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H229 Narrative Fiction 1
Lecture 1 1995
Welcome to H229 Narrative Fiction 1. This is the first of two great course units on narrative—on the novel—although the second does not require the first as prerequisite.
This first narrative fiction course has the word 'realism' in its subtitle. This is one of the more difficult words you'll have to deal with—as it covers a broad range of meanings. You might like to think of the word as referring to the problem of representation—the representation of 'real' life—and I'll say some more about this in a moment. The second course H237 Narrative Fiction 2 looks at texts which are more recent and in which the problem of representation has either become more acute or has been set aside in favour of other concerns, such as the question of writing as such. So it is said to be concerned with Modernism and Postmodernism.
This is Vijay Mishra's course design, and his choice of texts—some of which are related to his second doctorate and to his recently published book on The Gothic Sublime. (I have a suspicion that some aspects of this course are left from an earlier incarnation of this course when it was taught by John Frow, who is now Professor at the University of Queensland.)
I'm Garry Gillard and my room is EH 2.6 and my work phone is 360 2389. I do expect that most of you will drop in to see me for one reason or another some time. My room is conveniently placed between most of the School of Humanities and the Social Club, so you'll probably pass it often. I'm usually here all day except Mondays. My office hours are Tuesdays afternoons, the day of this lecture. And as I'm here most of the time, I prefer not to be called at home.
There are a number of housekeeping matters which I should mention. As well as these Study Guide sheets which I've given you, there is a Study Guide and Reader available for sale from the Bookshop. It contains more of this information, part of it repeated, and readings which you should address at some point in the course. This Study Guide and Reader was prepared by Vijay Mishra, who was expecting when he did so to be the coordinator of this course. Since then he has been released from teaching by a research award, and so I have stepped in again. I say 'again' because I did so also last year while Vijay was on research leave overseas. At the moment it's anticipated that I'll coordinate H237 Narrative Fiction 2 as well—unless I win Lotto in the meantime. There are some differences between the Study Guide in the printed book and these sheets, and where they differ it is the stapled sheets which are the official version.
The set texts are the ones in the Study Guide sheets and in the first column on page 3 of the Study Guide and Reader. There is a list of alternative texts, but I'd ask you to ignore that, though you may get some benefit from reading the lectures and notes on these texts which are included in the course book. We'll have enough trouble dealing with the books on the first list without trying to take account of an alternative set as well. So, although the Study Guide prepared by Vijay Mishra lists a number of 'alternate texts' I'd prefer that you stuck to the 'set texts'. These are the ones that the Bookshop has for sale, and the ones that I'll re/read in 1995, and the ones that will be the subject of on-campus lectures and tutorials, and I'd be grateful not have to re/read those in the second list, and particularly the long ones. So—in order of decreasing displeasure—please don't write assignments on Pamela, Don Quixote, Sentimental Education, Moll Flanders, Vanity Fair, Old Goriot, Huck Finn, Howards End, Emma, or Notes from Underground.
This might be as good a time as many to make the point that this course will take up a lot of your time, simply in reading. Tom Jones, Middlemarch and The Brothers Karamazov are huge novels, which will take hours and hours to read. For example, if you read the 900 pages of Middlemarch at an average of one minute per page it will take you 15 hours. So I hope you are doing this course because you are happy spending a lot of time reading novels.
I remember that the first time I read The Brothers Karamazov it took me a year and a half: well, you are supposed to do it in one week, at the same time as doing your other reading and other courses, and the week after you have just finished reading Middlemarch.
So the message is: get into some bulk reading. You have more time at the beginning of the semester for reading, as you don't have to do a lot of writing yet, so do try to read as much as possible in the first six weeks—including the monsters for Weeks 10 and 11. If you leave it until then it will be too late.
Maybe there is a way you can structure your 'primary' reading time, such that you have certain times and places for reading the long haul books, and others for reading for more urgent needs. Maybe you will read Lazarillo de Tormes and Ian Watt at your desk, but Middlemarch lying on your bed—or something. Anyway, be aware that the bulk reading demand is a genuine problem for this course, and deal with it as best you can.
I suggest you read with a pencil to hand to mark things that strike you and to note the number of the page you've marked in the front or back of the book, perhaps with a thematic key, anticipating tutorial discussion and assignment writing. And as you go along you note points that contribute to an argument or series of observations in relation to that.
