Back to the Basics

The Kafkaesque strain, running through Beckett to post-modern popular writers, like Coetzee, has ran its course. The idea of wrestling ‘fiction free from 19th-century constraints like plot and character, and to wrest objects free from imposed meaning’ [RACHEL DONADIO] has itself now become tired, gaping for fresh air. Reading the fast aging masters of post-everything style of literature with their dreamlike fragment of narrative characterization and existential doubt of navel gazing you see they’ve reached a certain degree of stagnation. Where then is the novel going from here?

Sartre’s desire, towards the end of his life, was to free us from our morbid internal lives. The glazed inward looking hero with mannerist poses of alienation and ‘nightmarishly looping, repetitive semi-narrative, drenched in incantatory.’ Despite Sartre’s wishes, the last century in literature has been of ‘master of aridity, cultivated cactuses.’ But without any doubt the age of 'psychological man,' the herd of loners in modern things, especially literature, is, in our era, on its way out. It has tiresomely proved the truth of ‘Tocqueville's observation that in modern times the average man is absorbed in a very puny object, himself, to the point of satiety.’

The rallying call in every literature convocation I attend these days is the return to the classics, hunger for universal inspiration and simplicity. As the result writers like Pushkin, with their staggering simplicity are back in vogue. Attractive stories now are those that deviate from linguistic juggling for preference that is uniquely spare, laconic, and all that traditional aesthetic once dubbed “minimalism”. As a fan of Classical Realism I must confess, I’m thrilled about this turn of events.

Classical Realism, down from the Greeks to the Latinists, rediscovered by the Renaissance, promulgated by the Beaux-Arts academies, nearly exterminated by the modernists is resurgent again. What is Classical Realism? It is the narrative style that puts high premium on observed reality, which sublimates emotion away from the sensational while admitting the tragic. It is a pressure point of experiences towards the renegotiation and re-examination of pact with tradition, the collective way things have always been done.

In the first half of the 20th century, for instance, English literature especially, was very narcissistic, focused mostly on itself, its language, its literary structures; hence was almost cut off from actual reality. Addressing true reality, asking political, social, economic questions, became taboo, unless one was blatantly of say, Marxist political school.
The turn into Classical Realism is present obvious with French literature, where scholarship is happily united with clear thinking and witty writing. I can think of recent books by Jonathan Littell, “Les Bienviellantes” [“The Kindly Ones”], and other works of contemporary French writers such as Annie Erneaux and Pascal Quignard. Here the novel is structured on traditional strictures of strong characters, melodramatic narrative that is not self-indulgent, is not be fictionalized reportage, whose large-scale story development has a central idea that holds it together. As the result you might find in them dramatized the same sort of dilemma, like life with narrowing options. But there are subtle differences of plot, tone, location, nuance and effect. Something you get from Virgil tackling the fall Troy, which though based on Homer’s Illiad, is obviously a complete different book.

Last year I attended, for the first time, Cape Town Book Fair. I found most commentators commenting that the good thing about the direction of South African writing is that people are “telling personal stories more” as compared to our past that was awashed with more political novels. I don’t dispute the merit of this, but get concerned when subjectivism becomes the pinnacle of personal stories.
Subjective literature has contributed a lot in the protection and enhancement of our common humanity. It’s psychological individual brooding yielded many fresh and penetrating insights, and gave us more understanding of individual pathos. But this individual centeredness is itself is starting to pall. It has mastered the Hegelian concept of synthesis between the self and the external world to an extent of cloying hallucinatory tinge.
Rushdie, who has suffered a lot in the hands of politics encroaching in literature, had this to say in his lecture recently at Stanford University; “At a time when politics invades so much the boundaries of ordinary life, going to the frontiers and pushing back is the . . . There is a thing in the novel that wants to be provincial and wants to be small, to be intimate, . . . wants to never lose sight of the human scale, but novelists in our time have been forced to do that.” All good. Rushdie ended the lecture by saying; “Great art tries to open the universe a little more, . . . increases, by some small amount, what it’s possible to know, do, say and, therefore, to be. And we can’t do that sitting in the middle.”
The complaint here is that of making an individual the measure of all things, as Hans Jonas Paton put it when criticising some existentialist philosophers. “We should be particularly on our guard when the guide makes no pretence at objective thinking, which stands or falls by the argument independently of the personality of the thinker, but rests his case on the inwardness of his own personal experience. . .”
The problem with individual centred starting-point for literature and philosophy is that it tends to show less appreciation for other things, like history. It tends to run riot with morbid forms of subjectivism and individualism; looking only at the night side of life with unduly anthropomorphic understanding of reality. When a man is isolated as a centre of interests he tends to see himself, and those who share his point of view, as the highest and authentic forms of existence. That’s dangerous narcissism that often leads to fascism.
Unhealthy subjectivism promotes anti-socialism, elitism, and escapist tendencies from necessary collision with reality. Every country, every nation, every individual needs means to collide with its own reality. Escapist subjectivism avoids this to the detriment of discursive art. [Present day German art is good example of a nation trying to grapple with it’s demons through what they call Bildung; an engagement of history through art, philosophy and learning in general.]