Living by Fiction

  The use of narrative collage, then, enables a writer to recreate, if he wishes, a world shattered, and perhaps senseless, and certainly strange. It may emphasize the particulate nature of everything. We experience a world unhinged. Nothing temporal, spatial, perceptual, social, or moral is fixed.

  This is the fiction of quantum mechanics; a particle’s velocity and position cannot both be known. Similarly, it may happen that in the works of some few writers, the narrative itself cannot be located. Events occur without discernible meaning; “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” What if the world’s history itself, and the events of our own lives in it, were as jerked, arbitrary, and fundamentally incoherent as is the sequence of episodes in some contemporary fictions? It is, these writers may say; they are.

  The Egg in the Cage

  I would like to pause here to talk about artistic integrity. Distinctions of value need to be made among contemporary modernist works, as among all works, and I think they can be made most pointedly here, where technique fades into meaning and raises the issue of integrity.

  Interestingly enough, contemporary modernist fiction, unlike traditional fiction, has no junk genres. Like poetry so long as it is serious, fiction, so long as it is witty, is almost always assumed to be literature. Well, then, it has already passed the qualifying rounds and must go on to the finals: Does it have meaning? For any art, including an art of surface, must do more than dazzle. Is this art in the service of idea? And it is right here thatsome contemporary modernist fiction can claim, Yes, it does mean; it recreates in all its detail the meaninglessness of the modern world. And I cry foul. When is a work “about” meaninglessness and when is it simply meaningless?

  Clearly the shattering of what we feel as the rondure of experience (or of what, according to this theory, we who were born after 1911 have never felt as the rondure of experience), and the distant and ironic examination of the resultant fragments, serve, in Robbe-Grillet’s terms, “to exile the world to the life of its own surface”—and, by extension, to express our sense of exile on that surface. If meaning is contextual, and it is, then the collapse of ordered Western society and its inherited values following World War I cannot be overstressed; when we lost our context, we lost our meaning. We became, all of us in the West, more impoverished and in one sense more ignorant than pygmies, who, like the hedgehog, know one great thing: in this case, why they are here. We no longer know why we are here—if, indeed, we are to believe that large segments of European society ever did. At any rate, our contemporary questioning of why we are here finds a fitting objective correlative in the worst of the new fictions, whose artistic recreation of our anomie, confusion, and meaninglessness elicits from us the new question, Why am I reading this?

  We judge a work on its integrity. Often we examine a work’s integrity (or at least I do) by asking what it makes for itself and what it attempts to borrow from the world. Sentimental art, for instance, attempts to force preexistent emotions upon us. Instead of creating characters and events which will elicit special feelings unique to the text, sentimental art merely gestures toward stock characters and events whose accompanying emotions come on tap. Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls. An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given. That is why scenes of high drama—suicide, rape, murder, incest—or scenes of great beauty are so difficult to do well in genuine literature. We already have strong feelings about these things, and literature does not operate on borrowed feelings.

  As in the realm of feeling, so in the realm of intellect. Naming your characters Aristotle and Plato is not going to make their relationship interesting unless you make it so on the page; having your character shoot himself in the end does not mean that anyone has learned anything; and setting your novel in Buchenwald does not give it moral significance. Now: may a work of art borrow meaning by being itself meaningless? May it claim thereby to have criticized society? Or to have recreated our experience? May a work claim for itself whole hunks of other people’s thoughts on the flimsy grounds that the work itself, being so fragmented, typifies our experience of this century? Can a writer get away with this? I don’t think so.

  But let me state the question more sympathetically, from the writer’s point of view. The writer’s question is slightly different. If the writer’s honest intention is to recreate a world he finds meaningless, must his work then be meaningless? If he writes a broken book, is he not then a bad artist? On the other hand, if he unifies a world he sees as shattered, is he not dishonest? All this is an old problem for any writer, for a traditional one as well as a contemporary one. Stated broadly, the question is, What is negative art? What can it be? What can a writer do when his intention is to depict seriously a boring conversation? Must he bore everybody? How should he handle a dull character, a hateful scene? (Everyone knows how the hated voice of a hated character can ruin a book.) Or, in the big time, how can a writer show, as a harmonious, artistic whole, times out of joint, materials clashing, effects without cause, life without depth, and all history without meaning?

  There are several strategies which may ameliorate these difficulties. A writer may make his aesthetic surfaces very, very good and even appealing, in the hope that those surface excellences will impart to the work enough positive value, as it were, to overwhelm its negativity. Better, he may widen his final intention to include possibilities for meaning which illuminate, without relieving, suffering: but this solution, the writing of tragedy or of contemporary art whose intentions are wider than those posited, does not address the problem. The only real solution is this, which obtains in all art: the writer makes real artistic meaning of meaninglessness the usual way, the old way, by creating a self-relevant artistic whole. He produces a work whose parts cohere. He imposes a strict order upon chaos. And this is what most contemporary modernist fiction does. Art may imitate anything but disorder. The work of art may, like a magician’s act, pretend to any degree of spontaneity, randomality, or whimsy, so long as the effect of the whole is calculated and unified. No subject matter whatever prohibits a positive and unified handling. After all, who would say of “The Waste Land” that it is meaningless, or ofMolloy , orMrs. Bridge? We see in these works, and in traditional black works like Greene’sBrighton Rock and Lowry’sUnder the Volcano , the unity which characterizes all art. In this structural unity lies integrity, and it is integrity which separates art from nonart.

