I was wondering, as I read a long introduction to Erich Auerbach’s critical study of reality in western literature, if other people have little techniques and quirks for keeping their place when reading. Obviously, most people use bookmarks, the sensible, purpose-built tool for reliable book navigation, although some others, horror of horrors!, actually deface books by folding over the corners of their pages. My mother does this occasionally with her second-hand thrillers; my father has at several times expressed a severe distaste for the act. Personally, I can’t bring myself to damage any book, however poor its writing may be. I remember once last year, at a private view I attended, I believe for the Visual Studies course, my heart gave a lurch when I saw an artwork involving the cultivation of cress upon the partially-shredded pages of an open book. I experienced another cardiological shudder when, after reading only a few lines between the vibrant foliage, I realised the book was none other than Richard Adams’ Watership Down, doubtlessly one of the best books about talking rabbits ever written. Fortunately, my consternation was somewhat mitigated by the relative merit of the piece, which was actually rather well executed.

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I recently watched the first season of The Hills, an MTV reality drama series about a girl called Lauren who used to be on another reality TV programme I’ve never watched, called Laguna Beach. For me, the show was interesting in two ways: firstly, it offers a voyeuristic look into American life, and secondly, more interestingly, it creates a strange interplay between the real and the fake. For example, the show is structured as a television drama serial, with each episode centring around a particular subject and leading to a climax within the episode, in the same way each season builds towards a climax, and all the ‘stars’ of the show are presented as characters, with certain traits enhanced through the editing. It’s certainly not a documentary, the way it presents this skewed view of its subjects, and instead, with the title referring to Beverly Hills, the city neighbouring Hollywood, becomes a reality TV show in a town where everything is fake.

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Firstly, I would like to apologise for any typos in this article: I have a headache from trying to remember my password, and I’m typing on my little eee pc, which, as a counterweight to its incredible portability, does not possess the most ergonomic keyboard (and also an unresponsive ‘a’ key).

Anyway, I just watched The Shipping News, which is based on an Annie Prolux novel of the same name, and it is the best movie I’ve seen since… Once Upon a Time in America (not that I’m sure how many films I have seen since then). (more…)

This is an essay that I wrote as part of my university course, a little heavy-going perhaps, but it was something I enjoyed writing and I suppose some people may enjoy reading, so here it is:

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.

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