Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

The Antinomies of Realism
The Antinomies of Realism
The Antinomies of Realism
Ebook480 pages8 hours

The Antinomies of Realism

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

1/5

()

Read preview

About this ebook

The Antinomies of Realism is a history ofthe nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Pérez Galdós, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since struggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narratives – what today’s book reviewers dub “serious novels,” which are an attempt at the impossible endeavor to roll back the past.

Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism’s emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history.

In contemporary writing, other forms of representation – for which the term “postmodern” is too glib – have become visible: for example, in the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel or the stylistic plurality of David Mitchell’s novels. Contemporary fiction is shown to be conducting startling experiments in the representation of new realities of a global social totality, modern technological warfare, and historical developments that, although they saturate every corner of our lives, only become apparent on rare occasions and by way of the strangest formal and artistic devices.

In a coda, Jameson explains how “realistic” narratives survived the end of classical realism. In effect, he provides an argument for the serious study of popular fiction and mass culture that transcends lazy journalism and the easy platitudes of recent cultural studies.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherVerso Books
Release dateOct 8, 2013
ISBN9781781681916
The Antinomies of Realism
Author

Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.

Read more from Fredric Jameson

Related to The Antinomies of Realism

Related ebooks

Literary Criticism For You

View More

Related articles

Related categories

Reviews for The Antinomies of Realism

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
1/5

1 rating0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    The Antinomies of Realism - Fredric Jameson

    Possible?

    Introduction: Realism and its Antinomies

    I have observed a curious development which always seems to set in when we attempt to hold the phenomenon of realism firmly in our mind’s eye. It is as though the object of our meditation began to wobble, and the attention to it to slip insensibly away from it in two opposite directions, so that at length we find we are thinking, not about realism, but about its emergence; not about the thing itself, but about its dissolution. Much great work, indeed, has been done on these lateral topics: on the former, for example, Ian Watt’s canonical Rise of the Novel and Michael McKeon’s monumental Origins of the Novel; and on the latter, any number of those collections entitled problems of realism (in which Lukács deplored the degeneration of realistic practice into naturalism, symbolism and modernism), or towards a new novel (in which Robbe-Grillet argued the unsuitability of Balzacian techniques for capturing our current realities). I will later explain how these slippages determined the form of the theory about to be presented.

    First, however, we must enumerate a number of other possibilities which are not explored here (but which this particular theoretical exercise is by no means intended to exclude). Thus, the most ancient literary category of all—mimesis—still inspires work and thought, enshrined as anthropology and psychology in the Frankfurt School’s idiosyncratic notion of the mimetic impulse; and provocatively worked out, following Lenin’s reflection theory (Widerspiegelung), by scholars like Robert Weimann.¹ (Auerbach’s use of the term, not exactly classical, will be mentioned below). Aristotle did not, of course, know that form we call the novel, a product of Hegel’s world of prose; nor are we taking theatrical practice into account in the present book (so much the worse for it!); and indeed, my suspicion is that later discussions of this term tend to be contaminated by those of the visual arts, and to be influenced either in the direction of representationality or abstraction (in painting) or that of Hollywood or the experimental in film.

    This is the moment at which to assert the inevitability, in the realism debate, of what has just been illustrated by the turn to visuality, namely the inescapable operative value, in any discussion of realism, of this or that binary opposition in terms of which it has been defined. It is this, above all, which makes any definitive resolution of the matter impossible: for one thing, binary opposites make unavoidable the taking of sides (unless, as with Arnold Hauser, or in a different way, Worringer, one sees it as some eternal cyclical alternation²). Realism, for or against: but as opposed to what? At this point the list becomes at least relatively interminable: realism vs. romance, realism vs. epic, realism vs. melodrama, realism vs. idealism,³ realism vs. naturalism, (bourgeois or critical) realism vs. socialist realism, realism vs. the oriental tale,⁴ and of course, most frequently rehearsed of all, realism vs. modernism. As is inevitably the case with such a play of opposites, each of them becomes inevitably invested with political and even metaphysical significance, as, with film criticism, in the now somewhat antiquated opposition between Hollywood realism and formal subversions such as those associated with the nouvelle vague and Godard.⁵ Most of these binary pairs will therefore arouse a passionate taking of sides, in which realism is either denounced or elevated to the status of an ideal (aesthetic or otherwise).

