THE HACKS OF ACADEME

The Theory of the Novel: New Essays, edited by John Halperin. The two articles arouse suspicion. The theory? The novel? Since there is no such thing as the novel, how can there be a single theory? Or is the editor some sort of monist? Blinkered hedgehog in wild fox country? The jacket identifies Mr. Halperin as “Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Southern California.” This is true academic weight. “He is also the author of The Language of Meditation: Four Studies in Nineteenth-Century Fiction and Egoism and Self-Discovery in the Victorian Novel.” Well, meditation if not language is big in Southern California, where many an avocado tree shades its smogbound Zen master, while the Victorian novel continues to be a growth industry in Academe. Eagerly, one turns to Professor Halperin’s “A Critical Introduction” to nineteen essays by as many professors of English. Most are American; most teach school in the land of the creative writing course.

“Christ left home at twelve.” Professor Halperin’s first sentence is startlingly resonant, to use an adjective much favored by the contributors, who also like “mythopoeic,” “parameter” (almost always misused), “existential” (often misused), “linear,” “schematic” and “spatial.” Professor Halperin tells us that during the lifetime of Nazareth’s gift to the joy of nations,

poetry’s age…was in the thousands of years and drama’s in the hundreds. It was not until a millennium and a half later that the gestation period of the novel began. Thus it is not surprising, three quarters of the way through the twentieth century, that we find ourselves with a growing but still relatively small body of critical theory pertaining to the novel…

This is sweet innocence; also, ignorance. Two very good novels (Satyricon, Golden Ass) were written by near-contemporaries of the gentle Nazarene. Later, during the so-called long “gestation,” other cultures were lightened (as William Faulkner would put it) of novels as distinguished as the Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji (c. A.D. 1005).

But Professor Halperin is not very interested in novels. Rather:

It is the purpose of the present volume to reflect and hopefully to deal with some of the more radical issues of contemporary novel-theory…. This collection, containing original essays of theoretical cast written especially for this volume by some of the most distinguished critics of our time, hopefully will be a major addition to the growing corpus of theoretical approaches to fiction.

Professor Halperin has not an easy way with our rich language. Nevertheless, one opens his book in the hope that the prose of “some of the most distinguished critics of our time” will be better than his own. Certainly the great names are all here: Meir Sternberg, Robert Bernard Martin, Irving H. Buchen, Alan Warren Friedman, Max F. Schulz, Alice R. Kaminsky, George Levine, John W. Loofourow, Marvin Mudrick, Walter F. Wright, Robert B. Heilman, Richard Harter Fogle, Dorothea Krook. Also Leon Edel, Leslie. A. Fiedler, Walter Allen, and Frank Kermode. Un sac mixte, as Bouvard might have said to Pécuchet.

Professor Halperin quotes approvingly Barthes’s

Flaubert…finally established Literature as an object, through promoting literary labour to the status of a value; form became the end-product of craftsmanship, like a piece of pottery or a jewel…[The] whole of Literature, from Flaubert to the present day, became the problematics of language.

Professor Halperin adds his own gloss.

Modern theoretical novel-criticism…is occupied less with the novel as a mimetic and moral performance than with the novel as an autonomous creation independent of or at least not wholly dependent on the real world. The world of the autonomous novel may inevitably resemble our own, but it is not created as a conscious representation of anything outside itself.

American professors of English have never had an easy time with French theoreticians of the novel (close scrutiny of the quotation from Barthes reveals that it was taken from an English not an American translation). Nevertheless, despite various hedges like “may inevitably,” Professor Halperin has recklessly enrolled himself in the school of Paris (class of ’56). As a result, he believes that the autonomous novel “is not created as a conscious representation of anything outside itself.” Aside from the presumption of pretending to know what any writer has in mind (is he inevitably but not consciously describing or mimicking the real world?), it is naïve to assume that a man-made novel can ever resemble a meteor fallen from outer space, a perfectly autonomous artifact whose raison d’être is “with the relationships among the various structural elements within the work of fiction itself” rather than “between reader and text.” Apparently the novel is no longer what James conceived it, a story told, in Professor Halperin’s happy phrase, from “the limited perspective of a single sentient consciousness.” And so, in dubious battle, unconscious sentiencies clash in the English departments of the West with insentient consciousnesses.

The first essay is called “What Is Exposition?” This subject plainly troubles Professor Meir Sternberg. At a loss for the right words, he resorts to graphics. An inverted “V” occupies the top of one page. At the foot of the left leg is the word “introduction” then “exciting force” then “rise.” The apex of the inverted “V” is labeled “climax.” Partway down the right leg is the word “fall,” while at the base occurs the somber word “catastrophe.” This treasure-seeker’s map to tragedy is something called “Freytag’s pyramid,” which the eponymous architect set up in the desert of novel-theory to show how “time-honored” exposition works in tragedy.

