Divine comedy (3)

[Dave Monroe]

CONT'D ...

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his
predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not
say. Flaubert's poetics does not devalue Balzac's, anymore than the
discovery of the North Pole renders obsolete the discovery of America.
(Milan Kundera, "The Curtain")

If I don't like what the novel is doing, do I have any suggestions as
to what it should do? Perhaps.

The novel grows by theft and observation, both of real life and of
other "newer," yet often more conservative art forms. (Cinema was a
tremendous influence on Joyce.) The problem with the novels of, say,
John Banville is that, although brilliantly written, they steal only
from other novels (and a few oil paintings). His is a universe in
which the internet does not exist, and television scarcely exists. Yet
new art forms, and their delivery systems, change the way we read the
novel, and therefore must change the way we write it. This is not a
catastrophe; it is an opportunity. We are free to do new things with
the novel, which could not have been understood before now.

My generation, and those younger, spend a lot of time taking in
information not in long, linear, structured, coherent, self-contained
units (a film, a novel), but in short bursts, with wildly different
tones. A youth spent channel-hopping and surfing the internet rewires
the brain. (So does a youth spent reading critical theory: be
careful.) See 10,000 Hollywood movies and the journey of the hero
becomes utterly predictable: you can see the plot twists and ending
coming from the start. Traditional story may have been broken by this
overload: certainly it suffers from repetitive strain injury.
Television has responded to this crisis. The novel has not.

A comparison between The Simpsons and a soap opera is instructive. A
soap opera is trapped inside the rules of the format; all soaps
resemble each other (like psychologically plausible realist novels).
What the makers of The Simpsons did was take a soap opera and put a
frame around it: "this is a cartoon about a soap opera." This freed
them from the need to map its event-rate on to real life: they could
map its event-rate on to cartoon life. A fast event-rate is inherently
comic, so the tone is, of necessity, comic. But that is not to say it
isn't serious. The Simpsons is profoundly serious. And profoundly
comic. Like Aristophanes, debating the war between Athens and Sparta
by writing about a sex strike by the women of Athens and beyond.

With its cartoon event-rate, a classic series of The Simpsons has more
ideas over a broader cultural range than any novel written the same
year. The speed, the density of information, the range of reference;
the quantity, quality and rich humanity of the jokes—they make almost
all contemporary novels seem slow, dour, monotonous and almost empty
of ideas.

The Sopranos took a more subtle approach to the problem of the broken
hero, the broken heroic saga, by deconstructing the hero through
psychoanalysis, inside the frame. Twin Peaks and Lost have taken a
more ostentatiously radical, metafictive approach to the breakdown of
story.

Meanwhile, the internet is rapidly becoming Borges's library of Babel,
Rushdie's sea of stories: everything is turning up there, in potential
promiscuous intercourse with everything else. Everything is happening
all at once, in the same place, with no hierarchy. It's as though
space and time have collapsed. It's exhilarating, and frightening.
Who's capturing that in the novel? Because the novel is the place to
capture it. The novel has freedoms which television has not. It can
shape and structure multiplicity and chaos in ways the internet
cannot.

Novelists can take from these new art forms new structures and
techniques for telling stories, as Joyce did from cinema. But who has?
Weirdly, the modernists have a more accurate take on now than the most
recent Booker winners. Finnegans Wake reads like a mash-up of a Google
translation of everything ever. But John Banville and Anita Desai read
like nostalgia (for Nabokov, for Dickens, for traditional virtues, for
the canon). They feel far less contemporary than The Waste Land—which
is what Bakhtin would call a novelised poem: a poem that escapes
Aristotle's Poetics and hitches a ride on the energy of the novel. As
Baudrillard should have said: postmodernism never happened. Since
Joyce and Woolf (and Eliot), the novel's wheels have spun in the sand.

So steal from The Simpsons, not Henry James.

Realistic texture and a cartoon event-rate with a broad range of
reference: is this a revolutionary new way of writing the novel? Of
course not. It's ancient. Voltaire, for example, did it in Candide.
But we keep forgetting. The novel is constantly pushed by the culture
towards worthiness, towards Aristotle's Poetics, towards tragedy. The
next great novel will do to the contemporary literary novel what
Cervantes did to the chivalric romance. It's not that contemporary
literary novels are bad. Line by line, book by book, they're often
wonderful. But in the same few ways. Who needs more of that?

You may think that to praise The Simpsons at the expense of Henry
James makes me a barbarian. Well, it does, but I'm a very cultured
barbarian. The literary novel has gone late Roman. It needs the
barbarians. It secretly yearns for them. It's leading them on. How
many novels influenced by Henry James very politely fought it out for
the Booker in 2004?

GS Frazer, writing about Henry James in 1964, said: "The novelist must
recognise that the foundations of the world he walks are dangerously
shifting, that we are living in a world of rapid and disturbing
change, so that we can neither say with certainty when some new
pattern of relative stability will emerge, nor what sort of pattern it
might be. Yet the task of the novelist also, since the human heart
hungers after permanence, is to project some image of permanence and
to give the novel a coherence that life at large does not… possess."

This is completely wrong. The task of the novelist is precisely the
opposite: not to fake a coherence that does not exist, but to capture
the chaos that does. And in so doing, perhaps we shall discover that
chaos and permanence are not, in fact, opposed. The novel,
self-renewing, self-destroying, always the same, always new, always…
novel… is the art of permanent chaos.

And to clarify: I don't want everybody to write comedies. I just don't
want everybody to write minor, anxious, banal tragedies, without
thinking about why they've chosen such a crowded mode. Why all cluster
under the one tree when there's a forest to explore? We do not live in
tragic times. We do not live in comic times. We live in novel times.

Ah well, this praising of comedy at the expense of tragedy has gone on
forever. Let us go back to Greece, before Muhammad, before Christ, and
let someone else have the last word. In Plato's Symposium,
Aristodemus, a bit pissed, has just woken up to find "… there remained
awake only Aristophanes, Agathon and Socrates, who were drinking out
of a large goblet that was passed around, while Socrates was
discoursing to them. Aristodemus did not hear all the discourse, for
he was only half awake; but he remembered Socrates insisting to the
other two that the genius of comedy was the same as that of tragedy,
and that the writer of the one should also be a writer of the other.
To this they were compelled to assent, being sleepy, and not quite
understanding what he meant. And first Aristophanes fell asleep, and
then, when the day was dawning, Agathon."

END

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9276