Picked-Up Pieces (5 page)

I would suggest that this is a
genre
trait of the Novel rather than an undistorted reflection of our lives. There
are
areas of concern in our lives apart from love; yet as a literary practitioner, and as a sometimes compulsory reader of unsuccessful novels, I have observed that it is difficult to make them interesting in a novel. Disease and pain, for instance, are of consuming concern to the person suffering from them, but while we will follow for eight hundred pages the course of a romance, and suffer with each love pang, the course of a physical disease, and the description of pain and discomfort, however sympathetic the character afflicted, weary us within a few paragraphs. Similarly, the amassment of sums of money, fascinating in reality, acquires interest in a novel only if the acquisition of wealth advances the hero or heroine toward that eventual copulation that seems to be every reader’s insatiable and exclusive desire. Indeed, it is part of the peculiar democracy of fiction, and one way in which the air of its world is fresher than our own, that although in real life we
do
find wealthy and famous men more interesting than poor and obscure ones, in novels we do not. Even intelligence does not recommend a fictional character to us. No, in the strange egalitarian world of the Novel a man must earn our interest by virtue of his—how shall I say?—his
authentic sentiments
.

So we arrive at the not very spectacular inkling that the Novel is by nature sentimental. I use the word without pejorative intent, but merely as descriptive of the kind of coinage with which we transact our business in one literary realm. This coinage is not legal tender, I think, in the New Testament, or in
Beowulf
, or in
Prometheus Bound
, or to any predominant degree in the
Odyssey
or
Paradise Lost
. It is current, though not the only currency, in
The Divine Comedy
, and it would seem to have been introduced in Italy, with the breakup of the Middle Ages, and to be concurrent with the rise of capitalism. That is, when human worth began to be measured in terms of capital, and men became counters upon a board
of productivity, the uneconomic emotions went underground, into literature. We can scarcely imagine it: but with the massive cosmic drama of Fall and Redemption always before him, and the momentous potentialities of sin and repentance always alive within him, medieval man may well have needed less reassurance than we that his emotions were substantial and significant, that his inner life and outward status were integrated. Even today, religious fundamentalists are not notable novel-readers.

This scale of generalization is uncomfortable for a novelist, concerned as he properly is with the strict small circumstance, the quizzical but verifiable fact. I wish to describe, merely, the Novel as a product of private enterprise, for which a market is created when the state, or tribe, or church, withdraws itself from the emotional sector of the individual’s life. Erotic love then becomes a symbol, a kind of code for all the nebulous, perishable sensations which we persist in thinking of as
living
. Living and loving: the titles of two novels by the splendid Henry Green, and an equation, but for one transposed vowel, to which all novel readers consent—the housewife reading away the dull afternoon, the schoolboy concentrating amid the stupid family din, the banker sitting prim in the homeward commuting train. All are members of a conspiracy to preserve the secret that people
feel
. Please do not suppose that I am describing only penny fiction, trash. The most elegant and respectable of modern novels, from
Remembrance of Things Past
to
Lolita
, enlist in this conspiracy with all the boldness of their virtuosity. Even as all-including and unyielding a masterwork as
Ulysses
is finally about lovers; Leopold and Molly Bloom are great lovers, great in compassion and fidelity, fidelity to each other and to their inner sensations, their authentic sentiments. Perhaps the reason Stephen Dedalus is slightly tedious in this novel is that he is not in love. Not to be in love, the capital N Novel whispers to capital W Western Man, is to be dying.

So much for the past; what of the future? The Novel’s Victorian heyday has passed. If my impression is correct, that capitalism put sex in a treasure chest, the chest, after so many raids upon it, is battered to the point of collapse. The set of tensions and surprises we call
plot
to a great extent depends upon the assumption that bourgeois society discourages and obstructs free-ranging sex. In the 19th-century novels and the 20th-century movies, the punishment for adultery is death. Yet even in
Madame
Bovary
, one feels, reading it, that the heroine in swallowing arsenic is being hysterical, that there is nothing in her situation a sudden inheritance of money wouldn’t solve. In the novels, say, of Evelyn Waugh, adultery has become a dangerous pleasantry, and by now I think even the aura of danger is fading. As Denis de Rougemont has pointed out, the conventional obstructions to love no longer impress us; a somewhat extravagant situation, such as in
Lolita
, alone can bestow dignity upon a romantic passion. Freud, misunderstood or not, has given sex the right to be free, and the new methods of contraception have minimized the bail. Remove the genuine prohibitions and difficulty, and the three-dimensional interweave of the Novel collapses, becomes slack and linear. The novels of Henry Miller are not novels, they are acts of intercourse strung alternately with segments of personal harangue. They are closer to the
Arabian Nights
than to Tolstoy; they are not novels but
tales
.

