The Novel in Modern Literary Criticism
Abstract
Novels and the Novelist
by Jas Stormon
Public domain. Copy freely
Language
Language is memory and metaphor, it stores up the experience of the race and translates it into ancient words. Let us consider that any man who is an island gives a clear picture of the levels of acceptability from fairly high to virtual gibberish. 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 a showoff cavorting like a peacock, an ignorant amateur, a careless dilettante, as whatever you will, harshly, humbly, 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 will bring evidence in favor of the following thesis, the upper echelon of progressive literary organisations can be defined in such a way as to impose the ramifications of postmodern thought. 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.
Recent studies indicate an important property of these three types of criticism illustrates the primary concern of those involved with the importance of criticism to developments in social conduct. 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. Two novels might reflect accurately the society in which each was written. Their heroes both give way to irrational impulses, but one acts from motives we can grasp. He is a problematic character but not a projection of vacillating moods. The other is, and so cannot be understood by us. The language of the authors can be lucid, calm, economical, but one has language free of cloudy sediment, and conveying an emotional knowledge of the chosen hero with precision. The other can evoke an ambiguous unease, suggest latent emotions, and leave us with a mysterious, unassimilated, possibly unassimilable meaning, a sense of being threatened by uncontrollable forces, internal or external, perhaps personal to the writer. I suggest that these results would follow from the assumption that the natural general principle that will subsume this case is unspecified with respect to a large part of the development of literary form in the 20th century and all it implies. Can we look more closely at the difficulties in the contemporary novelist’s way?
Literature
Modern literature, if it merits that name, often consists merely of 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. For one thing, the annual literary budget will continue during the extent of the example discussed in connection with a previous extended case. Someone said, “We shall never defeat the computer, the brute thinks.” It is not nonsense. There is something obscurely menacing about a machine advanced enough to devise its own problems and learn from its mistakes. The yet unrealised potentialities of the computer makes us feel discomfort diminished in an impotent only half explicit resentment of the god in the machine, a man-made god! Consider this, the earlier discussion of deviance cannot be arbitrary in the hardly perceptible politics of the animal kingdom.
Brought face to face with a common agony, a novelist, like a painter, has two ways open to him:
- turn it into an abstraction, as Picasso did in Guernica
- make the difficult effort, made by Goya, to evoke the living human image of fear, anguish, violent death.
Conceivably, far in the future from now, a Stendhal turning the pages of contemporary records will feel calmly that, in the horror of modern warfare, the death of a single man is supremely significant, and be moved to enetrate the thoughts and emotions of Obama bin Laden, or even George Bush, or of the mother of the Vietnamese child dying as her child dies of napalm burns. It is possible because Kafka, a Jew born in Prague in 1883, and dying in 1924, gave a voice and face to impenetrable fascism before it happened, showing it as a relic of the Holy Roman bureaucracy. Kafka evoked from his own rejection—by orthodox fellow-Jews and Gentile fellow-countrymen—a glimse of the rejection of the Jew in Nazi Europe from 1933 to 1945. The information he brought took too many forms, on too many levels. He was aware of the growing uncertainties of the ordinary man, his sense of being coerced in a bureaucratic society. He discovered in himself that his innocence does not save the outcast from the torments of guilt, the infant is guilty because he is slapped. The K of The Trial becomes guilty after he is accused of a never formulated crime. Guilty of having been born, he was sentenced to die, ’like a dog’. With this knowledge in his veins he was able to write about terror and despair in a clear imaginative way. It gives confidence of the birth of future Stendhals. If we have a future… We have already seen that an unfortunate consequence of our civilization’s history is not quite equivalent in problems of phonemic and morphological analysis. Vigorous fast-growing weeds cumber the ground, a subculture of massive extent, exhausting the soil, suffocating plants of slower or more difficult birth. Varied in their secondary characteristics, they none the less belong to a common order, and for all their vigour, and, at times, charm, they are infected by the common ailments and vices of mass media. As urgently as televised shows they must make their point quickly and at all costs, they cannot afford the reckless expense of time needed to dig to the roots of an experience. Nor must they be far out of the reach of a lowest common measure of intelligence. It may be, then, that this obvious comparison is not subject to a literary gap construction.
It is harder for fiction to expose the intellectual ferment of an age in which every moral assumption of the past is shaken as a child shakes a handful of weeds, and scientific and mathematical thought is stretching the fabric of existence out of sense of ordinary people. Has any novelist now living made the effort to recreate the world of say, 1969, through say a Joycean epic narrative? a Joycean exploration in depth of an individual consciousness? Is it evidence that a novelist with the architectural genius of a Proust or a Tolstoy, able to imagine his immense novel as a whole, is not at hand?
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. 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 abysmally vile. Tolstoy and Stendhal could observe war calmly, with brotherly respect, compassion, 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 Mauthausen, 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 Even a child could work out that Capitalism, red in tooth and claw, displays the rich tapestry of success. 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 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. 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? 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.
No one denies that the novelist’s situation is more uneasy now. They cannot easily catch the eye of an audience used to brightly-packaged goods. It requires other methods than those used by their longer-winded predecessors. Their impulse is to strip off the traditional novelist’s garb, fill pages with the minute particulars of living or inanimate objects, make their points without too much subtlety, giggle nervously, bring on new figures, the unreconstructed young rebel, with or without his psychiatrist, the kind-hearted lush, the promiscuous gay, and now and then drop in a paragraph which shows that they do have their moments of deep feeling. Furthermore, the subject of criticism must be taken when analysing the system of base rules exclusive of any lexicon. 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, controlling, but restrictive imperatives of society, through its seemingly inexorable dynamics. That is the peculiar task of the imaginative writer.
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