- Is this great literature I wonder? I emptied the ashtray, walked about, took the cups, put them in the sink, wetted the kitchen cloth,
sprayed the table with detergent and was washing when Yngve
came in with a carrier bag in each hand. He set them down and began to unpack. First, what we would have
for lunch which he laid out on the worktop. Four vacuum-packed salmon
steaks, a bag of potatoes stained dark with soil,
a head of cauliflower and a packet of frozen beans. Then all the other goods, some of which he stowed in the fridge, some in the cupboard next to it. A 1.5 liter bottle of Sprite, a 1.5 liter bottle of CB
beer, a bag of oranges, a carton of milk, a carton
of orange juice, a loaf. This is taken from a book
whose addictive attention to detail and sheer
convincingness has puzzled even some of the critics who admire it. It's from "A Death in the Family" the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgard's six-part sequence of
autobiographical novels, "My Struggle", "Min kamp". Published in Norwegian in 2009, it was translated into English
by Don Bartlett in 2012. I can't believe that in Norwegian this is not just as it appears
in its English translation. Excessively circumstantial,
pedantically particular, utterly inert. Except for that stained dark with soil looks like an obstinately
poetic detail maybe. But it seems to me an
example of how novels have, for almost exactly three
centuries seized our attention and compelled our belief. These sentences exhibit some
of the powers of the novel which is the overall title
of my series of lectures. We know that the book from
which this passage is taken is autobiographical. We know it from the fact
that its narrator shares its author's name. We probably also know from
the much-reported fact that it aroused the fury
or excited the distress of several family members and ex-partners who are characters in Knausgard's story. We know that free song of revelation in the responses to one of
these examples of auto fiction from other examples of what has become to have that label, auto fiction. A word whose earliest use, the OED, the Oxford English
Dictionary records from 1976 but which has only become commonplace in the last couple of decades. Accomplished British examples
include Edward Aubyn's Patrick Melrose Quintet
published between 1922 and 2012 or more recently Rachel
Cusk's trilogy of novels, Outline, Transit and
Kudos completed in 2018. These books that in their
detailed accounts of encounters at literary festivals or difficulties with builders who are improving
your recently purchased London flat seem to, designed
really to prompt the thought, this must have happened to the author. Knausgard's six book sequence
is an important part of this literary phenomenon. The passage I've just shown
you that's up there still is taken from part two of
"A Death in the Family". Karl Ove, having been
told of his father's death travels with his brother
Yngve to Kristiansand on the southern tip of Norway where his father's been living. He had become an unrescuable alcoholic who'd retreated from the world to the house of Karl Ove's grandmother. It was she who found him one day sitting in the armchair, dead. The book is about his death
and the memories it stirs in the narrator but also
the ghastly business of cleaning up afterwards. The two brothers find that the house, still inhabited by his
skeletal, confused grandmother is in a state of utter squalor. They set about to try to clean it up and we go through the cleaning with them and that process is for many readers, the most memorable aspect of this book. We get as close to the
grot as the narrator does. Here he is, starting on the bathroom and emptying out the wall cupboard. "Blades, safety razors,
hairpins, several bars of soap, "desiccated creams and
ointments, a hair net, "aftershave, deodorants,
eyeliners, lipsticks, "some small, cracked powderpuffs. "Not sure what they were used
for but it must have been "something to do with makeup and hairs, "both short curly ones and
longer, straighter ones, "nail scissors, a roll of
plasters, dental floss and combs. "Once the cupboard was empty, "a yellow-brown thickish
residue was left on the shelf "but I decided to wash last of all. "The wall tiles beside the toilet seat "on which the toilet roll holder was fixed "were covered with light brown stains "and the floor beneath was sticky and these seemed to me to be
most in need of attention, "so I squirted a line
of Jiff over the tiles "and began to scrub them methodically, "from the ceiling right down to the floor. "Firstly, the right-hand
wall, then the mirror wall, "then the bathtub wall and
lastly, around the door." So it goes on, how do we
know that this narrative is actually fiction? Knausgard always refers to his books in this sequence as novels. How do we know that each volume
of My Struggle is a novel? But the whole is what we
might have been taught to call a (speaks foreign language), a sequence of connected works of fiction. One reviewer, a fellow novelist, complained about Knausgard's
merciless specificity and you can see what he
means from these passages that I've been reading. But this merciless specificity is exactly what shows it to be fiction. The people are real, the story is true but the detail has to be invented. Knausgard didn't keep a
journal or a diary or a record. He wrote these books from memory. He must have had to invent the minutiae. What is most like fact in the book is actually what is
likeliest to be fictional. Of course, death, the death
of the narrator's father makes this mere factuality
dramatically expressive. Death requires the gruesome
attention to detail because there has to be a clear-up but also death requires,
imposes the numbness that gives the factual detail its voltage. It's crucial to Knausgard's
method that the books in this sequence do not have chapters. I said earlier that these
passages are taken from part two of "A Death in the Family" and this first book in
Knausgard's sequence is the only one that is
