Echo-chamber of the American stage

Revisra de Esrudios Norteamericanos, nº 3 (1994). pp. 75-95. ECHO-CHAMBER OF THE AMERICAN . STA GE DANIEL GARCÍA Essm Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Much has been made, much of it by the writers themselves, of the fact that the American writer has no status, no respect, and no audience. I am pointing here to a loss more central to the task itself, the loss of a subject; or, to put it another way, a voluntary withdrawal of interest by the fiction writer from sorne of the grander social and political phenomena of our times. Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction" And it may be that when this situation produces not only feelings of disgust, rage, and melancholy, but impotence too, the writer is apt to lose heart and turn finally to other matters, to the construction of wholly imaginary worlds, and to a celebration of the self, which may, in a variety of ways, become his subject, as well as the ímpetus that establishes the perimeters of his technique. Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction" Public life, vivid and formless turbulence, news, slogans, mysterious crises, and unreal configurations dissolve coherence in all but the most resistant minds, and even to such rninds it is not always a confident certainty that resistance can ever have a positive outcome. Saul Be ll ow, "S orne Notes on Recent American Fiction" 76 'lbcl'C is no escaping tbe drift of tbcse commeots: Rodl and Bellow are not Ollly critics but writers. and yet such outlook would exclude much of wbat goes as fiction in the United States since 1960. The main premise ofRodl's and Bellow's criticism isthatthcrearethingsbappeningouttherewhicheithertbenovelistmusttackle,orturn aside from in guilt: the classical convergence of mimesis and morality. Coherence of the work equals coherence-0fthe mind. There can be more or less psycbology, more or less political awareness; but there are always depths to be probed. There can be no question for Bellow or Roth of forefronting Ianguage and suñaces. 1be model for the fiction which Saul Bellow wrote during the 50s was ali but complete by the middle ofthe 19th centwy, with little additions later on. 'Ibis is not to say that Bellow bad no use for later developments in narrative: simply that bis themes and bis outlook are in that tradition. There is a degree of experimentation in AugieMarch,butitismadecompatiblewitbmimesis.AugieMarchisthereforeahighly structured and controlled novel. built up on and ordered by a few themes ami pattemed by the single principie of irony. The centre seems to hold. But is the mold breaking from within? That was the lesson of Invisible Man. full of elements of non-mimetical fiction; Bellow' s novel is less innovative than that. Hit were 300-page long, it would be almost a canonical Bildungsroman. However. beyond that basic build-up, Augie March sprawls on, introducing dozens of characters wbo flickeron and off, almost like a bazaar or chronicle. lt is in that sense that Augie Marc:h in a way goes beyond the tradition of Mimesis. This paper starts witb a formal description of the narrative form of the novel, in an attempt to pin down the composite texture of the novel. This is summarized by the two principies of discontinuity (gap) andjuxtaposition (friction) with thenet result that the novel presents a wide scope of vision of American life; but whereas texture here is inclusion, thematically, Augie March is characterized by exclusion ( on the basis of mimesis). Not surprisingly. the presiding themes (tbe Bildungsroman and the meeting of tbe New world and tbe Old) are given a structuring function, to the extent that the form of tbe novel is made an analogy of tbose themes. l. INTRODUCTION: SOME TERMS In order to describe Augie Marc:h in terms of fonn, this paper will follow the model worked out by Gérard Genette. first in one chapter of Figures 1// (1972). wbich was published separately in English under the title of Narrative Discourse; and later, witb sorne corrections, in Nouveau discours du récit (1983). Genette's point of departnre is a triad of terms which define tbe object of bis study: fust. histoitt, or tbe events whicb are said to take place in tbe narrative, tbe ir order, tbeir connections, causal or arbitrary (le signifié ou contenu narratif, Genette, 1972, p. 72); second, réciJ, the report of those events in discourse; as Genette says, "récit désigne l'énoncé narratif, le discours oral ou écrit qui assume la relation d'un Echo-chamber of the American stage 77 événement ou d'une sé rie d 'évé nements" (1972, 71 ), " . . . le signifiant, énoncé, discours ou texte narratif lui-meme" ( 1972, 72)1 and, last, narration, itself an event, the act of narration itself, or, as Genette puts it, "acte qui con siste . .. a introduire dans une situation, par le moyen d'un discours, la connai ssa n ce d'une autre situation", ( I 972, 243 ). An event is still in volved here, but no lon ge r the actions, say, of a character, but the eve nt in itself that a story is being narrated (Genette 1972, 71 ). This triad provides the basis for two important vectors: (a) that linking histoire and récit(they may be closely parallel, or diver ge in