Chapter 6: From Classic Realism to Modernism and Postmodernism
1. Introduction
• Fiction is a generic term and includes short stories, novellas and novels.
• Fiction is the kind of imaginative literature many people are most familiar with; it is the form that sells best, is publicised most widely, and is usually the most straightforward to read.
• We will be attempting to define some of the characteristics of fiction writing by focusing mainly on novels written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
• The reason for choosing novels written in the last two centuries is that the nineteenth century is the period when novel writing really flourished as a literary form, and when the style is known as ‘classic realism’ dominated British fiction. George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell and Anthony Trollope are examples of some of the best-known writers from this time. However, the label ‘realism’, can be applied to a wide range of texts and is a style of writing still popular today. Some writers in the twentieth century reacted against many of the assumptions made in novel writing in the previous century, and by examining the contrast between nineteenth-century and twentieth-century forms.
• We will be identifying the stylistic features which are typical of classic realism, and of modernism and postmodernism. We think that being able to recognise the stylistic features associated with these movements can lead to a more thorough understanding of texts.
2. Literary Perspectives on Realist Texts
• Let’s look at some accounts of what constitutes a realist text, particularly the views of literary theorists Roland Barthes, Colin MacCabe and David Lodge. In the following sections, we will look at what kinds of novels, and what features of the novel were distinct from previous literature. We will then look at some of the stylistic features and devices that enable us to classify and interpret a text as ‘realist’.
• As we have noted above, the label ‘realism’ can be applied to a wide range of fiction, including contemporary texts, while ‘classic realism’refers to a particular movement in the nineteenth century.
• The social historian Raymond Williams (1972) has suggested that in the twentieth century, the realist tradition in the novel has been subdivided into two separate categories of ‘social’ and ‘personal’ realism. Writers like George Orwell and William Golding are in the first category, and Graham Greene and E.M.Forster in the second. As we will see, there are other kinds of novels which also use some of the stylistic features of realism to construct the textual world as real.
• One of the most influential accounts of the difference between realist and modernist writing is Roland Barthes’ distinction between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts.
• Barthes defines a ‘readerly’ text as one which enables the reader to be a ‘consumer’ of the meanings, narratives and characters which are presented to them by the text, whereas a ‘writerly’ text is one which makes the reader actively engage in producing those meanings. Let’s take a look at this idea in more detail to establish what these terms are actually referring to and whether we can clarify them from a stylistic point of view.
• We can start from Barthes’ definition of an ‘ideal’ text, which he describes as ‘plural’, consisting of ‘a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds’. A signifier in linguistic terminology is the actual material of language, the written or spoken word or phrase that we use to represent a particular thing or a particular concept.(The terms "signifier" and "signified" are used in semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. The signifier is the physical form of a sign, such as a word, image, or sound. The signified is the concept or meaning that the sign represents. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is unpredictable and determined by social convention.) So, for example, the combination of phonemes /k/, /æ/, and /t/ produces the item cat, which is the word we use to refer to the small four-legged domestic animal that purrs. The animal itself is the ‘signified’, the concept to which the label cat refers to. But the word itself is unrelated to the animal in any way—there is no good reason why the group of phonemes /kæt/ should represent the animal described above, rather than any other group of phonemes. It is our knowledge of the English language that enables us to link this word, or linguistic signifier, to its ‘signified’ element: the animal itself.
• Ferdinand de Saussure describes this relationship between signifiers and signifieds as arbitrary (inconsistent/unpredictable), that is to say, established through the systems and conventions of the language, and through an inherent relationship between the word and the thing it refers to. (Very few words do have this kind of ‘inherent’ relationship, for example when the sound of the signifier imitates the sound made by the signified. This is the connection between the word ‘cuckoo’ and the call of that bird; this relationship of a word imitating the sound of what it refers to is known as ‘onomatopoeia’.)
• When Barthes uses the terms ‘galaxy’ and ‘structure’ to describe the difference between readerly and writerly texts, we can take ‘a galaxy of signifiers’ to mean groups or clusters of words which may have multiple meanings, which can be interpreted in different ways. This is in contrast to ‘structures of signifieds’, where the relationship between the things or concepts being referred to is fixed and stable, producing only one possible meaning.
• In postmodernist texts with overtly complex signifying systems, this relationship is much weaker. Readerly texts are those whose structures seem to be ‘smooth’ on the outside, the narration ‘flows’ and the language seems ordinary and natural. Writerly texts, on the other hand, challenge the reading process in some way, and make the reader work much harder to produce meanings from a range of different possibilities, undermining the ‘naturalness’ of the text.
• We can illustrate this difference between readerly and writerly texts by using two contrasting examples: extract one is from The Prodigal Daughter by Jeffrey Archer and extract two from Russell Hoban’s novel Ridley Walker.
1. It had not been an easy birth, but then for Abel and Zaphia Rosnovski nothing had ever been easy, and in their own ways they had both become philosophical about that. Abel had wanted a son, an heir who would one day be chairman of the Baron Group. By the time the boy was ready to take over, Abel was confident that his own name would stand alongside those of Ritz and Statler and by then the Baron would be the largest hotel group in the world. Abel had paced up and down the colourless corridor of St.Luke’s Hospital waiting for the first cry, his slight limp becoming more pronounced as each hour passed. Occasionally he twisted the silver band that encircled his wrist and stared at the name so neatly engraved on it. He turned and retraced his steps once again, to see Doctor Dodek heading towards him.