divided into parts at all. Part one and part two, that's it. Otherwise, the only divisions in the text are the frequent but entirely irregular little white spaces separating
one sequence of events or thoughts from the next one. Here you can stop if you
want, put the book down for the night if you're reading it. The rest of the books in
the sequence as I've said, all five remaining volumes
are entirely undivided except for those little white spaces. When I interviewed Knausgard in 2016 about the second volume in the
series, "A Man in Love" as it's titled in English, he told me how important this undividedness was. That wherever and whenever
he was in the narrative, wherever and whenever
you were as a reader, it is always as he said, here and now. As no, as it were, overall map or diagram that you can have of the narrative. It's a good quiz question actually, how many chapterless
novels can you think of? I'm gonna turn now to another
entirely chapterless novel, for an example of factuality
that the Knausgard aficionado might recognize. "I first got three of the Seamens Chests "which I'd broken open and emptied "and lowered them down upon my raft. "The first of these I
filled with Provision, viz. "Bread, Rice, three Dutch Cheeses, "five pieces of dried Goat's Flesh "which we lived much upon
and a little Remainder "of European Corn which had been laid by "for some Fowls which we
brought to Sea with us "but the Fowls were killed. "There had been some
Barley and Wheat together "but to my great Disappointment,
I found afterwards "that the Rats had
eaten or spoiled it all. "As for Liquors, I found
several Cases of Bottles "belonging to our Skipper in
which were some Cordial Waters, "and in all, about five
or six Gallons of Rack. "These I stowed by themselves, "there being no need to
put them into the Chest, "nor any room for them." Perhaps even those who haven't
actually read the novel from which is this, this is taken will be able to guess what it is. It's from "Robinson
Crusoe" by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1719. Arak by the way, Rack by the way is arak which is a now kind of alcohol brewed I think from sugarcane. And even if you haven't read the novel, you probably know what's going on. The shipwrecked Crusoe, the only survivor is salvaging from the wreck of his ship everything that he might be able to use to survive on the island, his
island as he comes to see it. You'll notice that this
seems a single sentence and for connoisseurs of narrative style, it's important that it features Defoe's favorite punctuation
mark, the semicolon which allows his narrators
to launch out on a sentence and then if they think of
anything else, qualify it by simply adding on another bit. Somebody once said to me Defoe's the, the sentences of Defoe's narrators are rather like his protagonists. They set off in search of a conclusion they have not yet quite seen. But actually, this
isn't a single sentence, it's only half the sentence. Thus the ellipses at the beginning of it. Like Knausgard's narrator,
Defoe's narrator, Crusoe offers a list as the bare index of reality and there's a lot more
like this in the novel. Chapterless novels are a breed apart. Knausgard shares his habit of declining to divide up his narratives
with this leading pioneer of the nascent English novel, Daniel Defoe who indeed didn't know when
he wrote Robinson Crusoe but he exactly was writing novels and because of this undividedness, the fact that there are no chapters, no sections of any kind in the novel, teaching a class one of Defoe's novels is always a kind of very
disrupted experience. As the people in the room,
the students try to find whatever passage is being discussed in their various differently
pagenated modern editions. The novelist has given
them and us no landmarks. Everything is the flow of the
protagonist recollections. Here is the title page
of the first edition of Robinson Crusoe. This is actually the British Library copy. And you'll see very importantly, that Defoe's own name is entirely absent from this title page. Which announces the book,
the account that follows as if it were Robinson
Crusoe's own memoir. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York Mariner who lived
eight and 20 years all alone in an uninhabited island
on the coast of America near the mouth of the
great river of Oronoque having been cast on shore by shipwreck wherein all
the men perished but himself with an account how he was
at last strangely delivered by pirates written by himself. It's quite possible incidentally
that this title page was not exactly of Defoe's own devising but what surely is of his devising is the sense that it is
presented as a memoir. We might note before we move on that the prominence of one or two, sort of code words in that title page. Strange, surprising, strangely delivered. These, and it's something
I'm going to return to a little bit later, these are
actually very important words in the narrative and
they're clues as to the fact that Crusoe's narrative, as well as being as if factual is also
suffused with the narrator's recognition of the strange, surprising workings of
providence, of God's will in his adventures and misadventures. The title page is immediately
followed by a short preface in which a nameless editor
tells us how instructive the book we're about
to read is going to be. The editor believes the thing
to be a just history of fact, neither is there any
appearance of fiction in it. So it is a history of
fact and thereby lies, and therein lies the
satisfaction that it provides as a work of fiction, it is like fact. For Defoe's heroes who
are also his narrators, facts are consoling, facts
are what you can grab at but they're not sufficient of themselves. Here is an extract from
the part of the narrative where Crusoe recalls
the immediate aftermath of his first arrival on the island. And as in the title page,
but I think more clearly to the modern reader,
you will see that fact and providence are stirred together. "I walked about on the
