At best, integrity and intelligence go hand in hand to ensure against laziness, false analogies, pleaded connections, and sleight of word. Integrity demands of intelligence that it forge true connections on the page. Intelligence calls for integrity for the challenge of it, and from intelligent respect for the audience of literature, and respect for the art of literature itself, and for its capacity to mean.
CHAPTER 2
Two Wild Animals, Seven Crazies, and a Breast
Character
Contemporary modernist characters are extraordinary. Gone are the men and women of Dickens, say, or Hugo, whose exteriors are familiar to everyone, whose interiors are explored and forgiven by their authors. Also absent are characters who brood earnestly, and who seek God or the good or wisdom or love or, for that matter, money. We no longer examine the interior lives of characters much like ourselves. Instead, we watch from afar a caravan of alien grotesques in, as it were, big hats. Remedios the Beauty, inOne Hundred Years of Solitude , is typical. She carries about with her a noisy bag of her parents’ bones, is followed by butterflies, and is assumed bodily into heaven from her bath. In García Márquez, as in Pynchon, we see characters from a great distance, as colorful and extraordinary objects.
Oddly enough, grotesque modernist characters are more apt to be telling the story than not. Their first-person narration persuasively engages us with them, odd as they are, while it separates us a notch from the actual action. On this tension, and on the tension between sympathy for and estrangement from their weird characters, depends much that is interesting in modernist fiction. We are yanked into some remarkable sympathies. Gone are the trustworthy days of Trollope, the clear-headed days of Defoe, in which the author sat us down and told us a story. Now our first-person narrators are not authors: we are doing very well if they are even people. Instead they are cows, mental defectives, toddlers, dinosaurs, paranoid schizophrenics, dying cripples, breasts, axolotls, Neanderthals, or goats (Agee, “A Mother’s Tale”; Faulkner,The Sound and the Fury ; Grass,The Tin Drum ; Calvino,Cosmicomics ; Tommaso Landolfi, “Week of Sun”; Beckett,Malone Dies ; Roth,The Breast ; Cortázar, “Axolotl”; Gardner,Grendel ; Barth,Giles Goat-Boy ).
Contemporary modernist writers flatten their characters by handling them at a great distance, as if with tongs. They flatten them narratively. They flatten them, as Robbe-Grillet does, by treating them as sense objects alone, as features of landscape. A writer may show his characters’ speeches and actions without the faintest trace of motivation, so that we watch the scenes as strangers, as if we were freshly air-dropped into Highland, New Guinea. The speeches and actions of such characters seem random, unwilled, or absurdist. The narrator of Witold Gombrowicz’sFerdydurke , for instance, wants desperately to run out of a classroom, but instead sticks his finger in his shoe and complains, Beckett-like, “You cannot run with one finger at floor level.”
A writer may comment on his characters or, as Barth does, mock them. He may give them funny names which call attention to the artificiality of the whole business: Humbert Humbert, Betty Bliss, Word Smith. He may give them names which call attention to ideas, either ironically or in earnest: Oedipa Maas, Benny Profane, and J. Henry Waugh (=JHVH, Jahweh). (In two cases, at least, a writer wishes a name to be a double entendre, but no one pronounces the name as he intended, so the effect vanishes. Barth originally pronounced the Giles ofGiles Goat-Boy with a hard g, punning on “guile,” but when the book became known as “Jiles” Goat-Boy, Barth gave up his own pronunciation and joined the crowd. Nabokov fancied, rather endearingly, that the name Ada as spoken would coincide with the proper pronunciation of the word “ardor”—as indeed it may, somewhere. At any rate, guile and ardor are the respective subjects of the two novels.)
Other contemporary characters are historical; thus a writer playfully violates his fictional frame by giving us Nixon or Henry Ford. In an L. L. Lee story, Borges appears as a nineteenth-century writer of naturalist fiction, “the Argentine Dreiser.” Also contemporary is the return of the picaro, a fairly flat character whose story is episodic. The contemporary picaresque novel is by no means necessarily modernist—A Cool Million, Under the Net, The Adventures of Augie March, Lucky Jim, The Ginger Man, Little Big Man—but their picaros reflect the general flattening of character.
