Notesale: Turn your study into money

Document Preview

Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above

---

What is a Novel?

1

WHAT IS A NOVEL?

WHAT IS A NOVEL?

A

novel is a piece of prose fiction of a reasonable length
...
Not
all novels are writtten in prose
...
As for fiction,
the distinction between fiction and fact is not always clear
...

The truth is that the novel is a genre which resists exact definition
...
It is hard to say how ape-like you have to be
in order to qualify as hairy
...
It is less a
genre than an anti-genre
...
You can find poetry and dramatic
dialogue in the novel, along with epic, pastoral, satire, history, elegy, tragedy and any number of other literary modes
...
The novel quotes, parodies and transforms
other genres, converting its literary ancestors into mere components of itself
in a kind of Oedipal vengeance on them
...

The novel is a mighty melting pot, a mongrel among literary thoroughbreds
...
It can investigate a single
human consciousness for eight hundred pages
...
If it is a form particularly associated with the
middle class, it is partly because the ideology of that class centres on a
dream of total freedom from restraint
...
The novel is an anarchic genre, since its rule is not to have
rules
...
Myths are cyclical
and repetitive, while the novel appears excitingly unpredictable
...
But it is an extraordinarily
capacious one even so
...
Several authors have been proposed as plausible candidates
for the first novelist, among them Miguel de Cervantes and Daniel Defoe;
but the game of identifying origins is always a dangerous one
...
The Russian cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin
traces the novel back to imperial Rome and ancient Hellenistic romance,
while Margaret Anne Doody in The True Story of the Novel likewise locates its
birthplace in the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean
...
(This may also help to explain why so
many premature obituary notices of the novel have been issued
...
) Even so, something like the novel can indeed be found in
ancient times
...

Most commentators agree that the novel has its roots in the literary form
we know as romance
...

Novels are romances – but romances which have to negotiate the prosaic
world of modern civilization
...
Sex and property, one might claim, are the themes
of the modern novel from start to finish
...
In fact, nothing less than the magical
2

Eagleton_C01

2

18/5/04, 2:42 PM

What is a Novel?
WHAT IS A NOVEL?

devices of romance will do if, like the Victorian novelist, you are going to
conjure a happy ending from the refractory problems of the modern world
...
If the novel is a romance, however, it is a disenchanted one, which
has nothing to learn about baffled desires and recalcitrant realities
...
It portrays a secular, empirical world rather than a mythical or
metaphysical one
...
It
is wary of the abstract and eternal, and believes in what it can touch, taste
and handle
...
The novel presents us with a changing,
concrete, open-ended history rather than a closed symbolic universe
...
In the modern era, fewer and fewer things
are immutable, and every phenomenon, including the self, seems historical
to its roots
...

All this is very different from romance, as Cervantes’ Don Quixote makes
clear
...
It is thus a
peculiarly narcissistic piece of writing, a fact which becomes comically obvious when Quixote and Sancho Panza run across characters who have actually read about them
...
Cervantes was not the first author to
challenge romance in this way: the picaresque novel, with its downbeat,
streetwise anti-heroism, had done that, at least implicitly, before he came
to write
...

If there is one place where romantic idealism and disenchanted realism
meet, it is war
...
But Cervantes’ novel runs war a close
second
...
He lives, as
they say, in a book, and talks like one too; but since he is a character in a
book, this fantasy is also reality
...
It sends up
rhetoric and fantasy from a hard-headed realist standpoint
...
Cervantes backs
the world against the book, but he does so in a book
...

The kind of novel which speaks up for ‘life’ against ‘literature’ has all the
bad faith of a count who speaks with a Cockney accent
...
But a naked and neat style is
just as much a style as any other
...
‘Nutter’ is no
closer to the real world than ‘neophyte’
...
The relationship between language and reality
is not a spatial one
...
Anyway, one writer’s neat
and naked may be another’s ornamental
...
They may be more useful, but the difference between
them is not one of degrees of reality
...
Reading fiction
can drive you mad
...
The problem arises from confusing it
with reality, as Quixote does
...
In that sense, irony is what saves us
...
He is not trying to fool us
...
They
do not lie in the same sense that the advertising slogan ‘Refreshes the parts
that other beers can’t reach’ is not a lie, even though it is not true either
...
Indeed, there is plenty of romance in Don Quixote itself
...
It is really a kind
of dangerous narcissism, in which (as Quixote comments at one point) you
can believe that a woman is chaste and beautiful just because you want to
...
Romantic idealism
sounds edifying enough, but it is really a form of egoism in which the world
becomes clay in your hands for you to mould as you wish
...
It refuses to acknowledge what realism
insists upon most: the recalcitrance of reality to our desires, the sheer stubborn
4

Eagleton_C01

4

18/5/04, 2:42 PM

What is a Novel?
WHAT IS A NOVEL?

inertia with which it baffles our designs upon it
...
It is a sort of moral astigmatism
...

