins of the identifying momentum, with the narrative situation stimulating the dynamics of Dowell/Ashburnham “approximation.”

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Greimas, A.J. “Réflexions sur les modèles actantiels.” Sémantique Structurale: Recherche de Méthode. Paris: Larousse, 1966. 172–91. Ludwig, Richard M., ed. Letters of Ford Madox Ford. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. MacShane, Frank. The Life and Work of Ford Madox Ford. New York: Horizon, 1965. Moser, Thomas C. “Conrad and The Good Soldier.” Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford. Ed. Richard A. Cassell. Boston: Hall, 1987. 56–63. Pender, Simon. “Vidal in Furs: Lyric Poetry, Narrative, and Masoch(ism).” Comparative Literature 58.2 (2006): 95–112. Stang, Sondra J. Ford Madox Ford. New York: Ungar, 1977. Weiss, Timothy. Fairy Tale and Romance in the Works of Ford Madox Ford. Lanham: ­University Press of America, 1984. Welsh, Richard. “Fabula and Fictionality in Narrative Theory.” Style 35.4 (2001): 592–606.

chapter 9

Not Just Another Perplexity Gabrielle Moyer Abstract This essay situates Ford’s The Good Soldier and Conrad’s Lord Jim within metaphysical and epistemological debates to produce a broader (aesthetic, historical, and philosophical) and more nuanced assessment of the novels and the literary categories to which they belong. It also shows how Dowell’s method for finding the truth that matters to him produces his delusions and also marks him as a student of otiose Edwardian habits of knowing.

Keywords Modernism – puzzles – science – logic – narrative – knowledge – Strand magazine – Arthur Conan Doyle – Sherlock Holmes – Mystery Fiction – The Good Soldier

“If there is a truth in the aesthetic idea, it lies in its form rather than its content” “a narrative … tries to make sense of something”

∵ Western Europe began the twentieth century exposing a number of odd ­behaviors: psycho-symbolic dreams and rising suicide rates, symptoms without sickness and radical discontinuities of conduct.1 At the same time, newly 1 The theories behind such behaviors can be found in: Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900; although his first edition was not very successful and didn’t gain significant readership until the later editions, eight in all); Halbwachs, Maurice. The Causes of Suicide; Jean-Martin Charcot’s work on pathological physiology in hysterics, “Pathological Physiology: On The Various Nervous States Determined By The Hypnotisation of Hystericals” (1882),

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004344143_011

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e­stablished psychological, positivist, and sociological journals managed to generate explanations for just these kinds of puzzles.2 Rather than wallow in speculative philosophizing, they reasoned through science, promising to “bring […] in the fact and push […] out the fiction” (Humanity: The Positivist Review, 199).3 Henry Dudeney, the creator of The Strand’s popular monthly puzzler, Perplexities, captures this spirit of scientism when he writes in 1917, “Every puzzle that is worthy of consideration can be referred to mathematics and logic” (v). Although referring to his own prosaic puzzles of train schedules and family relationships, chess boards and change, his trust in logic as a magic bullet for human puzzles is not unusual. As Dudeney concludes in the Preface to his Amusements in Mathematics, it is how we respond to puzzles that divides the sane from the insane: “the unfortunate inmates of our lunatic asylums are sent there expressly because they cannot solve puzzles – because they have lost their powers of reason” (v). If any puzzle worth considering can be solved logically and those who cannot solve them are lunatics, then modernist fictions consider the wrong problems and its characters are mentally unstable. To some degree, this is what we find in modernist works: unresolved questions and prophetic, confused voices. Reading Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, for example, it seems as though Henry Dudeney or the editor of The British Journal of Psychology had been presented with a puzzle resembling all p ­ revious ones, only to find their logic fail. When puzzles remain unsolved after the usual process of observation, deduction and induction, reasoning and explanation, characters in these texts respond, in other words, with shock and panic.4 ­Although Ford and Conrad display a pyrotechnic mastery of narrative, the Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd (1895), Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1910). 2 In its first volume alone, The Sociological Review redressed child criminals, magic, the problem of decadence and poor colonial relations. 3 The British Journal of Psychology and the philosophical-psychological journal, Mind, both insist in their initial volumes that their methods will be scientific. In the first edition of The Sociological Review, as well, L.T. Hobhouse describes the whole of history as a problem for the science of sociology to resolve when he affirms “the problems of the day are just as much objects of science as any period of past history or any phase of primitive life” (11). 4 This is not to detract from the methodological ingenuity-under-pressure exerted by ­non-literary thinkers of the period. The founder and editor of The British Journal of Psychology, W.H.R. Rivers might serve as a model for this. Assigned to the Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh during World War i, he was confronted with soldiers suffering mysterious but “severe disturbances in their mental life” (Freud, Memorandum). The common practice at the time was to explain these disturbances as a form of “malingerering” (or avoiding one’s

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failure of narrative at its most basic and necessary level, as explanation, acts as a central if not the driving formal concern of these two works. This is the scenario I want to propose as a lens through which to view them: that rather than the product of active patricide, “kill[ing] off the novel once and for all” as Peter Nicholls describes the works of Joyce and Woolf, Broch and Musil, they have only begun to conceive of its death, and that this leads to a state of methodological uncertainty verging on insanity (1994: 255). The triumph of these novels arrives, though, in the way they offer more than the melodrama of failure. Ford and Conrad’s writing develops a strange success and even epistemic and ethical progress out of the novel’s remains. What I will explore here, specifically, is their experimentation with “failed stories” and how these stories, by their very failure, manage to succeed where once successful stories failed. This success cannot be said to take the form of high modernist experimentation: the radical innovations of “stream of consciousness,” formal pastiche, dispassionate “external narratives,” or what T.S. Eliot would describe as Joyce’s “mythical method” – the only replacement, according to Eliot, for the “narrative method,” “…controlling, organizing and giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history.”5 Neither a hodge-podge nor a satire, a detonator nor a scaffold, these “failed stories” can be described as remaining within the structure of narrative even as it collapses around them. patriotic duty) and to cure it with electrical treatment and a prompt return to the front. ­Rivers broke with conventional diagnoses and treatments, however, by describing these strange disturbances as authentic neurological disorders, expressions of psychological fears – descriptions that led him to develop what he would call a “talking cure.” His cure broke not only with medical but also with social conventions by encouraging patients to explore their emotions rather than keep a stiff upper lip (Rivers, Conflict and Dream). Freud provides an evaluative account of these electric treatments during World War i in a post-war memorandum submitted to the Austrian War Ministry, written for their inquiry into the treatment of soldiers with war neuroses (dated February 3, 1920). In the memorandum, he compares the limits of electric treatment with the success of psychotherapeutic treatment, a comparison premised on a psychoanalytic etiology of shell shock. Rivers’ methods and his relationship to his patients, especially the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen (both patients at Craiglockhart) are explored in Pat Barker’s novel, Regeneration (1991). 5 Eliot describes Joyce’s “important discovery” in the following sentences: “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (178).

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In this way, Ford’s The Good Soldier and Conrad’s Lord Jim provide examples of two early experiments with prose, where the characters’ efforts to narrate their way out of the mystery of a person fall short and where the text’s aesthetics both demonstrate and engage with the limits of language and narration. Although these texts do not yet break with narrative form as High Modernist texts will, their literary experimentation for philosophical ends does look forward to later texts by such authors as Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, as well as later and contemporary modernists, Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett and Sebastian Barry. These authors write as much out of skepticism and the hope for knowledge as those before them. What they arguably share in their fictions is an appeal to narrative experimentation for epistemological ends, a re-imagination of storytelling, at least in one respect, as a method for thinking more clearly about who other characters are and who a character is to himself or herself. I want to propose, then, that these authors not only manage to translate politics or culture into style, but that they conceive of radical, narrative style as a new method of thinking. Such a claim for the significance of narrative style can sound misplaced in light of the significance of language in modernist texts. It is less common to read them as stories than to read how their language dismantles stories, scattering attention to individual components of sense and meaning. We see this, for example, in the way Gertrude Stein’s flair for meticulous grammar and double entendre, verbal repetition and still life, grinds the fantasy of storytelling to a halt. Or in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Beckett’s Trilogy, how an attention to character development is displaced by attention to the word, as it constructs and deconstructs a character, a place, a world. And yet the narratives that remain in modernist texts are, I want to argue, less ad hoc fragments, surviving linguistic experimentation than attempts to picture the enigma of someone’s character or soul through a series of narrative derangements. Conrad and Ford can be said to write stories that are in this way methodologically ­self-reflective. They produce works that are fictional narratologies or philosophical m ­ etafictions: their stories reflect on stories and stories’ relation to truth and understanding.6 To study The Good Soldier and Lord Jim is to find 6 What is philosophy’s role in these fictions? Their questions mimic questions in a detective fiction: “What happened?” and “Why did it happen?” But their questions are arguably more philosophical than criminal. Turning to Richard Rorty’s description in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature of what philosophers are doing when they think philosophically, can help clarify this argument. “Philosophers,” he writes, are those who are “looking to find the ­vocabulary and the convictions which permit one to explain and justify one’s activity … and thus to discover the significance of one’s life” (4). This project recalls The Good Soldier and

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stories tugged on one side by the imperative to doubt and on the other by the imperative to explain, but it is also to find stories rewritten as a humanly demanding, recursive process of attention, self-reflection and re-description.

Stories as Satisfying as Answers

When science appears as a radiant replacement for fables and false authority, what place can story telling have but the trash bin of retired narratives? Ford and Conrad, like their contemporaries, present story telling in The Good Soldier and Lord Jim as a form tied as much to deception and self-deception as to the project of knowing. They are storytellers whose fictions raise difficult questions and whose characters are desperate to know. And their characters are storytellers, in both the imaginative and the deceptive sense, as well as avid readers of fiction. Before looking at new forms of story-telling in Ford and Conrad, it can be helpful to look at stories in Western Europe at the turn of the century, stories equally shaped by the mystery of a person and the desire to resolve this mystery. While Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories made a celebrity of Sherlock Holmes, they also popularized the explanatory detective narrative for a mass British public.7 Serialized in the widely popular, Strand Magazine, his stories would have been read by approximately five hundred thousand Britons a month. The satisfaction of Doyle’s narratives could come for them as much from the Lord Jim, where recursive descriptions aim at just such explanations and justifications. Jim, for example, attempts to justify his leap off the Patna to affirm his courage and heroism, Marlow attempts to justify his tolerance of Jim to clarify his own bravery as a sailor and Dowell attempts to justify his credulity and others’ deceptions to clarify his place in the world relative to them. Rorty’s phrase also points us to the incomplete philosophical work of these texts. They remain always only in the process of discovering this right vocabulary, the right convictions, the satisfactory justification or significance. Finally, Rorty’s sense of the critical role that language plays in gaining knowledge resonates not only with these texts but also, more broadly, with the project of Modernism itself – finding the certainty and the language to justify what we do and who we are. 7 Doyle remarked on a boat trip from England to France that: “Foreigners used to recognise the English by their check suits. I think they will soon learn to do it by their Strand Magazines. Everybody on the Channel boat, except the man at the wheel, was clutching one” (quoted in Pound, 63). The Strand was created with the hope that it would become popular in just this way. Its founder, George Newnes, explained the choice of the name Strand, for example, in exactly these populist terms: “it is through the [London] Strand itself that the tide of life flows fullest and strongest and deepest.” The hope here was that the journal’s audience would rise, equally, from the urban “tide of life” (Blathwayt 170).

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thrill of suspense as from the certainty of answers. Beginning with an unsolved crime or the threat of a crime, his mysteries proceed from a series of inexplicable facts to a discovery of both criminal and motives, to Holmes’ final story in which he explains how he solved the mystery. In this way, Holmes’ story ends the mystery both literally and formally. Here he is in his sitting room on Baker Street, for example, in a final chapter, describing the interrogative process that led him to Stapleton as the Baskerville criminal: I have had the advantage of two conversations with Mrs. Stapleton, and the case has now been so entirely cleared up that I am not aware that there is anything which has remained a secret to us… My inquiries show beyond all question that the family portrait did not lie, and that this fellow was indeed a Baskerville. He was a son of that Rodger Baskerville, the younger brother of Sir Charles, who fled with a sinister reputation to South America, where he was said to have died unmarried. He did, as a matter of fact, marry, and had one child, this fellow… (65) Holmes is precise here. A deliberative storyteller, he demonstrates the reliability of his methods through the surety of his conclusions. His language, further, admits of no error: “so entirely cleared up,” nothing “has remained a secret,” “beyond all question,” “did not lie,” “was indeed,” “as a matter of fact.” Accumulating facts in this way, one after another, the final story not only reveals but reproduces the method that leads to his story as solution. Given the perfection of Holmes’ methods and the sparity of his emotional life, these stories (both Doyle’s stories about Holmes and Holmes’ stories about the crime) place logic on display more than any human protagonist, such that the detective might be better read as an allegory for logic.8 What is 8 Several anecdotes over the past century point to Holmes as a powerful figure in the British cultural imagination. Readers evidenced their attachment to the character of Holmes, for example, in their response to Holmes’ deathly fall over the Reichenbach Falls (in “The Final Problem”). Over 20,000 readers threatened to cancel their subscriptions to The Strand and wrote letters of protest not only to Doyle but also to the Prince of Wales. More recently, a Sherlock Holmes Museum was opened at 221B Baker Street, London – the first museum in the world to be dedicated to a fictional character. The Royal Society of Chemistry also recently bestowed an Extraordinary Honorary Fellowship on Sherlock Holmes, the fictional character, in May, 2002 for “his love of chemistry, and the way that he wielded such knowledge for the public good, employing it dispassionately and analytically” (“Royal Society of Chemistry to Honour,” 2). The Fellowship is also the first for a fictional character. If it is not immediately clear which aspects of his character led to his popularity in the early part of the century, he is lionized now as an allegory of reason. This latter case, specifically, evidences

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more u ­ nexpected, though, is what it means to represent logic here: a man who explains the world by telling stories about it. Watson, in praise of this person/ skill, concludes that: [Holmes’] immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation [followed] out those clues, and clear[ed] up those mysteries, which had been abandoned as hopeless by the official police. From time to time I heard some vague account of his doings: of his summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder, of his clearing up of the singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee… Adventures 187

The supremacy of human intellect against murder and tragedy demonstrates Holmes’ ability to recuperate aberrant behavior into a complete narrative, with a clear beginning, middle and end. What is impressive then about a narrative like Holmes’ is that it is at once fictional and true: a demonstration of how stories can produce knowledge. By relying on investigation and conversation, experiments and experience, deduction and induction, Holmes identifies the cause of events and shows that those causes cannot be otherwise. Like knowing the fingers or feet that have created finger stains or footprints, he can know the desires and reasons that compel a man to act. In this sense, inexplicable human actions become comparable to canine marks on a stick. When submitted to Holmes’ methods, we can know their cause and we can know that their cause cannot be otherwise. The epistemological value of Holmes’ narrative also translates into cultural and political capital. We can witness events that don’t make sense or be surprised by someone’s actions, but Doyle’s mysteries show that by arming ­ourselves with an enlightened mind we can translate others’ nonsense and our shock into explanations. Such an ability, to reshape chaos into order, posits a civilizing role for narrative – one that was not lost on the editorial board of The Strand. In his recent study of the journal, Christopher Pittard explains how the editorial board aimed to improve the cultural health of readers with less a cult of personality than a cult of methodology. Although the former cases would seem to point to Holmes as a viscerally appealing character within Doyle’s narrative, I would argue that they testify less to the appeal of Holmes’ human moments of passion and pranks than to his uncanny elusiveness, his unnatural detachment – specifically, the dream of ultimate rationality. All iconic ciphers, moreover, from James Dean to Jesus Christ, evoke fantastical narratives and physical remembrances, as though these might stave off their perfect mystery. This generative tendency, as much as the dream of safety that Holmes’ perfect logic offered and offers still, arguably adds to the projection of Holmes and his methods as realistic and reliable rather than fictional.

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f­ictions, specifically detective fictions. Although the genre, as it was, would seem a morbid deterrent to cultural health (focusing on deviant behavior), the board came to the opposite conclusion: that “detective fiction, as a genre… privileges order and rejects disorder” (qtd. in Pittard 5). We can make sense of this unexpected evaluation as an editorial insight into the kinds of fictions The Strand published. Despite the way a crime is the motivating event of a detective ­narrative – prolonging the narrative as it demands the detective’s and our sustained attention – it is rather the ultimate narrative of attention and resolution that takes precedent. Not surprisingly, then, narrative order and consequently social order find their apotheosis in Doyle’s detective fictions.9 Still, they are only fictions. Even if these stories can offer readers a world where rational detectives like Holmes can straighten out the streets and the state, it is a wishfully imagined world without much rhetorical force. But if we look to the layout of The Strand, the very fictionality of fictions, especially Doyle’s, becomes complicated. Readers of these detective stories would frequently find logic games alongside them. Henry Dudeney’s column, Perplexities (Fig.  9.1, below), provided a longrunning series of brain-teasers that challenged readers to rely on their good sense to solve them. Their appeal arguably lies in the promise of self-revelation (“How clever are you?”) and a seductive mystification of the mundane (“In every business of life we are occasionally perplexed by some chance question that for the moment staggers us…” begins one riddle). With names such as “A Shopping Perplexity,” “A Railway Muddle,” “Queer Relationships,” the titles show the world to be a riddle in need of readers’ applied logic. By encouraging readers, in this way, not only to peruse methods of demystification in Doyle’s mysteries but also to reenact them, Dudeney’s puzzles encourage readers to practice Holmes’ detective methods in their everyday lives. Editors can be seen in this way to prompt readers to approach Sherlock Holmes’ narratives less as imaginary stories than as reliable ways of making sense of the world.

9 Dudeney takes a very similar position on the epistemological and cultural place of logic in his Preface to Amusements in Mathematics, published in 1917. Dr. David Giachardi, the current Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry, echoes him one hundred years later on the occasion of awarding Holmes an Honorary Fellowship: “Holmes began, albeit fictionally, a tradition that is now part of everyday policing around the world in which science and rational thinking are allied to combat evil…the value of the Holmes legend today, and in previous decades, is profound, having brought tangible moral benefits to society…” For evidence, he points to a broadcast debate in London’s Parliament in which a Lord Russell was heard quoting Sherlock Holmes’ views on moral values. “Holmes was for that moment,” Giachardi concludes, “a very real historical figure. Holmes did not exist but he should have existed. That is how important he is to our culture” (“Royal Society of Chemistry to Honour,” 1–2).

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Figure 9.1 Henry Dudeney, “Perplexities.” The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly. London: October 1917. This particular series of riddles appeared alongside Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story, “His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes.”

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As The Strand was schooling the British public on the satisfying methods of detectives and their narratives, Freud was writing similar stories for ­psychiatric colleagues and “cultural and inquiring readers” (The Interpretation of Dreams 129). In the fall of 1900, Freud had begun to write his first case history under the provisional title “Dreams and Hysteria.” He would use the psychoanalytic methods that he put in place here for his later case studies, what he called an “archaeological” process of reconstructing the human mind from its fragments.10 Writing at this time to Wilhelm Fliess, his colleague and frequent confidante, Freud explains how well one of his cases is coming along, and by extension how well his methods are working: “It has been a lively time, and I have a new patient [Dora], a girl of eighteen; the case has opened smoothly to my collection of picklocks” (Letters 427). Freud’s explanation includes a series of appositives that contain a central metaphor for his work: our motives, like secrets, remain locked as the psychoanalyst, like a key, applies himself to them. In order to make sense of this theory of hidden motives and interpretive dream work we need another one. For Freud, living in civilization often means repressing natural wishes when those wishes threaten civilization – or pose a threat to the patient’s sense of herself. When we repress these wishes, we wish them into secrets, and into nonexistence. Against one’s best efforts, however, they reemerge but now refigured into nightmares, sicknesses and abnormal behavior. The story of desire, then, begins with desire itself, a desire for what one should not want, followed by a recognition that it should not be desired, a denial of that desire and, finally, emotional or physical sickness. An unhappy if familiar story.11 10

11

“Just as the archaeologist builds up the walls of a building from the foundations that have remained standing, determines the number and position of the columns from depressions in the floor and reconstructs the mural decorations and paintings from the remains found in the debris, so does the analyst proceed when he draws his inferences from the fragments of memories, from the associations and from the behaviour of the subject of the analysis. Both of them have an undisputed right to reconstruct by means of supplementing and combining the surviving remains. Both of them, moreover, are subject to many of the same difficulties and sources of error” (Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” 1937). He does, in later cases, attempt to give this archaeological work over increasingly to his patients. This particular narrative serves as the premise of Freudian philosophy and can be found throughout his work. The very origins of The Interpretation of Dreams follows this narrative pattern, for example, through the emotional crisis which Freud suffered on the death of his father and the series of dreams to which this gave rise. Specifically, his self-analysis revealed that the love and admiration which he had felt for his father were mixed with contrasting feelings of shame and hate (such a mixed attitude he termed “ambivalence”). Particularly revealing was his discovery that he had often fantasized when he was young that his half-brother Philip (who was closer in age to his mother than to him) was really

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The problems and possibilities of Freudian theories, aside, what I want to draw attention to here is the role of storytelling in the production of those theories. Without Freud’s story, all we see is the final stage of sickness. With his story, however, we can perceive physical sickness as a necessary final effect in a series of psychological causes. By moving backwards from the fact of sickness to dreams and interpretations and forward again to sickness, he links them to each other as causally necessary, creating a plot that can proceed in an orderly way: from secrets to sickness to cure. His stories/studies demonstrate, in this way, that inexplicable ailments, actions and emotions can be ordered into a narrative chain of desire, repression, sickness and cure. That he saw these narrative chains as neither imaginative nor random shows in his sense of their general applicability. Specifically, Freud’s motive for publishing the case studies lay in his conviction that they would provide doctors with an iterable method for curing other patients suffering from hysteria: [the physician’s] duties towards science mean ultimately nothing else than his duties towards the many other patients who are suffering or will some day suffer from the same disorder. Thus it becomes the physician’s duty to publish what he believes he knows of the causes and structure of hysteria Fragment of an Analysis 174

What does it mean, though, for a doctor to believe his stories are true? We might make sense of his faith that stories could offer a reliable form of diagnostic psychoanalysis, at least in part, by returning to classical poetics and its legacy. In this tradition, narrative provides a logical form rather than an imaginative or chance form.12 Aristotle defines plot in the Poetics, for example, as a logically derived series of events. One episode follows another “either by necessity or in accordance with probability” (34–35). Since it is a deliberate arrangement, plot

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his father. This, along with certain other signs, convinced him of the deep underlying meaning of this fantasy: that he had wished his real father dead because he presented a rival for his mother’s affections. This was to become the personal (though by no means exclusive) basis for his theory of the Oedipus complex. (Anzieu, Freud’s Self-Analysis.) The logic of poetry’s form extends to its content. Aristotle explains that the poet writes about what can happen, whereas the historian writes about what has happened. Although the difference would seem to be between fiction and truth, he explains that the poet rather must write about what will happen in all cases – whereas the historian only writes about one particular case. On these grounds, it is the poet who writes about universals and the historian who writes about particulars. And in this sense the poet, not the historian, will reveal rules and laws of human behavior.

