Henry Green

by Henry Vincent Yorke

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Henry Green as Experimental Novelist

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SOURCE: "Henry Green as Experimental Novelist," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XVI, No. 2, Summer, 1984, pp. 197-214.

[In the following essay, Gibson examines Green's experiments with traditional conventions of the novel form in his fiction, comparing his novels to those of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Franz Kafka.]

The originality of Henry Green's experimental fiction has seldom been given its due. He has been deemed a modernist with little understanding of what his "modernism" actually involves, or what makes it peculiar to him. Critics like Stokes, Russell, and Tindall have called him (among other things) a "poetic" or a "symbolist" novelist. But terms like these minimize the differences between him and some of his predecessors or contemporaries. He has been readily grouped with Faulkner and—by Toynbee and Cosman, for instance—with Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In certain respects, however, it is the differences between his work and theirs that need insisting on. His uniqueness has sometimes been described primarily in terms of certain eccentricities in style which are among the least felicitous aspects of his work. Much should be made of the acclaim Green has won from other writers (Waugh and Graham Greene, Nabokov, Sarraute, Updike, Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West and Angus Wilson, Rosamond Lehmann and Eudora Welty). Yet it has misled commentators into thinking of him as a novelist's novelist, a "pure artist" (as Harold Acton dubs him), a master of a limited range of techniques. There is more than that to be said for Green.

Yet it is not to be said in the customary terms. Criticism that has looked for the usual kinds of human interest in Green's novels has, in general, been trivial criticism. Ryf has written of the element of "psychological verisimilitude" in Green's work, and Stokes of his powers of "psychological insight." Weatherhead has used Freudian apparatus to demonstrate Green's concern with "self-creation," and Hall has detected analogies between Green and Freud, and Green's and Joyce's "use of modern psychology." The trouble is that this kind of approach to Green begs us to compare him with a Joyce or a Woolf and, as an exponent of psychological fiction, he must quickly be found wanting. His motto, in fact, might come from the Céline he so much admired: "Je n'ai pas la grande idée humaine, moi." Characteristically, Green plays down the significance of individuals and their predicaments. He attributes little importance to private emotions or psychological events. To examine, for instance, Max Adey's deliberations, in Party Going, on whether to take Amabel to France or not, is to find consciousness reduced to almost absurdly simple terms, as it so often is in Green's novels.

Indeed, so long as our criteria remain those of a certain kind of "depth," Green will probably seem an inconsiderable novelist. They are criteria, of course, that must play a part in any evaluation of his work, and they offer us an exact sense of his limitations. He is not, in the end, a truly major figure. But they can themselves be limiting, and they continue to lie behind most views of Green. They inform, for instance, the preoccupation with Green and his novels as "enigmatic." They lurk there in Kermode's account of Party Going as a novel which has to "mean more, or other" that it manifestly says. Kermode's view of the novel is attractive in its subtlety. But it is also an invitation to appreciate another kind of concealed depth: an invitation less crude than those of critics concerned with psychology, but nonetheless similar in its appeal to a certain kind of value. In general, we shall not really understand Green's art unless we recognize it for what it is: an art, above all, of surfaces, surfaces that are suggestive and yet, in the end, blandly impenetrable.

To say so is not ipso facto to demean that art. Much the same might be said, and with as much justice, of Kafka. Nor, if we call Green's art an art of surfaces, do we necessarily convict him of sterile formalism. Melchiori has seen Green's later novels as sacrificing content to form, eschewing humanism in favor of aestheticism. But the qualities he detects in the later fiction are quite clearly evident, too, in earlier work. More importantly, Melchiori's reading of Green involves a narrow conception of Green's kind of formal experiment as mere artiness, extravaganza. The obvious point need to be made: that worthwhile experiments with the form of the novel make possible new ways of seeing, of knowing or—perhaps most accurately—of constructing the world. Green's experiments are of this kind.

We should remind ourselves here that Green saw his fiction as specifically opposed to traditional fiction—not, simply, as a deviation from its norms, but as an attack on them. He called it "an advanced attempt to break up the old-fashioned type of novel." The most interesting transgressions in his novels are transgressions, I think, of norms of uniformity and diversity that partly govern traditional fiction. Green's novels are full of the unexpected, and, above all, of unexpected similarities and conformities, and unexpected variations or incongruities. His work continually imperils the frontiers commonly established by narrative codes. It disturbs or fractures the narrative conventions that make for certain kinds of differentiation. In the end, it subverts the very modes of individuation which the novel tends to confirm and even promote.

