The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk

Author:Orhan Pamuk [Pamuk, Orhan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-74525-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

It is impossible not to see a connection between the great advances in the art of the novel in the mid-nineteenth century—when it became the dominant literary form in Europe—and the sudden exponential increase in European affluence during the same period, which resulted in a veritable flood of material goods into cities and homes: an abundance and variety of objects unprecedented in the Western world. Especially in urban life, the massive wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution surrounded people with new devices, consumer goods, art objects, clothes, textiles, paintings, trinkets, and bric-à-brac. The newspapers in which these objects were described, the changing lives and tastes of the classes that used them, the countless advertisements, and the various signs and notices in the city landscape became a significant and colorful part of Western culture. All this visual profusion, this surfeit of objects, this hectic urban activity, banished the simpler ways of living which had seemed so straightforward in the good old days. People now felt that they had lost sight of the bigger picture amid the welter of details, and they suspected that meaning was hidden somewhere in the shadows. Adjusting to new modes of life, the modern city-dweller discovered part of the meaning he sought in these life-enriching objects. The place of an individual in society and in novels was determined partly by his home, his possessions, his clothes, his rooms, his furniture, and his bric-à-brac. In his poetic and quite visual novel Sylvie, published in 1853, Nerval says that in those days many people collected curios to decorate apartments in old-fashioned buildings.

Balzac was the first writer to incorporate the social and personal appetite for objects and bric-à-brac into the landscape of his novels. Both Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black and Balzac’s Père Goriot, which was written at about the same time, open with an exterior description (that is, from the reader’s point of view) of the setting in which the events will take place. In Stendhal, the place we gradually enter is a small, quaint town nestled in a valley, but in Balzac the setting is very different: he gives a detailed portrait of a boarding house, beginning with the wicket gate and the garden. The following descriptions are taken from Old Goriot, the translation of Balzac’s novel by Marion Ayton Crawford. There are horsehair chairs, a table with a top of Sainte-Anne marble, a white china tea-service whose gilt pattern is half worn away (“the kind of tea-service that is inevitably found everywhere today,” Balzac adds scornfully, making his point clearer), vases of artificial flowers imprisoned within bell jars and flanking a vulgar bluish marble clock, food smells lingering in the air, stained decanters, thick blue-bordered earthenware, a barometer, some engravings bad enough to spoil your appetite and framed in varnished black wood with gilt beading, a clock with a tortoiseshell case inlaid with copper, a green stove, lamps coated with dust and oil, a long table covered with oilcloth so greasy that a facetious boarder

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