The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (17 page)

“It implies further that after God ‘died,’ man himself became the supreme person, the only divinity. . . . With the field thus cleared of supernatural encumbrances, the true approach to the divine came to consist in man’s probing of his own most innermost states. For this century everything, from dream analysis to the perception of relativity, became self-knowledge as the first stage to self-assumption. The ancient sin of
hubris
, man’s too-great arrogance in the face of the cosmos, disappeared when divine powers no longer existed outside man. Evil was confined to failure in confronting oneself.”
13

Shattuck thought that the avant-garde began in France because of its tradition of protest, established back in the Revolution; and he identified the “New Spirit” in the arts as consisting of four traits, each one different and each epitomized by one of four remarkable individuals—the
actor-playwright Alfred Jarry, the “primitivist” painter Henri Rousseau, the composer Erik Satie and the painter-poet-impresario Guillaume Apollinaire (the phrase “New Spirit” was first used by Apollinaire, in a lecture).

The four traits Shattuck identified as crucial to the New Spirit began, he said, with a re-evaluation (in Nietzschean mode) of the very idea of
maturity
—who is the complete man? Throughout history, Shattuck said, the adult qualities of self-control have preponderated over those of the anarchic child. But after Romanticism, and even more after Rimbaud, a new personage emerges: the “child-man.” Artists became increasingly willing to accept the child’s “wonder and spontaneity and destructiveness” as not inferior to adulthood.
14

The second trait is a pervading note of humor. “Humor, a genre that can command the directness of comedy and the subtler moods of irony, became a method and a style.” And Shattuck refers (and defers) to Bergson on the distinction between comedy and irony. “Humor describes the world exhaustively and scientifically
just as it is
, as if that were just the way things are. Irony haughtily describes the world
as it should be
, as if that were just the way things are.” And this leads us into the device of absurdity, “
the absence of any a priori values in the world, of any given truths
.” Whereas Rousseau was indifferent—or even oblivious—to the mirth his work often provoked, Satie was not—instead, he made use of it. “Why attack God? He is as unhappy as we are. Since his son’s death he has no appetite for anything and barely nibbles at his food.”
15
Faced with this, we no longer know how to react and this is the point: this absence of value becomes itself a value. In particular in the work of Jarry, the “baseness and incongruity” of life must be understood not as a source of disgust but of joy.

The third trait of the New Spirit is the attachment of meaning to dreams. Dreams have always had some sort of oracular meaning, but it was in the avant-guerre that artists “abandoned themselves” to a “second life” of dreams. This was not necessarily Freudian in context—in fact, it was the ready preoccupation with dreams that helped Freud’s book have the impact it did (though it sold very few copies to begin with). “The employment of dream techniques in the arts implied an effort to reach beyond the bounds of waking consciousness towards faculties that could grapple with unrestricted intuitions. . . . These new realms of conscious
ness and expression were pursued with something approaching religious conviction by Bergson and Proust, Redon and Gauguin. Without relying on the existence of a ‘higher’ or spiritual world apart from our own inner being, dream can endow ordinary experience with an aura of ritual and the supernatural.”
16

Dream and humor lent themselves to the fourth trait that Shattuck identified—ambiguity. “Ambiguity here means neither meaninglessness nor obscurity—though both dangers are present. It means simply the expression of two or more meanings of a single symbol or sound.” By this account, there is no single true meaning banishing others that are faulty. Works can be at the same time beautiful and ugly, all meanings are possible, and the extraction of one alone “infeasible.”

