Occasional Prose (19 page)

Like
Tess
, some of the most arresting fictions of modern times are puzzles to classify, and it may even be that an inherent anomaly contributes to a disquiet that they engender. I am thinking of Joyce’s “The Dead,” a very long story, which would be a full member of the novel family were it not for the ending. At the outset “The Dead” looks like an intensely social narrative firmly set in the mundane (classically novelistic) world of professions, politics, careers. Like
War and Peace
, it starts at a party.

In the first sentence, as if on the threshold, we meet the servant who is helping the guests off with their outdoor things: “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.” This is everybody and nobody talking—the collective voice of the party. It is a dance, an annual Christmas event put on by Gabriel Conroy’s aunts, and, as in a real novel, we are told what refreshments the guests are served, given samples of the speech Conroy, a middle-aged literary man, must deliver to honor the old ladies, his thoughts during the music and the dancing, his passage-at-arms with a partner who is a strong Irish nationalist, and finally the lust he begins to feel for his wife, as they make their way home to their hotel through the snowy streets. There is even the un-tale-like suspicion that Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta must be something like Joyce and Nora. But a song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” sung at the party has reminded Gretta sorrowfully of a young lad in Galway who died for love of her when she was a girl living with her grandmother. Gabriel’s designs on her body are thwarted; in their room she cries herself to sleep, remembering Michael Furey. And Gabriel goes to the window. At that moment the short novel is transformed by incantation into a tale:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Note the echoic effects of “soul swooned slowly ... snow falling faintly” and, again, in inversion “falling faintly ... faintly falling,” none of which would “go” in a novel, any more than would a lad dying for love of a girl, both being offensive to the robust spirit of prose.

The mutation, I think, in this exquisite early story is an eerie premonition of
Ulysses
, published eight years later. Here an essence or, one might say, concentrate of novel is changing form as we listen and watch the process of transformation. It was a crucial moment. The surface shifting of genre, like a sex change, was testifying to a deep disturbance in the underground structures of the novel. After this, the novel would never be the same again, though the unsettling of its clear and stable identity did not become noticeable to the public or even to other writers until
Ulysses
revealed the whole truth.

To account for what had happened I am going to come back to the first sentence of “The Dead.” But before doing that I want to note, very summarily, signs of a decomposition of narrative that became evident soon after the appearance of
Ulysses
and was surely to some extent its result. An outstanding case is Faulkner, who responded to the Joycean example in various and quite contradictory ways. On the one hand, he constrained the novel to revert to the tale in works like
As I Lay Dying
,
Light in August
, “Old Man” (from
The Wild Palms
), or to outright saga, as in “The Bear” and parts of
The Hamlet
, and, at the end of his life, to allegory (
A Fable
)—a romance, somewhat unconvincing, called
Sartoris
was designed for the
Saturday Evening Post
.

On the other hand, and at the same time, he sought to reconstitute the traditional, pre-Joycean novel; his enterprise, taken as a whole, clearly has Balzacian aspirations: Yoknapatawpha County lays claim to being a microcosm of the
comédie humaine
. Yet the individual pieces of that broad jigsaw are far from resembling the historical realism of nineteenth-century practice. Take
The Sound and the Fury
, a stream-of-consciousness narrative that has obviously felt the effect of European modernism and is therefore regarded, justly, as the most experimental and difficult of Faulkner’s fictions—the opposite of what we think of as Balzacian.

In fact, though, the situation of the stream-of-consciousness narrative was not so simple, even for Joyce himself or Virginia Woolf, its leading practitioners. The interest, for them and for their followers and imitators, was in narrowing the narrative focus to the perceptual screen of a single consciousness or (more commonly) several consciousnesses, multiple fields of vision. We were allowed to see only what would appear on such a screen, often a half-shuttered or impaired one; evidently, once you started on this kind of experiment, you would soon be trying out various types of distorting lenses to see how the world looks through them—the artist’s eye (Lily Briscoe), the madman’s eye (Septimus Smith), the idiot’s (Benjy in
The Sound and the Fury
).

