Where Have All the Strivers Gone?
IMAGINE if literary novelists stopped writing about love and sex. We'd notice, wouldn't we? Yet that's exactly what happened to ambition, which used to be one of their great subjects. It's a disappearance as mystifying as anything in Sherlock Holmes — and part of the mystery is the silence that greeted it. As a matter of cultural history, it's the dog that didn't bark, or, anyway, the dog that didn't yearn for more kibble than its littermates.
Once upon a time, the typical literary hero was a man on the make. Think of Stendhal's Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son who spends his childhood dreaming of Napoleon. Or Balzac's Eugène de Rastignac, a poor law student who racks up debts trying to get in good with the well-married daughters of the old pasta maker Goriot. Or Trollope's Phineas Finn, who leaves his hometown girl behind for a life in London and a seat in Parliament. Or Jack London's Martin Eden, an unlettered seaman who does a Professor Higgins on himself and becomes a literary celebrity.
Of course, ambition wasn't the only thing novelists wrote about. But for most of the novel's history, the story of the Young Man From the Provinces was a standard plot premise. (And yes, these tales tended to be about, and by, men.) YMFTP arrives in the city with nothing except talent and dreams of greatness; adventure and misadventure ensue. You can push forward with these stories of ascent a few decades into the 20th century, through writers as various as Arnold Bennett and Theodore Dreiser. "The bitch-goddess SUCCESS," in William James's famous phrase, wasn't just a powerful literary muse; she remained a powerful literary subject. Then the lady vanishes.
Round up the usual suspects of the modern canon, and you'll see what I mean: the go-getters have gotten up and gone. Where Sorel and Rastignac once schemed, their successors took their credo from André Gide's Lafcadio: "I am a creature of inconsequence." Where Phineas Finn had painstakingly rehearsed his public addresses, Lucky Jim prepared for his by getting blotto. Meanwhile, the jut-jawed, chest-thumping American Century brought you literary protagonists like Salinger's anomie-addled Seymour Glass, Roth's overmothered Portnoy and the self-doubting husbands of Cheever and Yates and Updike. ("My characters are all failures," Updike once cheerfully noted.) And let's not forget Bellow's Herzog, with his maundering, unsent letters to Spinoza, Churchill, Heidegger and so on.
This isn't a complaint; nobody wants Professor Herzog to start composing letters to Dale Carnegie and pining for an endowed chair. In the main, these are ambitious works that brilliantly achieve their ambitions. They excel at capturing our every fleeting, furtive, shaming thought. Almost.
In an era when practically nothing is too sordid to be the stuff of serious fiction, the craving for success has become the love that dare not speak its name. Curious, no? Making a reputation, making money, rising in the world — is this so much more unseemly than, oh, sex with a piece of raw calf's liver?
In his zesty 1967 memoir, "Making It," Norman Podhoretz chafed at the way his fellow New York intellectuals considered it "contemptible to dream of the rewards contemporary society had to offer." This kid from Brooklyn wasn't having any of it: a basic lesson of Western literature, by his reckoning, was that money, power and fame were "immensely desirable things to have." Actually, the great novelists of ambition often shared this suspicion toward strivers. They didn't celebrate the drive to succeed, any more than they celebrated lust. As with any ungovernable passion, it was likely to lead to trouble. Julien Sorel, caught between l'ambition and l'amour, loses his head, literally. Rastignac finds himself contemplating a dire criminal bargain, and Phineas only narrowly escapes the scaffold.
And then, if you thought (like Dickens, but not Trollope) that the social order was deeply unjust, you'd want to show that worldly success was basically a crapshoot. The wistfully progressive William Dean Howells once wrote a YMFTP novel about an Ohioan who arrives in New York with an unpublished novel and half-acknowledged fantasies of a glittering career. By a fluke, his wildest dreams come true. But Howells's novel ends with the poor guy's realization that his success wasn't earned or deserved, and maybe everything else in this lousy world was a roll of the dice, too. Lest anyone miss the point, Howells entitled his novel "The World of Chance." Jack London's Martin Eden, after his own disillusionment, drowns himself in self-pity, and then he drowns himself for real.
Today, a few American writers — Tom Wolfe and Jay McInerney among them — remain defiantly old-school in their portrayal of ambition as a basic aspect of the human character. But the literary heavyweights who address the theme usually do so not as tragedy but as farce: think of William Gaddis's "JR," about an 11-year-old who puts together a multinational conglomerate. And even when we're given a Gatsby or a Widmerpool (from Anthony Powell's multivolume saga, "A Dance to the Music of Time"), a narrative cordon sanitaire is maintained; the authorial consciousness belongs to a more fastidious soul, like Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway or Powell's Nick Jenkins. The drive to get ahead is registered, recognized and, usually, reviled: but it's seldom owned.
How come? One conjecture I've heard is that modern literary fiction is just following a course set earlier by Romanticism in poetry. Subjectivity moves to the foreground; conflict becomes interior. You're not striving to best your rivals in the big wide world; you're struggling to come to terms with the ghosts of your past or the discord of the authentic self. According to this theory, nobody writes literary novels about worldly advancement any longer for more or less the same reason that nobody writes poetry about charging brigades, light or otherwise.
Still, this can't be the whole story. It doesn't quite tell us why lusting for a shiksa goddess can propel a modern classic, while lusting for the bitch goddess is off limits. I've got another explanation, and it starts with the fact that we've been talking about literary fiction. In the humbler feedlots of so-called popular fiction where I toil, the lady never left. Suspense fiction still offers up star-is-born sagas or, more darkly, updates on the Faust story: Jeffrey Archer's "Kane & Abel," John Grisham's "The Firm." Ambition breathes the perfumed air, and wears Jimmy Choos, in the high-rent precincts of the sex-and-shopping novel, from Judith Krantz's "Scruples" to Candace Bushnell's "Lipstick Jungle."
The point isn't that literary fiction has dropped the subject because popular fiction hasn't. It's that literary fiction is defined, in part, by its distance from popular fiction. And a crucial aspect of our whole high-low cultural system is that high culture mustn't be created for worldly gain. Which is an especially touchy subject when it comes to the novel.
Like old Goriot's upwardly mobile daughters, literary fiction has had to turn its back on its miserable origins. Long ago, the novel was condescended to as mere entertainment, and could only envy the cultural status that forms like lyric poetry and verse drama enjoyed. Literary fiction only fully emerged as a self-conscious genre in the later decades of the 19th century, and the gap between it and popular fiction widened in the first decade or so of the 20th.
Trollope, for one, cocked a snook at the trend, and in his autobiography he insisted that his "first object" in writing was to rake in the bucks. Bad move. The book's publication in 1883, shortly after his death, pretty much scuttled his literary reputation for years. Compare that Victorian scribbler to a popular British literary figure from our own era of candor: "What I care about is literary durability," Martin Amis has said. "That is all that matters to me, and I'm just happy enough when I have an advance of £250." You've got to marvel at how our most brazen talents go knock-kneed before the ideology of art. Because literary fiction is, by stipulation, fiction that isn't written for personal reward, ensuring its status means roping off the subject of status. To betray a non-ironic interest in money, power or fame would compromise its place in the culture.
Not to worry, though. Literary novelists aren't about to run out of material. As for the sordid appetite for advancement, the sullying dream of making it? Leave ambition to us "commercial" writers, congregants of the wire racks. Honestly, she's in good hands. We'll treat her like a goddess.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment