DISPOSABLE CONTAINERS: METONYMY IN THE NOVEL (AUSTEN, ELIOT, LAWRENCE, PYNCHON)

The novel, the fictional child of eighteenth-century realistic philosophy, grows up in the nineteenth, as faith in things eternal gives way to an increasing concern with matters quotidian. The novelist's close scrutiny of the everyday, the ordinary, reveals the vicissitudes of life, and the realization that knowledge is limited within the realm of the physical at-hand leads to even greater doubts about the metaphysical beyond. This new emphasis on the real and skepticism about the ideal causes metaphor, the predominant figurative mode of Western literature until this period, to be replaced by metonymy. Novelists generally consider the permanent, static, and symbolic relationships suggested by metaphor to be falsifications of reality; metonymy describes the changing, dynamic, and partial relationships characteristic of prose fiction. Each narrative becomes a disposable container--a paper cup, so to speak--holding the author's particular understanding of the world external to the work, and replacing the Holy Grail of metaphor with a temporary but more tangible receptacle of values and belief. Just as the London of Bleak House becomes visible only when Dickens separates it from the metaphoric, the primordial mire, and incrusts it instead with the metonymic, the grimy deposits and compound interest of the money-grubbing world, so novelists characteristically use parts selected from, but embedded in the whole muddle of reality which surrounds their fictions. By investigating the disposable containers and the vital parts of novels, we can develop a theory of fiction which acknowledges the genre's concern with both form and philosophy, and explains its historical and literary evolution. My approach is in itself metonymic. Through analyses of Emma, Middlemarch, Sons and Lovers, and V., I show how each work stands out as a literary sign of the times: how the estate, society in reform, character, and finally, even metaphor serve as metonymic containers for the respective author's vision of society and for the novel's generic development.