    The definition of realism by way of such oppositions can also take on a historical, or periodizing, character. Indeed, the opposition between realism and modernism already implies a historical narrative which it is fairly difficult to reduce to a structural or stylistic one; but which it is also difficult to control, since it tends to generate other periods beyond its limits, one of postmodernity, for example, if some putative end of the modern is itself posited; or of some preliminary stage of Enlightenment and secularization invoked to precede the period of realism as such, in a logic of periodization bound to lead on into the positioning of a classical system or a pre-capitalist system of fixed modes and genres, and so forth. Whether such a focus on periodization necessarily leads out of literary history into cultural history in general (and beyond that to the history of modes of production) probably depends on how one situates capitalism itself and its specific cultural system in the sequence in question. The focus, in other words, tends to relativize realism as one mode among many others, unless, by the use of mediatory concepts such as that of modernity, one places capitalism uniquely at the center of human history.

    For at this point another combination comes into play, and that is the tendency to identify realism with the novel itself as a uniquely modern form (but not necessarily a modernist one). Discussions of either concept tend to become indistinguishable from the other, at least when the history of either is invoked: the history of the novel is inevitably the history of the realist novel, against which or underneath which all the aberrant modes, such as the fantastic novel or the episodic novel, are subsumed without much protest. But by the same token, chronology is itself equally subsumed, and a Bakhtin can argue that novel-ness is itself a sign, perhaps the fundamental sign and symptom, of a modernity that can be found in the Alexandrian world fully as much as in the Ming dynasty.

    Indeed, Bakhtin is himself among the major figures for whom the novel, or realism as such, is both a literary phenomenon and a symptom of the quality of social life. For Bakhtin, the novel is the vehicle of polyphony or the recognition and expression of a multiplicity of social voices: it is therefore modern in its democratic opening onto an ideologically multiple population. Auerbach also invokes democracy in an analogous sense, even though for him the opening is global and consists in the conquest and achievement of a realist social life or modernity around the world.⁷ But for Auerbach realism, or mimesis in his sense, is a syntactic conquest, the slow appropriation of syntactic forms capable of holding together multiple levels of a complex reality and a secular daily life, whose twin climaxes in the West he celebrates in Dante and in Zola.

    Lukács is more ambivalent in his reading of the novel’s formal and historical record: in the Theory of the Novel, the form is essentially distinguished by its capacity of registering problematization and the irreconcilable contradictions of a purely secular modernity. The latter becomes reidentified as capitalism, in the later Lukács, and the novel with realism, whose task is now the reawakening of the dynamics of history.

    But in all three apologists for the realist novel as a form (so to speak), it is never very clear whether that form simply registers the advanced state of a given society or plays a part in society’s awareness of that advanced state and its potentialities (political and otherwise). This ambiguity (or hesitation) will characterize the evaluative approaches to realism I want to outline in this initial survey, and which grasp the problem in terms of form and content respectively.

    Realism as a form (or mode) is historically associated, particularly if you position the Quijote as the first (modern, or realist) novel, with the function of demystification. It is a function which can take many forms, in this foundational instance the undermining of romance as a genre, along with the use of its idealizing values to foreground features of the social reality they cannot accommodate. I have mentioned a first period of modernity in which the tasks of enlightenment and in particular secularization were fundamental (in a kind of bourgeois cultural revolution): these are for realism essentially negative, critical or destructive tasks which will later on give way to the construction of bourgeois subjectivity: but as the construction of the subject is always an intervention supported by taboos and inner restrictions of all kinds (one model of which is Weber’s protestant ethic), the eradication of inherited psychic structures and values will remain a function of realist narrative, whose force always comes from this painful cancellation of tenaciously held illusions. But later on, when the realistic novel begins to discover (or if you prefer, to construct) altogether new kinds of subjective experiences (from Dostoyevsky to Henry James), the negative social function begins to weaken, and demystification finds itself transformed into defamiliarization and the renewal of perception, a more modernist impulse, while the emotional tone of such texts tends towards resignation, renunciation or compromise, as both Lukács and Moretti have noted.