2. There is the Hart of the Wud in the Eusa Story that wer a stage every 1 knows that. There is the hart of the wood meaning the verýes deap of it thats a nother thing. There is the hart of the wóod where they bern the chard coal thats a nother thing agen innit. Thats a nother thing. Berning the chard coal in the hart of the wood. That’s what they call the stack of wood you see. The stack of wood in the shape they do it for chard coal berning. Why do they call it the hart tho? That’s what this here story tels of.
• The first extract makes few demands on the reader. There is little difficulty or effort involved in interpreting this text. The characters and events are presented through third person narration, the hospital setting is familiar to the majority of readers, the action of a father pacing the corridor, waiting for the birth of his child is recognisable (even stereotypical), and the language does not draw attention to itself in any way.
• The second extract, in contrast, not only foregrounds the use of language by using non-standard spellings and grammar, but it also poses problems of interpretation for the reader. Meaning is not transparent in this text. The first-person narrator points out that there are three possible meanings for the ‘Hart of the Wud’, and none of them is straightforward to understand.
• Text 2 has non-standard spelling and punctuation, uses forms more usual in registers of spoken language than written like the tag innit (an informal pronunciation of isn’t it), and the marker you see; the semantic referents are not immediately available because of the deviant spelling—for example, do we know what chard coal is?Does a stage refer to a stage in a theatre, or a stage in a process(for instance a stage in the sequence of events in a story)? Do the words Wud and wood refer to the same thing? The different semantic fields in the extract are not easily related to one another.
• In contrast, Text 1 has none of this ambiguity; the spelling and punctuation are conventional, the register fits our expectations of narration using past tense forms, and the semantic fields are clearly the themes of birth, hospitals and doctors, and the world of finance. The semantic referents are easily recoverable, either from the context or from background knowledge the reader is likely to have about the world.
• Writerly texts are not ‘consumable’ since they challenge our normal reading habits and interpretative practices, and often need to be read many times; each time a different interpretation may emerge.
• Another related way of describing classic realist texts is to see them as containing a ‘hierarchy’ of levels of discourse (discussion/dialogue): the discourse of the narrator, and the discourse of the characters. By ‘discourse’ in this context, we refer to the sets or types of sentences or utterances that can be attributed to one source (a character or a narrator) in the text. The narrative discourse provides a ‘window 1 on reality’. It presents the world of the text to the reader as if it were part of exterior reality, situating the events and the characters of the novel as if they were in the real world.
• As we saw in the extract from The Prodigal Daughter, the narrator presents the character Abel Rosnovski in a hospital, waiting for news of the birth of his child, describing his thoughts and actions while he waits, as part of a world that is familiar to the reader. The discourse of the characters is then interpreted by the reader via the dominant discourse of the omnipresent narrator. Extract 3, from the same novel, illustrates this process:
3.
‘Congratulations, Mr Rosnovski,’ he called.
‘Thank you,’ said Abel eagerly.
‘You have a beautiful girl,’ the doctor said as he reached him.
‘Thank you,’ repeated Abel, quietly, trying not to show his disappointment.
• Here we can clearly see this distinction between discourse, as we are given Abel’s reaction to the news through the evaluative discourse of the narration (‘...trying not to show his disappointment...’) rather than the direct speech of the character (‘“Thank you,” repeated Abel ...’). MacCabe labels these two levels of discourse as ‘metadiscourse’ (the discourse of the narrator) and ‘object-discourse’ (the discourse of the characters) and claims that the reader is guided in their interpretation of the text through the discourse of the narrator.
• David Lodge (1990) disagrees with this idea of narrative discourse as ‘transparent’ prose and suggests that there may be various discourses operating in a realist novel, not only in the form of the narration but also in the reported speech and thoughts of the characters. He argues that we cannot consider the voice of the narrator as being the controlling voice of the narrative, at the top of the hierarchy as it were, guiding the reader through the text. Instead, readers have to engage with a range of discourses and their interpretation will be influenced not only by the narrator but equally by the other voices present in the text.
3. The Emergence of Realism
• Representing the textual world as ‘real’ was not always of paramount importance in fictional writing, particularly in very early fiction. Before the eighteenth century, literature was overwhelmingly concerned with mythical, romantic or heroic subjects, rather than the ordinary, domestic, everyday world typically represented in the later realist tradition. Poetry and drama were the genres writers used for imaginative literature, rather than prose.
• Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, a mixture of prose and poetry, written in the latter half of the sixteenth century, is considered by many to be one of the earliest precursors of the English novel. In this text, the bardic tradition (a poet, traditionally one reciting epics and associated with a particular oral tradition) of oral narrative is very much in evidence. The story is situated at a time which is unspecified and a place which is very distant from the world of the reader. The pastoral setting of the country of Arcadia is a conventional literary landscape of the time, and nothing like the real Arcadia, a rather bleak mountainous area. The main characters are members of the nobility, and behave in a way that appears very stylised and lacking in psychological realism today.
• The concern to produce fiction which could be accepted by the reader as if it were part of the real world began to appear in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.
