Peter Kislinger: Death [of facts] in [Little] Venice – A Powell’s a man for a’ that

Paper presented at the Anthony Powell Conference held at Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice in October 2014.
https://www.anthonypowell.org/proceedings-of-the-anthony-powell-conference-venice-2014-252 [Paperback, 2017, 166 pages, ISBN 9780954173692 | Edited by Elwin Taylor |The collected papers from the Anthony Powell Conference held at Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice in October 2014. Includes a CD of additional material.]

Peter KISLINGER: Death [of facts] in [Little] Venice – A Powell’s a man for a’ that

Once upon a time, and it wasn´t my time, and it wasn´t your time, there lived a king. His name was Mark Members. He said, “You’ll live like a king once you get [to Venice].” And Nick Jenkins asked, “One of those temporary kings in The Golden Bough, everything at their disposal for a year or a month or a day – then execution? Death in Venice?” And Mark Members answered, “Only ritual execution in more enlightened times – the image of declining virility. A Mann’s a man for a’ that.” And Robbie Burns said: The honest man, / tho 'e'ersae poor, / Is king o' men for a' that.

Even in a sequence dense with intertextuality, Anthony Powell surely here surpasses himself with that complex interweaving of allusions: to James Frazer[1], Thomas Mann[2] and Robert Burns.[3] A trilogy who must make the least likely of bedfellows. Or so you might have thought; but of course, nothing in Dance happens by accident. And if it does, it is not by accident. My starting point should be obvious: the death of X. Trapnel’s magnum opus of a novel in the waters of the Grand Union Canal near Maida Vale. I’ll come to the “facts” in my title sooner rather than later.

I propose to try to get from this View to a Death in the Morning, in a murky London canal, to an end point in something I shall argue should rightly be seen as a birth – not in Little Venice this time, but here, amid the canals of “Big Venice”.

But Jenkins, since he narrates how it actually was, is not writing a novel. He is concerned with rendering facts from his life, he is an auto-biographer. For this very reason, he would seem suspicious to Trapnel.When the scholar Russell Gwinnett submits his biography to the prize jury just under 20 years after Trapnel’s death, Jenkins (“experiencing self”) recollects one of his conversations with Trapnel, the topics of which were the concept of truth in the genre of the novel, on the one hand, and in biographies and autobiographies, on the other:

Irritated by what [Trapnel] judged the “impacted clichés” of some review, Trapnel had once spoken his own opinions on the art of biography. “People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the opposite is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can only be tentative, empirical. The autobiographer, for his part, is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect. In contrast with the other two, the novelist is a god, creating his man, making him breathe and walk. The man, created in his own image, provides information about the god. In a sense you know more about Balzac and Dickens from their novels, than Rousseau and Casanova from their Confessions.” (HSH 80; my italics)

Ignoring Jenkins’s objection, Trapnel continues with his programmatic explanation, which is qualifiedby Jenkins ("experiencing self") as a mere "opinion":

"What you say, Nick, strengthens my contention that only a novel can imply certain truths impossible to state by exact definition. Biography and autobiography are forced to attempt exact definition. In doing so truth goes astray. The novelist is more serious – if that is the word.” (HSH 80)

Inserting at this point the narration of the memory of this conversation is initially justified as an “ironic”[4] commentary on the method of the biographer Gwinnett and Jenkins’s autobiographical narration. What Trapnel is here condemning is the ideal, familiar from 19th century narrative history, of a “naïve historical realism” borne by the premise “it is only a question of keeping the presentation of res factae free from any fictionalization”[5], which seems suspicious to Trapnel because it proceeds from the epistemological assumption that there were such a thing as a pre-suppositionless factual report, to which, in a subsequent step, a subjective interpretation is added.

The insight from hermeneutics that every – linguistically – conveyed fact is "always already an interpretation" and that it is hence idle to hope for a presentation of the past that might show without prejudice “as it actually happened” (“wie es eigentlich gewesen ist”)[6] should always be borne in mind when we follow Jenkins’s biographical, or autobiographical, narration. What hermeneutics charges narrative history with, i.e. that “the fictionalization […] of historical experience [has always been] at work because the eventful what of a historical happening has always been conditioned by the perspectival when of its perception or reconstruction, and also by the how of its presentation and interpretation”[7], must always be taken into consideration, when we follow the reconstruction (the act of narration, the récit, the narration) of historical events (what is narrated, the histoire, the story) by the “historiographer” (auto-biographer / biographer) Jenkins. The same applies to the act of narration and the narrative acts of the status of res factae on the level of what is narrated. They are the same res factae that Gwinnett collects for his biography.

Poetics has always countered the dilemma of the loss of truth[8] with the “truth of fiction”. It is in the genre of the novel where Trapnel sees suspended the “classical separation”[9] of res fictae as the subject of poetry and res factae as the subject of history. When he speaks of “truth”, then he refers to a truth “standing as ‘something general and middle’ between what is universally true, at all times and everywhere, and the factual detail.”[10]The function of knowledge (“the cognitive and communicative function of the fictional”[11]) of what is “general and middle” in the novel, which Trapnel claims and which Jenkins seeks for his own novels – which are not to be equated with the quasi-autobiographical report we are reading – has been subsumed in the concept of the “plausible” since Aristotle and has formed the common area of poetry and narrative history since Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant and G.E. Lessing.[12]

A similar paradox is hit upon by the aspiring Jenkins in his tentative Ritz reflexion on the complexities of writing a novel about contemporary English society:

Alternatively, prejudice might prove the very element through which to capture and pin down unequivocally the otherwise elusive nature of what was of interest [...]. (AW 39)

The paradox is familiar from Nietzsche´s critique of Schopenhauer´s "correspondence theory of truth"[13]:

“Essence”, “the essential nature”, is something perspectival and already presupposes a multiplicity. At the bottom of it there always lies “what is it for me” [...].[14]

Nietzsche targets metaphysics, referring to Socrates and Plato as prime suspects. Philosophers write as if they reached their ideas in an objective way, motivated only by the search for truth. For Nietzsche, our “truths” are born from ourprejudices. In Beyond Good and Evil (5), he objects

[…] to the fact that philosophers “are not honest enough in their work,” that they write as if they had reached their ideas in an objective and disinterested manner, motivated only by the search for truth. But according to him these same philosophers “are all advocates who resent that name, and for the most part even wily spokesmen for their prejudices which they baptize ‘truth’ – and very far from having the courage of the conscience that admits this, precisely this, to itself; very far from having the good taste or the courage which also lets this be known, whether to warn an enemy or friend, or, from exuberance, to mock itself.”[15]

In a review in 1957, Powell sums up what he sees as Nietzsche’s central insight:

[Nietzsche] contended [...] that any point of view could be “established” by subtle reasoning; but that “behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, there are valuations, or to speak more plainly, physiological demands for the maintenance of a prejudiced mode of life.” The kernel of every philosophical movement was the moral, and the moral was the man.[16]

Nietzsche comes up with what at first seems, and indeed is, a rather commonplace recommendation: just as the eye needs to alternate perspectives (in the literal sense of “perspective”) in order to see anything, the human subject needs to alternate perspectives (in the metaphorical sense of “perspective”) in order to know anything.[17]

For later Nietzsche, truth and facts are not something that is there but something that must be (and always has been) created and that gives a name to a process, or rather to “a will to overcome that has in itself no end – introducing truth, as a process ad infinitum. [...] It is a word for the will to power.”[18]Nietzsche invites us to see the world as analogous to a literary, to a poetic text [i.e. a text made, constructed] that is to be interpreted. Perspectival interpretation is not to be equated with arbitrary subjectivity, it is a process without end. It is in and through art that life becomes acceptable (for both the intellect and our "psyche") after the loss of the belief in (metaphysical) certainties. Art, for Nietzsche, is “[...] der gute Willen zum Scheine [...]”[19], “the good-will to illusion.”[20]

Trapnel holding forth on the novel echoes Nietzsche’s objections: “`Facts´” – as Trapnel himself, talking about writing, was later to point out – `are after all only on the surface, inevitably selective, prejudiced by subjective presentation.´” (BDFR 115) And, similarly, in the pub discussion with Bagshaw:

People can’t get it right about Naturalism. [...] Just look round at what’s happening and shove it all down. [...] They can’t understand that’s not in the least the case. It’s just as selective, just as artificial, as if the characters were kings and queens speaking in blank verse. [...] What I’m getting at is that if you took a tape-recording of two people having a grind it might truly be called Naturalism, it might be funny, it might even be beautiful, it wouldn’t be art. It would just be two people having a grind. (BDFR 228)

Jenkins´s "Ritz reflection" (on how to tackle a novel on English life) is the first explicit meta-fictional comment[21] dealing with the relationship between the art of the novel and reality (historical, biographical facts):

[...] I felt myself cut off from the rest of the world. I began to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things observed. (AW 38)

A novelist who chooses to write about contemporary society applying a narrative art based on the theory of naturalism, based on 19th-century narrative history, but at the same time has arrived at an extended notion of “reality”, which includes conveying the “inner truth of things”, must by necessity find obsolete the fact that

[...] [e]ven the bare facts had an unreal, almost satirical ring when committed to paper, say in the manner of innumerable Russian stories of the nineteenth century: ‘I was born in the city of L----, the son of an infantry officer [...].’” (AW 40)

Thus such a novelist, Jenkins argues, cannot ignore being “a man with parti pris”: “Thinking about Members that evening, I found myself unable to consider him without prejudice.” (AW 39) Jenkins still lacks a literary solution but, as in Nietzsche’s objection to and rejection of “positivism” (a term which for Nietzsche includes the French naturalist novelists), there is already hidden a formal, i.e. a narrative, means for the avoidance of prejudice, subjectivism and dogmatism. Jenkins applies that means at Milly Andriadis’s party by “borrowing” from Uncle Giles the “perspective” (“the field of vision”; BM 103)

To look at things through Uncle Giles’s eyes would never have occurred to me; but [...] there may have been something to be said for borrowing, once in a way, something from Uncle Giles’s method of approach. This concept of regarding one's own affair through the medium of a friend [...] is not, of course, a specially profound one [...]. [BM 103]

The Giles-Jenkins method, at this stage is, as a matter of fact, reminiscent of (early) Nietzsche’s perspectivism:

There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing [event, person, story, i.e. narrative of a story], the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity", be.

Yet Nietzsche at this point objects that a mere synoptic summary of any given number of such perspectives is factually impossible because it ignores two essential players:

But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this – what would that mean but to castrate the intellect.[22]

Jenkins – accepting that selecting as well as simplifying, and thus falsifying, "reality" cannot be avoided – starts searching for ways and means to both achieve that selection and at the same time embed parts in the text that would reflect that insight. It is by way of the novelistic device of "mise en abyme" that Powell meets the requirements of that notion of reality and truth. The term "mise en abyme" comes from heraldry: a figure in an escutcheon is said to be en abyme when it constitutes a miniature of that escutcheon. In the art of writing it is often a miniature replica of a text embedded within that text; a part of the text reduplicating, mirroring and reflecting the textual whole but also reflecting on and laying bare the nuts and bolts of the embedding text, its aesthetics, its poetics etc. Consistent with this, Powell introduces not only one "anti-naturalistic" meta-fictional model but employs numerous analogies, drawing on non-literary and non-philosophical areas in his attempt to both represent and avoid what he calls "prejudice" (or to portray "A Man with parti pris" becoming a Musil-like Man Without Parti Pris[23]): "Prejudice was to be avoided [...]. Alternatively, prejudice might prove the very element [...]." (AW 39) In the same way as reality is more than just a synoptical summary of perspectives, meta-fictional models in Dance draw on different and diverse metaphorical sources, recycling the history of the self-reflexive novel.

Meta-fictional models

In compliance with the fragmented stories and character portraits, which call for the "synthetic activity"[24] of the reader to be pieced together, Powell creates a "network of relations"[25], which spans places, buildings, works of art, ideas, opinions (on love, death, art, literature, poetical and historical truth) and, as a consequence, meta-fictional models too (even those referring to the principle of fragmentation). Such models reflecting and commenting on the poetics of the embedding text refer to "perspectives" as well as the inevitable subjectivity of each narrative statement and include: hypo-diegetic (or meta-diegetic)[26] narrating/narratives; the reciprocal relationship between story (histoire)[27]and discourse (récit) and finally "fragmentation/totality". Meta-fictional models help to undermine both the 19th-century belief in "facts" and the tradition of naturalistic novel-writing.

