Among the multitude of scholars and authors we feel no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than of inspiration.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Over-Soul
When I have waded through one of these books its insipid descriptions and interminable harangues go instantly out of my mind, and the only impression that remains is one of surprise that a man can write three or four hundred pages when he has absolutely nothing to reveal to us—nothing to say!
J.K. Huysmans, La-Bas
It’s not difficult to find great writers skewering their contemporaries. Similar passages can be found in Shakespeare, Fielding, Dickens, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Lawrence, Miller, Orwell and many others, complaining that charlatans and hacks dominate the world of letters, that beneath literary sentiment and pretension there is nothing, there is nothing, there is nothing.
And nothing has changed. Pick up a book in the display section of Barnes & Noble, Foyles or Fnac and then pick up another, and another, and another, and it’s all the same. Like ready meals in a posh supermarket, it all looks the same, feels the same, tastes the same; the same concerns, the same approach, the same style, the same content, the same reviews, even the same covers. In non-fiction a single point, which could have been condensed into a paragraph, is strung out for a whole chapter, with irrelevant details, ideological niceties and tedious personal reflections filling up the page like undigested cellulose. In fiction, pages and pages go by without any real plot development or, if plot is not central, any entertaining or insightful episodes.1 There is nothing.
There is a frustrating weightlessness to published literature, because so little of it traces its pedigree back to the senses, for the simple reason that the senses of the author do not function properly. They’ve been amputated by their senseless lives. The literary second-rater has no real interest in ‘sensual communion’,2 no capacity to lay wide his soft-conscious attention in order to absorb the strange quality of the moment, the hidden subtleties of life or the unspeakable understory being played out in the world behind the world. Reality, the sensate reality of life as it is, is always out of fashion for the literary mediocrity, or out of reach, and so he must instead focus on subjective imagination (‘synthetic hallucination’—whatever he can merely think up) or objective reportage (the isolated—and therefore arbitrary—facts of experience). This will ensure that what he writes has an air of, on the one hand, magic, wonder, creativity or, on the other, hard-hitting truth-telling factual accuracy while, actually, being imitative, dull and fundamentally misleading.
Characters in books are interchangeable because characters in the world are.
The conscious reader gets a curious sense, from both ‘hard-nosed’ non-fiction and from ‘transcendent’ creative fiction, that, actually nobody is really there. The I—the passionate I—is absent. In the first case, with the popular science or self-help book, the political ‘call to arms’, the philosophical tract or the authoritative history, there is no sense whatsoever that the author is passionately involved with the truth he or she is presenting, no sense that the author’s life or consciousness—the source of meaning, after all—can bring anything of vivid import to the question. In the latter case, with ‘literary fiction’, there appears to exist, on the contrary, an extremely personal ‘voice’, one that oh, bloods and smokes its heart-truths like a confusion, like a darkness, like an old, wet loaming (and so on and so forth), yet this narrating persona is paper thin. Underneath there is no sense that the author is passionately realising a recognisable truth, there is no distinct context, no recognisable society and no vivid, living characters, who speak and think individually.
Perhaps you have noticed this in myths and stories? A strange tendency for superheroes of the future, speaking seagulls, five-year-old children, ancient tribes-people and alien mind-clouds to all speak like comfortable middle-class graduates working in the entertainment industry? Perhaps you have heard the neck-clenched mono-voice which speaks in the bestsellers and literary prize winners—the same voice you hear on the radio, at the office, in the newspapers…?3 Or maybe you’ve had the uncanny sense that all of the characters in a story are interchangeable. They speak the same, they feel the same, if they didn’t have different names, skin-tones and a few bolt-on quirks (or, in drama, weren’t played by different actors) you’d never be able to tell the difference between them, certainly not from their speech.
The ‘mono-character’ can be traced back to the unreal, discarnate awareness of ‘creatives’, living in an abstract, mechanised world. Characters in books are interchangeable because characters in the world are.4 Meaning in literature does not exist as unique quality, which inheres in people, but as a series of ideas which float disconnected above existence like a parade of mythical flying machines. The dreary and shallow socialist version of this bodiless realm, that these ideas are nothing more than a condition of social antagonisms, reigns in all serious discussion of literature, where even to speak of ‘character’ marks one as a hopeless fuddy-duddy, while to speak of the character of the author, as expressed in his work, is beyond the pale.5 Literature today, like the modern conversation it seeks to justify, is seen as an exchange of text messages, a collection of word-things without reference to anything real at all. Real!? Hahahaha—you fascist. There is no ‘real’, didn’t you know? There are just words.
