Then exaltations and panegyrics for the altar and the sibyl! For consciousness of anointment (however mistaken or futile), for self-belief subversive of commerce (or call it arrogance defeated by commerce); and for spectacle, dominion, energy and honor —a glorifying phrase pinched from Trust. It was the novel of my prime; I will never again write with so hubristic a passion. It marked the crest of life, the old ambition's deepest bite—before doubt and diffidence set in, and the erosion of confidence, and the diminution of nerve. My loyalty to my first novel continues undiminished. If, in 1966, it gave no pleasure to a reviewer (except for the sex chapter), I will not complain. For the real right reader I am willing to wait a thousand years!—because it is not so much the novel that takes my praise as that archaic penumbra, that bottomless lordly overbearing ambition of long ago. Ambition as it once was.
Let Enoch Vand, chanting his imperious aphorisms in chapter twenty-two, speak for the author of Trust in her twenties, and a little beyond:
To desire to be what one can be is purpose in life.
There are no exterior forces. There are only interior forces.
Who squanders talent praises death.
I was never again so heedlessly brave.
Highbrow Blues
NOT VERY LONG AGO, when the (literary) writer Jonathan Franzen was catapulted to the status of celebrity, it was not only because his novel The Corrections had become a bestseller. It was because he had declined celebrity, he had scorned it, he had thumbed his nose at it. It was because for him celebrity was a scandal, an embarrassment. It shamed him. It demeaned him. It was the opposite of his desire. His desire was to be counted among artists, not to be interviewed by a popular sentimentalist hosting a television show. His bailiwick, his turf, his lingo—his art—was serious literature. He wanted it plainly understood that he was not your run-of-the-mill Oprah pick. He was a highbrow. Oprah Winfrey, he complained, was in the habit of choosing "schmaltzy, one-dimensional" books that made him "cringe."
And then followed what may turn out to be the most arresting literary gaffe of the twenty-first century so far: "I feel," he said, "like I'm solidly in the high-art literary tradition." For a writer in that tradition, he intimated, the letter "O" (for Oprah) branded on a book jacket might signify hundreds of thousands of copies in print, but it was also the mark of Cain. Or else it was the scarlet letter of literary disgrace.
Like I'm solidly in the high-art literary tradition. Never mind that "the high-art literary tradition" generally shuns the use of "like" as a conjunction: the remark was off the cuff, presumably under a journalist's pressure, and nothing if not informal. It was the telltale phrase itself— the high-art literary tradition—that shot Franzen through the cannon of doleful celebrity, if not into the Western canon. What did it mean? What was it? Why did it sound so awkward, so out of tune, so self-conscious, so—one hesitates to say—jejune? Why did it have the effect of a very young man attempting to talk like the grownups? And what had become of those grownups anyhow? Why were they, by and large, no longer on the scene—so little on the scene, in fact, and so little in anyone's thoughts or vocabulary, that a locution like high-art literary tradition took on the chirp of mimicry, of archaism?
Poor Franzen was scolded all around. He was scolded for ingratitude. He was scolded for elitism. He was scolded for chutzpah—what sane writer would be so unreasonable as to give the cold shoulder to the powerfully influential Oprah Book Club? Even Harold Bloom scolded him. Oprah herself didn't scold him—she simply canceled him.
Only a short while before the Franzen brouhaha, Philip Roth published a little volume called Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. Roth, of course, had long ago passed from the shock-celebrity, or notoriety, of Portnoy's Complaint to innumerable high-art literary awards, including the Gold Medal in Fiction of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Shop Talk consists of interviews, exchanges, reflections: on Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, Ivan Klíma, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bruno Schulz, Milan Kundera, Edna O'Brien, Mary McCarthy, and Bernard Malamud. It closes with "Rereading Saul Bellow," a remarkable essay of homage expressed in an authoritative prose of matchless literary appetite. A writer of Roth's stature—one of the shapers of the novel in our time—engaging with ten of the significant literary figures of the twentieth century!
