Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
The House and the Outsider:
The Site of Narration in Contemporary Theory
CHARLES CAMPBELL
The hall towered high, lofty and wide-gable
Then the mighty spirit who dwelt in darkness
Bore grievously a time of hardship, in that
He heard each day loud revelry in hall.
Beowulf (82-89)
Abstract:The paired images of The House and the Outsider form an
archetype of English narrative fiction, as the example of Beowulf shows
with the celebration of the construction of the Hall Heorot waking the
monster Grendel who would destroy the house of social order. Many
houses and many outsiders follow this paradigmatic pattern, from Lovelace
and Harlowe Place to Heathcliff and Thrushcross Grange to Kinbote
with his “window-framed opportunities” to spy on John Shade, and then
to invade and occupy his work, Pale Fire. As this last example indicates,
in the formal self-consciousness of the novel the symbolic field of the
house-outsider comes to include the reader in relation to the house of
fiction. When Henry James describes the house of fiction as having “not
one window but a million” which were “mere holes in a dead wall,
disconnected, perched aloft,” he images the reader as the solitary outsider
to narrative form, an inhabitant of the house of the outsider. In the post1950 period, cultural, linguistic and critical theory have further described
the “architectural capacity” of printed narrative and the place of the
reader as outsider. Outsider, house, door, window, mirror—these
psychological and archetypal image-concepts help us to understand and
apply the critical writings of Sartre, Lacan, Barthes, Iser, deMan, and
Silverman. Lacan’s net of language “over the totality of the real,” seen
through the mirror, becomes Jameson’s prison-house of language; yet the
reader can still observe from without. This study will reveal how these
psychoanalytic and post-structural critics and theorists express the formal
and thematic interchange of the archetypal pattern, revealing the reader
of the novel to be, like the monster in Frankenstein, “the demon at the
casement,” observing the creation and destruction of the other who would
give him community and entering the house only to destroy.
Key Words: Narrative, Archetype, House, Outsider, Image, Novel, Limnal,
Deconstruction.
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
2
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
This hovel . . . joined a cottage of a neat and
pleasant appearance. . . . On examining my
dwelling I found that one of the windows of the
cottage had formerly occupied a part of it, but the
panes had been filled up with wood. In one of
these was a small chink, through which my eye
could just penetrate.
– Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 103-105
1. Images of Narrative Form
The image of the house can be considered an archetype of
English narrative literature according to Northrop Frye’s definition
of an archetype as “a symbol which connects one work with another
and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience”
(1990:118). Consider some of the many novels which have domestic
structures as their central symbols: The Castle of Otranto (and
numerous subsequent Gothic novels), Castle Rackrent, Mansfield
Park, The Heart of Midlothian, Wuthering Heights, Bleak House,The
House of the Seven Gables, The Mill on the Floss, The Spoils of
Poynton, Howards End, The Enormous Room, The House in Paris
and The Mansion. Furthermore, the construction and destruction
of houses has major symbolic significance in narratives as wideranging as Beowulf, Clarissa, Jane Eyre, To the Lighthouse and
Absalom, Absalom! This is so because the house is the primal image
of limits established—of enclosed, socially-defined space—the
concrete embodiment of the human desire for order, for civilization.
A house shapes space to a purpose; it is a refuge for human
coherency in an indifferent and undifferentiated landscape and an
attempt at permanence in the inexorable flow of time.
Another such archetype is the outsider, a figure in English
narrative that is human but denied or excluded by human forms.
He embodies the impulse to destruction and social enmity; but he
is also the source of great energy which is excluded from the house
in the interest of order. He is the monster of heroic tales, the alienus
of the Christian Middle Ages (Ladner 1967); and, with the
weakening of Christian faith, he takes on the characteristics of all
that is alienated from the Modern faith in reason, science and
conventional morality. His home is the site of the alien—of madness,
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
3
the unheimlich, the non-divine supernatural. When he seeks to enter,
the house is threatened with dissolution and can be saved only by
the reaction of the hero, who is the answer of the house of form to
the threat of the outsider. Cain’s kin, Grendel in Beowulf, is the
first outsider in English narrative fiction; his epigones include
Lovelace, Frankenstein’s monster, Heathcliff, Mr. Hyde and Joe
Christmas. The house with its hero and the outsider with his own
house are dialectically inter-related, opposed but necessary to each
other; like Hegelian opposites they conflict and inter-penetrate; and
like poles in a force field they establish a field of symbolic
significance that includes other narrative elements in a complex of
symbolic imagery I call a narrative landscape. Among these other
elements are the voyeur or passive outsider, who interacts with the
interior of the house visually, mentally, imaginatively, as do
Lockwood who grapples in a dream with Cathy’s ghost through the
window of Wuthering Heights and Kinbote who spies from his
“casement window” in Pale Fire (1996:497). Windows and doors
are the loci of transition or interaction between outside and inside;
mirrors and picture frames may image the transitional phenomena
or threshold within the house. Fire is the destroyer of the house but
is also found within as an aid to its functioning as a place of social
and personal organization, and serves, in the fireplace (Latin focus),
as the centre of this organization; it is of the outside but central to
the house. The narrative landscape of the house and the outsider
may also include a third house, a mid-way point and symbolic
synthesis of the house of the hero and the house of the outsider,
what Virginia Woolf in The Waves calls “the house which contains
all” (1968:176).
The conflict of the house of the outsider with the house of
social order is the focal point of this study. As the embodied principle
of anti-form, the outsider’s house, containing the uncontainable, is
the problematic centre of the problem of form seen as the problem
of the outsider. The monster’s confrontation with the house of form
is the problem of form itself, for narrative has always been a part of
the defining order of society and been told in the hall; and it has
always brought into play the forces that oppose order. Thus, when
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
4
Heorot is completed in Beowulf, the scop sings a song of Creation;
and, at that moment, Grendel arises from the mere to threaten the
hall. The song of Beowulf’s fight with Grendel can only be sung if
Heorot survives. Thus the defined social space of the house
establishes the locus of narrative, but the telling opens up a
correspondence with the house of the outsider: “Then the fierce
spirit [Grendel] painfully endured hardship for a time, he who dwelt
in darkness, for every day he heard loud mirth in the hall; there was
the sound of the harp, the clear song of the scop” (Beowulf 1966:3).
In the Modern Period the novel, with its solitary reader, becomes a
“house of fiction,” the text itself identified with its primary symbol
of social order. In the self-conscious world of the novel, the imagery
of house and outsider extends its significance to formal imagery;
involved in its representational field is a consideration of the nature
and problematics of narrative form, the principles of construction
and the methods of utilizing this narrative space, the “story of the
story itself.” So Henry James speaks in the Preface to The Portrait
of a Lady of the house of fiction, the spreading field of life and the
watcher at the window (1962:46-47); and he thus gives a reflexive
turn to Isabel’s gazing from the windows of the house in Albany,
Gardencourt and Osmond’s villa to see what life has in store for
her. Language and building are corollaries as constructs against
chaos; this correlation serves the self-analysis native to the novel.
