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December 12, 1976
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I
was a very contrary undergraduate more than 40 years ago. It was my habit to register
for a course and then to do most of my reading in another field of study. So that
when I should have been grinding away at "Money and Banking" I was reading the
novels of Joseph Conrad. I have never had reason to regret this. Perhaps Conrad
appealed to me because he was like an American - he was an uprooted Pole sailing
exotic seas, speaking French and writing English with extraordinary power and
beauty. Nothing could be more natural to me, the child of immigrants who grew
up in one of Chicago's immigrant neighborhoods of course! - a Slav who was a British
sea captain and knew his way around Marseilles and wrote an Oriental sort of English.
But Conrad's real life had little oddity in it. His themes were straightforward
- fidelity, command, the traditions of the sea, hierarchy, the fragile rules sailors
follow when they are struck by a typhoon. He believed in the strength of these
fragile-seeming rules, and in his art. His views on art were simply stated in
the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus. There he said that art was
an attempt to render the highest justice to the visible universe: that it tried
to find in that universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what was
fundamental, enduring, essential. The writer's method of attaining the essential
was different from that of the thinker or the scientist. These, said Conrad, knew
the world by systematic examination. To begin with the artist had only himself;
he descended within himself and in the lonely regions to which he descended, he
found "the terms of his appeal". He appealed, said Conrad, "to that part of our
being which is a gift, not an acquisition, to the capacity for delight and wonder...
our sense of pity and pain, to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation
- and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together
the loneliness of innumerable hearts... which binds together all humanity - the
dead to the living and the living to the unborn."
This fervent statement
was written some 80 years ago and we may want to take it with a few grains of
contemporary salt. I belong to a generation of readers that knew the long list
of noble or noble-sounding words, words like "invincible conviction" or "humanity"
rejected by writers like Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway spoke for the soldiers who
fought in the First World War under the inspiration of Woodrow Wilson and other
rotund statesmen whose big words had to be measured against the frozen corpses
of young men paving the trenches. Hemingway's youthful readers were convinced
that the horrors of the 20th Century had sickened and killed humanistic beliefs
with their deadly radiations. I told myself, therefore, that Conrad's rhetoric
must be resisted. But I never thought him mistaken. He spoke directly to me. The
feeling individual appeared weak - he felt nothing but his own weakness. But if
he accepted his weakness and his separateness and descended into himself intensifying
his loneliness, he discovered his solidarity with other isolated creatures.
I feel no need now to sprinkle Conrad's sentences with skeptical salt.
But there are writers for whom the Conradian novel - all novels of that sort -
are gone forever. Finished. There is, for instance, M. Alain Robbe-Grillet, one
of the leaders of French literature, a spokesman for "thingism" - choseisme.
He writes that in great contemporary works, Sartre's Nausea, Camus' The
Stranger, or Kafka's The Castle, there are no characters; you find
in such books not individuals but - well, entities. "The novel of characters,"
he says, "belongs entirely in the past. It describes a period: that which marked
the apogee of the individual." This is not necessarily an improvement; that Robbe-Grillet
admits. But it is the truth. Individuals have been wiped out. "The present period
is rather one of administrative numbers. The world's destiny has ceased, for us,
to be identified with the rise and fall of certain men of certain families." He
goes on to say that in the days of Balzac's bourgeoisie it was important to have
a name and a character; character was a weapon in the struggle for survival and
success. In that time, "It was something to have a face in a universe where personality
represented both the means and the end of all exploration." But our world, he
concludes, is more modest. It has renounced the omnipotence of the person. But
it is more ambitious as well, "since it looks beyond. The exclusive cult of the
'human' has given way to a larger consciousness, one that is less anthropocentric."
However, he comforts us, a new course and the promise of new discoveries lie before
us.
On an occasion like this I have no appetite for polemics. We
all know what it is to be tired of "characters". Human types have become false
and boring. D.H. Lawrence put it early in this century that we human beings, our
instincts damaged by Puritanism, no longer care for, were physically repulsive
to one another. "The sympathetic heart is broken," he said. He went further, "We
stink in each other's nostrils." Besides, in Europe the power of the classics
has for centuries been so great that every country has its "identifiable personalities"
derived from Molière, Ramne, Dickens or Balzac. An awful phenomenon. Perhaps
this is connected with the wonderful French saying. "Sil y a un caractère,
il est mauvais." It leads one to think that the unoriginal human race tends
to borrow what it needs from convenient sources, much as new cities have often
been made out of the rubble of old ones. Then, too, the psychoanalytic conception
of character is that it is an ugly rigid formation - something we must resign
ourselves to, not a thing we can embrace with joy. Totalitarian ideologies, too,
have attacked bourgeois individualism, sometimes identifying character with property.