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is designed to exhibit the causes and consequences of events. To construct a plot is, in this way, to construct a form of explanation. Its ­methods map, more importantly, onto Aristotle’s methods for arriving at scientific knowledge: “When we know the cause of why a thing is, that it is the cause of this, and that this cannot be otherwise, [we arrive at scientific knowledge]” (I.2). This correspondence, between providing a plot and providing answers, provides a legacy for Freud’s reliance on stories and turns the concept of a ‘truthful story’ into less of a contradiction in terms. Nonetheless, Freud’s stories, as stories, damage the integrity of his results. As readers of Freud continue to show, methodological errors in these n ­ arratives (speculation, generalization, false analogies, subjective associations, unreliable memories, and “unconsciously intentional” mistakes and coincidences) limit his applicability.13 And yet to ask of Freud’s stories that they either tell the truth about us or get us wrong proscribes the usefulness of his work. It is, perhaps, in the very radical ways he fails to get us right that he can begin to overhaul who we are in a more charitable, more modern way. Not only does Freud bring to attention the dark matter of dreams, desires, memories and sexual taboos, he insists that it is in this great murkiness that our actions and our health begin. Here, for example, secrets become central to hysteria’s etiology: “the elucidation of a case of hysteria is bound to involve the revelation of those intimacies and the betrayal of those secrets” (173). Understanding depends, then, on the patient’s revealing what she would not otherwise reveal. The secrets identified, moreover, refer not only to secrets in the ordinary sense of something known but hidden, but also to something unknown and hidden, in the sense of desires a patient has obscured even from herself. That Freud explores the forgotten night world of dreams, or imagines how a person can be divided into three (at once desiring and repressing and rechanneling desire) or how a person can be unknown even to herself, untethers us from just causes and reasonable actions. Or so it would seem. As a trained doctor and positive scientist, Freud perhaps could not imagine presenting even the most unexpected of his ­observations without also providing an explanation for them. This aversion, in the field of Psychology, for speculative and transcendental problems and their attendant speculative answers is evident in the introductory volume of the British ­Journal of Psychology. The founder and editor, W.H.R. Rivers, 13

See for assessments of Freud’s methodological limits: Adolf Grünbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (1984), Frederick Crews, The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute (1997) as well as his earlier Skeptical Engagements (1986), Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1972).

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a­ ffirms that ­psychologists are now restricting their inquiries “entirely […] to facts” (­British Journal of Psychology 1). Describing them as positive scientists rather than “mental philosophers,” Rivers enforces a disciplinary aversion to ­uncertainty. And yet, reflecting on the proper evidence lacking in Freud’s explanations, Ludwig Wittgenstein imagines the psychologist hemmed in by just such disciplinary constraints. When we are studying psychology we may feel there is something unsatisfactory…Here it seems that we cannot say: “If A=B, and B=C, then A=C”…psychologists want to say: “There must be some law” –although no law has been found. (Freud: “Do you want to say, gentlemen, that changes in mental phenomena are guided by chance?”) Whereas to me the fact that there aren’t actually any laws seems important. (42) The importance of psychoanalysis shows less in its observations than in its application of logical methods (specifically syllogistic narratives) to illogical subjects. This misalignment is important not only for exposing the cultural and disciplinary forces at work behind inaccuracies, but it also redirects us to a greater mysteriousness in human psychology. The feelings and events that Freud will insist on as motives are, Wittgenstein points out, rarely or hardly ever motives at all; and then there are always “countless other” motives that Freud might have identified (1997: 43). Wittgenstein’s account of ­psychoanalysis – as a coercive effort to explain the human mind – remembers and returns psychoanalysis to its inescapably speculative nature. At one point in his case study of the “Wolf Man,” Freud attempts to demonstrate the strength of psychological methods by showing the depths of darkness it can banish. He manages to conjure, however, the darkness here more than the light: “Only in such cases do we succeed in descending into the deepest and most primitive strata of mental development and in gaining from there solutions for the problems of the later formations” (402). Freud paradoxically assures us, as he so often does in his writing, not so much of the rightness of his solutions as much as the number of enigmatic “strata” and possible stories that might be told about them. When the desire to explain becomes the imperative to explain, the world suffers: white roses must be painted red, shouted orders that must be followed are not. In Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll shows how reasonable methods of explanation, when they become coercive, can become unreasonable. In the final chapter of Alice, the Knave of Hearts is put on trial. As evidence of a crime is brought forward, the King interprets the evidence for the jury while also presiding as Judge of his own interpretations. One piece of evidence that

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is brought forward is an unsigned letter, directed to no one, in handwriting that is not the Knave’s, composed in rhymed quatrains. It reads as follows: He sent them word I had not gone (We know it to be true): If she should push the matter on, What would become of you? … My notion was that you had been (Before she had this fit) An obstacle that came between Him, and ourselves, and it. (93–94) When the White Rabbit has finished reading this nonsense poem, the King reshapes it into the following explanatory narrative. Foreshadowing the narrative work of Sherlock Holmes or Freud, it takes the form of a demystification story: “We know it to be true” – that’s the jury, of course – “If she should push the matter on”–that must be the Queen – “What would become of you?” – What, indeed! – “I gave her one, they gave him two” – why, that must be what he did with the tarts, you know… ‘Let the jury consider their verdict,’ the King said, for about the twentieth time that day. “No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first – verdict afterwards.” Alice in Wonderland 93

For several reasons, the methods that produce this story are as nonsensical as the Cheshire cat’s grin without a cat: the King interprets only certain parts of the letter, namely those that make sense to him; he overlooks the remaining evidence; his thinking proceeds as the trial proceeds, from back to front, from conclusion to evidence, from sentence to verdict; and, finally, he assigns certain meaning to uncertain referents. We might fault the King’s (or any critic’s) hermeneutics for these reasons, but the scene is only part of a fictional diversion. Originally told to the three Liddell sisters on rowing trips through Oxford, the material history of Alice in Wonderland places it as fantasy. Picturing for characters a talking Dodo and a lizard named Bill, John Tenniel’s surreal illustrations alongside Alice’s curious dialogues provide both the “pictures [and] conversations” Alice notes are absent from her older sister’s book (1). In this sense, Alice asks to be read as a children’s story. But yet it is a children’s story about adult games. Its games are not only distracting play, but also nonsense taken and mistaken for sense. If

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we take its narrative games for explanations as the characters telling them do, then the King’s improvised and coercive rhetoric begins to look unfortunately familiar. Freud had scientific names for how he proceeds: “condensation,” “­displacement” and “pictorial arrangement of the psychical material.” We can see just how slim the narrative differences are between the King’s story and Freud’s stories by returning to the latter’s dream analysis: The hall – numerous guests whom we were receiving. We were spending that summer at Bellevue, a house standing by itself on one of the hills… On the previous day my wife had told me that she expected that a number of friends, including Irma, would be coming out to visit us on her birthday. My dream was thus anticipating this occasion… She [Irma] looked pale and puffy. My patient [Irma] always had a rosy complextion. I began to suspect that someone else was being substituted for her…’There was really no need for her to do that’ was no doubt intended in the first place as a compliment to Irma… The Interpretation of Dreams 133–34

Freud’s methods of inference, deduction, selectivity, and foregone conclusion align almost too neatly with the methods in Carroll’s Wonderland, published a dozen years before. The point, though, is not to show Alice in Wonderland as a proleptic critique of Freudian methods. By preceding Freud, Carroll reads less as a parody of psychoanalysis than as a harbinger of its particular brand of narrative hopes and delusions. It seems important to note, as well, that even as Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Carroll’s Alice picture mysterious worlds in need of explanation they (interpreters or characters) manage to escape from them – even if they cannot entirely set them straight. Freud can describe his case study of Dora as both incomplete and methodologically sound. Even as Carroll deliberately satirizes what passes as Victorian reason and good sense, Alice shrugs off that world. We see this literally as Alice walks away from the Mad Hatter’s dirty tea party and wakes up from the Trial’s equally soiled logic. It has been a bad dream, or a daydream. Like G.K. Chesterton’s extended critique of philosophy, The Man Who Was Thursday, its nightmare is allegorical, and can therefore end as soon as its protagonist wakes up. Such stories speak to their age but are not trapped in its nonsense. When we look to Ford’s and Conrad’s fiction, however, there is no exit. What happens when a story-teller finds he cannot escape his surrounding chaos by waking up or using a narrative to transform chaos into order? That is the story of Ford’s and Conrad’s stories.

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When Does a Man Resemble a Walking Stick?

That narrators in Ford and Conrad cannot tell chronologically ordered or conclusive stories might be ascribed to the kind of mysteries they encounter. But their mysteries about what we can know and how we can know about others and ourselves resemble those mastered by other narrators. Not only are their mysteries familiar but the events that trigger them are familiar as well: adultery, betrayal, self-deception. Narrating one’s way out of such mysteries seems not only possible, then, but also probable given its literary, scientific and philosophical precedents. The narrators in Ford and Conrad appear to follow in that narrative tradition, or rather attempt to as they take on the role of story teller. Marlow tells us Jim’s story as he tries to make sense of Jim’s desertion of the Patna: how could this young sailor, so apparently similar to Marlow and to sailors Marlow has trusted his and others’ lives to, have abandoned the sinking cargo ship with its 800 Muslim pilgrims? Jim tries to tell his story to Marlow, as he tries to make sense of his desertion of the Patna, an act of cowardice that contradicts his self-conception as brave above all others. Similarly, Ford’s Dowell tries to tell us his story as he tries to make sense of a series of betrayals by his wife and their friends the Ashburnhams. What is surprising about these characters’ inability to narrate their way out of confusion is not only that their mysteries look familiar but also that their methods of attention, deduction and induction appear similar to those used to narrate oneself out of confusion before (before, in the sense of characters’ fictional past, and before, in the sense of other narrative detectives). Ford’s narrator, Dowell, for example, observes others’ dress, habits, property, and titles, takes into account legal contracts, personal statements and shared routines in order to determine whom to trust. Speaking of Edward Ashburnham, he offers a shortlist of the empirical and evaluative judgments that led him to trust Edward: [he] was the cleanest looking sort of chap; – an excellent magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of the best landlords … to the poor and to hopeless drunkards… he was like a painstaking guardian … he never told a story that couldn’t have gone into the columns of the Field more than once or twice in… nine years. (gs 6) As Dowell concludes his observations, he challenges us to confess that we would have made the same deduction about Edward as he has made. Given these facts, he asserts, “You would have said that he was just exactly the sort

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of chap that you could have trusted your wife with” (gs 6). But Ashburnham wasn’t. If we suspend confidence for a moment in our ability to judge a person’s character, we might truly wonder whether we would have misjudged someone like Ashburnham too. We are being encouraged here, in other words, not only to sympathize emotionally with Dowell’s predicament as dupe, but also to sympathize methodologically with him. And yet both are problematized by the virtually psychotic narrative Dowell’s character has begun to present us with, evidenced at this early stage of the novel by self-contradictions (“No, by God it is false!…And yet I swear by [God] it was true” [gs 3–4]), paranoia (“I don’t know, was that last remark of hers the remark of a harlot, or is it what every decent woman, county family or not…thinks at the bottom of her heart?” [5]), melodrama (“Isn’t there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous and everlasting souls?” [3]) and hyperbole (“This is the saddest story I have ever heard” [1]). And yet Dowell does also, as we have seen, appeal to reliable methods for his judgments and to a flatly ironic narrative approach (“Captain Ashburnham also had a heart” [gs 2].)14 This frequent shift into an ironic rhetoric counters his semi-psychotic rhetoric in the way it shows him awake to others’ pretensions rather than asleep to them. It is precisely this hybridity of reliable methods and unreliable judgments, ironic tone and psychotic perception, that makes The Good Soldier’s methods of narrative explanation so interesting. If it makes sense on one hand to describe Dowell’s narration as psychotic or ideologically wrongheaded, the text’s inclusion of rational thinking and a range of perplexed, deceptive and self-deceptive characters yet complicates such readings.15 14

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The irony is that we would expect all characters to have a heart. “Having a heart” here, though, means “having a heart problem” where a heart problem is not a medical condition (as Edward and Florence both explicitly claim) but an emotional condition where adultery is both desirable and inescapable for the possessor of such a heart. The further irony is that “having a [medical] heart [problem]” is Florence’s alibi for her emotional heartlessness; and “having a heart” emphasizes the language and condition of Edward’s naive Romanticism, a perspective that takes him into several messy affairs. It is clearly undesirable, then, to be married to someone who has a heart. The “heart” also functions here as a metonymy for moral character, a subject whose mysteriousness drives Dowell mad. See, for example, Sarah Henstra’s and John G. Hessler’s essays on The Good Soldier. Henstra ties the failure of narrative to the failure of Britishness, reading in the novel’s ­aesthetics “the author’s conviction that narrative itself has somehow seen its day.” As she

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I want to begin by redirecting attention, then, back to moments in the novel when Dowell tries to explain others in order to see where his methods go wrong. Speaking to Leonora at one point in the novel, Dowell describes his method for character assessment as mathematical. Referring to his dead wife, he explains: “I have tried to think of her as a problem in algebra” (gs 82). For illustrative purposes, here is an algebra problem and its solution: What is the x intercept of the graph of the equation 2x−4y = 9. Given the equation 2x−4y = 9 To find the x intercept we set y = 0 and solve for x. 2x – 0 = 9 Solve for x. x = 9 / 2 The x intercept is at the point (9/2, 0). In order for a person to be like an algebra problem, we might describe her statements and actions as known quantities and her strange or unexpected actions as her x’s and y’s, her unknowns. These unknown quantities could then be determined by inserting her known quantities into a logical equation. And then the only reason someone could get this/her wrong would be if he lacked the sufficient mathematical skills or was somehow careless in his calculations. In Doyle’s stories, Dr. Watson seems to be this kind of wobbly mathematician, trying his hand at problems he doesn’t quite have the education to solve – whereas Holmes can always get them right. Like Holmes, who relies on equations of logic or physics to make sense of mysterious actions, Dowell also invokes reliable laws to find the truth of another’s character. What Dowell attempts is to solve the riddle of a person as though she were a brain teaser. Dowell’s effort to see his wife as an algebra problem serves as an attempt to solve her in this logical tradition, to solve her like the mystery of a math

concludes, “The ‘shadow of doom’ cast by global political events threatens to make fiction ineffectual, even irrelevant. The Good Soldier acts out the anxiety, regret, and longing encoded within an Englishness that has seen its day” (193). Or for an alternative perspective, see Karen Hoffman’s essay “Am I No More Than A Eunuch?” where she observes that Dowell alternates between naive and canny views of his relationships. Hoffman accounts for this variation by pointing to ideological contradictions within Dowell himself – contradictions that “send into motion his narrative as a performance of his identity” (32). She perceives his narrative efforts as an attempt to stabilize British traditions, an effort that Ford (as a good novelist who sees the moral paucity of that tradition) does not allow to succeed: “Dowellʼs desire to use narration to stabilize the particular social systems in question [is understandable], Ford nonetheless exposes the impossibility of realizing this desire as well as questions the value of salvaging these systems” (46).

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e­ quation. With his equations in hand (“How can she have known what she knew? How could she have got to know it… What is one to think of humanity?”), he attempts to help us see our way to the answer: “I am trying to get you to see…what Florence was like” (gs 4, 9). In order to do this, he will try to puzzle out the mystery for us. He possesses a number of “known quantities” about his wife. He knows she had several affairs, he knows she was his wife and that she was perfectly healthy, and he knows that she lied about having a heart condition and that she committed suicide because she was afraid her affairs were about to be exposed. What he doesn’t know, though, is her heart; who is this woman who was his wife for so long, this woman he didn’t apparently know at all; and why did she act the way she did? Given what he knows and what he doesn’t know, Dowell tries to answer these final questions about his wife. What does it look like to try and solve such questions about a person as though they were an algebra problem? Here is how Dowell practices the algebraic method: “And I think that that wait was the only sign Florence ever showed of having a conscience as far as I was concerned, unless her lying for some moments in my arms was also a sign of conscience” (gs 57). Recounting their elopement in retrospect, armed with the knowledge of her affairs, he attempts to understand his wife. To do this, he retells certain facts as symbolic acts, and in this way turns illogical actions into logical ones. Florence’s waiting to elope is more significant than a fiancée’s coy delay of the wedding night; he takes it to mean, in retrospect, that she felt uncertain or even guilty about going through with a marriage she had no intention of being faithful to. He re-imagines certain events, in other words, as meaning more than what he first took them to mean. Here, the fact of waiting points to values of character, namely guilt and uncertainty. In short, Dowell uses prior events as the hidden cause of later enigmatic events. By crafting this causal chain, he can reveal a satisfying plot where one event leads causally and therefore clearly to another: the beginning of a story about adultery. Using facts, then, to fill in the equation of his wife, he aims to account for her unknown quantities. He tries this again in the second explanation he produces about his wife. If, he hypothesizes, “that wait was the only sign Florence ever showed of having a conscience,” then he allows for the possibility that “her lying for some moments in my arms was also a sign of conscience” (gs 98). This equation relies again on turning to known facts to generate potential values, specifically turning to physical affection to imagine a sign of conscience. This equation falls short, however, as no rational pressure can wring values out of the fact of her “lying in his arms.” To say that sleeping with one’s husband is a sign of conscience is to distort the values of intimacy, and to distort as well what it means to have a conscience – to the point that calling them “values” or “conscience”

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would be to misuse them. What would it mean literally, rather than ironically, to sleep with a spouse as a sign of conscience? That she feels responsibility rather than affection? Or that she feels guilt at her affairs and a sense of obligation to supply her husband with a part of his physical due? Or that she seeks to provide him with some recompense for her affairs? Dowell’s venture into the heart of his wife stops short as her actions fail to mean in the way they ought to mean, in the way that Dowell, or perhaps any husband, wants them to mean. Her embrace ought to express care, but it expresses no such value, nor any value a man in that embrace would want. The meaninglessness of Florence’s actions stops the neat equation Dowell wants to use on her. Rather than producing an answer to who she is, he produces an ironic statement: “…unless her lying for some moments in my arms was also a sign of conscience” (gs 57). The difference between a solution and this ironic statement is the difference between a perfect geometrical form and an asymptotic line. What is important to note is that even as it fails to arrive at a solution, it provides a formal alternative to a mathematical equation and thereby manages to approach the truth of his wife better than an equation. By allowing for contradictions and admitting of little certainty, it acknowledges in its asymptote how a person can appear one way and yet also be something else, always partly unknown. Characters’ moral complexity and self-distortions provide only one reason, though, why they remain unfathomable in the text. From the details of their elopement to the details of Edward’s and Florence’s affair to Leonora’s ­(Edward’s wife) later confession that she knew of the affair, it becomes apparent that Dowell’s wife is not alone in deliberately posing false equations to him. His failure to get any of them right seems due in part, then, to the flatly deceptive characters he knows. It seems perfectly logical, in other words, for him to assume that if someone tells him “constancy [is] the finest of the virtues,” that he is being honest and that he also attempts to live according to this belief (gs 17). We can agree that this is the case, unless someone wants to deceive another person or is deceived about his own values or fails to realize as socially binding the normative relationship between self-descriptions and actions. And this is, in large part, the puzzle facing Dowell: what kind of characters is he dealing with? Several possible kinds are shown in the novel. A person can be deliberately deceptive (someone who says “I am sick” but knows she is not sick), or ­self-deceived and confused (someone who believes it is right to act like a gentleman but who acts in a way that is ungentlemanly, without realizing it) or honest about his values at the same time that he sometimes falls short of them (perhaps this is the better description of Ashburnham, as someone who believes

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that constancy is the finest virtue and yet there are several women he wants to be constant to, or that he wants to be constant to Leonora in one way and constant to Maisie Maidan in another way) or consciously uncertain (someone who thinks that he is noble but he may not be, and yet he wants to be). In both Ford and Conrad, there is not just one right description for each person but rather several descriptions that often apply to the same character. This range of possible descriptions seems important for assessing the difficulty characters have translating facts about a person into interpretive stories about a person. It is important in the sense that characters get others wrong as much because they tie facts to values that are not always true (someone who is a soldier and a British gentleman can be trusted; a wife is someone who is faithful; a brave-looking sailor is always brave) as because others are lying to them or because others are too complex to get right all the time. The problem both Dowell (and Marlow, as I will later show) have assessing others would seem to have as much to do with their methods of assessment as with the kinds of characters they are assessing and the range of ways they fumble through their lives. Florence, like everyone else Dowell is close to, is explicitly lying to him or at least remaining silent in order to protect him from knowing that he is being lied to. Conrad’s eponymous protagonist, Jim, on the other hand, does not lie deliberately to Marlow. He seems set, rather, on the integrity of his self-descriptions even as they contradict his actions. That narrators get other characters wrong can be tied not only to ideological blinders, then, but also to the false premises they are given, or to characters’ desire to tell stories of themselves as good, even if they are not always good in the ways they want to be. Is it possible to describe such complex characters, given that neither cultural norms nor causal narratives get them right? The aesthetic experimentation of both fictions attempts this. As they persist in storytelling, they skirt a nihilist aesthetic and yet they do dismantle their familiar world: untying familiar appearances from expected virtues, familiar actions from expected consequences, familiar statements from expected meaning. In their place, Ford’s text offers ironic stories as a response to human unreliability. It also offers derangement as a response. Although The Good Soldier shows one character’s attempt to create a clear, causal narrative about events he cannot understand, Dowell’s inability to connect the dots leaves him skeptical and increasingly paranoid. Concluding that nothing anyone does or says means anything, he offers this final interpretation while observing his lovely but deranged second wife across from him at the dinner table: “…and to think that it all means nothing – that it is a picture without meaning” (176). Although this is literally true of her – she has gone into a catatonic state since the news of Ashburnham’s suicide – it is also narratively true of The Good Soldier. His conclusion reads as a ­pronouncement

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as much about her as about all the actions he has witnessed and all the stories he has told, all the stories we have read. It stands, metonymically, as a conclusion to and as a description of the text of The Good Soldier: a story of actions without reasons and therefore without meaning, its narrator in search of lost causes. By grounding a philosophical problem (the elusiveness or impossibility of truth) within the context of human relationships, though, Ford’s novel complicates even this ultimate skepticism with its mix of confused, deceptive and self-deceptive characters. Dowell’s radical dismissal of people and meaning, both at once, comes to read less as the text’s ultimate insight, then, and more as the consequence of a demand for truth or nothing.16 If The Good Soldier points to this demand as the way to social isolation and hermeneutic despair, Lord Jim points to the way that narrative, at least a new kind of narrative, might redeem us.

