Kissing and telling turning round in A Room with a ViewJeffrey Heath福斯特看得见风景的房间论文.docx

1、Kissing and telling turning round in A Room with a View Jeffrey Heath福斯特看得见风景的房间论文Title: Kissing and telling: turning round in A Room with a View. Author(s): Jeffrey Heath Source: Twentieth Century Literature. 40.4 (Winter 1994): p393. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type: Article Lucy (86

2、) who, with her warped brain, is caught in the tangle (213, 224), cant disentangle her emotions (68, 94), ends conversations in a wrangle (215), and gives a nervous little bow when she first meets the Emersons (27). Later on, when she sees the nearly naked figure of George, radiant against the woods

3、, Lucy yields to the demands of Cecils propriety: Bow, Lucy; better bow. . . . Miss Honeychurch bowed (152). She introduces winding intricacies into Beethoven, who is usually so simple and direct (51), and in a scene that tells us almost all we need to know about her, she shakes hands with Cecil wit

4、h one hand while twisting up her other hand in the curtains (193). Mr. Beebe (even his name turns back on itself) expresses admiration for the way she has been able to wind herself up to speak (203), and thinks of her as a kite in the wind (112). Miss Bartlett with her rings Yesterday had been a mud

5、dle - . . . the kind of thing one could not write down easily on paper. . . . Lucy thought not so much of what had happened as of how she should describe it. . . . But . . . her words fell short of life. (A Room with a View 68, 94, 229) A Room with a View invites the same question that Charlotte Bar

6、tlett asks when she sees George Emersons enormous note of interrogation: What does it mean? (43). The reply might be that Forsters novel is about such matters as love, art, self-realization, Edwardian manners, feminism, values and their revision, exposure and concealment, completion and interruption

7、, daily life and celestial life, the subconscious mind, language, myth - and so on. These and other concerns point to an enticing variety of well-tried critical perspectives; however, before restricting our outlook to any one of them, well do well to remember Forsters own expression of pleasure in M

8、atthew Arnold as an author who writes to us because he is not writing about us (Abinger 91), and his observation that Virginia Woolfs fiction is not about something as much as it is something (Two 252). In what follows, I shall try to avoid Lucy Honeychurchs penchant for subordinating experience to

9、calculated and therefore valueless stories about experience, and I shall try to do at least some justice to the immediate yet elusive something that A Room with a View is. A promising way of doing this, it seems to me, is not to scrutinize A Room (or aspects of it) in isolation, but to consider it a

10、s a whole while at the same time becoming familiar with Forsters characteristic shifts and turns of thought as they are manifested in some of his other work. Without, I hope, losing sight of the foreground in the background, I propose to look at Forsters novel in the broader context of his fiction a

11、nd nonfiction, and to respond to it as it invites itself to be experienced within that context. I note in particular his remark in Aspects of the Novel that all that is pre-arranged is false (99). Forster articulates and dramatizes this idea so often and so variously (we might consider his ironic tr

12、eatment of Adelas love of planning in A Passage to India and his wry humor at Lucys constant difficulty in remembering how to behave in A Room) that it is impossible to regard it as anything other than crucial to his world view. It has seemed to me, therefore, in thinking about Forster, that critics

13、 of a novelist who prizes the unpremeditated and the involuntary will be well advised to adopt flexible and unconventional approaches themselves. Unlike the Lucy Honeychurch of the early chapters of A Room, Forster values direct experience - often profoundly human experience on a grand scale - over

14、limited and edited accounts of it. In fact, it was probably Forsters preference for experience that includes but somehow transcends the personal that prompted Peter Burra to remark, nearly sixty years ago, that what stays with us after reading Forster is a tone of Anonymous Prophecy that rises up .

