Loss has prompted some of the most lovely writing in the literary tradition (think of the lines in the Iliad where Priam petitions for the return of Hector’s body), but it is surely the desire not to commemorate but to ward off emotional pain, in a world approaching modernity, that partly precipitated the rise of free indirect style in the early nineteenth century. This claim will risk sounding dandyish, overstated, but how else to explain the role of the impersonal in style as two centuries of novelists have conceived it? It is impossible to ascribe intimate properties to third-person narrators whose voices are highly distinctive and yet altogether lacking the sorts of “traits” possessed by actual people. The distance of an Austenian or a Flaubertian narrator remains compatible, though, with the evocation and expression of a range of strong emotions: embarrassment, shame, self-revelation in the case of Austen, say, a savage sorrow and a kind of disgust at humanity in the case of Madame Bovary, self-pity and envy in The Line of Beauty. James’s fictions often feature the framing or displacement of emotions: The Golden Bowl is a story in which nothing much happens except for one thing that is almost incomprehensibly painful (indeed, indescribably so) for the two women most directly concerned in it. In the tradition that runs through Roland Barthes to Susan Sontag and Wayne Koestenbaum, we see a heightened intensity or awareness of perception that has some kind of charge to it (often an almost erotic charge) but that deliberately downplays, too, the personal in the sense of the full range of human personality.
In her book Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art, Marina Van Zuylen suggests that artists like Mondrian and Flaubert, obsessed with
the relationship of their straight line or perfect phrase to a sense of ontological security,…are splitting the world between the rigid (with its connotations of self-discipline, rigor, and control) and the arabesque, the overly lyrical I—all things that might well lead them out of their invulnerable worlds…. Do not show your passion, but sublimate it into style. We are reminded of Hobbes’s proclamation: madness is a matter of “too much appearing passion.” It is not the actual emotion itself that is unsettling to Flaubert, but the temptation to be dragged down by it and the sickly need to exhibit it to others. The heart must never speak and the artist must assume a god-like self-sufficiency; it is the only way he will be protected from the danger of others. The same detachment that Flaubert requires of his narrators, he mercilessly exacts from himself. He is willing to renounce all human contact for the price of peace of mind.1
Van Zuylen goes on to show that what she calls the “monomaniacal imagination” very consistently displays this “simultaneous cowering from and craving for the void”: “Movement, while it fends off the demons of introspection and provides temporary relief from anxiety, does not satisfy the soul’s craving for a higher order; it is a mere temporary solution. Idleness, however, richer in existential possibilities, can breed an intolerable sense of dread.”
Much of Perec’s writing is motivated by precisely this sort of tension. I think for instance of a passage I have always loved, in Perec’s early novella A Man Asleep:
It is not that you hate men, why would you hate them? Why would you hate yourself? If only membership of the human race were not accompanied by this insufferable din, if only these few pathetic steps taken into the animal kingdom did not have to be bought at the cost of this perpetual, nauseous dyspepsia of words, projects, great departures! But it is too high a price to pay for opposable thumbs, an erect stature, the incomplete rotation of the head on the shoulders: this cauldron, this furnace, this grill which is life, these thousands of summonses, incitements, warnings, thrills, depressions, this enveloping atmosphere of obligations, this eternal machine for producing, crushing, swallowing up, overcoming obstacles, starting afresh and without respite, this insidious terror which seeks to control every day, every hour of your meagre existence!2
If Sebald cries out against the destruction wreaked by both sides in World War II and Hollinghurst against the destruction wreaked by AIDS and by Thatcherism, Perec’s outcry (like Lear’s) protests the fact of the human condition itself. There is nothing sentimental about these sentences, but they are capable of bringing tears to my eyes. The passage might be said to perform something at odds with what it proclaims, by which I mean to say that the sentences are passionate even as they foreswear passion: the wild piling-on of “this cauldron, this furnace, this grill which is life, these thousands…” is a litany that becomes perversely almost celebratory even as it damningly outlines the contours of modern despair.
Prose styles might be placed along some imaginary axis from the most baroque or lush to the most stringent or self-denying; my own tastes run more to the latter to the former, though there are always exceptions. Three novels I particularly admire but that would strike many readers as overly bleak, in terms of both content and prose style, are Jenny Diski’s Nothing Natural, Heather Lewis’s House Rules and Stephen Elliott’s Happy Baby. Beautifully written novels are infinitely less likely to be joyful than despairing; Angela Carter’s Wise Children might be a rare exception, though I suppose the novels of Barbara Trapido (like Wise Children, inflected by the rhythms of Shakespearean comedy) might fall under this rubric as well.