It is worth pausing here to remark on some of Green's preoccupations. His autobiography, Pack My Bag, reveals a man peculiarly aware of and sensitive to "gulfs," gulfs between individuals, classes, walks of life, school and home, business and home, the old and the young, "officers and cadets," "apprentices and artisans," different kinds of speech, and so on. The book sometimes argues the need for such gulfs to be "bridged," and it is clear that, in some respects at least, fiction, for Green, served precisely that purpose. Yet this is true in no simple sense, and it would be rash to translate the point into straightforward political terms. Politics, Green wrote, was none of his business. The disclaimer inevitably looks disingenuous. But to say that does not really help, since the political attitudes revealed in Green's work are complex, in fact, and uncertain. Green's desire to "bridge gulfs" doubtless had its origin in obscure emotional needs of his own, and I am principally concerned, in any case, with its consequences for the form his writing took. Yet it is worth observing that much of his work, and the pattern of much of his life, suggest a man turning away from his social character—that of an industrialist educated at Eton and Oxford, and with aristocratic connections—toward something he felt might be richer and ampler. We should remember, too, that, on his own admission, his inspiration came from the working class, and that, when he lost a sense of connection with working people, his art went into decline.

To appreciate Green's work, we must recognize that it is full of precarious distinctions, distinctions that are established only to be obscured. He strikes us as a writer who is disinclined to abide by the clarity of the oppositions he has created or perceived. The characters in Doting, for instance, pair off in opposition to each other, only to pair off, again, with different partners, in opposition to other couples. In Concluding, Rock and Edge abruptly lose their hatred for one another and suddenly grow close. In Back, the Grants exchange roles, Grant becoming passive and stricken, Mrs. Grant the tender. To dwell on a detail: in Party Going, the very fact that Claire lies means that she subsequently begins "to speak out genuinely for once what she did really feel." Green is constantly inclined to perceive a connection or kinship between opposites. Reversals and transformations of the kind just instanced abound in his novels, and they are symptomatic, evidence of an imaginative habit which never leaves him. The dividing line between contraries is blurred: the different constantly threatens to become the same.

Green was obsessed with sameness. Mirrors, for instance, were always a source of fascination. One thinks, in particular, of the mirrors in the "private room" reserved by Mrs. Weatherby, in Nothing, to "entertain old friends in honour of Philip's twenty firster." "Mirror" and "echo" were favorite words. Anthony Powell remarks, in his Memoirs, that certain repetitive routines were a distinctive feature of Green's life at Oxford. The novels reveal a corresponding desire to repeat and duplicate. Phrases and scraps of conversation recur throughout certain novels and often from one character to another. The characters in Loving and Living imitate, quote, mimic, and copy one another. In Nothing and Doting, elements of certain scenes are repeated in other scenes involving different characters. Scenes are frequently constructed along similar lines and around similar concerns.

Images and techniques that involve duplication are legion in Green's work. Critics have seized, in particular, on the abundance of "structural parallels" in Green's work, and eagerly sought to squeeze meaning from them. Thus, for example, with the introduction of the passage "from the Souvenirs of Madame de Crequy" in Back. Apparently, it bears an important thematic relation to the main plot, and the question of its significance has sparked off disagreement among the commentators. Yet attempts to demonstrate that it makes a particular point have not been convincing. The parallel, in fact, is surely best read simply as an example of that compulsion to double things that is so characteristic of Green. It is one of those curious, unnatural, carefully arranged symmetries that are so common in his novels. In Back, again, the hero is obsessed with his dead love, Rose, and the novel begins in a churchyard thick with roses and ends in a rose garden. Green's passion for duplication is often evident in the smallest details. At one point in Living, thoughts settle "3 by 3" in young Dupret's mind. In Party Going, there is a surrealistic generality to some of the images evoked: the women, for instance, disturbed by a sudden noise, who are left holding cups "half-way to their lips," with the "little fingers of their right hands stuck out pointing towards where that crash had come from." Such images are eerily disconcerting, in a way that reminds us of Magritte or Kafka.

Green, then, was uncommonly inclined to imagine the world in terms of the similar or the identical, rather than to create a world that was wholly discrete, amply and incessantly particularized. It could lead him, on occasions, into absurdity, but it has an important effect on the way his narratives work. We have a sense, for example, of a limitation placed upon the kind of variety conventionally so crucial in the novel: the distribution, through the narrative, of different and clearly distinct identities. This is particularly relevant to any consideration of Green's characters. He sometimes seems less inclined to distinguish between them than to confuse them and to encourage us to confuse them. This can be one consequence of the duplication of names in his novels. There are two Alberts in Loving and, in Back, Rose and John are both the names of two people. The similarity of some of the names in Party Going has a like effect. Max and Alex, Angela and Amabel, Robert and Robin—the names seem to have been chosen because they resemble one another. The techniques Green adopts (and, in particular, the frequent shifts from one character or group of characters to another) mean that, at the beginning of the novel at least, it is difficult to tell the characters apart. We have the impression that we ourselves are peering through the fog. The characters in Party Going are granted few peculiarities and are easily mistaken for one another. As a result, words and actions tend to gain in importance over those who are talking and acting.