Fifty years ago, we can be sure, this would have been taken as an Event, as a cultural marker, as an occasion for heating up New York's literary stewpots as much as, or even more than, Franzen's explosive—and ephemeral—wistfulness. Fifty years ago, the publication of Shop Talk would have been the topic of scores of graduate-student warrens and middle-class dinner parties, of book and gossip columns, of the roiling cenacles of the envious ambitious bookish young. Fifty years ago, Roth's newly revealed correspondence with Mary McCarthy—in which she asserts that Roth's appraisal of anti-Semitism in The Counterlife "irritated and offended" her; in which she considers the "Wailing Wall" to be "repellent"; in which she wryly adds that she looks forward to Roth's conversion to Christianity—fifty years ago, these words, had they then been in print, would have engendered cool rebuttals in Commentary, and everywhere else a slew of op-eds, combative or conciliatory. For an analogy, only recall the storm that greeted Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: the avalanche of editorials, the tumult of answering essays pro and con. (Mary McCarthy's pro among them.)
Some are old enough to remember the contentious excitements that surrounded the publication of Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself, a personal assessment, like Shop Talk, of contemporary writers. Mailer's book was far less serious, far less well intended: it was mainly a noisy, nasty, competitive display of putdowns; an audacious act of flashy self-confessed self-aggrandizement. But—like Shop Talk—it was, after all, about writers, and there was a zealous public for it, a public drawn to substantive literary commotion. In contrast, when Shop Talk appeared in the first year of the twenty-first century, its reception was nearly total muteness. Publishers Weekly, taking obligatory notice, denigrated this large-hearted, illuminating, selfless work of cultural inquiry and fiercely generous admiration as fresh evidence of the Rothian ego—a viewpoint false, stale, and impertinent in both senses. Perhaps there were other reviews; perhaps not. What is notable is that Shop Talk was not notable. It was born into silence. It attracted no major attention, or no attention at all—not even among the editors of intellectual journals. No one praised it, no one condemned it. Not a literary creature stirred in response—not even a louse.
These observations are hardly new; but familiarity does not lessen the shock and the ignominy of a pervasive indifference to serious critical writing. Fifty years ago, it was still taken for granted that there would be serious discourse about serious writing by nonprofessionals, by people for whom books were common currency. These people also listened to Jack Benny on the radio and went to the movies. I am reminded of the Reader's Subscription, a book club presided over by an astonishing highbrow triumvirate: W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling. Fifty years ago, no one spoke so blatantly, so dreamily, of the high-art literary tradition—one doesn't give a name to the air one breathes. If the phrase sounds nostalgic today (and it does), it is because it has the awed, wondering, adoring and somewhat soppy tone Oprah herself would use; or else the tone of someone born too late, like an antiques-besotted client of limited means whom an interior decorator will oblige with duplicates of period furnishings. The high-art literary tradition—utter these syllables, and you utter a stage set.
In 1952, William Phillips wrote of "the attitude of aesthetic loneliness and revolt"—setting the writer apart from mass cultore—that had characterized his youth. "Along with many other people, most of them more mature than myself," he said, "I felt that art was a temple and that artists belonged to a priesthood of the anointed and the dedicated." The politics and social commitment of the thirties swept all that inherited romanticism away, but only temporarily—it re-emerged soon enough in the postwar aestheticism of the Ne
w Criticism. By the 1950s, the idea of literature as hermetically dedicated and anointed was once again solidly enthroned, complete with Eliot as pope and Pound as high priest—until a second political wave, in the late sixties and into the seventies, knocked out notions of temples and priestly artists once and for all, and replaced them with a howl. It is a long time since we fretted over mass culture. It is a long time since we were thrilled by alienation. It is a long time since Dwight Macdonald sneered at middlebrows. It is a long time since Lionel Trilling thought writing for money cheapened literary aspiration. (Henry James didn't think that.) Modernism as a credo seems faded and old-fashioned, if not obsolete, and what we once called the avant-garde is now either fakery or comedy. The Village, where Auden and Marianne Moore once lived and wrote and walked abroad, is a sort of performance arena nowadays, where the memory of a memory grows fainter and fainter, and where even nostalgia has forgotten exactly what it is supposed to be nostalgic about. Distinction-making, even distinction-discerning, is largely in decline. The difference between high and low is valued by few and blurred by most. The high-art literary tradition brings on snickers (except when it is in the newly aspiring hands of Oprah, who, having canceled Franzen yet learned his lesson well, has ascended, together with her fans, to Anna Karenina and Faulkner).
