Even Professor Steiner’s portrait of an exhausted Europe is, in my view, simply and demonstrably false. The last fifty years have given us the oeuvres of, to name just a few, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, Vladimir Nabokov, Günter Grass, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kis, Thomas Bernhard, Marguerite Yourcenar. We can all make our own lists. If we include writers from beyond the frontiers of Europe, it becomes clear that the world has rarely seen so rich a crop of great novelists living and working at the same time—that the easy gloom of the Steiner-Naipaul position is not just depressing but unjustified. If V. S. Naipaul no longer wishes, or is no longer able, to write novels, it is our loss. But the art of the novel will undoubtedly survive without him.
There is, in my view, no crisis in the art of the novel. The novel is precisely that “hybrid form” for which Professor Steiner yearns. It is part social inquiry, part fantasy, part confessional. It crosses frontiers of knowledge as well as topographical boundaries. He is right, however, that many good writers have blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction. Ryszard Kapuscinski’s magnificent book about Haile Selassie, The Emperor, is an example of this creative blurring. The so-called New Journalism developed in America by Tom Wolfe and others was a straightforward attempt to steal the novel’s clothes, and in the case of Wolfe’s own Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, or The Right Stuff, the attempt was persuasively successful. The category of “travel writing” has expanded to include works of profound cultural meditation: Claudio Magris’s Danube, say, or Neal Ascherson’s Black Sea. And in the face of a brilliant non-fictional tour de force such as Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, in which a re-examination of the Greek myths achieves all the tension and intellectual excitement of the best fiction, one can only applaud the arrival of a new kind of imaginative essay writing—or, better, the return of the encyclopedic playfulness of Diderot or Montaigne. The novel can welcome these developments without feeling threatened. There’s room for all of us in here.
A few years ago the British novelist Will Self published a funny short story called “The Quantity Theory of Insanity,” which suggested that the sum total of sanity available to the human race might be fixed, might be a constant; so that the attempt to cure the insane was useless, as the effect of one individual regaining his sanity would inevitably be that someone somewhere else would lose theirs, as if we were all sleeping in a bed covered by a blanket—of sanity—that wasn’t quite big enough to cover us all. One of us pulls the blanket toward us; another’s toes are instantly exposed. It is a richly comic idea, and it recurs in Professor Steiner’s zaniest argument, which he offers with a perfectly straight face—that at any given moment, there exists a total quantum of creative talent, and at present the lure of the cinema, television, and even of advertising is pulling the blanket of genius away from the novel, which consequently lies exposed, shivering in its pajamas in the depths of our cultural winter.
The trouble with the theory is that it supposes all creative talent to be of the same kind. Apply this notion to athletics and its absurdity becomes apparent. The supply of marathon runners is not diminished by the popularity of sprint events. The quality of high jumpers is unrelated to the number of great exponents of the pole vault.
It is more likely that the advent of new art forms allows new groups of people to enter the creative arena. I know of very few great filmmakers who might have been good novelists—Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Jean Renoir, and that’s about it. How many pages of Quentin Tarantino’s snappy material, his gangsters’ riffs about eating Big Macs in Paris, could you read if you didn’t have Samuel Jackson or John Travolta speaking them for you? The best screenwriters are the best precisely because they think not novelistically but pictorially.
I am, in short, much less worried than Steiner about the threat posed to the novel by these newer, high-tech forms. It is perhaps the low-tech nature of the act of writing that will save it. Means of artistic expression that require large quantities of finance and sophisticated technology—films, plays, records—become, by virtue of that dependence, easy to censor and to control. But what one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
I agree with Professor Steiner’s celebration of modern science—“today that is where the joy is, that is where the hope is, the energy, the formidable sense of world upon world opening up,” but this burst of scientific creativity is, ironically, the best riposte to his “quantity theory of creativity.” The idea that potential great novelists have been lost to the study of sub-atomic physics or black holes is as implausible as its opposite: that the great writers of history—Jane Austen, say, or James Joyce—might easily, had they but taken a different turning, have been the Newtons and Einsteins of their day.
In questioning the quality of creativity to be found in the modern novel, Professor Steiner points us in the wrong direction. If there is a crisis in present-day literature, it is of a somewhat different kind.
The novelist Paul Auster recently told me that all American writers had to accept that they were involved in an activity which was, in the United States, no more than a minority interest, like, say, soccer. This observation chimes with Milan Kundera’s complaint, in his new volume of essays, Testaments Betrayed, of “Europe’s incapacity to defend and explain (explain patiently to itself and to others) that most European of arts, the art of the novel; in other words, to explain and defend its own culture. The ‘children of the novel,’ ” Kundera argues, “have abandoned the art that shaped them. Europe, the society of the novel, has abandoned its own self.” Auster is talking about the death of the American reader’s interest in this kind of reading matter; Kundera, about the death of the European reader’s sense of cultural connection with this kind of cultural product. Add these to Steiner’s illiterate, computer-obsessed child of tomorrow, and perhaps we are talking about something like the death of reading itself.
