by Tim Parks
Cioran writes: “No one can renounce at least a shadow of immortality, and even less deny himself the right to seek it everywhere and in whatever form of reputation, beginning with the literary. Since death has come to be accepted by all as the absolute end, everybody writes.’
In short, this is the mind grappling with the fact of its own extinction.
The thirst for recognition adds a further complexity to the conflict between the impulse to comfort and the impulse to truth, and with it a further cause for rancour. Consider Giacomo Leopardi. Tiny, hunchbacked, ugly - in this, even worse off than the dwarf-like Pope - the man is indubitably great, because he is so terribly clear-sighted about the human condition, about human illusion and yet manages to present his unhappy intuitions so beautifully that, at least for the period of reading, there is great enjoyment.
But beautiful poetry or no, Leopardi’s gloomy vision to a considerable extent denied him success in his own lifetime, at least outside a small and clear-sighted elite. Like the older Dickens, he was constantly being told his work was too depressing and pessimistic (what did Dickens go around reading to people late in life, but his early work). Leopardi thus had good reason to feel rancorous. Not only was his clear-sightedness, his heightened consciousness, as he frequently tells us in his diary, a burden to him, but it denied him the consolation of success in his lifetime.
All the same, and here we approach the core of the matter, Leopardi knew that it was precisely this clear-sightedness, his ability to turn it into poetry, that made his work great, regardless of its immediate reception. So that in a way he would not have wished to have seen things differently.
Or would he? In his diary he comments: ‘If I could not take refuge in posterity, in the certainty that with time my work will find its rightful place, I would have sent literature to the devil a thousand times.’ Yet - another turn of the screw - right in the middle of that sentence, his clear-sightedness, the impulse to truth, forces him to introduce the parenthesis “(an illusory refuge, I know, but it’s the only one and absolutely necessary to the serious man of letters)’.
So one writes, raising consciousness of illusion to the highest and most uncomfortable levels, but can do so only in the thrall of another illusion: that posterity will recognise you for having so beautifully destroyed illusion - and that this will be a consolation. How infuriating.
When aged twenty-eight Leopardi is for the first time able to leave his tiny provincial village of Recanati and visit Rome, what does he gain from it? Only the further bitterness of confirming for himself, ‘close up, the falsity, ineptitude and stupidity of literary judgements’. A stupidity which, like the ‘dullness’ Pope describes in The Dunciad could only make his place in posterity less likely. He comments bitterly: ‘everything in this world is done out of the simple and constant forgetfulness of that universal truth that all is nothing’. But this was precisely the universal truth he expended all his energies seeking to express in a beautiful way. It’s worth noting how potency and impotency stand shoulder to shoulder here: the stronger the mind and its powers, the more trapped it becomes in its awareness of futility. ‘No future here,’ comments Beckett’s narrator in Worstward Ho. Then continues: ‘Alas, yes.’ Thus, contaminated, or ennobled by its philosophical content, the writing project has a tendency to devour itself. How many times in his diaries Leopardi wishes he could forget the whole thing. Not for nothing he was the first poet to write an ode ‘To a Winner with the Ball’.
The possible causes for rancour then, for one who undertakes both to represent the world and to create a work that will give pleasure and bring recognition, real recognition, are many, and mutually self-sustaining: rancour towards the world for being as it is, towards oneself for having adopted a particular position; rancour towards others for not recognising the truth of the matter, towards oneself again for seeking the recognition of people who are unworthy … (Perhaps the reason for the terrible retribution the gods wreaked on those who could not recognise them was simply their irritation with themselves for having sought such recognition.)
But the most easily vented rancour of all goes on those who, as the writer sees it, have cheated, and gained the world’s acclaim on easy terms …
For the author’s quarrel with other authors - which is usually different from a critic’s or reader’s quarrel - has intimately to do with how they have dealt with the struggle between comfort and truth. The other authors have taken an easy way out, they have lied, they have not persisted in exposing the truth of things. They have been lazily grandiloquent, over-optimistic. Here is Montale, brushing aside the pompous, immensely popular D’Annunzio at the height of Fascism:
Don’t ask us for the word that squares
Our shapeless spirit on all sides
To proclaim it in letters of fire that shine
Like a lone crocus in a dusty meadow …
Don’t ask us for the phrase that can open worlds,
Just a few gnarled syllables, dry like a branch.
This, today, is all that we can tell you:
What we are not, what we do not want.
At its most basic the other authors have committed the terrible crime of not having cultivated a sufficiently high level of consciousness. And thus they have won public affection. After all, as Schopenhauer tells us, ‘most people have … as the supreme guide and maxim of their conduct the resolve to get by with the least possible expenditure of thought’. Why should they read writers who wake them up? What does Pope accuse his fellow writers of if not ‘dullness’, a lack of perception, a lack of wakefulness. Beckett picks up the theme beautifully in this charming swipe at the British literary establishment in Molloy. The old vagrant is speaking of his ditch-sleeping habits.