In comparison, then, with most novelists, Green is little intent on firm and precise differentiations between his characters. In some of the novels, at least, differentiations seem, in large measure, to be there so that they can be blurred, so that similarities can be emphasized. The end of Party Going is a case in point. It involves a delayed and unexpected variant of a procedure that has been followed throughout the novel. A character is introduced (or reintroduced) in terms, primarily, that stress his likeness to others. As "Mr. Richard Cumberland" appears on the stage, Green tells us that he "was not unlike Alex and when he spoke his manner was much the same." There is an almost comic sense of anomaly, here, of deviation from a norm. At this point in the novel, it is bound to be particularly marked. For this is Embassy Richard. Other characters (and the novel itself) have attributed a quite unwarranted importance to him, and he has gained in importance, too, since he is, apparently, an outsider to the group. Once again, Green blurs the terms of what has previously been formulated as an opposition. That he does so at the end of the novel is a point that needs to be stressed. For it happens at a moment when there is a conspicuous potential for drama in the intrusion of an outsider, someone alien, someone of a different kind.

To some extent, the traditional novel depends for its effect (for its appeal) on its diversity. Encouraging and catering to an appetite for the new, it is committed to producing the unanticipated and unfamiliar, to contrasts. If iteration has a function in the novel, it is, as Genette notes in another context, a subordinate function. Anything else is heterodox, a transgression of the norms of variation which allow a novelist to hold attention and to retain his audience. In the work of certain modern writers, however, iteration has been given a more significant role. This is self-evidently the case with Proust and Proust's concern with the recurrent. Genette provides a useful account of the importance of "iterative narrative" in Proust, of Proust's "intoxication with the iterative." One thinks, too, of all the repetitions and duplications in Kafka's fiction; of Kafka's protagonists, doomed perpetually to try to comprehend the incomprehensible; of the very nature of Kafka's world, with its identical offices and corridors, its almost identical officials. Green knew and was devoted to the work of both Proust and Kafka, and to relate his fiction to theirs is to begin to put his habit of duplication, his mirror-techniques and structural parallels into the correct perspective. They are part of an important development in modern fiction, a movement away from the novel's traditional concern with singularity toward a fiction with consciously limited resources. In certain respects, Green, like Proust and Kafka, turns away from myths of uniqueness and presents the particular as instance.

To say, then, as Weatherhead does, that Green's novels show a "fidelity to entity," that they champion the individual and the "private living law," is to put the emphasis in precisely the wrong place. Green often seems to individualize only to obscure distinctions between individuals. As a result, what comes to the fore is not so much personalities as what they have in common: manners, impulses, habits, patterns of behavior and—above all, perhaps—language. Green, of course, was intensely conscious of language and, in particular, of speech, or—to use a word that recurs in his writing—of idiom. It is surely significant that his first novel is about a boy who goes blind and for whom, as a result, "voices" become of "great interest." Green was unusually aware of the different ways in which different people talk and the barriers that different ways of using language erect between people. So much is clear, for instance, from his account in Pack My Bag of his (failed) attempt to chat to a working girl at a dance in Blackpool.

He was particularly sensitive to what he calls the "half-tones of class," to sociolects as both exclusive and imprisoning. In the novels, however, the boundaries between sociolects are frequently crossed. Green understood that the language people use to some extent depends on the social context in which they use it, and many of his characters change their accent or their idiom during the course of a given novel. Richard Roe, for example, frequently lapses into the cockney slang of his fellow fireman in Caught. Young Dupret, in conversation with Tarver in Living, uses what he assumes to be "Tarver's language." In Loving, Edith, as she falls in love with Raunce, begins to "speak like him." Most strikingly of all, we have those two extraordinary characters, Sebastian Birt in Concluding and the "false detective" in Party Going, Birt successively adopts "the manner of a State executive," "eighteenth century speech," the shrill tones of Edge, "the manner of his colleague Dakers," "Mr. Rock's party manner," "the voice of the sort of lecturer" he is not, and so on. The curious eccentric in Party Going shifts, within a few lines, from a "Yorkshire accent," to "Brummagem," to "an educated voice." Both are extreme examples of a constant concern of Green's: the relativity of idiom.

