Shaun de Waal
THE NOVEL: LANGUAGE AND NARRATIVE FROM CERVANTES TO CALVINO by Andre Brink (UCT Press)
Anthony Burgess warns us against anyone who inserts an apostrophe into the title of Finnegans Wake, so it is a bit worrying that this apparent lacuna gets filled no fewer than three times on a single page of Andr Brink’s new book of literary criticism. Still, he does call James Joyce’s final magnum opus “perhaps the single greatest narrative monument of the 20th century”.
Brink sees in Finnegans Wake and in Ulysses spectacular examples of novels that are as much about language as anything else: “Language becomes its own greatest story.” That was a fully conscious strategy or obsessive drive on Joyce’s part (and even Burgess, the ultimate Joyce fan, complains of those novels’ lack of narrative thrust), but Brink sees novels that appear to use language purely as a vehicle for story and character as nonetheless also about language itself.
It is, after all, their very material, and, in its infinite richness and virus- like mutability, language refuses to submit entirely to the role of transparent and thus unseen window on an imaginary world. One way or another, brazenly or subtly, language provides a simultaneous performance of its own.
Roland Barthes distinguished between “readerly” and “writerly” texts: the (realist) ones that provide everything the reader needs and just expect to be passively read, versus those (difficult, modernist or post- modernist) texts that expect the reader to do a bit of writing him- or herself, as it were, to fill in the gaps and indeterminacies, to “complete” the text in his or her own way. Implicit was the presumption that the latter type was somehow more honest, less coercive perhaps, at any rate more salutary. Get those readers working!
Brink borrows from Barthes (and others), and does see a historical moment at which literature begins to “foreground its own medium” more strenuously than it had before. This moment is modernism, but in Brink’s view it blurs into post-modernism – and also back through the high realism of George Eliot to Cervantes. Brink sees the “writerliness” in every text, in Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert; later in Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Milan Kundera, and others. (What, one wonders, would he make of, say, Jackie Collins? Does her language also play this game?)
In nuanced readings exceptionally sensitive to the role of narrators and voices, to what is said as well as to “gaps, absences, silences”, Brink uncovers the complex relation of narrative and language in the novel. Risking reductionism, he explains himself directly, making theory work to clarify rather than to obscure.
Yet Brink’s choices of what to unpick often seem a little too easy. The teleological positioning of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – the quintessential post- modern inside-out novel – at the book’s climax, out of chronological sequence, is a bit of a giveaway.
Despite his brilliant readings of Calvino, Kundera and the rest of the tricksters, Brink is, after all, in such cases going very much with the current of the text. His readings of the likes of Eliot and Austen, where he is going against the realist text’s natural inclinations, are perhaps more challenging, for both writer and reader.