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Tag: psychology (page 6 of 6)

American Writers of the 1950’s

21 April 2003 / / 2 Comments

Eudaemonist goes after Randell Jarrell’s Portraits from an Institution:

I now understand why people go ga-ga for Kerouac: general American fiction of the 1950s was rotten…When seen against the backdrop of such insipid, feeble prose as Jarrell’s, where flashes of wit last no longer than a firefly’s flickering (and provide, if I may say so, rather less illumination), Kerouac’s writing, for all that it is petulant, adolescent, and puerile, at least has some spark.

(Jarrell was not the only poet to try his hand at a campus novel. Weldon Kees’s Fall Quarter is quite dull and loses its way early on, torn between social criticism and an unwillingness to indict as viciously as Kees did in his essays.)

Speaking as an avowed detractor from the beats, seeing them as an anti-intellectual offshoot of more self-conscious European surrealist/dadaist movements, I always saw the 50’s as a time of post-war retrenchment. Popular genres (mystery, sf) had been established and were being elaborated on and toughened. William S. Burroughs, not quite a beat, was still writing sordid books like Junky and Queer (not published until later, but still…) that derived from Nelson Algren’s work of the 1940’s. Authors like Hubert Selby and John Rechy would follow this arc in the 60’s, but it is not typical in any way of the 50’s. Likewise with John Barth’s first two novels, which would not have stood out had he not drastically shifted tacks afterwards.

On the more socially conscious front, Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis’s complaints did not yet seem appropriate again (and their writing was far too clunky to stand on its own aesthetically), and Faulkner’s Southern chronicles became rote and nearly pastoral. Faulkner still won the Pulitzer–twice–seemingly by default, once for the failed stretch of A Fable, which reads like an intentional shifting of weight to “larger” (not really) issues.

But there are several 50’s authors that had and continue to have a huge impact on writing style and people’s expectations of the demarcated beast that is “American fiction.” J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Richard Yates all got their start in the 50’s, and none ever really made an impact beyond what they accomplished in that decade. Even Bellow, who held some of himself back for later, spawned upstarts Philip Roth and Joseph Heller before he could wrangle back any significant influence, and settled for becoming an elder statesman who would write books about Allan Bloom. All of them outlined areas that became de facto concerns in what could get published.

Cheever and Yates both specialized in malaise. Cheever’s version had darker, more perverse undercurrents to it (submerged homosexuality quite large among them), while Yates stuck to the surface of things and painted anomie devoid of content. Cheever may have had the richer vision, but Yates was more precise, he knew exactly what wall he was hitting, time and time again, while Cheever wandered.

Bellow was dabbling in a self-mythology based around the already-forming detritus of Jewish intellectual circles of past decades, which were fast being reduced to the parochialism of The New York Review of Books (as well as Irving Kristol’s neoconservative movement, but that’s not literary). But hardly less than Cheever and Yates, he was working on a blank slate of American culture based around a middle-class that hadn’t dominated when Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis had been writing. The context of all of their writing was post-Freudian psychology, the self-defeating self-reflection that produces neurosis. With much less of the weight of history than corresponding European novels of the same time, they drew from the sociology of the moment, and constructed a view of middle-class intellectual and non-intellectual life that produced its own problems. It revolves around the psychology of the little gesture, the meager possession, the sentimental attachment, and the bland statement. These took on specific associations, so that every fictional character looking at a gray building or working in a garden or cooking dinner or walking down a sidewalk came to signify certain things about American life.

Many, many American fiction writers have been dealing with this landscape since, from John Updike to Raymond Carver to Grace Paley. Salinger introduced an element of religious or quasi-religious purity in his work, which was later developed by Walker Percy, among others, but as I get older I see Salinger more as a peculiar variation on the other three, glorifying a narcissistic but extremely personal and effective view of family as a non-historical response to Yates and Cheever’s monotonic views. It is a less robust response than Bellow’s, which has made it harder to imitate. That hasn’t stopped people from trying, though.