There is a hint of this in M. Robbe-Grillet's argument. Dislike of personality,
bad masks, false being have had political results.
But I am interested
here in the question of the artist's priorities. Is it necessary, or good, that
he should begin with historical analysis, with ideas or systems? Proust speaks
in Time Regained of a growing preference among young and intelligent readers
for works of an elevated analytical, moral or sociological tendency. He says that
they prefer to Bergotte (the novelist in Remembrance of Things Past) writers
who seem to them more profound. "But," says Proust, "from the moment that works
of art are judged by reasoning, nothing is stable or certain, one can prove anything
one likes."
The message of Robbe-Grillet is not new. It tells us
that we must purge ourselves of bourgeois anthropocentricism and do the classy
things that our advanced culture requires. Character? "Fifty years of disease,
the death notice signed many times over by the serious essayists," says Robbe-Grillet,
"yet nothing has managed to knock it off the pedestal on which the 19th century
had placed it. It is a mummy now, but one still enthroned with the same phony
majesty, among the values revered by traditional criticism."
The
title of Robbe-Grillet's essay is On Several Obsolete Notions. I myself
am tired of obsolete notions and of mummies of all kinds but I never tire of reading
the master novelists. And what is one to do about the characters in their books?
Is it necessary to discontinue the investigation of character? Can anything so
vivid in them now be utterly dead? Can it be that human beings are at a dead end?
Is individuality really so dependent on historical and cultural conditions? Can
we accept the account of those conditions we are so "authoritatively" given? I
suggest that it is not in the intrinsic interest of human beings but in these
ideas and accounts that the problem lies. The staleness, the inadequacy of these
repels us. To find the source of trouble we must look into our own heads.
The fact that the death notice of character "has been signed by the most
serious essayists" means only that another group of mummies, the most respectable
leaders of the intellectual community, has laid down the law. It amuses me that
these serious essayists should be allowed to sign the death notices of literary
forms. Should art follow culture? Something has gone wrong.
There
is no reason why a novelist should not drop "character" if the strategy stimulates
him. But it is nonsense to do it on the theoretical ground that the period which
marked the apogee of the individual, and so on, has ended. We must not make bosses
of our intellectuals. And we do them no good by letting them run the arts. Should
they, when they read novels, find nothing in them but the endorsement of their
own opinions? Are we here on earth to play such games?
Characters,
Elizabeth Bowen once said, are not created by writers. They pre-exist and they
have to be found. If we do not find them, if we fail to represent them,
the fault is ours. It must be admitted, however, that finding them is not easy.
The condition of human beings has perhaps never been more difficult to define.
Those who tell us that we are in an early stage of universal history must be right.
We are being lavishly poured together and seem to be experiencing the anguish
of new states of consciousness. In America many millions of people have in the
last forty years received a "higher education" - in many cases a dubious blessing.
In the upheavals of the Sixties we felt for the first time the effects of up-to-date
teachings, concepts, sensitivities, the pervasiveness of psychological, pedagogical,
political ideas.
Every year we see scores of books and articles which
tell the Americans what a state they are in - which make intelligent or simpleminded
or extravagant or lurid or demented statements. All reflect the crises we are
in while telling us what we must do about them; these analysts are produced by
the very disorder and confusion they prescribe for. It is as a writer that I am
considering their extreme moral sensitivity, their desire for perfection, their
intolerance of the defects of society, the touching, the comical boundlessness
of their demands, their anxiety, their irritability, their sensitivity, their
tendermindedness, their goodness, their convulsiveness, the recklessness with
which they experiment with drugs and touch-therapies and bombs. The ex-Jesuit
Malachi Martin in his book on the Church compares the modern American to Michelangelo's
sculpture, The Captive. He sees "an unfinished struggle to emerge whole"
from a block of matter. The American "captive" is beset in his struggle by "interpretations,
admonitions, forewarnings and descriptions of himself by the self-appointed prophets,
priests, judges and prefabricators of his travail," says Martin.
