General Editor: Daniel R. Schwarz

The aim of this series is to provide substantive critical introductions to Reading Novels in the British, Irish, American, and European traditions.

Teaching Cornell students at every level from freshmen to graduate students over the past 50 years has helped me to refine my understanding of how novels work and what they say. Much of the credit for whatever I accomplish as a scholar‐critic goes to the intellectual stimulation provided by my students as well as my Cornell colleagues, most notably my close friend Laura Brown.

My wife, Marcia Jacobson, to whom I owe my greatest debt, has read every page of the manuscript at least three times and given me countless valuable insights about the novels I discuss and the words I have written. It is impossible to overstate my debt to her.

My longtime Cornell friend and colleague Brett de Bary helped me understand translation theory and recommended the texts I should read on that subject.

It gives me great pleasure to thank Pauline Shongov, a gifted Cornell Presidential Research Scholar with whom I have worked for five years as she pursued her ambitious dual degree program. She has strongly contributed to the research as well as played an important role in editing, proofreading, and indexing.

I am grateful for the strong support of Wiley‐Blackwell, with whom I have had a productive professional relationship for many years. I am grateful for the current leadership of Catriona King and the past leadership of Emma Bennett and Rebecca Harkin, the editorial assistance of Joanna Pyke and Brigitte Lee Messenger, and the supervisory roles of Manish Luthra and Anandan Bommen.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge the continued support of the Cornell English Department leadership and staff, and in particular Roger Gilbert and Vicky Brevetti.

How to Succeed in College and Beyond (2016)

Reading the European Novel to 1900 (2014)

Endtimes: Crises and Turmoil at the New York Times (2012; new revised paperback edition 2014)

In Defense of Reading: Teaching Literature in the Twenty‐First Century (2008)

Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel 1890–1930 (2005)

Broadway Boogie Woogie: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture (2003)

Rereading Conrad (2001)

Imagining the Holocaust (1999; revised edition 2000)

Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship between Modern Art and

Modern Literature (1997)

Narrative and Representation in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens: “A Tune Beyond Us, Yet

Ourselves” (1993)

The Case for a Humanistic Poetics (1991)

The Transformation of the English Novel, 1890–1930: Studies in Hardy, Conrad, Joyce,

Lawrence, Forster, and Woolf (1989; revised edition 1995)

Reading Joyce’s “Ulysses” (1987; centenary edition 2004)

The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller (1986; revised edition 1989)

Conrad: The Later Fiction (1982)

Conrad:“Almayer’s Folly” to “Under Western Eyes” (1980)

Disraeli’s Fiction (1979)

As Editor

Damon Runyon: Guys and Dolls and Other Writings (2008)

The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli, 6 volumes (consulting editor, 2004)

Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (Bedford Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, 1997)

Joyce’s “The Dead” (Bedford Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, 1994)

Narrative and Culture (with Janice Carlisle, 1994)

“What we write about fiction is never an objective response to a text; it is always part of a bigger mythmaking – the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves.”

Jeanette Winterson¹

Basic Premises

As with my past books about literature, I am writing this book to share the joy of reading the texts I have chosen. I have chosen works that demand my attention and create a desire – indeed, a need – for me to understand them, sometimes because of their thematic focus, sometimes for their experimental techniques, and usually for a combination of both. All of the works I discuss demonstrate how a particular historical moment shaped the behavior and direction of a nation or significant community, although some of the works are more historically inflected than others. Among my criteria for inclusion in this volume: (1) I revel in rereading and rereading the text; (2) when I am not reading that text, I am thinking about my reading experience; when I awake, the issues generated by the text sometimes displace the more urgent issues of life; (3) I sometimes dream about the text’s characters and events; (4) on each rereading and rethinking, I discover new aspects of the text’s complexity, subtlety, and originality.

While any inclusive generalizations risk the danger of being reductive, we can say that the novel after 1900 is often experimental in form and challenges our expectations of continuity and consistency. These novels ask the reader to play a significant role in perceiving formal unity and in interpreting idiosyncratic, irrational, and seemingly inexplicable behavior. David Lodge has argued that “The modernist novel is generally characterized by a radical rearrangement of the spatial‐temporal unity of the narrative line” (Lodge, “Milan Kundera, and the Idea of the Author in Modern Criticism,” 141).² What he means is that the narrative of what happened next has given way to radical rearrangements of time and space, unexpected fissures, surprising returns to events in the past, inexplicable accidents, deviations from realism, and radical metaphors. More often than in the past the telling (discourse) of the story is as much or more the author’s focal point as the events of the story; hence, in many cases, the telling becomes the center of the reader’s experience. What I will be stressing is that readers must respond to the uncanny and unimaginable in both form and content.

