Jameson 2013

Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. Verso Books, 2013. Print.

• Read with Griffiths 2016, Underwood 2013, Shirley (Charlotte Bronte, 1849), Anderson 1983, Walter Benjamin, Waverley (Scott, 1814)

• [Narration as the production process of a tale]

• 16: …the storytelling function, if we want to call it that, must form part of an opposition, must be defined against something else….Ramon Fernandez developd an opposition between the tale and the novel…between the récit and the roman.

• 18: The time of the récit is then a time of the preterite [completed in the past]…. Clearly enough, then, what Sartre calls upon the novel to reestablish is the open present of freedom, the present of an open undecided future, where the die has not yet been cast, to use one of his favorite expressions.

• 19: “warming your hands on a death that is told” is the way [Benjamin] characterizes the récit; and if we feel that this is too bleak, we may substitute for death simply the mark of the irrevocable. This irrevocability adds a new dimension to Sartre’s critique of the inauthenticity of the récit: the temporal past is now redefined in terms of what cannot be changed, what lies beyond the reach of repetition or rectification, which now comes to be seen as the time of everyday life or routine.

• 21: …Here the distinction between récit and roman takes on a much more familiar appearance: it is simply that between “telling” and “showing.” You tell, you recite, the events; you show them happening in the present of the novelistic scene. To be sure, the novel includes both types of discourse; indeed the very passage from one to the other is itself stylistically and even metaphysically significant – that “choice,” as Andre Malraux put it, “of what is to become scene or remain récit, the emplacement of those porches where a Balzac or a Dostoyevsky lies in wait for their characters as destiny itself waits on man.”

• 23: In defense of telling [against Henry James], and by way of redressing the scales so heavily weighted by Sartre against the extraordinary storytelling art of Maupassant, it may be well to insist on the relative insignificance in the narratives, not only of the great oral practitioners, but even in that of more sophisticated practitioners such as Boccaccio.

• 24: But it is a tale that needs no “showing,” no scene, no present narrative at all; and this is the point of its introduction here, as the purest form of the récit [example from Boccaccio]. The anecdote not only needs no dialogue and no point of view (it has all these in Boccaccio’s brief “telling”), but the whole art of storytelling lies in this possibility of the anecdote, the fait divers, to be expanded and contracted at will, and according to the practical necessities of the situation.

• 26: What we can at least conclude from this discussion is that we have here finally located the definitive formulation for the discursive opposition we have been trying to name. Now it can be articulated not as récit versus roman, nor even telling versus showing; but rather destiny versus the eternal present…. Realism is a consequence of the tension between these two terms; to resolve the opposition either way would destroy it; James’s guilt feelings are not only justified, they are necessary. And this is also why it is justified to find oneself always talking about the emergency or the breakdown of realism and never about the thing itself, since we will always find ourselves describing a potential emergence or a potential breakdown.