Sunny Jim

While we’re on the subject of literature, Jacob Levy points to a subscriber-only piece in Even the New Republic about the perenially sad state of modern literature. I can’t read it because I’m not a subscriber, but Jacob quotes a chunk. Who’s to blame for the terrible condition of the novel? James Joyce, that’s who.

bq. I will say it once and for all, straight out: it all went wrong with James Joyce. _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ is less a _bildungsroman_ than the chapter-by-chapter unraveling of a talent that, if “The Dead” is any indication, could have been formidable, while _Ulysses_ is nothing more than a hoax upon literature, a joint shenanigan of the writer and the critical establishment predicated on two admirable, even beautiful fallacies that were hopelessly contingent upon the historical circumstances that produced them: William James’s late Victorian metaphor of the stream of consciousness …and T.S. Eliot’s early modern fantasy of a textual stockpile of intellectual history that would form an allusive network of bridges to the cultural triumphs of the ages, a Venice without the smell of sewage, or mustard gas… _Ulysses_ has served since its publication as the ideal for serious writers, and the twentieth century is littered with magnum opuses that have been written under its sway, and that have marked the nadir of their various writers’ careers.

Well, whether you like him or not, I think it’s hard to claim that Joyce realised Eliot’s antiseptic high-Anglican dream of “Venice without the smell of sewage, or mustard gas.” It was the sewage that so revolted many of his contemporaries, and brought out the worst of their snobbery. Virginia Woolf thought it an “illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are,” nothing more than the work of “a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” (In a letter to Strachey she amended this to “the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges,” Undergraduates presumably being too high-class.) Edith Wharton said it was “a turgid welter of pornography (the rudest schoolboy kind).” Shaw thought it a “revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilisation; but,” he conceded, “it is a truthful one,” E.M. Forster felt it to be “perhaps the most interesting literary experiment of our day” but still “a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud.”

And on and on. I’m more inclined to agree with Anthony Burgess (who wrote one of the best introductions to Joyce’s work): “the appearance of difficulty is part of Joyce’s big joke,” and Ulysses is “one of the most humane novels ever written.” I haven’t read the whole of Peck’s article, so I can’t say whom he’d prefer. I note, though, that having ham-fistedly smacked Joyce around he hurriedly tells us he cannot “that other strain, which I can hardly bear to slog through, the realists and the realists and the realists, too many to name, too many to contemplate, their rational, utilitarian platitudes rolling out endlessly like toilet paper off a spindle.” Perhaps a subscriber can tell me who, besides Dale Peck, counts as a great modern novelist.

Update: Thanks to Ogged, Jacob and Patrick for emailing me the full Peck article. I have to say that, after reading it, I am still not much the wiser. Most of the piece is spent in handwaving perfluffery, agonising over having to play the role of The Critic Who Appears Not To Like Anything. “I am leery of telling people what to look for,” he worries, “lest that’s precisely what they find.” Relax, Dale. Criticism is just part of the Big Conversation. Intelligent recommendations are what people pay you for. But he has bigger plans:

bq. I wanted only to hack away the dead wood in order to discover the heart of the novel. That heart is, I believe, still beating, is still strong and vital; it needs a critic’s help not to grow, but only to be seen. Of course the heart in question isn’t a heart at all, but rather a diffuse locus of ideas and ideologies loosely tethered to a set of individual visions and personalities.

It seems he wants to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, to coin a phrase. The problem is, his critique modern literature has rather too many targets:

bq. Because–make no mistake–every writer wants to save the world. … Embedded in every story, every poem, every play is a utopian vision that, if achieved, would make the words irrelevant, redundant, unnecessary. But parody and pastiche have run their course in that effort. … It is time for a literature that opts out of such a limited, dysphonic call-and-response paradigm, and instead offers a real alternative, an imaginative solution that hints at something beyond the juvenile culture that today’s writers spend so much time making fun of in such a juvenile manner.

So are writers saving the world or parodying it? Presenting us with an emancipatory Utopia or parroting juvenile culture? No doubt Peck would say something like “they want to do both, trying to put parody to work in utopia but leaving us with only the toxic antinomy of the modern novel.”

At the end he says,

bq. But only after a work of literature has accepted its own failure–has, as it were, elegized its stillborn self–can it begin the complex series of contextual manipulations by which meaning is created and we locate ourselves as surely as the ancient navigators fixed their positions between stars. … Contemporary novels have either counterfeited reality or forfeited it. In their stead we need a new materialism.

I have little idea what it means to elegize one’s stillborn self, or what a “new materialism” would look like. But it certainly sounds grand to say “a piecemeal approach won’t do anymore. The problem is too widespread within the insular literary and publishing world merely to pick at its edges: the entire scab must be ripped off.” I await Dean’s new scab-ripping novel. Maybe by writing it he can get over having to write pieces that read like Tenacious D‘s “Greatest and Best Song in the World … Tribute.”