A pleasure to read, with a lot to chew on, including much - in very sophisticated vein - on the conventions of good literary 'realism' that are worth being aware of for many reasons, as both reader and writer, not least in order to be thoughtful about the extent to which I should aim to follow them, and some of the implications of seeking other answers to the problems those conventions have developed to address.
It's tempting to quote whole long passages, but instead I've bought my own copy to mark and no doubt re-read (I've already read it twice through). Sections that especially caught my attention below.
* * *
[W]hen I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I am talking about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I am talking about detail I am really talking about character, and when I am talking about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my enquiries. (3)
Narrating
As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking ... this is called free indirect style [or] 'close third person' ... (8-9)
[T]he novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author's own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character's presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world - the language which fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging. ... the language of the world ... has invaded our subjectivity. (28-9)
Flaubert and Modern Narrative
Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible.We hardly remark of good prose that it favours the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. (32)
Flaubert perfected a technique that is essential to realist narration: the confusing of habitual detail with dynamic detail. Obviously, in that Paris street, the women cannot be yawning for the same length of time as the washing is quivering or the newspapers lying on the table. Flaubert's details belong to different time-signatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously. The effect is lifelike - in a beautifully artificial way. Flaubert manages to suggest that these details are somehow at once important and unimportant: important because they have been noticed by him and put down on paper, and unimportant because they are all jumbled together, seen as if out of the corner of the eye; they seem to come as us 'like life'. (34)
Flaubert and the Rise of the Flâneur
[In Flaubertian realism] The tension between the style of the author and the style of the character disappears because literary style itself is made to disappear. It is lifelike because detail really does hit us ... in a tattoo of randomness. And we do exist in different time-signatures. ... The artifice lies in the selection of detail. (46-7)
Detail
How would we know when a detail seems really true? ... [Thisness:] any detail that draws abstraction towards itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centres our attention with its concretion. (54)
[F]ictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself. In other words, the category of the irrelevant or inexplicable exists in life ... [Life] will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. ... [in realism] the margin of surplus itself feels like life ... (68, 69)
Character
[T]he vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence and even plain plausibility - let alone likeability - than with a larger, philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character's actions are profoundly important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters. That is how readers retain in their minds a sense of the character 'Isabel Archer', even if they cannot tell you what she is exactly like. We remember her in the way we remember an obscurely significant day: something important has been enacted here. (98)
[In character] It is subtlety that matters - subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure - and for subtlety a very small point of entry will do. (99)
A Brief History of Consciousness
The novel has changed the art of characterisation partly by changing who a character is being seen by. ... in Raskolnikov's story the audience - the reader - is invisible but all-seeing; so the reader has replaced David's God and Macbeth's audience. ... the novel becomes the great analyst of unconscious motive, since the character is released from having to voice his motives: the reader becomes the hermeneut, looking between the lines for the actual motive. (108, 112, 113)
Dostoevskian character has at least three layers. On the top layer is the announced motive: Raskolnikov, say, proposes several justifications for his murder of the old woman. The second layer involves unconscious motivation, those strange inversions wherein love turns into hate and guilt expresses itself as poisonous, sickly love. ... The third, and bottom layer of motive is beyond explanation and can only be understood religiously. These characters act like this because they want to be known ... (122)
Sympathy and Complexity
Since Plato and Aristotle, fictional and dramatic narrative has provoked two large, recurring discussions: one is centred around the question of mimesis and the real (what should fiction represent?); and the other around the question of sympathy, and how fictional narrative exercises it. Gradually, these two recurrent discussions merge ... (130)
Language
One way to tell slick genre prose from really interesting writing is to look, in the former case, for the absence of different registers. ... rich and daring prose avails itself of harmony and dissonance by being able to move in and out of place. ... We have a conventional expectation that prose should be written in only one, unvarying register [but] this is a social convention ... (148)
... the style of the sentence [should] incarnate the meaning ... (151)
Metaphor which is 'successful' in a poetic sense but which is at the same time character-appropriate metaphor - the kind of metaphor which this particular character or community would produce - is one way of resolving the tension between author and character, as we saw when discussing the 'leggy thing' of the nutcracker in Pnin. ... metaphor [can be] not explicitly tied to a character. It issues forth in third-person narration. So it seems to be produced by the stylish, metaphor-making author, but it also hovers around the character, and seems to emanate from that character's world. (159, 160)
Dialogue
Truth, Convention, Realism
[T]he reigning assumptions. Realism is a 'genre' (rather than, say, a central impulse in fiction-making); it is taken to be mere dead convention, and to be related to a certain kind of traditional plot, with predictable beginnings and endings; it deals in 'round' characters, but softly and piously ('conventional humanisms'); it assumes that the world can be described, with a naively stable link between word and referent ... and all this will tend toward a conservative or even oppressive politics ... This is more or less nonsense. (169)
The style could be called commercial realism. It lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent story-telling, itself derived from the more original grammar of Flaubert ... writing of this sort has indeed become a kind of invisible rule-book, whereby we no longer notice its artificialities. ... Decomposition like this happens to any long-lived and successful style, [so the] task is then to search for the irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity, the element in a style which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced. (174, 175-6)
The point to make about convention is not that it is untruthful per se, but that it has a way of becoming, by repetition, steadily more and more conventional. (178)
[Brigid Lowe] proposes that we restore the Greek rhetorical term hypotyposis, which means to put something before our eyes, to bring it alive for us. (179)
[L]et us replace the always problematic word 'realism' with the much more problematic word 'truth' ... (180)
George Eliot: 'Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowman beyond the bounds of our personal lot.' ... art is not life itself, art is always an artifice, is always mimesis - but art is the nearest thing to life. (181)
[W]e are likely to think of the desire to be truthful about life - the desire to produce art that accurately sees 'the way things are' - as a universal literary motive and project, the broad central language of the novel and drama ... the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable ageing. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional. (183-4, 186-7)
It's tempting to quote whole long passages, but instead I've bought my own copy to mark and no doubt re-read (I've already read it twice through). Sections that especially caught my attention below.
