From: Chris Jones <ccjones-AT-turboweb.net.au>
Subject: Re: of the imagination... the Novel
Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 17:48:01 +1100



Governments... are rarely truly happy with an unregulated flow of 
words. The itch to control dubious communication is often scratched 
by the irritated rejection of fiction, the easiest form of written 
communication to attack (as "trivial"), as well as the one most 
deeply opposed by nature to the civic. In the mid-eighteenth century, 
an ingenious mental invention came to the rescue to accomodate both 
writers and civic authorities. This was Book Reviewing- in its modern 
form...

Magazines promised (implicitly) to sieve out books, scutinizing 
novels and encouraging writers to write acceptable fiction correctly. 
Novel reviewing serves as a kind of gatekeeper for the civitas. It is 
official and responsible.

The Rise of Realism can be seen as a political event... Undoubtably 
there was a general repugnance, a "natural" aversion especially 
amongst the insular and provincial- if colonizing- English, to that 
which is "oriental". The new Novel would define itself as home-grown, 
Aryan.

The great bard "Homer", died in the eighteenth century. He passed 
away under the scrutininy of F.A. Wolf in his _Prolegomena ad 
Homerum_.

The culture of the Novel, the true "Great Tradition" stretching back 
not only to Boccaccio, but to Apuleius and Heliodorus, was still the 
literary heritage of European and English readers and writers born at 
the turn of the eighteenth century. This included Spanish novels of 
the sixteenth century and French novels of the seventeenth century. 
The rise of Prescriptive Realism put an end to this culture of the 
Novel and made the Great Tradition largely invisible. The fog of 
invisibility fell over England first but was to be exported to the 
Continent.

One of the most striking aspects of the new domestic realistic novel, 
particularly as the English developed it, is its ability to exclude. 
It does not on the whole care for ethnic mixing. Aspiring young 
European writers, male and female alike, are told to write about what 
they know- what they experientially know- as if that is the sum total 
of what is. They are encouraged to stay in the parish and not imagine 
Ethiopia.

What the eye did not see the novelist should not write about, for it 
is not "real" but would be "imaginary."

Only realistic novels could be viewed as literature-- but even then, 
always as literature of an inferior kind. "Gentlemen read read better 
books." 

I use capital letters on "Realism" to distinuish what I call 
Prescriptive Realism. The Realism new in the mid-eighteenth century 
and dominant in the nineteenth, that became considered as a sine qua 
non of fiction. This demanding and hectoring Realism can be a 
dangerous thing for fiction.

As soon as the Novel appears to be tied up in Prescriptive Realism, 
authors have to rescue it; they do so by inventing other forms of the 
Novel that do what the newly "risen" approved middle-class realistic 
novel says it will not do. Science fiction had already arrived and 
was to be a genre helpful to authors of the next three centuries.

It also invents the "Gothic" novel, a momentous invention first 
wrought by women and homosexuals who could not be happy with the 
conceptual "reality" on which domesticated Realism was founded.

The "Gothic" was always going to be unofficial; it takes up residence 
on the dark marches outside the pale.

The cult of Realism affected critical practice and literary history 
far more then it did the creative practice of novel-writing.

What any novel always had to draw on is the Novel itself, that great 
bizzarre medley of the African, the Asian, and the European. The 
western novel was strong enough to accommodate itself in appearance 
to the demands of Realism without losing its inner qualities- and if 
it has lost those it would have become fundamentally uninteresting, 
even to Leavisites.

The Novel itself- if we let it all in- offers a road towards a new 
aesthetics. In the novel History and Play combine.

From: _The true story of the Novel_  Margaret Anne Doody, 1996.

One does not set out to write a novel but the Novel. Next comes 
tropes of the Novel. No, No! Not tropes as figures of speech, as 
metaphor; but as the ancient Greek etymology, a turning, a diversion. 
The Novel diverts and begins on the margins.

(True Story, as in; up the nose of Deconstruction and Structuralism, 
too. Derrida likes to inhabit black holes.)