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Authors: David Shields

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BOOK: Reality Hunger
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In the first half of the nineteenth century, which remains for many a paradise lost of the novel, certain important certainties were in circulation: in particular the confidence in a logic of
things that was just and universal. All the technical elements of narrative—the systematic use of the past tense and the third person, the unconditional adoption of chronological development, linear plots, the regular trajectory of the passions, the impulse of each episode toward a conclusion, etc.—tended to impose the image of a stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal, entirely decipherable universe. To have a name was important, all the more so for being the weapon in a hand-to-hand struggle, the hope of a success, the exercise of a domination. It was something to have a face in a universe in which personality represented both the means and the end of all exploration. The novel of characters, though, belongs entirely to the past; it describes a period: the apogee of the individual. The world’s destiny has ceased, for us, to be identified with the rise or fall of certain men, of certain families. The world itself is no longer our private property, hereditary and convertible into cash. Two hundred years later, the whole system is no more than a memory; it’s to that memory, to the dead system, that some seek with all their might to keep the novel fettered.

“The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, or fantasy,” said the
New York Globe
in 1851 about
Moby-Dick
.

In 1859, Darwin’s
Origin of Species
, which sold out the first day it was published, threatened to undermine the Bible’s legitimacy, to explain the unexplainable. The Dewey decimal system was invented in 1876, although adopted slowly at first. A. E. Houseman said, “The aim of science is the discovery of truth, while the aim of literature is the production of pleasure.” Knowledge was exciting, but it threatened to quash
imagination and mythology. In 1910, the General Convention of the Presbyterian Church adopted the Five Fundamentals, a doctrine of five principles underlying Christian faith, a list of dogmas requiring of the faithful adherence to the inerrancy and literal truth of scripture. If we must be governed by the two-dimensional world of fact/fiction, then steps must be taken to ensure that our sacred texts land on the side of fact, that scripture not end up in the fictional cul-de-sac. We must be able to believe.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, several technologies emerged. Commercial printing technology dramatically improved, the new “wet plate” technique made photography popular, and Edison invented the phonograph. The first great wave of popular culture included newspapers, magazines, novels, printed sheet music, records, children’s books. Not only did authors and artists benefit from this model but the audience did, too: for the first time, tens of millions of ordinary people were able to come in regular contact with a great work. In Mozart’s day, few people heard one of his symphonies more than once; with the advent of cheap audio recordings, a barber in Java could listen to them all day long. By 1910, the motion picture had given actors a way to reach a much wider audience, effectively linking people across time and space, synchronizing society. For the first time, not only did your neighbors read the same news you read in the morning, and know the same music and movies, but people across the country did, too. Broadcast media—first radio, then television—homogenized culture even more. TV defined the mainstream. The power of electromagnetic waves is that they spread in all directions, essentially for free.

Plot itself ceased to constitute the armature of narrative. The demands of the anecdote were doubtless less constraining for Proust than for Flaubert, for Faulkner than for Proust, for Beckett than for Faulkner. To tell a story became strictly impossible. The books of Proust and Faulkner are crammed with stories, but in the former, they dissolve in order to be recomposed to the advantage of a mental architecture of time, whereas in the latter, the development of themes and their many associations overwhelms all chronology to the point of seeming to bury again in the course of the novel what the narrative has just revealed. Even in Beckett, there’s no lack of events, but they’re constantly in the process of contesting themselves: the same sentence may contain an observation and its immediate negation. It’s now not the anecdote that’s lacking—only its character of certainty, its tranquility, its innocence.

Collage, the art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, was the most important innovation in the art of the twentieth century.

After Freud, after Einstein, the novel retreated from narrative, poetry retreated from rhyme, and art retreated from the representational into the abstract.

books for people who find television too slow

Abstract expressionism: the manipulation of reality through its technique of spontaneous creation on the canvas.

BOOK: Reality Hunger
4.42Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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