In the traditional novel, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European novel, “character” means man or woman in society. Central characters in the Stendhal novel, the Dickens novel, the James novel, interest themselves in blood, money, and advancement to an extent that is simply staggering to anyone who approaches literature through formal methods appropriate to modernism. Where is the art? Where is the metaphysics? These characters, and presumably their authors as well, are more interested in a man’s cash assets than in his bargainings with eternity. Conflict in such novels seldom, if ever, erupts between people and whales. At the European novel’s close, characters do not, as in the American novel, ride off alone into the sunset. Instead, they are drawn off together in carriages to the bank.
Today all this is gone, even in naturalist fiction. Before the Romantic revolution, characters try to advance themselves; after it, they try to save themselves. Historical modernist characters, like Joe Christmas inLight in August , like Kafka characters and the nameless characters inHunger andInvisible Man , are a lonely lot. They try to keep body and soul together despite society, instead of trying to propel their bodies in ever more expensive garments through it. And contemporary modernist characters are not interested in society at all. Their sphere of activity is the novel. To Beckett characters, Borges characters, Nabokov characters, society does not exist. They may lack hearts as well as social ambition. They are no more lonely than chessmen. At any rate, the jolly picaros, and Calvino’s Cosimo, who lives in trees, and the various axolotls, dinosaurs, cows, etc., which I have mentioned, have on their minds other things than marrying money.
Such characters tend to be less human simulacra, less rounded complexities of deep-seated ties and wishes, than focal points for action or idea. Pynchon people are lines of force. Some Nabokov characters are literally chessmen. Borges characters may be ideas. They are not ideas represented by people-like characters, as in the “novel of ideas” such asThe Plague , in which the Doctor, representing Scientific Reason, goes about acting scientifically reasonable and voicing Scientific Reason’s opinion of everything; instead, Borges characters are ideas considered as objects for contemplation: Funes the Memorious on his deathbed, an idea in a sheet, more referred to than present, or Pierre Menard, absent altogether. Later Borges characters, on the other hand, are again lines of force, mythic and wholly externalized objects whose roles are identical with their definitions: the bandit robs, the overseer whips, the gunslinger slings guns. It would be ludicrous if anyone saw these characters as trapped in roles for which they are personally unsuited. In the world of surfaces, human reality coincides with social appearance.
Traditional characters are “rounded,” or “modeled,” or “drawn in depth.” The very terms are spatial analogues. Such characters are a Renaissance invention analogous to painting’s deep space. The art of representing the world is the art of depth. Modernist art, in painting and in fiction, is the art of surfaces. It no longer seeks to imitate nature in the round; it no longer seeks a technique which dissolves invisibly “down” into the depths of things. It seeks instead what might be called a new perspective, the careful flattening of forms on the surface in such a way that the depths of things float “up” into technique. Characters’ role in this fiction is formal and structural. Their claim on us is not emotional but intellectual. They are no longer fiction’s center.
The role of character has shrunk to such a degree that in some contemporary works, especially stories, there are no characters at all: in Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent story “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from theJournal of the Association of Therolinguistics ,” for instance, and in Stanislaw Lem’s collectionA Perfect Vacuum , an
d in many Borges stories, such as “The Library of Babel,” “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” and “A New Refutation of Time.”
Point of View
The twentieth-century development in fiction of a thoroughly limited point of view has been overemphasized, I think, especially in the light of more radical recent developments. One could argue that the use of a limited point of view is positively old-fashioned. When Conrad, Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf used strictly limited points of view, they were moving the novel’s arena into the mind and voice of individuals. This is consonant with the traditional virtues of depth, of rounded character, of emotional intimacy, and of sincerity. Nevertheless, you could also argue, and I shall, that the intimate voice of a narrator moves fiction a notch toward its own surface, and as such is new-fashioned indeed. Paradoxically, such an intimate, limited point of view actually distances us from the action.