on e of severa! ways; the récitcan shift the order of events, add things to the mere reporting of facts, etc), and (b) that linking récit and narration (the act of narration c an be hidden behind the narrative itself, so as to be invisible, or it can be foregrounded; it can take place after the narrative, or, less frequently, simultaneously, etc). The first vector is put to good use by the Premodern novel2: it gi ve s such pairs as description/dialogue -and , strikingl y, the éffets de réel so d ea r to Roland Barthes, those details which are supererogatory from the point of v iew of the s tory- a nd gi ves rise to changes of tempo, and occasionally of sequence. The second vector (récit - narration) is responsible for striking effects in the Baroque novel, in epistolary fiction and, most sig ni ficantly, in the Postmodern novel: th e u se of framing, of "Chinese boxes" -story within stor y-, discontinuit y. Moreover, Genette makes a furth er distinction between his t oire (events in succession) and the universe where they take place (where the c har acters "live"), which he ca lls diégese,3 and on which he comments in hi s more recent book: " La diégese ... est bien un univers plutüt qu'un enchafnement d'actions (histoire): la diégese n'est done pas l'histoire, mais l'univers ou e ll e advient" (Genette I 983, 13). Genett e' s other triad of terms corresponds to the fields of study (les problemes du récit, Todorov 1966, quoted by Genette 1971, 74 ): Ceci nous autorise peut-etre a orga ni ser, ou du moins a formuler les pr o bl emes d'analyse du discours narratif se lon des catégories em pruntées a la grammaire du verbe, et qui se réduiront ici a trois classes fondamentales de déterminations: ce ll es qui tiennent aux relations temporelles entre récit et di égese, et que nous rangerons sous la catégorie du temps; celles qui ti e nn ent aux modalités (formes et degrés) de 1 a "représe nt ation" narra ti ve, done aux modes du récit; e elles enfin qui ti ennent a la fa \:O n dontse trouve impliqu ée dans le récit la narration ellememe au sens oii. nous l'avons définíe, c'es t- a-dire la situation ou instance J. Thc opposition histoire/récit reproduces that of thc Russiam formalists between fable/sujer. 2. I understand by this the novel written before Flaubert and Jame s. 3. Which must not be confused with diégésis, the mode of pr esentation of reality (pure narrative, as opposed to the report of dialogue). See below. 78 Daniel García Essig narrative, et avec elle ses deux protago ni stes: le narrateur et son d es tinataire, réel ou virtuel. .. ce terme est celui de voix (Genette 1972, 75-76) ForG enette, the study ofnarrative can, thus, focus on tim e, mood (the regulation of narrative information), and voice. For a formal de scription of Augie March, the pr ese nt paper will centre on the second and the third group of problems: considerations of time become more interesting and fruitful the more one novel abides by the Classical (Aristotelian) rules about plot-formation, which pla ce the emphasis on rul es of causality and the co nvention of "Fate" (its elf a ki nd of necessity) as opposed to mere temporal succession (so that the analysis of, say, Tom Iones, or Great Expectations; and in 20th Century fiction, ofThe H eartof the Matterormore subtly The lim e Twig, would ben efit most from such an angle); the plot of Augie March, on the other hand, is rather crude in this sense, Bellow 's work being clearly "mod em", to this extent, in its distru st of "m ec hanica l" plots. The o th er two categories need so rn e further comme nt ary. Genette has the following to say about mood: On peut en effet raconter plus ou moins ce que I' on raconte, et le raconter selon tel ou tel point de vue ... la "représentation", ou plus exactement l'information narrative a ses degrés; le récit peut fournir au lecteurplus ou moin s de détails, et de fac;:on plus ou moins directe, et sembler ain si ... se tenir a plus ou moins grande distance de ce qu'il raconte; iI peut aussi choisir de r ég l er l'information qu' il li vre, non plus parc ette sorte de filtra ge uniforme, mais se Ion les ca pacités de connaissance de telle ou telle partie prenante de l' histoire ... dont il adoptera ou feindra d' adopter ce que l' on nomme courammentla "v ision" ou le "point de vue", semblant alors pr endre a l 'éga rd de l'histoire ... telle ou telle perspective (1972, 183-184 ). The fir st category within mood, distance, as Genette makes clear ( 19 72, 1 84 - 190; 19 83, 30-34) con ce ms the reporting of verbal events, 4 and in practice translates into the different ways spoken language (and the character s' thoughts) is presented (so that, in a commonplace metaphor, one might say that the more filters we ha ve, the more distance th ere is). Tra ditional Poetics has Ji sted direct, indirect or reported, and fr ee indirect speech; the system, however, ca n be simplified, since, as Genette points o ut "dans un récit, il n 'y a que rhésisetdiégésison ditd 'a illeurs, et fortclairement, texte de personnages ettex te de narrateur, (1983, 28, 29). A basic concern of th e (traditional) novelist is how oth er discourses m ay be made a part of th e narrative, the way the 4. In No u vea u discours