Assessment is as set out in the study guide sheets. Half of the tutorial component will be for a tutorial paper, and everyone is required to give one short paper. What I'd like you to do is to pick a novel as soon as possible and read it together with one of the secondary texts, whether in the Reader or in one of the secondary texts listed in the Study Guide. It's theoretically possible to combine any two, so don't worry too much about which to choose. With twelve tutes and about seventeen students in each, that means there will be a maximum of two papers in any given tute and a minimum of one. When you've signed up for a tutorial you should let me know which paper you have chosen to give. On a basis of first-come-first-served, I'll inscribe your name in the list for your chosen week and novel, beginning with Week 2. (There are no tutorials this week.) Your choice will obviously decrease the longer you take to make to make up your mind, and the last person may have no choice at all. Just come to my room at any time I'm there to let me know which tutorial paper you're going to give.
After you've presented the paper in the tutorial—which I hope will lead to animated discussion—I want you to hand it in to me for comments and a more considered grade—though I want to take into consideration its usefulness in the sense of leading to a learning on the part of everyone present (including me).
If for some reason your seminar paper cannot be fitted into the weekly schedule, you will have to submit a written assignment instead, by Tuesday 7 June. A higher standard of presentation will be required for the written paper, the same as for the other written assignments, so you are strongly advised to present the paper orally. In either case you must present the paper to pass the course. All five components of the course—including this seminar paper—must be completed in order to pass.
I'd also like each one of you to carry out a small task immediately. By next week I want everyone to read one of the readings in the Reader and provide a one-paragraph summary of it (one-paragraph—that's all). There are seventeen readings for the thirty-four or so of you, and I've allocated each of you to one reading, as on this list. If you're not on the list for some reason, just pick a reading of your choice. I'd like you to hand in your precis in the first tutorial, next week. I'd like you to give them to me on disk if possible, to save me having to type them out (a 3.5 inch disk in Mac or DOS format and written in any word processor). But if you can't do that, then I'll type them out—and then I'll get them printed. The idea of this is to give you all a flying start in reading some narrative theory by providing you with summaries of all the selected readings—as I'll get them printed and give each of you a copy. This is not for credit, and I don't mind at all if you want to work on the task together, so long as I end up with at least one summary for each of the set readings. Put your name at the end so that you get the glory and put your name on the disk if you give me one, and I'll return it promptly. Again: drop your summaries into my room at any time I'm there. The sooner I get them the sooner I can make them available to everyone.
I must also point out that there is a supervised examination in this course, although the Handbook refers to a 'test.' 1 This is to conform with current University policy. Half of you may wish to leave now.
It will be necessary to read secondary texts for your tutorial papers and also for your essays, for both of which some secondary reading is required.
The first essay topic does not absolutely require reference to secondary material, but you will always do better in a course like this if you refer to such material, so you are advised to do so as you find it appropriate.
The second essay topic does explicitly require reference to theoretical works. It is a little early in the course to discuss this perhaps, but even at this stage you might want to note that this topic requires a number of things to be done—a number of things which have to do with the reason for the existence of the course as a whole.
• It firstly refers to the genre of the novel, so some attention should be given to that issue—which is one of the abiding concerns of the course;
• secondly, it draws attention to the history of the genre;
• it also mentions the origins of the novel in relation to history in general, so you should show some awareness of that relationship;
• And lastly, it suggests that the development of the novel genre is continuing and of continuing interest to its students. I don't take this to mean that you need to talk about contemporary novels, but you may be able to discern a trajectory through all the novels in the course to get a sense of direction.
While on the subject of secondary texts, I should perhaps mention that a dozen or so copies of Vijay Mishra's book, The Gothic Sublime, have been ordered for the Bookshop, so you should be able to buy a copy if you wish. There are also half a dozen copies in the Library.
Now I want to say something about the way this course will be taught. The tutorials will be much as you will expect: one or two of you will give a ten minute paper, followed by fairly unstructured discussion, generated by yourselves, of any seminar paper, of the lecture, and especially of course of the set text. You will need to have read the text as closely as possible, and the lecture that goes with it. You will actually be expected to take part in each tutorial—each one of you—to a greater or lesser degree. This means that the normally quiet ones among you will have to make an effort to speak, and I hope that the more loquacious people among you will be aware of this necessity and give the shrinking violet the opportunity to bloom.