The view of the novelist through “the pierced aperture” of
his window on the world leads James to build “the large building
of The Portrait of a Lady. It came to be a square and spacious house”
(1962:46, 48). The view from the house of the artist leads to the
construction of the house of fiction. Furthermore, James’s image
of narrative language as a house from which to view the world sets
up a theoretical dichotomy which reverberates in the interplay of
imagery between his Preface and his story, in the inside/outside
ambience of Gardencourt and in the narrator who shares with his
villain and villainess a viewpoint which sees/shows people by means
of things. James’s house of fiction is the house of the outsider to
the spreading field of life. In an earlier example of narrative selfconsciousness, George Eliot, reversing the field, has the narrative
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
5
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
point of view skulking about the windows of the house of life:
Yes, the house must be inhabited, and we will see
by whom; for imagination is a licensed trespasser:
it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls
and peep in at windows with impunity. Put your
face to one of the glass panes in the right-hand
window: what do you see? (Adam Bede 1992:70)
The paradigm of the house and outsider, then, operates in questions
of form as well as thematically in the novel. In fact, the theme of
the outsider is always a question of form, and the novel, in its
questioning of social order and its formal self-consciousness,
represents itself as a house of the outsider.
With its solitary reader, its interest in marginal figures, its
origins in news and gossip (Davis 1984 and Spacks 1985), its affinity
for realism and fancy and its obsessive concern with “the problem
of the correspondence between the literary work and the reality
which it imitates” (Watt 1957:4). The novel is a borderline form, a
site of dichotomies and oppositions. This aesthetic stance is
expressed through the house-outsider paradigm. For, if the novel
identifies with the house, the solitary reader enters the novel
imaginatively as an outsider, as Eliot’s scene of representation
shows. This entry often involves passing through a liminal space
such as James’s prefaces (or Hawthorne’s or Scott’s) or a distancing
critical discourse like Eliot’s or Thackeray’s. Absorption in this
other world may be the reader’s aim (Shumaker 1960:5), but she is
kept always on the verge of this by characteristics of the novel
form: its length (we must occasionally put it down to return to our
mundane affairs), its “formal realism” which brings it close enough
to the real world to accentuate the ironic tension between the two;
its self-conscious narrator who, whether claiming to be an editor of
a genuine manuscript or speaking of his characters as puppets of
his own fancy, constantly draws attention to the disparity, the
separateness, of narrative space.
A novel defines a separate space, a virtual world in
contradistinction to the one we usually inhabit. It is this world’s
other, and its primary theme is the double. The novel is the house
of the outsider, and its reader is an outsider to the world of the
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
6
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
fiction. She is a border stalker, in a liminal space of anti structure—
like that Turner (1974) describes in primitive ritual; she is neither
here nor there, an outsider to the social form she has left behind
and to the aesthetic form she seeks to enter. In the house/outsider
paradigm the narrative posits an insoluble problem of form. In its
refusal to decide on the house or the outsider, the novel pursues its
radical mission of seeing form as fundamentally individual and
therefore undecidable. The novel, as the house of the outsider,
records the interplay of form and chaos, represents the house of
our social order and its antithesis, the destroyer of that order. The
house-outsider paradigm represents a collective dream of our
culture, a continual wrestling with the monstrous other; and, in the
novel, representation of this dream includes a sort of self-analysis
of the form this representation takes. In a kind of archetypal
deconstruction, myth is made self-aware, its fictionality made a
principle of the formation of the text; in Abell’s phrase, “a myth
conceived in its mental basis” (1966:93).
2. Theory: Deconstructing the House of Fiction
Wayne Booth, in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), recognizes what
Shumaker calls the “bi-polar” condition of narrative experience
when he describes the techniques in narrative which serve to mediate
between the reader’s point of view and that of the author. Narrative
experience involves a bi-polar situation with two related centers at
each of the poles: the real world versus the world of the novel and
the reader’s consciousness versus that of the author as embodied in
the text (see Iser 1978: 54). Such a perspective on reading coordinates
with the dialectical view of language expressed by Ernst Cassirer:
For what language designates and expresses is neither
exclusively subjective nor exclusively objective; it
effects a new mediation, a particular reciprocal relation
between the two factors. . . . Language arises where the
two ends are joined, so creating a synthesis of “I” and
“world” (1955:1.93).
Narrative fiction, as an extended construct of language, has this
same mediative, synthetical nature, with the added complexity of a
distinct, complete creation of and within language. The dynamics
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
7
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
of reading are expressed clearly by Jean-Paul Sartre: “The operation
of writing implies that of reading as its dialectical correlative. . . . It
is the conjoint effort of author and reader which brings upon the
scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the
mind” (1966:26).
Sartre’s “concrete and imaginary object” is the subject of
study by reader response theorists such as Wolfgang Iser when he
writes of the tension between author’s world view and reader’s and
between “the role offered by the text and the real reader’s own
disposition” (1978:37). For Iser, this means the narrative text must
“bring about a standpoint” apart from the reader’s “own habitual
dispositions” but which also “cannot be present in the text itself, as
it is the vantage point for visualizing the world represented and so
cannot be part of that world” (1978:35). This site, arrived at in
reading, apart from the reader’s self-conception and unlocatable in
the text is the location of the reader as outsider, as the problem of
narrative form becomes the theme of the narrative of the house and
the outsider.
Alan Friedman has written in The Turn of the Novel of “that
peculiarly novelistic continuum, the inner and outer dialectics of
the novel” by which the perceiving self (the protagonist) copes with
new experiences and adjusts his world view to them. The reader,
according to Friedman, is immersed in this internal flux and ceases
to have any vantage point apart as an independent perceiving self:
The co-operative reader submits to (the novel
produces) identification—a suspension of
dissociation before the intrusion of personality.
An “other” becomes our temporary self. . . . We
experience the fiction not from the orchestra but
from some center of the novel’s world. . . . The
self and the world in the novel become our self
and surrounding world, so that the experience of
reading a novel comes closer than does any other
form of literature to our personal experience in
time (1966:13-14).
