In Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions (1955), a stand-in for the author cries; “What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around.” Postwar novelists like Gaddis and Pynchon and postwar artists like Robert Frank answered these questions very differently than Norman Mailer and Andy Warhol did. In 1955, before television had even supplanted radio as the regnant medium, Gaddis recognized that no matter how attractively subversive self-promotion may seem in the short run, the artist who’s really serious about resisting a culture of inauthentic mass-marketed image must resist becoming an image himself, even at the price of certain obscurity.
For a long time, trying to follow Gaddis’s example, I took a hard line on letting my work speak for itself. I refused to teach, to review for the Times, to write about writing, to go to pub-industry parties. To speak extra-novelistically in an age of personalities seemed to me a betrayal; it implied a lack of faith in fiction’s adequacy as communication and self-expression, and so helped, I believed, to accelerate the public flight from the imagined to the literal. I had a cosmology of silent heroes and gregarious traitors.
Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone, somewhere, expects your voice to be loud. Silence in the Nineties seemed only to guarantee that I would be alone. And eventually it dawned on me that the despair I felt about the novel was less the result of my obsolescence than of my isolation. Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.
Writers and readers have always been prone to this estrangement. Communion with the virtual community of print requires solitude, after all. But the estrangement becomes much more profound, urgent, and dangerous when that virtual community is no longer densely populated and heavily trafficked; when the saving continuity of literature itself is under electronic and academic assault; when your alienation becomes generic, rather than individual, and the business pages seem to report on the world’s conspiracy to grandfather not only you but all your kind, and the price of silence seems no longer to be obscurity but outright oblivion.
I recognize that a person writing confessionally for a national magazine may have less than triple-A credibility in asserting that genuine reclusiveness is simply not an option, either psychologically or financially, for writers born after Sputnik. It may be that I’ve become a gregarious traitor. But in belatedly following my books out of the house, doing some journalism and even hitting a few parties, I’ve felt less as if I’m introducing myself to the world than as if I’m introducing the world to myself. Once I stepped outside my bubble of despair I found that almost everyone I met shared many of my fears, and that other writers shared all of them.
In the past, when the life of letters was synonymous with culture, solitude was possible the way it was in cities, where you could always, day and night, find the comfort of crowds outside your door. In a suburban age, when the rising waters of electronic culture have made each reader and each writer an island, it may be that we need to be more active in assuring ourselves that a community still exists. I used to distrust creative-writing departments for what seemed to me their artificial safety, just as I distrusted book clubs for treating literature like a cruciferous vegetable that could be choked down only with a spoonful of socializing. As I grope for my own sense of community, I distrust both a little less now. I see the authority of the novel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an accident of history—of having no competitors. Now the distance between author and reader is shrinking. Instead of Olympian figures speaking to the masses below, we have matching diasporas. Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.
That this marginalized community nevertheless lives in history and feels, if anything, more attuned to it than the great majority of nonreaders, and that it’s often our least visible writers who produce the most trenchantly engaged renderings of the culture, is a paradox that I recently spent a long evening trying to get to the bottom of with David Foster Wallace. “A contemporary culture of mass-marketed image and atomized self-interest is going to be one without any real sort of felt community,” Wallace wrote to me afterwards. “Just about everybody with any sensitivity feels like there’s a party going on that they haven’t been invited to—we’re all alienated. I think the guys who write directly about and at the present culture tend to be writers who find their artistic invalidation especially painful. I mean it’s not just something to bitch about at wine-and-cheese parties: it really hurts them. It makes them angry. And it’s not an accident that so many of the writers ‘in the shadows’ are straight white males. Tribal writers can feel the loneliness and anger and identify themselves with their subculture and can write to and for their subculture about how the mainstream culture’s alienated them. White males are the mainstream culture. So why shouldn’t we angry, confused, lonely white males write at and against the culture? This is the only way to come up with what we want: what we want is to know what happened, why things are this way—we want the stor^i.”
White men are a tribe, too, of course. But what makes our tribe frustrating to novelists, even beyond our dominance in the culture, is that we are so much more susceptible to technological addictions than women are. The adolescents who spend day-sized chunks of time on-line are mainly boys, not girls. And it tends to be men, not women, who are the aggressive wielders of the TV remote control, who stay up until one in the morning watching reruns and beach volleyball. The flip side of cultural dominance is a nagging sense of responsibility for the status quo, and there’s something sweetly regressive, something surrogate-maternal, in the gratifications of technology. How tempting it is to shun responsibility and forever be boys with toys. And so we reach for the channel flipper, for the techno-thriller, for the mouse. We plug into the grid and take comfort in the crowd. The writers who might remind us that a crowd can be a very lonely place are all too “difficult.”
One of the cherished notions of cybervisionaries is that literary culture is anti-democratic—that the reading of good books is primarily a pursuit of the leisured white male—and that our republic will therefore be healthier for abandoning itself to computers. As Shirley Heath’s research (or even a casual visit to a bookstore) makes clear, the cybervisionaries are lying. Reading is an ethnically diverse, socially skeptical activity. The wealthy white men who today have powerful notebook computers are the ones who form this country’s most salient elite. The word “elitist” is the club with which they bash those for whom purchasing technology fails to constitute a life.
That a distrust or an outright hatred of what we now call “literature” has always been a mark of social visionaries, whether Plato or Stalin or today’s free-market technocrats, can lead us to think that literature has a function, beyond entertainment, as a form of social opposition. Novels, after all, do sometimes ignite political debates or become embroiled in them. And since the one modest favor that any writer asks of a society is freedom of expression, a country’s poets and novelists are often the ones obliged to serve as voices of conscience in times of religious or political fanaticism. Literature’s aura of oppositionality is especially intense in America, where the low status of art has a way of turning resistant child readers into supremely alienated grown-up writers. What’s more, since the making of money has always been of absolute centrality to the culture, and since the people who make a lot o
f it are seldom very interesting, the most memorable characters in U.S. fiction have tended to be socially marginal: Twain’s Huck Finn and Hurston’s Janie Crawford, O’Connor’s Hazel Motes and Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop. Finally, the feeling of oppositionality is compounded in an age when simply picking up a novel after dinner represents a kind of cultural Je refuse!
It’s all too easy, therefore, to forget how frequently good artists through the ages have insisted, as W. H. Auden put it, that “art makes nothing happen.” It’s all too easy to jump from the knowledge that the novel can have agency to the conviction that it must have agency. Nabokov pretty well summed up the political platform that every novelist can endorse: no censorship, good universal education, no portraits of heads of state larger than a postage stamp. If we go any further than that, our agendas begin to diverge radically. What emerges as the belief that unifies us is not that a novel can change anything but that it can preserve something. The thing being preserved depends on the writer; it may be as private as “My Interesting Childhood.” But as the country grows ever more distracted and mesmerized by popular culture, the stakes rise even for authors whose primary ambition is to land a teaching job. Whether they think about it or not, novelists are preserving a tradition of precise, expressive language; a habit of looking past surfaces into interiors; maybe an understanding of private experience and public context as distinct but interpenetrating; maybe mystery, maybe manners. Above all, they are preserving a community of readers and writers, and the way in which members of this community recognize each other is that nothing in the world seems simple to them,
Shirley Heath uses the bland word “unpredictability” to describe this conviction of complexity; Flannery O’Connor called it “mystery.” In Desperate Characters, Fox captures it like this: “Ticking away inside the carapace of ordinary life and its sketchy agreements was anarchy.” For me, the word that best describes the novelist’s view of the world is “tragic.” In Nietzsche’s account of the “birth of tragedy,” which remains pretty much unbeatable as a theory of why people enjoy sad narratives, an anarchic “Dionysian” insight into the darkness and unpredictability of life is wedded to an “Apollonian” clarity and beauty of form to produce an experience that’s religious in its intensity. Even for people who don’t believe in anything that they can’t see with their own two eyes, the formal aesthetic rendering of the human plight can be (though I’m afraid we novelists are rightly mocked for overusing the word) redemptive.
It’s possible to locate various morals in Oedipus Rex—“Heed oracles,” say, or “Expect the unexpected,” or “Marry in haste, repent at leisure”—and their existence confirms in us a sense of the universe’s underlying orderliness. But what makes Oedipus human is that of course he doesn’t heed the Oracle. And though Sophie Bentwood, 2,500 years later, “shouldn’t” try to insulate herself from the rabid society around her, of course she tries to anyway. But then, as Fox writes: “How quickly the husk of adult life, its importance, was shattered by the thrust of what was, all at once, real and imperative and absurd.”
