JOHN

BARTH
The Literature of Exhaustion
(reprinted with permission from Atlantic Monthly, August 1967)
The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors.
His work modifies our conception of the past, as it wiII
modify the future.
JoRcE
LUIS BoRcEs, LabYrinths
The Literature
oI Exhaustion 7r
whimsical
writings,
'often
pointed" once mailed to various
ffi.,i'-$irat-it?'."tulog'le
describes
a1
lhe
New York
;:;;;;;J""ce School oi Litttututt);
and Daniel spoerri's
\;;t5;;;"iwiiiipnv
ot chance'
'on the surface' a
il;;;il
oi'ati tt'e'ou;ects
that happen to- be on the
;ffi;i;;;'^;"bl;-ii"
tu't' however ' ' '
a cosmologv
of Spoerri's
o(istence"
""'d"";il;;;;."1
; Ieast, the document
listing these items
tr ;il;;;
J ri," so'nJiti"g
Else
-Press'
a swinging
outfit'
'In fact, however',
ta *- U" 6ne of their offerings'
for- all
iil;;','irr"
N",i vo'tt'ol"it-rn'rail
Advertising
school of
Literature.
In any t"t, it'"i' rrares are lively
1o
read about'
and make for interesting
conv-ersation
in
,fi-ction-writing
;i;tdl;;
.""*pr.,
*it"i" *" discuss so-mgbodv-91-othr's
,rU."ti,
-r"prg,nated,
iandomly
assembled.
novel-in-a-box
;;in;;i;;iititv
ot printing Finnesans
wake on a verv
r.rullir.t-wet.
tt's
"'''i"t
ut'Ia sociaLler
to talk technique
than it is to make
"t,
*Jtn"
area of 'happenings'
and their
i<ii is"#ffIw.v
ot discussing
aesthetics'
really; illustrat-
i"e d.;.ri."tly'
hore or less
-valid
and interesting
points
about the nature ot ; ;;d th" definition
of its terms and
8"m'conspicuous
thing' for example'
,abo-ut
the 'inter-
tn;i;"'
;ffi-ii,.it
tt"aticv
(noted even.by
Lite magazinel
;ffit,"i;;;;oi-o"rv
the iiaditional
audience
-'tHg
;;0"6d.".G-rit6: @
audience rs
often the'castl
as rn-'ei@
mu sic-isn't
int"nq.g
t-qabffi
iai1F5ffi;Eo-
tf e
ir.rffii"tmi;;ti;;
oflhe ?rtEf the Aristotelian
con-
;i;;t;;;iwtro
utt'l"'es
with technique
and- cunning the
,iiir,i.Jn..a;
in other words' one endowed with uncommon
talent, who has mo.eover
ieveloped
and disciplined
that
;;;;*";i
into virtuosity'
It's an aristocratic
notion on
;; f;;;;
it, which the democratic
west seems easer to
have done with; not onty tt'" 'omniscient'
author of older
;;;"-,
;; ;h;;.tv
idea'of the controllinq
31*
has been
You who
manner
sible.
listen give me life in air.rr
of speaking. r rvoJiiroiJyou ,opo*,i;
My flrst words weren't my flrst words. I ;ish:tli
I'd begun diflerently.
JoHN
BAnrn, Lost in the Fun Hous-e-:
I want to discuss three things more or less together: firsti,i
some old questions raised by the new intermedia arts;l
second, some aspects of the Argentine writer
Jorge
Luib r
Borges, whom I greatly admire; third, some professional'r
concerns of my own, related to these other matters
having to do with what I'm calling
'the literature
bility'- or, more chicly,
Thila great many Western artists for a
Sreat
many yeali
have quarrelled with received deflnitions of artistic medil
don't mean anything so tired as
subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence,
the forms or exhaust
possftillies
-
genres, and forms goes without saying: pop art, dr
and musical 'happenings', the whole range of in
or 'mixed-mernr; irt, biar recentest witness to the
of rebelling against Tradition. A catalogue I received
of postcards on which are inscribed'apparently
exhaustion'.
-Bi-&ffiistion'l
questions', to be mailed to whomever the purchaser
i
them suited for; Ray
Johnson's
?aper Snake, a collectj
il^i"ffi;
rt poriiit'uv reactionary'
even.fascist'
time ago in the mail, for example, advertises such items
RobeririUiou's Ample Food toi Stupid lhought, a boi.i
r Now
I'rebel a
tional
l
ffilirctinet
to
Prefer
the kincl
can 761-TE6-ffi[-[Eat
requires
4*tt"?'i'I9,ffi*
n. I enioY the
PoP
an rn
72
ilhe
Novel Today
collection, a few blocks from my house in Buflalo, like a
lively conversation for the most part, but was on the whole
more impressed by the jugglers
and acrobats at Baltimore's
old Hippodrome, where I used to go every time they
changed shows: genuine virtuosi doing things that anyon-e
can dream up and discuss but almost no one can do.
I suppose the distinction is between things worth remark-
ing
-
preferably over beer, if one's of my generation
-
and
things worth doing. 'somebody ought to make a novel with
scenes that pop up, Iike the old children's books,, one says,
with the implication that one isn't going to bother doing
it oneself.
However, art and its forms and techniques live in history
and certainly do change. I sympathize with a remari<
technically up-to-date artist.. In the flrst category I'd locate
,il- itror. ,ouititt" who for better or worse write not as if
the twentieth century didn't exist, but as if the great writers
oi the last sixty years or so hadn't existed (nota bene that
our century's moie than two-thirds done; it's dismaying to
."" to *u.ru of our writers following Dostoevsky or Tolstoy
.r- rir"u"ri or BiI-Za-q wEen
-tEe-iea[-
ieihnical
question
;;; a" iiiti- to ue how to succeed not even
Joyce
and
f"n u, Urt those who've succeeded Joyce
and Kafka and
;;;* in the evenings of their own careers)' In the second
""t"gory
are such folk as an artist-neighbour
of mine in
guffIfo'*ito
fashions dead Winnie-thePoohs
in sometimes
monumental scale out of oilcloth stuffed with sand and
impated on stakes or hung by the-
19t5'
I1 the third belong
the few people whose artistic thinking is as hip as any
French news-novelist's,
but who manage nonetheless to
soeak eloquently and memorably to our still-human hearts
,""4 ..rai'U"ns,
as the great artists have always done' Of
t-G., t*o of the finest llving specimens that I know of are
ii".["tt and Borges,
just about-the only contemporaries
of
mvi"udi"g u.qrr""it tin." mentionable with the
'old masters'
oi t*""tiEir-."t t,rty fiction. In the unexciting history. of
it"i.ty awards, thL 196r International
Publishers' Prize'
;h;;by Beckett and Borges, is a happy exception indeed'
-
On. of the modern things about these two is that in
""-ri"
of ultimacies and
;flnal
solutions'
-
at least' telt
"fii*l"io,
in everything from weaponry to theology' the
..i"U.ut.a
dehumanizati'on of society, and the history of
it. nov"t
-
tfreir work in separate ways reflects and deals
*ittt utti*r.y, both techniially and thematically' as' for
exrmple, Finiegans Woke does in its different manner' One
,.tG, ty the-way, for whatever its symptomatic worth'
it ut
loyc"
was viriually blind at the etrd, Borges is litera.lly
so,
. ind Beckett has become virtually mute, musewrse'
ir"tl"g progressed from marvellously constructed English
,"nt"rr'ao tf,rough terser and terser French ones to the un'
syntactical,
unpunctuated
prose of
.Comment
C'est and
'ulti-
,iut.ty'to woidless mimes. One might extrapolate a theore
i-i.J tou.t" for Beckett: language, after all' consists of
,it"n.. as well as sound, and the mime is still communica-
iio"-'ttut nineteenth-century
idea', a Yale student once
The Literature of. Exhaustion 73
attributed to Saul Bellow, that to be
ute"of 5 w
haye to add that this
date
Symphony
would be
today
^.good many current
I would
be
of
Yyour0 Dc {Le{gy_emp.arl?s$n8;*A-... good many current
novelists write turn-of-the-century-type novels, only in more
or less mid-twentieth-century language and about contem-
por;uy people and topics; this makes them considerably less
interesting (to me) than excellent writers who are also
technically contemporary:
Joyce
and Kafka, for instance, in
their time, and in ours, Samuel Beckett and
Jorge
Luis'
Borges. The intermedia arts, I'd say, tend to be intermediary
too, between the fraditional realms of aesthetics on the one
hand and artistic creation on the other; I think the wise
artist and ciyilian will regard them with quite the kind and
degree of seriousness with which he regards good shoptalk:
he'll listen carefully, if non-committally, and keep an eye on
his intermedia colleagues, if only the corner of his eye.
They may very possibly suggest something usable in the
making or understanding of genuine works of contemporary
art.
The man I want to discuss a little here,
Jorges
Luis Borges,
illustrates well the difference between a-lectrn&ally o_lG_
fashioned artist, a technically up-todate civilianl-Ifi-d a
' 't'.1:)
rlllt
nllf
r liii
l;tlii:
ribute
74
The Novel Today
snarled at me-but by the language of action. But the
language of action consists of rest as well as movement, ahd
so in the context of Beckett's progress, iryrmobile, silent
flgures still aren't altogether ultimate. How about an empty,
silent stage, then, or blank pages (an ultimacy already
attained in the nineteenth century by that avont-gard.iste of,
East Aurora, New York, Elbert Hubbard, in his Essay on
Silence)
-
a 'happening' where nothing happens, like Cage's
4' 33"
performed in ?n empty hall ? But dramatic com-
munication consists of the absence as well as the presence
of the actors; 'we have our exits and our entrances'; and
so even that would be imperfectly ultimate in Beckett's
case. Nothing at all, then, I suppose: but Nothingness is
necessarily and inextricably the background against which
Being et cetera; for Beckett, at this point in his career, to
cease to create altogether would be fairly meaningful : his
crowning work, his
'last
word'. What a convenient corner
to paint yourself into !
'And
now I shall finish,' the valet
Arsene says in Watt,,'and you will hear my voice no more.'
Only the silence Molloy speaks of, 'of which the universe
is made'.
After which, I add on behalf of the rest of us, it might
be conceivable to rediscover validly the artifices of language
and literature-such far-out notions as grammar, punctua-
tion even characterization! Even plotl-if one goes
about it the right way, aware of what one's predecessors
have been up to.
Now
J.
L. Borges is perfectly aware of all these things.
Back in the great decades of literary experimentalism he
was associated with Prisma, a 'muralist' magazine that
published its pages on walls and billboards; his later Loby-
rinths and Ficciones not only anticipate the farthest-out
ideas of The Something EIse Press crowd
-
not a difficult
thing to do
-
but being marvellous works of art as well,
illustrate in a simple way the difference between the foct of
aesthetic ultimacies and their artistic use. What it comes to
is that an artist doesn't merely exemplify an ultimacy; he
employs it.
Consider Borges's story 'Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote':
the hero, an utterly sophisticated turn-of-the
century French Symbolist, by an astounding effort of
imagination, produces
-
not copies or imitotes, mind, but
The Literature ot Exhaustion
Zs
composes-seyeral chapters of Cervantes's novel.
It is a revelation
[Borges's
narrator tells us] to compare
Menard's Don Quixote with Cervantes's. The latter, for
example, wrote (part one, chapter nine) :
"
. . tmth, whose mother is history, rival of time,
depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and
adviser to the present, the future's counsellor.
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the 'lay
genius' Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical
praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
. . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time,
depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and
adviser to the present, the future's counsellor.
History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding.
Menard, a contemporary of. William
James,
does not
deflne history as an enquiry into reality but as its
origin . . .
