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1. he changed his country of domicile more than once he was more ambitious for literature than for himself Even so it is strange how completely he fails to blip on certain radar screens Edmund Wilson scarcely mentions him in his journals and criticism Virginia Woolf and Orwell are silent Waugh never mentions him This Ford forgetfulness continues not very long ago I had a conversation with an American writer friend about The Good Soldier which broke down when he said he d always found the book s humour deeply irritating Having never found more than grim and sarcastic ironies in the novel I was perplexed by this objection Finally it emerged that my friend thought that we were talking about Schweik and no he hadn t read The Good Soldier either The English critic Cyril Connolly in his book The Modern Movement praised The Good Soldier with idle words about its energy and intelligence Looked at now the novel barges its way into the modernist club for very different reasons its immaculate use of a ditheringly unreliable narrator the sophisticated disguise of true narrative behind a false fa ade of apparent narrative its self reflexiveness its deep duality about human motive intention and experience and its sheer boldness as a project Greene wrote in 1962 I don t know how many times in nearly forty years I have come back to this novel of Ford s every time to discover a new aspect to admire Take that famous2. entence one of high plagency and enormous claim This is the saddest story I have ever heard The first part of the sentence takes our attention and rightly so It cannot logically be until the second reading and it may not be until the third or fourth that we note the falsity of the final word Because it s not a story the narrator has heard It is one in which he has participated has been right up to his neck heart and guts in he s the one telling it we re the ones hearing it 1 Cyril Connolly The Modern Movement 100 Key Books from England France and America 1880 1950 London Deutsch 1965 The Good Soldier is the entry for 1915 Pr face 13 He says heard instead of told because he s affecting distance from his tale of passion declining to admit complicity And if the second verb of the first sentence of the book is unreliable if it gives a creak under the foot as we put our weight on it then we must be prepared to treat evey line as warily we must prowl soft footed through the text alive for every board s moan and plaint This is a novel about the human heart It says so on the first page Yet the word is set differently in its first two appearances once plainly once between quotes When is a heart not a heart When it s a medical condition a heart Ford plays for a while with this separation of meaning We might expect that having a heart means the affairs of
3. of great subtlety also one of deep emotional cruelty and pain He deploys the natural narrative tropes and forgettings of a bad narrator to enrich the narrator delay our unserstanding and finally deliver to us the whole or wholeish picture in other words he makes good narrative out of bad Could Ishiguro write as he does without the example of The Good Soldier Ford also plays relentlessly on the reader s desire to trust the narrator We want or want to want to believe what we are told and dummy like we fall into every pit dug for us Even when we know we can t trust Dowell we carry on doing so to our cost This trustingness before narrative recidivism has its counterpart within the novel in Leonora s trustingness before Ashburnham s sexual recidivism Of course it is our own fault as readers the hazard warnings are plain enough My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody and yet in another sense we knew nothing at all about 1 Norton p 9 10 2 See Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day London Faber and Faber 1989 14 I Ouvertures them Was that last remark of hers the remark of a harlot or is it what every decent woman thinks at the bottom of her heart Is all this digression or isn t it digression Such items from the opening pages are more than indicators of Dowell s candid indecisiveness They establish the switchb
4. the heart are off limits But this is a false fa ade it seems that the two characters who are at Nauheim for medical purposes Florence Dowell and Edward Ashburnham himself are the very two who are indulging their un quote marked hearts while the two healthy onlookers Dowell and Leonora Ashburnham are the two with a different sort of heart trouble hearts which are cold or killed However this paradox turns out to be a second false facade Florence s heart is a fake a got up condition to keep her husband out of her bedroom while later on we learn or seem to learn there is a lot of seeming to learn in this novel that Ashburnham doesn t have a heart either the Ashburnhams are in Nauheim because of Maisie Maidan whom they have brought to the spa from India for treatment She Maisie is or seems to be the only character in the novel who has a heart in both the amatory and the medical senses of the word Not surprisingly she is soon to die So the novel s ordinary language reveals its strategy It plays with the reader and it reveals and conceals truth And part of Ford s achievement is to find the perfect voice for paradoxical narrative He gives us a bluff know nothing narrator one who forgets to tell us his name until the book is nearly over who seems in his bumbling way to have spoiled his story in the second page by revealing that two of the main characters are dead He uses an armchair bore to tell a story
