{ c a s t r o v a l v a 4.0 } :: Notes from the Underground

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.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

A glancing reference in a somewhat recursive Zadie Smith essay on essays, drew my attention to David Shield's Reality Hunger:

"Standard operating procedure for fiction writers is to disavow any but the most insignificant link between the life lived and the novel written; similarly, for non-fiction writers, the main impulse is to insist upon the unassailable verisimilitude of the book they've produced. I've written three books of fiction and twice as many books of non-fiction, and whenever I'm discussing the supposed reality of a work of non-fiction I've written, I inevitably (and rapidly) move the conversation over to a contemplation of the ways in which I've fudged facts, exaggerated my emotions, cast myself as a symbolic figure, and invented freely. So, too, whenever anyone asks me about the origins of a work of fiction, I always forget to say, 'I made it all up,' and instead start talking about, for lack of a better term, real life. Why can't I get my stories straight? Why do I so resist generic boundaries, and why am I so drawn to generic fissures? Why do I always seem to want to fold one form into another?

I have a very vivid memory of being assigned to read The Grapes of Wrath as a junior in high school and playing hooky from my homework to read Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. Steinbeck’s humorlessness, sentimentality, and sledgehammer symbolism hardly had a chance against Hunter Thompson’s comedy, nihilism, and free association. I loved how easily Fear and Loathing mixed reportage or pseudo-reportage with glimmers of memoir.

I wanted to write a book whose loyalty wasn't just to art but to life, my life. I wanted to be part of the process, part of the problem. For quite a while I wrote in a fairly traditional manner - two linear, realistic novels and dozens of conventionally plotted stories. I’m not a big believer in major epiphanies, especially those that occur in the shower, but I had one, about fifteen years ago, and it occurred in the shower: I had the sudden intuition that I could take various fragments of things, aborted stories, outtakes from novels, journal entries, litcrit and build a story out of them. I really had no idea what the story would be about; I just knew I needed to see what it would look like to set certain shards in juxtaposition to other shards. Now I have trouble working any other way, but I can't emphasize enough how strange it felt at the time, working in this modal mode.

I'm hopelessly, futilely drawn toward representations of the real, knowing full well how invented such representations are. I'm bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters. I want to explore my own damn, doomed character. I want to cut to the absolute bone. Everything else seems like so much gimmickry. For me, anyway, the fictional construct rarely takes you deeper into the material that you want to explore. Instead, it takes you deeper into the fictional construct, into the technology of narrative, of plot, of place, of scene, of characters. In most novels I read, the narrative completely overwhelms whatever it was the writer supposedly set out to explore in the first place.
"

I tend to agree with Smith that Shields partly refutes his own argument, by noting the fantastical character of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as opposed to the sober realism of The Grapes of Wrath; it can often be the case that the more a writer adheres to autobiography, the more fantastical the narration becomes. Witness Huysmans and DeQuincey as obvious exmaples. One might also note that the division Shields draws between etoliated artifice and the crudity of raw experience is surely a false one; as John Bayley's The Uses of Division : Unity and Disharmony in Literature was at pains to point out, the most interesting work of many realist writers is often their more fragmented and inchoate. For me, writers like Lawrence, Eliot and Hardy are great precisely because of how untidy their novels often are. With all of that said though, in the end I probably sympathise more with Shields than with Smith. From Isherwood and Pessoa onwards to Coetzee and Sebald, writing that defies the division of reality and invention has become a hallmark of the age. Equally, it's difficult not to notice that if our age has any genre it has obsessively explored, it would have to be biography, even those of people who are still living and have done apparently little to merit the attention. Put simply, we live in an age where experience is a heavily circumsribed or heavily mediated concept. I recall an interview with Slavoj Zizek on this subject:

"In my work, I place strong emphasis on what is usually referred to as the virtualisation or digitalisation of our environment... But still, 30 percent of us live in a digitalised universe that is artificially constructed, manipulated and no longer some natural or traditional one. At all levels of our life we seem to live more and more with the thing deprived of its substance... Throughout the entire twentieth century, I see a counter-tendency, for which my good philosopher friend Alain Badiou invented a nice name: 'La passion du reel', the passion of the real. That is to say, precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life.

I think this may be what defined the twentieth century, which really began with the First World War. We all remember the war reports by Ernst Junger, in which he praises this eye-to-eye combat experience as the authentic one. Or at the level of sex, the archetypal film of the twentieth century would be Nagisa Oshima's Ai No Corrida (In The Realm Of The Senses), where the idea again is that you become truly radical, and go to the end in a sexual encounter, when you practically torture each other to death. There must be extreme violence for that encounter to be authentic.

Another emblematic figure in this sense to me is the so-called 'cutter'- a widespread pathological phenomenon in the USA. There are two million of them, mostly women, but also men, who cut themselves with razors. Why? It has nothing to do with masochism or suicide. It's simply that they don't feel real as persons and the idea is: it's only through this pain and when you feel warm blood that you feel reconnected again. So I think that this tension is the background against which one should appreciate the effect of the act."
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 6:01 pm

Sunday, June 21, 2009

William Boyd writes on the role of parks in the English novel:

"Angus Wilson (1913-1991), novelist and short story writer, identified what he called an essential dichotomy in the English realistic novel dating back to Samuel Richardson in the 18th century, namely the concepts of "town" and "country" and the opposing values that they imply. The division is an intriguing one, even today, and it is still relatively easy to classify a novelist in one or the other camp. Are you essentially "urban" or are you "rural"? This is not an innocent question, as Wilson infers. To categorise yourself as one or the other is tendentious and provokes a series of unconscious judgments. In his long autobiographical essay, The Wild Garden, Wilson lists some of the antitheses that "town" and "country" respectively embody: progress versus tradition; art versus nature; industry versus the contemplative life; reason versus instinct; strained sensibility versus sturdy common sense, bohemianism versus rootedness, and so on.

Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, in the pantheon of English literature, perhaps best illustrate the split between the "town" writer as opposed to the "country" one. It is a very 19th-century juxtaposition, made particularly acute and particularly obvious as the industrial revolution took its remorseless grip on the nation. Mansfield Park.. It best reflects Angus Wilson's dichotomy of "town" versus "country" in the English novel, with Fanny Price and Mansfield Park - and dull Edmund Bertram - representing all that is solid and worthy of "country" values, set against the witty and louche sophistication of the "town" Crawfords from London.

According to Edmund Burke's treatise of 1756, The Sublime and the Beautiful, the sublime finds its source in anything capable of exciting pain or danger. Beauty, however, consists of anything small, smooth, with an absence of angularity and a brightness of colour. This sounds almost park-like to me, the park providing us with those qualities of beauty we require in our life - in contrast to what the "sublime" city represents with its pain and danger."

Wilson's dichotomies are perhaps slightly disingenuous; in Fielding, Burney and Dickens the transition from the country to the city is essentially a journey from rural virtue to urban vice. Of course, Dickens is perfectly capable of writing of rural vice, as in Nicholas Nickleby but the contrast is still at the centre of his work, even as his descriptions of the city seem to echo Baudelaire's celebration of the urban sublime. The comparison with French literature is revealing; Maupassant and Balzac certainly see the division of town and country as a moral one but are rather more likely to portray it as a contrast of sophistication with dullness. Zola is perhaps slightly less withering in his indictment of rural vice to its urban counterpart, but the difference is one of degree not of kind. Conversely, Johnson might have thought that is a man tires of London he tires of life, but it is difficult to discern it from his depictions of 'the great wen.' While London was the first major industrialised city, writers of that era still tended to denounce or avoid it. The nineteenth century English novel frequently takes rural locations as its setting, from the Bronte sisters and Thomas Hardy to George Eliot, with the same applying to poets like Tennyson and Hopkins. Writers like Gissing, Orwell and Hamilton could justly be argued to belong to a minority tradition. Crime writers like Christie and Allingham preferred rural settings, even when their subject matter was considerably better described as an urban phenomenon. Even as technology made buildings like the Crystal Palace possible, medieval gothic became the preferred architectural style and the garden city movement arose. What tends to be interesting in the English tradition isn't so much a conflict between town and city, but between the sentimental or pastoral and the romantic. In Lawrence and Forster, the country represents eros and wildness, while in Dickens and Gaskell it represents tradition and the merely picturesque. Eliot, Hardy and the Bronte sisters depict the country in terms of both these categories.

