COMING TO A BOOK STORE NEAR YOU: AN INTERPRETATION OF THE EARLY TO MIDDLE NOVELS OF MORDECAI RICHLER:

FORM AS WORLD:

AN INTERPRETATION OF THE EARLY TO MIDDLE NOVELS OF MORDECAI RICHLER:

LITERARY CRITICISM AS AN ARGUMENT

Preface

Starting from the premise that form and content are one, and seeing interpretation as the elucidation of their unity, this essay interprets the early to middle novels of Mordecai Richler. Form here is that which forms the world of the novel, and is that world as an organized whole--form as process and as product. This essay examines the nature of the worlds of Richler's novels. It looks at how their worlds reflect themselves particularly in character, setting and plot. And it looks at how the literary forms Richler uses inform his worlds. The Introduction describes theoreti­cally the basis of this interpretive approach, and sets its scope and discipline.

Chapter One deals with Richler's first three novels. The Acrobats, set in a war-weary Spain, realistically treats Andre’s Bennett's search for definition. It treats symbolically how evil, as a constant force in people's lives because it is a permanent part of their nature, takes its toll in Andre's death.

Son Of A Smaller Hero (“Son”), Richler's most formally realistic novel, describes Noah Adler's search for definition within a particular, tightly-knit social con­text. It explores the fundamental tension between people's need for passion and their passionate need for security. And it shows how that tension results in them suppressing their passions in order to gain security and how that complicates this search.

A Choice Of Enemies (“Choice”), the most bitterly pessimistic of the first three novels, projects a world which overwhelms any attempt to find meaning and value in it, and in which, as the title suggests, a choice of enemies is the only kind of choice that can be made.

Chapter Two discusses The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (“Apprenticeship”). It focuses on how this novel marks a departure from the novels preceding it. Its argument is that Richler's controlled use of the picaresque and comic forms informs the world he pro­jects, and that this world, in its ambiguity and corruptness, reflects itself in Duddy Kravitz, a superb fictional creation. Chapter Two’s ultimate argument is that Apprenticeship is not a comic novel, and that the point at which Duddy's world absorbs him marks novel's overriding pessimism absorbing the comic.

Chapter Three concerns itself with The Incomparable Atuk (“Atuk) and Cocksure. It demonstrates how the pessimism of the previous novels intensifies and darkens as Richler moves from a predominant mode of verisimilitude to the caricature, grotesquerie and fantasy of satire and black humour. When the satire turns into black humour is when the malevolence Richler depicts establishes its predominance, which is to say, its power and significance beyond satire's ability to diminish it by ridicule. For it subsumes the moral norm satire needs to make its ridicule effective.

Richler self consciously references much from his previous novels into St. Urbain’s Horseman (“Horseman”). Chapter Four treats it both as a work unto itself and as a kind of summing up. Seen from the latter angle, Horseman anchors conclusions about Richler's work as a whole. Controlling these conclusions is the argument that the return to a mode of verisimilitude in it is inte­gral to its accommodation of the growing pessimism of the previous novels. Not clearly affirmative, this accommodation—Jake's ability to find some meaning and value in the world—is qualified by the unabated continuance of the sources of Richler’s pessimism. The tension here, paradoxically, is the new balancing of Richler’s pessimism and a new partial resolve.

Finally, behind all that is written in this essay rests the conviction that engaged literary criticism takes a position and argues for it. It argues for what it thinks, and says so clearly and accessibly, forming what it thinks into a coherent whole. Engaged literary criticism defends its position. In the view of literature taken here—seeing form as world, form as meaning, all resonating in theme—literary criticism is most engaged, meaningful and resonant when it grapples with form as world. For that fight brings the critic to the very heart of literary meaning, in which form and content are one, which is to say, to literary texts’ very nature and very essence.


(More to come.)