Writing on the Wall (25 page)

The name given to the particle of living substance, the germ of the novelist’s novel, is simply
la petite chose.
If other people try to assign a more precise name to her (“A vulgar accent, that’s all; you mustn’t let it get under your skin”), he is furious; they are taking her away from him, but she is his. As the book progresses, this humble creature, a sort of Cinderella, assumes a more and more important role. Now there are three in the novelist’s workroom: himself, his double, and
la petite chose.
It is almost a crowd.

By the final chapter, success has altered the relations between them. His double is no longer his plain old friend; he talks in a new stylish way, betraying the time he has been spending in literary circles. “Alive” and “dead” aren’t good enough for him any more. He has his nose in a big grammar—the one critics use to trip up an author. Sometimes his voice cannot be heard over the voice of the crowd. The worst, the most alarming sign is that he is no longer as critical as he used to be. Don’t worry; just publish it, he says. Everything between them is upside down. Now it is the “I” who is suddenly captious, wants to improve, rewrite, but the “You” brusquely stops him. You’re crazy. Leave it alone. How cynical he now is about the public! “They’ll never notice the difference” is his attitude. Or doesn’t he care anymore himself?

Evidently he is lost to the hero, who has no one to turn to in his extremity. All he can hear is the other writers out there, sneering at him for the enormity of his ambition to join some of them on their pedestals. The wider public seems to have disappeared. It is dark. But he is not utterly alone.
La petite chose
has stuck by him, after all, despite the mistakes he has made with her, painting her up, sending her to the great dressmakers. In fact, they have become closer, since the double has been unfaithful.
She
has not changed; she still has that stale, musty smell he has a perverse liking for. Feeling her there, he takes heart again. He dares another look at the chapter. And lo, as though recalled, reassured, by the nearness of
la petite chose,
his double is once more at his side. Not too close, says the author, but not too far off either. They look together at the chapter, examine it for signs of life. It seems to be faintly breathing. Is it the hero’s imagination or does his old friend observe too a fine mist on the pocket mirror placed before its mouth?

The book, naturally, ends on a question, the question asked by all books: Am I alive or dead? The answer, if by that is meant the reception, is material for
The Golden Fruits.
Indeed, the hero of the present work in his most aghast moments could not have foreseen what happened. Did it get bad reviews? Good? Mixed? It got no reviews. It came out in the month of May during the Paris general strike, when there were no newspapers or magazines, no television, and radio that consisted of news bulletins. By the time the media were back in service, the spring publishing season was over. Everyone went away for the summer, and when they came back, it was the fall publishing season. Nobody was talking any more about the books of last spring.

What happened to
Between Life and Death
was a common fate. Democratic. Covered by the act-of-God clause in the contract. Any book published in May was killed instantly, without suffering. A good way to go. Some lingered as a memory, in a few bookstore windows; a few people bought them, probably. A brief notice or so may have followed, in the fall or winter—not reviews but oversights remedied. Perhaps there has been somewhere a real review of
Between Life and Death
that I missed. All that is sad but funny. It belongs to the comedy of the literary life. What is important is that the book was written. It exists, compact in itself, independently of the sum of its readers and having a kind of self-evidence like a theorem in geometry. Soon somebody will find it, in a train or a hotel or even a bookstore: “I never knew she wrote that.” Though it is less a “born” classic than
The Golden Fruits,
it is more original, more complex, larger, deeper. Its greatest originality, more striking than its bewitching technical resources but leaning on them for support, is its egalitarian view of its subject. Hence the strange appropriateness of its being killed during the May-June revolutionary events; it would not have minded that. In any case it is an heroic book, as much a deed as an imitation of one, and therefore merits not fame but glory.

July, 1969

One Touch of Nature

T
HE ABSENCE OF PLOT
from the modern novel is often commented on, like the absence of characters. But nobody has called attention to the disappearance of another element, as though nobody missed it. We have almost forgotten that descriptions of sunsets, storms, rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys used to be one of the staple ingredients of fiction, not merely a painted backdrop for the action but a component evidently held to be necessary to the art. The nineteenth-century novel was full of “descriptive writing”; a course called that was still given at Vassar when I was an undergraduate. How innocent and young-ladylike that sounds, bringing back the push-pulls and whorls of Palmer Method penmanship.

We have come a long way from the time when the skill of an author was felt to be demonstrated by his descriptive prowess: Dickens’ London fogs, Fenimore Cooper’s waterfalls, forests, prairie, Emily Brontë’s moors, Hardy’s heath and milky vales, Melville’s Pacific. Yet in their day these were taken as samplings of the author’s purest creative ore, his vein of genius—more even than character-portrayal or plot handling. In the old triad of plot, character, and setting, the setting, comprising Nature and her moods, supplied the atmosphere in an almost literal sense; it was the air the novel breathed, like the life-sustaining air surrounding Mother Earth.

The set-pieces of description in the English and American nineteenth-century novel correspond with the primacy of landscape in English painting.
The Mill on the Floss
brings back Constable and vice versa. In the fresh delicate strokes of George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, Hardy, there are affinities with the water color and the sketch: Cotman, Turner, the notations of Ruskin, and again Constable, his skies, woodland, weirs. But the English novel is also redolent of the prepared oil painting. Hardy’s landscapes with cattle, his markets and fairs suggest the English animal painters. Dickens evokes coaching scenes, and his lurid sunset Thames recalls Turner.

On the Continent, there were the hunts of Turgenev and Tolstoy, the forest rides of Madame Bovary, Tolstoy’s peasants reaping and threshing, the sawmill in Stendhal. On the whole, though, there is less easel scenery in Continental fiction than in our own; a simple test is whether you can skip the “boring parts”—
i.e.,
the descriptive passages—without missing some of the action. It is easier to do this with Melville or Hardy than with Flaubert, where Nature is more functional, as in the famous contrapuntal scene of the Agricultural Fair. And with an author like Adalbert Stifter
(Colored Stones),
the test works in reverse: if you skip the snowstorm in “Rock Crystal” or the Hungarian plain in “Brigitta,” you will have no story left, for these tales are deposits of Nature, like mineral specimens on which a few spores of human life have survived.

Yet allowing for differences in the treatment of landscape and the elements among the “old” authors, most of them had in common a notion of Nature as belonging to the cast of characters of a novel—sometimes as a chorus, jeering or sympathetic, sometimes as one of the principal actors, even the prime antagonist, the role it inevitably plays in stories of the sea. The obvious exception is Jane Austen. There Nature appears as a shower interrupting a walk, a source of wet feet, drafts, and colds, and this matches the scarcity of physical description of her characters. You know how much money her people have but not the color of their eyes. Another exception is Dostoievsky. Yet in Jane Austen’s moral scheme, Nature or, rather, the natural—the reverse of affectation—is in fact a guarantor of value, just as it is in Shakespeare, whereas in Dostoievsky, the unnatural (an unnatural crime, unnatural sons, unnatural desires and impulses) has become the most natural thing in the world, and no evident reason can be found in the nature of things—though perhaps one exists, finally—to argue against a student’s killing an old pawnbroker. For the modern town-dwellers of Dostoievsky (and this is
where
he is modern) there is nothing “outside.” Even virgin America, in
The Possessed,
instead of being an Eden, is a scene of gang labor and sordid exploitation, not an unspoiled wilderness but a pestilential cabin.

Among the writers of our own century, it is chiefly Faulkner who sees Nature as a force in human destiny, and he also shares with the nineteenth-century Naturalists an interest in genetics and the inheritance of traits; the word “nature,” after all, derives from
natus:
birth, natality. It is your “born” hand. Joyce too, though in an urban setting, insists on what is “outside”—river, sea, strand, elm (“telmetale of stem or stone”), the snow in “The Dead” falling softly over Ireland, a universal blanket or shroud. In
Finnegans Wake
the snoring Earwicker is the hero of a cosmic Nature myth, where the thunderstorms popular in nineteenth-century fiction become the actual onomatopoeic growl of thunder in the most primitive Indo-European speech forms. Joyce, however, is not interested in genetics (which have a “plot,” mutation, a “storyline”) but in the static Family of Man: death and resurrection, sleeping and waking. At the same time, his famous seesay
(Ulysses)
is also a seesaw; what is “outside,” for Stephen Dedalus, has lost its absoluteness and sovereignty and is only a flickering series of notations on the perceptual screen. This fall into relativity is even more emphatic in Virginia Woolf. It is felt in Proust too, though with a difference, since he learned from George Eliot and Ruskin, for both of whom Nature was a moral law. But for Proust what is outside is inconstant, depending on the “way” you elect to take, like the peculiar optics of the church steeples near Combray, which appear to move as the viewer’s position changes.