du récit, Genette suggests that a more fitting title for this section would be "des mod es de ( re)prod uc trion d11 discours et de la pensée des personnages da ns le réc it littéraire éc rit" ( 1983, 34). Echo-chamber of the American stage 79 di sco ur se of others (Bakhtin 's langa ge étranger, 1978, 99) impinges, with a varying slant, on the discourse of the narrator, how they are ju xtaposed, how they qualify each o ther ; what, in other words, should the surface, or th e t ex tur e, of the novel be like. The second element in mood (perspective) is that of focalisation (in more traditional terms, point of view5 ), a question widely di sc ussed, since the beginning of the century, in critica! studies of the modero nov el , and which Genette summarizes in the formula Who sees?: "Par focalisation, j' entends done bien une restriction de "c hamp ," c'es t-a-dire en fait une sélection de l'information narrative par rapport a ce qu e la tradition nommait l' omniscience ... L' instrument de ce tt e ( éventuelle) sélection est unfoyer situé, e' est-a-dire une sorte de goulot d'information, quin ' en laisse passer que ce qu 'a utorise sa situation" (Genette 1983, 49). Genette goes on to enumerate the varieties of focalisation: .. . un e typologie a trois termes, dont le premier correspond a ce qu e la critique anglo-saxonne nomme le récit a narrateur omniscient et Pouillon "vision par derriere", et que Todorov symboli se par la formule Narrateur > Personnage (ou le narrateuren sait plus que Je personnage, ou plus précisément en dit plus que n 'en sait aucun des personnages) ... ( 1972, 206) ... en focalisation interne, le foyer coincide avec un personnage, qui d evie nt alors Je "sujet" fictif de toutes les perceptions ... En focalisation ex tem e, Je foyer se trouve situé en un point de l'univers diégétique choisi par le narrateur, lwrs de toutpersonnage, excluant par la toute possibilité d' information s ur les pensées de quiconque" ( 1983, 49, 50). The third and Jast field is that of voice: "qui raconte [l'histoire], ou et quand", (Genette 1972, 225), i.e. the study of what Genette calls the narrative entity ("C' est done cette in stance narrative qu'il nous reste a considérer, selon les traces qu'elle a laissées -qu'elle est censée avoir laissées-dans le discours narratif qu 'e ll e est censée avoir produit", 1972, 226-227). The two main sections ofthe study of voice arenarrative leve[ andperson: one narrator may be "within" or "without" the story (narrative leve!). He may, on the other hand, be a character in the fiction, or not. To these two, Genette adds one ca tegory related to the "when": when is the story told?5 To start with the last mentioned, the releva nc e of time in connection with voice lies in the relative position of the narrator with respect to the narrative. Genette 5. Ge netce acknowledges h is debt to Cleanth Br ooks and Roberl Pen n Warr en, who suggested in 1943 (in Undersranding Fictio11) the use of focus < !f 11arr a ri1111 asan alternative to pui 11t r~f view (quoted in Genette 1972, 203, 2 06 ). 6. Ge nette points out that it is practically impo ssible for author to avoid locating in ti me thr a:·t , 1f narrating. whereas in most cases the place whcre the narrating takcs place is ignored or l ef t in thc background, and accorded any significance (Genette. 228). He gives severa! 80 Daniel García Essig distinguishes severa! possibilities- 1 omit one which is marginal in literature. Starting with the more usual: l. narra/ion ultérieure (Genette 1972, 232), when the action is said to have taken place in its integrity be/ore the act of narrating begins: this is the typical form of the Mimetic novel in the tradition ofRealism. The present tense is sometimes brought in forthe sake of what Genette calls effets de "convergence" finale7 (1972, 232- 3) - in the case of Invisible Man, having the present tense both at the beginning and at the end suggests a complex narrative structure, in severa! levels. 2. narrationsimultanée (Genette 1972, 230~23 l ), when the action is said to be taking place at the same time as the act of narrating (as for instance with internal monologue). 3. narration intercalé e (Genette 1972, 229-230), when the novel shuttles back and forth from action narrated to act of narration; this is the norm in the epistolary novel and the pseudo diary (Frankenstein). According to narrative leve/, ali fictional events, beings, objects, etc, are either extradiegetic (and take place outside the universe defined by the narrative -by definition the only event in this category is the act of narrating8) or intradiegetic (if they take place within the frontiers ofthediégese); in those cases where the universe of the novel itself includes another act of narrating ("Chinese boxes"), the narration thus produced is called metadiegetic (when one character in a story tells a story; for instance, the narrati ve of the Monsterin Frankenstein). In this respect, the characteristic of the Mimetic novel (the School ofRealism) has consisten ti y been to steer clear away from metadiegetic narration. One of the last great novels of the l 9th century to use this technique -in a particularly self-conscious waywas precisely Frankenstein. The