Adam Bede

Some way into 'The Art of George Eliot' (illustrated, origin now forgotten, certainly not from new), which has prompted me to take another look at 'Adam Bede'. I may have chucked my rather battered book, but there is a backup on the kindle, previously unread.

I wondered who Mr. W. J. Harvey was and how he turned up at North Staffordshire, but books from 1961 do not see fit to include a little essay to puff the author. Such people were much more self-effacing then than they are now.

I then wondered how I came to be reading literary criticism, something I have not much done since I was an adolescent, although in recent years I have read the odd literary biography. What on earth is such stuff for? Is is not enough just to read & enjoy the books themselves? What does all this clever analysis of how it all works add to the sum of human knowledge?

But, the clever analysis has got off to an interesting start. The chapter I am on now is all about the author's magisterial voice intruding into the narrative. As far as I have made out so far,  Henry James, who has been influential in these matters, thought that this was a bad thing. The author's voice should not intrude into the narrative and the narrative should be all. If a writer cannot make his point through the narrative, through and inside the fictional world he has created, without needing to add tutorial asides, he does not know his business, And the early work of George Eliot, including here Adam Bede, which I recall to be the book that made her famous, is said to fail in this regard. Far too much authorly intrusion.

For me, it is certainly true that some novels irritate on this score; they are just vehicles for the writer to bang on about some hobby horse or other and it might have been better simply to write an essay, rather than dress whatever it was up in fictional clothes. Aldous Huxley can irritate in just this way, but he usually gets away with it because he usually has something interesting to say, even if his manner of so doing irritates.

And now, rereading Adam Bede, I can see what Harvey means. There are quite a lot of authorial asides, and some of them do grate. But I also think he is right to say that most of it is OK. The author is allowed to add some commentary about the fictional world he is portraying. We are not being invited to see some part of the world with our own eyes, the whole point of a novel is that we are invited to see it through the author's eyes. Our response to the part of the world in question is being qualified by his, that is part of the author's value-add and there is no need to be too stuffy or too purist about exactly how he does it.

I have also been reminded, once again, what a big writer George Eliot is. She might be a bit dense at times, in the sense of there being a lot of sense to the square inch, to the word, but she does have a lot to say, a lot to say which is all the better for being in a compressed form, rather than being all spread out, all too explicitly.

I shall report further in due course.

PS 1: a waking thought this morning was that in the olden days people went in for the Latin greats, and perhaps larded their addresses to the House of Commons with clever quotes, in the original Latin, from Cicero. Then they moved onto the English greats, the likes of George Eliot and D H Lawrence. And now they do media studies.

PS 2: I can't have read Adam Bede in the the last five years or so as the only mention at http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.ca/search?q=bede is mainly about something else.