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VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE WEST |
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21. The Faithful Witness It is hardly surprising that those who hold power should attempt to control the words and language people use. Determining how individuals communicate is the best chance rulers have to control what they think. Clumsy men try to do this through violence and fear. Heavy-handed men running heavy-handed systems attempt the same thing through police- enforced censorship. The more sophisticated the elites, the more they concentrate on creating integrated intellectual systems which control expression through the communications structures. These systems require only the discreet use of censorship and uniformed men. In other words, those who take power will always try to change the established language. And those who hold power will try to control it. Governments produced by the most banal of electoral victories, like those produced by the crudest of coups d'etat, will always feel obliged to dress themselves up linguistically in some way. At stake are not simply particular temporary arguments but the entire baggage of a civilization. What a language says about a society's history will create mythology, direct the individual's imagination and limit or justify whatever those in power wish to do. We can recount our own history in a myriad of ways, twisting the origins and characteristics of the individual, the passage of kings, the sequence of wars, the evolution of architecture, the. relationship between rich and poor, between men and women to suit whatever is currently at stake. But anyone attempting a disinterested look will notice that each major change in structure is either preceded or rapidly followed by some revolution in language. For the last half century, we have been lost in a jungle of social sciences which claim to have released man from the intellectual manipulations of the past, thanks to the application of disinterested rational analysis. And yet a calm look at any specific subject they have touched reveals that their objectivity has been just another interested manipulation of language. The wordsmith -- prophet, singer, poet, essayist, novelist -- has always been either the catalyst of change or, inversely, the servant of established power. He breaks up the old formulas of wisdom or truth and thus frees the human imagination so that individuals can begin thinking of themselves and their society in new ways, which the writer must then express in new language. He may also put himself at the service of the new powers in order to build linguistic cages in which that freed imagination may be locked. The breakup of the old Western linguistic order began in the fourteenth century, when men like Dante, Petrarch and Chaucer created remarkable social reflections by infusing their local languages with the genius of great poetry. They intentionally set these vulgar tongues in opposition to the Latin of the official religious and intellectual order. This breakup turned into what might be better described as a breakout in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with first the dramatization of reality led by Shakespeare and Moliere, then the insidious informality of the essay, which with Michel de Montaigne and Abraham Cowley began questioning the theoretical truths of their time, and finally the birth of a rough and undignified means of communication -- the novel. In the hands of a one-armed old soldier like Cervantes and a troublemaking doctor like Rabelais, these simple prose stories created entire models of civilization for every man's imagination -- models which reflected reality and not the official portrait of the world order. Finally, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this novel form came to full strength, poking its reflecting eye into the smallest corners of the established order. From Swift and Voltaire to Goethe, Dickens, Tolstoy and Zola, it mocked and dissected everything from the grand mythologies to the methods of industrial production and the ambitions of a small-town doctor's wife. The novel was not a product or a creature of reason. It was the most irrational means of communication, subject to no stylistic order or ideological form. It was to intellectual order what animism is to religion devoid of organized precedence or dependence on social structure. For the purposes of the novelist, everything was alive and therefore worthy of interest and doubt. At its best the novel became a vehicle for humanistic honesty. However, like democracy, it rose in tandem with the forces of reason. The endless specifics of reform made them allies to such a degree that the novel became the dominant linguistic form of the rational revolution. In that process novelists became famous people and important factors in the process of social evolution. They wrote about every aspect of civilization and, if they had examined a problem seriously and then written well about it in their fiction, they could make an impact on the condition of the peasantry, public education, the morality of empire building or indeed on what women thought about men and men about women. Most citizens still see our contemporary wordsmiths as an independent voice given more to criticizing the established powers than to praising them. And yet it is hard to think of another era when such a large percentage of the wordsmiths have been so cut off from general society and when language has been so powerless to communicate to the citizens the essence of what is happening around us and to us. The workings of power have never been so shielded by professional verbal obscurantism. The mechanisms of waste disposal management, opera houses, universities, hospitals, of everything to do with science, medicine, agriculture, museums and a thousand other sectors are protected by the breakdown of clear, universal language. Strangely, writers seem unwilling or unable to attack effectively this professional obscurantism. In fact, the majority actively participate in it. They claim independence from established authority, but accept and even encourage the elitist structures that literature has developed over the last half century. As indignant individuals they rightly criticize power, but as writers they tend to encourage, through their own use of specialized literary forms, the Byzantine layering of language which divides and confuses our society. They have saved from the writers inheritance his desire to speak out in the name of justice, but many have forgotten that this involves doing so first via their writing. In their rush to become part of rational society, which means to become respected professionals in their own right, they have forgotten that the single most important task of the wordsmith is to maintain the common language as a weapon whose clarity will protect society against the obscurities of power. The professional, by definition, is in society. He has his assigned territory over which his expertise gives him control. The writer is meant to be the faithful witness of everyman and should therefore be neither within society nor without. He must be of society -- the constant link between all men. Novelists had the power to make the new middle-class citizenry dream of freedom. They created a force which could pierce the shield of authority. That force consisted of ideas, situations and emotions clearly communicated. They used this to collapse the credibility of Church dogma and to layout a path which the nascent democratic regimes could follow. They defined and posted and defended on a continuous basis the standards expected from a responsible citizen. They became the voice of the citizen against the ubiquitous raison d'etat, which reappeared endlessly to justify everything from unjust laws and the use of child labour to incompetent generalship and inhuman conditions on warships. In places such as Russia, the novelist's was a loud voice widely and constantly heard, leading the way from the Napoleonic Wars to the Revolution of 1917. Throughout the West these storytellers, along with the poets and the essayists, baited and attacked and mocked again and again those with power and the systems they ran. The themes they popularized have gradually turned into the laws which, for all their flaws, have improved the state of man. Emotion -- so out of favour today in the management of public affairs -- was one of the strengths novels used to neutralize the most convincing explanations of state interest and of financial necessity. A great novelist could keep his head up and his words flowing even in the passionate gales produced by the supermen Heroes, who increasingly seized power and wreaked general havoc. Elsewhere in society brilliant and decent men of reason were silenced by these Heroes. Reason, they discovered, eliminated the emotional force necessary to fight back. The novelist could be saved from this trap by his need to communicate with everyman, but also by the need to animate characters who were as real as real men and women. The novelist preached reason but was himself dependent upon common sense, constantly balancing intellect with emotion. He served our imagination through his devotion to clarity and universality. Those wordsmiths who in some way served established power almost always preached complexity and the obscurity of superior language. With success and influence the novelists kept on multiplying until there were more of them than anyone could have imagined. And so, in the last years of the twentieth century, the citizen stares out expectantly into the vast scribbling crowd in search of the new Tolstoy, Zola's successor, Goethe reborn, Conrad or Lorca, and he does indeed find great writers and great novels. But above all he finds changed expectations, as the writing community is increasingly dominated by intractable purveyors of novels too opaque for any public beyond the semiprofessional reader, bevies of approving or disapproving professors of literature, multiplying hordes produced by creative-writing schools, esoteric sects producing high art of the sort which used to belong in the world of the vanity press and scores of hands rushing out detailed confessions of their personal loves and anxieties. Where the dangerous wordsmith and his weapon -- the word -- once led, a grand army of introspection, style and literary analysis now holds sway. It is easy to bemoan a society in which the creative word no longer carries great weight in the large and small arguments of the day. But, citizens rightly ask -- What does this person know to merit our ears? Even those writers, great and otherwise, who address the real world in their fiction, find that they are tarred by the broad brush of literature's withdrawal into professionalism and specialization. Perhaps this slide away from reality is simply part of an inevitable decline into dotage. After all, over the last seven hundred years the great centre stage of public communications has been held by a series of quite different dramatic forms. Thus the ballad gave way to the poem; and the poem more or less to the play and to the essay; and both of these to the novel. Now the electronic image is in the process of squeezing the novel out of the limelight. None of these forms ever quite disappears. But they do slip off the centre stage, out of the public's view and into the wings. There they hang about like dissatisfied old troupers, still convinced they could do it better than the newcomers. Yet history has little sympathy for the wordsmith as a delicate flower. And neither fatigue nor intellectual gentility are strong arguments for passivity. The evolution of language can be reduced to a series of breakouts in the direction of that clarity which allows ideas to be delivered and understanding promoted. Those are the moments when writers explode the established arguments and light up the obscurities of power. Nothing is more terrifying to those in authority, whether their power is over a country, a factory or a child. They quickly launch hunts to recapture this wild language and, once successful, force it back into appropriate order. Two factors are constant: in its moments of freedom, language seeks clarity and communication; when imprisoned, the word instead becomes a complex and obscure shield for those who master it. Over the last two and a half millennia, Western language has managed three escapes from the prison of established and appropriate order. The first occurred in the city-state of Athens, the second through the person of a young man who preached as the Messiah. The third started out audaciously with the genius of Dante and grew in strength despite constant opposition until it reached a maximum of freedom in the novel. That language now seems perilously close to being recaptured by the forces of order. *** It was clear from the beginning of the Athenian escape that the resulting freed language would be the servant of the individual and not of established power. When Solon was called upon to save Athens from its financial, legal and political crisis in 594 B.C., he was already the greatest poet of his time and an experienced political figure. The reforms he brought about in turn laid the foundations for the city's greatness. More important still, he fixed firmly into the Western imagination a conviction that moderation and honesty were the essence of public affairs. His main weapon was the word and he proved that it could be a force for restraint, rather than an incitement to extremes, as so much of our history has seemed to show. He established not that writers should govern or preach but that their words should carefully reflect the reality of their times in the context of what was possible for men to understand and to act upon. This freeing of language in 594 B.C. was an unexpected opportunity made possible by a crisis so great that the structures of established power were helpless. Solon may have been the leading populist poet of the day, but his greatest enemy was also poetry. The genius of Homer had provided the justifying texts for the old order. [1] The Iliad and The Odyssey, with their official gods and Heroes, had a stranglehold on imagination and power. Acceptance that humanity's affairs were decided on both the large and the