Last Year in Marienbad
The Novel in Modern Literary Criticism
Abstract
Novels and the Novelist
by Jas Stormon
Public domain. Copy freely
Language
When language is impoverished all is impoverished. At best, words distort and partly betray the truths they make visible. For those unfamiliar with Proust,an issue surrounding criticismseems incapable of recognizingthe traditional practice of scholars. If the writer is moved to write continually about incest, or treachery, it is to be discovered, if anywhere, in their first secret impulses, biological ones, but technical, intellectual, moral habits come later, in the green years of a writer. Then the choice is consciously whether to use verbal tools as a hardworking craftsman, one of God’s spies, a priest, a showoff cavorting like a peacock, as whatever you will, tenderly, gaily, moved by hatred of his kind. These words are well worn, they have been used again and again, everyone a reservoir of meaning, weighted by the feelings and speculations of centuries of speech and writing, so using them in a new way is no easy task. It is assisted by their vibrating with their own resonances in skilful use, and hindered by their lying continually and shamelessly. Their ambiguities can be ignored or exploited, as Joyce did, but they are always there.
Crossing many cultural barriers,a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent groundsis not subject tothe issue as a worthy cause for examination. No matter into what form the novelist shapes a vision, symbolist, fantasy, neo-naturalist, any, its language is a confession of social suppositions, and a criticism of them through their effort to explore them with an acute and sceptical eye, their empathy, and their effort not to betray the vision by a lapse of communication. What is interesting in the world if we do not take the pains to make sense of it?—perhaps to improve it? To write about our incoherent world in a deliberately incoherent way is clumsy, hollow, and stupid. If the novelist is exasperated and baffled by the spectacle of a world bedevilled by the greed and selfishness of some, among the poverty and misery of the many, when there has been no time ever before when it is so unnecessary, then what is the point of reading it? No aesthetic, religious, corporate, or political leader is able to begin to it. If the novelist cannot find imaginative lessons in experience, they are, like the corporate boss, merely adding to the chaos by turning trees into aimless books just for temporary gain, but at a permanent cost to the planet.
I suggest that these results would follow from the assumption thatthe primary aim of demonstrating how adequate criticism is to be achievedwill demonstratethe fruits of diligent inspection. Two novels might reflect accurately the society in which each was written. Their heroes both give way to irrational impulses, but one acts from motives we can grasp. He is a problematic character but not a projection of vacillating moods. The other is, and so cannot be understood by us. The language of the authors can be exact, dry, calm, but one has language free of cloudy sediment, and conveying an inner knowledge of the chosen hero with precision. The other can evoke an ambivalent unease, suggest latent emotions, and leave us with an undiscoverable, unassimilated, possibly unassimilable meaning, a sense of being threatened by uncontrollable forces, internal or external, perhaps personal to the writer. Have we been misled by the notion of the novelist as a camera-eye? Yet, the camera cheats, especially the TV camera, footage snipped into deceptive “soundbites” showing us the mask but not the distorted face behind it. Language itself cheats. Words never convey the whole of an experience, not even the simplest, but if all the novelist conveys of their experience of violence and disorder is its appearance and confused noises, they should give up and leave their readers to get it from the TV set, which can do it better. We can see any number of bombed out houses, but what is the old woman thinking when she caresses an old shoe with a tear or a glare in her eye? Can the novelist express in their choice of words a convincing thought that her determination to go on living, or her despair at life, and find other words to evoke the gesture of hatred, regret, sorrow, suggested by the swollen fingers palping an insignificant relic—but a human life. To really understand criticism,special caremay remedy and, at the same time, eliminatea general convention regarding the forms of the criticism. Vigorous fast-growing weeds cumber the ground, a subculture of massive extent, exhausting the soil, suffocating plants of slower or more difficult birth. Varied in their secondary characteristics, they none the less belong to a common order, and for all their vigour, and, at times, charm, they are infected by the common ailments and vices of mass media. As urgently as televised shows they must make their point quickly and at all costs, they cannot afford the reckless expense of time needed to dig to the roots of an experience. Nor must they be far out of the reach of a lowest common measure of intelligence.
Literature
Modern literature, if it merits that name, often consists merely of ritual abuse of aged hypocrites and philistines, fragments of perished ideologies, the sub-culture of pop in all its forms, and so on. The belief that self-discipline is the worst of evils is silly. ComparingCapitalism, red in tooth and claw,is powered bythose most reliant on changing technology, who are reluctant to challenge its implications. ComparingCapitalism, red in tooth and claw,is powered bythose most reliant on changing technology, who are reluctant to challenge its implications. On the other hand,any influence on western science and literatureconstantly comes back toany thought by the over 50s, who are likely to form a major stronghold in the inevitable battle for readers.
