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An Introduction (5/10)
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8.23.06
I came
across Tom Wolfe's essay today, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A
Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel," something that
apparently made waves nearly twenty years ago, & which still seems
relevent today (some kind person has posted a .pdf of it
here)
The gist is that Wolfe, beginning in the late 1960s, was waiting for
someone to eventually write the Big Novel about the 60s, & later the
70s, & the 80s, but this never happened--until (in the last case
anyway) he wrote his Bonfire of the Vanities. For me, the
need for manifestos at all anymore has recently hit bottom, & Wolfe's
essay, as good as it is, really only reinforces that, since he doesn't
go quite far enough.
What he wishes for, he tells us, is the Big Social Novels of Balzac,
Dickens, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. (He only mentions Dostoevsky
once, but I'll mention him more later) His reasons are simply that
these novelists apparently had something to say about the time in
which they lived, & their big novels did that, & took all (or most) of
society in their sweep, & communicated to their public in a way that
Post-Modern novelists have never done (or seen a reason to do).
Post-Modern novelists, he says, are lost on two fronts: the first is
they see the "novel" as being dead anyway, & are more interested in
playing games with the reader & the form--he mentions Sukenick being
very happy to mention in one of his novels that he is actually writing
this paragraph stark naked; the second is that the modern world has
become too complicated to describe & make sense of in the way of a
traditional novel, & also that most novelists don't see a reason to
compete with the oddities & drama of actual real life that appears in
the news (written in 1989, Wolfe mentions the various sexual scandals
surrounding a few televangelists at the time).
I first heard about Wolfe's essay almost eight years ago now, during
my first stab at college, and while introducing myself to the novels
of John Hawkes, who is quoted in Wolfe's essay as saying "I began to
write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel
were plot, character, setting, and theme"--which struck a dumb but
real spark in me back then as something so obviously rebellious (when
it's obviously not been for some time!). But to be clear--what Wolfe
is unhappy about isn't the experimentation of Hawkes or Pynchon or
whoever, but that the experiment is (for him) only that, an
experiment, a funny thing to do, another way of noticing the futility
of trying to communicate in a real way.
Probably one of the reasons I never finished college, & anymore don't
read modern novels, is that even eight years ago I never saw
experimentation as a technique to show the novel was dead, the author
was dead, that reality couldn't be put on the page; experimentation
was always about another way to express reality, to get at reality
precisely, but just from a different angle. This is why I love Joyce,
& I think why Wolfe mentions Faulkner in a nice light, since for all
his experimentation (think of his big three of The Sound & the
Fury, As I Lay Dying, & Absalom! Absalom!),
he's doing all this stuff to actually get somewhere, not as a merely
intelligent (even genius) gag, or toying with words.
So I'm with him that far, & agree at least that reality & experience
can be written about, that it's worth trying, that emotions &
characters can be portrayed. Except now I'm not sure the Big Social
Novel is the way to do it, at least not the way Wolfe puts it.
Consider when he says, "No one was ever moved to tears by reading
about the unhappy fates of heroes and heroines in Homer, Sophocles,
Moliere, Racine, Sydney, Spenser, or Shakespeare." Now while I'll
agree that of those in the list I've read, I've never wept over them,
I'm sure that there are indeed some folks out there who have. But even
if they hadn't--is our ability to cry over a work the final judgment
of its worth? Has Homer lasted so long but now is somehow less than
Thackeray because we don't weep over him? On the contrary, while I've
not read any of Thackeray, I have a feeling that he'd never fill me
with what Homer does, what the Gilgamesh poet does, what the
poet of Job does (if anyone should be wept over!), what the
author(s) of Genesis or the Irish myths do, what Dante does.
What they do isn't make us weep, but change the way we live, & this
has nothing to do with how "realistic" they are. What we're looking
for isn't "realism" but something that hits you directly in your heart
& soul & mind as being True & Real, even Wise.
