Both versions follow exactly the same plotline: a slightly naive fourteen-year-old boy, Ben, invites his friend to spend a night with him in a haunted house and Ben’s friend invites some other people. Ben is obsessed with ghosts and with seeing a ghost and photographing it. The other kids don’t care about ghosts, but just want to have a party in this abandoned house. Tensions rise between Ben and the rest of a group because he’s something of an outsider. Two of the group, Gavin and Michelle, go off together and have sex in an adjacent room. Naive, over-imaginative Ben mistakes the sounds of their sex for the moaning and bumping of a ghost, and so convinces himself that he has had a paranormal encounter.

The difference between the two versions is that one is written as if it had been written by fourteen-year-old Ben and the other is written as if it was written by an older Ben looking back on the experience. Purely looking at the writing style, the second, alternate version, is clearly superior; the sentences are more considered, the vocabulary is more expansive, and the imagery is evocative. This version, we’ll call it Version 2 to save confusion, was written more in my ‘natural’ writing voice; it was written in the style of someone who is, say, studying a BA in Creative Writing.

I had taken my tutor’s advice on board and written a ‘better’ version of the story, and it went on to achieve either a first, or a high 2:1. So I should have been happy with the story, only, I wasn’t, because, although the writing was better, it left a huge flaw in the story that I was never able to fully address with the more accomplished writing style: the crux of the story is the misinterpretation by naive, innocent Ben of the sounds of sex as the rattlings and moanings of a disembodied spirit, and of the regretful, tired face of Michelle the next morning as the traumatised and haggard visage of someone who had come face-to-face with said spirit; a mistake that fourteen-year-old boy who was a bit obsessed with ghosts and who hadn’t matured quite as fast as everyone else, might make. But not the sort of mistake an older person, looking back on and writing about the experience would make. So Ben, as the narrator, ultimately lacks credibility in Version 2.

Now what was my tutor’s criticism of Version 1, the version written as if by fourteen-year-old Ben? Ironically, it was the very effect I had sought to achieve: the story read as if it had been written by a fourteen-year-old, ie. badly. It’s a valid criticism: from a technical standpoint Version 1 is badly written: the pacing is off, there is a lack of detail, and the information the narrator gives us is often superfluous or contradictory. The only part of the story that could be argued to be well-written is the dialogue, as the narrator is only recording rather than describing this, but since dialogue counts for probably less than 20% of this story’s word-count, that would hardly recommend it, as a ‘badly-written’ story, to a high grade. One might even accuse me, at age nineteen, on a writing course, of being lazy when I say “oh, it’s badly written because I meant it to be.”

Laziness was not, however, my motivating factor when I wrote Version 1. On the contrary, I did quite a bit of research in order to develop the voice of my narrator, looking at the style of the Goosebumps books I used to read when I was young and which I assumed Ben would look to for stylistic inspiration; looking at the sort of writing I did when I was fourteen and fifteen, how I used to phrase things; and looking too at Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time a superficially amateur book written by a fictional autistic narrator. So what was my motivation for writing a ‘bad’, amateurish story?

Authenticity. I wanted the story to read authentically as if a fourteen-year-old boy had really written it, and the reason for this was that I wanted to prevent a skewed and biased viewpoint for the reader to question. I never spell out that Ben actually heard Gavin and Michelle having sex rather than a ghost because Ben doesn’t realise it and I want the reader to go “hang on, is this a fairly bland, clichéd ghost story, as the name implies, or is it actually that what the narrator is telling me is wrong and there’s something more?” It’s not an original idea; I basically lifted it from Mark Haddon, and I’m he was hardly the first author to present the reader with pieces of a puzzle from a limited narrator that the reader can then place together to complete the story, but it was my intention, and I think it’s why I still prefer the ‘inferior’ Version 1.

That brings me to a dilemma the contrast between these two versions has caused me to consider, though not for the first time: Which is more important, authenticity or readability? I suspect the answer is different for different works and for different people depending on the goals they want to achieve and the stories they want to create/read. But must the two necessarily be in opposition, are they mutually exclusive? These questions deserve more space and time than I can give them here today, but just from a cursory consideration, I seem to think they are opposed, and therefore that one or the other must be chosen and one or the other might be more important. Because if I write from the viewpoint of a fourteen-year-old amateur writer, not in a To Kill a Mockingbird retrospective way, but in a The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time immediate way, I must sacrifice readability for authenticity. For if I write well, in an easy-to-read way, then the authenticity of the fourteen-year-old’s writer’s voice is lost.

Generally, I think I’m more attracted to authenticity than to readability. Let’s take as an example (anyone who’s read my posts before can guess what’s coming next) James Joyce. I believe that the four episode of Ulysses, ‘Calypso’, which is the internal monologue of Leopold Bloom as he makes breakfast and gets ready for the day, is possibly the most accurate representation of representations of the conscious human mind in all of literature. It’s not very readable. It feels ‘authentic’ but you wouldn’t sit down and read it to your kids as a bed-time story. I think Virginia Woolf bridges the gap between authenticity and readability in some passages from To the Lighthouse well, but then she uses third-person free indirect style in that novel, which is different to the character’s themselves writing their stories. In The Waves she has the same ‘problem’ as Joyce; she goes for the more authentic stream-of-consciousness voice, so that book is harder to read as well.

Vladimir Nabokov, I’m told, does voices well, particularly in, I believe, Pale Fire, but I’ve not read that. That novel features the voices of a poet and a critic though, so they’re already writers. What I’m really talking about, before I start going too far into literary esoterica, is the difficulty of writing well in the voice of someone who is writing their own story, but is not a writer. Perhaps I’m a little hung up on ‘authenticity’ , on ‘reality’. I did my entire third-year dissertation on which group of writers ‘most realistically represented reality through fiction’ . I’m much more attracted to ‘realistic’ over ‘exciting’ characters who live excitingly readable lives; I’d much rather read about Leopold Bloom, Mrs. Ramsay and Marcel than… blast, what’s popular with normal people these days? Edward Cullen and Harry Potter and James Bond. No, they’re not great examples, but you get the idea.

And this is why, in stories such as ‘The Ghost of Sycamore Avenue’ I prefer the badly written ‘authentic’ version over the more well-written ‘readable’ version, and why in certain other stories, such as ‘My Ideal Saturday‘ and another one I wrote recently, I was conscious not to ‘over-write’ them, to leave them slightly rough, with a few awkward sentences, a few under-precise descriptions. Well, I like awkward sentences anyway, sometimes they’re more interesting than regular ones.

One final point on ‘authenticity’ over ‘readability’: the other problem a writer faces by writing badly, is that if the reader doesn’t get that this bad writing is a literary conceit, or they start to notice, say, spelling or typographical mistakes, there’s a danger they would think that writer was a bad writer, and not want to read any more of their work. Satisfied as I am of them, I wouldn’t like someone to read either The Ghost of Sycamore Avenue or My Ideal Saturday in isolation from my other stories. My Ideal Saturday particularly I feel has been a misunderstood story, and if it is read purely on a superficial level is very bland. I think it only works in the context of my other work, because, I assure you, it’s not really about a boy and a girl who live together in perfect bliss going out and having a nice day.

Okay, that is all on this subject, for now. And now that I have access to the internet again, I might even treat you all to some further updates in the near future.

Only one reason is shared by all of us [novelists]: We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is¹ – John Fowles

‘Real’ is subjective, changing from person to person and with the passing of time. Because of this indefinite nature, the representation of what is ‘real’ both in literature and in other art, has always been difficult. While all novelists may “wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is,” absolute ‘realism’ has not been the primary goal of every novel ever written: Many seek only to create enough of an internal realism to sustain suspension of disbelief. For example, no one would mistake a fantasy novel such as The Fellowship of the Ring² or even a Magical-Realist novel such as One Hundred Years of Solitude³ as reality because of the implausible and fantastic aspects of them. But there have been various movements and individual novels over the last century-and-a-half that have sought to represent the most ‘realistic’ real possible, to get as close to life as art can.

Three movements for which this has been the goal are Realism, Modernism and Post-Modernism, and three novels that typify the objectives of these movements are George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979). Each of these movements and novels has sought to be ‘realistic’ in a different way.