5. Pr sentation Fran ois Gallix Un texte contient toujours en lui m me une notice sur son mode d emploi Umberto Eco Po tique de la prose Un des crit res de la litt rarit d un texte concept toujours difficile a bien cerner est d offrir au lecteur une multitude de pistes que chacun peut choisir tout comme l auteur sans cesse confront aux sentiers qui bifurquent du jardin imaginaire de Luis Borges voire de son labyrinthe textuel Pour The Good Soldier il suffit d en noncer quelques unes pour embrayer une lecture toujours diff rente et renouvel e du m me roman une affaire de c ur la piste indienne la connexion catholique le 4 ao t l argent Histoire histoires le g nie des lieux l affaire Kilsyte the saddest story good people the poor girl Plusieurs de ces pistes fructueuses sont ouvertes par Julian Barnes dans sa pr face Lors d une conf rence a Paris IV Sorbonne le 14 novembre 2001 l auteur du Perroquet de Flaubert 1984 disait avoir lu une bonne demi douzaine de fois The Good Soldier qu il consid rait comme l un des plus grands romans anglais du XXE si cle a grand opera narrated by a bumbler Estimant que Ford a t trop longtemps n glig par la critique Barnes pense que The Good Soldier est un exemple parfait de ce qu un auteur peut faire grace a une parfaite maitrise des techniques litt raires de l criture avec its immaculate use of a dithe
6. ack rhythm of the whole book they set up the pulse the paradox and the dualism of the story Time and again a seemingly ordinary sentence will have contradicted itself by its end there are sentences beginning with And which offer no continuation from the previous sentence but rather a denial there are false abuttings and leaky grammatical joints Ford also uses the impossible verb tense Supposing that you should come upon us sitting together Dowell says when such a coming upon could only have happened in the past So the prose s dividedness points us directly to the towering either ors of the story Ashburnham as good soldier or plundering shit Leonora as marital martyr or vengeful destroyer the narrator as honest misprisoner or complicit evader timid domestic dormouse or repressed homosexual swooner over Edward Ashburnham and so on There is the wider dividedness between social face and inner urging between emotional expectation and emotional reality between Protestant and Catholic this part of the story seems artificial or underworked it s as if the Catholic element is mainly introduced to produce women of exceptional innocence and marital adhesiveness and thus up the ante when they face the complexity and wiles of sex Beyond this the dividingness of the personality between the conscious and unconscious mind And beyond all this the realization that the answer to either or may not be one or the other is A
7. ateur de relier les uns aux autres Ainsi l attention du lecteur mise en alerte par une premi re impression concernant un personnage est ensuite retenue par un balayage du pass de ce personnage avec des retours en arri re et des projections en avant it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze You have the facts for the trouble of finding them you have the points of view The Good Soldier p 119 120 1 Toutes les r f rences sont extraites de l dition Norton de The Good Soldier Martin Stannard d Pr face Julian Barnes He confused to make it clear The back cover of the old Fifties Vintage paperback of Ford s The Good Soldier has always made poignant reading Fifteen distinguished critics it begins have subscribed to a single statement concerning this remarkable novel Next comes the statement Ford s The Good Soldier is one of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels produced in English in our century And then the names from Leon Edel to Graham Greene Jean Stafford to William Carlos Williams There is something both heroic and hopeless about Ford himself Fifteen critics ought to be better than five but somehow the number overpleads Yet the statement remains poignant because you can hear the literary virtue behind it look we know this guy is good so will you please read him Ford has never lacked supporters but has always lacke
