I admire Miguel Unamuno’s philosophical masterpiece “The Tragic Sense of Life,” but I cherish even more his novel “Niebla” (usually translated as “Mist†or “Fogâ€), a story in which the protagonist objects to the plot in which he finds himself and visits the author to complain about it. Among other things, the story is a dramatization of theological issues that seem especially urgent in our times.
I think I know how that fictional character must have “felt.†Significantly, it is at that point of confrontation in the story that the protagonist RE-WRITES the text and his adventures, much to the surprise of his creator and of the reader too. In the John Fowles’ story “Enigma,†a detective is in search of a missing member of Parliament, when he discovers a fascinating and somewhat literary young woman who may have the solution to the riddle:
" …‘Let’s pretend everything to do with the Fieldings, even you and me sitting here now, is in a novel. A detective story. Yes? Somewhere there’s someone writing us, we’re not real. He or she decides who we are, what we do, all about us.’ She played with her teaspoon; the amused dark eyes glanced up at him. ‘Are you with me?’ …"
“The Ebony Tower” (New York: Signet, 1974), p. 177, at p. 221.
But then, tantalizingly, Fowles leaves us with the mystery that justifies his title:
“Theologians talk about the ‘Deus absconditus’ – the God who went missing? Without explaining why. That’s why we’ve never forgotten him.â€
“The Ebony Tower,” p. 226.
I was captivated by this character’s suggestion when I first read the story, since I had suspected as much in my own life all along: To paraphrase Anthony Burgess, “God is on holiday.”
I believe that I understand the point of the Fowles riddle.
If there is a God who has created beings capable of free will, then it is surely possible that these beings might arrive at His doorstep one day and call His attention to some ambiguities in the plot that He has fashioned, insist on revisions, perhaps even – to invoke the shade of Preston Sturges in the classic 1940 MGM film, “Sullivan’s Travels” – ask Him to “put a little sex in it.â€
The same may be said of literary characters who display an equally annoying tendency to escape the confines of the books in which they were created and take on a “life” or set of adventures very different from what their creators might have imagined: Hamlet and Don Quixote, Sherlock Holmes and even Tarzan – have all outlived not only their creators but their original texts, in order to inhabit, quite independently, the collective imagination of readers everywhere.
Perhaps the same can be said of Plato’s allegory of the cave and of such literary devices as Descartes’ “Evil Demon,†or Hegel’s parable of “Master and Slave.†All of these metaphors have taken on a life of their own. In the final paragraph of his wonderful essay on philosophy and literature, Joanthan Ree writes:
“So Western philosophy is by tradition an intricate art of irony, directed against itself. But this does not mean that it is a creature of sheer aesthetic whim. It articulates the experiences in which you stand aside from your ordinary personality, and treat the ideas with which you feel most involved as if they belonged to someone else, and you were indifferent to them; or you imagine yourself in the future, remembering that your present certitudes have vanished. The difficulties of such self-separation are the reason why philosophy’s progress has largely depended upon techniques for the presentation of voices and characters in narrative; and why the last thing you should do in philosophy is reach the end.”
“Philosophical Tales” (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 127.
The greatest contemporary English literary critic and (I suppose) “theorist,†is Frank Kermode. For me, his writings are a recent discovery and a revelation, especially the essays “Between Time and Eternity,†and “The Man in the Macintosh,†in “Pieces of My Mind: Essays and Criticism” 1958-2002 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), p. 32, p. 119.
I found myself nodding my head as I read the second of these essays, realizing that I am “The Man in the Macintosh.” What I mean by this, however, may only become clear in my final paragraphs. In his essays and in his recent book on Shakespeare, Kermode’s brilliance is evident from the very first page – as is his elusiveness. Without making a point of it, in the subtlest possible way, the reader finds himself running to keep up with the racing intellect of a writer who hardly breaks a sweat by comparison. It is a humbling experience, but it is worth it. I have learned a great deal from Kermode’s essays and from his slim book on Shakespeare; even more I have learned how to play the cat-and-mouse game of literature – of reader and writer – with this man as my guide at a much more sophisticated level than I ever did before.
It is a bit like the experience of reading something by Joyce or Shakespeare himself: One feels elated, both encouraged and discouraged by the challenge or hope or impossiblity of trying to write anything well, even transformed somehow by words. This is the power of literature. Paradoxically, literature is said to have become less important socially (Eagleton), just as it has become more important psychologically(Kermode).
We live in a time when the narratives in which persons traditionally “found†themselves, their meanings and purposes, have broken down. Religions, political faiths, myths of all sorts seem outworn and thin. We HAVE reached a kind of ending. To an unprecedented extent, persons now must construct their own stories. We can no longer rely on shared political or historical mythology to define us. This is a daunting and frightening, yet liberating, experience. No one is quite sure of how to create a new myth, collectively and/or individually – a myth in which to find meaning. Yet we also cannot wait to try. This has been described as the “postmodern†predicament.
I am told, fittingly enough, that the Chinese character for danger or predicament is the same as the one for opportunity.
Those of us who live – and love – English literature have noticed that, as John Fowles suggests in “Daniel Martin,” the essential English myth is about hiding. The classic example is Robin Hood. Accordingly, it is “language†(whatever that may be) that is the forest in which we English-speakers, we band of merry “persons†(let us not forget to be politically correct), must play. The writings of Jacques Lacan on the ways in which the unconscious is structured like a language come to mind here. Those who will succeed in this project of self-invention through narratives will be adept in hiding and playing in this forest.
The Internet, for its users, is merely another setting in which a self is created through language. It may be thought of as a gigantic and collectively-written novel. It is a gargantuan and self-perpetuating version of a Borges story, in fact, an “infinite library.”
I am, like many of us these days, a man of multiplicities. I find that my home, the geography of my real native landscape, is now more often linguistic than physical: I live in the English-language text, whether electronic or print is not too important; or in Cuban-Spanish myth; or in Italian Opera; in French films, or in American pulp fiction – but always in the original language. My loyalties are moral and human, personal and cultural. My friends, those I love, what I believe and will defend, come first; while ideologies have become excess baggage in a world of massive deceptions and disappointments and loss, where guilt for great crimes must be shared by adherents of all ideologies.
Zygmunt Bauman comments:
“Postmodernity – so we read and hear – has abolished old, comforting certainties and thrown the principles and assumptions that we have lived by into crisis. Everything in the world, including our own lives, seem to have been plunged into uncertainty. How does it feel to live in contingency? By what standards, if any, can we judge the quality of such a life, and can we dare to hope to make it better?”
“Intimations of Postmodernity” (London: Routledge, 1992), p. ii.
What people fear now is not death – and few politicians have understood this – so much as the absence of meaning.
This absence of meaning can result merely from the waste of language, from the draining of the meaning of words in advertising and politics. As language is corrupted, so are selves corrupted too. In James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” a man appears mysteriously in a funeral scene “wearing a macintosh … then disappears at the conclusion of the ceremony…” It was Joyce’s practice to ask people who claimed to have understood his book (which I do not!), “Who was the man in the macintosh?” Was it Joyce himself? God? or the reader perhaps? There are many possible interpretations of the episode.
My theory is that, today, this man is the English language-user; he is the English reader, who comes upon the literary text in his innocence – like Eve encountering the apple. These days, of course, the “reader” attends the funeral of the “author” who has gone missing, according to the French theorists, and suddenly died. But the man in the macIntosh is smiling because he realizes that it will now be up to HIM to become the author of the text, unless he always was the author anyway and is merely attending his own funeral, which brings us back to God and man.
Wherever James Joyce may be, he must be smiling.