Middlemarch, a work of Realist fiction, aims to show an external realism: the reality of a community. Like any community the provincial town of Middlemarch is composed of individuals. Rather than focus on the stories of just one or two of these individuals, as many novels do, Eliot details extensively the stories of six or so major characters and around twenty more minor characters, as well as how they all fit into the whole of a society. This creates an ensemble cast where the actions of each character can affect events in another character’s story either directly or indirectly. As the critic Imraan Coovadia says “George Eliot treats large-scale social phenomena purely as the unintended aggregates of the microscopic transactions by which individuals unintentionally thwart or promote one another’s pursuits⁴.” There is an example of this on page 255 (see appendix 1) where Rosamond refuses to leave the house as her parents suggest when her brother becomes ill, causing her, whether intentionally or unintentionally, to have further contact with Mr. Lydgate, a man whom she eventually marries.

This is not presented as an isolated event however. Nor is it implied to be a necessary contrivance in order for the author to get two characters together. It is instead a small culmination of events up to that point: Fred’s illness, Doctor Wrench’s incompetence, Lydgate’s chance passing (each of which themselves has their own story). This presentation of a web of interrelated events is one of the tenets of Realism, a movement where there are no acts of God or of the divine author, only the acts of Man and how they relate to one another.

While the metaphor of a ‘web’ is the commonly used one to describe the myriad plot strands and society of Middlemarch, in chapter 27 Eliot also describes scratches on a shiny surface appearing to form “a fine series of concentric circles round a [candle]” as a parable where “the scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent.⁵” This parable makes explicit what Eliot is attempting to do in showing the various unrelated actions of different characters as seeming to form logically around any single character when that character is examined individually. In real life we can see the same thing because, as we can only view events from our own perspective, we perceive only how they affect ourselves or those around us, as if they had been consciously directed towards us.

In this way, the way that Realism “rephrase[s] outcomes as the functions of unintentional, but structured, processes⁶” Middlemarch can be argued to be realistic. However, the ‘realness’ of Realism also had its critics, notably Leo Bersani who, according to Imran Coovadia, “criticizes the use of devices such as coincidence and implausible connections within the multiplot novel.” Coovadia goes on to say that “for Bersani, the problem with realism is that it projects an artificial shape onto experience that has no intrinsic form at all.⁷” While it is true that some of the ‘coincidences’ in Middlemarch are very convenient for the plot, some such concessions are necessary for the sake of Middlemarch being a novel because there will always be some conflict between representing that which is true to life and that which is readable, as can be seen both in Modernist work, particularly that of James Joyce, and Postmodernist work, which would later address the artificiality of the novel-form.

Of Joyce’s most famous work, critic Terrance Doody has said “Ulysses is at first hard to read because it is so thoroughly realistic; we are not prepared for an ordinary mind like Bloom’s to be so spacious, nor for a world as small as Dear Dirty Dublin to be so rich in significant detail.⁸” Indeed, the stream-of-conciousness technique popular with the Modernist writers that Joyce employs throughout much of Ulysses does require acclimatisation, for it seeks to replicate and follow the semi-concious processes of thinking. In this way it could be said that Joyce in Ulysses seeks to represent an internal real; the real of the mind and of perception, rather than the real of society.

What distinguishes Ulysses is its attention to detail in describing every aspect of the single day over which the novel occurs, creating a chronological, almost real-time narrative. This is shown by the way nothing is glossed over in Leopold Bloom’s journey around Dublin: We see him eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, we see him shopping, going to a funeral, the newspaper office, the beach, the hospital, the public house, and defecating.

This last act, occurring during Bloom’s introduction in the Calypso episode (see appendix 2), particularly emphasises the way Joyce approaches realism in his novel: everyone goes to the toilet, but very rarely in books or other art-forms, perhaps because the action is so mundane and familiar that it merits as little merit as the fact that the characters are breathing. Yet Doody takes Joyce’s position as “a human character is most himself not in any social relationship, but alone with his thoughts of the world.⁹” Showing Bloom on the toilet then adds a striking realism to his character as a person, as well as allowing the reader an uncommon intimacy with his thoughts.

The thoughts of characters are of great importance in Ulysses as it is these that drive the narrative. Since the novel is chronological and takes place within a single day, it is left to the characters’ thoughts to jump between the past, present and future, revealing the characters’ relationships to each other, their hopes for the future and their memories. For example, between pages 80 and 85, Bloom thinks briefly of his daughter away at school, his dead son, dressing with his wife, his plans for the garden, a funeral he will attend, and the magazine he is reading, among other subjects. While some of these are more significant than others, all are given only a line or two each before Bloom moves on to the next thought. They are not presented in any particular order, except that which would seem logical to the character, and many make little sense until the reader learns more, piece-by-piece later in the novel.

