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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
As an appendix to my last post, this article from AS Byatt covers much of the same territory:"Thomas Pavel once gave a splendid paper on the changes in the presentation of human nature during the history of the novel. In the beginning, he said, characters had immortal souls, and their actions took place in a battle between good and evil for the salvation or damnation of these souls. In later sentimental novels, souls had been replaced by hearts; what mattered was romantic love, and the recognition of other selves. Later still, he said, the heart had been replaced by the psyche – a system of unconscious drives, revealed in dreams, not clear to the characters, though controlled by the author, who like the analyst, understood the forms of energy and action. Iris Murdoch felt that humans – including those of her characters who were philosophers and psychoanalysts – had not understood the shift in the moral world that had come about with the absconding of God, the vanishing of external, metaphysical moral authority. Her analysts tend to be daemonic, manipulating what she described as a "system" and a "mechanism" of sadomasochism.
The consequences of Darwin’s evolutionary idea for literature has been deeply studied. Characters in the novels I read as a girl struggled with the meaninglessness of the world – the chancy world of gradual evolution of species, and death as a final end. European novels went on using the biblical and Christian stories as paradigms long after many of the novelists had lost their belief. Forms of art change more slowly than forms of thought or belief.
Both Freud and Darwin put sexuality at the centre of human nature. In Darwin, sexual selection is one of the important ways living creatures pass on their characteristics. Freud thought all human action was driven by libido, and libido was sexual desire. The Darwinist Richard Dawkins sees all life as driven by "selfish genes", seeking self-replication and outliving the bodies in which they are temporarily housed. In a way foreshadowing this, Freud saw what he called "the germ-cell" as immortality: the body dies, the gene lives on. Self-definition in terms purely of sexuality is one consequence of the thought patterns of the last century... modern humans define themselves to themselves in terms of their private lives, and define their private lives in terms of sexuality."
In spite of Byatt's citation of Bellow and Roth, I wonder whether sexuality's relationship to modern conceptions of character is quite so straightforward. The struggle for sexual self expression forms the nucleus of much nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, from Madame Bovary to Lady Chatterley's Lover; with its arrival in the sixties a lacuna emerged in the modern novel that the nouveau roman sought to correct by excising the idea of character from the novel altogether. Sexuality was a central theme only in so far as it existed as a form of stigma, an expression of civilisation's discontents, as Freud might have put it. Modern society is quickly displacing ideas of the unconscious with the gene, away from the environmental assumptions shared by Freud and Marx towards something typified instead by evolutionary psychology. It would be surprising of conceptions of character did not change accordingly. To a large extent much modern literature seems to regard character as less as a coherent set of traits and more as a collection of conflicting drives (episodic rather than diachronic), as in Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis Cooper or JG Ballard. Ballard's novels in particular, with their depiction of repressed primeval impulses, are often composed of episodic fragments rather than the sort of linear narrative that is conducive to the portrayal of more conventional modes of characterisation.
Update: a related observation from this piece on Celine by Will Self:"When the novel first appeared, it was still possible to believe in the avant-garde: there were important things to be said, things suppressed by taboo and prejudice. Now, everything is permitted and nothing is heard."
It's often been observed that modern society has ceased to be a guilt culture and has instead become a shame culture where our increasingly post-traditional ethics have nothing to do with earlier ideas of denial and abstinence. But it is an interesting question whether stigma or repression aren't necessary qualities for literature. Certainly when I think of the Victorian novel I think about novels like Anna Karenin and Madame Bovary or even La Dame Aux Camelias, which are predicated on a conflict between eros and civilisation of the kind Freud described as unavoidable; "It is much the same thing if we say that the conflict between civilization and sexuality is caused by the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between two people, in which a third can only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization is rounded on relations between larger groups of persons." Similarly, later writers like Burroughs, Lawrence or Genet dedicated their work to the subversive and transgressive, something a theorist like Georg Lukacs would argue that typifies the entire history of the novel, which he saw as based on the sort of conflict between self and society that this typifies.
Consider the difference between The Mill and the Floss or Tess of the D'Urbervilles and modern re-enactments of Victorian literature like The French Lieutenants's Woman or Self's own Dorian, both of which vacilliate somewhat regarding a tragic denouement their predecessors wouldn't have thought twice about. By contrast, the idea of a literature for a post-traditional society seems more problematic, with examples like Ballard or Houellebecq being comparatively few and far between.Labels: Literature
posted by Richard 6:12 pm