These four traits, Shattuck insists, reveal a profound unity. “They manifest an unrelenting desire to dredge up new material from within, from the subconscious, and in order to do so they attempt to forge a new and all-important mode of thought, the logic of the child, of dream, of humor, of ambiguity,” and this frees the artist from the need to make a work with a single, explicit meaning. This deep preoccupation with the subconscious, he says, is symptomatic of man’s belief that he can surpass himself, to reach into himself to extract what education and society have buried. “The blending of art and life represents an attempt to preserve spiritual meaning in a godless universe. In refusing a dualistic order of earthly and divine, the twentieth century has attempted to have its cake and eat it, too.”
17

Thus twentieth-century art—and this applies to Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism—
seeks not so much to represent reality as to rival it
; it strives to be its own subject. The boundaries, the frameworks, were overrun, the two universes, art and not-art, engaged in “mutual interference,” a major device whose lineaments have never been properly assimilated. “When the distinction between art and reality has broken down, we are ourselves incorporated into the structure of a work of art. Its very form importunes us to enter an
expanded community
of creation which now includes artist and spectator, art and reality.”
18

WHOLENESS VIA JUXTAPOSITION

This, Shattuck says, has profound implications for the very concept of unity, of unifying wholeness. In the Romantic period, immediately preceding modernism, only the privileged personality of the artist could hope for the fulfillment of the yearnings for wholeness, for unity; but the modern sensibility, dispensing with frameworks and boundaries, sought new ideas of unity through dislocation. In the new aesthetic—also a new ethic, as it turned out—the approach to unity, even to wholeness, was to be achieved by
juxtaposition
.

“The arts of juxtaposition offer difficult, disconcerting, fragmented works whose disjunct sequence has neither beginning nor end. They happen without transition and scorn symmetry.” The world is recorded, in effect, “in the still-scrambled order of sensation” (Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce); there is no fusion or synthesis, such wholeness as is formed is beyond the reach or grasp of logic, and represents a desire to respond to the voice within. These works, Shattuck says, have abandoned the possibility of meaning in the classical sense.
19

The point of juxtaposition is that “we cannot expect to reach a point of rest or understanding” in the conventional sense. The absurd is, essentially, an expression of the
lack
of connectivity in experiencing the world—play, nonsense, abruptness, surprise now become the order of the arts, rather than
verification
of certain general truths in the old tradition. “We can no longer expect to find in the arts only verification of knowledge or values deeply rooted within us. We will, instead, be surprised or dismayed.” The search for the subconscious functions by sudden leaps, “the way a spark jumps a gap,” which brings the spectator closer than ever before to the abruptness of the creative process. It is as if the spectator is now watching from the wings rather than the auditorium; there is a closeness, an
intimacy
of form in modern art that stems from this yearning for the subconsciousness shared by all, but which exposes the “jumpy” nature of the mind, the profound “unsteadiness” within us—“Few men ever attain the equilibrium necessary to live fully with what they have.”

Juxtaposition arranges fragments of experience, perishable rather than possessing the stability of monuments, in which the (often) conflicting elements are to be experienced/understood
simultaneously
rather than
successively, as was traditionally the case. “The aspiration of simultanism is to grasp the moment in its total significance or, more ambitiously, to manufacture a moment which surpasses our usual perception of time and space.” Simultanism establishes sources of meaning other than causal sequence, and seizes upon what is, for us in the twenty-first century, a new kind of coherence, a new unity of experience, not progression but intensification—intensification by standing still.
20

Juxtaposition requires assimilation without synthesis, directness free of conventional order, the compression and condensation of mental processes, freedom from the taboos of logic, potential unity at a moment in time, fixity. “Only by achieving rest,
arrest
, can we perceive what is happening outside ourselves.”
21
The figures in this chapter, though diverse, were united in their
daring
.

