The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

by Gore Vidal

  At the moment, advance culture scouts are reporting with a certain awe that those men and women who were brought up as television-watchers respond, predictably, to pictures that move and talk but not at all to prose fictions; and though fashion might dictate the presence of an occasional irreducible artifact in a room, no one is about to be reinvented by it. Yet the old avant-garde continues worriedly to putter with form.

  Surveying the literary output for 1965, Miss Sontag found it “hard to think of any one book [in English] that exemplifies in a central way the possibilities for enlarging and complicating the forms of prose literature.” This desire to “enlarge” and “complicate” the novel has an air of madness to it. Why not minimize and simplify? One suspects that out of desperation she is picking verbs at random. But then, like so many at present, she has a taste for the random. Referring to William Burroughs’s resolutely random work The Soft Machine, she writes: “In the end, the voices come together and sound what is to my mind the most serious, urgent and original voice in American letters to be heard for many years.” It is, however, the point to Mr. Burroughs’s method that the voices don’t come together: he is essentially a sport who is (blessedly) not serious, not urgent, and original only in the sense that no other American writer has been so relentlessly ill-humored in his send-up of the serious. He is the Grand Guy Grand of American letters. But whether or not Miss Sontag is right or wrong in her analyses of specific works and general trends, there is something old-fashioned and touching in her assumption (shared with the New Novelists) that if only we all try hard enough in a “really serious” way, we can come up with the better novel. This attitude reflects not so much the spirit of art as it does that of Detroit.

  No one today can predict what games post-Gutenberg man will want to play. The only certainty is that his mind will work differently from ours; just as ours works differently from that of pre-Gutenberg man, as Miss Frances Yates demonstrated so dramatically in The Art of Memory. Perhaps there will be more Happenings in the future. Perhaps the random will take the place of the calculated. Perhaps the ephemeral will be preferred to the permanent: we stop in time, so why should works of art endure? Also, as the shadow of atomic catastrophe continues to fall across our merry games, the ephemeral will necessarily be valued to the extent it gives pleasure in the present and makes no pretense of having a future life. Since nothing will survive the firewind, the ashes of one thing will be very like those of another, and so what matters excellence?

  One interesting result of today’s passion for the immediate and the casual has been the decline, in all the arts, of the idea of technical virtuosity as being in any way desirable. The culture (kitsch as well as camp) enjoys singers who sing no better than the average listener, actors who do not act yet are, in Andy Warhol’s happy phrase, “super-stars,” painters whose effects are too easily achieved, writers whose swift flow of words across the page is not submitted to the rigors of grammar or shaped by conscious thought. There is a general Zen-ish sense of why bother? If a natural fall of pebbles can “say” as much as any shaping of paint on canvas or cutting of stone, why go to the trouble of recording what is there for all to see? In any case, if the world should become, as predicted, a village united by an electronic buzzing, our ideas of what is art will seem as curious to those gregarious villagers as the works of what we used to call the Dark Ages appear to us.

  Regardless of what games men in the future will want to play, the matter of fiction seems to be closed. Reading skills—as the educationalists say—continue to decline with each new generation. Novel reading is not a pastime of the young now being educated, nor, for that matter, is it a preoccupation of any but a very few of those who came of age in the last warm years of linear type’s hegemony. It is possible that fashion may from time to time bring back a book or produce a book which arouses something like general interest (Miss Sontag darkly suspects that “the nineteenth-century novel has a much better chance for a comeback than verse drama, the sonnet, or landscape painting”). Yet it is literature itself which seems on the verge of obsolescence, and not so much because the new people will prefer watching to reading as because the language in which books are written has become corrupt from misuse.

  In fact, George Steiner believes that there is a definite possibility that “The political inhumanity of the twentieth century and certain elements in the technological mass-society which has followed on the erosion of European bourgeois values have done injury to language….” He even goes so far as to suggest that for now at least silence may be a virtue for the writer—when

  language simply ceases, and the motion of spirit gives no further outward manifestation of its being. The poet enters into silence. Here the word borders not on radiance or music, but on night.

  Although Mr. Steiner does not himself take this romantic position (“I am not saying that writers should stop writing. This would be fatuous”), he does propose silence as a proud alternative for those who have lived at the time of Belsen and of Vietnam, and have witnessed the perversion of so many words by publicists and political clowns. The credibility gap is now an abyss, separating even the most honorable words from their ancient meanings. Fortunately, ways of communication are now changing, and though none of us understands exactly what is happening, language is bound to be affected.

  But no matter what happens to language, the novel is not apt to be revived by electronics. The portentous theorizings of the New Novelists are of no more use to us than the self-conscious avant-gardism of those who are forever trying to figure out what the next “really serious” thing will be when it is plain that there is not going to be a next serious thing in the novel. Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end, if not the end. Yet that is no reason not to want to practice it, or even to read it. In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words.

