Novel geekery
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009WHAT makes us read novels? What kind of view of the world, vision or philosophy, can they offer which we might not find elsewhere? What knowledge, pleasure, insights or experience do we get from them? In a 1976 essay entitled “Sur la lecture”, Barthes distinguished three types, or modes, of reading. The first was what he called the “desiring” mode in which there is an almost fetishistic pleasure in the words themselves. The second is the mode of “suspense”, where we are carried forward by the narrative to the point where we can almost forget the actual words of the text as we unravel the story. And the third is the “productive” mode, wher eour relationship with the text is active, initiating in us the desire to write. To these three modes one might add the mode of enquiry. We read novels to find out about people, societies, ideas, places. Engels wrote in 1888 that he had learned more from Balzac than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together.
Poetry may fulfil our desire to relate to the word. Drama and film may provide suspense. Historical or documentary writings and films operate in the mode of enquiry. Autobiography may encourage us to write for ourselves. But the novel touches on all of these at some time. It moves between the different modes, showing greater variety and flexibility than any other genre.
If history is, as Hegel argued, not just what happened but how it is told, the novels of the generation that came of age in 1789 lay claim to the history of the disruptions of their world through formal innovations in the making of narratives. That these texts must always be unveiled as only fictions and not as the true accounts of the selves that made them does not lessen their capacity to testify to the tragedies that racked a generation. If it is possible to call these texts the first “modern” novels, then it is less because they champion a changing world, than because they mourn so poignantly the one in which their authors, readers and characters held tight to the trauma of memory, making sense of history as a story told about loss.
Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert & Zola: novels that move between the dramatic, the tragic and comic without being dominated by the popular equivalent of these modes: melodrama, sentimentality and farce or brittle wit. As well as having comedy, they have irony, a quality often lacking in popular minor works. They are able to combine the illusion of reality with imaginative boldness, and their language is more inventive and structures more skilful.
19th C novelists were shaped by 18th C ideas. Stendhal, for eg, was already 17 by the turn of the century and had done most of his formative theoretical reading in the 18th C philosophies. Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and Montesquieu had from varying angles undermined the assumption that social organisation was a God-given structure which could never be changed, and had stressed that cultural values were relative. Environment and circumstance, rather than immutable rules, shaped character, custom and laws. These ideas helped create a political atmosphere which made the French Revolution possible; the Revolution itself, and its aftermath, provided a startling demonstration that society could be changed. The poor and humble could assert their right to be elevated; history offered a lesson in mutability.
Hugo presents as caricatural a picture as he dares of almost all past European literature in the preface to his play Cromwell (1827) in order to assert that a new aesthetic, suited to modern times, must experiment with verse-form and must juxtapose the lowly, banal and grotesque with the lofty, dignified and beautiful; our conceptions of “beauty” will thereby change. He implies a political dimension to this: the de-hierarchising of aesthetic categories goes hand in hand with a de-hierachising of social attitudes.
A firmer stress on politics and the historical specificity of given circumstances (history in literature is no longer to be “generalised”, as in 17th C tragedy nor glamorised as in much of Walter Scott). Second, new choices of heroes (proletarians can become worthwhile and traic heroes, as in Le Rouge et le Noir, Les Miserables and Zola’s best novels), and a new use of banal consciousness through which to reflect the narrative (Flaubert). Third, a more serious and prolonged attention than hitherto to “humble” but revealing physical details — details which give important insights into the relationship between circumstance and individual.
The two most influential thinkers of modern times, Marx (1818–1883)and Freud (1856–1939), both stress the importance of understanding the past in order to change the present. Both were formed by the nineteenth C, the century of historicism. Just as we can see certain emphases of Marx’s foreshadowed in the political thought and even the literary practice of the early 19th C, so also Freud’s study of childhood did not spring from nothing. Childhood — the “history” of each individual — becomes increasingly important in European thought from the late 18th C onwards. in 1762 Rousseau published Emile, a work on the upbringing and education of children which not only had a deep impact on theories of child-rearing, but was to influence many novels of the 19th C.
Quite apart from wide questions of history and class, and the formative role of childhood, these novelists are also acutely interested in the power of immediate surroundings: thus Balzac will often imply or state that such-and-such a turn of events could not have taken place anywhere but: in the capital, or in a large provincial town, or in a village wehere everyone knows of everyone else’s movements. This interest in present circumstance also informs, say, Flaubert’s novels. We must not see Emma Bovary as too much a victim of her surroundings, to do so would be to miss the ironies surrounding her personality, yet one reading of the book is undoubtedly as a wickedly amusing account of the particular constrictions prevalent in 19th C provincial life.