Shore, lifting up my Hands "and my whole Being as I may say, "wrapped up in a Contemplation
of my Deliverance. "Making a Thousand Gestures and Motions "which I cannot describe,
reflecting upon all my Comrades "that were drowned and
that there should be, "and that there should not
be one Soul saved but myself. "For as for them, I
never saw them afterwards "or any Sign of them except
three of their Hats, one Cap "and two Shoes that were not fellows." Crusoe remembers his
confusion and tells us how he's inadequate to the
task of getting his experience down on the page. As I may say which I cannot describe but about about something
he can manage to be precise. Three of their hats, one cap and two shoes that were not fellows. That's, that's the brilliance
of Robinson Crusoe. He does remember that the
two shoes didn't match. Of course they're remanents
of two different drowned men and you'll see there also that evidence that I referred to earlier
of his religious sense of the significance of his fate. Deliverance, soul, saved, that vocabulary which is both literal and religious. It's no news that Robinson
Crusoe, the novel Robinson Crusoe shaped later fiction. Only 12 years later,
Johann Gottfried Schnabel had coined the word
Robinsonada in the preface to his utopian fiction
"Die Insel Felsenburg". Robinsonada became the
English word, Robinsonade. Although it didn't appear in English until the early 19th Century. Here in rapid review for
you are some Robinsonades. Each and age invents its own Robinsonades. Here some little
illustrations, the first one, "Der Schweizerische
Robinson" from 1812 which is the narrative of a virtuously
religious Swiss family marooned on a desert
island, having to survive and it became better known to us as Swiss Family Robinson
because it was translated only two years later. These of course are
not 19th Century covers although the modern version
of Wyss' novel in German does use a 19th Century, original
19th century illustration. This is one of the many
early 20th century editions of a perennial favorite for children, "The Swiss Family Robinson". Some other Robinsonades,
once hugely popular, R. M. Ballantyne novel, a
Victorian bestseller for boys, "The Coral Island" in
which three teenage boys are shipwrecked on a desert island and have to escape the threats of sharks. You can see them here with the sharks. Cannibals and pirates. Crusoe only had to deal
with the last two of those, he didn't have sharks and
then William Golding's frightening 1954 classic,
"Lord of the Flies". This is the cover, the illustrated cover of the first edition which
is an explicitly sort of, a disenchantment as it were
of The Coral Island story and it's partly inspired by it. More recently, two more Robinsonades. J.M. Coetzee's 1986
revisiting of Defoe's novel which is narrated from the point of view of a female castaway, Susan Barton who encounters a rather sluggish Crusoe and a speechless Friday on the island on which she washes up and
then later back in London tries to get somebody called Daniel Defoe to tell her story. Characteristically postmodern
version in the novel becomes about how narratives get made and next to it, Margaret Atwood's post-pandemic fable of human
meddling, "Oryx and Crake" which is also a kind of Robinsonade. It's centered on a kind of castaway. Once a genetic engineer who now lives in subtropical loneliness near the beach surrounded by peaceful but
peculiarly uninteresting genetically engineered humanoids, Crakers. We keep telling our Robinsonades. The desert island narrative,
the survival tale, actually the adventure story itself are all Robinson Crusoe's progeny, like the best kind of founding text, Robinson Crusoe opens itself
to our changing requirements. For us right now, it's
evidently a document in the history of colonialism
and Crusoe's subjugation of Friday has become in most
contemporary discussions its main lesson. But for some readers and for some writers, Robinson Crusoe, this just history of fact as it declares itself has
a kind of romance to it. For Charles Dickens, Robinson Crusoe was the elemental novel. Apart from plays by Shakespeare, Robinson Crusoe's the literary
work referenced most often in Dickens' fiction. When the Ghost of Christmas Past in A Christmas Carol returns Scrooge, the aged miser to his childhood,
Scrooge sees the fictions that he once loved come back
to the life they once had. "To hear Scrooge expending
all the earnestness "of his nature on such subjects, "in a most extraordinary voice
between laughing and crying, "to see his heightened and exciting face "would have been a surprise
to his business friends "in the city, indeed. "'There's the Parrot!', cried Scrooge. "'Green body and yellow tail
with a thing like a lettuce "growing out of the top
of his head, there he is." "Poor Robin Crusoe, he called
him when he came home again "after sailing round the island. "Poor Robin Crusoe, where
have you been Robin Crusoe? "The man thought he was
dreaming but he wasn't, "it was the parrot you know? "There goes Friday, "running for his life to the little creek. "Halloa, hoop, halloo! "Then with a rapidity of
transition very foreign "to his usual character he said
in pity for his former self, "'Poor boy!' and cried again." Karl Marx may have thought
Defoe a kind of celebrant of capitalism but in Hard
Times Dickens imagines Defoe's fiction as a kind
of escape into the world of imagination for industrial capitalism's
enslaved operatives. "There was a library in Coketown "to which general access was easy. "Mr. Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind "about what the people
read in this library. "A point whereon little
rivers of tabular statements "periodically flowed
into the howling ocean "of tabular statements which no diver "ever got to any depth
in and came up sane. "It was a disheartening circumstance "but a melancholy fact
that even these readers "persisted in wondering. "They wondered about human
nature, human passions, "human hopes and fears,
the struggles, triumphs "and defeats, the cares
and joys and sorrows, "the lives and deaths
