by Colin Wilson
Nothing to Be Done—the Romantic Dilemma
I have tried to suggest why the disappearance of the man of heroic stature cannot be explained away as a social problem. At this point, it might be of interest to study the trend in new heroes in the post-Faustian age, before the cult of the ordinary chap.
While Amis and Osborne side-step the question of their heroes’ futures by leaving all their problems suspended in the air, the writers of the nineteenth century were inclined to give an illusion of completeness by killing off the hero. Goethe has Faust carried off to heaven by angels who sing that “so long as man strives, he is not beyond redemption.” But later writers left the heavenly chorus to the imagination. Schiller’s Karl Moor has to die; there is no other way of rounding off the tragedy. Shelley’s Alastor is an idealistic young man who is embraced in a dream by a beautiful girl (who probably symbolizes truth or beauty) and wanders from country to country in search of her until he dies. The symbolism is not as absurd as it sounds; it implies clearly that the man who has seen this vision cannot do anything to recover it. He can only wander aimlessly, knowing the search is futile, for the vision came internally and he is looking externally. One is reminded of the tramps in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot with their periodic complaint: “Nothing to be done.” The Byronic hero, who is sensitive, handsome, and sinful, usually finds plenty to do (especially by way of sinning) but has to die in the end because nothing he ever does makes him feel better. (Manfred is a candid imitation of Faust.) The romantic heroes of Hoffmann, Tieck, Novalis, and Jean Paul follow the same pattern. In Theodor Storm’s popular Immensee, the hero fails to get the girl and drifts on into old age, sentimentally mooning about his youth and lost love. As a device for ending the story, this was even neater than killing off the hero, for it could give a sense of inevitability, which the arbitrary death of the hero often lacked, and could distract attention from the hero’s indecision in letting the heroine get away.
But nineteenth-century romanticism, for all its sentimentality, had certain advantages over the realism of the twentieth century. It never lost sight of the importance of the individual or of the importance of the ideal. The intensity that is only rarely achieved in twentieth-century writing, in such books as From Here to Eternity or The Caine Mutiny, is achieved every time by the romantic writers, simply because they were more concerned about the solitary individual and his relation to nature. As soon as the reader opens a book by Hoffmann or Kleist or Brentano, he is transported into a world of greater intensity. The romantics felt no guilty conscience when they turned their back on society.
Some Nineteenth-Century Heroes
Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir is of particular interest as a bridge between romanticism and modern realism. The first part reads like an early version of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Julien Sorel is portrayed as a bookish, sensitive young peasant, who is not quite sure whether he would prefer to be Pope or Emperor. He goes into the home of M. de Rênal, mayor of Verrières, as a tutor, and immediately seduces the mayor’s beautiful wife. Later, when he moves to a still more aristocratic family, he seduces the proud and elegant daughter. In these activities, he retains the reader’s sympathy; and the modern reader (who has probably encountered similar situations in Sons and Lovers, Lucky Jim, and Room at the Top), assumes that Julien has the author’s sympathy, too. But here he will be mistaken. When, in a jealous fit, Julien attempts to shoot Mme. de Rênal and is executed, the author writes of his execution with no less detachment than that with which he wrote of the seductions. It is difficult to discern any unified artistic intention. Apparently Stendhal borrowed his plot from a contemporary newspaper scandal, so it is probable that Julien was condemned to death from the beginning. But in that case, one can only assume that the author allowed himself to be completely carried away in the earlier chapters, identifying himself with the struggles of his hero, and then got tired of writing and ended abruptly and without any apology. There is something lopsided and unbalanced about the book. The first part shows a real preoccupation with the struggle of a potential hero to find self-expression. Sartre has said that “to read a book is to rewrite it,” and the reader of Stendhal feels himself challenged to imagine a future for Julien that is worthy of his ambition; he hopes that Stendhal will accept the challenge and show Julien’s education and triumph in the minutest detail.
