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I Want to First Define What I Mean by a Novel's Plot 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 Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] 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.
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