Notes from the Underground

Home > Notes from the Underground

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.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

 
Hermione Lee discusses various critical approaches to the novel, ranging from Kundera to Moretti:

"Hegel called the contingent, the everyday, the mutable, "the prose of the world," as opposed to "the spiritual, the transcendent, the poetic." "Prosaic" can mean plain, ordinary, commonplace, even dull. Prose fiction, historians of the novel tell us, has had to struggle against the sense of being a second-rate genre. Heidegger said that "novelists squander ignobly the reader's precious time." In late-eighteenth-century Britain, when large numbers of badly written popular novels were being published, "only when entertainment was combined with useful instruction might the novel escape charges of insignificance or depravity."

In pre-modern China, Japan, and Korea, the general word for fictional writing was xiaoshuo (in Chinese), meaning "trivial discourse." Socialist critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have accused the novel of bourgeois frivolity. By contrast, aestheticians of the novel, like Flaubert, proposed the ideal novel as "a book about nothing," or, like Joyce, as a game which would turn the everyday world into the most concentrated and highly designed prose possible. Moral writers of novels like George Eliot or D.H. Lawrence believed in the novel as the book of truth, teaching us how to live and understand our lives and those of others...

The most interesting pursuit of categories comes when they are seen crossing cultural borders, as in a rather fascinating account in Moretti (by Jongyon Hwang) of how in the early twentieth century, Korean fiction began to adopt the genre of the bildungsroman as a means of moving away from the previous generation's authoritarian culture (which collapsed under Japanese colonialism) and toward more Western desires for "self-expression and social advancement." Classification can be valuable, too, when the category is seen as a shape-shifter, as in a brilliant essay by Bruce Robbins on how the "upward mobility story" in fiction shifted from social climbing to the making of a writer...

The idea of the novel as contradictory, double-dealing, and secretive, the secret agent of literature, is matched in all these critical commentaries by an equally strong idea of the novel as multifarious, polymorphous, expansive, and superfluous, the behemoth of literature. For the prose of the world to be turned into the world of prose, superfluity, spilling-over, and generous abundance are called for. These critics show how even the most formal and aesthetically stringent of novelists also have appetites for excess. A.S. Byatt on Balzac eloquently celebrates his "manic inclusiveness." One critic of Ulysses describes it as investing in "an ideal of exhaustiveness..." Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein, "officially" endorses the theories of her time "of inherent human goodness," but at the same time, through her story, refutes them as "sentimental and false." Emily Brontë divides herself painfully between a desire for a marriage between the world of human vision and inhuman nature, and a recognition of its impossibility: "the romantic dreamer longs for a home that she is doomed never to find." For Mullan, secrets, suppressed emotions, and withheld information are some of the main engines of the novel—"moments when the surface of things suddenly changes its meaning.""


Similarly, Jonathan Ree also writes on this subject:

"The novelty of the novel is of course connected with the rise of printing, and the growth of a literate public with time and money to spare. Beyond that, the sheer scale of the form allows storylines to be extended and multiplied as never before, crossing and re-crossing each other with ample scope for coincidence, surprise and contingency, and hence for the depiction of characters with whom, as William Hazlitt put it, the reader can "identify..." The art of reading a novel involves a dash of experiment, conjecture, even risk. It requires readers to try out different narrative perspectives, styles, even personalities, and so to explore the inherent variousness of experience, and to recognise the vein of arbitrariness that runs through any possible version of events. Novels, in short, are implicitly pluralistic...

If Cervantes rent the curtain that separates us from the prose of ordinary life, Kafka tore it down completely. After Kafka, according to Kundera, the novel entered a realm where reality could never "correspond to people's idea of it"; from now on the novel would be a constant witness to the "unavoidable relativism of human truths..." And this gentle scepticism has political implications too, as Kundera notes when he recalls the "Manicheism" that deformed his native Czechoslovakia when he was a student in Prague after the second world war. Politics at that time was not a forum where perplexed citizens could engage in a collective search for freedom and happiness, or truth and reconciliation, but a battlefield where militant partisans would try to vindicate their correct views about everything and punish anyone who saw things differently...

One of the great virtues of the novel, according to Coetzee, is to teach us that there is no perfect way of carving up the world or recounting its stories. This is a lesson that bears on politics as well, counting against any political aspiration that arises from nationality, identity or tribal loyalty. But Coetzee does not confine his attention to novelists, and an outstanding essay on Walt Whitman allows him to explore a conception of democracy that he himself would evidently endorse: democratic politics, he suggests, is "not one of the superficial inventions of human reason but an aspect of the ever-developing human spirit, rooted in eros." Those who make a fetish out of politics, he implies, are in danger of foreclosing on democracy. Take Walter Benjamin, for example. Coetzee, refusing to treat him with the awed indulgence that has become customary, contends that when Benjamin decided to become a good communist, it was not through an imaginative appraisal of political options, but was simply "an act of choosing sides, morally and historically, against the bourgeoisie and his own bourgeois origins." And if there was something silly and unconvincing about Benjamin's Marxism — "something forced about it, something merely reactive" — it could perhaps be attributed to a certain literary narcissism. "As a writer, Benjamin had no gift for evoking other people," Coetzee says; he had "no talent as a storyteller," and no capacity for the kind of compassionate intelligence implicit in the art of the novel. In a perverse attempt to opt for political realism rather than literary imagination, Benjamin managed to cut himself off from both.

