From Realism to Expressionism: Toward a History of the Novel

Abstract

HE NARRATIVE perspective of a novel is the fulcrum, the pivot point between two zones. What is at issue here is the range of givens, the location of unquestioned acceptance of value as rooted in the social world, in relation to that which is questioned, to that which is not (yet) locatable or given. It is a question of inside and outside, reality and illusion, mind and surface, a matter of where the novelist begins and what he explores. life-world of any novel is generated out of the particular formulation of this general tension of intersection, as the narrator (and the novelist) explores and articulates the specificities of their interactions and transactions. In its simplest form these zones emerge as different lexical groupingsthe situational speech of the characters of Tom Jones over and against the witty learned vocabulary of Fielding's narrator-more complexly as differing grammars and rhetorics. Moving between them, the narrator occupies a pivot point, a dialectical node. narrator's fulcrum, the still point in the crossover of these two realms of the given and the not-given, where the spectrum is generated, is the location and the moment of metaphor. In the real world the status of fiction, then, is like that of metaphor; novels are in this sense poems; and metaphors, poems, and novels count because they constitute our everyday real world by defining, articulating, and selfconsciously enacting our mundane speaking, the shifting taken-forgrantedness of the natural attitude. Making believe that they are the world, novels, poems, and metaphors help to create our experience in and of the universe. As that brilliant Spanish novelist, Ram6n Perez de Ayala phrased it, The novelist aspires to nothing less than the creation of a small universe, which is what a novel attempts to be. 1