Such confusing stunts, including mirages, quicksands, the ventriloquism of the echo, “painted” turtles, the mocking-bird, all the monkey tricks of animal mimicry, constitute Nature’s freak show and tend to produce the opposite of a sense of sacred awe. This is evident in the case of Nabokov, a professional lepidopterist and amateur of botany and ornithology. There is a great deal of Nature in him but also a great deal of affectation. For him the natural world is the clever artifact of a showman closely resembling the artist-as-prankster; the curio cabinet of his fiction reveals a schoolboy’s hoard of specimens, human and non-human, collected and mounted, with a special partiality for the ephemerids, like the nymphet Lolita, impaled on pins. At the other pole, perhaps illustrating a class difference, is the sentient Nature of Lawrence, bred in the coal pits, whose language trembled with wonder on approaching a single wild flower.

For Lawrence, as for Faulkner, something formidable exists beyond man-in-society and beyond the natural sciences as well, something both innate and transcendent. Faulkner’s sole inheritor on the contemporary American scene is Mailer, who treats himself on the one hand as a natural force and on the other as a culture-hero, a hell-harrower, Herakles cleaning the Augean stables and putting on the shirt of the Centaur when making out his alimony checks. He can describe a bear-hunt
(Why Are We in Vietnam?),
make symbolic use of a deer park, and introduce a living elephant into his latest non-fiction epic
(Miami and the Siege of Chicago).
His competitor, Bellow, tried something of the sort with
Henderson the Rain-King
and with the eagle in
Augie March,
but Nature is not Bellow’s “scene”; when he touches this wild material, it turns into fable, not myth. Henderson in the lions’ den is a figure in a Talmudic vaudeville.

On the Continent, this side of the Iron Curtain, the natural world is in almost total eclipse. There was no Nature in Gide, not much in Mann or Malraux; there is none in Sartre, very little in Moravia. With the exception of Silone, among the Continental writers considered important today, the outdoors, at best, has a sort of hallucinatory presence. The blinding sun in
L’Etranger
which causes the hero to commit a murder, the sinister North African mountain in Claude Ollier’s
La Mise en Scène,
the frightening squashed centipede on the wall of
La Jalousie
are all in some way cryptic, signifying the retreat of the outside from cognition. The tropisms of Nathalie Sarraute, which refer to biology, are little darting movements of attraction and repulsion of the life-substance enlarged by the novelist’s microscope. For the “new” writers, far from being a touchstone of value, Nature is a source of disquiet, an unknowable quantity; the more minutely an object is studied as it impinges on the perceptual screen, the more mysterious it becomes, owing to the lack of perspective. Nature is not a reference-point, outside man, giving the scale, but inseparable from the viewer and his cognitive processes, themselves thrown into doubt.

Surprisingly at first sight, considering the empty landscape of the recent novel in France and Italy, there is quite a bit of weather, usually hot. But where the weather in the nineteenth-century novel supplied mood music for the characters’ reveries, aided or interfered with their projects, as it does in life, here it subjects them to a more or less uniform pressure (Moravia, Duras, Robbe-Grillet, Le Clezio, Oilier); it is “close,” confining, an atmosphere productive of aberrations, as in a terrarium. And this is true even when, exceptionally, the oppressive climate is northern as in Butor’s
L’Emploi du Temps,
set in the pervasive gray damp of an English industrial town, itself as hallucinatory to the hero as a rainy jungle of the Amazon.