  Let me tread shaky ground in order to insert a note from René Magritte on this business of integrity. Any juxtaposition may be startling. Narrative collage is a cheap source of power. An onion ring in a coffin! Paul of Tarsus and Shelly Hack! We can all do this all day. But in the juxtaposition of images, as in other juxtapositions, there is true and false, says Magritte. Magritte says we know birds in a cage. The image gets more interesting if we have, instead of a bird, a fish in the cage, or a shoe in the cage; “but though these images are strange they are unhappily accidental, arbitrary. It is possible to obtain a new image which will stand up to examination through having something final, something right about it: it’s the image showing an egg in the cage.”

  Now, what do we make of this curious assertion of Magritte’s, that surrealist images may be right or wrong? What can be right about a surrealist image? I am certainly not going to endorse as an artistic criterion Magritte’s vague, emotional phrase “something right about it.” But I do endorse his notion that the right image will “stand up to examination.” After all, there is nothing too mysterious about the rightness of an egg’s replacing a bird. The two have met. In other words, the “something right” which “will stand up to examination” is ordinary unity. Notice that Magritte’s surrealism by no means intends to traffic in “accidental” or “arbitrary” images. He uses these words to damn. Must arbitrariness always be damning? Must it forever be out of bounds not
as a subject but as a technique? I think so.

  Let me insert here a regret that criticism has no other terms than “device” and “technique” for these deliberate artistic causes which yield deliberate artistic effects. In painting and in music, the word “technique,” at least, has a respectable sound; but in fiction, and especially to laymen, both “device” and “technique” sound sinister, as though writers were cold-blooded manipulators and gadgeteers who for genius substitute a bag of tricks. They are; of course they are. But the trick is the work itself. The trick is intrinsic. One does not produce a work and then give it a twist by inserting devices and techniques here and there like acupuncture needles. The work itself is the device. In traditional fiction the work is device made flesh; in contemporary modernist fiction the work may be technique itself or device laid bare.

  All this is not to say that the fragmentation of the great world is the only theme of narrative collage: far from it. These techniques—abrupt shifts, disjunctive splicings and enjambments of time, space, and voice—are common coin. Almost all contemporary writers, including writers of traditional fiction, use them toward any number of different ends. For that matter, the historical Modernists themselves used them for various, often traditional ends. In Joyce’sUlysses , in Faulkner’sThe Sound and the Fury , the use of segmented narrative deepens the reader’s sense of the fictional world and its complex characters and scenes. The technique serves the works’ other themes, as it does in Garrett’sDeath of the Fox , Ellison’sInvisible Man , Lessing’sThe Golden Notebook , and Durrell’sAlexandria Quartet . And even when a work’s theme is fragmentation, the work may itself be unified, and the fragmentation may not be bad news; James and many other writers have celebrated the world’s “blooming, buzzing confusion.”

  Note, then, that the fragmentation of narrative line may be, and usually is, as formally controlled as any other aspect of fiction. There is nothing arbitrary whatsoever about fragmentation itself. In fact, as a technique it may elicitmore formal control than a leisured narrative technique which imitates the thickened flow of time in orderly progression, if only because it requires the writer clearly to identify the important segments of his work and skip the rest. No charming narrative dalliances prevent our seeing his scenes as parts of a whole; no emotional coziness lulls our minds to sleep.

  The virtues of contemporary modernist fiction are literary, are intellectual and aesthetic. They are the solid excellences of complex, formally ordered pattern. Most contemporary modernist fiction, and the best of it, does not claim these virtuesand the incidental virtues of realistic fiction as well. You do not find Calvino promoting “verisimilitude”; you do not read Nabokov as a document of the times. This is as it should be. I bring up the question of integrity here only because it is here that a writer may most readily fool himself—always an attractive possibility. On one hand, sophisticated, hurried readers continue to judge works on the sophistication of their surfaces. On the other hand, our culture continues to pay lip service to the incidental and dull virtues of realism. So a writer may combine the two sets of excellence inappropriately. He may fool himself into reproducing the broken, sophisticated-looking forms of good contemporary modernist fiction without its unified content, in the hope that the narrative technique,as an end in itself , has an intrinsic significance. It not only looks good, it is “realistic.” It is “social criticism.” He may fool himself into shirking the difficult, heartbreaking task of structuring a work of art on the grounds that art is imitation (all of a sudden) and a slapdash fiction imitates a seriously troubled world.