The wide-ranging interest in physical detail is also what distinguishes the 19th C from the boldest experimental fiction of the 20th C: writers like Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute have distanced themselves from what they see as a comforting fictional world which allows us to “label” characters and their appearance. The sense of reality is created too by the extraordinarily well-concatenated plots.
Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) is often thought of as the first truly modernist novel. But Proust, like his predecessors, endows the ordinary with significance; analyses class structure; highlights political crises; gives new value to prose; builds up and deflates dreams not only at the level of the “story” but in his very sentence-structure.
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The dynamic of constant self-renewal expresses the broader vitality of modernism at large, understood as a general etho informing a variety of artistic movements since the 1880s, all bent on expanding, and in some cases exploding, a sense of representation deemed to be unduly monopolised by codes inherited from the past. In the modern novel, as in the visual arts, the main codes under attack are those sustained by the orthodoxy of classical 19th C realism, with the attack itself often being justified in the name of a “higher” form of the basic mimetic urge, such as “psychological” realism, which prioritises the inner world of human subjectivity, or “phenomenological” realism, which tracks the outer world as physically experienced by a human subject. Modernism, then, is characterised by a strongly felt need to effect a break from the past, which in turn generates a search, often conducted in an experimental spirit, for new forms and modes of artistic expression. In the twentieth century, this modernist logic of rupture and renewal, central to the very concept of an “avant-garde”, provides the framework within which most theorising about the novel has taken place.
But a growing consensus now exists to the effect that, under the sway of post-industrial society, even this modernist framework hsa broken down, giving way to a different cultural condition, loosely described as “post-modern”, and a different aesthetic project, loosely described as “post-modernist”. This broad new cultural sensibility, part mood, part ethos, is marked by a loss of faith in the idea of underlying truths or overriding values. This sensibility breaks in particular with the modernist belief in progress, development, evolution. Abandoning the modernist contract with the future, postmodernism seeks rather to explore the possibilities of the present through a return to the past. Finally, more aware of the local and provisional nature of all intellectual endeavour, the postmodern sensibility encourages a new modesty within the humanities. Totalising theories are no longer considered tenable, and the perspective of the individual subject is correspondingly rehabilitated. As such, the postmodern sensibility reacts strongly against avant-gardism, shunning its doctrinaire arrogance as a discourse and its status as a future-oriented ideology.
Jean-Francois Lyotard: La Condition postmoderne (1979). French writers and critics have until quite recently regarded postmodernism as an essentially American, and therefore rather suspect, commodity. In the Anglo-American world, postmodernism as an area of study hsa gone from strength to strength: a phenomenon as yet without parallel in metropolitan France, where postmodernism has only recently been taken up as a serious issue in philosophy and the social sciences, while it has still barely emerged at all as a framework for literary studies.
In recent years the question of postmodernism has surfaced in retrospective assessments of the nouveau roman, the literary which, more than any other, advocated theory as the necessary counterpart of novelistic practice. The nouveau roman, represented primarily by the fiction of Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon, first came to prominence in the 1950s. They had a common desire to challenge the continuing hegemony of the classic “Balzacian” realism which, through its technical emphasis on plot and characterisation, they saw as drawing a falsely reassuring map of human experience. In rejecting a tradition which seemed to have survived the exemplary subversions of Proust, Kafka, Joyce and others, the nouveau roman met with the immediate approval of an influential young critic, Roland Barthes. Thus began an alliance which would develop through the 1960s into a prolonged exchange between practitioners and the critics steeped in structuralism, a cross-disciplinary intellectual movement which took meaning away from the doman of human agency and located it in relationships between entities, seen now as nodal points holding together a signifying system.
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I’m inputting books into librarything now, and am lingering over them, the copy of If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller I took with me to Florence and Siena, the poetry I got as gifts, the self-help books I got ostensibly for volunteer work but secretly devoured…the memories and places and growth and exploration and open roads and evenings closed. The dross and the gold, books that coil and circle and lick their paws, and that cool sly verb to write. Friends who are troubled in mind but clear-eyed and valiant, smarter than the tricks played on our hearts. Insight to battle love’s blindness, strength from the milk of human kindness, how souls knit together. Crystal balls and globes.
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La vérité vaut bien qu’on passe quelques années sans la trouver.