Writers shouldn't be mistaken for priests, it goes without saying; but neither should movie-script manufacturers be mistaken for writers. Readers are not the same as audiences, and the structure of a novel is not the same as the structure of a lingerie advertisement. Hierarchy, to be sure, is an off-putting notion, invoking high and low; and high smacks of snobbery and antiegali-tarianism. But hierarchy also points to the recognition of distinctions, and—incontrovertibly—the life of intellect is perforce hierarchical: it insists that one thing is not the same as another thing. A novel concerned with English country-house romances is not the same as a tract on slavery in Antigua. A department of English is not the same as a Marxist tutorial. A rap CD is not the same as academic scholarship. A suicide bomber who blows up a pizzeria crowded with baby carriages is not the same as a nation-builder.
Fifty years ago, a salient issue was the bugaboo of conformism. It's true that men in their universal gray fedoras had the look of a field of dandelions gone to seed. It's true that McCarthyism suppressed free opinion and stimulated fear. But both the fedoras and the unruly senator have long been dispatched to their respective graveyards, and if we are to worry about conformism, now is the hour. What does conformism mean if not one side, one argument, one solution? And no one is more conformist than the self-defined alienated, hoary though that term is. In the universities, a literary conformism rules, equating literature with fashionable "progressive" themes; and literature departments promote the newfangled conformism that paradoxically goes under the pluralist-sounding yet absolutist name of multiculturalism: a system of ethnological classification designed to reduce literary culture to group rivalries. Postcolonial courses offer a study in specified villainies and grievances. Certain imprimatur-bearing texts—ah, texts, denatured but indispensable coin!—are offered uncritically, as holy writ, without opposing or dissenting or contextual matter. Yet more than fifty years ago, in my freshman year at NYU, Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom was assigned to be read together with its antithesis, The Communist Manifesto—and that was in the heart of what even its denizens dubbed the Age of Conformity.
"It is worth something," Norman Mailer wrote in 1952, "to remind ourselves that the great artists—certainly the moderns—are almost always in opposition to their society, and that integration, acceptance, non-alienation, etc., has been more conducive to propaganda than art." No statement could be staler than this one, and it was already stale when it was first set down. Is the Thomas Mann of the Joseph novels an artist in opposition? Is Dubliners a work of revolt? What we can say with certainty is that much current study of the great artists tends to make art secondary to propaganda, and sometimes invisible under propaganda's obscuring film. In a democratic polity possessed of free critical expression through innumerable outlets, the moribund old cry of alienation is itself a species of propaganda. Nor, as that propaganda would have it, is self-congratulatory jingoism the opposite of alienation. What the propaganda of alienation seeks is not the higher patriotism saturated in the higher morality, as it pretends, but simple disinheritance.
Admittedly, there is always a golden age, the one not ours, the one that once was or will someday be. One's own time is never satisfactory, except to the very rich or the smugly oblivious. So it is doubtful that the high-art literary tradition, in strict opposition to mass culture, will ever return, even for its would-be latter-day avatars: high and low are inextricably intermingled, whether by sly allusion in The Simpsons, or in Philip Roth's dazzling demotic voice. Low has enriched high; and surely Oprah has enriched publishers. But nothing gives us license, even in the face of this enlivening cultural mishmash, to fall into meltdown: to think that a comic-strip balloon is as legitimate a "text" as Paradise Lost; or that the faddishly softening politics of what is misleadingly called "narrative" can negate a documented historical record; or that art exists chiefly to serve grievance. Alienation, that old carcass, remains, after all, the philistinism of the intellectual. As for the attention given decades ago to Advertisements for Myself: if it were published today, would anyone notice?
