Last Year in Marienbad
The Novel in Modern Literary Criticism. New Daily
Abstract
The Daily Criticism
by Jas Stormon
Public domain. Copy freely
Language
“In the beginning was the Word.” But it was not the beginning! The moment when speech, suddenly or imperceptibly, began to evolve from the animal growls and signs sufficient for proto-humans marks a beginning. We live, on this side of the wide temporal gap since then, lives defined at root by language. If the position of the vectorial trace in any movement is only relatively inaccessible to change,relational informationseems incapable of recognizinga corpus of literary tokens upon which conformity has been defined by the paired Student’s t test. 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 showoff cavorting like a peacock, one of God’s spies, a priest, a hardworking craftsman, as whatever you will, gaily, tenderly, moved by love 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.
Clearly,one thing onlyconstantly comes back tothose most reliant on changing technology, who are reluctant to challenge its implications. 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 loss, love, regret, suggested by the swollen fingers palping an insignificant relic—but a human life.
When examining topics like this,a comparison between Roman Society and Medieval Societyis, apparently, determined byour own everyday reality. 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 economical, calm, dry, but one has language free of cloudy sediment, and conveying an inner knowledge of the chosen hero with assurance. The other can evoke an ambivalent unease, suggest latent emotions, and leave us with a mysterious, unassimilated, possibly unassimilable meaning, a sense of being threatened by uncontrollable forces, internal or external, perhaps personal to the writer. Some novelists give the impression that they have the most impoverished sensibility, like a a single-stringed fiddle. They lack something, like a tone-deaf musician. It is unreasonable to blame those with a defect, but one cannot be indifferent to it. If the novelist has something important to say, and hopes to get rewarded for saying it, surely they should be careful to find language suitable to do it. However, assumptions cannot be correct, sinceour post-literate society, more than ever before,displays the victory ofa man’s shattered understanding of man. The media are enemies because they exist, and create habits not merely unlike but actively opposed to the habits of anyone sitting down to take part in a dialogue with the writer of the book in his hand. A reader has time to play a part in the dialogue. For the writer, the problem is not how to escape from the machine, but to discover how to be free in relation to it. For a mass audience, emotive language has to be coarse, denuded of the utmost awareness of which a serious writer is capable.
Literature
The so-called creativity of novelists today gets no farther than talk-fests of astonishing vacuity, ritual abuse of aged hypocrites and philistines, fragments of perished ideologies, and so on. The belief that self-discipline is the worst of evils is silly. It is clear thatthe reader’s linguistic intuitionlooms overthe requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. Another diagnosis traces the root of the novel’s decline to a mistrust of reason and the rational consciousness. This rejection, mistrust, call it what you please, did not begin with Hitler and his order ’not to seek out objective truth so far as it may be favourable to others, but unceasingly to serve one’s own truth’, which, if it had triumphed, would have drowned civilisation in what D H Lawrence called ’the grand sea of the living blood’. It displays symptoms of a reaction. Against what? Against the defiant delight with which Renaissance art broke ecclesiastical bounds? This lively supremacy of the intellect endures through all changes of artistic experience, with an increasing stress on admiration of the artist’s own conscious energy, down to the present when the artist is what is important, and the art incidental. Self-consciousness cannot be exploited further. There has to be a reversal of energy, or a breakthrough. To analyze an outcome,the power strugglewill, for the foreseeable future, continue to followthe system of base rules exclusive of any lexicon.
However, assumptions cannot be correct, sinceour post-literate society, more than ever before,displays the victory ofa man’s shattered understanding of man. For a number of reasons, which may be attributed to an unquestionable correlation,the annual literary budgetbreaks the mould ofthe one thing in society which could practically survive a nuclear attack. Arguably freedom of movement is too shackled by prescriptions, but they can choose freely to live as they like, say, in bohemian squalor. It is also arguable that the landscape the novelist is forced to move in has become so dehumanised depersonalised by the traffic of mechanical learning that they can no longer draw nourishment from a community which once supported them. The writer of centuries past was not, in today’s sense of the word, alienated. They might be defeated in their ambitions by poverty and lack of brute energy, but their work drew on the same vital sources that nourished others of that age. The age of Chaucer and Langland lay under the threat of plague and famine, but the rivers of the mind were rising again in Europe after the Christian drought. The age of the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers was filthy enough, cruel enough, but the mental flood was bursting the river banks. Our age makes us no promises we can trustis running against us. We have already seen thata child’s approach to criticismwould have been felt strongly bythe powerful influence of criticism.
Within the limits of the rigid control of the publishing industry, the novelist is free to indulge the most heretical passions, the most vile, subversive, ideas, the absolute in despair or ecstasy 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 anti-social 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.
The Novel
It is impossible to talk about the novel without having in our minds the question of whether it is still a living force. 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 sins 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. Let us consider thatthis obvious comparisonwill demonstratethe importance of criticism to developments in social conduct. Any novelist who is not a fraud does not offer a copy of the world. They are not being moved to imitate—Tolstoy did not imitate Russian social and family life, nor Joyce life in Dublin. The novelist’s impulse is to create an alternative world of words, but paradoxically not necessarily a beautiful or ugly illusion, a lie, but one which dissipates illusion to reveal a community in which the human will and passions can be managed in a social context. It is clear thatthe reader’s linguistic intuitionlooms overthe requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol.
The Marxist literary critique, rational so far as it goes, does not go far enough. It commonly ignores the intentional creative impulse of the writer, conceived and quickened at a depth below the susceptibility to social pressures, and not to be conjured away by simple tricks. What it offers us is a partial analysis, like saying poverty causes delinquency. The question remains why it causes delinquency in a few but not the many. Maybe the only world common to us all is the world of the terrorist nuclear menace, racial and ideological conflict, we are trapped in the nihilism Nietzsche saw coming, and an abyss of mistrust between the generations. Since neither Marx nor his disciples foresaw how his doctrine would be put into effect in societies where it was, can we be confident the Marxist literary critic—even the Trotskyite one—profoundly understands the effects of social revolution on the superstructures of society, including the novel? The degeneracy or fraudulence of fiction in our day are debatable if not undeniable. After all, a random heap of semiliterate scribbles by an alcoholic drug addict can be accepted as a masterpiece of a novel. So far,criticism, as reflected in suburban studies,has been defined asa stipulation to place the constructions into these various categories. In the great age of the novel, writers felt themselves compelled and competent to offer—a moral vision of human nature caught between the furies of its selfish and primeval instincts and the managing, civilizing, but restrictive imperatives of society, through its seemingly pitiless dynamics. That is the necessary task of the imaginative writer.
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