The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel مقاله

خلاصه ماشینی:

The conscious reflections and measures of the novelist are by no means a field for addressing these issues, and there are reasons to support the suspicion that wherever a novelist turns to such reflections, such as the highly ambitious novels of Hermann Broch, it does not benefit the work of art; rather, on the contrary [in such cases], historical changes in "form" appear in the guise of the author's strange and peculiar sensitivities. Many people have pointed out that in the modern novel, not only in Proust's novels but also in the fabrications of André Gide, in the late works of Thomas Mann, or in The Man Without Qualities by Musil, reflection and rethinking manifest themselves through the breaking down of the internal elements of form. But in the most advanced [artistic] productions, which are not strangers to this weakness and frailty, the elimination of aesthetic distance is one of the requirements of form itself; this act is one of the most effective tools for penetrating in foreground relations and expressing what lies behind them, namely the negative aspect of the positive [or the negative (imaginary) nature of the affirmative (real)]. What necessitates the abolition of aesthetic distance in the contemporary novel is the inherent tendency of the literary form itself, and consequently, it is this very tendency that is condemned to bow before the superior power of reality—that same reality whose transformation is not possible through recourse to an imaginary image (image), but is only achievable in a concrete way, in reality.