The Illusion of Reality
A review of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier
Includes notes and references omitted from the Amazon review
What need’st thou run so many miles about,
When thou mayest tell thy tale the nearest way?
Reading The Good Soldier you may well feel mystified. Writers of whodunnits mystify their readers on purpose; perhaps this writer hopes to lend interest to his story in a similar way. Or perhaps the narrator is proceeding rather like Proust’s Elstir, who (after Turner) painted things not as he knew they were but as he had first perceived them—perhaps the narrator is presenting this affair not as he may understand it now but as he lived it. ‘Life is a long discovery, isn’t it?/You only get your wisdom bit by bit.’
‘Yes—oh dear yes—the novel tells a story’. Whether or not implying an apology for novels in general and a justification of his own in particular, do E.M. Forster’s words indicate a criterion of a novel’s value? He himself valued one of the greatest modern novels, The Leopard, not for the story but for ‘making him realise how many ways there are of being alive’. If the modernists Ford Madox Ford is numbered with did seem modern once, it was partly because they were less interested in story-telling than in their hidden selves, in certain states of consciousness, or in conveying the quality of existence. So far as Proust does tell a tale it is anything but straightforward. And Ford’s narrative here does seem such a vehicle as the intimate psychology of the modern novel requires; only you hardly get such psychological finds with him as with Proust. He has no doubt an interest in character—for Virginia Woolf, the novelist’s distinctive quality—as well as in situation; and a persevering reader will hear his characters speak and see them act; but always through the thick glass of the narrative, so that they live only faintly, and their story isn’t as sad as it was meant to be.
We hear often how sad it is, but if we are to feel this it must be in spite of the complications Ford was so pleased with [1].
Since we needn’t follow Woolf in thinking of those Modernists as including her friend Forster, we may in fact think the author of The Good Soldier closer to Forster than to them—not because Ford’s narrative is conventional (it isn't), nor because adultery is typically a nineteenth-century subject (though it is [2]), but because evidently to Ford also the story is the thing. Of all the people in the book, the narrator (John Dowell) is the least alive and speaks most, and what exercises him most after the situation—and situation here is story—is how to relate it. The way he does relate it is indeed ‘very rambling’, it is indeed ‘a sort of maze’, and this on the part of a perfectly self-conscious narrator (those descriptions are his (GS, 142)) is unnatural—unless he happens to be a theorist of the novel himself. But as to that, when he says: ‘I am, at any rate, trying to get you to see what sort of life it was I led with Florence and what Florence was like’ (GS, 19), doesn’t he sound just like his creator, who in an essay probably contemporary with the novel (‘On Impressionism’, GS, Appendix B, 197) called himself ‘a perfectly self-conscious writer’?
Of course for a novelist actually to address the reader is, like an anachronism, fatal to realism—whether or not to the thing a literary critic distinguishes from naturalism or impressionism or modernism, at least to the fiction that what you are reading about is real. Ford himself was to suggest that Thackeray’s ‘incursion of himself’ into his account of Becky Sharp’s ‘manœuvres’ on Waterloo day was ‘the greatest literary crime ever committed’ (The English Novel , London: Constable, 1930, p. 78, quoted GS, p. 250, note to 204). And this form of authorial intrusion was opposed not only to realism: to give an illusion of reality was the aim of Ford’s ‘impressionism’ too—indeed when Wyndham Lewis queried the need for that illusion, Ford answered, ‘Why then write?’ [3]
Obviously, though, a story told in the first person, as this one is, can’t be intruded into in this way; Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield can address us with no such breach of realism, at once and repeatedly. But what if the narrator is also an author? Such a one is Proust’s Marcel, or at any rate he is an author-to-be; his is the story of a literary vocation, his ‘material’ is his own past life. No doubt he both is and is not the author, still he lives as a character only in so far as he is not like Proust; in this it’s the same with him as with Yuri Zhivago, who, as a poet, is Boris Pasternak—the fact that the Proustian narrative is a first-person narrative doesn’t alter the case.
And the narrator of The Good Soldier?
His proving unreliable doesn’t matter (and some of the mistakes in the narrative may be the author’s), realism is served by it; it does matter that the fiction of his being John Dowell should be kept up. Dowell is addressing a ‘silent listener’ (GS, 19, 44, 119, 143), to whom he tells not only the story but also his difficulties in telling it [4], until it’s a question whether, if the situation is the story, story-telling isn’t the real subject. Then he remarks that for six months he has been ‘writing away at it’ (GS, 143), though he subsequently addresses his silent listener once more (154). And when he actually refers to his ‘last chapter’ (178) we see that narrator and listener here are no different from author and reader. But even before that, how could the illusion of reality survive his justifying his rigmarole on the grounds that this is ‘a real story’ and this is the way real stories are told (143)? A real narrator would never say that—though Ford indeed in his Dedicatory Letter tells us ‘the story is a true story’ [5], just as in that contemporary essay he tells us the writer must address himself to ‘a silent listener’ (209, 213). The narrator in his preoccupation with both the story and his way of telling it is not Dowell but Ford, the literary technician who after the Letter saying the story is true shows what he can do with it [6].