“Do you know what you would have done?” (Lord Jim, 102)

What is this truth about a person’s heart that Ford’s narrator and then Conrad’s narrator, also, wants to know and why is it so important? Characters in The Good Soldier and Lord Jim are unseated by others’ unexpected actions as much as by their own unexpected actions. When the people they ought to know best, including themselves, act in unpredictable ways, they come to doubt their ability to know anyone, really, and they become paranoid. “What will my friend, my husband, my wife do next?” they panic. If such questions cannot be answered with certainty, then living in the world with other people is shown to be psychologically and emotionally too dangerous. Narrators’ search, in these novels, for methods that would accurately reveal who a person is looks like an attempt to stabilize and ensure rules of behavior, ways of judging and knowing people such that uncertainty might end as well. As a result, others might be trusted. To know the truth of a person’s heart would be a way of assuring this; such knowledge seems necessary. Given this logic, characters’ persistent inability to get others right leaves the theater of human actions a disaster and these failed detectives a wreck. Unable to predict or explain others’ choices, they (Dowell, Marlow and Jim, as well, when it comes to himself) alternately undergo terror and bafflement as they 16

For an example of a literal reading of Dowell’s conclusion, see for example Vita Fortunati’s “The Epistemological Malaise”: “In the end, this absurd character … becomes aware of the fact that it is impossible to get to know things or, better, that the world is ­incomprehensible” (280).

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experience the unexpected over and over again. In this way, the imperative to know a person and the inability to know a person batter against each other, without either relinquishing ground. These fictions are not, in other words, proceeding from an older epistemic model to a newer one. Rather they set in motion a narrative project that affirms the failure of narrative to illuminate erratic behavior even as they affirm the significance of narrative illumination. The diachronic futility of these narratives approaches the Kafkaesque: narratives circling in useless returns. But because their novels are social, the terror of uncertainty is not theoretical but actual, as relationships and choices wait to be determined. Placing Conrad’s Lord Jim alongside The Good Soldier, the novel can be read as another exploration into the riddle of getting a story right. We can see this in the way stories multiply and telescope in Lord Jim. As Jim is driven to tell his story, Marlow is driven to retell Jim’s story to “anyone who will listen to him.” And yet it is neither Marlow nor Jim who tells Lord Jim, but the sailors who have heard or read Marlow’s story of Jim, sailors who are also retelling second and third hand stories of Jim to us, stories embedded within stories told by other sailors as they consider their lives against Jim’s, stories we can imagine being told to Marlow as he finishes telling Jim’s story. As these stories compound – incomplete, unreliable, and multiple – Lord Jim begins to take the shape of a novel of recursive storytelling, recursive in the sense that characters are always in the process of telling or retelling stories, always in the process of trying to describe others and themselves. Jim begins his narrative, for example, judging others as Marlow does, relying primarily on their physical appearance and resemblances to determine their moral worth. This is how Marlow retells Jim’s internal process of assessment: “…the odious and fleshy figure [of the skipper], as though seen for the first time in a revealing moment, fixed itself in his memory for ever as the incarnation of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love” (Lord Jim 58). And yet it is the conduct of this same “vile and base” character that Jim follows when he leaps off the Patna, leaving the pilgrims to drown. That he acts as the skipper does logically places them in the same moral category, and yet he insists on telling the story of his desertion as courageous. Marlow judges this story as an alternately pathetic and ridiculous obfuscation of the facts: Jim is as responsible for jumping ship as the other ­European men, no matter what he looks like –and so he is just as base and should be equally reviled by himself. But Jim provides reasons for his actions that are neither criminal nor cowardly, and in this way creates an explanatory narrative that will hold true to his sense of himself as brave not base. He situates his leap off the Patna, for example, in a causal chain of his own making, such that it can be explained and defended:

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“It is all in being ready. I wasn’t… I would like to explain…” (103). If only he had been prepared, then he would not have jumped. Pressed against the fact of his desertion, Jim is trying here (as he does throughout the novel) to tell a story that is both more persuasive and more morally redeeming than the story the courtroom judge and jury and other sailors, like Marlow, tell about him. If his particular narrative isn’t always as persuasive as he wants it to be, Marlow acknowledges the significance of his effort to “save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be” (Lord Jim 103). Such salvation is not abstract, but translates literally into the fact that Jim is as good as dead without it. We can see this in the character of Brierly, who presides as magistrate over Jim’s case and as commander of the Ossa, and who mysteriously commits suicide by jumping overboard (a leap similar to Jim’s morally suicidal leap off the Patna – and yet in Conradian fashion, not quite). As Marlow surmises, Jim’s case has compelled Brierly to reflect on his past and discover a flawed resemblance to Jim. Judging himself, therefore, as guilty also, he kills himself. Brierly’s impartial judgment makes it necessary for him to condemn Jim in a court of law and himself to death. Or, equally, that it is Jim’s growing sense of fair judgment and just punishment (a sense that is described alternately as egocentric or unforgiving or as fair as Brierly’s own judgment) that compels him to offer himself unarmed, to be killed by Doramin, as payment for the deaths he has indirectly caused in Patusan. Alongside the mortal significance of one’s self-narrative, then, we can also see its porousness as it is subject to delusion, new contexts, beliefs and counter-narratives. As characters realize the unreliability and even falsity of their narratives – narratives we are reading and alternately trusting and mistrusting – the narrative frame of the text begins to shudder and loosen. Although Jim’s narrative of himself as still heroic, despite abandoning the Patna, seems self-deceptive, it comes to appear less self-deceptive than Marlow’s story of himself as potentially heroic. This story of future heroism matters since it allows Marlow to remain safe in the certainty that in Jim’s shoes, he would have acted bravely, and therefore to judge Jim’s cowardice more harshly. It also matters, therefore, to Jim who wants to prove that all sailors are really like him, like Marlow, believing they are heroic but cowardly when tested. Jim insists of him: “What would you have done? You are sure of yourself [that you would not have jumped] – aren’t you?” as he urges Marlow to undo his own heroic narrative (Lord Jim 121). For all his offense at Jim’s leap off the Patna, Marlow does acknowledge (at least to himself) that he doesn’t actually know what he would have done. Or rather, that all he knows for certain is that if he did jump from the ship to the lifeboat, he would have missed: “I did, with a rapid glance, estimate the

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distance… I would have landed short by several feet – that’s the only thing of which I am fairly certain” (Lord Jim 122). All he can know for certain are physical facts – not his own future actions, and certainly not anyone else’s. It is a pivotal moment for Marlow. Given he believes that such tests as the sinking Patna “show in the light of day the inner worth of a man,” he confesses here, nonetheless, that he cannot testify to his own heroism (50). He can hope and imagine, but as Jim shows and as Marlow himself recognizes, any account of himself remains a fiction until tested. Jim’s narratives compel characters, in this way, to self-doubt and by extension to develop what appear to be more careful, more uncertain narratives of themselves and others. His narrative is, Marlow affirms, “…momentous enough to affect mankind’s conception of itself” (112). To judge a character and tell his narrative carefully involves not only an attention to that character, then, but also a process of self-interrogation, an investigation into one’s moral values and delusions. It is this process of selfreflection, honesty and confession that is arguably repeated and resisted throughout Lord Jim, not only by characters but by readers compelled to assess these narratives for themselves. Take for example Stein’s story. Unlike Marlow, he has no illusions about falling short of who we want to be: I have known brave men… I say each of them, if he were an honest man … would confess that there is a point … when you let go everything… And you have got to live with that truth – do you see? Given a certain combination of circumstances, fear is sure to come… And even for those who do not believe this truth there is fear all the same – the fear of themselves. Lord Jim 151

Behind Stein’s everyman narrative lies a set of moral judgments unlike Marlow’s. If, in other words, everyone fails at one time to act as they should, then Jim might be called “one of us,” where “one of us” means anyone who has acted in fear when bravery was needed. Although Stein and Marlow construct different narratives for the failed dreamer, the text of Lord Jim doesn’t dismiss their stories as uselessly subjective. Marlow’s account of a sailor as someone who adheres to a strict standard of conduct matters, given sailors are in a position of responsibility relative to others’ lives. And yet Stein’s narrative reads as selfaware and compassionate where Marlow’s is not. In addition to Stein’s humanist narrative and Marlow’s typological narrative, moreover, are successions of alternate, revised and even antithetical stories of Jim, his goals and his failures. If having let one’s dreams escape makes Jim an everyman, his clinging to impossibly high ideals can also be said to make him an exceptional man: “… He had that faculty of beholding at a hint the face of

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his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer… He was of the sort that would drink deep…” (Lord Jim 171). The story of pursuing one’s dreams even after they have been lost, can therefore be told as extraordinary, or it can remain baffling. Confronted with Jim’s story of himself as brave alongside his apparently cowardly actions, Marlow is at a loss to know who this man Jim is, and how he is still able to see himself as brave, whether it is “the outcome of manly self-control, of impudence, of callousness, of a colossal unconsciousness, of a gigantic deception” (101). This difficulty Marlow has describing Jim – evident in his contradictory epithets, motives and images of Jim – evidences the difficulty Marlow will also have judging Jim, since judging (carefully) here involves knowing not only someone’s else’s character but also one’s own. Is Marlow, for example, the kind of person who believes everyone falls short of his dreams and therefore that such falling is not a sin? Does he believe a person can betray his code of honor and still be trusted? And can a person sin, gravely, but still redeem his life? In Lord Jim, the moral structure of one’s life informs the structure of one’s narrative and judgments. As that moral structure comes to be tested, narratives and judgments are tested as well. The mysteries of Jim, of Marlow, of Brierly, remain in Lord Jim. What is the purpose of the novel’s narratives then, if they do not arrive at knowledge and thus right judgment? One response can be found in Marlow’s description of what drives a man to sea and what happens there. In a statement that is at once compassionate and disillusioned, he explains: There is such magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own and only reward… In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality – in no other is the beginning all illusion – the disenchantment more swift – the subjugation more complete. Hadn’t we all commenced with the same desire, ended with the same knowledge. Lord Jim 137

This passage marks a difference between the kind of person we assume we are and how we live our lives – where what is in question is not only what we value and what we hold to be morally repugnant but also how we are, in practice. What Lord Jim insists on, through its tests and questions directed to characters and readers, is how rarely these align, how often we believe in our virtue only because our virtue has not yet been tested. I may, for example, take myself to be a brave person, simply because I have never been in a position where bravery was a difficult virtue to summon. Based

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on my assumptions about myself as brave, I may judge harshly those who are not. But as Lord Jim seems to want to show, such a claim as “I would never do that,” expresses little more in this context than inexperienced idealism. ­Rather, a test of one’s bravery is needed to turn self-assessments into true facts of character – or at least into a true claim about character in that moment. What happens, then, when I describe myself as honest but also find myself lying? My self-description is composed not of facts but what must be called, in all accuracy, hopes and then delusions. Conrad’s novel proposes that we can avoid the frustration of discovering how short we fall of our dreams of ourselves by remaining insulated, by avoiding what Marlow calls “reality,” but such characters appear sorry and naïve, persisting as they must in ignorance of themselves. Jim’s naiveté at the outset is to believe he can live out the ideals he holds about himself whenever the world might challenge him to live up to them, indeed that these ideals form the actuality of his identity. As Marlow, in his characteristic irony, describes Jim: “he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality” (Lord Jim 58). Jim sets himself as the hero of his own adventure story and cringes at others’ failure to be so wonderful, but his is a dream story as yet unlived. But Conrad goes on to tell another story of another kind of adventure: Jim’s response to moral failure. As new actions and experiences and reflections are added to Jim’s desertion, the monstrosity of his sin becomes both complicated and modified by these additions. As a fiction, then, Lord Jim offers what philosophical, psychoanalytical, or scientific narratives cannot by their very exigencies for theories and conclusions. The intrusion of more and more details and days, actions and reconsiderations become central here as they rarely can be in other disciplinary approaches to character. Take for example this parenthetical remark in Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, “(To make the example realistic, one should put in more detail; and, as often in moral philosophy, if one puts in the detail, the example may begin to dissolve)” (180). This account of how easily details can explode an argument strikingly mirrors Marlow’s sense of how easily “reality” can explode one’s sense of self. Speaking of Jim’s father, he explains the old man’s faith in rules and in world order as a faith that can only be sustained in isolation: “The old chap goes on equably trusting Providence and the established order of the universe… Virtue is one all over the world, and there is only one faith, one conceivable conduct of life, one matter of dying… everlasting ruin [but]… they would never be taken unawares, and never called upon to grapple with fate” (295). If Lord Jim invokes the language and questions of moral philosophy and religion, it uses fictional aesthetics and methods to engage with them, producing a detailed picture of how we might live narratively, actively through them.

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“I can’t explain to you…” (Lord Jim, 112)

At one point in The Good Soldier, Dowell, in his typically extravagant but contradictory way, describes Edward Ashburnham in the following way: But the fellow talked like a cheap novelist. – Or like a very good novelist for the matter of that, if it’s the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly. And I tell you I see that thing as clearly as if it were a dream that never left me. (gs 75) If it is the business of a good novelist to make us see things clearly, then both Ford and Conrad can be said surely to be poor novelists. If “clearly” in Ford, though, means seeing something with the vividness of a dream, then perhaps Ford is not such a failure in Dowell’s logic after all. The clarity and reliability of a dream recalled describes well the clarity and reliability of Dowell’s story. This seems to be the point, though – that this is as clear as a story can be. Nor are ­stories always the means to greater clarity; in Conrad they appear equally a means of ­self-deception, salvation, judgment and understanding. Still, such stories r­emain in direct ­contrast to the courtroom’s demand for the facts of Jim’s d­ esertion, facts that ­Marlow repeatedly deplores, “as if facts could explain ­anything!” (Lord Jim 63). To be known only for the facts of his life haunts Jim’s storytelling, in particular. And yet as much as the novel questions the ability of facts to show the truth of a person, it also questions the ability of stories to show the truth of a person. Can Jim be honest with himself in his stories and can he be honest with others? As the novel raises both questions, dreams and intentions become at least as reliable and important as facts. This seems to be because storytelling, as much as a fact, aims at the truth. As Marlow describes Jim’s endless story telling: “He wanted to go on talking for truth’s sake” (Lord Jim 67). Still, Jim’s search for clarity is muddled and muddied with other stories, with confusions and beliefs and hopes for redemption and forgiveness.17 Marlow describes his own story-telling in a similar and similarly confused way, where truth and illusion are inextricably bound up together: it is that feeling [of a strange and melancholy illusion, which I expect to be visions of remote unattainable truth seen dimly] which has incited me 17

David Brudney offers a philosophically illuminating account of the significance of description in Lord Jim as it determines actions and choices (“being able to get the description right is the most important capacity” he explains of Jim’s encounter with Gentleman Brown). By showing how a problem in character, namely narcissism, distorts Jim’s descriptions of himself and others, Brudney shows how they lead to Jim’s moral failure.

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to tell you the story, to try to hand over to you its very existence, its very reality – the truth disclosed in a moment of illusion. (281) Like Ford’s clarity of a dream, the truth in a moment of illusion seems, in these texts, the closest one can get to either clarity or truth. Narrators in The Good Soldier and Lord Jim approach and avoid themselves, stumbling in surprise and discovery as they doubt and modify their narratives. For all this effort, neither novel ends in epiphany. For all their trying to see, no character sees the truth of a person’s soul. But it is precisely this failure that succeeds in keeping characters from being oversimplified into facts and logically deduced actions, reduced to a list of legal terms and singular choices, lost to their paradoxes and reversals. Such fragmented, inconclusive narratives still leave us, as much as the characters who relate them, with a lack of trust and prone to paranoia. But they balance the apparently radical uncertainty of all individuals with a self-reflective, narrative project tied as much to ethics as to knowledge –an unexpected, experimental form to pursue, neither imaginative nor scientific and yet an extension of both. Acknowledgement Image reproduced with a permission from the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Library, usa (2013). Works Cited Anzieu, Didier. Freud’s Self-Analysis. Trans. Peter Graham. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1986. Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Gerald F. Else. Ann Arbor: Michigan, 1970. Aristotle. Posterior Analytics. Trans. Jonathan Barne. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Barker, Pat. Regeneration. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Bergson, Henri. Key Writings. Ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey. London: Continuum, 2002. Blathwayt, Raymond. “Lions in their Dens: George Newnes at Putney.” Idler (1893): 3. (161–73). Brudney, Daniel. “Lord Jim and Moral Judgment: Literature and Moral Philosophy.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 1, June, 1998. Vol. 56, Issue 3. 265–81. Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. New York: Bantam Classic. 1981. Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. London: Penguin Books, 1989.

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Crews, Frederick. The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute. London: Granta Books, 1997. Crews, Frederick. Skeptical Engagements. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Didi-Huberman, Georges. The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Trans. Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Hound of the Baskervilles: Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes; with the Adventure of the Speckled Band. New York: Broadview Press, 2006. Dudeney, Henry. Amusements in Mathematics. London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1917. Eliot, T.S. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923), in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. Emsley, Brian and McLoughlin, Claire. “Royal Society of Chemistry to Honour Sherlock Holmes With a Special Honorary Fellowship.” Royal Society of Chemistry News Release. London: Royal Society of Chemistry. (14, October 2002). Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Fortunati, Vita, “The Epistemological Malaise of the Narrator Character in Ford, Conrad, Pirandello and Svevo” in Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity. Ed. Robert Hampson and Max Saunders. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2003. 271–86. Freud, Sigmund. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1877–1904. Trans. and ed. Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard, 1985. Freud, Sigmund. “Constructions in Analysis” in Wild Analysis. London: Penguin Classics, 2002. Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1989. Freud, Sigmund. “Memorandum on the Electrical Treatment of War Neurotics” in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. A. and J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. V17, 211–15. Grünbaum, Adolf. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. Berkeley: California, 1984. Halbwachs, Maurice. The Causes of Suicide. Trans. Harold Goldblatt. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Henstra, Sarah. “Ford and the Costs of Englishness: ‘Good Soldiering’ as Performative Practice.” Studies in the Novel, 39:2 (1, June 2007): 177–95. Hessler, John G. “Dowell and The Good Soldier: The Narrator Re-Examined.” Journal of Narrative Technique 9.2 (1979): 53–60. Hobhouse, L.T. “Editorial.” The Sociological Review 1:1 (1908): 1–11. Hoffman, Karen. “‘Am I No Better Than a Eunuch?’: Narrating Masculinity and Empire in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.” Journal of Modern Literature 27.3 (2004): 30–47.

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Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. 2nd ed. Atlanta, GA: ­Cherokee Publishing Co. 1892. Newnes, George. Ed. The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly. London: 1891–1910. Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Pittard, Christopher. “‘Cheap, Healthful Literature’: The Strand Magazine, Fictions of Crime and Purified Reading Communities.” Victorian Periodicals Review 40.1: (2007): 1–23. Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Pound, Reginald. The Strand Magazine 1891–1950. Heinemann: London, 1966. Rivers, W.H.R. Conflict and Dream. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. 1923. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1979. Thomas, Philip. “The Movement Towards Free Catholicism.” Humanity: The Positivist Review 201: (September 1909): 198–202. Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard ­University Press, 1985. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Ed. Cyril Barrett. Berkeley: California, 1997.

chapter 10

“Like Chasing a Scrap of Paper”: Hysterical Detection in The Good Soldier Allan Pero Abstract This paper argues that Ford’s elaboration of temporality in The Good Soldier shares a narrative strategy with the modern mystery. Working from The Good Soldier and other works by Ford, the paper compares Ford’s elaboration of the problem of time to works by other modernist works (by Proust, for instance) but also to mystery writers like Dashiell Hammett.