    But the very ideology of realism also tends to stage it in terms of content, and here clearly the realist mode is closely associated with the bourgeoisie and the coming into being of bourgeois daily life: this, I would like to insist, is also very much a construction, and it is a construction in which realism and narrative participate. Sartre argued that mimesis is always at least tendentially critical: holding up a mirror to nature, in this case bourgeois society, never really shows people what they want to see, and is always to that degree demystifying.⁹ Certainly the attacks on realism which have already been mentioned are based on the idea that the literature of realism has the ideological function of adapting its readers to bourgeois society as it currently exists, with its premium on comfort and inwardness, on individualism, on the acceptance of money as an ultimate reality (we might today speak of the acceptance of the market, of competition, of a certain image of human nature, and so forth). I myself argue elsewhere in this collection that the realistic novelist has a vested interest, an ontological stake, in the solidity of social reality, on the resistance of bourgeois society to history and to change.¹⁰ Meanwhile, it could also be argued that in a stylistic and ideological sense, the consumerism of late capitalism is no longer a bourgeois society in that sense, and no longer knows the forms of daily life that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: so that realism inevitably gives way to modernism insofar as its privileged content has become extinct. This argument thus makes a fundamental distinction between a bourgeois class culture and the economic dynamics of late capitalism.

    I have outlined these multiple approaches to realism not only to make the point about its contextual variability as an object, but also to admit, finally, that I plan to do none of these things here. Realism, as I argued elsewhere, is a hybrid concept, in which an epistemological claim (for knowledge or truth) masquerades as an aesthetic ideal, with fatal consequences for both of these incommensurable dimensions.¹¹ If it is social truth or knowledge we want from realism, we will soon find that what we get is ideology; if it is beauty or aesthetic satisfaction we are looking for, we will quickly find that we have to do with outdated styles or mere decoration (if not distraction). And if it is history we are looking for—either social history or the history of literary forms—then we are at once confronted with questions about the uses of the past and even the access to it which, as unanswerable as they may be, take us well beyond literature and theory and seem to demand an engagement with our own present.¹²

    From a dialectical standpoint it is not hard to see why this is so. Both sociology and aesthetics are superannuated forms of thinking and inquiry, inasmuch as neither society nor what is called cultural or aesthetic experience are in this present of time stable substances that can be studied empirically and analyzed philosophically. History, meanwhile, if it is anything at all, is at one with the dialectic, and can only be the problem of which it claims to be the solution.

    My experiment here claims to come at realism dialectically, not only by taking as its object of study the very antinomies themselves into which every constitution of this or that realism seems to resolve: but above all by grasping realism as a historical and even evolutionary process in which the negative and the positive are inextricably combined, and whose emergence and development at one and the same time constitute its own inevitable undoing, its own decay and dissolution. The stronger it gets, the weaker it gets; winner loses; its success is its failure. And this is meant, not in the spirit of the life cycle (ripeness is all), or of evolution or of entropy or historical rises and falls: it is to be grasped as a paradox and an anomaly, and the thinking of it as a contradiction or an aporia. Yet as Derrida observed, the aporia is not so much an absence of path, a paralysis before roadblocks so much as the promise of the thinking of the path.¹³ For me, however, aporetic thinking is precisely the dialectic itself; and the following exercise will therefore be for better or for worse a dialectical experiment.

    But we need to have a better idea of what Deleuze might have called the image of the concept, the shape of some new dialectical solution, before continuing. Hegel’s thoughts certainly had some distinctive shapes, but it is not a question of adopting any of those forms here and today; nor does the word dialectical give us much help except to revive antiquated formulas, many of which are not even historically accurate.

