The novels of Joyce Cary: Romantic illusion and existential "pathology".
Creators: name: Fenwick, Julie M.
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 1990
Subjects: subject: Literature, English.

description: Joyce Cary's earliest novels address a whole range of "inadequate" ideas which he depicts as derived from romanticism and as fundamentally related to one another. These include the secularisation of divine providence as Hegelian dialectic, as a deterministic unconscious, and as the "life force." Furthermore, he depicts the romantic Utopianism of philosophers such as Rousseau as rooted in the same error as Social Darwinism. The ground of Cary's rejection of these notions is his belief that they all limit the freedom and responsibility of the individual. Having examined Cary's wholesale rejection of these ideas, this thesis discusses his novelistic dramatisations of specific notions adapted from the works of Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Kierkegaard. Cary is indebted to Carlyle for a notion of history as a cycle of decay and subsequent new creation of public institutions and symbols which embody cultural traditions. But history also exhibits a linear development, fueled by the desire of all people for greater "richness" of experience. Carlyle suggests that an important role in this development is reserved for exceptional individuals who are providentially selected "heroes" and who have a right to command absolute obedience in the realisation of their creative visions. In contrast, although Cary depicts "Promethean" iconoclasts as the inspirers of historical development, he suggests that the cooperation of other free individuals is necessary to bring their imaginative visions to actualisation. Cary's notion of the manner in which such a responsible and self-fulfilled individual develops is very similar to that of Wordsworth, with one important exception. Whereas Wordsworth attributes primacy to the relationship of the developing self to nature, Cary depicts the relationship with other people as paramount. Nonetheless, Cary's infants and children strongly resemble Wordsworth's in that they pass from a state in which they fail to differentiate between their own existence and that of the world, to a state in which they regard all of the world as animate but as separate from themselves. Furthermore, Cary's notion of memory is strikingly similar to Wordsworth's. Cary depicts the acquisition of a moral sense as an important facet of personal maturation. The mature person transcends the self to engage in compassionate relationships with other people, while respecting their separateness. Furthermore, the ability to transcend the self is fundamental to the exercise of creativity. It is involved both in the intuition which inspires artistic creation and in the engagement with material reality that is necessary to "translate" such intuition into a concrete symbol. In his final novels, Cary depicts the dire consequences of failures of self-transcendence. Many of Cary's characters who subscribe to such "inadequate" notions exemplify the existentially "pathological" states described by Tillich, Buber, and Marcel. Cary's examination and critique of specific romantic texts leads him to adopt a position that can be identified as "existentialist." His ideas diverge at revealing points from those of Sartre, and display a remarkable affinity with those of Nikolai Berdyaev. In the light of these divergences and affinities, the position exemplified by Cary's novels can be located within the heterogeneous existentialist movement. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)