What is Modernism?

I am using the term Modernism to refer to the period beginning in the late nineteenth century. Modernism is a response to cultural crisis. By the 1880s we have Nietzsche’s Gay Science (1882–1887) with his contention that God is Dead as well as Krafft‐Ebing’s revolutionary texts on sexuality; we also have the beginnings of modern physics in the work of J. J. Thomson. All challenged absolutist theories of truth.

Let us recall that Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared in 1859 and Essays and Reviews (edited by John William Parker) which in 1860 questioned the Bible as revealed history; in the period from 1865 to 1870, Karl Marx began to publish Das Kapital, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, and Freud opened the doors of psychopathology in the 1880s. Otto von Bismarck and Benjamin Disraeli dominated Europe, and colonialism expanded its reach.

In its response to difficult circumstances Modernism is an ideology of possibility and hope. But paradoxically Modernism is also an ideology of despair in its response to excessive faith in industrialism, urbanization, so‐called technological progress, and to the Great War of 1914 to 1918 which was believed to be the War to End All Wars.

As we shall see, Modernism goes beyond previous cultures in engaging otherness and questioning Western values. As James Clifford notes, in 1900 “‘Culture’ referred to a single evolutionary process.” He articulates an important aspect of Modernism:

The European bourgeois ideal of autonomous individuality was widely believed to be the natural outcome of a long development, a process that, although threatened by various disruptions, was assumed to be the basic, progressive movement of humanity. By the turn of the century, however, evolutionist confidence began to falter, and a new ethnographic conception of culture became possible. The word began to be used in the plural, suggesting a world of separate, distinctive, and equally meaningful ways of life. The ideal of an autonomous, cultivated subject could appear as a local project, not a telos for all humankind. (Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 92–93)³

Modernism contains the aspirations and idealism of nineteenth‐century high culture and the prosaic world of nineteenth‐century city life; both are colored by an ironic and self‐conscious awareness of limitation. Often convictions are framed by an ironic stand indicating an awareness of the difficulty of fulfilling possibility. Prior to modernist questioning, the possibility of a homogeneous European culture existed. As John Elderfield puts it, “history was not always thought to be quite possibly a species of fiction but once comprised a form of order” (Elderfield, Henri Matisse, 203).⁴

We must not look for reductive consistency in our narrative of Modernism but for pluralistic and even contradictory explanations. Modernism depends on the interpretive intelligence of a reader’s perspective. We need to not only look at assumptions from a modern point of view that is open to destabilizing shibboleths, but we also need to try to understand the world of modern authors and painters from a perspective that takes account of how they intervene, intersect, transform, and qualify the culture of which they are a part.

Modernism emphasizes that we lack a coherent identity and seeks techniques to express this idea. Stressing how each of us is changing every moment, Henri Bergson wrote in Creative Evolution:

Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. … The piling up of the past upon the past goes on without relaxation. In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought, and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. (Ellmann and Feidelson, Jr., The Modern Tradition, 725)⁵

Bergson continues: “What are we in fact, what is our character, if not the condensation of the history we have lived from our birth?” (ibid., 725). Note the parallel to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept that when each of us speaks or writes, our prior systems of language voluntarily and involuntarily manifest themselves in a heteroglossic voice.

We now accept that, given the ever‐changing nature of self, each of us has multiple selves and points of view. That shared understanding that we lack one coherent self is a cause of the complex dramatized consciousness of the narrators in Proust’s Swann’s Way, Grass’s The Tin Drum, Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy as well as the multiple narrative perspectives of Pamuk in My Name is Red and Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Is there not a continuity between Oscar Wilde’s concept of transcending the self by lying and Henri Bergson’s of duration? Both seek to transform the tick‐tock of daily life’s passing time – what the Greeks called chronos – into significant time or kairos.

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot affirmed that literary tradition meant writing with an historical sense which

compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. … No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. (Eliot, Selected Essays, 4)⁶

Modernism is inclusive, containing both the aestheticism and complexity of high culture, the straightforwardness and earthiness of working‐class culture, and, like its successor Post‐Modernism, an ironic awareness of its own self‐consciousness. Just as writers like Zola and Grass not only include the urban working class, agrarian workers, and miners but also focus on the lives and aspirations of these people, modernist painters focus on the vernacular in painting – Cézanne’s card players, Degas’s laundresses, and Picasso’s prostitutes, café life, and circus performers. Yet writers such as Pamuk and Kundera also believed in the power of art and in the artist as visionary prophet.

