New Voice

…on a Monday, this week. I thought, when I started to write, that I was done with work, and I am, for the moment, in a moment. I thought that I had done work to the death, but its relationship to literature is fertile ground for discussion – since I’ve started writing about it people have been mentioning books that deal with work, or writers known for their relationship with work, especially with means-to-end work. Someone mentioned Flann O’Brien, like myself a civil servant, and a man whose literary output would put one to shame. That he had time to squeeze in so much writing – the journalism and ficiton – between work and prodigious boozing (although he was a civil servant at a time when you could combine the working and the boozing, saving some time at least) is amazing and admirable. I have mentioned it in earlier posts, but it is what I find so admirable, in fact, about these writers – that they managed to find the time, to steal the time, as William Carlos Williams puts it, to write. In fact, quite often, they managed to turn the work to their advantage, to use it. They demonstrate what Mailer refers to in The Spooky Art about drinking, along the lines that if you are going to drink, at least make use of it in your writing, instead of using it as an excuse not to write. Which is what I was doing on Sunday night – successfully making excuses not to write.
My excuse was that I was watching a movie, The Reader, which qualifies as research for this week’s post, as you will see. This week I did want to write about something other than work. I want to write about realism and, briefly, to defend J.M. Coetzee in a way, against the charge that his novel Life and Times of Michael K lacks verisimiltude. This was made in Sam Jordison’s post in the Guardian books blog. I’m not actually going to defend the novel against the charge, I merely wonder at it, or at the need for it, in literature. I wonder at the need for realism and that a perceived lack of realism is regarded as a fault, even in a novel that announces, by virtue of its title, that it’s likely to be somewhat allegorical and owing a little to previous literary creations. It’s surprising that, after the developments of modernism have long become accepted, even unconscious, practice, that after Brecht, this debate is still going on.
Perhaps Coetzee’s crime is to assume the guise of realism, promising, then, the lazy comforts of ‘credible’ characters doing ‘reasonable’ things and instead delivering characters behaving in a way that serves his ideas. But we need only look at his oeuvre to realise that this is his point, his novels are, as written in Elizabeth Costello, and demonstrated blatantly from that point on, about ideas, and ideas and realism don’t sit together well:
Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations – walks in the countryside, conversations… (Elizabeth Costello, Vintage, P.9)
He isn’t intending to be realistic, he instead is attempting an imaginative literary treatment of certain ideas. The blogger, in this case, complains about the blatant flaunting of his didactic passages, one can only imagine what Jordison makes of Elizabeth Costello and the rest of the later works.
One of Coetzee’s intentions, it seems, is to point out the artificiality of ‘realism’. Indeed the idea of realism is absurd in its own right, the action of a novel is ‘real’, only in so far as it conforms to the conventions and structures of an artifical classification – a book is judged as realism not by its relationship with ‘real life’ but by its relationship to the literary ‘simulacrum’, to real life as conveyed in literature. Realism, whether in fiction or in film, requires an enormous leap of faith on the part of the reader, and like religion, rewards this leap of faith with the comforts of convention. Doing something like acknowledging the reader, or drawing attention to the artifice of the novel or film inspires not merely dislike but anger and hostility, I’ve often found myself in conversations with people who are angry by the very existence of these “tricksy” or “difficult” works, quite often without having read, or viewed them. Just the fact that there are those out there making this kind of art pisses people off.
When I rented Lars von Trier’s Dogville from the local video shop the assistant felt necessary to warn me that the film was not what I might be expecting. He had taken to warning everyone because of all the grief he was getting from Nicole Kidman fans expecting, I don’t know, BMX Bandits or something. Surely, though, I should have been warned last night, for example, when renting The Reader, that Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes would be playing Germans but would be speaking English. In the name of realism, though, they would be speaking English with a German accent, or even more bizarre, that a cast of Germans and Bruno Ganz, would be speaking English in what, we hope at least, were their own accents.