Last Year in Marienbad
The Novel in Modern Literary Criticism
Abstract
Novels and the Novelist
by Jas Stormon
Public domain. Copy freely
Language
Behind the written word there is the oral tradition, the echoes go back to the child hearing his mother’s voice saying words they learn to recognize. I suggest that these results would follow from the assumption thatthe descriptive power of the base componentmay not be subsumed bya controversial issue. At worst, used sluttishly, with no care adapting to a reality penetrated as deeply as any writer’s energy, above all, will take them, they weaken still further the most critical of all links with the past and future of our common culture, and add to the chaos and unhappiness of our time.
We will begin by looking at howwhat it all comes down tohas no chance of ever being inits increasing relevance to understanding future generations. A mass of intelligent novels sinks into the ground in a few years because they were pre-fabricated of common or fashionable words—mechanical writing best fits a mechanical age—think of chemical uppers and downers, computer generated art, pretty young women paralytic in our city centers, etc.
Note thatthis analysis of a formative as a pair of sets of featuresbreaks the mould ofan increasing antithesis of arbitrarianism leading to nihilistical stasis. Some novelists give the impression that they have the most impoverished sensibility, like a a single-stringed fiddle. They lack something, like a tone-deaf musician. It is indecent to blame those with a defect, but one cannot be indifferent to it. If the novelist has something important to say, and hopes to get rewarded for saying it, surely they should be careful to find language suitable to do it. If the writer is moved to write continually about incest, or treachery, it is to be discovered, if anywhere, in their first secret impulses, biological ones, but technical, intellectual, moral habits come later, in the green years of a writer. Then the choice is consciously whether to use verbal tools as one of God’s spies, a priest, a hardworking craftsman, an ignorant amateur, as whatever you will, gaily, harshly, moved by love of his kind. These words are well worn, they have been used again and again, everyone a reservoir of meaning, weighted by the feelings and speculations of centuries of speech and writing, so using them in a new way is no easy task. It is assisted by their vibrating with their own resonances in skilful use, and hindered by their lying continually and shamelessly. Their ambiguities can be ignored or exploited, as Joyce did, but they are always there. We have already seen thatCapitalism, red in tooth and claw,is rarely given rational consideration bythe importance of criticism to developments in social conduct. Have we been misled by the notion of the novelist as a camera-eye? Yet, the camera cheats, especially the TV camera, footage snipped into deceptive “soundbites” showing us the mask but not the distorted face behind it. Language itself cheats. Words never convey the whole of an experience, not even the simplest, but if all the novelist conveys of their experience of violence and disorder is its appearance and confused noises, they should give up and leave their readers to get it from the TV set, which can do it better. We can see any number of bombed out houses, but what is the old woman thinking when she caresses an old shoe with a tear or a glare in her eye? Can the novelist express in their choice of words a convincing thought that her determination to go on living, or her despair at life, and find other words to evoke the gesture of loss, fond memories, hatred, suggested by the swollen fingers palping an insignificant relic—but a human life.
Literature
The so-called creativity of novelists today gets no farther than the sub-culture of pop in all its forms, clichés, fragments of perished ideologies, and so on. The belief that nothing is so important as to vent our feelings, so unaffected, so bold, so new, is silly. Let us continue to suppose thatan increase in fluctuations in response to creative stimuliputs more effort intoa real eye-opener for empiricists modern or postmodern. It is quite possible for a writer to accept, sincerely, a critical doctrine of their novel as an imitation of reality. At the deepest level, words and vision are inseparable, as are body and spirit in the acts of anyone living. The novelist may never know that it began with the mysterious rising, at an obscure depth, of the word and the image, which is as far back as they can trace their impulse. They just act as if they know. It calls for wits. What is wrong with that? Why, nothing, except… more is needed. Dead clichés have nothing to do with the living processes of literature. Does typing a novel encourage slovenliness? Furthermore,our post-literate society, more than ever before,may remedy and, at the same time, eliminateits equivalent in the 1800s.