Or perhaps not. For literature, good literature, has always been a minority interest. Its cultural importance derives not from its success in some sort of ratings war but from its success in telling us things about ourselves that we hear from no other quarter. And that minority—the minority that is prepared to read and buy good books—has in truth never been larger than it is now. The problem is to interest it. What is happening is not so much the death as the bewilderment of the reader. In America, in 1999, over five thousand new novels were published. Five thousand! It would be a miracle if five hundred publishable novels had been written in a year. It would be extraordinary if fifty of them were good. It would be cause for universal celebration if five of them—if one of them!—were great.
Publishers are over-publishing because, in house after house, good editors have been fired or not replaced, and an obsession with turnover has replaced the ability to distinguish good books from bad. Let the market decide, too many publishers seem to think. Let’s just put this stuff out there. Something’s bound to click. So out to the stores they go, into the valley of death go the five thousand, with publicity machines providing inadequate covering fire. This approach is fabulously self-destructive. As Orwell said in 1936—you see that there is nothing new under the sun—“the novel is being shouted out of existence.” Readers, unable to hack their way through the rain-forest of junk fiction, made cynical by the debased language of hyperbole with which every book is garlanded, give up. They buy a couple of prizewinners a year, perhaps one or two books by writers whose names they recognize, and flee. Over-publishing and over-hyping creates under-reading. It is not just a question of too many novels chasing too few readers but a question of too many novels actually chasing readers away. If publishing a first novel has become, as Professor Steiner suggests, a “gamble against reality,” it is in large part because of this non-discriminatory, scatter-gun approach. We hear a lot, these days, about a new, businesslike spirit of financial ruthlessness in publishing. What
we need, however, is the best kind of editorial ruthlessness. We need a return to judgment.
And there is another great danger facing literature, and of this Professor Steiner makes no mention: that is, the attack on intellectual liberty itself; intellectual liberty, without which there can be no literature. This is not a new danger, either. Once again, George Orwell, writing in 1945, offers us much remarkably contemporary wisdom, and you will forgive me if I quote him at some length:
In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one hand are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism [today one might say, fanaticism], and on the other its immediate practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. In the past . . . the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic—political, moral, religious, or aesthetic—was one who refused to outrage his own conscience.
[Nowadays] the dangerous proposition [is] that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness.
The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, either of wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privileges. [But] to write in plain language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.
The pressures of monopoly and bureaucracy, of corporatism and conservatism, limiting and narrowing the range and quality of what gets published, are known to every working writer. Of the pressures of intolerance and censorship, I personally have in these past years gained perhaps too much knowledge. There are many such struggles taking place in the world today: in Algeria, in China, in Iran, in Turkey, in Egypt, in Nigeria, writers are being censored, harassed, jailed, and even murdered. Even in Europe and the United States, the storm troopers of various “sensitivities” seek to limit our freedom of speech. It has never been more important to continue to defend those values that make the art of literature possible. The death of the novel may be far off, but the violent death of many contemporary novelists is, alas, an inescapable fact. In spite of this, I do not believe that writers have given up on posterity. What George Steiner beautifully calls the “wonderful vainglory” of literature still fires us, even if, as he suggests, we are too embarrassed to say so in public. The poet Ovid sets these great, confident lines at the end of his Metamorphoses:
But, with the better part of me, I’ll gain
a place that’s higher than the stars: my name,
indelible, eternal, will remain. *7
I am sure the same ambition still resides in every writer’s heart: to be thought of, in times to come, as Rilke thought of Orpheus:
He is one of the staying messengers,
who still holds far into the doors of the dead
bowls with fruits worthy of praise. *8
May 2000
Notes on Writing and the Nation
[For Index on Censorship]
1
The ousel singing in the woods of Cilgwri,
Tirelessly as a stream over the mossed stones,
Is not so old as the toad of Cors Fochno
Who feels the cold skin sagging round his bones.
Few writers are as profoundly engaged with their native land as R. S. Thomas, a Welsh nationalist, whose poems seek, by noticing, arguing, rhapsodizing, mythologizing, to write the nation into fierce, lyrical being. Yet this same R. S. Thomas also writes:
Hate takes a long time
To grow in, and mine
Has increased from birth;
Not for the brute earth . . .
I find
This hate’s for my own kind.
