Roderick Hudson and The Lesson of the Master: Saving Art or Fooling the Artist? The Pattern of the Artist’s Educational Novel Put to the Test of Jamesian Duplicity
Chardin, Philippe
Roderick Hudson and The Lesson of the Master: Saving Art or Fooling the Artist? The Pattern of the Artist’s Educational Novel Put to the Test of Jamesian Duplicity - 2011.
3
The duplicity at the heart of Jamesian narrative techniques in the early novel Roderick Hudson and in the novella The Lesson of the Master, which is the object of this comparative study, casts strong suspicions on the traditional challenges the hero of a Künstlerbildungsroman (here, a young writer and a young sculptor) is expected to go through, namely equivocal rivalry, both amorous and artistic, with a brotherly, fatherly, or gemellary character, the destructive part played by beloved women, and the lack of reliability of calls to sacrifice by the mentor when he preaches the necessity to sacrifice life to art and develops sacred themes concerning the superiority of signs of art over signs of love and signs of social success. However, the complexity of Jamesian narrative techniques and the impossibility to decide what exactly the end of these two stories consists of prevent the reader from drawing definitive conclusions about those who might have intended to fool the artist while claiming to save his art.
Roderick Hudson and The Lesson of the Master: Saving Art or Fooling the Artist? The Pattern of the Artist’s Educational Novel Put to the Test of Jamesian Duplicity - 2011.
3
The duplicity at the heart of Jamesian narrative techniques in the early novel Roderick Hudson and in the novella The Lesson of the Master, which is the object of this comparative study, casts strong suspicions on the traditional challenges the hero of a Künstlerbildungsroman (here, a young writer and a young sculptor) is expected to go through, namely equivocal rivalry, both amorous and artistic, with a brotherly, fatherly, or gemellary character, the destructive part played by beloved women, and the lack of reliability of calls to sacrifice by the mentor when he preaches the necessity to sacrifice life to art and develops sacred themes concerning the superiority of signs of art over signs of love and signs of social success. However, the complexity of Jamesian narrative techniques and the impossibility to decide what exactly the end of these two stories consists of prevent the reader from drawing definitive conclusions about those who might have intended to fool the artist while claiming to save his art.
Réseaux sociaux