The crisis of narration and the future of the novel, part one

My disappointment with the contemporary novel has been an occasional feature on this blog. Fourteen years ago I asked myself whether I had a genuine interest in the novel. Later, I wondered if JM Coetzee's Jesus trilogy was an attempt to put an end to the novel as we know it and, most recently, two posts identified features that might explain what was missing: first, citing Genette's Narrative Discourse, most novels' "temporal stability", and then in A measure of forever the absence of existential consternation in the form in contrast to a non-contemporary book that broke the cycle of disappointment. But perhaps these are just symptoms of a deeper problem. Byung-Chul Han, a Korean philosopher based in Germany, insists there is and it has little to do with the ingredients I identified. He says we're living in "a post-narrative time" with proof coming in the discussion of the subject itself: "Narrative consciousness, allegedly rooted in the human brain, is a conception that is possible only...outside of the narrative spell."

The evidence suggests the exact opposite: from the #VSS hashtag on social media to multi-volume Harry Potter novels and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not to say the rows and rows of supermarket fiction, we are saturated in narrative. But this is his point: "At the heart of all the noise of storytelling, there is a narrative vacuum that expresses itself in a lack of meaning and orientation." For Han, as it was for Walter Benjamin, the not-so-secret sharer of this volume, the earliest sign of the decline in narration is precisely the rise of the novel, a rise coinciding with the decline of faith:

Christian religion is a meta-narrative that reaches into every nook and cranny of life and anchors it in being. Time itself becomes freighted with narrative. In the Christian calendar, each day is meaningful.

This is what he means by meaning and orientation: a faith "narrates contingency away...turning being-in-the-world into being-at-home". If the Christian calendar is still followed, it has been hollowed out by commercial interests. Each festival a marketing opportunity. Narration, Han says quoting Benjamin, comes from a distance: "what gets the readiest hearing is no longer intelligence coming from afar, but the information which supplies a handle for what is nearest". The availability and accessibility of stories is presented as an unqualified good, but they act like newspaper reports upfront, in our face, battering us one after another, and we're unable to slow down to listen and to contemplate. "The modern reader has lost the long, slow, lingering gaze." 

Many contemporary novels appear to challenge the condition with engrossing and informative stories about social and political issues – Ryan Ruby calls it "narrativized punditry" – but this is only a free-form variant of audience-seeking journalism. The alternative appears to be found in monumental or 'experimental' novels noisily hailed as renewing the aura of a bygone era – "already being compared to Nabokov and Proust" – yet really only forming pyramids in the desert visited by archaeologists and puzzled tourists; essentially nostalgic. What they lack Han says is the "revolutionary pathos" and "spirit of departure" of the narratives of the early twentieth century in which a different future is permanently on the horizon. Instead, modern narratives have no future and have settled into "a mode of 'on and on'". 

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In general culture, narration has been replaced by rampant storytelling devoured by those desperate for a communal anchor: "Populist, nationalist and right-wing extremist or tribal narratives, including conspiracy theories, cater to this need." Even those appalled by the idiocracy remain subject to the same need:

'stories' shared on social media fill the narrative vacuum. They are merely forms of pornographic self-presentation or self-promotion. Posting, liking and sharing content are consumerist practices that intensify the narrative crisis.

The Crisis of Narration is also a passionate denunciation of digital culture. Our brains have adapted to the sensory overload by dulling perception; we should remember an addiction goes on and on, which is why Han says that taking selfies is not a sign of narcissism but of "inner emptiness". What's curious about this short book with short chapters and Han's prolific output of short books is that he appears to be intensifying the crisis, just as this blog's information-heavy discussion is more or less a selfie with the book (hey, buy me a coffee!). 

So what does Han recommend for resistance? Despite his avowed Catholicism, a return to a meta-narrative is not possible, so he advocates slowing down and contemplation, and taking risks to achieve both: "A little bit of patience for narration, please. And then: patience through narration!" This, the book's epigraph, is from Peter Handke, an author who features in Han's other books. Elsewhere Handke describes his grammar as "conservative, almost epically so":

It comes from distance, as Dante said. In his case, people approach on a kind of country road and he says of them: they walked slowly and they came as if they came from far, far away. I too want to write sentences that come from a great distance.