These are far from the only movements, but in terms of disproportionate impact, I think the figures above stand out. Many literary magazines today print stories that almost exclusively conform to the boundaries set out: ahistoric, neurotic, drawing from quotidian symbols. And I don’t believe there has been a group since that has had anywhere near as much impact. (For a while, I thought Don DeLillo was doing pretty well in reorienting the field towards a more reductionistic, impersonal psychology, but scions like Steve Erickson and Stephen Wright seem to have faded fast.)

In comparison, there are the roads not taken, those of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and even Nabokov, whose Pnin is a less claustrophobic statement on the social life of the academy. There is Flannery O’Connor, whose pacing and plotting were appropriated, but not her modern gothic sensibility. And there’s William Gaddis, whose The Recognitions I never finished, but who was clearly working towards a more epic, contextual tableau, even if he seemed to get mired in the details.

In sum, then, the 50’s still seem a flagship decade for one of the most dominant breeds of American fiction, as well as its height. There is little that Christopher Tilghman writes about that could not be gleaned (albeit indirectly) from Richard Yates, thirty years earlier. Lorrie Moore adds a touch of Bellow’s eloquent mythologizing to very similar material. Which is to say, there are clearly identifiable “American writers of the 50’s,” in a way that there aren’t of subsequent decades. It’s as though time has stood still.

Count d’Orgel, Raymond Radiguet

2 March 2003 / / 0 Comments

Raymond Radiguet died at age 20, having completed two novels and some poetry, encouraged by his mentor Jean Cocteau. Count D’Orgel (actually Le Bal de Comte d’Orgel in French) is the second, written when he was 18 and 19 and published in 1924, a year after he died. Since the main impact of Stig Dagerman’s A Burnt Child is in its clear immaturity, I kept that in mind when reading what Cocteau called a book “that cannot be written at that age.” And in its appearance and its demeanor, that very nearly seems true: there is a calm maturity to the basic devices of the book. But underneath it, in the emotional and psychological content, the plot is very ingenuous, almost adolescent. Yet even beneath that…well, read on.

I. Maturity

The name d’Orgel sounded grotesque to me, and on first hearing it I expected a chamber of horrors close to Cocteau’s more intense work (Les Enfants Terribles). Maybe it was only because it reminded me of Daniel Pinkwater‘s Borgel and Yobgorgle. But stylistically and developmentally, there’s nothing grotesque here. Radiguet’s writing, particularly when describing the aristocratic background of Anne d’Orgel and his sedate romance with his wife Mahaut, is so proper and so enmeshed in the mores of upper-class society that it takes over the novel for a while. Radiguet’s style is terse, but he is so careful in laying the social and decorative groundwork for the plot that the book seems slower and longer than it actually is.

When young Francois de Seryeuse, with a middle-class background and more impetuousness than everyone else in the book combined, meets up with the Orgels and falls for Mahaut, Radiguet keeps his distance. Francois is clearly closer to Radiguet’s demographic than anyone else, but Radiguet is careful not to shift the focus entirely on to him. Radiguet gives a fair amount of time to his skeptical mother, who Radiguet gives motivations that would seem too sophisticated if given to Francois. It’s a keen device.

There is also nearly a worshipful attitude towards the focus on class and place, and almost total ignorance of the Great War, which puts the area of the novel’s exploration closer to later Flaubert and Balzac than Proust, since Radiguet doesn’t seem to have a lot to say about class or place; he only wishes to describe them. Jean Renoir would describe the destruction of this world less than a decade later, but here it seems immortal. The fixed world and the comfort with which Radiguet describes do make the book like a much older writer. His vision is much more grounded and fixed than Cocteau’s, which makes their relationship something of the opposite of Verlaine and Rimbaud’s.

II. Immaturity

All the background and scenic parties drop away for a large part of the book, however, as Francois falls for Mahaut and Orgel does his best to ignore what is happening. The love triangle that Radiguet constructs is simple but nicely etched, yet it’s something that is based more in the vague constructs of gentility than it is in French society of any particular time. Orgel’s balls could be parties anywhere, any time, that only require some kind of upper class. The details in the early part of the book fade away as Radiguet brings Francois’s barely consummated affections for Mahaut (he grasps her arm at one point) and her torn reactions to the fore.