Language can do much, but it cannot do everything. Svetlana Alexievich makes an unusual observation in the introduction to her staggering nonfiction book Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster:
I used to think I could understand everything and express everything. Or almost everything. I remember when I was writing my book about the war in Afghanistan, Zinky Boys, I went to Afghanistan and they showed me some of the foreign weapons that had been captured from the Afghan fighters. I was amazed at how perfect their forms were, how perfectly a human thought had been expressed. There was an officer standing next to me and he said, “If someone were to step on this Italian mine that you say is so pretty it looks like a Christmas decoration, there would be nothing left of them but a bucket of meat. You’d have to scrape them off the ground with a spoon.” When I sat down to write this, it was the first time I thought, “Is this something I should say?” I had been raised on great Russian literature, I thought you could go very very far, and so I wrote about that meat. But the Zone—it’s a separate world, a world within the rest of the world—and it’s more powerful than anything literature has to say.3
This statement cedes everything to testimony, acts of witnessing, and suggests that the writer’s role is to facilitate the production and recording of that testimony rather than to create sentences whose beauty and precision might do justice to the perfection of human ingenuity in a machine that brings death. The degradation of human beings into meat poses an unanswerable challenge to style, even for one raised (as Alexievich suggests) on great literature.
There are a number of ways for artists and critics to respond to that despairing lurking awareness that we are just meat puppets. One is to turn to what Jonathan Lethem, in an essay titled “The Beards” (it was first published in the New Yorker and later included in Lethem’s collection The Disappointment Artist), calls “dripless, squeakless art.”4 As a child, Lethem asks his mother why there are drips on his father’s paintings, and she offers the analogy that the paint drips are like the squeak of acoustic guitar strings audible in folksingers’ recordings. As an adolescent in the grip of unbearable feelings, and in the years beyond adolescence, Lethem asks works of art “to be both safer than life and fuller, a better family,” then plumbs them so deeply that “many perfectly sufficient works of art would become thin, anemic”:
This was especially true of anything that assumed a posture of minimalism or perfectionism, or of chilly, intellectual grandeur. Hence my rage at Stanley Kubrick, Don DeLillo, Jean-Luc Godard, and Talking Heads. The artists who’d seemed to promise the most were the ones who’d created art that stirred me while seeming to absent themselves from emotional risk—so these were the ones capable of failing my needs most violently. When I discovered their imperfections, my own hope of absenting myself from emotional risk seemed imperiled. It was as though in their coolness these artists had sensed my oversized needs and turned away, flinched from what I’d asked them to feel on my behalf.
Perec also writes out of this sort of a bind, but perhaps the writer who most clearly kicks against it and occasionally transcends it is Thomas Bernhard. In the short novel Wittgenstein’s Nephew, describing himself just before he mounts the stage to receive a major Austrian literary prize, the narrator (a distorted version of Bernhard himself) says he “had jotted down a few sentences, amounting to a small philosophical digression, the upshot of which was that man was a wretched creature and death a certainty.”5 To give this sort of remark as an aside is very funny (it is comically inappropriate for delivery on this sort of occasion, though that fact speaks to the dreadfulness of the occasion rather than to anything inherently nonviable about such philosophical digression in its appropriate contexts), but that does not stop it from being also very seriously meant. Here is an early passage that gives the flavor of Bernhard’s unrelenting prose; the whole novel is presented in the form of a single paragraph, or rather the paragraph break has no place in this style of narration. The story chronicles the vicissitudes of the friendship between Bernhard’s proxy and his real-life friend Paul Wittgenstein, nephew of the philosopher and scion of the prominent and self-destructive Austrian family:
If I had friends staying with me he would go for walks with us. He was not keen to do so, but was prepared to join us. I do not care for walks either, and have been a reluctant walker all my life. I have always disliked walking, but I am prepared to go for walks with friends, and this makes them think I am a keen walker, for there is an amazing theatricality about the way I walk. I am certainly not a keen walker, nor am I a nature lover or a nature expert. But when I am with friends I walk in such a way as to convince them I am a keen walker, a nature lover, and a nature expert. I know nothing about nature. I hate nature, because it is killing me. I live in the country only because the doctors have told me that I must live in the country if I want to survive—for no other reason. In fact I love everything except nature, which I find sinister; I have become familiar with the malignity and implacability of nature through the way it has dealt with my own body and soul, and being unable to contemplate the beauties of nature without at the same time contemplating its malignity and implacability, I fear it and avoid it whenever I can. The truth is that I am a city dweller who can at best tolerate nature. It is only with reluctance that I live in the country, which on the whole I find hostile. And naturally Paul too was a city dweller through and through, who, like me, was soon exhausted when surrounded by nature. (53)