  Encounter

  December 1967

  AMERICAN PLASTIC: THE MATTER OF FICTION

  The New Novel is close to forty years old. Although forty is young for an American presidential candidate or a Chinese buried egg, it is very old indeed for a literary movement, particularly a French literary movement. But then what, recently, has one heard of the New Novel, whose official vernissage occurred in 1938 with Nathalie Sarraute’s publication of Tropismes? The answer is not much directly from the founders but a good deal indirectly, for, with characteristic torpor, America’s departments of English have begun slowly, slowly to absorb the stern aesthetics of Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet, not so much through the actual writing of these masters as through their most brilliant interpreter, the witty, meta-camp sign-master and analyst of le degré zéro de l’écriture Roland Barthes, whose amused and amusing saurian face peers like some near-sighted chameleon from the back of a half-dozen slim volumes now being laboriously read in Academe.

  Barthes has also had a significant (or signifying) effect on a number of American writers, among them Mr. Donald Barthelme. Two years ago Mr. Barthelme was quoted as saying that the only American writers worth reading are John Barth, Grace Paley, William Gass, and Thomas Pynchon. Dutifully, I have read all the writers on Mr. Barthelme’s list, and presently I will make my report on them. But first, a look at M. Barthes.

  For over twenty years Barthes has been a fascinating high critic who writes with equal verve about Charlie Chaplin, detergents, Marx, toys, Balzac, structuralism, and semiology. He has also put the theory of the New Novelists rather better than they have themselves, a considerable achievement since it is as theoreticians and not as practitioners that these writers excel. Unlike Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, and Butor, Professor Barthes is much too clever actually to write novels himself, assuming that such things exist, new or old, full of signs or not, with or without sequential narrative
s. Rather, Barthes has remained a commentator and a theoretician, and he is often pleasurable to read though never blissful, to appropriate his own terminology.

  Unlike the weather, theories of the novel tend to travel from east to west. But then, as we have always heard (sometimes from the French themselves), the French mind is addicted to the postulating of elaborate systems in order to explain everything, while the Anglo-American mind tends to shy away from unified-field theories. We chart our courses point to point; they sight from the stars. The fact that neither really gets much of anywhere doesn’t mean that we haven’t all had some nice outings over the years.

  Nine years ago I wrote an exhaustive and, no doubt, exhausting account of the theory or theories of the French New Novel. Rejected by the American literary paper for which I had written it (subject not all that interesting), I was obliged to publish in England at the CIA’s expense. Things have changed since 1967. Today one can hardly pick up a Serious literary review without noting at least one obligatory reference to Barthes, or look at any list of those novelists currently admired by American English departments without realizing that although none of these writers approaches zero degree, quite a few are on the chilly side. This is not such a bad thing. Twice, by the way, I have used the word “thing” in this paragraph. I grow suspicious, as one ought to be in zero-land, of all things and their shadows, words.

  Barthes’s American admirers are particularly fascinated by semiology, a quasi-science of signs first postulated by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics (1916). For some years the school of Paris and its American annex have made much of signs and signification, linguistic and otherwise. Barthes’s Elements of Semiology (1964) is a key work and not easy to understand. It is full of graphs and theorems as well as definitions and puzzles. Fortunately, Susan Sontag provides a useful preface to the American edition of Writing Degree Zero, reminding us that Barthes “simply takes for granted a great deal that we do not.” Zero degree writing is that colorless “white” writing (first defined and named by Sartre in his description of Camus’s L’Étranger). It is a language in which, among other things and nothings, metaphor and anthropomorphizing are eliminated. According to Sontag, Barthes is reasonable enough to admit that this kind of writing is but “one solution to the disintegration of literary language.”

  As for semiology or the “science” of signs, Barthes concedes that “this term, sign, which is found in very different vocabularies…is for these very reasons very ambiguous.” He categorizes various uses of the word “from the Gospels to Cybernetics.” I should like to give him a use of the word he seems not to know. The word for “sign” in Sanskrit is “lingam,” which also means “phallus,” the holy emblem of our Lord Shiva.

  In S/Z (1970) Barthes took “Sarrasine,” a Balzac short story, and subjected it to a line-by-line, even a word-by-word analysis. In the course of this assault, Barthes makes a distinction between what he calls the “readerly text” and the “writerly text” (I am using Mr. Richard Miller’s translation of these phrases). Barthes believes that “the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce…between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness—he is intransitive; he is, in short, serious. Opposite the writerly text, then, is its counter-value, its negative, reactive value: what can be read but not written: the readerly. We call any readerly text a classic text.” Then “the writerly is the novelistic without the novel, poetry without the poem…. But the readerly texts? They are products (and not productions), they make up the mass of our literature. How [to] differentiate this mass once again?”

