Although there is an obvious virtue in a plot which moves directly through time and space, the final justification of form is how well it conveys the author's theme, his vision of life. Conrad experimented with form: we must keep in mind his habitual refusal, beginning with Lord Jim, to follow a straight time sequence. In Lord Jim, Marlow the narrator is responsible for the complexity of time shifts which characterizes both the Patna and Patusan episodes. And the fact that the plot does break into two discrete actions makes the form of Lord Jim a special problem. Thematically, this break is compensated by a myriad of small parallelisms in action and image. While enlightening, the binding quality of such parallelisms (much noted by critics recently) goes only part way toward remedying the split. A more satisfactory approach to the problem is to assume that the two episodes represent the necessary embodiment of Conrad's conception. I would say that, in Lord Jim, Conrad came the closest he ever did in his attempt “to render the highest kind of justice” not only “to the visible universe” as he affirms in the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” but also to the invisible universe within. In the same preface, Conrad asserts that “the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal.” And “his appeal is made ... to that part of our nature which . . . is . . . kept out of sight.” In Lord Jim, Conrad's aim and his triumph was to explore the world of the imagination more thoroughly than he had in Heart of Darkness or ever would again.

In spite of the critical attention that it has received, Conrad's The Secret Sharer continues to present mysteries that usually affect our understanding of the story's climax in which Leggatt, the murderer and fugitive, is given his chance to escape while the ship hovers on the edge of disaster. Clearly enough, in its broadest aspects, the story is framed by a question and its answer. The narrative opens by presenting an uninitiated captain, a stranger to his ship and to himself, wondering how far he “should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.” It closes with the answer that through self-knowledge and self-mastery the captain has achieved “the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command” (p. 143). But between these two points, knowledge and self-mastery are won only after the disconcerting ordeal of protecting Leggatt and the strange exposure of the ship to near destruction, for the dangers from which the captain is allowed to extricate himself seem unnecessary ones of his own making. In turning towards the rocks of Koh-ring, he has done what he “certainly should not have done ... if it had been only a question of getting out of that sleepy gulf as quickly as possible” (pp. 132–133). Moreover, in shaving the land “as close as possible,” he has approached disaster far closer than necessary if it had been only a question of testing his authority or granting Leggatt a reasonable chance to escape.

Although Azorín is characteristically self-renovating and experimental, his boldest innovations occurred mainly from 1926 to 1931. This period has been variously classified as his second or third, but for clarity I shall call it his experimental period. It includes the bulk of his plays (from Judit and Old Spain!, 1926, to Cervantes, o La casa encantada, 1931), three novels (El caballero inactual [title changed from Félix Vargas], 1928, El libro de Levante [first called Superrealismo], 1929, and Pueblo, 1930), a collection of short stories, Blanco en azul (1929), a book of criticism, Andando y pensando (1929), and many stories and essays written contemporaneously with these works, though published later.

The “Cabalistic” diagram of The Awkward Age (1899) whereby James explained the novel to its original publisher (Harper's Weekly) comprised “the neat figure of a circle consisting of a number of small rounds disposed at equal distance about a central object. The central object was my situation, my subject in itself, to which the thing would owe its title, and the small rounds represented so many distinct lamps, as I liked to call them, the function of each of which would be to light with all due intensity one of its aspects.” Each of the “lamps” was a “single social occasion” in which James proceeded to exhaust, as he says, the scenic possibilities; the “occasions” corresponded, he continues, to “Acts of a Play,” and his purpose in using them as a basis of form was to achieve “objectivity” that required no “going behind” scenes to explain, as fiction so often does, and as drama does not. “To make the presented occasion tell all its story itself” was then his purpose (AN, p. 111). The careful arrangements of The Awkward Age are only slightly suggested, however, by James's diagram of circles. The following analysis will attempt to describe the mutual relationships of the order of the “circles” (the books or “acts” of the novel, each of which is named for a different character). Each of the “acts” is divided into numbered units which we may, for convenience, call “scenes.” There are thirty-eight such “scenes” rather evenly distributed among the ten character-named books of the novel.