Keywords mystery – detection – truth – time-shift – The Good Soldier – It Was the Nightingale

In a remarkable passage in It Was the Nightingale, Ford Madox Ford refers briefly to his famous “time-shift” technique. What makes this passage remarkable is his comparison of writers like himself or Proust to mystery writers like Dashiell Hammett; in Ford’s opinion, authors of texts like The Glass Key deploy the narrative technique of the “time-shift” in a way “identical with that of all modern novelists” (213). Ford makes the same point in The March of Literature (844), and the problem’s recurrence confirms that the problem of temporality is thus conjoined with the resolution of a mystery. As such the time-shifts themselves appear as clues that drive the mystery forward, yet do not in themselves provide transparent access to the concealed “truth” behind the veil. Sally Bachner makes several useful connections between Ford’s The Good Soldier and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, arguing that “these texts both construct crises of knowledge and offer compensatory strategies for hermeneutic and epistemological success” (104). While she focuses on the problematics of seeing and identification as blocks over which both ­Dowell and Holmes stumble, I want to push her provocative insights f­urther

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by ­thinking through precisely how the narrative of The Good Soldier might be more usefully compared to the hard-boiled detective’s relation to the femme fatale. A primary difference which traditionally distinguishes brilliant amateur detectives like Holmes or Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin from hard-boiled detectives like Ned Beaumont or Philip Marlowe is the way in which the latter are embroiled in the narrative. Detectives like Holmes identify with the criminal in order to repair the shattered social structure. They do so in order to locate and cordon off the guilty party. On the other hand, detectives like Marlowe are absolutely imbricated in the temporality of the mystery they attempt to solve; the object that produces this ensnarement is the femme fatale (Looking Awry 61–66). Characters like Marlowe, then, are faced with a dual problem: (1) solving the murder that has brought him into the case; and (2) solving the problem of his own desire for the femme fatale. When we consider The Good Soldier in this light, Dowell’s hysterical narrative turns upon a similar problem. Like the hard-boiled detective novel, Ford’s narrative informs us within the first few pages that two of the main characters, Florence Dowell and Edward Ashburnham, are already dead (a trope which Ford himself notes elsewhere [iwn 213]); in this way, we are introduced to the mystery to be solved – how did they die and why? But as he contends in The March of Literature, the primary difference between the “greater fiction” and what he names the “romance of crime” is a spatial one: the former “works as a rule from the inside – with the criminal – instead of exteriorly with the detector of crime” (832). Yet the clues appear not as objects that form a trail leading back the murderer, but as the contiguous time-shifts which crowd upon Dowell’s narration of events, leading him to locate his desire in the femme fatale. In several respects, however, Dowell obviously cannot be conflated utterly with the hard-boiled detective. In order to inflect my discussion, we must turn back briefly to the problem of hysterical narrative. The story is not hysterical merely because it defies linear, historical sense (which is an important psychological dimension of Ford’s use of time-shifts). It is also hysterical in that it problematizes the identity of, and identification with, the femme fatale. I contend that the mystery of the hysteric’s question, which Jacques Lacan describes as “Am I a man or am I a woman?”, is crucial to understanding how and why the corpses first appear in the text (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book iii: The P­ sychoses: 1955–1956 171). The identity of the femme fatale (which, on first r­ eading, might appear to be Florence, and later, Leonora) is troubled by Dowell’s confusion about his own role, since he repeatedly compares himself to a woman or, perhaps more strangely, to an “old maid” (gs 30, 103). His constant allusions to the indeterminacy of his gender prompt a larger crisis – one of identity. If one’s identity is largely granted through one’s relationship to the

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other, how does one know how to articulate one’s desire to the other, or how to respond to the question “What does the other want?” if one has no stable basis from which to pose an answer. For example, how can Dowell know what Florence wants, if his being a man is a crucial element in his being able to answer that question? If she wants him to perform masculinity in a particular way, how can he confidently do this if he is not sure that he is a man in the first place? His narration thus turns upon the problem of feminine desire; is his desire “feminine,” or can it be located (and pathologized) in Florence and Leonora? If Dowell is a hysteric, then his inability to provide a historical narrative is not simply a failing on his part. Nor is he is simply obtuse or duplicitous. Ford’s text shows us that Dowell is not just attempting to resolve an ethical dilemma, but to free himself from responsibility in it. As the story develops, we notice that by constantly returning to particular “scenes of the crime,” he unwittingly produces revelations about his desire that historical narrative would deny him. Another way of putting it is to say that Dowell’s narrative, in shuffling different temporal moments, spatializes the historical by “resisting the prevailing, historically specified form of interpellation or symbolic identification” with the prevailing social order (For They 101). In using the repetitions that emerge in the time-shifts as interpretive tools, we realize that Dowell’s involvement in the narrative, together with the disavowal of his desire, blurs, in a modernist way, the tidy distinction between the detective and the femme fatale. If Dowell is charging himself with the task of solving this mystery, the first question is: why? Several critics have noted that he is attempting to narrate a trauma, to give it the historical structure of witnessing that will permit him, and others like him, to “if you please, just to get the sight from out of their heads” (gs 14). Here we encounter the problem of interiority with which Dowell wrestles. In order to speak from the perspective of the “detector” of the crime, he must work toward an exteriorization of the traumatic events to which he has been a witness. Yet there is a persistent tension in the use of words like “witness” and “heard” (as in “This is the saddest story I have ever heard” (13)) would itself seem to be a mode of disavowal of his own intimate role in the events. More important, the slippage between Dowell’s writing as a mode of therapy, and his fantasy of speaking to a silent interlocutor suggests a dualistic impulse; on the one hand, he wishes to play the detective, skilfully bringing the events of the past nine years into some sort of historical sense, while on the other, he acts as a patient engaging in a version of the analytic session. Both elements of this impulse are conditioned by a different relation to time. The desire to write implies that, as readers, we are witnesses to a past, to a document that has already been written, while the desire to speak to a silent listener implies the immediacy of the present. As is well-known, Ford himself believed

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that memory – informed not just by one’s experience of a particular event, but also by how the act of remembering changes our relation both to the past and the present – is dual, and like an Impressionist painting in that it exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass – through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects the face of a person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other. “On Impressionism” 263

This dualism has the earmarks of the ambivalence that, in psychoanalytic terms, structures transference – the projection or attribution of affects from the analysand, who stands at the window, onto the analyst, who is the face of the person behind you. As Max Saunders, in Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, has persuasively argued, Ford’s novel is “pre-eminently an art of transference,” as the narrative affects shift between and among Dowell, Ashburnham, the listener and the reader (458). I would like to take his insight in another direction by thinking more about the relationship between time and transference. As Jacques Lacan, in his seminar on transference, avers, “The presence of the past, therefore; such is the reality of transference” (206). Crucially, it is the temporal dimension of transference which Dowell evinces, in that the analysand must make the past “speak” in order for it to be narrated. The past is thus not something that is merely “repressed”; rather, it is precisely that in its uncanny presence, it resists remaining in the past, and it is this problem which drives the patient into analysis. In this sense, the intensity that Ford sees as a hallmark of the “progression d’effet” (jc 210) is perhaps more essentially a feature of the progression d’affect. The listener and the reader are in turn placed in the position of analyst. Dowell’s narrative repeatedly suggests, even requires, the presence of the person who knows or understands, even if he does not. His anxiety over his ­tendency to digress not only points toward the eruption of the past into the present, but also that it is the listener who possesses the knowledge necessary to make sense of the narrative. Hence Dowell’s ambivalence about the listener is twofold: if she understands, will she understand too much? If she understands too much, does he want to possess that knowledge himself? That is to say, every statement, every digression is thus subjected to a scrutiny that ultimately places Dowell’s desire under a klieg light. Placed in the position of analyst, the listener and the reader are, in Lacanian terms, avatars of the “­ subject supposed to know” the desire of the analysand (sxi 232). Indeed, much scholarship on

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the novel (and now I must perforce include myself in that list) revolves upon the problem of understanding Dowell’s motives. Is he naive or stupid? Is he passively truthful or hectically lying? Or is it the inverse? These debates are an effect of Dowell’s digressive narration, which veers constantly from what is ostensibly its main point into apparent dead ends, huis clos which are themselves only alluded to or resolved later, and often in a contradictory manner. In this way, we are confronted with the complexity of desire. The novel thus explores the problem of “knowing one’s desire” through a hysterical identification with the other; this is of course, one of the implications of Lacan’s famous phrase “desire is the desire of the Other” (sxi 235). As the novel brilliantly anatomizes, desire is not simply the act of desiring the other; it is that one suspects that the other knows one’s desire and that is why one pursues her or him – to find out what it is. For the hysteric, desire surfaces in a specific way. Identifying with the other’s desire manifests itself as an interest in the object with which the other is captivated (Soler 51). Our relation to desire is thus complex; just as Dowell keeps insisting he does not know, we see that it is not only the case that we do not know what the other wants from us, it is also that we don’t know what we want. Language, the means of articulating our desire, persistently slams up against the limits of our ability to make that desire known to the other, and can also work to “hide” our desire from ourselves. Lying about one’s desire, then, is a vehicle for seeking its elusive, impressionistic truth. What all of these possibilities about desire reveal is that Dowell is a kind of symptom who resists final interpretation or symbolization. Of course, the negative affect Dowell often produces is itself a result of the hystericization of the narrative; it is a lure that Ford himself notes in the difference between writing and dictating a novel. The former is governed by an internal struggle for editorial control over the style and cadence of the story, while the latter produces in the dictation a fraught struggle for mastery. His description of the composition of The Good Soldier indicates the difference he perceived: You have the silent back or emotionless face of the doomful creature presented to you. You dictate for a little while and nothing happens. And nothing and nothing. It gets to be like being in the presence of a marble block. At last you say: “Damn it all I will make that creature smile. Or have a tear in its eye!” Then you are lost… When I was dictating the most tragic portion of my most tragic book to an American poetess she fainted several times. So I had to call in her husband to finish the last pages of the book. He did not faint. But he has never forgiven me… I don’t wonder. I should hate anyone whose secretary I was forced to become. I should think I could write so much better than that fellow… (iwn. 241)

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In this anecdote, Ford offers a rationalization of the mutual ambivalence that he, H.D. and Richard Aldington all apparently felt during composition. The narrative has an obvious parallel in the transference of the analytic session. The scribe, here figured as the silent analyst, placidly waits for the analysand to speak. The terror of the “nothing,” metonymically reflected in what Ford might call the unanswering gaze of the inscrutable face or silent back, is the aural equivalent of the anxiety produced by the blank page. The “nothing” which speaking is meant to hide or keep at bay, is laid bare as a failure to master speech, to make language bend to his will. This failure is evinced (for the speaker) in the enigmatic silence of the listener. If the speaker falls for the lure, set out by his own eyes, that the listener is indeed an impassive, marble block, then he is seduced into speaking not for the sake of producing the impressionistic truths of the text, but for the purpose of generating merely an immediate, gratifying reaction from the listener. This is what Ford means when he says “you are lost.” Rather than remain in the position of the teller of the tale, the speaker attempts to relieve himself of the horrible duty of speaking. He is working to alleviate the lonely pressure of the listener’s refusal to assess or interpret. As Dowell puts it to his fantasy listener, “But you are so silent.” And then, he complains “You don’t tell me anything” (gs 21). Yet as Lacan tells us, the snares the analysand presents to the analyst, the hesitations, deceptions, and misdirections are important steps toward transference. They are tests, meant to determine whether or not she can simply be mistaken or misled (sxi 234). Transference, in terms of the absurd drama of dictation Ford presents, is the moment when the secretary becomes the “subject supposed to know” or, in this case, the better writer. It does not mean that the secretary is the better writer; it is that the speaker perforce assumes it about her. In the telling, the struggle between speaker and listener is thus for the position of analyst; the questions that determine this struggle are: who will not only direct the narrative, but who will also govern its interpretation? With respect to the novel’s presentation of the “facts” of the case, Dowell presents himself as the hysterical detective, inexorably drawn back into a web of calamity by the urgent telegrams from Ashburnham and Leonora. These are two of the bits of paper whose arrival, not long after the deaths of Florence and her uncle, prompt Dowell to chase over “half the world” in order to do some “good” for them and Nancy Rufford (gs 24–25). But the telegrams themselves are not taken up until quite late in the novel, as Dowell turns back to the first meeting with the Ashburnhams. Why this deferral? From their perspective, Dowell is the “subject supposed to know.” Edward needs to talk over the situation of the “girl” with Dowell, and Leonora subsequently agrees. In traditional hard-boiled style, Dowell characterizes himself in this moment as the knowing

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storyteller, looking back with bemused irony on his earlier naiveté at being inveigled so easily once again by the “spirit of peace” which surrounds Bramshaw Teleragh. The deferral brings us back into the events that began their dizzy minuet toward doom. What emerges in Dowell’s account is an obvious ambivalence toward Edward, whose own performance of masculinity, however replete with contradiction and riddled with betrayal, is infinitely more convincing to D ­ owell than his own. For the purposes of my argument, I want to focus more specifically on Dowell’s portraits of the two women. At different points, Leonora and Florence are figured as actresses, duplicitous in their manipulation of men and events (gs 45); the former is variously described as frightening (51), “threatening” (59), a virtual “Scarlet Woman” (53) and, with Florence, as Maisie Maidan’s murderess (62). Meanwhile Florence, blameless as Dowell insists she is (16), is presented as hypocritical, hateful and fully deserving of all the pain and loneliness that Hell can inflict upon her (61). Of course, these depictions are misogynistic, but I do not want to suggest that the women should free themselves from criticism. What is germane to my discussion is that Dowell’s perspective toward women works to obscure his own desire in this quartet. When they are called “actresses,” the term is meant to gesture back toward Dowell’s erstwhile ingenuousness. While he imagines himself Florence’s “nurse,” he comes to realize that, because of Leonora’s rare performative lapses, he is instead the “patient” being indulged by a slightly bored, yet caring mother: “It is true that, at times I used to notice about her face an air of inattention as if she were listening, a mother, to the child at her knee” (45). The gap in her performance surfaces as a problem of distraction. Again, the struggle for mastery, which we saw earlier in the relation of listener to speaker, and of analyst to analysand, appears in Dowell’s determination to retroactively find meaning in the enigma of the other’s gaze. If he is a detective, that role too is structured by deferral. In this sense, the narrative’s temporal shifts are continually inflected not by detection, but by a forensics of affect. Leonora’s inattentive face is, as Sherlock Holmes might put it, the “curious incident” that points to her culpability in the greater deception. However, that “guilt” can only be determined once Dowell realizes that his role as emasculated nurse is a fantasy of his own making. In other words, he would seem to believe this fantasy to be his social identity, even when everyone else knows it is a just that – a fantasy. What are the implications of this fantasy? At moments like these, Dowell reveals to his reader/listener the difference between the affects that govern transference, and the knowledge that transference is meant to provide. Leonora’s affective lapse has multiple meanings. On the surface, her inattention

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implies boredom, but the affect of boredom points back to the problem of how Dowell narrates and uncovers clues to his desire. Her boredom is not simply a singular reaction to a lack of stimulation; it is also a window into the nature of the speaker’s desire. The appearance of boredom is literally a sign; in Fordian terms, the progression d’effet in the narration of fantasy makes manifest to Dowell that he already knows that his dreary “plans for a shock-proof world” (gs 45) are themselves compensatory stratagems for the shocks already taking place between and among the two couples. This fantasy comes fast on the heels of the first shock: Florence’s apparently innocent gesture of placing one finger on Ashburnham’s wrist (gs 42), which endangers the delicate balance of the quartet’s relationship. For the moment, Leonora saves them from the impulse to “run and cry out; all four of us in ­separate directions, averting our heads” (42) by helping Dowell disavow the significance of the gesture with her calm admission of offense at Florence’s bigotry about Irish Catholics (43), a bigotry which Dowell himself periodically evinces. Leonora has provisionally spared them the shock of what one can only call impending adultery by invoking a fantasy of the Catholic other to mask it. Her stratagem has the desired effect. Dowell cheerfully tells us that “Those words gave me the greatest relief I have ever had in my life” (43). But what is of greater import is his next statement: “They told me, I think, almost more than I have ever gathered at any one moment – about myself” (43). What this passage reveals is the crucial role fantasy plays in maintaining a particular social structure; he is relieved by the diversion away from the truth about the budding union of Florence and Ashburnham, but in its very deception, simultaneously reveals a truth about his own desire. He does not only want to desire Florence; he wants to control the very economy of desire that informs their relationship to other people. By way of elaboration, let us turn to the spatial dynamics of Dowell and Florence’s respective roles as nurse and patient. As Dowell gleefully informs us, Florence has made a tactical error in choosing her heart as the particular site of her illness. The trouble with her heart is ultimately used as the excuse to keep her caged in Europe; Dowell, here taking a page from Osmund and Isabel’s marriage in James’s Portrait of a Lady, “fixes” Florence by refusing to make the p ­ resumably fatal voyage to Fordingbridge. Ironically, he makes this decision on the strength of the advice offered by Jimmy, Florence’s clandestine lover (75–76). In his contest with the unfaithful femme fatale, Dowell seems to have gotten, however briefly, the upper hand. The logic of their unspoken conflict is structured by a blurring of the distinction between agency and passivity; in general terms, the femme fatale exerts a power that is not produced by ­subjectivity, but in her role as a metaphor, or, as Mary Ann Doane phrases it, as the “carrier” of

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power (and the disease that the word connotes) (1991: 2). In Ford’s novel, Florence’s “diseased” heart is the means by which she is able to exercise a kind of control over Dowell (by making a sexual relationship impossible), but it cripples her ability to articulate or act on her desire (to go to England). The performance of invalidism, of passivity, is used to ensnare Dowell, and to ensure her freedom from her aunts and uncle, but, in achieving it, she discovers that her freedom is caged by the very role that made it possible in the first place. This limit is policed by Dowell’s refusal to yield his role as nurse. As he insists, “It fixed her beautifully because she could not announce herself as cured, since that would have put an end to the locked bedroom arrangements” (76). In this manner, Dowell reveals himself to have known unconsciously the implications of the arrangements before they married. He then seizes upon the power of which she can only be a carrier. His passive acceptance of the bargain disrupts the impotence that his role implies; in fixing her, he demonstrates that when Florence locks him out, she is effectively locking herself in. Yet power has not simply shifted from one partner to another; the success of Dowell’s surveillance is compromised by the very assumption of power that fixing Florence seems to provide. He tells us she was never out of his sight, except when she was safely locked in bed (gs 16), yet, through his labyrinthine map of detection, he comes to another impression: “When I come to think of it she was out of my sight most of the time” (75). But how does he come to this realization? By detailing the ways in which she and Jimmy had “worked” him into accepting the phalanx of rules that surrounded access to her, Dowell comes to maintain that the rules had been elaborated by them, and not by him (75). Yet it is Jimmy who has “made himself useful for… two years,” despite his otherwise utter failure as a man (74). Dowell, whose masculine confidence is never strong, avers that Florence “would have given [him] the better” in a contest between himself and Jimmy. The compensation for being a cuckold is that he need not sacrifice the fantasy that he is a better man than Jimmy. According to the logic of hysterical identification, Dowell must continue to accept the situation with Florence, that is, identify with her desire, but only so long as he is not responsible for satisfying it. One of the interesting effects of this particular time-shift, between his assumption of constant surveillance and its reality, is that it has opened up the problem of his role in his being cuckolded. But how does he compensate for it? He disavows the “useful” dimension of Jimmy’s masculinity (that it can satisfy Florence’s desire better than Dowell’s) in order to justify that he is “ready enough” to yield the duty to someone else (gs 74). Moreover, the arrangement with Florence is acceptable to him in part because it provides him with a secure position of surveillance from which to detect the objects that fascinate her desire.

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His unconscious acceptance of this power relation is structured into the first days of their marriage. For example, when travelling to Europe on their honeymoon, Florence insists upon leaving behind Julius, the ­African-American servant. She does so in order to limit the amount of surveillance to which she will be subjected. Dowell’s blind spot is produced by his belief that she has internalized the limit set on her freedom; however, his sudden, parting attack on Julius is not merely an expression of anger, but an impression of power on Florence through display. But the key to the articulation of power does not reside in its violence. It resides in Julius’s failure to carry the object of power that binds the couple together: the grip containing her heart medication. As an example of nursing, his beating a servant in front of a woman with a “heart” seems like an odd tonic. Why does he do it? In a sense, he is asking Florence to take his act literally. In dropping the valise, Julius inadvertently exposes the fact that it does not contain amyl of nitrate or nitroglycerin, drugs which were considered potentially explosive. In this case, Dowell’s explosion of rage is meant to stand in metonymically for the explosion that might have happened (or was at that time imagined as a possibility when handling such medications). While masking the absence of an explosion, Dowell imagines that he has made it clear to Florence how dangerous he is. This decision would seem to make constant surveillance redundant, given that she now sees that he is capable of violence. Again, this masculine display suggests that Dowell is not the patsy or dupe he must imagine himself to be, since he believes it had the desired effect: “She was afraid I should murder her” (78). In doing so, he impresses upon her the necessity of offering symbolic weight to her claim to a weak heart by producing the conditions by which she, in turn, would perform its “truth” – by having a heart attack during the crossing. In this way, Dowell is working with Florence to protect the secret of the precious object – the “drugs” – in order to sustain the bargain which informs their relationship. If she is indeed an actress, then she is as good as she is only because Dowell is her director. In a beautiful paradox, Dowell must perform aggressive masculinity in order to constitute himself as the impotent “eunuch” to Ashburnham’s “raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour’s womenkind” (gs 19). The stasis he attempts to impose is spurred by his desire not to desire; more specifically, he desires only those objects which remain inaccessible or out of bounds. One begins to notice a pattern; Dowell claims to love the memory of Maisie Maidan (47) and Nancy Rufford (196), but, and this point is crucial, only after Ashburnham has fallen in love with them. In both cases, any hope of his love being reciprocated is rendered impossible by Maisie’s absurd death and Nancy’s disturbingly picturesque madness.

