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168

Truth, Convention, Realism

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Wood, J. (2009). Truth, Convention, Realism. In Wood, J. How Fiction Works. Vintage, pp. 168-193

174

The style could be called commercial realism. It lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent storytelling, itself derived from the more original grammar of Flaubert; and of course it didn't end with Greene. Efficient contemporary realistic narrative, elegantly finished, still sounds pretty much like this. Here is John le Carre, from Smiley 's People:

Smiley arrived in Hamburg in mid-morning and took the airport bus to the city centre. Fog lingered and the day was very cold. In the Station Square, after repeated rejections, he found an old, thin terminus hotel with a lift licensed for three persons at a time. He signed in as Standfast, then walked as far as a car-rental agency, where he hired a small Opel, which he parked in an underground garage that played softened Beethoven out of loudspeakers.

This is nice writing, for sure, and by the standards of contemporary thrillers it is magnificent (the 'thin' hotel is very good). But the detail selected is either reassuringly flat (fog, cold, the Opel car), or reassuringly 'telling': it is nothing out of the ordinary. The hotel is dabbed onto the canvas with its lift that can only carry three, the garage by its Beethoven. The selection of detail is merely the quorum necessary to convince the reader that this is 'real', that it 'really happened'. It may be 'real' but it is not real, because none of the details is very alive. The narrative, the grammar of the realism, exists in order to announce to us: 'This is what reality in a novel like this looks like—a few details that are not extraordinary but nevertheless tastefully chosen and executed, enough to get the scene going.' The passage is a clever coffin of dead expectations.

—p.174 by James Wood 6 years, 7 months ago

The style could be called commercial realism. It lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent storytelling, itself derived from the more original grammar of Flaubert; and of course it didn't end with Greene. Efficient contemporary realistic narrative, elegantly finished, still sounds pretty much like this. Here is John le Carre, from Smiley 's People:

Smiley arrived in Hamburg in mid-morning and took the airport bus to the city centre. Fog lingered and the day was very cold. In the Station Square, after repeated rejections, he found an old, thin terminus hotel with a lift licensed for three persons at a time. He signed in as Standfast, then walked as far as a car-rental agency, where he hired a small Opel, which he parked in an underground garage that played softened Beethoven out of loudspeakers.

This is nice writing, for sure, and by the standards of contemporary thrillers it is magnificent (the 'thin' hotel is very good). But the detail selected is either reassuringly flat (fog, cold, the Opel car), or reassuringly 'telling': it is nothing out of the ordinary. The hotel is dabbed onto the canvas with its lift that can only carry three, the garage by its Beethoven. The selection of detail is merely the quorum necessary to convince the reader that this is 'real', that it 'really happened'. It may be 'real' but it is not real, because none of the details is very alive. The narrative, the grammar of the realism, exists in order to announce to us: 'This is what reality in a novel like this looks like—a few details that are not extraordinary but nevertheless tastefully chosen and executed, enough to get the scene going.' The passage is a clever coffin of dead expectations.

—p.174 by James Wood 6 years, 7 months ago
184

And in our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere; we encounter scenes and moments and perfectly placed words in fiction and poetry, in film and drama, which strike us with their truth, which move and sustain us, which shake habit's house to its foundations [...]

this makes me melt

—p.184 by James Wood 6 years, 7 months ago

And in our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere; we encounter scenes and moments and perfectly placed words in fiction and poetry, in film and drama, which strike us with their truth, which move and sustain us, which shake habit's house to its foundations [...]

this makes me melt

—p.184 by James Wood 6 years, 7 months ago