It is partly the effect of the lack of paragraph breaks, but the way that each sentence knots itself to the previous one by way of repetition and variation leads to the creation of a dense web of meaning, with the narrator the end of this passage seemingly having gone nowhere at all despite having touched down on the misleading theatricality of his walking style, his hatred for nature and his inability to escape it and the link between himself and Paul Wittgenstein based on their shared sense of nature’s malignity. This willingness to circle back around the same topics again and again produces an effect unlike anything I have described so far as the characteristic forms of pacing of novel versus short story. Each “episode” in a novel by Bernhard has the feel at once of a comic set piece and a raw unedited transcription of thought, only the prose is too perfect; the tension between the craft of the sentences (and the shape or momentum of individual stretches of prose) and the repetitive or compulsive quality of the narration gives the narrative its underlying dynamism. Here is another passage that stands out:
I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouses, but I go on visiting them. I have visited them every day, for although I have always hated them—and because I have always hated them—I have always suffered from the Viennese coffeehouse disease. I have suffered more from this disease than from any other. I frankly have to admit that I still suffer from this disease, which has proved the most intractable of all. The truth is that I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouses because in them I am always confronted with people like myself, and naturally I do not wish to be everlastingly confronted with people like myself, and certainly not in a coffeehouse, where I go to escape from myself. Yet it is here that I find myself confronted with myself and my kind. I find myself insupportable, and even more insupportable is a whole horde of writers and brooders like myself. I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself, and so when I am in Vienna I have to forbid myself to visit the coffeehouses, or at least I have to be careful not to visit a so-called literary coffeehouse under any circumstances whatever. However, suffering as I do from the coffeehouse disease, I feel an unremitting compulsion to visit some literary coffeehouse or other, even though everything within me rebels against the idea. The truth is that the more deeply I detest the literary coffeehouses of Vienna, the more strongly I feel compelled to frequent them. Who knows how my life would have developed if I had not met Paul Wittgenstein at the height of the crisis that, but for him, would probably have pitched me headlong into the literary world, the most repellent of all worlds, the world of Viennese writers and their intellectual morass, for at the height of this crisis the obvious course would have been to take the easy way out, to make myself cheap and compliant, to surrender and throw in my lot with the literary fraternity. Paul preserved me from this, since he had always detested the literary coffeehouses. It was thus not without reason, but more or less to save myself, that from one day to the next I stopped frequenting the so-called literary coffeehouses and started going to the Sacher with him—no longer to the Hawelka but to the Ambassador, etc., until eventually the moment came when I could once more permit myself to go to the literary coffeehouses, when they no longer had such a deadly effect on me. For the truth is that the literary coffeehouses do have a deadly effect on a writer. (85–87)
I am unsettled by the combination of humor and seriousness here. Are these sentences really funny, or is this intolerable, insupportable? Both must be true at once: “I find myself insupportable, and even more insupportable is a whole horde of writers and brooders like myself”; “I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself”: it is the bind of literature, but also the bind of life, and Bernhard’s prose will have to serve as fine consolation.
I recently read a passage that summed up what I, too, see as the highest goal of writing. I have published four novels, but I have become increasingly frustrated with the aspect of fiction that involves making up characters and the things that happen to them; it seems to me fatally artificial, an abuse of my own imaginative powers and an insult to what I see as the underlying purpose of any novel I would write (to examine or anatomize a problem or a situation, in the process transmitting something of a mood or an emotional affect—really I am an intellectual at heart rather than a novelist, but I don’t see why the two should finally be at odds with one another). When I came to read it, I found Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle just as transfixing as everyone said it would be. These words fall near the end of the first volume and represent a kind of turning point as Knausgaard’s own vocation comes into clearer focus:
I was after enrichment. And what enriched me while reading Adorno, for example, lay not in what I read, but in the perception of myself while I was reading. I was someone who read Adorno! And in this heavy, intricate, detailed, precise language whose aim was to elevate thought ever higher, and where every period was set like a mountaineer’s cleat, there was something else, this particular approach to the mood of reality, the shadow of these sentences that could evoke in me a vague desire to use the language with this particular mood on something real, on something living. Not on an argument, but on a lynx, for example, or on a blackbird or a cement mixer. For it was not the case that language cloaked reality in its moods, but vice versa, reality arose from them.6
It is not so different, strange to say, from the green peas that Barthes hoped would punctuate the intellectual murmur: a fusion of ideas and things in language that becomes in turn a supremely sensitive instrument of the self, the kind of instrument desired by many of the other writers whose words I have most loved. It has been the purpose of these pages to open up to others some of the ways of reading and writing that have shaped my own reality, delighted and consoled me; and now I will simply step aside, given the impossibility of offering any kind of a proper conclusion, so that we can return to our real lives of reading and writing.