Certainly, where the common reader [7] may see a botch, a crime writer like Julian Barnes sees a lesson in technique. To Ford’s editor, Ford seems to be doing something different here from psychological realism, something which anticipates post-modernism (Introduction, xiv). Evidently it is also different from Ford's own impressionism. The narrator’s self-consciousness as a narrator, his preoccupation with his story as a story may be considered metafictional. And it is because Ford brought such things into his writing that he has influenced some later writing. But in letting himself in with them, he departed from the doctrine he had preached for most of his working life. Wasn’t the impressionist author supposed to be sedulous in keeping himself out of his book [8] ? Naturally so, if impressionism was concerned to produce an illusion of reality. As to which, many readers will feel that fiction should indeed do this, and that they have seen through the illusion here, in so far as they see the author in the narrator.
Notes and references:
(Text references are to Max Saunders’s 2012 edition for Oxford World’s Classics, paperback and ebook (pagination the same): GS. Its copy-text is the UK first edition.)
[1] 'I have always regarded this as my best book...’ ‘And I will permit myself to say that I was astounded at the work I must have put into the construction of the book, at the intricate tangle of references and cross-references’ (GS, ‘Dedicatory Letter’, 3, 4). 'The Saddest Story’ was the original title, which Ford’s publisher got him to change (5). He used the phrase instead in a new opening sentence, and not only there: 'This is the saddest story I have ever heard’ (GS, 10); ‘this sad affair’ (11, 186); ‘Yes, this is the saddest story’ (45); ‘Well, this is the saddest story’ (93); ‘I call this the Saddest Story… just because it is so sad’ (128); ‘a long, sad affair’ (143); ‘It is this part of the story that makes me saddest of all’ (178).
[2] ‘Quelle est la donnée la plus usée, la plus prostituée, l’orgue de Barbarie le plus éreinté?’ And to this question posed in his 1857 article on Madame Bovary Baudelaire replied: ‘L’Adultère.’
[3] ‘…one is an Impressionist because one tries to produce an illusion of reality—or rather the business of Impressionism is to produce that illusion. […] Thus the Impressionist author is sedulous to avoid letting his personality appear in the course of his book’(‘On Impressionism’, Second Article, GS, Appendix B, 204. And 205, where Ford asks himself whether this is not indeed ‘the sole end and aim of art’.
[4] ‘I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down—whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself’ (ibid., 18). ‘I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way… I cannot help it. […] when one discusses an affair—a long, sad affair—one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognises that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. […] At any rate, I think I have brought my story up to the date of Maisie Maidan’s death. I mean that I have explained everything that went before it from the several points of view that were necessary … you have the points of view as far as I could ascertain or put them. […] Let us consider Leonora’s point of view with regard to Florence; Edward’s, of course, I cannot give you, for Edward naturally never spoke of his affair with my wife’ (143).
[5] ‘…I had it from Edward Ashburnham himself’ (ibid., 4).
[6] ‘But I have always been mad about writing—about the way writing should be done and… I had even at that date made exhaustive studies into how words should be handled and novels constructed. So, on the day I was forty I sat down to show what I could do—’ (ibid., ‘Dedicatory Letter’, 3).
[7] In the sense in which Dr Johnson used the phrase (and Virginia Woolf after him)—though this reader will finally judge the novel, like any novel, according as he or she judges whether the characters are worth reading about.
[8] ‘I have asked myself frequently… why one should try to produce an illusion of reality in the mind of one’s reader. Is it just an occupation like any other… or is it the sole end and aim of art? I have spent the greater portion of my working life in preaching that particular doctrine…’ (‘On Impressionism’, Second Article, ibid., Appendix B, 205). ‘Thus the Impressionist author is sedulous to avoid letting his personality appear in the course of his book’ (ibid., 204).
Other writings:
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Edwin Arnold, 1927; Penguin, 1962).
----------------, Introduction to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Two Stories and a Memory (Penguin, 1966); also in Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (London: Everyman’s Library, 1991).
Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, 6 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), vol. 3 (the 1923 essay), and in Collected Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf, 4 vols (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966-7), vol. 1 (the text of the 1924 Hogarth Press pamphlet); Kindle Edition, 2013.