It is, after all, the phenomenal world which is literature’s subject, and a given character is but one of many phenomena. A character’s limited consciousness and his obtrusive voice erect a veil between us and things and between us and the forgetfulness which is total immersion. Marlow’s oldhandedness does not match our innocence of the horrifying particulars he relates. Hearing his ironic voice may strengthen the severity of our judgment of events, but it does not deepen our experience of them. We are not meant to experience them. We are meant to contemplate them.
Marlow’s interrupting voice also deepens our admiration for Conrad’s narrative technique. That is, it is an artifice which intermittently calls attention to itself. So also,a fortiori , is the obtrusive and disjunctive surface treatment of Molly Bloom’s maundering mind. It is an aesthetic experience, not an intimate one. Do we enter her world? her mind? or that section ofUlysses? A tour de force is, after all, a power play; we gasp, but we do not weep. Finally, a narrator’s personality tinges his record of events and inclines us to skepticism. And skepticism is no traditional virtue; it is the beginning of the end, of the shattering of the world of things and its ultimate dispersal into bits from which to make worlds of mind.
When several voices take turns telling a story—a device common in Faulkner, most clearly seen inAs I Lay Dying —their effect compared to that of a single voice is even more distancing. The use of such multiple voices inclines us to relativism with respect to fictional events on one hand and toward aesthetic appreciation with respect to the artwork on the other. And when these several voices each iterate the same event, like the blind men describing the elephant, in such a way that the flow of time halts while everybody steps off and looks around (Light in August, The Sound and the Fury), the effect is more distancing yet. For while we as audience walk round and round some fictional event, that event, while it acquires rondure and depth before our eyes, also becomes isolated. Cut off from the rush of time and the direct flow of unconsidered sense data, a given reiterated event—say, Luster’s loss of his quarter inThe Sound and the Fury —becomes a fixed and immobile artistic or intellectual object. When we hear each of the blind men in turn, the hearsay elephant itself seems to us more and more remote. It becomes less an experienced event than an object of speculation. It becomes quite patently an element of fiction, a focal point of artistic structure.
And so these comparatively recent uses of limited points of view may in fact be contemporary modernist in their effects. They diminish our emotional involvement in the tale and draw attention to the teller. Those limited viewpoints which are very limited or obtrusive—those which are unintelligent, out of position, alien, grotesque, or fanatical—add to the work a layer of irony, like an oblique plane. When a tale’s teller is an axolotl or a dinosaur or a breast, we scarcely enter his tale with wholehearted sympathy, although we may be drawn to the character himself. So works with such narrators (Cortázar, “Axolotl”; Calvino,Cosmicomics ; Roth,The Breast ) move us by paradox, as Cubist canvases do. Their odd voices and viewpoints deepen our involvement in what would traditionally be considered the works’ more or less invisiblesurface , the tale’s teller. Yet at the same time they flatten what would traditionally be the deep part of the work, the tale itself. And so by making the deep parts shallow and the shallow parts deep, they bring to the work an interesting and powerful set of tensions, like Cubist intersecting planes.
Similarly, limited points of view emphasize the isolation of individual consciousness. When that individual is grotesquely limited, they suggest the grotesquerie of any limited stance; they stress the bias and partiality of anyone’s knowledge. By moving fiction’s arena from the material world to consciousness itself, they stress modernself -consciousness, and suggest a world in which total and forgetful immersion in events is no longer possible.
Often, as in Coover’s “The Babysitter” and inAs I Lay Dying , the points of view collide, mingle, or switch. In these cases, the point of view is simply another aspect of narrative collage, and expresses its themes. Not only is the world in bits, but our senses are parceled out among us. We are forced to be skeptics and relativists. The number of narrators of a given event may be multiplied indefinitely. The world is that which cannot be known. The world is that which we each imagine. What, in “The Babysitter,” really happened? The world is caught in a crossfire between necessity and possibility; the world is the fabrication of a billion imaginations all inventing it at once.
Return to Narration
The intrusion of the author into his own book is part of narrative collage. The author pops in and interrupts his story’s flow with confiding, ironic, or extravagant comment.
