Joyce Cary’s Second Trilogy

JOYCE CARY'S I SECOND TRILOGY Elizabeth M. Kerr Although unfortunately Joyce Cary's Art and Reality makes little reference specifically to his own art, the principles he therein expresses are useful to reinforce the prefaces and the critical articles in which he explains his purpose and method in his trilogies. In analysis, this study is limited to the second trilogy: Prisoner of Grace, Except the Lord, and Not Honour More; the First Trilogy, however, is based upon the same principles, uses substantially the same method, and must equally be viewed as an artistic whole. Cary's basic assumption about the role of the artist and his concept of human truth explains the form and method he devised to "express and communicate his total meaning." Since the author has "no more business in a book than a microphone on the screen," and the "truth about quality" can be conveyed only "within the realm of personality, of emotional and sensible forms," the novelist must speak through a character , presenting a world created by that character, the "world that is his work of art." The use of the first-person narrator, therefore, provides the consistent point of view necessary to lend order to experience and to transmit human truth by allowing the reader to enter the private world of the character who reveals "his own world in his own style." The author must become that character by intuition, by the "subconscious logic ... without which no novelist should write dialogue."1 This approach to truth imposes severe limits in scope: since truth cannot be known as a totality to anyone person, a novelist "can give only very partial truth in anyone book, and that truth with an angle.'" The trilogy was the artistic means by which Cary overcame this limitation and solved the two problems of the writer: to convey, in one work of art, one formal conception, a significance which is simple enough for immediate apprehension by the feelings of a reader and yet not fa1se to the immense complication of actual life ... to design a book in which all the characters and incidents form parts of one coherent Vol. XXIX, No.3, April, 1960 JOYCE CARY'S SECOND TRILOGY 311 experience for the judgment, and at the same time to give it the vitality of a narrative from actual life.3 Cary's explanation of the method he chose and the effect he hoped for in the First Trilogy apply equally well to the second trilogy: his three chief characters in tum "give us their complete worlds": By this means I hoped to get not only a richer sense of life in its actual complexity, but a three~dimensiona1 depth of characterization; qualities not to be obtained in a single book without confusion. or. what was for my purpose equally bad, conceptual analysis." Since the three novels form "one coherent experience," they comprise an artistic unit. What he says about the form of a book applies to the trilogy : All these separate pages and chapters, like the movements of a symphony. do not have a complete significance until the whole work is known. ... This is only to say again that the separate forms do not possess their whole content until the work is complete. That's why I call the book a total symbol. It is both richer than its parts and actually different from them. [A novel] is not apprehended simultaneously in all its elements like a picture, it builds in the memory. and it is not complete until aU has been read, until it becomes a total symbol, a total meaning. Yet at once, when this total effect has been felt. not only do all the details assume a new and final relation to the whole, but we are aware of the judgments which assessed them at the time of reading.~ Joyce Cary's dissatisfaction with his First Trilogy was caused by a failure perceptible only when the work is viewed as a whole. The three worlds "were not sufficiently interlocked to give the richness and depth of actuality" that he sought. He therefore limited his second trilogy to "a single subject, politics, and tied the three chief characters...