by Tim Parks
Perhaps such an extreme example is too easy. Here is F. Scott Fitzgerald, introducing Gatsby’s old lover Daisy and her husband, Tom, in The Great Gatsby:
Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
At first glance this may seem fairly standard prose. But my Word spell-check does underline unrestfully, and in fact this word is not in Webster’s dictionary. It’s a classic case of a word gaining meaning by not being what you expected: They drifted here and there . . . how? restlessly, of course. But restless suggests an impulse to be up and doing. It can be a noble attribute. Unrestfully suggests not so much the impulse that drives Daisy and Tom to move—actually they only drift—but a lack of benefit from their languor. They drift without relaxing. Fitzgerald feels this mental state is sufficiently special to deserve a neologism to point it up.
But a style requires a combination of interacting elements. What do we have? Well, a reiterated absence of knowledge or meaning: “I don’t know.” “No particular reason.” “I didn’t believe.” “I had no sight into Daisy’s heart.” This lack of knowledge might connect up with the repetition of the verb drift. One doesn’t know where to go, so one drifts. Then, at the heart of the paragraph, there is one strong affirmation of certainty—“This was a permanent move”—but the claim is undermined by a blatant oxymoron, made possible by the double meaning of move: “move house” or just movement. To read a few more pages of The Great Gatsby would alert us to the fact that the book is full of oxymorons—ferocious indifference, magnanimous scorn, inessential houses—suggesting a general state of precariousness.
Perhaps related to the oxymoron, “permanent move,” is the other oddity in this paragraph: “wherever people played polo and were rich together.” Standard usage has people being happy together, or sad together: emotional states. Alternatively partners can get rich together, or get stoned together: progressive developments. But this confusion of an emotional state with a generous bank balance, “were rich together,” is emblematic of everything that makes Gatsby’s elegant world so oddly fragile, as if it existed only in the magic of words that somehow stick together despite their contradictory energies.
As with Henry Green, much of this is lost when Fitzgerald’s text leaves the culture it was written in and travels around the world in other languages. I’ve looked at five Italian translations of Gatsby. None is able to convey “unrestfully,” “permanent move,” or “get rich together.” It’s surprising how much trouble they have too with an “irrecoverable football game,” a longing for an unrepeatable past that connects Tom with Gatsby and measures the distance between them: Gatsby dreams of reviving love, Tom of reliving sporting glory. And as the separate stylistic devices disappear in translation, so does the pattern that they combined to sustain; losing the pattern one inevitably loses the peculiar position the text created for itself within its culture of origin and hence its special relationship with readers. In translation, stripped of its style, Gatsby really doesn’t seem a very remarkable performance.
What I’m getting at is that style is predicated on a strict relation to a specific readership and the more that readership is diluted or extended, particularly if it includes foreign-language readers, the more difficult it is for a text of any stylistic density to be successful. In the past, a work of literature would establish a reputation in its culture of origin, first among critics who were presumably equipped to appreciate it, then among the larger public; only later, sometimes many years later, would it perhaps be translated by those cosmopolitan literati who wished to make it known in another country. Now, on the contrary, everything is immediate; the work of a major established author is pronounced a masterpiece the day it is published; translations, even of less celebrated authors like myself, are often prepared for simultaneous publication in a score of countries. In the long run, whether through a growing awareness of the situation on the part of writers, or simply by a process of natural selection, it seems inevitable that style will align with what can be readily translated more or less into multiple languages and cultural settings, or into an easily intelligible international idiom.
In this regard let me mention two recent novels at once very literary and evidently global in their aspirations: Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the Century, and the 2013 Booker winner, The Luminaries, by the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton. Neuman, Argentinian, but resident in Spain, sets his work in the early part of the nineteenth century somewhere in Germany (neither date nor place are exactly defined), where a mysterious traveler falls to frequenting the cultural salon of a rich family and deploys his wit to seduce a local and highly intellectual beauty. The register is high, the lexical range considerable, the style extravagantly articulated and playfully pompous; but the knowledge it asks of its reader is all book knowledge, general history, a vague awareness of what a high prose style once was. There is no appeal to anything writer and reader know and share in the here and now, though we do get some softly eroticized, politically correct enthusiasm for internationalism.