* * *
[W]hen I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I am talking about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I am talking about detail I am really talking about character, and when I am talking about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my enquiries. (3)
Narrating
As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking ... this is called free indirect style [or] 'close third person' ... (8-9)
[T]he novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author's own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character's presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world - the language which fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging. ... the language of the world ... has invaded our subjectivity. (28-9)
Flaubert and Modern Narrative
Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible.We hardly remark of good prose that it favours the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. (32)
Flaubert perfected a technique that is essential to realist narration: the confusing of habitual detail with dynamic detail. Obviously, in that Paris street, the women cannot be yawning for the same length of time as the washing is quivering or the newspapers lying on the table. Flaubert's details belong to different time-signatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously. The effect is lifelike - in a beautifully artificial way. Flaubert manages to suggest that these details are somehow at once important and unimportant: important because they have been noticed by him and put down on paper, and unimportant because they are all jumbled together, seen as if out of the corner of the eye; they seem to come as us 'like life'. (34)
Flaubert and the Rise of the Flâneur
[In Flaubertian realism] The tension between the style of the author and the style of the character disappears because literary style itself is made to disappear. It is lifelike because detail really does hit us ... in a tattoo of randomness. And we do exist in different time-signatures. ... The artifice lies in the selection of detail. (46-7)
Detail
How would we know when a detail seems really true? ... [Thisness:] any detail that draws abstraction towards itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centres our attention with its concretion. (54)
[F]ictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself. In other words, the category of the irrelevant or inexplicable exists in life ... [Life] will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. ... [in realism] the margin of surplus itself feels like life ... (68, 69)
Character
[T]he vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence and even plain plausibility - let alone likeability - than with a larger, philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character's actions are profoundly important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters. That is how readers retain in their minds a sense of the character 'Isabel Archer', even if they cannot tell you what she is exactly like. We remember her in the way we remember an obscurely significant day: something important has been enacted here. (98)
[In character] It is subtlety that matters - subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure - and for subtlety a very small point of entry will do. (99)
A Brief History of Consciousness
The novel has changed the art of characterisation partly by changing who a character is being seen by. ... in Raskolnikov's story the audience - the reader - is invisible but all-seeing; so the reader has replaced David's God and Macbeth's audience. ... the novel becomes the great analyst of unconscious motive, since the character is released from having to voice his motives: the reader becomes the hermeneut, looking between the lines for the actual motive. (108, 112, 113)
Dostoevskian character has at least three layers. On the top layer is the announced motive: Raskolnikov, say, proposes several justifications for his murder of the old woman. The second layer involves unconscious motivation, those strange inversions wherein love turns into hate and guilt expresses itself as poisonous, sickly love. ... The third, and bottom layer of motive is beyond explanation and can only be understood religiously. These characters act like this because they want to be known ... (122)
Sympathy and Complexity
Since Plato and Aristotle, fictional and dramatic narrative has provoked two large, recurring discussions: one is centred around the question of mimesis and the real (what should fiction represent?); and the other around the question of sympathy, and how fictional narrative exercises it. Gradually, these two recurrent discussions merge ... (130)
Language
One way to tell slick genre prose from really interesting writing is to look, in the former case, for the absence of different registers. ... rich and daring prose avails itself of harmony and dissonance by being able to move in and out of place. ... We have a conventional expectation that prose should be written in only one, unvarying register [but] this is a social convention ... (148)
... the style of the sentence [should] incarnate the meaning ... (151)
Metaphor which is 'successful' in a poetic sense but which is at the same time character-appropriate metaphor - the kind of metaphor which this particular character or community would produce - is one way of resolving the tension between author and character, as we saw when discussing the 'leggy thing' of the nutcracker in Pnin. ... metaphor [can be] not explicitly tied to a character. It issues forth in third-person narration. So it seems to be produced by the stylish, metaphor-making author, but it also hovers around the character, and seems to emanate from that character's world. (159, 160)
Dialogue
Truth, Convention, Realism
[T]he reigning assumptions. Realism is a 'genre' (rather than, say, a central impulse in fiction-making); it is taken to be mere dead convention, and to be related to a certain kind of traditional plot, with predictable beginnings and endings; it deals in 'round' characters, but softly and piously ('conventional humanisms'); it assumes that the world can be described, with a naively stable link between word and referent ... and all this will tend toward a conservative or even oppressive politics ... This is more or less nonsense. (169)
The style could be called commercial realism. It lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent story-telling, itself derived from the more original grammar of Flaubert ... writing of this sort has indeed become a kind of invisible rule-book, whereby we no longer notice its artificialities. ... Decomposition like this happens to any long-lived and successful style, [so the] task is then to search for the irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity, the element in a style which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced. (174, 175-6)
The point to make about convention is not that it is untruthful per se, but that it has a way of becoming, by repetition, steadily more and more conventional. (178)
[Brigid Lowe] proposes that we restore the Greek rhetorical term hypotyposis, which means to put something before our eyes, to bring it alive for us. (179)
[L]et us replace the always problematic word 'realism' with the much more problematic word 'truth' ... (180)
George Eliot: 'Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowman beyond the bounds of our personal lot.' ... art is not life itself, art is always an artifice, is always mimesis - but art is the nearest thing to life. (181)
[W]e are likely to think of the desire to be truthful about life - the desire to produce art that accurately sees 'the way things are' - as a universal literary motive and project, the broad central language of the novel and drama ... the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable ageing. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional. (183-4, 186-7)
