The newspapers are alive with inexplicable follies. Men, safe in important positions, earning huge salaries, forget to file income tax forms. What a block-headed, unrealistic contrivance, out of character. We see, particularly in persons high in public and political life, the recurrent, bold dissolutions of the very core of themselves as it has been supposedly observed in endless printed repetitions, in biography, in assertion of principle. The puritan drinks too much it turns out, the Christian is a heathen. Even if a number of opinions and habits have attached themselves like moles to the skin of personality, it is not unnatural that our favorite word for character is image—“a reproduction of appearances.” Since the image is impalpable, one is not obliged to keep faith either with the details or with the gross accumulation of what one is supposed to be.
Spiro Agnew, an almost forgotten, verbose vice president, with his long donkey face, his arresting alliterations, his tall, broad-shouldered ease in the pulpit, was, in his reign, old fiction. He might have been Mr. Bounderby. “I was born in a ditch, and my mother ran away from me. Do I excuse her for it? Have I ever excused her for it? Not I.” Yet, in collapse, Agnew became an unaccountable post-modernist who ceased suddenly to be a character, his own character, and became a man who roams the world without a memory of alliterative abuse, without a voice, born again in middle age as a baby, alien to the “role” that had brought him to our attention in the first place. So there he is somewhere, freely “mutating” like V.—Veronica, Victoria, Venus, VD, “the incursion of inanimate matter into twentieth century life.”
TIME
The three-act play is no longer in fashion, having given way to the long one-act, occasionally punctuated by an intermission, an intermission that is a convenience for the audience rather than the signal of a diversion in the flow. Impatience plays its part as one of the powers of our existence and no doubt it has much to do with dramatic structure. The celestial arithmetic of three acts turned out to be authoritarian and oppressive to the shooting-star conceptions. More importantly—a three-act play implied a three-act life.
Curtain lines ending the first act with a question, a riddle leading to unexpected turns in act two, act three resolving and returning in some way the call of act one. In the realistic American theater it was the habit to have, in the end, flashes of “understanding” which arose like a perfume out of the soil of the past. Yes, these characters would say, I discover that I have been a selfish dolt and just where I had been most convinced of my nobility and rectitude. The curtain fell.
In life, in domestic conflicts, in matters of wounded feelings, it is so often those who have been acted against who are required to uphold a pretense of form. (I don’t mind what you do to me, but it is so awful for the children.) The pedantry, the conservatism, the intransigence of the hurt and the inconvenienced are scarcely to be separated, we feel, from bitterness and frustrated will. Suspicion of motive afflicts the decent as well as the dishonorable.
Resolutions, recognitions, the strands at last tied in a knot? Whose experience can that be faithful to? In contemporary theater, it is usually the popular and commercial work, manipulating the assumed moral and aesthetic traditionalism of the audience, that insists the gun hanging on the wall in act one must indeed go off before the final curtain falls.
The tyranny of the nineteenth-century three-volume novel leaves its wreckage in Gissing’s New Grub Street. A chapter entitled “The Author and his Wife”: the wife anxiously inquires about a work in progress, where are you? what have you done?
Reardon, the burdened novelist, cries out, “Two short chapters of a story I can’t go on with. The three volumes lie before me like an interminable desert. Impossible to get through them. The idea is stupidly artificial, and I haven’t a living character in it.”
THE NOVEL
Perhaps we cannot demand a “novel.” The most practical solution seems to be an acceptance of whatever designation the publisher has put into his catalog. The object in hand, its length not defining beyond a hundred pages, is not an essay, not a short story, not autobiography since we are told so much of it is “made up” and altered from the truth; it is then a novel of some kind. In the reviews of Renata Adler’s Speedboat, a work of unusual interest, many critics asked whether they should consider the fiction truly, really a novel. The book is, in its parts, fastidiously lucid, neatly and openly composed. Its structure is linear and episodic as opposed to a circular development and while this is more and more the rule in fictional practice, traditional readers sometimes question the nature of what they are reading.
In Speedboat, the narrator—a word not entirely apt—is a young woman, a sensibility formed in the 1950s and ’60s, a lucky eye gazing out from a center of a complicated privilege, looking about with a coolness that transforms itself into style and also into meaning. Space is biography and conflict finally, and going from one place to another is the thread of experience.
The girl takes flying lessons; she lives in a brownstone in New York among others little connected to her except as voices, scenery; she visits the starving Biafrans as a journalist (“We had been told to bring cans of food, jerry cans of gasoline, and a lot of Scotch”); she examines her generation (“Some of us are gray. We all do situps or something to keep fit”); she teaches at City College and worries about language (“ ‘Literally,’ in every single case, meant figuratively; that is, not literally”).
For the girl, the past has not set limits and the future is one of wide, restless, interesting “leaps.” Not the leaps of lovers (she has lovers, but this is a chaste book), not leaps of divorces, employment liberations, but a sense of the way experience seizes and lets go, leaving incongruities, gaps that remain alive and are valuable as conversation—conversation the end result of experience. She writes that, “the camel, I had noticed, was passing, with great difficulty, through the eye of the needle. . . . First, the velvety nose, then the rest.” And how right she is. If the rich can’t get into heaven, who can?