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Persistently, Dowell’s claims to otherwise feel nothing are themselves indices of a particularly hysterical identification with the desire of the other. Earlier, we saw that hysterical identification requires an interest in the other’s object of desire. But as Lacan reminds us in his “Presentation on Transference,” the hysteric can only agree to sustain the desire of the other on the condition that he is not himself an object of the other’s desire (181). In other words, Dowell’s fascination with the object of the other’s desire is part of the bargain the hysteric makes with the other. The economics of the unfaithful partners’ desire is permitted to continue as long as Dowell himself is not implicated as a potential object of that desire. In such an economy, even outsiders like Maisie and Nancy remain safe for Dowell precisely because there is no possibility that they can transform him into an object of their desire. How does this form of hysterical detection and identification redound upon Dowell’s relationship to Edward Ashburnham? In order to answer this question, we must first turn to the problem that imbricates desire and the law. Just as the law governs the rules which prohibit some modes of behavior, and endorse others, we see that the law structures our relation to desire itself. That is to say, we narrate our desire in relation to what we can and cannot have, to what can be spoken and what remains unspeakable. The law determines what is rational and irrational, or what can be narrated – in a courtroom, say, or in a detective novel – by producing texts that purport to explain a series of events, but must necessarily exclude some of the “facts” in order for the case to make sense. The paradox of the law’s relation to desire is that, while it works to limit or prohibit some desires, it also works to produce others. As Lacan contends in Seminar vii, the logic of the law of desire is that it makes enjoyment possible, but does so by placing a limit on the amount of enjoyment the subject can claim (83–84). Dowell’s identification with Edward Ashburnham’s desire functions in the following way. If he follows Ashburnham’s desire by proceeding to fall in love with several of the women Ashburnham is in love with, Dowell would seem to move toward cracking the case of his own desire. His account of what he repeatedly calls the “Kilsyte case” reveals the paradox of the law of desire in its meditation on the law’s intervention into Ashburnham’s transgression: kissing an unresponsive servant girl on a train. Ashburnham claims that the notion of being unfaithful to Leonora only “came suddenly into his head whilst he was in the witness box” (gs 127). In effect, his desire to commit adultery was triggered, as it were, by the law itself. The prohibition that has brought him into court is what creates the desire to transgress; in this respect, he views “himself as the victim of the law” (127), yet his privilege prevents the law from dealing with him harshly. The realization of his desire to transgress in turn prompts him to

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set off in search of a sympathetic woman who could provide “moral support” (127). Ashburnham’s own crisis of masculinity, produced in part by his gambling and infidelity, is thus meant to be assuaged by turning to the very object that makes him adulterous in the first instance. Leonora, by Dowell’s account, produces another ambivalent identification. She is his twin insofar as she becomes the custodian of Ashburnham’s errant desire. However, the important distinction to be made between her situation and Dowell’s is that she remains constantly frustrated by Ashburnham’s refusal to make her the object of that desire. If Dowell is obsessed with keeping the desire of the other at arm’s length, Leonora is equally consumed by gaining some leverage over the direction of Edward’s fascination with other women. One of the upshots of the Kilsyte case is that it paradoxically brings Ashburnham and Leonora closer together. His transgression is read as a consequence of his trying to please Leonora by travelling third-class (gs 122). As a result, his crime is revised as merely a symptom of attempting to rein in his desire, to remain within the law of economy. What his action does, then, is shift the terms of the economic agreement reached by the couple after Ashburnham is nearly ruined by a spate of gambling after another femme fatale, La Dolciquita, refuses to join him in a tryst. In an almost comic irony, she finally relents in order to prevent his utter financial ruin by placing a financial limit on her bargain for intimacy, a limit that he fails to exercise in his hand-to-hand combat with fate at the tables. One is tempted to say that only in this novel would we find a misogynist fantasy – La Dolciquita – exercising a greater propriety in relation to the law of desire that the man clearly lacks (gs 131–32). In this case, the femme fatale’s desire is not the dangerous excessive drive which must be contained, but is instead the instantiation of the law that makes Edward’s survival possible. Leonora thus discovers that Edward’s desire must be managed not just economically, but erotically. However, she cannot simply perform the role of dominatrix, prohibiting his desire absolutely. Instead, she must leave open the possibility that he can gamble and cheat on her, but within a perversely and mutually constituted fantasy of restraint. But the terms of this unspoken agreement, in which ­Leonora essentially pimps Maisie Maidan (55) and, later, Nancy Rufford, for her husband, are smashed by the appearance of Florence in their lives (144). Ford’s novel thus offers a strange reversal of the usual discourse which ­governs gender relations. When Leonora attempts to manage Edward, she is constantly accused of being too masculine, too much the embodiment of the law. In other words, she is criticized for continuing to make Ashburnham’s performance of masculinity, as magistrate and lord of the manor, possible by managing their affairs. Her crime, then, is in exposing that masculinity is not the

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natural exercising of certain faculties of strength and rationality, but is instead a culturally-constituted set of norms. Of course, this is a secret known to Dowell, but not the public. Ashburnham’s different relationships to La Dolciquita and Leonora suggest that masculinity itself is the excess that requires the harness of the law, not, as Žižek, following Lacan, calls the “Woman as symptom of Man” (“Rossellini: Woman as Symptom of Man” 21). That is, the usual logic structuring gender relations argues that Man, in ­order to maintain the masculine fantasy of subjective agency and consis­tency, must rely on another sexist fantasy – that Woman herself is not a subject, possessing her own ontological consistency. Instead, she can only exist as a symptom against which Man defines himself. If Man rejects her, as in the case of the hard-boiled detective spurning the femme fatale, she loses her status as powerful agent, and her subjectivity dissolves (“Rossellini: Woman as Symptom of Man” 21). What The Good Soldier demonstrates, however, is that this notion of Woman is not just a fantasy, but, in applying pressure on the necessity of the fantasy of Woman as symptom, brings to light the very inconsistency and fragility of masculine identity. Dowell’s investigation works constantly to substantiate the truth of Man’s superiority to Woman, only to succeed, in its prevarications, to suggest the opposite. In its hysteria, the narrative tries to argue that women are possessed of a dangerous instability compared to men, but it cannot remain faithful to the tenets which underscore the position. It is not that women shore up a particular masculine fantasy by acting as the symptom of men. Rather, it is that women who do shore up men reveal all too painfully that there is no such thing as independent masculine agency. By this logic, Leonora is thus read as a threat to Florence (59), as a “cruel and predatory beast” by Nancy, and as an object of Ashburnham’s hatred (179) because she is not, like Dowell, the hysterical “dupe.” Dowell’s refuses to recognize the constraints placed upon Leonora by Ashburnham’s perverse role in the story. Indeed, some critics of the novel seem to fall for this snare, despite maintaining a frosty vigilance over Dowell’s version of the facts. For example, Roger Poole offers a witty and polemical reading of the text that is obviously meant to radicalize how we might re-think the concept of the unreliable narrator. Poole lovingly catalogues the series of incredible events and occurrences that point away from verisimilitude and toward what he names a “deliberate and controlled series of mishandlings of vraisemblance,” borrowing Julia Kristeva’s term for “the artistic play of resemblance and difference” (126–27). The sheer number of baffling and outrageous claims made by Dowell motivates Poole to fashion a new theory of the crime; Dowell and Leonora plotted together to steal the estate, the money and eliminate their spouses. Moreover, Nancy is figured as the illegitimate daughter of the devious pair (Poole 130–32).

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Although I am sympathetic to Poole’s refusal to take Dowell’s version of events with sanguine nonchalance, the problem with his reading, in my view, is that he first provides his own narrative of the novel (120–24), which he then uses as the basis for his interpretation. In effect, he must dislodge Dowell as narrator in order to assume control of the story. In this manner, he tries to prove his claims about what really, or most likely, happened. In effect, Poole becomes the brilliant amateur detective, who, like Hercule Poirot, takes the complex and enigmatic events surrounding the crime, and fashions a coherent narrative that explains away the unnnarrated void that the story opens up (usually with the appearance of the corpse) (Looking Awry 58). He must make Dowell’s desire calm down into a group of facts that hinge upon one structuring element: Dowell is simply lying. In positing the suspicion that Dowell is lying, Poole removes the crucial question of why Dowell is lying in the way he is. That is to say, deception and truth are not opposing principles, which is the guiding assumption behind Poole’s version of Ford’s text. As I argued earlier in my discussion of transference, deception is a form of testing, in which the analysand does not hide the truth, rather he or she attempts to lure the attention of the analyst away from truths that already lurk unconsciously in his or her speech (sxi 139–40). Deception, then, is an integral component of uncovering a truth that can never be fully spoken, since truth resides in the intention that drives the course of the various lies. Further, by reducing Dowell’s narrative to a binary opposition between truth and deception, Poole unwittingly relies on a fantasy of Woman as a symptom that sutures the gap the narrative opens and refuses to close. The problematics around gender and the narration of desire, which are key elements of Ford’s novel, must be significantly altered to accommodate this reading. Woman as symptom must be shuttled in through the back door as the accomplice who makes Dowell’s actions possible. In a sense, Dowell’s ambivalent and often contemptuous attitude toward Leonora is represented as evidence of her guilt. She becomes the femme fatale, pulling the strings that guide Dowell’s hands in committing murder. As a result, we can excuse ourselves of any guilt in how we might narrate our intimate relationships and project it onto Dowell and Leonora. If I can offer an alternate theory of the crime, I would argue that Dowell is passively complicit in the deaths of Florence and Ashburnham, but is not actively their murderer. Both of their deaths revolve upon the problem of the clue; significantly, Dowell expresses a different attitude toward the individual clues, but to the same effect. For example, he compares Florence’s personality to that of paper, but of a specific kind. She is compared to a bank note; as we know, money is a mere carrier of its larger social function, which is to represent

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an absent and abstract object of “genuine” wealth. But, as Slavoj Žižek contends in The Sublime Object of Ideology, money’s power is produced by a kind of disavowal. We can say to ourselves that we know that money is just another material object, but it still is made of some sublime substance over which we have no power (18). But from the perspective of the hysteric, the disavowal is inverted. Another way of phrasing it is that Dowell is prepared to acknowledge Florence as the sublime source of economic power, but that she is after all just another material object – “a scrap of paper” (gs 101). This realization comes to him after Bagshawe tells him that he had seen Florence coming out of Jimmy’s room. She no longer seems “real” to him at precisely the moment when her value plummets (101). This logic is consistent with hysteria; Dowell must identify with her desire to kill, but only as long as he is not the object of it. Consequently, he cannot motivate himself to run up to her room to prevent her suicide, since he would be acting on an assumption that he secretly knows that she wants to live. More important, the bargain that defines their relationship, that her vials contain medicine and not poison, is rendered void as soon as her desire for Jimmy is made visible to Dowell. Since she is already a scrap of paper, Dowell cannot put himself in what he calls the “ignoble” position (gs 101) of chasing after her because her value perforce reverts to him. In other words, he does not have to kill her. As her husband, he simply has to identify with her unto death. Remarkably, the death of Ashburnham revolves upon another clue; the scrap of paper that makes up the telegram from Nancy Rufford. David H. Lynn has argued that Dowell’s callous flippancy in recounting Ashburnham’s suicide is a form of concealing “his own latent desires” from himself (394). Perhaps, but Dowell does admit to being in love with Edward Ashburnham (gs 196). I would argue that his behaviour is consistent with the hysterical form of detection that has characterized his story from the beginning. As we have seen, he is not prepared to chase after a piece of paper, but he is prepared to be an errand boy, happily trotting off to present the telegram to Leonora (199). Why the difference? First, in a variation on his relationship to Florence, he has identified so utterly with Ashburnham that he cannot hinder his desire. He can only clear its path. But there is a more crucial dimension is that he embodies a masculine incarnation of the very object he claims to encounter repeatedly over the course of his story: the femme fatale. Just as the femme fatale sometimes appears in the guise “of an impotent or sexually ambivalent man” (Looking Awry 64), Dowell too would seem to ably fit this profile. If the femme fatale is a figure of danger, it occurs because its desire remains mysterious to us; moreover, the question of whether he enjoys or suffers as a result of his actions also remains a question. The difference between Ford’s novel and the detective novel appears

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in its conflation of the detective with the femme fatale. What we discover is not, as Žižek asserts, that she embodies a radically ethical attitude by heroically assuming the consequences of the death drive (Looking Awry 63). Rather, by refusing to project the femme fatale onto the body of a Woman, and instead placing the misogynistic fantasy in the body of the hysterical male, Ford reveals to us that even if this fantasy appears in another frame, we invariably encounter the inherent perversity of ascribing to this subject position either a heroic or a villainous aspect. If the concept of the femme fatale is a misogynist fantasy (and it is), then The Good Soldier presents us with a portrait of the effects of this fantasy from the seat of its origin: Man. Works Cited Bachner, Sally. “The Seeing Eye’: Detection, Perception, and Erotic Knowledge in The Good Soldier.” Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity: International Ford Madox Ford Studies 2. Ed. Robert Hampson and Max Saunders. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. 103–16. Doane, Mary Ann. Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier. Ed. David Bradshaw. London: Penguin Books, 2002. Ford, Ford Madox. It was the Nightingale. New York: Ecco Press, 1984. Ford, Ford Madox. Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. London: Duckworth, 1924. Ford, Ford Madox. The March of Literature. New York: Dial Press, 1938. Lacan, Jacques. “Presentation on Transference” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. 176–85. Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre VIII. Le Transfer: 1960–1961. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1991. Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1981. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III: The Psychoses: 1955–1956. Trans. Russell Grigg. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: 1959–1960. Trans. Dennis Porter. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Lynn, David H. “Dowell as Unromantic Hero” in Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier. Ed. Martin Stannard. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1995. Poole, Roger. “The Unknown Ford Madox Ford” in Ford Madox Ford’s Modernity: ­International Ford Madox Ford Studies 2. Ed. Robert Hampson and Max Saunders. ­Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. 117–36.

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Saunders, Max. Ford Madox Ford A Dual Life: Volume I, The World Before the War. ­Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Soler, Colette. “Hysteria in Scientific Discourse.” Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality. Ed. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink. Albany: State University Press of New York, 2002. 99–108. Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso, 1991a. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991b. Žižek, Slavoj. “Rossellini: Woman as Symptom of Man.” October 54 (Autumn, 1990): 18–44. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1994.

chapter 11

“Of the Question of the Sex-Instinct I Know Very Little”: The Good Soldier and the Discourse of Indecency Chris Forster Abstract This essay reads Dowell’s narration in the context of the discourses of obscenity and indecency contemporary with the publication of The Good Soldier. Like the modernist landmarks Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Good Soldier treats the theme of adultery. Yet both Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were at the center of landmark obscenity trials because of their frank and controversial representations of sexuality. By comparison, The Good Soldier seems to willfully avoid such explicitness, favoring euphemism and circumlocution as John Dowell narrates the complicated series of sexual liaisons that form the novel’s plot.

Keywords sexuality – desire – adultery – obscenity – indecency – Joyce – Ulysses – The Good Soldier

Late in The Good Soldier, John Dowell apologizes to the reader for the disordered sequence of his narrative. He explains, “I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably best told in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real” (147). “Real” here describes both a means and an end. It describes the manner in which Dowell has offered his narrative, in “the way a person telling a story” would tell it. But it also describes the very purpose of his narrative, to re-­ present the events as truthfully as possible to the reader. Dowell’s narrative meanders, stalls, and digresses because this is the means best suited to Dowell’s goal; he is telling a “real story” and wishes to make sure it “seem[s] most real.” Some notion of getting closer to the real is a common goal shared by a variety of different writers in the first years of the twentieth century. This desire for

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a truer representation, however, often came up against larger cultural taboos and prohibitions about representing sexuality. This conflict is best exemplified in the famous obscenity trials that took place during the first half of the century. The Good Soldier, of course, was never at the center of any obscenity trial, though some early reviews did fault the novel for its “sex-morbid atmosphere” and for being “swamped by tawdry detail.”1 And this itself is worthy of note. Not only does Dowell profess a commitment to faithful representation of reality that would seem to ally him with figures like Lawrence and Joyce, but the subject of his narrative is, like that of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses, adultery. In what follows I’d like to read Dowell’s narration as an uneasy compromise between the modern desire to narrate sexuality within the conventions of literature, and a more traditional cultural imperative to censor such narratives. This reading is justified, in part, through a comparison of the novel to Ford’s 1922 essay, “Ulysses and the Handling of Indecencies,” in which Ford attempts to address the relationship of obscenity to literature. The same rhetorical ambivalence towards obscenity evident in Ford’s essay characterizes Dowell’s narration in the novel. Reading the novel through the lens of “Ulysses and the Handling of Indecencies” offers the possibility of understanding Dowell’s narration from the perspective of indecency, rather than unreliability or epistemology. Dowell emerges as an articulation of Ford’s vexed attitude towards the representation of sexuality in literature, and the eroding division between the properly “literary” and the “obscene.” The question of Dowell’s narration has, for more than fifty years, been the central question of criticism of The Good Soldier. As Mark Schorer influentially wrote, “the book’s controlling irony lies in the fact that passionate situations are related by a narrator who is himself incapable of passion, sexual and moral alike” (45). The novel, for Schorer, binds questions of irony to questions of sexuality. Framing the debate in this way, between epistemology and sexuality, however, leads to an inevitable impasse, the most persistent expression of which is the tendency for Dowell to become an occasion for the value judgments of the novel’s critics. Samuel Hynes indicates as much when he writes, “The problems involved in the interpretation of The Good Soldier all stem from one question: What are we to make of the novel’s narrator?” (49). Is he a hopeless, asexual cuckold? Or is he the victim of the cruel machinations of others? Is the novel a comedy, or a tragedy? The question of how to evaluate Dowell continues to be the most intractable question the novel asks. It represents

1 See the March 17, 1915 review from the Boston Transcript and the March 22, 1915 review from Independent, both reprinted in the Norton critical edition (220–21).

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both the motor that continues to drive interest in the novel and the shoal upon which criticism of the novel inevitably wrecks. Introducing Ford’s treatment of Ulysses as a context for The Good Soldier allows us to move beyond this impasse by viewing Dowell’s narration as one attempt to more completely chart human experience (including, crucially, sexuality) in literature, not through explicit representation, but by admitting a gap. As Schorer rightly notes, this novel is about the difference between convention and fact. The story consists of the narrator’s attempt to adjust his reason to the shattering discovery that, in his most intimate relationships, he has, for nine years, mistaken the conventions of social behavior for actual human fact. (45) Ford’s essay on Ulysses offers an opportunity to recover the “conventions of social behavior” at stake in The Good Soldier, in particular the strictures governing obscenity and indecency in literature. By bringing these two key texts of early twentieth century British literature together, though, we have the opportunity to shift the discussion of The Good Soldier from questions of epistemology in the strictest sense (“What do I know? How can I be certain?”), to questions of textuality (“How does language mean? What can be said? How does literature seek to capture experience?”).

Between England and Europe: Literature Beyond Convention

Reading The Good Soldier alongside Ford’s short treatment of Ulysses is justified by Ford himself, who implicitly compares The Good Soldier and Ulysses by referring, at different points, to both novels as “European” works in English. In the 1927 letter dedicating The Good Soldier to Stella Bowen, Ford recounts the origins of the novel in an “ambition … to do for the English novel what in Fort comme la mort, Maupassant had done for the French.” Ford “had his reward,” he explains, when one day, a fervent young admirer exclaimed: “By Jove, The Good Soldier is the finest novel in the English Language!” Whereupon my friend Mr John Rodker who has always had a properly tempered admiration for my work remarked in his clear, slow drawl: “Ah yes. It is, but you have left out a word. It is the finest French novel in the English language!” (gs 5) In “Ulysses and the Handling of Indecencies,” published in the English Review in 1922 (that is, between the novel’s initial publication, and the 1927 d­ edicatory

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letter), Ford never mentions The Good Soldier; he does, however, describe Ulysses in terms very similar to those in which Rodker describes The Good Soldier. Ford writes, “a great deal of Ulysses is serene, and, possibly, except to our Anglo-Saxon minds, even the “disgusting passages” would not really prove disgusting. That is what one means when one calls Ulysses at last a European work written in English” (225). Ford’s comments unite Ulysses and The Good Soldier through an opposition between Europe and England (or Anglo-Saxondom). National borders here allegorize distinctions of aesthetic value and narrative convention. Englishness similarly emerges as a crucial category in The Good Soldier. Describing the “nine years of uninterrupted tranquility” he spent with the Ashburnhams, Dowell remarks that the period was characterized by an extraordinary want of any communicativeness on the part of the Ashuburnhams to which we, on our part, replied by leaving out quite as extraordinarily, and nearly as completely, the personal note. Indeed, you may take it that what characterized our relationship was an atmosphere of taking everything for granted. (34) This atmosphere of taking everything for granted, is one of rigorous conventionality; instead of communication between characters, adherence to an unarticulated, cultural code is substituted – the code of “good people.” Ford writes: “The given proposition was, that we were all ‘good people’.” Without any communication, “We took for granted that we all liked beef underdone but not too underdone; that both men preferred a good liqueur brandy after lunch; that both women drank a very light Rhine wine qualified with Fachingen water – that sort of thing” (gs 34–35). Dowell laments the result of this taking things for granted. “After forty-five years of mixing with one’s kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one’s fellow beings. But one doesn’t” (36). And it is this condition of conventionally governed communication that Dowell describes as English, “the modern civilized habit – the modern English habit of taking every one for granted – is a good deal to blame for this” (gs 36). Thus, the “modern English habit” comes to stand in for all that is obscured or repressed by the social necessity of being “good people.” And Dowell decries, in terms that anticipate Ford’s treatment of Ulysses, the effects of such rules and strictures. It is, in fact, in discussing such conventions that Dowell allows his own conventional decorum to lapse, if only slightly: “But the inconvenient – well, hang it all, I will say it – the damnable nuisance of the whole thing is, that with all the taking for granted, you never really get an inch deeper than the things I have catalogued” (37).

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In discussing Ulysses, Ford places European literature in opposition to precisely this sense of English convention. In literature too, convention thwarts ever getting “an inch deeper.” Ford praises Ulysses for its ability to escape such convention, “The literary interest in this work… arises from the fact that, for the first time in literature on an extended scale, a writer has attempted to treat man as the complex creature that man – every man! – is.” Ulysses attempts to present a more complete account of experience. Ford continues, The novelist, poet, and playwright hitherto, and upon the whole, have contented themselves with rendering their characters on single planes. A man making a career is rendered simply in terms of that career, a woman in love as simply a woman in love, and so on. (219) Ford’s insistence on escaping rote convention recalls the more famous words of Virginia Woolf in her essay on “Modern Fiction.” There, Woolf writes, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it… Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and the external as possible? (150) For Woolf, the modern novelist must relinquish the reliance on conventional plots and turn instead to the meticulous charting of individual experience, of “life.” Both Woolf and Ford describe a similar rejection of convention and return to experience; both identify Ulysses as a landmark in literature’s charting of subjective experience; and, for both Woolf and Ford, this rejection of convention and return to “life” is a hallmark of European, rather than English, literature (of Russian literature, in particular, for Woolf). Ford writes, “Of this complexity man has been aware, nevertheless in Anglo-Saxondom until quite lately no attempt has been made by writers to approach this problem” (“Ulysses” 219). And just as both identify this fidelity to lived experience as the achievement of Ulysses (and the sign of its European pedigree), both address the question of the novel’s obscenity as an result of its attempt to escape convention. Woolf identifies the novel’s obscenity as part of a peculiar dissatisfaction that remains in spite of its accomplishment.