Dr. Johnson defined “novel” as a type of tale; and, though the classic Novel, the sentimental underground of bourgeois Europe, may belong to a moment of history that is passing, the appetite for tales is probably not less fundamental to the human species than the appetite for songs. Books of prose about imaginary events will continue to appear, and they will be called, out of semantic inertia, novels.

What will be the shape of these books? Some will continue the direction of Miller, and be more or less angry personal accounts of coitus and conversation among bohemians. The tradition is not dishonorable—Dostoevsky’s
Notes from the Underground
is such a book—and will veer very close to pornography, which itself has a tradition that is, at the least, venerable. The subversive burden will shift, I fear, from sex to violence, and the threat of society, and the problem for censorship, lies not, in my opinion, with the description of sexual acts but with fantasies of violence and torture. Books like
Last Exit to Brooklyn
and
The Painted Bird
, with their unrelieved brutality, and the relish that seethes beneath their creditable surface pretensions, augur an unhappy direction. Cruel events do occur in reality, of course; but the obligation of the artist, when dealing with them, as with sex, is to be, not inexplicit, but accurately alive to their complicated human context. Today’s bohemia, or hippiedom, seems to aspire toward a political effectiveness that precludes much compass of sympathy or subtlety of craft. Rather, a fanatic and dazed narrowing of comprehension seems to be in progress. The sour riots of
the Sixties are not likely to call forth the ebullient rapture of a Kerouac, let alone the refined anguish of a Huysmans.

Other books of fiction will, I think, try to employ the inherited machinery of the romantic novel for drier purposes than the dramatization of erotic vicissitudes. The novels of Vladimir Nabokov already ingeniously toy with romantic triangles to produce more intricate patterns. His novels approach the condition of puzzles—
Pale Fire
was rigged on the scheme of an annotated poem and the introduction playfully invited us to buy two copies to read it properly. Novels by other men play hopscotch with us, or invite us to shuffle the pages and make our own plots. Robbe-Grillet gives us an overlapping sequence of repetitions of actions; all such inventions have a somewhat capricious air, but I think the two directions, of novel as philosophy, of novel as object, will be fruitfully pursued. Heightened intellectual demands should compress the conventional size of the novel; hundreds of thousands of words in Dickens’ time, it may settle at around two hundred pages, the length of a mystery story, of
Candide
, or of a novel by Samuel Beckett.

The surface of the page, now a generally dead rectangle of gray, a transparent window into the action, could be a lively plane of typographic invention, as it was for Apollinaire—a surface that says “This is printing” much as Impressionism forsook the licked illusionistic surface and announced, “This is painting.” The comic strip offers a blend of picture and word that, though it has not attained the status of high art, has, in strips like the old “Krazy Kat” and the contemporary “Peanuts,” climbed rather high. I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. Artistically, this century has belonged to the eye; concrete poetry, medieval manuscripts, and Egyptian hieroglyphs all hint at paths of accommodation in an ecumenical movement among eye-oriented media.

If these suggestions sound frivolous, let me say that tale-telling
is
a kind of toying, and that something of primitive magic does linger about the manipulation of verbal dolls. When the speaker was an undergraduate student of “creative writing,” a guest writer, John Hawkes, told our class—amazingly, I thought—“When I want a character to fly, I just say, ‘He flew.’ ” We are, all of us novelists, like neoclassic playwrights captive to the three unities, prisoners of conventions we cannot imagine our way around; a wonderful freedom awaits us, and extraordinary opportunities. Let me admit to the hopeful fancy that some book such as I have
imagined—a short novel, approaching the compact, riddling condition of an object—may serve as the vehicle of a philosophic revolution. That a new Rousseau or a new Marx or a new Kierkegaard may choose to speak to us through the Novel. That the Novel, relieved of some of its old duties as an emotional masseur, may prove to be a light and nimble messenger. That, though at the moment the Novel roosts a little heavily in the bookshops, to fly it only needs him to come along who will say, “It flies.”