Et cetera. Now, this is an interesting idea, of considerable
intellectual validity. I earlier that if Beethoven's
Sixth were com
but if done
interil
*h9gE-,,are-Jt-"ould have then potentially,
^for
better
or Worse, the kind of signiflcance of Warhol's Campbell's
\
l
Soup ads, the diflerence being that in the former case a
.-
work of art is beinEEF-roduced instead of a vioik-6:ET6-n-
art,
direct
intellectual point one needn't even recompose the Sixth
Symphony any more than Menard really needed to r+
create the
Quixote.
It would've been sufficient for Menard
to have attributed the novel to himself in order to have a
new work of art, from the intellectual point of view. Indeed,
in several stories Borges plays with this very idea, and I
can readily imagine Beckett's next novel, for example, as
rronlc com
n
l
The Novel Today
Tbe Literature of Exhaustion
speaking fictional and would find a ready publisher in New
York nowadays The author of the story 'TI<in, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius', who merely alludes to the fascinating Encyclo'
paedia, is an artist; what makes him one of the flrst rank,
like Kafka, is the combination of that intellectually pro-
found vision with great human insight, poetic power, and
consummate mastery of his means, a deflnition which would
have gone without saying, I suppose, in any century but
ours.
Not long ago, incidentally, in a footnote to a scholarly
edition of Sir Thomas Browne (The Utn Burial, I believe it
was), I came upon a perfect Borges datum, reminiscent of
Tlon's self-realization: the actual case of a book called
The Three lmpostors, alluded to in Browne'sReligio Medici
among other places, The Three lmpostors is a non-existent
blasphemous treatise against Moses, Christ, and Mohammed,
which in the seventeenth century was widely held to exist,
or to have once existed. Commentators attributed it vari
ously to Boccaccio, Pietro Aretino, Giordano Bruno, and
Tommaso Campanella, and though no one, Browne included,
had ever seen a copy of it, it was frequently cited, refuted,
railed against, and generally discussed as if everyone had
read it-until, sure enough, in the eighteenth century a
spurious work appeared with a forged date of 1598 and the
title De Tribus lmpostoribus. It's a wonder that Borges
doesn't mention this work, as he seems to have read
absoiutely everything, including all the books that don't
exist, and Browne is a parricular favourite of his. In fact,
the narrator of
'Tlon,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' declares at the
'end:
. . . English and French and mere Spanish will disappear
from the globe. The world will be Tlon. I pay no atten-
tion to all this and go on revising, in the still days at
the Adrogud hotel, an uncertain Quevedian
translation
(which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.
(Moreover, on rereading 'Tlcjn', etc., I find now a remark I'd
swear wasn't in it last year: that the eccentric American
millionaire who endows the Encyclopdedio does so on
condition that 'the work will make no
Pact
with the
impostor
Jesus
Christ'.)
77
76
.
Tom
lones,
just as Nabokov's last was that multivolume
i annotated translation of Pushkin. I myself have always
i
aspired to write Burton's version oI The roor Nights, com-
plite with appendices and the like, in twelve volumes, and
ior intellectual purposes I needn't even write it. What
,
evenings we might spend (over beer) discus_sing Saarinen's
'
Parthenon, D. H. Lawrence's Wuthering Heights, or the
Johnson
Administration by Robert Rauschenberg !
The idea, I say, is intellectually serious, as are Borges's
other characteristic ideas, most of a metaphysical rather
than an aesthetic nature, But the imPortant thing to observe
is that Borges doesn't attribute the Quixote
to himself, much
less re-compose it like Pierre Menard; instead, he writes a
remarkable and original work of literature, the implicit
theme of which is the difficulty, perhaps the unnecessity,
of writing original works of literature. His artistic victory,
if vou like, is that he confronts an intellectual dead end
and employs it against itself to accomplish new human
, work. If this corresponds to what mystics do
-
'every
' *o*.nt leaping into the inflnite', Kierkegaard says, 'and
every moment falling surely back into the flnite'- it's only
one more aspect of that otd analogy. In homelier terms, it's
a matter of every moment throwing out the bath water
without for a moment losing the baby'
Another way of describing Borges's accomplishment is
in a pair of his own favourite terms, algebro and fre. In
his most often anthologized story, 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius', he imagines an entirely hypothetical world, the
invention of a secret society of scholars who elaborate its
every aspect in a surreptitious encyclopaedia. This First
Encyclofaedia of TIdn (what fictionist would not wish to
have dreamed up the Britannica?) describes a coherent
alternative to this world complete in every aspect from its
algebra to its flre, Borges tells us, and of such imaginative
power that, once conceived, it begins to obtrude itself into
and eventually to supplant our prior reality. My point is
that neither the algebra nor the fire, metaphorically speak-
ing, could achieve this result without the other. Borges's
algebra is what I'm considering here-algebra is easier to
tJk about than fire-but any intellectual giant could equal
it.
'Ihe
imaginary authors of the First Encyclopaedia of Tldn
itself are not artists, though their work is in a manner of
i!iijiirirrii_i
The
"Literature
ot Exhaustion
il ;;"p;;p;tl".
-ii
vou
were
.B.orges
v"y
Tgh,t^-:ti::
i?iri,'itr,i,'
iiii",,, ui'-J r"u'""d. libinria.l in
:L: l:J:' :f
;#i#;;
ir"'al.'rL
them, to imasi n ary or
.t'v' :tL::'f 1]
;;r. A;t I'll add, since I believe Bbrges's idea is rather
;;il.;;i"e,
titut if
vou
were t!9 a1th11.of
,tf:-l1ft:
;;'d;";"*riftensomethinglike-I]r^eS"!;Y"rt^*"!i'rii
79
',
78
The Novel TodaY
r This 'contamination
of reality by dream" as Borges callc
I it, is one of his pet themes, ind commenting upon such
s contaminations
i, o.t" of his favourite fictional devices'
i llk; many of the best such devices, it turns the artist's
t *oae or iorm into a metaPhor for his concerns' as does
, il; aiary-ending
of Portait ot the Anist as a Young Man
E ;;1he cyctical fonstruction of Finnegans Wake' In Borges's
5 case, the story
'Tlon', etc', for example' is a real piece-of
4
ildined
reality in our world, analogous to those Tlonian
o u.tiLcts called hronir, which imagine themselves into exist-
o ence. In short, it's a paradigm of or metaphor,for
itself; nqt
s, iust the torm of the story but the tact of' the story is
c
''
iymbolic;
'the medium is the message
'
n-'Mor"ou.r,likeallofBorges'swork'itillustratesinother
B
".
of its aspects my subject-: ho*.utt artist may paradoxically
c, ir* ,rr" t"rt ultimacies of our time into material and means
.. io, his work-
paradoxically because by doing so he trans-
t( cends what had appeared to be his refutation' in the same
A way that the mys'tic who-transcends
finitude is said to'be
O
"rrrbl.d
to live, spiritually and physically' in the.finite
is world. Suppor"'yiu't.
a writer by vocation
-
a 'print-
orientedbastard','astheMcluhanitescallus-andyoufeel'
h ior example,
that the novel, if not narrative literature
^,
,
gl""i"uy, if not the printed
Yo1d..'11o8,:tnttl lT^Y^llli
instead of a prophet. There are others') If you-happened
to
t" Vf"ai*i, i.tuUot o, you might address that felt ultimacy
hv writine ?ale Fire t a flne iovel by a learned
pedant' in
;i. i;t-="i l"p"d""ri.
commentary
on a poem invented
Giles Goat-BoY :
whi
;i I f,;;;;;'ir,.
*"ai
irti
auout shot its bolt' us Leslie Fiedler
ncl*ls*t"f; lHTil;,1'#iHt'.'s":?,&"'?"Hi,l?"ffi hr
'ct
I I tions and hedges. Lrterary rorms certalnly rraYc uDrurrLJ aN
-
''r//
ili;;d .oniing",.io,
and it may well be that the novel's
u,
b* I
;#
3;;
;;,."fu ttli'^
:L::,'l^'^"':3:'":::ti;tl
ifl
,r I
n'
,H*:E:.'"IJ-ll!|ii
-$
I
;;;'-.dr, er;nd-opttu,
or the *n1t1 sequ.ence t'T"-
11-bj:
pr
I
No-
tl
l
to cenaln novc'r\'-, '"" ""' '"-"
'.:' "-"-'-
"--,--
-- -
"
i,r I ..i^r.r ha r^ rIirF a novel about it. Whether historically
ill u.,L"gi, writers-anO criiics feel apocalyptical..lh-',!
il
1L?:
ae feeling U"come,
"
considerable
culturai fact' like the feeling
isthatWestern-.iuitiz"tion,ortheworld'isgoing.toend
er rather soon. If you took a bunch of people out into the
desert and the world didn't end' you'd come home shame'
Qr fr."a, f imagine; but the persistence of an art form doesn't
ce invalidate
*oit
"t."t"d
in the comparable
.apocalyptic
in
"*Ui"n...
Thatjs one of the fringe beneflts of being an artist
The Literuture
of Exhaustion
tries to exhaust)
its
8t
8o
The Novel TodaY
of his frequenter
literary allusions is to.the 6oznd night of
'
lli ,"ii ilishts, when, owing to a copyist s error' Scheheie-
,.J" Gl"t"to
tell the King the story of
.the
roor nights'
t o* tt-" beginning.
Happily, the King- intermpts; if he
maJt irr"."'due
no OoSra night ever, and while this would
,oiul s.rr"ir"tezade's
pioblem-which
is every storlteller's
,itul"* r to
publish tr perish
-
it would put the 'outside'
;;;il; , Liira. (I suspeit that Borges dreamed this whole
;;ff;;,-it"
u.rrinot'he mentions isn't in any edition of
itr"roo,
Nights I've been able to consult' Not yet' any'
iro*,
-rft"t
ieading
'TI6n, Uqbar', etc'' one is incliued to
recheck every semester or so')
'-iq.*
s.rg,;
(whom someone once vexedly accused me of
inventlngl
is iriterested in the 6oznd night because it's an
instance of the story-within-the-story
turned back upon
i["ri, u"a his interesi in such instances is threefold: flrst'
*
-iii
tti**U declares, they disturb us metaphysically:
t wtren the characters
in a work of flction become readers
1
"r'"r,fr"*
oi tt" fiction they're in' we're reminded of the
',::;f'T;.'.m?ffi
",%:,f""#'t'?':
!r""".,
""J ",lei
tott. Second, the 6oznd night is a literary
'iiirttt"tion
of ttre regressus in infinitum' as are almost all
il;;;;'t
principal images and motifs' Third' Scheherezade's
IJ.il.*"i s;uit,
life Borges's other
-
versions of the
;;;;;
in"infnitum,
is an image of
.the,
exhaustion' or
,i[i*pi"a .-haustion,
of possibilities
-
in this case literary
poitiilfl,io
-
and so we return to our main subject'
What makes Borges's stance, if you like' more interesting
t *.iirr", say, Nibokov's or Beclett's is the premise with
*iri.f, fr" appioaches
literature; in the words of one of his
editors:
'For
[Borgesl
no one has claim. to originality
in
iit"trtu..,
all writJrs are more or less faithful amanuenses
;i-,h.
"
6iti
, translators
and annotators
of pre'existing
;;.ily$' fhus his inclination
to write brief comments
." i*lgi""ty
books: for one to attempt to add overtly to
;h; ffi of
:original'
literature by even so much as a con-
ventional
short itory, not to mention a novel' would be too
presumptuous, too naive; literature has been done long
since. A librarian's
point'of view ! And it would itself be
ioo o.ou*r,uous,
if it weren't
part of a lively'
passionately
;;iJ;-iliupr,vti.,r
vision and slylv emploved
against
itself
precisely, to make new and original literature'
BorgF
i
defines the Brr .
il ;;lt i*tnoto'to
imaginary texts' but posrccripts to
'"
"i"
work is not
[16
(the Baroque,Y*^J-1'::.::
ffi::1i"ffi;.?;;;il;r),
il
'"eeot'
thl view that inter-
iJ""i r"a [ierary history has been Baroque' and has pretty
;;iil;;ilJtrre
pottiuititied of noveltv' His fic.ciones are
the real corPus of literature'
-'ihit-p;"ilise
gives resonance
and relation to all his'i
principal images. Trre racii"g ;iiioo it"t.t"tur
in his storiesi"'
are a dual regressus.