category of person ( 1972, 251-254) refers to the question, Who is telling? and Genette accordingly distinguishes two varieties of narrative: heterodiegetic (the narrator is not himself a character, and consequently cannot be referred to in the first person) and homodiegetic (the narrator is a character in the story, he is included in its fictional universe). The most significant system within voice is the opposition between first-person narrative and third-person narrative. There has been a consistent trend in the Classical American novel to use homodiegetic narrators (Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn; Invisible Man, On the Road, The Adventures of Augie March). exceptions -Lo/ita whe re the narrating takes place in a psychiatric hospital-. Anolher clear example is In.visible Man, whose narrator is underground. 7. Such as, towards theend of Lazarillo de Tormes: "En el qual eldia deo y viuo y resido a servicio de Dios y de vuestra merced." 8. Which is different from the act of writing the novel, an acl in the real world. Echo-chamber of the American stage 81 2. A CLASSICAL AMERICAN NOVEL Augie March will be here discussed from the point of view of mood and voice, omitting consideration of time. To the reason given above for such a choice, I must add here that effects of time are in any case not very conspicuous (there are indeed changes of rhythm, which underline the paradox of Augie's development, as a character who is always short of time, as it were; changes of sequence, on the other hand, are practically absent from the novel9) . 1. As to the reporting of discourse (included within mood), the inclusiveness of novelistic discourse, its openness to various dialects -in effect the preeminence of direct speechis a permanent trait of the American novel. In Augie March, notably from chapter three onwards, there is a profusion of direct speech, sometimes in the form of long tirades, which are used to set up character against character. This is not to say that other forms, mainly free indirect speech, are not present in the novel. As to focalisation, Bellow's clear choice for irony and the structure of the Bildungsroman practically determines neutralfocalisation. This is what Genette has to say, in connection with A la recherche du temps perdu: Comme en tout récit de forme autobiographique, les deux actants que Spitzer nommait erzahlendes Ich (Je narrant) et erzahltes Ich (Je narré) sont séparés dans la Recherche par une différence d' age et d' expérience qui a,J.1torise le premier a traiter le second avec un sorte de supériorité condescendante ou ironique. (1972, 259) In other words, two aspects are brought together in the autobiographic narration: an homodiegetic narrator, and a neutral focalisation. This is especially revealing in connection with the relationship between narrator and (anti)hero: the fonner does not hesitateto reveal -and revel inthe hero's naivety, as a result of which the hero 's discourse, his actual voice, is ignored-overthe first half of the book Augie is scarcely aJlowed to speak for himself as character. As to the narrator's (later) insight into the motives of the younger hero, 1 will only give a few examples: However, they couldn't get me to beg and entreat -though 1 wasn't unmoved by the thought of a jail sentence, head shaven, fed on slumgullion, mustered in the mud, buffaloed and bossed. If they decided 1 had i t coming, why, 1 didn't see how 1 could argue it . 9. For the rare ex ception, see p. 17 , with a sentence, right in the middle of a paragraph. starting "Years a/ter ... " This Genette calls prolepse ( 1972, 82). 82 D an i el García Essig But/ was neverin realdangerof the house of correction. 'º(Bellow 195 3, 45-46 emphasis added). I didn't yet know what vi ew I had of ali this. It still wasn't clear to me wheth er 1 would be for or against it. 11 (Bellow 1953, 238) Oh ,jealousy, sure. But there were plenty of otherdef ects and inferiorities. What 1 sometimes didn 't thfok of myself , in the fine pants and the bu cks kin s, boots, sheath knife, while I drove the station wagon as if from th e co urt at Greenwich and along the Thames, ju st back from a Spanish riad, goofy flower s in my hat. T hi s was how l'd note my s elfwith satisfaction and glowing; l may ask a partial excuse, because of the swelling of my heart, that 1 was su ch a happy jerk ... But these shortcomings, both in her and me, could have been corrected or changed. (Bellow 1952, 329, emphasis added). I wasn't going to !et h er be rough, I thought as I went to face and to lie to Th ea. 1 did11 't really fe el the sharpness of the lyi11g 1 wa s prepared to do. l ca rne ba ck to h er thinking I was now more faithful than before, so 1 believed I wa s go ing to maintain so mething more true than not. And I didn 't expect to fee l as bad as I did f ee l . . . (Bellow 19 53, 392, emphasis added). Th e narrator inAugie March doggedly refuses himse lf to espouse any individual angle: it is mad e inescapable that th e narrator knows more th an any one character. Thi s does not only apply to the her o's motives (his own): No, Grandma Lausch couldn't have been withstood, I' m convinced. Not now, not in this. Everything considered, it