{"id":155938,"date":"2024-06-27T15:41:36","date_gmt":"2024-06-27T23:41:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=155938"},"modified":"2024-06-27T15:47:36","modified_gmt":"2024-06-27T23:47:36","slug":"reading-against-the-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=155938","title":{"rendered":"Reading Against the Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tim Parks writes for the July 18, 2024 edition of NYBooks.com<\/a>: <\/p>\n

In hundreds of essays and reviews, the nineteenth-century lawyer and judge James Fitzjames Stephen considered the novel\u2019s effects on society at a time when it was becoming the dominant form of entertainment…<\/p>\n

Nevertheless Stephen is always reading, as it were, against the text, like a prosecuting attorney scrutinizing a defendant\u2019s testimony.<\/p>\n

…Novel readers, he implies, are regularly choosing, indeed paying for their pathos. And authors are all too willing to supply it. Dickens \u201cgloats over [Little Nell\u2019s] death as if it delighted him\u2026touches, tastes, smells, and handles [it] as if it was some savoury dainty which could not be too fully appreciated.\u201d <\/p>\n

…Other distortions are the suppression of vast areas of experience (particularly work life), the undue prominence given to romantic love (\u201cof course, every one is in love in a novel\u201d), the alteration of historical facts, the overdefinition of character, the romanticization of crime and vice, and the evidently contrived plots.<\/p>\n

…The second essay, \u201cWoods v. Russell\u201d (1856), turns to journalism. During the Crimean War, Nicholas Woods was the correspondent for The Morning Herald and William Russell the correspondent for The Times. Both had contributed to the view that the British campaign in the Crimea resembled an \u201carmy of lions commanded by asses.\u201d This had won them notoriety and popularity. Stephen takes advantage of the publication of collections of the two men\u2019s war dispatches to analyze the evidence they offered for their criticisms. Meticulously cross-referencing their accounts, he shows how frequently they contradict each other over the most elementary facts, while on other occasions one man has clearly plagiarized the other. As with the novel, Stephen complains, newspapers enjoy great political influence, without demonstrating the sort of responsibility and impartiality that might legitimize it: \u201cStatements of the most vehement kind are made upon any or no authority\u201d and presented in a \u201cshowy, noisy, clever, and picturesque\u201d style that in one case has a dead dog being described as a \u201cdecayed specimen of canine mortality.\u201d<\/p>\n

…\u201cA newspaper,\u201d Stephen reminds us in a later essay, \u201cis essentially and pre-eminently a mercantile speculation.\u201d The power it boasts to intervene in cases of injustice is limited by its need to sustain the interest of its readers. Journalists, like novelists, labor under an obligation to be entertaining. They play to \u201cthe impatience which every one feels of being governed in a prosaic way,\u201d<\/p>\n

…”Most writers are so nervous about the tendencies of their books, and the social penalties of unorthodox opinion are so severe\u2026that philosophy, criticism and science itself too often speak amongst us in ambiguous whispers what ought to be proclaimed from the house tops.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nathaniel Rich writes in the Dec. 21, 2023 issue<\/a>: <\/p>\n

In Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II, James Heffernan argues that for a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding…<\/p>\n

In Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II, the Dartmouth literary scholar James A.W. Heffernan proposes that academic and popular histories, diaries, and journalistic accounts offer only a blinkered view of the past. For a fuller understanding of any historical period, you must read the literature it produced. Best of all, you must read the literature that was written and published while the events of the period were still unfolding.<\/p>\n

\u201cPunctual literature,\u201d as Heffernan calls it, is a narrow category, especially when it comes to World War II, for practical reasons: it isn\u2019t easy to write and publish while being bombed. To fortify his argument Heffernan further narrows his definition of \u201cpunctual,\u201d limiting his survey primarily to fiction, poetry, and plays set or composed or published in 1939 (which happens to be, he gallantly declines to mention, the year of his birth) \u201cand one or at most two of the years that followed.\u201d Virginia Woolf\u2019s Between the Acts, Patrick Hamilton\u2019s Hangover Square, and Evelyn Waugh\u2019s Put Out More Flags are novels about historical events, but they\u2019re not historical fiction, strictly speaking, because they were written in the early years of the war, before the conclusion was known\u2014before the chaos of those years could be sealed and wrapped and ribboned in a tidy narrative. \u201cThe uncertainty of being in medias res,\u201d writes Heffernan, \u201cis precisely what punctual literature aims to represent.\u201d Ignorance of the war\u2019s outcome does not count as a deficiency of this literature, as it might to a historian, but as an advantage.<\/p>\n

…He directs his argument not to readers of literature but to historians. Brazenly he trespasses into their territory, their cleared jungles and straightened rivers, as an emissary from the shadowy realm of make-believe who dares to suggest that their scrupulous volumes, no matter how impressively researched or dramatically written, cannot match the honesty of fiction, poetry, or theater. \u201cHistories tell us much\u2026about the origins of World War II,\u201d he writes. \u201cBut the literary works\u2026examined in this book tell us even more.\u201d<\/p>\n

These are fighting words. Heffernan\u2019s method is to pit a work of literature against a definitive historical account of the same subject. In these head-to-head battles, literature cheerfully concedes some predictable defeats. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tim Parks writes for the July 18, 2024 edition of NYBooks.com: In hundreds of essays and reviews, the nineteenth-century lawyer and judge James Fitzjames Stephen considered the novel\u2019s effects on society at a time when it was becoming the dominant … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","category-literature"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t