It’s not that the book skews towards Francois, but by the halfway point, the main chracters are in such stark relief from the faded background that the focus shifts to archetypal psychology rather than the particulars of the characters:

The Count liked to find his own prodigality in others. To him it was a true sign of nobility. He always accepted the smallest invitation or the most insignificant present with outward signs of pleasure. It was not the right thing for a noble nature to think that everything was his due, or at least to show that he thought so. Francois’ behaviour won the Count’s heart more than any calculated act could have done.

As such, the book comes to read as more modern as it goes on, but also more dated. The sophistication of the early sections seems less close to Radiguet’s heart and more like the immaculate dressing done up in imitation of his forebears.

III. Some Kind of Advance

Radiguet was aware that, as he said, “The background does not count” in Count d’Orgel. The advance in the book is not noticeable until close to the end, but it’s derivable from the title. Orgel himself is the least important of the three main characters; even Francois’s mother makes a stronger impression in her greater wisdom. Orgel mainly sits around enjoying Francois’s company and ignoring what’s going on until he can’t any longer. This is not just carelessness on Radiguet’s part; at the end, it’s finally revealed that Orgel’s actions stem not from coarseness or stupidity, but an internal paralysis arising from the role he is playing. When Orgel does lose it and acts mad at his ball, it’s through his inability to process matters internally:

It was, as we know, in Orgel’s character to perceive reality only through what takes place in public. Orgel now admitted that he might perhaps suffer. He was less afraid of the suffering than of the behaviour it would impose on him.

Radiguet, in spite of everything, manages to tie the background and the foreground together. The setting doesn’t count, but it functions as the web in which Orgel has been working quietly for the entire book, and what has fallen apart from him. The refraction of his breakdown such that he doesn’t take his problems out on Francois or Mahaut but on himself, in the public display of his society, marks him as someone with considerably less ego than characters in this sort of book ought to have.

So while Mahaut and Francois are fairly ordinary types of a past era, Orgel is something else entirely, a public self wondering about its private self, which has been disemboweled. It’s the sort of figure for for whom sincerity is ambiguous, whom Lionel Trilling said was the invention of modernity. Radiguet’s emphasis on the absence of (Orgel’s) self in the context of high society is a theme similar to Cocteau’s and, more loosely, to the surrealists, but Radiguet’s excavation of it is both freer and far more careful than his contemporaries. He is impudent enough to paint a history of the upper class in detail only to throw it away, but he maintains a tight grip on his materials and works them into his new shape. The message has adolescence in it–he is dealing with questions of sincerity and phoniness–but the technique is, at the end of it, subtly mature.

Elias Canetti and Hermann Broch in Conversation

2 February 2003 / / 1 Comment

Hermann Broch to Elias Canetti in the 30’s, recollected by Canetti:

What you have done in your novel [Kant Catches Fire] and in The Wedding is to heighten fear. You rub people’s noses in their wickedness, as though to punish them for it. I know your underlying purpose is to make them repent. You make me think of a Lenten sermon. But you don’t threaten people with hell, you paint a picture of hell in this life. You don’t picture it objectively, so as to give people a clearer consciousness of it; you picture it in such a way as to make people feel they are in it and scare them out of their wits. Is it the writer’s function to bring more fear into the world? Is that a worthy intention? You believe in alarming people to the point of panic.

Canetti’s response, recollected by Canetti:

If I did, if I had really given up hope, I couldn’t bear to go on living. No I just think we know too little. I have the impression that you like to talk about modern psychology because it originated in your own back yard, so to speak, in a particular segment of Vienna society. It appeals to a certain local patriotism in you. Maybe you feel that you yourself might have invented it. Whatever it says, you find in yourself. You don’t have to look for it. This modern psychology strikes me as totally inadequate. It deals with the individual, and in that sphere it has undoubtedly made certain discoveries. But where the masses are concerned, it can’t do a thing, and that’s where knowledge would be most important, for all the new powers that are coming into existence today draw their strength from crowds, from the masses. Nearly all those who are out for political power know how to operate with the masses. But the men who see that such operations are leading straight to another world war don’t know how to influence the masses, how to stop them from being misled to the ruin of us all. The laws of mass behavior can be discovered. That is the most important task confronting us today, and so far nothing has been done toward the development of such a science.

