a later novel, quite fanciful, that dramatizes stream-of-consciousness as a mode of relationship rather than simply of authorship

Folks

Intimate: few if any recurring characters of note matter; it’s too intimate

• Harriet Hume, a pianist of indeterminate background who finds she can read the mind of her lover. Though this trick instantly separates them (she finds out he will leave her for someone who will help him politically), her periodic meetings with him prove her to have the gift still, allowing her to unmask every one of his devious plots to rise in the world—so she acts as his conscience, but can’t prevent his actions. Sylph-like as well as Sibylline, she is always the same color (of an old Greek statue), has “modern eyes that read too much” (12), is very small and sensual, “wild and ethereal.”

• Arnold Condorex, the master of negotiation (especially with himself, his own conscience), a low-born man of unflagging, overmastering ambition who rises through secretaryships to a peerage until his ambition makes him fly too close to the sun. He is the male equivalent of all those poverty-ridden heroines who feel they deserve a life of luxury: Gwendolyn Harleth, Becky Sharp, Lizzie Eustace, Undine Spragg. After Harriet shows him the folly of his final plan (to accept money from an Indian prince to assure the latter’s power), he temporarily goes insane, losing his power to understand time, and tries to murder Harriet, who of course foils the plan with her mind-reading trick and accepts him into her house for a night of recovery.

Themes

• Fantasy
  • In her mind-reading ability, in her fairy tales that she tells him to calm him down, in the three trees in her garden (copied from a painting by Reynolds of three sisters), in their convoluted Romantic and Shakespearean speech habits (ie, Arnold says “Hark!” in the middle of a soliloquy), in her piano (which she can make play without touching it)
  • Arnold’s resistance: “But, my love, this is real life!” (32)
    • When he’s humiliated and angry at her knowledge of him, he calls her a witch (quite derogatorily, usually accompanied by a wish to kill her)
    • Later conversion: “It seemed to him that he needed a fairy-tale as a starving man needs food.” (88)
  • She insists, however, that her mind-reading power isn’t just fantasy, but instead real.
  • All of her fairy-stories come from the place they’re at (her own garden, the architectural details of the interior of his house, like the sheep’s head and the sphinx)
• Social Mobility
  • Arnold’s rogue character (his words!) comes from his desire to transcend his lowly beginning, vowing to crush all the high-born in his path.
  • This ambition makes him a figure for Marx’s contradictions of capitalism, for Arnold is the person whom capital creates and who yet threatens to destroy capital itself.
  • Symbolically, West shows how the typical bildung plot cannot succeed with stream-of-consciousness
  • He realizes that there’s only room for one rogue at a time in English society (they will only tolerate one 227)
• Insubstantiality of daily life
  • Time Confusion
    • Cf the objects that Harriet loves that are Victorian (the color of her clothes, her portico, her match-case, and even the physical appearance of Arnold himself)
    • Time disappears for Arnold when he realizes he is ruined, and he is lost in the time of day, the time of year, and the year itself. (Particularly the season is what he craves to know.)
      • “I feel I am lost among the centuries as well, and if all time is my labyrinth, I must be lost forever!” (238)
      • Explains why modernists care so much about time: it’s disappeared as we know it
    • Harriet exclaims, “There is so much of this in-and-out work between the centuries!” (133) showing how the past seems to “pop” out at you suddenly
      • cf Bergson
  • Mixing of the substances
    • What is Arnold’s idea? Wholeness
      • “Indeed there is a delicious quality in a state of wholeness.” (262)
    • Arnold says that Harriet can read his mind because cosmically there was a mix-up of their physical substances (hair, skin, teeth mixed up at birth).
      • “a mystical confusion of substance in us” (203)
    • Represents the intolerable or wonderful, simultaneous existence of opposites. Arnold can’t stand that they can occupy the same physical and spiritual space, but his relation with his opposite, Harriet, shows him that both sides of the coin will always exist.
      • “What are we to think of a universe in which there is a mystical confusion of substance in opposites! What an unseemly chaos!” (203)
      • Even when he admits that in space, you can have contradictions, he won’t admit that the spiritual world does: “There is no room in the world of spirits for opposites…. Believe me, it has room for only one will.” (204)
    • No substance, physical or spiritual, is stable.
      • Because Arnold is “shocked by” the confusion of the world, “I would transport you to a purer world where things sit more stably in their categories.” (209)
      • Here, the chaos of changing life conditions turns into an epistemology
• (Sometimes Neoclassical) Order
  • In raptures about neoclassical architecture, Harriet talks about the “very orderly design” in which “we must break the day into hours and gild each with beauty! And how the pilasters on each side of the shelves claim that if we constrict our lives by the sound and temperate exercise of the faculties…we shall not be crushed by the sky” (132)
    • She sometimes longs for the simplicity of a secure, orderly world
    • Compare to Woolf’s cynicism over such ideas in the Proportion and Conversion section of Mrs Dalloway
  • Art for Harriet is a form of wisdom that will be expressed if you find the correct form for it
    • “There is the same difficulty in finding a perfect form by which that invisible thing, the form of human wisdom known as music, can express itself.” (143)
    • Art relates human wisdom if you find the right form
  • “I must admit I am disorder personified,” he admits to Harriet after he attempts to murder her
    • Once he realizes he can’t succeed, all of his cant about order and wholeness falls away, because ultimately it was all about himself achieving anyway (his ultimate order was that “I” rules everything and receives everything.)
  • Yet here’s Harriet’s more positive spin on things: music and politics are both ordering policies
    • Had she been a better musician, she could have used her sense of harmony to “instil it in others and establish it as the accepted order of life” (266-7)
      • The duty of the artist is to order the world harmoniously
    • The politician: “Tis the sturdy desire you have to shape the random elements of our existence into coherent patterns that is the very pith and marrow of mankind.” (267)
      • This mindset made him “a excellent administrator,” so he did great stuff like education, bridge-building, and peace-keeping
• Sibyl
  • The female prophet: Harriet is born among the long line of Sibyls
  • Also, Greek images proliferate (129), reminding us of the relationship between New Woman freedom and their Greek-laden education (eg, Jane Harrison, A Room of their Own).
• Mind/body split
  • One of her fairy stories ridicules the decoration of Arnold’s house, with sheep’s heads everywhere. Her friend looks out a window and sees a flock of decapitated sheep being herded by the Adam Brothers (the people who popularized the decorative form) as a sort of divine punishment. Arnold asks if the minds and bodies miss each other, and she says no. The body can do what it wants, happily, and the mind isn’t constrained by the inferior body.

Form

• Remember Harriet’s belief that human wisdom is transmittable through art if you find the right form. (143)
• Intimate: only the two characters are significant, while all others we never directly see, wavering in the background (the only ones we actually see are the policemen at the end)
• Five exceedingly long chapters
  • First three: each dramatizes a separate meeting between the two characters
    • No connective tissue whatsoever: just meetings
    • Indirect discourse fairly distributed between them
    • Very episodic, but not shallow (the scenes move almost as slowly as a James novel)
  • Last two chapters depart a little: both describe same night, and Chapter four itself and much of Chapter five is a complete interior monologue (cf Molly chapter in Ulysses), without hardly any stage direction
• Repetition and leitmotifs
  • “The woman was dying in the street,” he repeats obsessively, which expresses the true, albeit hidden, morality of his profession
  • Andrew and Phoebe, their mystical children, are the names of pretty much all kids in the book (three or four times)
  • The Adams Brothers: Scottish neoclassical architects who changed late 18th century architecture
    • Classical influences: Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Baroque
    • Picturesque, “movement,” diversity of decoration, contrasts
    • Anti-Palladian architecture, which had been dominant (too orderly, Adams Bros said)
  • Greek imagery
  • The three trees keep cropping up
• Harriet herself prefers the Neo-classicism of Mozart, for example, to any Romantic composers (“the good music that was made before the Romantics came” 131)
• “As if the tide of fate had invaded a dancing academy” (195)
  • A metaphor for the necessity to shape life to make art, especially in the midst of chaos (ie, WWI)
• Re-visualizing the world: “her rose-coloured nail toying with the nail-coloured rose” (12)

Modernism

• Re-evaluation of what is truly meaningful in a life: the big events of life she reads in the newspaper are “an amusing appendix to the vastly more important things that happened when she played the piano, bit into an apple, was hot, was cold.” (17)
• Cynicism: “All was ended in a general levelling.” (54)
• Uncertainty of substance and time = chaos of modernity
• Stream-of-consciousness style dramatized
  • Harriet’s ability to read his mind IS the ability of the modernist writer to write in stream-of-consciousness or indirect discourse
    • Harriet is the mind of the modernist author turned loose on the world
    • Thus, the book can be read as an allegory of modernist form
• Inability to create events; impossibility of the Event
  • Negotiation—that is, the inability to express whole, complete Values, not worn away by other desires or inattention or the imperfect world—“forbids one ever to let the simple essences fo things react on each other and so produce a real and inevitable event.” (267)
  • Bildung is gone: it’s not a coincidence that Harriet thinks that Arnold looks like a Victorian statesman in the time of the Corn Laws and Reform Bill (he is a relic from the time of Events, the Victorian era, just as her loved objects are, from her match-case to her choice of cloth for her dresses to the architectural style of her home.)

Quotes

• A man is “the exhausted gametes of his parents” (173)
• There are also some good quotes about credit and work/leisure
  • Some quotes about him having “toys” to interrupt his work schedule (141), work allowing Harriet to heal emotionally (98), and Arnold’s mean diminution of art by comparing it unfavorably to real business (142)
  • He made up an Indian province to prove his knowledge about it and thus rise: she tells him, “The whole idea of Mondh, my love, was no at all unanalogous to the conception of credit which stll prevails in Threadneedle Street.” (277)

Questions

• Relation of stream-of-consciousness form and typical plot of novels (bildung)
• Use of repetition and leitmotifs
• Intuitive personal relations
  • Close personal contact is an active influence on behavior
  • It can also be a way of predicting the future or affecting the future
  • Social behavior as true mover and shaker of the active world
  • Personal contact has wide ramifications
• Episodic form