The Artificial & The Good Soldier
In his dedicatory letter of The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford writes about the effort that went into perfecting his final novel. He wrote into it an “intricate tangle of references and cross references” using his own experience as fuel and ambition as fire. Ford believes that The Good Soldier is his finest craftsmanship:
“It is the finest French novel in the English Language” (lvii).
However, I feel that The Good Soldier sinks heavily under the weight of the author’s hand. He is trying too hard with word and letter to achieve impossible effects.
First, Ford uses paired intimate words which are deliberately similar in appearance and organization. The effect is jarring, rather than subtle. For example, take the phrase “good glove’s,” used to describe the narrator’s relationship to the Ashburnhams (3). It breaks the parallelism of the previous pair “loose and easy,” and ruins the flow of the sentence. You have to read “good glove’s” at least twice, letter by letter, because both words are roughly the same length, contain two vowels, start with the same consonant, and have one letter that extends above the mid-line. Why break the glove? I see no purpose here. He does the same thing, but worse, with “quite quiet” describing the disposition of the same Ashburnhams (4). Why use a single-letter inversion to confuse the words? Is there something hidden that we should look to, in the context of this construction?
Second, Ford uses grandiose self-praising hyperbole. Rather than wait until his work is publish and critically reviewed, he writes his own review into the narrative. This comes off as purely arrogant, rather than intellectual. Take, for example, his reference to the Aeneid:
“You may well ask why I write. […] It is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed” (5, italics mine)
The Aeneid is told from the point of view of Aeneas who just witnessed the fall and sack of his home city Troy and then leads a band of stragglers to found Rome. Thus, the preceding paragraph attempts to associate the narrator with the great epic poet Virgil. The guile of it is such that an ordinary reader ought not notice the reference, so that it can serve as a private arrogance. Unfortunately, to anyone moderately well-read, this and many others are clear as daybreak, and distract from the story.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2005 at 12:12 pm and is tagged with ford maddox ford, french novel, first ford, good soldier, mid line, falling to pieces, aeneid, aeneas, consonant, parallelism, hyperbole, cross references, vowels, craftsmanship, tangle, italics, inversion, ambition, human beings, gloves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.