T
HE TITLE
of this talk has been assigned to me; and, though I confess I find it congenial, I confess also that I can hardly imagine a language
less
international than that of written humor. For humor, written or otherwise, operates in the nuancé margins of experience and communication; not only is a pun lost in translation from one language to another, but also lost are rhythm, slang, and the many fine halftones of verbal allusion. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, in parenthetically discussing the failure of Shakespeare’s humor to amuse him, ventures the surprising thought that “humor … is an oral genre, a sudden spark in conversation, not a written thing.” And, if we reflect upon those occasions when we laugh, we perceive how delicate and complex are the forces giving rise to our reaction, how close to pathos or banality these forces verge, and how difficult it is to describe, later, what, in the heat of conversation or, it may be, in the forward surge of reading, seemed so funny.

The phenomenon of humor, or laughter, has not failed to attract theorists. Henri Bergson locates the comic essence in an “encrustation of the mechanical upon the organic.” Twins, for example, are humorous because duplication of individuals hints at a mechanical intervention in the species; a man slipping upon a banana peel is comic in that he behaves like a machine, rigidly perpetuating his motion without the foresight and allowances proper to vitality. By Bergson’s theory, the comic incident is a misapplication of momentum and the comic character is a
monomaniac, which well enough describes the heroes of French farce but does not encompass such a nimble and many-faced comic hero as Shakespeare’s Falstaff.

Confusingly, just as weeping can express joy as well as sorrow, laughter arises from states of mind that appear not merely various but even opposite: laughter can announce scorn and contempt, but may also be applause. Our laughter at Falstaff, for instance, has much applause and admiration in it, as well as feelings of superiority, and in literary humor especially, we find an ingredient of the genial. Within a comic work we are relaxed in a world of essential safety, where the dangers of death and destruction have been exchanged for mock penalties, for semblances of defeat and punishment that are erased by the next comic scene. The comic character, whether a cat in an animated cartoon or the hero of a classic like Don Quixote, is rubbery; he bounces back, and suffers no scars. Contrast the brittle, stony characters of Greek tragedy, who, under the unforgiving pressure of fate’s engines, irrevocably shatter.

Sigmund Freud attempted to extend the methods of his dream analysis into the analysis of jokes. His book
Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious
explains jokes and examples of verbal wit and, by extension, all instances of the comic in terms of a difference in psychical expenditures; the characteristic joke sets up an instant of bewilderment, and laughter follows in the recognition that a kind of sense has been made, but different from what we expected. As Kant said, the comic is “an expectation that has turned to nothing.” Certainly jokes, like dreams, do function in a realm liberated from the laws of logic and logical consequence; and there is melancholy profundity in Freud’s tentative suggestion that humor, the art of the comic, is an intellectual adult attempt to recover “the lost laughter of childhood.”

And what might be this original laughter, the laughter of childhood? A recent, popular, but not uninformative book called, a little provocatively,
The Naked Ape
, discusses, from a zoologist’s point of view, the origin of laughter. Desmond Morris first notes that crying is present from birth but laughter does not appear until the third or fourth month of life. It arises in circumstances like these: the mother, holding the child in her lap, pretends to let him drop, or does something else startling. The infant’s instinctive crying reaction is cancelled by his recognition that he is safe, that the mother is with him, and his cry merges with the parental-recognition gurgle that by this time is part of his vocabulary. In
this manner, laughter is born. How many of the games parents instinctively play with infants, for instance, the tossing and clutching, the chasing and tickling, are in fact a systematic daring and scaring, a systematic widening of the circle of safely in which the children may feel privileged to laugh? A hundred and fifty years ago, William Hazlitt wrote this on the theory of laughter: