Edwardian Intimations of the Shape of Fiction to Come: Mr. Britling/ Job Huss as Wellsian Central Intelligences

229 EDWARDIAN INTIMATIONS OF THE SHAPE OF FICTION TO COME: MR. BRITLING/ JOB HUSS AS WELLSIAN CENTRAL INTELLIGENCES By Richard Hauer Costa (Texas A&M University) The most pronounced trend in fiction at the three-quarter century mark is the author as vessel. The first-person novel and its many variations comprise a dominant genre in which autobiographers gather their evidence from the self and leave it at that. Norman Mailer's creation of "Mailer" or "The Novelist" as the main character of Armies of the Night becomes more a species of celebrity exploitation than an enactment of its dual subtitles, History as a Novel; the Novel as History. John Fowles is more successful in merging history and fiction. He tells a compelling story in The French Lieutenant's Woman and also, by intruding on the action as an omniscient "I1" he instructs us on how nineteenth-century man became twentieth-century man. No donnée of recent years has been so consciously manipulated. In his famous thirteenth chapter , Fowles states a paradox. Pirandello-like, he will set his characters free of their creator's intentions. Although he has done no such thing, his sense of post-modernist directions in fiction is interesting: I could fill a book with reasons [why novelists write], and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as. but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.1 Certainly the novelist, at the time of which Fowles is writing Victorian England, 1867 - "stands next to God" (p. 80). And, equally surely, writers like Henry James and H. G. Wells, for all the psychological prospecting of the one and the didactic thrust of the other, never stopped being novelists-in-charge. For all the deserved significance given the James-Wells quarrel as perhaps the landmark engagement in the still-seething struggle between literature and journalism, it has never been adequately stressed that both writers, particularly in maturity, were pursuing , in common, just such an informal aesthetic. Each managed his fiction in a way that Fowles would say is obsolete. Each cavilled over the kind of managing the other practiced. For James, the Wells of Tono-Bungay. Ann Veronica, and Marriage blunts critical judgment by his "blinding, bluffing vivacity . . . we wince at a certain quite peculiarly gratuitous sacrifice to the casual very much as at seeing some fine and indispensable little part of a mechanism slip through profane fingers and lose 230 itself." To Wells, the "mechanism" lives while life dies. He has Boon declare, apropos of James, that "the way of doing isn't the end. First the end must be judged - and then if you like talk of how it is done. Get there as splendidly as possible. But get there."3 But how to "get there"? Fowles elsewhere pinpoints the fallacy of the nouveau roman: its practitioners' goal to find, at all purposes, a new form but, in the process, subordinating all the novel's other conceivable purposes: to entertain, to satirize,^ to describe new sensibilities, to record life, to improve life. It is the position of this paper that technique ought not be separated from content; that technique, as has been well said by Mark Schorer, discovers.^ What it discovers depends on what is sought. Technique served James as a means of delineating the life he saw, and it served Wells equally as crystallizer. Specifically , Wells's version of the "central intelligence" could not be James's. Wells saw life as dramatic interaction between sensibility and the chaotic flow of the times. James ordered impressions - regulated viewpoint - out of the necessity to encounter experience without the ability to take dramatic part in it. With James, in his last phase, ordered experience dominates any other aesthetic...