It goes without saying that the contrast "fragmentation/totality" itself draws on different metaphorical sources: mosaic, collage, jigsaw puzzle, kaleidoscope; cubism; images from Greek and Egyptian myths, biblical as well hermetical writings, which allegorise dis- and re-membering of "obsolete [literary] forms" (BDFR 235): castration, resurrection etc.Jenkins´s reflection on a personal insight of his can be seen as a meta-fictional comment on the device of "mise en abyme":

As time goes on [...] supposedly different worlds, in fact, draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all; so that, at last, diversity between them, if in truth existent, seems to be almost imperceptible except in a few crude and almost exterior ways: unthinkable, as formerly appeared, any single consummation of cause and effect. In other words, nearly all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected empires turn out at last to be tenaciously inter-related [...]. (BM 168)

I read this as a meta-fictional comment on the principle that simple maxims (from the mouth of Uncle Giles, Le Bas, Archie Gilbert and others) are "utilisable" for the poetics of the novel, applicable to its narrative technique, though in no way related to the latter. Powell puts into perspective even that perspectival principle by obliquely using a term from the language of chemistry. The narrator remembers noticing the "dissimilarities of these two Americans [Glober and Gwinnett]" and while struggling "for a phrase to define [their 'Americanness']"

... [a]n appropriate term warbled across the room from the lips of Quentin Shuckerly.
"So I told Bernard he was just like the lame boy in the Pied Piper, getting left behind as a critic, whenever a fashionable tune was played. I clinched my argument by using a word he didn't know – allotropic – a variation of properties that doesn't change the substance. My dear, the poor man was completely crushed." (TK 105-06)

Totalizing images for fragmentation: mosaic, puzzle, kaleidoscope

Very early on in the narrative, Powell introduces the image of the "jigsaw puzzle" as a meta-fictional model for Dance in describing Stringham´s reticence in private affairs. The apparent casualness of the information and its cumulative effect can serve as building blocks for the poetics of the novel we are reading. Both elements contribute to a slightly corrected overall picture of any given phenomenon. Notice the combination of the effect of obliquity of information with the factor of time:

[...] fitting the rough outline pieced together from the scraps of information regarding his home, or stories about it, that Stringham had from time to time let fall. (QU 61; my italics)

The analogy (fragmentation and the jigsaw puzzle technique) will be complemented by Sillery´s kaleidoscopic gossip collecting and dispensing technique:

Others, of course, thought differently, some saying the Sillery legend was based on a kind of kaleidoscope of muddled information, collected in Sillery's almost crazed brain, that his boasted powers had no basis whatever in reality: others again said that Sillery certainly knew a great number of people and passed round a lot of gossip [...]. (QU 166; my italics)[28]

The image of the kaleidoscope combines three aspects of Powell's narrative art that play such an important role in the pub discussion:

• The processing of a wealth of the most heterogeneous information (about ideas, opinions, people and even meta-fictional models).
• Despite the rejection of the demand for unity and wholeness it still promises some kind of satisfactory wholeness once we arrive at the end of the narrative.
• A kaleidoscope will never produce identical images; they are dependent on how and on by whom it is handled; and any image can be the starting point of a new game.

The image thus promises, or maybe warns, that the stories told in Dance will at the same time for every single reader, in a kaleidoscopic way, in fits and starts, be different and, for a brief moment, will also come to a conclusion, unless ...
Jenkins´s next comments on Sillery´s technique from another perspective, which links the image of the jigsaw puzzle – still purely an image at this point of the narrative – to the realm of espionage.

On such stray pieces of information, the cumulative effect not to be despised, Sillery's intelligence system was built up. (BM 129; my italics)

By having Jenkins describe Sillery´s technique Powell – meta-fictionally,indirectly, "en abyme" – lays bare another narrative strategy of his narrator:

[...] ceaselessly collecting, sorting, and collating small items in connection of the people he knew; or, at least, knew about. (BM 129)

Jenkins meets in the Sillery-technique what Trapnel will postulate for the novel. Sillery´s diaries however will lack the means of allusion and linguistic virtuosity that he once exercised in his Corridors of Power:

[...] Sillery, through the medium of considerable verbal convolution, had indicated, or at least implied that Quiggin's scholarship had been withdrawn [...]. (BM 249; my italics)

Both meta-fictional images, mosaic and kaleidoscope, will later be complemented by the image of the jigsaw puzzle (later still with the concept of "spatial distance"). Employing free indirect discourse the author promises, behind the apparent contingencies, some kind of teleological unity based on his intellect and the factor of time.

Whatever the imperfections of the situation from which I had just emerged, matters could be considered with justice only in relation to a much larger configuration, the vast composition of which was at present – that at least was clear – by no means even nearly completed. (BM 271; my italics)

In LM, we find the Sillery-method joining forces with Lady Warminster´s (necessitated by the social conventions of her class). What Powell´s narrator admires, i.e. Lady Warminster´s "mannered obscurity" (LM, 210), serves as a model for Jenkins´s "hypo-diegetic", or "meta-diegetic", technique:

Layer upon layer of wrapping, box after box revealing in the Chinese manner yet another box, must conceal all doubtful secrets; only the discipline of infinite obliquity made it lawful to examine the seamy side of life. If these mysteries were observed everything might be contemplated: however unsavoury: however unspeakable. (LM 210; my italics)[29]

Lady Warminster´s art of gossiping anticipates characteristics of Trapnel´s writing (which is a latter-day resurrection of Robert Burton´s aptum-theory, who in turn revived it in the 17th century in his "Anatomy of Melancholy..."): virtuoso command of all registers of language and literary forms, choice of subject matter as well as theme, taste, "hypo-diegetic", or "meta-diegetic", narratives, and his polemic levelled against narrative history as well as "obliquity":

Trapnel's writing was not the sort to be greatly affected by prohibitions of language or subject matter. He was competent to express whatever he wanted in an oblique manner. At the same time, he might feel that, if obliquity in the context were less concordant than bluntness, it was absurd for bluntness to be forbidden by law. Language was a matter of taste. (BDFR 143)

Jenkins (in "indirect free discourse", i.e. this is not the narrator´s view) shows little patience with Moreland when the latter is reluctant to divulge details of his failing marriage and also reflects some critical ("niggling") reactions to Powell´s narrator´s supposed "reticence".[30]

If he wanted to tell his story, he must supply the facts, not reveal one half and allow the other to be guessed. He had always been too fond of doing that when extracting sympathy for his emotional tangles. [...] Some explanation was required. The situation could not be pieced together merely from a series of generalisations about matrimony. (KO 245; my italics)

Readers learn few "facts" about Jenkins´s "emotional tangles" with Jean, or with Gypsy Jones (her abortion finally paid for by Widmerpool) and virtually none with his wife, Isobel. Readers´ reactions are almost identical to Jenkins´s story-telling when they have no choice but piece together the situation merely from a series of generalisations or significant formal parallels. It is Jenkins´s parents who could be identified as very early (role) models for the art of allusion ("obliquity"). His father, Jenkins says, was "a confirmed maker of mysteries, who disliked imparting information of any but a didactic kind", while his mother stood for one-dimensional "bluntness":

Nothing in life – such was his view – must ever be thought of easy access. There is something to be said for that approach. Certainly few enough things in life are easy. On the other hand, human affairs can become even additionally clouded with obscurity if the most complicated forms of definition are always deliberately sought. [...] My mother was greatly given to stating matters openly. (KO 47)

We are given a new perspective on fragmentation in TK when Jenkins introduces the image of the "jigsaw puzzle":

To meet some of these [famous writers], merely to set eyes on them, would be to connect together a few additional pieces in the complex jigsaw making up the world's literary scene; a game never completed, though sometimes garishly illuminated, when two or three unexpected fragments were all at once coherently aligned in place. To addicts of this pastime [...]. (TK 12; my italics)

The analogy (jigsaw puzzle = writing = searching for truth based on "facts") introduces the element of playfulness but at the same time, with the mention of the impossibility of completion, it runs counter to the inner logic of a jigsaw, which of course can be completed. Why then do so many writers, Powell´s Jenkins included, draw the analogy, although they must be aware of the fact it is seriously flawed? One answer may be that story-telling, (narrating) would not be possible without the illusion of totality, of a coherent structure, of imposing order on chaos. By using the jigsaw puzzle model for fragmentation writers can both address the notion of discontinuity and pretend to be able to achieve some sort of completion.[31] Powell even draws such an analogy to the jigsaw analogy. Sillery´s spying image is finally and explicitly employed as a model for the art of writing novels:

X is always very keen on spying, says there's a resemblance between what a spy does and what a novelist does, the point being you don't suddenly steal an indispensible secret that gives complete mastery of the situation, but accumulate a lot of humdrum facts, which, when collated provide the picture. (BDFR 243; my italics; the underlined word is Powell´s)

What in QU and BM was meant purely metaphorically, spoken almost as an aside, has now in BDFR and TK become political reality. The image of "borrowing" the "perspective" ("the field of vision") from Uncle Giles appears in BDFR in the seedy world of espionage and has been transformed into stealing:

To look at things through Uncle Giles's eyes would never have occurred to me; but [...] there may have been something to be said for borrowing, once in a way, something from Uncle Giles's method of approach. This concept of regarding one's own affair through the medium of a friend [...] is not, of course, a specially profound one [...]. (BM 103-4; my italics)

We will encounter the metaphor of "borrowing a perspective" (theme: prejudice; imagery: visual) later in Burton´s wording of the ancient rhetorical aptum-theory, both of which will in turn be expressed by alchemical imaginary ("dissolutio"/"coagulatio" as well as "dis-membering"/"re-membering") and by Trapnel´s theory of plagiarism:

One of the principles dearest to Trapnel was that, as a writer himself, he did not care to borrow from another writer, anyway not more than once. (BDFR 161) [H]e was an accomplished parodist of his contemporaries [...]. (BDFR 165) "It might be pinched by some detective-story writer [...]." (BDFR 130; my italics)

The espionage analogy will be further developed in the Tiepolo passage by adding the ingredient of voyeurism. The "novelist as spy" delivers "information", which needs to be both pieced together and evaluated by the reader. There can be an element of voyeurism in reading but readers need to be active too: the allusion here is to "reader participation".

"[Widmerpool] had been giving encouragement, too, by passing across little bits of information himself from time to time. How valuable that information was remains to be seen. In any case, I´m putting two and two together. Most of it guesswork." (TK 217; my italics)[32]

Widmerpool and Jenkins conjoined again, also in the act of betrayal:

"Will you be awfully good, and keep quiet about all this, Nick? Don't say a word, for obvious reasons." (BDFR 218)

Jenkins´s narrative can be seen as a betrayal of what he once heard or – similar to a voyeur – saw; anecdotes, incidents, and stories unfolding that serve him as subject matter. Widmerpool (agent) and Jenkins (patient): the man of imagination again shadowed by and contrasted to the man of action. Farebrother´s disclosure is little more than a piece of jigsaw in the narrative about Widmerpool, in the narrator´s "discontinuous presentation of character"[33]; while at the level of the narration / narrative it works as yet another self-reflexive hint at how the meta-fictional technique of "mise en abyme" works.

Powell – borrowing, stealing, spoofing an analogy used by French nouveau roman authors – varies the jigsaw analogy by alluding to the Egyptian Isis and Osiris myth[34] and, as I have shown elsewhere in detail, Cubism serves as yet another meta-fictional model for fragmentation and perspectivism. This method of variation, transformation, resurrection, metamorphosis, finding similarities in heterogeneous areas, is brought into play by alluding to the term "allotropic".

In HSH, Powell has Jenkins, the narrator, first quote Akworth from 1 Corinthians 13, then drift off Jenkins into banal reminiscences (what the reader is confronted with are to the narrator´s reflections):

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
The reference to sounding brass was appropriate, recalling a sole personal memory of the reader [= Akworth], the rebuke administered by our housemaster, his nerves always tried by pupils with strident voices.
"Don't shout, Akworth," Le Bas had said. "It's a bad habit of yours, especially when answering a question. Try to speak more quietly."
The habit remained. It seemed to have been no handicap in Sir Bertram's subsequent career. At one of the closing sentences of the Lesson he hardened the pitch of the utterance. It rang through the nave.
"For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face." (HSA, 179)

The epistle in its entirety can be seen as working as a meta-fictional comment on both theme ("love" is addressed at from various angles in HSH) and narrative technique; it is particularly verses 9-12 that serve as a comment on Jenkins development, his "coming-of-age", and a reminder that what the reader gets, more often than not, is the reflections and value-judgments of the "experiencing" rather than the "narrating self":

9For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.10But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.11When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.12For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

The function of the epistle is similar to the narrator´s epiphany at the Salon de Guermantes in Le Temps retrouvé, the final volume of Marcel Proust´s À la recherche du temps perdu. Powell, however, by omitting most of the verses of the epistle refuses such a gratifying apotheosis. Again, it is up to the individual reader to "put two and two together".

