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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
I wrote some time ago about a piece by Julian Evans, bemoaning the lack of narrative in contemporary European fiction. In this review of Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots he pursues a similar line of argument. On the whole, I'm more interested in this argument than in Booker's rather Jungian and Casaubonesque tome:"The histories of the novel and of storytelling ran together until the early 20th century; since the 1920s, that history has been one of formal drift, away from the novel as a social form that described how characters live in relation to others... After the 1950s it was more creditable, as a writer of fiction, to be Beckett's or Borges's descendant than Orwell's or Waugh's. Possibly writers were tired of making the effort of linear narrative, possibly they simply wanted to be modern. Yet I can think of few more complete embodiments of 20th-century alienation than Orwell's George Bowling in Coming Up for Air, and I cannot think of a novel that better expresses 20th-century English dissent than Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy."
One of the problems with Evans's critique is that it never seems entirely clear whether he is lamenting the dearth of narrative fiction or the dearth of social fiction. After all, though the two may often be related they are hardly synonymous. On the whole, I'm inclined to think that modernism and the displacement of narrative are less important than the displacement of the social novel. Although many post-war writers like Greene, Fowles and Murdoch tally well with Evans's ideas about the novel, it's striking that rather more writers have since strayed into magical realism (Carter, Winterson, Kundera), historical fiction (Eco, Ackroyd, Pamuk) or speculative fiction (Atwood, Coetzee, Ballard). Though realist fiction remains available to contemporary novelists (Gordimer and Houellebecq, for example), it isn't necessarily the only form of novelistic expression in the way Evans suggests (as with the picaresque novel prior to the rise of realism).
My own suspicion is that realism is a simply a less attractive form now than it was for Victorian novelists, who were writing in a society dominated by competing social narratives (from Comte to Marx to Newman) in a way that doesn't seem particularly true for a contemporary society, which is signficantly more atomised and lacking shared assumptions. I recall Martin Amis comparing modern Britain to Switzerland; an ordered, prosperous society that had produced nothing other than the cuckoo clock (to steal a phrase from the Third Man). I'm not sure that Britain quite fits this description, but I might certainly say that as a society it lacks any general narratives to discuss the kind of concerns that so motivated Victorian fiction.
Of course, as far as narrative is concerned, I'm biased. One of the critical works that I always found rather appealing was John Bayley's Unity and Disharmony in Literature. Its central argument was that works characterised by a certain uneveness are often much more engaging than works characterised by a rather formidable and inapproachable aesthetic perfection. Certainly, when I read novels it was always the sub-plots and diversions and all the other things that didn't quite fit into the central narrative that I liked the most.
Update:
An interesting comment from Susan Sontag:"The long prose fiction called the novel, for want of a better name, has yet to shake off the mandate of its own normality as promulgated in the 19th century: to tell a story peopled by characters whose options and destinies are those of ordinary, so-called real life. Narratives that deviate from this artificial norm and tell other kinds of stories, or appear not to tell much of a story at all, draw on traditions that are more venerable than those of the 19th century, but still, to this day, seem innovative or ultraliterary or bizarre...
It seems odd to describe ''Gulliver's Travels'' or ''Candide'' or ''Tristram Shandy'' or ''Jacques the Fatalist and His Master'' or ''Alice in Wonderland'' or Gershenzon and Ivanov's ''Correspondence From Two Corners'' or Kafka's ''The Castle'' or Hesse's ''Steppenwolf'' or Woolf's ''The Waves'' ... or Calvino's ''Invisible Cities'' or, for that matter, porno narratives, simply as novels. To make the point that these occupy the outlying precincts of the novel's main tradition, special labels are invoked. Convention dictates that we slot many of the last centuries' perdurable literary achievements into one or another of these categories."Labels: Literature
posted by Richard 6:36 pm
