The God of the Labyrinth

by Colin Wilson

  That is, provided the character was clear-cut. But the essence of romanticism was its self-division, its sense of a lack of definite identity. And slowly, Werther gives way to Stephen Dedalus, Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge, Sartre’s Roquentin, Camus’s Meursault—the last being the completely static hero—Kafka’s K. The fish no longer has strength to swim, or even thrash around; in Beckett, it only gasps and flutters its tail. There is a gain in detail—the magnifying glass is now within an inch of the fish’s nose—but no story is possible. And without a story, how can the novel be possible?

  Joyce’s solution was not generally applicable; in fact, as far as I know, he is the only person ever to attempt the ‘mytho­logical method’. The novel has stopped trying to solve the prob­lem; it has regressed to an earlier stage, and come to terms with its loss of status.

  The drama passed through a similar crisis in the twentieth century. It also drifted into subjectivism, symbolism, expression­ism, even a kind of deliberate nightmare in Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. It was Brecht who attempted to re-establish contact with the beginnings, with the source of the stream. Drama began as spectacle, as a story told to an audience who knew it was not reality. So why try to compete with the cinema? Why not make the best of the limitation; in fact, affirm the gap between the audience and the players? Yeats had been toying with the same idea—the theatre of ritual—but Brecht had the genius to com­bine the theatre of ritual with the lecture platform, the music hall and the soapbox.

  I had written several novels before it struck me that what I was doing was to bring the Brechtian alienation effect to the novel. My first novel, Ritual in the Dark, began with a mytho­logical structure based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead, until it struck me that if I intended to use a ‘framework’ that did not spring naturally from the inner-meanings of the story, I might as well choose a framework that could be accepted by ordinary readers. I chose the story of the Ripper murders and the struc­ture of the psychological thriller. But it was still basically a realistic novel in the Dostoevsky tradition. In later novels, I aimed at the ‘alienation effect’ more consciously by choosing conventional forms, and aiming at an effect approximating to parody. In Adrift in Soho, it was the picaresque novel; in Necessary Doubt, the roman policier; in The World of Violence, the German bildungsroman with comic overtones; in The Mind Parasites and The Philosopher’s Stone, science fiction; in The Black Room,¶ the spy novel; in The Glass Cage, the detective novel again.

  ¶ Still unpublished at the time of writing.

  Now the letter that defended me against the charge of writing pornography raised a question in my mind. Could one use the form of the conventional pornographic novel, à la Cleland or Apollinaire, as the basic framework of a novel, and achieve this same alienation effect? I had tried something similar in Man Without a Shadow (whose title was later changed—without consulting me—to The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme) and I had observed then that writing about sex tends to destroy the aliena­tion effect because the reader becomes involved. But the Sex Diary did not use the form of the pornographic novel, but of the confessional journal; it was a novel of ideas taking sex only as its starting point. It is an interesting challenge, for the porno­graphic novel is more rigidly formalised than any other type I can call to mind; it has something of the symbolic rigidity of a ballet. So much the better for the alienation effect. The challenge is, of course, to endow this structure with life. The trouble with the conventional pornographic novel—Justine may be taken as an example—is that one is aware that it is a series of ‘set pieces’ connected by an arbitrary thread of narrative, like a Monteverdi opera. I am far more interested in the story and the ideas than in the set pieces. I must also admit that, formally speaking, this book does not obey the rules of the pornographic novel so much as those of the detective story—particularly the literary detective story of the sort popularised in Russia by Irakly Andronnikov. The ‘sect of the phoenix’ is developed from a hint by Jorge Luis Borges. In fact, if The Mind Parasites and The Philosopher’s Stone borrowed the mythology of H. P. Lovecraft, the present book may be said to be based on the mythologising of Borges.

  The success or failure of this novel as an exercise in the aliena­tion approach should not be taken as a measure of the value of the approach. I am convinced that the answer to the problem of the ‘Shakespearian fish’ and the stranded fish lies in applying the alienation effect to the novel, whether or not it works in this particular case. But I would argue that if it can work in this case, it can work anywhere.

  There is a final point, which I raise with some hesitation, since it seems obvious. As we grow from childhood into adulthood, we enter new ranges of experience that would have been impractical or undesirable for a child, from drinking alcohol and smoking to climbing mountains and listening to string quartets. Sex stands out from all the other experiences as being one that must be treated as a kind of secret, as if it were some strange tribal initia­tion involving a name that may not be spoken. Now this may be essential for certain primitive tribes, or patriarchal societies; but how far is it desirable for a civilisation like ours whose basic aim (whatever gloomy historians say) is ‘sweetness and light’? The evolution of Western civilisation has been an evolution of reason; the rejection of the dogmatic and authoritarian element in reli­gion, and also (hopefully) in politics. This evolution did not come to a halt when England rejected the pope, or Voltaire rejected Christianity; even Newman and the Oxford apostles must be seen as a development of the same trend, an insistence on the claims of a deeper, subtler reason related to man’s metaphysical needs. Freud had to fight the same battle; to overrule social taboos and reticences with the demand for frankness and open-mindedness; so did D. H. Lawrence. The extermination camps of the Nazis may be seen as an attempt to return to a more primitive—and uncomplicated—form of society, in which prob­lems are solved by force and dogma, not by reason.

  It seems to me that this development presupposes an import­ant humanistic premise: that ‘forbidden-ness’ is bad in itself, although it may sometimes operate for the good on a limited scale. For example, sex murders are not committed by people who think and talk about sex without inhibition, but by people in whom frustration has built it up into something forbidden and darkly alluring. ‘Forbidden-ness’ should not be confused with discipline, which is basically a liberating factor. A good army is like a well-oiled machine; its discipline is the factor that allows it to run without friction.

  If all this is true—and I find it hard to conceive any reason­able person denying it—then it follows that mature adults should be able to think of sexual experience as they think of any other form of experience—in art, science, sport, adventure. When I read Rider Haggard as a child, I experienced both detachment and involvement. The detachment came from sitting in an arm­chair reading a book, the excitement from marching through snake-infested jungles with Allan Quatermain. This is the essen­tial quality of civilised experience—detachment and involvement. But where sex is concerned, this notion is still not accepted. We are supposed to be either directly involved—in bed with a partner—or totally detached, as when I read a case in Havelock Ellis and murmur ‘How interesting’. There seems to be an element of absurdity about this. Most adult readers have had the basic experience that is described by Cleland or D. H. Lawrence; and, unlike cruelty or crime, this experience is not regarded as socially undesirable. Is there really such a gulf between the subject of sex and subjects like history, adventure, sport? Is there any reason why civilised adults should not, if they are so minded, read about sex with feelings of detachment, or humour, or even a certain involvement? If we can say that a thing is ‘shocking’, without meaning that it is ugly or wicked, then it seems to me an excellent idea to use it to shock as many people as possible, until it has lost its shock-effect, and can be seen calmly and without distortion. In a really civilised society—and we are still some distance from it—there will be no forbidden books, or forbidden
ideas.

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