Of course, modern England's agricultural sector is one of the smallest in Europe, as is the percentage of forested land area. Pastoral is not a mode that can be convincingly deployed today, which may be suggestive for the current condition of English literature.
Labels: England, Literature

posted by Richard 3:50 pm

Saturday, February 07, 2009

A somewhat unusual article on Post-Soviet 'Gothic morality:'

"How can we discover the consequences of historical amnesia? How can we employ customary historical methods to measure the impact of absent memory on contemporary Russian society? What kind of sources could reveal for us this hidden work of deformed memory that results in transformations of values, attitudes, customs and social relations? Fiction is a particularly fruitful source for studying historical representations of the Stalinist past. As a genre, it addresses moral and aesthetic dilemmas; describes transformations of values, attitudes, customs and social relations; and provides access to the emotions and to the workings of the individual memory of its protagonists. Post-Soviet fiction, loaded with reminiscences of Soviet terror and atrocities, discloses the connection between suppressed memory and the emergence of new moral norms and social structures.

However post-Soviet fiction differs considerably from realistic prose such as Tolstoy's War and Peace or even Grossman's Life and Fate. It is overwhelmed by all kind of magic and monsters – vampires, witches and werewolves... Over the last three centuries, Enlightenment rationality has boxed dragons and witches into a specific genre – fairy tale. Now we see them becoming the main protagonists of novels and films aimed at adults. The human being, that as an inheritance of the Enlightenment used to be the centre of the anthropocentric universe, has been pushed to the periphery in favour of the non-human. Two highly popular cult novels – Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch and Vadim Panov's Taganski Crossroads – serve as examples. Their success with the Russian reading public is testified by huge print runs and by the fact that they have been turned into movies and computer games. Both novels share features that are typical for the genre in general. Both leave the realities of Russian culture and society almost intact, making them extremely fertile for an analysis of moral and aesthetic developments. Their main protagonists are strikingly similar: rank-and-file administrators, average men on the street, painstakingly portrayed positive heroes with whom the reader fully identifies. In both novels, the plot unfolds in contemporary Moscow.

A simple mental experiment helps to prove this statement. If we remove the vampires, werewolves and witches from these narratives and substitute them with cops, gangsters and their victims, if we parenthesize the witchcraft and the magic, the story would not differ much from a pale description of everyday Russian life. At the heart of gothic morality is a remarkable equality of good and evil, expressed in Night Watch by the opposition between "light" and "dark" vampires. Their methods and goals are explicitly compared and judged to be the same. Nevertheless, light and dark vampires represent not just a metaphor for the notorious convergence of the state and mafia in Russia. The impossibility of distinguishing good from evil – the heroes conclude – makes any attempt to do so a sheer absurdity. The total denial of morality leads to a cult of force. Gothic morality considers murder an everyday routine – who counts (dead) humans? "Life against death, love against hate, and force against force, because force is above morality. It's that simple," concludes the hero of Night Watch... Personal loyalty to the boss is the only principle that the hero of post-Soviet fantasy never betrays. He is always ready to go against his own judgments, betray his inferiors and the norms of his unit to obey his boss's orders."

It's not an overly persuasive argument. It may be true that Lukyanenko does tend to depict the forces of light and dark as being opposed but equivalent, needing to be brought into balance. The two concepts sometimes seem equivalent to good and evil, sometimes not. But in any case, much of the above criticism of Lukyanenko would also apply to the likes of Anne Rice or any number of contemporary horror novelists in any number of other Western countries. I'm also not persuaded that it's such a bad thing to deny the validity of collective projects (or meta-narratives); if anything, that also seems a rather Western attitude. With that said, it is interesting for other reasons. Realist fiction does tend to presume some degree of social homogeneity or stability, in keeping with its status as what Lukacs called the "bourgeois epic," even if ghost stories were a favourite pastime for the writers as produced landmarks of nineteenth century realist fiction. Nontheless, this may be part of why the fantastic is a familiar component of Russian literature (or why South America produced magical realism). Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Gogol all wrote stories quite similar to the above, set in a familiar realist setting and depicting average men on the street. It would have seem more persuasive to me to observe that horror fiction in increasingly post-traditional societies that lack chiastic structures of good and evil to rehabilitate (or emasculate) the monsters they depict. In other words, to foreground the romantic outcast and decenter the damned creature. A novel like Dracula is frequently depicted as an allegory of Victorian anxieties that perhaps lack the same force today:

"According to Nina Auerbach, in "Our Vampires, Ourselves" (1995), Dracula’s crimes are merely symbols of the real-life sociopolitical horrors facing the late Victorians. One was immigration. At the end of the century, Eastern European Jews, in flight from the pogroms, were pouring into Western Europe, thereby threatening to dilute the pure blood of the English, among others. Dracula, too, is an émigré from the East. Stoker spends a lot of words on the subject of blood, and not just when Dracula extracts it. Fully four of the book’s five vampire-hunters have their blood transfused into Lucy’s veins, and this process is recorded with grisly exactitude. (We see the incisions, the hypodermics.) So Stoker may in fact have been thinking of the racial threat. Like other novels of the period, Dracula contains invidious remarks about Jews. They have big noses, they like money—the usual.

At that time, furthermore, people in England were forced, by the scandal of the Oscar Wilde trials (1895), to think about something they hadn’t worried about before: homosexuality. Many scholars have found suggestions of homoeroticism in
Dracula. Auerbach, by contrast, finds the book annoyingly heterosexual. Earlier vampire tales, such as Polidori’s story and Carmilla, made room for the mutability of erotic experience. In those works, sex didn’t have to be man to woman. And it didn’t have to be outright sex—it might just be fervent friendship. As Auerbach sees it, Stoker, spooked by the Wilde case, backed off from this rich ambiguity, thereby impoverishing vampire literature. After him, she says, vampire art became reactionary. This echoes Stephen King’s statement that all horror fiction, by pitting an absolute good against an absolute evil, is "as Republican as a banker in a three-piece suit."

According to some critics, another thing troubling Stoker was the New Woman, that turn-of-the-century avatar of the feminist. Again, there is support for this. The New Woman is referred to dismissively in the book, and the God-ordained difference between the sexes—basically, that women are weak but good, and men are strong but less good—is reiterated with maddening persistence. On the other hand, Mina, the novel’s heroine, and a woman of unquestioned virtue, looks, at times, like a feminist. She works for a living, as a schoolmistress, before her marriage, and the new technology, which should have been daunting to a female, holds no mysteries for her. She’s a whiz as a typist—a standard New Woman profession. Also, she is wise and reasonable—male virtues. Nevertheless, her primary characteristic is a female trait: compassion. (At one point, she even pities Dracula.) Stoker, it seems, had mixed feelings about the New Woman.