The Role of History in Shaping Fiction

Although I was trained as a formalist focusing on the fictional ontology of literary works, I have become more and more interested in how art, and specifically literature, is a function of culture. The common thread in my work from my early books on Disraeli, Conrad, and Joyce to my studies of New York City between the wars (Broadway Boogie Woogie: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture) and the New York Times (Endtimes? Crises and Turmoil at the New York Times) is an effort to balance formal analyses with historical knowledge, expressed by my mantra: “Always the text; always historicize.”

Fictional texts are windows not only into the minds of authors but also into the period in which they were written. I have come to think history is always present whether an author is aware of it or not. Thus the historical dimension of a literary text is not always volitional on the part of an author. Certainly Swann’s Way, once considered the paradigmatic novel of manners with a strong personal inflection, reflects an historical and cultural moment in France and Europe. The same can be said of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, once considered the ultimate hermetic novels of manners, but which on closer inspection make us realize that World War I hovers over both texts.

I begin with two texts published before World War I, Death in Venice (1912) and Swann’s Way (1913). I include one written during World War I, Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), and one written during World War II, Camus’s The Stranger (1942). Most of my selected novels appeared after World War II: Camus’s The Plague (1947), Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958), Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959), Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi‐Continis (1962), Kertész’s Fatelessness (1975), and a few on the cusp of the twenty‐first century – Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), Pamuk’s My Name is Red (1998) – with Müller’s The Hunger Angel (2009) and Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy (2012–2015) appearing in the twenty‐first century.

Certainly several of our novels, notably Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Pamuk’s My Name is Red, and Müller’s The Hunger Angel, have Post‐Modernist components. To be sure, many other of our texts also have aspects of the skepticism, irony, resistance to orderly and logical explanations, doubts about the efficacy of language, and structural and thematic discontinuity which we associate with Post‐Modernism. This is another way of saying that Modernism not only set the stage for Post‐Modernism but also that they have vast similarities and that a dotted rather than a straight line divides them.

The two World Wars and the Holocaust as well as the Cold War between the West and the USSR and the threat of nuclear war loom large in any study of the fiction of this period. My readings will place the texts in the context of what we know about authors’ personal experiences and the world to which they are responding. Bassani, Kertész, Grass, and Müller focus on World War II and its effects, with Bassani and Kertész explicitly addressing the Holocaust. We cannot read Camus without knowing about his life in colonial Algeria and his role in the French Resistance. Even novels which seem to focus on remote periods such as Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon and Pamuk’s My Name is Red address major historical transitions and severe cultural clashes, especially between Western Eurocentric and Islamic values.

Not every reader notices the same historical nuances and contexts, in part because we bring different degrees of historical knowledge to our reading, but we cannot ignore the strong historical pressure of twentieth‐century European history on events in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Leopard, The Tin Drum, Fatelessness, The Garden of the Finzi‐Continis, The Hunger Angel, and Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy, and indeed on most of the novels I discuss in this study.

The problem is when and how much to focus on historical contexts without straying too far from texts. To take an extreme example, the meaning of Holocaust texts such as Elie Wiesel’s Night or Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz depends far more on historical knowledge than the poems of Wallace Stevens or the fiction of Proust, although for Proust, knowledge of his biography is more essential than for Stevens. Our knowing something about Joyce’s life and Irish history from 1880 to 1922 is far more important in reading Portrait of an Artist and Ulysses than our knowing about Stevens’s life when reading his collected poems, although even there knowledge of his biography and some sense of American history help.

Claire Messud has insightfully described the balance in major fiction between form and ideas:

The novel form, capacious and elastic as it is, nevertheless requires that ideas and emotions – all abstractions, really – be pressed and transformed, passed through the fine sieve of the material world and made manifest in action, conversation, and concrete detail. Fiction is created out of T‐shirts and tomato plants, oven fries, chalk dust and rainfall, out of snarky exchanges and subtle glances. Constructing a world out of these apparently random bits – “the nearest thing to life,” as George Eliot put it – is a matter of meticulous imagining and careful craft. Making this fictional world come alive is a matter, as Martha Graham put it, of the life force. … [F]iction is like dance (or jazz music) in its tension between freedom and constraint: eventually, choreography must assert control to effectuate a satisfying conclusion. (Messud, “The Dancer & the Dance,” 6, 8)⁷

What is missing from Messud’s observation is the role of history which is much messier to discuss than form but nevertheless essential to our understanding. In this study, I am going to show the relevance of historical contexts to close reading and how close reading, rather than conflicting with historicism, actually complements it. This is not to argue that we should all read similarly; for some readers, historical contexts and biographical knowledge will be less important than for others. How we respond to a literary text is a function of who we are at the time we read and reread.

