The Grassy-Green Sea
Thorne, Christian
Early Modern Culture, No. 5 (2006)
Abstract
I would like to consider just a single question here, but it is a big one. Bigness, in fact, is its subject and mode. Is it possible to represent the complexity of social life under global capitalism? It has often been argued that the classic realist novel, as practiced, say, by Balzac, offered something like a spontaneous lesson in social history. On the face of it, the realist novel often had the form of biography — it seemed to tell the story of a single life, of David Copperfield or Felix Holt — but its secret achievement was to situate that one life within the changing history of social relationships. Such novels, in other words, demonstrated that individual lives could not be understood without also understanding the complex social networks of which they were a part. It is noteworthy, then, that the realist novel, as a genre, only emerged in western Europe under conditions of unprecedented social complexity, organized around the new phenomena of finance, global trade, the bureaucratic state, the public sphere, the advanced division of labor. The realist novel offered its readers one way of imagining their collective condition amidst such complexity, and the faltering of realism over the twentieth century — its waning in favor of non-realist narrative forms — must be understood as the faltering of that project. It has meant that contemporary narrative can no longer represent the social world in this one crucially important way. Under conditions of political and economic globalization, which entangle individuals in social networks of ever more extended intricacy, established narrative techniques break down or come to seem patently false.
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