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

[felephant]

Like I said to Adam, I'm not particularly committed to authors lying. The point is that they say things they ought to know are false. I would think they all do know this to some extent - how can you not feel the tension between the world and your ability to capture it? - but maybe they don't. No matter: the point is not that they are consciously saying false things, but culpably saying false things.

'False things' - I do mean those transcendent-seeming truths, though I don't know why you call them 'transcendent'. I also mean more trivial truths: representing an event in a character's life - a tiny thing, a passing thought - as it is, for instance.

To your last question: My reading of Joyce is not that he's trying to put everything into every sentence. There's a fair bit of that, to be sure, but he's also trying to - how do I put this - he's trying to acknowledge the limitedness of what he can do by this way. You get the core meanings of a sentence, you get some of the immediate penumbra, and you just a vague hint of the more distant penumbra; and so you see the inadequacy of the sentence to its world. The sentence is like a light shone on the world, and it illuminates what's most near to it while what's further away is progressively dim and vague. Every sentence is like this: but only in Joyce does the sentence feel like this. That's what's honest in him, not his ability to say everything.

These answers are I think inadequate. I get the sense that your response is to be dwelt upon rather than answered like I've been doing. I'll do that. I'm glad you found this post refreshing though!

[mendaciloquent]

Like I said to Adam, I'm not particularly committed to authors lying. The point is that they say things they ought to know are false. I would think they all do know this to some extent - how can you not feel the tension between the world and your ability to capture it? - but maybe they don't. No matter: the point is not that they are consciously saying false things, but culpably saying false things.

I'm not sure if I understand the sense of "false" you mean here. I assume you don't mean that the author is "saying false things" simply by writing, because this would presume that either the author or the audience fundamentally doesn't "get" the premise of representational art. But I think it's safe to say that disclaimer is implicit and the artist is absolved of culpability, at least in that very literal sense of falsehood.

I mean "transcendent" in the sense that meaning and truth in fiction can become sort of disembodied. If you read a work of psychology, and the psychologist says, "People are generally like this," you can evaluate the truthfulness of that claim, in part because it's explicitly attached to the knowledge and competence of the person or institution making it. In a great work of literature, you might also come away with a feeling of "people are generally like this," but in a way that can be very detached from the scope and competence of the author. The author doesn't explicitly disclose themselves (usually) and the source of the meaning is distributed across points of phenomenological contact with your own life -- your memories, emotions, relationships. The veracity of the novel is nebulous. Even if you realize the work of art was written by some bourgeois douchebag a hundred years ago, it does no good, because all the ex post caveats you add will often not shake the fundamental feeling of something being true and significant at the time of reading it, even if it's bullshit.

Your third paragraph -- that is very well-put.

[felephant]

Perhaps I can illustrate better than describe what I mean by 'false'. (Because of course my objection is not that Anna Karenina, pace that filthy liar Tolstoy, doesn't exist.) Gilbert writes her unobtrusive and realist 19th-century North-American protagonist in an unobtrusive, literary-realist, Anglophone way. Beyond what the sentences describe - the fact that the protagonist did a certain thing, felt a certain way - the prose style suggests a certain world, and suggests certain things about the character's perspective and Weltanschauung and so on. For instance, it suggests that she thinks in full and grammatical sentences, and that the world is fairly neatly organised (into mine/thine, legal/illegal, inside/outside, thought/emotion, real/fantasy, etc.). Later, the protagonist finds herself in Tahiti; but the prose style doesn't change. It still suggests the Lebenswelt of 19th-century North America and so on. But this is no longer appropriate to the content; it suggests false things: for instance, that the dyads I mentioned above (mine/thine, etc.) are intact (or viable or helpful or whatever), even while the content of the novels challenges them. This is what I mean by 'false'.

(Of course, it could be deliberate: Gilbert could be telling the story in the protagonist's voice, and saying that the protagonist is so blinkered that she can't really see Tahiti. But that would be another, more complicated story that I'm putting aside here.)

To your second paragraph: If I understand you - I'm not sure I do - I want to strongly disagree. The worth of a novel is tied to the competence and insight of its author. The reason we still laud Brideshead Revisited and the Ring cycle (and, indeed, De Anima and Being and Time) is not because their truth isn't dependent on what their authors took themselves to be saying with the works, but because the authors' failings aren't so pervasive as to prevent them seeing and saying everything. So Waugh, for instance, who was a year's worth of steaming turd, is not a monster in every respect, and is still able to be insightful with regard to, for instance, the tension between love of God and love of a man.

I think it's very important to keep this connection. Otherwise we have no way of dealing with a roomful of typewriting monkeys who come up with Shakespeare. We can't say that that text is in English, let alone that it's profound or wise.

[mendaciloquent]

Hmm. I see what you're saying. Here's my problem. All of this assumes a kind of narrative realism, which seems to me a stylistic choice. It might be a very meaningful stylistic choice, but ultimately that's what it is, isn't it? And I'm not sure how we could describe other choices as being false. Distasteful maybe, uninteresting, but not false. Though if one upheld a pretense of realism in the work while failing to meet it squarely, I could see how this could be the case.

re:, the transcendent, I agree completely. I was describing my use of the word, not advocating for what it represents. What I was getting at is that if we forget or lose the connection to the author, and the other aspects of the work's context, it makes it easier for it to lie to us. Its truths appear to come out of nowhere, or to stand apart from the work itself.

[felephant]

"I'm not sure how we could describe other choices as being false."

Right, yes. Because we have to be able to say this of all sorts of things. Not even just other literary styles, but even abstract music. We say a climax or a resolution in music is 'false' if we feel it's been too cheaply won, if it comes out of nowhere emotionally speaking. I'm really keen to keep this strong alethic vocabulary. (It might even be necessary to explain why something can be 'distasteful'.) Perhaps there's something to be said for the Heideggerian serious looking at how truth is a-lethia, un-coveredness. Then we could say that abstract music and representational literature both are true insofar as they uncover something about, say, an emotional progression or a Weltanschauung, and false insofar as they fail to do so? Just a thought; I don't remember my Heidegger very well, and didn't understand it very well even when I was reading it.