of common men and women. "They sometimes, after
15 hours' work sat down "to read mere fables about men and women "more or less like themselves
and about children, "more or less like their own. "They took De Foe to their
bosoms instead of Euclid "and seemed to be on the whole
more comforted by Goldsmith "than by Cocker." Goldsmith, Dickens is
thinking of Goldsmith's novel, 18th century novel, "The
Vicar of Wakefield", another of his favorites. Cocker is William Cocker, the author of the dauntingly
titled textbook, "Arithmetic". Robinson Crusoe was just
the first of Defoe's novels, its author discovering the
appeal of the fictional memoir and moving on from this tale of adventure to autobiographies of penitent criminals. One of these was "Moll Flanders". Moll Flanders is another autobiography, the tale of a woman who falls into crime. Remembering how as an
impoverished young woman she first gave into
temptation and how she heard the voice of the Devil, Moll our narrator also recalls some facts. She has tempted a small, a child who is wearing a
necklace she wants to steal into an alley. "The Child had a little
Necklace on of Gold Beads, "and I had my Eye upon that
and in the dark of the Alley "I stooped, pretending
to mend the Child's Clog "that was loose, and took off her Necklace "and the Child never felt it, "and so led the Child on again. "Here I say, the Devil put
me upon killing the Child "in the dark Alley, that it might not Cry. "But the very thought frighted
me so that I was ready "to drop down but I turned the Child about "and bad it go back again
for it was on its way home. "The Child said so she would "and I went through into Bartholomew Close "and then turned round to another Passage "that goes into St. John's-street. "Then crossing into Smithfield,
went down Chick-lane "and into Field-lane to Holbourn-bridge, "when mixing with the Crowd of
People usually passing there, "it was not possible
to have been found out. "And thus, I enterprised my
second Sally into the World." In all her fear and confusion,
Moll still knows her way through those streets. Her GPS is absolutely tuned. As she looks back on her fall into crime, she can at least be sure
of those street names, that precise root that keeps her safe. Though Defoe's authorship of his novels may not have been much
known in his lifetime, works like Robinson
Cruse and Moll Flanders were from the evidence we have clearly understood to be fiction. Fact-like fiction. A couple of his novels as we now call them were however so like real memoirs, that they were actually taken to be such. The title page of one of these, "A Journal of the Plague
Years" we now call it is here given alongside
that of Moll Flanders and you'll see "A Journal
of the Plague Years" written by a citizen who
continued all the while in London, never made public before. It was published in 1722, the
same year as Moll Flanders. When "A Journal of the
Plague Year" was published, Londoners were fearful
of the impending arrival of the plague which had
reached the south of France and there was a flurry
of publications about previous experiences of plague and what people had done to
try and counter the pandemic. And these publications included
Defoe's fictional narrative which was duly taken to be a real memoir. When in the 19th Century it became clear that Defoe had concocted the whole thing, some critics were appalled,
it was fraudulent. Now we're more likely to
think that the fabrication of such a convincing
document was an admirable, fictional achievement. The romantic essayist
has the lament De Quincy were amongst the first
to see literary merit in Defoe's novels. Narrated they are in that
peculiarly unliterary manner. De Quincey wrote in Blackwood's Magazine of how Defoe was the only author
known who was so plausibly circumstantiated his
false historical records as to make them pass for genuine, even with literary men and critics. He relished Defoe's
invention of what he called such little circumstantiations of any character or instant as seen by their apparent inertness, sorry as seen by their
apparent inertness of affect to verify themselves. I think this one of a sort of, one of the neatest and best
little celebrations of Defoe's peculiar fictional talents. "For, where the reader is
told that such a person "was the posthumous son of a tanner, "that his mother married afterwards "a Presbyterian schoolmaster who gave him "a smattering of Latin "but the schoolmaster dying of the plague, "that he was compelled at
16 to enlist for bread, "in all this as there is
nothing at all amusing, "we conclude that the
author could have no reason "to detain us with such particulars "but simply because they were true. "To invent when nothing at
all is gained by inventing, "there seems no imaginable temptation." Novels learnt from the beginning
to provide the unnecessary particulars that made them seem true. Thus our next example
which is in some ways, in the minds of the reading
public of the 18th century is where the 18th century
novel really began does the same thing. The example of Samuel
Richardson's groundbreaking novel, Pamela published in 1740 which is written in the form of letters but
is also published anonymously as if it were a real
collection of documents. These letters are from a
15-year-old servant girl, Pamela, to her their parents
and they're introduced like Robinson Crusoe by a
preface from a nameless editor recommending the moral tendency
of what will follow and it, the novel is subtitled
"Virtue Rewarded" and Pamela's virtue is her, her goodness but also her virginity. She must defend herself
from the sexual advances of her master, Mister B after
the death of her mistress, Mister B's mother. The virtuous heroine worries
a good deal about her soul but of course she also
worries about her clothes. "Since my last," that's her last letter. "Since my last, my Master
gave me more fine Things. "He called me up to my old Lady's Closet "and pulling out her Drawers, "he gave me Two Suits of fine
Flanders laced headcloths, "Three Pair of fine Silk
Shoes, two hardly the worse "and just fit for me, for my old Lady "had a very little Foot
and several Ribbands "and Topknots of all Colors and Four Pair "of fine white Cotton
Stockens and Three Pair "of fine Silk ones, and
Two Pair of rich Stays "and a Pair of rich Silver Buckles "in one Pair of the Shoes." With psychological exactitude, Richardson has his heroine so
fussed by all this stuff that she cannot notice
what her new Master, who is her would be
seducer is really up to. For even some of the 18th century readers who were gripped by Pamela
which was a bestseller, such domestic detail was vulgar and absurd and utterly unliterary. Yet it would be taken up by the subgenre that gave fiction new
prestige in the next century, the 19th century, the historical novel. The historical novel's
attention to little facts learnt from the likes of
Pamela is still familiar to us and I've only got time
for one passing example but it's, it's from one, from a book which might be
familiar to us and I append the extract with a
quotation from a review. This is a, from a review
of Hilary Mantel's "Bring Up the Bodies"
published in the New Yorker in May 2012 in which the critic James Wood praised the novelistic
intelligence as he called it with which Mantel fictionalized her facts and the first paragraph
here is a quotation from Bring Up the Bodies and the second is back to Woods' review. "This season, young
men carry their effects "in soft pale leather bags, in imitation "of the agents for the Fugger bank, "who travel all over
Europe and set the fashion. "The bags are heart-shaped and so to him, "it always looks as if
they're going wooing, "but they swear they're not. "Nephew Richard Cromwell
sits down and gives the bags "a sardonic glance." "Do you know if Mantel has
manufactured or borrowed "from the record this
information about the fashionable "Fugger bag? "In some sense it doesn't matter "because the writer "has made a third category of the reality, "the plausibly hypothetical. "It's what Aristotle
claimed was the difference "between the historian and the poet. "The former describes what happened "and the latter what might happen." James Wood's question is
rhetorical but I wondered about the answer so I
confess I asked Hilary Mantel and indeed, she tells me the information
about the 16th century man bag was recovered from the
archive, not invented. And as she said when
replying to my inquiry, doesn't the naming of the banking house, the Fugger bank suggest to
the reader that this is fact, not fiction so to speak? In the early decades of the novel there was an important word
for what it was about a novel that made it convincing,
that word was probable. In the 1750s when John Cleland, author of the infamously
pornographic novel, "Memoirs of a Woman of
Pleasure" celebrated the new type, the new species
of fiction as he called it being written by people
like Smollett, Fielding, Henry Fielding and Sarah Fielding, he declared that it
was familiar, practical and probable to be met with
in the course of common life. Probable to be met with, the
earliest sustained account of the rise of the novel is Clara Reeve's, "The Progress of Romance"
published in 1785. Reeve, very interesting
writer, herself a novelist and The Progress of Romance
is set up in a series of dialogues between two
women, Euphrasia and Sophronia who love novels and a man, Hortensius, who's very suspicious of this new genre and he gets convinced by the two women in the course of the debates
and this is how Reeve defines the novel in her book. "The Novel gives a familiar
relation of such things, "as pass every day before our eyes, "such as may happen to our
friend, or to ourselves, "and the perfection of it
is to represent every scene, "in so easy and natural a
manner as to make them appear "so probable as to deceive
us into a persuasion, "at least while we're
reading, that all is real." Probable again, by the late 18th century, there was a plentiful supply
of novels that took pleasure in transcending the probable. We call them Gothic novels
and I'm going to be talking about those in the third of my lectures. It's notable that the probable word recurs when Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, when in Jane Austen's
Northanger Abbey Henry Tilney confronts the heroine, Catherine Morland, with the folly of her
Gothic-inspired fantasy. She's got a fantasy that
his father, General Tilney has murdered his dead wife. "Dear Miss Morland,
consider the dreadful nature "of the suspicions you've entertained. "What have you been judging from? "Remember the country and
the age in which we live. "Remember that we are English,
that we are Christians, "consult your own understanding, "your own sense of the probable, "your own observation of
what is passing around you. "Does our education prepare
us for such atrocities? "Do our laws connive at them? "Could they be perpetrated
without being known "in a country like this, "where social and literary intercourse "is on such a footing, "where every man is
surrounded by a neighborhood "of voluntary spies and
where roads and newspapers "lay everything open? "Dearest Miss Morland, what
ideas have you been admitting?" Consult your own sense of the probable. It's almost like Austen's
motto for any reader of novels and certainly for any good
readers of her novels. Ian McEwan chose this very passage as the epigraph for his novel "Atonement". A novel whose protagonist is misled by her own capacity for fiction-making to turn what she's seen
into what she imagines. Forget the probable and disaster beckons. So actually, the postmodernist novel continues to be fascinated by factual, minutiae, as fascinated
as the first pioneers of the English novel. McEwan is well-known for
glutting us on detail. In his 2005 novel
"Saturday" is particularly well-known for doing this. Whole rallies of a squash
game, every incision or suture of a brain operation. Here is the protagonist, Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon who rather
fancies himself as a cook making a meal. "He's cleaning up the
