The Realist Fantasy Fiction and Reality since Clarissa

249 Pages·1983·24.764 MB·English

by  Paul Coates (auth.)

THE REALIST FANTASY
THE REALIST FANTASY
FICTION AND REALITY
SINCE CLARISSA
PAUL COATES
© Paul Coates 1983
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1983 978-0-333-34708-9
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1983 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basings toke
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
ISBN 978-1-349-17321-1 ISBN 978-1-349-17319-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-17319-8
Typeset in Great Britain by
Vantage Photosetting Co Ltd
Eastleigh and London
For my wife Anna
Wir haben das Gestalten erfunden:
darum fehlt allem, was unsere
Hande miide und verzweifelt fahrenlassen,
immer die letzte Vollendung.
(Lukacs, Die Theorie des Romans)
Contents
Acknowledgements IX
Introduction 1
1. Notes on the Novel 17
2. Clarissa, Dialectic and U nreadability 23
3. The Nineteenth Century 50
Four Germans: Hoffman, Kleist, Goethe and Buchner 50
The Illustrated Novel: Thoughts on the Novels of Dickens 64
Reading Signs: Hawthorne and the Characters of Allegory 75
4. The Text Against Itself 88
The Dialectics of Enlightenment: Elective Affinities and Women
in Love 88
Utopias: Butler and Morris 96
Repetition: Kierkegaard and Proust 100
A Note on Metonymy in Proust 112
Doubles: Conrad, lrzykowski, Poe, Hawthorne 114
J6zef Konrad 122
The Late Henry James: Substitution, Projection and the
G~~~ 1~
5. Fictions of Identity: Modernism in Germany 141
Thomas Mann: The Myth of Doktor Faustus 141
Some Aspects of The Man without Qualities 148
Franz Kafka: The Impossibility of Writing 158
6. Post-Modernism 180
The Fading of Modernism 180
The Art of Lying: Three Post-War English Novels 183
The Survival of Modernism: Some Post-War American
Novels 190
(a)InvisibleMan 190
(b) The Crying of Lot 49: Mirrors, Paranoia and the Senseless-
ness of an Ending 1 93
(c) Gravity's Rainbow: Nullpunkt, Brennschluss 208
(d) The Public and the Private Burning: Coover and Doctorow 217
Vll
viii Contents
Notes 223
Selected Critical Bibliography 235
Index ofN ames 237
Index of Themes 241
Acknowledgements
Some of the material in this book has already been published elsewhere:
'Notes on the Novel', in PN Review; two or three paragraphs from 'The
Illustrated Novel' and 'Mirrors, Paranoia and the Senselessness of an
Ending', in the Comparative Criticism Yearbook 4, as part of an essay
entitled 'Cinema, Symbolism and the Gesamtkunstwerk'; and the essay on
'Doubles', in my book in Polish about the Symbolist poet Bofeslaw
Ldmian (the present version is partly a translation, partly a revision, of
the Polish original). I would like to thank Michael Schmidt, the Cam
bridge University Press and the Paiistwowy lnstytut Wydawniczy in
Warsaw respectively for permission to reprint.
I would also like to thank Thomas Pynchon, the Viking Press and
Jonathan Cape Ltd for permission to reproduce copyright material from
Gravity's Rainbow in my essay on that novel.
In conclusion I would like to thank several people who have had an
influence, direct or indirect, on the shaping of this book. Firstly, I must
thank Rosemary Bechler for the enthusiasm with which she introduced
me to Clarissa; I hope she does not feel I have abused the insights I so
shamelessly appropriated from her. Secondly, GabrielJosipovici, whose
work has been an inspiration to me even when I have felt compelled to
disagree with it. Thirdly, Macmillan's reader, whose light I am sadly
unable to bring out from under the bushel of his namelessness, but whose
suggestions were very helpful. Fourthly, Thomas Pynchon, whom I have
never met, but who seems to me to be the major force keeping the novel
alive today. And finally my wife Anna, without whose encouragement
very little of what follows would ever have been put to paper; the
dedication of this book is scant recompense for my debt.
lX
Introduction
The title of this book is two-edged. It states both that the notion of
realism is a form of fantasy; and that fantasy itself is a form of realism. It
criticises the claims to objectivity made in the name of classic realism,
and also reduces fantasy to the reality it flees and reproduces in the dark
code of dreamlike distortion, symptomatic writing. Realism in prose is
the fruit of a fantasy of omnipotence; the all-knowing narrator who
directs his often shaky plot to the happy idyll of a siding in the best of all
possible worlds is over-optimistic about the feasibility of dominating
reality. The solipsistic fantasist and the first person narrator are in a
sense more realistic than the realist, for they are conscious that other
people are often opaque and that even the best-laid plot can miscarry.
Realism and anti-realism are opposed in the same way as are the
nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the Victorians and the moder
nists. To say this is to repeat a truism. But the truism itself contains an
element of falsity: it is too easy, too banal. For in actuality, realism and
fantasy are both historically successive modes of consciousness (the
self-proclaimed modernists swim with the tide of history even when they
claim to oppose it), and two aspects of the same object. There is a
dialectic of realism and fantasy, representation and solipsism, at the
heart of all writing. The fact that one era accentuates one mode, another
its opposite, means only that the inadequacy of any attempted resolution
of this dialectic cries out for a correction that itself requires to be
corrected.
Hillis Miller has given a definition of the Victorian novel that may
appear seductively applicable to all novels.
Many characteristic Victorian novels show that society no longer
seems to have a transcendent origin and support. This leads in turn to
the discovery that the individual human heart generates the game of
society and establishes its rules. Society rests on human feelings and
on human will. It is created by the interplay of one mind and heart
with another.1
The assumption that society 1s purely self-generating causes the
Victorian novel to ignore the return of the repressed in the unforeseen
1