The Din in the Head
ON A GRAY AFTERNOON I sit in a silent room and contemplate din. In the street a single car passes—a rapid bass vowel—and then it is quiet again. So what is this uproar, this hubbub, this heaving rumble of zigzag static I keep hearing? This echo chamber spooling out spirals of chaos? An unmistakable noise as clearly mine as fingerprint or twist of DNA: the thrum of regret, of memory, of defeat, of mutability, of bitter fear, made up of shame and ambition and anger and vanity and wishing. The soundtrack of a movie of the future, an anticipatory ribbon of scenes long dreaded, or daydreams without a prayer of materializing. Or else: the replay of unforgotten conversations, humiliating, awkward, indelible. Mainly it is the buzz of the inescapably mundane, the little daily voice that insists and insists: right now, not now, too late, too soon, why not, better not, turn it on, turn it off, notice this, notice that, be sure to take care of, remember not to. The nonstop chatter that gossips, worries, envies, invokes, yearns, condemns, self-condemns.
But innerness—this persistent internal hum—is more than lamentation and desire. It is the quiver of intuition that catches experience and draws it close, to be examined, interpreted, judged. Innerness is discernment; penetration; imagination; self-knowledge. The inner life is the enemy of crowds, because the life of crowds snuffs the mind's murmurings. Mind is many-threaded, mazy, meandering, while every crowd turns out to be a machine—a collectivity of parts united as to purpose.
And with the ratcheting up of technology, every machine turns out to be a crowd. All these contemporary story-grinding contrivances and appliances that purport to capture, sometimes to mimic, the inner life—what are they, really, if not the brute extrusions of the principle of Crowd? Films, with their scores of collaborators, belong to crowds. Films are addressed to crowds (even if you are alone in front of your TV screen). As for those other machine-generated probings—television confessionals, radio psychologists, telephone marketing quizzers, the retrograde e-mail contagion that reduces letter-writing to stunted nineteenth-century telegraphese, electronic "chat rooms" and "blogs" and "magazines" that debase discourse through hollow breeziness and the incessant scramble for the cutting edge—what are they, really, if not the dwarfing gyrations of crowds? Superhero cybernetics, but lacking flight. Picture Clark Kent entering a handy telephone booth not to rise up as a universal god, but to sidle out diminished and stuttering, still wearing his glasses and hat. The very disappearance of telephone booths—those private cells for the whisperings of lovers and conspirators—serves the mentality of crowds, where ubiquitously public cell phones announce confidential assignations to the teeming str
eets.
Tête-à-tête gone flagrante delicto.
Yet there remains a countervailing power. Its sign blazes from the title of Thomas Hardy's depiction of the English countryside, with its lost old phrase: Far from the Madding Crowd. How, in this madding American hour, to put a distance between the frenzy of crowds and the mind's whispered necessities? Get thee to the novel!—the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart's maelstrom.
The electronic revolution, with its accelerating development of this or that apparatus, is frequently compared to the invention of movable type—but the digital is antithetical to the inward life of letters. Print first made possible the individual's solitary engagement with an intimate text; the Gutenberg era moved human awareness from the collective to the reflective. Electronic devices promote the collective, the much-touted "global community"—again the crowd. Microchip chat employs a ghostly simulacrum of print, but chat is not an essay. Film reels out plots, but a movie is not a novel. The inner life dwells elsewhere, occasionally depositing its conscious vibrations in what we think of as the "personal" essay. Though journalism floods us with masses of articles—verbal packets of information suitable to crowds—there are, nowadays, few essays of the meditative kind.
And what of the utterly free precincts of the novel? Is the literary novel, like the personal essay, in danger of obsolescence? An academic alarm goes up every so often, and I suppose the novel may fall out of luck or fashion, at least in the long run. Where, after all, are the sovereign forms of yesteryear—the epic, the saga, the Byronic narrative poem, the autobiographical Wordsworthian ode? Literary grandeur is out of style. If Melville lived among us, would he dare to grapple with the mammoth rhapsody that is Moby-Dick? Forms and genres, like all breathing things, have their natural life spans. They are born into a set of societal conditions and become moribund when those conditions attenuate. But if the novel were to wither—if, say, it metamorphosed altogether into a species of journalism or movies, as many popular novels already have—then the last trustworthy vessel of the inner life (aside from our heads) would crumble away.
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