Impressionist Fiction and Detective Fiction: Literary Foils in Ford Madox Ford's Oeuvr

This dissertation examines the filial relationship between Impressionist fiction and detective fiction in the writings of Ford Madox Ford. Beginning with his first publication after collaborating with Joseph Conrad, Ford uses the genre of detective fiction as a foil for his Impressionist method, contrasting the Impressionist techniques of progression d'effet, coup de canon, charpente, digression, justification, inevitability, and, in particular, the time-shift, with their use in popular fiction. This dissertation, alongside Ford, brings together two types of fiction that have long been held in separate cultural spheres, "high culture" and "popular culture." While Ford's critics have offered occasional comments regarding his affinity for detective fiction, this dissertation seeks to provide a much needed extended discussion of how the genre informs his method of literary Impressionism. Beginning with an examination of one of Ford's early detective stories, this dissertation contextualizes Ford's work in a tradition of scenes of narrative detection by Dickens, Conan Doyle, James and Joyce. Subsequently, this discussion explores Ford's Impressionist survey of London in The Soul of London, in which his literary approach becomes a series of literal approaches, each compounding to form a composite picture of a city that had grown too large and too compressed for a single image to capture. In this work Ford's technique evokes a sense of pathos, a desire to know beginnings and endings of stories witnessed out the window of a train or tram. Ford renders a sense of mystery, not to solve it as in detective fiction, but rather to allow it to exist in suspense, a reflection of the experience of real life. Next, this discussion examines the critical reception of Ford's best known novel, The Good Soldier, which has been indelibly shaped by critics' attempts to identify the novel's genre. This dissertation examines how the generic instability of Ford's novel leads critics to assign the novel to a certain genre before making their critical interpretations. Those critics who argue that the novel is a murder mystery in disguise are understandably but mistakenly responding to real affinities with the genre. Such readings attempt to set straight Ford's superimposed plotting in order to establish a chronological and corrected chronicle, missing entirely the point of Ford's Impressionism, the evocation of a mystery, of an impression. Next, this dissertation looks at Ford's most accomplished explanation of his Impressionist technique in It Was the Nightingale. In this fictional reminiscence Ford tells the story of the story of his Impressionist masterpiece, Parade's End. In this work Ford explicates and exemplifies his literary techniques, showing how they inform the construction of a novel and how they mirror the technique of detective fiction. Ford argues that his return to literature was prompted by the work of two French authors, Marcel Proust and George Simenon, whose literary methods combine to shape Ford's post war fiction. Finally, this dissertation examines how Ford's double novels, The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh, are inverted detective stories that render the psychological involution of an "almost" innocent criminal, watching as a team of investigators follow his trail. These novels explore the universal desire to escape, to escape into death, into the life of one's double, or into the pages of a book. These novels form Ford's final comment on the literature of escape and the centrality of rendering a vicarious experience to literary Impressionism. Like detective fiction, Impressionist fiction endeavors to take readers out of the world, to help them escape, to make them see. However, while detective fiction diverts its readers with a comforting allegory of a perfect reading, Impressionist fiction shows that our perspectives are limited, escape is momentary, and meaning is provisional. This dissertation concludes by arguing that these two contemporary literary methods form a correlative pair, each requiring the other for a sufficient appreciation of their literary techniques and forms.