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.

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: , ,



posted by Richard 6:47 pm

Sunday, August 07, 2005

 
An interesting piece from Waggish on the decline of realism:

"Genealogy of Metaphysics: what was it that caused the shift from the master dichotomy of real/unreal to the slave dichotomy of real/fake? The loss of authority/authenticity in young American authors (see Eggers, Foer) indicates a preoccupation with returning to an imagined time where every utterance was a statement of the real, as opposed to the supposed fakeness that surrounds us that everyone is fed up with. The term "irony," which once signified a sophisticated sort of social satire that required a certain amount of intelligence to appreciate, has become to devalued to the point where it simply signifies insincerity, the positive referent not being a specific target but simply the mores of society."


Certainly, realism has not been an especially fertile ground for modern literature (though I suspect that the increasingly individualistic nature of modern society is as likely a cause as Lyotardian explanations; realism has a certain sense of social solidarity as a pre-requisite; this is the difference between Balzac and Houellebecq), in spite of a brief flourishing after the second world war (Greene, Murdoch). Other forms have come to the forefront; historical fiction (Ackroyd, Atwood, Fowles), magical realism (Marquez, Kundera, Carter, Winterson) or speculative fiction (Atwood). That said, although Waggish notes that those that want to return to a pre-enlightenment authenticity (a dangerous notion, if one thinks of Hamsun or Heidegger) ingore how marginal and disingenuous their views are, his comments did remind me of Slavoj Zizek saying this:

"Throughout the entire twentieth century, I see a counter-tendency, for which my good philosopher friend Alain Badiou invented a nice name: 'La passion du réel', the passion of the real. That is to say, precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life."


This seems a good description of the writing of JG Ballard and perhaps others like Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk. Perhaps that is the writing that will be remembered from these times as being real. Perhaps it already is; I always remember JG Ballard observing that on the whole, the future would be bland, a world of stifling mediocrity and conformity occasionally punctuated by mildly absurd and senseless acts of violence. For all of its impact, 9/11 did not seem to fall into this category; it resembled a film (a Hollywood disaster movie) too much to seem truly real. The recent Tube bombings seem to meet Ballard's description rather more accurately.

Update: Some interesting related observations I came across from John Fowles:

"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the novel was at one remove from life. But since the advent of film and television and sound recording it is at two removes. The novel is now generally about things and events which the other forms of art describe better.

All the purely visual and aural sequences in the modern novel are a bore, both to read and to write. People’s physical appearance, their movements, their sounds, places, moods of places—the camera and the microphone enregister these twenty times better than the typewriter... In other words, to write a novel in 1964 is to be neurotically aware of trespassing, especially on the domain of the cinema... So over the novel today hangs a faute de mieux. All of us under forty write cinematically; our imaginations, constantly fed on films, “shoot” scenes, and we write descriptions of what has been shot. So for us a lot of novel writing is, or seems like, the tedious translating of an unmade and never-to-be-made film into words."


I'm not sure I agree, as I tend to think of cinema as the artform that failed but it does rather remind me of Paglia's observation that cinema was always implicit in Western art in the prominence it gave to the visual or to Tanizaki's compliant about the respective roles of light and shadow in Oriental and Occidental aesthetics.

Labels: , ,



posted by Richard 5:02 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.

Labels: , ,



posted by Richard 1:36 pm

Friday, May 27, 2005

 
A somewhat mediocre article from the Los Angeles Times (one of my favourite publications, if it goes without saying) manages to accidentally stumble across an interesting point:

"My students and colleagues have returned in recent years to long-neglected writers in the American realist tradition, including William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather....

Like Henry James before them, they saw themselves less as lonely romantic outposts of individual sensibility than as keen observers of society. They described the rough transition from the small town to the city, from rural life to industrial society, from a more homogeneous but racially divided population to a nation of immigrants. They recorded dramatic alterations in religious beliefs, moral values, social and sexual mores and class patterns. Novels like Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" and Wharton's "House of Mirth" showed how fiction paradoxically could serve fact and provide a more concrete sense of the real world than any other form of writing... This is how most readers have always read novels, not simply for escape, and certainly not mainly for art, but to get a better grasp of the world around them and the world inside them. "


To some extent, I tend to think that the present age does bear greater comparison with much of the Victorian period than with the first half of the twentieth century. In both cases, rapid technological change has helped to drive forward economic and social change. In both cases, the impact of economic growth was greater social inequality the two nations are increasingly divergent once more. Instead of the cataclysmic disruptions that dominated the first half of the twentieth century, social forces are at play that could theoretically be documented by modern writers in the same way that they were documented by Dickens and Eliot.

However, it nonetheless remains the case that any return to realist fiction seems unlikely at best; if there is a dominand force in modern literature it is probably magical realism. The realist novel rested on a numner of shared assumptions relating to social homogeneity rather than post-traditional individualism, and relating to notions of progress through commerce and science rather than scepticism with which both of those continue to be viewed. If I were to speculate as to the greatest modern writer, I would put the name of JG Ballard forward. His fractured, episodic narratives represent in many respects a return to the type of narrative that existed before nineteenth century realist fiction and suggests a route beyond it.

Labels: ,



posted by Richard 8:32 pm