eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
In close textual analyses of works ranging across European and American literature, including paradigmatic texts by Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot, Zola, Henry James, and Thomas Mann, Furst shows how the handling of time, the presentation of place, and certain narrational strategies have served the realists’ claim. She demonstrates how readers today, like those a hundred years ago, are convinced of the authenticity of the created illusion by such means as framing, voice, perspective, and the slippage from metonymy to metaphor. Further, Furst reveals the pains the realists took to conceal these devices, and thus to protect their claim to be employing a simple form. Taking into account both the claims and the covert strategies of these writers, All Is True puts forward an alternative to the conventional polarized reading of the realist text—which emerges here as neither strictly an imitation of an extraneous model nor simply a web of words but a brilliantly complex imbrication of the two.
A major statement on one of the most enduring forms in cultural history, this book promises to alter not only our view of realist fiction but our understanding of how we read it.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822377610 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/11/1995 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 386 KB |
About the Author
Lilian R. Furst is Marcel Bataillon Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Read an Excerpt
All is True
The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction
By Lilian R. Furst
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1995 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7761-0
CHAPTER 1
Truth to Tell
* * *
That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth mainly. There were things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.–Mark Twain
"All is true," the narrator declares at the opening of Le Père Goriot before launching into the description of the Vauquer boardinghouse and its inhabitants in 1819. The phrase makes an immediate impact on readers through both its appearance in a foreign language and its typographical presentation in italics. It functions as a prefatory frame to the "drama" about to be narrated. In explicitly emphasizing that "ce drame n'est ni une fiction ni un roman" (2:848; "this drama is neither a fiction nor a novel"), Balzac is subscribing to the categories of "the true" and "the fictitious" instituted in the eighteenth century. What is more, he is very firmly placing his own novel under the former heading. In his preface to La Comédie humaine he repeatedly underscores the need for rigorous adherence to the truth if the writer aspires to become "un peintre plus ou moins fidèle" (1:7; "a more or less faithful painter") of humanity. Yet at the same time he distinguishes between history, which is or should be exactly as it was, and the novel, which tends toward "le monde meilleur" and "le beau idéal" (1:11; "the better world" and "ideal beauty"). Indeed, he goes so far as to refer to the novel as "cet auguste mensonge" (1:11; "this august lie") that would be as nought were it not "vrai dans les détails" (1:11; "true in its details").
Openly to confront and to take into account this paradox between the sonorous proclamation "All is true" and the hushed admission that it is an illusion suggests a new approach to realist fiction: that its strength lies precisely in its readiness to use contradiction as its pivot instead of denying and bypassing it, as critics have tended to do by envisaging the realist novel either as a faithful portrayal of a social situation at a particular time in a particular place or as a textual web of discourse. Both these conceptions are valid, but each is partial in more than one sense, not least because of its exclusion of the other. Taken together, Balzac's statements offer a basis for a binary reading that does not eliminate or minimize the dissonances in favor of one or the other alternative. On the contrary, it is in the very precariousness of its endeavor that the ultimate attraction of the realist novel resides: in its risky attempt to create truth and/in illusion.
This duality is already implicit in that "All is true." On the one hand, it represents an aggressive effort to program readers to take the narrative as an authentic transcription of actuality: "[I]l est si véritable," the narrating voice argues, "que chacun peut en reconnaître les éléments chez soi" (2:849; "It is so true to life that everyone can recognize its elements in their own surroundings"). This injunction to gauge the events of the fiction against the matrix of personal experience is an open exhortation to a referential reading. But many readers will see Old Goriot as an archetypal figure too, strongly reminiscent of King Lear. This second, intertextual source of Balzac's novel is also, albeit indirectly, hinted at in "All is true," for it carries an allusion to Shakespeare. Henry VIII, on its first production, was subtitled All Is True, a fact revealed in the Revue de Paris of 10 August 1831 in an important article by Philarète Chasles, a leading literary figure of the day. Some contemporary readers of Le Père Goriot would have caught the covert signal alongside the overt message. Certainly to readers in our age of suspicion, the crosscurrents are apparent and have been underscored by Brombert: "The extreme signal of realism (all is true) thus places the elaborate opening disclaimer of literarity under the sign of literature" (21). Brombert puts forward the provocative suggestion "In the particular case of Balzac, the analysis lends support to the hypothesis that so-called 'realistic' texts call for an ironic reading of the message of realism" (22). "Ironic" is not the most appropriate word in this context, because it normally denotes a certain intentionality of reversal. A more neutral term such as "binary" or "dialogic" (with its echoes of Bakhtin's Dialogic Imagination) would be preferable. The double import of "All is true" points to the urgency of questioning and reassessing such dicta in order to understand the underlying complexities of the realist enterprise, that daring interface of referentiality and illusion, to which only a dualistic reading can hope to do fuller justice.