There is something admirable about idealism – Quixote’s own ideals include protecting the poor and dispossessed – but also something absurd
...
Those who cannot see the world
aright are likely to wreak grotesque damage upon it
...
In Quixote’s case, fantasy
is very definitely connected to social privilege
...
Power is fantastic to the core
...
Marvels and the market are no stranger
to each other
...

Realism, it would appear, is out of favour because the ordinary reader
delights in the exotic and extravagant
...
Quixote’s chivalric illusions are a kind
of upper-class version of popular superstition
...
They have quite enough
ordinary life in their working hours without wanting to contemplate it in
their leisure time as well
...
Cervantes’ priest recognizes that the labouring masses need
circuses as well as bread, entertainment as much as work: they need to see
plays, he believes, but the plays should be censored to strip them of their
worst extravagances
...
Cervantes thus wins himself serious
literary status by insisting on the verisimilitude of his writing – on ‘probability and imitation’, as the canon puts it – while at the same time craftily
serving up crowd-pulling fantasies by creating a hero who acts them out
...
The novel from
Defoe to Woolf is a product of modernity, and modernity is the period in
which we cannot agree even on fundamentals
...
It is the
5

Eagleton_C01

5

18/5/04, 2:42 PM

What is a Novel?
WHAT IS A NOVEL?

most hybrid of literary forms, a space in which different voices, idioms and
belief-systems continually collide
...
The realist novel quite often throws its weight
behind a particular way of seeing the world, but it is ‘relativizing’ in its
very form
...
In fact, this is one
reason why the form was originally greeted with such suspicion
...

For Mikhail Bakhtin, the novel tends to emerge and disappear again, like
a river threading its way through a limestone landscape
...
2 It is when the verbal and ideological centre can no longer
hold, as in Hellenistic Greece, imperial Rome or the waning of the medieval
Church, that Bakhtin finds the novel emerging
...
In his
view, then, the novel is inherently anti-normative
...
No doubt this makes it sound
too inherently subversive
...
In any case, not all diversity
is radical, or all authority oppressive
...
It is parasitic on the scraps and leavings of ‘higher’
cultural life-forms; and this means that it has only a negative identity
...

Hegel saw the novel as the epic of a prosaic modern world
...
The novel resembles the classical epic in its consuming
interest in narrative, dramatic action and the material world
...
For
the novel is above all a contemporary form, as its very name suggests
...
When it
turns to the past, it is often to treat it as the prehistory of the present
...
The novel
is the mythology of a civilization fascinated by its own everyday existence
...
It reflects them
without morbid nostalgia or delusory hope
...
This refusal of both nostalgia and utopia means that the
realist novel, politically speaking, is for the most part neither reactionary nor
revolutionary
...
It is committed to
the present, but to a present which is always in the process of change
...

If the novel is a distinctively modern form, whatever its ancient pedigree,
it is partly because it refuses to be bound by the past
...

Modernity is the only epoch which actually defines itself, vacuously enough,
by its up-to-dateness
...
If this is a liberating experience, it can
also be a traumatic one
...

It can no longer rely on the paradigms offered by custom, mythology,
Nature, antiquity, religion or community
...
Whereas the epic bears the signature of no one author,
the novel bears the fingerprints of an individual writer, known as style
...
The more values there are, the
more of a problem value itself becomes
...
But this means that, lacking authority outside itself, it
must find it in itself
...
Authority now means not conforming yourself to
an origin, but becoming the origin yourself
...