Professor Sternberg then adds his own markings to the sand. “Suppose an author wishes to compose a narrative which is to consist of three motifs: a1, a2, a3. These motifs, arranged in an order in which a2 follows a1 in a time and a3 follows a2, will form the fabula of his story.” The sequence of numbered a’s is then arranged vertically on the page, and casts almost as minatory a shadow as Freytag’s pyramid. Later Professor Sternberg assembles a positively Cheopsean structure with such parallel headings as “story,” “fabula,” “plot,” “sujet,” a monster Rosetta stone with which to confound strawman Freytag. The resulting agon (or duel or lutte) in the desert is very elaborate and not easy to follow. Occasionally there is a simple sentence like: “A work of fiction presents characters in action during a certain period of time.” But, by and large, sentences are as elaborate as the ideas that they wish to express are simple. And so, as the sun sinks behind the last tautology, our guide sums up: “As my definition of it clearly implies, exposition is a time problem par excellence.” (Instructor’s note: Transpose “it” and “exposition.”)

Further on in the Sahelian wilderness we meet Professor Irving H. Buchen. At first, one is charmed: “Critics may need novels to be critics but novels do not need critics to be novels.” This is fine stuff. The pathetic fallacy is at last able to define for us that mysterious entity “the living novel.” Professor Buchen likes his literature lean.

Almost all novelistic failures, especially significant ones, are the result of crushing richness. Plenitude swelled to bursting Fielding’s Tom Jones, deluged Conrad’s Nostromo, over-refined Proust’s sensibility, and transformed Joyce in Finnegans Wake into a self parodist.

Solution? “The key to the artistry of the novel is managing fecundity.” The late Margaret Sanger could not have put it better.

Although Professor Buchen’s “The Aesthetics of the Supra-Novel” deals only in the obvious, his footnotes are often interesting. Occasionally a shy aphorism gleams like a scarab in the sand. “The novel is not a given form; it is given to be formed.” Pondering the vast amount of novel-theory” written for classrooms, he notes that this process of over-explicating texts produces

new novelists who, like the re-issue of older novelists, seemed to be buttressed both in front and in back. Finally, virtually every facet of the novel has been subjected to structural, stylistic, formalistic, epistemological processing. Aside from some outstanding seminal pieces, what is instructive about the entire theoretical enterprise is that it has created a Frankenstein.

I assume that he means the monster and not the baron. In any case, relieved of those confining “parameters” of “novel-theory” (also known as “book-chat”), Professor Buchen’s footnotes betray glimmers of true intelligence.

In general, Professor Halperin’s novel-theorists have nothing very urgent or interesting to say about literature. Why then do they write when they have nothing to say? Because the ambitious teacher can only rise in the academic bureaucracy by writing at complicated length about writing that has already been much written about. The result of all this book-chat cannot interest anyone who knows literature while those who would like to learn something about books can only be mystified and discouraged by these commentaries. Certainly it is no accident that the number of students taking English courses has been in decline for some years. But that is beside the point. What matters is that the efforts of the teachers now under review add up to at least a half millennium of academic tenure.

Although The Novel is not defined by Professor Halperin’s colleagues, some interesting things are said about novels. Professor Frank Kermode’s “Novel and Narrative” is characteristically elegant. In fact, so fine-meshed is his prose that one often has to reread whole pages but then, as Kant instructs us, “comprehension is only a knowledge adequate to our intention.” Kermode is particularly good on the virtues and demerits of Roland Barthes, no doubt because he has actually read Barthes and not relied upon the odd quotation picked up here and there in translation. Kermode tends to pluralism and he is unimpressed by the so-called great divide between the mimetic fiction of the past and the autonomous fiction of the present. “It seems doubtful, then, whether we need to speak of some great divide—a strict historical coupure—between the old and new.” Minor complaint: I do wish Kermode would not feel obliged always to drag in the foreign word whose meaning is no different from the English equivalent. Also, my heart sinks every time he fashions a critical category and then announces firmly: “I shall call it, hermeneutic activity.” As for the great divide:

There are differences of emphasis, certainly, as to what it is to read; and there are, within the narratives themselves, rearrangement of emphasis and interest. Perhaps, as metacritics often allege, these are to be attributed to a major shift in our structures of thought; but although this may be an efficient cause of the mutation of interests it does not appear that the object of those interests—narrative—imitates the shift.

Phrased like a lawyer and, to my mind, demonstrably true. Nevertheless, the other “most distinguished critics” seem to believe that there has indeed been at least a gap or split or coupure between old and new writing, requiring, if not a critical bridge, an academic’s bandage.