was, no matter h ow sad, wi se r to commit the kid. As Simon said, we wou ld later have had to do it ourselves. But the old lady made of it something it didn't necessarily have to be, a test of s tr ength, tactless, a piece of sultanism; it originated in things we little understood: di sa ppointment, ang ry giddiness from sel fimposed, prideful struggle, weak n ea rn ess to death that impaired her judgment, maybe a sharp utteran ce of stubborn animal spirit, orbubble fromhuman enterp ri se, sinking and di scharging blindly from a depth (B ellow 1953, 56, emphasis added). For a useful contrast, see how differently this is dealt with in two no vels of th e same period, On the Road and Invisible Man. Whereas in Bellow almost in va ri ably the 1 O. Here the narrator mig ht have said, more discreetly, «I did not go to a hou se o f correction». Another point is th e u se of lito/ es( ! wasn't unmoved for «I was frig ht ene d to death» ), which is characteristically ironical. 11. T hi s on ly makes sense if the first-person narrator has later discovered th at he is in fact, «against it». Echo-chamber of the American stage 83 narrator is distancing himself frorn his younger self, in Ellison' s novel, sometimes the narrator avoids providing an explanation oran insight which he "now" is in a position to give, adapting hirnself instead to the hero's rnistaken consciousness (not always: the relationship hero/narrator is not fixed). And this is most often the case at important turns of the novel -point s where the hero' s development is about to be thru st forward: I thought of the glee certain folks at home would feel if I were expelled. 1)tlock's grinning face danced though my mind. What would the white folks think who' d sent me to college? Was Mr Norton angry atme? In the Golden Da y he had seemed more curious than anything else -until the vet had started talking wild. (Ellison 1952, 84) They had to investigate the charges against me, but the assignment was their un se ntimental affirmation that their belief in me was unbroken. 1 shivered in the hot streel. I hadn 't allowed the idea to take concrete form in my mind , butfor a moment I had almostallowed an old, southern backwardness which I had thought dead to wreck my career. (Ellison 1952, 329, emphasis added) The second of those examples is especially subtle: her e, as in man y other cases, narratoria! commentary-the little there isseems to be made, not by the underground narrator, but from the vantage point ofthe values of a socially successful person (what we know from the prologue the narrator is not). The narrator would not now tax with "so uthern backwardness" his resentment at the cruel and stupid treatment the "Brotherhood" hasjust inflicted upon him: "southem backwardness", this is what his grandfather 's words purported, is it not? what infact has become his outlook in the .basement from which he is telling th e story (the realization that an immense joke is being played on him). Words and phrases such as un sentimental affirmation, unbroken, for a moment, southern backwardness, wreck my career are evidence that the narrator is presenting as his own the values of the hero at this point of the action. These examples at least lea ve room for psychological insight, even if it is that of the deluded hero. Kerouac in On the Road goes further than this, closer to "behaviouristic" narrative (in Genette' s terms, negative focalisation). He does not, though, cultivate the pessimistic note, as Camus or Faulknerin l 'étranger and Bengy' s section in The Sound and th e Fu ry. Instead, Kerouac cultivates surfaces, and sheer action; from the point of view of psychology, it is as if character were flattened out, and psychological analysis, whether ironical or deluded, substituted by cliché: When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his lije, how he had to lea ve me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes. 12 "Okay, old Dean, I 'll say nothing" (Kerouac 19 57, 285, emphasis added) 90 Daniel García Essig What materials are present inAugie March? Primari ly , they appear to be of three so rts: dialogue, description/reporting of action, and narratoria! commenta ry . This may be further reduced, howeve r, if one takes into account a suggestion first made by Bakhtin and lat er explained more technically by Dole_el (quoted by Genettc): "A cette dichotomie brutale, Dole_el et Schmid en ajoutent une autre, a laquellcj'ai déja fait allusion: il n'y a et il ne peut y avoir dans un récit, disent-ils, que deux sortes de tcxte: du texte de narrateur (Erziihlertext) ou de texte de personnage ( Per so nentext )" (Genette 1983, 42). Mention was made above of the importance of direct speech; Bellow, furthermore, uses direct speech to individualize charactcrs (Einhorn or Simon, for instance). What is striking in Augie March, however, is that very frequently direct speech is n ot used in dialogue, most conspicuously in Augie's earlier phase. Augie is nota speaker in Einhorn's section: he is spoken to ("l was a lis tener by upbringing", Bellow 195 3, 72). In this sense, direct speech would appear to be cultivated in Augie March for its own sake (oras Roth would sayas "an expression of pleasure"). But