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The poet's function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction between historian and poet...consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of a graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
Aristotle (Poetics 1451)
(1)
In my more honest moments, I am inclined to admit that I find only two things in the world truly fascinating: metaphysics and gossip. Everything between these two limits, between the general structure and meaning of the universe on the one hand and, on the other, who exactly went to bed with whom and what they did there, is of less compelling interest. Most of the things that are important to the material well-being of the human race lie in this in-between zone - how to cure pneumonia, how to overthrow tyrants, the structure of polymers, etc. are equidistant from metaphysics and gossip. And I take these things as seriously as anyone. But I am not concerned here with the serious and the important. I am concerned with the truly interesting; I am concerned with art; in particular with the art of fiction.
(2)
Somewhere in his massive and wonderful unfinished masterpiece The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil's hero and alter ego Ulrich remarks rather snobbishly that there are two sorts of mind: the superior mind that is interested in the (general) what and the common mind that is interested in the (particular) who. Musil is not being entirely true to himself here. For if he were concerned exclusively with the most general what he should never have been a novelist. Novelists, I believe, are inescapably interested in the quis as well as the quid, the who as well the what, the particular as well as the general; otherwise they would have concerned themselves with purer intellectual pursuits such as cosmology, ontology, theology and the like - or not been writers at all.
(3)
There has been interesting and intriguing resistance to acknowledging and valuing the hybrid nature of the novel, its dual attraction towards the two poles of metaphysics and gossip. There are those who reject the metaphysics and those who reject the gossip.
(a) The Rejection of Metaphysics
Nabokov famously despised the novel of ideas, not to speak of the philosophical novel, singling out Thomas Mann as a crashing bore, the archetype of the novelist who wanted to subordinate his fiction to the ideas he wished to purvey. This is, of course, a caricature. Mann's greatness lay in his ability to dissolve large ideas in the situation, characters and events of his narratives. Yes, his characters utter ideas - almost endlessly, at times, as in The Magic Mountain - but they are also uttered in those ideas. Think of Settembrini, of Naphta, even of that tabula rasa himself, Hans Castorp. And Nabokov's own novel and novellas are charged with implicit philosophy. Nabokov was right to detest novelists who had rather obvious designs on readers; authors of romans a these for whom the theses could spare the novelist his essential craftsmanly obligation to 'caress the details', to describe the real world or, as Nabokov so often insisted, a real world.
The thesis-novel offended Nabokov because he didn't believe in the world - corresponding to the monolithic vision of the ontologist or political theorist - and partly because he saw invocation, not analysis, as the novelist's essential business. To forgo the observation that a character's chin might triple as she glanced down to brush off the crumbs from her large bejumpered bosom is to renege on the novelist's essential responsibility to make the reader see. And he would have concurred with Proust's observation that art subordinated to the conveying of ideas is like a gift with a price ticket on it. (Proust was, of course, among the greatest of all philosophical novelists.)
(b) The Rejection of Gossip
'...the fatal futility of fact'
Henry James
Paul Valery despised the particularity and contingency of the novel. Why should I care, he famously asked, whether the marquise went out at five o'clock? Not a bad question. For fictional facts risk a double nullity: like non-fictional facts, they are trivial, or have only a narrowly local interest; and, in addition, they are not even true. To this there corresponds a double arbitrariness of confabulation - there is no limit to one's ability to make up any number of marquises and their comings and goings. (And it is true that most novelists are too busy inventing (or cribbing) to discover anything - though, admittedly, in fiction as in science, one does need to do some inventing to kick-start the process of discovery.) For Valery, fiction failed to be of interest because it did not address either of the aims he thought non-trivial writing should have: investigating the fundamental nature of consciousness; and uncovering the system of language.
It is difficult to know how sincere Valery was. His own great works are by no means free of the particular, even his most abstract poems. The recit of La Jeune Parque gains resonance from the contingent fact that the voice is attributed to a female. As for Le Cimitiere Marin, the local details and their personal reference give this most philosophical of poems a poignancy crucial to its power to engage our ravished attention. Moreover, for the reasons he himself set out in his early prose masterpieces such as M. Teste and Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci, he did not write metaphysical treatises on language or on consciousness, but poems, dialogues, essays...in short, gossip.