This is what our mysterious traveler talks to his beloved about when they are at last between the sheets:
How can we speak about free trade, Hans pronounced as he lay next to Sophie, of a customs union and all that implies, without considering a free exchange of literature? We should be translating as many foreign books as possible, publishing them, reclaiming the literature of other countries and taking it to the classroom! That’s what I told Brockhaus. And what did he say? Sophie asked, nibbling his nipple. Hans shrugged and stroked her back: He told me, yes, all in good time, and not to get agitated. But in such exchanges, said Sophie, it’s important that the more powerful countries don’t impose their literature on everyone else, don’t you think? Absolutely, replied Hans, plunging his hand between Sophie’s buttocks, and besides, powerful countries have a lot to learn from smaller countries which are usually more open and curious, that is to say more knowledgeable. You’re the curious one! Sophie sighed, allowing Hans’s probing finger in and lying back. That, Hans grinned, must be because you’re so open and you know what’s what.
Reviewing The Luminaries, an eight-hundred-page mystery story set in 1860s New Zealand, Catton’s compatriot C.K. Stead remarks on its “chintzy,” “upholstered” pastiche of the nineteenth-century novel and adds:
Every episode has its setting, decor, clothing, its period bric-a-brac, its slightly formal but often sharp dialogue. This is costume drama. It is conventional fiction but with the attention to fact and connection that the (cross-checking and online research) facilities of the modern computer permit. That apart, only the author’s cultural sensitivity in dealing with Maori and Chinese characters, and an occasional anachronistic word or phrase in the dialogue (“paranoid”, “serendipitous”) locate authorship in the present.
In general terms this would also be an appropriate description of Neuman’s book. Removing us from the present, pastiching what the modern ear assumes the eloquence of the past to have been, the writer can appear “stylish” without appealing to anything in his readership’s immediate experience. Catton’s prose has been likened to that of Dickens in The Pickwick Papers. But for readers who followed it in the 1830s, Pickwick was drenched in references to the world they shared, and the language itself was not so far away from what could be heard and read every day. If one translates Dickens into another language, an enormous amount is lost; even for the Londoner reading him today, half the references mean nothing. Neuman’s and Catton’s novels have dispensed in advance with this intense engagement with a local or national readership and seem set to lose very little as they move around the world in different languages. It is in
this regard alone that one has to disagree with Stead. Authorship is located in the present exactly insofar as its appeal—as in a Hollywood costume drama or indeed an extravagant computer game—is to well-established, globally shared tropes and not to any real contact with the specificity of a here and now.
LITERATURE AND BUREAUCRACY
I AM CURRENTLY involved in two huge projects: one to give the Italian government an absolutely exhaustive description of the degree course in which I teach and one to give the same, but in response to a different set of questions and assumptions, to the European Commission. We are talking hundreds of pages and hours upon hours that could far more usefully be spent helping students, correcting their essays, and preparing lessons. Needless to say my university is not alone in devoting time to such activities. Nor are universities special in this regard. Nor is Italy, where I live, for all its genius for bureaucracy, any worse than the UK or the USA in this matter (indeed my dealings with both the States and Britain suggests those countries may be worse). What we have then is a propensity in modern life to substitute cataloguing and recording for actual doing, to create for ourselves an illusion of responsible action by endlessly multiplying the work, so-called, that precedes and—in the rare cases where it actually occurs—follows responsible action.
Literature, of course, is implacably opposed to bureaucracy. Isn’t it? Here is Dickens in Little Dorrit (the chapter is called “CONTAINING THE WHOLE SCIENCE OF GOVERNMENT”) castigating the British Treasury Office, which he renames the Circumlocution Office:
The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.
This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.