Whether or not politics was operating in Stoker’s novel, it is certainly at work in our contemporary vampire literature. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series openly treats vampires as a persecuted minority. Sometimes they are like black people (lynch mobs pursue them), sometimes like homosexuals (rednecks beat them up). Meanwhile, they are trying to go mainstream. Sookie’s Bill has sworn off human blood, or he’s trying; he subsists on a Japanese synthetic. He registers to vote (absentee, because he cannot get around in daylight)... In The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice also seems to regard her undead as an oppressed group. Their suffering is probably, at some level, a story about AIDS. All this is a little confusing morally. How can we have sympathy for the Devil and still regard him as the Devil?"
Labels: Gothic, Literature

posted by Richard 2:16 pm

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Rather predictably, this article has recently been highlighted on more than one occasion:

"The current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls "the real Great Depression." ... The problems had emerged around 1870, starting in Europe. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, formed in 1867, in the states unified by Prussia into the German empire, and in France, the emperors supported a flowering of new lending institutions that issued mortgages for municipal and residential construction, especially in the capitals of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. Mortgages were easier to obtain than before, and a building boom commenced. Land values seemed to climb and climb; borrowers ravenously assumed more and more credit, using unbuilt or half-built houses as collateral. The most marvelous spots for sightseers in the three cities today are the magisterial buildings erected in the so-called founder period.

But the economic fundamentals were shaky. Wheat exporters from Russia and Central Europe faced a new international competitor who drastically undersold them. The 19th-century version of containers manufactured in China and bound for Wal-Mart consisted of produce from farmers in the American Midwest. They used grain elevators, conveyer belts, and massive steam ships to export trainloads of wheat to abroad. Britain, the biggest importer of wheat, shifted to the cheap stuff quite suddenly around 1871. By 1872 kerosene and manufactured food were rocketing out of America's heartland, undermining rapeseed, flour, and beef prices. The crash came in Central Europe in May 1873, as it became clear that the region's assumptions about continual economic growth were too optimistic. Europeans faced what they came to call the American Commercial Invasion. A new industrial superpower had arrived, one whose low costs threatened European trade and a European way of life.

As continental banks tumbled, British banks held back their capital, unsure of which institutions were most involved in the mortgage crisis. The cost to borrow money from another bank — the interbank lending rate — reached impossibly high rates... In the end, the Panic of 1873 demonstrated that the center of gravity for the world's credit had shifted west — from Central Europe toward the United States. The current panic suggests a further shift — from the United States to China and India."

I've long felt that contemporary society bears a marked resemblance to its Victorian precursor, with marked social inequality being matched by the volatility and instability of free markets. As the conservative project to roll back the twentieth century progressed, the inevitable result was that many of the safeguards introduced to prevent depressions like 1873 and 1929 were also removed. The current conditions are essentially identical to those Marx and Engels had hoped would destroy capitalism in the previous recession of 1857 when Dickens had based the character of Merdle in Little Dorrit on railway speculator and Minister John Sadleir, who embezzled and then bankrupted the Tipperary Joint Stock Bank before killing himself. Given that the current crisis poses substantial questions around the Anglo-American economic model of the last twenty to thirty years, it will be interesting to observe whether current events produce novels like Our Mutual Friend or The Way We Live Now, as this article debates:

"In Britain, there is a long-standing aversion to writing about business. More than a century ago, Henry James decreed that novels should focus on private life and the emotions, not politics and business; most writers since have taken him at his word... Perhaps because US writers are generally more ambitious, and also because US culture is less sniffy about moneymaking, modern American novelists seem at home in the worlds of work and money in a way that few British ones do. Think of [Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities] Saul Bellow's comi-tragic portrait of errant market speculation in Seize the Day, or Philip Roth's account of factory life in American Pastoral. Or think of David Foster Wallace's sinister vision of a corporatised America of the future in his 1996 epic Infinite Jest.

We should not be surprised, then, that it is an American writer who has been most prescient about the current financial upheavals. In his slim 2003 novel Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo tracked the life of an enormously wealthy currency trader on a day of global financial meltdown. It is by no means DeLillo's best work, but many things about it that now seem prophetic – the way, for instance, he captures the trader's overweening ambition and arrogance, and how he evokes the sense of a system that no one fully understands spinning rapidly out of control."

I do tend to recall Milan Kundera's observation that the re-establishment of the middle class in the Czech Republic following the collapse of the Soviet bloc was a subject worthy of Balzac at a time when novels of that kind had ceased to be possible. Realism in its conventional sense seemed to assume a more homogeneous society that could be more easily conceived of a single entity, which applies rather poorly to contemporary society (although Hollinghurst's documenting of the 1987 stock market crash in The Line of Beauty does rather spring to mind as a counter example). In practice, it may not be that easy to roll back the twentieth century and all of the literary innovations that went with it. Of course, all of this assumes that we don't end up with nostalgic works of escapism like Brideshead Revisited ("it was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster — the period of soya beans and Basic English — and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past"), Love in a Cold Climate and Lord of the Rings instead.

Update: a closely related follow-up piece from Tristram Hunt:

"To wander through modern Los Angeles is to get a keen idea of Rome in 400AD, Venice at the end of its medieval glory or post-war London. LA is a city redolent of empire and it is visibly in collapse. It is not just the choking smog, violent ghettos or armies of homeless, but a more fin de siècle sense that its time has passed. One can imagine, in 100 years, the Pacific waves lapping at the stones of Santa Monica, the sand blowing through the skyscrapers and the great film studios serving as a 20th-century Colosseum.

Last week's report from the National Intelligence Council only served to confirm the fear that the age of America is drawing to a close, with the Iraq invasion standing as the final act of imperial hubris. As the Pentagon securocrats rightly predict, the emerging economies of the Bric nations - Brazil, Russia, India and China - are starting to flex their political and military muscles. The dollar's financial dominance is crumbling. Meanwhile, Bollywood and Nollywood (Nigeria's nascent film industry) are beginning to challenge the cultural prowess of Hollywood. In the coming decades, globalisation will no longer stand as a byword for Americanisation. quot;
Labels: Literature, Politics

posted by Richard 7:51 pm

Sunday, October 05, 2008

George Szirtes writes on the mutability of signifier and signified alike:

"Writers rely on the precarious stability of language. It's like an artist not trusting fugitive colours. I think of Blake on Reynolds:

When Sir Joshua Reynolds died
All Nature was degraded;
The King dropp'd a tear into the Queen's ear,
And all his pictures faded.

Reynolds experimented with Lake colours that decayed far too quickly - in his own lifetime.

Writers depend on stable reference. Signifier should bear some reasonably constant relationship to signified. It has often been said that part of a poet's function is celebration: the preservation of fleeting phenomena in a medium that is, ideally, less fleeting. That is why all kinds of people write verses on weddings, birthdays, funerals. They are attempts to carve something into the language. You can't carve into that which is fugitive. Even the writing down of events in diaries in the plainest of prose is an attempt at carving.

There is an implication here that, by extension, the referents themselves should remain stable. This would include social circumstances, cultural practices, ideas, values, desires and even dreams: it seems to demand an ossified world of stable meanings. Márai's novelist tells us that his values, his compass, his entire craft depends on a vanishing social framework. He is working down a mine where the coal is all but exhausted. The colours are fading even as he writes.

We could regard him as a hidebound reactionary and indeed, in some ways he is. But that is not all he is. His whole aesthetic is based on the knowledge that the seam has been almost, if not quite, worked out, that the colours are fading. This, he tells us, is the nature of things. He is an elegist by nature, meaning that he gazes upon things dying and is not wholly consoled by a glance at things new born."

The likes of Sandor Marai and Joseph Roth (or Ford Maddox Ford to take an English example) are seeking to document the collapse of an entire form of social order (in this immediate example, the destruction of the Austro Hungarian Empire). In that sense, they have more in common with nineteenth century writers like Balzac, Scott that documented the near past with a suspicious eye on the present, than they do with many of their modernist contemporaries. While a preoccupation with social change is not necessarily mutually exclusive with the modernist fascination with the instability of language (Woolf or Broch for instance) the two have a rather fraught relationship. One particularly good example of this is Andrei Biely's St Petersburg, a novel that is ostensibly concerned with the acts of terrorism in Tadrist Russia that were leading to the Russian revolution. The theme is misleading as the narrative tends to approach events symbolically rather than through the lens of historical realism. Instead of social tensions, events are depicted through a set of chiastic oppositions; reason and unreason, occidental and oriental (at times it reads more like Sax Rohmer than Conrad's The Secret Agent). St Petersburg is at once a real city with places that can be found on the map and also a Escheresque labyrinth made unreal by mists ("he wondered as in a dream about the relation of appearance to reality"); the geometry of the enlightenment reverts to the swamp that lies beneath it. Unsurprisingly, the mutability of language emerges as a recurrent theme; "my words get entangled... a modernist would call it the sensation of the abyss and search for an image."
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 8:22 pm

It's not a publication I greatly care for or regularly read, but I was struck by this article in First Things:

"The Platonic tradition in Christianity invests beauty with ontological significance, trusting it to reveal the unity and proportion of what really is. Our apprehension of beauty thus betokens a recognition of and submission to a reality that transcends us. And yet, if beauty can use art to express truth, art can also use beauty to create charming fabrications. As Jacques Maritain put it, art is capable of establishing "a world apart, closed, limited, absolute," an autonomous world that, at least for a moment, relieves us of the "ennui of living and willing." Instead of directing our attention beyond sensible beauty toward its supersensible source, art can fascinate us with beauty’s apparently self-sufficient presence; it can counterfeit being in lieu of revealing it... "Art is dangerous," as Iris Murdoch once put it, "chiefly because it apes the spiritual and subtly disguises and trivializes it."

This helps explain why Western thinking about art has tended to oscillate between adulation and deep suspicion. "Beauty is the battlefield where God and the devil war for the soul of man," Dostoevsky had Mitya Karamazov declare, and the battle runs deep....

The closer one moved toward the present time, the more blatant and unabashed became the association of the artist with God. Thus Alexander Baumgarten, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, compared the poet to a god and likened his creation to "a world"... If the artist in the modern age emerges as a second god, his divinity tends to close itself off from reality in order to clear a space for art’s fabrications. As such, the artist tends to draw close to the demonic, which Kierkegaard astutely defined as freedom "shutting itself up" apart from the good. ("Myself am Hell," Milton’s Satan declares in a moment of startling self-insight.) If, as Paul Valéry put it, "the artist’s whole business is to make something out of nothing," then, unable to meet this demand, he will find himself wandering alone among the shadows cast by the world he forsook in order to salvage his freedom and creativity. ...

We do not need Nietzsche to tell us that the disintegration of the Platonic-Christian worldview, already begun in the late Middle Ages, is today a cultural given. Nor is it news that the shape of modernity—born, in large part, from man’s faith in the power of human reason and technology to remake the world in his own image—has made it increasingly difficult to hold the traditional view that ties beauty to being and truth, investing it with ontological significance. Modernity, the beneficiary of Descartes’ relocation of truth to the subject ( Cogito, ergo sum), implies the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere and hence the isolation of beauty from being or truth....

The twentieth-century Welsh Catholic poet David Jones.. [thought that the real threat to the arts] was the modern world’s increasing submission to technocracy, to a thoroughly instrumental view of life that had no room for what Jones called the intransitive—for the freedom and disinterestedness traditionally thought the province of religious experience, on the one hand, and aesthetic experience, on the other."

And from a rather different perspective, Zadie Smith takes up a similar theme:

"All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene. These aren't particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked...

Critiques of this form by now amount to a long tradition in and of themselves. Beginning with what Alain Robbe-Grillet called "the destitution of the old myths of 'depth,'" they blossomed out into a phenomenology skeptical of Realism's metaphysical tendencies, demanding, with Husserl, that we eschew the transcendental, the metaphorical, and go "back to the things themselves!"; they peaked in that radical deconstructive doubt which questions the capacity of language itself to describe the world with accuracy. They all of them note the (often unexamined) credos upon which Realism is built: the transcendent importance of form, the incantatory power of language to reveal truth, the essential fullness and continuity of the self... In an essay written half a century ago, Robbe-Grillet imagined a future for the novel in which objects would no longer "be merely the vague reflection of the hero's vague soul, the image of his torments, the shadow of his desires." He dreaded the "total and unique adjective, which attempt[s] to unite all the inner qualities, the entire hidden soul of things."... The received wisdom of literary history is that Finnegans Wake did not fundamentally disturb Realism's course as Duchamp's urinal disturbed Realism in the visual arts: the novel is made out of language, the smallest units of which still convey meaning, and so they will always carry the trace of the real. But if literary Realism survived the assault of Joyce, it retained the wound...

The literary economy sets up its stall on the road that leads to Netherland, along which one might wave to Jane Austen, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Yates, Saul Bellow. Rarely has it been less aware (or less interested) in seeing what's new on the route to Remainder, that skewed side road where we greet Georges Perec, Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard. Friction, fear, and outright hatred spring up often between these two traditions—yet they have revealing points of connection. At their crossroads we find extraordinary writers claimed by both sides: Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Nabokov. For though manifestos feed on rupture, artworks themselves bear the trace of their own continuity."

As Rorty felt, my prejudice has always been that there is no overarching intellectual framework that can reconcile 'Trotsky and the Orchids' in his example (or perhaps the diseased body of a dying prostitute and the second French empire in Zola's Nana; as Eliot put it, these things are a parable) or truth and beauty in this example. My preferences in literature and art has always tended to shun the monologic medieval world where art is for the most part subordinate to the transcendental. Conversely, I've always tended to prefer romanticism specifically for its elevation of the individual ego. Nonetheless, the principal tropes of romanticism and modern literature are heavily indebted to christianity. The role of the transcendental in Emerson or Wordsworth may not be specifically christian (hence the fact that Kerouac could write in a similar vein while casting it in buddhist terminology) but it is difficult to conceive of it without christianity. The concept of the romantic spot of time or epiphany is a moment of revelation in the christian sense whether it belongs to Wordsworth or Joyce. The romantic quest romance is prototypically a christian narrative of fall, damnation and redemption, at the very least a form of via negativa that inverts the standard christian eschatology, as in Lautreamont or Melmoth. As a picture this becomes more intermittent in the twentieth century; Derrida's concept of differance is in many respects kabbalistic, assuming an infinity of arcane meanings within a text; De Man's statement that a text possessed of all meanings is possessed of none marks an end to transcendental underpinnings to literature, leading to places like Forster's Marabar caves where all meanings seem equally valid and invalid. It only waited for the postmodernist suspicion of all meta-narratives to complete the final coup de grace. The examples of Kafka or Perec point to a conception of writing akin to Lyotard or De Man; raising the notion of hermeneutics only to dismiss it, dissolving all interpretation in the same way as the paintings in Life A User's Manual are returned to being a blank slate after the jigsaw has been reconstructed. In the case of Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, the narrative is deflated to the viewpoint of a single observer (who nonetheless remains absent and never uses any personal pronoun, there by removing any element of authorial interpretation from the narration). As the narrative lacks any speculation at to the consciousness of the observed actors or as to events where the observer is absent, it is one of the most anti-metaphysical narratives written (although a repeated incident with a centipede being squashed does seem to be correlated to the putative death of one of the female protagonists in a car crash), although the refusal of access to the consciousness of the other does rather serve to emphasise the issue in a way that the realist novel does not.

In theory, this should represent a form of literature that matches my philosophical predilections. In practice, I often find the likes of Perec more devoid of jouissance than the conventional realist novel, with the reader's every response manipulated and controlled. Where Eliot or Dostoevsky wrote novels that are filled with competing, contradictory voices, this is often subdued in novels like those of Robbe-Grillet that are intended to do the opposite; Barthes claimed that "the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text," reassembling the scenes presented and represented here in any number of orders.