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If we want life itself, here surely we have it. Indeed, we find ourselves fumbling rather awkwardly if we try to say what else we wish, and for what reason a work of such originality [as Ulysses] yet fails to compare, for example, to Youth or The Mayor of Casterbridge… Does the emphasis laid, perhaps didactically, upon indecency contribute to the effect of something angular and isolated? “Modern Fiction” 151–52

The question Woolf asks in passing, whether the effect of the novel’s indecency might undermine its broader goals, thoroughly vexes Ford. Joyce’s “indecency” is not merely a puzzle for Ford but a profoundly troubling question of aesthetic representation. If the goal of literature is the faithful representation of subjective experience, sexuality emerges as a key point of articulation. It also, of necessity, comes into conflict with the social strictures that govern, manage, and often prohibit sexuality’s entrance into language. Ford’s expressed commitment to such representational fidelity would seem to put him at loggerheads with any logic of censorship. The question of the expression of what are called indecencies in the arts is one that sadly needs approaching with composure. I will claim to approach it with more composure than can most people. On the whole I dislike pornographic or even merely “frank” writing in English – not on moral but on purely artistic grounds, since so rare are franknesses in this language that frank words wear out a page and frankly depicted incidents of a sexual nature destroy the proportions of a book. The reader is apt to read the book for nothing else. Critical Essays 221

It is a curious argument. Ford objects to “pornographical or even merely frank writing in English” – and the specification of language here seems vital – on “purely artistic grounds.” Obscene writing is not a problem because it is immoral, but because it upsets balance and proportionality since such “franknesses” are, at least according to Ford, rare in English. There is an etymological curiosity here that merits our attention, if only for the direction in which it will allow my argument to proceed. Ford insists that he dislikes, “pornographic or even merely ‘frank’ writing in English.” As the oed notes, “frank” (here meaning “candid, outspoken, unreserved”) has its origin in the medieval Latin francus, meaning free; it is “originally identical with the ethnic name Francus, which acquired the sense of ‘free’ because in Frankish Gaul full freedom was

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possessed only by those belonging to, or adopted into, the dominant people.” The words “frank” and “French,” that is, ultimately share an etymology. Ulysses is certainly frank writing. But what about Ford’s own “French novel in English”? This etymology catches Ford between a desire for a “French” or “European” novel in English and the fear that “frankness” in literature will upset its proportionality as art. There is a split here, between a desire for a mode of writing that charts the reality of lived experience, that clings with all possible fidelity to life, and a desire (“on purely artistic grounds”) to avoid disproportionality and obscenity. This ambivalence attends Ford’s entire reading of Ulysses. Even as he endorses and praises the novel, he tries to do so without endorsing its “indecencies.” Ford at once countenances the disgusting, and decries it, a book purporting to investigate and to render the whole of a human life cannot but contain “disgusting” passages; we come, every one of us, into a world as the result of an action that the Church – and no doubt very properly! – declares to be a mortal sin; the great proportion of the food we eat and of the food eat by the beasts that we eat is dung; we are resolved eventually into festering masses of pollution for the delectation of worms. Critical Essays 225

Ford, indeed, begins his essay by insisting that he has no interest in discussing Joyce’s work. “I have been pressed to write for the English public something about the immense book of Mr Joyce. I do not wish to do so” (218). And, in a sense he never really does write about Ulysses. Instead he offers two long quotations from the work itself. The first is from the “Circe” episode though here, too, Ford is split between a desire to faithfully reproduce the text, and a desire to avoid obscenity. He quotes the text, but strategically elides the obscenities contained in the page he quotes. Of the passage, Ford writes, That appears to have been an ordinary Dublin Night’s Entertainment; the English reader may find it disagreeable to peruse… I ought to say that in Mr Joyce’s pages the epithets that my more coy pen has indicated with dots are written out in full. I don’t see why they shouldn’t be; that is the English language as we have made it and as we use. Critical Essays 224

As earlier, Ford’s divided aesthetic loyalties are evident; he censors Joyce’s text even as he argues that such censorship is foolish and unnecessary.

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Ford ultimately resolves the apparent contradiction between his aversion to obscenity and his admiration for Ulysses by locating obscenity not in the text, but in certain ways of reading. To illustrate the point, he recounts the following anecdote from his own experience, A great many years ago an American publisher… proposed to publish one of my works in his country… He sent for me one day and protested: ‘You know, we could not print this speech in the United States!’ To indicate something of great rarity one of my characters said: ‘You will find a chaste whore as soon as that!’ I suggested mildly that he should print it: ‘You will find a chaste – as soon as that!’ But, ‘Oh!’ exclaimed that publisher… “we could never print the word ‘chaste’; it is so suggestive!” Critical Essays 222

Ironically, the word “chaste” proves too unchaste for American publisher. As the example illustrates, what constitutes a “suggestive” or “indecent” word is a function less of the text itself than of the reader. Indeed, precisely what worries the American publisher is what “suggestions” the word may conjure in a reader. Yet, the absurdity of the publisher’s objection does not lead Ford to reject censorship outright, so much as locate it elsewhere. He continues, For the person who prefers the phrase “take advantage of” to the word “seduce”, like the person who cannot read the word “chaste” without experiencing indecent suggestions, must have the mind of a satyr. It would be better not write, to publish or to edit for him at all. Critical Essays 222–23

Ford in fact preserves the logic of censorship, which condemns obscenity as the excitement of sexual desire, but shifts its location from writer to reader. It is not writing that is obscene or indecent, but a particular way of reading. Such an understanding of obscenity has curious effects. For one thing, if obscenity is a certain way of reading a text, rather than a property of the text, it becomes possible to separate the value of a text from the value of reading it. If is it “better not write” for the satyr-minded reader, it can also be good that a text merely exist – even if it is never read. “Nor indeed do I recommend Ulysses to any human being. In the matter of readers my indifference is of the deepest. It is sufficient that Ulysses, a book of profound knowledges and of profound renderings of humanity, should exist – in the most locked of bookcases.” Stranger still, Ford imagines the sort of reader who would nevertheless be able to read Ulysses without noticing its obscenity.

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Only… my respect that goes out to the human being that will read this book without much noticing its obscenities will be absolute; and I do not know that I can much respect any human being that cannot do as much as that. But I daresay no human being desires my respect! Critical Essays 226, original ellipsis

Here again, the Dowell-like uncertainty of Ford’s attitude towards Ulysses is manifest – at once praising the person who could read Ulysses “without much noticing its obscenities”, damning the person who cannot, and insisting that “no human being desires my respect” anyway. In turning now to The Good Soldier, I’d like to highlight the ways in which the novel dramatizes the question of how sexuality is represented in language. The aesthetic problem of obscenity evident in Ford’s treatment of Ulysses becomes the narrative problem of representing sexual desire in The Good Soldier. The ambivalence of Ford’s attitude towards Joyce’s novel becomes the drama of desire charted with such detail by John Dowell. And the ideal reader, capable of reading Ulysses “without much noticing its obscenities” emerges as John Dowell himself.

To Tell the Story Like a Story: Dowell’s Narration

Like Ulysses, The Good Soldier too might be read as an attempt to capture lived experience from a subjective point of view. And just as Ford’s attitude towards Ulysses is characterized by a profound ambivalence, John Dowell’s narration is similarly split. Dowell’s narration, in fact, offers a sort of allegory of reading, in which the attempt to capture the specificities of lived ­experience comes up against the uniquely literary challenge of placing that experience in language and of facing the challenge of sexuality and “indecency” in particular. But first consider the way in which Dowell seeks to construct his narration. In the novel Dowell is polarized between his role as narrator of the novel and his role as character within the narrated story. However, is not simply a character-narrator. Instead he is both character and narrator, without being able to comfortably occupy either of these roles. Ford foregrounds Dowell’s narration explicitly as an acting of writing, a struggle to place a sequence of events into a “story.” Dowell is not merely reflecting on events that have passed, but is sitting, attempting to place these events into language. This fact is highlighted by Dowell’s own references to the very act and circumstances of composition:

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I am writing this now, I should say, a full eighteen months after the words that end my last chapter… I have seen again for a glimpse, from a swift train, Beaucaire with the beautiful white tower, Tarascon with the square castle… I have rushed through all Provençe – and all Provençe no longer matters” (gs 183). As this image of Dowell catching glimpses of Provençe from a moving train makes clear, Dowell is not simply an unreliable narrator (which would suggest stasis in his narration). Rather, his narration and its reliability are in process. The events that Dowell sits down to narrate at the beginning of The Good Soldier are incomplete; and The Good Soldier is as much about the process of writing these events, as it is about the events themselves. Dowell is divided between the role he played in the experiences he is attempting to narrate (husband of Florence; ignorant participant in the events around him), and his role as organizer, indeed, as author, of those very same experiences. Dowell exemplifies the split which Emile Benveniste locates in every act of enunciation, between the content of the statement and the act of stating. Discussing the first person pronoun, Benveniste writes, I can only be identified by the instance of discourse that contains it and by that alone. It has no value except in the instance in which it is produced. But in the same way it is also as an instance of form that I must be taken; the form of I has no linguistic existence except in the act of speaking in which it is uttered. There is thus a combined double instance in this process: the instance of I as referent and the instance of discourse containing I as the referee. (1971: 218) Dowell too is plagued by such a double instance – his presence, as a figure (even a minor, “tertiary or quadrutiary” figure2) in the love affair of his wife and Edward Ashburnham, and his presence as the authoritative narrator of that same affair. Benveniste continues, The importance of their [pronouns and other “‘pronomial’ forms”] function will be measured by the nature of the problem they serve to solve, 2 In an early review of the novel, Theodore Dreiser writes, “Personally I would have suggested to Mr. Hueffer [Ford], if I might have, that he begins at the beginning, which is where Colonel Powys wishes to marry off his daughters – not at the beginning as some tertiary or quadrutiary character in the book sees it, since it really concerns Ashburnham and his wife” (42).

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which is none other than that of intersubjective communication. Language has solved this problem by creating an ensemble of “empty” signs that are nonreferential with respect to “reality.” These signs are always available and become “full” as soon as a speaker introduces them into each instance of his discourse. Since they lack material reference, they cannot be misused; since they do not assert anything, they are not ­subject to the condition of truth and escape all denial. Their role is to provide the instrument of a conversion that one could call the conversion of language into discourse. It is by identifying himself as a unique person pronouncing I that each speaker sets himself up in turn as the ‘subject.’ (219–20) It would be reductive, but not unfair, to treat The Good Soldier as an elaborate footnote to this passage, qualifying and troubling the confidence of ­Benveniste’s optimism. The movement from language to discourse, the assumption of subjectivity – for Benveniste these are problems which “language” has solved. The first person pronoun in particular, and the possibility of subjectivity in language more broadly, represent a hole in the otherwise complete structure of language through which any individual can subjectivize himself. What Benveniste fails to reckon is that the assumption of this empty signifier has effects which redound upon the subject; that the problem of “intersubjective communication” might be solved from the perspective of language, but from the perspective of the “subject” it is something else entirely (for Lacan, for example, the name of the subject’s assumption of this emptiness is castration). For Dowell, during “those nine years of uninterrupted tranquility,” the problem of communication was solved not through subjectivation (seizing the conventions of language), but through convention itself. Recall the “extraordinary want of communicativeness” Dowell describes during his nine year friendship with the Ashburnhams (34); this absence of communication, this “damnable” taking of things for granted, is exactly the opposite of the active subjectivization Benvensite describes. Borrowing Benveniste’s linguistic terminology, we might say that the real action of Ford’s novel occurs neither at the level of the statement (in the events narrated), nor at the level of discourse (in Dowell’s writing them down), but in the dynamic tension between them, as Dowell struggles to take responsibility for the conventions he has obeyed for past nine years. The aptness of such a linguistic model is suggested by Dowell himself who specifically invokes a scene of dialogue when attempting to justify his peculiarly disorganized mode of narration. Dowell explains, I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down – whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or

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whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself. (gs 19) Dowell frames this as a question of how to tell the story – from the beginning or in the order in which he heard it. Behind this rather classic question of ­rhetoric, however, lies a much deeper paradox produced by the fact that Dowell is inescapably on both sides of the narrative. This division, between Dowell the narrator and Dowell the character, provides a narratological analogue for the epistemological question of Dowell’s knowledge. What Dowell the character may not understand, Dowell the narrator retrospectively does. The result, however, is not a simple passage from ignorance to knowledge; and crucially, in attempting to understand his experience, Dowell invokes a fiction. Dowell’s initial solution is to suture the space between his actual lived experience and the narrative he is writing with a fiction. He invokes an imaginary scene of conversation between himself and his reader; a solution that combines the two alternatives Dowell posed himself, embedding the discontinuous oral narrative of his actual experience within his written text, unified by the constraining fiction of a “country cottage.” Dowell begins, So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars. (gs 19) This fictional scene, and this imaginary “sympathetic soul,” however, prove in excess of their purpose. Dowell’s imaginary interlocutor acquires a body and begins to walk with Dowell through the fictitious cottage. “From time to time we shall get up and go to the door and look out at the great moon and say: ‘Why, it is nearly as bright as in Provençe!’” And with this recollection of Provençe, the fiction effectively collapses. Dowell’s attempt to imagines a fictional place from which to narrate his story is destroyed by the intrusion of his real memories of Provence. No longer are Dowell and his imagined interlocutor in the suturing non-space of a fictitious country cottage – they are instead inhabiting the past of Dowell’s memory. Dowell continues, And then we shall come back to the fireside, with just the touch of a sigh because we are not in that Provençe where even the saddest stories are gay. Consider the lamentable history of Peire Vidal. Two years ago Florence and I motored from the Biarritz to Las Tours… (gs 19–20)

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Dowell’s fiction is in fact a sort of projection of his own desire; through the resemblance it bears to Provence, it fails to serve its purpose, and Dowell, unable to successfully separate his position as narrator from his position as character, is led to recollections of his life with Florence. The problem is not that Dowell is split between the narrative and the ­narration – such a split is (for both Benveniste and for Lacan) the prerequisite condition of all language, and itself nothing new in the history of the novel. Rather, early in the novel, Dowell is unable to maintain that split – he is ineluctably drawn to collapse any distinction between narrative and narration, ­between his experience and his knowledge, between appearance and reality. By the end of the novel, however, Dowell’s attitude toward Provençe has radically changed. Cleansed of the associations of romance which attended it before, Provençe becomes merely a landscape. “I have rushed through all Provençe – and all Provençe no longer matters. It is no longer in the olive hills that I shall find my heaven; because there is only Hell….” (gs 183, original ellipsis). How are we to understand that final clause? Is “there” Provençe, or is Dowell making a more general claim? It might be read as one more predicate of Provençe and of the “olive hills” in which Dowell once imagined he could find his heaven: “because there [in Provençe] is only Hell…” It might equally be read, though, as a more general predicate. Dowell shall not find his heaven in the olive hills of Provençe, or anywhere else, because Hell is all that there is. Read thus, Dowell’s shift is not simply a change in attitude towards the Provençal landscape, but a much broader shift, concerning his attitude toward his own narrative. When Dowell’s narration begins, he is initially stymied by the discrepancy between the reality of an individual’s behavior and the larger symbolic universe in which he or she lives. Edward Ashburnham must be a “good soldier,” because he looks like one; Florence must have a heart condition, because she says she does. The realization that this is not so – that a gap might exist between appearance and reality, between signifier and signified – is the experience The Good Soldier dramatizes. At stake is not obscenity in the sense it appears in Ulysses. Instead, like the reader Ford describes who can read Ulysses without noticing its obscenities, Dowell has completely overlooked the indecent implications of his experience. And so, for example, we learn that Edward Ashburnham, never told a story that couldn’t have gone into the columns of the Field more than once or twice in all the nine years of my knowing him. He didn’t even like hearing them, he would fidget and get up and go out to buy a cigar or something of that sort. You would have said that he was just exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine and it was madness. (gs 18–19)

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In this sense, The Good Soldier approaches the problem of obscenity from the opposite direction from Ulysses. At least for Ford, Ulysses attempts to capture experience by broadening the representational scope of literature to include “indecencies.” The Good Soldier, in Dowell, offers a figure for whom the world is so thoroughly decent that obscenity emerges not in particular terms or representations, but in a discordance between representation and reality. The difficulty Dowell encounters is exactly that described by Lacan when he writes, “There is the fundamental difficulty that the subject encounters in what he has to say… the sort of discordance between the signified and the signifier that is brought on by all censorship of social origin” (Écrits 310). This “social origin” of censorship is the position from which Dowell understands the world. His narrative evidences precisely the difficulty Lacan describes, when his perception contradicts reality; when, as in Ford’s treatment of Ulysses, fidelity of representation comes up against the obscenity of reality. That Dowell’s split is directly related to the issues of “indecency” Ford discusses with respect to Ulysses is evidenced by another fireplace in The Good Soldier; not the warm fireplace in Dowell’s imaginary cottage, but the fireplace at Branshaw Teleragh, which dissolves as a symbol of coherence and meaning for Nancy Rufford. Staying with the Ashburnhams after Florence’s suicide, Nancy reads in a newspaper about the divorce of Mrs Brand: It seemed to her to be a queer affair. She could not understand why one counsel should be so anxious to know all about the movements of Mr Brand upon a certain day; she could not understand why a chart of bedroom accommodations at Christchurch Old Hall should be produced in court. She did not even see why they should want to know that, upon a certain occasion, the drawing-room door was locked. It made her laugh; it appeared to be all so senseless that grown people should occupy themselves with such matters. (gs 171–72) Like Dowell, Nancy is a naive reader. She is unable to understand what the proceedings of the divorce hearing concern, unaware of the (indecent) sexual reality behind the mundane questions about locked doors and the geography of bedroom locations. But as she reads the newspaper accounts of the Brand divorce, a gap opens between appearance and reality, like the gap Dowell discovers between his experience of “those nine years of uninterrupted tranquility” and its reality. Nancy had always understood the Brands to be a happily married couple, Yet there it was – in black and white. Mr Brand drank; Mr Brand had struck Mrs Brand to the ground when he was drunk. Mr Brand was adjudged, in

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two or three abrupt words, at the end of the columns and ­columns of paper, to have been guilty of cruelty to his wife and to have committed adultery with Miss Lupton. The last words conveyed nothing to Nancy – nothing real, that is to say. She knew that one was commanded not to commit adultery – but why, she thought, should one? (gs 171–72) Reading opens up the space of sexual desire precisely in what it refuses to represent. In the euphemisms of the newspaper’s account of locked doors is something else entirely which the paper cannot capture – sexual desire as such. It is not, in fact, adultery per se which upsets Nancy. The word adultery “conveyed nothing to Nancy – nothing real, that is to say.” Nancy understands, in some sense, what the word “adultery” means. What she doesn’t understand is the desire behind it. “She knew that one was commanded not to commit adultery – but why, she thought, should one?” It is not, therefore, simply a gap between appearance and reality which proves so ­troubling – but something which operates in that gap. Indeed, what troubles Nancy is not sex so much as desire itself. Nancy doesn’t seem to understand what sex really is. As we learn later, Nancy “offers herself” to Ashburnham without really understanding what she is doing. “She said: ‘I can never love you now I know the kind of man you are. I will belong to you to save your life…’ It was a fantastic display of cruelty. She didn’t in the least know what it meant – to belong to a man” (189). Similarly, when Nancy receives a letter from her mother, she is unable to understand precisely what it means: Then came the desperate shock of the letter from her mother. Her mother said, I believe, something like: ‘You have no right to go on living your life of prosperity and respect. You ought to be on the streets with me…’ She did not know what these words meant. She thought of her mother as sleeping beneath the arches whilst the snow fell. That was the impression conveyed to her mind by the words ‘on the streets.’ (gs 145) What sex is, and the euphemisms through which it is spoken about, are lost on Nancy, but what she already understands is desire. And with this recognition of desire, as a force that upsets any easy equivalence between appearance and reality, the simple fullness of meaning in ­Nancy’s symbolic universe is drained away. The andirons with the brass flowers at the ends appeared unreal; the burning logs were just logs that were burning and not the comfortable symbols of an indestructible mode of life. The flame fluttered before

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the high fireback; the St Bernard sighed in his sleep. Outside the winter rain fell and fell. And suddenly she thought that Edward might marry someone else; and she nearly screamed. (gs 173) As she stares at the fireplace, appearance is severed from reality – what was once a comforting symbol, becoming a mere appearance. The operation of desire is what breaks the two apart; just as a marriage is not, as Nancy had supposed, a necessarily eternal commitment, so the fireplace becomes, not a symbol of domestic happiness – “an indestructible mode of life.” Like Dowell, Nancy must confront obscenity as the disparity between appearance and reality introduced by sexual desire. Dowell’s solution to this gaping disparity is (like Marlow’s in Heart of Darkness) to narrate the events – to imagine himself talking to an individual. Nancy instead relies on religion. Divorce and adultery portend the unravelling of Nancy’s entire understanding of the world. Leonora is able to briefly allay her fears through reference to the Church. “I thought you were married or not married as you are alive or dead,” Nancy says to Leonora. “‘That’, Leonora said, ‘is the law of the Church. It is not the law of the land….’” And with this, Nancy “felt a sudden safeness descend upon her, and for an hour or so her mind was at rest” (gs 174). This rest does not last, of course. With the realization that Edward, like the Brands, is a Protestant it ultimately proves too much for her, the torturing conviction came to her – the conviction that had visited her again and again – that Edward must love someone other than Leonora. With her little, pedagogic sectarianism she remembered that Catholics do not do this thing. But Edward was a Protestant. Then Edward loved somebody…. gs 176, original ellipsis

The trauma of this realization for Nancy inheres not in what it reveals about Edward, but in what it reveals about Nancy’s own desire. If Edward could marry someone else, then he could marry Nancy. And this, of course, is what Nancy both intensely desires and cannot admit. After first reading the newspaper account of the Brand divorce, Nancy wonders, “If he [Ashburnham] could love someone else than Leonora, her fierce unknown heart suddenly spoke in her side, why could it not be herself?” (gs 173). When Nancy learns of Ashburnham’s suicide, and her desire is definitively thwarted, she descends into madness; the fragment of the Nicene creed she utters marks her futile attempt to restore to wholeness her shattered experience (183). And indeed, each of the characters in the novel similarly seeks to suture the gap between ­appearance

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and reality represented by their own desire; each of the characters, that is, ­except John Dowell himself. Dowell, in his very narration, manages to negotiate another relationship to his desire.

“It is beyond me”: Two Approaches to Desire in Modern Literature Well, it is all over. Not one of us has got what he really wanted. Leonora wanted Edward and she has got Rodney Bayham, a pleasant enough sort of sheep. Florence wanted Branshaw, and it is I who have bought it from Leonora. I didn’t really want it; what I wanted mostly was to cease being a nurse-attendant. Well, I am a nurse-attendant. Edward wanted Nancy Rufford, and I have got her. Only she is mad. It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me. (gs 185)

In closing, Dowell turns his narrative over to the reader. He does not pretend to be able to explain it all. Rather, he insists, “it is beyond me.” This, in fact, is the attitude Dowell has come to assume towards his own desire. And while Dowell suggests that he, like Florence, Ashburnham, and Leonora, has not gotten what (he thinks) he wants, unlike them, he also realizes his own alienation from his desire. Elsewhere he professes himself still quite ignorant in matters of sex. “Of the question of the sex-instinct I know very little and I do not think that it counts for very much in a really great passion. It can be aroused by such nothings – by an untied shoe-lace, by a glance of the eye in passing – that I think it might be left out of the calculation.” Desire is so peculiar, Dowell suggests, that it cannot be comprehended. What can be understood, though, is the role such desire comes to play, in the shoring up of our fragile identities. “We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist” (97). It is possible to read this passage as expressing a pathological incapability for passion (to paraphrase Schorer). Yet the remainder of the novel, the stories of Ashburnham, Florence, Leonora, and Nancy, seem to support Dowell’s point. Unlike these other characters, though, Dowell comes to assume his own desire precisely as that which is most alien to him; “it is beyond me.” After Florence dies, for example, Dowell remarks: “Now I can marry the girl.” “Now that is to me a very amazing thing – amazing for the light of possibilities that it casts into the human heart.

