How to read literature by Terry Eagleton ( part 3) - Plot in Classical realism vs. modernism

"For classical realism, the world itself is story-shaped. In a lot of modernist fiction, by contrast, there is no order apart from what we ourselves construct. And since any such order is arbitrary, so are fictional openings and endings. There are no divinely ordained origins or natural closures. which is to say that there are no logical middles either. ...

"Some modernist works are thus sceptical of the while notions of narrative. Narrative suggests that there is a shapeliness to the world, an orderly procession of causes and effects. It is sometimes (though by no means always) bound up with a faith in progress, the power of reason and the forward march of humanity. It would not be too fanciful to claim that narrative of this classical kind fell to pieces on the battlefields of the First World War, an even which scarcely fostered a faith in human reason. It was around these years that the great modernist works were produced, from Ulysses and The Waste Land to Yeats's The Wild Swans at Coole and Lawrence's Women in Love. For the modernist mind, reality does not evolve in a tidy fashion. Event A may lead to event B, but it also leads to events C, D, E and countless others. it is the product of countless factors as well. Who is to decide which of these storylines should take priority? Whereas realism views the world as an unfolding, modernism test to see it as a text. The word "text" here is akin to "textile", meaning something spun of many interwoven threads. ...less a logical development than a tangled web... You cannot pinpoint where it begins or ends....

"So the idea of narrative is thrown into crisis. For modernism, knowing where something began, even if this were possible, will not necessarily yield you the the truth about it. To assume so is to be guilty of what has been called the genetic fallacy. There is no one grand narrative, simply a host of mini-narratives, each of which may have its partial truth. ..To narrate is to falsify. In fact, one might even claim that to write is to falsify. Writing, after all, is a process which unfolds in time, and in this respect resembles narrative. The only authentic literary work then, would  be one which is conscious of this falsification, and which tries to tell its tale in a way that takes it into account.

"That is to say that all narratives must be ironic. They must deliver their accounts while keeping their own limitations constantly in mind. They must somehow incorporate what they do not know into what they know. ... Narratives must find a way of suggesting that there could be many versions of their subject-matter beside their own. If they are not to appear deceptively absolute, they must point to their own arbitrariness."

This helps us to understand and appreciate what Ian McEwan is trying to do in any of his novels but perhaps "Sweet Tooth" most of all, and it helps us to understand what Sterne is doing in Tristram Shandy. Also I noticed it in Doctor Who recently (episode by Mark Gatiss).

Terry Eagleton part 1

Terry Eagleton part 2