personal scales at the level of divinities left no room for either individual responsibility or initiative. In fact, it invited the arbitrary and chaotic rule of Heroic leaders. Once the Athenian crisis had been dealt with and Solon had modestly withdrawn from power, his constitution was overthrown by the' conservative forces. He had provided an alternate model for government, but not the more important thing -- an alternate model for civilization and the individual. Over the next two and a half centuries the struggle he had initiated swayed back and forth. Pericles made political advances which were superficially impressive but fragmentary on the level of the imagination. The invasion of wandering sophists -- experts on various subjects who had great success selling their advice -- demonstrated how confused the population was. These sophists bore an astonishing resemblance to our social scientists and technocrats. Then, in the years around 400 B.C., Socrates and Plato resolved at least the issue of language. Socrates' persistent attacks on doubtful knowledge were often aimed at the poets. He was attacking not only the Homeric dictatorship but also the old school of conservative poets-playwrights. By persisting with his loud, often rude questions and refusing to write a word himself, he undermined their control of the language. By questioning everyone in a simple, popular tongue, he was giving power to that part of the language not controlled by established forms. In the end they formally accused him of heresy and of corrupting the minds of the young and, by a vote of 280 to 221, condemned him to death. This unjust and unwise victory backfired and brought about the undoing of the old order of the imagination. Plato, one of Socrates' students, was profoundly marked both by the trial and the subsequent legally imposed suicide. He felt driven to layout a fundamentally secular and balanced way of organizing society. Whatever their flaws The Republic and other texts provided a complete alternate model for civilization and the individual. This illumination of nonarbitrary human relationships was so successful that every succeeding Western society has felt obliged to take it into account, as often to gain control over the individual's mind as to release it. Perhaps the most ironic claim of lineage has come in the last century from our own technocracy. The Athenian breakout of language pitted moral standards and free thought -- which were at first embedded in simple language and then in philosophy -- against the highly evolved beauty of poetry which demanded unquestioning consent from the individual. The second outbreak again began with simple language, again unwritten but this time preached. Christ's populist prose was inevitably pitted against sophisticated religions -- first Judaism and then the heroic and divine panoply of Roman gods. The few simple words he uttered seemed to have a universal and inherently uncontrollable strength such that their influence grew despite the obscurity of his life and death. They survived the interpretations of the unknown scribes who produced the texts which were gathered together as the Gospels. Christ's language witnessed reality in such a way that no organized power could control his meaning or profit from it. Even the subsequent compromises made by the Church in order to win support from the emperor and the bureaucratic officials in Rome did not limit the force of his actual words. It was only thanks to the contested and late inclusion in the New Testament of the Book of Revelations that governments and the administrators of formal religion were able to gain control over Christ's language. Rome pushed hard for inclusion. Constantinople and the Church in the east were strongly opposed. This fourth-century argument was almost a rehearsal for the subsequent dispute over idolatry, which began in earnest with Damasus's election as Pope in 361 and dragged on until 841, when the iconoclastic struggle ended with virtual victory for Rome's position in favour of idol worship. The premise of Revelations was that an old man called John, living on the island of Patmos, could deliver a prophesy revealed to him by the risen Jesus Christ. Five verses into the text, John establishes his privileged relationship by introducing Christ as "the faithful witness" who, with "a great voice as of a trumpet," instructs him to write. The "faithful witness" is the one who sees and speaks accurately and thus is to be trusted. John therefore goes on to convey Christ's message to the churches on earth. What follows are pages of raving. These include the entire pagan, superstitious, dark tradition which had dominated the Western barbarian imagination until the arrival of Christianity. Northrop Frye has shown that the Book of Revelations is nothing more than a compendium of mythological elements drawn from the Old Testament. [2] But this is precisely the sort of mythology which, when isolated from the main narrative, Judaism had in common with every other sect in the Mediterranean basin. The mesmerizing beauty of the words and images cannot be denied -- majestic, filled with foreboding, threats and promises -- offering a tantalizing physical view of heaven, which Christ had so carefully avoided; providing, in fact, a complete and complex model for the Christian imagination. Once the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Seven Seals and the whores of Babylon, along with a false and facile division of the world into good and evil, had been given equal footing in the New Testament with the Sermon on the Mount, it was hardly surprising that the Christian language had been undermined to the point where it was as malleable as any old moon cult. In fact, more malleable. Pagan cults were often difficult for those in power to deform or manipulate because they combined strict public ritual with a narrow set of ironclad rules. Paul and his Epistles are often blamed for Christianity's strange tangents. But his contributions were merely politics and policy. John's Revelations altered the nature of the Christian ethic. It blew the Christian message so wide open that any extreme action, good or evil, could be justified -- self-sacrifice, martyrdom, purity, devotion and concern for others had no greater purchase in Christ's official Testament than did racism, violence or absolutism of any sort. Whoever wrote John's text was consciously or unconsciously in the service of organized authority. Official inclusion did not necessarily guarantee Revelations equal standing with those earlier Gospels which actually quoted the living Christ on the basis of firsthand evidence. Much of the credibility for a prophesy theoretically received from the risen Son of God came from a widespread belief that the author was the Disciple John who, years before, had also theoretically written one of the Gospels. Of course, anyone who wanted to know knew that they were two different people. For a start, the earliest manuscript of John's Gospel is in Greek, while that of Revelations is in Hebrew. The Church never actually said that the young fisherman/Disciple and the old man on the island of Patmos were one and the same. Instead the authorities remained vague on the subject. They permitted the misunderstanding to spread, which it did so successfully that most preachers, pastors and even priests still believe there was only one John. For the quasi totality of believers who, from the fourth century on, simply accepted that one man wrote both texts, it was impossible not to give his later revelations equal value with his earlier work. If he lied on Patmos, then why would we believe his original Good News about Christ? And since his Gospel matches those of Matthew, Mark and Luke, if John lied, then why should anyone believe any of them? Thousands of theologians would later contribute to the capture, binding and disarming of the original Christian language; Saint Augustine first among them. Perhaps the most effective method they found was the maintenance of the Bible in Latin, so that the original simple oral message could only be received in the form of an authorized interpretation by a priest. Even so, the real victory of official complexity over simple free language was already long over, having taken less than four hundred years from when Christ first preached. *** The third and greatest breakout of language began tentatively inside the Christian church in the thirteenth century and eventually came to a culmination through the novel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It seems now to be almost over, our dominant language today being one of reassurance, confusion and control. That this revolution began in the Church was hardly surprising. Christianity was the universal truth of Western civilization. There was no serious dissenting position outside that idea. The obvious alternative, for anyone wishing to withdraw from the ideological and bureaucratic complexities of the Christian empire, was to return to the simplicity of the Church's founder. Francis of Assisi, son of a rich merchant, set aside all the benefits of his civilization in 1206. His physical emulation of Christ's simple way of life was eloquent. More revolutionary, however, was his setting aside of a millennium of intricate theology and ideology to think and speak in the simple oral tongue of Christ. [3] This came in a world still dominated by the rich, mystical obscurity of another saint, Bernard of Clairvaux, who had died fifty years before. Francis's opting out was passive and suggested no challenge to authority. His message flashed through Europe like an electric current -- oral and therefore intellectually invisible, escaping all ideological and theological structures, controls and traps. However, as with Socrates and Christ, oral dissent becomes the property of structures when the spokesman dies. The Church recuperated Francis's message by burying his memory in sainthoods, basilicas, writings and paintings -- all the formal honours, in other words, that authority can dispense. If there was to be an alternate model for the imagination it would have to come through the written word. This would have to begin unfolding through the forms which were already in existence -- first poetry, then poetry on stage, then drama in prose, before evolving into the novel. The idea of narrative -- of the story -- was there from the beginning, inching its way through different media towards an autonomous existence. But perhaps the greatest works of genius came very early on, through the mechanisms of the older forms. The fourteenth century was filled with these explosions of language, as Dante, then Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer seized essentially secular local languages which they exploited in order to reflect human reality. But they also filled and formed them with their own genius and imagination. Poetry was therefore at the very centre of the public stage. Dante, a leader in Florentine city-state politics, was forced into exile in 1302 and consciously chose to write not in Vulgar Latin, but in a vulgar local dialect which was the fresh, straightforward and unchained language of the people. The same can be said of Petrarch, a papal courtier; Boccaccio, a Florentine public servant; and Chaucer. who was in the service of the king before becoming a civil servant. This humanist explosion was driven in part by a conviction that such poetry could have a profound effect on the reader. The writers were also fully conscious that they were sliding along a very thin line between social dissent, which could cost them their positions and perhaps their lives, and innocent verse, which wished merely to inform and to delight. So long as the poem remained the weapon of men concerned by and involved in the real world, it maintained its popular force. The examples are endless. Alexander Pope, political meddler. John Milton, jailed for his political and religious beliefs. Walter Raleigh. adventurer and courtier. Aleksandr Pushkin, Decembrist sympathizer. Mikhail Lermontov, exiled for his poem attacking Pushkin's murderers -- "You greedy crowd that round the sceptre crawl." Alphonse de Lamartine, leader of the 1848 Revolution. Victor Hugo, scourge of Louis-Napoleon. That Hugo was among the most famous men of the second half of the nineteenth century and Byron nearly the most famous of the first does not really impress the world of contemporary literature. It merely seems to confirm that Romanticism didn't produce important verse. But the fame of Hugo and Byron had nothing to do with their style. It had to do with a willingness and an ability to reflect their own times. When Byron wrote, "All contemplative existence is bad. One should do something," he meant that words are what you do, not what you are. You must try to do something in the world -- not in order to succeed, as if it were a matter of banal ambition, but in order to be there. in order to understand how to produce real words. Throughout the long debate over the proper role of poetry, the Republic of Dubrovnik remained a peculiar and stable poetic example sitting on the edge of the West. Isolated and protected by the cliffs behind and the sea in front, Dubrovnik was the closest the Christian world ever came to recreating Athens. It was governed much of the time by its leading poets and lasted a thousand years, from the ninth to the nineteenth century, which also made it the longest lived of Western political organizations. The rectors of this city-state were changed monthly on a revolving basis. Their characteristics were a high level of education and, more often than not, an ability to denounce injustice and defend liberty through their verse. [4] In those thousand years. the city held off or maintained loose alliances with the Muslims. the Turks. the Venetians and the Austrians. Despite having one of the largest commercial fleets on the Mediterranean, they defended themselves without a navy or an army. Their strength was a remarkably astute foreign policy which neutralized their enemies. The poets also excelled in the particularly difficult negotiations which played the city's various rivals and enemies off against each other. Needless to say, it was Bonaparte, the destroyer of republics, who brought the by-then-aged system to an end. Already in the early nineteenth century, the forces throughout the West that wished to drag poetry off into the wings of contemplation, specialization and elitism were growing. The centre stage was already being occupied by the novel. Later in the century, the shift was more or less complete. Even a genius like Baudelaire, who in some ways was one of the new inward-looking poets and yet who wrote with the full power of a popular wordsmith, was unable to find a window through to the public. "Any book," he wrote, "which does not address itself to the majority -- in number and in intelligence -- is a stupid book." [5] The burgeoning intellectual elites who "controlled" French poetry kept him out of the anthologies, school manuals and encyclopedias long after he was dead. Similar battles took place in the theatre. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries national languages were exploding on stages around Europe. Emotions, politics, national consciousness, love, ambition were all being expressed with an accuracy and originality never seen before. No one would have thought to differentiate between theatre for the elites and theatre for the people. The various parts of the audience took what suited them from plays like King Lear or Hamlet, whose staying power still seems to come in large part from this populist conception. Most of the audience, after all, was poor and uneducated. Moliere came later in the evolution of French than Shakespeare did in English, so his role had less to do with explosive creativity than with a remarkable turning up of the lights of clarity and understanding. Although somewhat better educated than the Englishman, he, too, was an actor-producer-writer and by no means what his contemporaries would have considered a man of learning. He put on his plays both at court and in Paris and wrote for all parts of French society. The Church, the courtesans and the more serviceable pens were infuriated by his ability to expand apparently simple comedies, containing simple, accessible language, into social commentaries which directly attacked those who had money or who used the courts to advance their ambitions. They did everything they could to stop him and from time to time were able to close him down or turn the king against him. But Moliere's pen was faster and sharper and more popular than their backroom politics. Above all, he had the public with him because he reflected the world as it was. In the midst of the greatest controversy of his career, when he was under constant physical threat and the menace of being removed from court as well as shut down in Paris, he replied with a play which sent up his critics. In the middle of La Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes he paused to rub the noses of his literary rivals in their failure to carry the great public: "I'd just like to know," one of the characters mused, "whether the greatest rule of all the rules isn't to please." [6] It was precisely this undefeatable power of the popular word -- the word that pleases -- which had driven Richelieu to create the French Academy." The blows from a sword are easily healed," he wrote in his Political Testament." But it is not the same with blows of the tongue." [7] The Academy was apparently devoted to developing language and literature. However, by its own internal logic, an official body devoted to language could only be driven by a desire for respectability and a conviction that if anyone was to be pleased, it was established authority. In more practical terms, a literary organization empowered to define could not help but be devoted to control. Richelieu's understanding of systems and how they could be used to control ideas was, as always, astonishing. His use of the Academy to honour writers is still not generally understood to be a fine method for disarming dangerous language. If it had been understood, writers would not have run so eagerly to support other academies around the world. With the exception of a short period in the second half of the eighteenth century, when almost all French institutions were slipping out of control, the Academy has done precisely what the Cardinal expected. It has been a conservative force working against ungoverned explosions of language. The essence of the faithful witness is that he seeks no honour for his words, except from the public. The ability to reflect accurately and to communicate directly requires an absolute freedom from any obligation as a writer to any organized structure. A writer can be involved in the world in a nonliterary capacity so long as his language is not directly bound to any interest. The worst of all possible combinations is to be out of the world as a man and yet bound to its structures as a writer. The gradual marginalization of poetry and drama as the principle means of public communication can be attributed in part to such public ties. Never freed of their origins stretching back to Homer and increasingly imprisoned by the now stable national languages, poets found themselves writing more against their own past than to the reader. This poetry of reference, however brilliant and explosive, necessarily had to be turned inward, cutting off the public reflection. The growth of literary studies encouraged this, as did the growth of academies and prizes. What to intellectuals seemed revolutionary, to the outer world seemed elitism. Poetry had at first been liberated by the exploitation of local languages that began in the fourteenth century. But the more poets plunged into local forms, the less sense their verse made in other tongues. To all intents and purposes it became untranslatable, although much of it was translated and published. The result is that the leading poets of the last hundred years are virtually unknown outside their own languages. Mallarme influenced poets everywhere, but who else? Pound and Eliot wrote astonishing things about the modern world. How many French or Germans are aware of this? Rimbaud's myth as a tragic Hero has travelled, but not his poetry. Apollinaire, Eluard, Auden, Char, even Yeats, seem hopelessly limited by language. Today there are poetry festivals almost every day in different universities throughout the West. There poets read to each other. This is not a forced imprisonment. Outside the Western democracies poets still communicate easily with the public through their verse. This is a prison constructed of the poets' own language in their own minds with materials such as dignity, formality, appropriate styles and appropriate structures -- an imprisonment of the imagination by heightened self-consciousness. Theatre has been hampered by many of these same problems in addition to its dependence on a material infrastructure. The need to fill large halls with assembled crowds is not just an economic factor. It also creates a lack of flexibility -- of light-footedness -- which at the hint of political difficulties becomes a major disadvantage. *** Those who first used the novel form were a minority voice in a civilization still dominated by religious parables, oral storytelling, traditional epic poetry and all the newer forms of poetry, theatre and essays. Yet even in its early picaresque appearances, the latent power of this new method came bursting out. Amadis de Caule, perhaps the first real novel, was theoretically just an adventure story filled with the rules of well-bred worldliness. It appeared in Spain in 1508 and rapidly became one of the largest-selling books of all time, spreading throughout Europe and creating, as it went, a revolution in social perceptions. The curious, contradictory relationship between the rise of the novel and that of reason begins here. Machiavelli's The Prince, the first intellectual exposition of the new rational method, appeared in 1513. As for Amadis, he became the model for the wandering chivalrous individual of fiction. The twentieth-century existential heroes are reverberations of that knight, still fixated on the contradiction between the responsibility attached to honour, as opposed to their personal freedom, which requires staying outside all structures. One way to understand the power in these books is to look at who wrote them. Cervantes: professional soldier, captured by the Turks, a slave for five years, one of the planners of the Armada. He was also jailed several times for fraud and murder. Rabelais: a physician devoted to theological law, politics, military strategy and botany. Daniel Defoe, author of the first modern English novel, Robinson Crusoe: merchant, rebel soldier under the Duke of Monmouth, secret agent for William III and journalist. Henry Fielding: lawyer and polemicist. In The Welsh Opera, he attacked the royal family and in The Historical Annals, turned on Walpole. He was eventually made a judge and set about writing Tom Jones as part of his dual campaign against poverty and dishonest judges. Jonathan Swift: political polemicist, Anglican priest and defender of Irish rights. He told Pope that his aim in writing Gulliver had been "to vex the world rather than to divert it." Voltaire: philosopher, polemicist, political agitator, courtier, imprisoned in the Bastille, exiled in England, adviser to both Empress Catherine the Great of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia, highly successful gentleman farmer and, as has already been noted, the most famous man of the eighteenth century. Lermontov: adventurer and professional soldier; died in a duel. Goethe: senior government official in Weimar. Tolstoy: professional soldier, political agitator and landowner devoted to experimental farming and revolutionary new farm management methods which, needless to say, included land reform and a new deal for the peasants. All these people were searching about for new written forms which would break out of the established debates and have the sort of impact those in authority could not easily control. The novel rose in interwoven tandem with journalism and so novelists tended also to be pamphleteers and polemicists, writers of tracts and broadsides, political satirists and moralists. During his exile in England, Voltaire had seen the combination aggressively exploited by Swift. But that was not exceptional. Wherever there was a sufficient crack in the censorship laws to permit publication, novels and journalists rose like Siamese twins. These driven men were not convinced, at least not in the early days, that a frivolous thing like the novel would help to change the world. Many of them had been taken in by the growing elitism which surrounded poetry and the stage. The superiority of those in decline seems always to undermine the self-confidence of those on the rise. Voltaire worked much harder at his poems and plays -- nobler art forms, he believed - than at his novels. His epic poem La Henriade (1723) illustrated the life of Henri IV, who came closer than any other to the ideal of the good king. Zaire (1732), an heroic tragedy written according to the established rules of the stage, played out the agonies of honour, power and betrayal. He was convinced that classic forms of literature, when combined with his influence on monarchs such as Catherine the Great and Frederick the Great, would create the maximum pressure for social and political change. He and others believed that these rational monarchs would respond with reforms. For decades he wasted time praising the Prussian King's endless and mediocre rhyming couplets. This shared devotion to the noblest of art forms seemed like a guarantee that change would come. Voltaire's poems and plays had great success but little secondary effect in the world outside books and theatres. They were eventually forgotten. But his frivolous little novels, thrown off more in frustration than out of any great belief in their artistic or moral value, immediately revealed a force of their own. Like his poems and plays, they had great popular success. But apart from the pleasure they brought the reader, novels like Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759) miraculously vaporized the dominant intellectual argument in favour of passivity before established systems. His fiction did not respond intellectually and win debates. It simply permitted readers to understand instinctively that such arguments were nonsense. The secret of the novel seemed to be that, alone of the word forms, it created a complete world, and one which the public could easily penetrate. A novel belonged to the solitary reader in a way that no poem, play or essay could, It was free standing, three-dimensional and open to any man's view of it. The novelist seemed little more than a cipher for the public's reflection of itself. It was as if each reader had written the book himself. As if in some way each novel was read as an autobiography of the reader. Indeed, one of the novel's great strengths is that, at some unconscious level, each reader does believe he has written it. And he consciously believes that he could have written it. The greater the novel, the more easily the reader slips into this confusion. The novelist and his ego must obviously be invisible or such confusion would not be possible. The more the writer is visible in his fiction, the less the readers can participate. They must settle instead for a sort of intellectual voyeurism. While the role of the peeping tom may give pleasure, it is vastly inferior to that of the participant. The great novelists therefore disappeared from their books. Perhaps most surprising was the ease with which this new form could be used by both writers and readers. There seemed to be neither inherent nor man-made limitations to the emotions it could provoke or to what it could evoke about public and private affairs. There were no arguments to be had over complex poetic forms. The only limitations were those the laws could impose. And unlike drama, there were no theatres for the authorities to close down. Books could be banned, but without great success since it was difficult to guess in advance what the public might read into a story. Governments could seize printing presses, but there were always more of these simple machines just across borders. And books slipped easily over borders and under counters. They were too small to be detected and too numerous to control. What's more, by writing in the language of the people, novelists ensured that the