Another conspicuous lack in the literary wasteland—and another consequence of the unspoken belief that meaning resides in words alone—is original observation; pithy, aphoristic reflection on life as it is, on people as they are. There are no ‘that’s so true!’ moments of recognition in the modern novel6 or work of non-fiction, no quotable quotes, no sharp gnomic asides, no insights into human nature. Compare a celebrated novel of today, something by, oh I don’t know, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth or Ian McEwen,7 with, say, Honoré de Balzac. Here are a few quotes, far from exhaustive, selected from one of his books… Pere Goriot.8
Like all narrow-minded people, Madame Vauquer tended not to look beyond her own version of events or to examine root causes. She preferred to blame others for her own failings.
…one of the most unattractive habits of Lilliputian minds is to imagine that others share their pettiness.
According to the logic of the empty-headed, who keep nothing secret because they hold nothing sacred, those who keep themselves to themselves must have something to hide.
Mademoiselle Michonneau kept her eyes lowered, not daring to look at the money, for fear of revealing how she coveted it.
Maxime, looking searchingly at him with that melting concern which betrays a woman’s secrets without her realizing.
However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colours his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of eloquence, in thought if not in language, and seem to move in some luminous sphere.
Eugène was smouldering with that suppressed rage which drives a young man to plunge still deeper into the hole he has dug for himself, as if he hoped to find some way out at the bottom.
The open drawers of his brain, which he had banked on finding full of wit, slid shut, his aplomb deserted him.
Rastignac had one of those heads packed with powder which explode on the slightest impact.
I could go on. You might wonder how modern writers can read that list, let alone a book by Balzac (or by Kafka, or Sōseki, or Nietzsche, or Dickens), and not feel an anguished impulse to set light to their oeuvre, but it’s simple to explain; they just don’t read such books, or if they do, they don’t feel very deeply about them, because they can’t feel very deeply about anything. Their ‘Lilliputian minds’ see nothing but their own pettiness in the majesty of great writing. Reading the above excerpts the modern author feels the same way Madame Vauquer would in the company of Anna Karenina; fawning adulation, supercilious lack of interest or open contempt.
This helps explain another feature of third-rate writing; cliché, or empty metaphor. I suggested above that ‘subjective imagination’ and ‘objective reportage’ are really the same in that both indicate flight from reality, rather than reconciliation with it. This, the fact that literary mediocrities have to combine dreary, literal, materialism with equally dreary, but equally literal, idealism9 accounts for the notable lack of vivid, living metaphor one finds in their output. The writer has no access to an actually existing reality which eludes the literal mind—which miraculously unites objectivity and subjectivity—and so he has no instinct to express such panjectivity in meaningful metaphor.
I’ll explain. In great literature two radically different things are compared to show us real and recognisable, albeit enigmatic quality. Take another look at the last three of the Balzac quotes above, which use digging a hole, a chest of drawers and a bag of gunpowder to express recognisable human qualities. Compare these images with those in the metaphors of celebrated modern literature, where, instead of an actually existing quality being revealed through two concrete images, one thing is compared with a signpost for quality, an advert for depth — ‘the air is raining messages’, ‘blood spilled from his skull like a secret’, ‘The smoke [was blown] upward, like a prayer’.10 Unlike ‘his head was packed with gunpowder’ there is a kind of smeared vagueness about these comparisons, a wearying lack of actual content, which is why they are swooned over by people whose lives lack actual content.
Not that, I should add, metaphor should be as sturdy and sensible as Balzac’s. He was, after all, a realist. We could perhaps, as a complementary example, put alongside his style something like the following famous passage, from one of his near contemporaries, Comte de Lautréamont.
He is fair as the retractility of the claws of birds of prey; or again, as the uncertainty of the muscular movements in wounds in the soft parts of the lower cervical region; Of rather, as that perpetual trap always reset by the trapped animal, which by itself can catch rodents indefinitely and work even when hidden under straw; and above all, as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!11
Here the relation between image and referent is extremely, even comically, remote, but it is still sharp and distinct. An actually existing quality is being revealed by the contrast between sensory phenomena,12 even if the contrast is wildly, madly clashing. With the ‘her knickers smelt like sacrifice’ school of poetry, we are not given access to any quality at all, but are being told to be impressed by it, a kind of literary despotism, not much different from a teacher telling children to be impressed, or to be good.13 Naturally enough, people who spend their lives in schools have no problem with this kind of thing.
More ‘muscular’ writers will avoid the silliness of ‘his mouth was full of bigness and importance’ and reach for more trivial, nakedly clichéd, comparisons, ‘like a dog,’ ‘like a snuffed candle’, ‘like the dawn’, while true highbrows, authors of Serious Fiction, will wow us with images which make no sense at all, something like ‘the sense-captive mother-sense of petrichor’ or ‘his lips stood like proud herons over her crumb-clustered doubt’.14 After a few pages of such bonkers imagery, the kind that set serious critics’ eyes bulging, the reader actually ceases to think about what words mean and becomes numb to genuinely poetic language—which is precisely the point; Lilliputian minds like to be mystified.15
Put on some mind-wellies and take a wade through the following passage, from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses;
While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who’s will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who’s will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations of who’s will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned.16
Compare that with a passage from Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie. On the face of it, just as florid and sensuous, but God what a difference…
Never to be forgotten, that first long secret drink of golden fire, juice of those valleys and of that time, wine of wild orchards, of russet summer, of plump red apples, and Rosie’s burning cheeks. Never to be forgotten, or ever tasted again…
I put down the jar with a gulp and a gasp. Then I turned to look at Rosie. She was yellow and dusty with buttercups and seemed to be purring in the gloom; her hair was rich as a wild bee’s nest and her eyes were full of stings. I did not know what to do about her, nor did I know what not to do. She looked smooth and precious, a thing of unplumbable mysteries, and perilous as quicksand.
I can only hope, dear reader, you can see that while ‘the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned’ is at best a ludicrous caricature, at worst an empty signpost for depth, ‘her hair was rich as a wild bee’s nest and her eyes were full of stings’ conveys specific, sensuous quality and, unlike the jarring clash between ‘keyboard-teeth’ and ‘hot-globe-eyeballs’, has an elegant poetic ‘bee-themed’ (itself consonant with summer) consistency to it.
Other tricks used by writers to conceal the essential emptiness of their work include;
Sloppy, sleazy, oozy, fat, dribbly, visceral adjectives in their straining, creaking, chunky, glistening cartloads; ‘gentling the gleaming dirigible’, ‘like a drug dripped down the spiraling canals of their ears’ and so on and so forth.17
Porn of any kind. Decadent imagery, food, explicit sex, horrendous violence, and ‘controversial subject matter’, but not too controversial, at least nothing that might diminish one’s chances of appealing to a ‘demographic’.
A common form of porn, found in lowbrow literature, is sentiment. This might appear as the queen of pornographic allusion, nostalgia or the author might prefer titillating references to shared knowledge, such as sequels full of in-group, fan-servicing allusions to part one.
Sentiment is the holiday of cynicism, another favourite of the literary second-rater. Simply write a book, or a series of books, that expresses nothing but nihilistic despair or hatred for life and you can be sure of a decent return.
Excessive literariness also finds a paying audience. Books full of classical references, for example, or arcane language serve the same function as quiz shows do for lower sorts, as a consoling justification for a mind full of useless knowledge.
Formal experimentation is also very important if you have nothing much to say. Make it impossible to work out which character is speaking, or when,18 or omit all punctuation, and your vacuity becomes harder to identify.
Postmodern techniques are also popular today; demolishing the fourth wall (the author appears as a character, the characters remind you they’re not real, Darth Vader swans in, etc.), or cross fertilising stories with characters from other books, or random rather than revealing onions and ninjas.
A pomo favourite is hyperfocus on microscopic fragments of sensation, such as six pages on a shade of blue, or a shade of doubt. Reportage, the tedious minutiae of a character’s life, is another pomo staple, appearing in books and films as five minutes (or pages) of watching a character eat a pie.
Naturally, none of these things are really bad in themselves. All great literature employs such tricks to some degree, to embellish or even to express artistic truth. The point is that they are all used, in substandard work, to conceal meaning, just as salt and sugar are with nutritionless unfood. Because quality—beauty, harmony, truth, love and so on—is so rare in most people’s experience, its absence is not really missed. The reader fans herself in breathless wonder at the slender, snaking, smokey poetry, she is titillated by references to lollipops she used to suck, and she nods with glowing recognition at the trials of someone who is just like her, but, ultimately, she is left frustrated, as after a Big Mac. The world remains as it was before, if anything—as fraudulent artistic experiences tend to move the reader to feeling an up which always leads to a down—less alive than it was before she opened the book.