And gossip has been robustly defended by some authors who are serious to the point of austerity. listen to Joseph Conrad, responding here, through his alter ego Marlowe, to the charge of 'seeking amusement through mere gossip':
From gossip there springs in us compassion, charity, indignation, the sense of solidarity; and in minds of any largeness an inclination to that indulgence which is next to affection (Chance).
(4)
The future of the novel, I would like to propose, lies in more explicit recognition of the two poles, metaphysics and gossip, to which serious fiction tends and in more ingenious and convincing and effective ways of mediating between the two. For the novel has the potential - by connecting the small facts that detain us with the large facts that enclose us - to be a means by which we are, if not unified, at least composed in a larger sense. Its future lies in exploiting to the maximum the power of the storyteller - who is able to invest a withheld fact with our curiosity, who can awaken in us a ravenous appetite for knowing a particular thing, a specific future - on behalf of the larger wonder of the metaphysician. By reconciling the vector of the journey towards revelation with the stasis of certain knowledge, such fiction would seem to fulfil one idea of the purpose of art: that of putting our minds and hearts into their least local mode without loss of intensity or interest.
If we think of fiction and philosophy as they are conventionally understood, each by itself is insufficient: fiction is concrete but too regional in its reference; philosophy, on the other hand, is universal in its range but abstract to the point of near-emptiness, and, except in the case of a gifted few readers, themselves usually philosophers, gives nothing for much of the imagination to get a purchase on. Appetite is necessary to italicise our sense of being there and this depends upon links to locality, to particulars. By uniting strong appetite to wide wonder, the fiction of the future might fulfil the dimly intuited dream of utopian consciousness in which, in the same moment, we know ourselves as subjects experienced from within and as objects seen from afar.
(5)
Perhaps the fiction I am talking about will look increasingly essay-like. In his discussion of Diderot, author of one of the earliest fictional essays, Le Neveu de Rameau, Lucien Goldmann noted that
The essay is both abstract and concrete. Its nature, like that of philosophy, is chiefly to raise certain conceptual questions fundamental to human life; but, unlike most philosophy, it has neither the desire nor the ability to answer them. Like literature, it puts these questions not in a conceptual form but attaches them to the 'occasion' of a concrete person or situation taken both from literature and (as the greatest essayists do) from real life. The true essay thus necessarily inhabits two worlds, and is necessarily ironic: it seems to be talking about real people and situations, but these are mere 'occasions' for the essayist to raise crucial abstract questions.
The fictional essay of the future, however, will be animated with a longing to answer the questions fundamental to human life. It m may not have the ability to answer them but the writer will be one of those, like Wittgenstein, of whom Russell said it hurt him not to know the answers. And that hurt will not be separated from the other hurts - and delights - that come with our peculiar condition of being transcendent minds embodied in warm flesh.
(6)
Such fiction will, of course, have precursors. I have already mentioned Musil with admiration. Proust, Borges, Mann, Benn - even, at a lower level, Kundera - also figure large in my own Antologia Personal. Each of these writers has struck his own balance between gossip and metaphysics, found his own way of ensuring that the spider of abstract thought does not break the web of enchantment, his own way of dealing with the anxiety, so eloquently expressed by Amiel, that abstract reflection should not 'dissolve reverie and burn her delicate wings'. (An excessive concern with negative capability should not override the supposedly 'philistine' rage for deeper understanding.)
Perhaps in Borges' case the ideas sometimes precipitate out too decisively from the solvent of the story; but even a piece such as 'A New refutation of Time' has sufficient human presence to dramatise the ideas. In the hands of such a master, the mere use of a woman's name - who this 'Helen' is whom he refers to in the midst of his elegiac meditation on time, I do not know - is sufficient to infuse a sense of personal loss into the universal and abstract mystery of transience, to create a luminous anguish which does something like justice to the condition of some lives. If we are to be whole, our sadness and happiness should animate our most profound reflections on the great questions; and the novelist should, to take a phrase of babel's far out of context, ensure that her meditations on the enigmas of the future and the past convey the autumn in the heart as well as the spectacles on the nose.
