Symmetry (3)

I have always thought that TS Eliot's greatest critical failure was his review of Ulysses. He sees the formality that Joyce imposes on the book through the use of Homer as a great triumph. I know this will get a lot of people really angry, but I see nothing but failure in Ulysses. Here is how the Cambridge Companion to Modernism sets it up:

Eliot wanted to make the novel possible again by instilling into it a stricter form. He admired Joyce's use of Homeric myth as "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."

Here is the thing, it doesn't work. Empty formalism doesn't work in Joyce and it doesn't work anywhere else either, unless you take the point to be to show how empty modern life is by setting it against the classical form.

And it's a problem in Northanger Abbey too. Not in the same sense, Austen didn't think that applying a formal structure was enough to make chaos meaningful. She thought stories had this structure because life itself, far from futile and anarchic, was best described in certain forms.

No, I think the problem with the symmetrical form here brings out is that the book isn't finished. Austen either planned more revisions or she'd given it up as a lost cause (I'm guessing the latter).