Startling to find an admission of something close to self-hatred in the lines of a national bard. Yet this perhaps is the only kind of nationalist a writer can be. When the imagination is given sight by passion, it sees darkness as well as light. To feel so ferociously is to feel contempt as well as pride, hatred as well as love. These proud contempts, this hating love, often earn the writer a nation’s wrath. The nation requires anthems, flags. The poet offers discord. Rags.
2
Connections have been made between the historical development of the twin “narratives” of the novel and the nation-state. The progress of a story through its pages toward its goal is likened to the self-image of the nation, moving through history toward its manifest destiny. Appealing as such a parallel is, I take it, these days, with a pinch of salt. Eleven years ago, at the famous PEN congress in New York City, the world’s writers discussed “The Imagination of the Writer and the Imagination of the State,” a subject of Maileresque grandeur, dreamed up, of course, by Norman Mailer. Striking how many ways there were to read that little “and.” For many of us, it meant “versus.” South African writers—Gordimer, Coetzee—in those days of apartheid set themselves against the official definition of the nation. Rescuing, perhaps, the true nation from those who held it captive. Other writers were more in tune with their nations. John Updike sang an unforgettable hymn of praise to the little mailboxes of America, emblems, for him, of the free transmission of ideas. Danilo Kis gave an example of a “joke” by the state: a letter, received by him in Paris, posted in what was then still Yugoslavia. Inside the sealed envelope, stamped on the first page, were the words This letter has not been censored.
3
The nation either co-opts its greatest writers (Shakespeare, Goethe, Camoens, Tagore), or else seeks to destroy them (Ovid’s exile, Soyinka’s exile). Both fates are problematic. The hush of reverence is inappropriate for literature; great writing makes a great noise in the mind, the heart. There are those who believe that persecution is good for writers. This is false.
4
Beware the writer who sets himself or herself up as the voice of a nation. This includes nations of race, gender, sexual orientation, elective affinity. This is the New Behalfism. Beware behalfies!
The New Behalfism demands uplift, accentuates the positive, offers stirring moral instruction. It abhors the tragic sense of life. Seeing literature as inescapably political, it substitutes political values for literary ones. It is the murderer of thought. Beware!
5
Be advised my passport’s green.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
To forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
Kadare’s Albania, Ivo Andric’s Bosnia, Achebe’s Nigeria, García Márquez’s Colombia, Jorge Amado’s Brazil: writers are unable to deny the lure of the nation, its tides in our blood. Writing as mapping: the cartography of the imagination. (Or, as modern critical theory might spell it, Imagi/Nation.) In the best writing, however, a map of a nation will also turn out to be a map of the world.
6
History has become debatable. In the aftermath of Empire, in the age of super-power, under the “footprint” of the partisan simplifications beamed down to us from satellites, we can no longer easily agree on what is the case, let alone what it might mean. Literature steps into this ring. Historians, media moguls, politicians do not care for the intruder, but the intruder is a stubborn sort. In this ambiguous atmosphere, upon this trampled earth, in these muddy waters, there is work for him to do.
7
Nationalism corrupts writers, too. Vide Limonov’s poisonous interventions in the war in former Yugoslavia. In a time of ever more narrowly defined nationalisms, of walled-in tribalisms, writers will be found uttering the war cries of their tribes. Closed systems have always appealed to writers. This is why so much writing deals with prisons, police forces, hospitals, schools. Is the nation a closed system? In this internationalized moment, can any system remain closed? Nationalism is that “revolt against history” which seeks to close what cannot an
y longer be closed. To fence in what should be frontierless.
Good writing assumes a frontierless nation. Writers who serve frontiers have become border guards.
8
If writing turns repeatedly toward nation, it just as repeatedly turns away. The deliberately uprooted intellectual (Naipaul) views the world as only a free intelligence can, going where the action is and offering reports. The intellectual uprooted against his will (a category that includes, these days, many of the finest Arab writers) rejects the narrow enclosures that have rejected him. There is great loss, and much yearning, in such rootlessness. But there is also gain. The frontierless nation is not a fantasy.
9
Much great writing has no need of the public dimension. Its agony comes from within. The public sphere is as nothing to Elizabeth Bishop. Her prison—her freedom—her subject is elsewhere.
Lullaby.
Let nations rage,
Let nations fall.
The shadow of the crib makes an enormous cage
upon the wall.
April 1997
Influence
[A lecture delivered at the University of Torino]
The Australian novelist and poet David Malouf tells us that “the real enemy of writing is talk.” He warns particularly of the dangers of speaking about work in progress. When writing, one is best advised to keep one’s mouth shut, so that the words flow out, instead, through one’s fingers. One builds a dam across the river of words in order to create the hydroelectricity of literature.
I propose, therefore, to speak not of my writing but rather of my reading, and in particular of the many ways in which my experience of Italian literature (and, I must add, Italian cinema) has shaped my thoughts about how and what to write. That is, I want to talk about influence.