Let me take a little time to look more closely at this travail. In private life,
disorder or near-panic. In families - for husbands, wives, parents, children -
confusion; in civic behavior, in personal loyalities, in sexual practices (I will
not recite the whole list; we are tired of hearing it) - further confusion. And
with this private disorder goes public bewilderment. In the papers we read what
used to amuse us in science fiction - The New Tork Times speaks of death
rays and of Russian and American satellites at war in space. In the November Encounter
so sober and responsible an economist as my colleague, Milton Friedman, declares
that Great Britain by its public spending will soon go the way of poor countries
like Chile. He is appalled by his own forecast. What - the source of that noble
tradition of freedom and democratic rights that began with Magna Carta ending
in dictatorship? "It is almost impossible for anyone brought up in that tradition
to utter the word that Britain is in danger of losing freedom and democracy; and
yet it is a fact!"
It is with these facts that knock us to the ground
that we try to live. If I were debating with Professor Friedman I might ask him
to take into account the resistance of institutions, the cultural differences
between Great Britain and Chile, differences in national character and traditions,
but my purpose is not to get into debates I can't win but to direct your attention
to the terrible predictions we have to live with, the background of disorder,
the visions of ruin.
You would think that one such article would
be enough for a single number of a magazine but on another page of Encounter
Professor Hugh Seton-Watson discusses George Kennan's recent survey of American
degeneracy and its dire meaning for the world. Describing America's failure, Kennan
speaks of crime, urban decay, drug-addiction, pornography, frivolity, deteriorated
educational standards and concludes that our immense power counts for nothing.
We cannot lead the world and, undermined by sinfulness, we may not be able to
defend ourselves. Professor Seton-Watson writes, "Nothing can defend a society
if its upper 100,000 men and women, both the decision-makers and those who help
to mould the thinking of the decision-makers, are resolved to capitulate."
So much for the capitalist superpower. Now what about its ideological adversaries?
I turn the pages of Encounter to a short study by Mr. George Watson, Lecturer
in English at Cambridge, on the racialism of the Left. He tells us that Hyndman,
the founder of the Social Democratic Federation, called the South African war
the Jews' war; that the Webbs at times expressed racialist views (as did Ruskin,
Carlyle and T. H. Huxley before them); he relates that Engels denounced the smaller
Slav peoples of Eastern Europe as counter-revolutionary ethnic trash; and Mr.
Watson in conclusion cites a public statement by Ulrike Meinhof of the West German
"Red Army Faction" made at a judicial hearing in 1972 approving of "revolutionary
extermination". For her, German anti-semitism of the Hitler period was essentially
anticapitalist. "Auschwitz," she is quoted as saying, "meant that six million
Jews were killed and thrown on the waste heap of Europe for what they were: money
Jews (Geldjuden)."
I mention these racialists of the Left to show
that for us there is no simple choice between the children of light and the children
of darkness. Good and evil are not symmetrically distributed along political lines.
But I have made my point; we stand open to all anxieties. The decline and fall
of everything is our daily dread, we are agitated in private life and tormented
by public questions.
And art and literature - what of them? Well,
there is a violent uproar but we are not absolutely dominated by it. We are still
able to think, to discriminate, and to feel. The purer, subtler, higher activities
have not succumbed to fury or to nonsense. Not yet. Books continue to be written
and read. It may be more difficult to reach the whirling mind of a modern reader
but it is possible to cut through the noise and reach the quiet zone. In the quiet
zone we may find that he is devoutly waiting for us. When complications increase,
the desire for essentials increases too. The unending cycle of crises that began
with the First World War has formed a kind of person, one who has lived through
terrible, strange things, and in whom there is an observable shrinkage of prejudices,
a casting off of disappointing ideologies, an ability to live with many kinds
of madness, an immense desire for certain durable human goods - truth, for instance,
or freedom, or wisdom. I don't think I am exaggerating; there is plenty of evidence
for this. Disintegration? Well, yes. Much is disintegrating but we are experiencing
also an odd kind of refining process. And this has been going on for a long time.
Looking into Proust's Time Regained I find that he was clearly aware of
it. His novel, describing French society during the Great War, tests the strength
of his art. Without art, he insists, shirking no personal or collective horrors,
we do not know ourselves or anyone else. Only art penetrates what pride, passion,
intelligence and habit erect on all sides - the seeming realities of this world.