T;.-a;bl*
that his characters'
likei\h
Nabokov's,
run afoul ;; ;G; dlzzving
multiples-
'19
S
;:;#;;;
oi s*".'t .e*.if that
r9'vsrvilnan-iLnel-anlv-:
;il;;u
'-:@'
(lt would Please
;;iffi
iltustrate
Browne's
poine-to call Browne a
ililil;f
s;tgo.
'Every writer" Borges savs^l:
llly:1l
)
ff?;il;,
;;ili,it #t
precu*ors'1. Borges's favourite
;htJ;;;t
heretical sect is the Histriones -
I think and
ii;;;;-i;;"niea
trrem
-
who believe that repetition-is
imoossible in history and therefore
live viciously
in order
ilfi;;;-d;
il.-u_rJ of the vices thev commit:
in other
;i;,L
"*t "ott
the possibilities of the world in order to
bring its end nearer.
The writer he most often mentions' after Cervantes'
is
Sh;Gp;;;;;in
one piece he imagines the plavwrighl on
!t1
;;;;il#
"rt
lng God to
permit hlim to be one and himself'
having been everyon"
*d tto one; God replies from the
*iiffiina
that He is no one either; He has dreamed the
world like Shakespeare,
and irtcluding Shakespeare'
Homer's
ri".y r"-ilk rv lt tr,. odyssey, of Menelaus,on
the beach
,i-ptr.ot, tackling Proteus, appeals
profoundly to Borges:
;il;;;;
t" *n"o
'exhausts^ih"
guittt of ttalitv' while
Me-nelaus
-
who, on e rffi,
-af
E"iSuc
nie- o*"-m;tiry
in
;td.t-;;;-t"sh
him
-
holds'fast]Zeno's
paradox of Achilles
;;il;; i;;;it" .-uJio
a re1ressus.in
infinitum
which
;&; .;;;, ttrorgr,
philosophical-history'
pointin-g- out
irrut'e'rirtotf"
uses it io refute Piato's theory of
-forms'
Hume
;;-;.frl;ih;
possibilitv oi cause and effect' Lewis Carroll
;; ;;ili; ,y'tolitti.
deduction, william James
to refute the
n"il.t or tt*i.ral
pussugg, and Bradley to refute the general
The Literature
of Exhaustion
8g
82
possibility of logical relations; Borges himself uses it, citing
Schopenhauer,
as evidence that the world is our dream, our
idea, in which 'tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason'
can be found to remind us that our creation is false, or at
least flctive.
The infinite library of one of the most popular stories is
an image particularly pertinent to the literature of exhaus'
tion; th]e iib.rry oi Sibel' houses every possible combina-
tion of alphabetical characters and spaces, and thus every
possible book and statement, including your and my refuta-
iio* u"a vindications, the history of the actual future, the
history of every possible future, and, though he doesn't
;;;;;" it, th; encyclopaedias
not only of Tl<in but of
"u.ry
i*ug'itable other world-since, as in Lucretius's uni-
verse, the-number of elements, and so of combinations,
is
flniie'(though very large), and the number of instances of
each elemeit and combination of elements is inflnite, like
the library itself.
That biings us to his favourite image of all, the labyrinth'
and to my
loint.
Labyrinths is the name of his most sutr
siantial tranilated volume, and the only full-length study-of
The Novel TodaY
Borges in English, by Ana Maria.Barrenechea,,
is ca1led
in whic all the
nsation
that Shakespeare's
heroic metamorphoses
.
culminate
not
*"..f, in a theophany
but in an apotheosis'
"'ili,'il
i*'.ry
ota u"ay is equipped
for this labour'
.nd Tho"u, in the Cretan labytinth-becomes
in the end the
;;L;il;"
of Borgesaftt'
'il'
Ditttosing-as
the fact is to
usliberalDemocrats,thecommonality'alas'willalwoys
;"J';# *i
"ra
their souls; it's the chosen remnant' the
;1 .";;;; tt e'Tt o""n hero, who, confronted^with
Baroque
realitv. Baroque tristoty, tt'e Baroque state of his art' need
;;';'"ffi'ltt
p"ttiuiiitio to exhaustion'
any more than
;;;; needs actually to write the Encyclopaedia
ot Tliin
;;;ir;;;kt
in the Librarv of Babel' He need,onlv be aware
of their existence
or possibility'
,acknowledge
them' and
,*l ii ir," aid. of very special
gifs
-
as extraordinary
as
r"i.l- .t-ft".*hood
and n'ot likely to- be found in The New
?;;k
-;*pondence
School of Lit"tututt
-
8o
straiSht
,h;;;s;;;-i,ur.
to the accomplishment
of his work'
int
Iike s
-
must be exhaust one rea
l.ll,
liir
i:
rl
\
T
t
i,
t
il
a
ir
e
(
c
ir
fuo*, i" fact, the legendary Theseus is non-Baroque; thanks
to Ariadne's thread he can take a shortcut through the
labyrinth at Knossos' But Menelaus on the beach at Pharos'
for'example, is genuinely Baroque in the Borgesian spirit'
and illustrates a positive artistic lnorality in the literature
of exhaustion. He is not there, after all, for kicks (any more
than Borges and Beckett are in the fiction racket for- their
-:-
^l- ^C
tL^
io hold fast while the Old Man of t
ity's enrng
8u
may
.,
I'i
Lne recalls that the aim of the Histriones is to get history
done with so that
Jesus
may come again the sooner' and
health):
world, and
so
urns to
8S
..I
The Novelist
at the Ctossroads
)
DAVID LODGE
The Novelist at the Crossroads
(reprinted, abridged, with permission from The Novelist at the
Crossroods, Routledge, r97r; Cornell, r97r)
Marvin asks Sam if he has given up his novel, and Sarn
says, 'Temporarily.' He cannot flnd a form, he explains.
He does not want to write a realistic noYel, because
reality is no longer realistic.
NoRMAN MAILER z The Man Who Studied Yoga
Robert Scholes's recent book The Fabulators (OUP, 1967)
has given a new impetus to the old guessing game of
'Whither the Novel?'At least, it has prompted me to try
to organize my own tentative thoughts on the subject. To
do this, however, and to understand The Fabulators, it is
necessary to go back, flrst, to an earlier book of Mr Scholes,
The Nature of Naruative
(1966), written in collaboration with
Robert Kellogg. There, the authors proposei that there are
two main, antithetical modes of narrative: the empitical,
whose
primary allegiance is to the real, and the fictional,
whose primary allegiance is to the ideal. Empirical narrative
subdivides into history, which is true to fact, and what
the authors call
,mimesis
(i.e. realistic imitation), which is
true to experience. Fictional narrative subdivides into
romance, w[ich cultivates beauty, and aims to delight, and
allegory, which cultivates
Soodness
and aims to instruct.
ThiJ genre theory is combined with a large-scale historical
scheme, according to which the primitive oral epic was a
synthesis of empirical and flctional modes that under various
cultural pressures (chiefly the transition from oral to written
forms of communication) broke up into its component
Parts;
and this fragmentation occurred twice
-
once in late classical
literature, and again in the European vernacular literatures,
where the different modes were developed independently, or
in partial combinations. In the late Middle Ages and the
Renaissance there is a perceptible movement in narrative
literature towards a new synthesis of empirical and fictional
modes which flnally produces, in the eighteenth century, the
novel. In the experiments
of modern narrative
writers' how-
;;;t,';J-i;-the
adven-t-of
n"* media such'
as motion
;.d;:;.il;les
and raiossl'*
evidence that the svnthesis
L about to dissolve once more'
Now, while this ambitiou'1"n"*"
is obviously
vulnerable
to scholarly
sniping
oo-
'oln"
of detail' it is' I think'
a
r;t;;;;;;"i
,l"t,"r on"'*h"n
we try to take.an
overview
"ol','t"'nr,r."
and development
of the novel' It
gives some
substance,
for instance,
'"ott"
"g'"
intuition
that the novel
stands to modern,
post-ienalsaice
civilization
as the epic
I
lli;*,;t*ii#"*t6t1f5,p$;;i;Hr#*fqf
"i
nrffuiir"lriaitions,
rather
tha+
3
5onqllualtg'I
thiin oi an entirely unpittJ*tid
phenomenon'
it accouns
I
for the
great variety anJ incl'sivengs
of
.the
novel form: I
il
&:itioi
u"i"g
p"Jta' uv different.au.thors'
in the
directions of history lrncluding
iutobiography),
allegory
or
romance while still t"-"i"i'git-thot'-ti-'e
novel" It will
be noticed that I do
"ot
i""ot-"' t'ere' the fourth'
of Scholes's
and Kellogg's categories -
*t'ut tftty call 'mimesis" and what
ffi;d;E;o
io"."u
'tt'ilt*" to tatt< of the.'novel
'being
oushed in the airection
oi realism
while still remaining
i#;.;'r;;r-l'-;;;
not make immediate
sense because
;;i;;iffi."l
ao conceive
of rhere being a conflict
of interest's
between
the novel uJit'fit*-w-hether-one
uses that
;iJil;;rimarilv
in a formal sense
(as I do)' to denote
.'i"rrii."ir.
iioo" ot prl"ntarion
which, roughly speaking,
treatsfictionaleventsasiftheywerea'kindofhistory,or
in a more qualitative t*t", io-ft'ote-a^literary
aesthetic of
truth-telling.
For most oii't.tt no"t't
life-span'
one of these
norions of realism nus LJea to imply the other. If realism
of
presentation *u, ,,oi uti'ntty
it'v"r't"a
by the eighteenth-
::":; ;';;;jrtr rno ti,"l, ni.,ltt""th-century
successors'
it
iJil:Jdi"i;'ilJ;p;J;Jexproited.bv,',h:i,".1-"-::*
,rr."."a"ra6d
in earlier
literatuie;
and w-hen all the neces-
#?
"i.;;,*;'il
il;iifl"iio"'
have been made'
it is
;.ti.t;iiy'ile-tt,t
ti""*litt
novelists.
of this
period
iustified the form, and ihelr ow" purtic'lar
contributions
ffil,;;
;;;ffi;
to
'o*"
kind or
lrealist'
aesthetic'
Thus, if Scholes
""d
[;ila are right to see the novel
*';i[;rrG;ffi;-i*-
,,.iii*
::ilt!!ii
ilIrilr'ii
86
The Novel TodaY
The Novelist at the Crossroads
8Z
for their expression.
'The mimetic
impulse towards the
"i',..r.i.izrtion
of the inner life dissolves inevitably into
ilhi; and expressionistic
patterns upon reaching the
;i?"d.I of'ti,.
p'ty.te.' on the other hand' if the writer
oersists in seeking to ao
Git"
to the commoa
phenomenal
i
[r"rn fr" nnot f,i-t"rf ,
today, in competition
with new
j
;Idi;, t;.i; ; tafe and motion
pictures' which can claim
'
to do this more eflectivelY'
*fit .l-ait;;;oint
is taken up and developed
by Mr Scholes
i"'inr'riiitltors,
wrrictr is a more topical and polemical
sequel to Tbe Nature ot Narrative"
the cinema sivss...th_g
-qggp
d, grdce t-g_l dYlllg-Iealism
tur'
i;iti.n n.tiJt" niitrilm
purporis: haf ffiaii
purported
-
i":stt iai"rt6the
words themselves. to their"refergnts'
to
.,)
i
(.