It’s hard not to think that Canetti, writing forty years later, didn’t rewrite his insights to be more prophetic than they actually were; the bit about “another world war” seems awfully suspicious. Likewise, it seems likely that Canetti skewed Broch’s words so that Canetti’s response would seem more visionary and hopeful than what Broch had to offer. But the general positions are probably accurate: Broch as the individualist who is very lost about the state of the world and wishes he could go back to a less international, smaller time, and Canetti as the twentieth-century intellectual determined to address things on their own terms–or rather, what Canetti perceived as their own terms. He hadn’t read Max Weber or Emile Durkheim then, who were already dealing with exactly the issues Canetti claims aren’t being addressed, and as far as I know, Canetti never did read them. Canetti accuses Broch of parochialism in Broch’s attachment to Freud, but Canetti’s perimeters weren’t so different. He adhered to the implied tenets of the already decrepit Viennese literary scene, mostly an anti-establishment streak brought on through proximity to the destruction of Austria in the first World War. With Canetti it reached a nihilism to which he never fully admitted, but which marks itself in his work.

But first look at Broch. Here he sounds like the cautious elder, advising a sympathetic intellectualism that would open people to self-understanding. Canetti portrayed Broch as a weak, transparent man, but fitting an admirer of Freud, he adhered to an outlook on the world that prescribed clear values. Read The Sleepwalkers or The Unknown Quantity and his characters are archetypes: the scientist, the revolutionary, the party man, the artist. They behave in predictable ways, and the dilemmas they face clearly arise from their occupations.

This would seem fatalisic, but since Broch is pushing sociological points rather than a realistic story, it has the mythological status of Totem and Taboo more than the hopelessness of Theodore Dreiser or Mikhail Lermontov. The problem, and this is more of a necessary aspect of his work than a defect, is that his points all point backwards. Broch’s “weakness” is not any reticence to say bold things, but an inability to see any prospect of a golden age coming out of cultural and industrial modernism. In his last and best book, The Death of Virgil, he sets his titular artist up as a paragon of being, existing in ancient Rome but at the same time taking the material of his existence and casting it on his own plane of creativity. It is a clever way to turn away from the immediate , but it suggests that Broch never solved his problem. Virgil is on top of such a mountain of prestige, selflessly giving his works down to all beneath him, that Broch comes off (to use a vulgar example) as a proto-Harold Bloom figure, rhapsodizing about the days when the impact of state poets equalled their (supposed) breadth of understanding. This is why I called Broch a conservative.

Canetti wanted none of this. The disrespect of tradition and people of which Broch accuses him is real, and the urge to destruction persists from Auto-da-Fe, his novel of a bookish man and his plebeian housekeeper, who destroy each other, to Earwitness, a collection of heartless character studies. His description of “The Home-biter” is clinical:

The home-biter has an ingratiating manner and knows how to form new friendships. He is especially popular with ladies whose hands he kisses. Never getting too close for comfort, he bows, takes the hand like a precious object, and brings it the long way to his lips.

The entomologist’s detachment that Canetti displays distinguishes the book from similar efforts like Thomas Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator, but its consistent deployment across Canetti’s books makes his focus on the “masses” seem less like a psychological approach that would yield insights for the individual than a coldly utilitarian tactic. When Canetti did address the issues of the new “masses,” he did not take any steps to humanizing them. The tyrant at the end of Crowds and Power is as much a monster as any character he had conceived of. Sympathy is noticeably absent from the book, his major excursion into “sociology.” The book is strongest when describing the movements of the masses; it is weakest on attempting to give concrete evidence on how these assemblages form. Canetti resorts to folk legends and indigenous histories, but he lacks the ability to discriminate between, say, a matrimonial link, a blood link, and a legal link. It makes for a book unlike any other in sociology, but the problem you’re left with at the end is very different than the one Canetti wants to point out. Canetti tries to illuminate the movement of associative groups with an eye towards exerting more rational control over them. But the omission of the differentiation of individualistic motives makes the book feel like an erector set.

