Literary
Theory and Criticism-II
Mark
Schorer’s ‘From Technique as Discovery’
An American novelist, editor, and short story writer, Schorer
was primarily known as a literary critic. His "Technique as
Discovery," published in 1947, became a critical hallmark for its claim
that fiction deserved the close scrutiny, attention, and consideration that was
accorded poetry by the New Critics.
Mark Schorer believes that technique is the means by which
the writer’s experience, which is his subject matter, compels him to attend to
it; technique is the only means he has of discovering, exploring,developing his
subject, of conveying its meaning, and finally of evaluating it. Thus, when we
speak of technique we speak of nearly everything. Schorer is very clear from
the beginning of the article that only if we apply technique to the subject
matter of the novel , only then it can be called art. Otherwise it is just
social experience. “The difference between content, or experience and achieved
content ,or art, is technique.”
Schorer takes three
novelists: H.G.Wells, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce as examples to prove his
point.
H.G.Wells
H.G.Wells had no great
opinion about the importance of technique in fiction.Wells had enormous
literary energy, but he had no respect for the techniques of his medium. Wells
stated that “I have never taken any very
great pains about writing. I am outside the hierarchy of conscious and
deliberate writer’s altogether”. Schorer says that this lack of respect for the
medium took its revenge on the works of Wells. Wells was proud to escape from
artistic preoccupations by calling himself a journalist. Schorer Cryptically
comments: “...he escaped-he disappeared from literature into the
annals(archives) of an era”.
Modern novelists like
James, Conrad and Joyce pays enormous attention to the medium. For them
technique is not secondary as Wells thought it to be. The novel like Tono
Bungay, which is considered as a master-piece of Wells, flounders through a
series of literary imitations- of Dickens, Shaw, Conrad, and Jules Verne- to
end as a failure. He gives not a novel but a hypothesis.
D.H.
Lawrence
Lawrence had great
belief in the therapeutic function of the novel. He said , “One sheds one’s
sickness in books, repeats and presents again one’s emotions to be master of
them.’ “ Merely repeating one’s emotions , merely to look into one’s heart and
write, is merely to repeat the round of emotional bondage”, says Schorer. If a
book should become an exercise in self-analysis, then technique must take the
place of the absent analyst. Lawrence’s failure in his master-piece Sons and
Lovers is because of his impatience with
technical resources. The novel has two themes-the crippling effects of a
mother’s love on the emotional development of a son and the split between two
kinds of love, physical and spiritual, which the son develops , the kind
represented by two young women, Clara and Miriam. Paul is left at the end
‘drifting towards death’. Yet in the last few sentences of the novel a false
note is struck when Lawrence makes Paul turn towards life. This partly because
of Lawrence’s confused ideas about characterization.
Schorer points out that
Lawrence’s personal life interferes with the characterization “Lawrence could
not separate the investigating analyst , who must be objective, from Lawrence,
the subject of the book; and the sickness was not healed, the emotion not
mastered, the novel not perfected”.
James
Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man,
is also an autobiographical novel like Tono
Bungay and Sons and Lovers. The
theme is a young artist’s alienation from his environment. The theme is
explored an d evaluated in three stages as Stephen moves from childhood through
boyhood into maturity. A highly self-conscious use of style and method defines
the quality of experience in each of these sections. The progress of Stephen’s
alienation is complete at the final portion of the novel. In essence his
alienation is a denial of the human
environment.
Stephen
in Ulysses is a little older. The
environment of urban life finds a separate embodiment in the character o Bloom,
and Bloom is lost as Stephen, though touchingly groping for moorings. Each of
the two is weakened by the inability to reach out to the other . Schorer says,
“...Ulysses is like a pattern of concentric circles , with the immediate human
situation at its centre, this passing on and out to the whole dilemma of modern
life, this passing on and out beyond that to vision of the cosmos, and this to
the mythical limits of our experience. If the novel is read with more
satisfaction than any other novel of this century, it is because its author
held an attitude towards technique and the technical scrutiny of subject matter
which enabled him to order , within a single work and with superb coherence,
the greatest amount of our experience.
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