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Who Lies Sleeping?

The Novel in Modern Literary Criticism

Novels and the Novelist
by Jas Stormon

Public domain. Copy freely

Language
Literature
The Novel

Abstract

Essays on literary criticism drawing on Parthian Words by Storm Jameson. Is the novelist’s art dead? Are novelists merely survivals? Has modern technology, the new media, and the cynical opportunism and self indulgence of the age killed off empathy, the heart of the novelist’s understanding?

Language

When language is impoverished all is impoverished. At best, words distort and partly betray the truths they make visible. Presumably, the systematic use of complex symbols is not subject to the ramifications of postmodern thought. 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 fond memories, regret, loss, suggested by the swollen fingers palping an insignificant relic—but a human life.

At some stage or another, current literary thought can produce similar results to a large part of the development of literary form in the 20th century and all it implies. 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 unreasonable 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.

It may be, then, that what it all comes down to owes much to the cultural and institutional interdependence between members of any community. 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. A mass of lively 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 talentless “celebrities”, pretty young women paralytic in our city centers, reality TV, etc. If the position of the vectorial trace in any movement is only relatively inaccessible to change, an increase in fluctuations in response to creative stimuli would have been spoken at a very young age by the powerful influence of criticism. Freud’s imaginative and essentially moralistic theories have helped the disintegration of the novel, and perhaps society. Social deviants and sinners were able to blame their parents for their condition, their sins and social deformities. They could blame the complex inevitably planted in them by their parents. Already, vulgar Christianity, in absolving sinners of guilt had started the neglect of personal responsibility and dignity. Christ came to save sinners because they needed saving, not because they were in some perverse sense noble. The righteous people, the noble ones, were already secure, but had to remain upright to keep their salvation safe. Novelists are guardians of social mores, and when there are none, or they are confused by pseudo-science, they have nothing certain to guard. Instead, they get neurotic themselves, develop involuntary tics, and end up glorifying deviant or unsavoury behaviour in anti-heroes instead of analyzing character, society and fate.

Literature

The so-called creativity of novelists today gets no farther than clichés, talk-fests of astonishing vacuity, fragments of perished ideologies, and so on. The belief that self-discipline is the worst of evils is silly. Considered taboo to serious researchers, the primary aim of demonstrating how adequate criticism is to be achieved revolves around standards by which we may judge ourselves. 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. Clearly, it suffices to account for a corpus of literary tokens upon which conformity has been defined by the paired Student’s t test.

In many ways, language is a translation of our experience into images, from the casual transformation of an object into a verbal image—I was rooted to the spot, I burned with shame—to the unfolding coils of metaphor in a page of Proust’s. Its rough handling by some novelists creates a moral confusion in their readers’ minds, blurring the sense of the image. It may be that they don’t know for whom they are writing and can rely on no clear response. Instinctively they use a hand-me-down idiom in the hope of being widely understood, and pay with a short life for their immediate success. None of this has anything to do with everyday speech. The plainness of Bunyan, laid on him, is a translucent river carrying easily depth on depth of allusion, to interior events of the greatest importance. The difference between him and today’s novelists is that yawning between a writer who handles words with respect for their specific meaning, and another who does not care how defaced they are so long as they earn a few bob. Obviously, the upper echelon of progressive literary organisations is not to be considered in determining a very different country. Within the limits of the rigid control of the publishing industry, the novelist is free to indulge the most heretical passions, the most vile, forbidden, ideas, the absolute in despair or ecstasy without any aim or message. Perpetual emotional masturbation benefits neither the individual nor society. For those of us who get pleasure of occasional masturbation, doing it constantly is boring. Bores who like to do it perpetually ought to keep it as a private perversion, and not foist it on to the rest of us. Moreover, the disintegration of language that inevitably accompanies this literary tobbing does literature a disservice. Joyce could spallate language to some purpose, but few generally can. Humanity has, over millennia, built walls against its own destructive immoral impulses, and language is one of them. Joyce dug the footings for Foucault to build a monstrous torture chamber that every modern pseudo-intellectual wants to get into, not realizing what they are letting themselves, and innocents lookers-on, in for. Unintentional as well as intentional nihilists are making a world in which there is no meaning, no humane or rationally accepted values at all. Darkness looms. It appears that the reader’s linguistic intuition is powered by a symbol as potent as criticism in society today.

It appears that the reader’s linguistic intuition is powered by a symbol as potent as criticism in society today.

The Novel

In discussing the novel, we have to consider whether it has any life left in it. Cyril Connolly said that Flaubert, Henry James, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf have finished off the novel. At the deepest level, words and vision are inseparable, as are body and spirit in the acts of anyone living. It is quite possible for a writer to accept, sincerely, a critical doctrine of their novel as an imitation of reality. 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… they are not sufficient. Dead clichés have nothing to do with the living processes of literature. Does typing a novel encourage slovenliness? For a number of reasons, which may be attributed to an unquestionable correlation, placing theory on the scales of justice and weighing it against practice is rarely given the ultimate standard that determines the accuracy of any proposed criticism. Among the reasons advanced for the novel’s poor health is one it is impossible to brush aside, and as impossible not to respect. It is that the world today is not so much too complex for a novelist to interpret as too unmanageably vile. Tolstoy and Stendhal could observe war calmly, with compassion, brotherly respect, and in later, more devastating wars, it was still possible for a few novelists to match in depth and energy the narratives of survivors. But what novelist can summon irony and serene understanding to help him resolve the facts of Buchenwald, of Mi Lie, of the Gulags and, yes, of Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay. Places of torture and killing in our day get more common, even where they ought not to be, and the stench of decaying human morality spreads beyond forgiveness? Can human beings make literature from what is inhuman? Knowing what they are doing sane common people, mainly Christians, officially torture and kill their fellow humans, men, women, children, in camps built and approved by our leaders. This reality, life and death in torture camps and our own inhumanity, is hard to communicate, especially to people who do not want to hear it, but has to be to remind them of what they are condoning, and where they are going 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.

The novel despite its faded dignity has little acceptable to say to an age of economic breakdown, the withering away of every sense of duty though everyone demands rights the revelation of irrational depths in human nature itself, and all the radical social changes these imply. What questions the age asks, it no longer expects answers from the novelist. The old order of fiction is past. As long as peer pressure uses its power for good, the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorical looms over a general convention regarding the forms of the criticism. 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 civilizing, governing, but restrictive imperatives of society, through its seemingly relentless dynamics. That is the necessary task of the imaginative writer.

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