The claim "All is true" is a good starting point for a reconsideration of realist fiction, because it implicitly raises the essential critical issues. Are readers still willing to accept the postulate that the realist novel gives a true and faithful account of a preexistent, stable, knowable reality? If truth to life is to be the predominant criterion, what sort of truth or life is it to be? Is the literalism of Tristram Shandy or of Arno Holz's Papa Hamlet in their minute recording of sensory impressions to be taken as the consummate form of realism? If such literalism is not to be equated with realism, what is the nature of the relationship between the aesthetic artifact and the world in which it is embedded? Can the objects of that world be translated into and conveyed by words, and if so, by what means? What is the role and function of readers in such a process? Because these questions resist conclusive answers, the debate about realism will continue as long as there are readers and critics. To prepare the ground for renewed discussion, we need to recall how the realists themselves and their successors have envisioned the problem.
Pronouncements about the realist novel's truthfulness are legion and invariably raise more difficulties than they allay. Most of the major realists have expressed their views on this issue, which was a basic tenet of their program, yet the statements all have the same curious tendency to limit or undercut their own contentions, as Balzac's assertion does. "All is true" is paradigmatic both in its boldness and its self-subversiveness.
No one wrestles the problem with as much searching honesty as George Eliot at the opening of chapter 17 of Adam Bede. Rejecting the idealism of "things as they never have been and never will be" and avoiding any "arbitrary picture," the narrator sets out to "give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind." More directly than Balzac, George Eliot avows the obstacles and flaws inherent in her creed, even while ardently continuing to defend its intrinsic integrity:
The mirror is doubtless defective, the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath. (171)
Eliot does not attempt to conceal the subjectivity of her vision, nor does she underestimate the difficulties of "truth" in contrast to the relative ease of "falsehood" which she dreads and shuns. But the vivid example she chooses to illustrate her contentions is perplexing:
The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin–the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. (173)
The griffin stands for the fabulous, while the lion belongs to the domain of the actual, though not quite to "the dusty streets and the common green fields," the everyday world "in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work" (172). More telling, however, than the ontological status of the object is the method of portrayal: "the longer the claws, and the larger the wings" adumbrates the grotesque stylization of caricature, but what are the proper proportions for "a real unexaggerated lion"? The dearth of established literary conventions for the middle-of-the-road sobriety of realism was a grave handicap to the realists, who sought to overcome the problem with an appeal to truth. But the truthfulness of the portrait of the lion is dependent on the artist's perception, which will vary according to circumstances, such as the size of the lion in relation to that of the beholder, its distance from the artist, the feelings aroused by it, and so on. Once the presence of the artist's eye and mind as reflecting intermediaries is admitted, the notion of truth as an absolute has to be abandoned. The filter of the perceiver necessarily entails a significant modification of the implied ideal of a faithful representation of an independently existent actuality, that is, the lion. Eliot's "quality of truthfulness," described by her as "rare" and "precious," proves extraordinarily slippery as a doctrine. The unquestionable sincerity of her quest cannot compensate for the fragility of the argument.
Despite their groping and tentative tone, Eliot's theories show greater discernment than George Lewes's simplistic and dogmatic declaration:
Art always aims at the representation of Reality, i.e. of Truth; and no departure from truth is permissible, except such as inevitably lies in the nature of the medium itself. Realism is thus the basis of all Art, and its antithesis is not Idealism, but Falsism.
The authoritarianism of the capital letters (Reality, Truth, Art, Idealism, Falsism) smacks of sententiousness. Nevertheless, Lewes makes an important contribution to the debate in his interpolated phrase "except such as inevitably lies in the nature of the medium itself." This concession is crucial insofar as it recognizes, at least by implication, the essential difference between reality and a representation. The "nature of the medium itself" requires that the artist be granted the right to select, to combine, to shape the material, in short, to create rather than to copy. Although Lewes himself was certainly unaware of the implications of his modifying phrase, it can be connected to George Eliot's quandary: how "to draw a real unexaggerated lion." It was obviously far easier for the realists to define in general terms what they wanted to achieve than to figure out the specifics of how to do so. For this reason, quite early already in the unfolding of realism the spotlight began to move from its matter ("truth") to the question of the most appropriate manner.
