This may have something to do with the unique perspective he brings to both his fiction and his critical writings. Gabriel has said that he’s never felt ‘inward’ with England and with English life. This is not something he laments – indeed, these circumstances, he says, are less a disadvantage than a privilege. Part of this privilege is that it’s meant that he has cultivated a sense of the fragmentariness and insecurity of human experience – a sense that our lives are more incomplete and disordered than they might seem, and that we are never quite at home in the world.This is apparent in Gabriel’s account of the novel. Take the two great achievements of the novel genre: psychology, that is, the depiction of interior life, and social expansiveness, that is, the surveying of a complex social universe. Novels typically show depth in their rendering of human interiority, and breadth in their presentation of a social panoply. The danger comes when the achievement of this depth and breadth is dependent on the model of representation. For this kind of realism depends on a kind of bad faith. This is apparent, Gabriel suggests, in the use of an impersonal narrator, describing a scene from a position outside space and time. Such a position is unavailable to us, and is, as such, dishonest. The use of first-person narrative might seem a solution to this problem, but too often one finds exactly the same kind of remove, for example, in the use of description, which implicitly depends on the narrator stopping to describe an environment. Bad faith again, since we rarely pause in this way. The question, then, is how we write without the remove in question. How do we show fidelity to our experience of passing through the world in all its openness and its fleetingness?
― j., Friday, 23 September 2016 05:50 (seven years ago) link