    The unity of opposites, for example, will certainly characterize a situation in which what brings a phenomenon into being also gradually undermines and destroys it. But the content of these fundamental categories is not identifiable: what is negative and what is positive in the trajectory of realism (it being understood that the struggles over its ideological value are not yet even in play here)? Indeed, on any responsible reading of Hegel it will have been clear that what is positive in its own eyes is negative from the standpoint of its opposite number, and vice versa: so nothing much is gained here except the notion of unity—unity not as synthesis but rather as antagonism, the unity of attraction and repulsion, the unity of struggle.

    What is also gained—but it may well simply have been some unconscious structuralist premise, smuggled in avant la lettre—is the sense that we still have to do here with a binary opposition. I have argued elsewhere that the play of oppositions we have grown accustomed to since structuralism is not some newfangled linguistic supplement, but already exists fully developed in Hegel’s own time and work, who derives them from ancient philosophy.¹⁴ But now what we need to do is not only to give some literary content to this abstract form, but also to demonstrate such an opposition at work within realism itself (and not externally, between realism and some other kind of discourse). Meanwhile, the superficial traits that come at first to mind—the new plain-language écriture versus the language of dialogue, for example—must not only be specific to realism itself but must also entertain some relationship to the seemingly more external question of realism’s coming into being and going hence.

    Taken all together in bulk, the heterogeneous materials that somehow end up coalescing into what we call the novel—or realism!—include the following: ballads and broadsheets, newspaper sketches, memoirs, diaries and letters, the Renaissance tale, and even popular forms like the play or the folk- or fairy-tale. What is selected from such a mass of different types of writing is its narrative component (even when, as for Balzac or Dickens, that component is first offered as a seemingly static description of characteristic types or activities, of picturesque or costumbrista evocations). To put it this way is to isolate something like a narrative impulse which is also realized in the novel as a form, but perhaps does not exhaust the novel’s energy sources.

    What could then constitute the opposite of the narrative impulse as such? Taken thus abstractly and speculatively we could surely think of any number of non-narrative sentence types: judgements, for example, such as the moral a storyteller might want to add on at the end, or a bit of the folk wisdom with which George Eliot liked to regale her readers. But the most inveterate alternative to narrative as such reminds us that storytelling is a temporal art, and always seems to single out a painterly moment in which the onward drive of narrative is checked if not suspended altogether. The shield of Achilles!: this is the most famous instance of that suspension of narrative which still remained to be theorized as late as Lessing’s Laocoon in the late eighteenth century. Will the ancient rhetorical trope of ekphrasis be sufficient to fold this descriptive impulse back into narrative homogeneity?

    Everyone knows the patience one must bring to his novels as Balzac slowly sets in place his various components—description of the town, history of the profession, the loving enumeration of the parts of the house, inside and out, the family itself, the physiognomy of the protagonist and his or her favorite clothes, his or her favorite emploi du temps—in short, all those different types of discourse which as raw material were to have been fused back together in this new form, but which Balzac unapologetically requires us to plow through on our way to the story itself (which will eventually satisfy any taste for reckless momentum, suspense and action we may have had to hold in check during those opening pages).

    But if all it accomplished was to lead us back to Lessing and the status of ekphrasis today, this search for the opposite of the narrative impulse will not have been very productive. Perhaps, indeed, the more satisfactory identification of narrative’s opposite number is better sought at the other end of the history of the genre, namely at the moment of realism’s dissolution, which we always seem to call modernism, without feeling the need to rummage among the innumerable modernisms, not all of them reducible to a single denominator in the first place.