Professor Leon Edel chats amiably about “Novel and Camera,” reminding us that Robbe-Grillet’s reliance on the close-shot in his novels might have something to do with his early training as an agronomist where the use of a microscope is essential. Professor Edel notes that the audience for the novel is dwindling while the audience for films, television, comic books continues to grow; he echoes Saul Bellow:

Perhaps we have had too many novels. People no longer seem to need them. On the other hand, pictorial biographies—real pictures of real lives—exist in abundance, and there will be more of these in the coming year. The camera is ubiquitous.

In “Realism Reconsidered,” Professor George Levine has a number of intelligent things to say about writing. Although limited by a certain conceit about his own place in time (“Reality has become problematic in ways the Victorians could only barely imagine”), he is aware that the word “reality” is protean: even the French ex-agronomist wants to be absolutely realistic. Buttressed by Auerbach, Gombrich and Frye, Professor Levine’s meditation on realism in the novel is not only sensible but his sentences are rather better than those of his fellow most-distinguished critics. There is a plainness reminiscent of Edmund Wilson. Possibly because:

My bias, then, is historical…. What is interesting here is that at one point in European history writers should have become so self-conscious about truth-telling in art [which I take to imply the growth of doubt about art in society] that they were led to raise truth-telling to the level of doctrine and to imply that previous literatures had not been telling it.

Then Levine states the profound truth that “fiction is fiction,” ruling out Truth if not truth. Or as Calvin Coolidge said in a not too dissimilar context: “In public life it is sometimes necessary in order to appear really natural to be actually artificial.”

“The Death and Rebirth of the Novel.” The confident ring of the title could only have been sounded by America’s liveliest full-time professor and seducer of the Zeitgeist (no proper English equivalent), Leslie A. Fiedler. A redskin most at home in white clown makeup, Fiedler has given many splendid performances over the years. From a secure heterosexual base, he has turned a bright amused eye on the classic American goyim and finds them not only homoerotic to a man (or person as they say nowadays) but given to guilty pleasures with injuns like Queequeg, with niggers like Jim. As far as I know, Fiedler has yet to finger an American-Jewish author as a would-be reveler in the savage Arcadia of Sodom-America, but then that hedge of burning bushes no doubt keeps pure the American Jewish writer/person.

Fiedler reminds us that for a “century or more” the leading novelists and a good many critics have forgotten “that at its most authentic the novel is a form of popular art.” But he shares the academic delusion that the novel was invented in the middle of the eighteenth century by “that extraordinary anti-elitist genius” Samuel Richardson, who launched “the first successful form of Pop Art.” For Fiedler, Richardson reflects little of what preceded him (the epic, the ballad) but he made possible a great deal that has come since: “the comic strip, the comic book, cinema, TV.” After the Second World War, the appearance of mass-production paperback books in the supermarkets of the West was insurance against the main line of the novel becoming elitist, for “the machine-produced commodity novel is, therefore, dream literature, mythic literature, as surely as any tale told over the tribal fire.” Consequently, “form and content, in the traditional sense, are secondary, optional if not irrelevant—since it is, in the first instance, primordial images and archetypal narrative structures that the novel is called on to provide.” Fiedler believes that dream-literature (Pickwick Papers, Valley of the Dolls) is peculiarly “immune to formalist criticism.” Further, “it sometimes seems as if all such novels want to metamorphose into movies…a kind of chrysalis yearning to be a butterfly.”

Certainly Pop narratives reveal the society’s literally vulgar daydreams. Over and over again occur and recur the sex lives and the murders of various Kennedys, the sphinx-like loneliness of Greta Garbo, the disintegration of Judy Garland or, closer to the heart of Academe, the crack-up of Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, the principal factory of this century’s proto-myths. Until recently no Art Novelist (Fiedler’s phrase) would go near a subject as melodramatic as the collapse of a film star or the murder of a president. Contemporary practitioners of the Art Novel (“beginning with, perhaps, Flaubert, and reaching a climax in the work of Proust, Mann and Joyce”) are doggedly at work creating “fiction intended not for the market-place but the library and classroom; or its sub-variety, the Avant-Garde Novel, which foresees immediate contempt followed eventually by an even securer status in future Museums of Literary Culture.”

To put it as bluntly as possible, it is incumbent on all who write fiction or criticism in the disappearing twentieth century to realize that the Art Novel or Avant-Garde Novel is in the process of being abandoned wherever fiction remains most alive, which means that that sub-genre of the novel is dying if not dead.