]lV
\r{
.}
r(.
realism which holds history, romance and allegory together
i"-pi"*tio.t
synthesis, mitcing a bridge between the world
oi iirir"," faits (history) and the patterned, economized
*oria of art and. imagination (allegory and romance)' The
nou"l, t,rpt.*ely among literary forms, has."s.3,trf:f,S$.our
Ironeoror.,qfrsmeep-ilsigl-pr4er-11g."9,{'"IP*:lign.ewithout
&iil;- lilr Cmpiri;;i ;'bsert;froii'ijr
^itf,-rdridiiffi
ness and
tuiil."iu.ity.
It ii therefore based on a kind of compromise'
Lut one *hi.h hrt permitted many varieties of emphasis'
on ot. side or the other, from Richardson and Fielding
onwarfu, and which has survived numerous attempts to
break it up. Ihe Gothic novel was one such attemPt: a
r"""tt
"g"intt
realism, sponsored for, the most part by
r..ona-.irtt
minds, it wai by the major novelists of the
nir"t..nth century either ridiculed out of countenance
(e'g'
jr"e
euste") or iamed, domesticated,
and assimilated into
u
-or"
realiitic account of experience
(e'g' the Bront6s)' To
be sure, the compromise
(or synthesis) was always more
rtrlf" i" Europe ihan in America' But even in Hawthorne
urra U"tuitt", iriters strongly attracted to history' allego,ry
"ia
i.-"".", realism exerts a strong if intermittent influ-
."".t
-*irif"
in Huckleberuy Finn, the book from which
H"#"g*uy
traced all signiflcant modern American litera-
i"..,-#" rtl"" a classic novelistic achievement: mythic a4d
thematic
interests controlled and expressed throug-h'- dp
realisiic tehdeiifig
iiT.ptrtitilui-6xpeYrcncu-
*"
*
5
i
.'\
"E
\=
f
a
i
J
\.
.v-.
.j
)
If the above argument is granted, it follows that the-flis'-
irt."irii", of th"e npvel-sy n-thp.is
"
sh-s
gl{ be associ ated w ith
;;;?i;;i ile"'*i"ifrpf
ipelism ii u
llq-""rary 4g!e;
a:iiil
il"i it pt .it"ry what is iiiimed in The Nature of Narrative'
ili.r"ty realism, we may say, depicts the individual experi'
"i."-.it
-^
"o*rrron
phenomenal world, and Scholes and
[.ifogg
point out thit both parts of. this undertaking are
u"a"t-irkt".e
in modern culture' As, influenced by develop-
;;;i;:i" human knowledge, particularly in the field of
"r".ii"fo*r,
the writer puitres the reality of individual
!"pa.i.nJ"
deeper and deeper into-the subconscious or un-
conscious, the common
perceptual world recedes and the
.."*p, .f the unique pe.tot di5solves: the, writer flnds
ffi;;ii in a region ot myt t, dreams, symbols and arche
;Ftili
demfnd
'fictional' rather than
'empirical' modes
;;ifi.-G
face of competition
from cinema' fiction
*uii
"uu"aon
its attempt io 't"pttttnt realiqy' and rely
*.ii-p:,r,"-pg-"-lgv::*:g:ggY}9:i'J-'ir:sil*ti"e**
Mr Scholes's
book consists largely of appreciative
studies in
a number of contemporary
nirritive writers who have' in
itir ui"*, already recognized
the obsolescence
of realism
*d h;;;";i i# traditilnal
novel' and are exploring'
with
ilta..t
-*pfristication,
the purely. 'fictional' modes of
;il;l.ry
"t
d t"*u""". To describe this kind of. narrative he
frrr"#i""a
the archaic word
'fabulation" It is' as wiil be
""ia""a,
a development
he wel&mes" "fne novel may be
alrins,'
-t
"
srys,
'but we need not fear for the future"
-'i;i;;*'Durrell,
Iris Murdoch' John
Hawkes' Terry
Soutii.tn,
Kurt Vonnegut
and
John
Barth are the writers
;;i;;ii"- dittussed.
burrell's
-Alexandria
Quanet
is seen
;;;;#raated
exploitation of the Iabvrinthine
intrigues
*J r",r"rrd, of (appropriately)
Alexandria-n
romance' Mur-
ar.fr;t iir Unicorn is interpteied as an elaborate and multi-
f;;;d-;i+ory,
worked out in terms of Gothic flction'
"U"riift"
co"nflict of secular and religious attitudes' Hawkes'
ara tne'Black Humorists' Southern
and Vonnegut' are seen
Iiir.,rJrrg
a suneatistic
form of picaresque' Barth's Giles
88
The Novel TodaY
Goat-boy, with its rich and exuberant mixture of mythic'
romantic'and allegorical modes, is the perfect exempliflca-
tion of Scholes's theory, and his prize exhibit'
'The only legitimate way to approach ''intention" in a
fiterary wort<,'"tvtr Scholes observes,
'is through a highly
discriminated sense of genre.' In this respect his explications
are useful and perceptive, but as evaluations they are some
what undiscriminating.
Reading The tlnicorn for the flrst
ti*" ,rrd"t Mr Scholei's
guidance, I felt I understood what
Miss Murdoch was up to more clearly than in previous
r.uai"gr of her novels; but whether the 'ideas' in that book'
or its
"involved
and melodramatic
plot, or the process of
abstracting the former from the latter, yield any great
pleasure & instruction seemed to me still open to question'
it is a question that Mr Schotes scarcely faces: for him the
irrtentio., to reiect realism in favour of fabulation is itself a
guarantee of value.
'
In considering this point of view it behoves the English
reader to p.oceed carefully, and with a certain self-aware
,or. fir"." is a good deil of evidence that the-English
literarv mind is oeculiarly
committed to realism, and resis-
iu ;t t"
""ii"-ieriiftie
tte'.;ty nic;Aes tct ?ifl bxtent- that might
be described as prejudice. It is something of a commonplace
of recent literary hiutory, for instance, that the 'modern'
e*pe.i*entrt novel, represented diversely by
Joyce,
Virginia
Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, which threatened to break up
the stable synthesis of the realistic novel, was repudiated by
two subsequent Senerations
of English novelists' And' re
viewing tnl history of the English novel in the twentieth
."ni.,.f it is difficult to avoid issociating the restoration of
traditional literary realism with a perceptible decline in
;ftirti; achievement. There is a certain uncomfortable truth
in Mr Rubin Rabinovitz's comments at the end of his recent
book, The Reaction Against Expetiment in the English Novel
t95o-r96o (Columbia UP, t968) :
The critical mood in England has produced a climate in
which traditional novelsian flourish and anything out of
the ordinary is given the denigratory label
'experiment'
and neglectld
'
. . fn. greatest fear of the English con-
temporiry novelist is to commit a taux
Pds;
every step
ls tat<en *ithin
pt.t..ibed limits, and the result is intelli'
The Novelist at the Ctossroads
89
sent. technically
competent,
but ultimately mediocre
' ' '
ilil;;;til
iroveriit in England becomes' too quicklv'
"'p"rt "iite
literary establis[ment
' ' '
All too often he
"ril-frit
position as i critic to endorse the type of flction
il""-ru*r"if
it *riting and he attacks those whose approach
is different.
Though Mr Rabinovitz has little to offer that is either new
oii.ri"rotirrg,
by way of critical comment
on the English
;;*l;i the"-fiffres, he has burrowed deep into the
jour-
"rUtii"
u..i iues of the period and produced some interest-
il;il;;ation.
tt ii instructive,
for irstance' to learn
ioi ue reminaed)
that Lord of the Flies (rg54) was reviewed
ty Wutt.. AIIen in the New Stat'esman
in these terms I
the Flies is like the entofan
mare, for
Fp.
The difficultY
Th-eTd5-not a child so
;:ii-r;J
weak but has hiJ little cross to-take" These
)
afr-lat*;t crosses, it seemed to me, were altogether too
ur".iti"ffy
heavy for it to be possible.to
draw con'
;Ir.il;; from Mr-Golding's
novel, and if
-that
is so' it is'
;;;;;;kiHullv
told, oily a rather unpleasant and too-
easily affecting story.
The unexamined
assumptions
behind this critique' that ;
;ll.g..y il;".essarily
, iit.tuty vice, because it makes the
,Jii"'ot the book
''unnaturaf,
undermining
the essential
.Jt"rl"" of it could be like that', without the satisfaction
"f
*fri.f, a[ 'skill' is vain-these
essentially
realist assump-
'
;;;;;;
entirely
rypical
of the post-war English literary
temper. It now seems fairly obvious.that
this was an in'
appiopriate resPonse to Loid oI the Flies
(at least Mr Allen
il'ri ,it"o*r"aiea
as much by his praise of the book in
fiia,it:,ion and iream
[rs6+]),
but the instance is a caution'
;;;". Most of Goldini's
'ubt"q"nt
novels have provoked
similar obiections,
at least initially'
---'iririrg'.
the writers Scholes holds uP
lol
admiration
*; fr;-d t-wo English novelists
(Murdoch. and
"Durrell)
who
fr*"
g"*.^lty einioyeO a higher reputation
abroad than at
all that it is fghtty told. lt com
yes@
a
[.
-r
i;
tl
t,
Ii
Iit,'
I'rll'
TIte Novelist at the Crossroads 9r
The Novel TodaY
90
home, antl whose later work has been received with less
;il^L;;;;
in England;
and four American writers who
h;;";"d.
.ornpututluety
little impact-on,English
readers'
'+;;;;il-;-n"i
widelv read
.in
England' and although
il;he?;
is well known for the scandalous Candy' this
;;;;t';";*
to
"
literary reputation' Hawkes's novels
Iuil.J [f*t.ously
in England
uniil the determined efforts
o? . i.w admiiers, noLuty Christopher
-Ricks'
recently
oltrin.a
for them a respectful
but grudging attention'
Barth's Giles Goat-boy,
rapturously
received rn Amenca' was
put down by most English reviewers'
'
it.
pi"tut" we get-by putting Rabinovitz's and Scholes's
U"Of.t tig"rfr"t
-
of"att incorrigibly insular England defending
""-
.t i"," realism againsi the life-giv-ing
.
invasions of
irU"irtlo" -
is, howevel,
an oversimplification'
For one
ili;;:;h;t"*ensus
of English literary opinion as described
r:"^iirr-nrui".r'itz
has been greatly shaken up since 196o;
iJ.' ,nottt.t, fabulation
is not the only alternatiYe to
symbolic
properties. of circumstantial
detail' for shapeliness
and ironic contrast ,t ,t*t'u'"'
The moral
protests the book
orovoked in some
quarters-the
charge' for instance' that
i#,1";; ;;;;il;s';;iio"s
and inhuman
about so'literarv'
;^tr*il;a;f
"xp"il.nt"
so painfully actual and immediate
:;;;; i"di;.iio"
ot the wav the book straddles the con'
,"itio"rtl
Uo"ndary
between flction and. reportage'
'"iilnorrrrrn
tt'tuiter's
The Armies o! t'h1 Night
(1968)
,"riai*
arrlt Uo,,rrar.y
it utty clearly- advertised
by its sutr
title:
'History ,s a Novel
-
T'ne Novit as History"
The first
illii't'iiiti.ty
as a Novel'; of this account
of the anti-
Vietnam War march on it'6 PentaS'on in r^967 is a detailed
;;;;;;;"f
the author's ow" t*p"titttce
of the event' from
his initial, reluctant
"grt"*"t't
io particip-ate' through
the
,i.,.rt-"r"-"f-march
gathering at the- Ambassador
Theatre
iririlrnin*,"n,
*t"t" v'iler
f,runkenly
insisted on chairing
ii.";;il;;i;g',
'.'"a'ri'ing
or embariassing
most of those
il:#ni).io,If,;;;il";i;G
or
.the .MarcLr'
Maler's
serr-
sought arrest, ,rrrp,',o"t"-nt'
trial and release'
This section
;; il'i'l;ti;i;
*oia,,
'";tli;g but a- personal historv which
while written
u,
' "ovel
*l, to the best of. the author's
*.*.ty-i*rpulous
to facts" It is distinguished
from a
ilil;
u,rtodiogrupt'icai
narrative
primarily. by the fact
that Mailer writes auoui himself in the third
person' thus
;;i";il
;" ironic distance on his own complex
personality
;-#;h-f";; of the chief delights of the book:
ifi
l, .i
:il
I
I
I
narrative writers.
i shall take the latter point first' Mr Scholes may be right
t ;;;;;;."e1
as closei to disintegration. today than it has
.u.i U."n in its always hectic and unstable history' bu1 hi,s
;i;ilt" oi i , .ot li,ion in The Fabu]ators is onesided'
il:;, i; fi ;i;*' the svnthesis
of empirical and.flctional
modes is no longer *otth th" trouble of maintaining'
he
.".o*m.rrd,
thai narrative should exploit the fictional
;;a;, for which he has a personal predilection' more or
ior .".irtiu"ly.
