the reality of novels

i'm not sure how much i read novels this way but my first cliche answer is probably big chunks of Joyce from Dubliners thru to Ulysses. there are lots of passages in those two and Portrait that always feel vivid and present to me and that elicit sympathetic recognition.

i had a girlfriend once who would always remember some bit from catcher in the rye when she was holding hands with a boy

i used to always remember the scenes between hal and orin incandenza from infinite jest whenever i clipped my nails

always made it seem somehow like this world and that world were coextensive or aligned or something

summer meanderings thru Dublin feel like every sunny walk i've taken thru the city

I'm not quite sure I understand the question but I think I like its direction.

But I'm not sure that the novels that are real to me would be very distinct from just novels that I like. Because I like fiction that feels real somehow. A circular logic.

Ulysses is the obvious answer for me as for the poster above.

Another is Geoff Dyer's first novel THE COLOUR OF MEMORY: essentially because it details a world that was fairly familiar to me. So that's partially like stand-up 'observational comedy / comedy of recognition', etc - it feels real because it's naming things I know from the real world.

perhaps, the pinefox, it is indexed by the difference between 'well of course it's just a book', i.e. not real, ficitonal, and some sense of 'to be sure, it's a book... but it's real'

'present' is a good word, also 'presence'

I think there's also a sense of reality which comes from not being familiar. This isn’t a novel, but I read The Kalevala recently, and there are some absolutely wonderful and startlingly unusual stories in it, completely separate from any range of reference I had previously, and I might say that its brilliance asserted its reality in my mind. That’s one way stories can feel real, in startling you with a very unusual perspective of what human beings are like.

i think the initial question, as far as it distinguishes something "real" from "Realism" as a genre/style/technique, reflects my own issues with the latter, i.e. i almost always find Realism very artificial and often not in a satisfying way. "realness" in art is something different from the implied blunt scientism of descriptive rigour. maybe. a big maybe.

something to do with Realism being hitched to plot, and plot being the opposite of "the real" idk

i was reading monsieur gerard genette recently, in his chapter on duration in narrative he says the four basic narrative movements are descriptive pause, scene, summary, and ellipsis, and up til the end of the nineteenth century novels would be mostly dramatic scenes against a background of summary used to link them. seems like the attachment to that kind of scenic writing might have to do with the artificiality of 'Realistic' plot (used to maximize the impact of all the scenes).

http://spurious.typepad.com/spurious/2016/09/back-in-march-i-discussed-josipovicis-work-with-him-at-the-newcastle-centre-for-literary-arts-no-recording-exists-but-ther.html

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?

that's v interesting, tho it's only a problem if you're trying to save some version of realism

have you ever read any nouveaux romans? somehow never got round to it, think i was mistakenly waiting for my French to get there.

If I had a bit more extra brain space I would pursue this question from a different direction, asking how does our imagination conjure a sense of reality without any immediate sensual input connected to that reality? From there it one could inquire what sort of verbal suggestions best activate that feeling of reality? My hunch is that it may well differ according to the individual, but it would be fun to think about.

xp i don't know, i think not really

i read part of 'tropisms' the other month does that count

i have a robbe-grillet detective novels somewhere that i never cracked

This is a potentially interesting topic that I have nothing to say about right now.

A novel that felt vividly real to me and huge and expansive, while being utterly wild, in a sense what Denis Johnson's Train Dreams. It's all the more amazing because it's actually no more than a novella and yet you feel like you learn everything about the protagonist and his environment. It's all so fucking REAL. I recommend it to everyone.

^^^^^^ seconded

Though I was hoping for the same (+ Graham Greene atmosphere) from his most recent, The Laughing Monsters, and so was a bit underwhelmed.