John Cowper Powys: Displacements of Voice and Genre

Sammanfattning: This study is based on dialogic readings of two of John Cowper Powys´s major novels, A Glastonbury Romance and Porius. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the interrelationship in the examined texts between the chain of narrative displacements and the frequent changes of voice and genre. Powys´s cornucopian writing with its wide employment of characteristics from various genres makes it particularly well suited to a Bakhtinian analysis, combined with Roman Jakobson´s conclusions on the metonymic quality of the contiguity-dependent realistic prose text. A dialogic understanding of novelistic discourse will prevent any future accusations of formlessness or incoherence - arguments that have been raised against Powys´s artistic achievement in previous discussions. Mikhail M. Bakhtin has shown that novelistic discourse works according to its own intrinsic laws. With its readiness to incorporate passages from every conceivable genre - fictional as well as non-fictional - the novel resists unequivocal possession of meaning and ownership in the conventional sense. However, the author´s accents are present from the first to the last page; it is he who orders the narrative material into a coherent whole. Together with a consideration of Powys´s writings on, among others, Dostoevsky, Rabelais, and Sterne, Chapter One discusses the theoretical framework of the textual analyses in the following chapters. Different stylistic and generic traits are investigated both in Chapter Two and Chapter Three, as well as the function of the chronicling voices and their interaction with the voices of other characters. Among other things, Chapter Two considers the polyphony in A Glastonbury Romance and the connection between the symbolic-metaphoric Grail notion and the chain of metonymic expressions employed to denote the evasive "Mystery of Glastonbury". The main portion of this study, Chapter Three, is devoted to a discussion of Porius, Powys´s most comprehensive and complex novel. Its meandering narrative structure is examined together with reflections on the important roles played by various manifestations of time, such as flux and shape-shifting. Special emphasis is given to a discussion of the relationship between shifts of accents and generic variation. The final part of Chapter Three considers the protean Myrddin Wyllt. As the embodiment of textual displacement, this character occupies a central position in the narrative as a whole.