Fantasy as Necessity: The Role of the Biographer in 'The Moon and Sixpence.' (Novel by W. Somerset Maugham)
1997; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-1512
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoSheldon W. Liebman argues in a recent essay that central character in The Moon and Sixpence is not Strickland, but the Narrator.(1) Liebman recognizes the inadequacy of Maugham's novel (1919) as a of its ostensible subject, the fictional painter Charles Strickland, but he fails to grasp the complexity of Maugham's design in constructing an intentionally flawed Liebman blames Maugham's anonymous narrator for the failure of Stickland's biography (p. 341), complaining that the narrator's principal activity throughout the novel is not observation, analysis, and discovery, but speculation, interpretation, and judgment (p. 330), but he underestimates the author of the novel when he claims that is solely interested in exploring the process of projection, the biases from which it derives, the moral shallowness that it reflects, and the consequences that it engenders (p. 341). The narrator of The Moon and Sixpence has no choice but to speculate, interpret, and judge because he is attempting to do the impossible. Strickland's story cannot be told because his achievements cannot be translated into the language of civilized society. Somerset Maugham knows--and shows--what the narrator cannot see, that biography itself is impossible when its subject is a man of because works of genius ale beyond the grasp of civilized readers and writers. The earliest critics of Maugham's novel recognized its inadequacy as a biography. Writing of The Moon and Sixpence in the May 9, 1919, issue of The Athenaeum, Katherine Mansfield remarks that [i]f Strickland is a real man and this book a sort of guide to his works, it has its value; but if Mr Maugham is merely pulling our critical leg it will not do.(2) Mansfield's discussion of the novel reflects an uncertainty as to its generic status. Although nominally a biography of the fictional painter Charles Strickland, The Moon and Sixpence (1919) is also the story of Stickland's biographer, an aspiring novelist who may or may not be Somerset Maugham. In Mansfield's opinion, the novel is a failure. She deplores the narrator's inability to enter into his subject s consciousness and finds Strickland obnoxious and unlovable. Taken on its own fictional terms, as biography, The Moon and Sixpence will not do. The narrator repeatedly calls attention to his biases and to the unreliability of his sources and offers, at best, an incomplete and distorted portrait of Strickland. In choosing to frame the novel as a biography, Maugham sets up a series of generic expectations that he fails to satisfy. Mansfield recognizes the implications of Maugham's biographical pretense but, like Liebman, she does not understand why he undertakes to write a flawed biography. Maugham models Strickland's career on that of Paul Gauguin, although his fictional character bears little resemblance to the French painter. Richard Cordell calls attention to the autobiographical quality of the novel,(3) and Laurence Brander assures the reader that [t]he narrator is Maugham himself before he had adopted the persona of Ashenden.(4) There are actually several narrators in The Moon and Sixpence: the anonymous biographer. Rose Waterford, Mrs. Strickland, Colonel MacAndrew, Dirk Stroeve, Captain Nichols, Tiare Johnson, Capitaine Brunot, and Dr. Coutras. On the margins of the novel stand Strickland's other fictional biographers, the art critic Huret, the artist's son Robert, the German scholar Weitbrecht-Rotholz and the American Van Busche Taylor. Each tells a different story about the painter who recedes into increasing obscurity as the novel progresses. In the end, the novel is not about Strickland at all, nor is it the story of the anonymous narrator or of Somerset Maugham. The Moon and Sixpence is a story about story-telling, and it raises important questions about the role of narrative in both discovering and concealing the truth about its subject. What does it mean to write the life of a man of genius? …
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