Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Some time ago in these pages I indulged in a blow-off about the smart labelling or ‘placing’ of their own characters that many modern novelists go in for. I have done it myself, though, and I understand only too well the temptations of knowingness. But this is only one small aspect of a much wider problem, that of the author’s own place in his work, and this in turn is part of a wider problem still, that of (oh dear, yes) reality.

     For the curious fact is, the more one is conscious of the author — his insight, his powers of analysis, his use of symbols, his wit, his opinions, his very fascination with the predicaments he arranges, in brief, his attitudes — the less one believes in the reality of the people he is depicting. One tends to see only the author doing his stuff. At least, this is what seems to have been happening to the novel, which we have come to regard as an organism for its own sake, or a significant reflection of its time, or a mouthpiece for the author’s views, or a plural projection of his personality. No one believes in the characters of a novel any more, least of all the authors. Many of them have been seriously concerned with this whole problem, and now here comes John Bayley, with an extremely interesting, if somewhat opaque contribution..

     Characters in modern fiction, he tells us, are observed rather than loved. Meanings are more real than people. Yet in the greatest novels, personality is the meaning; one cannot say of their characters that they do or do not ‘speak to us’, they simple are, in all their contradictory complexity and fundamental unknowability.

     In his Epilogue, Mr Bayley makes a broad division, which he admits is artificial, between writers whose subject is ‘Nature’, in the traditional sense, and writers whose subject is the ‘Human Condition’ (about which Iris Murdoch has also written recently). The portrayal of Nature implies:

     . . . an absence of purpose, of insistence, and of individual insight; . . . an almost involuntary fidelity to what is constant in human types and human affairs. . . a lack of pretension — the author gets no particular credit for his awareness of Nature though he may get credit for portraying it well. The Human Condition, on the other hand, implies a personal sense of where life is significant, of where humanity suffers especially or feels intensively; of unusual violence and unusual modes of feeling; of interesting development or of illuminating decay. The subject matter may even be the same, but those who write about Nature take it for granted, while those who write about the Human Condition take an attitude towards it.

     Later he adds: ‘Taking other people’s reality for granted is . . . the first requirement of love. And it is also the first requirement of character creation.’

     Of course, much of this is truism, and in an obvious sense the book is old-fashioned. But because truisms need saying again and again, and because the cry ‘back to nature’ is necessarily recurrent as each fresh mode of seeing turns to artifice and eventual emptiness, the book is also bang up to date. Its greatest strength, moreover, lies in Mr Bayley’s examination of three main works in the light, precisely, of artifice.

     He first takes Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Now many critics believe that Chaucer’s realism is a result of his freedom from convention and his mockery of the rules, but Mr Bayley shows, most convincingly and in enjoyable detail which is all too rare in critical discussion of mediaeval literature, that the realism on the contrary operates through convention and depends on the rules. For it is through his extraordinarily sophisticated use of rhetoric — often standing it on its head — that Chaucer develops ‘an awareness of separate people that goes deeper than any insight into abstractions like love and grief and the “truth” about men and women’. There is an absence of the moral explanation and demonstration we expect from the ‘psychological novel’ (as Troilus has been called), while the very acceptance of the Courtly Code, and the unselfconscious use of all its artificialities allow a ‘depersonalizing of the author’s play of intelligence’ (clumsy phrase), and an atmosphere of incalculability which make us feel, as we do not in Boccaccio, that everything might have happened differently. Above all we see Criseyde both from the outside and inside, both as a ‘character’ (what other people have) and as a ‘consciousness’ (what we are).

     Mr Bayley then uses the very smartness of the horrible ‘placing’ game to analyse the process, unique in Shakespeare, by which Othello evolves as a tragedy of incomprehension. In the other tragedies there is somewhere some communion in sorrow, but not in Othello. Nothing is fixed or fated, and the incomprehension is paradoxically a form of spaciousness, for the lovers do not place each other: it is the identity game that throws Othello off his magnificent certainty, ruled as he is by his passion for cause and decisiveness, from the very moment when he first glimpses, as newly-weds do, an unexpected aspect of Desdemona’s identity, so that he lets Iago’s insidious ‘placing’ of Desdemona as a gay Venetian deb unsettle him, and finally allows the spaciousness of his love to be enclosed inside Iago’s despicable comprehension.

     There is, moreover, a vital connection between the theme of love and the two kinds of moral awareness depicted — the Renaissance self-regard, or consciousness of one’s moral position in society, and the consciousness of goodness as valuable merely to serve the will. Othello is the classical man-in-society, Iago is the romantic man-on-his-own. We as moderns tend to feel with Iago, we share his wish to escape the self and, as Mr Bayley puts it, to ‘corner others’. Ironically, although Iago triumphs in getting Othello wholly ‘placed’ (for he is made to act strictly within Iago’s field of comprehension), it is only Iago who is ‘placed’ in the end, love and honour being too boundless, as presented through the poetry of the play, to require an inserted conscience of any kind.