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
8
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
Recognizing the dialectics of inside and outside essential to the
narrative experience, Friedman nevertheless commits himself to
the concept of identification, the idea that entry into the house of
fiction is completed. I would suggest rather that the reader hovers
continually over the threshold, occupies an in-between point, a locus
of liminality. As Friedman says, the self becomes an “other,” but it
does not cease being itself; as Iser points out there are “two selves”
in the reading process and “the one can never be fully taken over
by the other” (1978:37). The experience is one of doubleness, of
disunity, a dwelling in the margins of form. As Dr. Jekyll says of
man, the reader “is not truly one, but truly two” (Stevenson
2003:104).
The rhetoric of fiction works against identification. Such
comments as those of Conrad’s narrator at the outset of Under
Western Eyes— “Words are the great foes of reality” (1983:1)—
warn against absorption into the world of words. The falseness of
written words as concretizations of unstable and indeterminate
attitudes and experience is also considered by the narrator of Vanity
Fair:
Perhaps in Vanity Fair there are no better satires
than letters. . . . How queerly they read after awhile!
There ought to be a law in Vanity Fair ordering
the destruction of every written document (except
receipted tradesmen’s bills) after a certain brief
and proper interval (Thackeray 1963:182).
The novel calls attention to itself as an artificial construct. William
Dean Howells has the characters in Indian Summer speculate on
how they would behave if they were characters in a Howells novel
(1982:754). Virginia Woolf in Jacob’s Room metaphorically merges
a walk down the street with reading a book and both with the reader’s
progress through the plot of her novel, merging the novel and its
representative setting:
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public
house and dark square is a picture feverishly
turned—in search of what? It is the same with
books. What do we seek through millions of
pages? Still hopefully turning the pages—oh, here
is Jacob’s room (1965:92).
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
9
This sort of narrative self-consciousness heightens the counterpoint
with the real world and keeps the reader from achieving a unitary
consciousness, keeps him on the border, Janus-faced, a divided self.
The polarities of narrative experience are more firmly
established by the medium of print which is uniform, visual and
sequential, detaching the one sense from an interplay of senses as
it does the single reader from others in its “audience.” Marshall
McLuhan sees phonetic writing as causing a split between thought
and action and between “the magical world of the ear and the neutral
world of the eye”; and he suggests “that literate man is a split man,
a schizophrenic” (2010:22). Print technology intensifies this effect
and makes us passive consumers of stories “translated” from “the
dialogue of shared discourse into packaged information, a portable
commodity” (2010:164). This translation also changes mythic
consciousness to the exclusive, consistent, coherent progress of
linearity. In the oral/aural technology that preceded print and the
phonetic alphabet, narrative was more fully involving and collective;
the Anglo-Saxon scop engaged with his auditors in a cooperative
and simultaneous process of composition and performance (Lord:
2000). The narrative form was then a resonant audial atmosphere
which filled the mead hall, enveloping singer and listeners. The
house of social organization and the house of fiction were, as in
Beowulf, in effect one and the same. The shift from formulaic epos
to written and then printed fiction causes the separation of the
components of this primal narrative situation—of the audience from
the poet and performance from response—as part of a general
cultural movement that separated the individual from the social
group.
The process of language development from its early roots
was a gradual liberation of the human spirit from the confining
web of the mythico-magical world of primitive conception towards
an increasing capacity for abstraction and detached thought. The
development of techniques for preserving and conveying language
hastened this “separation of the knower from the known,” as E.A.
Havelock points out in his study of the Homeric encyclopedia as
the primary educative force in Greek culture prior to Plato. OralVol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
10
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
formulaic narration created a sensuous involvement for the auditor
which enforced an emotional identification with the tale. This is
why Plato saw his countrymen as sleepwalkers and argued for the
examined life:
The Greek ego in order to achieve that kind of
cultural experience which after Plato became
possible and then normal must stop enacting the
whole scale of the emotions. . . It must separate
itself out and by an effort of the will must rally
itself to a point where it can say, “I am I, an
autonomous little universe of my own.” . . . The
doctrine of the autonomous psyche is the
counterpart of the rejection of oral culture
(1963:200).
Havelock explains Plato’s attack on poetry by showing that Plato
deprecated the survival of “an oral state of mind” into the Fifth
Century, after the development of phonetic writing had provided
the means for escaping it. What A. A. Lee 1972) calls the Guest
Hall of Eden has become the house of fiction with its many unique
windows—”mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft”
(James 1962:46) – through which the isolated observer peers;
narrative experience has gone from the sensuous, involving audial
atmosphere of the spoken word to the “visual enclosure of nonvisual spaces and senses” (McLuhan 2010:43). The reader of
narrative is made an outsider by the development of the technology
of its communication; no longer contained by the story, except
metaphorically and self-consciously by the added fiction of oral
narration, the reader gazes from without into the enclosed space
established by “the architectural capacity of written or printed signs
on a page” (Havelock 1963:296). In this the reader does identify
with Catherine and Heathcliff, as outsiders to the house of social
form:
Both of us were able to look in by standing on the
basement, and clinging to the ledge, and we saw—
ah! it was beautiful—a splendid place carpeted
with crimson, and crimson-coloured chairs and
tables, and a pure white ceiling bordered by gold,
a shower of glass-drops hanging in silver chains
from the centre and shimmering with little soft
tapers. We should have thought ourselves in
heaven! (1986:47)
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
11
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
The condition of the reader in relation to the text and of the
individual in relation to the telling of society establishes the form
and thereby the theme of the novel as it explores the house/outsider
paradigm. Such novels as Wuthering Heights or Nabokov’s Pale
Fire tend to be about their own making, about their own impossible
reaching for formal unity. The novel, in this mode of its awareness,
multiplies marginality, as with the multiple narrative frames in
Wuthering Heights, to focus on borders, separations, to place
Kinbote, the critic and editor in Pale Fire, at the window peeping
into John Shade‘s house in his attempt to become integral to the
poem at the centre of the narrative layers of that novel: “Today it
would be impossible for me to describe Shade’s house in . . . any
term other than peeps and glimpses, and window-framed
opportunities” (1996:496). In that case the protagonist shares the
reader’s experience which is liminal in Van Gennep’s and Victor
Turner’s sense of this term: “In this interim of ‘liminality,’ the
possibility exists of standing aside not only from one’s own social
position but from all social positions and of formulating a potentially
unlimited series of alternative social arrangements” (Turner
1974:13-14 and 16). Structurally and thematically the novel involves
the confrontation between the house of form and the house of the
outsider. The site of narration is the place of the border-dweller,
where the vision of the monster penetrates the house of social order.
In this field of its operation the novel offers the reader no
rest, no place of formal unity, only divisions upon divisions.
Inhabiting this house is not a coming home but a haunting, a
continually textual reaching for the other that completes the self.
Like Genet’s burglar in The Thief’s Journal we discover not unity
but our own doubleness:
As soon as I push the door it thrusts back within
me a heap of darkness, or, to be more exact a very
thick vapor which my body is summoned to enter.