But it also means that the novel’s authority is ungrounded in anything outside itself, which is what renders it precarious
...
It, too, is ‘original’, in the sense that
modern men and women are supposed to be the authors of their own
existence
...
Modern
subjects, like the heroes of modern novels, make themselves up as they go
along
...
It is, however, a fragile, negative kind of freedom, which lacks any warranty beyond itself
...
Absolute value has evaporated from the world in the
7

Eagleton_C01

7

18/5/04, 2:42 PM

What is a Novel?
WHAT IS A NOVEL?

modern age, which is what makes for unlimited freedom
...
If everything is permitted, it is only because
nothing is intrinsically more valuable than anything else
...
But there is another key distinction between them
...
It is the great popular genre, the one mainstream literary mode
which speaks the language of the people
...
It is not the first literary form in which
the common people stage an appearance
...
Our contemporary version of this is no doubt the
soap opera, which we enjoy not so much for the occasional dramatic turn
of plot but because we find the familiar and everyday a strange source of
fascination in itself
...

The staggering popularity of Reality TV programmes which consist simply
in someone pottering mindlessly around his kitchen for hours on end suggests one interesting truth: that many of us find the pleasures of the routine
and repetitive even more seductive than we do the stimulus of adventure
...
3 For Auerbach,
realism is the literary form which finds the workaday life of men and women
supremely valuable in itself
...
The novel for Auerbach is an incipiently democratic kind of art,
hostile to what he sees as the static, hierarchical, dehistoricized, socially
exclusive art of classical antiquity
...
Authors in Mimesis score high marks for being vulgar,
vigorous, earthy, dynamic, demotic, grotesque and historically minded, and
are rapped smartly over the knuckles for being stylized, elitist, idealized,
stereotyped and non-developmental
...
Contrast this with a text like the
New Testament, which grants a humble fisherman like Peter potentially
tragic status
...
4 As Auerbach argues, it is the Christian gospel, with
its image of God as incarnate in the poor and destitute, its carnivalesque
reversals of high and low, which provides the source of realism’s elevation
of the commonplace
...

Jesus is a kind of sick joke of a Messiah, a parody of regal pomp as he rides
a donkey towards his squalid death as a political criminal
...
It is one of the momentous events of human history,
which we now take casually for granted
...
Auerbach, a Jewish
refugee from Hitler, was writing about the novel while in exile in Istanbul
at the same time as Bakhtin was writing about it as a dissident in Stalinist
Russia; and both men saw in it a populist strike against autocratic power
...

There are problems with these claims
...
Not all realism is novelistic, as Auerbach is
aware, and not all novels are realist
...
There is not much earth beneath the fingernails of Mr Knightley
or Mrs Dalloway
...

A work of art is not radical simply because it portrays the experience of
ordinary people
...
But this assumes that
people are insensitive to social deprivation only because they are unaware
of it, which is far too charitable a view of them
...
As Bertolt
Brecht remarked, putting a factory on stage will tell you nothing about
capitalism
...

Suppose some future civilization were to discover a copy of Samuel Beckett’s
play Endgame, in which two elderly characters spend their time sitting in
dustbins
...
They would need to know, for example,
whether stashing old people away in dustbins was standard geriatric practice
in mid-twentieth-century Europe
...
False
teeth can be realistic, but not the Foreign Office
...
Realist art is as much an
artifice as any other kind of art
...
Such details can be perfectly gratuitous from the viewpoint of plot: they are there simply to signal
‘This is realism’
...
In
this sense, realism is calculated contingency
...

It is as though its representations have become so transparent that we stare
straight through them to reality itself
...
But
then, ironically, it would no longer be a representation at all
...

For some commentators, realism in art is actually more realistic than
reality itself, because it can show how the world typically is, shorn of its
blunders and contingencies
...
Jane Austen
or Charles Dickens would never have tolerated such a botched conclusion
...

It is dangerous, then, to talk about realism as representing ‘life as it really
is’, or ‘the experience of the common people’
...
Realism is a matter of representation; and you
cannot compare representations with ‘reality’ to check how realistic they
are, since what we mean by ‘reality’ itself involves questions of representation
...
But perhaps also because of a fascination with mirroring and
doubling which lurks deep in the human psyche, and which lies at the roots
of magic
...
What was intended as an alternative
to magic and mystery may itself be a prime example of them
...
It is also the yardstick of so many critical judgements
...
It is not clear where this leaves
Sophocles’s Teiresias, the Macbeth witches, Milton’s God, Swift’s Gulliver,
Dickens’s Fagin or Beckett’s Pozzo
...
In his classic study
The Rise of the Novel,5 Ian Watt regards all of these as reasons why the
modern English novel emerged in the eighteenth century
...
As far as the
ceremonial is concerned, it is also worth noting that the novel is not an
‘occasional’ form, like those masques, odes or elegies written – perhaps for
an aristocratic patron – for special occasions
...

