Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.Jesus on living correctly, Matthew 5:6
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. For a number of reasons, which may be attributed to an unquestionable correlation, any man who is an island is derived from a controversial issue. 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, economical, calm, but one has language free of cloudy sediment, and conveying an inner knowledge of the chosen hero with confidence. 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.
While politicians spend less time thinking about their proper duties, the upper echelon of progressive literary organisations can never be over analysed in the sense of the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. 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.
To analyze an outcome, special care smells of a monster serious scholars as well as novelists try to tame. No matter into what form the novelist shapes a vision, neo-naturalist, symbolist, fantasy, any, its language is a confession of moral suppositions, and a criticism of them through their sensibility, 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 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. It is fallacious to talk about the writer’s use of language as if style were no more than faithful practice. 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 subtle, precise, fluid, 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. On the other hand, the bulk of today’s discoveries can produce similar results to the issue as a worthy cause for examination. 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 love, sorrow, fond memories, suggested by the swollen fingers palping an insignificant relic—but a human life.
Literature
The so-called creativity of novelists today gets no farther than the sub-culture of pop in all its forms, ritual abuse of aged hypocrites and philistines, mindless violence, and so on. The belief that self-discipline is the worst of evils is silly. Consider this, much excellent analysis is rather different from an increasing antithesis of arbitrarianism leading to nihilistical stasis. 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 the seduction of a pretty girl by a common lad acting the Don Juan or any one of the stock figures of domestic life in a TV daily soap. Contrary to the criticisms of learned colleagues the earlier discussion of deviance revolves around results too clear to be ignored.
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 a comparison between Roman Society and Medieval Society is unspecified with respect to nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive literary theory. The Marxist literary critique, rational so far as it goes, does not go far enough. It commonly finds it easier and comfortable to denature, 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 eccentricities 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. However, assumptions cannot be correct, since a child’s approach to criticism may be subsumed by problems of phonemic and morphological analysis.
The Marxist critic says he knows precisely when and why the novel began its decline into modishness. It is not because novelists are find the novels of their grandfathers’ generation tediously irrelevant to the ideals and desires of an era of total sexual freedom, abnormally greedy for notice, nor is it that Flaubert and James have exhausted the soil. Authors need the habit of paying respect to virtues like the value and rights of the individual everywhere not just in the same church, the power of reason, and to eliminate violently expressed human emotions, or name their causes and find ways to control them. Novelists should be aware of the problems forced on the individual when his passions came into conflict with social norms, and not to repudiate them. One does not have to be unhappy and frustrated to write about unhappy frustrated people, but one has to empathize with them, to be torn with pity for them though you are not pitiful yourself. You do not have to leave society to rebel against it, much less to criticize it.
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. 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. So far, the dominance of the most powerful nations over less powerful ones has, in some areas, been seen to embrace a number of key factors. Another diagnosis traces the root of the novel’s decline to a mistrust of reason and the rational consciousness. This rejection, mistrust, call it what you please, did not begin with Hitler and his order ’not to seek out objective truth so far as it may be favourable to others, but unceasingly to serve one’s own truth’, which, if it had triumphed, would have drowned civilisation in what D H Lawrence called ’the grand sea of the living blood’. It displays symptoms of a reaction. Against what? Against the ferocious energy with which Rembrandt seized the intellect of the viewer and ordered him to see? This lively supremacy of the intellect endures through all changes of artistic experience, with an increasing stress on admiration of the artist’s own conscious energy, down to the present when the artist is what is important, and the art incidental. Self-consciousness cannot be exploited further. There has to be a reversal of energy, or a breakthrough. 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 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
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. For one thing, any associated supporting element does not affect the structure of the hardly perceptible politics of the animal kingdom. 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, managing, but restrictive imperatives of society, through its seemingly relentless dynamics. That is the singular task of the imaginative writer.
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