There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other
reality is always sending us hints, which, without art, we can't receive. Proust
calls these hints our "true impressions." The true impressions, our persistent
intuitions, will, without art, be hidden from us and we will be left with nothing
but a "terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life." Tolstoy put
the matter in much the same way. A book like his Ivan Ilyitch also describes these
same "practical ends" which conceal both life and death from us. In his final
sufferings Ivan Ilyitch becomes an individual, a "character", by tearing
down the concealments, by seeing through the "practical ends."
Proust
was still able to keep a balance between art and destruction, insisting that art
was a necessity of life, a great independent reality, a magical power. But for
a long time art has not been connected, as it was in the past, with the main enterprise.
The historian Edgar Wind tells us in Art and Anarchy that Hegel long ago
observed that art no longer engaged the central energies of man. These energies
were now engaged by science - a "relentless spirit of rational inquiry." Art had
moved to the margins. There it formed "a wide and splendidly varied horizon."
In an age of science people still painted and wrote poetry but, said Hegel, however
splendid the gods looked in modern works of art and whatever dignity and perfection
we might find "in the images of God the Father and the Virgin Mary" it was of
no use: we no longer bent our knees. It is a long time since the knees were bent
in piety. Ingenuity, daring exploration, freshness of invention replaced the art
of "direct relevance." The most significant achievement of this pure art, in Hegel's
view, was that, freed from its former responsibilities, it was no longer "serious."
Instead it raised the soul through the "serenity of form above any painful involvement
in the limitations of reality." I don't know who would make such a claim today
for an art that raises the soul above painful involvements with reality. Nor am
I sure that at this moment, it is the spirit of rational inquiry in pure science
that engages the central energies of man. The center seems (temporarily perhaps)
to be filled up with the crises I have been describing.
There were
European writers in the 19th Century who would not give up the connection of literature
with the main human enterprise. The very suggestion would have shocked Tolstoy
and Dostoevski. But in the West a separation between great artists and the general
public took place. They developed a marked contempt for the average reader and
the bourgeois mass. The best of them saw clearly enough what sort of civilization
Europe had produced, brilliant but unstable, vulnerable, fated to be overtaken
by catastrophe, the historian Erich Auerbach tells us. Some of these writers,
he says, produced "strange and vaguely terrifying works, or shocked the public
by paradoxical and extreme opinions. Many of them took no trouble to facilitate
the understanding of what they wrote - whether out of contempt for the public,
the cult of their own inspiration, or a certain tragic weakness which prevented
them from being at once simple and true."
In the 20th Century, theirs
is still the main influence, for despite a show of radicalism and innovation our
contemporaries are really very conservative. They follow their l9th-Century leaders
and hold to the old standard, interpreting history and society much as they were
interpreted in the last century. What would writers do today if it would occur
to them that literature might once again engage those "central energies", if they
were to recognize that an immense desire had arisen for a return from the periphery,
for what was simple and true?
Of course we can't come back to the
center simply because we want to; but the fact that we are wanted might matter
to us and the force of the crisis is so great that it may summon us back to such
a center. But prescriptions are futile. One can't tell writers what to do. The
imagination must find its own path. But one can fervently wish that they - that
we - would come back from the periphery. We do not, we writers, represent mankind
adequately. What account do Americans give of themselves, what accounts of them
are given by psychologists, sociologists, historians, journalists, and writers?
In a kind of contractual daylight they see themselves in the ways with which we
are so desperately familiar. These images of contractual daylight, so boring to
Robbe-Grillet and to me, originate in the contemporary world view: We put into
our books the consumer, civil servant, football fan, lover, television viewer.
And in the contractual daylight version their life is a kind of death. There is
another life coming from an insistent sense of what we are which denies these
daylight formulations and the false life - the death in life - they make for us.
For it is false, and we know it, and our secret and incoherent resistance to it
cannot stop, for that resistance arises from persistent intuitions. Perhaps humankind
cannot bear too much reality, but neither can it bear too much unreality, too
much abuse of the truth.
We do not think well of ourselves; we do
not think amply about what we are. Our collective achievements have so greatly
"exceeded" us that we "justify" ourselves by pointing to them. It is the jet plane
in which we commonplace human beings have crossed the Atlantic in four hours that
embodies such value as we can claim. Then we hear that this is closing time in
the gardens of the West, that the end of our capitalist civilization is at hand.
