Arthurian Romance: A Short Introduction (Blackwell Introductions to Literature)

Literary Non-Fiction

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Finally, we see how language evolves.

2. The Historical Arthur

We see linguistic creativity in action as the different voices lend to each other their various energies, or draw strength and conviction as they speak against one another. Heteroglossia shows us language breaking up.

The Modern Novel: A Short Introduction (Blackwell Introductions to Literature)

What we might have presumed to be a single thing — the language shared by people of the same nation and culture — emerges as something plural, and discordantly so. We get variation where there had been unity. And when this variation gets most extreme, we get a texture, once again, of fragmentation.

In this case, however, the fragments can be pieces of a richly progressive social plurality. Narration, too, no longer proceeds in consistent patterns. Together, these fragmentations create the disjointed, wholly random and undone worlds of the modern novel. Together, they give us perhaps the clearest sense of just how the modern novel reformed itself to match the deformations of modernity. For even if events do happen in linear time, we tend not to experience them that way. Moreover, they found the potential for such temporal chaos so intriguing that they often made time itself the subject of their books.

Often, they not only experiment with the presentation of time, but make it a focus for characteristically fundamental questions: what is time? How does it structure our lives?

Arthurian Romance: A Short Introduction - Derek Pearsall - Google книги

And how has modernity transformed it? These were pressing questions for everyone, in these years, because time itself had demanded new attention.

In the s, the very measurement of time changed: it became standardized. To make trains run better, and to make factories more productive, clocks around the world were synchronized. First, people came to see time as a force for standardization — and to resent it.

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A sense of freedom required some resistance to standard time, to mechanized linearity. People came to feel that they had within themselves a private time that was different from public time.

Public time was lived by the clock; private time was idiosyncratic, and free. I went to the dresser and took up the watch, with the face still down. I tapped the crystal on the corner of the dresser and caught the fragments of glass in my hand and put them into the ashtray and twisted the hands off and put them in the tray. The watch ticked on. I turned the face up, the blank dial with little wheels clicking and clicking behind it, not knowing any better. When Quentin smashes clock-time, Faulkner announces a very typical modern intention: to defy chronology, to break free of linearity, to let life fracture more freely into all of its natural forms.

The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time.

This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation. As public time sped up, it seemed to demand, from writers, better ways to reproduce the rushing dynamicism that, for better or for worse, now determined the feel of ordinary life.

When we remember the past, we do so incompletely, vaguely, and often in error — if we remember it at all. Writers of an earlier day might have presumed that the past was easily available to memory — that a writer need only think back in order to recall and to recreate the past. But Proust made it clear that the past is far more elusive, and that memory requires a far stranger process, one in which involuntary recall when, for example, a smell or sound suddenly brings back a past moment very vividly and hard work involving, for example, the concentrated effort of writing and revising only sometimes come together accurately and effectively to bring the past back to us.

It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it all: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of the intellect. In the modern novel, any such recollection happens fallibly, and the narrative result is confused and chaotic. The Good Soldier is the best example of this confusion. He has to keep backtracking, covering old ground, adding things forgotten and changing things misremembered. I cannot help it. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognises that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places.

Arthurian Romance: A Short Introduction

I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. And the present was no less mysterious. Just as it now seemed hard to recapture the past, it was hard accurately to convey a sense of the way time acts and feels as it passes in the present. How, then, to give readers the feel of immediate life, of the present moment, of time going by? Evoking presence could mean vivid descriptions, or it could mean trying to capture the shape of a moment.

It could mean giving a feel for the way things change, or trying to look behind change for what makes some moments eternal. Intense moments were perhaps the main preoccupation here, and perhaps the signature of the modern approach to time is the moment rendered at once ordinary and revelatory, at once a passing thing and a route to transcendence. There are four basic narrative speeds: scene, summary, pause, and ellipsis.

Scene is perhaps the norm. Summary happens when the narrator sums up a lot of time in a relatively shorter amount of narration. If you think about these four speeds for a moment, you can fairly easily imagine how a deliberately conventional story might use them.

Sometimes, scene and ellipsis disappear altogether. Woolf, for example, tends to try for a more seamless kind of writing, in which any breaks only take you to another place, rather than another time, and you feel that time never stops moving. In these cases a very short amount of time passes, but the length of the telling is long. Their scenes are scenes of people remembering, or thinking in summary fashion about their lives. Since they are summing up, we get summary, but since we see them remembering, summary is scene.

We get both at once. Modern writers experimented with the representation of time in these various ways also in order to defy the temporality of modernity. Modernity seemed more and more to mechanize life. That was the problem with linearity, with public time: it seemed to restrict human possibilities, and subordinate them to the times of factories and calendars. The modernists believed that they could help restore a sense of free human possibility.

When it comes to time, modern novels have a revolutionary purpose, for they aim to smash the clocks of the modern world, and break their hold on temporal freedom. How did they do so? Modern city life deeply changed the very nature of the novel. It meant a whole new set of interpersonal relationships. It meant new modes of contact: people were thrown together in new ways, without the kind of knowledge of each other they might have had in other, older places. Metropolitan perception had to be different.

1. General

It saw things that were suddenly very desirable — and then suddenly very threatening. It had to deal in spaces that seemed not at all made for human life, and yet adapt to them. But it also had to work against the pattern of metropolitan life, because these stimuli were not just intensifying, but deadening. What were others? They were mainly temporal forms — unfolding in time, in particular spaces along the way. Any adequate crosssection of city life had to take in a lot of people and a lot of places at the same time. It meant stopping time, effectively, and spreading out description all over an urban space, letting the connections from one thing to the next be juxtapositions in space rather than time.

One thing would lead to the next not in temporal sequence but in spatial proximity. A good example comes in the very middle of Ulysses. The chapter begins by following a leader of the church around town, giving us access to what thoughts he has in response to the sight of the people he serves.

When these thoughts are troubled by the sight of a promiscuous young couple, our attention shifts to them, and then onward to other Dubliners, until the chapter has wandered about among a vast cross-section of the city. They do not follow each other in the way events in a story typically proceed. They are proximate in space, and by moving through proximities from one to the next, Ulysses takes an entirely new approach to the presentation of space.

Fiction now also made space mutable. Rather than stress any single landscape, Woolf chooses to show how space is relative.

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