California, 1975.
What Alter intended was to trace a tradition of the "self-conscious" novel through the history of literature. Indeed, he displays an extensive knowledge of his subject and has no shortage of ideas related to it. But, in this book at least, he falls prey to a simple problem most freshman English teachers chide their students for: long paragraphs made up of topic sentences. No sooner has he made a bold statement, than he is moving on to another such statement, without taking time to explain his belief. Even given that he takes for granted in the reader a familiarity with the works he discusses and a vocabulary of literary terms, his writing is every bit as vague and unclear as the texts that drove me from traditional classes. Here is a mild example of an overly complicated sentence of his: "If Sterne slows down time to the fluttering suspension of felt duration, Diderot, when he is narrating and not reporting dialogue, tends to negate duration by reducing the intricate laminations of experienced times to a pure verbal act, symmetrically shaped and attitudinally-defined" (64). If Alter had strained out his excess ideas, and avoided vague literary terms, this book would have been a much more fruitful read for someone like me. Still, there were some nuggets to be found.
There is no mention in the book of metafiction, or magic realism, or romanticism. Instead, Alter delineates two kinds of novel throughout the history of (Western) literature: realistic fiction, and self-conscious fiction. "A self-conscious novel, briefly, is a novel that systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice and that by so doing probes into the problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality. I would lay equal stress on the ostentatious nature of the artifice and on the systematic operation of the flaunting" (x-xi). Though Alter takes great pains to explain his concept of the self-conscious novel, he takes less trouble to explain realism. It seems to be a catch-all for him, for anything that does not meet his criteria for a self-conscious novel: "This novelist, in other words, pointedly asks us to watch how he makes his novel, what is involved technically and theoretically in the making, as the novel unfolds" (xiii). By leaving out an adequate explanation of the alternative to self-conscious fiction, Alter left his task half-finished.
I suspect "realism" may have been a term Alter was uncomfortable with, and thus he avoided defining it too clearly. He may not have known--remember, this book was written in 1975 and I've read nothing else of his--just how to define what else there was, after his category of self-conscious novels. My personal view (so far) is this: there are fictions that adhere to what Gardner called the "vivid and continuous dream," and there are fictions that break that mold. The fictions that break it by calling attention to the writer and his technique are Alter's self-conscious novels: "Literary criticism, it should be noted, is intrinsic to the fictional world of the Quixote and of all the self-conscious novels that follow it." Later: "In this self-conscious mode of fiction, literary criticism is not, as it may sometimes seem, interpolated, but is an essential moment in the act of imagination, an act that is at once 'conjuration and radical probing'" (12-13). Though I would argue over a few of the novels Alter claims as being self-conscious, the vast majority are works that in my view have similar qualities to abstract art. Novels like Cervantes' Don Quixote are significant for their contributions to the understanding of fiction, but I wouldn't hang it on my wall or go to see it at the Saturday matinee. On Don Quixote:
The writing of a self-conscious novel seems to go hand-in-hand with a writer's disenchantment with the acceptance of fiction as a continuous dream. It is as though, in learning the craft of writing, the author's innocence was lost and cannot be regained. So, like an illusionist explaining his tricks of the trade for a television expose, the writer of a self-conscious novel feels compelled to show off for his audience. On Laurence Sterne: "In all his cap-and-bells antics, Sterne is one of the shrewdest literary critics of his century, and a central insight of his novel is that any literary convention means a schematization--and thus misrepresentation--of reality" (33). But the vast majority of novelists, and their readership, do not wish to be so disenchanted. They may very well be conscious of their own suspension of disbelief, but they are willing to participate for a reason. Much the same as people who recognize religious texts as literature and not the Word of God can keep attending church, readers can understand the tenets of ordinary fiction without losing their appreciation for it.
To his credit, Alter recognizes the potential problems of the self-conscious novel: "If the self-conscious novel tends on one side to excessive cerebrality, to an ascetic avoidance of the pungent juices of ordinary fictional life, it tends on the other side to an unchecked playfulness that may become self-indulgent" (182). If only there were more to this book, to delineate what is not self-conscious fiction. It would be interesting to see whether Alter would go on classifying fiction into ever smaller and more complex categories; I will have to see what else he has published on fiction.
All contents, except where otherwise noted, are copyright Andrew Lee Hunn.