A look at the tradition of meta-fictional models (passaged "mise en abymes") helps to appreciate Powell´s original approach. It may not come as a surprise that he held in low esteem most representatives of the nouveau roman:

In our own time the French contemporary literary scene seems not a specially invigorating one to offer a lead. (Powell: Daily Telegraph, 14/04/1960) The nouveau roman group can be credited with only modest talents. (Powell: Daily Telegraph, 21/06/1973)

Whch may be a little bit on the harsh side, but for me, it is a fact that Powell is in no way inferior to his French contemporaries (Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon) as far as complexity, novelty and subtlety of approach are concerned. If there is a trace of chagrin in his judgements it might be due to the fact that at the time reviewers and academic critics alike (in German speaking countries, too) assiduously reviewed and published book-length studies of anything that complied with the (quality) criterion of experimentation.[35]

A strictly novelistic model for fragmentation may be found in the novels of Joseph Conrad and Henry James, whose narrators´ "subjective sense of truth replaces the formulas of civilisation."[36] In some of their novels, authorial characterisation and story-telling are taken over by a multitude of informants and witnesses; characters and plots need to be "put together" by the reader. It is particularly Henry James´s novels of his last period that come to mind, where he experimented with "successive reflecting centers" (The Wings of the Dove), a "single center" (The Ambassadors) and "a pair of reciprocal centers" (The Golden Bowl)[37]. Jenkins can be seen experimenting in his narrative with all three approaches in the Pamela passages in TK.[38]
Similar examples of ironic distancing from what is being told can be found in Conrad´s Nostromo (1904), Under Western Eyes" (1911) and The Secret Agent (1907); the latter two novels employ the spy imagery both for fragmentation and for a discussion of the professional ethics writers.[39][40]

The "fragmented", "ironically held" polemic against a naïve concept of Naturalism (facts, truth, essence)

As a consequence, and according to "constructive irony", in the context of, and against, the "horizon" of the concrete narrative implementation of "truth" and "fact" the epistemological problems of autobiography and biography are introduced and debated from different perspectives: spatially separated ("fragmented") in the act of narration. This happens, for instance, when the narrator, even before Trapnel’s first appearance, remembering an adage by Trapnel breaks off a fact-based summary description:[41]

Perhaps this description, factually accurate – as so often when facts are accurately reported – is at the same time morally unfair. "Facts" – as Trapnel himself, talking about writing, was later to point out – are after all only on the surface, inevitably selective, prejudiced by subjective presentation. What is below, hidden, much more likely to be important, is easily omitted. (BDFR 115)

While Trapnel addresses the deep structure of Dance (i.e. the level of the author), Jenkins is addressing the surface structure (i.e. the level of the narrator). In Trapnel’s section of the dialogue, Powell makes a meta-fictional comment about the figure of the narrator who, like Rousseau and Casanova in their memoirs, is trapped in the subjectivity of his "quasi-autobiographical" report: "[he] can never be wholly true." (HSH 80) Then, at the very beginning of BDFR, the topic is introduced in the context of autobiographies that Jenkins is reviewing for the periodical Fission. Jenkins, critical of biographies, anticipates the theses put forward by Trapnel:

[...] chronicles of somebody or other's individual fate, on the whole unenthralling enough, except insomuch as every individual's story has its enthralling aspect, though the essential pivot was usually omitted or obscured by most autobiographers. (BDFR 7)

In TK (32), the narrator repeats Trapnel’s adage, but cannot remember, or does not quote, Trapnel as the source; what is new is the explicit link to narrative history. Misgivings towards Gwinnett’s understanding of the love triangle between Trapnel – Pamela Widmerpool – Kenneth Widmerpool are based on his mistrust of the "empirical realism" of narrative history, which is denied the ability to convey the "essence" and the totality of an event or a person. Both the "theme" (the biographer Gwinnett’s research and the love triangle between Trapnel-Pamela-Widmerpool, which was narrated by Jenkins in BDFR) and the "horizon" of the other segments go through a "process of transformation"[42]. First, Jenkins’s ("experiencing self") misgivings:

The stories [Gwinnett] had been told were, on the whole, garbled in a manner to make the true circumstances of Trapnel's life all but unrecognizable. [...] At the same time, if Gwinnett's information had percolated through misinformed sources, he himself showed unexpected flashes of insight. Enormous simplifications were possibly necessary to carry a deeper truth than lay on the surface of a mass of unsorted detail. That was, after all, what happened when history was written; many, if not most, of the true facts discarded. Besides, what could be called unreservedly true when closely examined, especially about Trapnel? (TK 32; my italics)

The reservations culminate in the following consideration, which must lead to a further re-assessment (of our reading) of the "Jean plot"[43] – both of the act of narration and the narration – due to the constellation of the figures:

The stories told to Gwinnett became notably blurred in their inferences about Pamela Widmerpool. Trapnel's relationship with her emerged as little more than a love affair that had gone wrong, something that might have happened to anybody. Naturally, in one sense, it was a love affair that had gone wrong, but subtlety was required to express the unusual nature of that love affair, its start, progress, termination. All these had been conveyed with such lack of finesse that no kind of justice was done to the exceptional nature of those concerned: Pamela: Widmerpool: Trapnel himself. For Gwinnett, too, there existed the seldom remittent difficulty of translating the personalities and doings of English material into American terms. (TK 32; my italics)

Both Trapnel’s qualms about the loss of truth and "final essence" in a naïvely comprehended mimetic realism and Trapnel’s "claim to truth" for the genre of the novel are already voiced by (the fictitious painter) Barnby’s criticism of the narrative conventions in contemporary novel writing. As Barnby exemplifies his criticism in the presentation of love stories, the "meaning" of the "Jean plot" also becomes visible from the structural aspect:

[...] it's unaccountable to me the way intimate relations between the sexes are always spoken of, and written about, as if of necessity enjoyable or humorous. In practice they might much more truly be described as encompassing the whole range of human feeling from the height of bliss to the depths of misery. (BM 263)

Such criticism of clichéd writing already contains the anti-naturalistic criteria with which the narration of the "Jean plot" can be assessed; also the recycling of obsolete and technically dubious or unsuccessful and trivial forms is discussed here obliquely, which will later be varied in Trapnel’s "alchemistic" method of "narrating by quoting":

Yet, after all, even the crude image of the postcard depicted with at least a degree of truth one side of love's outward appearance. That had to be admitted. Some of love was like the picture. (Jenkins in AW 221)[44]

It is left up to the "synthetic activity" of the reader to combine Barnby’s remarks; Trapnel’s later comments on the lawyer´s Pontius Pilate notion of truth (as opposed to the novelist´s Petronius); the configuration of the "Jean plot" by Jenkins ("narrating self"); and Jenkins´s reflections on "significant form" as reciprocal commentaries and ultimately to understand them as a commentary on the value of Gwinnett’s biography of Trapnel. The slow-motion ("microscopically" precise, as if produced "from great proximity" to the object) description of the "first embrace" turns out in retrospect to be such a calculated distortion of the overall perspective – and the precision of style acquires a different significance.[45] Conversely, single-mindedly concentrating on the formal devices of a work of art impedes the understanding of its contents, as can be seen from (the fictitious writer) Ada Leintwardine’s remark "later" in the narrative (which is an echo of Walter Sickert´s remarks on "deformation or distortion"[46]):

Do you know the subject of the picture? I was brought up on significant form, colour values, all that sort of thing, so I hadn't particularly noticed what was being illustrated. (TK 157)

The concept of "significant form" and Burton´s perspective on the the aptum-theory ("... as at that time I was affected ...") will be fully put into practice, tested in the field as it were, by Jenkinsin the "Pamela segments".Before Jenkins ("narrating self") commences with relating the story of "Pamela’s nakedness", he applies the literary concept of "perspective" to practical life. (TK 196-202) In the narration of the story of "Pamela’s final onslaught on Widmerpool", it is finally pure "common sense" that provides the model for the text-critical method, as it were. (TK 256-70)

The narrations of "Pamela's nakedness" and "Pamela´s final onslaught"

The narrations of "Pamela's nakedness" and "Pamela´s final onslaught"

The following section proceeds from the following issues:

• the question as to the reason for selecting these stories;
• the question as to the "mood". Following the French narratologist Genette rather than Stanzel here, "mood" refers to the following:

"`Distance´ and `perspective´ [...] are the two chief modalities of that regulation of narrative information that is mood – as the view I have of a picture depends for precision on the distance separating me from it, and for breadth on my position with respect to whatever partial obstruction is more or less blocking it."[47]

Jenkins introduces his hetero-diegetic narration,[48] the story of which represents a "res factum", with the following remark:

To express how things fell out is to lean heavily on hearsay. That is unavoidable. (TK 196)

Jenkins ("narrating self") opens his ("quasi-")autobiographical narration by referring to a contemplation by the novelist Trapnel concerning the "mediacy" of narration:

Trapnel himself, speaking as a critic, used to insist that every novel must be told from a given point of view. An extension of that fact is that every story one hears has to be adjusted, in the mind of the listener, to prejudices of the teller in practice, most listeners increasing, reducing, discarding, much of what they have been told. (TK 196; my italics)

Bagshaw’s father serves as the main source for "Pamela’s nakedness":

In this case, the events have to be seen through the eyes of Bagshaw's father. What Bagshaw himself later related was not necessarily untrue. [He] was the only human being who really knew the facts, he himself only some of them. (TK 197; my italics)

But the narration by Bagshaw Sen. has already been passed on to Jenkins by Bagshaw Jr.:

[O]nly a long time later did I hear [the alleged happenings] from Bagshaw's own lips. (TK 197)

Hence, the "focus"[49] in this segment clearly lies on the narrating self, who himself refers to the "mood" of the narration, and the narration itself partly consists of narrating a story. However, before the perspective is placed directly on the time level of "Pamela’s nakedness" with the words of the narrator, the narrator focuses on the time level of the report by Bagshaw Sen. (i.e. the narrator focuses on the narrative distance) by inserting the report in direct speech (thus "avoiding mediacy"[50]) into the primary narrative report:

Dating is possible, because, on that occasion, Bagshaw made a great point of the Christmas decorations being up, imparting a jovial grotesqueness to the scene. [...]
"My father enacted the whole curious incident under a sprig of mistletoe. In the middle of it all, some of the holly came down, with that extraordinary scratchy noise holly makes." (TK 197; my italics)

Sidestepping the already two-fold mediatization (the narrative presence of Bagshaw père, the narrative level of Bagshaw fils), Powell has Jenkins ("narrating self") tell the actual beginning of the story himself: "Mr Bagshaw had risen in the night to relieve himself. He was making his way to a bathroom in, or on the way down to, the basement." (TK 198) Subsequently, the text is interspersed with reflections ("meta-narrative signs") by the narrating self, focusing on gaps in the narration, or credibility and reliability (of Bagshaw Sen.):

He was making his way to a bathroom in, or on the way down to, the basement. This fact at once raises questions as to the recesses of the Bagshaws' house, its interior architectural complications. An upper lavatory may not have existed, been out of order, possibly occupied, in view of what took place later. On the other hand, some preference or quirk may have brought him downstairs. He could have been making a similar journey, when I had seen him. Perhaps sleeping pills, digestive mixtures, medicaments of some sort, were deposited at this lower level. The essential thing was that Mr Bagshaw had to pass through the hall.’ (TK 198)

The narrator interrupts his narration based on two narratives with appraising phrases:

Here again the narrative lacks absolute positiveness. In a sense, the truth of its essential features is almost strengthened by the comparative unimportance adjudged to exact locality. Bagshaw's insistence on the mistletoe suggests the hall, other circumstances, a half-landing, or alcove, on the first floor. (TK 198)

Another example:

Then, probably owing to [...]. He may also, in spite of his poor sight, have observed the lady's hair was grey, even if scarcely seeing well enough to appreciate threads of strawberry-pink caught by artificial light. [...] Speculation as to what Mr Bagshaw thought is really beside the point. What happened was that [...]. Whether or not he associated in his mind the midnight nymph with Gwinnett is another matter. [...] Equally unknown is how Pamela [...] effected entry into the Bagshaw house. Even Bagshaw himself never claimed to be positive about that. His theory was [...]. That seems over-dramatic, if not infeasible. A more probable explanation [...]. (TK 199)

And concerning the later part of the story:

Just what happened at this stage is not at all clear; nor at what moment were spoken the words to put in some sort of perspective subsequent events. (TK 200)

The narration of the event is concluded by once more focusing on the mode. The narrative of the meeting with Gwinnett follows:

By the time Bagshaw told the story himself, a good deal had happened to give opportunity for improving its framework, accentuating high spots of the narrative. One could not be quite sure he had not seen things differently during the embroilment. For example, he spoke of words, possibly apocryphal, murmured by Pamela, as she withdrew (however that had happened) from the house. [...] Bagshaw could not swear to the exact phrase. It had something to do with [...]. He also asserted that Gwinnett [...]. (TK 201-202)

It is Jenkins’s perspective that dominates a large part of the narrative;[51] but Bagshaw’s account of the involvement of his step-daughter Stella, which is directly quoted by Jenkins, also adopts Stella’s perspective and puts himself in Stella’s position: "‘[...] her sister heard the talking, and came down too.'"[52] He, too, is a "hetero-diegetic narrator"[53].

Summing up: By what is continuously practised on the level of the act of narration (becoming the object of observation on the level of the story [i.e.of what is narrated]) the entire act of narration by Jenkins comes into the position to be assessed with the same criteria as both in the above-mentioned and in the segment "Pamela’s final onslaught". If we take seriously the ("quasi-") autobiographical level, the profession of the narrator (completed studies in History; a writer by profession) and the conversations about the forms of the novel and the autobiography, then the seemingly slight shifts in perspective will become visible when examined with the subtle tools of narratology (primarily Genette´s and Stanzel´s).