Such fiction might earn the respect of the shades of Paul Valery and even of William James. The latter's letter to Gertrude Stein, explaining why he has not yet read the copy of Three Lives she had sent him, is worth reflecting on:
I promise you that it shall be read some time! You see what a swine I am to have such pearls cast before him! As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to cerebrate!
Of equal relevance here is Eliot's characterisation of William's brother Henry:
James's critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.
The novelists of the future will not be afraid of ideas, nor even of taking them seriously. They will have minds so fine that they can be violated by many ideas without losing their refinement. In this way, they will avoid the emptiness that sometimes haunts the perfections of idea-resistant geniuses such as William's brother, of whose method William said:
To avoid describing it [the object] straight, but by dint of sighing and breathing all around it, to arouse in the reader, who may have had a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn't!) the illusion of a solid object, made...wholly out of impalpable materials, and the prismatic interferences of light, ingeniously focussed by mirrors upon empty space...
(7)
Of course there will be problems:
(a) A gossip-yeasted novel will often find it difficult to transcend the gossip which animates it, just as contemporary a-philosophical novels, by intermittently appealing to the reader's appetites, sometimes lose the latter's attention for long stretches. The aroused reader hurries impatiently from one undressing to another, resenting the intervening descriptions of the grass and tress and the scrupulous dissections of feelings. The novelist of the future will have to find new ways of mediating between the warring claims of the reader's cerebral cortex and limbic circuit.
(b) The standard implausibilities of serious fiction will remain a perpetual temptation; for example, the contrived attribution of polished thoughts to ordinary, ragged consciousness and the turning of busy consciousness into articulate, or diagnostically inarticulate, voices to help the plot (metaphysical and gossippy) along. This attribution may also be a form of authorial cowardice: half-baked thoughts can be off-loaded on to characters (forced to think to themselves with improbably coherence) whose creation permits the author to be at once didactic and ironically distant from didacticism.
(c) Whimsy, magic, etc. Will still tempt the idle writer shrinking from the 'the ordeal of mimesis'. The penalty of requiring of the reader that she suspend her disbelief is that she will at the same time let go of the greater part of her critical intelligence, her native sensibility and, into the bargain, her propensity for a wider wonder. The mystery of goblins distracts from the mystery of children; horses that speak deafen us to the miracle of human speech; a concern with the doubtful magic of ESP blinds to the indubitable magic of P. Enough said.
(d) The natural state of the reader is boredom seasoned with impatience. The novel of the future will require new kinds of reader, trained in new sorts of expectations. They will need a special sort of forebearance to persist with fictions that demand two kinds of patience at once: the sort of patience necessary to follow arguments; and the sort necessary to engage with the contingent quiddities and the cunctations of a protracted narrative.
(e) A philistinism of seriousness will remain a constant danger. The philosophical fiction of the future must not fall into the trap of merely illustrating pre-formed ideas; it must transfigure the great ideas by marrying them to the gossip of everyday life. Metaphysics and gossip should be equal partners. This means taking gossip as seriously as we take it in real life: it should not be subordinated to the ideas. It also, however, means that authors should not be inhibited by pusillanimous fear of being philistine according to the old understanding and consequently being afraid of breaking spells with thoughts. A thought, properly realised, is a spell. (To vary what has been said before: the novelist of the future will not be afraid of ideas; having a mind so find that many ideas can violate it without detriment to her refined sense of the actual.)
(f) Etc.
Let me end, where I began, with metaphysics and gossip. We may relate these to the two great projects or aspirations of human consciousness: the achievement of what Thomas Nagel poignantly titled 'The View from Nowhere' that endeavours to see the whole of things in the light of eternity; and the equally difficult achievement of 'The View from Here', of utter immersion in the particular, even singular, and at the same time open to generality of the highest order. By this means, fiction may contribute to bringing together those two halves of ourselves and making us whole.
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