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FORM, CONTENT AND RHETORIC IN THE MODERN NOVEL: OR WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE ANYWAY?
Abstract
Novels in the nineteenth century and even earlier were written under the assumption that we could measure knowledge, describe the world, reduce it to clear cut empirical facts and therefore understand it. To some extent the large number of details evident in most novels written before the twentieth century is related to the concept that a novelist who captures enough information of a sensory and rational nature will be depicting a fictitious world similar to the real world. In the twentieth century must nontraditional works are not novelistic in this sense; instead they create their own world. They possess an organization all their own, an organization, structure, plot or whatever we choose to call it, which is of significance because the structure of the book may be seen as a metaphor for the way the writer conceives of the structure of the universe; and this structure reveals something about the world we inhabit and is therefore part of the book's theme. These forms also evoke the reader's interest by posing puzzles for the reader to solve, puzzles which parallel the books' themes. In the end the reader is forced to ask not, "What will happen next?" but, "What is going on now?" Form is not only related to content and rhetoric; it is actually part and parcel with them. The present work describes the rhetoric of these nontraditional novels and indicates how the form is part of the rhetoric as well as part of the book's content in terms of the metaphors the writers have provided. Often writers will indicate exactly what form they are imposing on the world and their books by offering readers a metaphor through a character in the novel; Durrell offers the palimpsest, Pynchon the quest, Fowles the godgame, Nabokov the word puzzle, Reed the mystery and Barnes the night; each writer chooses a metaphor which best suits the themes of his or her work. All of the metaphors are related, overlapping in various ways, so that one cannot legitimately separate the detective metaphor from the maze from the quest from the palimpsest and so on. What one discovers is the common assumption that reality takes its shape from the form we choose to impose upon it, and which metaphor the writer brings to the foreground is merely a matter of emphasis. The list of writers who have made use of nontraditional forms in this manner is endless: William Gaddis in JR, Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebook or numerous others would do just as well in this examination of the relationship of form to content to rhetoric. What all these works share is a debt to the works of Joyce, Proust and Mann, who expanded the modern world's concept of the novel. In some ways, approaching the nontraditional novel by examining how their forms are metaphoric is a simpler task than attempting to approach the works from other directions; I have often found that the easiest, or best, or only way to speak about art is through other metahpors.
Subject Area
Modern literature
Recommended Citation
BOCCIA, MICHAEL ANTHONY, "FORM, CONTENT AND RHETORIC IN THE MODERN NOVEL: OR WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE ANYWAY?" (1980). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8100415.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8100415