. . . I am steeped in the idea of property while I
loot property. I recreate the absent proprietor. He
lives not facing me, but about me. He is a fluid
element which I breathe, which enters me, which
inflates my lungs (1964:139).
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
12
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
In its refusal to decide on the outsider or the house, the novel
establishes its space of anti-structure; the narrative landscape throws
into question all social order and sets up an insoluble problem of
form. In exploring this paradigm the novel is its own undoing, a
game of lost identity, of “Where is the self?” As the house of the
outsider the novel records the interplay of form and chaos and
introduces into the house of social order the destroyer of that order;
within its boundless bounds the reader seeks his own form.
The reader cannot actually enter the house of fiction but
must haunt the threshold, hovering on the precincts of form, enacting
the archetypal outsider. So, while the novel establishes the image
of the social/ discursive order, it activates its opposite—just as the
singing to celebrate the completion of Heorot awakens Grendel in
his lair. The novel is thus “a true spiritual form of expression” in
Cassirer’s terms, a place of mythic thinking:
In every such form the rigid limit between “inside”
and “outside,” the “subjective” and the “objective”
does not subsist as such but begins, as it were, to
grow fluid. The inward and outward do not stand
side by side, each as a separate province; each,
rather, is reflected in the other, and only in this
reciprocal reflection does each disclose its own
meaning. Thus in the spatial form which mythical
thinking devises the whole mythical life form is
imprinted and can, in a certain sense, be read from
it (1955:2.99).
3. Psychological Space: The Dialectics of Outside and Inside
Windows, as well known, have been the solace of first-person
literature throughout the ages.
–Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire1996:497
According to Cassirer the first enclosed space was “sacred space,”
a centre without precise bounds established by religious awe or
taboo (1955:2.76-82). Similarly, the first social space was defined
by a campfire and the first narrative space was defined by the teller
of tales, also a centre without precise margins. The temple, the hall
and the written word give visually manifest, bounded and concrete
form to sacred, social and narrative space, respectively.
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
13
The notion of the self as a separate space from the rest of the
experienced world is a late development linguistically and is related
to the collapse of the temple and the communal hall as viable forms
and, as we have seen, to the shift from oral to written and then
printed techniques of communication. Cassirer also shows how
linguistically the development of abstract religious, legal and
political systems and the chronological ordering of time derive from
the basic concept of divisions in space: “The god . . . the stage, the
community, and the individual acquired a definite space through
the intermediary of the idea of templum”—a word which originates
in the Greek verb, to cut, and encompasses the conceptual acts of
limitation which establish religious and legal forms and the concepts
of chronological time (tempus) and detached thought (contemplari)
(1955:2.99-109).
Spatial determinations are also the primary data of the
imagination, especially how we imagine ourselves apart from
ourselves, or imagine our bodies. Freud observed that “the only
typical, that is to say, regularly occurring” dream image used to
represent the human form as a whole is a house. Windows and doors
represent cavities in the body; entrances and exits are often disguised
sexual intercourse. Furthermore, the various parts of the house dwelt
on in dreams indicate various human faculties, imaginative
connections that Freud sees as engrained in language (1957:160168). Drawing on a dream of his own, C. G. Jung finds that “the
house represented a kind of image of the psyche” with its main
divisions residing in the attic, the main floor, the cellar and, in the
case of the collective unconscious, in the vast labyrinthine extent of
the sub-basement (1965:158-161). One’s own experience confirms
the archetypal significance Jung claims for his conception. The house
of our childhood is the basis of our emotional life and, as such, the
typical setting for our dreams. It is where we were loved and cared
for, or expected to be, in fulfillment of the post-natal yearning for
the integrated environment of the womb. In Fiction and the
Unconscious Simon O. Lesser relates literary form to this need for
an integrated, self-affirming environment; he includes in his
argument the fear of the outsider, the destroyer of form, which is in
each of us and in the human community (1957:121-144).
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
14
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
On the other hand, we do not only dream of home and yearn
for protective form. Eric Fromm (1999) applies Freud’s method of
dream analysis to demonstrate an inherent drive for freedom from
constraint. We dream also of immensity, of flight, of uncontained
space in which the human spirit can expand in unlimited potentiality.
In The Enchafed Flood (1950) W. H. Auden finds imagery of
wilderness, the sea and the desert as symbolic formless places to
be the central landscapes for English Romantic poetry—locales with
no history, no community and no legal or customary restraints. This
motif can be traced back to Anglo-Saxon poetry with its mere and
“rime-cold sea” to which several protagonists commit themselves.
They leave the warmth, light and order of the hall because its form
denies the formlessness around them and/or because its form is
merely a transient type of the Heavenly Hall. This is the case with
the protagonists of The Wanderer and The Seafarer who seek to
reach a higher order through the chaos of the sea. This is also the
case with Christian who turns away from his own house to reach
the Celestial City and with Clarissa who leaves her father’s house
to the end of, after her struggle with the monster Lovelace, “setting
out with all diligence for my [F]ather’s house” (1968:4.157). For
Jung the first aim of self-knowledge is to assimilate the shadow self
which has been projected outside the personal identity and social
image (1971:144-148). For Joseph Campbell the monomyth of
western culture is a journey into the regions beyond personal and
social awareness into an area of mystery, like Theseus into the
labyrinth to face the minotaur and Beowulf’s journey to Grendel’s
“hostile hall” beneath the mere, to return with knowledge that will
take the house of form to a higher state of inclusion (1988:30-46).
In his phenomenological study of open and enclosed space as
imaginative motifs, Gaston Bachelard brings together the essential
metaphorical significance of the house image:
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of
protection. Something closed must retain our
memories. . . . The house is one of the greatest powers
of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams
of mankind. . . . Without it man would
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
15
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
be a dispersed being. The house we were born in
has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various
functions of inhabiting that particular house, and
all other houses are but variations on a
fundamental theme (1994:6-7, 15).
The house is archetypally “intimate space” and “fossilized duration,”
but it is “unwilling to remain permanently closed”: “For the door is
an entire cosmos of the Half-open. The door schematizes two strong
possibilities, which sharply classify two types of daydreams”
(1994:222). In anthropological terms Bachelard here touches on
the fascination with the threshold, the division between formed
social space and the indeterminate but sacred space beyond that, a
place assigned its own god, a place of ritual rites of passage. Thus
the passageway, explored by Victor Turner in his studies of ritual
process in primal cultures (1974), follows van Gennep’s (1960)
model of separation, liminality and re-integration. For Bachelard
the human imagination moves between intimate and unbounded
space in a “dialectics of outside and inside” (1994:211-31). This
dialectic is the process allegorized on the landscape of the house
and the outsider.