For many eighteenth-century commentators, the answer to the question
‘What is a novel?’ would be: ‘A trashy piece of fiction fit only for servants
and females’
...
For these early observers, the novel was less like the The
Times than the News of the World
...
The novel belonged to a new world of
speed, ephemerality and disposability, playing something like the role of
e-mail to handwritten correspondence
...

Eighteenth-century gentlemen did not by and large rate novelty very
highly, believing as they did that the few truths necessary to a well-ordered
human life had long since been apparent
...
Whatever was valid was also venerable
...
To pretend that your narrative
was a real-life one – that you had stumbled across it in a pile of mouldy
letters or manuscripts – was a way of indicating that it was not romantic
garbage
...

In the end, the English novel would wreak its vengeance on those who
dismissed it as fit only for females by producing some magnificent portrayals
of women, from Clarissa Harlowe and Emma Woodhouse to Molly Bloom
and Mrs Ramsay
...
As a form, it would grow in importance as poetry became increasingly privatized
...
By the mid-nineteenth century,
the word ‘poetry’ has become more or less synonymous with the interior,
the personal, the spiritual or psychological, in ways which would no doubt
have come as a mighty surprise to Dante, Milton and Pope
...
The novel takes
care of the outer world, while poetry copes with the inner one
...
The very distance between the two modes reflects a
growing alienation between the public and the private
...
There is no obvious
place for the lyric in a world of insurance companies and mass-produced
meat pies
...
There is, however, an equal problem with the novel’s very closeness to social existence
...
Otherwise it is idle, even sinful, fantasy
...
There is a related problem
here
...
But the more effectively you do this, the less changeable
12

Eagleton_C01

12

18/5/04, 2:42 PM

What is a Novel?
WHAT IS A NOVEL?

the world may come to seem
...

Richardson knew that in reading the realist novel, we believed and disbelieved in its discourse at one and the same time
...
Richardson speaks in his private
correspondence of ‘that kind of historical faith, which fiction itself is generally read (with), even tho’ we know it to be fiction’
...
In this way, realism can be preserved, but it can also
serve a broader, deeper function
...

This captures the realist quandary exactly
...
But if readers
genuinely take it to be real, this in turn might diminish its exemplary force
...

It is not just moralistically minded authors like Richardson who confront
this dilemma
...
This is
why the sign ‘No Exit’ is not a work of fiction, though you could turn it into
one easily enough by reading it, say, as a comment on the solitary confinement of the self
...
So ‘fiction’ does not exactly mean ‘not true’
...
This may not be the snappiest
of definitions, but it makes an important point all the same
...
It is as though such language is signalling by its very self-consciousness: ‘Don’t take this literally’
...
It also helps to explain how fiction may be a potent source of ideology, since one function of ideology is to present a specific situation as though
it were a universal truth
...

13

Eagleton_C01

13

18/5/04, 2:42 PM

What is a Novel?
WHAT IS A NOVEL?

Realism and the exemplary would thus seem hard to reconcile
...
Yet this
character does not seem to have any deeper symbolic dimension
...
Yet if Oliver is a
signifier of heartlessness and oppression, then this deepens his significance
only at the risk of thinning out his particularity
...
Exemplariness without realism is
empty, whereas realism without exemplariness is blind
...

If you set out to paint a portrait of, say, the workings of the legal system,
then fiction is probably the most effective way of doing so, since it allows
you to edit, select, transpose and rearrange, in a way which most fully
highlights the typical features of the institution
...
It is in this sense that fiction
is sometimes claimed to be more real than reality
...
You
may find yourself inventing situations in which those aspects are most
illuminated
...
R
...
The
trouble is that these two requirements are not easily compatible with each
other
...
The novel could then be ‘reverently open’ to it
without going baggy
...

The history of the novel, however, is bedevilled by the problem of being
both at the same time
...
In this sense, the novel is an ironic, self-undoing
genre
...
Its reflection of a contingent,
14

Eagleton_C01

14

18/5/04, 2:42 PM

What is a Novel?
WHAT IS A NOVEL?

haphazard world continually threatens to undercut its coherence as a piece
of fiction
...
Authors like Defoe and Richardson tackle the problem by sacrificing form to representation
...
The gap between form and content
is closed by effectively ditching the former
...
A Richardson character who was giving birth would most certainly have a pen and notebook
in her hand
...

Richardson’s novels are by no means as loose and baggy as Defoe’s, but they
must be scrupulous about not falsifying lived experience by foisting too
obtrusive an artistic shape upon it
...
He is also suspicious of any set of forms or conventions
which might interpose themselves between him and his inner life
...

Henry Fielding takes the opposite way out, cheerfully acknowledging
the rhetorical artifice of his novels, and drawing ironic attention to the gap
between form and content rather than seeking to conceal it
...
He is aware, for example, that while the requirements of formal design requires that his villains meet a sticky end and his
heroes are granted happiness, this form is comically at odds with the actual
state of the world
...
Human viciousness,
in other words, is one reason why this gap between form and content cannot be resolved
...
It is not to be mistaken for
everyday existence, which is why the novel is an ironic form
...
In the actual world,
Fanny, Joseph and Parson Adams would probably have ended up in a ditch
with their throats slit
...

15

Eagleton_C01

15

18/5/04, 2:42 PM

What is a Novel?
WHAT IS A NOVEL?

The novel is a utopian image – not in what it represents, which can be
gruesome enough, but in the very act of representation – an act which at its
most effective shapes the world into meaning with no detriment to its reality
...
7
Laurence Sterne spots the impossibility of reconciling form and realism,
and plucks from the discrepancy one of the greatest anti-novels of all time,
Tristram Shandy
...
His
story thus falls apart at the seams, to make the point that realism is a selfdeconstructing enterprise
...
literature is categorically realist, in that it never has anything but the real as its object of desire; and
I shall say now, without contradicting myself
...
8

If the novel is the modern epic, it is, in Georg Lukács’s famous phrase, ‘the
epic of a world abandoned by God’
...

Meaning is no longer written into empirical experience
...
As soon as such a man is capable of
recounting events in chronological order, Musil goes on, he feels content
even if a moment ago he was writhing in agony
...
The
only problem is that the modern world ‘has now become non-narrative’
...
‘Character’ gathers into unity a varied range of events or
experiences
...
Another way is through the act of narrating itself,
which involves pattern and continuity but also change and difference
...
Narrative orders the world into a shape
which seems to emerge spontaneously from it
...

Reality will accommodate a whole number of tales about itself, and will not
16

Eagleton_C01

16

18/5/04, 2:42 PM

What is a Novel?
WHAT IS A NOVEL?

pipe up itself to sort the true from the false
...
For many
modern artists, there is no longer one big narrative embedded in the world
itself, which we simply need the skill to decipher
...
The fact that so
many novels centre on a search, quest or voyage suggests that meaning is
no longer given in advance
...
Motion
is now pretty much for its own sake
...
History writing does the same at a more collective
level
...
Time is history or narrative struck
empty of significance, as one event follows on the heels of another with no
real connection between them
...

The novel is a sign of our freedom
...
Politically speaking, this is known as democracy
...
It is we who give form and meaning to reality, and
the novel is a model of this creative act
...
For some commentators, in
fact, this is where the novel is most truly realistic
...
The novel on this view
is most deeply realistic not because we can almost hear the sausages sizzling
in Fagin’s den, but because it reveals the truth that all objectivity is at root
an interpretation
...
If the only world we know is one
which we have created ourselves, does not all knowledge become a pointless tautology? Aren’t we simply knowing ourselves, rather than a reality
independent of ourselves? Don’t we only get back what we put in? Anyway,
if form is what we impose, how can it have authority? The fact that I help to
bring the world into existence makes it more precious; but it is also what
threatens to undermine its objective value
...

If value and meaning reside deep inside individuals, then there is a sense
in which these things are not really ‘in’ the world at all
...
It also reduces reality to a realm of objects which
17

Eagleton_C01

17

18/5/04, 2:42 PM

What is a Novel?
WHAT IS A NOVEL?

have been drained of meaning
...
And the less they can do this, the more
they begin to disintegrate from the inside
...
What we are left with is a human
being who is valuable but unreal, in a world which is solid but valueless
...
The world is thus divided down
the middle between fact and value, public and private, object and meaning
...