The abrupt ending comes as a shock; it leaves a feeling that the book is unfinished. Le Rouge et le Noir seems to be one half of a great novel. But after all, it is in the nineteenth-century tradition of tragedy and defeat. Perhaps we should be grateful to Stendhal for creating a real hero for the first two hundred pages, instead of being irritated that Julien becomes a papier-mâché figure for the last hundred.
The nineteenth century had re-created the hero. But above its Valhalla, in letters of gold, was inscribed the motto: “You can’t win.”
By the mid-nineteenth century, literature was already showing signs of a tendency towards other-direction. Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert, Turgenev, George Eliot were all more concerned with the individual as a social unit than with the romantic struggle for self-expression. Gogol really launched the cult of the ordinary chap when he made the hero of The Overcoat a harassed little clerk. His influence on later Russian writers was immense. Dostoevsky commented, “We have all emerged from under Gogol’s overcoat.”
One of the few exceptions was Herman Melville, who created in the character of Captain Ahab a hero who possessed strange affinities with Don Quixote. Ahab is unique; not so much because he is an exception to the rule that you can’t win as because he knows he cannot, and doesn’t care. In a sense, he is more important as a symbol than as an individual. (His chase after the white whale occasionally becomes tiresome.) What is important is his absurd courage. He illustrates an important point: that the hero’s aims need not be reasonable—that, on the contrary, everything depends upon the act of will, the indomitable obsession, rather than upon the reasoned calculation. But although a logical positivist might see no clear distinction between Ahab and Don Quixote, the distinction is of fundamental importance. Don Quixote has no relation to any form of reality; he blunders on in a fog of romance. Ahab has also turned his back upon reality—insofar as his family and Starbuck and Stubb represent reality—but his will power reaches out where his imagination collapses. Although he also denies the “common daylight,” although he knows that Moby Dick cannot be beaten, some giant act of obsession in him forces him onwards. As the wreckage of the Pequod subsides into the sea, there is no feeling of defeat; only of protest against the nineteenth-century assumption that you can’t win, the premise that prevents writers from creating heroes who dare to assert any identity or sense of purpose beyond the society in which they live.
In France, the heroic was revived, to some extent, in the work of Guy de Maupassant, but mostly in the form of a debased Don Juanism. Five out of six of Maupassant’s novels are about seduction; to enjoy them, the reader must identify himself with the hero and immerse himself in an atmosphere of high-minded eroticism (high-minded, for sex in Maupassant is never crude and physical; Joyce would undoubtedly have shocked him deeply). Bel Ami, one of the best of his novels, is in the tradition of Le Rouge et le Noir. It deals with the seductions and rogueries of an amiable but ambitious Casanova. It is not (as Tolstoy seemed to believe) a criticism of society, nor is Bel Ami intended as a villainous gigolo. Maupassant illustrates perfectly Blake’s comment that all true poets are of the devil’s party; he obviously derives great enjoyment from describing how Bel Ami seduces the wife of his employer, and then the daughter, and ends by marrying the daughter (whose father is a millionaire) in a cathedral. The reader also takes pleasure in Bel Ami’s course from penniless clerk to Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. It is true that Bel Ami is not particularly intelligent or sensitive; but then, none of Maupassant’s heroes is.
But Bel Ami is the nearest Maupassant ever came to that close self-identification with the hero that was so
typical of the romantic era. Even Tolstoy, on his moral high horse, noticed it: “Bel Ami is a very dirty book. The author evidently gives himself a free hand in describing what attracts him, and at times seems to lose his main negative attitude towards the hero and to pass over to his side.” In his later novels, Maupassant gives himself over completely to writing of the pleasures of seduction, and allows the hero no other motive in life. Increasingly, he prefers to write about weaklings. All his novels are superbly written, and all revolve around sex. (It is surprising, in the circumstances, that there has been no enthusiastic Maupassant revival in recent years.) But the novels lack a center of gravity. Although the author declines to load the dice against his heroes in the fashionable manner, he also declines to try to represent them as in any way admirable.