In relation to the story they tell, Jenkins ("narrating self") and Bagshaw Jr. are "hetero-diegetic narrators"[54], only Bagshaw Sen. is a ‘"homo-dietgetic narrator"[55]). Only Bagshaw Sen. can report from an "inner perspective", whereas Bagshaw (the main part) and Jenkins ("narrating self") could only report from the outer perspective. Concerning the degree of the narrative level,[56]Jenkins ("narrating self") is an "extra-diegetic narrator"[57]. Like everything narrated by Jenkins ("narrating self"), the narrative of Bagshaw Jr. is within his narration, it is "intra-diegetic" in relation to it and it is "extra-diegetic" in relation to the narrative by Bagshaw Sen., which it "frames". So, the incident narrated must be understood as at least framed, i.e. conveyed, three times: Bagshaw Sen. tells Bagshaw Jr.; Bagshaw Jr. tells Jenkins ("experiencing self"); Jenkins ("narrating self") tells of the young Bagshaw’s narration. This last temporal plane, the primary narrative present, can be assumed after the autumn of 1971 at the earliest. At any rate, a detailed investigation of the time levels in Dance yields for the plot of "Pamela’s nakedness" a three-fold hypo-diegesis.[58] The narrating self, however, gradually removes all the layers; example: "[Bagshaw Sen.] saw a naked woman, standing in the passage or hall."

What has been shown in this text segment (the changes in mood: the thematized "mediacy" of the narration due to the insertions by the narrating self that contrast with the illusion of immediacy;[59] the temporal shifts and diverse, almost inconspicuous frames or their suspensions) characterize all "hetero-diegetic" sections in Dance. The inclination of many first-person narrators not to be content with the "function of the conscientious reporter of one’s own experiences", but "also to claim the privileges" that "are really only due to the author as the creator of what is narrated" is termed by the Austrian narratologist Stanzel as "authorialization".[60]

Both the extent and function of this "authorialization" can be shown even more convincingly in the narration of "Pamela´s final onslaught", which is a further variation of the basic pattern. It is by contrast half seen and related by Moreland and Odo Stevens, with Jenkins ("narrating self") synthesising the two witnesses´ "reports" (narratives). Whereas the chronology of events in the Bagshaw house emerges for the reader like a jigsaw puzzle from stories whose tellers each only contribute fragments of the whole event (introduced by theoretical considerations on the problem of novelistic "perspective"), Jenkins reconstructs the – again hetero-diegetic – story of "Pamela’s final onslaught" from the comparison between two simultaneously present "informants" in the manner of a historian.[61]

I have dealt elsewhere in detail[62] with the calculated effect of the "echelon" and "serial arrangement"[63] of text segments in Dance ("Pamela’s nakedness" and "final onslaught", "Jenkins under the Tiepolo Fresco", "Billson’s nakedness" [KO][64], Gwinnett’s source studies for his monograph and finally the four-cornered plot of Delavacquerie - Polly Duport - Fiona Cutts - Gwinnett in HSH).[65] For the "real" reader, "reader-response criticism" substitutes an "implied reader", who is the reader a given literary work "requires". Within various polarities created by the text, this "implied" reader creates expectations, meanings, and the unstated details of characters and settings through a "wandering viewpoint". It is the text that controls the reader's activities, which are confined within limits set by the literary work.The segments I have referred to are held together by a "network of relations through which the segments, or the images, reciprocally determine and comment on one another".[66] Genette´s and Stanzel´s critical tools help to conceptualize the hybrid and paradoxical elements of the form – that Jenkins, who is a novelist by profession, who is relating episodes from his life, tells the novel of his life "so to speak, over the dinner-table."[67] "Truth" is conveyed when the contingent act of narrating biographical contingencies incidentally develops into a novel[68], in which every element is laden with "significance": in a "first-person narrative situation", the narrative "is no longer a randomly picked episode, but receives a certain existential relevance through the selection it is granted in the memory of the first-person narrator."[69] Elsewhere in Dance, too, the range of narrative styles applied by a first-person narrator is inextricably related to the subject matter. In TK, the subject matter ("truth of fiction" and time) is reflected by this subtle and spectacular "distancing network of tellings within tellings"[70], corresponding to Robert Burton´s re-cyling of the ancient aptum, whose own range of his style in his The Anatomy of Melancholy flowed, he wrote in his preface, “now serious, then light; now comical, then satirical; now more elaborate, then remiss, as the present subject required, or as at that time I was affected.” The passage is of course quoted by Jenkins. (BDFR 219)

A combined thematic-functional analysis of the technique that has been dubbed by a critic "hypothetical mood"[71] yields a more fruitful result than the assertion that what we see here is simply the wish to break out of the monotony and restriction of the "first-person narrative situation". Neither is the peculiar focussing on narration a mere "embellishment", nor is it, as a reviewer (himself a novelist) suggested, a result of Powell being "not well equipped to deal with direct versions of forceful action" and credits him with "finding a means to compensate" this deficiency.[72]

Contrary to reader expectations, Powell distracts attention from the narrative, the plane of the "story" (the what), and directs it to the plane of the narration (the how), i.e. to the narrator; with Jenkins, the experiencing self, Powell blocks "our desire for easy wish fulfilment through simple identification with a hero".[73] It is in his formal, narrative and playful treatment of reality, his creation of a reality without defined ethical or ideological content that Powell, in the figure of Jenkins, the narrating self, indeed creates a figure with whom the reader can identify, or even should identify in order to develop their talent to become the kind of reader envisaged by Powell´s melancholy novelist Trapnel.[74]

With his efforts to collect "facts", Gwinnett is not the only person to be exposed to the sceptical and ironic gaze of Powell and his narrator. On the level of the narrative with the interpretation and reproduction of reality, the last three volumes offer minor narrative figures who, committed to this naïve concept of truth, can stand up neither to a comparison with the criteria discussed in the "novel conversations" nor to the narrative practices exercised by the narrating self.
A few more examples may suffice:

in Venice. (TK 88)

Jenkins has the opportunity to observe one of the roles Trapnel likes assuming when Trapnel approaches Widmerpool with the intention of cadging money from him. The true motives would remain hidden to a merely mimetic and objectivistic approach; thus, on the level of the plot, Widmerpool becomes the perfect victim of Trapnel’s irony. The latter addresses (Lord) Widmerpool with a pastiche of political jargon; Jenkins consequently supplies a pastiche of the pastiche. (BDFR 145)

• Widmerpool mimics a crypto-Communist. (BDFR 152)
• Trapnel’s and Evadne Clapham’s argument about Gissing, which Trapnel decides in his favour with aplomb, is reproduced in Clapham’s next novel, albeit with a falsifying constraint:

The conversation was reproduced in due course, somewhat more elaborately phrased, with the heroine getting the whip-hand, when Evadne Clapham's next novel appeared. However that is by the way. (BDFR 155; my italics)

• Malcolm Crowding’s report about Trapnel’s final public appearance (TK 32-34) is an example of an all too naïve understanding of truth in the field of academic literary criticism.
• Even photography does not escape the verdict of naïvety. Jenkins utters this verdict on a photograph of Pamela in the context of reports by French scandal sheets, whose readers, moreover necessarily, get to know Pamela Widmerpool as "Lady Widmerpool", producing "prejudices" about the English upper classes. The incongruence of the titles "Lady" and "Lord Widmerpool" will presumably remain hidden to most foreign readers:

[...] photographic portraiture in the press automatically assumes the nationalcharacteristics of whatever country has produced the blocks, fabricated their 'screen'; an extension of the law that makes the photographer impose his personal view of them on individuals. (TK 49)

The interconnections between the levels of story and the act of narration provoke a wealth of interpretations ("infection of the act of narration"), thematically reasoned: parody, critical pastiche, plagiarism; the ancient aptum theory. The approach of the (French) journalists criticized by Dr Brightman and Jenkins (rumours, innuendo, nationalistically coloured prejudices and projections revealing more about the subject than the object), which leaves the reader unclear about the "facts" and stimulates their imagination, will be employed by the narrator:

"The implication is [...]"
"Nothing definite is even hinted."
"We never seem to get anything solid."
"I am still not at all sure what happened [...]."
"[...] no details given [...]"
"[...] even less specific [...]"(TK 50-51)

What is Truth? said jesting Petronius; and would have stayed for an answer. [75]

In HSH, the conflict positivist versus the artistic presentation of truth is given a further twist – seen from yet another perspective – by the contrast between the question by a sceptical Roman man of the world, the lawyer Pontius Pilate, as to "truth", and the Satyricon by Petronius; in short this conflict is enriched by a further dimension, leading the "problem of truth" into the border country between jurisdiction (Roman, Jewish), religion and myth – "with the discipline of infinite obliquity". At the relevant point in the text, the allusion is placed against the "horizon"[76] of Gwinnett’s, meanwhile published, monograph on Trapnel. At the end of the "novel conversation", Trapnel states: "What is effective is art, not what is `true' – using the term in inverted commas." This leads to the following exchange between Jenkins and Trapnel:

"Like Pilate."
"Unfortunately Pilate wasn't a novelist."
"Or even a memoir-writer."
"Didn't Petronius serve as magistrate in some distant part of the Roman empire? Think if the case had come up before him. Perhaps Petronius was a different period."
The Satyricon was the only classical work ever freely quoted by Trapnel. He would often refer to it. I recalled his views on biography, reading Gwinnett's [...] and wondered how far Trapnel would have regarded this example as proving his point. (HSH 81)

That allusion to accounts of the death of Jesus – "specimens from the history of hermeneutic (mis)understanding [...]"[77] – definitively shows the conflict to be timeless. Legally correct, the Roman official Pontius Pilate examines Jesus’ interpretation of himself as "King of the Jews". From the man indicted of such presumption, the lawyer, intent on facts, must accept to receive this answer:

36 My kingdom is not of this world [...]: 37 Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. 38 Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?

Pontius Pilate dispenses with a clarification, an interpretation, of this question, confines himself to the meaning and not the truth of the spoken statement and takes literally what is meant metaphorically. The consequence of this understanding of reality is hinted at by the author of The Gospel According to St. John when Pontius Pilate has the spoken statement, moreover taken out of context, but factually literally correct, written down.

19 And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS. [...] 21 Then said the chief priests of the Jews to Pilate, Write not, The King of the Jews; but that he said, I am King of the Jews. 22 Pilate answered, What I have written I have written.[78]

In his "Ritz Reflection", Jenkins had also identified the difficulties of a novel "about English life" (committed to the "inner truth of the things observed") in the written fixation of the nuances of spoken language:

Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony – in which all classes of this island converse – upset the normal emphasis of reported speech. (AW39; my emphasis.)

Pilate’s laconic tautology ("What I have written I have written.") plays "[...] the sheer positiveness and materiality of expressed speech and written results against all the efforts to cheat this literalness in the name of more profound meaning or intellect."[79] It is not without reason that the Jewish high priests – as the representatives of a religious tradition that potentially accords traditional texts, even ones understood as revealed, the same status as the latter themselves[80] – feel provoked by Pilate’s behaviour. Pilate’s actions have been termed a "world historical irony" because he "[...] in view of the figure that has helped the business of interpretation to attain a unique boom: in view of the passionate interpreter of Jesus [...]."[81] The fact that Powell puts the issue of truth into his text from this perspective and via Trapnel´s allusion is no coincidence, as Trapnel’s last public appearance is "ironically narrated" in ambivalent imagery analogous to the story in the New Testament (Trapnel as Lazarus resurrected; TK 32).

The both open and hidden allusions in the book title and the text of TK to Frazer’s The Golden Bough put into perspective the claim of emerging Christianity to have in Jesus, this time, a historically unique tradition (of the sensu litteralis of interpretation), unlike the not to be taken literally legends and myths of the "pagans" of the archetype – motif/myth – of the dismembered/consumed and re-assembled god/hero/king by being reminiscent of the eponymous chapter of Frazer’s book, reporting about pre-Christian traditions. In TK, the parallel of the myth of Isis and Osiris is thematically and formally "recycled"[82].

The contrasting pair of Pilate/Petronius used by Trapnel could also have been formed by Pilate and Jesus, as the quotation from St. John’s Gospel exemplifies. Another parallel to the catastrophe of the New Testament is produced by the legends forming immediately following Trapnel’s final appearance and death, the wealth of versions of "real events", of reality, of the truth that can only be had in versions, perspectives and prejudices.[83]
Does it still come as a surprise that Trapnel and Jenkins, according to Trapnel’s statements (and the narration practised in Dance up to this point), would prefer Petronius, the author of "the first novel ever written"[84] instead of Pontius Pilate?