6

The Insistence of Desire

D
id André Gide’s life owe its shape to the fact that he came from a Protestant family in Catholic France? Or that his father died when he was still a boy and his life at home (he was born in Paris but grew up in Normandy and the Languedoc) was largely influenced by the women of the family? Or that he was an only child? Can such questions ever be answered satisfactorily? Whatever motivation governed Gide’s makeup, he was able to end his last major creative effort,
Thésée
, with words that were to become famous: “I have lived.”
1

In fact, arguably the most important influence on Gide was the landscape that he explored with the family’s Swiss maid, a woman of the mountains, who shared—and fostered—his passion for wildflowers. Later, he was “intoxicated” by the beauties of the countryside around Uzès, near Nîmes in the Languedoc, the valley of the Fontane d’Ure and above all the
garrigue
, scrubland, where the wildflowers dazzled in the spring. Here, the not overwhelmingly lush surroundings permitted him to appreciate the heroic and dignified qualities of individual flowers. His reaction to natural beauty was never passive, and that fact was to play an important role in his view of life.

STIRRED BY SELF-LOSS

Devotedly religious in his teens, Gide’s faith failed in his twentieth year. He had come to the conclusion that Christianity was “deadly” to culture.
2
At more or less the same time, he inherited enough money for him not to need to work, so he moved back to Paris and began to mix there with the avant-garde, particularly the writers gathered around Stéphane Mallarmé, whose aestheticism and love of the music of words Gide shared. Like many an only child, he craved company and found a home among the circle that formed around the literary magazine he helped to found, the
Nouvelle Revue Française
.

But he was not only alive to French writers but also much influenced by Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Browning, Yeats and Blake, and liked to quote the latter’s lines:

Thou art a man, God is no more

Thy own humanity learn to adore.
3

Perhaps because of his upbringing, Gide was temperamentally suited to the phenomenologists’ central idea, which was a reaction against the view that the particular is somehow of less consequence than the general. Husserl had said (see chapter 3) that, in giving our attention to the particular, “we fear the risk of fixing ourselves upon an exception to the rule,” but that was never Gide’s worry.
4
He shared with Shaw the idea that life is not a possession but an experiment and, as a consequence, he quickly formed the view that a man’s greatest task must be “an exemplary existence.” More specifically, he said that salvation cannot depend on human organization, that man is whatever he will eventually make of himself, limited only by his “unfortunate eagerness” to accept ready-made definitions which “permit him to substitute contemplation for action.”

God, Gide thought, is one of these ready-made definitions. Moreover, we should not “spoil” our life for any one objective; there is no one to pray to, and “a man must play the cards he has.”
5
Sooner or later we must make a choice, in order to act, but one choice does not necessarily pre-determine another. We must realize there is nothing beyond man, except what he can make for himself.
6

Gide used the word “spiritual” as Valéry did, as Mallarmé did, as Santayana did, not as something that concerned another realm, a mystical world elsewhere, but as an important part of
this
life that stemmed from
the phenomenologists’ understanding, the poetic approach to the particular. He came to believe that it is the “duty” of man to “surpass” himself, strive not toward any specific goal but simply toward the
enrichment
of existence itself. Life is its own meaning, he concluded, and that meaning has been realized if you can look back on your life and say something like, “All things considered, I have won the game I played.”

Gide claimed that the particular is itself meaningful, from which it follows that “truth” is not to be attained by any procedure—artistic, scientific, philosophical—but only by those experiences which are
immediately
accessible to perception and sensation. Nothing, he insisted, can trump the argument of the individual who says, “I saw it” or “I felt it.” All attempts to systematize experience succeed only in “denaturing, distorting and impoverishing.”
7

One consequence of this was that Gide consciously tried to develop his senses, and showed this in his work. Travel, he thought, was an important element here (he was an early visitor to North Africa)—the stranger in the land, taking nothing for granted, is alive in a way that the native inhabitants are not.
8
This is, in essence, what his 1897 book
Les Nourritures terrestres
(Fruits of the Earth) was about, emptying the mind of its contents, so that “there is no longer anything between us and things.” “There were merchants of aromatics. We bought different kinds of resins from them. Some were for sniffing. Some were for chewing. Yet others were burned. . . . Sheer being grew for me into something hugely voluptuous.” For Gide, touch was the most immediate of the senses, underlining that “[o]nly individual things exist . . . things in themselves hold forth, accessible to everyone, all that life has to offer. Objects are neither ‘symbols’ nor manifestations of ‘laws’ more important than themselves, but independent entities that have successfully resisted all of man’s attempts to organize them into other things that can be neither seen, heard nor touched.”
9

The independence of things, he warned, can be terrible, but it can also be exhilarating, an opportunity; and we should beware explanations, which, he said, were “necessarily inadequate.” “Existence is not something that may be thought of at a distance; it has to invade you abruptly, fix itself upon you.”
10
For him, logic was a kind of mental barrier, stopping us from realizing the chaos “on the other side”—a chaos, he thought, that
Baudelaire, Cézanne and his friend Valéry had tried hard to show. For Gide, “wonder at the world” should replace philosophy, which attempts to “explain” the world. Philosophies, ideologies—and that includes religion—get in the way of wonder.

More than that, Gide believed that all systems of organization—science, religion, philosophy, theories of art—are egoistical impositions on the chaotic reality that is life; and that the
self-loss
, or self-forgetting, involved in wonder, in the immediacy of experience, in the taking of decisions and acting, is, in effect, what salvation is, removing the difference between us and things.

By the same token, he maintained that the idea of the self as a unity is false. The words he used were in fact that the self is a “superstition.” “If we look inside ourselves we discover no fixed unchanging thing we can call the self, but only the aimless passage of memories, perceptions and emotions.” That, he thought, was Montaigne’s great innovation, to recognize the “non-stability” of the human personality, “which never
is
, but is conscious of itself only in a becoming that cannot be pinned down.” As he liked to say, “I am never; I become.” He shared with Yeats, and many others at the turn of the century, a view of human nature that was in many ways quite at variance with Freud’s, a view which insisted that there is no single self but as many selves as we want there to be, a new one every day. “We are no more ‘determined’ from within than from without.”
11

We are “condemned” to freedom, Gide said, and the verb was appropriate in that, unless we understand freedom, the complete lack of guidance, the total absence of ready-made solutions, can be fearsome. Rather, he said, “events should find us ready to exchange one self for another and better one”; we have to stand ready to recognize a better self (how we do that is considered later). Everett Knight put it this way: “The greatness of Gide is to have resisted throughout his life the temptation
to be
—to enter into the ‘repose’ of thinghood.” In other words, he never thought of himself as one thing rather than another, he never resisted change. He thought it was the dread of being nothing very much that made men do dreadful things.
12

All this was the context for his famous concept of the “gratuitous act.” Gide’s “philosophy”—though he eschewed that word—his approach to life and experience, was that if man possesses no internal principles, then
he exists only through his actions, and when he is acting, behaving, it is the suddenest actions that are the most authentic, because then a man is behaving without allowing himself time to think and his performance will not be tarnished by self-interest. “A gratuitous act is not dictated by self-interest.” (This was to be strongly substantiated years later by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.) Since there are no eternal goals or truths, “the only incentive to action is one which leaves man with dignity and autonomy.” This is what establishes value; it is in effect an ethic, which may be summarized as follows: “You must follow your bent, provided it leads upward. Self-imposed discipline; self-abnegation is the noblest form of self-realization.”
13

Gide’s emphasis on the particular led him to the view that we should strive to bring to “the fullest fruition” that which is unique in us, and through our actions we must surpass ourselves—that is, seek to achieve more than we thought we could at the outset. And the way to achieve
this
, he thought, was not the old religious idea of “a contemplative life,” but holding ourselves in constant readiness to discover experience through action. And action involving self-loss is the most fulfilling and complete of experiences.

LIES AND SHARED FICTIONS

More than one critic has drawn attention to the lines of influence between William James and his “younger and shallower and vainer” brother, Henry. The older brother stayed with the younger one in the spring of 1901 while the former was writing
The Varieties of Religious Experience
, making use of Henry’s typist, Mary Weld.
14
Henry read his brother’s finished book in 1902, while finishing his own novel
The Wings of the Dove
. At times their creative lives were so intertwined (both were fascinated by mental illness, for example) that wags described William as the better writer and Henry as the better psychologist.