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For I had never had the slightest conscious idea of marrying the girl; I never had the slightest idea of even caring for her. I must have talked in an odd way, as people do who are recovering from an anaesthetic. It is as if one had a dual personality, the one I being entirely unconscious of the other. (gs 89) So too, Dowell suggests, he may harbor some unconscious anger towards Ashburnham. “Perhaps one day when I am unconscious or walking in my sleep I may go and spit upon poor Edward’s grave. It seems about the most unlikely thing I could do; but there it is” (gs 90). Or, much earlier in the novel, Dowell confesses, I don’t know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness. (19) It is passages like this one that show Dowell to be more than some mere dupe of the novel, the object of ironic disdain. Dowell’s question is a real and salient one. The answer, however, he turns over to the reader. Placing The Good Soldier alongside “Ulysses and the Handling of Indecencies” allows us to see both of these works as responding to a single contradiction: how does one offer a faithful representation of lived experience in a ­context where certain matters are deemed indecent or obscene? What both The Good Soldier and Ulysses share, from Ford’s perspective, what makes them both European works in English, is an attempt to escape convention to provide a truer account of human experience – and therefore to address the place of desire in social life. Where they differ is in how they answer this question. Joyce’s novel imagines that desire, if the strictures of decency are discarded, may be represented. Ulysses textualizes individual experience, imagining that desire is itself textual. Ford’s novel, by contrast, offers a sort of via negativa, treating desire as necessarily opaque. In place of obscenity, or indecency, The Good Soldier offers the labor of writing, a labor which, at its very best, can never achieve full representation of desire but only gesture toward it. From Ford’s perspective, instead of the indecency of Ulysses, The Good Soldier offers ineffability. This difference is best captured in the contrast between Joyce’s stream of consciousness and Dowell’s writing. Ulysses offers a representation of subjectivity as itself textual; but it cannot be understood, even metaphorically, as the writing of a character’s consciousness. Joyce suggests that meaning

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(as textuality) inheres in the very fabric of experience itself. Experience in general, including desire, is essentially textual and therefore capable of being narrated. Obscenity, therefore, emerges in Joyce as a species of truth; Joyce’s text includes “indecencies” in order to provide the truest possible representation. In Ford, only characters write – but experience itself is something else, a “darkness” inaccessible to writing, structured by desires that it may not be possible to ever fully excavate. If obscenity has a presence, therefore, it as an absence. The distance here between Ford’s impressionism, and Joyce’s stream of consciousness, is enormous. John Dowell’s narration allegorizes the conflicted place of the novel, from Ford’s perspective, at the start of the twentieth century – committed to the most faithful possible representation of human experience yet without the means of providing that representation. Ford himself seems to acknowledge that his version of novelistic representation was being superseded by Joyce’s in a 1922 letter to Edgar Jepson, “personally I’m quite content to leave to Joyce the leading novelist-ship of this country, think he deserves the position, and hope it will profit him” (Letters 143). And today it is easy, reading The Good Soldier in the wake of Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Ulysses, to see Ford’s novel as comparatively old fashioned. However, it is also worth resisting, if only temporarily, the too easy judgments of literary history. For in the difference between Ford’s and Joyce’s response to obscenity, are two very different attitudes towards desire. If Joyce offers experience as always already a text, The Good Soldier posits desire as being profoundly inaccessible to such a text. Dowell finally represents desire not by placing it inside his text, by writing obscenity, but by turning the text over to the reader. Acknowledgement For their readings and advice with earlier versions of this essay I would like to thank Michael Levenson, Wesley King, Nathan Raigan, David Sigler, and Scott Selisker. Works Cited Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971. Cassell, Richard A., ed. Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford. Boston, MA: G. K. Hall & Co, 1987.

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Dreiser, Theodore. “The Saddest Story” review of The Good Soldier. In Cassell (1987): 41–44. Ford, Ford Madox. Critical Essays. Ed. Max Saunders and Richard Stang. Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2002a. Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier. London: Penguin, 2002b. Ford, Ford Madox. Letters of Ford Madox Ford. Ed. Richard M. Ludwig. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. “Frank.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Print. Hynes, Samuel. “The Epistemology of The Good Soldier” in Cassell (1987): 49–56. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. NY: W. W. Norton and Co., 2006. Schorer, Mark. “The Good Soldier: an Interpretation” in Cassell (1987): 44–48. Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction” in The Common Reader: First Series Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1984. 146–54.

chapter 12

“A Family Romance”: Oedipal Melancholia and Masochism in The Good Soldier Marc Ouellette Abstract The reliability of John Dowell as a narrator in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier has been variously discussed, however, this essay examines the reliability of John Dowell with respect to his Oedipal motivations. The fact that Freud mostly ignored the fantasies that parents direct toward their children could be one explanation for the growing interest in recent psychoanalytic research. The essay addresses the social commentary in the novel through the Freudian paradigm rather than the relationships among the characters in it.

Keywords Freud – Oedipus complex – moral masochism – melancholia – adoption – The Good Soldier

Much has been written about the reliability of John Dowell as a narrator in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. However, only one of the more than 100 citations in the mla Bibliography, since 1963, even mentions the existence of the Oedipus Complex in the novel. That article addresses the extent of the social commentary in the novel rather than considering the relationships among the characters in it. Further, no one has examined the reliability of John Dowell with respect to his Oedipal motivations. This gap in the available criticism may be due, in part, to the fact that Freud largely ignored the fantasies and impulses that parents direct toward their children (Brinich 194). Only recently have these urges begun to be examined in psychoanalytic terms. The fact that Leonora and Edward are symbolically the adoptive parents of Dowell and Nancy Rufford does, indeed, fit the Freudian paradigm with respect to adoption fantasies involving idealized parents. Moreover, Edward and Leonora act aggressively towards the others.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004344143_014

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When speaking of Dowell, John G. Hessler observes, “His narrative stance is, ultimately, an emotional strategy of evasion,” without so much as hinting at what or why Dowell would be evading (53). Similarly, Frank Nigro adds to the discussion begun by Hessler: Considering The Good Soldier as Ford’s narrator wants us to consider it […] leads to wide implications for the work as a whole. John Dowell ceases to be only an “unreliable narrator” as the term is commonly understood; he becomes instead an incompetent narrator resorting to seemingly haphazard narrative techniques; and through his incompetence […] Ford suggests that Dowell really does have something he wishes to cover up. (389) Neither Nigro nor Hessler, nor anyone other than Bruce Bassoff, considers the possibility that an Oedipal motivation directs Dowell’s narrative. It is worth noting that Nigro questions whether Ford agrees with Dowell. In so doing, Nigro also suggests that Dowell wishes to hide or obscure a deviant form of morality. Although he does not pursue its psychic dimension, Nigro’s observation regarding Dowell’s morality has significance in terms of an Oedipal structure for the narration. Regarding morality, Kaja Silverman observes, “Perversion always contains the trace of Oedipus within it – it is always organized to some degree by what it subverts” (186). Therefore, tracing the Oedipal dimensions of the novel and their effects comprises the first section of my analysis and occasions a subsequent investigation into Dowell’s underlying motivations. Silverman revises Freud’s version of the Oedipal struggle to account more fully for the variants of masochism, including the “moral masochist,” who “has been subordinated to prohibition and denial” and its derivative, the “Christian masochist” (192, 197). It is worth recalling that Freud posits a masochistic component to melancholy and that Dowell spends much of the “saddest story” acknowledging his own failure to grieve: the very definition of melancholy. If the source of the masochism is Dowell’s melancholy, there is then no greater instance of prohibition and denial than Dowell’s sexless marriage. Moreover, the moral masochist is one who lives in suspense, but without the promise of a redemptive end-pleasure. Here suspense has a double face. It signifies both the endless postponement of libidinal gratification, and the perpetual state of anxiety and apprehension which is the result of that renunciation and of the super-ego’s relentless surveillance. silverman 200

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His moral masochism inspires Dowell’s elopement and the relationships which follow. The failed grieving of his melancholy which is revealed in the many repetitions and the admissions of not knowing and of not understanding also encompasses his attempt to repress the ambivalent feelings he has for Leonora and for Edward. Clearly, Dowell’s inability to resolve his struggle results in an unreliable narrative. Additionally, the parts of the narrative which address Edward, Leonora, and Nancy’s motivations can be read as either Oedipal in nature, or as Dowell’s projection of his own Oedipal desires, or as both. To successfully conceal his own desires, Dowell must also avoid the truth about their desires, most notably Edward’s. Thus, Dowell’s unreliable narration and his sexless marriage are more than connected; they are part of the same process.

The Cleanness of My Thoughts: Oedipal Figurations

Freud makes us aware of the reality that children have powerful drives, especially sexual and aggressive ones. Often, these developing drives are directed toward the child’s parents. Fantasies about adoption frequently occur in the attempt to resolve early feelings. If the fantasies involve having been adopted, the imaginary “real” parents are idealized; the reverse is also true. Paul Brinich explains that Fantasies of adoption allow us to express both love and hate at the same time, and to direct these feelings toward different aspects of our parents – these aspects being represented by the two sets of parents included within the ‘family romance.’ (194) Ford then constructs his own version of the family romance through Nancy and Dowell’s adoption of/adoption by Edward and Leonora Ashburnham. By way of introduction, Dowell immediately identifies Nancy as the adopted child of Edward and Leonora: Nancy Rufford was her name; she was Leonora’s only friend’s only child, and Leonora was her guardian, if that is the correct term. She had lived with the Ashburnhams ever since she had been of the age of thirteen, when her mother was said to have committed suicide owing to the brutalities of her father. (gs 79)1 1 Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier. London, uk: Penguin, 2002. All further references to the novel will be indicated by gs in parentheses and will refer to this edition.

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Nancy replaces her own less than ideal parents with Edward and Leonora and idealizes them. Colonel Rufford is said to have a terrible temper; his wife is described as “cruel-tongued” (gs 95). It should not be surprising that Nancy “adored Edward Ashburnham [as] the model of humanity […] the father of his country, the law-giver” (95). In a very real sense, Edward and Leonora are the only parents Nancy knows or recognizes. These feelings are indeed mutual, for “Edward and Leonora really regarded the girl as their daughter” (103). Ultimately, Nancy’s Oedipal love for Edward manifests itself, or this is how Dowell frames it based on his own understanding of the situation, an understanding rooted in his own Oedipal repression, which pointedly recognizes Edward as the “law-giver.” For example, Dowell remarks that “Nancy was always trying to go off alone with Edward” (103). Certainly, if Dowell’s reliability is at stake this statement almost sounds like victim blaming in contrast to his idealizations of girl. However, Dowell’s oscillations are very much in line with his attraction/ repulsion regarding Florence and Edward. Even so, Nancy even manages an obviously Oedipal fantasy of Edward in which she felt like a person who is burning up with a flame; desiccating at the soul with thirst; withering up in the vitals […] she gave way to the thought that she was in Edward’s arms; that he was kissing her on her face, that burned; on her shoulders, that burned, and on her neck, that was on fire. (176–77) Nancy, we are told, never touched alcohol again after this episode. The alcohol removed the inhibitions regarding the desires she wishes to repress. These desires “died out of her mind” (gs 177). Though she does not actually know where “the vitals” are, Nancy exhibits an Oedipal passion for Edward which he returns. Edward reciprocates Nancy’s feelings and yet he tries rather unsuccessfully to suppress them. It is his failure which eventually leads Leonora to sacrifice Nancy – as Laius and Jocasta intended with Oedipus – in an attempt to save her marriage and to comply with Catholic doctrines. Before killing himself, Edward admits to Dowell, “I am so desperately in love with Nancy Rufford that I am dying of it” (gs 194). This is not a parental love; rather, it is an incestuous love which Edward has been denying. Edward comes to the realization that his love is improper when he tells Nancy she is “the person he cared for most in the world” (96). Nancy thinks he means to say “except Leonora”; Edward means otherwise because “when he realized what he was doing, [he] curbed his tongue at once” (96). As the adult, Edward recognizes the moral ramifications of what he is saying and so he tries to convince himself not to feel that

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way. Dowell relates, “Had he been conscious of it, he assured me, he would have fled from it as from a thing accursed […] But the real point was his entire unconsciousness […] He was very careful to assure me that at that time there was no physical motive” (94). It is this realization of conscious/unconscious feelings for Nancy that drives Edward to kill himself. He is not so much trying to convince Dowell as he is himself of the purity of his intentions. Edward’s love for Nancy is the most sinister example of the many similar infidelities he commits with the girl on the train, Maisie, and Florence. Leonora thrusts Nancy onto Edward in the hope that he will become aware of the impact of his actions. Indeed, he kills himself when he recognizes that he is trapped morally and financially. Nancy rightly feels like a “shuttlecock” because she has been sacrificed to Edward by Leonora (gs 196). It is likely, then, that her madness following Edward’s death results from the inability to properly resolve the Oedipal fantasies she has been repressing. Edward convinces Dowell more successfully than he convinces himself. If Dowell acknowledges Edward’s impropriety in regard to Nancy, then he must also acknowledge his own Oedipal ambitions. Therefore, Dowell only admits “I feel myself forced to attempt to excuse him in this as in so many other things […] I think Edward had no idea at all of corrupting her” (96). Dowell shares Nancy’s views of Edward as a father-figure. In the story of the young girl accused of murdering her child, Dowell describes Edward as an idealized, universal father. He characterizes Edward as “the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the fair-dealing, fair-thinking, public character” (78). Edward is the father-figure for his regiment as well, looking after their families, and twice saving men from drowning. In contrast, Dowell never really acknowledges his own biological family. They are replaced by Edward and Leonora. Dowell asserts, “I can’t conceal from myself that I loved Edward Ashburnham–and that I love him because he was just myself” (gs 197). In truth, Edward is nothing like John Dowell. He is what John Dowell aspires to be, for in the next breath Dowell says “If I had had the courage and the virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done what he did” (197). Beyond courage, virility, and physique, there is almost nothing left to emulate. Dowell is not Edward, but he wishes he were. The quality Dowell most wishes to possess is Edward’s way with women. He equates this style to a juggler “who throws up sixteen balls at once and they all drop into his pockets” (31). Dowell wants it to be that way for him too. Since nothing will happen with Florence, his “unattained mistress,” Dowell turns his attentions to the women he perceives to be the objects of Edward’s desires: Leonora and Nancy (45). Ultimately, Dowell replaces Edward after the death of the latter.

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Dowell first directs his gaze toward Leonora. This is very much in keeping with the Oedipal construction since Leonora, as Edward’s wife, becomes Dowell’s adoptive mother. Dowell’s feelings for Leonora are marked by much ambivalence which is characteristic of an (unconscious) recognition of the impropriety of such desires. After Edward’s death, Dowell remarks, “I cannot conceal from myself that I now dislike Leonora. Without a doubt I am jealous of Rodney Bayham, But I don’t know …” (gs 196). If Dowell truly dislikes Leonora, then he has no reason to be jealous of Rodney Bayham. However, Bayham has displaced Edward, and Dowell, as the (potential) object of Leonora’s affections. This intervention arrests Dowell’s development so that he is unable to resolve his emotions. He echoes the previous statement, but with a different emphasis when he declares, “Leonora rather dislikes me because she has got it into her head that I disapprove of her marriage. Possibly I am jealous” (gs 185). Dowell bandies the matter about in his mind, placing the onus alternately on Leonora and himself in an attempt to settle the conflict. His unconscious recognition of the taboo against desire manifests itself in the following admission: I loved Leonora always and to-day, I would very cheerfully lay down my life, what is left of it, in her service. But I am sure I never had the beginnings of a trace of what is called the sex instinct towards her. And I suppose – no I am certain that she never had it towards me. As far as I am concerned I think it was those white shoulders that did it. I seemed to feel when I looked upon them, they would be slightly cold […] I seemed to feel chilled at the end of my lips when I looked at her …(33) Dowell makes an effort to convince himself that he has no desire for Leonora­ by describing a fantasy very similar to Nancy’s fantasy of Edward, so that Edward­and Leonora function more like parents than as acquaintances or romantic partners. The chill he feels originates in his punishing superego. As he frequently does when offering details about his own potential for heightened emotion, as in his admission of jealous, Dowell’s account fades into an ellipsis, which indicates that there is more to say on the subject, but either he cannot or he will not go into further details. He also tries to assure himself that Leonora does not care for him in order to help the repression along. This would not matter if there were nothing to repress. Dowell is never able to displace Edward, or Rodney Bayham, to fulfill his (repressed) ambition for Leonora. Instead, he turns his attentions to the remaining available facets of Edward’s life. Dowell makes no secret of his intention to take Nancy away. He utters to Leonora, “Now I can marry the girl”

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(gs 89, 93). Since Florence is dead, Dowell has no moral or legal impediment in the way of his desire to possess Nancy. He is triumphant in his quest to replace Edward, for, after Edward’s death, Dowell purchases Branshaw from Leonora and assumes guardianship of Nancy. Indeed, it is Leonora who puts the idea into Dowell’s head as a way of sacrificing the girl for the sake of her own (re-) marriage. However, Nancy’s madness complicates the situation so that Dowell is forced to be a nurse as he has been for Florence. Unfortunately, he assumes Edward’s role so well that he is now the father figure for Nancy. He can never truly possess her, and so he tries to repress his craving for her: Of course you have the makings of a situation here, but it is all very humdrum, as far as I am concerned. I should marry Nancy if her reason were ever sufficiently restored to let her appreciate the meaning of the Anglican marriage service. But it is probable that her reason will never be sufficiently restored to let her appreciate the meaning of the Anglican marriage service. Therefore I cannot marry her, according to the law of the land. (184–85) Dowell obviously aims to persuade himself not to marry Nancy. If the situation were truly “humdrum,” he would certainly not need to repeat the portion regarding the “Anglican marriage service.” Further, Nancy is a Catholic and Dowell is a Quaker. Edward is the Anglican in the story. Dowell has even taken on Edward’s religion, a religion which might allow divorce. This is significant when the last line of the passage is compared to Leonora’s admonition to Nancy about “the law of the church” as opposed to “the law of the land” (gs 174). In this case, the land means England, which Dowell adopts in deference to Edward. Having consciously bypassed the morality of the church, Dowell’s unconscious needs the blockade of the seemingly more immutable law of the land. This law applies to all rather than the select few members of a particular denomination. The effect of the law on Dowell, he hopes, is the same as the effect of Catholicism’s morality on Leonora. His impure intentions–lust for the helpless child he now attends–might be repressed. Edward’s death provides the mechanism by which Dowell succeeds him as the master of Branshaw and the guardian of Nancy. This is much like Oedipus becoming the king of Thebes following Laius’ death. Dowell’s role in Edward’s death furnishes additional clues regarding the Oedipal nature of their relationship and helps to explain the seemingly paradoxical statements Dowell makes about Edward. Rather than actively causing Edward’s demise, Dowell acts out of complicity. Dowell explains that “he looked at me with a direct, challenging, brow-beating glare. I guess he could see in my eyes that I didn’t intend

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to h ­ inder him. Why should I hinder him?” (gs 198). Dowell’s description of Edward’s glare as being “brow-beating” presents a paternalistic image of Ashburnham. Thus, Edward’s aggressive, reproachful stare stands for the threat of paternal violence, which is one of the methods of repressing Oedipal desires. As with Edward’s advances on Nancy, his aggression toward Dowell is typical since “real, actual violations of the Oedipal taboos usually begin with the adult participants (that is, Laius and Jocasta),” or, in this story, Edward and Leonora (Brinich 197). The presence of Edward’s knife recalls Dowell’s earlier fantasy that “it would have been better in the eyes of God if they had all attempted to gouge out each other’s eyes with carving knives” (gs 193). Dowell’s­ dream is a blatant allusion to the Sophoclean tragedy’s ending in which Oedipus stabs out his own eyes. Oedipus blinds himself to avoid seeing the moral degradation which has transpired. After deciding not to hinder Edward, Dowell admits, “I didn’t think he was wanted in the world […] that that poor devil should go on suffering” (198). The paradox of the assertion is that someone as good as Edward deserves to die. Bassoff best explains the paradox as “an idealized view of someone who is too good for the world and a devious rebellion against his overbearing figure” (47). According to Bassoff, Dowell becomes a “passive-aggressive” Oedipus. Edward is the model father for whom Dowell still feels Oedipal ambivalence. Dowell hints at these emotions much earlier when he considers the possibility of Edward’s transfer to the Transvaal. Amazingly, Dowell remarks “It would have done him a great deal of good to get killed” (gs 137). In light of what finally occurs, Dowell’s true state of mind presents itself. While Dowell does love and admire Edward, he also wishes to be Edward. In order to be Edward, physically and psychically, Edward must be removed, which occurs once he is removed by his own hand. Indeed, as will be discussed later, Dowell slides into this position almost naturally since the (paternal) threat of castration precedes his relationship with Edward in the form of his emasculating marriage to Florence.