As such, both characters are examples, in miniature, of what happens in the novels themselves. For the most characteristic idiom in Green's novels is itself a mixed one. It blends the tones of different social groups, the literary and the colloquial, the vernacular and good novelese. Russell is surely right to argue that there is, in fact, no single prose style that we can recognize as Green's. The idiom of most of the novels is various, "unpredictable," to adopt a world Harold Acton uses to describe both the man and his work. There is, for instance, an odd ornateness to some of Green's prose, what Melchiori calls "unexpected flourishes of feeling, fanciful word-pictures" developed in passages of "florid diction" which have "the syntactic freedom and the sensuous imagery of poetry." There are extravagances like the lengthy description of the fallen beech in Concluding and the description of Raunce cutting and punting the daffodil head in Loving. There are Green's extended similes, so protracted that the point of resemblance at which they start is forgotten, and—like Milton's—they take on a life of their own, a life, indeed, that is sometimes more vivid than that of the narrative context from which they spring.

But if, on the one hand, one of Green's most conspicuous styles is highly embellished, decorative, consciously literary, the other is flat, spare, sometimes awkward, colloquial in tone. Green shifts, not only between different idioms, but idioms that are opposed extremes. He interrupts a colloquial with an ostentatiously literary tone and contaminates literary language with the vernacular. There is thus a disconcerting sense of the heterogeneous yoked by violence in much of Green's writing. Take, as a single instance, the description, in Loving, of Edith and her charges running "along a path round by the back past the dovecote and any number of doors set in the Castle's long high walls pierced with tall Gothic windows. Running," we are told, "they flashed along like in the reflection of a river on a grey day, and smashed through white puddles which spurted." Green is blending a highly wrought style with a casual idiom that might be Edith's own ("any number of doors," "like in the reflection"). We are left with the sense of a voice, in the narrative, that is both chatty and refined, careful and careless, stylish and crude.

Green's prose is constantly disrupted by the unexpected word or phrase. There are lapses into colloquialism that, in context, are incongruous. As Edge in Concluding tires, for instance, of the press around her and yields to the desire to dance, we are told that "when that moment came, she simply opened her eyes, from which long years had filched the brilliants." But, as in some of Beckett's novels, there are equally incongruous lapses into formality and stiltedness (one notes, for instance, how often the characters in Concluding "propound"). Again and again, the blends in style imply an apparent indeterminacy as to the kind of reader addressed, or—perhaps better—the novelist seems to be addressing a reader who is both simple and sophisticated. This single sentence from Loving will serve as another example: "Then all three huddled round as if over a live bird sat between his palms till their fags were lit." It slips from Faulknerian elaboration, from modernist self-consciousness into plain slang. Arguably, of course, the use of the slang word is merely another aspect of the same self-consciousness. But the effect, nonetheless, is of a shift in the level of address, as if the narrator were changing his conception of the reader to whom he is communicating. It is difficult for the reader of most of Green's novels to feel a comfortable sense of collusion with the novelist. If he feels that Green is colluding with him in what he takes to be an appropriate manner, he is likely to feel, soon afterwards, that the collusion is with someone else, on different terms.

The narrative idiom Green adopts, then, is commonly a mixed or carefully suspended one. To recognize that is to understand better what is going on in Living. Critics have argued over the nature of the style that is most characteristic of the novel and the success with which it is used. Toynbee finds it simply "irritating," a mere striving for effect. Bassoff sees it as a rejection of ordinary prose, an indication that Green is groping his way toward a more conspicuous style. But an observation of Weatherhead's is more to the point. The omission of articles, says Weatherhead, is a way of bringing the tone of the novel close to "the Warwickshire dialect prevalent in Birmingham in which the becomes the frequently inaudible apocopate, t'." We might be reminded, here, that Green himself said that the style in Living was intended to make the book "as taut and spare as possible" to fit "the proletarian life" he was then leading.

The point, in fact, is that the style in the book is a simulation of a native (and primarily working-class) idiom which, by virtue of its very incompleteness, is seen to be a simulation. It is a style that closes the gap between us and the novel's working-class characters, but also holds us at a distance from them, conveys a sense of Green's (and our) remoteness from them. The novel, in any case, is written in more than one style. Stokes apparently believes that the differences in style correspond to the differences in class and background between the characters. But this will not do. Colloquialisms creep into the sections of the novel concerned with the Duprets and their social milieu. Equally, an ostentatiously literary word or phrase is always likely to intrude into passages describing the novel's humbler folk. Lily Gates and Jim Dale, walking down a leafy lover's lane, kiss "in boskage." Displacements like this are manifold in most of the novel. Styles, for example, are adopted when they are singularly inappropriate to the character who is the subject of attention. So, too, Party Going is strewn with scraps of proletarian idiom, though the novel contains no proletarian characters of any importance. There is thus a peculiar relation between the various characters in Green's world and Green's narrative idiom. To some extent, at least, it traverses them all impartially, absorbing, mingling and redistributing their tones.

