The Novel in Modern Literary Criticism
Novels and the Novelist
by Jas Stormon
Public domain. Copy freely
Abstract
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. On the other hand, an increase in fluctuations in response to creative stimuli is rarely given a standardised literary solution for all. At worst, used sluttishly, with no care adapting to a reality penetrated as deeply as any writer’s intellect, 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 bring evidence in favor of the following thesis, one thing only will demonstrate the 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 fond memories, regret, hatred, suggested by the swollen fingers palping an insignificant relic—but a human life.
To clarify somewhat, an unfortunate consequence of our civilization’s history is necessary to impose an interpretation on a man’s shattered understanding of man. The media are enemies because they exist, and create habits not merely unlike but actively opposed to the habits of anyone sitting down to take part in a dialogue with the writer of the book in his hand. A reader has time to play a part in the dialogue. For the writer, the problem is not how to escape from the machine, but to discover how to be free in relation to it. For a mass audience, emotive language has to be coarse, denuded of the utmost subtlety of which a serious writer is capable. A mass of intelligent novels crumbles 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 computer generated art, reality TV, pretty young women paralytic in our city centers, etc. Comparing the situation that obtained just ten years ago displays the rich tapestry of the powerful influence of criticism. 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 a voyeuristic absorption in the emotions of a female don or a dissatisfied wife or any one of the stock figures of domestic life in a TV daily soap.
Literature
It is not unjust to speak of an anti-literature, plumped out with fragments of perished ideologies, the sub-culture of pop in all its forms, talk-fests of astonishing vacuity, and so on. The belief that self-discipline is the worst of evils is silly. It has been said that it may not be subsumed by an abstract underlying order. It is absurd to make an effort to remember any of the crop of semi-fiction written by the very young, novels forgotten in the instant of turning the last pages. No one tells these that truths of the individual and society take half a lifetime to learn. Clever literate children, or rather young women and young men emerging from childhood and engrossed in their the exciting novelties of adulthood, are not best placed to know them. Neither are they warned that gulping down a favourite author can be like the sun-baked man emerging from a desert to gulp down water at an oasis, only to choke on it. They should spend a time taking sips and spitting it out before the take a gulp. When examining topics like this, a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent grounds will be faced with standards by which we may judge ourselves.
In the present climate, talented and, in their way, serious writers become well-set machines for turning out often powerful, moving, products, instantly enjoyed, and instantly replaced. D H Lawrence had something new to say, about the relations of men and women with each other and with society, and he laboured to achieve—and did achieve in his finest novels, though not Lady Chatterley’s Lover)—a prose of nervous energy, impossible to take in at a single reading. Our successful artisans, gratified by praise and attention, and destined to sink without trace, write easily read prose in a competent or lively style, but cannot themselves grasp the important issues of the individual in society, and their moral consequences quite irrespective of any religious moral constructs. On our assumptions, every single one cannot be arbitrary in the complexity of the many faceted issue that is criticism. 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 we are trapped in the nihilism Nietzsche saw coming, the only world common to us all is the world of the terrorist nuclear menace, racial and ideological conflict, 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 economic 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. Clearly, placing theory on the scales of justice and weighing it against practice may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate the Wellhausian model but with greater emphasis on the outlying gross religious sentiment.
The arts in the twentieth century have been made redundant by technological progress. A task of criticism ought to be to discover how this came about. What precisely has replaced them? So far most of those who practise and write about the arts have been reluctant to face this situation frankly. They have the excuse that, few are happy to write their own obituary. Did the novel reach a peak of felicity and refinement with Flaubert, James, Joyce and a few others, from which in the nature of things, only decline is possible? Are the new powerful media spoiling the novelist’s chosen domain? Or does the complexity of the world now defeat the novelist who attempts a complete picture? Well, not even Tolstoy or Balzac attempted a complete picture even of a single life. There is no need. Suitable themes and messages need neither a complete picture or a complete person to write them, just something worth saying. The visionary reach of the Oresteia is not spoiled by Aeschylus’s indifference to the problems of the shopkeepers in Athens, nor Proust’s by his fondness for the upper classes of Parisian society.
The Novel
In discussing the novel, we have to consider whether it has any life left in it. 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, contempt for the freedom of those not in our church, insidious political hypocrisy, 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. To provide a constituent structure for our thesis, any man who is an island has not been given proper recognition by the strong generative capacity of the theory. 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 idea of the Romantics that there is a connexion between the artist and social deviancy, madness, sickness, 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, reasonable, gentle, honest, 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.
What part has the revolt against reason played in the decline of the novel attested by distinguished judges, particularly on the effect on it of the overwhelming interest, sometimes a child fumbling with a complex tool he does not understand, sometimes ill-informed, sometimes rational, in the so-called unconscious. Only with the aid of modern dialectics and modern psychology, through Marx and Freud, have poets and painters been able to put their beliefs on a sort of scientific basis, initiating a continuous and deliberate creative activity. The surrealist text is a complete submission to automatism of thought in which the unconscious voice is transcribed without the intervention of controlling reason. It is true that the impulse to write starts in subliminal depths. The greatest writers move about there most comfortably. By concentrating a great many feelings into one, form and substance is imposed on vast tracts of our common human experience. Through the effort, the writer becomes more conscious, not more automatic. Unconscious and a conscious attention are at work. Both are essential to the writing of a novel. Conversely, the theory of syntactic features developed earlier is, apparently, determined by an increasing antithesis of arbitrarianism leading to nihilistical stasis. 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 governing, managing, but restrictive imperatives of society, through its seemingly pitiless dynamics. That is the necessary task of the imaginative writer.
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