kitchen, wiping his." And it's important to know
that while he's doing this a television in his
cavernous London kitchen is running footage of the military buildup to the invasion of Iraq. "He's cleaning up the
kitchen, wiping his mess "from the central island into a large bin "and scrubbing the chopping
boards under running water. "Then it's time to tip the boiling water "off the skates and
mussels into the casserole. "When that's done, he has now, he reckons "about two and a half liters
of bright orange stock "which he'll cook for
another five minutes. "Just before dinner, he'll
reheat it and simmer the clams, "monkfish, mussels and
prawns in it for 10 minutes. "They'll eat the stew with
brown bread, salad and red wine. "After New York, there's
the Kuwait-Iraq border "and military trucks moving in convoy "along a desert road and
our lads kipping down "by the tracks of their tanks, "then eating bangers next
morning from their mess-tins. "He takes two bags of
mache from the bottom "of the fridge and empties
them into a salad tosser. "He runs the cold tap over the leaves. "An officer, barely in his 20s
is standing outside his tent, "pointing with a stick
at a map on an easel. "Perowne isn't tempted
to disable the mute, "these items from the front
have a cheerful, censored air "that lowers his spirits. "He spins the salad and
tips it into the bowl. "Oil, lemon, pepper and
salt he'll throw on later. "There's cheese and fruit for pudding." There's something deliberately irritating about this I think. It's free indirect style, filtered through Perowne's
consciousness and he's just too pleased with every
aspect of his preparation. His complacency has to be well established in order to be threatened. The interleaving of the
scenes from a coming war is appropriately jolting, mocking even. But he's a descendant
of Defoe's protagonists. When confusion threatens,
you can cling to the details. What we've come to call
cuisine has attracted the satirical attention of quite a few late 20th and early
21st century novelists. Here is Patrick Bateman, narrator, but definitely not hero of
Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel, "American Psycho" in a New York restaurant with some characterless fellow yuppies convinced that the waitress
is flirting with him. You can never know by the
way if this kind of thing is so because the narrative
allows no perspective beyond Bateman's self regard. "She laughs sexily when
I order, as an appetizer, "the monkfish and squid
ceviche with golden caviar, "gives me a stare so
steamy, so penetrating "when I order the gravlax potpie
with green tomatillo sauce "that I have to look
back at the pink Bellini "in the tall champagne
flute with a concerned, "deadly serious expression
so as not to let her think "I am too interested. "Price orders the tapas
and then the venison "with yogurt source and fiddlehead
ferns with mango slices. "McDermott orders the
sashimi with goat cheese "and then the smoked duck
with endive and maple syrup. "Van Patten has the scallop sausage "and the grilled salmon
with raspberry vinegar "and guacamole." Do these dishes exist, I
actually Googled fiddlehead ferns and there indeed was footage of quote, the furled fronds of a young
fern, harvested for use as a vegetable being
sauteed in front of me. Notoriously, the most frequent
details in American Psycho are the details of the designer clothes of his triumphantly superficial,
massively overpaid friends and the killing and dismembering
of his many victims. Mostly women, the latter
descriptions are often unreadable but actually both these
accumulations of detail become increasingly
fantastic and incredible. Such catalogs as Bateman's
are another version of the stuff of fact-like fiction. We've already seen the
fact-like title page of Defoe's "A Journal of a Plague Year". No wonder that it was mistaken
for what it pretended to be. Here in a modern reprinting I'm afraid is an example of the facts
that went into that narrative. Defoe provided his readers
with statistical tables of the impact of the plague, taken from the so-called
Bills of Mortality published by London
parishes and reproduced them in what we call his novel. There is the truth of it week by week, how many people died in what places. And what does HF, Defoe's
narrator is called HF, what does HF say in the face of this? He tells us how the
living, delirious with fear would throw themselves
into the plague pits in which the dead were being buried. It is impossible to say
anything that is able to give a true idea of it to
those who did not see it other than this. That it was indeed very,
very, very dreadful and such as no tongue can express and the verys are italicized. Very, very, very dreadful. You can see why that was once
thought to be bad writing and now seems like great writing. Facts make narratives convincing but also characters and
narrators clutch at facts when their own powers of
understanding or explanation are not to be trusted. From Defoe to now, the novel
has shown this clutching. My last passage is the last paragraph of Kazuo Ishiguro's brilliant I think, 2005 novel "Never Let Me Go". It's narrated by Kathy H, a human clone, living in a just slightly
different version of England in the 1990s. She and her fellow
clones have been created in order to supply organs
for transplant surgery for the benefit of the rest of us. Before she does this and completes, that's a euphemism for is killed, she's employed as a
carer, another euphemism, tending others who are in
the process of donation. One of these, Tommy,
has recently completed. Kathy H drives around
England doing her caring, one day arrives in Norfolk
and stops somewhere she's never been before. And I'll just read it, it's a passage, take up two slides but
I'll read it to you. "I found I was standing
before acres of plowed earth. "There was a fence keeping me
from stepping into the field, "with two lines of barbed wire, and I could see how this
fence and the cluster "of three or four trees above me "were the only things