Although Fiedler’s funeral oration ought to alarm those teachers who require a certain quantity of serious “novel writing” so that they can practice “novel criticism,” I suspect that they will, secretly, agree with him. If all the Art Novels have been written, then no one need ever run the risk of missing the point to something new. After all, a lot can still be written about the old Modern masterpieces.

As always, Fiedler makes some good sense. He can actually see what is in front of him and this is what makes him such a useful figure. Briskly, he names four present-day practitioners of the Art Novel of yesteryear: Bellow, Updike, Moravia, Robbe-Grillet. This is an odd grouping, but one sees what he means. Then he gives two examples of what he calls, approvingly, “the Anti-art Art Novel.” One is Nabokov’s Pale Fire. The other is John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy: “a strange pair of books really”—note the first sign of unease—

the former not quite American and the latter absolutely provincial American. Yet they have in common a way of using typical devices of the Modernist Art Novel, like irony, parody, travesty, exhibitionistic allusion, redundant erudition, and dogged experimentalism, not to extend the possibilities of the form but to destroy it.

This is nonsense. Professor (Emeritus) Nabokov’s bright clever works are very much in the elitist Art-Novel tradition. It is true that the Black Swan of Lac Léman makes fun of American academics and their ghastly explications, but his own pretty constructions are meant to last forever. They are not autonomous artifacts designed to “self-destruct.”

Giles Goat-Boy is a very bad prose-work by Professor John Barth. Certainly the book is not, as Fiedler claims,

a comic novel, a satire intended to mock everything which comes before it…it is itself it mocks, along with the writer capable of producing one more example of so obsolescent a form, and especially us who are foolish enough to be reading it. It is as if the Art Novel, aware that it must die, has determined to die laughing.

With that, Professor Fiedler goes over the side of Huck’s raft. Whatever Professor Barth’s gifts, humor, irony, wit are entirely lacking from his ambitious, garrulous, jocose productions. If this is the Anti-art Art Novel, then I predict that it will soon be superseded by the Anti-Anti-art Art Novel, which will doubtless prove to be our moribund friend the Art Novel. I suspect that the works of Professor Barth are written not so much to be read as to be taught. If this is the case then, according to Fiedler’s own definition, they are Art Novels. Certainly they are not destined for the mass marketplace where daydreams of sex and of money, of movie stars and of murdered presidents are not apt to be displaced by a leaden narrative whose burden is (oh, wit, oh, irony) the universe is the university is the universe.

Happily, Fiedler soon abandons the highlands of culture for those lowlands where thrive science fiction and the Western, two genres that appear to reflect the night mind of the race. Fiedler mentions with approval some recent “neo-Pop Novels.” Little Big Man excites him and he is soon back on his familiar warpath as white skin confronts redskin. Yet why the “neo” in front of Pop? Surely what used to be called “commercial fiction” has never ceased to reflect the dreams and prejudices of those still able to read. Fiedler does not quite deal with this. He goes off at a tangent. “At the moment of the rebirth of the novel, all order and distinction seem lost, as High Art and Low merge into each other, as books become films….” Fiedler ends with an analysis of a novel turned into film called Drive, He Said, and he suggests that “therapeutic” madness may be the next chapter in our collective dreaming: injuns, niggers, subversives…or something.

Rebirth of the novel? That seems unlikely. The University-novel tends to be stillborn, suitable only for classroom biopsy. The Public-novel continues to be written but the audience for it is drifting away. Those brought up on the passive pleasures of films and television find the act of reading anything at all difficult and unrewarding. Ambitious novelists are poignantly aware of the general decline in what Professor Halperin would call “reading skills.” Much of Mr. Donald Barthelme’s latest novel, The Dead Father, is written in a kind of numbing baby talk reminiscent of the “see Jane run” primary school textbooks. Of course Mr. Barthelme means to be ironic. Of course he knows his book is not very interesting to read, but then life is not very interesting to live either. Hopefully, as Professor Halperin would say, the book will self-destruct once it has been ritually praised wherever English is taught but not learned.

Obviously what Fiedler calls the Art Novel is in more trouble than the Pop novel. Movies still need larvae to metamorphose into moths. The Anti-art Art Novel does not exist despite the nervous attempts of teachers to find a way of making the novel if not news, really and truly new. I think it unlikely that Barthes, Barth, and Barthelme will ever produce that unified field theory of Art-Novel writing and theory so long dreamed of by students of Freytag’s pyramid.

Meanwhile, the caravans bark, and the dogs move on. Last December the Modern Language Association met in San Francisco. According to a reliable authority, the most advanced of the young bureaucrats of literature were all reading and praising the works of Burroughs. Not William, Edgar Rice.

Times Literary Supplement
February 20, 1976