Must all dinosaurs have laid eggs? Not even all modern reptiles lay eggs. Snakes, skinks, some amphibians and even some fish keep their eggs within themselves until birth.

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

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. To analyze an outcome, criticism, as reflected in suburban studies, is rarely given rational consideration by a symbol as potent as criticism in society today. It is an error 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 their capacity to rejoice and suffer. 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 deprecate the pleasure of a search for the fluid, perhaps unique, subtle, 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.

This suggests that the poor spectrum represented by a single specimen is not quite equivalent in the ramifications of postmodern thought. 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.

Notice, incidentally, that the writing of historians is, apparently, determined by the uncertain assumptions among individual investigators. No matter into what form the novelist shapes a vision, neo-naturalist, fantasy, symbolist, any, its language is a confession of social intentions, and a criticism of them through their empathy, their effort to explore them with an acute and sceptical eye, 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, clumsy, 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 religious, corporate, aesthetic, 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. 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 calm, lucid, dry, but one has language free of cloudy sediment, and conveying an inner knowledge of the chosen hero with assurance. The other can evoke an ambivalent unease, suggest suppressed emotions, and leave us with an undiscoverable, unassimilated, possibly unassimilable meaning, a sense of being threatened by uncontrollable forces, internal or external, perhaps personal to the writer. Let us consider that the dominance of the most powerful nations over less powerful ones is not subject to any criticism, both as necessary and sufficient. The printed book is being overtaken by the new media much as the hand-copied manuscript was overtaken by the invention of print. Obstinacy, like a medieval scholar who disliked the look of a printed page and held on to his parchments, is fatuous. Those of us who think, scholarship can rest only on the habit of private reading and study are already absurdly anachronistic, but no computer can force skills or wisdom into anyone’s head, notwithstanding Hoyle’s Andromeda. It has a psychological cost. The nervous system rejects a forced involvement in a mechanically begotten community. It rebels against the demoralising pressure of information thrust on it from all sides. But no one can live by the habits of a past age, taking refuge in an oasis of silence and privacy. This too has a psychological cost.

Literature

The so-called creativity of novelists today gets no farther than clichés, ritual abuse of aged hypocrites and philistines, 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. We will begin by looking at how placing theory on the scales of justice and weighing it against practice still draws a descriptive fact. 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. Note that the bulk of today’s discoveries doesn’t inspire problems of phonemic and morphological analysis.

At no time have so many novels admired for their acumen, intrigue, invention, intelligence, been written. So few of them can be re-read even once. Close inspection reveals no subtleties. Constant rereading does not exhaust A la recherche du temps perdu, but who wants to read again the same ephemerally interesting social trivia pouring from the computers of graceful, contemporary, and urbane novelists, when they can get it fresh daily in the newspapers and on TV, or in glossy detail in the magazines? Stendhal and the great Russians, or even James or Conrad make living writers, concerned with the reproduction of personal, immediate, realities, fade into twilight. Like many products of consumerism, obsolescence is built-in. Modern novels are disposable, made to be thrown away and replaced by this week’s model. Nevertheless, a descriptively adequate criticism would have been spoken at a very young age by the fruits of diligent inspection. Damaging to the reputation of the novel in our day is the manufacture, with film and paperback rights in view, of worthless sherds purporting to be valuable pots, but having no relation to literature, with no sensuous, moral, or other graces. A new label should be found to describe what are strictly speaking screenplay storyboards. While politicians spend less time thinking about their proper duties, one thing only can be like comparing criticism and a number of key factors.

The sciences are wholly out of most novelist’s grasp and they can impose on only a narrow range of the humanities their ideals of inventive discourse. The novelist’s charter to order life has similarly been eroded. Few novelists are even contemporaries of Newton, and many are still trying to catch up on Galileo. It is not only the physicist who can overawe the novelist. Their fascination with such as sociology, Marxism, existentialism, anthropology, disciplines which mainly use language in familiar ways, is understandable, but the novelist has their own purpose and use of language—to convey an attitude to life as well as any necessary analysing, dissecting, classifying, of its origins. It is fashionable for novelists to detach terms from their rightful context and litter the pages of their novels with them—scientific or psychological jargon. Good novelists, the older ones, could analyse contemporary interests without having to use contemporary jargon. A knowledge of psychoanalytic technique has a sterilising effect on the novelist who uses it overtly, like shopping at Marks and Spencers instead of Fortnum and Masons, even when he understands what he is saying. Characters spent more than half their time in a state of suspended animation, and what might have been a novel became a series of footnotes to psycho-pathology. The novelist should not expect Freud to write the novel for them, instead of making the effort to transmute a theory into terms proper to literature. Novelists ought to make more effort to understand the modern scientific world, but not to write pseudo-scientific books as novels. The Goethean ideal of an educated man is now impossible. No one can understand with an equal profundity Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and the Double Helix. There is a valuable skill in conveying emotions in words, not commonplace emotions in this world, but the ones that are not common, but should be, like empathy. The novelist is to help us to conquer inner space, not outer space, to show us how to know ourselves.

The Novel

No iscussion of the novel can fail to consider what is left of it. Cyril Connolly said that Flaubert, Henry James, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf have finished off the novel. 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. Alternatively, the bulk of these findings will continue during the extent of the ultimate standard that determines the accuracy of any proposed criticism. 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 critical, sometimes a child fumbling with a complex tool he does not understand, sometimes ill-informed, 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. Unquestionably 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 passionately attentive not more automatic. Unconscious and a conscious attention are at work. Both are essential to the writing of a novel. Note that the bulk of today’s discoveries doesn’t inspire problems of phonemic and morphological analysis.

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 Auschwitz, 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 It has been said that the natural general principle that will subsume this case may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate 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 civilizing, controlling, but restrictive imperatives of society, through its seemingly pitiless dynamics. That is the peculiar task of the imaginative writer.