breaking the wind for miles. "All along the fence, "especially along the lower line of wire, "all sorts of rubbish
had caught and tangled. "It was like the debris
you get on a seashore, "the wind must have carried
some of it for miles and miles "before coming up against these trees "and these two lines of wire. "Up in the branches of the trees too, "I could see flapping
about torn plastic sheeting "and bits of old carrier bags. "That was the only time as I stood there, "looking at that strange rubbish, "feeling the wind coming
across those empty fields "that I started to imagine
just a little fantasy thing, "because this was Norfolk after all "and it was only a couple
of weeks since I'd lost him. "I was thinking about the rubbish, "the flapping plastic in the branches, "the shoreline of odd stuff
caught along the fencing "and I half-closed my eyes and imagined "this was the spot where
everything I'd lost "since my childhood had washed up "and I was now standing
here in front of it "and if I waited long
enough, a tiny figure "would appear on the
horizon cross the field "and gradually get larger
until I'd see it was Tommy, "and he'd wave, maybe even call. "The fantasy never got
beyond that, I didn't let it "and though the tears rolled down my face, "I wasn't sobbing or out of control. "I just waited a bit, then
turned back to the car, "to drive off to wherever it
was I was supposed to be." Knausgard's potential fictional alter ego, sorry Knausgard's fictional alter ego facing his father's death. Defoe's resourceful record makers in the face of potential extinction. Ishiguro's parentless young
woman with little time, little life left. We believe all of them because
of what they cannot say and what they can still
manage to notice, thank you. - Mr. Mullan, thank you very much for
a fascinating lecture. It has provoked a number of questions. So I'm hoping we'll be able
to get through most of them but we'll see how we get on. There are two related ones first. Would you say all convincing fiction has to have a very factual
and informative style? With Knausgard and Defoe,
the writing seems almost like stream of consciousness. What is your opinion and related to that, sorry I'm just going down. It Was a question about Ulysses. In Ulysses, a fiction full of detail, is, sorry excuse me. Is Ulysses a fiction full of
detail convincing fiction? And have Defoe swift or
stern had a lasting influence on such 20th century texts? - Gosh.
- Yeah so there are two big ones, did you want me to? - Well let's, yeah tell
me the first one again. Just do, is that, do all
novels have to have a sort of? - All convincing fiction,
does it need to have a very factual and informative style? With Knausgard and Defoe. - Right.
- The writing almost seems like stream of consciousness. - No, I don't think all
novels have to at all. I think that I was, I've
been trying to illustrate, I suppose something that is
there in the early decades of the novel which continues
to be a fascination for novelists but it's not, as it were, a compulsory element of fiction. And there are, there are
novels as we'll discover in the third of these
series, which take place in fantasy zones which are not kind of factually circumstantiated,
as De Quincy would say and involve supernatural
agencies and beings. So this isn't a sort of compulsory menu or agenda for fiction. However, it is really striking
that when novels internalize some of those novels that we mentioned. You mentioned Joyce's
Ulysses but you know, some other early 20th
century modernist novels like those of Virginia
Woolf, when they internalize, when they give us a
stream of consciousness, they also need to have
their factual structure and you'll remember how
Joyce's novel gives us, as it were, the consciousness
of, in some ways, three characters but it also
gives us the smell of breakfast the sound of a cat and
for the first time ever in a fiction in English, the experience of going to the lavatory too. So it's full of names,
it's full of quiddities as they're sometimes called. And one could say the same
thing about Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. So it's not compulsory but
it's something that novelists can never completely get away from. - Thank you, another
audience member has asked is it important to distinguish
between fact and fiction? Autobiography slash truth and invention. Are these such binary opposites? - Well they're not, they're
not binary opposites. But at the same time, I think
it can be a truism to say that and an empty truism to say that all supposedly true
narratives, that memoirs or works of history are in
some ways also fictions. It's true but I think
it's trivially true often. It's absolutely fundamental
to the experience of reading Knausgard's autofiction
and that's where I started that we believe that although as I said, the detail has to be made up, the events as far as he can remember them
are truthfully remembered. And of course that's a
problematic confidence he's managed to give to the reader because as those relatives
and acquaintances who've challenged his account have said, it may seem to be true
but some of it isn't true or it's not true to my perception. It's the will to and the effort of truth that we believe rather
than the infallibility of memory itself. There's an extraordinary
thing said at the beginning of a work which is and in some ways, the founding text of
European autobiography, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions" published in the late
18th century and he says in his absolutely unironical Rousseau way that everything that follows is true. Absolutely everything is true
and he will challenge anybody who doubts any of it and
yet within about a page, there is a footnote telling you about the factual error that he's
made but you know what he means. What he means Is that as
far as he was concerned, as far as the effort
of his will and memory and conscience was concerned, it was true. Even if actually the memory is fallible. - We have a couple of questions
about form and typography. - Okay.