This has marked effects on the relationship between narrator and character in Green's novels, and, in particular, that relationship as it is defined through differences in idiom. In the traditional novel, the linguistic aberrations or peculiarities of any given character are seldom likely to be incorporated into the narrative itself, unless by means of style indirecte libre. They are often comic, the comedy being enhanced by the contrast between the character's tones and the suaver and more correct tones of a more articulate narrator. (One has only to think, here, of the humor Jane Austen or Dickens extracts from characters' odd tricks of speech). Modern narrative, on the other hand, has tended to absorb the tones and idioms of characters, but into prose, nonetheless, that—as in Joyce, or Faulkner—is set apart from them by its complexities or involutions.

But in much of Green's work, the narrator's idiom is sometimes scarcely distinct from the idioms of certain characters. Green himself wrote that he wished to avoid the roles of the conventional narrator, the "demi-god" or "know-all." Critics have pounced on his words and eagerly adduced examples of his refusal to assume a position of omniscience. But Green's abdication of authority goes further than that and has more far-reaching consequences. It involves a willingness to surrender the conventional supremacy of the narrative voice, a reluctance to privilege the language of the narrator over the language of characters. Green's narrators assimilate the linguistic habits of others. But they do so only sporadically, and not consistently, and it is partly this that distinguishes Green's narratives from the linguistic hubbub of a Ulysses or a Finnegans Wake. The shifts and transitions are perceptible as violations of norms that the novels also abide by. For the most part, Green's narrative idiom is not so much a new one as a familiar one that is constantly foundering, losing its power, being taken over.

Stokes points out that the idioms of the working-class characters in Caught and Loving carry over into the narrative itself, but argues that it is true only in these two novels, and only with respect to working-class idiom. In fact, in most of the novels, the language of any given character is likely to affect the narrative context. When Liz is introduced in Concluding, we are told she is "distracted," a woman who can scarcely manage "a connected sentence." So, too, at this point, her grandfather's conversation and the narrator's prose both become more disconnected. Green's characters frequently have this kind of effect on the narratives in which they are located. When, for instance, Green deals with his idle rich in Party Going, he slips into precisely the kind of sly innuendo which is one of their (few) fortes. Amabel, for instance, is once described as "like some beauty spot in Wales. Whether it was pretty," Green writes, "or suited to all tastes people would come distances to see it and be satisfied when it lay before them."

Certain passages in Caught deserve to be remarked on here. They appear, at first, to be instances of style indirecte libre, but cannot, in fact, be read as such. The description of Pye's arrival at the hospital is a case in point. The first paragraph begins like this: "The porter kept an occurrence book, same as they have in the Brigade. Then there was the paper he was made to sign, in which he undertook not to give anything to the patient. He read this carefully." The second paragraph ends thus: "In a week's time, if he had had anyone to talk over his trouble, and there was no one, he would have insisted that she spoke no different from another." The first excerpt can plausibly be read as an account of Pye's thoughts and perceptions, relayed in Pye's language. But the second cannot, since it speculates on what Pye might have said. The tone, however, remains the same. We are left with the perplexing impression of a comment passed on Pye by a Pye-like narrator who cannot be Pye. There is a hint of Flaubertian mockery in the offing, but its terms are also reversed. (To appreciate this fully, however, one has to be reading the novel and aware of how often the Pye-like tones are the narrator's, irrespective of whether Pye is his subject or not.) The character's manner has become the narrator's, in a way that goes beyond Flaubert's kind of ironic mimicry. Indeed, the point to be made here is that Green is playing with one of the conventions of Flaubertian narrative itself.

Yet, if the characters' tones tend to invade Green's narratives, the tone of a narrator may also be taken up by a character. During a bus ride back to the substation in Caught, Pye begins to watch a girl:

She was fair, that was all he could see for some time…. But, as this double-decker swayed and banked … he caught sight of one protuberant, half-transparent eye, sideways, blue, hedged with long lashes that might have been scythes to mow his upstanding corn. And a straight grave nose, curved like a goose neck at the nostril.

This is not Green at his best, but the passage is nonetheless of interest. The point of view, here, can only be Pye's. But the manner of the passage, its vocabulary and imagery are clearly remote from his. They are those we identify as the narrator's. There is a sense of irreducible discrepancy, of the narrative as problematic, its mode of address an insoluble paradox. A character has usurped the tones of the narrator who controls him.

This is seldom the case with Back. Yet Back is a novel which exhibits tendencies that are similar to those I have just remarked on. I am thinking in particular, here, of the relationship between protagonist and his world, the world the narrative provides and vouches for. Charley Summers, of course, goes mad, and goes mad in confusing identities. He is thus a familiar kind of figure, kin to Don Quixote and to Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. Conventionally, this kind of madness is likely to be firmly placed as madness, in the novel, contrasted with a world (as established by the narrative) in which the distinctions the character blurs are clearly maintained. This, for instance, is the case with Don Quixote. Alternatively, his madness may be presented from within and contextualized only indirectly. We know that Benjy is mad because we have Jason to set against him, but we do not know precisely what he is confusing or misrepresenting in his section of the novel. What is rare—and perplexing—is the narrative in which an "unbalanced" character faces a world that is other than his, at odds with his, but in some ways as bizarre as his. This is the case, however, in much of Kafka's fiction, and it is also the case in Back. The world represented in these novels is both an analogue for the character and entirely irreducible to his terms. It is a world that sometimes matches him in lunacy and yet turns him into a laughing stock.