The Beginnings of a Trace: Melancholy and Masochism

Dowell’s sexless relationships pose potential pitfalls for anyone attempting to understand the narrator and his motives. Here, I would like to delve deeper into an Oedipal reading and offer Freud’s essay on “Mourning and Melancholia” as an entry point for a final reflection on Dowell. As the internalization of grief, melancholia has a masochistic component, and it is in masochism that one most pointedly finds the subject’s superego assuming the role of the parent. The basis for mourning and for melancholia, Freud explains, is a love

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o­ bject that has been lost (251). Whereas mourning is an externalized condition, melancholia’s internal functioning reflects a situation in which the missing object is something lacking in the melancholic person him or herself. For Freud, the key distinguishing characteristics of melancholia include the “loss of the capacity to love [and] the inhibition of all [libidinous] activity” (252). Dowell’s narration contains multiple layered overtones of sorrow and mourning. Even so, his view of himself compared to Edward stands out among the list. For example, Dowell writes of Edward, “I suppose he regarded me not so much as a man” (gs 30). One must keep in mind, though, that this is not Edward’s actual view of Dowell; instead we have Dowell seeing himself as he imagines Edward perceives him. The distinction is important because it represents Dowell’s internalization of an (overbearing) parent’s judgments. In keeping with Freud’s finding of a cessation of love and libido, the narrator’s supposition regarding Edward’s esteem proceeds into Dowell’s earlier cited feelings for Leonora (gs 33). Like a good soldier – that is, the man he hopes to be – Dowell would lay down his life for Leonora. In addition, the layering of the affects continues in Dowell’s claims, “what is left of it,” and “beginnings of a trace.” The former could refer to the remaining years of his life, but given Dowell’s tendencies, one might also discern a hint of self-pity in his tone. In the context of his presumed inferiority he means to say, “my life, such as it is.” In the second case, the phrasing offers a double denial. It would have been more than adequate to use either descriptor. In other words, the doubling acts as a further internalization of his self-abnegation. So strong is Dowell’s melancholia that others believe he is, in fact, mourning – or at least he is sure they do. One month after Edward’s funeral, Dowell recalls his conversation with Leonora only two hours after Florence’s funeral. Dowell observes, “She had, then, taken it for granted that I had been suffering all that she had been suffering” (gs 89). However, this was not the case. Florence and Edward figure as losses for which Dowell neither grieves nor mourns. Yet, he still lacks certainty regarding his feelings, their source, and his awareness of them, for he claims, “Perhaps one day when I am unconscious or walking in my sleep I may go and spit upon poor Edward’s grave. It seems about the most unlikely thing to do; but there it is” (90). When Dowell explains that his unconscious self – his sleeping, dreaming self – might spit on Edward’s grave, he does so, quite contradictorily, in a conscious state. Dowell’s confusion also presents itself in the omnipresent reference to “poor” Edward, not to mention his preceding acquiescence that it was the misfortune that Florence was Edward’s mistress which occasioned his meeting Leonora and Nancy.

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It is well worth noting that Freud posits a contradictory aspect to the hallucinatory role of melancholia. The lowering of libido and the cessation of affection are accompanied by a “a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterances in self-reproaches and self-revilings [culminating] in a delusional expectation of punishment” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 252). This is significant because the conflicting impulses bring previously hidden or suppressed feelings into consciousness. In Dowell’s case, the most notable instance of the process Freud outlines has to be the disrespect aimed at Edward’s grave, which stands as a symbol of Edward rather than the man himself. As well, this reflects Dowell’s conflicting feelings regarding Edward. Even in his moment of wanting to be angry with Edward, Dowell calls it an unconscious urge and then doubts that he could even carry out the act. Finally, the infantile gesture of spitting takes the place of vocalizing the suppressed feelings. So, the loveless marriage provides the source of Dowell’s loss, which in turn causes him to lose and/or suppress his identity as a sexual entity. Thus, he does not mourn anyone but rather his feelings can be read as melancholia produced by his failed affiliations with both his wife (of whom more will be said) and with Edward. With the opportunities for expression of libidinal impulses denied, Dowell’s­ sexual self similarly dies. Rose de Angelis claims that Dowell “offers coded disclosures of his homosexual desire, often disguising his love for Edward under the guise of shared hetero-love or the homosocial affiliation that perpetuates male entitlement” (2007: 426). While the consummation trope can be delayed endlessly through the insertion of a homosexual character, de Angelis’ argument is not altogether dissonant with my own and in fact confirms my assertion­that Dowell’s circuitous and confused negotiation of an Oedipalized relationship contributes to his contradictory feelings towards his social sphere. Based on the recognition that melancholia is the unfinished process of grieving, Judith Butler ascribes a melancholic state to masculinity, in general. This occurs, Butler explains, because “gender is acquired through the repudiation of homosexual attachments,” which results in a “melancholic identity” (1995: 25). In this formulation, homosexual (and/or homosocial) attachments cannot be mourned because of the cultural prohibitions against homosexuality and so become internalized. The critical linkage between melancholia and the Oedipal dynamic occurs through the masochistic tendency of the melancholic – the self-reproaches and the self-revilings Freud attributes to the state. For her part, de Angelis considers only the masochism required of Leonora in her marriage to Edward and which manifests itself in her violence toward Mrs. Maidan and others (since the masochist is always already a sadist) (2007: 440). She does not consider

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Dowell’s similar behaviours, for while he does not commit physical violence, his propensity for exchange-based relationships and his fantasies demonstrate an instrumental violence. Further, Dowell’s clinging to Florence and to Edward can be described as exhibiting a masochistic tendency. Kaja Silverman describes the masochistic as the product of a negative Oedipal scenario, which results in identification with the mother and desire for the father (1992: 195, 212). If my Oedipal formulation of Edward as a father-figure is accurate, then Florence functions as a kind of mother figure for Dowell. In his most elaborate discussion of the “sex instinct,” Dowell concludes: But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man, is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. (gs 97) As with his other discussions of sexuality, Dowell admits that he has no desires of his own, although he assumes sex might occur within a marriage. In his description of his ideal version of love, though, Dowell describes identification with his partner as the ultimate desire rather than obtaining libidinous gratification. He actually craves the sexless marriage he enters. In her discussion of masochism, Kaja Silverman explains that the Christian masochist’s experience requires an external audience, the body of the masochist to be on display and the organizing fantasy or central image of Christ’s crucifixion. Simply put, “What is being beaten here […] is not so much the body as the ‘flesh,’ and beyond that sin itself, and the whole fallen world” (1992: 197). Furthermore, the “exemplary Christian masochist also seeks to remake him or herself according to the model of the suffering Christ, the very picture of divestiture and loss” (198). In his quest to be seen making great sacrifices, “the masochist rushes toward the punishment he or she fears in order to get it over with as quickly as possible” (199). Dowell’s description of his extraordinarily brief courtship with Florence provides evidence of each of Silverman’s tenets. I procured at once the name of the nearest minister and a rope ladder. […] I suppose it was my own fault, what followed. At any rate, I was in such a hurry to get the wedding over, and was so afraid of her relatives finding me there, that I must have received her advances with a certain amount of absence of mind. I was out of that room and down the ladder in under half a minute. She kept me waiting at the foot an unconscionable time – it was certainly three in the morning before we woke up the minister. […] I fancy that, if I had shown warmth then, she would have

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acted the proper wife to me, or would have put me back again. But, because I acted like a Philadelphia gentleman, she made me, I suppose, go through with the part of a male nurse. (gs 71) So while he was afraid of her relatives, they went on a cruise immediately. Dowell rushes into the relationship and does so very publicly. The common knowledge of Dowell’s sexless marriage continues throughout his relationship with the Ashburnhams, and clearly Florence’s affairs – with Jimmy and with Edward – were well known among their circle. Finally, the reference to being a “Philadelphia gentleman” alludes to his earlier-cited Quaker upbringing, an upbringing based on sacrifice and on self-denial in order to achieve a more Christ-like existence (gs 14, 53). It is worth recalling that prior to the elopement, Florence attempts to initiate contact with Dowell. He coldly refers to it as “the first time I had ever been embraced by a woman – and it was the last when a woman’s embrace has had in it any warmth for me…” (gs 71). The trailing ellipsis in Dowell’s description indicates a slippage between this scene and his succeeding description of the rush to be wed. More could be said, but Dowell chooses silence. In Silverman’s terms, the masochist’s insistence on identification in place of physical love “implies the complete and utter negation of all phallic values [and] Christian masochism has radically emasculating implications, and is in its purest form intrinsically incompatible with the pretensions of masculinity” (1992: 198). Many will cite Dowell’s admission, “I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham – and that I love him because he was just myself” (gs 197). However, Dowell follows this with a list of his shortcomings in comparison to Edward. He refers to Edward as “a large elder brother”; that is to say, a masculine model (197). As Bob Bassoff notes, “Dowell’s over-estimation of his model is such that his desire is never fully drawn to the women designated by Ashburnham but remains partially fixed on Ashburnham himself” (1988: 43). Bassoff’s observation reflects the reversed priorities of the negative Oedipus complex Silverman attributes to the Christian masochist. At the same time, Dowell’s problems, like those of any Christian masochist are amplified by the fact that the castrated figure is a man because the castration is embodied rather than figured in and through the feminine. In this regard, Silverman concludes that Christianity contains its own limiting structure for male masochism, the Oedipal narrative of Christ as son of God: “Christianity […] redefines the paternal legacy; it is after all through the assumptions of his place within the divine family that Christ comes to be installed in a suffering and castrated position” (1992: 198). This strategy provides a corrective for the potentiality of the radical meanings Christ generates as both model of identification and object of desire. Dowell’s frequent references to Edward being­

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the one who made a great sacrifice no longer puzzle in this reading. Dowell’s references to Edward’s suffering constitute an apotheosis of sorts. Most pointedly, Dowell muses, “I seem to see poor Edward, naked and reclining­amidst darkness, upon cold rocks, like one of the ancient Greek damned, in Tartarus or wherever it was” (gs 196). This is conceivably an allusion to the myth of Sisyphus, who revealed Zeus’s kidnapping of Aegina’s daughter and was punished for it with an eternity of repeating an onerous, monotonous task. It stands as an ultimate measure of self-sacrifice but also foreshadows the cost of giving oneself up freely for the benefit of others. By forgiving Edward and by assuming care for Nancy, then, Dowell is by far the better, and the more Christ-like, man and so replaces him completely. Thus, among the available connections, Edward’s quotation from Swinburne, “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean,” signals Ashburnham’s resignation and it resonates with Nancy’s incoherent utterances regarding an “Omnipotent Deity” (gs 195, 178). However, it also seems to refer to Dowell’s character, which matches the dullness – a Sisyphean dullness, at that – of the Victorians against whom Swinburne railed. In addition to the emasculation Dowell endures through his wife’s infidelities, all of the religious impediments involved in the novel add another layer of complexity to Dowell’s troubled moralizing. Stepping outside her argument about Dowell’s homosexuality, de Angelis writes, “by vilifying his adulterous wife, Dowell can remain true to his Puritan ideal of sexual morality” (2007: 430). As a product of a culture of self-abnegation, Dowell’s attempt to achieve a more Christ-like identity further necessitates his asexuality. He explains that his relationship with Leonora became “a parsley crown that is the symbol of [a hero’s] chastity, his soberness, his abstentions, and of his inflexible will” (gs 77). Symbolically, the crown recalls the crown of thorns. The remaining qualities provide further signals of the attempt to mimic Christ but also provide an acknowledgement by Dowell of his need for an audience and for recognition of his commitment and of his masochism. In the end, Florence and Nancy are “crosses” Dowell chooses to bear. Contrary to his statement, “Not one of us has got what he really wanted,” Dowell as melancholic receives precisely what he wants (gs 185). His masochism ensures it.

I Also am a Sentimentalist: Conclusion

Clearly, Leonora and Edward regard Nancy as their daughter. Dowell’s eventual replacement of Edward as Nancy’s care-giver completes at least a portion of

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the Oedipal relationship between the men. Considering Dowell’s marriage in Freudian terms, as an abstracted loss of a sexual self, is supported by Freud’s emphasis on both self-punishment of melancholia and on what he calls the melancholic’s “hallucinatory wishful psychosis” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 253). Dowell’s conflicting fantasies regarding Edward, especially, can be read as reflecting the hallmarks of a (Freudian) melancholic. Of the melancholic, Freud writes, “He is not of the opinion that a change has taken place in him, but extends his self-criticism back over the past; he declares that he was never any better” (254). Dowell’s fantasies of marrying Nancy and of spitting on Edward’s­grave ostensibly offer psychological gains, but his conclusion that Edward was “just myself” and his position as “nurse-attendant” reveal the masochistic streak Freud attributes to the melancholic. In this case, the melancholia’s masochistic component manifests itself in an identification with the mother figure of the “negative Oedipus complex [which] situates desire and identification within the parameters of the family” (212). It should come as no surprise, then, that this essay takes the first half of its title from Dowell’s oft-cited categorization of the tale as “a family romance.” At the same time, one cannot overlook the even more frequently cited opening of the novel as the saddest story its narrator has ever heard. However, Dowell’s share of the sadness is largely of his own volition. Since both Edward and Leonora leave Dowell’s “family romance,” he is never able to properly resolve his Oedipal conflict. He does not ever, within the confines of his narrative, find a meaningful relationship outside the family, as his “humdrum” situation with Nancy reveals. In the absence of his adopted parents, the matter is not likely to be corrected. Dowell’s (unreliable) narrative is fraught with repressions and evasions. Comparing the four-sided association of the Dowells and the Ashburnhams to an apple, he asks “isn’t it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?” (gs 16). The apple imagery is important particularly since it serves as the Biblical symbol of forbidden, sexual knowledge. Dowell wants to banish his desire for that knowledge. In spite of previously saying he had no sexual attraction for Leonora, which at least implies awareness of what that attraction involves, Dowell still proceeds to explain the importance of the sexual aspect of relationships, and so provides additional contrast. Dowell’s lament that “I only know that I am alone–horribly alone” reflects his ongoing Oedipal feelings (16). The isolation he feels comes from his inability to find a way to tear away from the family and interact outside its bounds. The result is his ownership of Branshaw and his assumption of responsibility for Nancy. He further states “I don’t like society–much,” as is to cement his isolation (197). By staying in England, he completes his confinement. When Dowell asserts that he is not

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“preaching anything contrary to accepted morality” in his defence of Edward, he is really attempting to persuade himself that Edward’s actions were proper. By extrapolation, if Edward’s motives were pure, then Dowell’s become pure, too. Dowell refuses to find fault in Edward’s character because that would find fault in his own. For example, Dowell uses the episode of the maid turned thief as an analogue for his rationalizations. He convinces himself that it “was nothing in her character. So perhaps, it was with Edward Ashburnham. Or perhaps it wasn’t. No, I rather think it wasn’t. It is difficult to figure out” (gs 126). The real shuttlecock is neither Nancy, nor Edward; it is Dowell’s own conscience, for an Oedipal relation suggests ambivalence as opposed to identity. He goes back and forth in the effort to suppress his true intentions. The most glaring evidence of Dowell’s effort to hide the truth occurs when he admits to having told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find his path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it […] And when one discusses an affair – a long, sad affair – one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. (gs 147) Dowell allows that he creates a maze in telling the story. He admits that his mind is the shuttlecock which “goes back” and “goes forward.” He admits he cannot help it. The switch to the third person reveals the desire to separate the conscious from the unconscious. By denying his conscious thoughts, Dowell’s unconscious assumes control of his identity and of his actions. Dowell’s entire narrative, by his own confession, consists of nothing more than a series of regressions and repressions of Oedipal ambitions. In reality, Dowell relates the story not for the benefit of the reader, but for his own peace of mind. His is an interrupted development and his narrative must be regarded in this context. If we are to accept Dowell’s unreliability, as so many have, we first need to accept that it stems entirely from the incomplete Oedipus complex he experiences. Acknowledgement The author wishes to thank Dr. Ronald Granofsky for his wisdom at a key stage in the process of writing this essay.

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Works Cited Bassoff, Bruce. “Oedipal Fantasy and Arrested Development in The Good Soldier.” Twentieth Century Literature 34.1 (1988): 40–47. Brinich, Paul. “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Adoption and Ambivalence.” Psychoanalytic Psychology 12.2 (1995): 181–200. Butler, Judith. “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification.” Constructing Masculinity.­ Ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis and Simon Watson. New York: Routledge: 1995. 21–36. De Angelis, Rose. “Narrative Triangulations: Truth, Identity, and Desire in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.” English Studies 88.4 (2007): 425–46. Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier. London: UK: Penguin, 2002. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” On Metapsychology (Penguin Freud Library No. 11). Toronto: Penguin, 1984. 245–68. Hessler, John G. “Dowell and The Good Soldier: The Narrator Re-Examined.” The Journal of Narrative Technique. 9.1 (1979): 53–60. Hoffman, Karen A. “‘Am I no better than a eunuch?’” Narrating Masculinity and Empire in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.” Journal of Modern Literature 27.3 (2004): 30–46. Nigro, Frank. “Who Framed The Good Soldier? Dowell’s Story in Search of a Form.” Studies in the Novel 24 (1992): 381–91. Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. London: Routledge, 1992.

Index Aldington, Richard 180 Aristotle 115, 154–155 Poetics 154 Arnold, Matthew 72–73 Athenaeum 10 Barnes, Djuna 61 Nightwood 61 Barnes, Julian 2 Barry, Sebastian 147 Beckett, Samuel 147 Trilogy 147 Belloc, Hilaire 18, 30 Benjamin, Walter 114, 119 “A Berlin Chronicle” 114, 119 Benveniste, Emile 201–202 Bergson, Henri 144n1 Biala, Janice 2, 15n15, 18 Blast 102, 116 Bookman 11n4 Boston Transcript 10n2 Bowen, Stella 2 Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights 42 Brown, Catherine Madox 1 Brown, Ford Madox 1, 20, 129 Cabestan, Guillem de 129 Carroll, Lewis 156, 158 Alice in Wonderland 156–158 Catholicism 2, 18, 24, 27, 30, 33, 43–44, 96, 100 Cervantes, Miguel de 104 Cézanne 10, 15 Charcot, Jean-Martin 144n1 Chesterton, G.K. 30, 158 The Man Who Was Thursday 158 Conrad, Joseph 1, 7, 38, 47n8, 85, 97, 145–148, 158–159, 164–166, 170–171 Heart of Darkness 207 Lord Jim 7, 145, 147–148, 165–172 Romance (with Ford Madox Hueffer) 1 The Secret Agent 47

The Inheritors (with Ford M. Hueffer) 1 The Nature of a Crime (with Ford Madox Ford) 1 cummings, e.e. 2 Daily News and Leader 11 De Certeau, Michel 113–114 Derrida, Jacques 114 Archive Fever 114 Doyle, Arthur Conan 148–151, 161, 175 Dreiser, Theodore 10n1, 95 Dudeney, Henry 145, 151–152 Amusements in Mathematics 145 Edward vii 50 Eliot, T.S. 146 Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby 43, 52 Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary 11 Fliess, Wilhelm 153 Ford, Ford Madox A Call: The Tale of Two Passions 12 England and the English 20, 22, 34 Great Trade Route 129n9 It Was the Nightingale 175 Memories and Impressions 19 “On Impressionism” 2, 12, 29, 57n3, 57n4, 98 Parade’s End 2 Provence 129n9 Return to Yesterday 21 “Techniques” 57n2, 129n7 The Brown Owl 1 The Critical Attitude 22 The English Review 2, 22–24, 26, 28, 194 The March of Literature 175–176 The Transatlantic Review 2 “Ulysses and the Handling of Indecencies” 8, 194, 209 When Blood is Their Argument 21 While the Wicked Man 2

230 Ford, Stella 36, 74, 93 Forster, E.M. 75, 86 Where Angels Fear to Tread 75 Freud, Sigmund 119–120, 144, 153–158, 212, 214 Fragments of an Analysis 154 Letters 153 Mourning and Melancholia 119, 221, 225 On Narcissism 119 The Interpretation of Dreams 144n1, 153, 158 Thoughts for the Times on War and Death 119 Frost, Robert 75 “Home Burial” 75 “The Impulse” 75 Frye, Northrop 50n11, 104n6 Anatomy of Criticism 50n11 Galsworthy, John 2 Greene, Graham 18 Halbwachs, Maurice 144 Hammett, Dashiell 8, 175 Hardy, Thomas 2, 29n9, 75 Jude the Obscure 75 Hemingway, Ernest 2, 75, 86 A Farewell to Arms 75 History 111–113 Holmes, Sherlock 7 Hueffer, Ford Hermann 1 Hueffer, Ford Madox 102, 116 Hueffer, Francis [Franz Xaver] 1, 20, 129 Hunt, Violet 2 James, Henry 2, 85, 182 Portrait of a Lady 182 Joyce, James 54, 85, 146–147, 193, 198, 209–210 Finnegans Wake 147 Ulysses 8, 75, 92, 192–200, 204–205, 209–210

Index Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de Les Liaisons dangereuses 42 Lawrence, D.H. 54, 61, 86, 193 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 8, 192–193, 210 Women in Love 61 Le Bon, Gustave 144n1 Lewis, Wyndham 2, 70, 97, 102, 119 Luther, Martin 31, 100–101 Marinetti, F.T. 87 Let’s Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings 87 “Vital English Art” 87 Martindale, Elsie 2 Marwood, Arthur 2 Masochism 8, 212, 214, 219–221, 223, 225 Melancholy 8, 213, 219–221, 225 Metaphor 5–6, 91, 93–95, 102 Milton, John 51 Samson Agonistes 51 Modernism 4–6, 36–37, 53, 72–75, 86–88, 97–98, 144, 148n6 New Witness 11 O’Brien, Flann 147 Ortega, José 119 Owen, Wilfred 103, 146n4 “Dulce Et Decorum Est” 103 Peirce, C.S. 113 Poe, Edgar Allan 176 Pope Pius X 19 Pound, Ezra 2, 74, 87, 97, 130, 134 Protestantism 43 Protestant 20–21, 23 Proust, Marcel 175 Puzzles 7, 144–145

Kafka, Franz 49 The Trial 49

Rhys, Jean 2, 54, 123 Quartet 2 Rivers, W.H.R. 145n4, 146n4, 155 Rodker, John 36 Rossetti, Christina 20

Lacan, Jacques 121, 123, 176, 178–179, 185, 187, 205 “Presentation on Transference” 185

Sassoon, Siegfried 146n4 Seccombe, Thomas 11 Sensus communis 5, 36, 39–40

231

Index Shakespeare, William 106 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 106 Shaw, George Bernard 30 Sinclair, May 75 Life and Death of Harriet Frean 75 Sophocles 13 Oedipus the King 13 Southern Review 129n7 Stein, Gertrude 2, 73, 85 Sterne, Laurence 11 Tristram Shandy 11 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 224 Tate, Allan 20 The British Journal of Psychology 145, 155 The New York Times 11 The Observer 87 The Saturday Review 12n11 The Strand 145, 148, 150–151 The Times 20 The Toronto Star 86 Thucydides 111 Trauma 6, 111, 119–123 Vidal, Peire 7, 126, 128–130, 132–136, 139–142 Villon, François 16

Waugh, Evelyn 18 Weber, Max 27, 114 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 27–28 Webster, John The Duchess of Malfi 49 Wells, H.G. 2 West, Rebecca 11, 147 Williams, Bernard 170 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy 170 Williams, William Carlos 75 “The Dead Baby” 75 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 156 Woolf, Virginia 54, 61, 85, 136n15, 146–147, 196 “Modern Fiction” 196 Mrs. Dalloway 61 To the Lighthouse 92 World War I 74–75, 102, 111 Yeats, W.B. 49 “Leda and the Swan” 49 Zwingli, Ulrich 31