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The Realist Fantasy Fiction and Reality since Clarissa PDF

249 Pages·1983·24.764 MB·English
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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

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