We are now speaking of good style, lack of which makes the literary landscape look much like the urban landscape that shapes it, a mixture of bleak, brutalist tower blocks and multicoloured perspex pop-ups; both aspects fronting nothing. Great writing also has two aspects, on one side a kind of transparency that lets the light of meaning shine through—Homer’s, for example, or Hume’s, or Hemingway’s—and on the other, a more forceful, ‘stylised’ or individualistic ‘stained-glass’ that provides its own colour. Tacitus might be an example from the ancient world, Shakespeare from the early modern period and Joyce (at his best) from the modern era. All these writers seem, stylistically, to be very different, but both of the extremes they represent are expressive of something else, an artistic truth which, through the character of the writer, actually exists. By contrast, the prose of poor stylists, to stretch my metaphor a little further, resembles a muddy window, allowing no light through, yet providing no beauty of its own.
I don’t mean to say that good writers can sustain a good prose style from first to last, nor do they have to. ‘An imperial crown cannot be one continued diamond; the gems must be held together by some less valuable matter.’19 What’s more, lack of finesse, like unconscious plagiarism creeps into writing like mites into furniture. Really only an obsessive can keep out every cliché, every tired metaphor, every ungainly repetition and all the rest of the gunk that clogs up literary expression. That said, a good style is, like a good metaphor, careful, distinct and vivid,20 even when it is expressing enigma, and poor writing is ragged, vague and shapeless, even when it is endeavouring to be hard-nosed and cowboy-fingered.
Nowhere, if you’ll excuse the oxymoron, is this obscurity clearer than in modern philosophy, where mystification brought down to its murky nadir, because nowhere is it so necessary to conceal lack of meaning—confusion and triviality—with verbiage. Philosophers, taking their cue from the German godfathers of obscurity, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, are only too willing to dress up nonsense or vapidity in baffling circumlocutions and impenetrable fiddle-faddle. Style, as Goethe, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche all realised, is the physiognomy of the author’s soul which, in the case of writers who do not want to be clearly understood, is not worth revealing. This is why the faces of modern authors are as bland as their prose. One need not look very deeply into the lives, or eyes, of writers who write without meaning to see that there is very little there to meaningfully speak.21
Logically enough, obscurantism is strenuously defended as somehow necessary in philosophical expression. Apparently it is impossible to express profound meaning in clear language—insurmountable opacity is the only form depth can take. Readers of Lacan, Blanchot and Badiou might suspect that bad writing is just that, bad, or that highly literate non-fiction, philosophical or otherwise, is difficult to understand because it is written by and for people who live entirely on the page. What such hopeless naifs don’t realise is that highly literate speculation does not have to be interesting, relevant or clear, because only words matter in educated discourse. This is why, starting with Martin Heidegger, so much modern philosophy, from the largely vacuous (Michael Serres) to the genuinely fascinating (Byung-Han Chul) concerns itself with etymological enquiries into words.
The reality that closely-inspected words once referred to is of diminished importance in modern Deep Thought, likewise the character of the writer, likewise his passions, likewise the context of the reader. Even the clarity of the text is irrelevant, because, as a text, it is always there to refer back to, to work out. This, you see, is what you are supposed to do with highly literate philosophy, as you are with ‘great’ literature; not listen to it, enjoy it, converse with it, apply it to your struggle to live more intensely, no no no; you’re supposed to work it out, as you would five-metre square Sudoku puzzle. Actually this is reasonably good training for engaging with the world, which is an extremely difficult and purposeless puzzle, but for anything which really matters—love, life, death, truth, beauty—such an approach scorches what it affects to illuminate and imprisons what it pretends to set free. We get the meaning: but so what? So what?
In two week’s time, part 2, The Literary Mediocrity.
Alternatively, a story will be all plot, all cleverness and message, but peopled with cyphers, people-shaped devices, without individuality, and so rarely described, and almost never located in anything like a ‘personal world’ or ‘life world’.
Bad poetry always suffers from the same defects: synthetic hallucination and artifice. Invention is not poetry. Invention is defence, the projection of pseudopods out of the ego to ward off the ‘other’. Poetry is vision, the pure act of sensual communion and contemplation.
Kenneth Rexroth, Poetry, Regeneration and D.H. Lawrence
In the textbooks, in the children’s books, in the instruction manuals, everywhere this same tidy, comfortable, colourless middle-class unitone.
