You already know my question. I’m wondering because this morning
I read Almond’s essay “Once Upon a Time, There Was a Person
Who Said, ‘Once Upon a Time’” (cute title), which apeared in last
Sunday’s New
York Times magazine. Almond’s not-very-clearly expressed
thesis is that the art of narration, as exemplified by “Zola or
Dickens or Tolstoy” (apparently he isn’t sure in what order these
writers were born), is dying.
Here, in four easy-to-follow steps à
la analytic philosophy, is Almond’s argument:
1) Narrators in realist fiction do certain things: e.g.,
“portray… how individual fates collide with
history,” “enlarge our moral imagination,” “offer a sweeping
depiction of the world that helps us clarify our role in it.”
2) Narrators in the tradition of high modernism don’t do any of
these things.
3) Most films and television shows don’t even have a
narrator.
4) Therefore, President Obama cannot “tell a story to the
American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and
optimism.”
I’m with you if you think that there are some
(actually a lot of) missing steps here. Three
premises (the second of which is exceedingly dubious) and one
conclusion that doesn’t really follow from anything preceding it:
not exactly air-tight.
Anyway, Almond’s non sequitur isn’t what really burned me.
(Frankly I expect nothing else from the Times; I
would be put out, in fact, if I encountered something not unlike
cogent logic in its pages.) No, it was this banal assertion about
James Joyce that really got the eyes glistening and the heart going
pitpat: “Writers like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein turned their
gaze inward, toward the intricacies of consciousness.”
This is the sort of thing that middlebrows say about Joyce all
the time, in every used book store cum café in Blue State
America. “Last summer I finally made it
through Ulysses. A fascinating work of
fiction.* Stream-of-conciousness, you know.” As if
“stream-of-consciousness”—itself simply a natural (though more
than occasionally tiresome) development of the tendency of earlier
novelists to explore, as Almond himself puts it, “the interior
lives of characters”—were all that Joyce was up to in his second
published novel.
One of the book’s most remarkable “episodes” (and,
incidentally, Joyce’s favorite), Ithaca, is
actually the antithesis of stream-of-consciousness: a cold,
detached catechism (“What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of
water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?”) that has
nothing whatever to do with “consciousness.” Virginia
Woolf offers something similar in the “Time Passes” interlude
from To the Lighthouse. The first few paragraphs
of Bleak House also anticipate Joyce’s
extra-human hyper-naturalism.
So again I ask: has Steve Almond ever
read Ulysses, or is he just opening the Eng.
Lit. cliché spout?
Oh, and one more thing: no one reads Gertrude Stein.
*For some reason, it’s always “fiction,” genus, rather
than “novel,” species, with these types. Don’t know
why.
