kleph
17-05-2006, 03:14 AM
There is a tragic finality to the fact that, as we make our way through our lives, our days grow steadily smaller in number while our memories are growing ever more prodigious. This can taint our personal histories with a painful nostalgic sadness and pour discontent into the time we have remaining. As a consequence this is a fertile field for the novelist but fraught with dangers for the unprepared artist.
A Dance to the Music of Time was the late British author Anthony Powell’s 12-volume magnum opus that took almost a quarter century to complete. The first book, A "Question of Upbringing," was published in 1951 and the last, "Hearing Secret Harmonies," reached bookshelves in 1975. (The work is now collected into four volumes, or movements, that each include three of the books)
It has been praised as the twentieth century's greatest English novel of manners but that almost trivializes what it actually accomplishes. The title of the work comes from a painting by the 17th century French artist Nicolas Poussin. Powell lays out his intent for the work on the second page as he describes this work of art:
"These classical projections, and something from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance."
For Powell, the past is an ever expanding mosaic whose rippling complexity provides a meaning for the present as it steadily folds itself snugly into it’s proper place after its time has proceeded. The intent of the undertaking in writing a work of the caliber of Dance is manifold but Powell makes it clear throughout that by looking at the whole of the scale of these lives he is trying to understand the singular human element within us all.
“I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some "ordinary" world into which it is possible at will to wander,” he wrote. “All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.”
What is astounding about the work is despite it’s immense scope and scale, the entire duodecalogy contains more than one million words, is its intricate preciseness and structure. Although Powell balances more than 500 characters over the course of almost 60-year span, there is an almost flawless exactness to the story. As a reviewer once noted, there is such a perfect symmetry and construction you feel the author could have penned the entire work, from the first page and the last page, in one morning sitting.
The story is an account of the lives of a select group of English elite. The tale begins with the narrator, Nick Jenkins and his two friends Peter Templer and Charles Stringham at a nameless school clearly modeled on Eton College. From the very first page the story swells with endings and beginnings and, between them a vast web of interconnections delightfully adorned with recurring serendipity and coincidence. There is an unerring flow and transience to it all, but that is a calculated part of the charm.
From the very start the reader is forced to deal with the imposing cipher of Kenneth Widmerpool. His is first cast as the stereotypical outcast whose sole trait of note is impassivity to abuse. But Widmerepool also has an almost inhuman resolve and desire for advancement that clearly sets him apart as well.
He is, by far, the most prominent character of the book despite his distasteful traits of personality. In the hands of a lesser author, Widmerpool would have slipped into caricature but, as reviewer John Perry pointed out, Powell makes him impossible to dismiss; “Highly successful in the war, grotesque, sexually complex, serially cuckolded, but never insignificant.”
And there is a host of secondary characters such as Lady Pamela Widmerpool and the author X Trapnel whose unique and compelling depiction stay with the reader long after they have completed the prodigious work.
One tactic Powell uses to unveil the tale is through a curious subjugation of the narrator. While the story is told to us by Nick Jenkins, his presence as a character is almost nonexistent. It is well into the work before we even learn his name. It was an approach that I found difficult to deal with at first since there is an expectation for the story to be the story of the narrator’s life.
Instead it is the story of how the narrator sees other’s lives, much like the role an author plays in the lives of the characters in his work. So while the approach gave Powell the tools he needed to construct this vast and intricate tale it also subjected it to endless speculation on “who” which character “really was.” – a practice the author loathed.
More importantly, the approach shocks the reader out of the traditional expectations of plot forcing one, as the reviewer Robert L Selig notes, to step back and observer “time's slow reshuffling of friends, acquaintances, and lovers in intricate human arabesques."
The work quickly evokes comparisons with Marcel Proust’s, A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, due to it’s scope and preoccupation of the role of memory and the past on the present and, by extension, the future. But Powell is not as much trapped by the past as Proust and he certainly has a more blithe manner in how he goes about unpacking it.
Or, to be more to the point, this book is damned funny. Reading it for the first time in my mid-twenties I picked up the book with that sober gravitas one takes on when approaching such a vast work. It was about a hundred pages into it when I was struck by the fact the incidents were simply laugh-out-loud funny. After that I was able to settle back and really enjoy the thing.
Because Powell is also often compared to his contemporary Eveyln Waugh due to his wit, but in my estimation, that’s somewhat unfair to both. Waugh’s humor was biting and satirical by it’s overreaching absurdity, however, the humor is much more a natural element in Powell and it never bares it’s teeth in the same manner. So while both are hysterical to read, they are so for vastly different reasons and purposes.
I found Powell most incisive when he allowed himself to examine individual themes concerning our humanity – particularly when he fixed his attention on the complexities of love and relationships. Of course I first read Dance in my mid-20s when that topic was of the highest importance but the truth of his observations continue to resonate with me even today.
The unique perspective of his work gives him an opportunity to present not just the flower of the initial romance but also the whole chaotic sweep of relationships and he uses that to full advantage.
“Being in love is a complicated matter; although anyone prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests. In general, things are apt to turn out unsatisfactorily for at least one of the parties concerned,” he wrote. “Persistent enthusiasts have usually brought their own meaning of the word to something far different from what it conveys to most people in early life.”
And, although a realist, he is not a fatalist on the matter. In fact, it is my suspicion he was a romantic at the core. I have rarely discovered a more truer observation than his almost offhand note: “There is no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.”
