Comments | felephant: Realism, the novel, Joyce, philosophy

felephant

Realism, the novel, Joyce, philosophy

Jan 19, 2015 20:31

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 ( Read more... )

Comments 10

Are they Lying, Though? ext_2972165 January 19 2015, 21:29:05 UTC

What exactly is it that's the challenge posed by the Wake (according to Anonymous-of-Reading-Group)? The idea that novels lie, well, OK, in some sense, in the sense that they're fiction, they do. But beyond that, it doesn't seem to make much sense as a claim unless we're going to generalise it into narratives of any form. But then we're into those general anxieties about narratives and partiality. And that's only really lying if you're Plato or a really poor reader. Maybe this is something that points away from authenticity back to something approximating sincerity.

Alternative: does it make sense to say that novels lie when it's structurally always so? If it's inescapable, then it's not as though it makes much sense as a claim because you can't point to a contrary case.

In phi, I'm sure I've seen critiques of thought experiments and similar habits of thought, usually on feminist grounds, on 'selectivity' and 'bias' grounds.

Also: wow, Livejournal. Actual 'subject' headers just for comments. Magical. Retro.

Re: Are they Lying, Though? felephant January 19 2015, 22:44:24 UTC

The thought is something like this: When the author says in the course of a fiction something like, "x shouted at y", then questions like, 'who's saying this?', 'to whom are they speaking?', 'how do they know what they know?', 'why do they say that rather than something else?', 'why do they say it how they say it?', 'why does the novelist permit them to say it?', 'is the claim known to be true by the characters?', 'in what way and to what extent known?', and so on for a while (ad infinitum?) are legitimate and proper responses. I get the sense that a lot of novelists want to shut down the questioning at a certain point: "the narrator's omniscient, she just knows", "yes all the characters know the claim", "they know it well enough". They want to simplify or streamline their world. But the world can't be so streamlined without becoming impossible, and presumably the world of realist fiction exists (or it's fictional that it exists) and is more or less the same as ours regarding physics and psychology and so on. So the authors in ( ... )

Re: Are they Lying, Though? ext_2972165 January 20 2015, 09:37:36 UTC

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

Re: Are they Lying, Though? felephant January 20 2015, 19:05:02 UTC

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.

mendaciloquent January 20 2015, 06:15:02 UTC

It's been a very long time since I've read "real" literature or thought much about it, and many more years since I've read Joyce, so I found this kind of refreshing. Not sure what to make of it, this sense of determinism, that anything must do this or that. Is it lying? Does anyone reading a story not know they're reading a story? "No-go zones" in London: that's lying, sure. But a novel ( ... )

felephant January 20 2015, 11:56:02 UTC

mendaciloquent January 20 2015, 19:52:04 UTC

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 ( ... )

felephant January 21 2015, 15:56:48 UTC

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 ( ( ... )

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