No one was more obsessively conscious of the centrality of manner than Flaubert. In his letters to Louise Colet during the composition of Madame Bovary, he repeatedly laments the near impossibility of writing, to his own satisfaction, about the mediocre personalities and environment he has deliberately chosen for his novel as a kind of challenge to his artistic ability. "J'ai été cinq jours à faire une page!" ("I have taken five days to do one page!"); in mid-September 1853 he scrapped all he had done the previous week in order to remodel the phrases (429); often he was exasperated, despondent, oppressed by the task he had set himself. From his struggles one paramount insight emerged: that the subject matter is more or less incidental: "[I]l n'y a pas en littérature de beaux sujets d'art, et ... Yvetot vaut done Constantinople, et... en conséquence l'on peut écrire n'importe quoi aussi bien que quoi que ce soit" (362; "There are no beautiful subjects in literature, and ... Yvetot is as good as Constantinople, and ... consequently one can write just as well about one thing as about any other"). It is solely the artistic virtuosity of the writing that counts in the shaping of the aesthetic artifact: "Je suis convaincu d'ailleurs que tout est affaire de style, ou plutôt de tournure, d'aspect" (238; "I am convinced, besides, that it is all a matter of style, or rather of turn of phrase, of perspective"). Flaubert endows realism with an aesthetic considerably more subtle than Balzac's. However, even in the process of delineating it, he offers a supreme example of its refractory nature.
Attempts to work round the dilemma of how "to draw a real unexaggerated lion" are manifest in the palpable shift of emphasis that occurs in the later years of the century: from Balzac's blunt and literalistic "All is true" to the more evasive tenet that it is the impression of truth that matters. This finds its most cogent expression in Henry James's often cited phrase, "the air of reality." For James it is the semblance of truth that is the supreme virtue of a novel, although, like Balzac, he sees it as most likely to be attained by "solidity of specification." While asserting that "the only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life" (5), James not only stubbornly resists rigid rules, but also admits that what is produced in the novel is "the illusion of life" (12). This significant modification of realism's position is reiterated in the 1888 preface to Pierre et Jean, where Maupassant reassesses the creed of "Rien que la vérité, et toute la vérité" ("The whole truth and nothing but the truth") and replaces it with the Jamesian concept of verisimilitude through illusion. "Les Réalistes de talent," Maupassant concludes, "devraient s'appeler plutôt des Illusionistes" (16; "Talented realists ought rather to call themselves Illusionists"). Such a perception may offer the only valid answer on how "to draw a real unexaggerated lion."
To accept such propositions is to acknowledge the innate paradoxicality of the realist novel. It stakes its claim to special authenticity by accenting its primary allegiance to experience over art, thus purporting to capture truth. In keeping with this view, the role played by observation in the realist novel is proportionately greater than that of artistic convention. This ordering of priorities has to be seen in the context of the growing interest in documentary as a genre, which followed the debut of photography in 1839 with the daguerreotype. The pressure on writing to mimic and compete with this new form is evident in the program outlined by Duranty in the first issue of the short-lived journal Réalisme (1856-57): art should give a truthful representation of the real world by studying contemporary life and manners through meticulous observation, and it should do so dispassionately, impersonally, and objectively. These prescriptions are predicated on two fundamental assumptions: the intelligibility of the universe and the capacity of the individual eye "to see things clearly, as they really were, and to draw appropriate conclusions from this clear apprehension of reality." Much of the authority that the notion of realism commanded derived from widespread acquiescence in these postulates.
Yet the very reproducibility of that representation was bound to reduce its worth. Together with photography, the rapidly advancing technology of printing (in which Balzac took a personal interest) facilitated procedures of reproduction. As Ann Jefferson has pointed out, the key words in the rhetoric of realism, 'copy,' 'imitate,' and 'reproduce' are all double-edged, in having the simultaneous sense of faithful representation and plagiarized repetition. The implications of "All is true" could thus be derogatory to the artist, if his powers of accurate observation and representation were now to take precedence over the traditionally prized skills of manipulating readerly sensibilities. The image of itself that realism nurtured thus turns out to be strangely self-defeating. Its basic aesthetic position is logically untenable; moreover, it undermines its own prestige as an imaginative artifact by deliberately setting itself on a par with reproductive technologies. It seeks thereby, no doubt, to heighten its appeal to audiences of the period, captivated by the mode for the documentary, but as a corollary, ironically, it weakens its standing as art.
This thrust on the part of the realist novel toward documentary status can be understood better within the larger frame of the evolution of prose narrative. Through much of the eighteenth century, the newly emerging form of the novel was still regarded as "a transgressive genre," operating in the space between romance and history. The latter half of the eighteenth century, however, witnessed the elaboration of a theory of the arts that "ignores the communication between appearance and what appears, setting up the work of art as a self-sufficient replica." This meant a substantial change in the relationship of art to appearance as the earlier ideal of aletheia gave way to the new one of adequatio. Aletheia maintains the awareness of the illusion as an integral part of the audience's imaginative involvement with the aesthetic artifact, which is acknowledged as being bimodal in partaking simultaneously of both illusion and imitation. Adequatio, on the other hand, makes a separation between the two; it is bipolar in creating a distinctive consciousness of the work of art as a stabilized, self-contained illusion imitative of but not corresponding identically to an existent actuality. In other words, the nascent realist novel declares its independence in terms of adequatio as a self-sustaining reproduction of actuality while at the same time insisting on its dependence on that actuality as a true eyewitness account.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from All is True by Lilian R. Furst. Copyright © 1995 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.