The world machine is comprised of human parts which, like every other machine, are not interchangeable with each other, but with anyone else who fits there. This is why we find, for example, an unskilled worker is just as suited to working in a fish factory as a phone factory. Or, at the other end of the social scale, why a politician can become minister of health, then minister of defence, minister of culture, and do each job equally well (or, as far as the real world is concerned, equally badly). It doesn’t matter that he knows nothing of these things, any more than it matters that the wheels don’t know where the car is going. They just have to go round.
There is, in both fiction and non-fiction, a taboo on understanding literature not just as something produced by certain people but as a consequence of being the person that wrote it. This taboo is put in place by people who know they are nobodies. Of course ideas do stand alone and of course they are culturally determined and it would be reductionist to confine them entirely to the nature of the author. But to rule out the author entirely (or his interest in people—in serious discussions of serious literature it is démodé to discuss character, to take Shakespeare for example, as someone interested in people) is to say, in effect, that books write themselves. No surprise then that the idea that the author is dead took hold just at the point when machines appeared which could replace him.
Unless of course you were raised in modern house, went to a modern university, then got a modern job—punctuated by a few modern holidays—and raised a modern family. Then nothing happening for page after page seems like the acme of perceptive acuity.
A casual search for ‘greatest quotes’ of these three novelists results in gems such as these;
Morrison: “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” / “You are your best thing.”
Roth: “Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.” / “Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.”
McEwen “A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.” / “Not being boring is quite challenge.”
You don’t say Ian.
It doesn’t end there though. Take a look at the jewels dropped by Paul Auster, Marilynne Robinson, Jon Fosse, Annie Proulx, Paul Kingsnorth, Anna Burns, Paul Lynch or any Pulitzer or Booker prize winner, or nominee, of the past three or four decades. I’m not saying that one has to be a master of the epigram to write well—a few greats weren’t—but the dearth of aphoristic insight, and the preponderance of witless ‘poetic insight’ along the lines of ‘Love is holy because it is like grace,’ or ‘Old things climb out of my mouth and set themselves free in the air’ or ‘Happiness hides in the humdrum’, is not because proverbs are out of fashion but because there is not a single original thought in a single published head.
Some of these are not immortal insights — Balzac wasn’t very penetrating; nothing like Dostoyevsky, say, or Lawrence. My point is that, unlike literary journeymen, he touches on universals, or on qualities of ‘type’, that we can all recognise, and which we enjoy recognising, in the specificities of individual character.
See Self and Unself.
These examples are taken from, respectively, Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things. Richard Powers, The Overstory and Louise Eldritch, The Night Watchman.
Comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror. Obviously more conspicuous examples could be taken from modern literature.
Even as it is with the most enigmatic metaphors of all, the kind that one finds in the Gospel of Thomas, in which Jesus is compared to what one finds in the space of a lifted stone, or in the Tao Te Ching, in which the Way is compared to the still centre of a moving wheel.
You know the types, the ones who say, ‘you’ve really impressed me.’
B.R. Myers in his justly celebrated (and, naturally, hated), ‘Reader’s Manifesto’ lists the following example, from Annie Proulx’s The Half-Skinned Steer;
In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns.
Myers follows this laughable rubbish with the following analysis:
Like so much modern prose, this demands to be read quickly, with just enough attention to register the bold use of words. Slow down, and things fall apart. Proulx seems to have intended a unified conceit, but unfurling, or spreading out, as of a flag or an umbrella, clashes disastrously with the images of thread that follow. (Maybe ‘unraveling’ didn’t sound fancy enough.) A life is unfurled, a hustler is wound tight, a year is spooled out, and still the metaphors continue, with kicked down—which might work in less crowded surroundings, though I doubt it—and hinge, which is cute if you’ve never seen a hinge or a map of the Big Horns. And this is just the first sentence!
When the Latin Bible was translated into vernacular, spoken languages of the congregation many of them… complained!
Quoted in Myers (see note above). McCarthy, it should be obvious, I can’t stomach, but, as Myers recognises, his first few novels were restrained and readable, before he started with all his burning and sizzling and carving and boning.
These are from Marilynne Robinson and Ann Patchett.
This is the great appeal of modern novels, of which there are countless thousands, which ‘explore memory and identity’. Oh wow, so perhaps it never really happened.
Dr. Johnstone, The Lives of the Poets.
By which I mean characterful. One gets the sense, as Pascal put it that…
When we encounter a natural style we are always surprised and delighted, for we thought to see an author and found a man.
I invite the reader to compare these mountainous physiognomies with the molehills that grow on the necks of modern authors and literary agents.