Progress and the novel
This interview with David Shields raised some interesting points
So much of what happens in contemporary literary culture is works which are essentially working off of a completely desiccated 19th-century model, essentially a Flaubertian model of realism. Flaubert was a great writer, Tolstoy was a great writer, Dickens was a great writer. But those books go back 100, 150 years. The idea that we endlessly praise writers now for mimicking their forebears from seven generations ago, to me, is preposterous. It would be as if you were praising a composer now who was composing the 1812 Overture, or a visual artist who was painting, in a straightforward way, a realistic portrait of George Bush. It’s just not what art does. Art, to me, like science, moves forward. Forms evolve, forms die, art advances."
I always rather dislike the parallel between artistic creation and technological progress, especially as it is often invoked by people who would be rather unlikely to profess any great belief in progress when meant in a social or political sense. In practice, art can indeed often repeat the same forms for decades or resurrect practices that had long been buried and forgotten (and in a post-Marxist and post-Freudian world it’s not difficult to argue that much of Victorian literature has acquired a greater modern relevance than much of modernism). The contemporaneity of art is the issue, not the advancement of it and applying arguments of artistic progress feels like a rather anachronistic worldview. The more worthwhile points relate to the changes in our conception of setting and time. It’s certainly true that we tend not to be rooted in particular places; as Shaffer put it in Equus we have very little idea of place. Our lives are very far from the stable and homogenous communities that gave birth to the Victorian novel. The point about glacial pace is also interesting, but the likes of Sebald and Coetzee write with far less awareness of the velocity of modern existence than someone like McEwan. Finally, the complaint about the patterned, allegorical nature of literature, how things are parables in George Eliot’s phrase, has a great deal of resonance for me. I’ve always liked the untidy aspects of literature to the neat and symmetrical. But surely, the looseness of life is precisely what the novel is good at and exactly what Bakhtin revered about it.
At the moment, I’m reading Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. In his introduction, Wolfe argues that realism in literature was akin to the discovery of electricity in engineering rather than simply another medium or device. The novel is in many ways a demonstration of that, replacing the taboo of sexuality in the Victorian novel with the modern taboos of race and class, showing that the old forms could be easily adapted to modernity. In many ways, I prefer Wolfe’s view to Shields.