What Wolfe assumes (& he's a journalist, after all, & has to be
concerned with what's happening right now) is that the best way to
explain people, or show society to themselves, is to writing about
them directly; & he assumes the best way to do this is on a huge
canvas wrapped around plots & subplots. For me, I think in some ways I
can say more about today by writing about 2,000 years ago, or even 140
years ago, & can do so instead with only the thinnest shred of plot;
can do so with only a speech taking up less than half a page, floating
there without a context; that I could, conceivably, say more about
modern life today with three hundred pages of fragments of quotes &
monologues & descriptions, rather than weaving it all together amid a
family drama.
Wolfe still sees some grand importance in a story that propels you
forward, not necessarily in a soul beneath it. For him, I assume, it's
enough to have been the journalist & gotten the accents & all the
details right. But Joyce most of all understood that it wasn't merely
enough to get the city down, but you had to get its soul down as
well--can we imagine Ulysses written like The Bonfire of
the Vanities, or vice-versa? In the same way, Dostoevsky isn't
great because he writes about his own time & place, he's great because
he's seeing his own time & place as the perfect stage for all the old
questions, dilemmas, emotions, troubles, joys. It wasn't merely enough
to cobble together a handful of anecdotes he'd heard over the years
from crimes of parricide--instead he wrote The Brothers Karamazov,
& knew he was after something much more than a news report.
If Wolfe wanted to try to touch something eternal, & have his stuff
speak for (& to) not just the reading public of today, not just sum up
& present the public with a picture of themselves in their lifetime,
he'd see his precursors go much farther back than just Zola or
Thackeray. It isn't enough to simply write what people say or do--&
this is probably what separates me from both him & the other novelists
he doesn't think are doing anything importance--but God must also be
in there somewhere; & if that sounds strange, simply something
eternal. It's the quality Dante has, that the Bible & the Bhagavad
Gita has--in a sense, very little story, very little of what
blurb-critics would say strung us along or kept us interested, but
instead enigmatic scenes, enigmatic dialogue, characters that are
unclear, characters that disappear without reason, a great deal that
is entirely "unrealistic" but which undeniably speaks to the most
"real" parts of us, & is filled with & evokes germs of insight & germs
of wisdom that have helped these works last for thousands of years,
interpreted to no end. These are the things that get into our psyches,
get into our souls, not merely a report of what New York was like in
the 1980s, not to mention what it was like for a writer to have
written this scene while completely naked.
The problem is that Wolfe still thinks of himself as a writer, when
he's much more than that. A writer, especially today, is a
businessman; a symbol of someone terrifically snobby or horrendously
shy; a cliche you can imagine at a podium or alone by himself or
drinking himself to death or cheating on his wife; or of a novelist or
poet--no matter how well the novel or poem is written--who can only
present us with the hip & ironic & "real" ugliness of nearly
everything, where nothing is holy or means anything. I used to think
it was better to think of myself as a "poet"--but a poet is just as
much of a businessman & cliche too. The best of us are seers &
prophets, even priests. As a contemporary said of Dostoevsky a few
days before he died,
"Just as the highest worldly power somehow or other becomes
concentrated in one person, who represents a state, similarly the
highest spiritual power in each epoch usually belongs in every people
to one man, who more clearly than all grasps the spiritual ideals of
mankind, more consciously than all strives to attain them, more
strongly than all affects others by his preachments. Such a spiritual
leader of the Russian people in recent times was Dostoevsky."
But I assume that mentioning things like "spirit" is far from Wolfe, &
all the others he criticizes, & the idea of an "epoch" is ridiculous
to those concerned with irony. & further that the problem, too, is the
"one person" factor here--only one or two or a dozen of any of us will
last like this, & so it's not surprising that we'll take what we can
while we can get it, just as any actor or actress who is suddenly
famous, or whose career is suddenly reborn, will go with what is being
given right now.
Still, it's
worth reminding myself that I remember Alyosha Karamazov, I remember
Quentin Compson, I remember Dante in hell & Augustine converting; I
remember Joyce & his Nora in Trieste, & Whitman on his Brooklyn Ferry;
& I remember Gilgamesh, four thousand or so years ago, crying over his
dead friend--but I don't remember who was in the New York Times
Book Review even last weekend.
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