Logic s.,ggeits, however'.that.
it would be
eqruiry
po.tiui. to move in the opposit:-9'I"t*':,i;-ttYt
i..aition.t
realism that is being explored by contemPorary
;;iti.ri;;;rtl*,
,na awav from fiction' This in fact is
what we find haPPening'
.trir.a"tt
and backgrounds'
Yet ln Cold Blood also reads
ilf.. l-r"""f . It i, i".itt"tt
with a novelist's eye for the
,.rifr.,i.
p.ttiuititiet of his donnde, for the evocative and
'Let's sing them a song, boys" Mailer
.called,out
[on
the
#;ki;?'r.i.rt"a
dJmonsirators
to
iaill'
He could not
heln it- the mountebank
in him felt as if he were playing
*i""t*"4;;;htl'i
i.n ,,,it'"ttt ago he had been mired in
b;;i;;h;uir,tt
or four wives
-
now he. had a stage
again and felt not unt"i"it'
'Can it be?' he wondered
i3- f,l*t.ff,
'that I have mis-spent
twenty
years as
-a
novelist,and,all,tot'ghuvebeenlanguishingasanactor?'
This self-irony
enabled by the third-person
narrative method
"it.
il.""t* i"tril". to aLttiU" his iellow-particiPants'
such
;iltilftr"oomla
and Robert Lowell' with a mischiev-
;r";;'d"";
ahat might have seemed
impertinent
in a con-
;;;;J;;,;illogru[t'v,
'"d
to indulge in a good deal or
;;;il;;
.ritrr"t"g"t'"i"li'atiot'
abouiAmerica
which' like
ilr::li:ri it
fl.rii[iilirii]
:,r,.,ii:,iil,i:,'
The term
'pgtL[-9!].9]"-Lovel'
was first coined' I believe' by
Truman
capof6-tO"descri6e
tris book In Cold Blood' an
;;;;i of a brutal multiple murder committ-ed
in Kansas
i;-;;;;. Everv detail ot ttrls book is 'true" discovered by
"rir'Ci"*
ll"r..rt -
Capote spent many hours with the
"*rra*.il'r"-priron, foi instance, cgttylc^Jo
|<ngw
tne]1
gz The Novel TodaY
'ideas' in a novel, we
judge by their plausibility, rhetorical
force and relevance to context rather than by the stricter
criteria of logic and verifiability
-
for example:
the American small town .
'
. had grown out of itself
again and again, its cells travelled, worked for govern-
ment, found security through wars in foreign lands, and
the nightmares which passed on the winds in the old
small iowns now travelled on the nozzle of the tip of
the flame thrower, no dreams now of barbarian lusts,
slaughtered villages, battles of blood, no, nor any need
for them
-
technology had driven insanity out of the wind
and out of the attic, and out of all the lost primitive
places: one had to find it now wherever fever, force, and
machines could come together, in Vegas, at the race track,
in pro football, race riots for the Negro, suburban orgies
-none
of it was enough-one had to find it in Vietnam;
that was where the small town had gone to get its kicks.
It makes a significant difierence to such passages if one
transposes the free indirect speech into the declarative
present tense of the conventional essay'
It is less easy to describe the narrative principles of the
second part of The Armies of the Nighr, partly because
Mailer liimself seems confused about them. When; at the
beginning of this section,
'The Novel as History', he speaks
of-'the novelist . . . passing his baton to the Historian', he
seems to mean that the narrative method of Part r, in
which events were seen from one limited point of view, in
the manner of a
Jamesian
novei, will be exchanged for the
method of the historian, who assembles and collates data
from various sourcqs and presents a coherent account of a
complex sequence of events'
The mass media which surrounded the March on the
Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would
blind the efforts of a historian; our novel has provided us
with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our
facts and conceivably study them in that light a Iabour
of lens-grinding has
Produced'
I take this to mean that, both for the writer and for us
The Novelist, at the Crossroads 93
the readers, the research into the self that is carried out in
Part I has exposed and purged the inevitable bias of any
human report. Thus the 'novel' has given the
'history' a
unique Una of reliability. About half-way through Part II,
however, Mailer abandons this claim. When he
Sets
to the
point in his narrative where the massed troops and demon'
itrrtors confront each other across 'six inches of no-man's-
land' he announces that Part II 'is now disclosed as some
sort of
-condenSation
of a collective novel
-
which is to
admit that an explanation of the mystery of the events at
the Pentagon cannot be developed by the methods of history
-only
by the instincts of the novelist'- Mailer thus claims
the freed'om to enhance his narrative with vivid invention
-
for instance, the brieflng he imagines the troops
Setting:
'Well, men,' says the major, 'our mission is to guard the
Pentagon from iioters and out-of'march scale prearranged-
upon levels of defacement, meaning clear ? well the
poittt to keep in mind, troopers, is those are going to be
American citizens out there expressing their constitutional
right to protest
-
that don't mean we're going to let them
firt in our face
-
but the Constitution is a complex docu-
ment with circular that is circulating sets of conditions
-
put it this way, I
Sot
my buddies-being chewed up by
. V,C. rigl,t this minute maybe I don't care to express
p"r.or"1 sentiments now, negative, keep two things in
*ind-thot. demos out there could be carrying bombs or
bangelore torpedoes for all we know, and you're going
out;ith no riunds in your carbines so thank Cod for the
.45.
And first remember one thing more
-
they start
trouble with us, they'll wish they hadn't left New York
unless you get killed in the stampede of us to get to them'
i"rrit,"yorikeep
a tight asshole and the fellow behind
you can keep his nose clean.'
This, certainly, uses to advantage a novelist's gift for carica-
ture' Uy violating the rules of modern historical method
iifr"rgi,
the coniention is a very familiar one in classical
historiography).
The Armiis of the Night implies no disillusionment
on
the author's part with the novel as a literaf form: on the
:contrary, it ieaffirms the primacy of that form as a mode
94 The Novel Today
Having blown up his flctional bridges behind him, the aurhor
stands at the end of the book defiant and vulnerable on the
The Novelist, at the Crossroads
bare ground of fact. And there in his subsequent books,
Trawl (1967) and lhe Untortunates (1969) he has remained,
taking the f undamentalist Pl?!p[is__po5it&[Jha!_JgUil$_
_
stofjes*is-le[ing
Jies',
but at the same time experimenting
with form to bring writing into closer proximity with living.
The Untortunates, for instance, consists of twenty-seven
unbound sections, in a box. The flrst and last sections are
marked as such, but the rest are in random order, and the
reader is invited to shuffle them further if he so wishes.
According to the blurb, this unconventional format is
designed to 'represent the random workings of the mind
:without the forced consecutiveness of a book', but this is
not in fact the case. The random flow of sensation and
association in the narrator's mind is imitated by the move-
ment of the words, clauses and sentences within each
section- a stream-of-consciousness technique in the manner
of
Joyce.
The randomness only affects the narrative presen-
tation of this consciousness in time. It makes explicit the
almost infinite choice a writer has in representing a par-
'ticular
sequence of events by refusing to commit itself to
any one choice. Such is the nature of the human mind,
however, that, working with the key of the marked first
section, we mentally arrange the events of the book in their
chronological order as we read; and the puzzle or game
element thus introduced into the reading experience has the
effect (ironically, in view of the author's declared intentions,
but also advantageously in my opinion) of putting the pain-
ful, personal, 'real' experience of the book at an aesthetic
distance, making it read more like flction than auto-
biography.
For
Johnson,
one may gather readily from his books, the
eflort required to throw off the burden of the great tradi
tion of the realistic novel has been considerable. For Frank
Conroy, a young American writer whose flrst book Stop-
time
Q967)
attracted considerable attention, it was evidently
no effort at all. Where the young writer of an earlier
generation would have worked his experience of growing up
into a Bildungsroman, he simply wrote his autobiography
(a form traditionally thought to be the privilege of maturity,
if not fame)
-
but an autobiography with, in the words of
Norman Mailer's signiflcant tribute, 'the intimate and un-
95
of exploring and interpreting experience.
The non_fiction
noyel, however, is, Iike fabulation, often associated with
such disillusionment. A case in point is the young English
writer B. S.
Johnson, whose break with the conventional
novel_was- very explicitly made in Albert Angelo
Gg6l).
This, for about threequarters of its length, is the story of-a
young architect who is unable to practise his profession,
and is obliged to earn his living as a supply teacher in a
lyTbel
of tough London schools. He is- i fairly familiar
kind of English post-war hero, or anti-hero: young, frus-
g-utd,- classless, mildly delinquent, disappoinied in love.
Though
Johnson
uses a number of experimental
expressive
techniques (simultaneous presentation
of dialogue and
thought in double columns, holes cut in the pages
so that
the reader can see what is coming), the narrative reads I
realistic flction. Then, at the beginning of the fourth secti
comes the shock:
-
fuck. all this Iying look what im really trying to write
about is writing not all this stuff about-arciriticture try.
ing to say something about writing about my writing im
my hero though what a useless appellation, my irst
character then im trying to say something about
through him albert an architect when whats-the point
covering- up covering up covering over pretending pre
tending- i ca.n say anything through him that is anlttring
i would be interested in saying . . .
f'
96
The Novel Today
protected candour of a novel'. Here is a specimen-the
author's memories of his father:
I try to think of him as sane, and yet it must be admitted
he did some odd things. Forced to attend a rest-home
dance for its therapeutic value, he combed his hair with
urine and otherwise played it out like the Southern
gentleman he was. He had a tendency to take off his
trousers and throw them out the window. (I harbour some
secret admiration for this.) At a moment's notice he could
blow a thousand dollars at Abercrombie and Fitch and
disappear into the Northwest to become an outdoorsman.
He spent an anxious few weeks convinced that I \yas
fated to become a homosexual. I was six months old.
And I remember visiting him at one of the rest-homes
when I was eight. We walked across a sloping lawn and
he told me a story, which even then I recognized as a lie,,
about a man who sat down on the open blade of a
penknife embedded in a park bench. (Why, for God's sake
would he tell a story like that to his eight-year-old son?)
The Novelist at the Crossroads
that the art is to be found (P.tS6)'
The last
sentence is obviously true, but it obscures the point
that the autobiographical novelist is free to alter, rearrange
and add to'the facts'; and that this freedom is exercised not
merely to protect his privacy, but in the interest of literary
I values ru.i ut representative significance and formal coher'
97
ence. In practice the reader is rarely in a position to
judge
with any confldence the'fldelity to facts' of either the auto-
biography or the autobiographical novel, but he makes a
diffirent 'contract' with each kind of book, and brings
. drflerent exPectations to the reading experience. Works like
';,
The Untortinates and Stop'time compiicate and delay this
. process by combining the properties of both forms; but
'
iooner or Iater one decides, I think, to read the former as a
Bovel and the latter as an autobiography.
ll
,l
i
rl,
,:i
l
li
I
.t
I
!
Henry Miller here as a precursor of this form of the non-'!i
flction novel) take this principle to its logical conclusion.
If the fictional reworking of personal experience inevitably
falsifles it, and if the writer no longer feeis the need or
obligation to protect his own and others' privacy, the auto-
biographical novel is, in this perspective, redundant.