Strangely (as it may seem now, given the long-term results), the aim of the new techniques was a greater exactitude—the distortions being conceived as truer to the laws of perception than old-fashioned straight narration. Moreover, the introduction of multiple consciousness (in
Ulysses
,
The Sound and the Fury
,
Mrs. Dalloway
, and in
USA
,
Les Thibault
,
Les Chemins de la liberté
, right up through
The Naked and the Dead
) was also aiming at realism, in the sense of a wider representativeness, inspired by the social sciences. A democratization of the novel seemed to have been decreed, as specimens of every category of human being demanded equal treatment; the hero was demoted or sent into exile, and each human unit was allotted an eye of its own. Between the two wars, thanks to multiplicity and stream of consciousness—separately or in combination—the novel, though fractured, retained its ascendancy.

Few tales were published in this period, narrators had all but vanished, and romances had been sentenced to best-sellerdom—
So Red the Rose
,
Anthony Adverse
,
Gone With the Wind
. The novel’s besetting problem—credibility—seemed to have been bypassed, since multiple viewpoints (“Einsteinian relativity”) denied the possibility of establishing objective truth. In painting and sculpture, a similar development had occurred, and there too the process had begun (with the Impressionists) in a search for a greater realism and fidelity to the laws of perception that entailed the resolute junking of perspective.

The Second War and what it uncovered made drastic demands on the public’s power of belief, and the effect on the novel, though slow to be felt, has been radical and long-lasting. The old problem of credibility, with Auschwitz and Hiroshima, affected not travel tales but real central events, whose dominant trait had become unreality, utter unlikelihood encroaching on the stable and familiar and rapidly expanding its empire to include space, the gulag, nuclear terror. It was up to the novel, as custodian of the reality principle, to react. But, though the expectation was widely felt, there was no prompt response, unless one counts the parable of
1984
. The only indication that the novel was preparing to buckle down and help us believe the unbelievable was the return of the narrator—first noted, if I remember right, in
Lolita
. Not so long afterward came works dealing, not yet with the death camps but, more modestly, with such questions as the making of a fascist: Moravia’s
The Conformist
and
The Tin Drum
of Günter Grass, which showed the Nazi era, appropriately, from the “low” viewpoint of a grocer’s household in Danzig, with a dwarf child banging a toy drum as the focal consciousness.
Mr. Sammler’s Planet
,
Sophie’s Choice
,
The White Hotel
followed, each portraying, in one way or another, a survivor of the death camps whose individual experience is meant to relay, through letters, journals, flashbacks, interior monologue, a “found” manuscript—fiction’s familiar devices—“the central experience of our time.” All were best sellers, but none succeeded in carrying literary conviction; it is maybe not a good idea to reduce the incredible to a state of fictional believability. A persuader figure like Mr. Sammler makes the horrors still impinging on his consciousness seem considerably more unlikely than they were in factual reports.

There are some kinds of material with which the novel in its governing common sense is unequipped to cope. The trench experiences of World War I were at the very limit of the novel’s powers. In the matter of “the novelist’s responsibility,” silence would be preferable to the musings of a narrator like Stingo in
Sophie’s Choice
. Possibly it is a matter of tact.

In contrast with these efforts, I want to return to the first sentence of Joyce’s “The Dead,” which shows what the novel
can
deal with and what, more and more in our time, it has been condemned to deal with, like Sisyphus pushing his stone up the hill. I refer to the phenomenon of banality and repetition—Flaubert’s curse.

“Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.” Now maybe that does not strike anyone but me as worthy of notice. “What is new in it?” the reader may well ask. Or, rather, what
was
new in it when Joyce put it down? Fortunately, the question is easily answered. What is new is in the word “literally,” which of course is not to be taken literally—nobody is literally run off her feet. This should lead us to ask who is saying this silly, exaggerated thing. Not Joyce, clearly, not the narrator (there is no narrator), not Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist—he would not use a commonplace expression like that. If you listen carefully, you will overhear (as I have suggested) everybody talking, or nobody talking, which amounts to the same. And this new, strange
vox populi
was Flaubert’s invention (contemporary with early versions of the phonograph); you would not find it in Jane Austen or Balzac or George Eliot or Tolstoy though all of them were much concerned with the quality of ordinariness and its pervasive expressions, the noise that Heidegger called “chatter.”

This sound of echoing clichés, further amplified today by the new means of mass communication, must have a large responsibility in what is called the “death of the novel,” which depends on social intercourse for its characteristic life, on parties like Anna Pavlovna Schérer’s at the opening of
War and Peace
, on public meetings and every kind of get-together—think of the
comices agricoles
in
Madame Bovary
, think of the fete for needy governesses in
The Possessed
, think of Proust. The discovery Joyce made in “The Dead,” surely, was the seedy, moribund state of all this human commerce, once full of life and variety, now good for nothing (he must have concluded), serving no purpose that could be considered “creative,” not even the ends, always rather questionable, of satire. The reversion to myth and incantation, as Gabriel at the end stands at the window, is a judgment on the world of the novel.

The mechanization (by now automation) of the social in the modern world has affected not only public events. It has penetrated the inner life of the modern person, so that it was bound to become apparent in the stream of consciousness like a pollutant in a river from the dumping of factory waste. Joyce, particularly sensitized to these effluents, would soon be noting the internalizing of triteness in
Ulysses
—in Molly Bloom’s monologue and the occasional riot, as in the Oxen of the Sun episode, of parody and pastiche. And it became the entire subject of
Finnegan’s Wake
, which is an encyclopedia not of knowledge but of the trash collected in the human consciousness jointly by Everybody-Nobody. (Nothing is totally new. The
Wake
had been anticipated, albeit mildly, by Bouvard and Pêcuchet’s “Dictionary of Received Ideas.”)

Yet the lint in the recesses of our gray matter, as in the inside of our pockets, could not fail to be inartistic, and I doubt that
Finnegan’s Wake
, for all its musicality, its spiraling form, and so on, was designed to give pleasure, as works of art do. Rather, it seems almost designed to give offense, as though Joyce fully accepted the price to be paid by the man who
would
write a novel in the present age. It is hard to guess whether he foresaw that he would be exchanging readers of the customary kind for scholars and specialists, whose pleasures in the act of reading are perverse to a repellent degree. Probably he did, being a churlish spirit, trained to sour amusement. His contempt is open: anybody not caring for his “trashy” masterpiece is free to turn to tales and romances; we see the author indicate with his stick the scraps of them strewn about his vast dust heap. But for anyone still desirous of that baggy thing called a “novel,”
Finnegan’s Wake
, he can assure the world, is the only choice left.

I do not disagree. If there was ever a theme set, like a fairy-tale task, for the modern novel, it was not the horrors (“Heart of Darkness”), not the incredible or the apocalypse, but the universal ordinary, which presents no believability problem, except to the higher reason. As has often been said,
Finnegan’s Wake
was a dead end; it led nowhere for those who came after. The letter scratched up by the chicken in Earwicker’s back yard incriminating the householder with its nonsensical banality may well have been the novel’s suicide note.

Montreal, Oakland, Poughkeepsie, 1981-82

REVIEWS AND CRITICISM

The Tolstoy Connection

F
OR WESTERN READERS ALEXANDER
Solzhenitsyn’s
August 1914
is a difficult book. The geography is unfamiliar; the logistics are bewildering to anybody but a military specialist; and the chronology is not easy to follow since the scene keeps shifting and many events overlap. Here the author has, in fact, been helpful, taking pains to scatter unobtrusive dates in each of the episodes (there are sixty-four chapters, which comprise fifty-five episodes told in direct narration, two flashbacks, four summaries, three montages of newspaper clippings) as they unroll, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in sequence, during the fatal month of August 1914.