Cliché, Consensus and Realism

Abstract

It is well understood that the most famous statements of the objective method in fiction come from writers who seem to believe least in objectivity. Both of Beckett’s fellow ‘Stoic Comedians’, Gustave Flaubert and James Joyce, made memorable pronouncements redefining the artist’s relation with the work of art. Flaubert declared famously that the author ‘should not appear any more in his work than God in nature’, that is, should be present everywhere but visible nowhere. Joyce’s narrator in Portait of the Artist reprised this image in a more facetious vein, envisioning the writer behind the work of art, outside it, paring his fingernails.1 Both statements have of course become cliches of the realist endeavour, introducing a new conception of the long cherished goal of ‘impersonality’ in literary creation. Yet as H. Porter Abbott has argued in relation to Beckett, whom he sees as following Joyce and Marcel Proust (to whom might also be added Gustave Flaubert) in this respect, these writers in fact display an ‘extraordinary intimacy’ with their works of art. They do not, it is true, express there their personal feelings or ideas, but they nonetheless inhabit every word and shape their work according to a very particular artistic vision.2 These famous descriptions in fact speak not so much of the impersonality of art as of the mammoth work of construction needed in order to keep the constructor out of the frame.