SPENGLER Thanks, but I already have a
novel By Spengler
One
Sunday morning years ago I was walking across
Mexico City's zocalo, the grand square abutting
the cathedral and the presidential palace. Street
vendors swarm there until the cops roust them. A
middle-aged man in a grey windbreaker had opened a
box of blue-covered paperback editions of the
Mexican Constitution, the kind that's given free
to schools and trade
unions. "Buy the Mexican
Constitution!" he cried. "Sorry," I told him. "I
don't like fiction."
The man with the blue
books laughed at the joke, but it was a liberating
moment. There: I had said it! I don't like
fiction. I'm like the dumb blonde in the joke who
gets a novel as a present. "Thanks," she says,
"but I already have a novel." The novel I already
have is J W Goethe's The Sorrows of Young
Werther, which really is about why people
shouldn't write novels, let alone read them.
There are perhaps a dozen works of fiction
that embodied the Zeitgeist so well that the whole
literate world had to read them. The 16th century
read de Rojas' La Celestina in dozens of
editions and translations; the 17th century read
Don Juan in a thousand versions, and the
mid-18th century read Voltaire and Rousseau. But
the last quarter of the 18th century belonged to
Werther. Napoleon read the French translation
under the pyramids.
It is the first modern
novel, that is, a novel of personal development
that one reads to develop one's own personality by
proxy. Goethe's biographer Nicholas Boyle observes
that the generation that came of age in the 1770s
was the first with the freedom to choose its own
identity. This generation gave us the American and
French revolutions, as well as the great rejection
of tradition. It also gave us the modern novel.
Werther is a young man who sets out to
invent his own identity with a rural bias
influenced by Rousseau. He falls hopelessly in
love with the married Charlotte and at length
blows his brains out. As Professor Boyle observes,
it is not a sordid little love story but a
cautionary tale about the folly of self-invention.
To be young at the time was very heaven, wrote
Wordsworth. Wordsworth lied; on the contrary, it
was excruciatingly horrible. Human beings simply
aren't clever or strong enough to invent their own
identities, and come to grief whenever they
attempt to. The outcome is likely to be
embarrassing. Werther, mortally wounded, declaims
verses from the spurious epic Ossian, a
literary hoax perpetrated by a Scots pastor who
claimed to have discovered the Celtic Homer.
Werther made me cringe as an
undergraduate, but the 18th century couldn't take
its eyes off him. Lovelorn young men emulated
Goethe's hero and did away with themselves so
often that copycat suicide still is called the
"Werther effect". The book made Goethe Europe's
first literary celebrity. Forty years later he
created another youthful hero, Wilhelm Meister,
who fancies himself an actor and leaves his dull
merchant family for a traveling theater troupe.
Rather than kill himself like Werther, Wilhelm
Meister decides at length that he doesn't want to
waste any more time being in a novel, and goes off
to get a life instead. It's the same idea, but
without the pistols.
When I reject
"fiction", I do not mean all imaginative prose,
but only the kind of prose that is supposed to
give us profound insight into character and help
us work through our own existential quandaries by
proxy - the sort of fiction that is supposed to
help us grow as human beings, extend our empathy
with our fellow human beings, and similar rubbish.
You don't stumble upon an identity by falling in
love, running with the bulls in Pamplona,
murdering a pawn-broker, or suffering along with
the retreat from Moscow.
Novels become
important to us as a wellspring of identity when
the center of our lives shifts away from family
and congregation, that is, from the hope of
transcending our mortal existence through physical
as well as spiritual continuity. Goethe's Wilhelm
Meister spends a few years stumbling into other
people's tragedies, and then drops out of his own
novel: he discovers that an actress with whom he
had a youthful fling died after bearing his child,
and leaves his wandering to raise his son. At that
point he no longer has a novel, but a life. Like
his cousin Werther, Wilhelm Meister finds his
fictional existence insupportable, but unlike
Werther, he abandons the novel for life instead of
death.
It's like the joke about an old
Jewish couple. The wife says, "Let's go to the
theater!" The husband replies, "I don't want to go
to the theater. It's boring." "What do you mean,
'boring'?," the wife protests. "It's boring,"
insists her husband. "How can the theater be
boring? The only reason people go to the theater
is to be entertained. People go to the theater all
the time for entertainment, and entertainment is
the opposite of boredom, so how can the theater
possibly be boring?" The old man sighs: "It's
boring. When he wants, she doesn't want. When she
wants, he doesn't want. And when they both want,
it's over."
What is boring from the Jewish
way of looking at things is the fantasy of pursuit
and evasion. Real life, by contrast, is
interesting. Tolstoy got it exactly backwards in
Anna Karenina: unhappy families are all
unhappy in the same way. It is happy families that
are different, because every child is radically
unique, such that raising children is the one
human activity that is sure to surprise. No-one
writes novels about raising children; if they did,
they would be as dull as a day spent watching
someone else's domestic videos. Jane Austen's
interest in her mating pairs ends abruptly with
the promise of marriage; how they handle their
eventual progeny lies outside her purview. I never
cared if those tedious specimens of English gentry
married in the first place.
Before novels
set out to help us find the meaning of life, the
genre had a different purpose, namely to paint a
broad canvas of society and show things in their
true light. The incapacity of the Christian West
to suppress evil formed the great theme of
European fiction from the appearance of La
Celestina in 1499 through Byron's Don
Juan in 1819. In the twilight between the
medieval Christian world and the Enlightenment,
the West became obsessed with its own
vulnerability to evil.
Fernando de Rojas
was a Toledo attorney from a converted Jewish
family. Published just seven years after the
forcible expulsion from Spain of Jews who refused
to convert, Celestina is an indictment of
the Christian world at the cusp of modernity. De
Rojas' perverse, elderly procuress Celestina is a
top-of-the-food chain predator in world of
feckless hypocrites. Marlowe's Barnabas and
Shakespeare's Iago look like the Katzenjammer Kids
next to the literary sensation of 1499. In the
century after its release, the book had 30
editions in Spanish and translations into all
major European languages as well as Hebrew.
Celestina was the first work of
fiction that every European had to read. The next
work was Celestina's spiritual stepchild Don
Juan, who first appears in Tirso de Molina's
1630 play The Trickster of Seville, and
then in no fewer than 1,720 subsequent versions of
the legend during the next two centuries. Don Juan
is a pest with no natural predators. As a devout
Christian, Juan believes in the power of
repentance, and reckons that he has plenty of time
to rape women and murder their male relatives and
repent afterwards. This theological joke was the
object of the original drama by Tirso, a Spanish
monk from yet another Jewish family forcibly
converted to Christianity.
Reflection on
the fraying of the Christian West is the impulse
that gave us the modern in literature. Don
Quixote looks back to the world of the
medieval epic that he lampoons, the chivalric
accounts of Roland or El Cid Campeador or Amadis
of Gaul, as does Grimmelshausen's Simplizius.
Contrary to Harold Bloom, Don Quixote is
not the first modern novel, but the last antique
one. Celestina and Don Juan are modern monsters,
throttling their victims with the loose ends of
Christian society. Shakespeare did it better, to
be sure, but he got there a century after the
Spaniards.
The next works of literature
that every literate European read were Voltaire's
Candide (1759) and Rousseau's Emile
(1762). These two philosophical novels marked the
end of Christianity as a culture, if not as a
religion. For the first time, the whole of
literature Europe was reading polemics against
religion.
Just 10 years later it was time
for Werther. After Voltaire and Rousseau, literate
Europeans no longer sought personal salvation in
religion. Goethe's genius was to create a
protagonist who looked for the meaning of his own
life in intimate personal relationships, and that
is why his confused young Thuringian set the
standard for love letters, men's clothing style
and, occasionally, suicide. All of the
searchers-for-meaning in subsequent literature,
from Pierre Bezukhov to Holden Caulfield, are
Werther's children - a feckless race of boors.
I did manage to finish Wilhelm Meister's
Apprenticeship, but I have an excuse: I was
nineteen at the time and didn't know any better. I
abhor Tolstoy, but confess to having read all of
Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov is easy
enough to understand. I met plenty of fellows like
him in the financial industry, but none who felt
guilty about whatever heinous crimes they might
have committed.
There are still great
works of fiction that must be classified as novels
for lack of a better designation. The ones I like
all are anti-novels, for example Fielding's Tom
Jones, Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found
in Saragossa, or Robert Musil's The Man
Without Qualities. Fielding's hero is a foil
for the author's dissection of English manners.
Saragossa lampoons all the literary genres in a
carnival sideshow of the West; after one peels all
the onion layers off Western civilization, there
is nothing left. Musil's masterwork is set in 1914
Vienna, and the reader knows what none of the
protagonists do; namely that their world will come
to a sudden and horrible end when the world war
breaks out in August. By construction, the novel
cannot end.
The problem lies not so much
in the novelists as in what came to be expected of
them, namely to play the role of modern prophets
once religion ceased to be the center of public
discourse. They are woefully ill-suited to such
expectations, and the cult of High Culture as a
substitute for religion turned out to be one of
the weaker ideas to bother the Western mind.
Werther should stand as horrible example
to would-be novelists, warning them that we've
been there and done that, and it never was worth
the trouble in the first place. The trouble with
searching for the meaning of life, as I argued in
this space some time ago, is that human beings are
woefully unqualified to find such a meaning, for
the simple reason that they all will die before
very long. To find a meaning beyond one's mortal
existence is something that no individual can do
for himself, for an obvious reason: our existence
can only mean something beyond our brief life span
if it means something to people other than us. The
search for personal meaning is the problem. That
is why modern novels of character development
typically are tendentious.
Returning to
that day in Mexico City, I might add that a
special sort curse afflicts Latin American
novelists. The surrealism of everyday life in
Mexico draws on the creative energy of the 90
million actors who daily extemporize the
continuing national telenovela. By contrast, the
novels of a Carlos Fuentes or Octavio Paz seem
like an attempt to tame the epidemic insanity for
effete literary tastes. One has to rely on
visiting Spanish surrealists (Ramon del
Valle-Inclแn's Tyrant Banderas, Luis
Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel) to find a
fictional representation stranger than cotidian
life.
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