I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 2 7between knee and ankle stood an excellent chance of being elected
king. In which case, we would be forced to reclassify the text
as realist.
A visitor from Alpha Centauri who was handed a history of
humanity, complete with wars, famines, genocides and massacres,
might suppose that this was some outrageously surrealist text.
There is a great deal in human history that beggars belief. Awarding
the Nobel Peace Prize to a politician who illegally bombed
Cambodia is merely one example. For psychoanalytic thought,
dreams and fantasies bring us closer to the truth about ourselves
than our waking life. Yet if these dreams and fantasies were to be
put in fictional form, we would probably not regard the result as a
realist work. In any case, there are very few purely realist works. A
lot of supposedly realist texts contain some grossly improbable
features. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, we are told that a woman’s
face ‘had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain
mingled with the fear of some struggling, half- shaped resolve’. This
impossible facial expression exists only at the level of language. It is
doubtful that even the most talented of actors could look tragic,
fierce, wild, sorrowful, pained, fearful and half resolved at the same
time. An Oscar would be a poor reward for such a performance.
If Joyce’s Finnegans Wake rebuffs interpretation, it is partly
because it is written in a number of different languages at the same
time. Joyce’s compatriot J.M. Synge was said to be the only man
who could write in English and Irish simultaneously. Like all of
Joyce’s writing, the Wake reveals a profound trust in the power of
the word, but this is not true of modernism in general. Modernism
sends words out on a spree, but this is not generally because it has
a robust faith in them. It is more typical of it to be distrustful of
language, as with T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. Can it really