| The comparatively limited and instinctual handling of narration and temporality during much of the nineteenth century gave way to a period of experimentation in which novelists sought new methods in order to represent subjective consciousness and the inner experience of time. As confidence waned in the idea of an objective, independent and knowable "reality", the novel's fictional world was felt to have substance only insofar as it was portrayed within the flux of consciousness. Consequently, the narrational and temporal form of the novel assumed new significance as a structuring device and as an index of narrative realism, a development that superseded conventional realism's attention to probable plots and plausible characters. In effect, the narrational situation became subject to a new kind of perceptual realism.;In George Eliot's progression from Adam Bede to The Mill on the Floss and Dickens' progression through David Copperfield, Bleak House and Great Expectations can be seen a growing concern to make narrative structure evoke not the broad oscillations of history but rather the recording of impressions in time on the individual consciousness and their subsequent recall in memory. As a result, the conventional first-person situation undergoes great change in order to focus less on the report of past events and more on the experience of remembering those events in the narrational present. Henry James's pivotal narrational and temporal innovations achieve an effect in the third-person situation similar to that of Eliot's and Dickens' retrospective novels. The Ambassadors intricately exploits the counterpoint between the immediate recording of impressions on Strether's consciousness and his later recollection of those impressions, thereby evoking duration in a manner unlike conventional nineteenth-century novels. Through complex narrational situations that force the reader to reconstruct for himself the tenuous reality of the Sutpen tale, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! dramatizes a collective and subconscious stratum of mind and memory. Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude creates a world reminiscent of the fictional worlds of nineteenth-century realism, but it undercuts that world by insisting on the fiction's dependence upon a narrational and temporal form that represents existence--and fictions--as a kind of collective memory. |