The house constructed by and in the novel then is a
representation of the novel; and the consciousness on its thresholds,
doors and windows, represent the reading experience, as a
transitional phenomenon in D. W. Winnicott’s sense of “a restingplace for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of
keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated”
(1971:2).This is much the type of experience that Poulet (1969)
describes as the reader making another temporary self—and thus
being neither inside nor outside; it is with the paradox of reading
and the narrative as transitional object that the house-outsider
paradigm has to do.
The matter of the house and the outsider is the story of the
reader ’s separation from him/herself, her liminality and
re­integration. The house of the outsider refers to the site of the
problem of form, the place on the narrative landscape at which
meet the reader and the textualized author (the living and the dead).
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
16
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
The site of narration is the viewpoint of Frankenstein’s monster in
the hovel learning to read through the disused window of the
DeLacey’s cottage: “I also learned the science of letters [through
the peephole] as it was taught to the stranger; and this opened before
me a wide field for wonder and delight” (1992:118). The hovel
with its obscured window into a world made of language is a spectral
region, haunted by the characters on the borderline of the story
(Belford, Walton, Marlow, Henry James) where the reader confronts
the fictional world of the novel. In this no-place on the text’s
margins, the problem of form and order appears as the problem of
the house and the outsider. In this liminal realm of the novel’s
phenomenology we find the implied reader; and it is in our uncanny
likeness/otherness to this figure, doubled in our partnership with
the meditative character, that makes for the haunting of the house
of fiction. There the reader meets his fellow peeper-at-the-window
of form—Frankenstein’s monster, Lockwood (in Wuthering
Heights), Coverdale (in The Blithedale Romance), George Eliot’s
narrator or James’s preface-writer, and each figures in the
transitional phenomenon.
The novel can be defined then, in anthropological terms, as a semipermanent state of transition, a being on the boundary of ear and
eye, mythic and ironic, nature and culture. It is the place of presence
without substance, the shadow of the aural-mythic configuration,
where the monster holds sway; it is also the shadow of our present
“reality”:
Instead of reproducing the system to which it
refers, it almost invariably takes as its dominant
“meaning” those possibilities that have been
neutralized or negated by that system. If the basic
reference of the text is to the penumbra of excluded
possibilities, one might almost say that the
borderlines of existing systems are the starting
point for the literary text. It begins to activate that
which the system left inactive (Iser 1978:72).
Abell says that heroes arise to conquer monsters when the culture
enables them to do so (i.e. is confident and strong in its beliefs); at
other times the monster will predominate. So Beowulf is a sort of
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
17
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
allegory of the rise of efficient farming techniques that will banish
the fear and insecurity of famine. Our era is one of the predominance
of the monster, (fear of) the other, the uncertainty of meaning. So,
for Abell, Clarissa succeeds because she has much in common with
the dragon (1966:53). In its bipolarity, which parallels that LeviStauss (1966) maps, the novel celebrates the savage mind as sacred,
a taboo, our society’s liminal realm. In our time Mr. Hyde dominates,
not Dr. Jekyll who dies when the other commits suicide.
The landscape of the house and the outsider is a “tension
image”—a locus of awareness of that which eludes consciousness;
in Abell’s sense it is mythic thought that has become aware “that
the monster does not exist as an outward reality” (1966:89:
The tension image remains subject to our present
power of rational discriminations. . . . Instead of
confusing it with the outward world, we say that
it expresses or symbolizes our reactions to certain
aspects of that world. In this respect it corresponds,
not to true dream, but to the daydream as normally
circumvented by reason. Cultural tension imagery
which is thus circumvented might be described as
near myth or, if we apply the analogy of the
daydream, as day myth (1966:95).
The story of the house and the outsider is a story of reading. The
reader enters into the place of mystery, the place without form; she
dwells with the monster in the margins. She discovers the
unconscious in the structure of language, in that no-place of the
gaze, seeing and not seen—whole but excluded from the paradise/
hell of other people. The story of the house of the outsider is the
impossible attempt to share the solitude of liminality, to be as one
in the transitional object. The novel, in its matter of the house,
would unite the hero and the outsider, the communal ear and the
individuating eye, the defined interior and the unlimited exterior in
its narrative language.
Our shadowy epic of separation reveals itself
psychoanalytically. Recently, a group of Jungian and Winnicottian
therapists have shown how the liminal state and transitional
phenemona are essential to their work of establishing a separate,
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
18
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
sacred space for successful therapy (Moore 1991). This is where
the self can meet its other in a space of paradox, where all values
and forms dissolve or appear as their opposites. According to the
house/outsider schema, this is where the hero/monster enters the
house of the outsider. In Lacanian terms, for hero read subject of
house of the outsider. In Lacanian terms, for hero read subject of
the Symbolic order, and for outsider read its primordial other in the
Imaginary order: “Who, then, is this other to whom I am more
attached than myself? . . . His presence can be understood only at a
second degree of otherness, which already places him in the position
of mediating between me and the double of myself” (Lacan 2001:
172). The meeting of the hero and the outsider enacts the splitting
(subjection, castration) of the self which originates upon its entry
into culture (Silverman 1984:176).
Iser gives us a theory of the novel as a psychoanalytic tool,
with his premise: “It is only when the reader is forced to produce
the meaning of the text under unfamiliar conditions, rather than
under his own conditions (analogizing), that he can bring to light a
layer of his personality that he had previously been unable to
formulate in his conscious mind” (1978:50):
Psychoanalysis has taught us that there is a large
area in the subject which manifests itself in a
variety of symbols and is completely closed to the
conscious mind. . . . Now reading is not therapy. .
. . Nevertheless, it does enable us to see how little
of the subject is a given reality, even to its own
consciousness (1978: 158-159).
Iser develops this insight into a concept he calls “staging”:
“the appearance [in narrative] of something that cannot become
present” (1992:881). There are two houses of form in question for
him: personal systems and societal systems. Both these ways of
structuring experience are disrupted, challenged, made other in the
reading of narrative fiction (1974:197-199). The process is a work
which brings out the third man, the unseen, only imagined, other:
“A layer of the reader’s personality . . . which had hitherto remained
hidden in the shadows” (1978:157); “latent relationships” activate
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
19
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
in opposition to our habitual and customary attitudes and behaviour
(1978:189). Iser offers The Third Man as an example, quoting
Rudolph Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception (1966):
Instead of presenting a static world with a constant
inventory, the artist shows life as a process of
appearing and disappearing. The whole is only
partly present. . . . In the film The Third Man the
mysterious protagonist stands unseen in a doorway.
The frightening existence of things that are beyond
the reach of our senses and yet exercise their power
upon us is represented by means of
darkness.(1978:177).