The numerous coincidences in Back are particularly relevant here. They are coincidences that—unlike those, say, in Hardy—not only tax our credulity, but are, like coincidences in The Trial, quite blatantly implausible. Charley's friend Middlewitch turns out to be a friend of the Grants, a former lodger of Mrs. Frazier's, and Nancy's neighbor. When Charley and Dot visit James, Middlewitch appears in the same village, in which his friend Mandrew happens to own a house. Nancy, it transpires, is also a friend of Mandrew. Though much of the novel is set in London, the world of Back is as confined as that of Pride and Prejudice. In this version of the modern metropolis, most of the characters Charley meets separately turn out to know each other, and incidental characters sometimes have the same names as more important ones. There is an almost comical reluctance to diversify the novel, to provide the kind of diversity we conventionally expect.

We cannot simply reconcile ourselves to these coincidences by briefly relaxing our criteria, as a Hardy or a Dickens requires us to. Yet they are no mere trivial exercises in "anti-realism." Nor, as Stokes suggests—rather oddly—are they ways of universalizing the particular. They shrink the gap between Charley's view of the world and that world itself. Yet it is a difference the novel nonetheless insists on. Charley wrongly assumes the improbable to be the case, in a world where it sometimes is. He mistakes the different for the same, in a world which seems likely to encourage him in his error. The distinction, conventionally established in novels, between norms and the abnormal, between reality and distortions of reality, is constantly on the point of giving way.

I have so far dwelt chiefly on the way in which Green closes gaps between what are often polarities in more conventional fiction. But he also varies what more conventional novelists tend to keep constant, and this is particularly true of his narrative methods. The world represented in his novels, as we have said, tends to lack diversity. But the ways in which he represents it are uncommonly diverse. We expect novels to be varied, but chiefly in incident, in the events they record and the characters they depict. In Green's novels, it is the narrative itself that is varied. This is not to say, with Melchiori, that Green attends to form at the expense of content, but that he tends to subvert some of the conventional relations between the two.

Green's narratives often lack the smooth progressions, the efficiently articulated flow of information provided by more orthodox fiction. They are full of pockets of disturbance, awkwardnesses, idle digressions and troubling disruptions, anomalies and incongruities. Fragments of narrative discourse often seem oddly detached from their context, sometimes as self-conscious performances, arabesques or tours de force. Green's baroque excursions, for instance, and his lyrical flights, though characteristic features of the novels, are commonly isolated excrescences. They are marked by a care, by a finesse or a quality of feeling which sets them at odds with the context in which they are located. Take, for example, the passage concerning the music of the "famous coloured lady" in Caught. We are bound to be struck by the almost grotesque—but not, in fact, ironic—disparity between the richly toned account of the singer, her music and its effects, and the slightness of the situation it interrupts (the beginnings of Roe's rather tawdry affair with Hilly already seem tainted by half-heartedness and petty falsehood). The passage is resonant, rich in connotations. But they are connotations we will seek in vain to relate to its context, or (other than abstractly) to the novel as a whole. We are given a fleeting glimpse of different possibilities. But they are possibilities quite remote from the novel and entirely beyond the imagination of the characters in question. The passage moves us abruptly beyond the limits of this particular tired little world and adumbrates something quite different. It affords a brief intimation of a kind of experience—a manner of experiencing—that is markedly out of key with the tenor of the rest of the novel. The narrative shifts in Green's novels are sometimes there to perform precisely this function: to sweep us suddenly beyond fixed horizons; to demonstrate the relativity of horizons.

In this context, Nothing is a novel that is worth some comment. It has been rightly assessed as the novel of Green's that (with the exception of Doting) is most consistent in style and most uniform in its technique. But there are anomalies even in Nothing, and anomalies, moreover, of a peculiarly conspicuous kind. The tone of the novel is generally hard, dry, detached, essentially inexpressive. It communicates an attitude toward the characters that seems to be either neutral or faintly contemptuous. Yet we come upon occasional passages where the reverse seems true, where the narrator's manner is meticulous and sensitive, his attitude one of sympathy and some warmth. Take, for example, the description of Pomfret and Mrs. Weatherby sitting together by the fireside, toward the end of the novel:

as he could outline her heavy head laid next his only in a soft blur with darker hair over her great eye above the gentle firewavering profile of her nose, and because he was nearest to this living pile of coals in the grate, he could see into this eye, into the two transparencies which veiled it, down to that last surface which at three separate points glowed with the fire's same rose; as he sat at her lazy side it must have seemed to him he was looking right into Jane, relaxed inert and warm, a being open to himself the fire and the comfort of indoors….