• Stylistic devices for constructing an impression of reality in texts, through the supposed validity of documents like letters, or a written confession, started to be used and narratives began to look as if they were drawn from real life. One of these devices was to present a fictional story as if it were fact through a sequence of letters. In an epistolary (relating to the writing of letters) novel, the letters create an impression of reality as it unfolds through time. As David Lodge(1992) points out, a real letter and a fictional letter look very similar, and the time- scale of the letters in Richardson’s novels, Pamela(1741) and Clarissa (1747), represents the story as if it were unfolding in real time. Daniel Defoe, writing in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, used the device of the confessional novel for Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724), to convince readers of the ‘truth’ of the story. The following extract comes from the preface of Roxana, in which Defoe attempts to present the novel to his readers as based on fact:
• He takes the Liberty to say, That this Story differs from most of the Modern Performances of this Kind, tho’ some of them have 53 met with a very good Reception in the World; I say, It differs from them in this Great and Essential Article, Namely, That the Foundation of This is laid in Truth of Fact; and so the Work is not a Story, but a History.
• The novel is written as a first person narrator telling the story of her life, and the reader is constantly reminded of the ‘reality’ of the story through devices such as ‘disguising’ the names of some of the characters:
• At about Fifteen Years of Age, my Father gave me, as he call’d it in French, 25000 Livres, that is to say, two Thousand pounds Portion, and married me to an Eminent Brewer in the City; pardon me if I conceal his Name, for tho’ he was the Foundation of my Ruin, I cannot take so severe a Revenge upon him.
• The emergence of the ‘classic realist’ novel in the nineteenth century, of which George Eliot’s writing is often regarded as the prototypical example, was an attempt to produce a ‘whole’ picture of life, community and characters as they could have existed in the real world, and that world was presented through the view of an exterior, ‘omnipresent’ narrator who was not part of it but who commented on it.
• Realism is therefore a very significant development in the history of fiction.
4. Stylistic Characteristics of Realist Texts
• If we are interested in analysing the stylistic features of realist texts, and exploring the similarities between classic realism and modern realist writing, we need to move from a general account of realism to a more detailed analysis of the level of linguistic choices in the text. Moreover, the term ‘realism’ has been applied to other literary and artistic genres including Hollywood films. A stylistic analysis of realism should therefore attempt to describe the devices used to construct the appearance of reality in very different kinds of texts.
• Lodge (1990) suggests the following set of criteria for defining a ‘realist’ text, to contrast these more ‘readerly’ kinds of texts against the more ‘writerly’ texts of the modernist and postmodernist literary style:
• the language of the text is not foregrounded (i.e. it does not draw attention to itself);
• the narrator does not draw attention to his or her role in interpreting events, the events ‘speak for themselves;
• there is an emphasis on a detailed description of context (time, place, setting)
• there is a similarity with the conventions of non-fictional texts from the same culture which produces an impression of reality.
• In light of the above criteria, these are some areas that we could investigate as possible devices for constructing realism in texts. We will be focusing on the representation of time, place and dialogue, as well as discussing the role of the narrating voice and the device of narrative closure.
i) The Omniscient Narrator
• The presence of an ‘omniscient narrator’ in realist texts allows the writer to build up a picture of the world of the text and the people in it as if they were real. The narrator not only tells the story but also comments on and makes judgements about the events and the characters. The passage below is taken from George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch; Dorothea, a young woman with a provincial upbringing, is engaged to Mr Casaubon. She hopes he will teach her Latin and Greek, in part so that she can help him in his work:
• She would not have asked Mr Casaubon at once to teach her the languages, dreading of all things to be tiresome instead of helpful; but it was not entirely out of devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin and Greek. Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing ground from which all truth could be seen more truly. As it was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance: how could she be confident that one-roomed cottages were not for the glory of God, when men who knew the classics appeared to conciliate indifference to the cottages with zeal for the glory? Perhaps even Hebrew might be necessary—at least the alphabet and a few roots—in order to arrive at the core of things and judge soundly on the social duties of the Christian. And she had not reached that point of renunciation at which she would have been satisfied with having a wise husband; she wished, poor child, to be wise herself. Miss Brooke was certainly very naive with all her alleged cleverness. Celia, whose mind had never been thought too powerful, saw the emptiness of other people’s pretensions much more readily. To have in general but little feeling seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.
• The narrating voice here shifts through various levels or perspectives. In the first six lines, we could argue that the narrator is representing the situation from the perspective of Dorothea through a series of ‘mental process’ verbs. These are a group of verbs which refer to processes to do with thinking or feeling. In the following examples, ‘she’ is the subject and agent of these mental process verbs: ‘dreading of all things to be tiresome’, ‘she wished to know’, ‘she constantly doubted’,‘she felt her own ignorance’. After the colon, the following two questions can be interpreted as Dorothea’s own internal thought processes, since they occur without a descriptive, narrating frame such as ‘she wondered’ or ‘she thought’.
• … how could she be confident that one-roomed cottages were not for the glory of God? Perhaps even Hebrew might be necessary.
• This method of representing a character’s thoughts or words is known as ‘free indirect speech’, where the discourse of a character and the narrator’s discourse are blended, or indistinguishable as different voices in the text. There is then a shift back from Dorothea’s perspective to the narrator’s external voice, commenting on the previous section with a description of Dorothea’s mental state, but this time using a material process verb reach, followed by the very explicit poor child.
• … she had not reached that point of renunciation at which she would have been satisfied with having a wise husband; she wished, poor child, to be wise herself.
