I've just got home from an evening out with Sandra, seeing the playwright Michael Frayn speak with David Edgar, as part of the Birmingham Book Festival. Michael Frayn is an elegant self-effacing man who proved to be a reasonably engaging speaker. Sandra and I have seen at least two of his plays in the past. We saw Copenhagen, which is a dramatic representation of the meeting of two nuclear physicists, Werner Heisenberg and Nils Bohrs (thanks Wikipedia) in Copenhagen in 1941, at Malvern a few years ago. We unfortunately drank enough white wine to fog our already questionable intellectual powers, and both fell asleep during the first half hour, destined never to master what is quite a demanding play. We saw Noises Off, described this evening by David Edgar (who was interviewing Frayn on stage) as the world's funniest play, at the Birmingham Rep, and yes it was very very funny. So that's why we were there this evening.
On Copenhagen, Frayn made the point that according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics there is a theoretical barrier to knowing everything about a moving object, and that this reflects broader intellectual currents, in the sense that we now acknowledge the impossibility of understanding everything about the motivations of another individual (tell that to educational technologists). This is important to Frayn as a dramatist, and he went on to elaborate that in plays we don't know what is going on in the heads of all the characters. And this makes plays more like life itself than novels. Novelists like Philip Roth (most successfully, imo, with American Pastoral) have constructed sophisticated narrative structures to get over the problem that it's no longer acceptable for the narrator to delve confidently into the inner mental machinations of all its characters. In the 19th century, on the other hand, novelists like Tolstoy did just that. To what extent is this change attributable to the breakdown of intellectual confidence during the course of the 20th century? Frayn made the point that although quantum physics paralleled this broader trend, they did in fact have divergent causes, though Frayn didn't actually elaborate further on that point. Six years ago (actually the night before I met my husband for the first time), I went to see Jeffrey Eugenides (author of Virgin Suicides and Middlesex) speak at the Orange bar in Birmingham, again as part of the Birmingham Book Festival. Eugenides stated that the generation of writers to which he belonged rediscovered the great novels of the 19th century, jealously realising the narrative powers of those novelists with their untrammeled access to their character's thoughts, and that was why novelists like Roth were so inventive in terms of narrative structure, as they would want to somehow position himself to get similar access, but in a more credible way.
We left the event at around 9pm, both feeling that the festival as a whole would benefit from improved promotion and communication, and that the organisers are clearly missing a trick, as venues such as the Birmingham Conservatoire Recital Hall will realistically only attract the usual suspects (like me and Sandra) when they could be holding events in city centre bars or out in the suburbs, attracting new audiences. This is all the more pitiful given the stellar lineup of this year's festival compared to more lacklustre events elsewhere.
1 comment:
Sarah’s invited me to comment on this very interesting post. What I say may end up obscuring rather than clarifying, but my hope is that questions are raised that reveal the areas for further enquiry rather than closing the debate down with pat answers.
The issues seem to be over the role of the ‘omniscient narrator’ (a term that is itself problematic) and the depiction of interiority, and then accounting for transitions in the handling of these by deeper social processes.
There is always the danger of invoking too mechanical a relation between cultural expression and infrastructure (the best discussion of this is Raymond Williams’s subtle Marxism and Literature (Oxford: OUP, 1977)). The nineteenth-century novelist was rarely a direct spokesperson for the bourgeoisie (whereas you could more plausibly claim this of eighteenth-century writers). And note also the exceptions to omniscience: the complex layering of narration in Wuthering Heights makes it highly indeterminate. There are strategies of reading, too, that can render uncertain the most confident of nineteenth-century narrators. Yet the omniscient narrator does seem to disappear in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries (though still figuring strongly in popular fiction and, I suspect, in lower middlebrow writers like Sebastian Faulks). It may simply be stylistic fashion as much as some crisis in epistemology: after Henry James’s prescriptions about showing rather than telling, that sort of omniscience was critically frowned upon. Yet note that, at least not right away, the author’s full and immediate acquaintance with the inner life of her characters doesn’t simply disappear. In James, and in Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf, there is perhaps no narrator telling us what characters think and feel, but we are often instead shown the play of consciousness directly—sometimes more fully, in fact, than the older device might tell us. (Though the subject under observation might well be more fractured and indeterminate than the homogeneous character of earlier novels; that is a separate question.)
No single trend can be discerned after high modernism—the Nouveau Roman refusing even to attempt interiority, the postmodern fiction’s attention to the process of narrative itself, are among many. As you’ve rightly said, Philip Roth develops a highly individual approach to the problem that takes on postmodern self-consciousness and yet is still committed to the humanist project of representing character and subjectivity.
How would one account for Eugenides’s rediscovery and refocusing? It’s not enough to say simply as a reaction against his predecessors, or as pure accident. And what are the new, more credible ways that he talks of? Why are they now more credible? I can’t remember anything startlingly new technically in Eugenides, but I think a close account of Roth could be made that would uncover genuinely original rhetorical techniques.
Some further, scattered, points:
Frayn is quite right to point out different causes (though there may be, in the shift to relativism, some common factor after all): quantum mechanics is founded in experimental evidence (yet, even among physicists, the Copenhagen interpretation of that evidence is not universally accepted).
Frayn says that we now find it impossible to completely comprehend another’s motivations; was it ever so certain even in Tolstoy? I’m not so sure; and, conversely, I’m not so sure that our knowledge of others is that uncertain. I’m not convinced utterly by the novel/drama contrast, or that drama is closer to life (a problematic statement in itself), or whether that is even a good thing.
One of the best, and most accessible, books on these topics is Wayne C Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), despite his analysis having been critiqued and refined by Gerard Genette and others.
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