Before next week, I also want you to have read Lazarillo de Tormes in the Three Picaresque Novels. Given that you have so much reading to do, there's no real need to read El Buscon, The Swindler. You should, however, be trying to make a start on one or more of the big novels for the course: Tom Jones, Middlemarch and The Brothers Karamazov, and in that order.
Well, now to the substance of this course. Which is to some extent signalled by the description in the Handbook.
This course unit is '[a] study of the form and development of the classical/European novel, with particular reference to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and of the major theories of the genre. Areas of concentration will be narrative structure, the relation between the novel and history, and theories of realism.' 1
As Jonathan Culler points out (in his Foreword to Tzvetan Todorov's book Poetics of Prose), poetics (that is, what we more generally call it 'theory' here at Murdoch) is not about interpretation, but about the way texts are able to convey meaning. This unit falls somewhere between the two ways of approaching the literary text as pursued in this School: it is less theoretical than the units in Literary Theory, but more so than, say, the first-year unit Introduction to Literary Studies or the one in Australian Literature. Culler writes this.
We have been accustomed to assume that the purpose of theory is to enrich and illuminate critical practice, to make possible subtler and more accurate interpretations of particular literary works. But poetics asserts that interpretation is not the goal of literary study. Though the interpretation of works may be fascinating and personally fulfilling, the goal of literary study is to understand literature as a human institution, a mode of signification. When poetics studies individual works, it seeks not to interpret them but to discover the structures and conventions of literary discourse which enable them to have the meanings they do. 2
Well, we shall not merely be doing poetics; we shall also be doing quite a bit of interpretation. In fact, to a large extent, what 'we' do is up to you. At least in the tutorials, I want to try to encourage you to follow your own interests in your encounters with these major texts.
Some of you will allow yourselves to be influenced by the fact that you are doing Literary Theory and will take the opportunity to bring a philosophical interest to bear on the novel texts in this course. Others will take the opportunity to further their curiosity about the minds of Fyodor Dostoevsky and/or Mary Ann Evans; while still others of you will be thinking about stylistic considerations as part of your training in preparation for own writing. I see this course is capable of allowing for a diversity of interests and approaches. You don't necessarily have to follow all or indeed any of my leads.
I thought it might be helpful to begin the course by addressing one of the central questions with which it is concerned: 'theories of realism' in 'the classical/European novel.' So today I want to begin to deal with the question: what is realism? But before I come to that, I must consider the idea of the 'real.'
English words related to 'real': 'realism,' 'reality,' and so on, are very slippery and difficult words to deal with, and I think this is because of the huge range of connotation with these words come to bear. They come from the Latin word for 'thing,' one of the most basic concepts you can imagine, and then go on to express some of the most abstract ideas of which the human mind is capable of thinking. After all, what is more removed from the idea of any given 'thing,' a coffee cup, for instance, and the idea of 'reality': the state of thinginess or 'thisness' in which we seem to agree to we find ourselves. Consider some of the more esoteric terms people have scratched around to find to express this idea: 'ontology,' quidditas,' haecceity,' and so on, as ways of dealing with its difficulty.
But you all know what it is 'real,' don't you? And that is another problem with the idea of 'reality': that we all need to believe that our idea of what it is is not only clear and unambiguous, but is also agreed by everyone else, when unfortunately it seems to be the case that it is at least equally true to say that everyone's reality is different from everyone else's.
And then when we turn to 'realism' in literature or the other arts, we add another dimension to the problem, in that the 'real' we are talking about here is not like 'real' of any immediately given environment, with all the problems which are always already inherent there—it's not like the reality of a tree, or a person, or building, but is only a presentation of such an imagined object—or as we prefer to say, for some reason of which I'm not aware—a representation of such an imagined object. I suppose, if I have to explain it, the assumption in the use of the term 'representation' is that the taken-for-granted object, the tree, or whatever, is somehow taken into the imagination of the presenter and then re-presented to the receiver—the reader or audience or viewer. And the assumption which is central to this process is, as I say, that what ends up in the mind of the receiver—what the reader constructs in her imagination on the basis of what signals she receives—is supposed to be pretty close to what was in the mind of the presenter. And the test of the adequacy of the process of transmission, the work of art in this case, is supposed to be the closeness of the copy, the representation, to the original. So a reader wishing to praise Dickens's 'realism' may say something to the effect that she can 'really see' Mr Fang when she reads the description of him in Chapter 11 of Oliver Twist.
Mr Fang was a lean, long-backed, stiff-necked, middle-sized man, with no great quantity of hair, and what he had, growing on the back and sides of his head. His face was stern, and much flushed. If he were really not in the habit of drinking rather more than was exactly good for him he might have brought an action against his countenance for libel, and have recovered heavy damages. 3
Of course, we've already moved one step away from the original situation I was setting up when I suggested that the writer was re-presenting an object he had seen. In this case, we are told that 'Mr Fang' was based on one Allan Stewart Laing—but it seems unlikely that the description I've read was intended to describe Mr Laing, if only because this might have resulted in the kind of libel suit to which the paragraph itself refers. 4 So 'Mr Fang' is an object largely if not wholly imagined by Dickens, so our reader is talking about a putative correspondence between one imagined object and another—and this is supposed to be a measure of 'realism'—'thinginess'!
So let's turn for assistance to professional definers of literary terms. And let's begin with what I see as a naive definition.
[Realism is: ] The depiction of actual life with faithfulness and objectivity, as opposed to romance, in which … writer[s] depicts life as [they] wish[…] it to be or believe[…] [their] readers wish it to be. Realism is the dominant mood of much of the better contemporary fiction, and writers like Steinbeck and Hemingway have discarded the romantic dream picture in favour of a more exact and objective view of life, grim though it may be. This is perhaps by way of reaction from the method of the last century, a reaction assisted by the harsh realities of this century. 5
Now what's wrong with that? Well, for a start, it confuses a literary technique, if not a philosophical position, with an ethical attitude. Not only is it limiting the notion of 'realism' to that which is depicted in the relevant works, as opposed to including consideration of techniques which might also be crucial, but it also apparently limits the idea still further to bring it within ideological constraints and valorises the presented worlds of whatever fictions it has in mind as opposed to others. Its main function seems to be an apologia for placing a high valuation on writers approved of by the definers, namely, Steinbeck and Hemingway.
Secondly, it seems to be saying that fictive writing in the nineteenth century was characteristically of romance as opposed to realism, and we shall find in our studies in this course that realism (in the broadest sense) of one kind or another has always been with us, and in more specific forms is certainly characteristic of important novels since the middle of the previous century.
And another thing wrong with this is that it is simply imprecise about what is meant by notions like 'depiction' and 'objectivity,' about which it is necessary to say more about how they work as well as that they exist.
Now let's move on to something slightly more insightful.
Realism is used in two ways: (1) to denote a literary movement of the nineteenth century, especially in prose fiction (beginning with Balzac in France, George Eliot in England, and William Dean Howells in America); and (2) to designate a recurrent way of representing life in literature, which was typified by the writers of this historical movement.
Realistic fiction is often opposed to romantic fiction: the romance is said to present life as we would have it be, more picturesque, more adventurous, more heroic than the actual; realism, to present an accurate imitation of life as it is. [141] … The realist sets out to write a fiction which will give the illusion that it reflects life as it seems to the common reader. … The realist, in other words, is deliberately selective in his material and prefers the average, the commonplace, and the everyday over the rarer aspects of the contemporary scene. His characters, therefore, are usually of the middle class or (less frequently) the working class—people without highly exceptional endowments, who live through ordinary experiences of childhood, adolescence, love, marriage, parenthood, infidelity, and death; who find life rather dull and often unhappy, though it may be brightened by touches of beauty and joy; but who may, under special circumstances, display something akin to heroism.
A thoroughgoing realism [requires] a special literary manner [such as] Daniel … Defoe's reportorial manner of rendering … events … in [a] circumstantial, matter-of-fact, and seemingly unselective way. Writers such as Henry Fielding and Jane Austen are sometimes called realists because they often render commonplace people so well that they convince us such people really lived and talked this way. It is well, however, to reserve the term "realist" for writers who render a subject seriously, and as though it were a direct reflection of the casual order of experience, without too patently shaping it, as do Fielding and Austen, into a tightly wrought comic or ironic pattern. … The technical term, "realistic novel," however, is most usefully applied to works which are realistic both in subject and manner, and throughout the whole rather than in parts … 6
This definition brings together a number of elements. Firstly, there is a concept of periodicity: realism is 'a literary movement of the nineteenth century.' Another writer on this subject is even more specific, writing that
Realism can be said to have lasted from 1848 to 1871, [and, he goes on to specify] naturalism from 1871 to 1890, symbolism from 1890 to 1914. 7
So realism only lasted, according to this writer, for 23 years, from 1848 to 1871, and that period happens to include only two of the novels we shall study closely: Oliver Twist and Middlemarch, as 1848 happens to be precisely the year in which Oliver Twist completed its first serial publication and 1871 is precisely the year in which Middlemarch began its publication in parts. 8
But I return to my second definition, which, by the way, is from Meyer Abrams. There is a second element there, namely, a general notion of representation, which is always one aspect of prose fiction, but which he suggests is merely typified by particular nineteenth century writers, who are more intensely interested in the problem of representation than people have been at other times. And it's this more general notion of representation that I'm interested in today.
I'm influenced in my thinking to some extent by Erich Auerbach's huge work, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Auerbach begins, in his first chapter, by comparing a passage in Homer with one in the Bible, and concludes, in his last chapter, with a moment in To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf (one of whose novels probably should be on this course). Obviously, Auerbach is interested a broader range of literature than that limited by the very specific interest in 'realism' as such, and so are we, at least in the sense that we need to understand in what ways that interest differentiated works from the 'realistic' period from others who nevertheless bear some relationship to 'reality.' 9
I am also interested in a notion of 'realism' which refers in turn to a notion of representation, as I think this is more in keeping with the generic interest in this course. I take it that although we are interested in a secondary way in the history of the novel genre we are primarily interested in its nature: the Handbook summary puts 'form' before 'development:' it says that the course is 'A study of the form and development of the classical/European novel, with particular reference to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and of the major theories of the genre.' And I take it that it is intentional that form takes precedence over development, as that is the main interest in the 'lectures' in the Study Guide and Reader. And so whereas we are interested in the way the novel develops in the nineteenth century, it is in the larger context of coming to understand something about the nature of the novel as such. And for this purpose I suggest we need to consider the notion of 'representation' as being prior to the historical notion of 'realism.'
And so I turn to my third and last definitional excerpt, which prioritises the notion of 'representation' in the process of defining 'realism.'
realism * [is] The use of representational devices (signs, conventions, narrative strategies, and so on) to depict or portray a physical, social or moral universe which is held to exist objectively beyond its representation by such means, and which is thus the arbiter of the truth of the representation. * Realism is often used almost interchangeably with other terms, like naturalism or verisimilitude, which were established in art/literary theories in the nineteenth century. In such usage, the concept often refers merely to the extent to which representational details resemble or concur with the knowledge of the object (which may be an emotion, theme or idea as well as thing) that we already have. We won't find a circus scene set in ancient Rome "realistic" if we spot a gladiator wearing a wristwatch—but we tend not to be upset by the fact that he's speaking English. Thus realism of this kind is above all conventional—we learn to recognize a fictive world as "real" by means of certain devices.
Frequently, the concept of realism is implicitly or explicitly contrasted with others. In philosophy, for instance, it is opposed to idealism, but it may be contrasted with fantasy, sentimentalism, the far-fetched, and so on. In these cases, realism tends to be used to describe not just denotational authenticity (verisimilitude), but attention to the grubbier or less edifying aspects of life. Here it is useful to remember that realism is a multi-discursive concept—it is also to be found in philosophy and politics. In political rhetoric, realism is often used to justify expedient policies which don't follow established moral principles. In representations too, the concept of realism can be used to justify attempts to break free of the conventions which tend to over-discipline an art form or medium once it has become routine.
This "progressive" notion of realism was prevalent in the nineteenth century, and it gave rise to one of the more specialized (theorized) usages of the concept, deriving principally from the work of the Marxist literary theorist Lukács. He maintained that certain writers—Balzac and Dickens for instance—were able to escape their own personal class prejudices and ideologies in their writings, and represent the social totality of a class society. Realism in this context is a quality of writing or other representation which gets under the surface of ideology to reveal the "true" relations between people and their source in class struggles. It follows that it is possible for representations to be realistic in this formulation without having to obey the demands of naturalism or verisimilitude. Conversely, representations can be naturalistic and full of verisimilitude without being recognized as realism. The distinction between realism and naturalism/verisimilitude in this case is not so much a property of a given text as of an ideology—it is the perceived "truth to life" that qualifies a work for realism, and of course what "truth to life" amounts to depends on what you're looking for. So realism as a critical concept is also the site of ideological struggle between different critical positions.
It is at this point that we can see that the concept of realism as used in the analysis of representations has lost little of its original (philosophical) force. That is, it still relies on an ideological commitment to an objective, external, reality (whether of timeless universal abstract notions like "human nature", or of historical [259] but objective facts like class struggle). Whatever it is, the status of external reality is privileged over its representation in whatever medium; our attention is directed through the representation to the "truth" beyond.
In order to combat this tendency, and to assert instead that timeless notions and objective facts alike are all products of the discursive strategies that seem to "reveal" them, recent structuralist and semiotic work has concentrated not so much on the "what" as the "how" of realism. This is also in response to realism's establishment as a routine in the screen media especially. Nowadays it is hard to find a television or film genre that doesn't have some claim to it. Within this kind of analysis, realism is seen as a signifying practice characteristic of bourgeois representations (but with a claim on all classes). It is, literally, made of devices such as characterization, narration and mode of address, which are reproduced over and over again in various guises. Thus, while realism itself seeks to suppress the act of representation in order to propose its versions of truth as the truth, the analysis of realism turns the tables on it by restoring the act of representation to primacy and showing how realism is an effect not of "life" but of texts.14
So we arrive at the end of this long excursion through the unreality of the real at a point where a textual analyst like me can feel quite comfortable—in the middle, not of reality, but of text. And it's time to turn to some texts, and why not firstly turn back to the first bit of text that I presented near the beginning of this lecture: the evocation of Mr Fang.
Mr Fang was a lean, long-backed, stiff-necked, middle-sized man, with no great quantity of hair, and what he had, growing on the back and sides of his head. His face was stern, and much flushed. If he were really not in the habit of drinking rather more than was exactly good for him he might have brought an action against his countenance for libel, and have recovered heavy damages. 10
Now among the things that strike me about this fragment, the first is the rhythm of the prose, and particularly the repetition of 'long-backed, stiff-necked, middle-sized,' which we might want to think suggest something in itself about the psychical character of the magistrate, as well as his physical appearance. The shape of the clauses which follow in themselves I think suggest that it was sheer pigheadedness on the part of Mr Fang through which he caused his hair to hair to grow where he so decided. The long sentence about his complexion, although it contains a physical description—which, however, we have already been given in the word 'flushed'—is at least as much about the nature of argument in general and specifically about argument at law as it is about the character. Few readers, I suggest, would be capable of understanding its meaning at first reading, so concealed is it in the trope that contains it.
If I were to take only one more example of Dickens's 'realism,' I could perhaps do no better than examine briefly the most famous passage in the book, the death of Nancy, as this was the passage with which Dickens always concluded his public readings from his works, as he knew he could depend upon it to get the effect he wanted from his audience, who must therefore have been impressed in some sense with the realism of the account. Here it is, and you might want to imagine Dickens himself reading it with all his oratorical skill and gestures.
The housebreaker freed one arm, and grasped his pistol. The certainty of immediate detection if he fired, flashed across his mind even in the midst of his fury; and he beat it twice with all the force he could summon, upon the upturned face that almost touched his own.
She staggered and fell: nearly blinded with the blood that rained down from a deep gash in her forehead; but raising herself, with difficulty, on her knees, drew from her bosom a white handkerchief—Rose Maylie's own—and holding it up, in her folded hands, as high towards Heaven as her feeble strength would allow, breathed one prayer for mercy to her Maker.
