The Realist Novel

For a start, the novel didn’t start out with the realist conventions associated with the blockbuster mid-nineteenth century writers. I mean what we now consider “psychologically realistic” characters, “believable” situations, the usual Bildungsroman theme of self-discovery championed by the Romantics, the major story-arc supplemented by numerous character-based sub-plots and so on. The realist novel is as formulaic as the Hollywood blockbuster satirised in Charlie Kaufman’s film Adaptation.

Those conventions emerged slowly during the eighteenth century out of a morass of different practices. Depending on your definition of a “novel”, those practices had been creating things that look nothing like Dickens or Hugo for three or four centuries: Cervantes, Rabelais, Behn, Swift and Sterne are a few well-known examples. Even once it was established, the conventions of the realist novel continued to be flouted: think of de Sade, Büchner, Kierkegaard, Ducasse or Jarry. Think even of the original Great American Novel, Moby Dick.

The “fractured” and dissociative aspects of writing have always been part of the novel, since before the term even existed. And the economic dominance of the realist novel in the contemporary fiction industry should not suggest that they’ve now vanished again. Nor should they lead us to conclude that modernism was a brief, incandescent experiment that went wrong and burned out quickly. This is a narrative that works well if you want to make the latest product of the lit fic production line look like something revolutionary and new; it’s therefore a narrative that plays well among the literati. It is, though, a convenient untruth.

Avant Garde As Critique

One assumption lying behind this is that realist novels are fluffy and entertaining while modernism is angry, confrontational, “typographically altered, grammatically shattered, rhetorically obscure”. Grossman sees the triumph of the former as a product of people power, a “revolution from below, up from the supermarket racks” that overthrows the donnish old elites with their Greek and their high aesthetic notions. People want to be excited, not educated, and that’s what they shall have.

Unsurprisingly, this naive free market aesthetic is labelled “postmodern”, as if that’s what “postmodern” used to mean. The idea that somehow Tesco and W H Smith are engaged in a revolution against the powerful intellectual elites is so daft, when you say it out loud, that one can hardly believe it made it into print.

Grossman also betrays what appears to be a complete lack of understanding about the politics of modernism. Yes, of course, T S Elliot and Virigina Woolf were modernists and they were elitists. They believed they were the carriers of a great cultural tradition. They were writing close to the beginning of the age of mass consumption and can perhaps be forgiven for believing it really wasn’t very important. Let the mass media be as apparently insignificant as they’d been in the previous century — the penny dreadfuls, the melodramas, the music hall — and leave literature to the few who appreciated and wanted it. This mostly wasn’t meant to be a revolution but a continuation, even when its rhetoric was sometimes startling. An Ezra Pound or a Pierre Boulez could speak of destroying the remnants of the past in the present because they believed a progressive tradition had begun to stagnate, and felt an urgent need to revitalise it.

In addition, let’s not imagine that the Victorian novel was somehow a complacent, uncritical reflection of an idyllic world. The novel in the hands of Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Hugo or Zola was specifically designed to offer criticism: in their time many realist novelists caused outrage with their alienating, daring use of subject-matter and especially their depictions of poverty, moral breakdown and vice.

It’s not, then, as if the realist form were somehow incapable of critique, or that the events of the early twentieth century therefore created a need for new techniques. It’s also not the case that our own society no longer needs critical representations of itself, regardless of whether they’re realist or avant garde or something else, and regardless of how immediately popular they are.

The Customer’s Always Right

The head for Grossman’s article (maybe not his choice) is “Good Novels Don’t Have To Be Hard Work”. Because our status as citizens is pretty much defined by our status as consumers, we feel as if it’s our right to consume whatever we like and be immune from criticism. If I buy a washing machine, I expect it to make my life easier — to get the washing done quickly, quietly and efficiently. I want to do as little work as possible; that’s the point of the machine. So why wouldn’t we all make the same demands of our books?

Grossman doesn’t name his targets here, but he’s complaining about contemporary fiction, not Joyce or even B S Johnson. I suppose it’s people like Vonnegut, Calvino, Pynchon (whose “cumbersome verbal calisthenics” get a swipe here), Auster, Danielewski, Wallace, Saramago, Winterson, DeLillo and so on. Phew: what a relief not to have to slog through another of their tiresome novels again just so I can pass muster at the next dinner party. Pass the Stephenie Meyer, would you?

I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Andrew Lanyon’s Circular Walks Around Rowley Hall, which I’m sure is on Grossman’s list of novels nobody enjoys if he’s heard of it. I didn’t read it for a research project or because I felt I ought to, but because it sounded fun, and it was. No, it doesn’t have a plot. Yes, it has a bizarre set of characters, each of whom independently may or may not be real. Yes, it’s written in a peculiar style reminiscent of a local history guidebook and illustrated by very odd pictures. No, it doesn’t have a character who learns more about himself after going through a painful personal experience, and nobody robs a bank.

In Grossman’s world, Lanyon’s readers don’t exist, or anyway don’t count. What counts is sales: Grossman’s new book, which appears to be about secret codes and ancient manuscripts à la mocirc;de, reached at least #9 in the NYT bestseller list, which means it’s really really good. Grossman’s world is, of course, the dominant one. But in my view his industry is dead, or dying, and so are its forms. Who on Earth thought it was all about the novel any more?

It might sound like a thin idea, but it’s mesmerising to listen to. What’s more, even if you know that translation is a complex process that makes meanings rather than just safely transporting them from one language to another, the repetition and the variations together really bring it home in a way that just reading the words doesn’t. So her reading is a beautiful piece musically, but it does something intellectually, too, that’s hard to precisely put a finger on.

Bergvall is one of a number of practitioners who are blurring the line between poetry and the visual arts. In a sense, of course, that line has been blurred for as long as poetry has been written down; as I’m fond of pointing out (entirely spuriously), the very first word of English poetry is both a sound and a graphic image more than it is a piece of straightforward semantic content. In the twentieth century concrete poetry — making the graphic elements of typography part of the work — was a movement of the avant garde, but anyone who’s read some books printed in the sixteenth century, or looked at a reproduction of a Chaucer manuscript, will know that these concerns have always been important.

Treating them as such, however, cuts against a curious fetish that developed in literary criticism for the “text” — something that could be easily reproduced and consisted only of those aspects of language that the logical positivists would have considered significant. I’m not aware of any conscious connection between The Criterion and the Vienna circle (perhaps there was one, I’m no expert) but there must have been something in the air in the first half of the twentieth century. In effect, it was that the important things about language were the combinations of abstract syntactic units — tokens of lexemes, say. How each token was instantiated wasn’t so important. A Shakespeare sonnet chiseled into a block of stone, say, was the same poem as it was on the printed page of a modern edition.

This marginalised at least two important aspects of poetic practice: sound and image. A poem looks like something, and sounds a certain way; these are aesthetically important, too. Of course the layout of a poem on the page matters, and modernist poets began to experiment with using the space of the page more and more. Later in the twentieth century, poets continued to use words to make images. The results are as richly different as can be imagined, and there are many different aesthetics that emerge from the need to interpret written text as a plastic phenomenon.

Dick Higgins’s book Pattern Poetry is good on this “minor history”, as Deleuze would call it. But my key point is that all poetry is visual poetry, just as all poetry is musical. These are important aesthetic aspects of the work that an unwarrantedly abstract kind of criticism often misses.

The excellent Penn Sound site has more recordings of Bergvall’s work as well as an interview. In a nice piece of circularity Bergvall, whom I discovered through a top-ten-of-Ubuweb list, made her own top ten, which is also worth a look.