tension between artistic and commercial impulses in literary writers’ engagement with plot

Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ theses@gla.ac.uk Brown, Luke (2014) Tension between artistic and commercial impulses in literary writers’ engagement with plot. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5158/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Brown 1 Tension between artistic and commercial impulses in literary writers’ engagement with plot Luke Brown Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of PhD in English Literature School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow October 2013 Brown 2 Abstract Tension between artistic and commercial impulses in literary writers’ engagement with plot This thesis explores whether plot and story damage a literary writer’s attempt to describe ‘reality’. It is in two parts: a critical analysis followed by a complete novel. The first third of the thesis is an essay which, after distinguishing between story and plot, responds to writer critics who see plot as damaging to a writer’s attempt to describe ‘the real’. This section looks at fiction by Jane Austen, Henry James, Jeffrey Eugenides, Julian Barnes, Tom McCarthy and Zadie Smith, against a critical background of James Wood, Roland Barthes, David Shields and others including Viktor Shklovsky and Iris Murdoch. It then examines my own novel which makes up the second part of the thesis and looks at whether my advocacy of plot has compromised my literary ambitions, and to what extent my advocacy of plot prioritises the commercial over the artistic. The discussion is set against the extra context of my eight years working as a commissioning editor of literary fiction. It is also set against the process of being edited by a publisher who brought to bear commercial imperatives as well as artistic ones on the redrafting process. The second part of the thesis is the novel, My Biggest Lie, due for publication in April 2014. Brown 3 Acknowledgements Professor Michael Schmidt, Kei Miller, Peter Straus, Francis Bickmore Author’s declaration I declare that, except where explicit reference is made to the contribution of others, that this dissertation is the result of my own work and has not been submitted for any other degree at the University of Glasgow or any other institution. Signature _______________________________ Printed name _______________________________ Brown 4 Table of Contents Part One 5 Fiction and Realism 8 Plot v. Story 13 ‘Literarily speaking back in time’ 14 ‘The idiotic use of marriage as a finale’ – Emma by Jane Austen 16 ‘Kept alive by suspense’ – Portrait of a Lady by Henry James 25 ‘Books are about other books’ – The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides 35 The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes wins the Booker Prize 41 Two directions for the novel 44 ‘Liberal humanists are the enemy’ – Tom McCarthy 52 ‘Why narrative at all?’ – Zadie Smith 71 Conclusion 86 Works Cited Part Two 91 My Biggest Lie, a novel Brown 5 Fiction and Realism The idea that it is the fiction writer’s artistic duty to faithfully engage with ‘reality’ still animates contemporary criticisms of narrative realism. In a widely reviewed polemic, Reality Hunger (2010), David Shields suggests fiction has lost its artistic power. He bases this on his commitment to realism, if not realist fiction: ‘If literary terms were about artistic merit and not the rules of convenience, about achievement and not safety, the term realism would be an honorary one, conferred only on a work that actually builds unsentimental reality on the page, that matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language. It would be assigned no matter the stylistic or linguistic method, no matter the form’ (199-200). One of the features of narrative realist fiction that prevents it being true to ‘reality’ is its commitment to telling a story. Shields’ manifesto is a clever collage of (thought-provoking) quotes from other writers (the one above is taken from Ben Marcus) interspersed with his own (bombastic) declarations. Readers familiar with Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel will recognise many of the sentences attacking story: ‘to tell a story well is therefore to make what one writes resemble the prefabricated schemas people are used to, in other words, their ready-made idea of reality’ (31, or, in Shields, 200). The extrapolation of this argument can be found in Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism, also published in 2010, that ‘the [classic] novel, the unfettered product of the imagination, actively prevents us from having a realistic attitude to ourselves and the world, and therefore from achieving any sort of firmly grounded happiness’ (78). I am quoting from two books published first in 2010 to demonstrate that opposition to realism remains current, though of course these arguments share much in common with modernist rejection of realist methods and with semiotic deconstruction. Early Barthes – and it is important for my thesis to remember Barthes changed his view of the novel – sees realist narrative as an artificial code or series of codes designed to preserve the power structures of capitalist society from where it emerged: there is no overlapping between the written facts, since he who tells the story has the power to do away with the opacity and the solitude of the existences Brown 6 which made it up, since he can in all sentences bear witness to a communication and hierarchy of actions and since, to tell the truth, these very actions can be reduced to mere signs. (Writing Degree Zero 31) In this argument realism is a form that represents a subjective and self-serving notion of ‘reality’ as the objective way of things. Barthes suggests it lacks self-awareness enough to criticise itself. Such criticisms risk over-simplifying the methods of narrative realism, both as developed in the nineteenth century and as used by many writers today – including such as Jonathan Franzen, whom Shields couldn’t read, with a typical exaggeration expressed in a cliché, if his ‘life depended on it’ (199). He doesn’t say specifically why, but perhaps we can assume he thinks it as an example of realism that, in Barthes’ phrase, ‘copies what is already a copy’ (S/Z 55). The argument between realists – with their familiar reader-pleasing pace of plot and ‘roundness’ of character – and experimental writers – who think