•
To be interesting, each page, each paragraph—that is the burden of fiction composed of random events and happenings in a more or less plotless sequence. Speedboat is very clear about the measure of events and anecdotes and indeed it does meet the demand for the interesting in a nervous, rapid, remarkably gifted manner. A precocious alertness to incongruity: this one would have to say is the dominating trait of the character of the narrator, the only character in the book. Perception, then, does the work of feeling and is also the main action. It stands there alone, displacing even temperament.
For the reader of Speedboat, certain things may be lacking, especially a suggestion of turbulence and of disorder more savage than incongruity can accommodate. But even if feeling is not solicited, randomness itself is a carrier of disturbing emotions. In the end perhaps a flow is more painful than a circle, which at least encloses the self in its resolutions, retributions, and decisions.
AMERICAN PRACTICALITIES
Our novelists, sensing the shape of lives around them that do not conform to the finalities of the novelistic, nevertheless are reluctant to alienate, to leave so much of life morally unaccounted for. Novels that are profoundly about illicit fornication have a way of ending on accidents, illness, or death.
In John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, the young husband is in a restless mood of flight and infidelity; the wife is confused, sore, exhausted, and not sober. The new baby dies in the bath in a powerful scene very near the end of the novel. This is meant as a judgment on poor Harry and Janice. It says that Harry is not supposed to run around and Janice is not supposed to be sitting, drunk, before the television set in the afternoon. In Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, the hero pays for his disgruntlement, acrimony, and self-absorption by the death of his damaged son. In Francine Gray’s Lovers and Tyrants, the heroine has a hysterectomy, in what may be thought of as a rebuke to her promiscuity. In Speedboat, the girl, perhaps worried that her autonomy is out of line, like an overdrawn expense account, announces that
she is going to bear a child. In this way she chooses the impediments of nature to act as a brake on the rushing, restless ego.
Deaths, accidents, illnesses, and babies are a late resurgence of normality or morality (late in the books, that is). They seem to say that a distraction in the order of things will not go unpunished. It appears that free as we are, determined upon experience as we are, there is a lingering puritanism somewhere, a mechanical accountability that links transgression with loss and grief.
The resolutions are not always convincing, being as they are an afterthought of moral contrivance. The drowning of the baby in Rabbit, Run is the most truly prepared for and has the least hinting of an unnecessary, retroactive moral assertion. The unconvincingness of most resolutions is a measure of the practicality, the businesslike accounting at the end of a spree, the drawing back from observed life. The telegram about your mother’s death after you have been in bed with your secretary, the automobile accident as you come home from an infidelity: how far all of this is from the indulgent grip on experience that preceded it. The willingness to accept, or to offer for the public, a bleak vision without palliative intrusions is not in the end congenial to the American writer. Perhaps it is that the author steps aside from the scene he has created in such zestful detail to punish not on his own behalf but on behalf of his audience, whom he judges, somewhat patronizingly, as more vindictive than himself.
BANALITIES
A strict and accurate ear for banalities provides much of the subject matter in the work of Barthelme, Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Renata Adler, and many others. Blood, sex, and banality, as Malraux recently described the “terrible world in which we are living.”
Vonnegut:
Toward the end of maneuvers, Billy was given an emergency furlough home because his father was shot dead by a friend while they were out hunting deer. So it goes.
Speedboat:
The girl was blond, shy, and laconic. After two hours of silence, in that sun, she spoke. “When you have a tan,” she said, “what have you got?”
From a California newspaper:
The pastor of the New Life Center Church in Bakersfield and a woman member of his congregation were arrested on suspicion of plotting to murder the pastor’s invalid wife.
Banalities are not meant as a narrowing of intention. They are quite the opposite. Banalities connect the author with the world around him. They connect the extreme and the whimsical with the common life, with America, with the decade, with the type. They serve, in a sense, as a form of history.
BOREDOM
Emma Bovary, struggling along with her last lover, Léon—a man whom even romantic love and adventure cannot sever from the anxious calculations of a bourgeois—finds “in adultery all of the banality of marriage.” The most moving instance of such boredom in literature is Vronsky’s exhaustion with Anna Karenina’s love and with his own. It is not so much that he falls out of love as that the conditions of the great passion are a weariness: isolation, anxiety, idleness, the criticism of society. Boredom with love is as powerful as love itself and, psychologically, much more confusing to the spirit. Anna herself falls into one of the masks of boredom with love, obsessive, random jealousy.
Both of the women, Emma and Anna, try to modernize, to politicize the illicit. Anna and Vronsky live in a corrupt, self-indulgent world that retains its pieties about the details of indulgence. At one point Anna pathetically cries out that in living with Vronsky she is at least being “honest.” Emma, a naïve provincial, nevertheless understands that her nature inclines her toward the bohemian, the sophistications of the demimonde. She appears with a cigarette in her mouth and can be seen in town “wearing a masculine-styled, tight-fitting waistcoat.” Anna’s passion is inseparable from her position in society and Emma’s passions soon cannot be severed from her debts. Still, in their different ways, they are “new women,” and their husbands represent to them an intolerable boredom they do not see themselves destined to endure. They are to be trapped in a further boredom, but of course that lies ahead.
Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction. The limitations of the human body are nowhere more clear than in the fantasies of Sade. Nearly all of his “imaginative tableaux” involving more than two persons are physically impossible. In current American fiction, the novels that are most concerned with sex are becoming more traditional in form and imagination each year, and especially those that attempt solemn scenes of gasping and thrusting, the hopeless pursuit of the descriptive language of sensation, without the comic spirit of, for instance, Henry Miller. The body is indeed a poor vehicle for novelty. In many women writers on the current scene, the union of license and literary conventionality is quite noticeable. More and more they suffer from what Colette called the great defect in male voluptuaries: a passion for statistics.
CONSERVATIVES
The enclosed, static, oppressive nature of Soviet society makes it possible for Solzhenitsyn to write books that are formally conservative and yet profound and far-reaching in their significance. His fictions concern nothing less than the soul of Soviet Russia itself. The cancer ward is more than itself; it is the diseased state; the prison, the concentration camps are the setting in which history acts upon imagined characters realistically. The resonance of these great works from the cage is greater than we can produce in the openness and freedom of our lives; and altogether different. Totalitarianism is nothing if not a structure.
In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, a novel that is very American and yet conservative in both form and matter, Bellow needs the voice of one who has not shared the experience of the American last thirty years, one who has not come under the free-wheeling economic conditions here after the War, who in his own life has felt no strain from the sexual revolution, the draft, divorce, television—anything. He has chosen rightly. Mr. Sammler, over seventy, a European, profoundly formed and sure in character and values, another planet. Mr. Sammler is a suitable instrument of refusal: he says, I will not accommodate the New Left students or the nihilism of New York. I will not find the Negro pickpocket in his camel’s hair coat, his Dior dark glasses, his French perfume, merely interesting.
A novel like Pynchon’s V. is unthinkable except as the composition of an American saturated in the 1950s and ’60s. It is a work that, in its brilliant decomposition, explodes in a time of seemingly endless expanding capitalism. It comes out of our world of glut, reckless consumption, enviable garbage, and disorienting possibility. Life is not a prison. It is an airplane journey and on this journey the self is always disappearing, changing its name, idly landing and departing, spanning the world in hours. Geography is a character and town names have as much meaning as the names on the passenger lists. The novel does not end. It journeys on in a floating coda: “Draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa. Call it a radius. . . .”
In a recent article on the new fiction, Tony Tanner looks upon much of the work as a game, “games trying to break the games which contemporary culture imposes on us at all levels.” Entropy, carnival, randomness—the language of the critics of “post-modernist fiction”—seem to bring the novel too close to a poem, to put it under the anxiety of influence and to find it more subject to refinements and tinkerings of craft than a prose work of some length can actually be.
What is honorable in “so it goes” and in the mournful brilliance of Barthelme’s stories (“ ‘Sylvia, do you think this is a good life?’ The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. ‘No.’ ”), in Speedboat, in the conundrums of V. is the intelligence that questions the shape of life at every point. It is important to concede the honor, the nerve, the ambition—important even if it is hard to believe anyone in the world could be happier reading Gravity’s Rainbow than reading Dead Souls.
1976
SIMONE WEIL
SIMONE Weil, one of the most brilliant and original minds of twentieth-century France, died at the age of thirty-four in a nursing home near London. The coroner i
ssued a verdict of suicide, due to voluntary starvation—an action undertaken at least in part out of a wish not to eat more than the rations given her compatriots in France under the German occupation. The year of her death was 1943.
The willed deprivation of her last period was not new; indeed refusal seems to have been a part of her character since infancy. What sets her apart from our current ascetics with their practice of transcendental meditation, diet, vegetarianism, ashram simplicities, yoga, is that with them the deprivations and rigors are undergone for the payoff—for tranquility, for thinness, for the hope of a long life—or frequently, it seems, to fill the hole of emptiness so painful to the narcissist. With Simone Weil it was entirely the opposite.
It was her wish, or her need, to undergo miserly affliction and deprivation because such had been the lot of mankind throughout history. Her wish was not to feel better, but to honor the sufferings of the lowest. Thus around 1935, when she was twenty-five years old, this woman of transcendent intellectual gifts and the widest learning, already very frail and suffering from severe headaches, was determined to undertake a year of work in a factory. The factories, the assembly lines, were then the modern equivalent of “slavery,” and she survived in her own words as “forever a slave.” What she went through at the factory “marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I cannot help having the impression that there must be a mistake. . . .”
For those of us here in America who have known Simone Weil from the incomplete translation of her work and from the dramatically reduced and vivid moments of her thought and life, she has taken on the clarity of the very reduction itself. There the life was as if given in panels of stained glass, each frame underlined by a quotation from her writings, quotations unforgettably beautiful and quite unlike any others of our time. It is only in quotation, not in paraphrase, that the extraordinary quality of her concerns shines through. (“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”)
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 29