A soupcon of irony and grotesqueness does not invalidate the point (though, in a more extensive commentary, it would complicate it). We can hardly feel that Jane Weatherby or Pomfret deserves this kind of attention, or this kind of prose, or, in Pomfret's case, this kind of lavish fidelity to his impressions. Green briefly exchanges a tone and a method for very different ones. Positive emotion, for instance, touches a novel that has largely been empty of it. The very temper of the narrative changes, and Green seems briefly to recast his world. The novel bears the traces of something else—a novel, perhaps, that it might have been.

So, too, with other of Green's novels, and in other ways. Some of the conventional gambits, for instance, of more orthodox fiction are from time to time deployed in Green's work. But they appear irregularly, as scraps of narrative systems that have otherwise been set in abeyance. There are the moments when an omniscient narrator intrudes in Living, and other occasions, too, in that novel in particular, when Green seems to be performing some of the more conventional tasks but, in context, incongruously. Green claimed that he wished, in Dedalite fashion, to refine himself out of his novels. "The writer," he asserted, "has no business with the story he is writing." His presence, however, is likely to be felt, but infrequently and at unpredictable moments. This is the case with Living: "Mr. Gibbon said after he had done the Holy Roman Empire he felt great relief and then sadness at old companion done with. Mr. Dale wanted to feel relief but felt only as if part of him was not with him…." The (rather crass) irony here is perceptible almost nowhere else in the novel, which leaves us unsure as to how to respond to such crassness.

An authorial attitude, then, like contempt, neither pervades nor governs any of the novels. Instead, it becomes one of a number of elements (including very different attitudes) which surface periodically and almost incidentally in them. So, too, with the unaccustomed care, for instance, with which Green will ostentatiously seek to capture the motions of consciousness: "Hannah … did not even long for Tom to be pushed over her, nor did she even think of it, it was all—how shall I say,—all was like the clearness of an empty glass, with the transparency of light. Yet not transparent." Green is possibly calling Virginia Woolf to mind here. The passage reads like a resort to Woolfian tones, but in a novel where they are patently alien. It shows a delicacy and precision in matters to which, for the most part, the novelist pays scant attention. The care can only seem intrusive, foreign. But this is merely one instance of the way in which Green varies his delivery in his novels. Others include his ventures into Jamesian speculation about a character's motives and displays of practical or bureaucratic knowledge. His novels are essentially heterogeneous, catholic in their methods.

There is thus an unevenness, a patchwork quality to them. But Green was clearly conscious of his motley. It cannot be explained away in terms of consonance, the particular relevance of a given technique in context. When the narrator in Living slips, for instance, into the present tense, we search in vain for any convincing justification for it. Green mixes narrative modes, constantly shifts focus and perspective, frequently changes the voice in the narrative. His novels are not "psychological novels." But, at moments, they register consciousness with the care and subtlety of a psychological novel. They are not "proletarian novels" (as some of them have been dubbed) unless, with our notion of the "proletarian novel," we can reconcile passages, for instance, of fulsomely decorative prose, of a kind we more likely to associate with Oscar Wilde. Rather, they keep a wide variety of conventional elements of different kinds of fiction in circulation—but in a way, we should note, that allows those elements to remain functional.

This last point is worth emphasizing. Like most modern novelists, Green, on occasions, will make his narratives self-referential. But he is not a writer, in the end, who is really concerned to renounce the business of representation. We should not take his statements to the contrary very seriously. What Green means when he says that art "remains non-representational" is just (banally enough) that it cannot be life. He was not a very clever theoretician, and we should not be misled by his attempts, late in his career, to provide a theoretical basis for his art. Though his novels are hybrids, blend disparates and confound different terms, he remains committed to representation.

The same, of course, is true of Ulysses. Like Green's work, but on a much larger scale, it is a hybrid, a melting pot. Yet Green's novels are not mere minor instances of the Joycean mode. Green made no attempt to achieve the encylopaedic inclusiveness of a Ulysses. If there are unconventional variations in Green's novels, of the kind we have discussed, they take place within an art whose limits, in other respects, are clearly fixed. If the characteristic mode of the novels is offbeat, syncretic, venturesome, their areas of concern are for the most part mundane, unmomentous, tranches de vie, and precisely circumscribed. They fuse some of the extravagances we associate with modernist experiment with the narrowness of focus, the ordinariness we know as that of some of the more exemplary forms of realism. In Green and Joyce, to quote Finnegans Wake, "contraries reamalgamerge." But in Green's fiction—unlike Joyce's later work—the diverse is usually the familiar: literary styles that are largely familiar (or easily "placed"); familiar narrative techniques, familiar idioms and tones. Green has none of Joyce's sense of the cleavages and connections between different historical moments, different cultures and nations. But to criticize him for this is no more relevant than to criticize a Jane Austen or a Kafka for a similar failure in scope. The distinctions he breaks down are commonly familiar distinctions between familiar things. The point is that he breaks them down in a way that often makes them seem unfamiliar and even inessential.

This takes place in novels that are otherwise far closer to orthodox representational fiction than Ulysses is. Elements of conventional plotting, for instance, are much more evident in Green's work than in Ulysses. The kind of commutation I have described becomes a habitual procedure in what is, in certain other respects, a traditional sort of fiction. By retaining certain conventions, in fact, Green makes the transgression of others more perceptible. In reading Green's narratives, we are constantly torn between a sense of recognition and surprise. We are aware, for instance, that conventional differentiations are not being made, precisely because the context is one that makes them possible, that encourages us to expect them. Thus, too, with Green's characters. A use of detail that seems charged with significance (in passages of ostensibly "symbolic" writing) seems to hint at depths and intensities. But it finds no correlative in a depth or intensity granted to any particular person.

Here, of course, we return to Green's lack of interest in consciousness. Unlike Joyce, or Woolf or Faulkner, he seldom endows his characters with much inwardness. He is reluctant, too, as we have said, to adopt certain modes of individualizing characters conventional in the novel. Both Ulysses and The Waves are novels which, like Green's, absorb the idioms of characters into a more impersonal narrative idiom, constantly effacing the borders between the two. But a Dedalus, a Poldy or a Bernard remains clearly distinct, for all that—manifestly distinct, in fact, by virtue of the minuteness with which his peculiarities are itemized. Joyce and the Woolf of The Waves move in two opposed but related directions. The individual is realized in all his uniqueness, but he is also merged into something larger. Green, by contrast, is not much inclined to give prominence to individuals. In Green's novels, individuality sometimes seems incidental, something almost casually recorded in the midst of what is shared.

To compare Green thus with Joyce is inevitably to put his achievement into the proper perspective. But it also gives an exact sense of his peculiar position in the history of the novel (and, in particular, the English novel). He is a writer who breaks with some of the conventions of the traditional novel, but one who does not participate in modernist attempts at a new (psychological) realism. The limitations he so consciously imposes on the world of his fiction suggest parallels with Beckett and some of the practitioners of the nouveau roman, but he seldom shares their skeptical distrust of representation itself. In the end, his name seems best linked with Kafka's. The resemblance must necessarily be presented in somewhat abstract terms, and there are large and obvious differences. But the comparison, nonetheless, is worth making.

Both novelists create a world that is analogous to and yet remote from ours. In the novels of both, the very bases of a given conception of personality founder, and the fictional conventions which sustain them are undermined or dispensed with. Both novelists disturb the relations between the different and the same which pertain in more traditional narrative. In doing so, both begin to dismantle a stable order of thought. They do it obliquely, however. The breakdown of certain assumptions, the collapse of particular norms, the clouding of specific distinctions—all these are implicit in the form of their novels and have their full effect only as we read the texts themselves. In his essay on Flaubert's style, Proust argues that Flaubert's use of certain verb forms, of certain pronouns and prepositions, has perhaps "renewed our vision of things" as much as Kant, "with his Categories," has renewed "our theories of knowledge and of the reality of the external world." The potential effectiveness of a novelist's style and sense of form has seldom been so well expressed. In the long run, Green, like Kafka, may possibly come to be seen as having "renewed vision" more strikingly than other novelists who have been more vociferously or explicitly challenging.

Yet it may seem, from what I have said, that Green's novels, after all, are "poor." Some of the terms of approval, here, can doubtless be turned into terms of condemnation. But some of our current terms of approval could themselves do with scrutiny. We might reflect, for instance, on the contradictions to a criticism that so readily enshrines Beckett and George Eliot together in its pantheon and so seldom reflects on the contradictions in doing so. If Green's novels are "poor," they are poor as Kafka's are, as the Balzac in Kafka thought his own novels to be. Adorno remarks of Kafka that he has been "assimilated into an established trend of thought while little attention is paid to those aspects of his work which resist such assimilation." We might add, specifically, that the extent to which Kafka's fiction lies outside the mainstream of modernist experiment has still to be recognized. Kafka has yet to be widely understood. Green has yet to be widely appreciated. To end on a polemical note: neither novelist, perhaps, will be adequately assessed in a culture which continues, for instance, so unquestioningly to allot such pride of place in the modern canon to the novels of Hardy or Lawrence.

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