Is literature wise? In the sense, does it help us to live? And if
not, what exactly is it good for?
One way into that
question might be to look at how great writers themselves have
benefited. Or haven’t. The situation is not immediately promising,
since the list of writers who committed suicide, from Seneca the
Younger to David Foster Wallace, would be long; Nerval, Hemingway,
Plath, Pavese, Zweig, Mayakovsky, and Woolf all spring to mind. But I
suppose you could argue that there are situations where suicide is
the wise decision, or that without literature these talented people
might have gone much earlier. The list of those who have driven
themselves to an unhappy death would likely be longer still. Dickens,
Tolstoy, Joyce, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Henry Green, Elsa Morante, and
Dylan Thomas arguably fall in that category. Not to mention those
forever frustrated by insufficient recognition and other occupational
hazards; the gloom of Giacomo Leopardi would appear to have been
oceanic. It is not that there aren’t cases of writers who have
approached the end of their lives happily enough—Victor Hugo,
Alberto Moravia, Natalia Ginzburg, Fyodor Dostoevsky of all unlikely
candidates, even that great pessimist Thomas Hardy—simply that a
few moments reflection will suffice to convince us that being a fine
writer does not necessarily mean being “skilful” in the Buddhist
sense of acting in such a way as to foster serenity, joy, happiness.
Is there, then,
something in the nature of the literary that renders the author, but
perhaps also the reader, more vulnerable than most people to
unhappiness, being troubled, or perhaps simply to the kind of
emotional turbulence that writers as far apart as Shelley and Simenon
seem invariably to have created around themselves? In short, could it
be that there is something about our conception of the literary that
not only does not help us to live, but actually makes things more
difficult?
Generalization is
treacherous, but let’s posit that at the center of most modern
storytelling, in particular most literary storytelling, lies the
struggling self, or selves, individuals seeking some kind of
definition or stability in a world that appears hostile to such
aspirations: life is precarious, tumultuous, fickle, and the self
seeks in vain, or manages only with great effort, to put together a
personal narrative that is, even briefly, satisfying. Of course, the
story can end in various ways, or simply stop at some convenient
grace-point; happy endings are not entirely taboo, though certainly
frowned on in the more elevated spheres of serious literary fiction.
And even when things do come to a pleasing conclusion, it is either
shot through with irony or presented as merely a new beginning, with
everything still to fight for.
“They went quietly
down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed,” Dickens
tells us of Little Dorrit and Clennam after their five hundred pages
of misery, “and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the
noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain,
fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar.”
How promising is
that?
In short, at the
core of the literary experience, as it is generally construed and
promoted, is the pathos of this unequal battle and of a self
inevitably saddened—though perhaps galvanized, too, or, in any
event, tempered and hardened—by the systematic betrayal of youth’s
great expectations. Life promises so much, but then slips through
one’s fingers. Leopardi offers the refrain of a thousand works of
fiction from Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education to Muriel
Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, or any of a hundred Alice
Munro stories, when he writes:
Ah, how truly
past you are,
Dear companion
of my innocence,
My much-lamented
hope!
Is this that
world? Are these
The joys, love,
deeds, experience
We talked so
often of?
The experience of
the literary, then, would seem to be seeing this bitter pill dressed
up or administered in such a way that, at least in the telling, it
becomes a pleasure. There is the excitement of drama, of complex and
unstable situations, there is immersion in fine description, that
heightened sense of engagement that comes with recognizing an
accurate portrayal of things we know, and, of course, there is the
satisfaction of seeing the desperate human condition brilliantly
dissected. Sometimes, the more brilliantly pessimistic the
dissection, the more stimulating the reading experience, the greater
the sense of catastrophe, the more noble, profound, and grand the
writer who eloquently expresses it. Here is Chateaubriand:
This
impossibility of duration and continuity in human relations, the
profound forgetfulness that follows us wherever we go, the invincible
silence that fills our graves and stretches from there to our homes,
puts me constantly in mind of our inexorable isolation. Any hand will
do to give us the last glass of water we will ever need, when we lie
sweating on our deathbed. Only let it not be a hand that we love! For
how, without despair, can we let go of a hand we have covered with
kisses, a hand that we would like to hold forever to our heart?
What is on offer,
then, is the consolation of intelligent form and seductive style, but
enlisted to deliver a content that invariably smacks of defeat, or at
best a temporary stay of execution. In this sense, our literature
seems locked into a systemic antagonism with the crasser side of
Western civilization, the brash confidence that all could be
improved, controlled, resolved, if only we were better organized and
our science more advanced. Literature determinedly confounds such
unwarranted optimism; we must face the grim truth, it says, though
always armed with the artist’s ability to make the performance
palatable.
“Works of
[literary] genius,” Leopardi observed, “have this intrinsic
quality, that even when they capture exactly the nothingness of
things, or vividly reveal and make us feel life’s inevitable
unhappiness, or express the most acute hopelessness… they are
always a source of consolation and renewed enthusiasm.”
But what if one were
to suggest that literature exacerbates the very condition it
then soothes, the way smoking a cigarette, say, increases the
nervousness from which it offers a brief reprieve? This would have to
be the position of someone who took, for example, a Buddhist approach
to Western literature. With rare exceptions, such a person would
surely observe, the literature of modern times exalts the self, the
idea of self, the existence of self. Predicated on a hubris of
individualism, literature shows the self forming in childhood,
narrating itself into selfhood, as it were, in one Bildungsroman
after another; then it shows the self struggling to maintain its
supposed integrity and personhood in adult life. Where a character is
conflicted, unable to decide between identities—and that would be
the case of so many literary heroes from Hamlet to Stephen
Dedalus—this is presented as torment and potential failure.
In short, if this
belief in self, or in the construction of selfhood, is to be
considered unwise, then literature, for all its magnificent
achievements, becomes as much a part of the problem as the solution,
an addiction that feeds the sufferings it consoles. One enjoys
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, one admires Faulkner’s Absalom,
Absalom! or Bernhard’s Gargoyles, but one comes away with a
heightened sense of how much more literature will be required to
console such a desperate human condition.
Any number of
writers have sensed the trap involved in needing to offer ever more
catastrophe and catharsis. If character is destiny and destiny
disaster in Shakespeare’s tragedies, that conceit becomes far
more malleable and open to transformation in the late plays as the
bard prepares to bow out of writing altogether. In The Winter’s
Tale or Cymbeline, one senses, as in myth, the coexistence of various
versions of the same story, even a detachment of moral qualities and
consequent behavior from personal identity. In those works, evil or
compassion or envy is unfolding as an abstract entity, rather than
such-and-such a person being evil, compassionate, or envious. When
Cymbeline or King Polixenes behave rashly, what we have is not the
inevitable product of a fatal flaw in a tragic figure, as with Lear
or Macbeth, but simply a failure to guard against aberration provoked
by special circumstances. So all becomes reversible, and seemingly
ruinous behavior is set to right.
But who would not
say that Lear and Macbeth are closer to the core of our narrative
tradition than Cymbeline or The Winter’s Tale? Samuel Beckett, who
repeatedly encourages readers to become aware of their expectations
of fiction, making fun of their eagerness for “meaning” and
identification, does all he can in his trilogy of novels, Molloy,
Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, to suggest the absence of anything
that might be described as selfhood. Molloy, Moran, Malone, McMann,
the Unnamable, are all, apparently, the same “person,” but one
who is quite unable to impose a coherent story or even a single name
on their collective life—though they seem equally unable to stop
trying to do so. “I wonder if I am not talking yet again about
myself,” worries Malone. “Shall I be incapable, to the end, of
lying on any other subject? I feel the old dark gathering, the
solitude preparing, by which I know myself, and the call of that
ignorance which might be noble and is mere poltroonery.” Even where
there is no selfhood, the nostalgia for self and the compulsive
search for selfhood remains the central subject and guarantees
unhappiness. The Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s most recent novel, To
the Back of Beyond, in which a character simply splits in two,
offering the tragic in one manifestation and the picaresque in the
other, is another exploration of this territory.
Again, though, such
novels are very much outsiders and, while admired, soon acquire the
status of the dead end, the work that cannot influence writers in the
mainstream tradition, as though to ditch the self would be to ditch
literary fiction tout court. Perhaps, in a society so deeply invested
in individualism, writers are inevitably drawn to a vision at once
catastrophic and consoling, precisely because such a vision exalts
the self. It’s an approach that finds its most extravagant
expression in works like Chateaubriand’s René, or Byron’s Child
Harolde, but is still powerfully present in novels as apparently
different as The Catcher in the Rye or Saul Bellow’s Herzog.
Leopardi catches the grandeur, misery, and comedy of it all in this
note on a line from the Aeneid:
“Moriemur
inultae, Sed moriamur, ait. Sic sic iuvat ire sub umbras [I shall die
unavenged, but let me die—Dido says—like this, like this it’s
good to go down among the shades].”
Here Virgil
wanted to get across… the pleasure the mind takes in dwelling on
its downfall, its adversities, then picturing them for itself, not
just intensely, but minutely, intimately, completely; in exaggerating
them even, if it can (and if it can, it certainly will), in
recognizing, or imagining, but definitely in persuading itself and
making absolutely sure it persuades itself, beyond any doubt, that
these adversities are extreme, endless, boundless, irremediable,
unstoppable, beyond any redress …; in short in seeing and intensely
feeling that its own personal tragedy is truly immense and perfect
and as complete as it could be in all its parts.
The pleasure the
mind takes in dwelling on its downfall… At this point, then, we may
have our answer to what literature is good for. It is good, at least
in a great majority of cases, for going on exactly as we always have,
for keeping the market supplied.
Certainly, this was
Tolstoy’s feeling when he gave up writing fiction after Anna
Karenina. There were more serious things to be getting on with. But
he went back to it years later, to write the tormented Kreutzer
Sonata, and years later again, to write the distraught and
penitential Resurrection. For when the fiction drug is pure, and with
Tolstoy it always was, inebriation is guaranteed. This is not an easy
habit to break.