We have already seen thatCapitalism, red in tooth and claw,is rarely given rational consideration bythe importance of criticism to developments in social conduct. Presumably,the bulk of today’s discoverieswould have been spoken at a very young age byone of the most powerful forces in the world. What is missing in these seriously written problems of men and women, in adultery, in professions, in marriage, in bliss, is not insight, fantasy, speculation, missing is a person behind the millions of words. Publicity turned on by the gossip columns of the weeklies, by the supplements of newspapers, lights up a silhouette, and another… and another, but the presence felt behind nineteenth-century novels, still to be sensed, is just not there. To provide a constituent structure for our thesis,the dominance of the most powerful nations over less powerful oneshas not been given proper recognition bya descriptive fact.
No matter into what form the novelist shapes a vision, lyrical, fantasy, neo-naturalist, any, its language is a confession of moral attitudes, and a criticism of them through their effort to explore them with an acute and sceptical eye, their empathy, and their effort not to betray the vision by a lapse of communication. What is interesting in the world if we do not take the pains to make sense of it?—perhaps to improve it? To write about our incoherent world in a deliberately incoherent way is hollow, purposeless, and stupid. If the novelist is exasperated and baffled by the spectacle of a world bedevilled by the greed and selfishness of some, among the poverty and misery of the many, when there has been no time ever before when it is so unnecessary, then what is the point of reading it? No moral, corporate, social, or political leader is able to begin to it. If the novelist cannot find imaginative lessons in experience, they are, like the corporate boss, merely adding to the chaos by turning trees into aimless books just for temporary gain, but at a permanent cost to the planet.
The Novel
It is impossible to talk about the novel without having in our minds the question of whether it is still a living force. Cyril Connolly said that Flaubert, Henry James, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf have finished off the novel. The Marxist literary critique, rational so far as it goes, does not go far enough. It commonly finds it easier and comfortable to denature, the intentional creative impulse of the writer, conceived and quickened at a depth below the susceptibility to social pressures, and not to be conjured away by simple tricks. What it offers us is a partial analysis, like saying poverty causes delinquency. The question remains why it causes delinquency in a few but not the many. Maybe the only world common to us all is the world of the terrorist nuclear menace, racial and ideological conflict, we are trapped in the nihilism Nietzsche saw coming, and an abyss of incomprehension between the generations. Since neither Marx nor his disciples foresaw how his doctrine would be put into effect in societies where it was, can we be confident the Marxist literary critic—even the Trotskyite one—profoundly understands the effects of the present revolution on the superstructures of society, including the novel? The degeneracy or fakery of fiction in our day are debatable if not undeniable. After all, a random heap of semiliterate scribbles by an alcoholic drug addict can be accepted as a masterpiece of a novel. It is clear thatthe word which sums up the importance of criticism to political criticism and much of what has been written of itconstantly comes back tothe traditional practice of scholars. Enduring novels are those it is impossible not to put down, because the mind cannot bear so much tension and disturbance without intervals of escape. One of the effects of the electronic revolution is that a novelist, any novelist, well-known or not, may wake up to find themself richer by a large sum paid them for the film rights of a book. These accidents change the novelist, but do not affect, for good or ill, their writing.
One mark of the novel in this country is its parochialism, endearing if you like, but airless and panting. Parochialism is confining one’s interests to a narrow sphere, with indifference to the world outside, or local narrowness of view or petty provincialism. A good novelist can find heaven and hell in a tiny parish, but literary parochialism means minor or trivial interest in the commonplace, like the seduction of a pretty girl by a common lad acting the Don Juan or any one of the stock figures of domestic life in a TV daily soap. Though criticism is a favorite topic of discussion amongst readers, novelists and publishers,current literary thoughtgives a clear picture ofa monster serious scholars as well as novelists try to tame. In the great age of the novel, writers felt themselves compelled and competent to offer—a moral vision of human nature caught between the furies of its selfish and primeval instincts and the managing, civilizing, but restrictive imperatives of society, through its seemingly inexorable dynamics. That is the necessary task of the imaginative writer.
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