How can you tell a story in such a situation? It seems less and less possible
to pluck a narrative from a world of lifeless, disconnected objects
...
But this life has been driven in
upon itself, beating a retreat from a soulless world; and it has become so
subtle and densely textured in the process that it resists anything as
straitjacketing and steamrollering as narrative
...
So the external world is becoming too poor for narrative, and the internal one too rich
...
Instead, it is a place
where past, present and future interlock, with no clear frontiers between
them
...
The interior monologues of Leopold
and Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysess are a case in point
...

For Lukács, then, the novel is the product of an alienated world
...
Alienation is the condition in which men
and women fail to recognize the objective world as their own subjective
creation
...
The act of writing crosses the border between
subjective and objective
...
In this sense, its very existence can be seen as an
imaginary solution to the social problems which it poses
...
The great works of nineteenth-century realism, from Pride and Prejudice
to Middlemarch, are still able to relate fact and value, objective and subjective, inner and outer, individual and society, however much these relations
may be under strain
...
It is this history which Lukács’s later work on literary realism is concerned to investigate
...

Then, indeed, the early Lukács’s description of the novel form becomes
more and more apt
...
Instead, as we shall see in the
case of authors like Henry James and Joseph Conrad, those conflicts are now
beginning to infiltrate the very form of the novel itself
...
‘Organic form’ is now so unattainable, or so
flagrantly arbitrary, that it is either thrown to the winds or, as with a work
like James Joyce’s Ulysses, grotesquely parodied
...
What the modernist novel tends
to give us instead is a kind of empty signifier of a totality which is no longer
possible: the silver of Conrad’s Nostromo, Stevie’s scribbled circles in The
Secret Agent, E
...
Forster’s Marabar caves, Virginia Woolf ’s lighthouse
...
In the domain of culture, it has something like the importance of steam-power or electricity in the material realm, or of democracy in
the political sphere
...
In doing so, art finally returned the world
to the common people who had created it through their labour, and who
could now contemplate their own faces in it for the first time
...
As such, it was especially available to groups like women, who had been cheated of such an education and
shut out from such expertise
...

Women, stereotypically viewed as custodians of the feelings or technicians
of the heart, were thus obvious candidates for producing it
...
Like all social groups under the
unlovely sway of authority, women needed to be adept in finely detailed
observation, vigilant in their reading of a potentially hostile world
...
All this lent itself to the writing of fiction, even if the
same set of talents lends itself to being a successful tyrant
...

If it served middle-class society so superbly, it was not in the first place
because it championed the cause of mill-owners or fashioned demeaning
stereotypes of striking workers
...
And this version of reality involved an enormous amount
of editing and exclusiveness
...
Part of the novel’s appeal was that it seemed able
to accommodate every jargon, argot and idiom, yet spoke no specialist
language of its own
...
And this represented a
genuine democratic advance
...

In some sectors of the novel, it also involved a certain hard-nosed, macho
dismissal of ‘literariness’ – one still much in evidence in the kind of US
creative writing courses which nurture sub-Hemingwayesque sentences like
‘And he was still howling and blubbering and writhing on the slimy unforgiving wreck of the car hood and his teeth were all smeary with his own
blood and I took a slug of the brandy and it felt like the sirocco blasting hot
and dry and gritty right down into my heaving guts’
...
Realism
20

Eagleton_C01

20

18/5/04, 2:42 PM

What is a Novel?
WHAT IS A NOVEL?

has been responsible for a massive impoverishment of language as much as
for an enrichment of it, as the average novel published nowadays in the USA
or UK bears dismally uneloquent witness
...

The tradition recorded in this book is rather different
...
As reality grows more complex and fragmented, the means of representing it become more problematic as well; and
this forces language and narrative into a more elaborate self-consciousness
...
Even so, the finest English
novels manage to combine a convincing representation of the world with a
verbal virtuosity which is neither too sparse nor too self-regarding
...
How is this to
be both accurate and artistically accomplished? How am I to avoid sacrificing truth to form, without for a moment forgetting that this is indeed a
novel, and that everything that happens in a novel, however raw or pungent, harrowing or unspeakably pitiful, happens sheerly and exclusively in
terms of language? We have seen that ‘form’ and ‘content’, design and
representation, are hard to reconcile in narrative as a whole
...
And if this is so,
then style provides a kind of compensation at the micro level for the larger
problems which the novel finds itself confronting – problems which grow
more severe the further we move into the modern era
...


21

Eagleton_C01

21

18/5/04, 2:42 PM



---