  Barthes believes that this can be done through “interpretation (in the Nietzschean sense of the word).” He has a passion, incidentally, for lizardlike dodges from the direct statement by invoking some great reverberating name as an adjective, causing the reader’s brow to contract. But then the lunges and dodges are pretty much the matter as well as the manner of Barthes’s technique as he goes to work on Balzac’s short story of a man who falls in love with a famous Italian singer who turns out to be not the beautiful woman of his dreams but a castrated Neapolitan boy.

  I do not intend to deal with Barthes’s “interpretation” of the text. It is a very elaborate and close reading in a style that seems willfully complicated. I say willfully because the text of itself is a plain and readerly one in no need of this sort of assistance, not that Barthes wants to assist either text or reader. Rather he means to make for his own delectation or bliss a writerly text of his own. I hope that he has succeeded.

  Like so many of today’s academic critics, Barthes resorts to formulas, diagrams; the result, no doubt, of teaching in classrooms equipped with blackboards and chalk. Envious of the half-erased theorems—the prestigious signs—of the physicists, English teachers now compete by chalking up theorems and theories of their own, words having failed them yet again.

  Fair stood the wind for America. For twenty years from the east have come these thoughts, words, signs. Let us now look and see what our own writers have made of so much exciting heavy weather, particularly the writers Mr. Donald Barthelme has named. Do they show signs of the French Pox?

  Two years ago, I had read some of Gass, tried and failed to read Barth and Pynchon. I had never read Mr. Barthelme and I had never heard of Grace Paley. I have now made my way through the collected published works of the listed writers as well as through Mr. Barthelme’s own enormous output. I was greatly helped in my journey through these texts by Mr. Joe David Bellamy’s The New Fiction, a volume containing interviews with most of the principals and their peers.

  Over the years I have seen but not read Donald Barthelme’s short stories in The New Yorker. I suppose I was put off by the pictures. Barthelme’s texts are usually decorated with perspective drawings, ominous faces, funny-looking odds and ends. Let the prose do it, I would think severely, and turn the page, looking for S. J. Perelman. I was not aware that I was not reading one who is described in The New Fiction as, “according to Philip Stevick…‘the most imitated fictionist in the United States today.’” Mr. Stevick is plainly authority to the interviewer, who then gets Barthelme to say a number of intelligent things about the life of a “fictionist” today. Mr. Barthelme tells us that his father was “a ‘modern’ architect.” Incidentally, it is now the fashion to put quotes around any statement or word that might be challenged. This means that the questionable word or statement was not meant literally but ironically or “ironically.” Another way of saying, “Don’t hit me. I didn’t really ‘mean’ it.” As son of a School of Barnstone architect, Barthelme came naturally by those perspective drawings that so annoyed (and still annoy) me. He has worked as an editor and “I enjoy editing and enjoy doing layout-problems of design. I could very cheerfully be a typographer.”

  Barthelme’s first book, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, contains short stories written between 1961 and 1964. This was the period during which Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet and Barthes were being translated into English. Although Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel was not translated until 1965, Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropismes was translated in 1963 as were such essential novels as Le Planétarium, Fruits d’or, Jalousie, and Le Voyeur. I note the fact of translation only because Barthelme admits to our common “American lack-of-language.” Most American and English writers know foreign literature only through translation. This is bad enough when it comes to literature but peculiarly dangerous when it comes to theory. One might put the case that without a French education there is no way of comprehending, say, Roland Barthes (Sontag suggests as much). One can only take a piece here, a piece there, relate it to the tradition that one knows, and hope for the best. There is comfort, however, in knowing that the French do not get the point to us either.

  The stories in Come Back, Dr. Cali
gari are fairly random affairs. Barthelme often indulges in a chilling heterosexual camp that is, nevertheless, quite a bit warmer than zero degree centigrade. There are funny names and cute names. Miss Mandible. Numerous non sequiturs. Dialogue in the manner not only of Ionesco but of Terry Southern (another Texas master). One can read any number of Barthelme’s lines with a certain low-keyed pleasure. But then silliness stops the eye cold. “‘You’re supposed to be curing a ham.’ ‘The ham died,’ she said.” The Marx Brothers could get a big laugh on this exchange because they would already have given us a dozen other gags in as many minutes. Unhappily one small gag on its own shrivels and dies. “‘You may not be interested in absurdity,’ she said firmly, ‘but absurdity is interested in you.’”

  Three years later came Snow White. This fiction was billed by the publisher as “a perverse fairy tale.” The book is composed of fairly short passages. Quotation marks are used to enclose dialogue and there are the usual number of “he saids,” and “she replieds.” This is an important point. Truly new writing eliminates quotation marks and “he saids.” Barthelme is still cooking on a warm stove. The seven dwarfs are indistinguishable from one another and from the heroine. But the somewhat plodding tone of this work holds the attention rather better than did any of those fragments in the first volume. Yet Barthelme is compelled always to go for the easy twist. “Those cruel words remain locked in his lack of heart.” Also, he writes about the writing he is writing: