Notes from the Underground

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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.

Friday, July 25, 2008

 
On the one hand, an article reclaiming Hugo's most extensive novel:

"The size was the centre of Hugo's discovery in the art of the novel. And this is visible immediately: it's visible, to the perturbed reader, in the second of this novel's many sentences. The beginning, it turns out, is not a beginning at all. "There is something we might mention that has no bearing whatsoever on the tale we have to tell - not even on the background." Les Miserables begins with a digression from a digression... The subject of one of the longest novels in European literature is - what else? - the infinite. That is why its tempo is so explicit with slowness, syncopated with digression. But in this novel there is no such thing as a digression. Everything is relevant - since the subject of this book, quite literally, is everything: "This book is a tragedy in which infinity plays the lead," writes Hugo. "Man plays a supporting role."

"Really, universally, relations stop nowhere," Henry James would write, 40 years later, in his preface to the New York Edition of his early novel Roderick Hudson, "and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so." Life was infinite, argued James, but the novel therefore required a form which gave the illusion of completeness. James, after all, had learned the art of the novel from Flaubert. According to this modernist tradition, the novel was an art of miniaturisation, and indirection.

Hugo, however, had come up with a new solution, no less artful than the solution proposed by Flaubert and James. He wanted to create a novel which would try to represent everything by pretending that it did, in fact, represent everything. It would be wilfully ramshackle and inclusive - both on the level of form, and on the level of content: an essayistic novel, or a novelistic essay. "The eye of the drama must be everywhere at once," wrote Hugo. For every plot, seen from the angle of Hugo's style, was infinite.. In Tolstoy's War and Peace, if people coincide, or marry each other, it still seems probable. Every decision retains its fluidity. And yet in Les Miserables this isn't true. In this gargantuan novel, everything seems utterly improbable. Every plot operates through coincidence. Normally, novelists develop techniques to naturalise and hide this. Hugo, with his technique of massive length, refuses to hide it at all. In fact, he makes sure that the plot's coincidences are exaggerated... One way in which Hugo emphasises the coincidences in his novel is the persistent failures of recognition... Les Miserables is a game with destiny: it dramatises the gap between the imperfections of human judgements, and the perfect patterns of the infinite."


On the other hand, and once more citing the spectre of Herny James, Zadie Smith reclaims the aesthetics of George Eliot's most extensive novel:

"In 1873, the young Henry James reviewed George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It was an odd review, neither rave nor pan. Eliot represented the past and James hoped to be the future. "It sets a limit," he wrote, “to the development of the old-fashioned English novel." James’s objection to Middlemarch is familiar: there’s too much of it. He found "its diffuseness makes it too copious a dose of pure fiction."... A famous query opens chapter 29 of Middlemarch: "But why always Dorothea?" It’s neat that James’s complaint, essentially, "But why always Fred?", should be the inverse reflection of it. You might say of Henry and George what the novel says of Lydgate and Rosamund: between him and her indeed there was that total missing of each other’s mental track . . . James can’t understand why Middlemarch should stray so far from Dorothea, to linger on Lydgate, Fred and the rest...

But Fred, to Eliot, is a member of "mixed and erring humanity" - her favourite Goethe quote. She always hoped that her work would demonstrate the "remedial influences of pure, natural human relations". Still, it took a great deal of Art to arrange Middlemarch so that it might resemble Nature in all its diffusion, all its naturalness. Eliot’s Nature is a thing highly stylised, highly intellectual. She was a writer of ideas, maybe more so than any novelist in our canon. In order to be attentive to Fred, Eliot had to take the long way round. It was a philosopher, Spinoza, who first convinced her of the importance of experience. It was theory that brought her to practice. These days, "writer of ideas" has become a term of abuse: we think "Ideas" are the opposite of something we call “Life”. It wasn’t that way with Eliot. In fact, her ability to animate ideas is so acute she is able to fool the great Henry James into believing Fred Vincy a commonplace young man who was wandered into Middlemarch with no purpose. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Yet to Eliot all were equal, and of equal interest, and worthy of an equal amount of pages. All her people are striving towards the fullest truth, the least partial good. Except, when Eliot thought of striving, she had more in mind than Austen’s hope of happy marriages, or Dickens’s dream of resolved mysteries. She was thinking of Spinoza’s kind of striving, conatus. From Spinoza, Eliot took the idea that the good we strive for should be nothing more than "what we certainly know will be useful to us", not a fixed point, no specific moral system, not, properly speaking, a morality at all. It cannot be found in the pursuit of transcendental reward, as Dorothea believes it to be, or in one’s ability to conform to a set of rules, as Lydgate attempts when he submits to a conventional marriage. Instead, wise men pursue what is best in and best for their own natures. They think of the good as a dynamic, unpredictable combination of forces, different, in practice, for each of us. It’s that principle which illuminates Middlemarch. Like Spinoza’s wise men, Eliot’s people are always seeking to match what is good in themselves in joyful combinations with other good things in the world. In Ethics, the book Eliot spent years trying to translate (she never finished), the wise walk in gardens, see plays, eat pleasantly, do work that is meaningful to them, and so on, as their nature allows and demands. They love and are attentive to the laws of nature, because these alone are eternal and therefore an attribute of the Supreme Good. All of this was the riposte Eliot needed to the arid rigours of her family’s Methodism; she responded passionately to the idea of worldly striving, of cleaving to those qualities in others, and in the world, that complemented one’s own strengths. It was what she herself had done. And it cast two things she cared for deeply - natural science and human relationships - in a new, holy light. Spinoza seemed to understand Marian’s way of being in the world. Her shocking common-law "marriage of true minds" to George Lewes (who also translated Spinoza) was exactly the right kind of conatus: a power-strengthening union characterised by joy. Her rejection of the organised church, so horrifying to her family, was really a turning away from false, abstract moral values. Her interest in the new natural sciences was, in Spinozian terms, a form of worship... Eliot has replaced metaphysics with human relationships. In doing this she took from Spinoza - whose metaphysics are, in fact, extensive - what she wanted, and left what she couldn’t use. To make it work, she utilised a cast of saints and princes, but also fools and criminals, and every shade of human in between. She needed Fred quite as much as Dorothea."


I have to say it's really very refreshing to hear a defence of the Victorian novel that understands its practitioners as being as capable of experimenting with form as much as their modernist counterparts, even if they do so in profoundly different ways. I always tended to be rather wary of James for his dismissal of much of the Victorian novel as formless in contrast to his own works, even when those works were parasitic of the norms introduced in the Victorian novel. In practice, much of the form of the Victorian novel can be described as being akin to a web, a metaphor used by Dickens and Eliot to describe how their work demonstrated that the apparently disparate and unconnected actually formed part of an organic whole. For Dickens, this was a theme related to social solidarity, for Eliot a theme connected to a secular form of ethics that replaced religion. In the case of Hardy, it served as a rather different metaphor for causality, the sort of web that involves spiders and flies. In other words, the form of their novels cannot be painted on anything other than a large canvas if they are to succeed. The Victorians were distinct in discerning how the fate of an individual was bound up with wider forces stemming from the economic and social trends around them, rather than any more metaphysical concept of fate. For a society, acutely aware of economic tides, a preoccupation with the material in their writing seems entirely natural. Again, this is all something that demands a larger canvas and it's always seemed difficult to see Ulysses or Mrs Dalloway (for all their merits) as anything other than a retreat for telescoping their focus down to individual consciousnesses over considerably compressed timescales. Following Baktin, I inevitably tend to think that the polyphonic and heteroglossic character of Victorian writing, with its counterpointing of multiple plot strands, is considerably more interesting than what followed it.

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posted by Richard 6:51 pm