Monthly Archives: January 2007

What is realism in literature?

Parents: realism – literature

Truth (1870) – Jules Joseph Lefebvre

By definition, fiction is “untruth.” Since untruth is contrary to truth, and because truth is a virtue, does that not make untruth found in fiction a vice? –anonymous catholic quote

 

In literature realism refers to verisimilitude of narrative (whether or not a story is believable) or to verisimilitude of characterization (whether or not the characters are believable). Verisimilitude was introduced in literature when – in the latter half of the second millenium – the novel replaced the romance as primary literary genre.

The novel or the modern novel introduced realism in fiction, at a time when much fiction was marked by fantasy (romances such Amadís de Gaula, Le Morte d’Arthur). The devices used to introduce realism were the epistolary technique (Pamela), true adventure (Crusoe) and psychological development of the characters (Don Quixote, Madame Bovary, The Red and the Black). Literary realism as a full-fledged literary movement (first called realism and then naturalism) came into being in Europe in the 19th century. In France the movement’s main exponents were Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola, in Scandinavia there was August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen and in Russia Chekhov. The novelist George Eliot introduced realism into English fiction; as she declared in Adam Bede (1859), her purpose was to give a “faithful representation of commonplace things.” Mark Twain and William Dean Howells were the pioneers of realism in the United States.

See also: realism in film – realism in literature – realism in the visual arts

“Will I disturb your writing if I vacuum?”

Woman: “Will I disturb your writing if I vacuum?”

Bukowski: “Nothing can disturb my writing, it’s a disease.”

Via The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction (2005) – which arrived in the mail yesterday. I don’t find it as enjoyable as 1001 Books I’ve been raving about but in contrast to the latter, it has more cross-media references to music and film. Notably absent are Ian McEwan and Iain Banks. Also, mostly 20th century literature.

The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction (2005) – Michaela Bushell, Helen Rodiss Paul Simpson [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Renunciation of a vocation

Having read about Rimbaud’s life (and how he had stopped writing altogether) in Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, I re-read The Aesthetics of Silence by Susan Sontag. It’s incredible how Sontag – who was only 34 at the time this essay was published – reaches an impeccable style and an enormous lucidity. An excerpt:

The scene changes to an empty room.

Rimbaud has gone to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the slave trade. Wittgenstein, after a period as a village school-teacher, has chosen menial work as a hospital orderly. Duchamp has turned to chess. Accompanying these exemplary renunciations of a vocation, each man has declared that he regards his previous achievements in poetry, philosophy, or art as trifling, of no importance. —…

The essay is published in the bundel Styles of Radical Will, which also features the seminal The Pornographic Imagination (1967).

L’Ultrameuble (1938) – Kurt Seligmann

L’Ultrameuble (Eng: Ultrafurniture) is a work of surrealist art by Kurt Seligmann. This 1938 sculpture is a three legged stool where the legs are quite literally women’s legs (stockinged mannikins’ legs in high-heel shoes.). It first came to my attention via the excellent German book Sade / Surreal.

Dismembered body parts such as dolls, living plants and speaking body parts belong to the category of the grotesque and the uncanny. Freud wrote an essay on the latter entitled The Uncanny in 1919:

Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, as in a fairy tale of [Wilhelm] Hauff’s, feet which dance by themselves, as in the book by [Albrecht] Schaeffer which I mentioned above–all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove capable of independent activity in addition. —The Uncanny (1919) – Sigmund Freud

A picture by Roger Schall of it here. It would make an ideal illustration for my page on independent body parts in fiction.

BTW, does anyone know the location of a the Legs video clip by ZZ Top?

P. S. I think I finally ‘ve been able to track the two writers Freud cites in his essay: Wilhelm Hauff and Albrecht Schaeffer.

Introducing Dr. Gaston Ferdière

Ferdière has been somewhat on my mind since a letter that Hans Bellmer wrote to him on his strange codependent relationship with Unica Zürn came to my attention. It appears that he was the psychiatrist of Unica Zürn, Antonin Artaud and Isidore Isou. Here is an excerpt from a 1995 article by British academic Stephen Barber:

“Under Ferdiere’s supervision, Artaud received 51 sessions of electroshock between June 1943 and December 1944. The treatment had been invented only five years earlier, by the Italian doctor Ugo Cerletti, who had observed the pacifying effect of electric shocks applied to the skulls of pigs in a Rome slaughterhouse and adapted the strategy for human application. The treatment was surrounded by an aura of discovery and excitement at the time Ferdiere began to use it, and he embraced it enthusiastically. Ferdiere’s assistant, Jacques Latremoliere, included an account of the treatment Artaud underwent in his doctoral thesis, Incidents and Accidents Observed in the Course of 1200 Electroshocks. He writes of the “theatrical reactions of the subject in the face of his hallucinations” and notes that one of Artaud’s vertebrae was shattered during the third of the unanesthetized sessions. Artaud himself would write of his having been taken for dead at the end of this same session, and of watching the orderlies prepare to take his “corpse” to the mortuary before he suddenly awakened after a coma of 90 minutes. Ferdiere, while not denying that such an incident took place, told me that, with such a volume of electroshocks being applied, it was difficult to remember this particular event. … Ferdiere, building on his reputation as the “rehabilitator” of Artaud, would subsequently become the psychiatrist of the Surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer and his companion, the poet Unica Zürn (who committed suicide in 1970 while under his care). He also treated the leader of the Lettrist art movement, Isidore Isou, during the events of May 1968 in Paris. Isou and his fellow Lettrist Maurice Lemaitre subsequently wrote an entire book of outrageous insults against Ferdiere, titled Antonin Artaud Tortured by the Psychiatrists. They asserted: “Dr Gaston Ferdiere is one of the greatest criminals in the entire history of humanity: a new Eichmann,” and demanded his immediate arrest …” —Art in America

 

Amazon connections

Dear reader,

Nerval by Nadar

Of all online recommendation engines, Amazon’s ‘customers who bought this also bought this’ has proven itself the most useful. Allow me to illustrate what I mean. A while back I added The Other Side (Dedalus European Classics) to my Alfred Kubin page which brought The Maimed (1923) by Hermann Ungar to my attention.

The Maimed connects to Hell by Henri Barbusse, Dark Spring (1970) by Hans Bellmer companion Unica Zürn, Scarecrow & Other Anomalies (1932) by Argentine poet Oliverio Girondo, The Obscene Bird of Night (1970) by Chilean writer José Donoso, Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille, Moravagine (1926) by Blaise Cendrars (who once called the French cinematic serial Fantômas “the modern Aeneid”), Aurelia by French writer of the fantastique Gérard De Nerval and decadent classic Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont.

The above looks like a decent list of cult fiction.

When books by Dedalus are central, the connections turn out to be particularly undergroundish.

Do you want links to the names mentioned in this article? Click here if you do.

Blogademia / Craig Saper

Academics are not publishing their most valued thoughts about new media–the ones for which they hope to obtain tenure or promotion–in new media.

Jay Bolter (Writing Space, second edition, 111)

There’s something about this medium that convinces us that our merest flights of fancy, our wispiest free-floating musings, are Revealed Truths, outtakes from Thus Spake Zarathustra. . . . the chattering class’s presumption that it must have something, anything to say about everything? (Joan Didion famously said that she left New York because she didn’t have an opinion about everything.)

Mark Dery blog (September 27, 2005)

Via Reconstruction

Jay Bolter is an American new media specialist who has published Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999) . Mark Dery (born 1959) is an American author, lecturer and cultural critic who authored one of my favorite quotes on culture.