Iser’s version of Arnheim’s darkness, the gaps and “points of
indeterminacy” in a narrative, offers the reader the opportunity to
make (play at) meaning. It is a psychological operation, an
examination of personal and societal lines of order from the point
of view established by the unconscious. Iser makes clear that his
study, like Dryden’s of Melville (1981) is a “thematics of form”
(1978:192-195). His critical formulations derive from narrative
texts which talk about themselves; for example, the theory of blanks
from Fielding’s prefaces (1974:51). He studies novels which
theorize their narrative process. This is a way of making meaning
we can examine operating in various texts in association with my
paradigm of the house and the outsider.
The odd thing about novels is that they thematize their ways
of making meaning, that they are always frame narratives above
all. Iser argues that the formal process of the novel is also its
principle theme (its meaning as opposed to its significance) (See
1978: 186-187). The “discernment” of the self apart from the self
is the reader’s opportunity to engage in making meaning: “It is not
a one dimensional process of projections from the reader’s past
conventions but a dialectical movement in the course of which his
past experiences become marginal and he is able to react
spontaneously; consequently, his spontaneity—evoked and
formulated by the text—penetrates into consciousness” (1978: 158).
So, for Iser in his reading of Compton-Burnett, “the blanks
themselves become thematic” (1978:192). Iser sees a kind of climax
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
20
in this with modernism: the reader is completely excluded in Beckett,
the game of meaning does not work; the reader draws a total blank
(1978:222-225).
Deconstruction confirms and studies this condition of
reading; as de Man, Barthes and Miller point out (as did Freud of
his discovery of the unconscious), the verbal artist has always seen
the outsider in his window of form. The text is a mirror but a
“defective” mirror that deals not in similitude but in difference; in
place of the reflection is a blank, an opening onto otherness.
The matter of the house and the outsider operates as a
narrative landscape, a field of linguistic effects experienced in visual
terms. It is the virtual story of the gaze and explores the point of
symbolization, the ordering of the individual self within language
as the gaze of the other. This point is the imaginary locale on the
borderline of representation, so the story of that place, that house,
is the story of Winnicott’s transitional object and of Lacan’s mirror
phase; it is the story of the threshold between inner and outer reality,
between identification and alienation and between the Imaginary
and the Symbolic.
In the view of critical theory reading a novel involves the
dialectics of the house of the outsider and the house of the hero.
The opposed poles of Campbell’s monomythical journey come
together with explosive results for the subject and the social order.
Mr. Hyde comes in the back door, Dr. Jekyll through the front, and
their meeting in the cabinet with the red baize door brings about a
blotting out of “that immaterial tabernacle” of identity and “a
solution of the bonds of obligation” (2003:106-107). Following
Dr Frankenstein and preceding Freud, Dr. Jekyll discovers the
“primitive duality of man” and predicts further dissolution of
subjectivity in a social structure of anti-form: “Man will ultimately
be known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and
independent denizens” (2003: 104).
The situation of the reader is analogous to that of the
outsider, of the “houseless” Hyde (2003:119). Excluded from
integration in the narrative by the techniques and medium of the
novel, she haunts the borders of form, engaging in a dialectics of
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
21
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
outside and inside. The house of fiction contains only otherness; so
de Man argues that the inundation of indeterminacy and a “selfreflecting mirror-effect by means of which a work of fiction asserts,
by its very existence, its separation from empirical reality, its
divergence, as a sign, from a meaning that depends for its existence
on the constitutive activity of this sign, [characterize] the work of
literature” (1986:17). “What critical method does not,” Howard
Felperin asks, “devastate the texts on which they work?” (1985:119)
The condition of all reading, at least of literary texts, according to
deconstruction, is
the story of the unresolvable conflict between
textual declaration and textual description and so
of the wandering of meaning and of the reader’s
quest of readability and mastery. It emerges that
literary texts, born of language, partake of a both/
and nature, both preserving and undoing meaning
at once, though we try desperately to stop the
ceaseless oscillation and reduce the complication,
and interimplication, to the either/or thinking that
evidently characterizes Western thinking (Atkins
1983:4).
As Felperin sees through Derrida and Barthes the reader enters to
destroy, as the outsider who must disrupt, must mis-construe the
text; she is absorbed in/aware of structure and therefore outside of
it in a state Felperin describes as “that point in our reflection on
system-making where it begins to take on characteristics of those
activities to which it had been initially opposed” (1985:88).
Leonard J. Davis describes this from a Marxist perspective.
The novel creates a separate space, which is for Davis a
commodified space, a space of private property, “this newly made
interior space of the novel”: “These places, that pretend to be open
spaces of the real, are actually claustrophobic encampments of the
ideological” (1987:101). Citing the limitations of the novel’s
characters (no personality), Davis says we are fooled by the novel,
taken in by our consumer’s desire; we are duped ideologically, taken
away from real work towards social change in history (the real) by
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
22
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
this clever capitalist device. Like the novel itself, Davis yearns for
pre- and extra-novelistic discourse, but he also recognizes that
“novels, like psychotics,” engage in the omnipotence of thought
(1987:121) and agrees with Frederic Jameson that the aim of the
classic narrator is “to restore the coordinates of a face-to-face storytelling institution . . . disintegrated by the printed book” (1981:155).
Davis describes the liminal field of the house of the outsider in his
own critical discourse:
The ideology of the novel has to make readers
forget about the fullness and sensuousness of lived
experience. . . . Character becomes in effect a
personal way of forgetting about the increasing
contradictions in daily life [and] avoiding the
quality of experience that comes from living in
time. (1980:154)
Taken less politically, the novel appears to be a field for the play of
language which may be visually represented as the play of the house
and the outsider; that is to say, it poses the problem of whether
alienation can be turned into art. Davis’ comparison between the
novel and psychosis is revealing, although he seeks in it a
normalizing order rather than the other. The novel is, as Davis
argues, in the highest degree of alienation; but the novel faces its
own alienation, becomes aware of its otherness in the frame of
representation. The page becomes a window framing the monster:
“I saw at the open window a figure the most hideous and abhorred.
A grin was on the face of the monster” (1992: 202).
Davis agrees with George Levine (1981) that Frankenstin
is of central importance for the study of the novel (1987:144). Mary
Shelley’s story of “the daemon at the casement” (1992:170), staring
in at the wedding night as well as the reading process, is a turning
point in human consciousness as expressed in English narrative. In
that text the novel becomes aware of its turning away from order,
its transgression—towards evil and disorder, towards the double.
Before this, evil was external to God and therefore to be avoided,
seen as a nonentity, by the hero on his path to God. Christian and
Clarissa leave the house not to merge with the monster but to oppose
the hostile hall with the Heavenly Mansion. With Frankenstein
comes a tale where the monster cannot be expunged, for the demon
is the self.
