Fiction in a Vacuum
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing FICTION IN A VACUUM BY PEARL K. BELL In an essay written a few years ago for the reissue of Christina Stead's neglected masterpiece, The Man Who Loved Children, Randall Jarrell...
...This prospect understandably thrills the pacemakers of the new sensibility...
...He is conscientious about precursors, influences, chronology--the works...
...In fact, many of Gass' theoretical declarations sound not very different from the New Criticism of the 1930s and '40s (though his metaphors and feelings are, to his credit, much less magisterial...
...It is no accident that the most extravagant devotion to Barthelme stems from the trendier postmodern gamesmen of letters, their stylish guns always cocked for the final conflict, the demolition of all conventional forms--which Richard Gilman dismisses as "all those novels which never recognize the crisis of literature and therefore do nothing but repeat its dead forms...
...nor can fiction properly be construed as a means toward any sort of interpretative salvation...
...Think, for instance, of a striding statue...
...Instead we find him writing, in one instance, of that laureate of "the modern trash phenomenon," Donald Barthelme...
...In the poem "New Year Letter," written more than a quarter of a century ago, Auden devised an ironically succinct and less hermetic statement of the same esthetic certainty: "Art in intention is mimesis/ But, realised, the resemblance ceases;/ Art is not life and cannot be/ A midwife to society,/ For art is a fait accompli./ What they should do, or how or when/ Life-order comes to living men/ it cannot say...
...Writers & Writing FICTION IN A VACUUM BY PEARL K. BELL In an essay written a few years ago for the reissue of Christina Stead's neglected masterpiece, The Man Who Loved Children, Randall Jarrell said that it "knows as few books have ever known--knows specifically, profoundly, exhaustively--what a family is: if all mankind had been reared in orphan asylums for a thousand years, it could learn to love families again by reading The Man Who Loved Children...
...We are reminded of the Jesuitical insistence of John Crowe Ransom, R. P. Blackmur and Yvor Winters on the serene autonomy of a work of art, on its indifference to the rather grubby disruptions of those supposedly extraliterary parallels, events and reverberations that close textual analysis rendered impermissible...
...Applying his rigid stricture, Gass reviews or reevaluates books by Malcolm Lowry, Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme...
...In one essay, Gass disputes Ortega's statement that words are windows, and argues, instead, that they are opaque...
...Whatever is not metaphorically, sensually and conceptually part of this constructed order he finds irrelevant...
...Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, Gertrude Stein--writers whose distinct imagination, style and purpose lend themselves with appropriate resiliency to the exposition of his esthetic doctrine...
...To follow Gass' premises to their conclusion would mean discarding the insights of such critics as Trilling and Edmund Wilson, who treat a novel as a world in itself but also discern its context...
...The history of recent French fiction has been left, for the moment, in the hands of Vivian Mercier, who curiously manages to avoid any significant confrontation, philosophical or critical, with his subject...
...Yet our eye travels only to the finger's end, and not beyond...
...In our hearts we know what actually surrounds the statue...
...He detests mirrors (his prickly essay on Nabokov is entitled "Mirror, Mirror"), and is irascibly scornful of novels that claim to interpret experience, tell a story, or explore individual character...
...Gass...
...Nor do I find in Gass' doctrine any convincing rationale for some of his enthusiasms among contemporary writers...
...history without hiatus--intelligible, simple, smooth...
...As Lionel Trilling once discovered when he tried to limit a course in modern literature to formal analysis: "It went against the grain of the authors themselves--structures of words they may indeed have created, but these structures were not pyramids or triumphal arches, they were manifestly contrived not to be static and commemorative but mobile and aggressive, and one does not describe a . . . howitzer without estimating how much damage it can do...
...and if the existence of people is part of the way art functions, so then is history, their history and the history of others, the resonance of the past and the clamor of the multitudinous present...
...Indeed there is a crisis of literature, which is more accurately a crisis of present-day culture, and Barthelme is one of its symptoms...
...Ransom: "The kind of poetry which interests us is . . . the act of an adult mind...
...The worlds which . . . the writer creates are only imaginatively possible ones...
...Clearly, Gass is passionately and belligerently at odds with the ideas and practice of many contemporary critics...
...One would expect him to be irresistibly drawn to the masters of the nouveau roman, like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, but they are scarcely mentioned...
...Gass: The artist "can create with his body because that body has become a mind...
...But what he has produced is a dull and conventional survey fit for undergraduate crammers, not a critical exploration of any substance or originality...
...For most of these essays offer us the restless inquiries of a man who loves language and, in his own fiction, has earned its trust...
...William Gass at his best makes the reader's mind open wide to his light, but Vivian Mercier, who tells everything and says nothing, leaves the reader yawning in the dark...
...This is the kind of remark about fiction--affectionate and seemingly unexceptionable--that would undoubtedly make the novelist, philosopher and critic William Gass wince with distaste...
...Yet even if only one eye exists to travel to the finger's end, the surrounding space is neither empty nor silent...
...His often brilliant celebration of the wonder of the word, however, is pervaded by an unwarranted air of assurance that his thought is uniquely liberated from stale tradition...
...I find it hard to comprehend Gass' delight in Barthelme--or Robert Coover--because the ultimate subversive purpose of such writers, in a world where McLuhan calls the shots, is the destruction not so much of conventional forms of expression (a battle fought by Barthelme's betters long ago) as of language itself...
...Gass' point of view simply is not as daringly iconoclastic as his mandarin tone would suggest...
...And when he strides at his ease from summit to summit, as he does in the dazzling piece on Under the Volcano and in the memoir of Wittgenstein, he is transcendent...
...On the other side of a novel lies the void...
...To suggest that one can "learn to love families again" from a work of fiction is, in Gass' view, to falsify both the intention and the achievement of art...
...his praise, though, rings rather hollow...
...The same surrounds every other work of art: empty space and silence...
...For most people, fiction is history . . . without tables, graphs, dates, imports, edicts, evidence, laws...
...Though he can sometimes be maddeningly arch, stopped dead in his tracks by whimsy or repetitious conceits, Gass' mind, in Hopkins' phrase, "has mountains, cliffs of fall/ Frightful, sheer, no-manfathom'd...
...A novel is an absolute thing, absolutely different from the ordinary experience of reality because it adds something previously nonexistent to that reality...
...But Mr...
...Taken as a whole, these meditative, frequently lyrical essays put forth a unified view of the art of the novel that is consistently austere and unbending in its awe at the limitless philosophical potentiality of words...
...His authors are pelted with all the old critical chestnuts about plot, character, unity of time and place, form and content...
...they need not be at all like any real one, and the metaphysics which any fiction implies is likely to be meaningless or false if taken as nature's own...
...By similar measure, Gass censures Leon Edel's biography of Henry James, for he disapproves of psychological criticism, of evidence and conjectures in defense of "false" portraits and strained lives...
...Mercier, who teaches English at the University of Colorado, has excellent French, bottomless energy, seemingly inexhaustible patience with the strange, often refractory prose of the new novelists...
...For the principal weight of thought, argument and declaration in Gass' collection of essays, Fiction and the Figures of Life (Knopf, 288 pp., $6.95), is given over to a radically different view of the way art works and the way criticism develops its definitions and persuasions...
...He really does know better, though he doesn't always let on...
...The art of fiction, he insists, is not a reflection of or commentary upon anything...
...Though the conceptual purity and severity of his esthetic idealism at times sounds rather old-fashioned, Gass is very much a child of this century, vigorously alert to literary experiment and innovation...
...The New Novel: From Queneau to Pinget (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 432 pp., $10.00) is one of the oddest literary histories I have read, because the contrast between the complex novels and sensibilities he is writing about and the brisk no-nonsense banality of his method and point of view is so sharp that the book seems schizophrenic...
...There are no descriptions in fiction, there are only constructions," Gass writes...
...Everything would appear to direct us toward some goal in front of it...
Vol. 54 • March 1971 • No. 6
