Line | Critics maintain that the fiction of Herman Melville |
(1819–1891) has limitations, such as its lack | |
of inventive plots after Moby-Dick (1851) and its | |
occasionally inscrutable style. A more serious, yet | |
(5) | problematic, charge is that Melville is a deficient |
writer because he is not a practitioner of the “art of | |
fiction,” as critics have conceived of this art since the | |
late nineteenth-century essays and novels of Henry | |
James. Indeed, most twentieth-century commentators | |
(10) | regard Melville not as a novelist but as a writer of |
romance, since they believe that Melville’s fiction | |
lacks the continuity that James viewed as essential | |
to a novel: the continuity between what characters | |
feel or think and what they do, and the continuity | |
(15) | between characters’ fates and their pasts or original |
social classes. Critics argue that only Pierre (1852), | |
because of its subject and its characters, is close to | |
being a novel in the Jamesian sense. | |
However, although Melville is not a Jamesian | |
(20) | novelist, he is not therefore a deficient writer. A more |
reasonable position is that Melville is a different | |
kind of writer, who held, and should be judged | |
by, presuppositions about fiction that are quite | |
different from James’s. It is true that Melville wrote | |
(25) | “romances”; however, these are not the escapist |
fictions this word often implies, but fictions that | |
range freely among very unusual or intense human | |
experiences. Melville portrayed such experiences | |
because he believed these best enabled him to | |
(30) | explore moral questions, an exploration he assumed |
was the ultimate purpose of fiction. He was content | |
to sacrifice continuity or even credibility as long | |
as he could establish a significant moral situation. | |
Thus Melville’s romances do not give the reader | |
(35) | a full understanding of the complete feelings and |
thoughts that motivate actions and events that shape | |
fate. Rather, the romances leave unexplained the | |
sequence of events and either simplify or obscure | |
motives. Again, such simplifications and obscurities | |
(40) | exist in order to give prominence to the depiction of |
sharply delineated moral values, values derived from | |
a character’s purely personal sense of honor, rather | |
than, as in a Jamesian novel, from the conventions of | |
society. |
加"GMAT小百科"小智微信
直接送200