Some years ago Cyril Connolly wrote that we were about to undergo "a complete
mutation, not merely to be defined as the collapse of the capitalist system, but
such a sea-change in the nature of reality as could not have been envisaged by
Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud." This means that we are not yet sufficiently shrunken;
we must prepare to be smaller still. I am not sure whether this should be called
intellectual analysis or analysis by an intellectual. The disasters are disasters.
It would be worse than stupid to call them victories as some statesmen have tried
to do. But I am drawing attention to the fact that there is in the intellectual
community a sizeable inventory of attitudes that have become respectable - notions
about society, human nature, class, politics, sex, about mind, about the physical
universe, the evolution of life. Few writers, even among the best, have taken
the trouble to re-examine these attitudes or orthodoxies. Such attitudes only
glow more powerfully in Joyce or D.H. Lawrence than in the books of lesser men;
they are everywhere and no one challenges them seriously. Since the Twenties,
how many novelists have taken a second look at D.H. Lawrence, or argued a different
view of sexual potency or the effects of industrial civilization on the instincts?
Literature has for nearly a century used the same stock of ideas, myths, strategies.
"The most serious essayists of the last fifty years," says Robbe-Grillet. Yes,
indeed. Essay after essay, book after book, confirm the most serious thoughts
- Baudelairian, Nietzschean, Marxian, Psychoanalytic, etcetera, etcetera - of
these most serious essayists. What Robbe-Grillet says about character can be said
also about these ideas, maintaining all the usual things about mass society, dehumanization
and the rest. How weary we are of them. How poorly they represent us. The pictures
they offer no more resemble us than we resemble the reconstructed reptiles and
other monsters in a museum of paleontology. We are much more limber, versatile,
better articulated, there is much more to us, we all feel it.
What
is at the center now? At the moment, neither art nor science but mankind determining,
in confusion and obscurity, whether it will endure or go under. The whole species
- everybody - has gotten into the act. At such a time it is essential to lighten
ourselves, to dump encumbrances, including the encumbrances of education and all
organized platitudes, to make judgments of our own, to perform acts of our own.
Conrad was right to appeal to that part of our being which is a gift. We must
hunt for that under the wreckage of many systems. The failure of those systems
may bring a blessed and necessary release from formulations, from an over-defined
and misleading consciousness. With increasing frequency I dismiss as merely respectable
opinions I have long held - or thought I held - and try to discern what I have
really lived by, and what others live by. As for Hegel's art freed from "seriousness"
and glowing on the margins, raising the soul above painful involvement in the
limitations of reality through the serenity of form, that can exist nowhere now,
during this struggle for survival. However, it is not as though the people who
engaged in this struggle had only a rudimentary humanity, without culture, and
knew nothing of art. Our very vices, our mutilations, show how rich we are in
thought and culture. How much we know. How much we even feel. The struggle that
convulses us makes us want to simplify, to reconsider, to eliminate the tragic
weakness which prevented writers - and readers - from being at once simple and
true.
Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully
patient with them, continues to read them and endures disappointment after disappointment,
waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social
theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the
center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller,
more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we
are, and what this life is for. At the center humankind struggles with collective
powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession
of his soul. If writers do not come again into the center it will not be because
the center is pre-empted. It is not. They are free to enter. If they so wish.
The essence of our real condition, the complexity, the confusion, the pain
of it is shown to us in glimpses, in what Proust and Tolstoy thought of as "true
impressions". This essence reveals, and then conceals itself. When it goes away
it leaves us again in doubt. But we never seem to lose our connection with the
depths from which these glimpses come. The sense of our real powers, powers we
seem to derive from the universe itself, also comes and goes. We are reluctant
to talk about this because there is nothing we can prove, because our language
is inadequate and because few people are willing to risk talking about it. They
would have to say, "There is a spirit" and that is taboo. So almost everyone keeps
quiet about it, although almost everyone is aware of it.
The value
of literature lies in these intermittent "true impressions". A novel moves back
and forth between the world of objects, of actions, of appearances, and that other
world from which these "true impressions" come and which moves us to believe that
the good we hang onto so tenaciously - in the face of evil, so obstinately - is
no illusion.
No one who has spent years in the writing of novels
can be unaware of this. The novel can't be compared to the epic, or to the monuments
of poetic drama. But it is the best we can do just now. It is a sort of latter-day
lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter. A novel is balanced between
a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what
we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences,
that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences
signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning,
harmony and even justice. What Conrad said was true, art attempts to find in the
universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring,
essential.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968-1980, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993
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