Death of Facts, the Resurrection of Truth and the Apotheosis of Triangulation

I have mentioned before that Nietzsche´s original understanding of "perspective" was not a very sophisticated one. The following five basic features of the original concept of "perspective" are reintroduced and respected in Nietzsche’s mature employment of the analogy[85]:

(1) a perspective is the sort of thing that can be freely altered,
(2) it affords a view of an object,
(3) it has a specifiable location in a matrix of alternative perspectives,
(4) multiple perspectives may share a common object (or set of objects), and
(5) a multiplicity of perspectives allows us to correct for distortion and attain knowledge.

Having re-incorporated these five features, in its metaphorical inflection of the concept of a perspective, Nietzsche’s "mature perspectivism" is now able not only to allow, but positively to encourage each of the following five thoughts:

(1) If something is to count as a perspective (as opposed to a mere illusion), it must afford a glimpse of the object which it is a perspective on.
(2) We must alternate perspectives if we wish to gauge the object accurately;
(3) The glimpses afforded by one perspective must be compared with those afforded by another.
(4) Only through such triangulation can we attain knowledge:
(5) The more such glimpses we can compare the more objective our knowledge may become.[86]

Triangulation put to the test: glimpse, alternate, compare

What I would finally like to concentrate on here is yet again, or finally – as sensationally, hyperbolically, proclaimed in my title – i.e. the death of facts in Venice.
Towards the Tiepolo fresco, the viewers assume the role intended for Gyges: that of the passive voyeur. In a mirror image, they visualize (constructed by Powell en abyme) in the multiple perspective on one event the situation of the painter recording three figures (Candaules, his wife Lysia and the fleeing Gyges) from one perspective. Jenkins (‘narrating self’) is in a similar position as regards his relationship to the figures of the Jean plot and the following Pamela passages in TK.
In terms of motif (female nude; ménage à trois), the contemplation of the fresco and the contents of the picture are also legitimate as the centres of all the passages constructed en abyme. The deep-structural (meta-fictional) significance of the fresco section can be seen in the following six points:

1) Powell visualizes the historical and art theoretical issues of the volume TK in particular, those of the final trilogy and the entire cycle in general, on the plane of the experiencing self.

2) In their – necessarily – spatial distance to the fresco, the viewers are dramatizationsof the temporal distance requisite for understanding – historical – events (e.g. the Jean plot).

3) The triple perspective (Dr Brightman, Pamela, Jenkins [‘experiencing self’]) on one event (the three figures in the fresco) converges into one in the act of narration by the narrator. We attain, or come closer to, "knowledge" by "triangulation" (glimpse the object, alternate, then compare perspectives). This produces a "cubistic" collage technique. I have suggested elsewhere in detail some of the reasons for Powell´s choice of cubism as not just "yet another" model for storytelling but as the prime model from the realm of modern/modernist painting.[87]

4) In this passage, the fresco and cubistic techniques compress both possibilities underlying the act of narration. In the narration, as in living experience, the spatial distance of the viewer corresponds to the dimension of time. The "event" (the plot presented on the fresco) is shown in triple perspective[88] by means of the reactions (interpretations) of the viewers (Dr Brightman, Pamela, Jenkins).

5) Comparable to the last point, the material underlying the fresco – like the motif itself – is confronted with treatments from literature,[89] thus producing a supplement to the one-sided perspective on the material by literary versions (perspectives).

6) The contribution of the fresco to the plane of the narrative, and to Jenkins’s ("quasi-) autobiographical" account, is now apparent in that with "infinite obliquity" "unpalatable facts" concerning Jenkins are intimated ("imply truth"), thus offsetting the omissions and falsifications typical of autobiographies.

In his reaction to the fresco, Jenkins ("experiencing self") combines two extremes: Dr Brightman´s, intent on art historical objectivity, precision and scholarship; and Pamela’s very personal (philistine?) view. His re-narrating description of the picture, empathizing with the figures, and of what can be seen on the fresco yields an impression approximating the truth of what was intended. Not excluding parallels to the plane of the plot, neither formal aspects nor the story told by Tiepolo escape him.[90]

Passing over further details (concerning the triangle Seneschal, Widmerpool, Pamela) I would like to concentrate on Dr Brightman and Jenkins. The principle of “perspectivism” and Nietzsche’s “triangulation” can be discerned at the centre of Dr Brightman’s explanations of the literary material underlying the fresco, its motifs and the later literary configurations that link the fresco, apart from parallels in content, structurally to the “cubistically” narrated passages: “Versions vary in all such legends. According to Plato, Gyges descended into the earth [...].” (TK 93; my italics.)

A short time later, Dr Brightman delves into the national, era-determined, genre-occasioned and individual factors influencing the design. Powell does not make Brightman quote Gautier’s and Gide’s versions without reason: the motif existing in TK of the contrast between "littérature engageé’ and ‘l’art pour l’art’ is continued:

Gautier, in his conte written round the legend, characteristically adumbrates a melancholy artist-king, intoxicated by the beauty of his artist-model queen, whom he displays secretly to his friend Gyges, drawn as a French lieutenant of cavalry. Gide, on the other hand, takes quite another view, somewhat reorganizing the story. Gide’s Gyges is a poor fisherman [...]. Candaules, a liberal, forward-looking, benevolent monarch – no less melancholy than Gautier's prince, though not, like him a mere Ivory Tower aesthete – decides as a matter of social conscience to bestow on his impoverished subject [...]. (TK 95; my italics)

Dr Brightman here, however, makes a factual mistake in her explanations, which she corrects years later (HSH 56), when she erroneously quotes “Nicholas of Damascus in his Prepatory Exercises” as the source of her identification of Candaules’s queen. All her efforts for precision are for naught, for she makes a new error, which this time remains without contradiction in the text. Dr Brightman’s mistake represents a tiny thematic and motivic contribution to the dozens of uncertainties prevailing in TK concerning the reconstruction of the past.

On the level of the narrative, for instance, this uncertainty can be compared to the short-sightedness and age of Bagshaw Sen. and also to the prevailing gloom in the major Pamela sections. Powell does not forget to motivate Dr Brightman’s scholarly lapse, which he does not correct, "realistically": "sweltering weather", fatigue and "a gin and tonic" during her inquiries ("I was up half the night, establishing the references. [...] It was sweltering weather; I had not been able to sleep, and allowed myself a gin and tonic, with some ice in it, while I was doing so." [HSH 56]) It remains open whether Dr Brightman’s memory is here playing a practical joke on her – in the summer of 1968 she remembers her nocturnal source research in college at a not more closely defined juncture after 1958 – or whether the narrator has made an unintended amendment to Dr Brightman’s literally reproduced memory.[91]

In TK, published in 1973, Powell used his reading of Henri-Paul Eydoux’ Search of Lost Worlds of 1971 (Daily Telegraph, 22 July 1971) to make Dr Brightman in 1958 express speculative theses that were only confirmed by excavations in 1966. Error (about four centuries distance between the namesakes) and brilliant scholarship cannot be distinguished in the case of res factae; nor can it be clarified who really confuses the two. The true story of Gyges is told by painters and writers (and a different "Nicholas"!), and not by historians. Thus Dr Brightman, who is a sworn adherent of res factae, is spectacularly correct when she creatively gives free rein to her imagination.
Powell leaves it to the reader’s “synthetic activity” to draw parallels to Jenkins’ own past, albeit controlled by motivic, thematic and narrative clues: reading the contents of the fresco and the description of the picture against the backdrop (Iser´s “horizon”) of the Jean plot. However, the narrator does not merely restrict himself to formal similarity (the motif of female nudity). He misappropriates the (auto-)biographical meaning, like Gwinnett in the conversation with him earlier. Besides this explicit interaction, the interaction between the sections is justified by:

• the assumption of the narrative and conversation principle of the “infinite obliquity” of Lady Warminster’s “Chinese boxes”[92]
• the fact observed by Jenkins ("narrating self") of the inevitable cover-up of "unpalatable facts" (a "salient shortcoming of autobiographies"); and
• the opposing approaches to viewing frescos and oil paintings (TK 57), introduced by the narrator himself in this context, in so far as the artistic "over-all effect" is guaranteed in the case of the former by the spatial distance, whereas in the latter case there is the possibility of distortion as a consequence of a distance-reducing view.

The embarrassment, with which such an interpretation suggested by Powell’s highly allusive narration here and elsewhere in Dance that is called upon to fill up these references in the case of Jenkins with concrete details, is quite in keeping with Powell’s intentions. Reader response theory enables us to describe such intentional embarrassment in positive terms. This is the case when, in his discussion of the concept of "blank space", Iser remarks on the result of the "dyadic interaction between text and reader" that "a meaning constituted by the reader [...]" is "hard to reference [...]."[93] What Iser subsequently derives from Virginia Woolf’s description of Jane Austen’s dialogue technique applies to Nicholas Jenkins’s associations triggered by the Tiepolo fresco. As John Bayley suggests in his discussion of the Tiepolo chapter, the work of art does not merely compel an involuntary revelation of the entire person of the "recipient" (here: Pamela or Gwinnett) or the "recipient’s" obsessions[94], but Powell also makes a subtle commentary on Jenkins ("experiencing self"), or, to remain in the fiction: Jenkins ("narrating self") is revealing something about himself. Confronting the contemplation of the picture by the experiencing self and the narration of Jenkins’s visit to Rutland Gate ("Jean’s nakedness") can help identify what is "hard to reference" for the reader according to Iser, extant and inter-subjectively interchangeable, so to speak.
Iser’s exemplary presentation of the "blank spaces between the joints" in the dialogues in Jane Austen’s novels proves itself for the level of the plot (the relations of chapters and sections) and for the relationship between "theme" and "horizon":

What is not mentioned in apparently trivial scenes and the blank spaces in the joints of the dialogue stimulate the reader to project content into what has been left out. They draw the reader into the plot and induce him to imagine that what has not been said was intended. This produces a dynamic process, for what is said only really seems to speak when it refers to what it does not say.[95]

The description of the fresco – from the perspective of the Jenkins ("experiencing self") – confirms the certainty established after Duport’s and Brent’s narratives that, in the dialogue between Jean Duport and Jenkins, Jean’s evasive replies to Jenkins’ pressing for an appointment (AW 110-112) or the entire section set at Rutland Gate must be accorded a different meaning than the direct context suggests for Jenkins and an identificatory (first) reading, which is, of course, initially contingent on the perspective compelled by the narrator. The picture on the fresco and the associations in Jenkins’s ("experiencing self") description provide insight into the otherwise usually hidden thoughts of the experiencing self. They help indirectly to relate, supported by visual details, the events happening immediately or almost at the same time as Jenkins’s visit in Rutland Gate (the flat of Jean, who is currently living separately from her husband Bob Duport).
With the quotation in italics[96], the novelist implies “certain truths impossible to state by exact definitions” granting insight into the subjective, “quasi-autobiographical”, not explicit interests of the experiencing self. (Let us recall: “Surely biographers and memoir-writers can often do no more than imply things they chronicle, or put them forward as uncertain.”) The following reflection, proceeding from rumours about Pamela’s appearance at the Bagshaws’, obliquely corroborates the assumption that the narrator generates the context due to formal identity. The narrator does not mention the degree of emotional participation, the significance for his biography or the background of Jean’s appearance in particular.

At the time, naturally, emphasis immediately afterwards was laid on the question why Pamela had been wandering about without any clothes. Reflecting on similar instances in my own experience, there was the time (actually not witnessed) when the parlour maid, Billson, had walked naked into the drawing room at Stonehurst; more tangibly, when the front door of her flat had been opened to myself by Jean Duport in the same condition. Unlike Candaules´s queen, these two had deliberately chosen to appear in that state, not, as the Queen – anyway vis-à-vis Gyges – involuntarily nude. Perhaps the Tiepolo picture had done something to disturb the balance of Pamela´s mind, in the light of her reported behaviour at the Bragadin dinner party. The situation – just what had really caused the doings at the Bragshaws´ [sic!] – remained, at the end of that year, still obscure. (TK 202; my italics)

What Powell does – by not allowing Jenkins to divulge the content of his "reflections" – is stimulate the readers’ imagination offering them the chance to join forces with the “men of imagination”. “Modernist” writing was to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text, the preference for what is not only “readerly” (i.e. classical) but “writerly” (i.e. modern/ modernist) where the reader plays a role more active than simply that of observer and analyst.[97] In Nabokov’s words:

Since the master artist used his imagination in creating his book, it is natural and fair that the consumer of a book should use his imagination too.[98]

The reader is invited by Powell to participate in and, to an even greater extent than in Proust (whose narrator is more interested in parading his analytical brilliance), to contribute to create and bring to light features which the author created.This process is almost open-ended.[99] Does Powell imply a truth about Jenkins who betrays a personal interest in the story told by the Tiepolo fresco? If so, then Jenkins´s reaction is not so dissimilar to Pamela’s (albeit radically more subjective, supposedly "philistine", response). In telling his memoirs, Jenkins comes close to achieving a synthesis of Trapnel’s theory of the novel and the one he intimated "in the Ritz".

