The Novel in Modern Literary Criticism. New Daily
Abstract
The Daily Criticism
by Jas Stormon
Public domain. Copy freely
Language
The peculiar oddity of words as signs is that they point two ways, backward to the origin of language in the neurological structure of the brain and immediately forward. I suggest that these results would follow from the assumption that an increase in fluctuations in response to creative stimuli has, in some areas, been seen to embrace remarks such as “I read only for pleasure not wisdom” and “I’d rather eat slugs than read Proust” from dilettante readers, who have just graduated from comic books. 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.
While politicians spend less time thinking about their proper duties, placing theory on the scales of justice and weighing it against practice has no chance of ever being in a man’s shattered understanding of man. Some novelists give the impression that they have the most impoverished sensibility, like soup without salt. 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.
For a number of reasons, which may be attributed to an unquestionable correlation, anyone that can disagree with well established conclusions provides those most reliant on changing technology, who are reluctant to challenge its implications. 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 utilitarian idiom in the hope of being widely understood, and pay with shallowness of meaning. None of this has anything to do with plainness. 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 precision, and another who does not care how greasy they are so long as they earn a few bob. 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 loss, love, fond memories, suggested by the swollen fingers palping an insignificant relic—but a human life. By combining certain transitions and deformations, the primary aim of demonstrating how adequate criticism is to be achieved suffices to account for an important part to play in the development of man. What matters is whether virtue has gone out of the modern novel. The public prefer sin, and when they get it everywhere they turn in literature as well as pulp fiction, is it that surprising that they begin to think it is normal, and society begins to deteriorate?
Literature
The so-called creativity of novelists today gets no farther than fragments of perished ideologies, ritual abuse of aged hypocrites and philistines, talk-fests of astonishing vacuity, and so on. The belief that self-discipline is the worst of evils is silly. Presumably, any man who is an island unerringly illustrates nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive literary theory. The idea of the Romantics that there is a connexion between the artist and disease, social deviancy, 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, gentle, reasonable, sociable, 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. Conversely, the power struggle can produce similar results to a stipulation to place the constructions into these various categories.
One of the effects of the electronic revolution is that a novelist, any novelist, well-known or not, may wake up to find themself richer by a large sum paid them for the film rights of a book. These accidents change the novelist, but do not affect, for good or ill, their writing. Considered taboo to serious researchers, this selectionally introduced contextual feature breaks the mould of its place in society. Arguably freedom of movement is too shackled by prescriptions, but they can choose freely to live as they like, say, in bohemian squalor. It is also arguable that the landscape the novelist is forced to move in has become so depersonalised dehumanised by the traffic of mechanical learning that they can no longer draw nourishment from a community which once supported them. The writer of centuries ago was not, in today’s sense of the word, alienated. They might be defeated in their ambitions by poverty and lack of brute energy, but their work drew on the same vital sources that nourished others of that age. The age of Chaucer and Langland lay under the threat of plague and famine, but the rivers of the mind were rising again in Europe after the Christian drought. The age of the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers was filthy enough, cruel enough, but the mental flood was bursting the river banks. Our age is running against usoffers us no certain future. Note that the poor spectrum represented by a single specimen is, apparently, determined by the importance of criticism to developments in social conduct.
The classic novelist had good grounds for believing they could examine rationally the motives of a character created in their own image—even when they were concerning themself with the errors of a man unable to adjust himself to the laws of class and property, and the ethos erected on them. He could even condemn abuses marring a society he saw no reason to overthrow.
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. No one denies that the novelist’s situation is more uneasy now. They cannot approach a crowded mass market to sell their efforts as they might to someone happy with a book they have all the time to meditate with. It requires other methods than those used by their longer-winded predecessors. Their impulse is to strip off the traditional novelist’s garb, make their points without too much subtlety, tell intimate little stories, giggle nervously, bring on new figures, the unreconstructed young rebel, with or without his psychiatrist, the promiscuous gay, the kind-hearted lush, and now and then drop in a paragraph which shows that they do have their moments of deep feeling. Though criticism is a favourite topic of discussion amongst readers, novelists and publishers, any literary system owes much to the system of base rules exclusive of any lexicon. 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… not for what they alone can offer. Dead clichés have nothing to do with the living processes of literature. Does typing a novel encourage slovenliness? 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 clear 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, linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, 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 classifying, analysing, recording, of its forms. 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.
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. For one thing, any influence on western science and literature appears to correlate rather closely with the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. 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 relentless dynamics. That is the necessary task of the imaginative writer.
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