8. d readers In 1929 Hugh Walpole wrote that there is no greater literary neglect of our time in England than the novels and poems of Ford to which Ford replied It is just that the public will not read me There are various overlapping reasons for this He presents no usefully crisp literary profile he wrote too much and in too many literary genres he fails to fit easily in university courses He seems to fall down a hole between late Victorianism and modernism between a childhood of being dandled by Liszt and seeing Swinburne gambol to a later career as avuncular facilitator of Pound Hemingway and Lawrence He also presented himself as an elderly party fading out before this new generation which was probably a bad tactical move In his 1927 preface to The Good Soldier he writes of himself as an extinct volcano someone prepared to stand aside in favour of the clamorous young writers an old bird who had laid a great Auk s egg in the form of The Good Soldier and was happy to leave it at that Yet 1927 was the year between the publication of the third and fourth volumes of his other masterpiece Parade s End His bufferish pose was too convincing Graham Greene wrote that The death of Ford Madox Ford was like the obscure death of a veteran an impossibly Napoleonic veteran say whose immense memory spanned the period from Jena to Sedan Today Greene seems the more old fashioned writer of the two If ambi
9. e 15 he said slowly is any sort of man some time or another you know Ford s approach is to get at character and more widely truth not just indirectly or contradictingly but often by way of ignorance As V S Pritchett put it Confusion was the mainspring of his art as a novelist He confused to make it clear
10. en main le narrateur se contente de laisser le lecteur deviner un malaise qui aurait pu tre salutaire mais dont il ne fera rien tandis que par la m me occasion il offre au lecteur la possibilit de percer jour sa triste histoire Dans Entre Perte et figuration Pr sence du Corps Fran oise Tusques Venisse utilise le prisme de la transsubtantiation pour faire appara tre l criture a la fois moderniste et l giaque du corps dans le roman Ce lien particulier entre le narrateur l auteur et le lecteur souligne l omnipr sence de la guerre l vocation du schisme d Henry VIII la Protestation de Luther et le Catholicisme L enjeu de The Good Soldier devient ainsi l enjeu d une v rit vraie alors m me que les faits sont insaisissables les apparences trompeuses et les perspectives multiples Jeremy Tambling suit la trace au sens de Jacques Derrida d un th me que Dowell d veloppe trois reprises dans son r cit celui du sex instinct Cette piste le conduit des rapprochements avec Tess de Thomas Hardy avec Madame Bovary les trois essais de Freud sur la sexualit et avec Oph lie dans Hamlet C est cet instinct sexuel refoul par Dowell qui justifie ce besoin d crire qu il ne parvient jamais expliquer lui m me What writes indeed is the sexual instinct or rather the text shows the trace of the sex instinct its markings its existence as a force within t
11. he writing Cette trace permet de donner son sens plein a la confession de Dowell I can t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham and that I love him because he was just myself 161 Pr sentation 9 Gene M Moore d cline dans ses mutiples acceptions le mot sadness appliqu Dowell en partant de son tymologie et de ses associations litt raires Malory Chaucer Shakespeare Dickens Il en d busque l un des motifs dans les nombreuses paralipses o le non dit est toujours r v lateur dans un r cit qui m lange l oralit l criture Personnage schyzophr ne le narrateur ne peut que rester allusif pour sugg rer l une des raisons de sa tristesse Understanding the nature of Dowell s secret love for Ashburnham may well provide a key to understanding the sadness of his story Cet amour est d autant plus triste qu il semble tre le seul sentiment authentique dont il soit capable et qu il doit pourtant taire Marielle Seichepine analyse la longue anamn se de Dowell et les nombreux jeux avec le temps auxquels il se livre dans sa reconstruction du pass au gr de ses souvenirs plus ou moins fiables sur un arri re plan o plane l ombre de la guerre et les myst res de la r currence de la date du 4 ao t Dans un r cit fragment a chronologique le temps repr sent consiste en une succession d impressions de moments isol s et saillants qu il appartient au narr
12. r de piste secondaire et que les diff rents passages vers les Indes emprunt s par les personnages principaux donnent un clairage qui va bien au dela du simple arri re plan historique de l aventure imp riale anglaise Il faut tirer jusqu au bout ce fil de la trame du texte pour en appr cier pleine ment les traces intertextuelles du Rudyard Kipling des Plain Tales from the Hills pour d couvrir que l onomastique le nom de Maisie Maidan renvoie a Burmese Day de George Orwell et que comme plus tard chez Duras l Inde chez Ford est moins un territoire qu un r seau de sonorit s ressass es martel es ou souffl es comme dans India Song la narration fragmentaire de Dowell n est qu une voix qui r verb re les actions qu elle se contente de r percuter sur le mode chorique comme si elle n avait pas tout a fait prise sur les v nements Pour Christine Evain le texte de Ford Madox Ford n est pas seulement subversif dans sa strat gie litt raire par sa lib ration des r gles d autorit d sormais plus ou moins acquise au XXIe si cle mais parce qu il dynamise le lecteur en l amenant d passer la confusion morale dont fait preuve l homme faible qu est Dowell grace a une r flexion nietzsch enne qui nous conduit nous construire notre propre syst me de valeurs Incapable du sursaut nietzsch en qui lui permettrait de gagner en lucidit et par voie de cons quence de reprendre sa vie
13. ringly unreliable narrator the sophisticated disguise of true narrative behind a false fa ade of apparent narrative its deep duality about human motive intention and experience and its boldness as a project Il scrute l incipit analyse les ressorts les plus dissimul s du roman et en fait apparaitre les proc d s ludiques Dans son entr e en mati re au titre provocateur tr s fordien Trust me I m an introduction Max Saunders auteur de la magistrale bio graphie de Ford Madox Ford dont le sous titre A Dual Life donne une interpr tation nouvelle de l criture impressionniste de l auteur voir l article du TLS Nov 1st 1996 propose une analyse d un texte qui semble devoir tre red couvert tous les dix ans En partant des remarques de Ford sur l impression qu un crivain peut donner d un personnage d s les premiers mots qu il prononce Saunders offre un d cryptage tr s serr du r cit de Dowell qui d passe le simple cadre de la di g se du roman en montrant que son absence de fiabilit must be made to matter made to signify something about the limits of our understanding of others 1 Pour l enregistrement voir www ercla paris4 sorbonne fr Pour le texte crit voir tudes Britanniques Contemporaines 21 Dec 2001 p 107 132 8 I Ouvertures En abordant la mosaique textuelle de Ford par le biais du roman anglo indien Jean Pierre Naugrette d montre qu il ne saurait y avoi
14. shburnham a deep sentimentalist as Dowell constantly indeed infuriatingly insist or a ruthless sexual predator but both At the end of the novel Nancy Rufford briefly emerges from deep madness to utter the word Shuttlecocks which is understood as a brief lucid memory of how she felt she had been treated by the Ashburnhams It is also the way the reader has been treated soaring high between violent opposing bashes Ford s masterpiece is a novel which constantly asks how to tell a story which pretends to fail at narrative while richly succeeeding It also openly doubts what we easily think of as character For who in this world can give anyone a character Dowell asks at one point of Ashburnham typically there is a creak of the floorboard here as well give someone a character offers the sense to describe but also that of give the social thumbs up to Dowell s answer to his own questions is I don t mean to say that one cannot form an average estimate of the way a person will behave But one cannot be certain of the way any man will behave in every case and until one can do that a character is of no use to anyone Ford later refined and improved this line in The New Humpty Dumpty where it comes from the Duke of Kintyre s mouth Any man 1 Norton p 9 2 Norton p 13 3 Norton p 17 4 Norton p 160 5 Ford Madox Ford The New Humpty Dumpty 1912 Pr fac
15. tious novelists should all study The Good Soldier as an example of the possibilities of narrative how dull that makes it sound they would also do well to look at Ford s life as a prime example of negative career management 1 See Ford s dedicatory letter to Stella Ford Norton p 4 12 I Ouvertures He had the sort of large soft bonhomous presence which provoked attack and also a suffering gentlemanliness which declined to reply this naturally provoked renewed attack He quarrelled endlessly with publishers he regarded them as tradesmen and thought them impertinent for wanting to read his manuscripts before buying them Even those who admired Ford were often irritated by him Paul Nash called him Silenus in tweeds Rebecca West said that being embraced by Ford was like being the toast under a poached egg Those who weren t fond of Ford were more than irritated Hemingway whom Ford had made the mistake of promoting denounced him to Stein and Koklas as an absolute liar and crook always motivated by the finest synthetic English gentility Once when he was near Philadelphia Ford applied to see the Barnes Collection Admittedly if characteristically he made his approach through the wrong person but tactical maladroitness alone cannot account for the ferocity of Dr Barnes s telegram from Geneva Would rather burn my collection than let Ford see it He changed his name from Hueffer to Ford
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