Close Readings

What happens when the techniques of realist literature become absorbed into our understanding of real life? And what would it mean to try to depict that experience in fiction? In Dag Solstad’s Shyness and Dignity (1994), a middle-aged teacher, Elias Rukla, is teaching Ibsen’s The Wild Duck for perhaps the hundredth time when he has a revelation about an apparently insignificant detail in the play relating to a minor character, Dr Relling. The detail is classically realist in that it appears to have no importance in the plot, yet it acquires a major significance in Rukla’s life, who shortly after the lesson has a breakdown in the school playground and is convinced his career is finished. In this episode, James Wood is joined by Adam Thirlwell to discuss a novel that avoids the expectations of realism to explore the psychological and cultural impact of the realist tradition. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Adam Mars-Jones on Solstad: https://lrb.me/realism1101 David Edgar on Ibsen: https://lrb.me/realism1103 Michael Hofmann on Thomas Bernhard: https://lrb.me/realism1102 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned his fellowship at Oxford after realising that he could no longer in good conscience teach the doctrines of the Anglican Church, as the job required. He immediately embarked on some European travel and the following year found himself in Rome during the short-lived republican uprising against the Pope, led by Giuseppe Mazzini. Out of these experiences came Amours de Voyage, an epistolary verse novel written in hexameters, in which a young scholar visits Italy during the uprising and falls in love with a fellow English tourist. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at Clough’s poem as an expression of its author’s rootlessness and the crisis of faith that characterised the age, and the ways in which it undercuts the grand Byronic promise of its title and meter to unfold an Austenian story of subtle social snobbery and young romantic failure. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applesignupnp⁠ Other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Read more in the LRB: Fergus McGhee: Mr Mid-Victorian Doubt https://lrb.me/npep1001 Christopher Clark: God Bless Italy https://lrb.me/npep1002 Stefan Collini: Matthew Arnold https://lrb.me/npep101003 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Muriel Spark describes the art teacher, Mr Lloyd, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she writes that ‘most wonderful of all, he had only one arm, the right, with which he painted’. The loss of an arm was hardly wonderful for Mr Lloyd, but for the girls at the centre of the novel it is a rich source of fascination, and Spark’s description exemplifies her use of one of the classic realist tools, free indirect style, to fill her short book with the life and character of adolescent girlhood at an Edinburgh school in the 1930s. In this episode, James Wood considers the ways in which Spark, like Nabokov, gave the grammar of realism a post-modernist treatment to interrogate what it means to tell the story of a life. He considers the influence of Miss Brodie’s tyrannical, charismatic personality on the structure of the book itself, with its use of flash-forwards to suggest a Calvinistic, omniscient narrator, and the effect of Spark’s Dickensian leitmotif that sets the novelistic desire for knowability against the relentless change of youth. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Frank Kermode on Spark's life: https://lrb.me/realismep1001 Colin Burrow on Spark's letters: https://lrb.me/realismep1002 Susan Eilenberg on Spark's poems: https://lrb.me/realismep1003 More Spark in Close Readings: Listen to Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow on Spark's novel A Far Cry from Kensington in their Close Readings series On Satire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices