The secret of making long stories short Tuesday, Jun 19 2007
General and Related Reading 12:23 am
One of the books I’m reading is a book by Beongcheon Yu that focuses on Natsume Soseki’s academic and fictional works. Natsume was an early 20th century Japanese intellectual and his approach to Western literature was consciously from a Japanese outlook and more specifically based in his particular ideas about what principles govern literature. I thought that his take on Defoe’s fiction could be applied to Don Quixote.
At a point in his lecture “Eighteenth-Century English Literature” he addresses a not uncommon opinion that Defoe’s novels are way too long and asserts that the fault lies in the texts and not the readers. Yu summarises his point.
What…is the secret of making long stories appear short? It is what we call interest, composed of three things in fiction: character, incident, and scene. And the closer the second draws to the first, the more intense the degree of necessity; and the closer the second swings to the third, the more importance is given to chance. Most novels, being complex, contain all three in varying amounts. But all successful novels must achieve unity. And this unity of the three kinds of “interest” can be achieved through acceleration, development, and change. Out of this unity emerges the theme of a work.
My reaction to DQ fluctuates regularly, as my blog readers know. I present this question to the group to get a gauge of how y’all feel so far: is DQ working for you as a successful unit? Do you even agree with Natsume’s criticism, as conveyed by Beongcheon Yu?
Edit: Dorothy commented on my blog that really long, fairly repetitive books were a dime a dozen (my words) in 18th C Western literature which makes everything clearer now regarding Natsume’s particular choice of novelist for explicating his point.
June 19, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Oh I agree: I don’t think DQ offers much in the way of unity, but that’s not really the thing to ask of it. There are two interpolated novels and countless very intentional tangents, not to mention the fact that the text was written in two parts which are separated by ten years, so the novel itself is intertextual. Also, the second part was written in response to a “fake” version of the Don Quixote story written by another writer. The complexity of the novel’s storylines and structure overtakes any sort of “unity” that comes from “character, incident, and scene” to the point that the complex intertextuality becomes the dominating theme of the work. It’s a lovely example of heteroglossia, to apply a literary word.
June 19, 2007 at 2:45 pm
You know, I’m kind of allergic to theories of the novel like this one that define what makes a novel “work.” Perhaps it’s all the reading I’ve done in early novels before the genre really got defined and labeled and analyzed. I don’t think DQ is unified in the way Natsume is talking about — I’m seeing more repetition than development and change — but I’m guessing Natsume’s terms would work a lot better for novels that came along later, after people had theorized about novel aesthetics for a while. One of the things I like about the early novel is what complete messes they often are — but fascinating messes, I think.
June 19, 2007 at 6:12 pm
Dorothy I probably should have dated his criticism since, in part, Western ideas of what makes a novel “a novel” is what he’s referring to. This was done around early 20th C about 1905-7.
Yes, I don’t really ascribe to any single principle of What Makes Novel Works, and I found it interesting that even though Natsume wrote that it’s impossible to define or say what literature ought to be, at certain points in the lecture, as conveyed second hand, he comes quite close to doing so.
Maybe Natsume realised that later on, because he’s quoted as saying years after the lectures that it was more or less rubbish. Heh.
Ted oh I knew I should have borrowed that Bakhtin book. Of all the later theorists that I’ve come across he’s the only that got me excited.
To your point on the intertextuality I wonder if that’s what hinders my enjoyment at some points? If I were more familiar with the specific works Cervantes refers to constantly I’d be more entranced by what he was doing.
I’m really glad I joined this reading group. It’s really helping me out with reading DQ.
June 19, 2007 at 6:21 pm
I like what Bakhtin has to say about the novel — his is a theory that doesn’t seem to close down what the novel can do, but celebrates its openness and variety.
June 20, 2007 at 9:29 pm
I was just thinking how bogged down I am feeling with DQ (I’m hovering somewhere around the 300-page mark). This discussion gives me a little insight.
I really enjoy the novel, I love the interpolation of stories, the play on truth and credibility, the mirror it holds up to storytelling. BUT, I am feeling a struggle to keep on. Perhaps that has more to do with me as a reader, but the post above makes me think that others are having the same issues.
I appreciate anyone who tackles the issue of what makes novels work, and I have to give Natsume his due. There is no one answer, of course, but the viewpoint is thought-provoking.
June 21, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Whoops lost track of this thread.
imani, I wouldn’t worry too much about the intertextuality. Cervantes tells us, more or less, who he’s making fun of, and it’s especially clear in the second part of the novel. (Sorry about the spoiler — I’ve been trying to be careful but in my excitement I slipped — hope I was sufficiently indeterminate). I think you know enough vague generalizations about romance novels and chivalry stories to get the main gist of it. You’re not going to make all the connections, but you never can with any book. If you wanted to study the text as a scholar, you’d have to know all or most of the allusions, but it shouldn’t overly detract from your enjoyment of the book unless you let it.
I know it’s a slough sometimes. Keep at it. I’m sure it can’t be any worse than Paradise Lost.
June 21, 2007 at 9:14 pm
“Any worse”? Paradise Lost is amazing, bite your tongue. Satan and Death almost went into fisticuffs and Sin just told the story of how she and he came into existence. DQ just has the titled character slashing at wine skins. :p
June 22, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Yes, and Paradise Lost has allegory, which is the bane of my reading existence.
What I meant was that it can’t be any harder to get through. To each her own