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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.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Gabriel Josipovici has published an essay on the writings of Borges from his latest collection:"Borges’ fondness for detective stories stems from his dislike for the classical novel. For the detective story, unlike the novel, accepts from the start that the logic of fiction is not the logic of life and that as a fictional construct its prime duty is to be interesting, not realistic. The novel, on the other hand, is a curious hybrid: it wants to assert at one and the same time that it is dealing with life in all its boring contingency, while at the same time telling a story which implies that life has a meaning, is always more than mere contingency. This is the secret of its hold over us, as Sartre, for one, understood so well. We open a novel, Sartre says in La Nausee, and read about a man walking down a road. The man seems free, the future open before him. At once we identify with him, for that is how our own existence seems to be to us. We too are walking down the road of life, not knowing what is to come. But the pleasure of reading a novel stems from the fact that we know that this man is in fact the subject of an adventure that is about to befall him. How do we know this? Because he is there at the start of the novel and he would not be there if nothing were going to happen to him...
The traditional novel, by refusing to countenance the fact that things could have been otherwise, stops us also from understanding the strangeness of the fact that they are not otherwise, but thus."
For a while after reading this I found it difficult to pinpoint what bothered me about this, until I realised that it was the reference to Sartre. In practice, Sartre's ideas of existential self-determination were confronted with the social obligations represented by Sartre's communist sympathies. Behind lies the polyphonic narratives played out by the differing characters in Sartre's novels, which surely represents the fractured perspectives and disjunction between individual and society that the realist novel excels at.
More generally, I always have difficulty with the concept of realism as a monolithic entity. What is commonly referred to as the realist novel evolved in tandem with other forms; gothic, sensation and crime, all of which were absorbed into the realist novel itself. It's for this reason that the works of Balzac and Dickens combined elaborate plotting with the most abrupt and unexpected events, while even the arch-naturalist Zola was notorious for introducing the most lurid and sensational of plots. Josipovici correctly notes that early detective fiction works as a puzzle rather than a sequence of determined actions, with Poe and Doyle's stories working by revelation as much as by ratiocination. Conversely, the writer most wedded to causality as a central concern is an equally unclear example of realism; Hardy once wrote that fiction was about disproportioning reality so as to enable it to be seen more clearly and he tends to alternates between realism and something more metaphysical, reminding me of Hawthorne's definition of the romance as opposed to realism; "Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory... where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other."Labels: Fantasy, Literature, Realism
posted by Richard 6:47 pm