this does not prevent the narrator from intruding, and the net effect in many cases is one of counterpoint, as if the real interlocutor answering, qualifying, etc, were th e aged Augie, and not the young hero. There is a striking example of this in 74-75, where Augie' s sty le as narrator (full of allusions, quotations and misquotations, contemporary allusion, pseudopoetic language and slang, etc) confronts that ofEinhorn, two bloat ed egos voicing their obsessions: This was th e food of the house, in the system of its normalcy Jike its odours and furnishings, and ifyou were th e visitingalbatross come to light, you'd eat the food you ne'er had eat ando/fer no gripe . .. You might almost say he followed assimilation with his thought s; ali through hi s body that death had already moved in on, to the Washington of his brain, to his sex and to hi s studying eyes. Ah, sure, he was still agoing concern, very much so . . . (Be ll ow 1953, 74, emphasis added) What a piece of work is a man, and the firmament frotted with gold - but the whole gescheft bores him. Look at me, I'm not even express and admirable in action ... But to get back to the subject, it's one thing to be buried with ali your pleasures, like Sardanapalus; it ' s another to be buried right plunk in front of th em ... (Bellow 1953, 75) But one may follow as well the categoriesofthe premodern novel and divide the materials in two according to another criterium. In a (brief) remark about the functions of the narrator, Genette app li es to narrative Jakobson's famous definitions of the functions of language: L' orientation du narrateur vers lui-meme, en fin, déterminc une fonction tres homolog ue a celle que Jakobson nomme, un peu malencontreusement, la fonction "émo tive ": e' est ce ll e qui rend compte de la part que le narrateur, Echo-chamber of the American stage 91 en tant que te!, prend a l' histoire qu' il raconte, du rapport qu' i 1 entretient avec elle . .. (1972, 262) Les fonctions extra-narratives [e.g. the one mentioned above] sont plus actives dans le type "narratoria]," c'est-a-dire, dans nos termes, non focalisé ... l'usage du discours commentatif est un peu Je privilege du narrateur "omniscient" ... (Genette 1983, 90) According to the relevance of this function, the linguistic materials of the novel can be divided into two: description plus report of speech, on the one hand; narratoria! comment on the other. In Augie March, one of the striking things is the weight, the impudence of the narrator's voice. Non-narratoria! discourse in Augie March is sequential, and roughly contemporary (i.e. if a dialogue precedes another dialogue, it means that it took place atan earlier time); on the other hand, narratoria] commentas is the ca se in practically all Mimetic nov elsis di se mbodied, chronologically and geographically ambiguous (it takes place in Europe, but where? In Pari s? ali over the place? does one part take place in one place and another somewhere else? when? one year after the end of WW2? five years? The distinctive characteristic of narratoria] comment inAugie Mar ch, however, is the way in which the narrator systematically exploits the physicality of his voice, the quality of the narrator' s voice being linked to his physical movcments, to the travelling that seems to take place behind the narrative: Guys like the broken-down Cossack of the Mexican mountains and other spo kesmen would at least ha ve to agree that 1 had a breather coming. Nevertheless 1 have had almost none. It probably is too much to ask. (Bellow 1953, 514) It is not fanciful to point out that, in a narrator who can occasionally make cxtremely long sentences, the two sentences ending this passage, coming after ... l had a breather coming, betray, in a sense, a faltering in the rhythm, a failure of voice. And now h ere' s the thing. lt takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, ali the while you thought you were going around idle tcrribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunncls, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It 's intcrnally done. (Bellow 1953, 523) Thc rhythm of the voice even puts in question the metaphoric nature of what is being referred to -making thc metaphor so physical as to lea ve a doubt in the reader 's 92 Daniel García Essig mind as to its figurative use, a stylistic device typical of Emerson 18 --: one can scnse the effort, the strain, the rhythmical pauses like those of a work song. But this physicality is equivoca), since we also get passagcs like this: 1 have written out these memoirs of mine since, as a travelling man, travelling by myself, 1 have lots of time on my hands. For a couple of month s last ycar I had to be in Rome . It was summer, and the place broke out in red flowers, h ot am i sleepy ... To wake up in the afternoon I would drink coffce and smoke cigars, and by the time 1 carne to myself after thY. siesta it was well-nigh evening. You have dinner, and it 's soft nerveless green night with quiet gas mantl es in the street going on inca ndesce nt and making a long throbbing scratch in the utter night. Time to sleep again, so you go and subside thickly on the bed. (Bellow 19 53, 519) Do es he co ntradict him se