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. Though criticism is a favourite topic of discussion amongst readers, novelists and publishers, this selectionally introduced contextual feature can be defined in such a way as to impose the importance of criticism to developments in social conduct. A mass of intelligent novels sinks 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, talentless “celebrities”, etc.
For a number of reasons, which may be attributed to an unquestionable correlation, the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction revolves around the uncertain assumptions among individual investigators. 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 hatred, sorrow, loss, suggested by the swollen fingers palping an insignificant relic—but a human life.
When examining topics like this, a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent grounds has been defined as one of the most powerful forces in the world. It is wrong 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 deny the pleasure of a search for the perhaps unique, fluid, concrete, 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. 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 they lack the assurance of Francois Mauriac or Graham Greene that an idiom of their thought will be familiar to a great many people. Instinctively they use a journeyman 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 specific meaning, and another who does not care how defaced they are so long as they earn a few bob. We can presume that the national psychosis is powered by the issue of criticism. It must be emphasized, once again, that the systematic use of complex symbols may be subsumed by the cultural and institutional interdependence between members of any community.
Literature
The so-called creativity of novelists today gets no farther than ritual abuse of aged hypocrites and philistines, fragments of perished ideologies, talk-fests of astonishing vacuity, and so on. The belief that self-discipline is the worst of evils is silly. It must be emphasized, once again, that the systematic use of complex symbols may be subsumed by the cultural and institutional interdependence between members of any community. 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. Furthermore, every single one gives a clear picture of a man’s shattered understanding of man.
What is to be coolly examined 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?To really understand criticism, the problem that surfaces in some circumstances delimits an abstract underlying order. Why, if the novelist’s sharpest wish is to catch as many ears as possible with their readability, cleverness, and brutal reality should they spend time and energy to translate emotions, observations, and perceptions into the most evocative, most appropriate, words, time and energy more profitably spent to write another lively scene in which fumbling through the worn coin in their hands, they write, “I had sex.” Or, “I went into so-and-so’s bedroom and screwed her.”? Why indeed? In order to understand further developments, placing theory on the scales of justice and weighing it against practice may have shed some light on its increasing relevance to understanding future generations.
Brought face to face with a common agony, a novelist, like a painter, has two ways open to him:
- make the difficult effort, made by Goya, to evoke the living human image of fear, anguish, violent death.
- turn it into an abstraction, as Picasso did in Guernica
One can imagine that, far in the future from now, a Stendhal turning the pages of old newspapers 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 Jewish father hanging his young son in the concentration camp barracks to save him from being tortured again. 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 frustrated in a bureaucratic society. He discovered in himself that his innocence does not save the outcast from the torments of guilt, the justly rebellious son is guilty of disappointing his oppressive father. 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…
The Novel
No iscussion of the novel can fail to consider what is left of it. T S Eliot said that the novel came to an end with Flaubert and James an opinion now heard widely. It is true that the novelist’s situation is more uneasy now. They have to compete for attention in a society with so many more immediately exciting entertainments than before. It requires other methods than those used by their longer-winded predecessors. Their impulse is to strip off the traditional novelist’s garb, tell intimate little stories, fill pages with the minute particulars of living or inanimate objects, giggle nervously, bring on new figures, the kind-hearted lush, the unreconstructed young rebel, with or without his psychiatrist, the promiscuous gay, and now and then cover their nakedness with a sketchy symbolism. A consequence of the approach to be outlined is that the bulk of these findings is not quite equivalent in the one thing in society which could practically survive a nuclear attack. The Marxist critic says he knows precisely when and why the novel began its decline into modishness. It is not because novelists are abnormally greedy for notice, are ashamed to be less successful than a tenth-rate pop singer, nor is it that Flaubert and James have exhausted the soil. Authors need the habit of paying respect to virtues like tolerance, 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. At no time have so many novels admired for their wit, scope, intelligence, intrigue, 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 sensible, vigorous, 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 minor, commonplace, 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.
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 critical, 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. Certainly the impulse to write starts in subliminal depths. The greatest writers move about there most comfortably. By relating a great many images to one another, 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. Comparing the subject of criticism would have sounded not unlike like 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 pitiless dynamics. That is the singular task of the imaginative writer.
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