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[...] No one will agree with this and I don't want to spend the time arguing it. Or: Hemingway's fiction created the American male. Again, I don't have the time. [...]
thought this was funny
There's also the possibility that in a society as deracinated and stripped of tradition and continuity [...] as our own, the void that emptily exists where common experience would ordinarily repose is filled by elements of popular culture so anchored to a specific time that they become part of the lingua franca, staples of the manufactured conversation, endlessly in medias res, that takes the place of shared heritage. In effect, trends in television, movies and popular music and fake nostalgia for their various incarnations are our shared conscious heritage (in other words, Nick at Nite is not kidding), in a way that literature can never be, since fiction blasts aside most temporal restrictions with its persistent availability, as opposed to the unavoidability of popular culture [...]
[...] Many of the books currently being manufactured as part of a "Generation X" "movement" have at their dead cold centers the vacillating heart of the advertising executive. Kept aloft--that is, "relevant"--by a constant barrage of moronic platitudes concerning the meaninglessness of life (as if this were a new discovery), the emptiness of the sexual relationship (the latter-day democratization of whose romantic aspects is a dwindling luxury afforded by high capitalism's temporary redistribution of wealth), the absence of God [...] the narrator immediately reveals that what the second-person protagonist--implicitly the reader--really desires is re-entry into the world of middlebrow pleasures: a Ralph Lauren Sunday brunch of croissants, the Times, and a nice clean girl. [...]
Life Before Theory (or the Time of Tweed). Roughly 1930-1975. The scholar's life was predominantly male and upper-class (less so from the middle-sixties on). [...] Ideologically, the dominant was New Criticism and its modernist cult of the aesthetic. Literature as religion. There was also, significantly, the strong residual presence of historicism/philology and its vestigial ideology of "the great books," "the classics," and "the Western tradition." [...]
The Age of Theory (in which all of the above is French Fried--and to a crisp). Roughly 1975-1982. Poststructuralism and deconstruction sweep onto campus and are merged with sixties politics of various stripes, producing: Queer Theory, ACT UP, French Feminism, post-Marxism, Cultural Studies and the New Historicism. [...]
[...]
The Postmodern Condition (the New Regime of Performativity). Roughly 1982-present. Theory left modernity and its ideological mission not even a few shards to shore against its ruin. The postmodern moment is one of great and very rare opportunity. All is fluid. [...]
incidentally, Of Grammatology was first published in 1967 (English version in 1976)
There is a final refinement of free indirect style--we should now just call it authorial irony--when the gap between an author's voice and a character's voice seems to collapse altogether; when a character's voice does indeed seem rebelliously to have taken over the narration altogether. 'The town was small, worse than a village, and in it lived almost none but old people, who died so rarely it was even annoying.' What an amazing opening! It is the first sentence of Chekhov's story 'Rothschild's Fiddle.' The next sentences are: 'And in the hospital and jail there was very little demand for coffins. In short, business was bad.' The rest of the paragraph introduces us to an extremely mean coffin-maker, and we realise that the story has opened in the middle of free indirect style: [...] We are in the midst of the coffinmaker's mind, for whom longevity is an economic nuisance. Chekhov subverts the expected neutrality of the opening of a story or novel, which might traditionally begin with a panning shot before we narrow our focus [...]
To this end, Flaubert perfected a technique that is essential to realist narration: the confusing of habitual detail with dynamic detail. Obviously, in that Paris street, the women cannot be yawning for the same length of time as the washing is quivering or the newspapers lying on the tables. Flaubert's details belong to different time signatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously.
The effect is lifelike—in a beautifully artificial way. Flaubert manages to suggest that these details are somehow at once important and unimportant: important because they have been noticed by him and put down on paper, and unimportant because they are all jumbled together, seen as if out of the corner of the eye; they seem to come at us 'like life'. From this flows a great deal of modern storytelling, such as war reportage. The crime writer and war reporter merely increase the extremity of this contrast between important and unimportant detail, converting it into a tension between the awful and the regular: a soldier dies while nearby a little boy goes to school.
[...] A second later, control has been reasserted: "Her face still streamed with tears, but she was soothed and comforted and entirely herself as she rose to her feet and began straightway to occupy her mind with the announcement of the death—an enormous number of elegant cards, which must be ordered at once.' Life returns to busyness and routine after the tearing of death. A commonplace. But the selection of that adjective 'elegant' is subtle; the bourgeois order stirs to life with its 'elegant' cards, and Mann suggests that this class retains faith in the solidity and grace of objects, clings to them indeed.
from Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
[...] I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level. In such cases, our appetite is quickly disappointed, and surges wildly in excess of what we are provided, and we tend to blame the author for not giving us enough—the characters, we complain, are not alive or round or free enough. Yet we would not dream of accusing Sebald or Woolf or Roth—none of whom is especially interested in creating character in the solid, old-fashioned nineteenth-century sense—of letting us down in this way, because they have so finely tutored us in their own conventions, their own expansive limitations, to be satisfied with just what they give us.
Dostoevskian character has at least three layers. On the top layer is the announced motive: Raskolnikov, say, proposes several justifications for his murder of the old woman. The second layer involves unconscious motivation, those strange inversions wherein love turns into hate and guilt expresses itself as poisonous, sickly love. Thus Raskolnikov's mad need to confess his crime to the police and to Sonia the prostitute presages Freud's comment on the action of the superego: 'In many criminals,' writes Freud, 'especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive.' Or in the case of Fyodor Karamazov and his desire to punish the neighbour to whom he was once nasty, you could say that guilt is causing him, unconsciously, to be horrible to his neighbour; his behaviour recalls the quip— both funny and deadly serious—of the Israeli psychoanalyst who remarked that the Germans would never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust. [...]
[...] George Eliot, in her essay on German realism, put it like this: 'The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies ... Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowman beyond the bounds of our personal lot.'