lf? Very well then, he contradicts him se lf: the rhythm here is slower, with words filling the mouth, which the speaker obviously relishes (memoirs, a travelling man, red flowers, drink coffee and smoke cigars, tite siesta, nerveless, well-nigh evening, incandescent). The convergence of the different senses of "you" (impersonal, self-address, personal) gives a civil, genteel tone, the mood of relaxation as opposed to Augie's restle ss ness in his previous life. In this sa me direction, what do we know about the proxemic quality of Augie' s narration? The narrator seems to be placed at the closest possible range from the addressee: the tone is thatof cultivated intimate conversation (as Grandma Lausch liked it), with an addressee who will not get nonplussed by such an oddity as "w oodwork bower" in the following passage, introducing the supreme irony of the novel -the fact that this "civic" speaker will not now Jet anybody get a word in edgeways: We were in this woodwork bower, you see, ofthe Chinese restaurant, and ali seemed right, good-tempered, friendly. When important thought doesn't ha ve to be soliloquy, I know how valuable an occasion that is. Beca use to whom can you speak your ful! mind as to yourself? (Bellow 1953, 435) An important thing about the texture of Augie March is that it evolves. For a large part of the novel, the narrator's discourse plus the other "voices" (by other characters) on the one hand, and the hero 's discourse on the other, are mutually exclusive. Towards the second half of the novel, the pre se nce of the hero's (direct) speech, as opposed to that of other characters, increases: the h ero is, to put it frankly, 18.«But hi s operations taken together are so insigni fi cant. a little chipping, baking. patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result» (Emerson 1982, 36). Echo -c hamber of l/Je American stage 93 crowding out the other characters. There is one precise point towards the end of the novel where the discourse of the hero and that of the narrator blend, to be almost indi st inguishable, where weareshocked into ad mitting thaty es, Augie March, the hero speaks in the same overbearing tone as the narrator: "S top arguing," 1 said severely. "Ca n't you see something has happened to me too today?" Then he saw that I really was moved. I made a Jengthy declaration, which I remember went somewhat as follows: "I ha ve a feeling," I said, "about the axial lines of life, with respect to which you must be straight or else your existence is merely clownery, hiding tragedy ... The ambition of something special and outstanding 1 have always had is only a boast that distorts this knowledge from its origin, which is the oldest knowledge, old er than the Euphrates, older than the Ganges . . . (Bellow 1953, 454-455) One last point is that, in this novel more than in many others, the narrator' s discourse must be kept distinct from the (absent) per so nality of the author: whereas with Burroughs or Kerouac, we may be tempted to li ste n for the author in the narrator' s style -that this is la rg ely irrelevant is another stor yit seems obvious that in Augie March we are invited to have a laugh at the narrator 's expense. This is basically beca use Bellow works this novel on the convention of traditional irony (as opposed to the Rousseaunian, bragging innocence of the narrator in On the Road or the vicious sarcasm of Naked Lunch. This must be now addressed. 4. "THESE MEMOIRS OF MINE":TWO THEMES OF A UGIE MARCH My lastsection tried to show that, from the pointof view oftexture, Augie March is cha racterized by inclusion, with its variety of styles, contrast and antithesis, "richness," a fact which should be obvious if one compares it with many modem European novels, which are often !argel y monologic.19 However, from the point of view oftheme, it goes much furtherin its adherence to the principie of selection and exclusion than the typical cosmopolitan novel of the mid-20th century. There can hardly be three more traditional thernes in the novel than the ones chosen by Bellow: psychological development (the Bildungsroman), the question of identity and, characteristically American, theclashing of worlds. What these three themes ha ve in common is that they fit better with the aim of winning the r ea der's adhesion. There is no ne ed of inversion to reach the implied va lu es of the work of art (compare with a novel like Lo/ita, and the classical example of Swift's A Modest Proposa/)20: we ma y laugh at the young Augie, or even, more 19. Among great no veis in this vein, see L 'érranger, Mémoires d'Hadrien, or the typical novel by Robbe-Grillet or Claude Simon. 20 . Which does not mea n, as I said before, that Augie March = Sa ul Bellow. 