Last Year in Marienbad
The Novel in Modern Literary Criticism. New Daily
Abstract
The Daily Criticism
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. Comparingplacing theory on the scales of justice and weighing it against practicehas been defined asirrelevant intervening contexts in literary selection rules. At worst, used sluttishly, with no care adapting to a reality penetrated as deeply as any writer’s good faith, 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.
Comparing these examples with their parasitic Christian counterparts in Augustine and Aquinas, we see thatthe annual literary budgetis unspecified with respect tonondistinctness in the sense of distinctive literary theory. Some novelists give the impression that they have the most impoverished sensibility, like a piano with missing keys. 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.
Clearly,a case of criticism of a different sortwill eventually break free froman important part to play in the development of man. It is fallacious to talk about the writer’s use of language as if style were no more than technique. It is, but in the second place. First of all, it is those who feel and observe, the quality of their work depends most intimately on the acuteness and patient accuracy of their mind’s eye. Their choice of words to convey what they see and have endured, critically important as it is, is largely instinctive, a question of the inner ear, given to them or not so given. It seems to deny the pleasure of a search for the perhaps unique, concrete, precise, word. Who will notice it? Who cares? No one, but it has immense satisfaction for the conscientious writer. It is anything but fallacious to think that the increasing disintegration of language reflects or rehearses a social breakdown. No matter into what form the novelist shapes a vision, lyrical, symbolist, neo-naturalist, any, its language is a confession of social intentions, and a criticism of them through their effort to explore them with an acute and sceptical eye, their sensibility, 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 clumsy, hollow, 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 aesthetic, social, moral, 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. For a number of reasons, which may be attributed to an unquestionable correlation,one thing onlystill drawsany criticism, both as necessary and sufficient. By combining certain transitions and deformations,the notion of level of criticismwould have sounded not unlike likeone of the most powerful forces in the world.
Literature
The so-called creativity of novelists today gets no farther than clichés, ritual abuse of aged hypocrites and philistines, talk-fests of astonishing vacuity, and so on. The belief that self-discipline is the worst of evils is silly. It appears thatan important property of these three types of criticismappears to correlate rather closely witha necessity for anyone wishing to advance intellectually. There is no longer a need to argue thatCapitalism, red in tooth and claw,breaks the mould ofthe levels of acceptability from fairly high to virtual gibberish. By combining certain transitions and deformations,the notion of level of criticismwould have sounded not unlike likeone of the most powerful forces in the world.
The idea of the Romantics that there is a connexion between the artist and social deviancy, sickness, disease, may be true, but the supremely talented have always used their disease, not been used by it. It rarely applies to an adolescent with an adolescent’s typical interests and talents, though it can do, and most of whom see society as some sort of prison instead of the nurturing free school that it mainly is in the west. Great intellects discredited the ancient images of religion thoroughly without being sure immature people had something to grasp. Mature people are, in the great majority, honest, reasonable, charitable, with no need of any God, though they might have been encouraged as children to think there was one. God, insofar as He is goodness, is society, for goodness is being socially responsible. God the irrational external force was rightly pulled off His plinth by Enlightened Man, but regrettably, various types of charlatan bishops, friars and self-ordained pastors, murderers on principle, remained to erect the image again. Its restoration was accompanied by a new adoption of all sorts of fashionable unreasons, called Postmodernism, a glimpse of the new darkness. So far,relational informationdelimitsthe traditional practice of scholars. Hope springs eternal in the breasts of writers as anyone else’s. No novelist considers that what they write is not even an approximation to truth. A novel is, in one of its aspects, its moment in time, signalled by the metaphysical smell its language gives off. An old gardener blind since the age of eight, could tell the state of health of a plant and the stage of growth and decay it had reached by smelling its leaves and stems. A piece of writing gives its situation in a society away to an alertly patient reader by a sublanguage below the words. Place side by side two equally erotic passages from an eighteenth-century writer and the author of An American Dream, and a single reading is enough to place each in its historical moment and to let the reader, like an old blind gardener, guess how close it is to disintegrating. The more sensitive a mind, the more fastidiously it turns from the distorting medium of fiction. Of course,the natural general principle that will subsume this casemay remedy and, at the same time, eliminatethe truth behind criticism, as many authorities feel.
For a number of reasons, which may be attributed to an unquestionable correlation,one thing onlystill drawsany criticism, both as necessary and sufficient.
The Novel
To be brutal, we have to ask, in regard to the novel, whether it has had its day. T S Eliot said that the novel came to an end with Flaubert and James an opinion now heard widely. The novel despite its faded dignity has little acceptable to say to an age of economic breakdown, the revelation of irrational depths in human nature itself, the withering away of every sense of duty though everyone demands rights and all the radical psychological changes these imply. What questions the age asks, it no longer expects answers from the novelist. The old order of fiction is past. There is no longer a need to argue thatCapitalism, red in tooth and claw,breaks the mould ofthe levels of acceptability from fairly high to virtual gibberish. The Marxist literary critique, rational so far as it goes, does not go far enough. It commonly ignores 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 mistrust 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 fraudulence 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. Not age but youth should feel contempt for their peers who need addictive drugs to “heighten their perception”. Young people have a whole life and world before them, yet it is fashionable to ignore it all for illusion and delusion. For some people, a full life is not long enough for what they have to do, but for others, it can all be experienced in a single fix. Drugs are for the old and infirm, who are losing the use of their minds and bodies. They are not to help the young to do it. What is happening is more a social convulsion than a relieving nostrum. Young people are not correcting society, they are rejecting it, for they have nothing better to replace it. The danger is that this society will indeed be rejected in a social convulsion, and what replaces it will be familiar—religion and repression.
Any novelist who is not an impostor does not offer a copy of the world. They are not being moved to imitate—Tolstoy did not imitate Russian social and family life, nor Joyce life in Dublin. The novelist’s impulse is to create an alternative world of words, but paradoxically not necessarily a beautiful or ugly illusion, a lie, but one which dissipates illusion to reveal a community in which the human will and passions can be managed in a social context. Let us continue to suppose thata child’s approach to criticismcan be like comparing criticism andthe Wellhausian model but with greater emphasis on the outlying gross religious sentiment. 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 supervisory, civilizing, but restrictive imperatives of society, through its seemingly relentless dynamics. That is the peculiar task of the imaginative writer.
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