This may explain why Handke's novels in recent decades have been for me so difficult to read; not for any complexity or experimental obtrusions but simply their patience, in which the hamster wheel of consumption turns too slowly. While 'narration' in Han's book applies to the wider culture and not specifically to novel-writing, his injunction to take risks does. The on and on of contemporary literary fiction is due in part to it settling into recognisable forms. Han cites the fate of philosophy but it applies equally to novel production:

Once philosophy claims to be a science, an exact science even, decay sets in. Conceived as a science, philosophy denies its original narrative character and it loses its language. Philosophy falls silent. An academic philosophy that limits itself to the administration of its own history is unable to narrate. It does not run any risks; it runs a bureaucracy. 

This may be why the most stimulating writing takes place outside, evading Head Office.

Philosophy, in the form of ‘poetry’ (mythos), takes a risk, a noble risk. It narrates – even risks to suggest – a new form of life and being. Descartes’s ego cogito, ergo sum introduces a new order of things that represents the beginning of modern times. By leaving the Christian narrative of the Middle Ages behind, the radical orientation towards certainty risks something new.  

Byung-Chul Han's use of italics throughout is reminiscent of another Germanic scourge in which repeated assertions open a void in language, indicating at once that narration is untimely – "all literature is the literature of the end of time" Blanchot says – and that there is possibility of something new in that void. 

If I started with disappointment, I ended with The Crisis of Narration renewing my faith in the novel. It did what most of the novels I try to read fail to do: it was unputdownable and immediately rereadable. While each page bristles with passion and ideas, merely raising the question of narration seemed to be enough. Perhaps this is what the novel of the future must do, otherwise a very short story is never short enough and a 1,000-page doorstop never long enough.

Reading, forgetting

When John Updike read À la recherche du temps perdu after having read Scott-Moncrieff's translation, he was surprised to find Proust less Proustian, the epithet we associate with flowery prose blossoming over prodigious sentences proliferating clause within clause. While I cannot read French, this was also my experience of reading the new translations, first The Swann Way by Brian Nelson and now In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom by Charlotte Mandell. In the glow of remembering the experience of reading Within a Budding Grove, the prose of the new translation is noticebly less ornate, one might say more colloquial, at least no longer at arm's length from the decadence of fin de siècle France, an impression created perhaps by Scott-Moncrieff's grandiloquence. This worried me, as I've often described Proust to those who haven't read the novel as mind-expanding; one begins to follow thoughts into their depths of variation and reversal, suggesting that the recognition and interpretation of the signs of the world offers more to life than a novel's notable events, and I wondered if the overripe vocabulary and unusually generous size of the original typeface had something to do with this. With the new translations, one is sobered up enough from Scott-Moncrieff-intoxication to draw alongside Marcel the man himself, realising only too painfully one has failed to heed the lessons in love he presents with such eloquence and precision. With some shame, the reader comes to identify with Swann and Marcel.

In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom is a novel written in shade and sunlight. In the first part, Marcel's frustrated love for Swann's daughter Gilberte is given a long post-mortem, much as The Swann Way is a post-mortem for Swann's jealous love for Gilberte's mother Odette, while in the second Marcel has moved on from Gilberte and is spending Summer in a high-end hotel in Balbec on the Normandy coast. There he becomes infatuated with a "little band" of teenage girls he sees cycling around the resort, getting up to minor mischief. He describes their clothes and features lit by sunlight brightened by the sea, trying to discern their secrets, longing to get closer. Each day is charged by the thrill of catching a glimpse. The evocation of teenage kicks is hard to beat, provoking memories and melancholy shared by the reader.

It comes so quickly, the time when you have nothing left to look forward to, when your body is fixed in a state of immobility that promises no more surprises, when you lose all hope at the sight of faces that are still young framed by hair that's falling out or growing grey, like a tree in full summer with leaves that are already dead; it is so short, this radiant morning, that one comes to love only very young girls, the ones in whom the flesh, like a precious dough, is still rising. They are nothing but a pliable flow of matter, constantly moulded by whatever passing impression dominates them at the time. 

Back at the hotel, the family becomes acquainted with the painter Elstir who, impressed by Marcel, invites him to his studio, but Marcel keeps putting it off because he cannot bear to miss an opportunity to spot the little band. This proves to be an error.

