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

How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton part 2: Character in realist fiction vs modernist fiction

Here is Prof. E. writing about an important change in literature, and he makes the changes seem clear and easily understood. I have edited drastically taking out some of his examples:

One of the achievements of the great European realist novel, ... is to illustrate this weaving of character and context. Characters in this kind of fiction are seen as caught up in a web of complex mutual dependencies. they are formed by social and historical forces greater than themselves, and shaped by processes of which they may be only fitfully conscious. ... As George Eliot puts it, there is no private life that has not been influenced by a wider public one.

 Characters in the realist tradition are generally presented as complex, credible, fully rounded individuals. Many of them seem a lot more real than the people next door. 

The modernists are in search of new modes of characterisation, suitable to a post-Victorian age. ...The typical realist character tends to be reasonably stable and unified, ... As such, it reflects an era when identity was felt on the whole to be less problematic than it is today. People could still see themselves as the agents of their own destinies. they had a fairly acute sense of where they stopped and other people began. their personal and collective history, for all its ups and downs, seems to represent a coherent evolution, one which was more likely to issue in felicity than in catastrophe.  

 Modernism, by contract, pitches the whole concept of identity into crisis.... Once you start to see human consciousness as unfathomably intricate, it is hard to contain it within the well-defined limits of Walter Scott's Rob Roy or Robert Louis Stephenson's Jim Hawkins. Instead, it begins to spill out over the edges, seeping into its surroundings as well as into other selves....Woolf's fiction, where identity is more elusive and indeterminate than it is in Trollope or Thomas Hardy. ...It can involve a traumatic sense of loss and anxiety. Having too little identity can be quite as disabling as having too much.

If the self is bound up with its changing experiences, then it no longer has the unity and consistency of Bunyan's Everyman or Shakespeare's Coriolanus. It is less able to recount a coherent story of itself. Its beliefs and desires do not necessarily hang together to form a seamless whole. Neither do the works in which such characters appear. 

T.S. Eliot is also disdainful of mere consciousness, and largely indifferent to individual personality. what seizes his attention are the myths and traditions which shape the individual self.... and these forces lie far below the individual mind, in a kind of collective unconscious. It is here that we all share in the same timeless myths and spiritual wisdom.

There is another reason why the idea of character as Balzac or Hawthorne knew it no longer seems feasible in modern times. This is because in an age of mass culture and commerce, human beings come to seem increasingly faceless and interchangeable. We can ... not distinguish easily between Vladimir and Estragon. ...Leopold Bloom ... is sharply individualised, yet he is also an anonymous Everyman whose thoughts and feelings could be almost anybody's. His mind is magnificently banal.

So interesting, because one thinks that both views are true at the same time!  Is that possible? I don't know about Bloom because one book I keep meaning to read is James Joyce's Ulysses. will I ever? When there are so many great books to read?

There was something I was going to write about and I forgot what it was before I had time to write it in my blog, and now I feel very cheated, because whatever it was is now lost forever. I do fear I have the dementia that comes from having too much to do in the way of dreary job tasks. But my mother's dementia is worse than it was, because she is confused about her money now, and I am afraid that she will start to give her small pot of money away to an undeserving cause. She will then forget she has done it and wonder what has happened.

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

There is a very good analysis of the character of Sue Bridehead in  Jude the Obscure in How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton pp71-74.

He starts by stating how he once branded her as "a perverse hussy" and goes on to see her as a woman of her time:

 "her advanced sexual views are inevitably somewhat theoretical. Women's emancipation is still at an early stage [has hardly begun]. So her beliefs can easily succumb to social pressures."

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

There is an absolutely brilliant analysis of this in How to Read Literature, by Terry Eagleton, pp149-168. Goes into an analysis of Harry Potter afterwards.

I searched for an image of this work and found that all the pictures for the films are simplistic and misleading. It isn't about anything erotic: there's no kissing in it. It's about something much more complicated than that: it's about where the money comes from. Does your money have murky origins, morally speaking? It's about how wealth can taint character and relationships, and it's about having no parents and having to choose parents with the right values who can form healthy and positive relationships. It's no good hanging onto, or longing for parents who can't do that. And in the end the child has to be his or her own person, live by his own values and judge himself/herself.