The device is not new. Trollope and Fielding insert themselves into their novels at regular intervals to warn, lecture, or praise their characters or their readers, or to disclaim any responsibility for characters’ misbehavior, or otherwise to strike quondam attractive moral postures. Their intention is in part traditional, then; they seek to engage us in their works’ moral depths, such as they are. And they seek, in lesser part, something of what Sterne sought: but Sterne was two centuries ahead of his time. They seek, that is, to slip us the wink. The novel is a game or a joke shared between author and reader. When a writer like Barth speaks up in his fiction today, he returns to Sterne, he parodies the eighteenth-century novel, and he makes a virtue of his own self-consciousness. Barth parodies his self-consciousness too, brilliantly: he even celebrates the self-awareness of the writer whose chosen art is so developed and all its possibilities so known that he cannot enter into it forgetfully.
Now as in the eighteenth century, a novel’s chapters may open with an authorial précis of their contents: this parodies not only the older usage, but also contemporary advertising copy. (Chapter 21 of Spanish writer Manuel Scorza’s novelDrums for Rancas is headed “Where, Free of Charge, the Tireless Reader Will Watch Dr. Montenegro Grow Pale.” This sort of irony in contemporary fiction represents the neotenous and monotonous retention of adolescent humor into adult life.)
A writer may interrupt his narration not only with his voice but also with his disconcerting presence. Borges appears in his own work as a mythical intelligence. Nabokov graces his own novels as a figure—a figure at once majestic and ironic, the way Alfred Hitchcock appears in his own films. All these interruptions and cameo appearances celebrate the art of it all; they remind us that we are as it were in a theater, and that the narrative itself is a conscious and willed artifice.
Finally, if telling a good story engages readers, then it stands to reason that you can effectivelydistance readers by telling a bad story. Say what you will ofFinnegans Wake , it is a lousy story. So are Beckett novels, most Robbe-Grillet novels, recent Stanislaw Lem novels, and countless short stories of which early Borges fictions are the type.
Certain of the most attractive elements of good storytelling—I mean what blurbs call rip-roaring good storytelling—have been taken over by films and popular fiction. We think of a “walloping” good story as having a little death in it, and possibly some elemental forces like fire or the sea, and likely so
me big battles, crossed romances, exotic settings, betrayals, switched babies, murders, fortune or treasure, international intrigue, escapes, missed letters, vows, or disguises. All this drama and action appeals to practically everybody; the very popular genres depend on it; literary novels now avoid it. The serious novelist takes pains to distinguish his work from trash. If popular films and popular novels have good stories, then literary novels shall not. If despite all your precautions your novel is epic in scale, if it embodies such quaint narrative virtues as enlargement and diversity of action, forcefulness of dramatic conflict, vivid spectacle, and heart-pounding suspense, someone will accuse you of writing with an eye toward a film sale. No one will like you anymore.
Even among the serious writers of traditional fiction, dramatic storytelling went out with World War I. I do not know if Freud made the difference, or the very grave and very colorless events of the century itself; but at some point, the poeple in novels stopped galloping all over the countryside and started brooding from chairs. Everything became psychological and interiorized. External conflict became internal tension. We swallowed the arena and can no longer watch the show. Internal battles lack color. You may search the novels of Virginia Woolf in vain for so much as a single horse.
Narration, then, in the name of purity, can go the way of character. It is optional. It is suspect: recently Richard Lingeman, writing inThe New York Times , accused the ending of a novel of being “plotty.” Narration is finally dispensable. “To tell a story,” Robbe-Grillet proclaims from his corner, “has become strictly impossible.” Of course, Robbe-Grillet is speaking from his own theory. Telling a story is not at all impossible if the writer wants to; but for contemporary modernist writers, it is getting increasingly impossible to want to. At any rate, there are forms of fiction in which no story is told at all. These are usually short stories whose specialized forms forbid both characters and narration. These specialized forms derive from nonfiction: the scholarly article, the idea in a journal, the field report, the critical essay, the book review. Such essay-like fictions are unlikely to engage deeply our senses or our hearts. But their attraction for the mind may be considerable.
Living by Fiction Page 3