    But this procedure, which assumes that by subtracting the modern from narrative we will be left with the essence of realism, assumes that some general definition of what modernism is (or was) is available, an optimistic assumption which generally results in a few stereotypical formulae (it is subjectivist—the inward turn; reflexive or conscious of its own procedures; formalistic in the sense of a heightened attention to its own raw materials; anti-narrative; and deeply imbued with a mystique of art itself). Roland Barthes took a wiser and more prudent position on the matter: When it comes to the ‘modern,’ you can only carry out tactical-style operations: at certain times you feel it’s necessary to intervene to signal some shift in the landscape or some new inflection in modernity.¹⁵ But his own experience, to be sure, expressed the preoccupations of the post-war period, in which, in what I have called the late modern, the effort to theorize and to name what had happened in the first half of the twentieth century became a dominant theoretical ambition.

    There are also more paradoxical trajectories to be followed: as for example in film, where Tom Gunning has identified what in our present context might be described as a movement from modernism to realism. D. W. Griffith, who rightly or wrongly is traditionally credited with having invented the modern (fiction) film as we know it (relying indeed very heavily on literature and in particular on Dickens), began with atmospheric sketches (of a photographic nature) which it was his mission to develop into plots and narrativity as such.¹⁶

    The example suggests that, whatever thematic clue we choose to follow in our identification of the opposite number to the narrative impulse, its theorization will ultimately involve that most paradoxical of philosophical problems, namely the conceptualization of time and temporality. In the world of art, it is a dilemma compounded by our limited vocabulary: for even the récit or tale, whose events are already over and done with before the telling of it can begin, is experienced by listener or reader (and above all, of course, by the viewer) as a present of time, but it is of course our present, the present of reading time, and not that of the events themselves.

    So in what follows I will approach the question of realism from the angle of temporality; and I will suggest that the opposite number of that chronological temporality of the récit has somehow to do with a present; but with a different kind of presence than the one marked out by the tripartite temporal system of past-present-future, or even by that of the before and after. For all kinds of reasons, to be developed in the following pages, I will identify this present—or what Alexander Kluge calls the insurrection of the present against the other temporalities¹⁷—as the realm of affect.

    As the rather crude misuse of this term will be explained later on, I might as well generalize our other impulse with equally decisive approximation and replace the very general word narrative with a far sharper and more limited Fremdwort, which is the French récit, and which transforms narrative into the narrative situation itself and the telling of a tale as such.

    This means that we now have in our grasp the two chronological end points of realism: its genealogy in storytelling and the tale, its future dissolution in the literary representation of affect. A new concept of realism is then made available when we grasp both these terminal points firmly at one and the same time.

    A number of images come to mind for the shape of this thought: the electrical one of negative and positive currents is perhaps not the most reassuring one. But one can also imagine the strands of DNA winding tightly about each other, or a chemical process in which the introduction of a fresh reagent precipitates a combination which then slowly dissolves again as too much of the element in question is added. But it is the dialectical formulation which, taken as an image of thought rather than a philosophical proposition in its own right, still strikes me as the most suggestive: for in it positive force becomes negative (quantity changing into quality) without the determination of a threshold being required, and emergence and dissolution are thought together in the unity of a single thought, beyond all-too-human judgements that claim to separate the positive from the negative, the good from the bad. Still, what I will want to insist on in such images is the irrevocable antagonism between the twin (and entwined) forces in question: they are never reconciled, never fold back into one another in some ultimate reconciliation and identity; and the very force and pungency of the realist writing I here examine is predicated on that tension, which must remain an impossible one, under pain of losing itself altogether and dissipating if it is ever resolved in favor of one of the parties to the struggle.

    What we call realism will thus come into being in the symbiosis of this pure form of storytelling with impulses of scenic elaboration, description and above all affective investment, which allow it to develop towards a scenic present which in reality, but secretly, abhors the other temporalities which constitute the force of the tale or récit in the first place.

    The new scenic impulse will also detect its enemies in the hierarchy of characters who people the tale, which can scarcely be conceived without a protagonist. In particular, it will wage a ceaseless muffled battle against the structures of melodrama by which it is ceaselessly menaced; in the process also throwing off other genres such as the Bildungsroman, which for a while seemed so central to it as to define it. Its final battle will be raged in the microstructures of language and in particular against the dominance of point of view which seems to hold the affective impulses in check and lend them the organizing attribution of a central consciousness. Engaging this final battle will however exhaust and destroy it, and realism thereby leaves an odd assortment of random tools and techniques to its shrivelled posterity, who still carry its name on into an era of mass culture and rival media.