15、. . from that anonymous part of a man which cannot be labelled with his name. . . . (Introduction in Forster A Passage 332-33). Burras observation is a shrewd and sensitive one, and the remarks that follow may be seen (in part) as an exploration of some of its implications. Ill consider prophecy fir

16、st, and anonymity as I go along. In his important discussion of prophetic novels in Aspects, Forster maintains that although such novels have universal scope, what they say about the meaning of the universe is not of primary importance: We are not concerned with the prophets message. . . . What matt

17、ers is the accent of his voice. . . . Nothing can be stated about Moby Dick except that it is a contest. The rest is song (123, 128). Remarks like these from Forsters nonfiction suggest that as we read A Room we should not inquire too intently about its meaning because, like Charlotte Bartlett, we m

18、ay lose sight of the goal as we approach it (76), and experience may slide away into the untrue realm of mere information (37). Forster knew that the study of literature teaches us everything about it except the central thing, the pearl of great price (Two 94, 96). He amusingly confesses, for exampl

19、e, that his fountain pen vanished as soon as he had planned a suitable opening paragraph on Woolfs elusive novels. So near, and yet so far! . . . The words are here but the birds have flown (Abinger 125). Forsters difficulties with Woolfs work can help us to hear the prophetic song in his own: in A

20、Room the readers greatest problem (and it is one that afflicts the main characters too) is one of conceptual focus. It is not that we should avoid all interest in what Forsters novel means, but that we must not try to know in too excludingly particular or conscious a manner, or get its significance

21、prematurely narrowed and hardened into words (Aspects 126). As Forster wrote, concerning people who are intent on understanding Love and God, they are more likely to grasp the central fire and the central glow if they relax in their quests: Love is not a word of four letters, nor God a word of three

22、. . . . The fate of the emotionalist is ironic, and he will never escape it until he is less obsessed with the importance of emotion. When he is interested in people and things for their own sake, the hour of his deliverance has approached, and while stretching out his hand for some other purpose, h

23、e will discover - quite simply! - that he can feel. (Albergo 247)(1) As we proceed, then, we might remember how in A Passage Professor Godbole took his tea . . . from a low table placed slightly behind him, to which he stretched back, and as it were encountered food by accident (89). Like Godbole wi

24、th his tea, we shall encounter Forsters meaning best if we inadvertently stretch back to it (as it were), by accident. Knowing more about the merely intermittent use of realism in Forsters prophecy will help us along our way. Forster writes, Before we condemn the prophetic novelist for affectation a

25、nd distortion we must realize his viewpoint. He is not looking at the tables and chairs at all, and that is why they are out of focus. We only see what he does not focus - not what he does - and in our blindness we laugh at him (Aspects 117). We stop laughing at him when we adjust or reverse our emp

26、hasis; in fact, reversal of focus and other optical tricks are of great importance in A Room, which is often concerned both technically and conceptually with the snares of . . . perspective (43). We should be wary about the realism in A Room, because by the time we are finished, well be able to say

27、of Forsters novel what Forster himself says of Moby Dick - that once we get past the tables and chairs of realism, it reaches straight back into the universal (Aspects 130). Moreover, as Forster himself recommends as he reflects on prophetic novelists, it will be useful for the reader of A Room to p

28、ay attention to the turns of the novelists phrase . . . the minutiae of his style . . . and . . . the actual words he uses (116-17). This means (almost at Forsters own invitation) that the discussion that follows issues from close reading: readers who like their criticism at a comfortable distance f

29、rom the text should abandon all hope if they continue here; on the other hand, if they do continue, they may have some fun - the very thing Forster declared they should not have in reading prophecy itself (117). If prophecy contains elements of contest on the large scale, A Room provides a surprisin

30、g array of smaller encounters. We have a choice of contests: the opposing rows of white bottles of water and red bottles of wine on the dining-room table of the Pension Bertolini (23); Lucys hammer-strokes of victory at the piano (51); the complicated game on the hillside above Florence; the footbal

31、l game played with the army of cast-off clothing at The Sacred Lake; the many rituals of social one-upsmanship; the Guelfs and the Ghibellines and the many other references to actual warfare, victory, and defeat. Beyond these, curiously, there is tennis, with its mirror-image courts, and its suggest

32、ive terminology of doubles, deuce, serve, fault, advantage in and out, set, love, and match. The pre-eminent contest in A Room is between what Forsters narrator calls the real and the pretended (181). It is a battle between the spontaneous response to life (the direct, open, sincere, and childlike) and the muddled response (the self-conscious, rehearsed, ostentatious, inhibited, and excluding). Muddle is what results when people ignore their deepest promptings and respond dishonestly and indirectly to experience as they are expec