Death of facts? Not exclusively in [Little] Venice – but if we accept the "one-act-of-narration" theory Jenkins learns in Temporary Kings what he will start practising at the beginning of his narrative, which is not a novel, at least not Jenkins´s. While Thomas Mann´s novella may be primarily concerned with death[100], Powell’s TK is a celebration of renewal and resurrection (expressed with a welter of images and narrative artistry). Death of the author? Death of the novel? Quite the opposite: Birth in Venice. A Powell’s a man for a’ tha’.

Bibliography

Powell, Anthony

A Dance To The Music of Time (in brackets publication dates of the “Fontana Books” paperback edition, from whence all Dance quotations):

1. A Question of Upbringing, London 1951 (1967)
2. A Buyer's Market, London 1952 (1967)
3. The Acceptance World, London 1955 (1967)
4. At Lady Molly's, London 1957 (1969)
5. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, London 1960 (1970)
6. The Kindly Ones, London 1962 (1971)
7. The Valley of Bones, London 1964 (1973)
8. The Soldier's Art, London 1966 (1968)
9. The Military Philosophers, London 1968 (1971)
10. Books Do Furnish a Room, London 1971 (1972)
11. Temporary Kings, London 1973 (1973)
12. Hearing Secret Harmonies, London 1975 (1977)

"Introduction". In: Hilary Spurling, A Handbook to "Anthony Powell's Music of Time", London 1977, VII-VIII
Messengers of Day. Vol. 2 of To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, London 1978
The Strangers Are All Gone. Vol. 4 of To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, London 1982.
Miscellaneous Verdicts.Writings on Writers 1946-1989, London 1990

"Ivy Compton-Burnett". In: Spectator (6/9/1969), 304
"Thus Spake Nietzsche". In: Punch (5/6/1957), 720
“For Highbrows Only.” In: Punch (17/7/1957), 79
"The Artist as Craftsman". In: TLS (26/07/1947), 378
“The First Novelist”. In: Daily Telegraph (09/05/1968)
“Magic, Ritual and Frazer”.In: Daily Telegraph (06/08/1970)
"Robert Ackerman’s J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work" In: Daily Telegraph (09/01/1988)

Mann, Thomas: Der Tod in Vendig; S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1992 (first published in 1911)
Musil, Robert: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (ed. by Adolf Frisé) [The Man Without Qualities; originally published in three volumes, 1930-1943], Hamburg 1978

Bayley, John: "The Icon and the Music". In: Violet Powell (ed.): The Album of Anthony Powell's "A Dance To The Music of Time", London 1987, 9-22
Birns, Nicholas: Understanding Anthony Powell, University of South Carolina 2004.
Conant, James: The Dialectic of Perspectivism, II. In: Sats - Nordic Journal of Philosophy 7/1 (2006), 6-57
Daiches, David: The Novel and the Modern World, Chicago 1960
Dällenbach, Lucien: "Eine totalisierende Metapher: Das Mosaik Balzacs". In: Lucien Dällenbach and Christiaan [sic] L. Hart Nibbrig (eds.), Fragment und Totalität, 225-243, Frankfurt 1984
Bacon, Francis: "Of Truth". http://www.bartleby.com/3/1/1.html
Bal, Mieke:"Notes on Narrative Embedding". In: Poetics Today 2 (1981), 41-59.
Eco, Umberto: The Open Work. Harvard University Press, 1989
Frank, Joseph: "Spatial Form: Thirty Years After". In: Smitten, Jeffrey R. and Ann Daghistany (eds.): Spatial Form in Narrative, Ithaca and London 1981
Frank, Manfred: Einführung in frühromantische Ästhetik. Vorlesungen, Frankfurt/Main 1989
Genette, Gérard: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Ithaca, N. Y, 1980 (= Discours du récit, Paris 1972
Hörisch, Jochen: Die Wut des Verstehens - Zur Kritik der Hermeneutik, Frankfurt 1988
http://www.robertburns.org/works/496.shtml
http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/public/articles/Tradition_and_Commentary_as_Religious_Categories_in_Judaism-by_Gershom_Scholem.aspx
Imhof, Rüdiger and Annegret Maack (eds.): Der englische Roman der Gegenwart, Tübingen 1987
Iser, Wolfgang: Der Akt des Lesens, München 1976
Iser, Wolfgang: The Act of Reading, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
Jacoby, Thedor (ed.): Fragmente der griechischen Historiker 90F47. 6-13, 350), in: Walz, Joseph [ed.]: Rhetores Graeci, Berlin 1832, I, 287-289
Jauß, Hans Robert: Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik, Frankfurt/Main 1982
Joyau, Isabelle: Investigating Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time", London1994
Kislinger, Peter: “Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods and some Falsehoods almost Truths.” Narrative technique, mise-en-abyme, intertextuality, constructive irony and the truth of fiction in Anthony Powell´s "A Dance To The Music of Time". Wien/Vienna 1993 (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Vienna)
Kislinger, Peter: Dance for Readers, Trilogy Two: Dance for Readers: Flashback, Flashforward. In: Secret Harmonies. Journal of the Anthony Powell Society4/5, Summer 2011, 88-122 [based on a talk presented at The Wallace Collection London, January 2006])
Kitcher, Philip: Deaths in Venice. The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach, New York 2013
Miller Jr., James E. (ed.): Theory of Fiction, Lincoln 1972
Nabokov, Vladimir: “Good Readers and Good Writers”. In: Lectures on Literature, 4, London 1980
Nehamas, Alexander: Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cambridge-London 1985
Ricardou, Jean: "Le dispositif osiriaque: Problèmes de la segmentation: Osiris, ainsi que Le Corps conducteurs et Tryptique de Claude Simon". In: Noveaux Problèmes du Roman, Paris 1978, 179-218
Scholem, Gershom: "Offenbarung und Tradition als religiöse Kategorien im Judentum". In: Judaica 4, Frankfurt 1984, 189-228
Schrift, Alan: Nietzsche and the Quest of Interpretation. Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, N.Y. 1990
Selig, Robert: Time and Anthony Powell. A Critical Study, Cranbury 1991.
Stanzel, Franz K.: Theorie des Erzählens, Göttingen 19822 (5, verbesserte Auflage).
Stanzel, Franz K.:Theory of Narrative. (Transl. by Charlotte Goedsche) Cambridge, CUP 1984
Tucker, James: The Novels of Anthony Powell, London 1976, 103-104
Waugh, Patricia: Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction. New York 1988

[1]Powell remembers the intellectual adventure he owed his encounter with Frazer´s Golden Bough in the 1920s: "[...] nothing was ever the same again after [...]." (“Magic, Ritual and Frazer”.In: Daily Telegraph [06/08/1970 ]there also on T.S. Eliot, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the jargon of structural anthropology, just becoming fashionable in England.) In 1988, his review of Robert Ackerman’s J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work still testifies to Powell’s fascination on first reading:

The Golden Bough is not only about magic, it has itself a touch of magic in the curious fascination it imposes. I remember taking down from the shelf the first of its dozen volumes in School Library, wondering what a work of such length with that title could be. I was immediately mesmerized by Frazer's style, which might be described as Victorian baroque. [...] Frazer may be out of date as an anthropologist. His name does not depend on that. His memorial is in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the works of D.H. Lawrence and of other writers, on whom through him Adonis, Attis, Osiris have left their indelible mark. (Daily Telegraph, 09/01/1988)

[2] His novella Der Tod in Vendig; S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1992 (first published in 1911); Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter, New York 1936.
[3] An allusion to his song Is There for Honest Poverty, better known as A Man'sa Man for A' That(1795). The allusion is to the theme/motif of decline, renewal, (loss and gain of / relativity of) power, and equality; a reader not familiar with the song will be rewarded by taking the hint and reading the whole poem. (http://www.robertburns.org/works/496.shtml.) It pays heeding Trapnel´s advice: “Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them." (TK 225; Peter Kislinger, Dance for Readers, Trilogy Two: Flashback, Flashforward.In: Secret Harmonies. Journal of the Anthony Powell Society 4/5, Summer 2011, p. 115 [based on my talk presented at The Wallace Collection London, January 2006]; for the importance and indeed joy (bliss and fun too) of rereading cf. Nicholas Birns´ magisterial reading of the poem-reading passage in QU (Nicholas Birns, Understanding Anthony Powell. University of South Carolina, 2004, 77-87)
[4] Following a note of Robert Musil’s, "irony", to clarify the difference to the rhetorical irony of mere sneering, will subsequently be understood as "constructive [or structural] irony" in the sense of Musil: I

Irony is: presenting a cleric in such a way that, besides him, a Bolshevik is also affected, presenting an idiot in such a way that the author suddenly feels: I am partly that myself. […] It is the context of things from which it emerges, naked. Irony is considered mockery and sneering.+)

+) Musil, Robert: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (ed. by Adolf Frisé) [The Man Without Qualities; originally published in three volumes, 1930-1943], Hamburg 1978, p. 1939 (Musil’s punctuation, spelling and emphasis)

[5] Hans Robert Jauß, Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik, Frankfurt/Main 1982, 325. The German critic Walter Benjamin called narrative history "the strongest narcotic of the [19th] century." (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1687872)
[6] Leopold von Ranke (quoted after Jauß, Ästhetische Erfahrung, 331; my translation)
[7] Jauß, Ästhetische Erfahrung, 326
[8] Worded by Trapnel, reconstructed by Jenkins from memory: "Biography and autobiography are forced to attempt exact definition. In doing so, truth goes astray." (HSH 80)
[9] Jauß, Ästhetische Erfahrung 327
[10] Jauß, Ästhetische Erfahrung 327
[11]Jauß, Ästhetische Erfahrung 326
[12] Jauß, Ästhetische Erfahrung 328
[13] It states that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world and whether it accurately describes (i.e. corresponds with) that world.
[14] Alexander Nehamas: Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cambridge-London 1985, 81. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Umwertung aller Werte, 1. Buch, Nr.172, 120)
[15]Quoted in Nehamas, Nietzsche, 32 (my emphasis)
[16] Powell, "Thus Spake Nietzsche". In: Punch 5/6/1957, 720
[17] is the "later Nietzsche who arrives at a proper understanding of the dimension of subjectivity in our experience that invites the metaphorical identification of subjectivity with perspectivality" and in no way precludes a feature of our experience from being subjective (in the sense of depending on our perceptual or evaluative perspective) and at the same time objective (in the sense of affording a true estimation of how things are). Later Nietzsche "opposes some of the most influential philosophical stories ever told – stories about knowledge is (i.e. ‘pure knowledge’ of the ‘true world’) and counter-stories about what why (because such a ‘knowledge’ of such ‘world’ is impossible) knowledge is impossible – stories frequently encountered not only in the writings of other philosophers, but also in his own earlier writings.” (James Conant, "The Dialectic of Perspectivism, II." In: Sats - Nordic Journal of Philosophy 6/2 [2006], 7/1, 48)
[18] Alan Schrift, Nietzsche and the Quest of Interpretation. Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, New York,1990, 15
[19] Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Zweites Buch, Nr.107 (Nietzsche´s italics).
[20] The passage is worth quoting at length:

"If we had not approved of the Arts and invented this sort of cult of the untrue, the insight into the general untruth and falsity of things now given us by science – an insight into delusion and error as conditions of intelligent and sentient existence – would be quite unendurable. Honesty would have disgust and suicide in its train. Now, however, our honesty has a counterpoise which helps us to escape such consequences; – namely, Art, as the good-will to illusion. [...] As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still endurable to us; and by Art, eye and hand and above all the good conscience are given to us, to be able to make such a phenomenon out of ourselves. We must rest from ourselves occasionally by contemplating and looking down upon ourselves, and by laughing or weeping over ourselves from an artistic remoteness: we must discover the hero, and likewise the fool, that is hidden in our passion for knowledge; we must now and then be joyful in our folly, that we may continue to be joyful in our wisdom! And just because we are heavy and serious men in our ultimate depth, and are rather weights than men, there is nothing that does us so much good as the fool’s cap and bells: we need them in presence of ourselves – we need all arrogant, soaring, dancing, mocking, childish and blessed Art, in order not to lose the free dominion over things which our ideal demands of us." [http://nietzsche.holtof.com/reader/friedrich-nietzsche/the-gay-science/aphorism-107-quote_68a4741d7.html]

[21] Cf. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction, New York 1988. Though I would hesitate to dub it as "metafiction proper", Dance does in all 12 volumes draw attention to its status as an artefact; parts of Dance are about fiction, i.e. fiction which self-consciously reflects upon itself.
[22] Conant, Dialectic 48
[23]"Robert Musil´s great panorama on the eve of the first war The Man Without Qualities (more correctly the man without parti pris) [...]. " (Anthony Powell: The Strangers Are All Gone. Vol. 4 of To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, London 1982, 68-69; incidentally, the German title is just as misleading).
[24] Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des Lesens (München 1976), 92
[25] Iser, Akt 171
[26] A narrative embedded within another narrative, particularly within the primary narrative. Cf. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Ithaca, New York, 1980 (= Discours du récit, Paris 1972). For my preference for Gérard Genette´s terminology cf. Dance for Readers (2006), 96
[27] The content plane of narrative as opposed to "discourse", the "what" of narrative as opposed to its "how", the "narrated" as opposed to the "narrating".[28] As a raconteur, Sillery is indebted to some 19th century novelistic conventions Jenkins will be addressing in his Ritz reflection: "This was a fairly thumb-nail sketch of the kind commonly dispensed by Sillery, in anticipation of an introduction: true as far as it went, though giving little or no clue to the real Quiggin." (QU 172; my italics)
[29] Cf. Powell´s notes referring to the relationship between subject matter/theme and narrative technique in Ivy Compton-Burnett´s novels:

They are primarily concerned with human passions, and the ruthless manner in which these are usually satisfied. For an investigation of that sort, an accepted routine of manners must always be a great convenience to any novelist.