    So Part One of the present text is by way of offering a phenomenological and structural model, an experiment which posits a unique historical situation without exploring the content of that situation, as so many indispensable studies of the various realisms have already done. Of the two chronological sequels to the moment of realism—modernism and postmodernism—only the latter outcome will be briefly sketched in conclusion. The essay that comprises Part One is followed by three monographs on the relationships of narrative possibility to its specific raw material. The Antinomies of Realism constitutes the third volume of the sequence called The Poetics of Social Forms.

    April 2013

    ¹ Robert Weimann, Mimesis in Hamlet, in Geoffrey Hartman and Patricia Parker, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, New York: Routledge, 1985; and see also Dieter Schlenstedt, ed., Literarische Widerspiegelung, Berlin: Aufbau, 1981.

    ² I refer to Arnold Hauser’s Social History of Art (1954) as well as Wilhelm Worringer’s influential and rather cosmological oppositions in Abstraction and Empathy (1907).

    ³ The provocative concept of an idealist novel was developed by Naomi Schor in her study of George Sand and elaborated by Jane Tomkins in her work on the American western, where it also involved Christian religious and familial traditions (which the traditional western functioned to undermine).

    ⁴ See Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

    ⁵ And with Screen magazine in its heyday in the 1960s and ‘70s.

    ⁶ See, for example, his essay, Epic and Novel, in Michael Holquist, ed., The Dialogical Imagination, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

    ⁷ Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, 552, a common life of mankind on earth.

    ⁸ The most succinct summary of Lukács’ formal views is to be found in Narrate or Describe? in George Lukács, Writer and Critic, London: Merlin, 1970. We will see that this opposition is fundamental in explaining his (equally political) rejection of Zola’s naturalism.

    ⁹ Jean-Paul Sartre, "What is Literature?" and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, 91: The mirror which he modestly offers to his readers is magical: it enthralls and compromises.

    ¹⁰ See The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism, in Part Two of this volume.

    ¹¹ See Jameson, The Existence of Italy, in Signatures of the Visible, New York: Routledge, 1992.

    ¹² It is not only the content of literature which is itself profoundly historical (and necessarily has its own shaping influence on the form), it is also the sensory medium itself; it is always instructive to recall Marx on the history of the senses (Early Writings, London: Penguin, 1975, 351–55).

    ¹³ Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, 132.

    ¹⁴ See Michael N. Forster, Hegel and Skepticism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, 10–13, on equipollence.

    ¹⁵ Quoted in Alain Robbe-Grillet, Why I Love Barthes, trans. Andrew Brown, London: Polity, 2011, 39. My own proposals on modernism can be found in A Singular Modernity, London: Verso, 2002.

    ¹⁶ See Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

    ¹⁷ The title of one of his books: Der Angriff der Gegenwart gegen die übrige Zeit, Frankfurt: Europaeische Verlagsanstalt, 1985.

    PART I

    THE ANTINOMIES OF REALISM

    Chapter I

    The Twin Sources of Realism: The Narrative Impulse

    If there is anything distinctive to be discovered about realism, then, we will not find it without somehow distinguishing between realism and narrative in general, or without, at least, mapping some vague general zone of narrative which lies outside it (at the same time including it as well, since the realisms are presumably narratives themselves). Single-shot answers always seem possible: the fantastic, for example, or so-called primitive myth (the very word mythos means narrative); or in some narrower and more literary sense, the epic (insofar as we distinguish it from the novel), or the oral tale, insofar as we distinguish it from the written one.

    This is not the solution I want to begin with here, for I am looking for a storytelling impulse that precedes the formation of the realist novel and yet persists within it, albeit transformed by a host of new connections and relationships. I will call the products of this impulse simply the tale, with the intent of emphasizing its structural versatility, its aptness for transformation and exploitation by the other forms just enumerated. The tale can thereby be pressed into service by epic performance fully as much as by tribal and mythic storytelling, by the Renaissance art-novella and its equivalents in the Romantic period, by the ballad, by sub-forms and subgenres like the ghost story or SF, indeed by the very forms and strictures of the short story itself, as a specific strict formal practice in its own right with its own history.

    At the level of abstraction at which we are working, then, the tale becomes the generalized object of which narration is the generalized production process or activity, but this generic specification also becomes a convenient way of evading psychological or anthropological analysis of that activity, which would be a distraction in our present context.

    Yet we may retain one feature from traditional or modern psychological theories of the faculties and/or functions, in which narrativity might be opposed to cognition for example, or emotion to reason; and that is the requirement that the storytelling function, if we want to call it that, must form part of an opposition, must be defined against something else: otherwise the potentiality we are trying to circumscribe risks extending over the entire field of mental activity, everything becoming narrative, everything becoming a kind of story.¹

    So it is that in an influential pronouncement of the 1920s, Ramon Fernandez developed an opposition between the tale and the novel—or rather, to use the more precise and only imperfectly translatable French terms, between the récit and the roman.² It was a distinction that proved useful for several generations of French writers from Gide to Sartre; and that will remain helpful for us here, particularly since the same general opposition has taken somewhat different forms in other national traditions.

    In effect, Fernandez organized his distinction around two distinct genres, which may be taken as markers for either historical developments or structural variations. Translators have tried to render récit in English with its cognate, the recital, which is suggestive only to the degree to which someone might recite an account or even a chronicle of events. But even the word tale, which I prefer here, bears a weight of generic connotation, and can easily crystallize back into historical forms such as the Renaissance novella or the Romantic art-story.

    This is the sense in which the active content of Fernandez’ theory lies in the opposition itself and the differentiation it generates. For in itself, the term novel is even less structurally operative here than that of the récit: the latter can be more rigorously specified, particularly with the use of those national variants I mentioned. As for the novel itself, however (not to speak of the realist novel which interests us here), very little is to be deduced from Fernandez’ opposition, and writers have tended to fill in their own blank check according to their aesthetic and their ideology.

    So it is that Gide, conceiving of the récit as the tale of a unique personal existence or destiny (mostly, for him, a tale told in the first person), is able to draw the conclusion that the novel ought then to be a "carrefour," a crossroads or meeting place of multiple destinies, multiple récits. The only book of his own that he was willing to call a novel, then, Les faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), offers just such a convergence of a number of different life stories; and it may be agreed that many writers, particularly those specializing in the short story, have thought of the novel in this general way, as a sort of formal Everest to be confronted.

    Sartre, on the other hand, has a much more philosophical and ideological conception of this opposition, which he grasps in temporal terms and wields with no little critical and polemic power. Here is his evocation of the Maupassant short story, which he grasps as a kind of bourgeois social institution and translates into a concrete after-dinner situation set in the den of cigar-smoking affluent men:

    The procedure is nowhere more manifest than in Maupassant. The structure of his short stories is almost invariable; we are first presented with the audience, a brilliant and worldly society which has assembled in a drawing-room after dinner. It is night-time, which dispels fatigue and passion. The oppressed are asleep, as are the rebellious; the world is enshrouded; the story unfolds. In a bubble of light surrounded by nothing there remains this élite which stays awake, completely occupied with its ceremonies. If there are intrigues or love or hate among its members, we are not told of them, and desire and anger are likewise stilled; these men and women are occupied in preserving their culture and manners and in recognizing each other by the rites of politeness. They represent order in its most exquisite form; the calm of night, the silence of the passions, everything concurs in symbolizing the stable bourgeoisie of the end of the century which thinks that nothing more will happen and which believes in the eternity of capitalist organization. Thereupon, the narrator is introduced. He is a middle-aged man who has seen much, read much, and retained much, a professional man of experience, a doctor, a military man, an artist, or a Don Juan. He has reached the time of life when, according to a respectful and comfortable myth, man is freed from the passions and considers with an indulgent clear-sightedness those he has experienced. His heart is calm, like the night. He tells his story with detachment. If it has caused him suffering, he has made honey from this suffering. He looks back upon it and considers it as it really was, that is, sub specie aeternitatis. There was difficulty to be sure, but this difficulty ended long ago; the actors are dead or married or comforted. Thus, the adventure was a brief disturbance which is over with. It is told from the viewpoint of experience and wisdom; it is listened to from the viewpoint of order. Order triumphs; order is everywhere; it contemplates an old disorder as if the still waters of a summer day have preserved the memory of the ripples which have run through it.³

    Gide practiced both genres; Sartre has nothing but contempt for the kind of anecdote which forms the structural core of the récit and which he associates with the oppressive cult of experience wielded by the older generation over the younger (see La nausée). But it is precisely that judgement that allows him to formulate what the novel ought to be—the authentic, existential novel—in temporal terms.

    The time of the récit is then a time of the preterite, of events completed, over and done with, events that have entered history once and for all. It will be clear enough what a philosophy of freedom must object to in such an inauthentic and reified temporality: it necessarily blocks out the freshness of the event happening, along with the agony of decision of its protagonists. It omits, in other words, the present of time and turns the future into a dead future (what this or that character anticipated in 1651 or in 1943). Clearly enough, then, what Sartre calls upon the novel to reestablish is the open present of freedom, the present of an open, undecided future, where the die has not yet been cast, to use one of his favorite expressions. The aesthetic of the existential novel will then bend its narrative instruments to the recreation of this open present, in which not even the past is set in stone, insofar as our acts in the present rewrite and modify it.

    We will not fully appreciate the force of this conception of the novel until we recall the devastating critique of François Mauriac’s novels, with their sense of impending doom, their melodramatic rhetorical gestures (this fatal gesture, she was not then to know, this encounter, in retrospect so full of consequences, etc.), their built-in predictable mechanisms of sin and judgement. All this, Sartre tells us, is narrated from above, with a God-like omniscience of past and future alike. Dieu n’est pas bon romancier, he concludes, M. Mauriac non plus.

    But just as surely, even though more subtly, the Sartrean recipe for the novel is shaped and determined, preselected, by its own historical content: the time of the momentous decision and the impending Event, the effacement of everyday life and the iteratives of peacetime, the pressure of what he called extreme situations. The Sartrean taboo on foreknowledge will be replicated in a somewhat different way by the Jamesian ideology of point of view, and both will be appropriated, as we shall see, for far more inauthentic purposes after the end of realism as such, in what I will call a more commercial realism after realism.

    What we can retain of the Sartrean perspective on the récit, however, is its insistence on irrevocability, on which a somewhat different light is shed by the German tradition, relatively poor in novels as it may be, but extraordinarily rich in storytelling of all kinds, particularly in the Romantic era. We have, for example, Goethe’s memorable encapsulation of the content of storytelling as an "unerhörte Begebenheit"⁵—an unheard-of event or conjuncture, one thereby itself memorable and worthy of retelling over and over again, and of being passed down in the family and even the community: the time of the single lightning bolt that killed three people at once, the time of the great flood, of the invasion of the barbarians, the time Lizzie Borden took an axe, and so forth. It is then this time of the memorable event, of the traditional tale or story, that Walter Benjamin memorialized in his great essay The Storyteller (on Leskov).

    Indeed, Benjamin makes it clear what so many examples of the "unerhörte Begebenheit have in common: namely death. Warming your hands on a death that is told" is the way he characterizes the récit⁶; and if we feel that this is too bleak, we may substitute for death simply the mark of the irrevocable. This irrevocability adds a new dimension to Sartre’s critique of the inauthenticity of the récit: the temporal past is now redefined in terms of what cannot be changed, what lies beyond the reach of repetition or rectification, which now comes to be seen as

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1