potential public included everyone who could read. In the 1530s Rabelais's Gargantua began its comic obscene romp across medieval good behaviour, attacking idle monks, pointless wars and dogmatism. Under the form of high comedy, he was offering a common sense view of man. Rabelais was constantly in trouble with the law, as was Fielding, until his Tom Jones began to undermine the credibility of courts throughout England. There was in fact a solid wall between society and the reasonable use of words. That wall was established authority and structures, both civil and intellectual. The novelist, like a mortar, was able to lob the forces of language over the barrier of structure to society on the other side. The novel was the perfect missile, in that no effective antimissile could exist. There was nothing anyone could do to prevent its flight, apart from seize books, which was the equivalent of collecting mortar shells after they had hit their targets. Seizure was a tribute to the book and merely increased its success. None of this quite explains the response of the public to an apparently frivolous means of entertainment. Narrative was at the core of the novel's success. It was the unassuming use of the story which made it possible for the reader to find his or her reflection in the novel. Beyond that was the sense that life came to life in fiction. Even facts took on a new kind of hardness within the novel. Truth seemed clearer and easier to state. Fiction could be far more real than real life. It could perceive the realities of man's inner and outer lives. And although novels were theoretically limited by their devotion to popular and therefore local languages, it rapidly became clear that, compared to poetry and drama, they were easily translated. The narrative, characterizations, emotions and undogmatic style carried from one vernacular to another. Gargantua wasn't translated into English for a century (1653), but The Princess of Cleves appeared in 1679, a year after the French original. Robinson Crusoe was out in 1716 and soon being read throughout Europe; Gil Blas out in 1735 and into English by 1749. The conundrum of spreading literacy being limited to local languages could thus be bypassed by fiction. Where in all this was the writer as artist? From the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, he was running to keep up with the growing popularity of the novel, while inventing new and better ways to communicate true reflections to the largest possible number of people. He was developing the technical skills to make his mortar shells fly higher and farther. If art entered the picture at all, it was only as a judgment made by society upon the writer's work long after it was written -- more often than not as a sort of posthumous medal. And individuals do not go to war to win posthumous medals. As the nineteenth century advanced, novelists discovered that they could have an enormous effect not just upon government and power structures, but upon all sorts of social expectations. Even an apparently passive force, like Jane Austen, had impact simply because her witnessing of the world was so exact and so lifelike that many readers saw themselves for the first time and thus were able to take a new critical distance from themselves and their society. After the Reform Bill of 1832, British society remained uneasy for a good forty years. Political and social pressures were building on all sides for changes in such areas as the child labour laws, factory conditions and urban poverty. Into the midst of that unease Dickens dropped books like Oliver Twist and Hard Times. Most people knew that children were being exploited, the slums cruel and factory conditions intolerable. But that knowledge was abstract. Dickens took the middle-class husband and wife right into those slums and factories. He made them real places and therefore made the need for reform real. Alessandro Manzoni published his The Betrothed in 1825 with the same sort of effect. Theoretically it was an historical novel about the corrupt' oppression of the Spanish rule in Lombardy. Everyone understood that it was really about the Austrians, the current masters of northern Italy. In two decades, from 1827 to 1847, Balzac wrote ninety-one interwoven volumes of his Human Comedy, perhaps the most astonishing accomplishment of modern fiction. He created a portrait of contemporary France, including all the tensions between Paris and the provinces, which had an enormous impact not only on the French but also on readers and writers throughout the West. There was something in the novel's curious mixture of simple accessibility and complex content which made it the most accurate verbal reflection yet discovered. It permitted language to explode outwards again and again towards an ever-larger part of the population, as if humanity had finally invented a perpetual motion machine of the freed imagination. This could be seen in the books of Herman Melville, who -- although a mystic as much as a novelist -- nevertheless set his stories among the whale hunters (the oil industry) or in the navy or merchant marine. Even Flaubert strengthened the novel's force as a public reflection by making the writer disappear absolutely from the reader's consciousness while at the same time creating reflections in which people of no particular worth became "heroes." Thus the fictional hero ceased being one with the rational, public Hero. Perhaps this was the first sign that novelists wanted to distance themselves from the rational society they had done so much to create. Emma Bovary, for example, was unintelligent, selfish and nastily ambitious. By making her the main character, the one with whom we are meant to identify, Flaubert jolted the reader into a more acute state of consciousness. In the process he was dragged through the law courts for offending public morals. Although Flaubert was acquitted, his trial was a warning of the new administrative controls which society was developing. And yet fiction did not seem to have lost its steam by the century's end. In fact, Zola carried things a step further. He revived the old habits of the early "popular" novelists, like the elder Dumas, who had regularly gone out into society to research for three months and then returned to write for three. Year after year Dumas could be found in Russia studying the situation of the serfs, in Naples with Garibaldi, in Corsica with the bandits. Zola did not go so far afield, but he looked at his own society with an eye like a scalpel. He examined the stock exchanges and salons for L'Argent with the same detail as the slums and the mines for Germinal. It was as if the romantic eye of Dickens had been peeled of all its affectations. Zola found a way to bring to the page precisely what he saw. This concern carried him to the centre of the greatest crisis of the Third Republic -- the Dreyfus Affair. With his open letter to the President of the Republic, J'Accuse, he intentionally libelled the military command to force them back into court, where Dreyfus's lawyers could cross- examine them. The immediate result was that the court condemned Zola and this inadvertently carried the Affaire to the highest degree of politicization. It was as if every citizen at last felt obliged to take a stand on one side or the other. During a second trial, Zola walked out in protest and fled to England. In his absence he was condemned to a year of prison. Eleven months later the Affaire had so evolved that he was able to come home. [8] Although the literary community divided into pro- and anti-Dreyfus camps and writers seemed to be playing an ever-more-central role in public debates, in reality this was the high-water mark of the novelist's power. A new chorus of literary voices had been slowly growing during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. They claimed that the novel had to be written as an art form and not as a reflection of reality. For them someone like Zola was dealing in crude reality and writing little more than journalism. Fiction, they believed, was the opposite of reality. Involvement with society would merely corrupt it. In order to demonstrate that Zola had abandoned the mainstream and slipped off into mere category or genre fiction, the growing establishment of literary experts called his books naturalisme, as if to say that they were only real and lacked style. Or they called them roman-reportage, as if they were not real fiction because they drew too much on the real world. In truth Zola had simply strengthened the original link between the journalist-reporter- polemicist on the one hand, and the novelist on the other. Defoe, Swift, Voltaire, Diderot and hundreds of others had been products of that double approach. Zola had done no more than update the journalistic methods. *** The transformation of the individual into a specialist was nevertheless well under way in the rest of society. It was increasingly difficult to stay both in the system and out. Any involvement in a profession carried with it either a contractual or a moral commitment to remain silent in public about what that profession involved. Any deviation from what was felt to be professional parameters indicated a lack of seriousness. What had once been relatively common -- writers like Sheridan, Goethe and Lamartine holding public office -- became a rarity. Disraeli was the last English novelist to hold an important political position and when, as leader of the Conservative party, he published a new novel, his reputation was damaged. What was true for politicians was doubly true for civil servants, officers and other employees. Even lawyers and doctors, if they worked in large groups, began to feel the pressures of professional solidarity and therefore public silence. Those writers who wanted to remain part of the real world found that they were gradually being squeezed into an ever-narrower selection of professions. In fact, they were being squeezed out of the society they were meant to write about. They had always been marginal, but marginal had once described the privilege of free movement in and out. Now the rules proper to the boxes of expertise were keeping them on the outside. Only the rare individual could occupy more than one. And if rational society were to have made an exception to this rule, the privilege certainly would not have been given to writers. After all, they were nonprofessional individuals who wished to communicate uncontrolled truths to masses of nonprofessional people. What is more, through this process of exclusion, the writer was being denied the most sought-after reward of rational society -- respectability. He had not sought it in the past because he had been greatly admired. Now the growing mass of the respectable -- who were also the main readers of fiction -- began to look down upon the novelists. They were irresponsible. They lived on the margins like dancers and actors, lost in a world of alcohol, drugs and prostitutes. As more novelists turned away from the real world in order to balance art with fantasy, they were accused of being what the early novelists had often pretended to be in order to avoid censorship -- intellectual gypsies whose stories simply entertained innocent girls. As late as 1918 the British army demobilization forms, which broke men down into eighteen social and professional categories, listed the novelist on the eighteenth level, which consisted of leftovers, marginals and nonprofessionals, including gypsies, vagrants and other nonproductive persons. Change, however, was well under way. Fiction was being converted into an art form. And, as with all self-declared interest groups, it began to spend as much time justifying itself as it did actually producing real fiction. The world of writers was becoming bloated with hangers-on: doctors of literary analysis, devotees of specific writers, advocates of particular literary styles, chroniclers of literary gossip, perpetual secretaries of literary organizations, linguists and literary historians, to name just a few. Once the main subjects had been analyzed, the next generation of literary doctors had to focus on smaller and smaller details. They spent decades giving meaning to the tiniest aspects of each writer's life and then snarled at each other over the corpse. It was only a matter of time before the writer became a minority in his own world -- in general, an underprivileged minority. The literary professionals had such things as long- term contracts, university tenure and pension plans. While most writers were renting space in marginal neighbourhoods, the experts had entered into the middle-class world of property ownership. The writers were gradually becoming more regional and travelled little, while the professors were constructing for themselves a prefinanced, international, self-perpetuating travel machine, which required them to move around the world in order to research literature and to discuss it with other experts. That many of their subjects were poorer and led less stable lives was extremely helpful. The more a novelist drank, divorced, went bankrupt and had mental breakdowns, the more interesting he was to study and the easier it was to equate internal anguish with creativity. An image of the writer as a suffering, tragic, foolish, obsessive soul began to emerge. Baudelaire: syphilitic and absinthe addict. Verlaine: alcoholic. Joyce: poor and blind. Proust: asthmatic, closet homosexual. Fitzgerald: poor, alcoholic and impotent. Hemingway: alcoholic suicide. Wilde: imprisoned homosexual martyr. Kerouac, Burroughs, and company: drink, drugs and family tragedy. Through all of this ran the almost unbroken theme of uncontrolled egos and of genius labouring unrecognized in poverty. The career of the American writer Raymond Carver illustrated where all this would eventually lead. Specialists of literature fixed on him during the 1980s as a perfect, fresh example of the creator dogged by working-class roots plus family and alcohol problems. His work was rarely mentioned without reference to this personal colour. His premature death in 1989 came almost as a relief to his supporters. It freed them all to begin dividing the writer's body up into interesting morsels. That Carver died in his forties was a further benefit, confirming once again that writers are not made to live. At first glance there is no reason why Carver or any other writer should take notice of this necrophagy, with its combination of the absurdly analytical and the ghoulish. But literary scientists are professionals in exactly the same way that political scientists are. And so, in whatever direction they drag literature, writers have difficulty not being dragged along. The idea that they could change the nature of fiction may at first have seemed ridiculous, but they are like royal courtesans or military baggage trains. A king who allowed his court to grow out of control was leeched by the courtesans until they destroyed him, just as a swollen baggage train, laden with whores, pillage, cooks and home comforts caused armies to lose battles. Once the rational approach had provided literature with a multitude of specialized reasons for existing, its purpose could no longer be anything as base as communication with the reader. Instead, the relationship between the novel and its public came to be treated as an incidental or as an amusing subject worthy of gossip. That women had fainted when Byron read or that tens of thousands had welcomed Voltaire back to Paris in 1778 or that great crowds had come to hear Dickens, was the sort of information which belonged in light biographies. These were matters of little importance compared to the psychological interpretation of the writer and his words. Did Voltaire sleep with his niece? Was Byron bisexual? Did Dickens ever get over his childhood? The novel's relationship with the public came to be treated as indistinguishable from the writer's personal relationship with his public -- simply illustrations of ego and of Hero worship. They were of tertiary importance behind the examination of the work's artistic worth and the revelation of personal meaning. As Ford Madox Ford described the growing professionalism required by all this: "If you had told Flaubert or Conrad ... that you were not convinced of the reality of Homais or Tuan Jim, as like as not they would have called you out and shot you." Whereas an English novelist of the new period "would have knocked you down if they could, supposing you had suggested that he was not a gentleman." [9] In other countries we can replace "gentleman" with "intellectual" or "artist" or "professional." Although geniuses like Tolstoy and Mann were still writing and others like Orwell, Malraux, Hemingway, Greene and Camus were still to come, rules as to what constituted both a novel and a novelist were rapidly being written. Rebels like Julien Gracq would go on repeating, as he did in the 1960s, after refusing the principal accolade of the French literary establishment -- the Prix Goncourt -- for his novel Les Rivages des Syrtes, that "in art, there are no rules, there are only examples." But well before him Balzac had pointed out how self-serving the literary world had become -- a world in which "one loves only one's inferiors." And Spengler, in his hodgepodge of curious ideas, was arguing between the two world wars that modern writers "do not possess [any] real standing in actual life. Not one of them has intervened effectively either in higher politics, in the development of modern technics, in matters of communications, in economics or in any other big actuality with a single act or a single compelling idea." Aeronautics engineers know about airplanes and cardiologists know about hearts. But what does the average Western novelist now know? What is he to write about? What are his novels to contain? When Voltaire, Swift, Balzac and Zola wrote about government, industry, stock exchanges and science, they actually knew more than most of the people who were in those professions. The novelist was constantly pushing at the front edge of specific knowledge and understanding. Today's novelist, living as he usually does in the isolation of literature's own professional box, is unable to do this. What is it that he now knows profoundly enough to be able to write about? First, he knows about writing; second, about the world of writers; third, about the writer's inner life; and fourth, about his own practical situation, on the margins of the normal world, where he may exist in comfort or in poverty: At one extreme are those who write about writing -- the university novelists and the experimentalists. At the other are those who, like Raymond Carver, refuse this self- indulgent cocoon in favour of charting their own experiences on the edge. In neither case do we have the novelist running ahead of society, dragging everyone else behind. Walter Bagehot had already seen the problem looming late in the nineteenth century." The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything." *** As writers gradually lost their influence in society, so they fell back on the idea of art as its own justification. The seeds of this withdrawal were planted as early as Immanuel Kant and his "purposiveness without purpose" in art, It was not simply that a decadent school at the end of the nineteenth century had declared that art existed only for art's sake, Or that some genius like Wilde or Beaudelaire had added his weight to this argument. Language was gradually being brought under control by rational civilization and so the affected indifference of a few writers was not so much specific irresponsibility or egotism as one way of admitting defeat. Remy de Gourmont's aphorisms give a good sense of this petulant defeatism, which went as far as disgust for humanity." Number LXXXIII -- Better boredom than mediocre pleasure." Or, "we have no more principles and there are no more models; a writer creates his aesthetic by writing his books: we are reduced to relying on sensation, not judgment." [10] The flamboyant withdrawal of the aesthetes obscured the real effect of much of the Modernist movement. Everywhere writers agreed on the need to reveal the individual's inner perceptions or psychology. But the practical expression of this need was the gradual withdrawal of fiction as a whole into style and form. These were the two measurable characteristics which could make the writer a professional like everyone else. The effect of this demotion of content, emotion and purpose can be seen as early as the Goncourt brothers. They thought their novels provided a realistic, detailed portrait of society. And yet what they really believed came out on page one of the Journal they began to keep on December 2, 1851, the day their first novel was published. It also turned out to be the day of Louis-Napoleon's successful coup d'etat. The messenger who brought them the news of the coup was incensed when they enquired about the fate of the book -- "Your novel ... a novel ... France couldn't give a damn for novels today, my boys!" [11] And he ran off to rejoin reality on the barricades, leaving them to mope in their study. The way the Goncourt brothers told the story, there was an assumption of art's fragility and irrelevance when faced by reality. The self-hypnosis which the need to experiment with style and form was producing spread with astonishing rapidity. That this almost scientific approach was somehow related to unveiling the unconscious also made it seem to be relevant to the outside world. The excitement produced by radical changes in language and the genius; indeed madness, of many new practitioners, created a sense of progress. But the reality of this progress, when seen from the outside, was quite different. The writing profession was simply creating a dialect of its own -- a dialect as inaccessible to nonprofessionals as that of doctors and economists, In other words, from the thirteenth century on, writers had sought and created ever-wider understanding, Now they themselves had opted to restrict the use of language. The two most dramatic assertions of the death of literate, universal communications came early in the twentieth century with Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Once they had been adopted as the reigning geniuses of the modern revolution in literature, the novel was effectively dead as the leading linguistic tool for asking essential questions and changing society. What they did -- inadvertently in the case of Proust -- was to destroy both language and the story as bridges between the novel and the public: With a single stroke, they carried the novelist out of the domain of common sense and into that of reason maddened by logic. What Proust wrote, and intended to write, was a strong social and political novel about the destruction of the aristocracy and the rough-handed rise of the middle classes, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu was filled with the traumas suffered by the Jews in France, the profound divisions caused by the Dreyfus Affair, the pitiful etiquette of a society in decline and the crude ambitions of those on the way up. The whole thing ended with the offstage massacre of World War I, and the grotesque postwar reconstitution of a society pretending to be unchanged. The language and the narrative were perhaps drawn out, but they were clear. The literary community tended to focus its attention, however, on what it saw as a languid contemplation of the interior. From the charged story little more was retained than nostalgia. Proust was transformed from a terrorist into a custodian of memory -- a dream master delivering the literary nostalgia of things past. This is not memory as an active agent, linking past and present. This is simply the past -- passive and inoffensive. The overall effect of such an interpretation was to convert the "story" -- which had always been the strength of the novel -- into a coarse device that could be relegated to lesser categories of fiction. The situation became even more confusing a few years later when another writer nullified Proust's revolution by doing the exact opposite. Louis-Ferdinand Celine was probably this century's most revolutionary writer in French. He exploded the language, exploded convention and broke through to the general reader with an extraordinarily modern directness which gave new meaning and power to the story. But the ideas he communicated came crawling out of the mud of the trenches, and his marginal mental stability caused him to turn this pessimism into the voice of man's dark side. In a sense he became a brilliant voice for the worst of our past. His ideas seemed to belong with Proust's style. If Proust had delivered his vision with Celine's power and revolutionary clarity, the French novel might still be the greatest force in the Western language. The case of James Joyce was rather more straightforward. It is difficult to read his books as being written by other than an angry man filled with bitterness. He consciously felt himself to be the messiah of language and saw across on every corner. The anger he felt was in part the product of the divided society which had produced him -- an anger undigested by his. endless and unforgiving exile. He set out in his writing not, as is usually argued, to release the imprisoned word by destroying convention but to destroy communication itself. He closed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." What interests him is his own soul. There is no suggestion that he planned to pass on to others the forged results. And as first Ulysses, then Finnegans Wake demonstrated, indeed he did not. Like Proust, he filled his books with social and political drama, but what dominated in the Joycean revolution was the obscure language, which was inaccessible to most of the public. This obscurity was not an accident. Joyce, in his messianic fervour, was fully aware that he was wrenching the novel away from the public -- for whom it had been invented -- and delivering it to the literary experts. The great novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had often been written by doctors, engineers, soldiers and landowners. Joyce knew that his major works would not even be accessible as reading material to the doctors, engineers, soldiers and landowners of the twentieth century. Among university students, only those specializing in literature would open his books. And only a small number would make their way to the end. Whatever his genius, Joyce provided the justification for an elitist revolution designed to steal fiction from the people. It was as if he knew that critics, not the public, were going to be the new priests of literature and the guarantors of immortality, and that he had therefore set about single-handedly creating modern literary criticism by writing fiction which was dependent on their expertise. There's a lot of fly food in Ulysses and it was put there for the flies. [12] In the same period as Ulysses, another novel was written that broke down linguistic conventions with as much revolutionary fervour as Joyce's did. If anything, it did this better because it was driven by positive, not negative, impulses. Ford Madox Ford did not write with anger and hatred against humanity. And in Parade's End he broke up language narrative not as an intellectual trick or as a sort of revenge on the reader, but as a reflection of Western society breaking down during and after World War I. If the literary community turned away from Ford and chose Ulysses over Parade's End as the turning point of twentieth-century fiction, it was largely because neither Ford nor Parade's End fitted the picture of modern literature. Ford was not a solitary, anguished, inward-looking novelist. He was a generous, gregarious man, filled with flaws but who gave much of his life to helping other writers. And Parade's End related directly to the real world. Ford did not devote his life with obsessive concentration to one or two works of genius, as the modern artist was meant to. He wrote endless books, some of them not very good, and some the best that could be written. Finally, Ford considered Joseph Conrad to be the greatest novelist of the twentieth century. This was an unforgivable flaw in a profession which required egocentric genius to believe, above all, in itself. Conrad was and remains the source of the modern school of writers who have carried the inherent strengths of the novel into the twentieth century -- a school which has stretched from Fitzgerald and Hemingway through Graham Greene and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was not surprising that the literary professionals tended to fix Conrad in their intellectual class structure as a writer for boys. In most introductions to Joyce's work, he is presented as the genius who encompassed the whole Modernist movement:
Of course, the only real set boundary of the novel was its ability to communicate with the reader, As for the elaboration of the subconscious, other novelists, Conrad and Hemingway for a start, were having no trouble finding new ways to express humanity's spiritual depths without turning the novel into a secret language. And why it is simply assumed, as an absolute truth, that the principal task of the novelist is to make technical progress is not made clear. Yet Proust and Joyce became an intellectual wall behind which the literary experts could hide. It was not so much that generations of new writers would actually be influenced by them, They weren't. Rather, these two men were taken to be a signal that the literary profession had been officially constituted, Critics and writers could therefore begin acting as if style defined beauty and beauty was its own justification; as if politics had been proved irrelevant to fiction; as if the desire to communicate were old-fashioned, in fact retrograde, and a sign of intellectual inferiority; and as if success in building popular appeal were a sign of base commercialism. This widespread evolution testified to three things at once: a defeat of the novelist by rational society, a coup d'etat within the writing community by the camp followers, and a growing fatigue by an ever larger portion of the novelists as they gave in to the temptations and comforts of professional life." Indifference to politics among artists has always been associated," Cyril Connolly wrote, "with a feeling of impotence. [This] crystallized into a theory that politics were harmful, that they were not artistic material of the first order." [14] It looked almost as if many writers had changed enemies. Unjust authority and social conformity were being replaced by the "philistine" general public. How else could readers interpret the growing barriers between themselves and the written word? Or the conviction among intellectuals that what the public wanted was fiction of a lesser quality, which made it impossible to write for them? Some novelists inexplicably assumed the exact opposite: that the public, desperate for literature, would make devoted suicidal attacks upon their impenetrable prose. It turned out, however, that the reader was not interested in a struggle with art. And so what came to be called serious fiction also remained largely unread, beginning with Joyce and Proust themselves. Most of the "important" writers of our time have fewer readers than a banal computer manual. This is a radical break with the past. Are these novelists actually important? Most of the great novelists of the last four centuries have been enormously popular in their own time or soon after. The talismans of modern literature are, if anything, even less read now than they were on publication. The strength of the novel from the beginning rested upon the fact that the greatest fiction was intellectually accessible to the full reading public. As the public grew, so the novel grew. Abruptly, in the twentieth century, this is no longer so. Many of the important novels are not even accessible to that part of the population that would have been literate in the eighteenth century. Gracq identified this phenomenon when he pointed out that literature had become something people talked about instead of reading -- which was not particularly surprising given that it was no longer written to be read. This does not mean that Proust and Joyce were not geniuses. A novel can be wonderful and surprising without being written on the main highway of communications, thought and argument. Life is filled with culs-de-sac, some of them extraordinarily interesting. Certainly the twentieth century has built two remarkable baroque villas off on a literary dead end which is worth a detour particularly for other writers, who' may pick up ideas that can be adapted for use out on the main road. But what the literary profession has tried to do is to divert the main road into this cul-de-sac. And for the last sixty years it has spent most of its time trying to break through the privileged, walled gardens behind the Proustian and Joycean villas in the hope of discovering some nonexistent new highway. *** The tools of this diversion have been almost entirely technical. Technique and more technique. For example, much of American fiction is dominated today by "important" writers who are either professors of creative writing or literature or products of those professors. The professor-novelist John Barth boasts that his students have been "involved in formally innovative writing of one sort or another." [15] How innovative writing can be formal is hard to tell, and yet formal is the correct word here. It describes a process which has nothing to do with the writer as faithful witness to the public and everything to do with an elite diligently elaborating its own self-protecting etiquette. Producing novelists through these courses reinforces the isolation of a writing population that has little enough substantive training as it is to help it write about something. During the Middle Ages the aridity of the scholastic tradition came about in much the same way. Now as then, the scholastic approach can't help but define, categorize and create technical boundaries, when in reality the novel has none. It was not an accident that the historic strength of novelists came out of every domain except the scholastic, which -- like those of the courtesans and eunuchs -- thrived on structure and a worldview with itself at the centre. Now as then, the influence of scholastics turns on the assigning of jobs, titles, medals and prizes to the worthy. This obsession with control sidesteps the question of the reader's judgment and often causes the literary expert to forget one of the few truths about the novel, which Voltaire summarized as: "All styles are good except the boring." [16] Of course, if Barth and others want to reduce themselves to the status of highly skilled castrati -- the inevitable product of an overdeveloped court life -- why shouldn't they? And every novelist has the right to be boring if he wishes. All the same, it is incomprehensible in a century overwhelmed by change and war and breakdown, by famine and the radical replacement of elites, that so many Western novelists have had so much trouble finding things to write about which do not centre on their personal state, the world of writers and technical skills. Consider, for example, the nouveau roman, manufactured more or less by Alain Robbe-Grillet and a handful of other intellectuals over a dinner table late at night as a clever way to cause a stir by launching verbal havoc. Consider the effort put into developing and analyzing this style by large parts of the literary world, and the eagerness with which universities in particular embraced this new generation of fly food. Or consider the method of analysis known as deconstructionism, which at first glance seems to offer a way to uncover new meaning hidden in the language of texts. Instead, the real intention of the method is to immobilize language and communication by making it impossible to agree upon meaning. How? "Authorial intentions are to be given no credence. The text subverts its own apparent meaning. The language of the text carries no reference to any mystical interior. Meaning is not contained in language." [17] This is not so much nihilism as it is advocacy of the return to a preliterate society. The novelist who stays outside the specialist's box in which these kinds of debates take place is the closest thing to an enemy that the professionals have. The writer out in the real world is living proof that the novel was, and could still be, something else. Which is perhaps why the professionals have made such an effort to divide Western fiction into a maze of genres. Simplicity is no longer presented as a virtue. The value of complex and difficult language has been preached with such insistence that the public has begun to believe the lack of clarity must be a sign of artistic talent. Even when simplicity appears in the form of minimalism, the precedence given to style over any other aspects of content is clear. Most books dealing with the real world in an unaffected manner can therefore automatically be cast into the lower reaches, where an array of dismissive words has been developed to discount them. Faction had a certain vogue. And roman-reportage. Drawn from the author's experiences. These and other phrases are intended to imply that personal experiences produce a less literary effect if they are gathered outside either the author's psyche or the literary world. When Andre Malraux was asked whether Man's Fate was a "lived" experience, he shot back:
He was trying to explain the difference between the reflection produced by the witness and the mere photo. Earlier in his life he had been reduced to describing his own novels as "Greek tragedy invaded by the police novel," as if some shocking formula were needed to destroy the assumption that fiction was the opposite of fact, instead of being the same thing through another eye. Among those most successful at avoiding fiction's self-imposed limitations have been the writers who pretend to be writing nonfiction. Long before he took the risk of publishing his first official novel, Tom Wolfe was playing this trick. In reality he had always written fiction. The Right Stuff was an almost Zola-like story, Truman Capote did the same thing with In Cold Blood, And both men reached the full public in a way that resembled the uncontrollable fictional appeals of the eighteenth century. Primo Levi with Sequesto e un Uomo, Ryszard Kapuscinski with The Emperor, Shiva Naipaul with North of South, Bruce Chatwin with In Patagonia, Jane Kramer in The Last Cowboy and even Marguerite Yourcenar in Hadrian's Memoirs were all writing disguised fiction. This allowed them to tell a story without being easily judged and categorized by the literary community. The explosion in every sort of nonfiction has been part of this same process. Writers with something to say have been turning away from the novel as if it were a mortally wounded means of communication. Many of them, perhaps most, have dreamt of writing fiction. But their conviction is that this would be an altruistic sacrifice -- something to be risked someday when they are established as serious nonfiction writers. Their Pessimism demonstrates how structure and professionalism can discourage those with talent. Meanwhile the public has remained indifferent to the identification of reality as insufficiently literary. Readers have refused to abandon the story and so for decades have been embracing new means of communication that offer clear narrative. Fiction disguised as nonfiction has been one of the beneficiaries, so have various "categories" of the novel, such as the thriller. Throughout the West, people with the time and inclination to read can be overheard saying that they don't read novels anymore. Instead they read biographies. In describing a man's life, the biographer is obliged to tell a story. And with the breakdown of Victorian delicacy, these true stories have taken on the full flesh of fictional drama and character development. But no matter how extraordinary the subject's life, the writer is still limited by its direct attachment to reality. He is writing about his subject, while the novelist is writing about the reader. The faithful witness provides a reflection of the reader. The biographer can never offer more than voyeurism, examples and interpretation. All the same, he gives the public a story and some fictional vibrations. It's better than giving them nothing at all. These struggles for control over fiction must be seen in the context of the novel's rise. Its force came from the fact that, unlike poetry and drama, it was not hemmed in by stultifying stylistic rules. The novel was therefore central to an uncontrolled explosion in language and understanding. Now Western fiction is restricted by stylistic boundaries, categories. high versus low art, appropriate subject matter and intellectual elites that both monitor all of the above and train their own successors. One of the novel's great strengths was the facility with which it could be translated from one vibrant regional language to another without any of that strength being lost. The scholasticism of the twentieth century has removed that facility, so that it is now common to find novels as difficult to translate as poetry. What all this indicates is that the novel is no longer a centre of linguistic freedom. It is now as much part of the problem of communication as it is of the solution. *** The writers who have the greatest difficulty with what is now the literary status quo are those who make money from their books. This disapproval of novelists categorized as "commercial" comes without any direct mention of the public and the choice they exercise in reading one book rather than another. But the literary establishment cannot help noticing that most of what they consider to be good fiction is hidden deep in the wings, well off the public stage. This they blame on commercial fiction. Their view is that such commercial writers pander to the public's baser instincts. Had they not done this, the general reader would have been obliged to come to serious fiction on its own terms. "Commercial" or "popular," fiction consists mainly of police novels, spy novels, thrillers, adventure novels, science fiction and romance fiction. These categories have been defined and separated by those in literary authority -- professors, critics and publishers. Few of the writers placed inside these limiting walls would have put themselves there, apart perhaps from formula writers of supermarket romances and bus station mysteries. The subject matter of "category" fiction usually occupies at least part of the territory once covered by the traditional mainstream novel. It is the category writers who now describe the real world and its crises. They mayor may not do this honestly, with imagination or by rote, with great attention to detail or superficially. But even the hero of a