Realism, the novel, Joyce, philosophy

[felephant]

The Ulysses reading group is still going strong (five weeks? left), and we've some of us agreed to continue on to Beckett's prose works afterwards. I'm also reading The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert in my own time (and have read a fair few contemporary novels recently, as well webcomics, poetry, graphic novels, etc.), reading and

Comments

Re: Are they Lying, Though?

[ext_2972165]

That is some good cohering and helping, to answer the last first.

That first chunk of questions are operating on different planes, right? So to wonder "who said this?" or "did they bellow or merely raise their voice?" are matters 'within' the book, perhaps trying to correlate the report and an underlying happening. "Why does the novelist permit them to say it?" is really a question about authorial intent, or the craft of the thing, something to be settled by reference to the work as a whole, etc etc.

The 'streamlining' kind of anxiety makes sense only against the backdrop of thinking anything better is possible. And I'm not sure it is, or at least doing so privileges one particular world-view over others. You'll have seen the recent thing on Crooked Timber about historical fiction and truth/accuracy, so I'd really just be repeating that but denying that the cold analytic view is the objective view it pretends to be. Complaining about the lack of detail w/r/t physics and so in seems a bit churlish-the author knows that you the reader know roughly how these things work and that means they can get on with the rest. And is this a stricture we'd want to apply to every kind of document? The map can't match the whole territory without suffocating it completely. (Also something something Nietzsche perspectives something.)

I was unclear before because my eyes were trying to claw themselves free. It might just be a category error to look for a certain kind of facticity in fiction. The kind of honesty fiction can or can't aspire to is the woolly 'truths about the human condition' kind. And almost no writer will be a liar on that scale but inept instead (I can think of exceptions but they're only really folk who are mendacious beginning-to-end). Anonymous Allusionist is indeed great at grabbing all that stuff out of the air and linking it but I wonder if he's underestimating the degree to which he's extremely skilled at filtering and linking. What remains can indeed be enough provided one is good enough at saying 'yay' and 'nay'.

Failed to remember sources of thought-experiment critique. But it must be out there somewhere. Basically something about how the choice of what to describe and what to leave out itself being an expression of bias, often subconsciously.

The retro is good. But it took ten minutes to come up with a title that was not itself inadequate and therefore a lie. You can see the failure that ensued.

Re: Are they Lying, Though?

[felephant]

I don't mean to suggest that Joyce is not streamlining. What I'm saying is, first, that he does it less, and is perhaps more honest to that extent (though this claim would have to be treated carefully if it's to avoid foolishly criticising minimalists like Beckett); and secondly, more importantly, that he is open about his streamlining, and avoids pretending that the world is as measly as his representations of it are. (Perhaps the third paragraph of my response to Mendy below is helpful if this isn't clear.) Perhaps his openness is also found in physics, which is explicitly creating inadequate but adequate-enough models, and this is why it seems churlish to complain about the models' inadequacy? Not that I know anything about physics.

You don't need to have a title for comments. It's actually kind of adorable that you thought you needed one. You'll be cool yet; when LJ is revived with the anti-brevity fad that must be just 'round the corner you can tell all the wide-eyed ex-Twitterati visiting here how civilisation works.