Convention, In Life and In Words

Gaughin's Manao Tupapau (The Spirit Watches Over Her)

I adore Somerset Maugham’s novels.  While reading ‘The Moon and Sixpence’ recently I started to think about narrative flow.  It’s a fairly short novel of 240 pages, but it’s divided into 58 chapters of approximately equal length.  That’s an average of 4.13 pages per chapter, and all those chapter endings followed by a chapter beginning on the next page make for quite a bit of white space.  So the chapters are quite short.  A few of the early chapters are almost set pieces of a sort, but most of the chapters just take the story from one point to the next.  The chapters do fall into groups which deal with a certain time or place, but those groups are not explicitly shown on the page.  We’re simply presented with 58 short chapters.  What effect does this structure have on the reading experience?  How is the experience different from reading a Philip Roth novel, where there are fewer chapters and some of them are very very long indeed?

There are no cliffhangers or teasing links to pull the reader from one chapter to the next in the Maugham work.  If anything the style is quite formal and old-fashioned.  The action is carefully laid out, and the author (through the narrator) provides a good deal of commentary and speculation along the way.  My experience is of casual storytelling that is more-or-less evenly paced.  No Roth-like riffs or virtuoso passages that take your breath away.  The narrative proceeds without obvious effort from one topic to the next.  Each is dealt with in turn in a way that seems natural and appropriate.  The book has a certain propriety to it.  It bows to convention in a way that makes the reading experience comfortable and easy.  Nothing unusual gets in the way of the overall flow.

Would the reading experience be much different if Maugham had left the text the same, but combined several chapters into one?  There might be only a third or a quarter as many chapters, but would the experience be the same?  Dunno.  There is something comforting about digesting consistently short chapters.  And Maugham’s style of narration is nothing if not comforting.  It has echoes of the 18^th-century British novels that were written as a collection of letters, also of the serialized novels of 19^th-century writers like Dickens.  Maybe it’s just our familiarity with this structure that makes it easy and comforting.  Or is there just something pleasing about reading a book one short chunk at a time?

The plot is very loosely based on the life of Paul Gaugin, but Maugham’s protagonist is British.  Maugham seems caught up in the contrast between a truly artistic temperament and the accepted strict norms of British respectability.  I don’t think the main character’s transformation from workaday London stock broker to remarkably dedicated Parisian artist is well explained, but I don’t know that it’s important that the story be believable.  Maugham is highlighting the differences between two approaches to life.  Packing them both into the same character may not be entirely credible, but it does make the contrast more striking.

Maugham (through the narrator) seems to come down ultimately on the side of respectability, but with some looks of longing over the fence to the other side where a truly artistic temperament rules the day.  The conflict is fascinating.  And depicting this cruel, relentless, brilliant and somewhat unstructured artistic life in thoroughly conventional language in a reassuringly familiar structure gives the reader another clue to Maugham’s own choices.