Grand Hotel Abyss

From the Wikipedia entry on Muriel Spark:

In 1954, she decided to join the Roman Catholic Church, which she considered crucial in her development toward becoming a novelist. Penelope Fitzgerald, a contemporary of Spark and a fellow novelist, remarked how Spark “had pointed out that it wasn’t until she became a Roman Catholic … that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do.”

I am not a Catholic, though I was brought up that way. In fact, I am the kind of sturdy rationalist atheist who would write a book called something like The God Delusion or God Is Not Great, except that I think the people who write those books 1.) wittingly or unwittingly provide aid and comfort to those murderers who would prosecute a “clash of civilizations” and 2.) demonstrate a misunderstanding of human culture that would be put right by a quick review of the “Theses on Feuerbach,” if nothing else.

No, it’s not the Catholicism in that quotation that I appreciate, but rather its refutation of a certain cliché about novels and their writers. What is this cliché? Well, here is Jonathan Rée, who supported the Iraq war because of his dialectical understanding of history, writing about recent essays on “the novel” by Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag, J. M. Coetzee and Mario Vargas Llosa. Here he summarizes the views of Kundera and Coetzee:

Novelists are specialists in the kind of moral wisdom which knows “that nobody is the person he thinks he is, that this misapprehension is universal, elementary, and that it casts on people… the soft gleam of the comical.” And this gentle scepticism has political implications too, as Kundera notes when he recalls the “Manicheism” that deformed his native Czechoslovakia when he was a student in Prague after the second world war. Politics at that time was not a forum where perplexed citizens could engage in a collective search for freedom and happiness, or truth and reconciliation, but a battlefield where militant partisans would try to vindicate their correct views about everything and punish anyone who saw things differently. Kundera joined the Communist party, where he was taught that art must take sides in a historic “battle between good and evil,” but he was never quite convinced. (In 1950 he was expelled from the party for his obtuseness, but eventually gained readmission, only to be expelled a second time in 1970, after which he escaped to France and set about rebuilding his literary life in a second language.) “Art is not a village band marching dutifully at History’s heels,” Kundera now says, and politics itself will suffocate without access to the forgiving fluidity of the novel. “The novel alone,” as he puts it, “could reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless.”

But Coetzee does not confine his attention to novelists, and an outstanding essay on Walt Whitman allows him to explore a conception of democracy that he himself would evidently endorse: democratic politics, he suggests, is “not one of the superficial inventions of human reason but an aspect of the ever-developing human spirit, rooted in eros.” Those who make a fetish out of politics, he implies, are in danger of foreclosing on democracy. Take Walter Benjamin, for example. Coetzee, refusing to treat him with the awed indulgence that has become customary, contends that when Benjamin decided to become a good communist, it was not through an imaginative appraisal of political options, but was simply “an act of choosing sides, morally and historically, against the bourgeoisie and his own bourgeois origins.” And if there was something silly and unconvincing about Benjamin’s Marxism—”something forced about it, something merely reactive”—it could perhaps be attributed to a certain literary narcissism. “As a writer, Benjamin had no gift for evoking other people,” Coetzee says; he had “no talent as a storyteller,” and no capacity for the kind of compassionate intelligence implicit in the art of the novel. In a perverse attempt to opt for political realism rather than literary imagination, Benjamin managed to cut himself off from both.

On this view, which funnily enough couples its typical anti-Communism with a Marxist understanding of cultural history, the novel is the literary form par excellence of the bourgeoisie and its liberal values. Being somewhat contrary, I have less of a quarrel with the content of this concept of the novel than with its ubiquity, especially when it comes with moralizing reference to l’affaire Rushdie, as if this were the key to understanding what novels are and what they do (Rée blessedly neglects to mention Rushdie here, but Kundera, Sontag and Coetzee have insisted on it before).

The example of Muriel Spark shows us that, in fact, one need not be a secular liberal to write a good novel. One might be an agrarian conservative, a Latin Mass Catholic, a Communist, a fascist—I believe William Gibson once opined that a fascist couldn’t write a good novel, but I don’t see why not. Look at Dostoevsky, patron saint of the dialogic. He was, in his extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism, at the very least a proto-fascist, and yet who can match his burning sympathy for the exiled and the oppressed? It might be that the best novelists are precisely those who do not feel themselves to be at the center of their culture or its professed values. They have a clearer view from their distant prospect, and more sympathy for their fellow outcasts from life’s feast, in Joyce’s phrase. They can take a truer measure of the deed as against the word. Again, a little Marx could put us right: he famously preferred the conservative Catholic royalist Balzac to the good socialist Zola.

I do think that to measure the word against the deed requires a stable metric, in Donald Rumsfeld’s felicitous locution. Thus, Don Quixote, which always gets pulled into these discussions, and which Nabokov, lately read by the good liberal ladies of Tehran, thought a very cruel book. It is cruel, but not gratuitously so; it pictures the tragicomedy (which an anti-Communist ought to appreciate!) of a man who causes havoc in his attempt to impose upon a miserably recalcitrant world a global scheme of justice. The novel permits us neither to be easy in our sympathy for his crusade nor to dismiss it as lightly as his torturers do. That (take note: a dialectic!) is its genius and the reason it should always be read, as Coetzee seems to imply. But whatever this has to do with liberalism, it has nothing to do with the cant phrases of the present day, which itself has, as anyone can see, no premium on empathy and liberality. Homer can do these as well (or as badly) as any contemporary novelist.

Perhaps he could even do them better:

In this book, the events aren’t enough, or they are too much, which amounts to the same thing for a novelist. There appear to be few writers in America now who could bring us to know what might have been going through the minds of those people as they fell from the building—or going through the minds of the hijackers as they met their targets—but there is no shortage of those who would do what DeLillo does, which is to show us an anxious, educated woman watching a performance artist hanging upside down from a metal beam in Pershing Square. It is a form of intellectual escapism. The oddity of the art world can easily be made to stand in for the profundity of life and death, but none of us who lived through the morning of September 11, 2001, could easily believe that the antics of a performance artist, no matter how uncanny, would suffice to denote the scale and depth of our encounter with dread. The Falling Man, the artist, can do no better than constitute some figurative account of the author himself, suspended in freefall, frozen in time, subject to both the threat of gravity and the indwelling disbelief of the spectators below.

I haven’t read DeLillo’s novel, though I admire many of his other novels, particularly Underworld. I won’t comment on this paragraph at length except to say that I find its second sentence disturbingly true. Perhaps it’s to do with the paucity of commies and Catholics and witches scared away from novel-writing by the liberal/secular dogma!