It was a ghastly figure to look upon. The murderer staggering backward to the wall, and shutting out the sight with his hand, seized a heavy club and struck her down. 11
Again, I am struck not so much by the plausibility of the actions of the participants in the scene: especially the poor pistol-whipped prostitute who decides not only to pray in her dying moments, but feels the need of a prop to do it with; and Sikes who manages to club down someone without looking at her—I am struck more by the contrived sentences, clauses and punctuation. As with the 'lean, long-backed, stiff-necked, middle-sized' Fang, the prose builds up a rhythm in that long central sentence—which takes a whole paragraph for itself—to reach a calm plateau at the appearance of the handkerchief, the white symbol of Nancy's essential purity, perhaps, before declining down another balancing structure of clauses, in apposition to the first, before completing the paragraph which has had the effect of delaying for a few precious moments the final catastrophe. The short phrases, each pointed with a comma—'but raising herself, with difficulty, on her knees,'—are balanced on the other side of the plateau with a similar number of other such phrases—'and holding it up, in her folded hands, as high towards Heaven as her feeble strength would allow,' creating in the rhetorical shape of the sentence itself a feeling of 'things as they should be' before the horrid reality of the denouement concludes the scene and the chapter. 12
Obviously, one could say much more about all this, and Ian Watt has written a lengthy paper, for example, about the first paragraph of one of Henry James's novels, The Ambassadors. 13 For my part, I wanted to try to say just enough to support the claim made in the conclusion of my third definition, which, by the way, comes from my esteemed colleague, John Hartley, that 'realism is an effect not of "life" but of texts.' 14
1 Murdoch University Handbook and Calendar, 1995: 230.
2 Culler, Jonathan 1977, 'Foreword,' to Tzvetan Todorov [Fr. 1971], The Poetics of Prose, Blackwell, Oxford: 8.
3 Dickens, Charles 1966 [1837-9], Oliver Twist, ed. Peter Fairclough, Penguin: 120.
4 Dickens 1966, editor's note: 488.
5 Yelland, H. L., Jones, S. C., & Easton, K. S. W. 1950, A Handbook of Literary Terms, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, London, Melbourne, Wellington: 165 (sexist language corrected).
6 Abrams, M. H. 1971, A Glossary of Literary Terms, third edition, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York: 140-141.
7 Stromberg, Roland N. 1968, Realism, Naturalism and Symbolism: Modes of Thought and Expression in Europe, 1848-1914, Macmillan, London & Melbourne: ix.
8 Of the texts we study closely in this course only Oliver Twist and Middlemarch qualify as 'realistic' in Stromberg's limited sense. An inclusive list of texts with dates of first publication: 1564, 1604: Two Spanish Picaresque Novels: Lazarillo de Tormes, El Buscon; 1604-14: Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote; 1722: Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders; 1740: Samuel Richardson: Pamela; 1749: Henry Fielding: Tom Jones; 1764: 1786: Three Gothic Novels; 1783: Choderlos de Laclos: Dangerous Liaisons; 1794: William Godwin: Caleb Williams; 1816: Jane Austen: Emma; 1818: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; 1834: Honoré de Balzac: Old Goriot; 1837: Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist; 1847-8: W. M. Thackeray: Vanity Fair; 1852: Herman Melville: Pierre; 1869: Gustave Flaubert: Sentimental Education; 1871-2: George Eliot: Middlemarch; 1884: Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn; 1878-80: Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov; 1864: Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground; 1898: Henry James: The Turn of the Screw; 1897: Henry James: What Maisie Knew; 1910: E. M. Forster: Howards End.
9 Auerbach, Erich [1946] 1953, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trs. Willard Trask, Princeton University Press.
Hartley, John 1994, 'Realism', in O'Sullivan, Tim, Hartley, John, Saunders, Danny, Montgomery, Martin & Fiske, John, Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, 2nd ed., Routledge, London & New York: 257-259.
10 Dickens 1966: 120.
11 Dickens 1966: 422-3.
12 Dickens 1966, Chapter 47.
13 Watt, Ian 1960, 'The first paragraph of The Ambassadors: an explication', Essays in Criticism, X; reprinted in David Lodge (ed.) 1972, 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader, Longman, London: 528-544.
14 Hartley, John 1994: 'Realism', in Tim O'Sullivan, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery, & John Fiske, Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, 2nd ed. [1st ed., 1983], Routledge, London & New York: 259.
Garry Gillard | New: 11 January, 2018 | Now: 20 December, 2018