While this makes the novel challenging to read, and the fact that the almost total lack of events other than the mundane activities of the characters day-to-day to lives eschews the idea of a traditional plot structure, there is a realism and believability to this novel: People’s lives, particularly in their own heads, are not laid out as a clear-cut logical plot, they are established by the minute and recurring events of every-day life, and by their memories and their hopes for the future. By showing this, and by trying to bridge the gap between thought and language, Joyce has brought the novel closer to a different, though equally valid, idea of ‘real life’ than that in Middlemarch, but in the process of doing so, has made his novel obscure. The same can be said of his final work, Finnegan’s Wake (1939) in which Joyce attempts to replicate the experience of sleep through an idioglossia. This work has been called both “the most realistic novel ever written¹⁰” and “unreadable¹¹” by different critics.

By contrast, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, is a highly readable novel, drawing the reader effortlessly in with the first line “you are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller.¹²” (See Appendix 3) Referring to the reader directly with a second-person personal pronoun and having the reader as a character within the novel they are reading represents another level of reality, an extra-textual reality. This is an approach peculiar to Postmodern technique: making the text self-aware so that it can reference not only that which is outside the text, in this case the reader, but the position of the text itself within the outside world, as can be seen in the first line of the first incipit: “The novel begins in a railway station.¹³” (See Appendix 4).

Traveller continues in much the same way, and although the path of the Reader in Traveller becomes distinct as a character separate from the actual reader of the novel, frequent interjections from the author, who calls himself ‘Italo Calvino’, constantly remind the reader that they are reading a work of fiction. In an interview Calvino stated “Brecht’s conception of the epic theatre is one in which the drama must not make the audience believe in the reality of its world but instead must declare itself openly as theatre, in order to arouse the audience’s critical powers¹⁴.” This is important because Calvino wants to address the artificiality of the text, which was the problem Bersani raised with Realistic novels such as Middlemarch.

The difficulty for Calvino in doing this is treading the line between “the traditional novel, in which the reader identifies with more or less realistic characters” and the “postmodernist self-concious novel in which the author strives to lay bare the mechanics of literary production¹⁵.” However, we are encouraged not to believe in the “traditional novel” aspects of Traveller because the author references them from outside and leaves them incomplete, representing them as nothing more than fiction. Similarly, the divergence of the Reader character from the actual reader causes the reader to question how the second-person personal pronoun can any longer refer to them. If these are taken away, little is left but an essay on the act of reading.

Unlike Middlemarch and Ulysses, rather than create a society or a character in a fictional world that seems real, Calvino in Traveller has created an artificial narrative in the real world. He has not solved the problem of the novel-form’s artificiality, only acknowledged its limitations. Even the real-world reader he references is, as Brian McHale argued about The French Lieutenant’s Woman in his essay Postmodernist Fiction¹⁶, another level of fiction made to seem more real than the one below it: Rather than being real, the Reader (character) within Traveller is only more real than the novel-beginnings he is reading.

It is tempting to say that there can be no definitively realistic novel because what is ‘real’ is subjective; because Jacques Lacan describes the Real as that which is outside of language; because Nietzsche says “Realism in art is an illusion, all the writers of all the ages were convinced they were realistic.¹⁷” If this is true, then no novel can be said to be more ‘realistic’ than another, nor for that matter, can any art-form be more realistic than another. Middlemarch is ‘realistic’ in its depiction of human action and reaction, just as Ulysses is ‘realistic’ in its depiction of mundane familiarity, just as Traveller is ‘realistic’ in its self-awareness as a novel. None could be said to be the most ‘realistic’ or the closest to ‘real life’, but what separates them is their perception and representation of what is ‘real’, or not so much what is ‘real’ as what is important to that depiction of reality.

Aldous Huxley wrote in The Doors of Perception “Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner¹⁸.” He is disparaging towards art for not being real, and yet that is what art, and words, are: symbolic. When art approaches too closely ‘real life’ it runs the risk of entering the uncanny valley, or, as in the case of a novel such as Finnegans Wake becoming inaccessible. These three examples of Realism, Modernism and Postmodernism, it can be argued, come as close to ‘real life’, each in their own way, as it seems advisable for a work of art to come.

Footnotes: