Meredith's "Readable Marriage": A Polyphony of Texts

Contemporary theories of fiction as well as contemporary practice have caused a reassessment of some nineteenth-century novels which have commonly been judged interesting failures at best, as for instance Charlotte Bronte's novels.(1) practice of metafiction by such authors as John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, John Fowles, and Gunter Grass confirms an understanding of genre as historically parodistic and consciously reader-oriented, relegating practice and theory of mimetic realism to status of a particular period's aesthetic fashion. In Narcissistic Narrative (1980) Linda Hutcheon argues that renewed practice of a of process [challenges] inadequate, reified critical notion of 'realism' based on a narrow product mimesis alone (39). Published in 1980, Hutcheon's study does not refer to M. M. Bakhtin's theory, published in English translation a year later, but their views of genre as parodistic - the unmasking of dead conventions and establishing of new codes (Hutcheon 38) - and as conscious of reader's role in producing meaning are compatible. Although Bakhtin does not include among classic representatives of comic novel (301), his definitions apply: In comic novel, incorporation of heteroglossia and its stylistic utilization is characterized by two distinctive features: (1) . . . a multiplicity of and verbal-ideological belief systems . . . (2) incorporated languages and socio-ideological belief systems . . . are unmasked and destroyed as something false, . . . inadequate to reality. (311-12) My project is to consider in Amazing Marriage (1895), Meredith's last novel, various texts from which narrator of novel quotes and to show how their polyphony thematizes threat to eponymous and, by implication, every marriage: romance ideal of marriage envisions a dialogue as conversation between lovers only, whereas really that dialogue is occupied (Bakhtin) by many other voices, each with its language and belief system and each claiming authority for its respective zone[] of valorized perception (Bakhtin). How a Bakhtinian reading can produce a new evaluation of a novel is evidenced in Donald D. Stone's criticism. In his earlier book, Novelists in a Changing World (1972), he finds that the object of Meredithian novel . . . is to direct reader's attention away from novel and toward social consciousness, and he concludes that this is the enemy of novelistic artistry (95). He dismisses Amazing Marriage and Lord Ormont and His Aminta as literary hybrids of sporadic interest but over-all fatigue (170). However, in his article Meredith and Bakhtin: Polyphony and Bildung (1988), he observes approvingly that characters in or Dostoevsky have freedom to . . . intersect freely with times they live in and thus . . . to alter times they live in. optimistic and radical thrust behind Meredith's and Bakhtin's aesthetic is (700). This positive evaluation is compatible with conclusions reached in Joseph Moses's study of actual, un-safe in Novelist as Comedian (6). Although without reference to Bakhtin, Moses stresses heteroglossia in Meredith's novels, speaking of Meredith's refusal to allow conventions of novel to dominate his epistemology and instead, his widening of his epistemic (207). However, Moses only remarks on combination of two narrators in Amazing Marriage, Dame Gossip and Novelist, not on other texts in novel. In Amazing Marriage widening of choices is made most obvious to reader through diverse textual sources from which narrator quotes. uses fictive sources in other novels, for instance, Sir Austin's Pilgrim's Scrip in. Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Diaries and Memoirs in chapter one of Diana of Crossways, and Colney Durance's satirical novel, The Rival Tongues, in One of Our Conquerors. …