Will Self’s concept of 'modernism' in the novel (can we even
call it modernism anymore? Should that term not have been confined to the early
20th century along with the modernists who first expounded it?) is
flawed.
Perhaps within the parameters Self sets out, it is legitimate. But those parameters
are far too rigidly delineated. When I went to see him talk about his new novel Umbrella, his propounding of, let’s call it
experimentalism, in the novel was erudite and well-informed, and is well-executed in the novel. But I can’t help feeling he is a little too blinkered in the
unforgiving nature of his philosophy. Yes, it is essential that creative
writing in both form and content continues to push the boundaries of what has
yet to be attempted in literature. And it is important that the multifarious nature
of our world and of humanity can be
linguistically encapsulated in the multifarious nature of the novelistic internal
voice. But does that mean that the ‘realist’ tradition, honed
by George Eliot and Jane Austen and now typified by the likes of Amis, McEwan
et al, should be eschewed in favour of an attempt to conduct the darting meanderings
of consciousness into language? And isn’t this language by its very nature carefully
structured by the novelist and thus, ironically, ‘unreal’?
For what is language but a constrictive conduit through
which we must necessarily articulate our abstract thoughts and emotions, and by
which we are thus restricted within the very boundaries of that language and
the limited manipulations upon it that we attempt to enact? Self’s argument
that the novel should aspire to communicate the ‘reality’ of our thoughts and
their infinite tributaries and deviations is valid, and has to an extent been
executed by the 20th century greats: Joyce, Woolf and so on. Self experiments in Umbrella with shifting time-periods mid-sentence, or even mid-word, and with the expression
of what he calls ‘condensed thought’ via italics. And I do believe that such experimentation should be valued and
acknowledged as a progression of the artform. But I cannot help but feel that
his dogmatic insistence that this is the only way, or at least the closest way,
of authentically conveying our inner thoughts is flawed.
Because for me novels express the most fundamental truths,
emotions and expressions of being. And they can do this despite, or even due to, being composed of chapters, cohesive
sentences and linear narratives. Not all novels achieve this veracity of
course, but some do it to at least an equally potent effect as the stream of
consciousness and some, I would argue, more so. Marshall Brown is speaking of
poetry when he invokes ‘the vital round dance that lets form give life and
meaning to content and lets content give substance and expression to form’ but
I think this can apply equally to the novel and its form, be it experimental or
traditional.
Think of Dickens in Great
Expectations when he entreats the reader to ‘Think of the long chain of
iron or gold, thorns or flowers that would never have bound you but for the
formation of the first link on one memorable day’. Dickens is a proven master
of the chapter, of the slow materialisation of the links that join together and
form unbreakable nexuses around which an entire world can be created. Or think
of Will Self’s contemporary David Mitchell, a fine example of experimentalism
through the very distinct chapter partitions of his masterpiece Cloud Atlas, whose first character says:
‘Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of
itself, but as I approach it, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the
thorny swamp of dissent’.
These truer truths may be latent within the
simulacrum of the realist novel just as much as within the simulacrum of the
continuous stream of thought; they can be found not just in the attempted
realism of the mind’s nebulous internal iterations but in the marshalling of
these thoughts into something less ‘real’, perhaps, but equally true.
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