     I think that Mr Bayley may have made his task unnecessarily difficult by choosing love between characters as a theme to illustrate his thesis of the author’s love for and total acceptance of the characters. The two loves are constantly merging — as no doubt they are meant to — just as the author’s consciousness is constantly merging with the consciousness of the characters. This leads to some dubious equivocation, as when he tells us that the I. A. Richards parody criterion ‘clearly cannot have any relevance to Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry, whose simplicity (if it is simple) is not that of the author’. In other words, Shakespeare is so good a dramatist that the criterion cannot apply to him, therefore Shakespeare is a good dramatist.

     One accepts his reasons for choosing love: ‘love is the condition of personality and vice versa,’ it cannot be ‘penetratingly explored, compassionately revealed, and so forth. It cannot be revealed at all: it can only be embodied.’ Nevertheless, half the time he is not discussing love at all but awareness, and in fact he is most successful when describing not love but knowledge, as ‘embodied’ by James in The Golden Bowl.

     For here we have, in effect, the ‘game’ as the main theme. Charlotte and the Prince have indulged in ‘placing’ the Ververs, and their love depends on this mutual bond of knowingness: ‘ours was everything a relationship could be, filled to the brim with the wine of consciousness.’ But when the Prince marries Maggie Verver and Charlotte marries Maggie’s father, this mutual bond collapses from the moment that the Prince decides not to tell Charlotte that Maggie ‘now knows’; when Maggie refuses to ‘know’ as far as Charlotte is concerned, it is in effect a refusal to play the game, and an implied judgment on it. The Prince, in fact, rejects Charlotte’s ‘placing’ of Maggie for him, and realizes that Maggie is offering him something more worth while, an intimacy without the need for explanation. Mr Bayley emphasizes James’s concern here with the power of not knowing, and it is true that the evasion of a showdown is most dramatic; surely, though, Maggie’s power lies precisely in the fact that as far as the Prince is concerned she does know, however much she refuses to know (and therefore to tell us) the details. Even so, his comment is extremely pertinent:

     . . . goodness, embodied here in Maggie’s dependence on conventional values, not only gets better results than wrong-doing but is also more interesting. It retains its mystery, which will offer an unending avenue of exploration to the finer faculties, where wrong-doing ends in a blank wall of the obvious. It would so end, that is, if it were able to declare itself for what it is, but convention and Maggie save it from that fate by drawing it under the cloak of respectable incalculability! Charlotte and the Prince are positively not allowed to appear in the stupidity of their true colours; it is one of the triumphs of Maggie that she compels them to be not only good but interesting: by ‘not knowing’ about them she forces them to retain the aura of mystery and convention.

     It is a great pity that this book is not more clearly presented and better written. I have quoted only good bits, but Mr Bayley can write excruciating sentences, paragraphs and pages, full of qualifications and counter-qualifications, unproven therefores, constant arguments with other critics, innumerable digressions into Tolstoy, Lawrence, Flaubert, Proust, Balzac, Goethe, etc, etc, not to mention mind-wrenching phrases like: ‘Iago equates his cynicism with understanding, but as Conrad says in Chance . . .’ or ‘And, as Chekov might have put it in his sensible way on this issue, as he did on that of art versus science, “we are treating of assets only”,’ all of which made me long for a plain, ‘I-like-it-here’ bit of criticism. Then there are the complex arguments that suddenly flop bathetically into, for instance: ‘All this indicates that whatever we think of Othello, he is at least very unlike Iago’ or ‘he [James] is preoccupied with the morally significant theme, and it is what he usually starts with. He is not like Jane Austen . . .’

     It was perhaps this continuous con- (followed by a long comparison) fusion which prevented me from grasping just how the principle of love operates, how, in other words, the three authors in question ‘embrace and inhabit a character without making it either a projection of the author’s self or a vessel of moral discernment’. Mr Bayley seems to show us only that they do so, Chaucer through the ‘realism of rhetoric’, Shakespeare through the ‘dramatic poetry’, and James through the ‘divine principle’ for treating domestic and social passions impersonally and dramatically, the discovery that excited him so much as ‘a key that . fits the complicated chambers of both the dramatic and the narrative lock’. These are the artifices used, but so they have been by others. There is also ‘the neutrality of love’ (as opposed to three other methods which I found unsatisfactorily described and very overlapping in practice: the French ‘dogmatic’ tradition, the ‘whole truth’ tradition, and the ‘romantic’ tradition). This ‘neutrality of love’ never quite comes to life as a superior creative principle. Is it then a question of the degree of love? In which context surely, love becomes quite simply synonymous with genius.