The most reliable indicator of a tragic perspective in a work of fiction is comedy. I think there’s very little good fiction that isn’t funny. I’m still waiting for the non-German-speaking world to get the news that Kafka, for example, is a comic writer. Truer words were never spoken than when Clarence Thomas responded to Anita Hill’s accusations by intoning: “This is Kafkaesque.” A man who probably is guilty—a man whose twisted private problems with women have become public property—indignantly protesting his innocence? If Kafka had been alive, he would have been laughing. Given the prospect of Thomas on the bench for another thirty years, what else is there to do?
I hope it’s clear that by “tragic” I mean just about any fiction that raises more questions than it answers: anything in which conflict doesn’t resolve into cant. The point of calling serious fiction. tragic is simply to highlight its distance from the rhetoric of optimism that so pervades our culture. The necessary lie of every successful regime, including the upbeat techno-corporatism under which we now live, is that the regime has made the world a better place. Tragic realism preserves the recognition that improvement always comes at a cost; that nothing lasts forever; that if the good in the world outweighs the bad, it’s by the slimmest of margins. I suspect that art has always had a particularly tenuous purchase on the American imagination because ours is a country to which hardly anything really terrible has ever happened. The only genuine tragedies to befall us were slavery and the Civil War, and it’s probably no accident that the tradition of Southern literature has been strikingly rich and productive of geniuses. (Compare the literature of the sunny, fertile, peaceful West Coast.) Superficially at least, for the great white majority, the history of this country has consisted of success and more success. Tragic realism preserves access to the dirt behind the dream of Chosenness—to the human difficulty beneath the technological ease, to the sorrow behind the popcultural narcosis: to all those portents on the margins of our existence.
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.
—Flannery O’Connor
Depression, when it’s clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it’s known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there’s a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you’re depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don’t want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure, though this “cure” is anything but straightforward.
I spent the early Nineties trapped in a double singularity. Not only did I feel different from everyone around me, but the age I lived in felt utterly different from any age that had come before. For me the work of regaining a tragic perspective has therefore involved a dual kind of reaching-out: both the reconnection with a community of readers and writers, and the reclamation of a sense of history.
It’s possible to have a general sense of history’s darkness, a mystical Dionysian conviction that the game ain’t over till it’s over, without having enough of an Apollonian grasp of the details to appreciate its consolations. Until a year ago, for example, it would never have occurred to me to assert that this country has always been dominated by commerce.[8] I saw only the ugliness of the commercial present, and naturally I raged at the betrayal of an earlier America that I presumed to have been truer, less venal, less hostile to the enterprise of fiction. But how ridiculous the self-pity of the writer in the late twentieth century can seem in light, say, of Herman Melville’s life. How familiar his life is: he first novel that makes his reputation, the painful discovery of how little his vision appeals to prevailing popular tastes, the growing sense of having no place in a sentimental republic, the horrible money troubles, the abandonment by his publisher, the disastrous commercial failure of his finest and most ambitious work, the reputed mental illness (his melancholy, his depression), and finally the retreat into writing purely for his own satisfaction.
Reading Melville’s biography, I wish that he’d been granted the example of someone like himself, from an earlier century, to make him feel less singularly cursed. I wish, too, that he’d been able to say to himself, when he was struggling to support Lizzie and their kids: hey, if worst comes to worst, I can always teach writing. In his lifetime, Melville made about $10,500 from his books. Even today, he can’t catch a break. On its first printing, the title page of the second Library of America volume of Melville’s collected works bore the name, in 24-point display type, HERMAN MEVILLE.
Last summer, as I began to acquaint myself with American history, and as I talked to readers and writers and pondered the He
athian “social isolate,” there was growing inside me a realization that my condition was not a disease but a nature. How could I not feel estranged? I was a reader. My nature had been waiting for me all along, and now it welcomed me. All of a sudden I became aware of how starved I was to construct and inhabit an imagined world. The hunger felt like a loneliness of which I’d been dying. How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the “real” world? I didn’t need curing, and the world didn’t, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding—without a sense of belonging to the real world—it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one.
At the heart of my despair about the novel had been a conflict between my feeling that I should Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream, and my desire to write about the things closest to me, to lose myself in the characters and locales I loved. Writing, and reading too, had become a grim duty, and considering the poor pay, there is seriously no point in doing either if you’re not having fun. As soon as I jettisoned my perceived obligation to the chimerical mainstream, my third book began to move again. I’m amazed, now, that I’d trusted myself so little for so long, that Pd felt such a crushing imperative to engage explicitly with all the forces impinging on die pleasure of reading and writing: as if, in peopling and arranging my own little alternate world, I could ignore the bigger social picture even if I wanted to.
How to Be Alone Page 29
