In a preamble, I would have to agree, re: the strawmanning of
academia. If we are to, as Trilling said, attempt to consider things complexly
it is necessary for me to acknowledge: there are many in literary departments
up and down the Archipelago doing good and interesting work, and that so with
passion. Indeed, I enjoyed my degree (in
the long ago days) immensely. Primarily,
I think my reservations are to do with: a) how this good and interesting work
is reaching the Commonweal as a whole*, b) if the modes of language used aren’t
a net (an Iris Murdochy–Under-the-Net-type-net) that traps and hampers
rather than frees, and c) if the strictures of academia, as currently
constructed, deprive (say, in the case of philosophy) us of figures like a
Kierkegaard, a Nietzsche, a Plato.
But let’s refine your point further. You mentioned a certain
old-fashioned impulse to have the author be live and well on the page contra
Barthes, but simultaneously what you’re asking for is something that sounds
at least pretty modern, or at least postmodern. A foregrounding of the apparatus,
a self-consciousness. You want – in a
manner – a self-conscious text, perhaps not metafiction, but meta-nonfiction, a
metaessay (though, one assumes, not simply one that only describes its own
making, but is also about something else). You note an ennui, a distaste concerning “the
mechanics of outright fiction.” I
wondered if this had to do with an inauthenticity that you were tasting. Trilling wrote about the distinction between
sincerity and authenticity. Broadly, he says sincerity is about saying
out loud what is in your heart, and authenticity is to do with being oneself. Your insistence on the mess and stuff and
muddle is to ask for a kind of realism or authenticity. Simon says, Thoughts don’t come from nowhere. Simon says, Thoughts emerge from the mess, the
stuff and funk. Simon says, Show me
this. Is this that familiar move that we
have seen in our literature, the restless attempt to get at something truer or
‘real’, etc? So if modernism is (v
simplistically) the literature of consciousness (Joyce, Woolf etc), and
postmodernism (v simplistically) the literature of self-consciousness (Calvino
etc), this is a move away from fiction as such, toward a non-fiction that has
this awareness, this self-consciousness about how it is made? Is this a useful way to think about what
you’re saying? Or not? What does Simon say?
So far, the prime example you’ve given is Dept. of Speculation
(2014), which, broadly speaking, is a novel, and I think an example that is
more squarely in what we might call the essay would be helpful.
To add a discordant chime to your literary spidey-senses: your
particular thesis doesn’t hold – at least with the evidence you bring to bear. It is without question that, say, Woolf’s
diaries and letters are of very great worth**. Francis Spalding has, like you, speculated
that it is these that will last, and have the most value. I think this is a stretch – wonderful as they
are, the diaries and letters don’t exceed the brightness cast by the luminous
stream formed by Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927),
and The Waves (1932). Equal in value, perhaps, but they don’t outshine
her fiction. Bennet, I think, is fair
game here. (I don’t know enough about Simon Gray or Thoreau to say.) But are these representative figures? If one casts the net (not an Iris-Murdochy-Under-the-Net-type-net,
but a book-and-writer-nabbing-type-net) further, it isn’t clear to me that you
will dredge up enough driftwood you need to prop up your thesis. Your examples are journals, diaries. Things that are done in private, and may or
may not, have an intended audience beyond the writer themselves. To run with that, James Joyce’s letters (even
the dirtiest ones) don’t have the value of that lodestar Ulysses (1922);
Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks (1954) are very beautiful but I doubt
will accumulate enough clout to overtake his other work (nor should they, I
think). These are very narrow examples,
of course, but I think for you to give the tendency of your thoughts (The Simon
Tendency) more power there needs to be larger theory of the case, and more
luggage inside that case.
Yrz,
J.S.L.
* Not in a calculated impact way, but I do think that advocacy of
reading and literature as such could play a larger role in what departments do.
Maybe. My thoughts are hazy as a Pea Souper, or Air
Gravy.
** This description of Woolf’s diary is so great that it needed to
be here, and it felt relevant to what you’re thinking about. From A Writer’s Diary (1954): 'What
sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something
loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything,
solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble a deep old desk,
or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without
looking them through. I should like to
come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted
itself and refined itself and collapsed, as such deposits so mysteriously
do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet
steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.'
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