To borrow Takashi Murakami's term, such works tend to be characterised by their flatness, something sublunary and lacking transcendent values. It's difficult not to find the sheer untidiness or 'deconstructability' of the realist novel rather more appealing; realism is after all ultimately a form of artifice, hence contrived conventions like the omniscient narrator. I have often wondered if there's such a thing as a novel that retains the polyphonic character of the realist novel without the transcendental assumptions behind it.
Labels: Literature, Postmodernism, Theory

posted by Richard 8:21 pm

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.
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 6:51 pm

Saturday, July 12, 2008

This piece from Morgan Meis in The Smart Set struck a chord with me:

"Criticism isn’t powerful anymore. It doesn’t drive anything, it doesn’t define what is good and bad in culture. Surely this has mostly to do with all the changes in the media landscape over the last few decades. Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real distinctions between high and low. There’s just more... The blogosphere and social networking sites allow anyone to communicate tastes and opinions directly to those people with whom an outlook is already shared. Criticism is essentially bottom-up now, whereas it used to be practically the definition of top-down. The audience does not look to an external authority to find out what to think — it looks to itself...

Critics have, traditionally, prided themselves in a certain amount of distance. There’s even a name for it: "critical distance." To some extent this distance was always an illusion, the byproduct of a metaphysics that saw mind and world as fully separate and staring at one another from across an epistemological abyss. But more importantly, people believed that critical distance was possible and that they were achieving it. This self-perception was enough to fuel the practice from at least the early Enlightenment until some time in the middle of the last century... Trying to maintain critical distance today is thus a practice in self-alienation. The distance might as well be infinite. The proclamations might as well be made in outer space. So we need another metaphor. If criticism isn't about distance anymore, maybe it can be about closeness....

Pleasingly, a version of this argument was made by George Nathan, the co-editor (along with H.L. Mencken) of the original version of The Smart Set back in the early 20th century. Nathan wrote a little book called The Critic and the Drama. It was, I think, ahead of its time in setting up the dilemma of criticism in an age of too much art and suggested some ways to deal with it. Here's the crucial paragraph:

If art is, in each and every case, a matter of individual expression, why should not criticism, in each and every case, be similarly and relevantly a matter of individual expression? In freeing art of definitions, has not criticism been too severely defined? I believe that it has been. I believe that there are as many kinds of criticism as there are kinds of art. I believe that there may be sound analytical, sound emotional, sound cerebral, sound impressionistic, sound destructive, sound constructive, and other sound species of criticism. If art knows no rules, criticism knows no rules — or, at least, none save those that are obvious.

That last sentence is particularly crucial. Art, Nathan is perfectly willing to accept, has no rules. Another way to say this is that each work of art generates its own set of rules. The only way to deal with any individual work, then, is to read out that set of rules, to discover something about its own internal logic. A criticism that wants to step away, to achieve distance in order to apply a set of external rules and to make judgments, ends up stepping away from the only criterion available: the criterion there within the work. Nathan doesn't use the metaphor explicitly, but he is talking about closeness versus distance. He is talking about a kind of criticism that stands there right alongside the work of art, participating in it rather than holding it at arm’s length.

Going a little further into the metaphor of distance and closeness brings us inevitably to the grand master of critical distance, Immanuel Kant. It is simply impossible to talk about the modern critical attitude without addressing the sage of Königsberg. A central component of his aesthetics is the idea of disinterest and then of universality. For Kant, when we make genuine aesthetic judgments we do so with the implication that they are not made 'for ourselves' but with the implicit idea that they stand on their own, that anyone else would make the same judgment, that the judgment ought to be universally true even if that cannot be proven. This is how Kant puts it:

For if someone likes something and is conscious that he himself does so without any interest, then he cannot help judging that it must contain a basis for being liked that holds for everyone. He must believe that he is justified in requiring a similar liking from everyone because he cannot discover, underlying his liking, any private conditions, on which only he might be dependent, so that he must regard it as based on what he can presuppose in everyone else as well.

In contrast, here's a comment by William Hazlitt, an anti-Kantian in terms of aesthetics in every bone of his body: I hate people who have no notion of any thing but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions, even worse than I dislike those who cannot for the soul of them arrive at the comprehension of an abstract idea…They are for having maps, not pictures of the world we live in: as much as to say that a bird's eye view of things contains the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

It's always seemed to me that the idea of universal standards of taste was an obvious absurdity; any such standard wide enough to encompass Perec, Dante, Orwell and Rabelais would be so generalised as to be meaningless. There's often something quite unpleasant about aesthetic demagoguery of critics; Ruskin's praise of gothic architecture and Pre-Raphaelite painting was predicated on a dismissal of Whistler's painting or architects like Cuthbert Broderick who disdained the gothic revival. Leavis praised Eliot, James, Lawrence and Conrad in The Great Tradition while dismissing the experimental on the one hand (Woolf, Joyce) and the gothic or sensational (Dickens, Bronte) on the other. Both essentially make the mistake of conflating their own predelictions with the universe and do so on grounds that are often moral or political. In either case, it's doubtful that many of us would agree with them now. In many respects, the idea of someone whose sole function is to tell us what to think about art or literature seems a form of impertinence.

When I was first introduced to the ideas of Barthes and Derrida, it seemed to me that much of the basis for criticism as a specialised function had been demolished. If literature was less the product of a single individual writing at a specific historical period and more the product of an endless play of differance in the mind of the reader, then meaning became a subjective affair. Sceptical even then, I'm less attached to either Barthes or Derrida now, but I do still think this view holds. Matters of interpretation or hermeneutics arose out of religious exegesis, the assumption that there were transcendent meanings encoded in texts that could be divined. I suspect I'd still agree with Derrida that such concepts have become untenable. Criticism as a professional activity might do well to be based on Moretti's sociological techniques or exploring reception theory through study groups, but the idea of interpretation as a valid function is one that probably should be discarded.

If there is a problem with the argument outlined above, it's less likely to be an aesthetic one and is rather more likely to be a political or social one. For example, Matthew Arnold's Kantian defence of criticism is partly due to his desire for a set of universal aesthetic standards to replace universal religious standards. Since criticism is derived from the study of religious texts and operates in a similar fashion, Arnold presumably saw the critic as an ideal replacement for the priest. A lot of this assumes that art is a form of individual expression and that the response to it is equally individual. Morgan's arguments are the perfect ones for an atomised, individualistic post-traditional society where consumption is as much a matter of individual preference as it is one of collective identification. But there is something rather ahistorical in this view and it does seem to me that there's a good case to be made that art if an expression of collective mores. That might be why particular genres tend to cluster in certain places at certain times. Labels like Greek tragedy, Restoration comedy or the nineteenth century novel are undoutedly generalisations but they do nonetheless exist for a reason; the works in question did not orginate in a vacuum.
Labels: Culture, Hermeneutics, Literature

posted by Richard 2:57 pm

Monday, May 26, 2008

On the one hand:

"Brecht... was a communist writer, not a writer who happened to support communism. The normal injunction to never judge an artist by his or her politics is an insult to his ghost because politics dominated his work. The Good Soul of Szechuan ends with the narrator asking if it is possible to lead a good life in a rotten world. The expected, indeed demanded, answer is "no". Individual morality will only be possible when the collective morality of communism comes.

Nothing, not the mountains of corpses or the cults of the personality, could shake Brecht's confidence. He preferred silence about the vast crimes of the Bolsheviks, including the murders of his friends and translators, to admitting that his god had failed... The American socialist Sidney Hook put the case for indifference best after Brecht came to dinner in Manhattan in the mid-Thirties. Stalin was forcing thousands of Soviet communists to confess to fantastic crimes, and Hook asked Brecht what he thought of the show trials. It was at this point that he said in words I have never forgotten, 'As for them, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.' I was so taken aback that I thought I had misheard him."

And on the other:

"It's strange how forgiving we are of artists who were involved with Hitler's Third Reich. In 1933, Goebbels appointed the composer Richard Strauss - whose dreamily decadent operas Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier remain central to any contemporary opera house's repertoire - president of the Reichsmusikkammer, the state music bureau. In 1936, Strauss composed the Olympic Hymn for the infamous summer games and befriended some high-ranking Nazis.