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
23
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
The confrontation with our idle, destructive, cruel,
unreasoning selves is the path of post-Frankenstein narrative, with
the knowledge that there can be no final victory over the forces of
chaos but only knowing otherness. In its refusal to choose between
the house and the outsider, the novel establishes its space of antistructure; the house/outsider paradigm presents a radical questioning
of form. The reader sees the face at the window as his own. The
hovel where the monster learns to read and where he tells his story,
the house of the outsider, becomes the site of narration.
The hovel on the glacier in Frankenstein where the monster
tells his side of the story to his creator is a version of the third
house on the narrative landscape, related to Clarissa’s coffin, seen
as “her palace” and her “last house” (1968:4.257, 353), and the
ruined chapels midway in the narrative landscape of Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight and of Wuthering Heights. In Virginia Woolf’s
version it is the house of fiction seen as “the house which contains
all” (1968:176) human forms and the monstrous house merge,
virtually transcending the limits of representational form. This house
is never actually arrived at by the protagonist of the story and only
by the reader in a purely figurative way, in an uncanny experience
homologous with dream work—not a place but a process we may
call, paraphrasing Iser, active synthesis in reading. This is the house
of form built by the consciously alienated reader, the house of
deconstruction. Deconstructive reading is building/ destroying,
dissolving the personality of the reader, doubling subjectivity:
The distinction between author and reader is one
of the false distinctions that the reading makes
evident. The deconstruction is not something we
have added to the text but it constituted the text in
the first place. A literary text simultaneously
asserts and denies the authority of its own
rhetorical mode, and by reading the text as we did
we were only trying to come closer to being as
rigorous a reader as the author had to be in order
to write the sentence in the first place (de Man
1982:17).
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
24
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
The text is a frame but not one that defines, limits or makes explicit. As reading, the third house coalesces with the house of the
outsider in relation to the narrative text. The third house becomes
the act of reading as entering into unlimited otherness by means of
active synthesis, which Barthes calls “significance” and describes
as “that radical work (which leaves nothing intact) through which
the subject explores how language works him and undoes him as
soon as he stops observing it and enters it.” The text is the way of
the unconscious. “‘Signifiance,’ is a process in the course of which
the ‘subject’ of the text, escaping the logic of the ego--cogito and
engaging other logics (that of the signifier and that of contradiction), struggles with meaning and is deconstructed (‘is lost’). . . .
‘Signifiance’ is `the without-end-ness of the possible operations in
a given field of language’” (2006:38). This is Barthes’ work in the
field of “jouissance,” the dream of being inside the myth known to
be a myth, lost in the labyrinth of language.
Critical theory establishes a new epistemological object,
“the reading”; then critical practice becomes “a science which calls
into question its own discourse”; and the text becomes a no-place
which cannot establish itself as a separate space—”a closed object
placed at a distance from an observer who inspects it from the
outside. It is essentially this exteriority which textual analysis puts
in question” (Barthes 2006: 42-43). This is so because each text is
an intertext, not one with itself but permutated by “the volume of
sociality: the whole of language, anterior or contemporary”
(2006:39), and so the signifying practice dramatized in the text is
“a labour in which both the debate of the subject and the Other, and
the social context, are invested in the same moment.” The subject
of theory (which is the text) “no longer has the fine unity of the
Cartesian ‘cogito’; it is a plural subject, which so far only
psychoanalysis has been able to approach” (2006:36). This plural
subject is enacted in the literary text, expressing the endless process
of reaching after definitive form that includes the outsider, the third
house of narrative:
Literature . . . indicates the inveterate urge of
human beings to become present to themselves;
this urge, however, will never issue in a definitive
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
25
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
shape, because each self-grasping arises into a
panoply of shapes, each of which is an enactment
of self-confrontation. . . . It even incorporates into
itself the inauthenticity of all human patternings
it features, since this is the only way it can give
presence to the protean character of what it is
meditating (Iser 1992: 877).
Thus reading is the house of form as the house of the outsider in
this Post-Modern faith in the text. The work of signifiance “puts
the (writing or reading) subject into the text, not as a projection . .
. but as a ‘loss’. . . whence its identification with ‘jouissance’: the
text becomes Erotic” (Barthes 2006:38). In the deconstructive
version of the house of fiction, narrative discourse is the site of the
disappearance of the self into the text’s erotic field of signifiers, a
place of multiplying duplicity rather than any sense of order. For
Barthes the text is not the house of form but a cave of loss, “in the
sense which the word ‘perte’ can have in speleology” (2006:38), a
site not of mastery but surrender.
The shift in consciousness encouraged by writing
technology and staged in Frankenstein is the turning away from
the family and home, seeing them and their discourse as other. The
hero becomes the outsider’s double, what he does has nothing to
do with society but only to do with the self. Rather than build or
preserve the house, he builds the monster that will destroy all social
ties. The master-builder builds that which destroys social constructs.
Writing/reading is now centered in the house of the outsider—
permanently de-centred, abiding with the dark monster of many
parts and no unity, rather than in the house of light and order.
Shoshona Felman suggests that this deconstructive sense
of “textual practice,” with no possibility of fixed meaning, is the
equivalent of madness in “the non-mastery of its own fiction”
(2003:49). Reading for Felman is not absorption or identification
but “a transference effect” like that in the psychoanalytic encounter.
Therefore she studies critical transferences, strong readings as
implication in the madness of the text; in Felman’s Derridian/
deManian view the reader is “an unconscious textual actor caught
without knowing it in the lines of force of the text’s ‘pure rhetoric,’
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
26
of the addressing power of its signs, and of their reference to
interpretants” (2003:31).
In deconstruction, the site of narration is a place without
borders and without any fixed meaning, a place of dissemination.
The text’s lack of form makes it the house of the outsider who
invades the consciousness of the reader to destroy his house of
form, the narrative landscape reversing its field again: “The invasion
of intertextuality into the self of the reader disintegrates that enclosed
self” (Leitch 1983:111). Like Lanyon in his study or like Utterson
looking into the window of Dr. Jekyll’s cabinet, we watch as “the
features seemed to melt and alter” (Stevenson 2003:101) in an
allegory of our own reading. In the reflexive mirror/window the
novel’s problem of form dissolves into endless dissemination.
Reading a novel therefore is absorption in otherness, the
point of view of the outsider made available by the primary
alienation of language. The text operates from a site of non-reason,
apart from our agreed forms of social intercourse. In the view of
critical theory the text is where linguistic forms question their own
reality; so, in this discourse, the house of the outsider represents
that activity of the narrative text which calls into question all
discursive order, all truth. It is where we can examine our
subjectivity as readers and thus become aware of ourselves speaking
from beyond our rational selves. The house, with all its doors,
windows and mirrors is a frame image that frames the outsider—
an image of otherness in the reflexive mode through which we can
see the limits of our house of form.