• There is a further distancing of the narrator from the character in the use of her second name, Miss Brooke rather than Dorothea, and the paragraph ends with a general comment which is relevant not only to the situation at hand but to the world at large. So in this paragraph, there is movement from a shared narrator/character perspective, to a character perspective and then to a narrator-only perspective at the end, linking the specific situation with the ‘real’ world of the narrator and the reader.
ii) Representation of Place
• Another device found in realist writing to create an impression of a real world is to describe places in great detail, which was taken to even further lengths in the ‘naturalist’ novels of the nineteenth century. In the following extract from Eliot’s Adam Bede (1878), the narrator gives a detailed description of a place called ‘the Hall Farm’ which paints a very vivid picture of the building and surrounding land:
• Evidently, that gate is never opened; for the long grass and the great hemlocks grow against it; and if it were opened, it is so rusty that the force necessary to turn it on its hinges would be likely to pull down the square stone built pillars, to the detriment of the two stone lionesses which grin with a doubtful carnivorous affability above a coat of arms, surmounting each of the pillars. It would be easy enough, by the aid of the nicks in the stone pillars, to climb over the brick wall with its smooth stone coping; but by putting our eyes close to the rusty bars of the gate, we can see the house well enough, and all by the very corners of the grassy enclosure. It is a very fine old place, of red brick, softened by a pale powdery lichen, which has dispersed itself with happy irregularity, so as to bring the red brick into terms of friendly companionship with the limestone ornaments surrounding the three gables, the windows, and the door- place. But the windows are patched with wooden panes, and the door, I think, is like the gate—it is never opened: how it would groan and grate against the stone floor if it were!
• The detail is made even more ‘real’ by the device of situating the narrator within view of the place being described and using the present tense throughout the description. The narrator here acts as the ‘eyes’ (and potentially the legs and ears) of the reader. By using the word ‘we’, the first person plural pronoun, Eliot encourages the reader to see themselves as if in a ‘team’ with the narrator:
• … by putting our eyes close to the rusty bars of the gate, we can see the house well enough...
• The narrator’s expression I think in the description of the door also zv1 58 creates an impression of shared reality—as if the reader and narrator were in the same space, from where only a partial view is possible. These devices in the text function to construct the experience of seeing this house as ‘real’. The level of description of the fictional world is also a feature of contemporary popular fiction, as this extract from Dick Francis’s novel Comeback illustrates:
• We sat round a small dark table in a corner of a room heavily raftered and furnished in oak. The level of light from the red-shaded wall lamps was scarcely bright enough for reading the menus and there was an overall warmth of atmosphere that one met nowhere else on earth but in a British pub.
• Here we see the stylistic concern of realism to give lifelike and detailed representations of place can also be found in this ‘readerly’ novel of the twentieth century.
iii) Representation of Dialogue
• The representation of speech in narratives can take various forms. The extract below from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia shows many of the features of oral narratives, there is no attempt to reproduce the characters’ talk in the form of a recognisable dialogue:
• It was in the time that the earth begins to put on her new apparel against the approach of her lover and that the sun, running a most even course, becomes an indifferent arbiter between the night and the day, when the hopeless shepherd Strephon came to the sands which lie against the island of Cithera; where viewing the place with a heavy kind of delight, and sometimes casting his eyes to the isleward, he called his friendly rival, the pastor Claius, unto him; and setting first down in his darkened countenance a doleful copy of what he would speak,
‘O my Claius,’ said he, ‘hither we are now come to pay the rent for which we are so-called unto by over-busy remembrance—remembrance, restless remembrance, which claims not only this duty of us but for it will have us forget ourselves. [...] Did remembrance grant us any holiday either for pastime or devotion—nay either for necessary food or natural rest—but that still it forced our thoughts to work upon this place where we last (alas, that the word last should so long last) did graze our eyes upon her ever-flourishing beauty?
• The square brackets signal the omission of another six lines of declamatory prose in Strephon’s speech to Claius. The register is highly poetic, the language contains many rhetorical structures, and it is monologic rather than dialogic, bearing very little resemblance to anything we would recognise as conversation.
• Let’s compare this to the next example, taken from David Copperfield when David meets Mr Creakle for the first time:
• ‘Now,’ said Mr Creakle. ‘What’s the report of this boy?’
‘There’s nothing against him yet,’ returned the man with the wooden leg. ‘There has been no opportunity.’
I thought Mr Creakle was disappointed. I thought Mrs and Miss Creakle (at whom I now glanced for the first time, and who were, both, thin and quiet) were not disappointed.
‘Come here, sir!’ said Mr Creakle, beckoning to me.
‘Come here,’ said the man with the wooden leg, repeating the gesture. ‘I have the happiness of knowing your father-in-law,’ whispered Mr Creakle, taking me by the ear; ‘and a worthy man he is, and a man of a strong character. He knows me, and I know him. Do you know me? Hey?’ said Mr Creakle, pinching my ear with ferocious playfulness.
‘Not yet, sir,’ I said, flinching with the pain.
• In the extract above, the conversation is represented as if it were really taking place, through the conventional use of speech marks to indicate the words spoken, direct address between the characters, interactive question and answer sequences and reporting verbs like said, whispered and returned, discourse markers such as now and hey, as well as David Copperfield’s commentary (as the first person narrator) on the conversation in real-time, as it occurs.
iv) Representation of Time
• There is also a concern in realist novels to situate the narrative in real, historical time, by referring to events that actually took place, zv1 62 ranging from the very specific to more general references to a given historical period:
• Our tale begins in 1793; about seven years after the commencement of one of the earliest of those settlements, which have conduced to effect that magical change in the power and condition of the state, to which we have alluded.