For a dozen pages the concept of how not to do something and the mysteries of this policy’s universal “implementation” are thoroughly explored. Some of the observations will be all too familiar to anyone living in a democracy:
It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true that from the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn’t been done, and who had been asking the friends of the honorable gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn’t been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done. It is true that the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session through, uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have a considerable stroke of work to do, and you will please to retire to your respective chambers, and discuss, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech, at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not political), I now dismiss you. All this is true, but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it.
Dickens was not the only one to launch such attacks. It’s hard to think of a major writer—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence—who hasn’t at some point or other satirized bureaucracy. So why has such writing produced no results? This is Orwell, himself no mean satirist of the British civil service, commenting on Dickens:
In Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself. In its attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful tickling. Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong resemblance to Mr. Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that lawyers delight in Sergeant Buzfuz and that Little Dorrit is a favourite in the Home Office. Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.
Orwell treats Dickens as if he were a special case, but the question he raises here is whether all satire isn’t to some extent in connivance with the object of its attacks. After all, hasn’t Orwell’s own 1984 become almost an official text in the country that has more surveillance cameras per citizen than any other in the world? Leaving England, the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, another ferocious critic of his state, became fascinated by the extent to which people actually lapped up the criticism, applauded him for berating them. In the play Am Ziel (which might be translated Arrived) the lead character, who is simply designated The Writer, remarks of his successful play:
I can’t understand
why they applauded
we are talking about a play
that exposes every one of them
and in the meanest way
admittedly with humor
but nasty humor
if not with malice
true malice
And all of a sudden they applaud.[1]
Years later, commenting on the controversy surrounding Bernhard, the East German playwright Heiner Müller said, “He writes as if he had been hired by the Austrian government to write against Austria. . . . The disturbance can be articulated that loudly and clearly because it doesn’t disturb.”
So could it be—and this is the question I really want to ask—that however much literature may appear to be opposed to bureaucracy and procrastination, it actually partakes of the same aberration? Balzac’s Comedie humaine with his declared ambition to “compete with the civil registry”; Proust’s monstrous, magnificent Recherche, which he likened to a cathedral, tediously extending the analogy to every section of the work; Joyce’s encyclopedic aspirations in Ulysses, his claim that Finnegans Wake would be a history of the entire world. Or go back to Dante, if you like, and his need to find a pigeonhole in hell for every sinner of every category from every sphere of society. Or fast forward again to Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert’s two incompetents who react to practical failure by becoming obsessive copiers of literary snippets. This without mentioning the contenders for the Great-American-Novel slot, so eager to give the impression that their minds have encompassed and interrelated everything across that enormous continent (one thinks of the interminable lists of contemporary paraphernalia in Jonathan Franzen’s writing). In each case, however different in tone and content the texts, life is transformed into a series of categories, made more mental, more a matter of words and intellect; we revel in the mind’s ability
to possess the world in language, rather than to inhabit it or change it.
And of course all these literary achievements are wonderful and “enriching” (as they say) and infinitely more attractive than the dull documents I and my colleagues are compiling to describe our degree course to the European Commission; nevertheless they share with that document and with the people who devised it the desire for a control that stands off from participation, and perhaps substitutes for it. Similarly, the windy length of Dickens’s denunciation of the Circumlocution Office, and the lingering pleasure he evidently takes in blowing it away, share that office’s sinister vocation, which is why, as Orwell says, the bureaucrats themselves recognize and love the spirit of the passage. One almost feels it’s worth having a Circumlocution Office so Dickens can describe it. A dangerous state of mind.
The question arises: Is all locution inevitably circumlocution (as Beckett tended to think), and will the West perhaps slowly and voluptuously choke itself in a mounting tangle of red tape, meantime entertaining itself to death with a mountain of literature that describes and charmingly castigates the whole scandalous process? Wouldn’t it be strange, in the end, if there were not a continuity of vocation between these two major facets of the same culture? Here am I, after all, writing about other people writing about things, and with a little luck someone writing somewhere else will castigate me for my cynicism and irresponsibility, since we all know that literature, like democracy (and most of all the British democracy that gave us the Circumlocution Office), must always be praised to high heaven.