Reality in the Novel
DECEMBER 2020 | HISTORY AND THEORY OF THE NOVEL
The novel approaches reality as it approaches its narration: reflecting the new, ever-changing world in the making (Bakhtin 324) while possessing absolute freedom in its discourse. To dissect this, the novel’s basis must first be established. Though theorists argue its exact “definition” – in fact, many argue that to create a definition of the novel would be to dissemble it entirely – there are specific characteristics that reflect the modern narrative.
Walter Benjamin states that, “The birthplace of a novel is the solitary individual, who … is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others” (80). This is the diversion from traditional oral storytelling, alienating the individual’s perspective to one singular narration. In other words, the novel emerges from the individual’s consciousness in isolation, which is formulated through the singular experiences from that individual alone. Bakhtin summarizes this well: “The novel … is determined by experience, knowledge and practice” (325). Ian Watt reaffirms this notion, not through the novel’s content but its style: “the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it” (364). He notes this new realism, differing from classic realism, as “modern realism”, and that it “begins from the position that the truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses” (365) which derives from the Enlightenment philosophers, yet simultaneously restating the human assertion of their own assessment of reality since the birth of literature.
If the solitary individual analyzes their senses to produce a narration of their own, then they have created a perspective of their reality. If formal realism derives from the production of the novel, which is the individual’s consciousness, the reality is singlehandedly crafted from the individual themselves. This created reality, a world isolated and in extremes, holds its experience and value from the senses around the individual. There are two realities that hold different implications: the first, is “Reality”, which is the generalized, universal expression of our everyday reality, and the second, “reality” implies a perspective shaped by the individual consciousness. These two are important to distinguish when discussing the novel’s thoughts on reality.
This implies that reality is subjective. Since the birth of the novel, society has rejected universals, thus implying that there is not one singular Reality encompassing all humanity and its surroundings (Watt 3667). Because of this rejection, the individual is celebrated, thus, the individual’s consciousness through the novel is able to present reality in multiple facets
If an individual is celebrated, thus the idea of One Reality is rejected, too. However, the postmodernists and realists hurl tomatoes at this modernist thought; if there is not one Reality then how could all people be in communication with each other? The novels’ reality must be based off of one Reality, according to Lukacs, “because all writing must contain a certain degree of realism” since it is “the basis of literature” (769). Therefore, realism influences the individual’s consciousness regardless of its isolation and extremities. What the novel portrays about reality is both the individual’s consciousness producing a type of reality from the realist’s Reality. The individual’s consciousness is based in Reality, but does not restrict itself to that Reality, the reality of the consciousness, or the reality of the novel’s created world. This is exemplifying its freedom, a critical defining characteristic of the novel.
This does not mean that modernism and classic realism fight over which is more “like a novel”, though both weigh different contributions to the idea. The novel is absolute freedom, so putting limitations on its ability to discuss reality, whether from a modernist or a classic realist perspective, hyper-focuses it and thus excludes other novels, leading to the deconstruction of the idea of the freedom (which is counterintuitive since freedom is the novel).
What is to be noted, however, is the expansive range in which the novel and its freedom can reach. The novel presents reality as you, the reader, experience reality: not necessarily in a realistic sense but from gathering information around you via your senses. This is the single pathway in determining experience, which shapes that reality. How can the novel do this on such a vast scale? Its loose structure permits it so since, arguably, there is no strict form; the novel is expressed and characterized by its freedom and lack of limitations. If the novel, therefore, has the freedom to present the individual consciousness, then, the approaches to reality vary from distortion to realism, yet the novel still contains its individual consciousness.
Dorrit Cohn’s theory about free indirect discourse also sheds light, giving the internal monologue of the individual while placing that same individual in the context of its surrounding environments, thus shaping the way the reader views the individual’s reality. Comparing Pride and Prejudice to Mrs. Dalloway, the free indirect discourse varies drastically from each other; however, both obtain the isolated individual consciousness which in fact rules the narrative. Elizabeth Bennet may have a “realistic” life, in her English middle-class family holding multiple historical truths from, but her biased thoughts sway the reader into presenting Wickham as a gentleman and Darcy as the devil, yet “in reality”, in Elizabeth Bennet’s world, these characteristics are reversed. The reality may look like classic realism, and appears to be “realistic”, yet this manufactured perspective is still in isolation from the community, without counsel, and pushed into extremes. Jumping into Woolf’s modernist narrative, the consciousness following Septimus is unnerving, unhinged, and not realistic, yet in his own consciousness, his reality is plagued by “the brute with the red nostrils”. Forcing himself into suicide, Septimus ends when his reality crashes (Holmes had come to visit him) though his reality was never realistic nor reflecting classic realism (in its structure and his thoughts). However, both novels, though artistically and stylistic different, focus on the individual’s subjective experience derived from Reality, while each possessing its own freedom to express each subjective reality. This freedom leads way for the novel’s openness, or constant changing and evolving within itself.
Ultimately, the novel “stimulate[s] life in order to provide it with ever new situations and different ways of combining its ingredients” (Robert 66). Its goal is not to replicate Reality, or distort it, but to create a reality of its own to engage in its own individual consciousness, holding a specific moment and place in time for this to exist.
How does the novel think about reality, the realistic, and realism? In general, one could argue that it does not think necessarily about these things, but rather implores them or ignores them into their own narratives; unless the novel is hyper focused on classic realism or its opposite modernist text, the novel itself isn’t characterized by the way it thinks about reality, and how that reality effects if it is realistic or not. Rather, the novel’s focus on the individual consciousness creates an open space for the novel to expand into a form of multiple realities, or to reflect the main Reality. Regardless, thanks to the modern consciousness narrative, the novel does indeed present a specific isolate reality through the individual consciousness which, arguably, is the key factor of the novel itself. To end with this thought from Marthe Robert: “Where the novel does not, perhaps, reveal what it is so much as what it wants, that towards which it is striving by means of its apparently arbitrary structural and ideological growth.” (Robert 68)