Scholes and Kellogg seem to endorse this point of view
in The Noture oI Norratiye:
If any distinction can be said to exist between the auto- i
biography and the autobiographical novel it resides not ,,r
in tneir respective fidelity to facts but rrth.;-il1h;l;
l
respective originaliry in perceiving and telling the facts.
It is in the knowing and the telling, and not in the facts,
i
One can detect in B. S.
Johnson's
work the influence of
I ,samuel Beckett and of some younger French practitioners of
't,;.'the nouveau roman. In French experiments with the non-
[i
n"tion novel, however, the flction that is purged from the
r novel is not so much a matter of invented characters and
I^' actions as a philosophical 'flction', or fallacy, which the
l. aaditional novel encourages
-
namely, that the universe is
i susceptible of human interpretation. The purest statement
'
of this point of view is to be found in the theoretical
writings of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Etsgtiall;1-his--arggr.Isr-I! is
,
'
"
that tradtional- real ism hts*-41$-o"{Igq-Igilitx-Ur-tryrposing
I
,
hurifr1*nq-il1-!rydllo1-it,-Tnatls,
in describing the world
of t'fings, we are not willing to admit that they are
just
'things,
with their own existence, indifferent to ours. We
make things reassuring by attributing human meanings or
.'signiflcations' to them. In this way we create a false sense
i' of soiidarity between man and things.
In the realm of literature this solidarity is expressed
mainly through the systematic search for analogies or for
analogical relationships . . . Metaphor is never an inno-
cent flgure of speech . the choice of an analogical
vocabulary, however simple, always goes beyond giving
an account of purely physical data setting up a
constant rapPort between the universe and the human
'being
who inhabits it . . . It is the whole literary Ianguage
T.N.T.
-
D
:,ii.ll1 t:i_q.,trrli.i i:ililir+:
liriiiitii,ffi
'The history of the realistic novel,' Harryz Levin has
observed in his book on
Joyce,
'shows,ghal*f,ction
tends
towards. autobiography.
lhe-
increasi ng a.-rrrar fot
6.irt
and psychologiCal detail that are made upon the novelist
can only be satisfied out of his owri experiente. The forces
which make him an outsider focus his observation upon
himself.'
Johnson
and Conroy (and one might mention
t-
9E
The Novel TodaY
that has to change .
"
. the visual or descriptive adjective
-
the word that contents itself with measuring, locating,
limiting, defining
-
indicates a difficult but most likely
direction for the novel of the future'
so
-
it is constantly making 'things' over into 'words'. It
,
The Novelist at the Crossroods 99
Now, the language of analogy to which RobbeGrillet objects
is exploited much more elaborately in non-realistic narra'
tive [such
as allegory) than in the novel, which can clairn
to have honoured the world of discrete 'things' more tilan
any other previous form of literature, by virtue of what
Henry
James
called its 'solidity of speciflcation'. But Robbe
Grillet is right to see that the use of descriptive particularity
in realistic fiction assumes a meaningful connection between
the individual and the common phenomenal world; and
from his point of view the way in which traditional realism
conceals this connection while simultaneously exploiting it
*
smuggling maaphorical significance into apparently inno
cent factual descriptions of furnittlre, dress' weather' etc'-
makes it all the more subversive.
Of RobbeGrillet's attempt to disinfect his own narratives
of analogical implication, Scholes says in The Fabulatotsz
This cannot solve the problem, because all language is a
human product and thus must humanize everything i[
touches. The writer must either acknowledge this and
accept it as one of the terms of his work or turn to a
wordless art like cinema
-
as N4" Robbe-Gritrlet has so
brilliantly done on occasion.
With the first part of this statement I erltirely agree; btlt it "r
is precisely for this reason that I cannot accept Mr Scholes's
i
contention (quoted earlier) that literaryrealism
'subordinates
'
words . . . to things'. Being a verbal medium it cannot do'
think of
Jane
Austen or George Eliot or Flaubert or Henry
ffi;;;
teing less
,creative
users of worG because of their
commitment
to real$m.
*i
"*
t.t convinced, either, that the camera is' in human
, hands, any more neutral than language' or-that it'renders
,
ii;;.;i-r*lism
redundant'
It is true.that
Robbe-Grill":-l'::
;;lf'ffi;il,h"
fllm to deflne the 'new realism' he wants
ir-rriiir?
.'irt. nor.t; and other novelists have invoked
it" ?it" *"aium in a similar spirit' The narrator tf,
i'
-?
i.irrt'"r*2pnri'
aescribes the story as a
'sort of prose home-
;;;'"iTFmain
character of Doris Lessing's The Golden
i,!
.t
I
ilJrrrr"L -
rrrri anguished account of a writer's effort to flx'
identify
and express reality
--flnds
-herself
constantly
allud-
irg-lr--fite
"-.-L{,.9IU4-
t9 in41ia1e
-the
completely truthful;
-
-
",i%6ii.
qr.iiiyirie is seetlng i; t'er writing;
and
'[9q {n3!,
most satiif 3clqcr
i1slgE-turs-Ier--own.
experlenlx
:ome:
i"=if-t" i*rn or ; hillilEination
in which she seems to see
illinE%**nlm
which she has directed herself' There are'
il;;a;;r;;ilori.rt
,t ,t.gies
-
the visual medium is invoked
io i"inror.. a verbal corimunication'
FqJ tlris purpose the
fli;;;;;;" sm[d
for a highlv mlmetic irt Indeed' it ls;
'irftrr'rL*tno"pr;.e
tr,arirr6ie t-a language of the fllm
*hi;il;t;;;;ch
a 'human product'
"t
Y."II1I
language' It
t * itt own rules, conventio-ns
and possibilitiqs of choice'
*iri.f, frrr" to be learned by both
"titt
"'d
a'dience' and
*iri"ii *rr." possible an indnite variety of effects' none of
iir"* ."ti."ty neutral and objective'
The contemporary
.ir"*" i-tr.t, exhibits as wide a spectrum of styles as the
;;;1;;;t
novel, all the wav fiom
'no.n-fiction' under-
;;;;;;';.;ies
of the Empire sttt" B'ilding or people's
il;; to 'fabulations' like Stanley Kubrick's
2oor'
Godard's Weekend ot Yellow Submatine'
may indeed create the i/lusion of subordinating words to
things, and this may involve a certain restraint in exploiting
the literary resources of language. But the extreme exercise
of such restraint in RobbeGrillet or (much rnore poignantly
,
and meaningfully) in Beckett is not the norrn of realistic ,
flction, which has, historically, given many great writers
quite as much freedom as they needed to develop the
expressive
possibilities of their medium. It is difficult to
Much the same situation obtains in the contemporary
tfr"lt.., *-tLe ite
.wett-made
play, of scrupulously
realistic
iiffiil iii"
i."*rti. atiilv-'t""t;f
the.realistic
novel and'
i. ,tr.y *ryr, u Uy-p,oa'ct
of the cultural.dominance
of
ift" rria ti.-) has'been
to a large extent displaced
by
;;;i;;;;;o..op"nai"e
roughlv to fabulation
and the
noir-n.tio" novel in nut'^"tiut'
bn the one hand yq
-\ave
ii^*, ifr",
-eiploits
the artiflciality
of theatrical
presenta-
i*;tlnt*,i"g
ana otien fantasizing
freely
(e'g' Brecht'
.
roo The Novel Tod,aY
Ionesco, N. F. Sinopson), and on the other the 'theatre of
fact' (Hochhuth, Weiss) or efforts like those of the American
Living Theatre Company, who seek to break down the
forrural conventions that separate ar.ldience frorn performers
and to physically involve both in an uncontrolled and
unpredictable'happening'.
We seern, indeed, to be living through a period of un-
precedented cultural pluralisrn which allows, in all the arts,
an astonishing variety of styles to flourish simultaneously.
Though they are in rrany cases radically opposed on
aesthetic and epistemological grounds, no one style has
rnanaged to become donrinant. In this situation, the critic
has to be very fast on his feet. He is not, of course, obliged
to like all the sfyles equally, but he must avoid the cardinal
error of
judging one style by criteria appropriate to another.
He needs what Mr Scholes calls 'a highly discriminated
sense of, genre'. For the practising artist, however, the exist-
encs of d bCwildering pluratrity of styles presents problerns
not so easily solved; and we should not be surprised that
many contemporary writers manifest symptoEls of extreme
insecurity, neryous self-consciousness and even at tinoes a
kind of schizophrenia.
The situation of the novelist today may be compared to
a man standing at a crossroads. The road on which he
stands (l arn thinking primarily of the English novelist) is
."". the realistic novel, the cornprornise betweeu flctional and
ernpirical modes. In the fifties there was a strong feeling
"
that this was the main road, the central tradition, of the
English novel, coming down through the Victorians and
Edwardians, temporarily diverted by modernist experimen-
talisnn, but subsequently restored (by Orwell, Isherwood,
Greene, Waugh, Powell, dngus Wiison, C. P. Snow, Amis,
, Sillitoe, Wain, etc., etc.) to its trr-le course. That wave of
i
enthusiasna for the realistic novel in the flfties has, how-
, ever, considerably abated. For one thing, the novelty of the
,'
social experience the fiction of that decade fed on-the
I
break-up of a bourgeois-dominated class society- has faded.
;
More important, the literary theorizing behind the
'Move
ment' was tatally thin. For exarnple, C. F. Snow:
Looking back, we can see what an odd affair tlae 'experi'
naental' novel was. To begin with, the
'experiment' stayed
The Novelist at the Croistoad's
rol
remarkably
constant for thirty years'
-Miss
Dorothy
Richardson
was a
Sreat
pioneer, so were Virginia Woglf
;;;-l;y;,
but bJtween Pointed Roofs in r9r5 and its
ru..&tt.t,
largety American, in r945' there was no signifi-
;;;; d;.i"Pti.r,t.
tt fact there could not be; because
this mettrod, the essence of which was to rePresent brute
*r.il."i" ihrougtr the moments of sensation'
effectively
;;-;i
precisel! those aspects of the novel where a
ii-irg
"^iliioo
."n be handed on' Reflection had to be
ir.iifr..a,
so did moral awareness; so did the investiga-
io* i",.ifie"nce.
That was altogether too big a pric-e to
;;; ;J hJnce the
'experimental novel'
' ' '
died from
I'#triio", L".ause its intake of human stuff was so low'
Or KingsleY Amis:
The idea about experiment
being the life-blood of the
Engfitft novel is oni that dies hard'
'Experirnent" in this
.oia.*,,
boils down pretty regularly to 'obtruded oddity"
whether
in constructiot'--t'ltiplt
viewpoints
and such
-.i
i" style; it is not felt that adventurousness
in subject
matter oi attitude or tone really counts' Shift from one
taan" t" the next in mid-sentence,
cut down on verbs or
;;fr;ia" articles, and you are putting yourself right up in
the forefront, at any rate in the eyes of those who were
;;J;
joy.".na
Virginia Woolf and take a jaundiced
view of more recent develoPments'
Simply as literary history, Snow's comment does not survive
the most cursory examination
(no development
between A
iitroit of the Attist and' Finneg'ans Wake? Between ?oint'ed
R;;i; ;;; T:he Sound and the Furv ?)' Amis's has a certain
,uilri. for.. and cogency, and is aimed
1t
a
llore
vulnerable
I.is.i, ;ri ,hat ki;d of 'cultivated Philistinism" refreshing
in-?it'ti*",
could not be maintained indeflnitely' even by
Amis, Iet alone anYone else'
- --Realistic
novels continue to be written -
it is easy to
f&;;T;;
*ort nou"tt published in England still fall within
iilir' .u,.go.y
-
but the pressure- of scepticism
on the
aertfr"ti.
.-and
epistemological
premises of literary realism is
n"atointensethatma"nyn-ovelists'insteadofmarching
;;;hi;;it;iraisht
ahead, are at least considering
the t\Mo
,',iii
irlj;ril
,,r;iit#
l!:)
(
ti1::ii:rtirt!iiit
ii iiil:ifi
i:
Ilr
!:1
t,,
il,
l1
t:
li:l
li
hii,
f l '
i.,
tl'
I
ii l'
ti
ljia
f,i
l]i
:
t:
::r
,1,
;i
i
ri
,I
ii'
i
.! i
i di
r
!
.i'
The Novelbt at the Ctosstoads
r03
no2
The Novel TodaY
routes that hranch off in opposite directions frorn the cross'
roads. One of -these routes leads to the non-flction novel,
and the other to what IvIr Scholes calls 'fabulation'.
To flll out the latter cateSory we rnay add to the examples
discussed in The Fabulatots: Giinter Grass, William Bur'
roughs, Thomas Pynchorr, Leonard Cohen (Beautitul Losets),
Susan Sontag (Death Kir), some of the novels of Anthony
Burgess, and individual works by novelists who have
rerniined
generally faithful to realism, such as Bellow's
I'lenderson the Rain King, Updike's The Centaur, Malamud's
The Natural, Angus Wilson's The Old Men at the Zoo, and,
Andrew Sinclair's Gog. Such narratives suspend realistic
illusion in some signiflcant degree in the interests of a free
dono in plotting characteristic of romance or in the interest
of an explicitly allegorical rnanipulation of meaning, or
both" They also tend to draw inspiration from certain
popular forms of literature, or subliterature, in which the
irousal and gratiflcation of very basic fictional appetites
(such as wonder, wish fulfllment, suspense) are only loosely
controlled by the disciplines of realism: especially
lcien!9
flction, pornography and the thriller"
Of these three, science flction has the neost respectatrle
pedigree, going back to Utopian speculation, apocalyptic
propir".y, and satirical fantasy like Gulliver's Travels, Can-
-aiaZ,
efi", in Wonderland, and Erewhon. It was this tradi'
tion that kept fabulation alive through the period of the
realistic novel's dominance, and it continues to offer the
most obvious vehicle for the novelist who wants to experi-
ment with a more 'flctional'kind of narrative. Pornography
and the thriller, being more debased forms, are approached
more gingerly, but the fascination they hold for the con-
t"*potrty liierary imagination cannot be missed in such
phenome.ra as the cult of
Jarnes
Bgnd
(whph
was a high-
trow cult before it was a mass cult). ICngsley Amis seems
a representative figure here. His absorption with Fleming
(see ihe
lames
Bond Dossier), like hjs enthusiasm for science
hction (sle New Maps of Helt), is difficult to reconcile with
the stance he adopied in the fifties, both as novelist and
critic, as a defender of a traditional kind of literary realism'
except as a lust for fabulation, repressed by his literary
'."*tf, seeking outlet in certain licensed areas where tradi-
Uo*t tit.t"ty ialues are not expected to obtain' L{is publi'
cation of a
James
Bond novei, Colonel Sun (1968)' under
il;-;;;"d"
Robert Markham,
is surely a case of the
,"d;i" novelist taking a hotiday from realisrn' finding a
*r,r-i., .niov the forbidden fruit of romance without fully
.-ir*irlri'rrimself
to the enterprise'
(lt is' I hope' un'
;;;;rt
t iuuou the point thut the.
James
,Bond
novels
are essentially
,o*"t.o,
and that their superlicial
realism
;ip;;t;;;;.i6n -
itt" descriptive set-p^ieces'
the brand-name
drooping, the ostentatrous
display of technical
knowledge
;i-'t;;.;t kinds
-
does not convert the romantic stereotypes
i",;-;;ytt,G
individually
realized' but merely
gives them
a gloss of contemporary
sophistitS.tigl'
.'nS
facilitates the
reader's willing ,urp.r,ri'on of ditb"li"f'1 ln fact Colonel Sun
is conrlaerrUly
more realistic than most of the Fleming
;.;il"i;;;J
Bo"a, for instance' survives by virtue of his
*iir
"tiJ
e""d
luck rather than the
gadgetry which' like
the magicil weapons of medieval romance'
preserves FIem-
i""'r t,&.f and also duller' This is not surprising since the
*i.r"^iri..ptitt
,na.*uken,
apparently'.
in a spirit of
pi"rt r-ri.,rin, iequi.ea Amis to^lieep in check his natural
[uf*t tot parody and deflating comic realism' A]:yll
il;;;*'; Tiemor'of lntent
fi966)
is a much more entertarn-
*g^"irilfrUt.*
contribuii'on'to
the genre partly because of
its parodic exaSgeratrons
of Bondian themes
and motifs'
ifrir'ir u work ollxtraordinary
virtuosity'.
in which Burgess
sets himself to cap every
"nett
exploited.
by Fleming
and
rr.."LOt-"fr*phantly
, ih" te* is sexier' the violence more
;;;*1" ttre trigh-tiving.
more extravaga-nt'
the intrigues
and
;";;;t ;i r-h J ptot
-"ot"
ttu nni n8' and t he. stvle' naturally'
i;flil;t *oi. uiuia and evocativi'
Yet in its overall effect
the book wobbtes un..t ,iniy between
parodying Bond.by
extravagant
exaggeration
and reaching after something
i""**,"1y
rat arid-realized'
Thus at one
point in the story
a orecocious teenage
boy has to shoot a man to save the
h.l;#;;t;l;;;iv
sic[ imm"aiutelv
arter:
'He went and
ri-""a]-frf"
u nrug-hty
boy, in the corner'
His shoulders
"frl-uuia
,t he tried to throw uP the. modern world" This
;ri:,i*;&;;d,
a note too serious for the narrative
;; ;;;;, and'onlv
serves to remind
us that it is not the
;J;' worta wt ictr this character
is throwing
up but a
S,rotesque
comic-strip
version of it'
There is, I think, a similar
ambiguity of motive' an in-
to4
The Novel TodaY
l
securitv of stance, an irnpression that regressive or perverse
I'
;;il;;;';H;;
;;;EeJ ,,ae'
"-..u+ "r.
pretensions to
\
contempdrary
avant Sarde
and the cultural ctrirnate'
"post-
a;;;;;e-Apocaivpse',
that fosters it", has abandoned
il;;;G%ti,ir.ty
toiitiog either, and cvnicallv set hiunself
to match their wildest excesses'
--
ifr"r" ,t" indeed
good reasons for anticipating witlrr some-
thi"g-i;;'ahr;
entf,usiasm the disappearance
of the novel
,"J'itt-t"pt".ement
by the non-frction
novel or fabulation'
E pei,Lriy'a ;nyon" *hot" imagination has been nourished
ur'ttre eieat reilistic novelists of the p"t' both these side
;;rdr *"tli;;.* i" r.ua all too easilylnto desert or bog- i
reii-a"t"uting
banality or self indulgent excss' Yet' as I have
,
aireaay suggested, there are forrnidable discouragerne,'tt-ll
f
l
co"tln"i"iJerenely
along the road of flctional realism',Ihe
I
novelist *h" hut any kind of self-awareness
must at leas[
'-
hesitate at the crossroads; and ihe
solution rnany novelists I
i;;;;'ah;t.;
in their dilemrna is to build t'heit hesitation
}|"i;tne-ioueIitse]t,Tothenovel,thenon.flctionnovel,
and the fabulation, *""*uit taa I fouith category: thC
""r"i
+fi.f, exploits more than one of these modes without
iJiy
""r"*i,ting
itself to any, thq. novel-,ab9ut-itself'
the
tricLnovel, the gamenovel, the puzZie-novel' the novel that
i;;d'iih. reader"(who wishes, niivelv, only to be told what
i. U"fi"u"l through a fairground of-illusions and deceptions'
Air,""i"e
-irrqri
and tiip-doors that open disconcertingly
il;il; i."t, t.rrits him ultimately not with any simple
or reassuring message or meaning but with a paradox about
the reiation of art to life.
---t'ftit
f.lra of novel, which I shaXl call the 'probtrenrratic
"";;il
.t"r.ty has affinities with both the non-fiction novei
nnatf"n.,tntion,
but it remains distinct precisely because it
trrings both into play' Mr Scholes's fabulators' for instance'
pirfttl.f.. on their readers, expose their flctive machinery'
[^iiy *ittt aesthetic
paradoxes, in order to shed the restrict-
irj'.ottr*ntions
of iealism, to give themseives freedom to
iri"ri ,"a manipulate. In the kind of novel I arn thinking
"i,
frl*tr.., the reality principle it
ltu-"t
allowed to lapse
"rtir"fy
-
i"aeed, it is often invoked, in the spirit of the non-
frction'novei,
to expose the artiflciality of conventional
;;-;iG. illusion' Whereas the fabulator is impatient *itl' '.
;;;iiry1
-^na
tt
"
non-flction
novelist is impatient with
I
frJti;, the kind of novelist I arn talking about retains a
I.y;ilt to both, but lacks the orthodox novelist's confidence i
The Novelist at the Crcssraads
l05
;;ffi;i;."tr.E
o. diJplavs of stvlistic virtuositv'
in so-
.rUea'pr.oaies'
or
'spoofi' of po'nogt^phy' such as Candy
iiffi, ;; a;phen Schneck's
lhe Nisbtcterk
(1965)' or Gore
V':dJl;;;;;'
B,reckinridse
(re6g)' of these three novels'
viili'; is' easily the riost' tomplex and accomplished'
p^r"ayirg and commenting
acutely- uPoS
lot
only porno'
iirpiry
uit also the non-flciion
novel of the French variety:
Nothing
is like anlthing eise' Things are therlselves
;r;i..# and do not'need interpretation'
only a minimal
n rr..i for their
precise integrity' The mark on the wall
ilil;r.et it.""'inches
wide and four feet eight and a
f."aio. inches high. Already I have failed to be com'
oletelv accurate. I must write
'fraction' because I can't
I"ra irr" ii"re numtrers on the ruler without rny glasses
which t never wear'
-
and the kind of argument advanced by N4r Schoies' that
the cinema has superseded
the rnirnetic
possibilities of
literature:
Tyler's close scrutiny of the films of
"the
Forties makes
him our age's cential thinker, if only because in the
decade betieen ry35
and tg45 no irrelevant film was
iiii i" the Ilnited-itates'
During those years' the entire
;;il; ;i human
(which is to sav, American) legend was
put"on fiim, and any profound study. of these exffa-
iidn^.y *oit t it boundto make clear the hurnan condi'
tion. For instance, to take an exampie at random'
Johnny
W"it-rrtt"t,
the zahftic
'farzam,
stitrl provides the last
;"rd ;, the subject of soft man's relationship to hard
environment
that
glistening overweight body set
against a limestone cliff at noon says the whole thing'
.Auden once wrote an entire
poem praising limestone'
unaware that any one of a thousand frames from Tarzan
iia ti, Amazons had not only anticipated hinn but rnade
irrelevant his efforts"
Myra Breckinridge
is a brilliant, but sornehow
sterile and
Gp^hlts ;;rki as if Vida}, deepiy conternptuous of the
The Novel TodaY
The Novelist at, the Crosstoads
nov
ro6
in the possibility of reconciling them' He makes the diffi-
cultv oi his task, in a sense, his subject'
--i[.
