The First-Person Narrator

Abstract

‘La Recherche du temps perdu, en fait, est une recherche de la vérité.’¹ The same applies to A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75), a semiological novel whose primary allegiance is also to truth. ‘All men by nature desire to know’,² contended Aristotle. This certainly provides a key to the analysis of Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, whose gigantic effort in an obsessive search for certitude, for universals, for unconditional knowledge and for eidetic insight underlies the whole series. Powell problematizes the realm of the intellect by questioning the very possibility of understanding reality. What is at stake is not the suspension of judgement over the truth of any specific claim but over the very ability of our cognitive faculties to arrive at any kind of truth. Cardinal Newman’s motto: ‘ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem’ sums up the gist of the roman-fleuve very aptly. The narrator Nicholas Jenkins devotes all his energies to gaining access to the hard core of mystery behind individuals and events. In this respect, one could relate A Dance to the Music of Time to the tradition of novels of initiation in the vein of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. The development of youthful and inexperienced Nicholas Jenkins into a wiser man, the recurrent imagery of circles, the innumerable references to the occult and the use of vocabulary related to rituals, all testify to this interpretation.