• Let’s look at the different ways that time can be constructed, by considering the opening paragraphs of two nineteenth-century novels: extract a) is from the classic realist text, Middlemarch; b) is from Thomas Hardy’s novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge.
a) Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of today’s newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common sense.
b) One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot. They were plainly but not ill-clad, though the thick hoar of dust which had accumulated on their shoes and garments from an obviously long journey lent a disadvantageous shabbiness to their appearance just now.
• In both these extracts the characters are situated within a particular historical time— explicitly by Hardy: ‘before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span’; and by reference to contemporary time by Eliot: ‘in a paragraph of today’s newspapers’. The location is specified by Hardy; the existence of Miss Brooke within a social world is implied by Eliot in the phrase: ‘she was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever’ (i.e. by people who knew her). Eliot uses the first person possessive form ‘our’: ‘from one of our elder poets’, which not only foregrounds the ‘voice’ of the narration but also implies a close relationship between reader and narrator by the suggestion of shared time. In Hardy’s text, on the other hand, the description is given without foregrounding the voice of the narrator. However, the use of the phrase ‘just now’ in the Hardy extract brings the reader closely into the time of the narrated events, also creating the sense of a shared temporal perspective between the reader and the narration.
v) Realism in Other Fictional Genres
• To end this section, we want to look at other kinds of fiction which draw on the stylistic devices of realism to construct a ‘real’ textual world, even though they might not in other respects fit into our category of the ‘realist’ novel. Two of these genres are magic realism and science fiction, which share some of the characteristics of realist texts even though neither genre is in the business of representing the ‘ordinary’, everyday world. Science fiction is usually concerned with representing a world apart from ours, either separated by time or space; magic realism represents strange and inexplicable qualities in the world we know. Some writers of magic realism novels include Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, García Márquez and Angela Carter.
5. After Classic Realism
• Fiction, just like other artistic forms of expression such as architecture, painting and clothing, has fashioned and sooner or later, new ideas will be developed which have different values and put emphasis on different aspects of the art form. In the area of fiction, the values and forms of classic realism were challenged in the early twentieth century by modernism. Later in the century, the ideas informing modernism were themselves challenged by postmodernism.
• One of the clearest ways to illustrate the changes which occurred in fiction in the twentieth century is through another medium—painting. Consider these paintings:
John Constable’s The Hay-Wain, was painted in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. It has an almost photographic quality; it appears to be objective. A photograph of the scene taken at the same moment would probably look very similar, and the personality of the painter does not conspicuously intrude into the painting.
• It is a representation of an English scene so carefully accurate and detailed that you would easily be able to identify the place from the painting if you ever visited the spot. Attention has been paid to the exact special layout and proportions of all the objects in the scene, and great effort has been expended on making the light and colours precisely as they would be at a certain time of day, and in certain weather conditions. It is also an ‘ordinary’ scene, which anyone might have come across, i.e. it is a representation of ‘ordinary life’.
• All these features are similar to the defining features of classic realism. For many people, the measure of whether or not they like a painting in this style is how closely it looks like what it represents (how ‘accurate’ it is) and whether they like the subject matter (although art critics might not share this perspective). These are also criteria many people use when they judge whether or not they like a
classic realist novel.
• Almost a century later, we are accustomed to seeing pictures such as this. Imagine however the effect of seeing Les Demoiselles for the first time if you were used to seeing pictures like The Hay-Wain, and you will understand why Robert Hughes named his book on twentieth-century art movements The Shock of the New. The differences between The Hay-wain and Les Demoiselles d’Avignonare the same kinds of differences found between classic realist fiction and modernist fiction. Similarly, the relationship between Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and James Rosenquist’s Marilyn Monroe(1962) mirrors the
relationship between modernist and postmodernist fiction. |
Marilyn Monroe, I. by James Rosenquist. (1962) Oil and spray enamel on canvas, 7'9"×6'1⁄4". The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Sidney and Harriet Janis collection. Photograph © 1997 The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
6. The Origins of Modernism
• The modernist movement was a period of great change, particularly for people involved in the arts. Music, architecture, painting, drama and poetry, were affected as well as fiction. It was perceived by some to be such a complete break with the past, that in 1924 Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘On or about December 1910 human nature changed... All human relations shifted...and when human relations change, there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.’ (Woolf 1924:321).
• When this period is written about, the term ‘dislocation’ is frequently used, to refer to a sense that cultural forms which had been popular in the past are no longer relevant, and that new ones must be developed to express a different worldview.
• The term ‘modernism’ signals this break with the past. Because modernism erupted in so many forms and because it was so widespread, emerging in North America, Britain and mainland Europe, it must really have seemed to those involved with it to be a complete break with the world that had existed before.
• There is little agreement on the exact dates of the modernist movement. Virginia Woolf, as quoted above, proposed 1910 as a key date. The year 1922 has also been identified as a key year because so many significant modernist texts were published in it: Ulysses by James Joyce, The Waste Land by T.S.Eliot, Bertolt Brecht’s first play, Baal, Anna Christie by Eugene O’Neill, and Virginia Woolf’s first major experimental work, Jacob’s Room. In art, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is often thought to be the first modernist painting. It is probably best to work with two sets of dates, placing the ‘outer limits’ of modernism between 1880 and 1950, and within that period, the height of modernism as being probably between 1914 and 1939, from the start of World War I to the start of World War II.
7. Stylistic Characteristics of Modernists Texts:
• Modernist texts can be shown to differ stylistically from classic realist writing in some distinctive areas. In the following section, we will describe some of these differences, by analysing some examples of what are generally considered to be ‘modernist’ texts.
i) Language as a Substance in its own Right: If the language in classic realist texts was ‘transparent’, and a ‘mirror of reality’, then in modernist texts, it was treated by writers as a substance in its own right. Modernism challenged the unquestioned relationship between the signifier (the sound or written form of a word) and the signified (the concept represented). The form of language became an object to be experimented with. In extract 20, from James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the language does not simply record what Stephen, the protagonist, was like as a baby, it actually simulates the experience. The language is used to demonstrate a child’s perception of the world.
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming along the road and this moocow that was coming along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo....
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.
O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.
He sang that song. That was his song.
• The simple grammatical structures, the baby vocabulary, and the worldview (‘his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face’) are those of a child, not the adult who narrates most of the text. The language is not merely describing early memories and perceptions, it is being used to mimic them.
ii) Departure from Conventional Literary Structures: Classic realist novels are composed of two kinds of discourse usually, ‘narrative’ and ‘dialogue’. Characters hold conversations with one another, and the narrator fills in any other information the reader receives, for example about what the room looks like or what the characters are thinking. The modernist novel, starting with the Pilgrimage novels by Dorothy Richardson, replaced some of the narrative and dialogue with ‘stream of consciousness’.
• The ‘stream-of-consciousness technique is used to provide direct access to a character’s thoughts. The results can appear chaotic and difficult to read. The flow of language is meant to represent the movement of ideas through the brain, and all the memories, thoughts and impressions which can flash through someone’s mind in a moment. Possibly the most famous example is the closing forty-five pages of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, in which the thoughts of the character of Molly Bloom are represented in an uninterrupted flow. Virginia Woolf is also famous for using this technique, demonstrated in extract 21, taken from Mrs Dalloway.
No, the words meant absolutely nothing to her now. She could not even get an echo of her old emotion. But she could remember going cold with excitement and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy (now the old feeling began to come back to her, as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing table, and began to do her hair), with the rooks flaunting up and down in the pink evening light, and dressing, and going downstairs, and feeling as she crossed the hall ‘if it were now to die ‘twere now to be most happy’. That was her feeling—Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton!
• It was in this period too that poetry began to abandon the conventions of regular rhyme and metre and to explore the less rigidly structured forms possible in free verse or vers libre.
• Modernism, therefore, involved experimentation with the possible forms literature could take, particularly with more flexible styles of expression.
iii) Collage and Allusion: Modernist texts often bring together fragments of other texts to create a kind of ‘collage’ of references. This was also happening in the paintings of the time. Braque, for example, incorporated strips of wallpaper into his work. T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is constructed to quite a considerable extent from pieces of other texts, including works by Shakespeare, Webster, Goldsmith and Dante, extracts from the Bible and from Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. In Eliot’s case, this was in part because he was identifying his poetry with the tradition of European literature, from medieval poets like Chaucer and Dante to late nineteenth-century ones like Baudelaire. It was as if he were claiming that literature is like a relay race and that he was the appropriate person to take up the baton in the twentieth century.
• For Eliot and others, the use of allusions to other works of literature was a way of exploring twentieth-century life and meanings in relation to the cultures which had gone before—the myths, religious and secular, on which Western culture is founded.
iv) Register: Another feature typical of modernist writing is changing in a register. An example would be a shift from a formal, rhetorical register, which sounds like writing from the Bible, for example, to the register of ordinary colloquial speech. The effect of this is to bring into juxtaposition a ‘voice’ from ‘high culture’ and a ‘voice’ from ‘low culture’, providing a contrast which is one of the key areas of interest in this period.
• Another effect of different ‘voices’ is that the number of points of view offered by the text increases. The voice of the narrator carries less authority than in classic realism. To summarise, some of the key features of modernism in fiction are:
• eclecticism (using lots of different sources)
• experimentation with form (using language in new ways, stream of consciousness)
• exploration of the relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, and between European and non-European traditions.
8. The Origins of Postmodernism
• Postmodernism emerged in Western literature, art and architecture, and other forms of thinking and expression, in the period 1945–50, and is still in progress. The name ‘postmodernism’ appears to be a strange contradiction. It suggests a time after the modern, perhaps ‘the future’. It is important to emphasise the affixes: post and ism. The ism means we are dealing with a movement, rather than a chronological division; the post means after. Postmodernism is the movement which followed modernism, and the names emphasise the relationship between the two movements. Postmodernism did not simply follow modernism, it was a consequence of it. Modernism created the conditions necessary for postmodernism to happen.
• Naturally, modernism, which had been so shocking when it first appeared, began to look less unconventional and more institutionalised. Its key writers appear on English literature syllabuses throughout the world; it has become the ‘official culture’. To some extent modernism has been culturally ‘defused’; it does not challenge the way people think as much as it did at first.
• Postmodernism arose partly as a continuation of the ideas of modernism, in that it continues to challenge cultural forms and push back the limits of how we represent the world. But postmodernism pushes many of the questions and ideas further; it is more extreme and anarchic (without law and order). Postmodernist texts often set themselves in radical opposition to authority, frequently by means of humour.
