I've gone on record on this blog of saying that most 19th fiction is worthless and kitsch. The only novelist from this period I haven't derided is Dostoyevsky.
But then Dostoyevsky is a different kind of writer - he prefigures the existentialists and the nightmare visions of Kafka.
But the fact is that even the tamer, more conventional writing of the period is of worth and can teach a whole lot to any budding writer.
Even the equivalent chick lit of that time. I mean there's a lot of passion to Wuthering Heights - and it's genuine, heart-warming, involving even if you're a cynical male...
And that novel is one of many that's finely structured. WH may be an odd example in that is a sort of Pandora's box story-within-a-story, but the A to B novels of the day, be it in Balzac, Zola, Tolstoy or Stendhal, have merit... They are finely written, descriptive and have one aspect that lacks in today's serious fiction - it reflects their time of production.
A lot of the social realism in those novels are mirror images of the time the writers were writing in... Stendhal, however soppy a lot of his romances are, give a real vivid impression of 19th century society. The post-modernist trickery of today's fiction is more interested in the idea of meta-fictional illusion by reminding the reader that he is reading a work of fiction... Either case, neither social realism nor meta-fictitious narratives are the one-and-only way to write fiction, but both are equally valuable.
5 comments:
I would like to point out that Doris Lessing is a wonderful example of a 20th century writer who reflects her time. Take for example the Children of Violence series, or the Golden Notebook. There are countless others with her, so I can't really agree that the 20th century lacks social realism.
I absolutely agree with you. It's just that post-modernism is in vogue in the literary world. There's never going to be a lack of anything - Gogol, Lawrence Stern, Dostoyevsky and Goethe all wrote in the 18th and 19th centuries and don't at all reflect their time. There's always going to be a fashion/bandwagon and currently meta-fiction/etc. seems to be it.
But perhaps the meta-fiction of today is telling us more about our time than we immediately realise. In an age where the internet pulls the strings of our lives more than ever isn't the actual fact that we have to be reminded we are reading a novel telling us something? A reminder to keep a close eye on the boundary between reality and unreality, that erodes and changes by the day.
Excellent point - I agree with that, too. I covered that in the recent post 'Why the political and metaphysical are intrinsic,' which may be of interest to you.
I guess that writers like Don De Lillo, Pynchon, Auster et. al. do partially reflect day-to-day life, but it's through the view of kaleidoscope, really. Many facets of politcal current events can be disentangled in these texts, but they are not as immediate apparent as in the realist writers like Stendhal or Tolstoy, or more contemporary examples like Lessing...
Nice. I particularly appreciate the fact that egg, bacon, spaghetti and et cetera or a combination of the above can pretty much sustain any of the male species for 65-84 years (depending on country of origin). Also nice for one's daily schedule to involve wandering down to a pond and then returning home to read an educating book for 3 hours. This is an impressive way of living, you should maintain it at all costs.
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