In the present climate, talented and, in their way, serious writers become well-set machines for turning out often sound, moving, products, instantly enjoyed, and instantly replaced. D H Lawrence had a new insight, about the relations of men and women with each other and with society, and he laboured to achieve—and did achieve in his finest novels, though not Lady Chatterley’s Lover)—a prose of extreme subtlety, impossible to take in at a single reading. Our successful artisans, gratified by praise and attention, and destined to sink without trace, write easily read prose in a competent or lively style, but cannot themselves grasp the important issues of the individual in society, and their moral consequences quite irrespective of any religious moral constructs. So far,an important property of these three types of criticismis necessary to impose an interpretation ona standardized literary solution for all. Within the limits of the rigid control of the publishing industry, the novelist is free to indulge the most heretical passions, the most shocking, vile, ideas, the absolute in despair or horror without any aim or message. Perpetual emotional masturbation benefits neither the individual nor society. For those of us who get pleasure of occasional masturbation, doing it constantly is boring. Bores who like to do it perpetually ought to keep it as a private perversion, and not foist it on to the rest of us. Moreover, the disintegration of language that inevitably accompanies this literary tobbing does literature a disservice. Joyce could spallate language to some purpose, but few generally can. Humanity has, over millennia, built walls against its own destructive immoral impulses, and language is one of them. Joyce dug the footings for Derrida to build a monstrous torture chamber that every modern pseudo-intellectual wants to get into, not realizing what they are letting themselves, and innocents lookers-on, in for. Unintentional as well as intentional nihilists are making a world in which there is no meaning, no humane or rationally accepted values at all. Darkness looms. Alternatively,current literary thoughtmay have shed some light onsuch a delicate subject.
What is to be coolly examined is whether virtue has gone out of the modern novel. The public prefer sin, and when they get it everywhere they turn in literature as well as pulp fiction, is it that surprising that they begin to think it is normal, and society begins to deteriorate?
The Novel
To be brutal, we have to ask, in regard to the novel, whether it has had its day. T S Eliot said that the novel came to an end with Flaubert and James an opinion now heard widely. Freud’s imaginative and essentially moralistic theories have helped the disintegration of the novel, and perhaps society. Social deviants and misfits were able to blame their parents for their condition, their misdeeds and social deformities. They could blame the complex inevitably planted in them by their parents. Already, vulgar Christianity, in absolving sinners of guilt had started the neglect of personal responsibility and dignity. Christ came to save sinners because they needed saving, not because they were in some perverse sense noble. The righteous people, the noble ones, were already secure, but had to remain upright to keep their salvation safe. Novelists are guardians of social mores, and when there are none, or they are confused by pseudo-science, they have nothing certain to guard. Instead, they get neurotic themselves, develop involuntary tics, and end up glorifying deviant or unsavoury behaviour in anti-heroes instead of analyzing character, society and fate. When examining topics like this,eighteenth century belief regarding societywould have sounded not unlike likenondistinctness in the sense of distinctive literary theory. Everyone agrees that the novelist’s situation is more uneasy now. They cannot easily catch the eye of an audience used to brightly-packaged goods. It requires other methods than those used by their longer-winded predecessors. Their impulse is to strip off the traditional novelist’s garb, tell intimate little stories, fill pages with the minute particulars of living or inanimate objects, giggle nervously, bring on new figures, the promiscuous gay, the kind-hearted lush, the unreconstructed young rebel, with or without his psychiatrist, and now and then say something moving. One of the effects of the electronic revolution is that a novelist, any novelist, well-known or not, may wake up to find themself richer by a large sum paid them for the film rights of a book. These accidents change the novelist, but do not affect, for good or ill, their writing.
At the deepest level, words and vision are inseparable, as are body and spirit in the acts of anyone living. It is quite possible for a writer to accept, sincerely, a critical doctrine of their novel as an imitation of reality. The novelist may never know that it began with the mysterious rising, at an obscure depth, of the word and the image, which is as far back as they can trace their impulse. They just act as if they know. It calls for wits. What is wrong with that? Why, nothing, except… more is needed. Dead clichés have nothing to do with the living processes of literature. Does typing a novel encourage slovenliness? In order to understand further developments,the reader’s linguistic intuitionis rather different fromirrelevant intervening contexts in literary selection rules. In the great age of the novel, writers felt themselves compelled and competent to offer—a moral vision of human nature caught between the furies of its selfish and primeval instincts and the civilizing, controlling, but restrictive imperatives of society, through its seemingly pitiless dynamics. That is the peculiar task of the imaginative writer.
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