  But I am exaggerating, and speaking here more in theory than in fact. I am pummeling an unnamed straw man, a straw author, who composes, like Dadaist Tristan Tzara, by stirring a hatful of scraps. I am certainly not thinking here of a great writer like Cortázar, or Coover. In fact, I know for certain of no such writer of fiction, and I’m afraid I would not name one if I did. Serious writers are not consciously dishonest. I mean only to mutter darkly that in the present confusion of technical sophistication and significance, an emperor or two might slip by with no clothes.

  Anyone with wit and training can search a work for sense. And sense is by no means an obsolete virtue: sense, and not the skill to dazzle, is the basal criterion for art. Surface obscurity is, of course, by no means a sign of its absence. On the contrary, such obscurity usually proves to be smoke from some wonderfully interesting fire. We simply must not mistake the smoke for the fire. I am certain that much, if not most, of today’s lasting fiction derives from contemporary modernist writers of integrity (writers like Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, Barth, Calvino). That other writers may produce fictional surfaces similar to theirs, but without their internal integrity, does not in any way dim their achievement. But someone must distinguish between art and mere glibness.

  All we need are responsible readers who demand real artistic coherence from a work. And we need book reviewers who understand how literature works and do not forget their training when they read a dust jacket. After all, new, subtle, and intellectualized forms of sense demand, and must continue to produce, detailed critical effort. We need much more serious textual criticism of contemporary work—work to whose formal intentions publishers and reviewers are usually indifferent—and we need a wide forum for such criticism. It’s a pity it’s so dull. Nevertheless, such effort gave us Wallace Stevens and Nabokov; it must continue, undaunted by fluff, to locate the great work being produced today. (Or the philistines will get us, or the paperbacks won’t.)

  Let me conclude this excursus with a few bald assertions. Meaninglessness in art is a contradiction in terms. Meaning in art is contextual. What does a whale mean? A whale means whatever an artist can make it mean in a given work. Art is the creation of coherent contexts. Since words necessarily refer to the world, as paint does not, literary contexts must be more responsible to the actual world than painting contexts must be. That is, it is easily conceivable that a painted blue streak should represent a ship’s hull in one painting and a curved arm in another. But that fictional element inMoby-Dick had better be a whale or something mighty like one. The blue streak can hold up its end of the artistic structure in virtually any context, but whales belong at sea. Writers do not create whales; whales are known and given; you can only do so much with them. You would be hard put in your serious novel to make a whale stand for a repressive Middle Eastern regime, or baseball, or agriculture. You would violate the bonds of unity if you tried to force a serious narrative connection between a vicious whale and, say, Isabel Archer. It would be precious to yoke them together without just cause. It would be mere comedy. It would be painting a shoe in the cage.

  In all the arts, coherence in a work means that the relationship among parts—the jointed framework of the whole—is actual, solid, nailed down. (Of course, a proper demonstration of valid connection among parts would require a full-scale exegesis of a text, an interruption which I am unwilling to suffer. There are solid readings of standard works. Reliable readings of intelligent lyric poetry usually demonstrate the relationship of parts very clearly, if only because the texts at hand are so small. I could refer the reader to, say, Bloom or Ellman on Yeats, Frye on Blake, Vendler or Sukenick on Stevens. In contemporary fiction, theHollins Critic essays such as those collected inThe Sounder Few give intelligent exegeses of contemporary texts.) In all the arts, coherence and integrity go hand in hand. One cannot toss onto one’s canvas a patch of blue paint and hope one’s friends like it or some clever critic finds a reason for it. Similarly, one cannot add the weight of idea to a piece of fiction by setting a whale swimming through it, or by inserting Adolf Hitler with a larding needle, or by scrambling the world’s contents with a pen.

  Contemporary modernist fiction, in fact, requiresmore coherence than traditional fiction does. For one of the things this new fiction does is bare its own structure. (How long a novel wouldPale Fire be in the hands of Thomas Mann?) This fiction sees that the formal relationship among parts is the esse
ntial value of all works of art. So it strips the narration of inessentials: like Hugo’s excursions into the history of all aspects of human culture, like the unities of time, space, and action, like emotion. It bares instead its structural bones, asPale Fire does, andInvisible Cities , andFicciones ; it bares its structural bones, brings them to the surface, and retires. Those bones had better be good. If a writer is going to use forms developed by intelligent people, he should use them intelligently. It does not do to mimic results without due process. Traditional fiction has the advantage here, I think. In a conservative work well fleshed, we may not notice at once that the joints do not articulate, nor the limbs even meet the torso. There may in fact be so much flesh that the parts cohere as it were bonelessly. But it is easy to see, if we look, taped joints on a skeleton.

  It is interesting that John Fowles rewroteThe Magus. The Magus is in many ways a contemporary modernist piece of fiction—in its fantastic transfigurations, its object-like and grotesque characters, and its emphasis on the irrational. But the first edition ofThe Magus —now it can be told—was dishonest work, the relationship of whose parts was pleaded. Its structure collapsed at a touch. It is interesting that Fowles rewrote it because, I fancy, Fowles understood that in order to make his bid as an important writer he needed to set his house in order and redress his crimes against integrity.