He was probably politically naive. He may have been acting to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law; and he refused to have the name of his friend, the Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig, removed from the playbill of his opera Die Schweigsame Frau. This, it seems, is now enough to redeem Strauss the man... The early Brecht was a wild, anarchic poet. Productions of his 1928 Threepenny Opera often struggle to find in it a consistent political line... For a short time in the 1930s, as German society became more divided, Brecht's plays took a decidedly Leninist turn. His play The Mother shows a working-class woman struggling to reconcile individual needs with the demands of a political cause. It's a beautiful, moving piece, painfully ignorant of the horrors of Stalinism that were to follow. How strange that this play is considered beyond the pale in Britain and no longer performed - yet the Economist can declare, in 2003, that Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, marks her out as "the greatest female film-maker of the 20th century".

Brecht was very clear about one thing: his resistance to fascism. Before the Nazis came to power, Hitler's brownshirts were disrupting performances of Brecht and Weill's 1930 opera Mahagonny, claiming that it brought the contamination of black and Jewish musical influences into the German opera house. Brecht dedicated the next 15 years of his writing - plays, film scripts, poetry - to the anti-fascist cause."

I'm not really sure why the second excerpt believes an analogy between Strauss and Brecht to be especially helpful. His complicity with Nazism is rather better documented and more frequently discussed than the above article might suggest, but it is nonetheless rather improbable to imply that Strauss was a fascist composer in the same way that Brecht was a communist writer. A better analogy might have been Hamsun, Celine or Pound, but then the issue of their engagement with Nazism is equally well known and all three faced legal reprisals for their views during their lifetime. The point about Riefenstahl also seems misplaced (although there is a good case to be made that her treatment after the second world war probably was too lenient), particularly given that an especially harsh biography of her involvement with the Nazis was only published a few years ago. Worst of all is the insinuation that Brecht's opposition to Nazism exculpates his support for the other great totalitarianism of the twentieth century. While there's certainly no reason to single Brecht out for more criticism of his art or politics than Pound or Hamsun, there is a good case to be made that communist writers have only comparatively had their political commitments subjected to the same scrutiny that writers associated with fascism did long ago.
Labels: Communism, Fascism, Literature

posted by Richard 2:17 pm

Friday, May 23, 2008

An article questions the resurgence of graphics in modern fiction:

"The Lazarus Project features a twin narrative, telling the story of a murder in 1908 and a present-day writer investigating the death. In both cases, the images are intended to add depth and resonance to both stories. The effect, however, is the opposite: their inclusion only suggests that Hemon lacks confidence in his present-day narrator, and the verisimilitude of his historical reconstruction. Last week, I asked a friend, and fellow Hemon admirer, what he thought about it all. "Sebald has a lot to answer for," he said.

WG Sebald subtly altered the literary landscape with his fiction/travel/history books. Melancholic, digressive and erudite, his unsettling narratives are punctuated with photos, landscapes, diary entries and other images. It's the tension between these two elements - between what is real and fake, what words can describe and what they can't - that gives his books their dream-like power. It also allows Sebald to give a direct line into the mental landscape of his narrator, one that is visual as well as linguistic.

Sebald was a master of this device, but it's a technique that can scupper otherwise good novels... Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer's image heavy second novel, also suffers under the weight of its artistic leanings. I'm still undecided as to whether the last pages which depict a man falling from the Twin Towers, are an ambitious attempt to prove that sometimes words are not enough, or whether it's a final tricksy passage to a book over-stuffed with visual stimuli."

It's not particularly new; prior to the advent of the printing press, image and text were inextricably entwined. With the Victorian period, the love of medievalism led to a revival of sorts; editions of works by Chaucer issued by the Kelmscott Press were illustrated by Burne Jones. In parallel, Paget's illustrations for Conan Doyle were sufficiently powerful to create an image of Sherlock Holmes that failed to resemble that described in the text. The same followed for Phiz and Cruikshank's illustrations for Dickens and in the case of Tenniel's Alice in Wonderland; although modern readers might find themselves reading an edition illustrated by Mervyn Peake. George Eliot had her novels illustrated by no less a figure than Lord Leighton. Much of Dore's work was done as book illustrations, while Rossetti served as both writer and illustrator. Photographs occurred in fiction as early as Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, followed by the work of Andre Breton. In a sense, modern fiction has been aberrant for relying solely on text. Nonetheless, the above comments immediately brought an essay by Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line to mind:

"Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself--and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing graphical or sensorial ones--a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney? Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now--much more complicated than the hunter-gatherer world that our brains evolved to cope with--and we simply can't handle all of the details. We have to delegate. We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary.

But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds."

Update: on a related note:

"Our ancestors couldn't have foreseen, however, the sheer quantity of visual distractions which, while they aid, also hinder our readerly mind's eye. Indeed, surveys carried out in schools confirm that non-illustrated texts produce more mental images than illustrated ones. While there's a text/image balance to be struck as a means to training youthful brains in the art of visualising, we know that as adults the extent to which book covers, and even author photographs, while helping us situate a text before we crack open the pages, quite often mislead.

I'm not quite arguing that, in order to focus our minds we go back to minimalist Editions de Minuit style book covers as practiced over here in France - by their very austerity, they convey to the reader the immediate impression of the publishing house's chilly prestige. I am intrigued, rather, by the practice of certain readers like Nabokov, who produced for his Cornell students mock-serious diagrams of the comparative states of mind of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or drew up sketches of beetle-man Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis."
Labels: Images, Literature

posted by Richard 8:01 pm

Thursday, April 10, 2008

An interesting summary of Beckett's lectures on literature:

"Beckett first defined his literary criteria by way of the contrast he set up between the 19th-century French authors Balzac and Flaubert. Unlike his Irish contemporaries, Beckett saw Balzac as the counter-example of the modern novel, and Flaubert as the great innovator. For Beckett (as he has the protagonist of his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, put it): "To read Balzac is to receive the impression of a chloroformed world." He resented both the lack of confusion and the lack of self-criticism in Balzac. What fascinated him was the clair-obscure (the painterly distribution of light and shade) he found in the writers he admired, like Dostoevsky and Flaubert. Balzac, by contrast, only transcribed the surface, creating a fictional world that resembled a pool table on which balls are perfectly arranged and sent in one direction or another according to a very precise strategy of control. In Beckett's eyes, Balzac divested his fictional universe of the unexpected and the unknowable, properties which, for Beckett, lay at the heart of human experience and whose expression must find its way into fiction.

Art for Beckett at this period was the progressive discovery of the "real", as Burrows remembered in an interview in 1982: "The artist himself was changing all the time and his material was constantly in a state of flux, hence you had to do something to organize this mess, but not to make puppets and set them in motion." Beckett favoured the absence of a controlling authorial personality and any sense of finality in a text, and was opposed to the control, embellishment or glorification of reality. In these respects, Flaubert was an exemplary modern author for him. Citing Madame Bovary and Salammbo he explained that Flaubert was neither photographer nor image monger, but a writer who displayed an honest apprehension of reality.

Beckett denied any modernity in Balzac, whose flawed duality he denounced - on the one hand he was a realist, and on the other a romantic psychologist. But, for Beckett, these two aspects did not fit together, resulting in a profound lack of cohesion in Balzac's work. According to Beckett a modern writer must seek "homogeneity". Thus, Flaubert was at once coherent and complex, in the manner in which the extreme precision of his texts revealed the contradiction of so-called 19th-century realism: exactitude was inevitably bound to be frustrated because confusion cannot be reduced to a neat narrative à la Balzac.