The game is played, therefore, in a manner all the players can understand. Accordingly, much that is said and done is not made explicit. It might be pondered whether one of the great errors of the present day is the theory that nothing is thought to be "true" which is not explicit; or, put another way, everything that is "true" can be explicitly expressed. This is surely a great mistake. Life itself is not explicit. To write of it explicitly on all occasions is just as much an author's convention as any other; possibly a mistaken one. It is not, in any case, the Compton-Burnett method.

Her writing is a complete denial of any such approach. It is also, incidentally, a discommendation of a fashion of the moment [...] for supposedly "showing up" the Victorians for the licence of their lives. Of course much of Victorian life was licentious. Everybody knew that at the time; only the inadequately informed are just beginning to find it out now. However, the particular social technique of that epoch was to deal with such matters obliquely. The Compton-Burnett novels show –satirically, painfully, compassionately – how that method worked out in practice. [...] [I]f I were to name a contemporary writer who suggests something of the Compton-Burnett approach, it would be not among the novelists, but in the plays of Harold Pinter. (Powell, "Ivy Compton-Burnett". In: Spectator, 304, 6/9, 1969)

[30]Peter Kislinger: Dance for Readers, Trilogy Two: Dance for Readers: Flashback, Flashforward.In: Secret Harmonies. Journal of the Anthony Powell Society4/5, Summer 2011, 94-95
[31]Lucien Dällenbach, "Eine totalisierende Metapher: Das Mosaik Balzacs". In: Lucien Dällenbach and Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig (eds.), Fragment und Totalität, Frankfurt 1984, 238
[32] In Farebrother´s hints referring to Widmerpool´s working methods can also be found elements of power and resentment. The quotation might also serve as an example of how Powell never allows aspects of structure (form) and theme (content) / the structural function of his meta-fictional models gaining the upper hand over thematic ones.
[33] Joseph Frank, "Spatial Form: Thirty Years After". In: Jeffrey R. Smitten and Ann Daghistany (eds.): Spatial Form in Narrative, Ithaca and London 1981, 226
[34] Cf. Jean Ricardou: Noveaux Problèmes du Roman, Paris 1978 (particularly chpt. 4: "Le dispositif osiriaque: Problèmes de la segmentation: Osiris, ainsi que Le Corps conducteurs et Tryptique de Claude Simon", 179-218)
[35] With its articles on William Golding, Lawrence Durrell, Angus Wilson, Anthony Burgess, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and John Fowles, a collection of essays on the contemporary English novel claims to present authors "whose work has been recognized as substantial by literary criticism." B.S. Johnson, Margaret Drabble, Angela Carter and Gabriel Josipovici are assembled here because they comply with the (quality) criterion of experimentation and might be considered "pioneers of the modern novel over the last forty years". Anthony Powell is ranked among the "more conservative" authors Graham Greene and C. P. Snow, and is hence absent from the book. (Rüdiger Imhof and Annegret Maack [eds.], Der englische Roman der Gegenwart, Tübingen 1987, 7)[36]David Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World, Chicago 1960, 78
[37] Quoted in: James E. Miller Jr. (ed.): Theory of Fiction: Henry James, Lincoln 1972, 246-248
[38] Henry James was impressed by Conrad´s Chance (1914) because of its narrative technique, i.e. a narrator weaving a whole based on assumptions, speculations, observations, rumours, memories based on memories etc. ("a novel presenting reflectors within reflectors"):

Mr Conrad's first care [...] is expressly to posit or set up a reciter, a definite responsible intervening first person singular, possessed of infinite sources of references, who immediately proceeds to set up another, to the end that this other may conform again to the practice, and that even at that point the bridge over to the creature [...] shall [...] once more and yet once more glory in a gap. (Henry James: "The New Novel" [1914], quoted in: Theory of Fiction: Henry James, 254.)

But what´s the point of all this narrative pyrotechnics? In his 1909 foreword to his The Golden Bowl, James´s reading of Conrad is strangely narrow. There is talk of "intensification of interest" and he admits to his

[...] preference for dealing with my subject-matter, for 'seeing my story', through the opportunity and the sensibility of some more or less detached, some not strictly involved, though thoroughly interested and intelligent, witness and reporter, some person who contributes to the case mainly a certain amount of criticism and interpretation of it. (Theory of Fiction: Henry James, 250)

[39] Between 1947 und 1985, Powell published at least ten reviews (collected in Anthony Powell, Miscellaneous Verdicts. Writings on Writers 1946-1989, London 1990, 95-119 discussing Conrads writings with ever growing respect:

He is one of our greatest novelists. [...] Conrad's 'modern imagination' was out deliberately to resist the clarity and consistency that had hitherto been the fashion in novel writing. [...] In the case of Nostromo I have to confess that I got through it only at a fourth attempt. Then, the cure was complete. I enjoyed Nostromo enormously; and subsequently reread it with equal pleasure. That seems worth recording just as an example of the discovery that Conrad's powers sometimes lie well below the surface. (Powell: Miscellaneous Verdicts, 110)

[40]For a detailed discussion see Peter Kislinger: “Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods and some Falsehoods almost Truths.” Narrative technique, mise-en-abyme, intertextuality, constructive irony and the truth of fiction in Anthony Powell´s "A Dance To The Music of Time". Wien/Vienna 1993 (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Vienna), 381- 385
[41] Which serves as an example of the naturalistic character sketch felt to be obsolete by Jenkins. "The static character sketch is [...] an arbitrary formalization of the real facts [...]." This is how David Daiches summarizes Virginia Woolf’s reckoning with Bennett, Wells, Galsworthy and her milder criticism of Jane Austen as well as the Russian Realists. (David Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World, Chicago 1960, 16)
[42] Iser, Akt des Lesens 311
[43] Here, the concept is used in terms of Stanzel, who understands it as "a thematic `foregrounding' in the framework of the narrative perspective [...]". Franz K. Stanzel, Theorie des Erzählens (Göttingen 19822 [5., verbesserte Auflage]), 152
[44] For a detailed discussion: Kislinger, Dance for Readers 107
[45]Dance for Readers 115
[46] "Sickert's remarks on deformation or distortion are well worth quoting. After saying that it is a source of pleasure and interest in 'hand-made' art he adds, and the italics are his, 'But it is so on one condition: that it result from the effort for accuracy of an accomplished hand, and the inevitable degree of human error in the result.' In machine-made art accuracy needs no effort, and the source of pleasure and interest, is exclusively in the design." (Powell, "The Artist as Craftsman". In: TLS, 26/07/1947, 378)
[47] Genette, Discourse 162
[48] This refers to a narration whose narrator is absent from what he narrates. Genette, Discourse, 244-245
[49] Stanzel, Theorie 152
[50] Stanzel, Theorie 93
[51] For example in the following passage: "Bagshaw's other stepdaughter, Felicity, now played a part. [...] She was faced with the same spectacle, a slim grey-haired lady wearing no clothes."
[52] TK 200 (my italics)
[53] A "narrator absent from the story he tells [...]." (Genette, Discourse, 244-45)[54] Genette, Discourse 244-45
[55] The "narrator present as a character in the story he tells [...]" (Genette: Narrative Discourse, 244-45)
[56] In the context of his analysis of frame stories, Genette arrives at the following definition: "We will define this difference in level by saying that any event a narrative recounts is at a diegetic level immediately higher than the level at which the narrating producing this narrative is placed." (Genette, Discourse, 228; Genette’s emphasis)
[57] Genette, Discourse 228
[58]The hypo-diegeses in Dance may be somewhat more complex. If it is assumed that the act of narration takes its start from the time level of the bonfire described in Chapter 7 of HSH, and goes back again from this time level to that of the visit to the gallery, from which level the act of narration takes its chronological course, from a macroscopic point of view, the time level of the encounter between Jenkins and Bagshaw must be imagined as being framed twice. Following Mieke Bal´s "Notes on Narrative Embedding" (In: Poetics Today 2 [1981], 41-59) and initially setting the levels of the bonfire and the visit to the gallery aside, the narration of the event of "Pamela’s nakedness" must be characterized as four-fold meta-diegetic. So, accepting the circularity theory, if the levels of the bonfire and the visit to the gallery are taken into consideration, then "Pamela’s nakedness" has a six-fold meta-diegesis.
[59] Stanzel, Theorie 194
[60] Stanzel, Theorie 276
[61] Selig’s very valuable study ignores this difference and hence the link to the topic of the cycle and the individual volume. (Robert Selig: Time and Anthony Powell. A Critical Study, Cranbury 1991, 154)
[62] Kislinger, Dance for Readers.
[63] Iser, Akt des Lesens 171. Both of these strategies, argues Iser, preclude a positive orientation by constantly undercutting any perspective or guidelines.
[64] For the significance of the motif of female "nudity" both for Powell and Jenkins cf. Peter Kislinger, Epiphanies – Required inner processes, the coldest heart, and the marvelous road to the Hyperboreans (presentation held at the 5th bi-annual AP conference, Georgetown University Conference Center, September 2009).
[65] Dance for Readers 108-114
[66] Iser, Akt des Lesens 303. For Powell´s reliance on, and expectation of, reader participation and Powell´s "modernism", cf. Kislinger, Dance for Readers, 113-116; Birns, Understanding Powell, f. i. 83-88.
[67] Anthony Powell, "Introduction", in: Hilary Spurling, A Handbook to Anthony Powell's Music of Time, London 1977, VII. (I have always found Powell´s analogy a rather unlucky, because misleading, one.)
[68] "He has learned, in effect, that every good new story resembles an old good one, a kind of literary eternal recurrence. At the end of A Dance, Nick has become a supreme storyteller [...]. In this sense, A Dance [...] forms a narrative about how to form such a narrative from the bits and pieces of life as well as art." Robert Selig, Time and Anthony Powell. A Critical Study, Cranbury 1991, 154
[69] Stanzel, Theorie 132 (my translation and italics)
70] Selig, Time, 151
[71] Isabelle Joyau, Investigating Powell´s "A Dance to the Music of Time", London 1994, 20
[72]James Tucker, The Novels of Anthony Powell, London 1976, 103-104
73] Selig, Time, 75
[74] Most readers are reading for content first, looking for matter, or almost exclusively for a story, and are ignoring manner, the form (method / structure / technique / narrative etc.; the terms are of course not exactly synonymous but may serve to illustrate the point I am trying to make); they are turning “for support to the simple emotions and […] this is the worst thing a reader can do, [identifying] himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety”, Nabokov continues, “is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use.” In order to become what Nabokov calls a “good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader” one has to become a “re-reader.” (Vladimir Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers”. In: Lectures on Literature, London 1980, 4)

