A Dance to the Music of Time (Second Movement)

The "second movement," which I finished yesterday, pays particularly close attention to marriage--while, at the same time, claiming that the relational structures of marriage itself lie beyond the reach of representation. Not surprisingly, this leads Powell to figure marriage in thoroughly externalized terms. Nicholas Jenkins observes and analyzes the marriages of his friends and acquaintances, but cannot penetrate the mystery of such relationships' inner workings; he remains frustrated and baffled by his attempts to identify some logic to human partnerships. Moreover, Powell refuses to delineate what one presumes are the psychological complexities of Jenkins' own marriage to Isobel Tolland. We see nothing of their courtship, virtually nothing of their actual marriage and not much more of Isobel herself. Indeed, we know far more about Jenkins' emotional investment in the married woman with whom he has an affair, Jean.

Powell's strategy has at least two effects. First, it emphasizes Jenkins' status as an observing "I/eye" (the I Am a Camera approach, as it were), a man whose interiority seems largely composed of analyses of other people's actions. He's nearly the polar opposite of the novel's most famous character, Kenneth Widmerpool, a slightly frightening man who, we are repeatedly told, "lives by the will." At this point in the sequence, living by the will seems to mean forcibly creating the self by manipulating the social pattern (as opposed to Jenkins, to whom many things just seem to happen by chance). Such will represents a triumph of egotism over any kind of sympathetic identification; moreover, it usually involves running roughshod over anyone who gets in the way. While many characters in this novel are mildly incapable of taking interest in other people, Widmerpool's total self-involvement--except when it comes to his formidable mother--is not just impolite, but actively destructive.

Second, and speaking of egotism, Powell figures marriage in such a fashion as to highlight the drive toward separateness instead of union. Victorian novelists, even when representing wretched marriages, tend to dwell on what keeps couples together. Successful marriages--Jane Eyre may be the most extreme example--result in united but complementary personalities, forming a perfect and often self-enclosed whole. By contrast, in ADTTMOT, marriages produce not "couples" so much as somewhat tenuously attached individuals who never really relinquish their egotism. Even the "happy" marriages still consist of people who move in essentially separate orbits. In George Eliot's terms, all of the characters are well wadded about with stupidity, but--at least so far--there doesn't seem to be any way of overcoming such deafness to the other. The cumulative effect is rather stark, to say the least.