Notes from the Underground

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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."

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posted by Richard 6:47 pm

Friday, December 02, 2005

 
Somewhat belatedly and via this story, I've come across the comments made by Philip Pullman on CS Lewis:

"In Pullman's world, the universe is ruled by a senile, viciously sadistic deity who has to be deposed in battle so that its inhabitants can join with angels in creating a "republic of heaven".

In reply to a question, Pull man told an audience made up largely of children and young people that he had first read the Narnia books when he was a teacher. He added: "I realised that what he was up to was propaganda in the cause of the religion he believed in. It is monumentally disparaging of girls and women. It is blatantly racist. One girl was sent to hell because she was getting interested in clothes and boys."


It's not so much that I disagree with Pullman (though he generalises his comments are far from unreasonable) as that I suspect he has missed what is actually so unpalatable about Lewis. To a large extent, the difference between literature and propaganda seems rather arbitrary (Pullman's own work is, after all, propaganda for an anti-christian worldview) and in all fairness to Lewis, his works certainly do encompass myths other than the christian. However, this still leaves the rather unpleasant and rather sadistic way in which Lewis often seems to dwell on the need to purge inherent sin through suffering and punishment, whether than applies to Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It still leaves the choice of the lion rather than the lamb as the central metaphor for christianity. And it still leaves the dismissive comment in The Last Battle that "she's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She was always a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up." It seems rather difficult not to compare all this to Pullman's notion of sin as a birth into consciousness and to find something much richer and stranger there.

As a footnote, there's an interesting comparison to be made here to Tolkien, and his tendency to dwell on man's innate corruptibility and the evils of progress, when contrasted to Mervyn Peake's account of how Titus comes to rebel against tradition and order as surely as the villain of the novel, Steerpike, does. See also Michael Moorcock's comments on Tolkien:

"Like Chesterton, and other orthodox Christian writers who substituted faith for artistic rigour he sees the petit bourgeoisie, the honest artisans and peasants, as the bulwark against Chaos. These people are always sentimentalized in such fiction because traditionally, they are always the last to complain about any deficiencies in the social status quo... his High Tory Anglican beliefs permeate the book as thoroughly as they do the books of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis, who, consciously or unconsciously, promoted their orthodox Toryism in everything they wrote. While there is an argument for the reactionary nature of the books, they are certainly deeply conservative and strongly anti-urban..."

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posted by Richard 9:09 pm

Saturday, June 04, 2005

 
Michel Houellebecq has written a characteristically provocative defence of HP Lovecraft:

"Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new, realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don't care to know any more. Humanity, such as it is, inspires only an attenuated curiosity in us. All those prodigiously refined notations, situations, anecdotes ... All they do, once a book has been set aside, is reinforce the slight revulsion that is already adequately nourished by any one of our "real life" days... Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.

Lovecraft, for his part, knew he had nothing to do with this world. And at each turn he played a losing hand. In theory and in practice. He lost his childhood; he also lost his faith. The world sickened him and he saw no reason to believe that by looking at things better they might appear differently."


Of course, Houellebecq has 'form' in this particular area, having attempted to reclaim Agatha Christie for the literary canon in the past. It reinforces his status as enfant terrible, even if his actual writing is more influenced by Camus than by Christie (horror and crime are reactionary genres to a large extent, presenting threats to the social order that are quickly subsumed, which doesn't quite seem to fit, for all of Houellebecq's reactionary pronouncements). Equally, such defences do little to hide the fact that Lovecraft couldn't write for toffee. His prose is truly terrible, being entirely worthy of comparison to William Topaz McGonagall. He influenced other horror writers like Derleth and more literary writers like Borges and every single one of them wrote considerably better than he did.

Nonetheless, I wouldn't want to dismiss Houellebecq's arguments; you only have to read some of the final passages of Atomised to understand that his sense of indifference to the world is perfectly sincere. At one point, I would have been rather more puritannical to such arguments; fiction served a representational function, as Hardy had suggested; "Art is a disproportioning — (i.e., distorting, throwing out of proportion)— of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities." While far from being overly wedded to realism, I would prefer a simpler view now, largely based around Shklovsky's ideas of making the familiar into the unfamiliar, ostanenie (after all, consider how much science fiction from Brave New World to The Handmaid's Tale revolves around the depiction of contemporary concerns rather than the projections of the future).

With this, I seem to have become more tolerant of the notion that art can be a means of escaping reality rather than representing it; it seems difficult to deny that Gormenghast or The Bloody Chamber is as canonical as Mrs Dalloway and Little Dorrit or that the same could not be said of Grimm, Poe and Hoffmann. One of the reasons why Houellebecq is one of the very few modern authors to have successfully written in a social realist vein is that he does so with little sense of social engagement, an indifference that Balzac and Zola were simply incapable of. Living at a time when many European societies see their cohesion and identity as being undermined by increasingly liberal economic structures, I rather suspect this is the only way the realist novel can be created in the present age.

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posted by Richard 1:36 pm