• The image of Marilyn Monroe is drawn from popular culture, rather than ‘high culture’. It looks rather frivolous (not serious in content) next to the more austere (strict in manner or attitude) Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The face has been fragmented and turned upside down—a game is being played with the image; the picture is about the image and how it is used, rather than a portrait of the woman. Fragments of other materials have also been included. A recognisable part of our culture has been repackaged and sold to us again, as a comment on the way our culture uses images. The comparative frivolity, the concern with popular culture, the recycling of images, and the emphasis on the process of production, are some of the significant features of postmodernism.
9. Stylistic Characteristics of Postmodern Texts
i) Language as Free-Floating Entity
• Classic realist texts treat language as if it could be used transparently to depict reality; modernism experimented with language as a substance in its own right, with a complex relationship to the world it is used to represent. Postmodernism, however, treats language as if instead of referring to a ‘real world’ independent of language, language in fact only referred to itself—as if it is the only reality. There is an emphasis on the material forms of language, and a loss of interest in the content.
• Finnegans Wake, written by James Joyce and published in 1939, comes a little early in the time scale suggested earlier for the beginnings of postmodernism. However, its use of language is very postmodern. Language as a material entity takes priority over the content, the story.
• Retell as much of the extract from Finnegans Wake below in your own words as you can.
• Eins within a space and a wearywide space it was ere wohned a Mookse. The onesomeness wast alltolonely, archunsistlike, broady oval, and a Mookse he would a walking go (My hood! cries Antony Romeo), so one grandsumer evening, after a great morning and his good supper of gammon and spittish, having flabelled his eyes, pilleoled his nostrils, vacticanated his ears and palliumed his throats, he put on his impermeable, seized his impugnable, harped on his crown and steepped out of his immobile De Rure Albo….
• The extract seems to be about a ‘Mookse’ who lives alone and doesn’t like it, so after his supper and getting himself ready, he goes out for a walk on a lovely summer’s evening.
• Within this extract, games are being played with language. Joyce has made up words, borrowed words from other languages (German and French), and selected words that are ambiguous and can mean more than one thing. Part of the passage looks like Old English or German, which could give the impression this story happened a long time ago, in a mythological past perhaps (Einsfor example, is like ein, the German word for one; the s makes it more like once, the way traditional stories in English begin. The word wohned is like the German wohnen, which means live in the sense of reside, but with an English verb ending: ed. The conventional activity of story-telling is recognisable but distorted. Instead of starting with ‘Once upon a time’, the story starts ‘[Once] within a space’, a similar formula. Other words are reminiscent of English words. Spittish could mean spinach; broadly oval sounds like bloody awful, and so on. With some effort, a story does begin to emerge.
• However, it is clearly not the primary purpose of this text to communicate a story about the mookse. The text is much more about the process of telling a story, and how language works. Neither is it easy to read. To return to the distinction made earlier between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts, this is clearly a ‘writerly’ text, not one that the reader can comprehend on a first brief reading, but one which must be laboured at to wring its meaning from it.
ii) Loss of Narrative Closure
• Closure is what happens when the problems which have arisen in a story are resolved at its end; death or marriage are ways in which closure is often achieved. All of Jane Austen’s novels end with the heroines getting married, for example. In modernist novels, there is often some kind of closure; the action of Ulysses all takes place within a single day and ends with sleep, for example. In To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, the novel ends when the journey to the lighthouse is made. Postmodernist novels have tended to abandon conventional narrative closure, however.
• In The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, instead of being presented with a neat conclusion, the reader is offered a choice of three endings. In one, the male protagonist, Charles, marries his fiancée, the dull and pious Ernestina; in another, he marries Sarah, the French Lieutenant’s woman of the title; in the third, he loses both women. When a film was made of the book, two possible endings were shown. The effect of these ‘choices’ is that the reader is left with a lack of resolution, a sense that the problems of the story cannot be tied up neatly, and also a sense that the novelist is playing a game by drawing attention to the process of writing.
iii) Parody and Pastiche
• Postmodernism is characterised by parody (satire) and pastiche. Pastiche is the process of mixing styles or imitating the styles of other’s work, sometimes to humorous effect; parody imitates other work in order to mock it. Writers like Eliot used intertextual references because they believed in the value of traditional literature, and in the importance of the continuity of literary tradition. Postmodernism uses intertextual references often in order to mock the original texts, and for comic effect. The example below is from Lolita, a novel by Vladimir Nabokovfirst published in 1955.
To fill the pause, I proposed he read his own sentence—in the
poetical form I had given it...
‘Just as you say. Shall I read it out loud?’
‘Yes’
‘Here goes. I see it’s in verse.
Because you took advantage of a sinner
because you took advantage
because you took
because you took advantage of my disadvantage...
That’s good, you know. That’s damned good.’
Nabokov has parodied lines from the poem ‘Ash-Wednesday’ by T.S. Eliot:
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope...
• Nabokov’s version is a parody, rather than merely an allusion, for a number of reasons. The context in which the rewrite occurs is farcical—the reader of the ‘poem’ believes he is about to be shot by its writer (the first speaker) for kidnapping the first speaker’s prepubescent lover. Second, although the poem is very clearly a plagiarism of Eliot's poem, neither character acknowledges it. Third, the poem becomes increasingly ridiculous and is not at all deserving of the compliments its reader pays it. Thus the passage is a joke, partly at the expense of Eliot’s poem. This also illustrates the next feature of postmodernism to be considered.
iv) The End of Cultural Hierarchy
• Postmodernism also differs from modernism in its anarchic (lawless) disrespect for tradition and status. It juxtaposes ‘popular culture’ and ‘high culture’, without any sense that one has more value than the other, and has no hesitation in mocking or distorting high cultural forms (as in the example from Lolitaabove). Modernist texts also juxtapose high and low cultural forms but frequently emphasise the difference in value between the culture of the elite and the perceived sordidness and banality (unoriginality) of everyday life. Postmodernism rejoices in erasing the divide between popular forms and traditional culture.
v) All Stories have been Told Before
• Postmodernist texts often include a sense that all stories have been told before and underline the ‘usedness’ of language—there is nothing new to say, only words already used by other people, and stories which have been told over and over. Modernist texts used allusions to link them with the greatness of past writing. Postmodernist texts recycle for parody and pastiche.
