TS Eliot’s Portrait of a Lady and Dialogism
There seems to be an air of paradox in bringing a theory on the novel as a genre and the most famous Anglo-American modernist poet as a whole. Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal study of ‘Discourse in the Novel’, written in 1934-35, and finally appearing in English translation in 1981, offers us an account of the difference between ‘poetic discourse’ and ‘novelistic discourse’. The division is not strictly a difference in to the novel and the poetry as genres. Often with Bakhtin we find that the novel assimilates all genres including poetry which he himself calls the process of “incorporated genres” as one of the main features of the novel. Bakhtin also opines that even non-narrative poetry can possess a degree of ‘dialogism’ for which he rates the novel so highly. Among his instances of dialogised verse as the lyrical poetry of Jules Laforgue, who exercised a great deal of influence on T S Eliot, and of Francois Villon who was extolled as poetic model by Ezra Pound.
In modern literary practice too we witness a rapprochement between the novel and the poetry in the opening decades of this century. In “How to Read’ Pound declared: ‘I believe no man can now write really good verse unless he knows Stendhal and Flaubert’ Similarly the use of the ‘mask’ and the ‘persona’ in the poems of Eliot, Yeats and pound give us as it were the speeches of single characters in the novel with the rest of the text cut away. Their longer works may be thus seen as attempts to recreate those missing novels. The original or the working title of The Waste Land was “He Do The Police In Different Voices”, which is borrowed from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, which is as instance of the English comic novel and in Bakhtin’s view central to the history of the development because it is ‘externally very vivid and at the same time historically profound’. Its epigraph is meanwhile borrowed from Petronius’ Satyricon, a work which Bakhtin regards as the fount of novelistic prose coming together. The novels in the modern period also seems to be taking on the characteristics of poetry, the modern novelistic heroes spend their time in staring at lighthouses (Woolf), whiling way the time permutating on their biscuits on grass (Beckett).
Guerin, Wilfred L. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Harper & Row,
Updike, John. "A & P." Literature: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay. Ed. Robert DiYanni. 5th ed. New York: McGraw, 1998. 27-31.
Sixth Edition. New York: Harper Collins College Publishers Inc., 1995. Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 9.
Charter, Ann, and Samuel Charters, eds. Literature and its Writers: A Compact Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin's, 2003.
in Twentieth- Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. The. Vol.
Charters, Ann & Samuel. Literature and its Writers. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2013. 137-147. Print.
On Narrative and Narratives: II. New York: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994-98. 503-26. Print. Vol. 3 of New York Literary History. 11 vols.
Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. Exploring Literature: Writing and Arguing About Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay. Ed. Frank Madden. 4th ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. 1151-61. Print
Tan, Amy. “Two Kinds.” Exploring Literature: Writing and Arguing About Fiction, Poetry, Drama and The Essay.4th e. Ed. Frank Madden. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. 253-261. Print.
London: n.p., 1998. Print. fourth Bloomfield, Morton W. New Literary History. Winter ed. N.p.:
Guerin, Wilfred L., Earle Labor, Lee Morgan, Jeanne C. Reesman, and John R. Willingham. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 125-156.
Guerin, Wilfred L., et.al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Moore, Marianne. “Poetry” 1921. Approaching Literature: Reading + Thinking + Writing. Ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013. 843-844. Print.
Bearing these perspectives in mind, this essay will examine the metafictional traits found in Flaubert's Parrot and in John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, before comparing these with the elements of realism in Isaac Singer's The Family Moskat. By considering the advantages and disadvantages of these novelistic schools of thought, it shall then be demonstrated that the reader's own views on Life and Art may determine the value one assigns to these alternative styles.
The Modernist era of poetry, like all reactionary movements, was directed, influenced, and determined by the events preceding it. The gradual shift away from the romanticized writing of the Victorian Era served as a litmus test for the values, and the shape of poetry to come. Adopting this same idea, William Carlos Williams concentrated his poetry in redirecting the course of Modernist writing, continuing a break from the past in more ways than he saw being done, particularly by T.S. Eliot, an American born poet living abroad. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, was a historically rooted, worldly conscious work that was brought on by the effects of World War One. The implementation of literary allusions versus imagination was one point that Williams attacked Eliot over, but was Williams completely in stride with his own guidelines? Looking closely at Williams’s reactionary poem to The Waste Land, Spring and All, we can question whether or not he followed the expectations he anticipated of Modernist work; the attempts to construct new art in the midst of a world undergoing sweeping changes.