James, Conrad, Forster

Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 subtitle is "Narrative in Transition," she does not once refer to the title of the periodical or the series of secondary annotated bibliographies of the late Professor Helmut E. Gerber and his colleagues titled English Literature in Transition. But what she has achieved is excellent indeed. Bruce Teets Professor Emeritus Central Washington University JAMES, CONRAD, FÖRSTER Kenneth Graham. Indirections of the Novel: James, Conrad, and Forster. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. $35.00 THERE CAN BE LITTLE DOUBT that the novels of Joseph Conrad are self-deconstructing; Paul de Man could have had them in mind when he maintained that "a literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode." In The Secret Agent, for example, the economic determinism voiced by Michaelis is scathingly ridiculed and discredited, yet virtually every character in the novel at one time or another acts from economic compulsions. Similarly the feminist gospel of Peter Ivanovitch is attacked through irony at every step in Under Western Eyes, yet its validity is ultimately confirmed by the actions of Natalia Haldin and the near-nameless Tekla. It is not surprising, then, that deconstructionist critics should sooner or later turn their attention to Conrad, nor is it surprising to find him packaged in the company of Henry James and E. M. Forster. It is the textual gaps, turns, contradictions, and tensions that Kenneth Graham's Indirections of the Novel takes as the topography of its explorations. Its title, alluding to Polonius's plotting with Claudius, is but one of the clever and appropriate touches in this text. Graham announces that he wishes "to investigate the detailed strategies of three masters of indirection in the early modern novel" in terms of their "deployment of a radically new openness, obliquity, and contradictoriness of narrative forms" (1). Calling the three novelists "writers of the brink" (11), Graham wishes to show "how these crucial moral concerns and shared anxieties" (15) of theirs "are expressed by and produce . . . certain comparable narrative modes of ellipses, complex modulation and dynamism, subversion, irresolution, and interplay" (15). The paradigms operating in Indirections of the Novel are clearly apparent in Graham's statement that "By taking nothing for granted, least of all the utility of language, by asking everything of the reader's attention, and by submitting to their own self-contradic329 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 tions of thought and temperament, they reawaken us to the stresses within art and to how the forms of art. . . are always under pressure, always compromise at best, an unending open negotiation between the mind's shaping and the world's recalcitrance" (156). His novelists obviously demand an active, even a participatory, reader, who understands the instability of language, the slipperiness of generic forms, and the ambiguities of the narrator's transactions with the reader. The ancestry of his approach is complex theoretically. Graham comments that he is "clearly indebted in a very general way to contemporary narratological, poststructuralist, and reader-response criticism, which has enormously sensitized our responsiveness to the interdeterminacy of texts" (17) and specifically mentions Gerard Genette, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, John Holloway, Wolfgang Iser, and Stanley Fish. Undoubtedly other affinities could be identified, but the book lacks a bibliography, and very seldom do the aforementioned appear in any of the notes, which reveal a firm grounding in the older criticisms of Ian Watt, Richard Poirier, Irving Howe, H. M. Daleski, C. B. Cox, and others, for instance. Indeed, Graham's wish to avoid "the elaborately self-aware methodologies" (17) of the newer criticisms, and his desire not to "engage in full-scale debate" (918) with other critics often leaves his own discussions oddly decentered. Graham's strategy is to take one major scene or chapter, concentrate on its "self-subverting doubleness" (215), and read it with extraordinary attention, for he holds that "a single representative chapter, closely examined, might offer more hope of gaining a purchase on such a work, and of fairly typifying some of the complications of its technique" (76). The statement of general method appears in several forms throughout his text. In the Conrad section, he writes, "it might...