It is decades since my reading of Terence Kilmartin's revision of Scott-Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past and then Penguin's retitled re-translation, and I was alarmed by how much detail was unfamiliar; I had forgotten entirely Madame Swann's little salon and images of train journeys, visits to Elstir's studio and sightings of the little band were only vague. What I do remember very clearly is fresh air and brilliant light, as if the novel itself is a holiday in the sun. While this exposes dilettantish tendencies, it may be fairer to compare the condition to the narrator's experience of enchantment with the group of girls. Likewise, we are enchanted by certain books and, like Marcel, we can be "profoundly surprised" each time we are in their presence, which in his case he puts down to "the multiplicity of each individual" compared to when "we are left alone with the arbitrary simplicity of our memory". Our relationship to a book can also follow the via dolorosa of disenchantment and Marcel's post-mortem commentary bulks out that path, accessorising what is otherwise an unremarkable story, so perhaps I had become jaded over the decades. Except, commentary does not constitute forgotten detail, as the winding sentences unconsciously nourish the growth of the reader's quality of perception, acting at a crude level like a prose exposition of a poem or to the summary of a dream minus the purity of its experience. Purity shines like the Balbec sun. 

Seeking to recover the dream, to give the purity of the experience a presence we might hold and share, we turn to plot summaries, biographies, scholarly monographs, documentaries, film adaptations, even blog posts, leaving us in a state of literary insomnia comparable to a night in the hotel in which an exhausted Marcel tosses and turns in bed, kept awake by the dread of sleeplessness.

All of a sudden I did fall asleep; I fell into that deep sleep that opens up for us a return to childhood, the rediscovery of years past and emotions once felt, disincarnation, the transmigration of souls, the recollection of the dead, the illusions of madness, regression to the most primitive forms of nature (for it's said we often see animals in our dreams, but we forget that, almost always when we dream, we ourselves are animals deprived of the rationality that projects the light of certainty onto things; on the contrary, all we can direct at the spectacle of life is an uncertain gaze constantly being obliterated by forgetfulness, each reality vanishing before the next takes its place like the ever-shifting projection of a magic lantern as the slides are changed) all these mysteries we think we don't know but into which we are actually initiated almost every night, just as we're introduced to the other great mystery of annihilation and resurrection. 

The places to which we are taken in this passage and the music in Charlotte Mandell's beautifully invisible translation is reminiscent of the unrelenting procession of the dreams of which it speaks, and in this we might recognise that literature is, like dream, in excess of the world. We cannot access its mysteries by day.  

Blanchot notes that modern literature has "a preoccupation with a profoundly continuous speech" giving rise "with Lautréamont, with Proust, then with surrealism, then with Joyce...to works that were manifestly scandalous". Scandalous not because of the content but because an "excess of continuity unsettles the reader, and unsettles the reader's habits of regular comprehension". Again, like dreaming. The excess of continuity draws us close to what is discontinuous of habitual life, to what remains stubbornly unfamiliar and yet into which we are initiated in certain books, the axe-books Kafka said we needed. This may in turn explain why novelists like Beckett and Bernhard, as different from Proust as one can imagine, are nevertheless closer companions than those who write regular novels of time and memory. If we compare this to Heidegger's claim that the measure of a great poet is to the extent they are able to commit to "one single poetic statement", a statement that is not explicit, we can appreciate that such continuousness is the outpouring of what cannot be stated and that our attachment to a particular book is not something we can properly articulate without becoming novelists ourselves. Marcel recognises this once he is initiated into friendship with the little band:

It was on them that my thoughts contentedly dwelled when I thought I was thinking of something else, or of nothing. But when, even without realizing it, I thought of them, at an even deeper level of unconsciousness they were the hilly blue undulations of the sea, a procession silhouetted against the sea. It was the sea I was hoping to find again, if I went to some town where they might be. The most exclusive love for a person is always love for something else.  

To discover something else, we might ask: how can we sleep? This may be the question for the literature of our time.

Note

In Proust Regained, I wrote about Brian Nelson's translation The Swann Way and included links to other posts of mine on Proust and In Search of Lost Time.