readers should be pleased more by new forms and unfamiliar style – is frequently an argument about whose stance is more honest about its ambition to represent the ‘real’. This argument leads this thesis into the difficult discussion of what we mean by the ‘truth’ of art. I might say a plot is artistically ‘true’ if it faithfully engages with trying to capture ‘reality’ instead of smoothing out its complexity. The ever-present inverted commas suggest immediately the difficulty of pinning down a shared definition of these elusive and philosophically contested categories. Barthes, in the majority of his work, would deny there was such a thing as ‘reality’, or if there is, would argue that we cannot reach it because it is always constructed through linguistic and artificial codes. Writers are always striving towards representation rather than achieving it, but it is the existence of and the faithfulness of the attempt I am concerned with. I share James Wood’s admiration of Barthes but also his impatience with the extremity of this conclusion of Barthes’ from 1966: The function of narrative is not to “represent”, it is to constitute a spectacle still very enigmatic for us but in any case not of a mimetic order . . . “What takes place” in the narrative is, from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; “what happens” is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming. (Image Music Text 123-4) Brown 7 The presence of artifice and convention within realism does not logically entail, says Wood, that it is ‘so artificial and conventional that it is incapable of referring to reality’ (How Fiction Works 177) – a conclusion Barthes himself reached towards the end of his life, referring to his own ‘epiphany’ when he discovered moments of ‘truth’ in Tolstoy and Proust, particularly appealing as he mourned his mother because it might ‘permit me to say those I love and not to say I love them’ (qtd. in Thirlwell 30) . And Barthes’ earlier argument it is not the one put forward either by the anti- realists of today I’ve referred to; they think there are better forms than realism to represent existence – the lyrical essay for Shields; modernism for Josipovici. It is ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ that I too want to use as a measure for criticising and defending plot in literary novels. James Wood acknowledges the difficulty of talking about ‘truth’ but still wants to: ‘let us replace the always problematic word “realism” with the much more problematic word “truth”’ (How Fiction Works 180). This is not just conservatism, but an attempt to make a broader definition of what we classify as ‘real’, one which includes fiction about unlikely events that is nevertheless ‘true’ to life obliquely (he mentions Kafka, Beckett, Hamsun). In resisting the extremity of Barthes’ earlier conclusion, Wood is not declaring himself as a champion of plot. He is a critic keener to emphasise its ‘essential juvenility’ and the ‘mindlessness of suspense’ (How Fiction Works 114), and he is a stern critic of conventionality in fiction: ‘the point to make about convention is not that it is untruthful per se, but that it has a way of becoming, by repetition, steadily more and more conventional’ (178). There is an interesting nuance he makes here: that conventions are not necessarily artificial, but that they nearly always become boring. This explains why it might be necessary for writers, critics, reviewers, editors, academics – anyone, in short, whose business it is to repeatedly begin new ‘literary’ novels – to laugh occasionally at the conventions of literary realism, to notice them at their most tedious and groan. So we sympathise when Wood asks: Why, we say to ourselves, do people have to speak in quotation marks? Why do they speak in scenes of dialogue? Why so much ‘conflict’? Why do people Brown 8 come in and out of rooms, or put down drinks, or play with their food while they are thinking of something? Why do they always have affairs? Why is there always an ageing Holocaust survivor somewhere in these books? (How Fiction Works 169) Or when Ben Marcus yawns: when characters are explained by their childhoods . . . when depictions of landscape are intermissions while the author catches his breath and gets another scene ready (52) Or when Zadie Smith notices an epiphany in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, ‘expressed like all epiphanies, in one long, breathless, run-on sentence’ and asks: is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really realism? (Changing My Mind 81) Some of this is, intentionally with Wood and Smith, comic hyperbole. ‘Always’ and ‘all’ feel truer than they are when one begins, say, their thirtieth literary novel first published in 2011. This boredom, this sense that these conventions are repeating and steadily becoming more conventional when we read literary fiction suggests why an anti-fiction manifesto such as Reality Hunger receives respectable praise despite being manifestly hysterical. The symptoms of disease may have been identified, but the cause has been declared prematurely, and I would like to investigate with some optimism whether there is an alternative cure to that of killing the patient. Plot versus story To begin to investigate whether plot can be ‘truthful’ and capture ‘reality’ it is important to define what plot means. First it is useful to look at how plot has been defined differently to story. It is harder to separate the two concepts than others have proposed but for my purpose it is necessary. Narrative realism, skirmishing with Brown 9 oppositional, modernist traditions, is attacked for its plots: narrative shape is a fence, a prison, constraining literary art’s potential to faithfully represent reality. This line of argument risks conflating the most generic elements of story with the most expressively chosen of plots. Robbe-Grillet uses the term story (histoire) rather than plot as one of his list of ‘several obsolete notions’. His iconoclasm is contradictory if we conflate the meanings of story and plot: ‘to tell a story has become strictly impossible’ (33), and yet he concedes his own novels contain ‘plot [une trame 1 ], an “action” quite readily detectable, rich moreover in elements generally regarded as dramatic’ (34). It may not seem obvious therefore that his novels don’t tell a story. In Jealousy (1957), the signs of a wife’s infidelity are observed by a husband, with events repeating and skipping and seen only partially. There is drama implied, there is event, but it is not given to the reader in a linear order, and the narrator’s mood and emotional responses can only be inferred by the reader (this is his rejection of the obsolete notion of ‘character’). The reader has to piece together the narrative from discontinuous fragments. We can only agree with Robbe-Grillet’s assertion that story is obsolete in his novels if we make the distinction that story refers only to a simple linear narrative presented as such – Robbe-Grillet is not against narrative when he calls for a new novel. As he says about Proust, Faulkner and Beckett: ‘it is not the anecdote that is lacking, it is only its character of certainty, its tranquillity, its innocence’ (33 – and also to be found in Reality Hunger). E. M. Forster’s old distinction between a story and a plot is that of causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story; ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. ‘If it is a story we say: “And then?” If it is in a plot we ask: “Why?” . . . A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave-men or to a tyrannical sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public’ (59). Forster’s example suggests a plot is a series of narrated events that raise questions for the reader: a plot contains ambiguity and requires interpretation. A plot therefore requires an active response from the reader while a story requires only a passive response. Events in a plot raise questions about why they have happened; event withholds information and motivation as much as reveals it. Plot is, in this 1 I am quoting from the English translation but reading against the original French for the most important of my terms. Trame is not the traditional French word for plot (un intrigue), and is more accurately translated in English as ‘a thread’ or ‘outline’. [...]... romantic plot, and yet an engagement with a romantic plot is why I feel invested in what will happen to the characters Eugenides has encouraged me to care about The contradictory claims on me enrich my understanding and point to my lack of understanding of the love plot, of what it consists of and of why it appeals to me in the way it does A novel can continue to explore the way we shape reality within its... its interest in the way plot functions in novels, and by extension it looks at how we use plot to structure our lives and to create concepts such as ‘love’ The Marriage Plot sets itself up to examine how the marriage plot of nineteenth-century fiction can be adapted to a faithful depiction of campus life in 1980s America The novel’s heroine Madeleine Hanna is as authentic and central a literary heroine... convention (naming characters), and opposes his realist and modernist urges, voicing them through different ‘round’ characters He creates practical challenges to ideological positions and in doing so nuances his understanding of both realism and semiotics, avoiding using conventions complacently and theorising abstractly Character develops in The Marriage Plot in the conventional way it does in many realist... innocent The plots of narrative realism as they develop to an artistic highpoint over the course of the nineteenth century (Eliot, Tolstoy, James) show an increasing lack of complacency and innocence, and a corresponding growth in the way their plots internally self-criticise and become essayistic, and I will turn to look at this soon If we compare the novel of the nineteenth century with today’s commercially... optimism in attempting something that promises to be very hard? Or is it selfish in this very heroism, in allowing her the role of heroine while retreating from the reality of what Leonard is experiencing? That this marriage plot and style of narrative realism can pose these incommensurable questions proves to me its continued artistic potential I am not being asked to simplify my understanding to the... But a literary heroine in the 1980s has far more freedom to define herself outside of marriage and so her reactions to romantic offers are necessarily less fraught We are introduced to her in her final year as an undergraduate writing a dissertation on the marriage plot in the nineteenth-century novel In her ancient supervisor’s opinion the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had... Meditating in the Meeting House the next morning, Mitchell, instead of being filled with faith is filled with clarity Like Portrait of a Lady, the novel ends with the rejection of a false happy ending: Brown 34 From the books you read for your thesis, and for your article – the Austen and the James and everything – was there any novel where the heroine gets married to the wrong guy and then realizes it, and. .. refers to the order and way in which these events are told (or not told) A plot may blur the distinction between cause and event, suggesting they proceed logically from each other, and by extension, that life is ordered, has a plan, a hierarchy (Barthes’ criticism in S/Z: the readerly rather than writerly text) Alternatively, a plot may emphasise and make plain the dividing line and try to more accurately... Forster’s idea of a plot seems to refer more to what a good plot might do rather than what plot always does differently to story: a difference in degree rather than in kind The dividing line between narrating consecutive events and causal events is not so clearly drawn Barthes suggested in Writing Degree Zero2 that the impression in realist fiction of events proceeding causally from preceding events exploits... requires winding up As the novel draws to a close misunderstandings are cleared up and material hindrances are conveniently dissolved to allow for three couples to neatly get together To accept this tidying up demands in this case that we accept such sudden good fortune and go along with a sentimental convention – that people fall in love in sudden epiphanies – and we can hear Austen struggling to convince . Abstract Tension between artistic and commercial impulses in literary writers’ engagement with plot This thesis explores whether plot and story damage a literary writer’s attempt. Brown, Luke (2014) Tension between artistic and commercial impulses in literary writers’ engagement with plot. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5158/ Copyright and moral rights for. referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Brown 1 Tension between artistic and commercial