Susan Sontag would have agreed with Coetzee about the political significance of literature. The novel, as she remarks in her last, posthumous collection At the Same Time (Hamish Hamilton), exists to recall us to a sense of the interminable diversity that is the basis of what she calls "politics, the politics of democracy." In a substantial essay on Victor Serge, she praises him for having combined political militancy with a serious engagement with the art of writing. As a mature novelist, she says, Serge was able to deploy "several different conceptions of how to narrate," elaborating a capacious "I" as a device for "giving voice to others." It was through his narratorial doubles that he liberated himself from what he called the "former beautiful simplicity" of the fight between capitalism and socialism, so as to produce books that were "better, wiser, more important than the person who wrote them.""


Perhaps due to its relatively recent historical orgins, the novel has had far more attempts to interpret the implications of its genre in terms that are either metaphysical or political. It particularly tends to interest me how such interpretations can often be entirely opposed. From a Marxist perspective, Georg Lukacs saw the novel as the 'bourgeois epic,' the product of a disjunction between consciousness and society that is the product of the alienation produced by modern capitalism. Writers like Scott accordingly demonstrated a historical consciousness that demonstrated the contradictions of capitalism, their aristocratic sensibilities providing an ideal platform to critque bourgeoisie. Walter Benjamin went rather further, describing a distinction between the novel and story telling that he views as analogous to a distinction between the role of chronicler and historian. The former simply relates, the latter interprets and expounds. Benjamin sees the novel as a commoditised form of storytelling, burdened with information. The evolution from the story to the novel is something he sees as being akin to the evolution of crafts into industrial production; in other words, it is something he unambiguously disapproves of. Benjamin's tastes run to writers whose work resembles fairytale and form part of an oral tradition, like Kafka's Metamorphosis (by contrast, Lukacs preferred Mann to Kafka). Benjamin's admiration of Kafka is largely predicated on the opaque quality of his writing, which is all surface, lacking interest in consciousness or social relations. Symbolic imputations may be made but interpretation is withdrawn from the events being depicted. Benjamin's distinction between story and novel stems from his distinction between painting and film; the latter a form of mass reproduction and a form of art geared for modern capitalism. On the whole, I tend to agree with Coetzee; although Benjamin is the more famed writer today, Lukacs was far less doctrinaire and his notion of critical realism far more in keeping with the genius of the novel.

An alternative view of the novel is provided by Mikhail Bakhtin. Although influenced by Marxism, Bakhtin saw the novel as polyphonic, a means of representing multiple voices in a democratic manner that opposed monologic political viewpoints. Where Benjamin preferred the closed and withdrawn, Bakhtin prefers the open and untidy, the heteroglossic, dialogic and carnivalesque. I've already written elsewhere about this type of opposition between writers like Kafka and Shakespeare on the one hand and writers like Eliot and Dickens on the other. It's not an opposition that necessarily corresponds to the novel; Blake and Baudelaire are both 'open' writers while Kafka and Coetzee are 'closed.' Nontheless, the former category opposes meanings, the latter denies them. For instance, Coetzee's Slow Man places the central elements of the novel in the background, whether it is narrative (events are understated, abandoning resolution in favour of the indeterminacy of life) or consciousness (the central character being essentially hollow, experiencing a series of reactions towards Marijana, none of which can be fully characterised as emotion or feeling). As a fable, Slow Man is non-existent, its protagonist gaining no redemption, resolution or closure, simply a dying fall.

Elizabeth Costello has also led to questions as to whether it can be called a novel at all, seeming more like Murdoch's Acastos or Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Composed of a series of lectures given by the author himself, the issue of the author function is also present to an unusual extent, although this issue is further problematised by the extent to which the Costello personae's views are challenged throughout. In practice, the central issue of more one of the relation of literature of life; "the word-mirror is broken, irreparably... we are just performers speaking our parts." Similarly, the section on the novel in Africa foregrounds the solitude of reading as much of Costello's seclusion when writing, "people on trains take books out of their bags or pockets and retreat into solitary worlds" The novel and writing become a form of imperialism, a form of cancer, denying the ability to think ourselves into the mind of a bat and diminishing the ability to think oneself into the mind of an ape or cockroach; "if I do not convince you, that is because my words here lack the power to bring home to you the wholeness, the unabstracted unintellectual nature of that animal being." Where Lukacs saw the novel as typifying the disjunction of self and society, Coetzee sees solipsism.

Similarly, in In the Heart of the Country the narrator is denied awareness of the basis for her own actions, speaking of theories and fictionalised narratives of herself; "I signify something. I do not know what... is it possible that there is an explanation for all the things I do and that explanation lies inside me, like a key(?).. To die an enigma with a full soul or to die emptied of my secrets."

The Life and Times of Michael K is a novel that reprises the theme of the idiot from Dostoevsky and Cervantes. The obvious influence though, as indicated by the title, is Kafka, reminding me of some of Zadie Smith's recent comments; "His influence seems to cause a mutation in the recipient, metamorphosing the novel into something closer to a meditation, a fantastical historiography, an essay, a parable... Novelists simply do not resist life in this fashion. Life, in its shared social form, is, for lack of a less vulgar term, their material. They cannot say, as Kafka did, "Never again psychology!" Or, as Walter Benjamin put it, Kafka used the traditional forms of representation without the associated truth value. Like Kafka, Coetzee inverts the normal function of the novel, serving to obfuscate rather than elucidate social relations (hence the lack of a definite setting); "barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself". The novel is therefore polyphonic, offering a narrative of resistance to social norms (even to civilisation, since Michael is described "as if he had once been an animal") or of emotional dependency to matriarchal domination. Experience cannot be reduced to the neat patterns of literary convention.

Labels: , , , ,



posted by Richard 2:52 pm