What concerns us most is Henry’s concern with, and approach to, religious experience and how it is to be understood—and possibly replaced—in the modern world. At one level his novels notably reflect the distinction William makes in
Varieties
when describing Lutheranism and Calvinism
as theologies that appeal to “sick souls,” and Catholicism, by contrast, as “healthy-minded.” This centers most on the problem of evil. “The healthy-minded individual tends toward pluralism and a view of evil as not central to human experience, but rather ‘a waste element . . . so much dirt,’ as it were. The sick soul, by contrast, regards the problem of evil as the essential fact of this world, something to be surmounted only by appeal to supernatural forces.”
15
This is not exactly how it is played in Henry’s books: “Bereft of the possibility of a direct encounter with the supernatural, James’s protagonists must accept the world in its fallen state.”
16

The Golden Bowl
is the most explicit of Henry’s books with regard to religion and what comes after. At one level, the book is about Evil—evil, as the protagonist Maggie Verver puts it, with “a very big E.” At another level, and even more fundamentally, it is about the problem that, for James, lay before us in a secular world: namely, the problem of desire. It is desire that is at the root of all evil, and the ways in which desire can be expressed and controlled in a world without the traditional rituals of organized religion are for him both the core predicament and the main opportunity. It is the
institutions
of religion that concern James, and how we are to live without them.

The story of
The Golden Bowl
follows the theological conceit of the Fall, which accompanies Maggie’s acquisition of self-knowledge. What begins in
The Golden Bowl
is continued in James’s later fiction, but religious themes are there transformed into broader concerns. This is because, as Pericles Lewis has observed, “The characters in James’s novels seem to pay little heed to articulated religious belief. Indeed, they often seem to inhabit a moral world in which absolute measures of value such as those associated with God are no longer available.”
17
Instead, they try to tailor their former ethical views to a new way of living together, still taxed and vexed by the problem of (and solution to) Evil, always manifested through desire.

Henry recognized that he was living in a “radically new spiritual situation,” one in which the organized churches had little role left to play and where, increasingly, religion became a matter of personal experience.
18
As Louis Menand has observed, in
Varieties
William argued that “God is real because he produces real effects” (see chapter 2 for a wider discussion). More fully: “The unseen order is, in a sense, the product of our beliefs,
and its truth consists neither in the possibility of proving it scientifically nor in the possibility of having an unmediated access to it, but in the fact that it influences our actions in this world.” In effect, Lewis says, William James interpreted transcendental ideas as “shared fictions,” and it was
this
that Henry picked up on in his later works, from
The Golden Bowl
onward.

In those works he explored the mechanisms by which individuals try to obtain from others particular beliefs, and the phenomenon that, in order to belong to a certain group, one must “accept certain beliefs, and accept them so wholeheartedly as to experience them as one’s own. . . . For James, shared fictions take the place of more traditional religious beliefs; he often describes them as ‘sacred.’” These beliefs may involve believing in someone’s goodwill, that one character really loves another, that someone is virtuous; or negative shared beliefs such as suspecting the nature of someone’s illness, thinking the worst concerning the origin of another’s fortune. This leads, perhaps inevitably, to the point where James suggests that even
lying
might be a moral duty, “when the lie is in good faith.” The dénouements of his three last completed novels (
The Wings of the Dove
[1902],
The Ambassadors
[1903],
The Golden Bowl
[1904]) turn—like the final scene in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness—
“on the question of whether the protagonist will tell a ‘necessary lie’ in order to maintain an illusion in which a community would prefer to live.”
19
As Lewis goes on to say, the phrase “as if” recurs throughout the last three books, echoing William James’s recasting of Kant in
Varieties
: “We can act
as if
there were a God.”
20