Victor Hugo, observing his unhappy homeland from exile in Guernsey, wrote, in Napoléon le petit: “Et la liberté de la presse! Qu'en dire? N'est il pas dérisoire seulement de prononcer ce mot?” The word and the thing had indeed been effectively muzzled by the decrees of 17 and 23 February 1852, which made of each editor the censor of his own publication and punished infractions in the criminal courts. The history of journalism under the Second Empire is sad indeed, and there is no need to retell it here; for a number of complex reasons, the press law of 1868 eventually eliminated the “censure préventive” and in response to pressures for a “liberal” empire established that “tout Français majeur et jouissant de ses droits civils et politiques peut, sans autorisation préalable, publier un journal ou écrit périodique.” Although it retained the requirements of prior declaration of ownership and staff, as well as the fiscal stamp, the new law was nevertheless a long step in the direction of freedom.

Although a good deal has been written about L'Etranger in the light of Camus's philosophic insights in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, the verbal similarities between these two works have been used only sporadically in interpreting the novel. Carl Viggiani, whose essay on L'Etranger appears to have dealt most fully with the symbolic undercurrent of the novel and Meursault's relation to Sisyphus has concentrated almost solely on detached archetypal motifs while largely neglecting any sort of progressive or “novelistic” development of the protagonist as he moves from his mother's funeral to his final jail cell. I propose to demonstrate such a consistent development by viewing Meursault's adventure as a parable of mental awakening or coming to consciousness which corresponds in detailed thematic and imagistic ways to the adventure of the mind in Le Mythe de Sisyphe.

Despite its appearance as a miscellaneous collection of lyrics, Dylan Thomas' poetry is a closely unified body of work. Poetic unity customarily reveals itself in cohesive imagery (what Kenneth Burke calls “symbolic equations”), and in the repetition and development of related themes. Thomas' Collected Poems possesses such imagistic and thematic coherence, and these images and themes, furthermore, have as their subsuming source the Bible.

La cimerísima interpretación de Amado Alonso es harto bien conocida. Residencia en la tierra encierra la terrible y dolorosa visión de la “invisible e incesante labor de autodesintegración a la que se entregan todos los seres vivos y todas las cosas inertes, por debajo y por dentro de su movimiento o de su quietud” (pág. 19). Esta atroz contemplación de la permanente desintegración sin sentido de la realidad, del morirse de todo lo vivo a la que se entrega Neruda en un obstinado ensimismamiento es, sobre todo, un modo íntegramente valedero de afectarse por la realidad: el morir de las cosas se identifica con el morir humano, y el poeta se angustia. En el primer tomo (1925–31), sin embargo, la visión no es de desintegración y el sentimiento es más bien de sombría melancolía que de angustia. Si hay desintegración, ésta es “el escenario ... por entre cuyos lentos escombros renace el espíritu indestructible” (pág. 24). El gozo de poetizar y especialmente el oscuro instinto amoroso, dos formas en que se manifiesta el anhelo de perpetuidad entre lo caduco, constituyen la vértebra que preserva desde adentro al mundo del poeta que se quiere desintegrar. A medida que el instinto amoroso, el ansia de perpetuidad, se debilita, se espesan la desintegración y la angustia: en el segundo tomo (1931–35), la desintegración y su dolor, de atmósfera, se convierten en el tema medular.

The Problem of Stephen Dedalus is one of the most curious and interesting in modern letters. One aspect of the problem has been brought to our attention recently in a very impressive book by Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961). Mr. Booth notes that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was not, by its first readers, thought to be an ironic work. It was after the publication of Ulysses, with its presentation of Stephen as the fallen Icarus, that the reassessment of Stephen's character began; and it was the publication of the Stephen Hero fragment in 1944 which really accelerated the movement toward a view of the novel as mainly ironic, with Stephen seen as a posturing esthete rather than an actual or even a potential artist. The most extreme version of this ironic view of Stephen has been proposed by Hugh Kenner, in his Dublin's Joyce (1955).

Anabase was the first of Saint-John Perse's poems to be widely translated into other languages, as well as the first to receive widespread critical attention. Yet, despite several recent attempts at detailed exegesis, the poem remains baffling in many of its details and even in some of its more general implications. Close scrutiny of the text of the poem is, of course, the most natural and legitimate way of coming to grips with its meaning, but the more recent commentaries on Anabase too often prove that close textual examination alone is not an adequate safeguard against runaway interpretation. The present study, therefore, seeks to supplement close scrutiny of the text with references to other of Saint-John Perse's writings, especially to certain of his pronouncements on the nature of poetry in general and, most particularly, to his declaration of intent in writing Anabase.

The use of color by Galdós has so far failed to attract the detailed attention of literary scholars. This lack of attention may perhaps be explained by the fact that Galdós is so well known and so esteemed for his external and psychological realism that scholars have not been inclined to seek special connotative values, nuances, and interest for particular colors in his literary creativity. Galdós' penchant for drawing black-and-white sketches and two recent, very careful, and highly regarded studies—which only mention in passing specific instances of Galdós' lack of concentration regarding color—likewise fail to hint at its importance in his novels. That Galdós was interested in color, however, may be seen in his perennial use of yellow—an especially important chroma which occurs not only prominently at critical junctures in certain novels but also as the surname of an important character: Juan Amarillo in Gloria.

To one who has been revelling in and singing the German mastersongs for more than fifty years—I bought my copy of Peters' still unsurpassed Liederkranz in Leipzig in 1905—Professor Jack Stein's derogatory remarks must evoke first a certain sense of outrage and then pity: sincere pity that a man who knows the Lied so well (and you observe that we can hardly talk about it without using the German word as a technical term) has got so little pleasure out of it. Pleasure? No, joy, grief, exhilaration, ecstasy! To me it has always been one of the glories of European culture that this one people could produce, from Haydn on through Richard Strauss, including a number of composers whom Mr. Stein chose not to mention—Beethoven, Cornelius, Franz, Jensen, Liszt, Loewe, Mendelssohn, Weber—such a body of inspired song as no other nation can even approach.

Considering how little T. S. Eliot has written about the novel, one is especially struck by the frequency with which the name of Henry James gets into his criticism. Eliot has left little doubt as to his admiration for James, having referred to him once as “the most intelligent man of his generation,” and on another occasion having placed him among “the greatest novelists.” More than one student of Eliot has shown the influence of James's works on his poetry, but virtually nothing has been said about the nature and validity of Eliot's critical remarks on a writer who has been a stock property of his mind for the last half century. It is the aim of this study to examine the responses that one of America's major novelists has called forth from the most influential critic of our time.

St. Mawr has generally been treated as if it were a story about a symbolic horse, as if the other characters in the novel had obviously been intended to be subordinate to him, and as if his disappearance seven-eighths of the way through were an indication of Lawrence's inability to concentrate or of his ineptitude in constructing a novel. More than anything else in the book, St. Mawr's failure to cross the finish line has upset critics and has led even so able a commentator of Lawrence as Father Tiverton to describe the novel as “bi-valvular,” because near the end of the book Lawrence “forgets all about the horse-hero, St. Mawr himself, and becomes absorbed by New Mexico.” It is a matter for regret that Lawrence gave his novel the title he did, since it has been instrumental in leading critics into a new variant of the intentional fallacy: the titular heresy, which has made many besides Father Tiverton regard St. Mawr as a structural failure. In fact, the mystery of St. Mawr is bound up with the entire problem of the novel's organization, since the fuss about the horse is only symptomatic of the more profound frustration with what a recent critic has termed the “essential inchoateness of the book.” Therefore the fundamental problem involved in reading St. Mawr, which is one of the book's formal integrity, requires the exploration of the techniques Lawrence employed to shape his work; this problem solved, it then becomes easy not only to understand why the horse is dropped so casually from all notice, but also to see what vision of life the book as a whole means to communicate.