The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [9]
If we are prepared to read Dowell as a Fordian impressionist, rather than an unreliable narrator, the dependability of his narrative becomes less of a critical issue. The only problem then, as one critic puts it, is that ‘Dowell is not merely an untrustworthy narrator but an untrustworthy impressionist’.19
But even if there were no parallels between Ford’s narrative theory and Dowell’s narrative practice, there is plenty to suggest that the American narrator knows exactly what he is doing, and that in writing his story he wants to show us he has more of a ‘good’ novelist in him than a ‘cheap’ one. For example, Carol Jacobs has examined the layered complexity of the incident on the journey from Nauheim to Marburg when Dowell looks out of the train window and sees ‘a brown cow hitch its horns under the stomach of a black and white animal and the black and white one [is] thrown right into the middle of a narrow stream’. Jacobs addresses the way in which this ‘apparently irrelevant interlude’ actually ‘operates as an inexorably precise, almost mechanical, if ultimately problematic, allegory’ of what is about to happen to the party: the ‘black and white’ relationship between the two couples will be upended when Leonora discovers that she has been displaced by Florence, and at about this time, back at the Hotel Excelsior, ‘Maisie Maidan is thrown into the middle of a portmanteau, with her feet in the air, like the black and white cow’.20 Nor should such narrative flair surprise us, for Dowell is a well-read narrator who likes to show off his learning: telling us that Nancy saw Ashburnham as a compound of Lohengrin, El Cid and the Chevalier Bayard is a case in point. Just as Florence is keen to display how much she has read up on the cultural sites that the quartet visit, so Dowell, no less conspicuously, embroiders his tale with allusions to, among other texts, the Bible, John Dryden’s All for Love (1678), Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) and Heart of Darkness, and borrows quotations from the poetry of Robert Herrick (1591–1674) and Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909). And he is familiar (though ‘an old-fashioned Philadelphia Quaker’) with the Latin of the Roman Catholic Church.
Dowell’s use of figurative language is also notable. In the first half of the book, he is drawn chiefly to nautical imagery, telling us, among other things, that he ‘had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows’; that he is ‘invisibly anchored’ to Philadelphia, and that Leonora hated Ashburnham ‘with an agony that was as bitter as the sea’. He portrays their foursome as a noble and seaworthy vessel: ‘We were, if you will, one of those tall ships with the white sails upon a blue sea, one of those things that seem the proudest and the safest of all the beautiful and safe things that God has permitted the mind of men to frame.’ These descriptions seem almost deliberately uninspired, as if Dowell, true to Ford’s advice about narration, is lulling the reader into a false sense of his ability as a writer/narrator, not least because he goes on to show us that he can also use similes to good effect – for instance, when describing the Ashburnhams as being ‘like fire-ships afloat on a lagoon’; when noting Edward’s ability to enter a room and capture every woman’s gaze ‘as dextrously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls’, and when describing the Englishman’s desire for La Dolciquita arising ‘like fire in dry corn’.
In addition, Dowell’s metaphors occasionally take on such eyecatching boldness and obtrude with such a disconcerting extravagance that it is almost as if he is trying to make the reader laugh. Somewhat less than heart-rendingly, for example, Maisie Maidan’s trunk ingests her (save for –a small pair of feet in high-heeled shoes’) ‘like the jaws of a