In winter I wrapped myself in swathes of newspapers, and did not shed them until the earth awoke, for good, in April. The Times Literary Supplement was admirably adapted to this purpose, of a never failing toughness and impermeability. Even farts made no impression on it.
Tough and impermeable, insensitive to the most fundamental realities (‘I can’t help it, gas escapes from my fundament on the least pretext,’ Molloy says), the TLS is something to be cast off when the world awakes “for good’.
An author’s attack on other authors then, however mistaken sometimes, however self-serving, is not just pettiness, it is also a spreading out from the struggle going on at the heart of his own work. Here I am, the writer tells himself, struggling to reconcile reality with some kind of acceptable form, to achieve Kierkegaard’s and Nietzsche’s dream of making - if only for the duration of the work - necessity loveable, of putting the mind and the world into some acceptable relationship, and this other person, whether by craft or obtusity, cheats by offering the world some candied vision, or by pretending the important problems are soluble, are merely a question of American imperialism, or British colonialism, or communism, or racism, or male chauvinism. If this continues, how will I ever be recognised after I am dead?
Don Quixote is an interesting case here. We all know that Cervantes began the book as a satire of immediately preceding authors. What are they lampooned for? Their ludicrously untrue presentation of reality. ‘They are all fictions invented by idle brains … to pass the time.’
So far, then, the book’s inspiration has much in common with The Dunciad or indeed with all screams for elbow room. But as the work progresses another and subtler source of rancour is seen to be at work. Don Quixote, for all his foolishness, for all his outrageous violence, is an attractive person and his desire to see the world as an extension of his own idealistic mind, as obeying noble rules and regulations, as being full of beautiful damsels, etc., is a recognisable and, in the end, attractive desire. It has to do with the mind’s ancient quarrel, its perennial struggle to come to terms, its own terms, please, with everything that is not itself. So that while on the one hand the silly books that nurtured Don Quixote’s mentality are despised, nevertheless we identify with the yearnings for glory and control,
writerly yearnings if ever there were, and in Cervantes’ ultimately kind treatment of Don Quixote we can’t help suspecting the ancient rancour that the world refuses to be as we wish it, and, arising from that, the ancient envy of the mad, of those, that is, who despite all the evidence believe the world is as the mind wishes it to be. ‘Everything is folly but folly itself,’ says Leopardi.
Writers, then, frequently criticise authors on their telling of the truth. But more rarely there is the alternative charge that someone has just been brutally pessimistic, or brutally truthful and nothing else, without turning his work into art, without giving pleasure. This, it seems, is more acceptable when the content deals with the condemnation of social injustice, political tyranny and the like, for then there is the implied optimism: here we all are concerned about injustice, eager to have things changed. But when it comes to matters existential, what is the point of being merely pessimistic? Thomas Bernhard is sometimes accused of this. And in Italy, where I live, Beckett is likewise accused. The case is instructive because it suggests both the way a writer’s rancour may be channelled and the pitfalls of translation. Here is a moment from the Italian version of Watt where Arsène gives the book’s inexperienced protagonist a foretaste of how he will feel a few years hence:
Personalmente, come’è owio, rimpiango tutto. Non una parola, non un’azione, non un pensiero, non un bisogno, non un dolore, non una gioa, non una ragazza, non un ragazzo, non un dubbio, non una certezza, non uno scherno, non una voglia, non una speranza, non un timoré, non un sorriso, non una lacrima, non un nome, non un volto, nessun momento, nessun luogo, ehe io non rimpianga, esageratamente. Uno schifo, dal prineipio alla fine.
For those not familiar with Italian, here is my own translation of that translation back into English.
Personally, as is obvious, I regret everything. Not a word, not an action, not a thought, not a need, not a pain, not a pleasure, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a certainty, not a scorn, not a desire, not a hope, not an anxiety, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no moment, nowhere, that I do not regret excessively. Crap from beginning to end.
It is not surprising that Italian critics object that, while one may occasionally feel like this, it hardly makes for good reading, the only element of grim humour lying in the scandal of the excess.
But here is Beckett’s original.
Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place, that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure from beginning to end.
Worth noting here is the way, while the translation retains the negative content, it entirely loses the fun of Beckett’s demonstration that even the most miserable vision can be disguised by the mode of presentation, if you so choose. With the monosyllabic, nursery-rhyme anapaests, the symmetrical organisation of opposites, the lovely change of pace as the piece ends - ‘no time, no place’ - and the amusing shift of register in ‘exceedingly’ and ‘ordure’, the English reader hardly notices what a miserable statement this is.
The paragraph is in fact a parody of another and most important consequence of the artist’s rancour about the impossible task he has set himself: his growing vocation for seduction, for inventing, that is, some artistic means that will allow him - at least for the space of his narrative - to present the truth, as he sees it - including Cordelia’s death, and Little Nell’s and the miserable destiny of Isabel Archer and Anna Karenina’s suicide -in such a way that people will be charmed.