Powell was expecting the “lowly kind of reader” while also providing fodder for the “re-reader.” Powell admits that he, too, was often no exceptionally talented reader: “I had read the novel with a fair enjoyment as a picture of American expatriate Paris life, but without noticing anything revolutionary about the method“. This is Powell looking back at Powell, the first-time reader of Hemingway´s The Sun Also Rises in 1927. Then “someone spoke of Hemingway´s style (whether in praise or blame, I am not sure), and I read the book again.” (Powell, Messenger 110); Kislinger, Dance for Readers, 88-90. In his brilliant analysis of the poem-guessing episode in QU, Nicholas Birns argues that “[i]n a way, each book is divided into its Widmerpool action and its rereading action. […] The first-time reader preoccupied with […] questions [such as] Where will Widmerpool turn up next? What outrageous fad will he be following? What will he do and in whose people´s lives will he meddle? tends to ignore the weighted literary illusions or the significant minor characters. As with the Theocritus passage, they will have to wait for a second reading.” [Birns, Understanding, 83
[75] "WHAT is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer." (The first sentence in Francis Bacon´s essay "Of Truth". http://www.bartleby.com/3/1/1.html)
[76] In most narratives, Iser sees four vantage points: "that of the narrator [in Dance: Jenkins], that of the characters [in Dance, Jenkins, too, is one of the "characters"], that of the plot, and that marked out for the reader."
When the reader is concerned with any of these perspectives their attitude will be conditioned by the "horizon" established from past reading and the other perspectives. The "ultimate meaning of the text" transcends any individual perspective. (Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading, Baltimore and London 1978, 62-63
[77]Jochen Hörisch, Die Wut des Verstehens – Zur Kritik der Hermeneutik, Frankfurt 1988, 33
[78]Remember the subtle allusion to the Burns´s A Man'sa Man for A' That at the very beginning of TK, a poem celebrating equality. The verse relevant to the title and theme of the volume reads The honest man, / tho 'e'ersae poor, / Is king o' men for a' that. Jesus – everybody – is a "king o´men".
[79] Hörisch, Wut 34
[80]Gershom Scholem, "Offenbarung und Tradition als religiöse Kategorien im Judentum". In: Judaica 4, Frankfurt/Main 1984, 189-228. In this tradition, truth is no longer identical to written tradition, is not fixed in a probably circumscribed quantity of positively given statements, so that tradition might exhaust itself in as authentic a reproduction as possible. Instead, the process of tradition itself is considered "the truth". Even the written Torah is regarded as an interpretation. ("Tradition and Commentary as Religious Categories in Judaism": http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/public/articles/Tradition_and_Commentary_as_Religious_Categories_in_Judaism-by_Gershom_Scholem.aspx)
[81] Hörisch, Wut 34
[82]The parallel to Gwinnett’s biography of Trapnel is evident: he "puts" Trapnel "back together", "awakens him to life", just as the act of narration by Jenkins does with Trapnel and Gwinnett (etc.; just as every memory is a "re-membering" of the past, a “re-surrection”, a "re-awakening of the dead). The myth is both used literally (Pamela’s destruction and scattering of Trapnel’s manuscript in the Maida Vale Canal) andas a meta-fictional model for the technique of quoting and alluding as well as using fragments of other writers ´works. Not surprisingly, it is Bagshaw who is well aware of the, then fashionable, structural potential of the myth: "Looks as if someone´s dumped their unit´s paper salvage. Obsolete forms waiting to be pulped and made into other forms. An eternal reincarnation." (BDFR 235, my emphasis.) Allusions to the Egyptian myth were ubiquitous – one might even be tempted to say obtrusively so – in French contemporary novels (cf. Ricardou, Noveaux Problèmes du Roman). Later on, Jenkins mentions an article by Canon Fenneau dealing with "the worship of Isis and Osiris" (HSH 224), and Osiris´s treacherous brother Seth puts in a brief appearance too: Ernie Dunch´s grandfather Old Seth Dunch. (HSH 145) In the context of references to writers, Nicholas Birns has pointed out that “allusive presences [...] are always made far from where the possible allusions occur, as if Powell means them to be in the reader´s awareness but does not want them to be obtrusively suggestive.” (Birns, Understanding, 214)
[83] The four canonical gospels offer the best example; not to mention the Apocrypha.
[84] Anthony Powell, “The First Novelist”. In: Daily Telegraph (09/05/1968). The passage is worth quoting in full: “The Satyricon has real claims to be the first novel ever written [...]. [H]ere, probably for the first time, is the pure imaginative vision of the novelist, directed against the life around him, grotesque enough, but was all the same accepted [...]."
[85] Conant, Dialectic 47
[86] "This in no way denies that our perspectives sometimes distort: some of our putative glimpses of an object may turn out to be merely subjective, i.e. not genuine glimpses of an object at all [...]. [I]t is not wrong to think that the later Nietzsche is committed to [...] the claim [...] that the particular affects and values (prejudices) that people bring to their encounters with the world shape how they perceive it. But he is not committed to any of the traditional metaphysical interpretations of its significance – either of a realist [...] or anti-realist [...] variety. Nietzsche’s later employment of the concept of a perspective reduces that claim to a platitude." (Conant, Dialectic, 47)
[87] The story of Jenkins´s love affair with Jean is told applying a "cubist technique". The same event, the same woman, being seen, narrated, from three perspectives (Jenkins´s, Duport´s, Brent´s) helps getting closer to the truth by glimpsing the object; alternating, then comparing perspectives.) Kislinger, Dance for Readers 110-112 and Some truths (etc.) 87-163
[88] Herodotus can be seen as another possible source for the motif, and “three-perspectives” technique (cf. Kislinger, Truths, 71 and 148,as well as Dance for Readers 22; and Birns, Understanding 66.)
[89] Dr Brightman explains the genesis of the fresco in Venice:

The Council of Ten made trouble at the time. Objection was not, so many believe, to the danger of corrupting morals in the private residence of a grandee, so much as to the fact that the subject was known to bear reference to the habits of one of the most Serene Republic's chief magistrates, another patrician, with whom the Bragadin who owned this palace had quarrelled. The artist has illustrated the highspot of the story's action. (TK 89)

[90] The reader, if they want to prove themselves equal to Jenkins and if they want to have more than just their obsessions mirrored, are here confronted with a narrative art "that provides much to think about, without any specific concept being adequate to it, which consequently cannot completely reach any [critical and conceptual] language and make it comprehensible [...]." Thus Immanuel Kant characterizes the "truth" of art and its precedence before conceptual thinking and rejects any form of – philistine – art consumption. Art can present the continuous failure to find truth as such by producing a multi-layered, supra-determined structure (in which any attempt at a final conceptual interpretation will fail a priori), whereas philosophy and science speak of it in concepts. Kant understands truth not merely as the agreement of a judgment with the matter underlying it; truth is conceived as "the disclosure of meaning, into the most original expression of which art makes itself […]." (Quoted after Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Vorlesungen, Frankfurt/Main 1989, 18; my translation.)
[91] Nikolaos of Damascus (Nikolaus Damascenus), 64-4 BC, was the author of a universal history, in which he relates the story of Gyges, his friend Sadyattes and a Princess Tudo. (Jacoby, Thedor [ed.], Fragmente der griechischen Historiker 90F47. 6-13, 350, in: Walz, Joseph [ed.]: Rhetores Graeci, Berlin 1832, I, 287-89.); but there is a certain “Nikolaus of Myra” (470-490), a rhetorician in Constantinople who corrects Herodotus’s version in Progymnasmata 5.3 [Walz, Joseph [ed.]: Rhetores Graeci, I, 287-89 [Berlin 1832]); he does not mention the queen’s name.
[92] The constellation of figures in the fresco: Gyges - Queen - Candaules; the viewers; Jenkins contemplating the viewers and the fresco – including voyeurs/exhibitionists; with his narrative act, Jenkins envelops the fresco, the viewers and the viewer. The author and the reader should not be forgotten.
Some of the results presented here have been confirmed by Selig (I had arrived at them before Selig´s study was published). He states, the Tiepolo fresco "becomes itself a second-level tale with complex connections to the main story line. [...] The painting [...] depicts `three main figures' [...]: a reclining naked man with an erection; a naked, hesitating woman near his coach; and a cloaked man about to sneak away [...]. The text transforms the visual work of art into a dramatic tale by an intricate weave of narrating methods: the teller-observer's own vivid word-painting, the viewer's excited dialogue about Tiepolo's ceiling, and Professor Emily Brightman's learned exposition." (Selig, Time, 138) Selig, who subsequently traces the links made by Powell to other volumes of the cycle and the narrative function of the allusions to various myths, concludes his analysis with an observation that matches our own one above: "Besides these intricacies of narrating method and also of interlaced myths, an extraordinary embedding of many voyeuristic levels, one inside the other, further complicates the scene both in and out of the painting. [...] In spite of the episode's emotional intensity, it remains oddly distanced from a sense of fictional presence by a web of complications rather like those of a Chinese box puzzle." (Selig, Time 140)
[93] Iser, Akt des Lesens 265
[94] In Pamela’s reduction of the story told by the fresco to its sexual aspect, John Bayley sees – not entirely unjustifiably – Powell’s portrait of an " archetypal philistine", but simultaneously ignores Dr Brightman’s ironic view:

The incongruity between Tiepolo and the world of Pamela Widmerpool is clearly brought out, illustrating a point of general importance in the novel: that the world of art is closed to those who take themselves and their obsessions too seriously. The charm and variety of the legend, the ebullient splendour of the Tiepolo ceiling, is lost on Pamela, who can see in it one thing only, the one thing that concerns herself. In addition to her other defects as a human being Pamela is the archetypal philistine. (John Bayley, "The Icon and the Music". In: Violet Powell, [ed.], The Album of Anthony Powell's "A Dance To The Music of Time", London 1987, 19)

Nevertheless, the fresco seems to help her gain shock-like insight into one aspect of her life; and Jenkins concedes her: "To present Sir Magnus Donners as Candaules at the Bragadin dinner showed imagination on Pamela's part." (TK 159) In no less philistine a manner, the contents and the story of the fresco will remain hidden from the intellectual Ada Leintwardine.
[95] Iser: Akt des Lesens, 265
[96] No doubt the King was ardent, not to say randy, in the mood for a romp; he was experiencing another relish too.

"The lady – perhaps the Queen, perhaps a mistress – less intent on making love, anxious to augment pending pleasure by delicious delay, suddenly remembering her own neglect of some desirable adjunct, or necessary precaution, incident on what was about to take place, had paused. Her taut posture, arrested there in the middle of the bedchamber, immediately proposed to the mind these, and other possibilities; [...] that her excitement was no less than the King's, but her own attention had been suddenly deflected from the matter in hand by a disturbing sound or movement, heard, perceived, sensed, in the shadows of the room. She had scented danger. This last minute retardation in coming to bed had, at the same time, something of all women about it; the King's anticipatory complacence, something of all men.

The last possibility – that the lady had noticed an untoward happening in the background of the bedchamber– was the explanation. [...] Had she glanced behind, she might, or might not have been in time to mark down in the darkness the undoubted source of her uneasiness. A cloaked and helmeted personage was slipping swiftly, unostentatiously, away from the room towards a curtained doorway behind the pillars, presumably an emergency exit into the firmament beyond. At that end of the sky, an ominous storm was plainly blowing up, dark clouds already shot with coruscations of lightning and tongues of flame (as if an air-raid was in progress), their glare revealing, in the shadows of the bedchamber, an alcove, where this tall onlooker had undoubtedly lurked a moment beforehand. Whether or not the lady was categorically aware of an intruding presence threatening the privacy of sexual embrace, whether her suspicions had been partially aroused, was undetermined. There was no doubt whatever some sort of apprehension had passed through her mind. The features of the cloaked man, now in retreat, were for the most part hidden by the jutting visor of the plumed helmet he wore, so that his own emotions were invisible. The calmly classical treatment of the scene, breath-taking in opulence of shapes and colours, imposed at the same time a sense of awful tension, imminent tragedy not long to be delayed. "(TK 90-92; my italics)

Here are the relevant passages from the narrative of Jenkins´s "Visit to Rutland Gate", understood as the "horizon":

[...] I rang the bell of the ground-floor flat. [...] For some time there was no answer to the ring. I waited, peering through the frosted glass of the front door, feeling every second an eternity. Then the door opened a few inches and Jean looked out. [...] As I entered the hall, closing the door behind me, she ran back along the passage. I saw that she wore nothing but a pair of slippers.
"Why are you wearing no clothes?"
[...]
"To make up for the formality of our last meeting."
"Aren't I showing my appreciation?"
"Yes, but you must not be so conventional."
[...]
"It was a kind thought anyway."+"Is this how you like me?"
"Just like this."

There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you. Here, at last, was some real escape from the world. The calculated anonymity of the surroundings somehow increased the sense of being alone with her. (AW 144-146)

The passage is an example of the effective use of a "narrated self-monologue" in a "first-person narrative situation". The irony turns against Jenkins ("experiencing self") and an identificatory reader, for the generalizations on the "essence of woman" will soon turn out to be immature, naïve and sentimental explanations completely misconstruing the situation and they must by no means be confused with the narrator’s let alone the author’s viewpoint. In hindsight, the visit was no "real escape from the world." Jenkins ("experiencing self") explains Jean’s refusal to arrange a date for an appointment (the passage would have to be quoted in context):

A measure of capriciousness is, after all, natural in women; perhaps fulfils some physiological need for both sexes. A woman who loves you likes to torment you from time to time; if not actually hurt you.

Paradoxically, with knowledge of the continuing story, some of the attempted explanations for Jean’s hesitation are even accurate:

She seemed to have no sense of the urgency of making some arrangement quickly – so that we should not lose touch with each other, and be reduced to the delay of writing letters. I suffered some agitation. [...] Probably women enjoy such moments, which undoubtedly convey by intensity and uncertainty a heightened awareness of their power. In spite of apparent coldness of manner her eyes were full of tears. (AW 110-112)

[97] Most famously, and most often quoted, Roland Barthes in S/Z. A similar, and earlier, dichotomy can be found in the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer´s study Abstraktion und Einfühlung of 1909 (= Abstraction and Empathy), the theses of which (distinguishing between “audience art” and “artist art”), together with T.E. Hulme´s Romanticism and Classicism (1913-1914), are frequently referred to by Powell. (For example in “For Highbrows Only.” In: Punch. 17/7/1957, 79)
[98] Nabokov, Lectures on Literature 4
[99] Cf. Umberto Eco´s Opera aperta (1962). Eco, Umberto: The Open Work. Harvard University Press, 1989
[100] But also with renewal, cf. Philip Kitcher, Deaths in Venice. The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach, New York 2013