Ltrr.. and mother of this kind of nove] is Trlstram
'
shil;-6;ail
which is to concede that we ale not dealing
ilh; toially'new
phenomenon. But it is signiflcant that'
*irillliit
ai?ncult tL think of anv-thing
(apart from feeble
ffi;iiott) comparable to Tristram Shandy in the eighteenth
,"J"l""t,i""ah
ienturies, when the realistic novel developed
into r*iutity, it is not hard to think of parallels in modern
iiilirt"t". T'ake, for example, J'
D' Salinger's Glass stories'
ffi;;;;"
puts them menially beside Tristro.m Shandy.the
ot""ilJtiririlarity
of each writer's undertaking is striking:
.h;1;;i*, minuiely circumstantial
evocation and celebra-
tlln of I ti.t ty
-eccentric
family, obselved mainly in
Jo*oti" life, with extraordinary
attention to detail of
.-J"".irl*u""erism
and
Sesture,
recorded by a narrator who
ii tri.".ft a member of the family
(though with certain very
,"l"t"a, t"*ing resemblances to the actual' historic author)'
;il;
plttri a.p.ndent on the other members for his
i"il**"ai.rn,
*ho iddroto the reader directly in a whim'
;i.;i;-;;*"irus,
digressive
flow of complex reminiscence
and reionstruction,
commenting freely on the difficulty of
,tir u"a".ruting,
and incorporating
into the narrative an
;;;;;
"i
hislersonal ciriumstances
at the time of com'
,oririo". Salingir's stories, it seems to m-e' have been
I;i";J with it...*iog disfavour because they have been
l;;" i;" much at theii face value as disingenuous
gospels
J r-".* ,.figion, to the neglect of their literary experimen'
;il. ihi, i""tut., thougli Iess obvious than in Ttistram
irrrrJy,-it .r"rr enough *1.t ot'" reads the stories through
in tt
"
ota", of their iomposition' Then, one cannot fail to
notice how, as the record of the Glass family comes more
ffi;;; io follow the shapelessness
and randomness of
..turfity, as the tone of the narrator
(Buddy Glass) becomes
more and more personal, idiosyncratic,
non-literary
-
as' in
short, the n"rtuio. begins to appeal to our
-interest
more
,"a t"o." at the level of anecdote about
'real' people'-so.a
,,rbtly
g.o*ing amount of highly unusual' obiectively
i-prl,u.h.
"rri
i, f..t irrationai information is conveyed'
il;;; t; Raise High the Rootbeam, Carpentets' Franny Glass
ir *ia to ,.rrr.mie. her brother Seymour
(the family guru)
i.raing to her when she was ten months old' and Seymour
records in his diary the experience of stigmata frorn touch'
ing certain things. In Seymour; an lntroduct'ion Buddy tells
urio* he eased the pain of pleurisy by placing 'a perfectly
innocent-looking
BIa[e lyric in my shirt pocket', and claims
itrut tto* early"childhood
till he was thirty he seldom read
fewer than 2oo,ooo words a day, and often
4oo,ooo'
In other
words, as the manner of the saga
incl!4es
more-and more to
#;;i;;:fr.i;;;;i;roiti*,
ir," *atter becories ma;d
lLg-
more
'flctive', There is a similar tension between the bizarre
'
&;t il and ecientricities of the Shandy family and the
minutely faithful, realistically
particular rendedng of thenr
by Tristram. In both cases the normal conventions of narra-
tive flction are exposed and undermined by the narrator
ti*r;ff, and the staUility of the reader's stance towards the
experience of the book is always th-reatened"
it ir i, fact the transference of the writer's own sense
(which
mav be humorous or deadly serious) of the
probtematic' nature of his undertaking-making
the read-er
'participate
in the aesthetic and philosophical problems the
'*riii"i
of flction
Presents,
by embodyinS- them directly in
the nairative-thai characterizes the 'problematic novel'' I
would want to make this a large enough cateSory t@
include such works as Gide's The Counterfeiters' Flann
ii's.l.n'" At Swim'Two'bitds,
Nabokov's Pale Fire' Sartre's
La Naus6e, the labl'rinthine fables of
Jorge
Luis Borges'
waugh's in, ora"fu of Gilbert Pintold, Amis's I Like lt
HereJ Uuriet Spark's The Comfotters, and Doris Lessing's
iir'citaq Notebook. No doubt the reader can think of
oih"t
"*r*ples,
if not of the fully developed
problematic
nou"t, ut least of novels that incorporate to some degree its
.iru*.tetitti.
note of self-consciousness'
As Elizabeth Hard-
wick has written recently:
Many good novels show a degree of p.anic about the forrn"
w[J."- to start and where io end, how much roust be
believed and how much a
joke, a puzzle; irow to combine
tfr*
"pitoai.
and the carefully designed and consequential
. . . tir. mood of the writer is to admit manipulation
and
a*ig", t" exploit the very act of authorship in the midst
of the imagined scene.
l-A rurr"e""discussing Julian
Mitchel\'s
Tke {'l ndiscovered
Cirriry
(rgOa) has been cut here'
(Ed')l
The Novelist at tke Crossroads
l09
ro8
The Novel TodaY
This brings me to my conclusion, which is a modest
,mrm"tioi of fiittr in the future of realistic flction' In part
;hi" l" ; radonalization
of a personal preference' I Iike
i".rirti. novels, and I tend to write realistic fiction myself.
it"G^u"t"r"
code of literary decorum that governs the
""rnroiition
of realistic fiction
-
consistency with history'
;id;t ;i ;pecification,
and so on
-
which to many of the
ffid;
discussed above seems inhibiting' or evasive' or
i"ar"aunt -
is to my mind a valuable discipline and source
;-ilt*grh
-
or at ieast can be' Like rnetrical or stanzaic
tortn-i"-""rt.,
which
prevents the poet from saying what
^fr""
*r"rt i" tay in the way that comes most readily to his
,n-i"a,
-i"uoiui.r'g
ltirn in a laborious struSSle with sounds
."a *.""irg, tf,at, if he is resourceful enough' yields results
superior to spontaneous
expression, so.the conventions of
."itlrti. flction
prevent the narrative writer from telling the
e;;a;t that comes into his head
-
which is likelv to be
"itir.i
uut"Ui"graphy
or fantasy
-
and compel him to a kind
oi.o".""t
",ion
bn the possibilities of his donnde that may
i;r; hil io ,"* and quiie unpredictable discoveries of what
ii" frrt to tell. ln the novel personal experience must be
""pio."O
and transmuted until it acquires an authenticity
*l-p.iirrtlueness
independent of its actual origins.; while
tn" dair" imagination ihrougtr which this exploration and
[r-rrr*,rtutiot
is achieved is itself subject to an empirical
standard of accuracy and plausibility' The problem of recon-
JfinJtfro" t*o opposite imperatives. is essentially rhetorical
*a'1.o"r.".y
to- il4v Scholes) requires
great linguistic re
sourcefulness
and skill for its successful solution'
(l am not
;;;;"
denying that fabulation or autobiography or the
nlr,-nction
novel-have their own internal disciplines--and
"frrif"r,g*,
but merely trying to define those of the realistic
novel.)
--If
tire case for realism has any ideological content it is
thai of liberalism. The aesthetics of compromise
go naturally
with the ideology of compromise,
and it is no coincidence
tft.i Uott ,r. .rrrd.t pressure at the present time' The non-
n.iion nou.f and fabulation are radical forms which take
ttJ.i*p"trt
from an extreme reaction to the world we live
i-'iii er^ies ol the Night and Giles Goat'boy are equally
lioducts
of the apocalyptic
imagination'
,The
assumption
fehind such expeiiments
is that our 'reality' is so extra'
ordinary, horriflc or absurd that the methods of' conven-
til"ri i."ruic imitation are no longer adequate' There is
r" p"i", in carefully creating fiction that q:YT
'"
illusion
of iite when life itself seerns illusory (This argument'
i"t6.oti"gfy,
was used by the Marquis de Sade' writing at
i-fr" tit*
"oi'tt
"
French itevolution, to explain the Gothic
r"t.i
^"a,
by implication, his own pornographic contribta-
ti."t t" tfi" genre.; Art can no longer compete with life on
;il;;;,"sho#ing
the universal in the particular' The
,fternutives are eithei to cleave to the particular
-
to
'tell it
like it is'-or to abandon history altogether and construct
,,rie-tictions which reflect in an-emotional
or metaphorical
iay the discords of contemporary experience'
The realist
-
and liberat
-
inswet to this case must be that
while many aspects of contemporary
experience encourage
ur-
"*tt"*",
apocalyptic response, most of us continlle to
Iive most of our lives on the assumption that the reality
which realism imitates actually exists' History rnay be'. in
, pftifotopiri.al sense, a flction, but it does not feel like that
*[r." *" miss a train or somebody starts a. war' We are
conscious of ourselves as unique, historic individuals'
living
together in societies by virtue of certain common assump'
ii,itt
"rra
methods of comrnunication;
we are conscious that
;;;-;;" ;i--identitv, of happiness and unhappiness'
is
;;fi";a-;y small things as well-as iarge; we seek to adjust
;; ii;*, individuallf and communally, to some order or
G.*
oi values whi.h, however, we k-noy is always at
iir* *...y of chance and contingency'
It is..this sense of
*dlly *fuJ realisrn imitates; and it seems likely that the
lattei will survive as long as the forrner'
Writing in 1939, at tf,e beginning- of the Second World
w;;;e;;"
oi#el voiced rianv o-f the doubts about the
irtri.
"r
iire novel reviewed in this essay' The novel' he
,rla-it
lf"tiae
the Whale', was inextricably
tied up with
tiU."rt i.raiuiaualism
and could not survive the era of totali'
i*iu, ai.txorships he saw ahead' In his appreciation
of
;i;rty ffiii"i s Tiopic of cancer he seems to endorse the
.tri.iri*rf
non-flclion novel as the only viable alternative
i';il;ttilthe
whale .
'
. Give yourseli ovr to the world
i*"rr, stop fighting against it or pretending
you controX
ir,"rr*pry-ri..ii
it,-.nau.. it, recoid it' That seerns to be
tkle foimutra thart any sensitive novetrist is llkely to, adopt.')
rro
The Novel TodaY
Orwell's
prophecy was, however, incorrect' Shortly afterthe
wrrlrr.t! lias a signiflcant revival of the realistic novel in
E;;ir;4, i";pired
iartly
by orwell's own fiction of the
*iiii"tt-and'although
none of this flction is of the very
iiit tunt, it is not in inconsiderable
body of work' Many
.iifr" most talented
post-war American novelists-John
Ga*",
Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth' for
e>iample-have
worked, for the most part, within the con'
""nUont
of realistic fiction' Obsequies over the novel may
be as premature today as they were in 1939'
FR.ANK KERN,[ODE
The House of Fiction
Intenviews with Seven l{ovenisffi
(reprinted with permission frorn Partisan Review,
Voi. xxx, no. r, SPring 1963)
These conversations are abridged frorn longer tatrks; they
were entirely free and unprepared' In cutting them I have
naturally preferred to Ieave out whatever secmed rnost
remote
-from
the centre represented by the title. If this
seems a somewhat abstract topic, I can only say that it
proved reasonably easy to keep the mind oJ the- contributors
hxed upon it. Clearly it is a relationship that they all think
about in a more or less abstract way, as well as handling it
daily in terms of technique.
I planned to ask each of the novelists about this ahstract
issui, and then to get them on to the subject of their own
books. Sometimes this method didn't work, and the two
questions got involved with each other, beneficially I think'
ttiough there were no striking divergencies of opinion, there
were-considerable
and interesting difierences of emphasis'
But if I had to decide what this selection of good living
English novelists had most obviously in common I should
ruy it wrs a kind of modesty' Not only do they emphasize
their own limitations; for the most part they're happy to
ignore all the larger claims that can be made for their craft'
dbviously none of them subscribes to apocalyptic view-s
such as i"wre.t.e's:
'Being a novelist, I consider myself
superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the
poet. The novel is the one bright book of life.' There is
probably no living English novelist who even wants to
telieve that. again, though none of them would accept the
old criterion of naturalism unrevised, none on the other
I
hand throws it out with the arrogance of Gide: 'Pleasei
understand, I should like to put everything into rny novel"l
The old realism will not do, nor the old formalism, for none
of these writers sees himself as making a universe.
E-a"h-"*
looks out, as if from one of the-Jsjlidawq
s{"J3ASil ht-'-*-,
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