94 Daniel García Essig sub ti y, at the bombastic narrator, but we are still invited to see him as, basically, a good guy. Even here, however, there is an analogy between the thematic structure and the form of the novel; 1 will consider next two of the central themes of Augie March: first, the Bildungsroman and, second, the confrontation of the New and the Old world. First of ali, there is a correspondence between the psychological development of the hero and the form of the novel: as Augie March teaches "himself," by heeding the "knocks" -his own wordhe becomes more articulate, his discourse starts to converge with the narrator' s discourse and to crowd outother discourses. The difference is striking with a novel like Great Expectations where from the very bcginning we get Pip impossibly voluble. As to the working out ofthe theme ofNew World vs. Old World, I will start from the other end: does the forefronting of narratoria! discourse ha ve any thematic significance in the novel? In a 19th century novel, such invading presence might have been less noticed. In Bellow, it does not seem to me to be intended as a parody of traditional novelistic forms, but rather as a metaphor: we get herc an American narrator, "Chicago bom," and possessed by the American vemacular, and by the intensity of the American experience; and yet at the same time an expatriate, an "idler," who has taken 600-odd pages to tell the storyof one haljofhis life. Theplace ofnarration is Europe, butthe story takes place in America: a problem of identity. The novel is circular: Grandma Lausch' s program of gentiUzation has been achieved, triumphantly, by an Augie who is able to tell a story where the culture of the Old World is ever-present. I reflect on the historical implicationsof theBildungsroman, and Iam again tempted lo compare Augie March with On the Road: in Kerouac's novel, the Old World is quite absent, and so is irony; in Bellow, the overwhelming presence of irony creates a background of knowingness, of ex peri ene e, the "com1ption of the Old World." Because in effect there are two worlds in the novel, although their limits are difficult to draw. Two travel narratives occupy a central place in the novel: the trip to Mexico, which only enables the hero hysterically to focus on himself, even contaminating the narrative; and the journey across the Atlantic, after the sinking of the Sam MacManus, which is the experience that brings Augie March to Grandma Lausch' s world, and by the same token, unlocks his ability to tell his story.21 CONCLUSION: RICHNESS, WHAT RICHNESS? Augie March gives the impression of multifarious life, of scintillating reality, a feeling of tolerance, of geniality. If one analyzes in depth the origin of such a 21. A complex question is that of morality: when is Augie more genuine, more human: in hi s American «adventures», or in his presenl sit-back-and-relax mood, earning (lots of) money in an obscure business which may not be that different from Harry Lime's? Echn-chamber nf the American stage 95 reaction, che fact becomes paradoxical: the scope of experience (socially) is not so wide as would appear at first sight (the Marches are not that destitute, nor are the Magnuses so rich); there are not that man y characters (for a 600-page novel), or more precisely, a surprising number of characters keep reappearing, with new functions and in ncw contexts; "advcnture" itself is not so varied, if one excludes the Transatlantic phase ofthe nove l, about which we are told little (thc obvious exception is theMexican episode; but even hcre, the Mexico of Augie March cannot match that of Under the Volcanp for dazzling mystery). What then is responsible for the impression of richness Saul Bellow novel conveys? I believe that it is che vocal variety of the novel. It is as a re sult of this that the linguistic world of a novel which, oversimplifying, can be said to be somehow parochial -its universe the world of half a dozen Jewish families of Chica gois surprisingly large - just think of the sheer quantity of names from Greco-roman Antiquity, either myths, historical characters, philosophers, e tcin comparison with even the typical novel of the 60s or 70s. To my mind, the epitome of this is the report of a monologue by Hooker Frazer, with an impossibly wide range of reference: Declarations, resolutions, treaties, theories, congresses, bones of kings, Cromwells, Loyolas, Lenins and czars, bordes of India and China, famines, huddles, massacres, sacrifices, he mentioned. Great crowds of Benares and London, Rome, he made me see . . . (Bellow 1953, 490) A novel such as chis resists che thematical straitjacket which Bellow 's stated intentions appear to be imposing: if the problem is one of the search for identity, why dazzle the reader with so many words, so many unnecessary words? The attraction of Augie March could be summed up as a virtuous circle: to convey such a sense of richness, you need a 600-page no ve l; to fill up that vol um e, you need words, words, words. WORKS CITED BAKHTIN, M. Esthétique et théorie du roman. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. BEL LOW, S. Adventures of Augie March. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953. BROOKS, C. & WARREN, R.P. Understanding Fiction. New York, 1943. ELLISON, R. Invisible Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952. EMERSON, R.W Selected Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. GENETTE, G. Figures Ill . París: Seuil, 1972. GENETTE, G. Nouveau discours du récit. París: Seuil, 1983. KEROUAC, J. 011 the Road. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957. TODOROV, T."Lcs ca tégories du récit littéraire ", Communications 8, 1966.