The amazing thing about the novels of the nineteenth century—and it is even more true of the twentieth—is that the writers seemed to feel no instinctive aversion to loading the dice against their heroes. After all, imaginative invention usually starts when a child tells himself tall stories in which he figures as the hero. The essence of fiction lies in this machinery of wish fulfillment, of vicarious pleasure, of the reader’s identification of himself with the hero. How, in that case, can its aims be so completely altered? The answer lies partly in a writer’s sense of drama, the need for theatrically effective situations. Maupassant’s first short story, Boule de Suif, like his first novel, Une Vie, possesses a compassion and sense of pity that somehow do not ring true; they give the feeling that Maupassant has assumed them for the occasion, being on his best behavior as a young writer making his first bow to his audience. As soon as he felt more certain of himself, he also began to be true to himself and dropped the fashionable note of pity.
This is a fascinating problem of psychology. Consider Zola, for instance, the great preacher of realism. The reader might imagine that he was not a storyteller but a scientist classifying butterflies. There seems to be no trace of wish fulfillment in his sordid tragedies. The early novel, Thérèse Raquin, provides a perfect illustration of this paradox. It begins by involving the reader’s interest in the fate of the orphan Thérèse, who lives with her aunt and invalid cousin in Paris. The household centers around the wretched invalid Camille Raquin, whose mother adores him. Thérèse becomes his wife and settles down to a stifled existence with the sallow-skinned, weakly mother’s boy, who is a clerk in a store. Sometime later, Camille meets an old school friend, a muscular artist named Laurent, and introduces him into his home. Laurent decides to seduce Thérèse, and succeeds without much difficulty. The adultery is an immense release for Thérèse; it transforms her from the silent, bored companion into a woman with incredibly violent desires. The relation between Thérèse and Laurent becomes stronger, until they are insanely in love. They decide to murder Camille, so that they can marry. On a boating excursion, Laurent throws the husband overboard. The murder scene is followed by a chapter that can only be compared with Dostoevsky for power and horror, in which Laurent goes daily to the morgue to look for the corpse of Camille.
Up to this point, the novel moves with tremendous force, and the reader feels that Zola is fulfilling all the functions of a great artist. He has projected himself into the situation of a frustrated woman and has shown that frustration being swept away (one of the most dramatic and touching subjects in all art). But now Zola suddenly withdraws, and writes a conventional tragedy of conscience. Thérèse and Laurent marry, but the dead husband is always between them. Madame Raquin becomes paralyzed, and when she finally learns that her son was murdered, can only roll her eyes. Thérèse and Laurent simultaneously decide to murder one another; when they discover each other’s design, both commit suicide. It is unconvincing and boring (for the harrowings of conscience go on for over half the book). Zola so plainly intends to harrow the reader that he has the opposite effect; he only alienates. The old woman’s paralysis, which is obviously intended to be a knockout blow, produces the same effect as the accumulated brutalities of modern gangster fiction—it seems contrived, too deliberate. (This is also painfully true of what many consider to be Zola’s best novel, La Terre.)
But why was there this sudden change of attitude halfway through the book? One is inclined to suspect that Zola’s imagination failed him. He was challenged to show the effect of freedom on two people who had lived in an invisible prison. The feat was too much for him. He fell back on dramatic formulas, and the life went out of the novel.
But the reader who suspects Zola of lacking imagination has a hard case to prove. It is true that all his novels leave the feeling, “here is a man whose creative faculty is two-dimensional, flat, lacking the dimension of freedom,” but Zola’s air of being a scientist rather than a writer is intimidating. Critics lay great emphasis on the amount of research that went into the novels (just as early defenders of Joyce tried to give the impression that Ulysses is a highly erudite and esoteric work, on no account to be judged by ordinary standards). Zola seems to deny that all art is based on identification, wish fulfillment: he writes as a lepidopterist.
But when one examines Zola’s life, this plea collapses. Most of the novels are dominated by sex—particularly by rape. Yet Zola led a highly respectable life. He took a mistress in his early years, married her, and remained faithful to her. The novels were full of sexual violence. Nevertheless, Zola led an exemplary life.