The inventiveness and originality of the novels I discuss in this volume speak to the importance of both individual imagination and historical context. These novelists understand the role of historical forces as well as the decisions humans need to make to respond to conditions they did not create. Often existential decisions required by specific historical conditions – in the case of Kertész’s Fatelessness and much of Bassani’s Ferrara fiction, the Holocaust – determine an individual’s fate. Historiography, albeit fictional, shapes the existential decisions made by characters in Camus’s The Plague and Lampedusa’s The Leopard. In these novels, the narrative drama and thematic focus are on how characters respond to events beyond their control. Even in a text which once was thought to barely evoke historical forces like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, we realize that Gregor is the victim of a capitalistic system where money undermines family and community life. Notwithstanding striking examples in post‐1900 Europe of autocracy and its effects, individual lives lived do not conform to the plans and rules of one person and his cohorts. That resistance – in deeds and imagination – is very much part of the fiction I will be discussing.

Another strand of historicism is the interaction between art and literature. Developing strategies presented in depth in my Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature, I will be discussing influences, parallels, and formal experiments shared by visual artists, especially painters, and novelists. I shall relate Cubism and Futurism, among other movements, to the novels I discuss.

Human Choices

We need to be wary of what Isaiah Berlin calls historical inevitability – in a 1953 lecture of that title – namely the idea that forces rather than humans shape and determine history. This was of course Marx’s idea. The alternative that human choices – with all their inconsistencies, obsessions, and irrationality – play an important role need not be restricted to the Great Man or Woman but can take the form of a group of individuals (perhaps anonymous, perhaps known) determining historical direction. In modern times, the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising was such an event.

As I have mentioned, by the end of the nineteenth century, Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, among many others, were challenging accepted truths about history, nature, and humankind. In response to new ways of thinking, twenty‐ and twenty‐first‐century writers often use their fiction to explore and define their own values, psyches, and ideas about the purpose of literature. The result is a polyphonic response in which authors struggle to find meaning in an amoral cosmos and foreground that quest in their narratives. In the novels I will be discussing, a recurring theme is how do we respond to a world in historical turmoil and bereft of sustaining political and religious certainties in which we can believe? How do we find personal order in such a world? For our authors, as for many of us, the only alternative is existential commitment to a set of values, even while knowing that these values are a tentative arrangement of positions that makes one’s own life work rather than moral absolutes.

Thus many of the works I discuss in this volume have a strong autobiographical aspect even while they respond to historical context: Müller’s The Hunger Angel, Kertész’s Fatelessness, Bassani’s Ferrara stories and novels, Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy, and Proust’s Swann’s Way. Indeed, the novels in my study of Reading the Modern European Novel Since 1900 have far more examples of a strong autobiographical presence than the novels discussed in my earlier Reading the European Novel to 1900.

All fiction, indeed all criticism, has an element of autobiography no matter how hard the writers try to efface themselves from texts. But the personal does not mean authors cannot invent characters and events. For authors can and do imagine other genders and ethnicities as well as experiences that they never had and even places they never visited. Yet the protagonists of many of the novels I discuss are often clearly surrogates for the authors. Such is the case of Aschenbach in Death in Venice, Gregor in Metamorphosis, Georg in Fatelessness, the Prince in The Leopard, Dr. Rieux in The Plague, and Elena in Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy. If I may cite an example from a European exile writing in English and well known to most of the aforementioned authors, Conrad’s Marlow plays the role of his surrogate in Heart of Darkness (1899) and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in Lord Jim (1900). Conrad’s 1896–1898 letters as well as his Congo Diary show that Marlow is struggling with the same issues – loneliness, anxiety, doubt about the pretenses of imperialism – in Heart of Darkness as Conrad struggled with in his life.

A recurring pattern in post‐1900 fiction is authors feeling a sense of otherness, that is psychological, political, and/or ethnic separation from the dominant group, usually as a result of historical forces beyond their control. Many of our texts dramatize that marginalization within the narrative about fictional characters. Kertész, Bassani – victims of the Holocaust – and Müller are examples where racial and ethnic reasons are central to estrangement. In Proust, Mann, and Müller, the reasons for marginalization are sexual, while in Kundera they are political and psychological. In Pamuk’s My Name is Red the miniaturists feel aesthetically and ideologically under siege because their basic assumptions are being challenged by Western realism. Lampedusa’s Prince is historically and politically displaced by what he feels is a materialistic order that is replacing the one he knew and which was based on inherited privilege. In a number of our texts, notably those by Kafka and Saramago, economic marginalization within a capitalist economy plays a role. Saramago’s bachelor is psychologically marginalized by shyness and a sense of his inferiority. Kafka’s Gregor has become a slave to his office because his family depends on him to pay off debts.