• There is a mythical remark which sums this up; someone apparently commented that it is impossible to say in the late twentieth century ‘I love you’ because it has been said so often before that its meaning is tarnished. You have to say ‘I love you, as Barbara Cartland would say’ (Barbara Cartland being a very famous, and often parodied, romantic novelist). The implication of this anecdote is that you have to show an awareness of how the words have been used in other contexts.
• Stories have always been retold; Chaucer and Shakespeare’swritings are full of retold stories. Writers such as Umberto Ecoand A.S.Byatt make very rich use of stories which have been told before. If all stories have been told before, however, this is a further reason for the content of fiction writing to become much less interesting that the way a story is told, and the forms of language which are used.
vi) Self-Referentiality
• This is another version of a point that has been made several times already. While classic realism aimed to present the world as if language were a window to look through, and modernism explored the relationship between language and the world, postmodernist texts keep drawing attention to their own ‘textuality’. They tend to dwell on the nature of texts and to a large extent ignore the world outside the text. Extract 25 is the opening paragraph of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino:
• You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world about you fade. Best close the door: the T.V. is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, ‘No, I don’t want to watch TV!’ Raise your voice—they won’t hear you otherwise—‘I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!’ Maybe they haven’t heard you with all that racket; speak louder, yell: ‘I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel’. Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.
• What are the features of this opening paragraph which are (a) different from the opening of a classic realist novel? (b) similar to it?
• Differences:
• The use of deixis to refer to the reader’s ‘time’ e.g. new in the first sentence (a number of years after publication, this is clearly not an accurate adjective);
• direct commands given to the reader e.g. ‘Relax’, ‘Concentrate’;
• direct reference to the existence of the novel itself;
• no reference to the ‘novel action’—e.g. characters, setting, events—which most classic realist novels start with;
• references to the setting the reader is in—the rooms, the other people in the building, the TV.
• Similarities
• This is clearly a beginning of a series of actions, although not clearly the beginning of a story!
• You may have been able to add several points we have not thought of to both lists.
vii) Irony and Humour
• If all texts can only be about other texts, as is assumed in postmodernism, then saying anything serious and with sincerity becomes a very difficult thing to do. Playfulness is central to postmodernism since there is little else to do in this view of the world but play. Thus postmodernist texts are full of jokes about language, other texts, and about themselves.
10. The Function of Style in Fiction
• This chapter has looked at some of the characteristics of fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We have shown how ideas about language and social order are manifested in different writing styles. Classic realism is still very common in many novels (and films) and exists alongside the postmodernism that we encounter in advertisements and other forms of media all around us. As we have said, few novels actually fit ‘tidily’ into the categories of classic realism, modernism, or postmodernism, but we can still classify the general trends.
• We have focused on the stylistic characteristics of novels over the last century and a half, and the artistic reasons why a writer might choose one form over another. However, like any cultural form, fiction is not produced only for artistic reasons. Amongst other functions, fiction can have a didactic (instructive) purpose, for example representing certain aspects of society or kinds of behaviour as more or less wholesome.
• Classic realist texts include novels such as Dickens’s Hard Timesand Mrs Gaskell’s North and South, both concerned with the inhumanity which existed in industrialised Victorian England. Modernism incorporated ideas about the workings of the human mind, based on the ideas of psychoanalysis, and explored the relationship between high culture and popular culture, and between Western culture, and other civilisations. Postmodernism asserts the relativity of everything and challenges all claims to authority. All three therefore could be seen as defying aspects of the status quo.
11. Analysis of Fiction
• In this chapter, we have suggested ways in which one can approach the analysis of works of fiction in relation to literary style. Some of these draw on more traditional ‘literary’ concerns with narrator, dialogue, character and plot, while others draw on more ‘linguistic’ analyses of voice, register and formal features of language use. Here are some of the questions one could deal with:
• Does the text appear to be ‘readerly’ or ‘writerly’? What sort of demands does it make on the reader, and what are the features that help you categorise it as one or the other?
• What kind of narrating voice, or voices, are there in the text?
• What are the linguistic devices used to represent time, place and dialogue in the text?
• Is there any ‘foregrounding’ of specific linguistic forms—i.e. does the writer draw attention to the language of the text, for example through changes in register, or the use of structural or lexical patterning?
• What is the structure of the plot, and narrative development? For example, is there a resolution, or ‘ending’, or no narrative closure? Is the story linear, or does the writer represent events in a non-linear way? Is the story portrayed as ‘new’, or does the writer make reference to other similar stories through intertextuality and allusion?
• This list is not exhaustive, and each text may generate different and original questions to do with stylistic form. However, many texts also share characteristics, which is what enables us to categorise them in the first instance (or at least try to categorise them) by identifying their similarities with other texts.
END OF THE PART
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