Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer

Author:Geoff Dyer [Dyer, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857863393
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Bruce Chatwin doesn’t even get near to that kind of responsiveness and suggestiveness in the three hundred pages of The Songlines.

‘Have you noticed how often a writer’s letters are superior to the rest of his work?’ wonders Comtesse d’Arpajon in Remembrance of Things Past. She had in mind Flaubert (though his name escaped her at the time). I tend not only to agree but to wonder if this remark might not be prophetic. Could my own preference for writers’ – not just Lawrence’s – notes and letters be part of a general, historical drift away from the novel? For Lawrence the novel was ‘the one bright book of life’, ‘the highest form of human expression so far attained’. Nowadays most novels are copies of other novels but, for Lawrence, the novel still contained these massive potentialities. Marguerite Yourcenar offers an important qualification to this idea when, in her notes on the composition of Memoirs of Hadrian (a text of far greater interest, to me, than the novel to which it is appended), she writes that ‘In our time the novel devours all other forms; one is almost forced to use it as a medium of expression.’ No more. Increasingly, the process of novelisation goes hand in hand with a strait-jacketing of the material’s expressive potential. One gets so weary watching authors’ sensations and thoughts get novelised, set into the concrete of fiction, that perhaps it is best to avoid the novel as a medium of expression.

Of course good, even great, novels continue to be written but – as someone remarks every twenty years or so – the moment of the form’s historical urgency has passed. Part of the excitement of reading Lawrence comes from our sense of how the potentialities of the form are being expanded, forced forwards. That feeling is now almost wholly absent from our reading of contemporary novels. If the form advances at all it is by increments, not by the great surges of the heyday of modernism.

Milan Kundera’s faith in the novel is the equal of Lawrence’s but the logic of his apologia for the form actually carries him beyond it. Kundera takes inspiration from the unhindered exuberance of Rabelais and Sterne, before the compulsive realism of the nineteenth century. ‘Their freedom of composition’ set the young Kundera dreaming of ‘creating a work in which the bridges and the filler have no reason to be and in which the novelist would never be forced – for the sake of form and its dictates – to stray by even a single line from what he cares about, what fascinates him’. Kundera duly achieved this in his own fictions, the famous novels ‘in the form of variations’. In his ‘Notes Inspired by The Sleepwalkers’, meanwhile, Kundera paid tribute to Broch who demonstrated the need for ‘a new art of the specifically novelistic essay’. Novels like Immortality are full of ‘inquiring, hypothetical’ or aphoristic essays like this but compared with these, my favourite passages, I found myself indifferent to Kundera’s characters.

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