There is a curious moment in The Odyssey, when Helen and Menelaus are back in Greece and Telemachus visits them. They wish to speak of Troy, because Troy is the most important experience of their lives. But it is too painful. Menelaus must remember Helen’s betrayal. Helen must remember the dead lovers. Telemachus must remember his father missing, believed dead. The truth is too depressing to be comfortable with. Helen gets up, goes into another room, finds a drug she was given in Egypt and slips it into the wine. This is a drug, Homer says, ‘that robs grief and anger of their sting and banishes all painful memories’. And so it is. She and her husband, and Telemachus, have a wonderful evening recalling the unbearable truth of Troy, and then fall serenely asleep.
The artist’s dream is to conjure that seductive drug from his way with words and narrative. Only by presenting us with those truths which are all-important to us, but usually too difficult to face, can he get us entirely in his thrall, rather than merely amuse us with a pastime. Only by getting us in his thrall can he present those truths and leave us mostly unscathed. Otherwise he must just amuse us with tales of gallant knights. So it is that the only really significant reading experiences are those where one sets out with scepticism, only to find oneself enchanted, overwhelmed by a vision that, with Promethean peremptoriness, fired with an ancient antagonism, demands our acquiescence.
Which allows me to come at last to Prospero. Since for recognition of the artistic mind’s essential rancour and its intimate relation to his genius for seduction and self-affirmation, the greatest, the most explicit example remains The Tempest, a title that speaks worlds.
People like to forget what an angry, punitive fellow Prospero is. How quickly he dismisses his daughter’s ‘brave new world’! ‘One more word/shall make me chide thee, if not hate thee,’ he tells Miranda when she appeals for Ferdinand’s life. And to Ariel: ‘If thou more murmur’st, I will rend an oak./And peg thee in his knotty entrails, till/thou has howl’d away twelve winters.’ His magician’s spells, however beautiful, are designed to bind, not please, to regain through the enchantment of the mind the sovereignty he so foolishly relinquished at the political level. The whole play is steeped in the vocabulary of sovereignty and thralldom. One is either controlling or controlled, and the world is of such a nature that it must be brutally manipulated if the miracle of Miranda and Ferdinand’s love is to have any chance at all. And if this rancorous, vengeful magician does in the end forgive, how grudgingly and sceptically it is done! And that only when every enemy is securely in Prospero’s power, only when the gesture of relinquishing power provides the final claim to superiority, the ultimate demand for recognition.
Then the wonderful final irony: the Duke, the artist, reveals -how infuriating - all the while he appeared the sovereign, he was in fact in his audience’s thrall, they had to be kept constantly in mind.
Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Like Leopardi two centuries later, Shakespeare alerts us to the contradiction at the heart of the writer’s aspirations: his strength as magician and seducer, his weakness in needing recognition for this strength. Prospero seems to be trapped on the very stage that was the scene of his triumph, the world he watched over and made conscious for us. In the end the writer will ever be dogged by the reflection that once the work is over, he ceases to be god. And the work itself will ever be fuelled by the rancour consequent on that knowledge, and the rancorous determination that everybody else be aware they share the same limitations. Here is Beckett’s Malone giving us a splendid combination of vindictive-ness and awareness of the futility of seeking recognition at all:
Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life and then the fires and ice of hell and in the execrable generations to come an honoured name.
The wonder is that in taking it to such extremes Beckett can actually seduce us with these negative emotions. The humanistic project of generating sympathy and a sense of shared destiny is most nearly achieved when the artist’s essential rancour is most openly recognised.
References
The first number in the left column refers to the
page, the second to the line on which the quotation ends.
Hell and Back
1, 7 Gospel According to St Luke, 18, 22
1, 26 Dante, Inferno, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander (New York,
Doubleday, 2001), Canto I, 11. 1-3
2, 19 J.L. Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, trans. E. Weinberger (New York, Viking, 1999), p. 337 2, 21 D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (London, Penguin, 1995), p. 61 4, 24 Dante, Inferno, op. cit., Canto III, 1. 9 4, 27 Ibid., Canto III, 1. 36
4, 31 Ibid., Canto III, 11. 56-7
5, 4 Ibid., Canto IV, 1. 42
5, 10 Ibid., Canto IV, 11. 44-5
5, 34 Ibid., p. xxxiii
6, 2 Mundaka Upanisad, 1, 1 6, 6 Loc. cit.
6, 33 Dante, Inferno, op. cit., Canto VII, 1. 99
6, 34 Ibid., Canto XVII, 1. 40
7, 5 Ibid., Canto XXIX, 11. 1-3
7, 10 Ibid., Canto XXIX, 11. 11-12 (trans. Hollander)
8, 15 Dante, Hell, trans. D.L. Sayers (London, Penguin, 1949),
Canto XXVI, 11. 94-102
9, 3 Dante, Inferno, trans. H. Longfellow, Canto V, 11. 46-51 9, 21 Dante, The Inferno of Dante, trans. Robert Pinsky (New York,
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), Canto XXVIII, 11. 22-8 10, 10 Dante, Dantes Inferno, trans, various (New Jersey, The Ecco Press, 1993), p. xii
10, 28 Ibid., Canto IV, IL 25-31