My interest in Canetti goes way back, and my attitude towards him has worsened as I’ve grown more mistrustful of those who would separate themselves from society in order to dissect it. Canetti is more skilled at it than any of Colin Wilson’s children, and the backwards-focused Broch may have been more scared than most by what Canetti represented, but damned if Broch’s accusation, even when tweaked by Canetti, doesn’t ring true. It’s melodramatic to see him as a anti-life force, as his young lover Iris Murdoch evidently did, but it probably took someone of Murdoch’s strength to reject his ethos as completely as she did, both personally and in her writing.

A Burnt Child, Stig Dagerman

1 February 2003 / / 0 Comments

It wasn’t until two-thirds of the way through A Burnt Child that I remembered that Dagerman committed suicide at age 31 and therefore, this book had been written at a very young age: 24, exactly. The odd shifts in the book make far more sense if you think of the author as barely out of his schooling, and I wonder what I would have made of it had I continued to think of him, incorrectly, as a mature, staid adult. The book’s demeanor and its flaws are very particular, and it’s not a stretch to think of them as endemic to a specific period in one’s biological life and its respective mental organization.

It begins with a mother’s death, and places three, then four characters, into the aftermath in a clean, Ibsen-like family schema. There is the father, Knut, who has little but contempt for his monstrous, dead wife, and the son Bengt, who venerates her to the point of swearing revenge against his father, and Bengt’s girlfriend Berit, who is mostly a passive observer. Knut quickly begins to date the elderly but feisty Gun, whom Bengt loathes.

Apart from Bengt’s infrequent histrionics, the early part of the book alternates between a processional of grief and slow, well-observed descriptions of the shaken world of the characters. It’s very proper, and very “mature,” since it’s closer in tone to work from the early 1900’s rather than 1948, when it was published. (There is no mention whatsoever of the war.) But soon, Bengt’s psychosis takes over, with impressionistic dreams and threats of violence. The psychology is typical, but delivered in such an unself-conscious manner that you can almost think he hadn’t read Freud. Unavoidably, Bengt has an affair with Gun, and the book shifts again. The writing becomes lost in reverie and Dagerman reveals a newfound weakness for romantic philosophical generalization:

We cannot comprehend our own death, nor the fact that someone should deceive us. That someone else should sleep naked with the one we love is something beyond our power of imagination. If we were to see it even our reason would not believe it, our feelings alone would know it.

This may read better in Swedish, but it probably doesn’t improve the ideas. By the time of Bengt’s exhibitionistic suicide attempt at the very end, the narrative is so involved with Bengt’s self-obsession that the surgical distance and description at the beginning has completely vanished, replaced by portentous imagery and clipped, melodramatic dialogue.

It’s not the self-obsession that marks A Burnt Child as having been written by a 24-year-old. His writing is not immature in the way that Marguerite Duras’s writing is immature, though they share a passionate narcissism. It’s the way he moves in many directions without committing to one, and the way he treasures the extremities of feelings to which teenagers and young adults are prone. Dagerman thought highly of himself and his writing, but he thought even more highly of his self five years earlier, who makes the basis for Bengt. Compare him with Salinger, who deals with hyperarticulate children with overdeveloped neuroses. Bengt is remarkably simple and remarkably passionate, and he makes his forebear, Goethe’s Werther, looks measured in comparison. It is a portrayal of an immature mental state by someone who has picked up enough writing ability before he’s forgotten the firsthand experience of the feeling altogether. (Compare him to Thomas Mann, who in Buddenbrooks is rushing away from firsthand mental experience as fast as possible.) It seems like less of a recreation than a contemporaneous document. The verisimilitude is startling, but the drastic shifts in tone and style yield a book that is not cohesive. It is too close to Dagerman’s own experience, and his own shifting perception as he aged at 20. Dagerman’s apparent lack of awareness of any of this damages the novel, but as a record of a period of a person’s life that has rarely produced any worthy writing, it is at least comprehensive and deeply felt, in many contradictory directions.