But when he was fifty, he fell in love with a girl of twenty-two and seduced her. Jeanne Rozerot was his wife’s maid. The result was a love affair that lasted till the end of his life. And sex dropped abruptly out of the novels. The year before he met Jeanne, Zola had published La Terre, which has an atmosphere of sex and violence that resembles nothing so much as No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Immediately after the beginning of his affair with her, he wrote the beautiful and idyllic Le Rêve, and the delicate love story Doctor Pascal. It seems hardly necessary to argue that sex in the earlier books was a form of wish fulfillment.
I dwell on Zola because the realism for which his name became a synonym has also become the basic premise of twentieth-century writing. This premise states that writing should be scientific—an observation and documentation of social facts. I would argue that writing never has been and never can be anything of the sort. At its center, there must be a completely personal statement of its author’s attitude to life and to freedom. This attitude will manifest itself in the author’s attitude towards the hero. If the author has no subjective strength, no sense of freedom, then his work will be broken-backed, no matter how imposing his realism makes it appear. In Zola’s novels, as in The Caine Mutiny, society is the hero. Zola lacked the inner-direction, the inner reality, to create authentic heroes. The imposing facade is a fake.
All that emerges from consideration of the nineteenth century is that, with occasional exceptions, its writers lost sight of the hero. Society is the true hero of most nineteenth-century novels. The significance of Melville’s Ahab, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Goethe’s Faust was completely lost on the disciples of Zola and George Eliot.
One of the most important exceptions, and one not generally considered as a character of fiction, is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Nietzsche, who was in every way an inner-directed man, tried in Zarathustra to create the new hero. Zarathustra begins by turning his back on society and coming to grips with his own problems. We are told that he had passed through a period of utter pessimism and life-denial; he obviously feels the same as the Underground Man about the old hero, as his comments on the army and the state show clearly. What is most interesting about Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s realization that the real hero must be a perfectly healthy man. Like Goethe, he does not believe in weighting his hero with neuroses. But unlike Goethe, Nietzsche was not himself a physically healthy person. The result is that Zarathustra shows the conflict between Nietzsche’s weakness and his own strength. In some sections, Zarathustra speaks with the ecstasy and certainty of a prophet; in others, he seems torn by self-division. This work provides
an insight into the difficulties of a writer who wishes to create a completely heroic figure. Nietzsche tried to portray the authentic hero—the man who has passed through self-division to self-knowledge and the power to act. Zarathustra is also a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy; he has perfect health, many disciples, an unclouded vision. But his action amounts only to preaching, and the world in which he preaches is an anonymous realm of fantasy. Like Goethe’s Faust, Thus Spake Zarathustra is an attempt to create the new hero, and an admission of failure.
I have already discussed, in The Outsider, the way in which the idea of the “man on his own” began to be debased in the twentieth century. The defeat premise, the hypothesis of insignificance, begins to obtrude itself all the time. The solitary hero of Barbusse’s L’Enfer is gloomily modest: “I have nothing and I deserve nothing.” It is interesting to note the transition from Faust, through the Underground Man. Faust had expressed pessimism and despair as he sits alone in his room, but the despair has nothing to do with society; it is to do with the problem of the meaning of the “will to truth.” He feels a certain patronizing affection for society; he would like to take refuge in the gaiety of the country folk on Easter day, but knows he can never feel restored to kinship with other men. The Underground Man is already morosely anti-social, although the problems that oppress him are also problems about the will to truth, the strength and weakness of human beings. Like Zarathustra, he is inclined to regard men as “flies in the market place.” But Barbusse’s hero is simply anti-social—that and no more. Although he says: “Truth—what do they mean by it?” this is a cynical gesture of disillusionment rather than a real question. His problem is mainly his feeling of insignificance. “I have nothing and I deserve nothing. Yet I feel I deserve some recompense.” But nothing can convince him that he is not insignificant.