Beckett also appreciated that Flaubert, rather than fabricating heroes, created circumstances that reduced his characters to their just level of banality, thus revealing their paradoxical nature and sometimes their stupidity, an approach which shocked Henry James, who said: "Why did Flaubert choose, as special conduits of the life he proposed to depict, such inferior and ... such abject human specimens?" Madame Bovary's creator had anticipated such a charge by once writing that there were neither good nor bad subjects, and that, from an artistic point of view, the subject was irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things. He refused to dissociate form and content. "Here form is content, content is form. [...] His writing is not about something; it is that something itself" was Flaubert's motto, which Beckett used to champion Joyce's Finnegans Wake. It's a formula at one with Flaubert's notion of the ideal book - that would be about nothing, one that would rely on its style alone and whose subject would be invisible."

As noted on my previous post on this subject, there's a lot about this that reminds me of the distinction Keats drew between Milton (the egotistical sublime) and Shakespeare (negative capability) or that outlined by Berlin in the case of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, with Balzac firmly characterised as a writer who celebrates diversity and the contradictory and Doestoevsky described as the type of writer who sees the world through the lens of a single lens (itself an opposed description to Bakhtin's characterisation of Dostoevksy's work as polyphonic). It's certainly true that in Flaubert, we have the sense of consciousness as something submerged and independent from the normal categories of the social novel, as with Emma Bovary's romantic longings or Frederic's admission at the end of Sentimental Education that the zenith of his life was a hitherto unmentioned visit to a brothel. It's also not difficult to see how Flaubert's stated aim to "derouter le lecteur" would appeal to Beckett. Sentimental Education in particular goes a long way to confirming Beckett's contention; in a Balzac novel the different paths taken by the characters would often lead to different moral outcomes, whereas in Flaubert all paths lead to the same destination. The usual teleological structure of the nineteenth century novel, with its remorseless progress towards tragedy or marriage, is abandoned. While the depiction of Dambreuse is not that far removed from that of Merdle or Melmotte (the poverty of Madame Arnoux and Rosanette is also not that far from Dickens), Flaubert is equally cynical as to the alternatives, as with his observation that Senecal is filled with love towards the mases in their aggregate state and is merciless towards individuals; "a sort of Athenian Sparta in which the individual would only exist to serve the state... anything which he considered hostile to it he attacked with the logic of a mathematician and the faith of an inquisitor." Frederic is at once an aristocratic snob ("he felt utterly nauseated by the vulgarity of their faces, the stupidity of their talk...the knowledge that he was worth more than these men lessened the fatigure of looking at them.") and is fired with revolutionary ideals ("I think the people are sublime"). Deslauriers similarly notes that "he had preached fraternity to the conservatives and respect for the law to the socialists." Sentimental Education is the great novel of the middle ground, with all viewpoints contested and all found wanting Frederic and not steering a straight enough course, and Desluariers being too rigid, with the same applying to the aesthetic debates of Pellerin and Senecal.

Nonetheless, I'm still not quite convinced I find Beckett's argument wholly meaningful. It's certainly true that, like Dickens, Balzac seems to see his characters as caricatures, driven by social and moral concepts rather than an idea of human consciousness (his idea of each individual having only a certain amount of life force that can be frittered away by dissolute or hubristic behaviour has a rather medieval quality to it). On the other hand, there is the difficulty that Balzac, like Thackeray is not an especially good moralist, and the moral fables that lie at the centre of his work either lack conviction or simply go awry altogether, leading to something rather more interesting. In short, I think that the disconnection of the romantic and realist in Balzac is a strength rather than a defect - not the first time, I find myself preferring the dissonant and inconsistent to the consistent and harmonious. Homogeneity is probably the very last thing the novel should aim for. To take the example of The Black Sheep, I was struck by what an anti-novel it is. The form of the novel should be similar to that of Nicholas Nickleby but instead of simply dwelling on the notion of the good and neglected Joseph eventually receiving his dues, Balzac pays as much attention to Philippe, the prodigal son, and instead of solely focussing on the dissolute aspect of his life, depicts the raw will to power as someone could have been a great general but is left out of place in the world he finds himself in. Instead of a simple moral fable, Balzac instead describes "a place where speculation and individualism are carried to the highest level, where the brutality of self interest reaches the point of cynicism." Philippe's rapacity is as vital and necessary here as Eugenie Grandet's self sacrifice or Cousin Pons's good nature is as pointless or helpless in the novels of those name. In Balzac, we always feel that we are reading a novel where the characters are evaluated primarily in moral terms, only to discover that such considerations are never of any importance.

To take another example, Lost Illusions I was struck by how it forms a mid-point between the picaresque novel (since although Balzac's narrative is highly plotted, the plot nonetheless tends to turn through unexpected events in an episodic fashion, a moral fable depicting the travels of a young man from country to city and consequently from innocence to corruption and redemption) and later social novels (where morality has a much more problematic relationship with social conditions and where the character of society is not necessarily regarded as a given, though Balzac is markedly more nonchalant on that score than Zola). For instance, Balzac writes of Lucien that "he was under the spell of luxury and the tyranny of sumptuous fare; his wayward instincts were reviving," but in practice the majority of the narrative is driven not by Lucien's fall into immoral debauchery but by the machinations of society driven by the cash-nexus; "everything is taxed, everything is sold, everything is manufactured, even success." Accordingly, Balzac links dissipation with the society that produces it; "the helotism to which the Restoration had condemned young people... having no outlet for their energy they... frittered it away in the strangest excesses." The consequence is that although 'Herrera' is clearly marked as a Faustian figure, both author and narrator are left pinioned by the novel's own logic when he declares that any morality can only come after financial security. A statement that is worthy of Brecht's What Keeps Mankind Alive?

Update: an interesting comment on the same theme from a review of a history of modernism:

"Each of Gay’s dramatis personae exhibit his two key modernist traits – that is, the desire to challenge the cultural establishment (Ezra Pound’s 'make it new') and to give expression to hitherto unencountered depths of the self, be it the 'monologue interieur' of Joyce or the near pathological self-portraiture of Max Beckmann... Modernism, for its constituents, was experienced not simply as liberation, but as crisis. It bespoke something profound: the cultural experience, indeed, the disillusionment of modernity’s promise of autonomy. The emancipation of individual subjectivity, encouraging self-scrutiny as Gay sees it, if bereft of social bonds becomes as much a prison as a promise of freedom.

This is writ large in the development of literary modernism. As Gay notes, the mimetic, realistic component typical of nineteenth-century realism was increasingly experienced as a formal inhibition. But he fails to tell us why this was the case. What had changed between the time of Balzac and that of Flaubert and Baudelaire, the two progenitors of modernism identified by Gay? As the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs explained, between these two generations of French writers 'lies the year 1848 and the bloody days of June, the first independent action of the working class, which left so indelible an impression on the ideology of the French bourgeoisie, that after it bourgeois ideology ceased to play a progressive part in France for a long time'. In other words, universal aspirations were abandoned in favour of the protection of particular interests.

This is crucial. For the realist writer, the ability to narrate, to find meaning in social praxes, rests, as Lukács argues, on the artist having a 'living relationship to the real life of the people'. Be it Balzac or Walter Scott, the vital problems of the time are experienced as their problems; the life and struggles of the community as their struggles. Modernism’s emergence depends on the dissolution of just such an involvement. As Peter Nicholls notes, it is with Baudelaire, writing during the 1850s, that 'a cleavage begins to open up between bourgeois modernity, on the one hand, and aesthetic modernity on the other'.

