Desire, Loss and Storytelling in The Good Soldier

Abstract

Unlike Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and unlike Ford’s own historical novels and studies, The Good Soldier is firmly set in the present of the early twentieth century. There is little place for historical change. The narrator’s movement through space is as regular and repetitive as the seasons: ‘Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for us, and Nauheim always received us from July to September’ (Ford, 1999b, p. 7). This repetitive geographical pattern suspends the difference between past, present and future and disables the experience of a linear time flow. Time becomes spatialised, a perpetual present, in which the Dowells and Ashburnhams move in a circular pattern. Dowell imagines his life with the Ashburnhams as unchanging and unchangeable when he compares it to a ‘minuet’ that, despite death and disaster, ‘must be stepping itself still’ (Ford, 1999b, p. 10). In this perpetual present, the past features only in the frozen form of tourist attractions and chivalric stories. Medieval castles in Provence (‘Las Tours’), the Articles of Marburg signed by Luther, Bucer, Zwingli and others, and the medieval troubadour Peire Vidal represent fossilised survivals, mere anecdotal material. At best, the past provides a backdrop against which the crisis of the present can unfold. It is only gradually in the course of the novel that the tensions of changing times emerge beneath this polished surface of the present.