third-rate adventure novel is closer to the real world than an obscure creation by Barth or Robbe- Grillet. In 1976 the late Senator Frank Church, chairman of a U.S. congressional committee investigating the CIA, wrote in his report that the enormous power the new technologies of surveillance, indoctrination and mobilization had given to the state were capable of creating a Fascist regime overnight. [19] In some ways the spy novel is trying to deal with that situation. Equally, the growth in criminal violence, accompanied by a breakdown in our legal system, has fed the police novel. The steady growth in the arms trade has. created a permanently escalating level of international violence, which has fed what is called the thriller. The explanation for the extraordinary success of "category" fiction is not that the public is craven and uncultured. Times are confusing and citizens feel constrained by the narrow boxes of specialization into which rational structures have shut them. More than ever they need clear reflections of themselves and their world, which they feel they cannot see. The most successful works have .always presented these reflections in the form of entertainment. Shakespeare and Moliere, Goethe and Gogol all knew they had to entertain. There was never a suggestion that the pleasure this gave rendered their writing or their themes inconsequential. *** Since this is no longer the case, why not simply leave literature in the comfortable refuge of the wings? New means of communication eager to take its place are not lacking. The images of film and television have already occupied the centre of the public stage once dominated by the novel. Even the most successful "category" fiction must struggle for a place at the feet of the electronic media which, without any effort on the part of the public, can instantly deliver perfect reflections. The new comic book has grabbed a place with a growing number of readers. In fact, the public stage is crowded today with a greater variety and quantity of communicators than the West has ever seen. And they all appear to be perfectly at ease in the limelight. In this company the writer seems even more apart -- often reluctant, dour, shy -- and this in spite of centuries of public striving. Perhaps the explanation is simply that the sort of person who writes is no longer the same. Byron, for example, were he alive today, would probably be a rock star, driven to get through to the public by seizing hold of the microphone. Perhaps there has simply been a change of media on the public stage, but not of personnel. However, these new media don't really give the public what it needs, either because they are too narrow or too easily manipulated. The popular song, for example, is more like an anthem or a slogan -- more a raw, direct emotion than a witnessing. There was a return to the troubadour approach in the 1960s with poets like Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, but it was quickly overwhelmed by an explosion of electronic technique, in which words have played a very poor third to a complex packaging of sounds and, through video clips, of images. This ability to assemble electronically, note by note and instrument by instrument, is having an effect even on the reality of live classical music performance versus the superhuman arias and sonatas which are everywhere for sale. Just as the growth of the Hero feeds passivity and the worst kind of elitism, so these Heroic sounds, whether popular or classical, undermine the role of music as an active, binding phenomenon. As for the comic book, whatever its strengths -- and not to denigrate its popularity -- it is primarily visual and its central force is illustration rather than verbal communication. Comics for children can easily sell hundreds of thousands of copies at a few dollars a piece. Adult comics or BD are more expensive but often sell a hundred thousand and average in the twenty thousand range. The average for novels in most countries is between two and five thousand. These comics play an essential role in the vibrancy of modern images. They can even take the place of the written word, but they do not replace it. They do not provide the practical mechanism of public language which permits the organization of daily life, general understanding and civilized change. Finally, the electronic media suffer from weaknesses which are integral to their strengths -- large physical infrastructures, high costs, corporate organization. Any means of communication which can be unplugged cannot be independent. Both film and television are easily controlled by political, military or administrative forces. Outside the handful of democracies, cinema and television screens are a barren land of official or harmless images. It used to be that during coups d'etat the forces in revolt had to capture the presidential palace and the armories in order to succeed. Modern technology caused them to include the airports and radio stations. Now they must add the television studios as well. The invention of the video cassette seemed to create a new element of freedom. A cassette is no more difficult to smuggle or hide than a book. Now, even in the most restrictive dictatorships, the elites who travel abroad return with cassettes. But only people rich enough to travel and to own a VCR are involved; people rich or powerful enough to ensure that they can, watch the cassettes in absolute privacy. The blatant controls enforced in some countries encourage us to think that the problem does not apply in the West. Yet in some ways our problem is worse. Nothing can appear on any of our screens without large inputs of cash from either advertisers or governments. Almost from the beginning the advertisers understood that, while they could not dictate content, it was easy to block whatever they didn't want on the air. All they had to do was not advertise it. Attempts by some networks to disarm this pressure by selling block advertising not assigned to specific programs has tended simply to obscure the problem by forcing advertisers to be more subtle when they apply pressure. The intelligent master never forbids. He shapes things in order to avoid undermining his own interests and to avoid open conflict. Television advertisers understand this and have therefore become the champions of inconsequential entertainment. Meanwhile, throughout much of Europe, government funders understood from the beginning that they held controlling power. The result -- in contrast to the early freedom on public television in a few countries such as the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Canada and Australia -- was organized propaganda, sometimes subtle, sometimes not. But even those few arm's-length governments gradually tired of being criticized by state corporations which exercised electronic free speech. Politicians began to respond with' clumsy personal attacks on specific television programs and journalists, accusing them of antigovernment bias. This approach tended to backfire because it reminded the public of the 1930s, which had begun with governmental righteous indignation against free speech and ended with dictatorships across Europe Governments therefore turned to bureaucratic manipulation. Budget restraints and political appointments proved so effective that producers soon understood there was little or no funding for real and sustained criticism. That was already the situation on private networks. This atmosphere gradually created self-censorship, first among management and then among senior production staff. They found them selves becoming ever-more careful and ever-more "balanced," until they began to take extreme "care" each time a public issue arose. But those who hold power already have an advantage over both the opposition and the press, which is why serious journalists have always tended towards a critical approach which seeks out faults. Governments and corporations have budgets and experts permanently assigned to the preparation of arguments designed to contradict all unfavourable judgments. These professional answers, when placed in opposition to most criticism, will at least create confusion and, at their most successful, cancel out the effect of the attack. Rigorous balance, when applied to television, gives a permanent advantage to those in power. Nevertheless, budgetary and political manipulations are a complicated way to control freedom of speech. The solution has therefore increasingly been to commercialize television. After all, what attracts advertisers to television is precisely its ritualistic, reassuring smoothness. Shocking and unsettling programs do not provide an effective background for marketing products. Distinctive programming detracts from the surrounding ads. What the sponsor seeks can be seen in the fact that ads are played at a higher sound level than the programs. On a scale of one to ten, programs vary from occasional silence to moments of maximum noise, but they run at average levels of four to six. Commercials are recorded at seven to eight, well above the program average. And while program sound fluctuates, ads hold a constant level for thirty seconds. This makes them seem even louder. The more commercial the overall television system, the more these ads tend towards eight or nine, as in the United States. But even at seven they are the dominant sound. Ritual is a continuous and repetitive background phenomenon. Thus most programming is the background for commercial messages. The per-second production costs -- what the industry calls "production values" -- of advertisements are far higher than those of programming. In fact, most commercials are better television than the programs they finance, thanks to richer colour, more camera work and snappier scripting. If there is some benefit to be derived from dramatic surprise, it is saved for the advertiser. The cinema has been just as easy to handle. American movies continue to dominate the screens of the world and Hollywood "standards" require budgets which make most truly independent production impossible. Cinema has come to resemble opera in that the apparatus for production is so heavy that those who have power and money inevitably control what will be produced. The financiers can hardly be blamed for financing only what they think is appropriate. As for social and political criticism, the heart of the film production system is financial, not moral. It is a high-risk business which produces ponderously via committees. Films therefore rarely enter unresolved public debates. They tend rather to illustrate resolved opinion. And production is only the first step in. this lengthy process. Distribution is equally dependent on financial risk and political complexities. Films mayor may not cross borders because of a tangle of interests. They may be distributed widely or in a few theatres only. Films such as La Bataille d'Alger or Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory for a long time were simply not distributed in France. No one quite understood how it was done. Corporations own films in the absolute way that only an author, not a publisher, can own a book. But the filmed image has other limitations. Even a brilliant, full-length motion picture made by a genius cannot be more than a narrow vision of limited events. It cannot, as a novel can, create an entire world and turn the reader's imagination loose within it. The genius of electronic communication turns on its ability to direct the viewer and to evoke responses. The genius of fiction turns on its ability to release the individual's emotions and thoughts. The electronic media require a more or less passive public. The novel needs an active one. There is a simple technical illustration of this difference. The short story is a limited vehicle -- not in artistic qualities, but in time, place, number of characters, complexity of story, emotional variety, and, of course, in the scope of the world reflected. At its best the short story is an object of single, intense, brilliant focus. It is a precise exercise in specific human emotions, while the novel, at its best, is a total release. After almost a century of converting the written word into film, the patterns of success and failure are fairly clear. Novels generally convert into bad films, good novels into particularly bad films. Short stories, on the other hand, have a relatively high success rate on the screen. They are sufficiently precise to avoid overwhelming the limited capabilities of the motion picture. In fact, the best movies are often drawn from mediocre or bad short stories, because even a good short story can be too complex for ninety or even one hundred and twenty minutes of screen time. Television's greatest success has been in the area of sports broadcasting. Only there does the viewer feel he is getting the whole story. In no other area does the producer feel himself truly free to pursue the subject at hand. And nothing else can offer the advertiser guaranteed excitement free of socially relevant controversy. The sports formula has become increasingly important over the last forty years, with its most obvious by-product being a growing number of Heroic feature films on everything from boxing and baseball to Olympic running. More important, however, has been the spread of this formula into cinema and television plots which have nothing to do with sports. On the surface they are war or crime stories or family sagas. Closer examination reveals that they have been reduced to the structure of a football drama. The key to this formula lies in its highly formal structures. Clearly defined relationships are laid out. The real world is converted into a fixed pattern according to which predetermined actions will bring glory or tragedy. The excitement of this sports formula depends on a rigid system in which the unexpected can nevertheless happen. The established Hero, who may unexpectedly miss, lose, fall or in some way fail, is invariably pitted against the unproved player, who may unexpectedly save the day and become a Hero. The reliance of all sports scenarios on this unexpected Hero to provide excitement is emotionally attractive, but it is also an insidious theme in a civilized society. It converts human relationships into little more than a lottery. Someone is going to win a million