This essay previously appeared on my webpage kleph.com (http://www.kleph.com/)
© 2006 C.J. Schexnayder
A Dance to the Music of Time was the late British author Anthony Powell’s 12-volume magnum opus that took almost a quarter century to complete. The first book, A "Question of Upbringing," was published in 1951 and the last, "Hearing Secret Harmonies," reached bookshelves in 1975. (The work is now collected into four volumes, or movements, that each include three of the books)
It has been praised as the twentieth century's greatest English novel of manners but that almost trivializes what it actually accomplishes. The title of the work comes from a painting by the 17th century French artist Nicolas Poussin. Powell lays out his intent for the work on the second page as he describes this work of art:
"These classical projections, and something from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance."
For Powell, the past is an ever expanding mosaic whose rippling complexity provides a meaning for the present as it steadily folds itself snugly into it’s proper place after its time has proceeded. The intent of the undertaking in writing a work of the caliber of Dance is manifold but Powell makes it clear throughout that by looking at the whole of the scale of these lives he is trying to understand the singular human element within us all.
“I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some "ordinary" world into which it is possible at will to wander,” he wrote. “All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.”
What is astounding about the work is despite it’s immense scope and scale, the entire duodecalogy contains more than one million words, is its intricate preciseness and structure. Although Powell balances more than 500 characters over the course of almost 60-year span, there is an almost flawless exactness to the story. As a reviewer once noted, there is such a perfect symmetry and construction you feel the author could have penned the entire work, from the first page and the last page, in one morning sitting.
The story is an account of the lives of a select group of English elite. The tale begins with the narrator, Nick Jenkins and his two friends Peter Templer and Charles Stringham at a nameless school clearly modeled on Eton College. From the very first page the story swells with endings and beginnings and, between them a vast web of interconnections delightfully adorned with recurring serendipity and coincidence. There is an unerring flow and transience to it all, but that is a calculated part of the charm.
From the very start the reader is forced to deal with the imposing cipher of Kenneth Widmerpool. His is first cast as the stereotypical outcast whose sole trait of note is impassivity to abuse. But Widmerepool also has an almost inhuman resolve and desire for advancement that clearly sets him apart as well.
He is, by far, the most prominent character of the book despite his distasteful traits of personality. In the hands of a lesser author, Widmerpool would have slipped into caricature but, as reviewer John Perry pointed out, Powell makes him impossible to dismiss; “Highly successful in the war, grotesque, sexually complex, serially cuckolded, but never insignificant.”
And there is a host of secondary characters such as Lady Pamela Widmerpool and the author X Trapnel whose unique and compelling depiction stay with the reader long after they have completed the prodigious work.
One tactic Powell uses to unveil the tale is through a curious subjugation of the narrator. While the story is told to us by Nick Jenkins, his presence as a character is almost nonexistent. It is well into the work before we even learn his name. It was an approach that I found difficult to deal with at first since there is an expectation for the story to be the story of the narrator’s life.
Instead it is the story of how the narrator sees other’s lives, much like the role an author plays in the lives of the characters in his work. So while the approach gave Powell the tools he needed to construct this vast and intricate tale it also subjected it to endless speculation on “who” which character “really was.” – a practice the author loathed.
More importantly, the approach shocks the reader out of the traditional expectations of plot forcing one, as the reviewer Robert L Selig notes, to step back and observer “time's slow reshuffling of friends, acquaintances, and lovers in intricate human arabesques."
The work quickly evokes comparisons with Marcel Proust’s, A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, due to it’s scope and preoccupation of the role of memory and the past on the present and, by extension, the future. But Powell is not as much trapped by the past as Proust and he certainly has a more blithe manner in how he goes about unpacking it.
Or, to be more to the point, this book is damned funny. Reading it for the first time in my mid-twenties I picked up the book with that sober gravitas one takes on when approaching such a vast work. It was about a hundred pages into it when I was struck by the fact the incidents were simply laugh-out-loud funny. After that I was able to settle back and really enjoy the thing.
Because Powell is also often compared to his contemporary Eveyln Waugh due to his wit, but in my estimation, that’s somewhat unfair to both. Waugh’s humor was biting and satirical by it’s overreaching absurdity, however, the humor is much more a natural element in Powell and it never bares it’s teeth in the same manner. So while both are hysterical to read, they are so for vastly different reasons and purposes.
I found Powell most incisive when he allowed himself to examine individual themes concerning our humanity – particularly when he fixed his attention on the complexities of love and relationships. Of course I first read Dance in my mid-20s when that topic was of the highest importance but the truth of his observations continue to resonate with me even today.
The unique perspective of his work gives him an opportunity to present not just the flower of the initial romance but also the whole chaotic sweep of relationships and he uses that to full advantage.
“Being in love is a complicated matter; although anyone prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests. In general, things are apt to turn out unsatisfactorily for at least one of the parties concerned,” he wrote. “Persistent enthusiasts have usually brought their own meaning of the word to something far different from what it conveys to most people in early life.”
And, although a realist, he is not a fatalist on the matter. In fact, it is my suspicion he was a romantic at the core. I have rarely discovered a more truer observation than his almost offhand note: “There is no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.”
This essay previously appeared on my webpage kleph.com (http://www.kleph.com/)
© 2006 C.J. Schexnayder