The sovereignty of the artist, his autonomy, is set against the political sovereignty and autonomy won in 1789. Although free to experiment, to push the boundaries of their art, the artist loses those with whom he had previously found common, if problematic cause. His professionalisation becomes a burden. Bereft of something like solidarity, he is left before his fellows – the market – as before an antagonistic mass: 'Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere!'"
Labels: Hermeneutics, Literature

posted by Richard 8:16 pm

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Philip Hensher writes on the history of the state of the nation novel:

"Several things define this genre: a range of social settings; the coverage of an extended period of time; a sense that the lives described reflect major social shifts or matters of public importance; and, often, open debate on political concerns and the nature of the nation itself. Commentators on the English novel have often claimed to find works of this type in 19th-century fiction. In fact, few of Dickens's or Eliot's works really analyse the whole of a society. However, some 19th-century authors certainly did set out to write state-of-the-nation fiction. The title of Trollope's The Way We Live Now is a clear indication of intent, and the book conscientiously covers a range of social settings and roles, from the agricultural to the new capital markets of the City. Disraeli's splendid "Young England" trilogy of the 1840s, Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred, with its broad social spectrum and tendency to political solutions, is virtually the founding example of the state-of-the-nation novel. The celebrated passage from Sybil about the two nations, rich and poor, is one of the very few examples of a piece of state-of-the-nation rhetoric making its way permanently into the political debate. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Middlemarch and, probably, Little Dorrit all have a state-of-the-nation flavour: they have an acute sense of the larger implications of the individual situation; their ambitions are both literary and, in a general sense, policy-directed in ways which go beyond the aspirations of, say, Great Expectations or Daniel Deronda.

The novelist's concern with the state of the nation has never gone away, but it only occasionally emerges in the form of a state-of-the-nation novel. Nothing could be more telling about Britain's unhoused exhaustion at the end of the second world war than the rush of enthusiasm for novels about country houses and fantastical, often demonic palaces—Brideshead Revisited, Love in a Cold Climate, Gormenghast and The Lord of the Rings. None of them, however, was exactly state-of-the-nation, and the taste for the national diagnosis was satisfied by the factual discussions of the Beveridge report, which sold an astonishing 600,000 copies, at two shillings each.

Since then, the state-of-the-nation tendency in fiction has surfaced from time to time. The mid to late 1970s saw a small run of such books concerned with what seemed the collapse of the Attlee consensus. AS Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden (1978), set in the early 1950s, was the first volume of a tetralogy that traced the developing state of the nation in the following decades. William Golding's Darkness Visible (1979) seems to give in to despair in a tale of motiveless violence. In Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age (1977), commerce and property become evil, empty values in ways that foreshadow the "Thatcher's Britain" novelists... Why are we seeing such a range of state-of-the-nation novels at this moment? Perhaps the last occasion when such novels seemed urgent and vital was not the "Thatcher's Britain" years but the years which produced Drabble, Byatt and Golding, the fag-end of the Callaghan Labour government. The public consensus then was clearly breaking down under a prime minister who had no mandate from an election. The trust between people and elected representatives was evaporating, and acts of individual violence were common."

This is something I've been thinking about recently and something I have my doubts about. London Fields by Martin Amis is characterised by a sense of English life as an irrelevance, a place from where history has fled ("Bellow says that America is the only place to be, because it contains the 'real modern action'"). I recall him later comparing England to Switzerland, making me think of Greene's comment about centuries of peace and prosperity creating nothing more than the cuckoo clock. By contrast, the London of Trollope and Dickens was an economic experiment, a place wholly unlike anywhere else on Earth and which represented the shape of things to come. There's also the sense of Victorian society as having been considerably more cohesive; even with two nations there is the sense of inequality as a source of collective shame that needs to be addressed collectively. This isn't something that is obviously a part of modern England, where the return of Victorian social conditions does not seem to have led to any similar set of social concerns. Modern England seems to be comparatively atomised, it's individualism and multiculturalism making state of the nation fiction difficult at best and often confined to minority groups, as with Smith or Hollinghurst.

Perhaps this is why much modern social fiction seems a rather poor substitute for its Victorian counterpart; Arnott's He Kills Coppers spans a social history of decades but its characters remains as they are, unaffected by social upheaval, whereas the Victorian assumption was that the individual and society were inextricably intertwined. Similarly, McEwan's On Chesil Beach certainly contains several passages that suggest a degree of scepticism as to political radicalism; Florence's mother describes the Soviet Union as little different to Nazi Germany. As Florence believes it to be essentially benevolent it is a little inconsistent for her to describe Edward's membership of CND as being akin to a medieval millenarian cult (particularly when she too belongs to it). However, whether any of this really translates to support for conservative ideas is an extrapolation the novel fails to justify, particularly when McEwan comments that he has not disavowed any of the views he once held as a member of CND. My own reservations about McEwan are rather different. As the above descriptions attest, the novel is concerned with events in the years that Larkin described sexual intercourse as having invented in ("This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine ...This was still the era when to be young was a social encumbrance.") At one point McEwan's omniscient narrator declares that "Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself." This seems true of one of the characters, Edward, who travels in the course of the novel from English middle class awkwardness to becoming a sixties dropout. However, Florence's "visceral dread" of sex is deliberately left unexplained and can certainly not be laid at the hand of history. Similarly, her suggestion that their relationship be platonic, with her tolerating him having sex with other women hardly seems to be ahead of its time in the way McEwan seems to believe it to be; quite the contrary. The idea that Edward's life would have been much better if he had accepted also seems somewhat unwarranted, given that the novel itself holds out little more than a post in her father's firm for choosing that road. McEwan generally seems to prefer the aberrant and unexplained too much to be able to work fully within the constraints of the realist novel, where the struggles of Julien Sorrel or Dorothea Brooke is entirely in keeping with the spirit of their age.

Update: an interesting, and to my mind quite persuasive, article from Alan Massie takes an approach that rather recalls Lukacs. In this context we might compare the 'closed' Madame Bovary to the 'open' Lost Illusions:

"One may make a distinction between two types of novel: the self-enclosed and the open. The distinction is not absolute. Such things never are. Genre fiction may merge with what is called the literary novel, for instance. Still the categories I have in mind are useful, or at least interesting. By the self-enclosed novel, I mean one which makes no reference — or almost no reference — to anything beyond itself. It belongs to its age of course, but it does not appear to be set in time. Time naturally passes, as it must in a narrative, but there is no suggestion that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters, influence their behaviour, or affect the course of their lives. The doors of the novel are closed against the winds of the world. In the open novel, these winds, which are the winds of history, beat upon the characters. Indeed history is itself a character in this kind of novel, even if the author chooses not to introduce real-life historical figures. In, for instance, that fine novel by Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day, the second world war is a character as the Napoleonic Wars are not in Jane Austen’s beautifully self-enclosed novels. The treason of which the heroine’s lover is guilty would seem less significant if we didn’t bring to our reading of the novel our knowledge of the enemy he has chosen to serve — the enemy whom his lover, Stella, rightly calls ‘horrible — specious, unthinkable, grotesque’.

The open novel was invented more or less by Walter Scott, though it had ancestors in Defoe and Fielding. Especially in the series of great novels set in the Scotland of the 17th and 18th centuries, Scott demonstrates that, for a man of a certain stamp at a certain time, there is no escaping history. It is history, the world of harsh political fact which, working in conjunction with personal qualities, forms or deforms men’s lives. Henry Morton’s dilemma in Old Mortality is certainly occasioned by his character, but it is specifically provoked by the temper of the times in which he lives and the bitter animosities with which he is confronted are historical facts...

Some frown on this. A work of art, they say, should be self-sufficient, needing to make no reference to anything beyond itself. This argument is advanced more often in discussion of painting than in literary criticism — Roger Fry’s doctrine of ‘significant form’, for instance — and would have puzzled the Old Masters who expected people to bring their knowledge of the Bible or Classical mythology to the contemplation of their work. It would likewise have puzzled the poets who expected their readers to catch their classical allusions.... The self-enclosed novel will always be written, but Scott’s example was soon followed by Stendhal, Hugo and Tolstoy. Most novels are perhaps hybrids. Sometimes you get an open novel, like Thomas Mann’s masterpiece Doctor Faustus, which, for much of the time, pretends to be self-enclosed. Nowadays the problem for the writer of the contemporary open novel is that news and the sense of immediacy press so hard and insistently upon him. This is perhaps why so many of the best open novels are set in the past, even if that past is quite recent, as in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy."
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 11:08 am

The Thief's Journal

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