- If I may. The first question is do we
know if Defoe's punctuation is authorial or the compositor's? And then another audience
member has asked about his use of capitals. Why does he sometimes use capital letters? - Okay well the second one is
easier so I'll do that first which is just that that
it was quite conventional in the early 18th century
and before to capitalize most nouns. But it was also a form of emphasis. So it was, it's difficult
so sometimes important verbs will be capitalized for instance
in order to emphasize them but surrounded by nouns which
as in German to this day capitalizes, that's a language
that capitalizes nouns and that convention
disappears in the course of the 18th century but it's
still strong with Defoe. As to do we know that
whether his punctuation was authorial or not, that's
a cracking question. Which I, I don't think that
any scholar that I know of has really researched Defoe's
punctuation and those texts over which he clearly did
have a good deal of control, so for instance he wrote
works of, he published works of history where it's clear
that he was absolutely on top of the text, right unto
the moment of its production because it was a high status thing to do, to write history whereas
these novels as we call them were written to make money, they were not high literary productions. However, I would just say this, and I say it with regard
to some other writers where this debate is interesting. A favorite novelist of mine
who was there in the lecture, Jane Austen, people ask was her, was the punctuation of
her novels authorial or done in the print shop
or done by the publisher? And the answer would be that
in both those cases their, the punctuation is so idiosyncratic by the standard of contemporaries, so downright odd and distinctive but it seems to me very,
very difficult to believe that it was not authorial. People, other writers did not
use semicolons like Defoe. I mean I can only say that
as a matter of impression. I've read lots and lots of
early 18th century prose and the punctuation of Defoe's novels, of those narratives whilst
using certain conventions of the time, colons did different things in 18th century prose
from what they do now, is absolutely, I think
unique and therefore, I think authorial. But it's a case to be proved I think. - Thank you, how does
the chapterless novel or this segmentation of the novel effect our perception
or experience of time? - Okay, that's a really good question. I mean, well I have two
thoughts in answer to that. The first is that the time,
time as represented in a novel is often, especially if
the novel is this skillful, closely connected to the
reader's experience of real time. So you know, one of, simply one of the, one of the commonist uses
for chapters is simply to allow the reader to stop reading. And there's a big difference isn't there between a novel and a
novella in that you cannot, most cases, you cannot really
read a novel all in one go. To me a novella is a narrative
that you can if you choose read in one go. I know people will stay
I stayed up all night to finish this novel
and I know that happens but even then they're probably saying, not I started reading it
and I read the whole thing in a single night but
they just couldn't stop as they normally would. So that sense of it's
time to stop is part, is absolutely essential
to how we read novels and it seems to me
something, it's one of those, actually rather practical
things that literary critics, especially academic literary
critics often completely ignore this very little on this. How you divide a novel up. So without any divisions,
you're sort of abandoned. You have to decide, you have to decide how you're gonna align
as it were your time with the novel's time and you know, skillful novelists in the
past have used chapters to divide things into, into
as it were, consumable units. Henry Fielding, the great
18th century novelist would sometimes say at
the end of the chapter, okay well my characters
have stopped at an inn and they're going to be going to sleep and you can do the same now. Have a little pause and then
we'll start again tomorrow. In Jane Austen novels, in Gothic novels, characters sometimes fall
asleep at the end of one chapter and wake up at the beginning of another. So without this you have
to make up your own time and that's a very,
potentially disorientating but also maybe potentially
kind of liberating thing. So it abandons you to, I think
Knausgard says it really well that in some ways you're,
it's always here and now. You're always in the here and now and too long an answer I know
but finally I'll just say, in the case of both Defoe and Knausgard, what that gives you a strong sense of is not events having taken place in the past but of a narrator, of a
narrator finding his way, whether it's Crusoe or Knausgarof himself, finding his way through
events and memories and you're constantly aware of
the activity of the narrator in the present. So that's what chapterlessness does, it makes you aware of the
present tense of narration. - Here's a different view,
quite a fun question. Are novelists aware that some readers skip the very factual passages where
there's a surfit of details? Is a good reader allowed to do so? - Beware, beware. I don't know if, I have no idea if either of those writers
I've just mentioned were aware of the possibility. I think, as many readers
of Knausgard will confirm, even if they didn't find
it strange or perplexing, it's actually the detail
which is somehow gripping. With Crusoe, you're
assembling his world with him and it's fantastic and you
may say oh it's unliterary, it's very prosaic, it's
list-like sometimes but actually you're gripped by it. I would say that with many novelists, the bits you might be tempted to skip are sometimes dangerous to skip. Let me give you one favorite example. In Jane Austen's novel Emma, readers, many readers will know
that some of the most trivially fact-filled
elements are the monologues of the garrulous and witless
Miss Bates who records, who remembers and then narrates all the most trivial incidents of that day in the village or town of
Highbury where they all live and everybody's bored to tears by her and you might be too and you might skip. Perhaps the first time
I read Emma I skipped but when you go back to it, you realize that in all her trivial details, it's like the boring
servant in a Agatha Christie which actually says
things which are the clue, the clue to what's really gone on and so it is with Miss Bates in Emma. If you actually listen to what she says you might be able to work
out what's secretly going on between some of the characters. If you are too bored and
ignore it, you won't. - Thank you very much, thank you for a really
interesting lecture and for taking so many questions. I was interested and kept
you too long I think, but. - Yeah a pleasure.
- Yeah, we'll finish up now. Thank you to the audience
for your attendance and I wanted to alert you to
Professor Mullan's next lecture which will be on crime in fiction. He'll be presenting that on
Wednesday the 24th of February next year and just another alert for you. Tomorrow evening, Gillian
Darley will be speaking on John Evelyn, Britain's
first environmentalist. So please do join us for that, thank you.