The private happiness of good families needs to be defended from the morally compromised Victorian public world, in Wemmick's case, his tiny house is surrounded by a moat and entered across a drawbridge!

It is a superb book that I knew while I was reading it was the best novel I had ever read, but this analysis seems to understand it very well in its substance, rather than poking into its methods.

Terry Eagleton - How to Read Literature, Young People, and Voting

If I find a book that's clever and witty and tells me something new I am so happy. Or even a book that's shown me something I know from another point of view. I want to share it with someone I love. (If you've received a book from me, and you didn't like it - I am philosophical. I still think it's better to try to share than give up hope.) I loved sharing books with the children when I had children, and we still go back to the old ways when we stumble upon a Dr Seuss, (as we did in the Youth Hostel) or a Mairi Hedderwick.

I really like the cover art too.

Anyhow, here is Terry Eagleton explaining how to appreciate literature, and I'm finding it really helpful. I always suspected, when I did my degree, that I didn't quite understand  how the writers had mixed form and content to create meaning, and this book is very helpful with understanding that, giving plenty of examples from classic literature to consider.

But this is Terry Eagleton and rejoice with me, for Terry Eagleton is witty. He is so un-pompous.

On stereotypes:

A type is not necessarily a stereotype. .... Stereotypes reduce men and women to general categories, whereas types preserve their individuality but lend it some broader context. A cynic might take this to mean that Irishmen are forever engaged in drunken brawling, but that each does so in his own unique way.

We can identify objects only by language, and language is general by nature. If it were not, we would need a different word for every rubber duck and stick of rhubarb in the world. ... there is no special word for my particular pair of eyebrows or fits of sulkiness. .... In fact, there is nothing that does not resemble something else in some respect. The Great Wall of China resembles the concept of heartache in that neither can peel a banana.

Character:

It is not that Aristotle thought Character unimportant in general. On the contrary, he regarded it as supremely important, as another of his books the Nicomachean Ethics, makes clear. this work is all about moral values, qualities of character, the difference between virtuous and vicious individuals, and so on. Aristotle's view of character in the real-life sense, however, differs from some modern versions of it. Here too, he sees action as primary. It is what men and women do, the way they realise or fail to realise their creative powers in the public arena, that matters most from a moral viewpoint. You could not be virtuous simply on your own... Ancient thinkers were less likely than modern modern ones to view individuals as existing in splendid isolation. They would no doubt have had some trouble in understanding Hamlet, not to speak of being utterly bemused by the work of Marcel Proust or Henry James....

Actually, I think you can still divide people into ancients, who naturally fulfill themselves in the public sphere, (e.g. my husband) and the moderns, who are interested in their own consciousness and the way their own perceptions of the world add up to what they know. I guess we are readers. There are fewer of us now, as Will Self wrote in the Guardian not long ago, young people don't read novels.

But you can't say they don't like a good story! Look at "Game of Thrones". I am not able to comment on this work because I haven't read it. I know S gave up on it but F's friends discuss it excitedly and she says she is going to read the whole multi-volume saga as a post-exam chillout.

But they don't want to have to work at anything. I saw on the news yesterday clips of young people explaining why they hadn't voted, and they said: we don't know enough about it. Well, I felt the same so I went and searched for info on the web, the way that's so easy and natural these days. then I was able to brief my daughter while walking to the polling station (her first time voting, we insisted that she vote for something, - anything!) But if the young people feel that they can't make important decisions for themselves, it's as though they are saying; "We are children, please decide for us, because you know best." They are passengers, and modernists, with their headphones on blocking out everything but their own consciousness, and they need a more Aristotelian point of view.

In the end I voted Green in the hope that there would be enough Green people acting in concert in Europe to protect the fish. Yup, I voted to save the fish.

My two German girls don't want to continue English lessons with me. I think that's because I kept wanting them to discuss things they have no ideas or opinions about. It is amazing that these intelligent young women (20+) have no ideas or opinions, and I'm not sure I will really miss them. But I said I would. Of course, they gave other reasons for not continuing, :- their plans had changed and they were returning to Germany earlier and they had decided not to take the Advanced exam after all.