Conjectures
On the use of personal experience in writing: but these fragments of the real should be relativized within a larger whole, as a method actor’s memories are harnessed to character, character to play.
He was a scout for the future among the ruins of the past.
One could probably draw a link between this hypothesized future without humans and the narrative technique that Lawrence developed. His free-indirection, for instance in the opening of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, might seem to have the effect of relativizing thoughts by locating them within individual minds. I would say, on the contrary, it implies that thoughts have a kind of independent existence, and are then only contingently instantiated in human minds. This is consonant with the pervasive emphasis on mood, on atmosphere. If mood is prior to thought, then the not-quite formulated thought has a kind of ambient being— the “glamor” that is apprehended in the ambience in England in the early years of the war (I am thinking here of the “The Nightmare,” the war chapter from Kangaroo), or the dark underworld glamor emanating from the mine, from the colliers, that is apprehended by Gudrun and Ursula, in Women in Love. It is true that there is a to so and so aspect to these perceptions (how things seem to Ursula and how things seem to Gudrun), but for Lawrence this is an attunement to something really there. Perception varies based on the perceiver, but is not dependent, in a radical sense, on the perceiver. To put it another way, while we tend to think of free-indirect discourse as inflecting narrative with the perspective of character, in Lawrence we would say that free-indirection makes character the registering apparatus of mood. It is an alignment between the sensitive registering apparatuses of character and of telling.
Any discussion of any object necessarily abstracts from the various relations, within which it might be set. To demand that any discussion of any object acknowledge the totality of its exclusions is, if an interesting Borgesian experiment, a means of distancing rather than approaching it.
The moribund professional literary-critical taboo on “value judgements” and hence on “aesthetic rankings,” associated with the literary critical left, in fact finds it at its most bourgeois, in that it betrays a desire for civil society immune to the influence of power (or, as I would call it, showing my hand, the influence of strength). This wish is born of fear—fear at being on the receiving end of power, but also, in a deeper sense, at being able to wield and hence be responsible for its just exercise. Literary academics are gun-shy.
More might be said of this. Whereas the traditional Hobbesian view of the origin of the state imagined civil society emerging in the shadow of a sovereignty to which the many cede their individual powers, the new dogma of anti-power depends on surrendering power to its negative image, its shadow, a scapegoat, on whose image the denied powers of the surrenderer are visited in outrages.
Flipping through an essay collection by a prominent contemporary novelist, I was surprised to find my eye catch on the name “Céline.” On closer inspection? It was “Creative.” As in, “Creative writing.”
Near where I live there are drydocks. I walk by them sometimes, though not all that often. Most of the time they are dry, though at least I have seen them filled with water. I have never seen a boat in them. I have never even seen a person nearby them. What they give me is an image of time. I have to get down in there, get my work done, before the sluice opens, the basin fills.
Some longer essays, including one on a prominent midcentury American poet of memory and (largely thwarted) desire will be appearing here soon. In the meantime, thank you for subscribing, and please consider a paid subscription, which puts more gas in the tank.
For those interested in the great short story writer and war correspondent Stephen Crane, I will be hosting an online conversation this upcoming Sunday at 7PM Eastern Time via Interintellect. Link here.