REFERENCES
Abell, Walter. 1996. The Collective Dream of Art: A Psycho-Historical
Theory of Culture Based on Relations between the Arts, Psychology, and
the Social Sciences. New York: Schocken.
Arnheim, Rudolph. 1996. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of
the Creative Eye. Berkeley: U. of California P.
Atkins, G. Douglas. 1983. Reading Deconstruction / Deconstructive
Reading. Lexington: U. of Kentucky P.
Auden, W. H. 1950. The Enchafed Flood: Three Critical Essays on the
Romantic Spirit. New York: Vintage.
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
27
Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston:
Beacon.
Barthes, Roland. 2006. Theory of the Text. In Robert Young (Ed.),
Encyclopaedia Universalis 15: 1014-17. Rpt. in Untying the Text: A
Poststructuralist Reader (31-47). Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Beowulf. 1966. Trans. E. Talbot Donaldson. New York: Norton.
Booth, Wayne. 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U. of Chicago P.
Bronte, Emily. 1986. Wuthering Heights. Ed. Ian Jack. Oxford: Oxford
U.P.
Campbell, Joseph. 1988. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. London:
Paladin.
Cassirer, Ernst. 1955. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Trans. Ralph
Manheim. 3 Vols. New Haven: Yale U.P.
Chaytor, H. J. 1966. From Script to Print: An Introduction to Medieval
Vernacular Literature. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Colby, Robert. 1968. Fiction with a Purpose. Bloomington: Indiana U.P.
Conrad, Joseph. 1980. Under Western Eyes. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Davis, Lennard J. 1980. “A Social History of Fact and Fiction:Authorial
Disavowal in the Early English Novel.” In Edward Said. (Ed.), Literature
and Society (120-248). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P.
—. 1987. Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction. New York: Methuen.
de Man, Paul. 1982. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau,
Rilke and Proust. New Haven: Yale U P.
—. 1986. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary
Criticism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.
Derrida, Jacques. 1987. “Living On: Border Lines.” In Harold Bloom,
Paul De Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, J. Hillis Miller (Ed.),
Deconstruction and Criticism (75-176). New York: Continuum.
Dryden, Edgar A. 1981. Melville’s Thematics of Form: The Great art of
Telling the Truth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P.
Eliot, George. 1992. Adam Bede. London: Everyman’s Library.
Felman, Shoshana. 2003. Writing and Madness (Literature/Philosophy/
Psychoanalysis). (Martha Noel Evans, Trans.). Ithaca: Cornell U.P.
—. 1998. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psych-analysis. JacquesAlain Miller (Ed.). (Alan Sheridan Trans.). New York: Norton.
Ladner, Gerhard. 1967. “Homo Viator: Medieval Ideas on Alienation and
Order.” Speculum 42 (April), 233-259.
Lee, A. A. 1972. The Guest-Hall of Eden: Four Essays on the Design of
Old English Poetry. New Haven: Yale U.P.
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
28
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
Felperin, Howard. 1985. Beyond Deconstruction: The Uses and Abuses
of Literary Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1957. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Trans.
Joan Riviere. New York: Permabooks.
—. 1955. Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny). (James Strachey, Trans.).
Works XVII (217-256). London: Hogarth.
Friedman, Alan. 1966. The Turn of the Novel: The Transition to Modern
Fiction. New York: Oxford U.P.
Fromm, Erich. 1999. The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the
Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales and Myths. New York: Rinehart.
Frye, Northrop. 1990. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton:
Princeton U.P.
Genet, Jean. 1964. The Thief ’s Journal. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New
York: Bantam.
Havelock, E. A. 1963. Preface to Plato. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Howells, William Dean. 1982. Indian Summer. In Novels 1875-1886 (591857). New York: The Library of America.
Iser, Wolfgang. 1974. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication
in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P.
—. 1978. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins U.P.
James, Henry. 1962. The Art of the Novel. New York: Scribner’s.
Jameson, Frederic. 1990. “Modernism and Imperialism.” In Terry Eagleton,
Frederic Jameson, Edward W. Said (Eds.), Nationalism, Colonization and
Literature (43-66). U. of Minnesota P.
—. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act. Ithaca: Cornell U P.
Jung, C. G. 1965. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffe. Trans.
Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage.
—. 1971. The Portable Jung. New York: Viking.
Lacan, Jacques. 2001. Ecrits: A Selection. (Alan Sheridan Trans.). London:
Routledge.
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012
Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies
29
Leitch, Vincent B. 1983. The Subversion of Foundations. Deconstructive
Criticism: An Advanced Introduction. New York:Columbia U.P.
Lesser, Simon O. 1957. Fiction and the Unconscious. New York: Vintage.
Levine, George. 1981. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from
Frankenstein to Ladv Chatterley. U. of Chicago P.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson.
Lord, Albert B. 2000. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P.
McLuhan, Marshall. 2010. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man. Toronto: U. of Toronto P.
Moore, Robert L. 1991. “Ritual, Sacred Space, and Healing: The
Psychoanalyist as Ritual Elder.” In Nathan Schwartz-Salent and Murry Stein
(Eds.), Liminality and Transitional Phenomona (13-32). Wilmette, Ill.: Chiron.
Nabakov, Vladimir. 1996. Pale Fire. In Novels 1955-1962 (437-667). New
York: The Library of America.
Poulet, Georges. 1969. “Phenomonology of Reading.” New Literary History
1, 58-68.
Richardson, Samuel. 1962. Clarissa; Or, the History of a Young Lady. 4
vols. London: Dent.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1966. What is Literature? Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New
York: Washington Square.
Shelley, Mary. 1992. Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus. New York:
Knopf.
Shumaker, Wayne. 1960. Literature and the Irrational: A Study in
Anthropological Backgrounds. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall.
Silverman, Kaja. 1984. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford U.
Spacks, Patricia Mayer. 1985. Gossip. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. 2003. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: Signet
Classic.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. 1986. Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero.
John Sutherland (Ed.). Oxford; Oxford U.P.
Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in
Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell U.P.
Van-Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage. (Monika B.Vizedom and
Gabrielle L. Caffee Trans.). U of Chicago P.
Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and
Fielding. London: Chatto & Windus.
Winnicott, D. W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.
Woolf, Virginia. 1965. Jacob's Room. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
---.1964.The Waves. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Canadian Professor of English Literature at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman.
Vol. IV 7&8 Jan. - Dec. 2012