In a world increasingly devoid of certainties, metaphysical or historical or personal, the novel after 1900 also tests the limits of language. A major recurring pattern in these novels is the dramatization of their narrators’ and characters’ Sisyphean quest to overcome those limits. Or as Müller puts it, “[W]ords have their own truth, and that comes from how they sound. But they aren’t the same as the things themselves, there’s never a perfect match. … Even language doesn’t reach the deepest places we have inside us” (Müller, “The Art of Fiction No. 225”).⁸ Nevertheless, the writer must keep trying: “Language is so different from life. How am I supposed to fit the one into the other? How can I bring them together? There’s no such thing as one‐to‐one correspondence” (ibid.). The human choice of language defines the author as well as narrators and characters. As Wittgenstein observed, the limits of one’s language are the limits to one’s world.

The Complexity of Modernist Texts

As we shall see, reading modernist texts keeps readers off balance and undermines the possibility of monologic responses. Even authorial readings, that is the readings generated by the author’s choices, insist on polyphonic readings. Kertész does not permit his reader to become complacent about “knowing” what happens in the camps. Nor will Camus allow us to take a one‐dimensional view of human conduct in The Plague or The Stranger, although he comes closer than many of our writers in subscribing to an ethical if existential code.

Ferrante reminds us that Elena makes mistakes and bad choices; even as Ferrante evokes both her readers’ sympathy and empathy for women finding their voices, she does not let them forget that repulsive violence remains a fact of life in Naples. Kafka does not allow readers to impose simple allegories of reading on Metamorphosis without pushing them to inquire about what it is to be human and what they would have done if confronted with a transformed loved one, whether by Alzheimer’s or physical deterioration.

Authorial readings are supplemented by resistant readings which call attention to what is missing in an author’s vision. Thus we see in Mann a tendency to patronize the feelings of the less advantaged. Grass does not seem aware of how he understates the Holocaust. But sometimes readers simply miss the implications of what an author writes. Each generation, indeed each reader, responds to a text differently, and the interpretive history of canonical texts texts shows this. Texts change not only as individual readers change, but also as cultural assumptions change. A paradigmatic example of how readers change is Conrad’s The Secret Sharer where Leggatt and the Captain have a homosocial relationship that earlier critics didn’t notice. When I studied Swann’s Way in college in the somewhat repressive 1950s much less was made of Swann’s sexual proclivities and those of his cohorts than when I teach Proust’s texts now.

Principles of Selection

I need to acknowledge that for Reading the Modern European Novel Since 1900, I found it more difficult to select novels on which to focus than it was to select the novels for Reading the European Novel to 1900, and my choices are more arbitrary. Only a handful (if that) stand out as giants the way Don Quixote, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, and Madame Bovary do. I have thought deeply about what should be included in this volume and have asked for input from colleagues teaching twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century literature. In surveying the novels after 1900, I have tried to be more inclusive of different nationalities than in the first volume where I included mostly Russian and French authors with one Spanish author. I include four relatively recent Nobel Prize winners from different countries: Müller (Romania), Saramago (Portugal), Pamuk (Turkey), and Kertész (Hungary) as well as two from an earlier era: Mann (Germany) and Camus (France). Proust and Kafka did not win Nobel prizes, surprising as that might be to our generation of readers.

Since my two volumes are really one, namely the story of the evolution of the European novel, I will on occasion refer back to the novels I discussed in the first volume. The novels I discuss in Volume II are influenced by those in Volume I and are responding to them in what Harold Bloom has called the Anxiety of Influence. Many of the texts in the second volume are in part strong misreadings of novels I discussed in the first. It can be instructive to imagine all our novels in both volumes sitting around a table responding to one another. Indeed, we might think of the novelists in the second volume as taking a class from the writers in the first.

I have tried to include works that I consider masterworks. What makes a literary masterwork? While in some cases I regard my selections as suggestions rather than the results of a full consensus, I am sure future generations will sort out the canonical figures. Yet I am interested in what makes a novel a literary masterwork. Masterworks, whether in literature, the visual arts, or music, demand our attention and create a desire – indeed, a need – to understand them in terms of their value system even while aware that we might not share all their values. Indeed, the novels I am discussing represent radically different value systems, including, in the case of Pamuk and Saramago, non‐Western ones.