dollars. Someone is going to be the Hero in today's game. It raises the prospect of unfounded hope to the level of normalcy. That is why an increasing number of films -- the vast majority, in fact -- glorify the unexpected Hero. The day is endlessly being saved by the weak, the untrained, the fearful, the losers. This bears no relationship to what actually happens in the real world. The weak do not win battles anymore than the poor outsmart the rich or those who buy lottery tickets win the grand prize. From the very beginning; the moving picture has been addicted to happy endings. On television unhappy conclusions are almost unknown. In order to accomplish this, whole segments of Western fiction have had to be adapted; that is, twisted into suitably inspiring shapes. Thanks to Walt Disney and others, the tough realism of children's literature -- from the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen to Beatrix Potter and L. Frank Baum's Oz books -- has been quite simply inverted. Some people would say that the little parables of the moving picture give hope to the underdog. In fact, they give a false reflection of reality and so weaken any hope for change. The difficulty with the new devices for communication which crowd the public stage is that they minimize language or trivialize it or simply make no use of it. But you cannot ave a postverbal civilization. Language is the one essential element in any society. It enables us to understand organizations and makes relationships possible. The word civilization itself rises out of the Roman civil law -- the words which organized the relationship between individuals. What the electronic media have done is drown us in the sound of words but remove all sense of their meaning and overall shape. *** The question which remains is whether the novel has the strength to do to the dictatorship of reason what it once did to the dictatorship of arbitrary power. One glance at much of the Western literary elites is enough to discourage that idea. Outside the West the situation is quite different. In Central Europe and Latin America, the novel still reflects society. If writers played such an important role in the events of Central Europe in 1989, it was because they and their words had been the voice of opposition for forty years. In Africa and in much of Asia, where the nationalist era has only just begun and political instability is dangerous to anyone who speaks out, the novel is in full expansion. Put another way, the prisons of Eastern Europe and of the developing world have been populated with writers for the last forty years and the annual lists of political murders and executions are filled with novelists, essayists and journalists. Any cursory glance back through the fiction which has made a profound impact in the West over the last half century turns up names like Arthur Koestler, Boris Pasternak, Gabriel Garda Marquez, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Wole Soyinka, Jorge Amado, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Mario Vargas Llosa and J. M. Coetzee. It is astonishing how many come from precisely those places on the edge of the West or completely outside where the novel is as important to local society as it was in Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Or, indeed, there were Western writers like Albert Camus and Graham Greene, who found a certain strength by writing of the West in the context of the world outside. Today's reader takes from all these books the genuine reflection -- the faithful witnessing -- which the bulk of our own fiction no longer provides. Only in the West, where the electronic media have taken over public communications, have the wordsmiths slipped off the public stage. There is a tendency to believe that the Rushdie affair in 1989 demonstrated just the opposite. But of course The Satanic Verses had nothing to do with a Western writer upsetting Western preconceptions. Instead, this novel was used as a lever by a factional political-religious leader to create a diplomatic incident between the West and the Islamic world. The incident resembled one of those nineteenth-century gunboat crises, only in reverse. We in the West used to seize regularly on some minor affront to our principles -- such as free access for traders or missionaries to someone else's territory -- and send off a military detachment to force major concessions. The Ayatollah Khomeini seized on an affront to his beliefs and sent off terrorists to destabilize the West and his Arab neighbours. The threat to Salman Rushdie's life came on top of the ongoing threats by various governments for various reasons against hundreds of writers outside the West and the murder of dozens of novelists, journalists, playwrights and poets every year. Less than half a century ago we were doing the same sort of thing ourselves. And yet the West reacted to the Ayatollah Khomeini's threats with what can only be called embarrassment that words could have caused so much trouble. We insisted, and pressured Salman Rushdie to insist, that he hadn't intended to offend, that it was only a novel. But Rushdie was born a Muslim, was writing on one of his preferred subjects and knew what he was doing, just as Voltaire must have known when he attacked the Catholic Church or Tolstoy when he turned on the landowners or Fielding when he exposed legal corruption. As to Khomeini's reaction, it can hardly be considered surprising, coming as it did from the politically experienced leader of a radical wing of a religion six hundred years younger than our own and still caught up in the fervour of belief. After all, in the West religion lost most of its power two centuries ago and yet Christian sects are still murdering each other in Ireland. Unacceptable though they may be, Khomeini's actions can be understood. The Western reaction was far more astonishing. An old man in a bankrupt developing country had only to utter a short sentence for our enormous infrastructure to go into spasms and begin turning in circles. Rational structures came up against belief and belief won with hardly a struggle. Most writers -- no matter how withdrawn into their private world -- supported Rushdie. A few, like the late Roald Dahl, did call on him to withdraw the book so that everyone could get on with their lives, thus suggesting that free speech was a valued part of society so long as it didn't cause delays or cost money. Even the vast majority of writers, who continue their support, seem to feel only that there has been a barbaric interference in the right of creativity, when what is at stake is creativity's right to interfere with barbarism and power, to say nothing of our own civilization's failure to identify with that right. It is all the more surprising then that our wordsmiths have slipped off the public stage, turning away from society's need for reflection. Writers are at their best as terrorists -- sometimes social terrorists, sometimes political, sometimes terrorists of the heart. If a writer is good, he will be all three at once. His weapons are words well used to disturb and to clarify thought, emotion and action. His genius, if he has it, will help him to explode self-satisfaction. He will create confusion in order to make clarity possible. Yet if the citizen wants to read about today's world -- influenced as it is by rising crime, unmanageable drug use, directionless elites, contrasts of wealth and poverty, alienating cities and industrial structures dominated by arms production -- he has a surprisingly limited number of writers among whom to choose. They must be supplemented by novelists from elsewhere, as well as large numbers who have been relegated to categories. Besides, much of the "category" fiction is very good. Long after Barth is buried and forgotten, Chandler's The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye will be read as masterpieces. What is it, then, which holds back the force of the written word in the West? Sclerosis? Gentility? The wrong people Writing? Or is it something much more basic? The novel, after all, rose with the struggle to advance reason. Fiction was the greatest enemy of the old system, but also the advance guard of the new. Even though the novel is a humanist and unmeasurable phenomenon, its most profound assumptions are indivisible from the dream of man's rational progress towards a better world. It is hardly surprising that when reason began to go off the tracks, novelists lost their way. They find it easy to criticize totalitarian regimes but are still congenitally blocked from getting at those elements in the foundations of reason which make the new totalitarian systems possible. Those who do try to deal with today's problems have a tendency to draw the portrait of a civilization gone mad, as if betrayed by the survival of the pagan or dark side of man that predates reason. Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Milan Kundera, Yann Queffelec, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis -- most of them brilliant, a few simply hysterical -- seem to find the inspiration for this shock treatment approach in the heavy parodies and satires of the eighteenth century. But the similarity is deceptive. Gulliver, Zadig and Tom Jones were also carefully aimed missiles. The reader immediately understood where the problem lay and in what direction society might move to improve itself. The modern equivalent expresses the confusion people feel, but the target is often less clear. In place of a reflection or witnessing the reader is offered participation of a cinematic sort. The problem these novels are trying to deal with has little to do with the anarchy of a modern madness and everything to do with a form of logical sanity which grinds on like a perpetual motion machine cut off from common sense. To expect the novelist to deal with this dictatorship of reason is to hope that he will turn about and eat his own children. He must not only decide to do it, he must discover how it might be done. Most people now see the Western writer as uninvolved in that world which engages the bulk of the population. He appears to be off in a corner, comfortably shut up in his specialized box, But the writer himself also suffers from being just another expert in our civilization, exercising one of the thousands of professions available to an educated citizen. The complex demands of the publishing industry, the titles, prizes, tenures, grants and all the other honours he receives or, worse still, does not receive but needs to in order to survive -- these are the chains which keep him in place. In order to become the faithful witness again, he would have to regain the distrust, if not the hatred, of the established structures. He would need to cut away his literary chains and roam about as he once did, sometimes inside society, sometimes outside, seeking to release us from the prisons of rational language by finding new, alternate models for the imagination. Those writers who are solitary by nature, who walk alone and yet see everything around them, have an initial advantage. But even they have not cut themselves loose." To write in plain, vigorous language ... and to think fearlessly," Orwell said was his objective. Those skills both strengthen the writer and serve the public." The spare word is the sword," wrote Robert Ford, "that guards better than silence." [20] With those weapons he can warn and win back the tribe to his reflections. The standard analysis of a troubled society concentrates on its aging structures. Language, however, can be more important than those tangible forms. As time goes by, it is the established patterns of thought, the known arguments, the self-perpetuating truths which become the principal defenders of the structures in place. The older and more stable a society, the deeper down into our subconscious stretches the substructure of givens. These are the essential questions which are silently assumed to have been answered before a conversation begins or a word is written. The West has now built up layer upon layer of assumptions which cannot be addressed in any intelligent manner. The active vocabulary needed to question, even to simply discuss them, has withered away. Worse still, these givens take on an enormous innate power. The last two centuries have fuelled a plethora of abstract givens which float in and out of fashion. Imperialism gives way to Socialism to Fascism to Capitalism to free peoples to free markets, efficiency, competition. Governments take great care to place themselves in chosen positions vis-a-vis these words, as do most organizations and individuals. They may wrap them as cloaks around themselves or heave them like boulders against other men. There is no longer any need to corrupt the ideas born of reason. Anyone today may use a word such as freedom to mean everything under the sun. It is a concept which now has the intrinsic value of Weimar Republic paper money. There is no longer any emotional or sensible counterfeit detector which goes off when we hear the word incorrectly used. Where earlier Western societies were built upon military or religious power, reason was constructed upon thought and language. The structures which at first released, then restrained, and now smother us are primarily the abstract manifestations of that thought and language. There is no way out of the present confusion unless the writer leaves his specialist's box, abandons her professional privileges and begins stripping language down to its universal basics; what Mallarme and Eliot called purifying. [21] Only they can demonstrate the folly of professional dialects which pretend to provide answers to everything, even though those answers reflect no reality. The reality of language is not to be right. The deformation such a hypocritical requirement brings to our essential means of communication can't help but create a prison for civilization. The faithful witness, like Solon and Socrates, Voltaire and Swift, even Christ himself, is at his best when he concentrates on questioning and clarifying and avoids the specialist's obsession with solutions. He betrays society when he is silent or impenetrable or, worst of all, when he blithely reassures. He is true to himself and to the people when his clarity causes disquiet.
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