Kobo Abe

28 January 2003 / / 0 Comments

Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night also reminds me of Kobo Abe, particularly his insane works of the 70’s, The Box Man and Secret Rendezvous. As long as we’re drawing cross-continental comparisons, William Burroughs is there too, but Burroughs more surrealist, later work is pedantic and decadent in a too-familiar way. These two books of Abe’s aren’t familiar. They don’t seem like successes, and it’s not easy to say that they succeed on their own terms, because they don’t appear to have their own terms. Calling them pretentious is besides the point, since the books don’t have a pretense towards anything in particular. Psychological and and political intimations turn out to be complete blinds; what mostly flows out of the books is deep, total sickness. Apart from Inter Ice Age 4, an early work which gets mired in the tropes of science fiction, most of Abe’s translated books do have a purity about them.

I discovered Abe through The Woman in the Dunes. At the time I was a huge Camus adherent, and the summary of a man trapped in a sand pit with a woman who has lived there for years, makes it sound similar to any number of existentialist works of fiction. It’s not. Attempts to draw a metaphor do not work, since the book remains focused on the constraining of the man with a fundamentally unresponsive woman, and his very real interaction with the sadistic villagers keeping him there. The slow madness that overcomes him stems from the particular (and odd) circumstances rather than any speculative human condition. Far from existential, the story has more in common with Nabokov, especially the finely-ground fantasies Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, though it’s far more realistic than either. Teshigahara’s film of the book also seems to misunderstand it (though it has an amazing, crackling score by Toru Takemitsu), adoping long shots of dunes that don’t fit with the relative lack of desperation on the man’s part.

By the 70’s, Abe had headed away from anything close to realism. The Box Man revolves around a series of men who walk around with boxes on their heads, with doppelgangers and fakes, disconnected memories and self-consciously pompous meanderings on the integrity of being a box man. Michaela Grey offers an excellent description of the book, but I disagree with her tying it to Derrida: Abe remained focused on personal identity and integrity and was never concerned with purely textual matters. But the book is nuttier than what comes out in the article, since Abe never builds up any credibility in the narrative. The only strand that rings true is one about the noetic nature of being a box man, an affirmation that can’t be obtained externally. This in turn implies that any individual section of the book is dubious, since in total they are the ramblings of one or more men whose ability to place themselves in the world is falling apart. Apart from the surreal surface, here is where there is the most commonality with Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night, in its resolute lack of commitment to any particular reality.

Secret Rendezvous is more narratively coherent, but only furthers the idea that individual plot points, characters, and settings are losing all intrinsic meaning short of inciting a vague, sickly psychosexual aura. The narrator’s wife is abducted one morning by an ambulance, and he journeys through the labyrinthine hospital attempting to find her. There is a nice twist on Kafka, when the frustrated narrator is allowed full access to the hospital’s surveillance tapes, only to find that there are so, so many hours of tape that he’ll never be able to derive anything from them. Again, the mental state of the man is subordinate to the organic disease around him that he seems oddly distant from. When, at the end, he ends up leading an entourage including a girl whose bones are dissolving, the enviroment mirrors the girl by not remaining firm enough to grasp. The parallel to Kafka is most appropriate here, but the “characters” are as indeterminate as the landscape. Where Kafka dealt with amorphous persecution, Abe simply pulls the rug out from everything he touches.

There is, at the heart of these books, very little interest in character or psychology, despite the trappings that appear. The next book he wrote, The Ark Sakura, is far less disorienting, but the main character, a paranoid survivalist, spends the last third of the book with his leg caught in an industrial toilet and the other characters are one-dimensional. The book is essentialy a Stevenson-like adventure story, and the abrupt end pushes the unreality of what’s gone before, as he finally emerges from his cave into the light:

Beyond the transparent people lay a transparent town. Was I transparent, then, too? I held a hand up to my face–and through it saw buildings.

The situations Abe deals in do not raise epistemological or existential questions; they are deranged treatments of metaphysics. The question is whether the shifting realities and, in The Box Man, pseudo-philosophical ramblings amount to something that is prior to experience and organized thought. With Donoso, I believe it is. With Abe, they seem detached from thought altogether: some sort of objectification of humans. The perversions in his books often come off as heartless, but Abe may be pushing for metaphysical heartlessness.

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