THE TWO LITERATURES

Deirdre Crowe had long been interested in literature and had written quite a few short stories since first embarking on a literary career, some three years ago. But Patrick Moran had never much liked her work and wasn't afraid to tell her so, when he chanced to meet her at a literary party one summer's evening. She hadn't expected this dark-haired, handsome-looking young man to reveal his dislike of her work to her shortly after they were introduced to each other, and found it difficult to conceal her disappointment in him. Nonetheless she was curious to learn why he hadn't got a better opinion of it?

He smiled defensively at first, surveying her through half-closed eyes, then replied: "Because your work has always struck me as being too bourgeois, by which I mean traditional. God knows, short stories aren't the most ingratiating form of literature at the best of times! But when they're so carefully written, so artfully shaped, as yours tend to be, then I'm afraid any chance of my being ingratiated by them must be completely ruled out! The attention you give to appearances is, in my opinion, quite excessive."

Deirdre found this explanation no less baffling than she had found his first comment disappointing. She considered him slightly insulting. Appearances? What-on-earth did he mean by that? Swallowing her pride with the help of a mouthful of sweet wine, she put the question to him.

"Ah, I ought to have suspected!" he responded, as though to himself. And, again, he looked at her through half-closed eyes, the way Lenin must have looked at H.G. Wells from time to time during that fateful interview in the Kremlin. Or, rather, looked through him. Yes, a middle-class philistine was what one was up against here!

"Well?" she insisted, becoming a trifle impatient.

"By appearances, I primarily mean that which pertains in literature to a description of or orientation towards external phenomena, particularly when such phenomena are naturalistic, as in the case of your writings," he declared. "But I also mean, albeit to a lesser extent, that which pertains to matters grammatical and involves the author's dedication to careful phrasing, the construction of sentences which, from a pedant's standpoint, are above reproach and consequently reflect a traditional or conventional adherence to syntactic custom. Both these aspects of literary activity can be found, to an alarmingly high degree, in your short stories, which is the chief reason why I've never been able to admire them."

Deirdre was unable to prevent herself blushing at this juncture, despite the precautions she had taken to remain as cool as possible, which included an inclination to drink wine rather more quickly and copiously than was her habit. "But shouldn't literature bear witness to external phenomena, as well as be constructed along the most careful and grammatical lines?" she objected.

"Not at its highest level," Moran averred, while sportingly pouring some more wine into the young lady's by-now empty glass. "The highest literature concentrates much more on internal phenomena, or noumena, and is accordingly essential rather than apparent. It deals to a greater extent in matters intellectual and spiritual than with their converse in the material world, and does so, moreover, in an appropriately essential way - namely by the employment of a fairly spontaneous technique, freed from grammatical fetters, which attests to the preponderance of creative free will over grammatical determinism. English civilization has long been a victim of grammatical determinism. For its Calvinistic roots, stressing predestination and thus the necessity of adherence to the 'Laws of Providence', preclude the radical development of creative free will and ensure that culture remains, by and large, on a bourgeois level of grammatical propriety. Admittedly, most other Western countries aren't much different. But none of them can match England for degree of enslavement to grammatical determinism! Even France is capable of producing the odd writer now and again for whom creative free will is more important. But in England a confession that one became neurotic over the regular or too frequent placement of prepositions ... is a virtual confirmation of literary respectability, and guarantees one a wide range of sympathy from fellow grammatical neurotics. Admittedly, France produced Flaubert. But for every big grammatical neurotic in France, there are at least ten little ones in England!"

There issued from Deirdre's throat an impulsive laugh which she had a job controlling, and which threatened to cause her glass-holding hand to precipitate some of its alcoholic contents over her colleague's jacket. But the jacket escaped relatively unscathed nonetheless, for she was able to bring her laughter under control before things got completely out-of-hand, so to speak. "And you evidently consider me one of them?" she at length surmised. He smiled benignly, but said nothing. So she continued: "Yet I don't care for a spontaneous or fairly spontaneous approach to my work, since it would lead to scrappy writing, and I cannot equate such writing with the highest literature."

"I didn't say the highest literature had to be scrappy or slapdash," corrected Moran, who had ceased to smile. "Simply that it should entail a greater degree of freedom from grammatical determinism than is evinced by your work. You won't get me worrying over the regular placement of prepositions, at any rate. Nor do I give undue attention to the construction of a sentence or to the shape of a phrase. I leave that kind of thing to bourgeois anachronisms, who are better qualified than me to treat appearances with more respect. To me, the most important thing, on the contrary, is what I'm saying, not the way I'm saying it! Though one cannot deny that, on the highest level, what one is saying to some extent conditions the way it's being said. For to write about spiritual or intellectual matters with a technique that gave undue importance to grammatical appearances ... would constitute a contradiction in terms, unworthy of truly advanced literature. If one writes about the inner world more than the outer one, it's only proper that one should employ a suitably essential technique, in order to avoid compromising oneself with undue attention to pedantic details. One doesn't wish to be bothered or impeded by apparent considerations ... in the form of grammatical determinism. For a truly essential content can only be sustained with the aid of a relevant technique, one which is sufficiently liberated as to make for an unprecedented degree of creative freedom. Free thought requires free expression - that's the inescapable logic of the matter!"

Deirdre Crowe politely nodded her head in apparent agreement. "You may be right, Patrick," she conceded, "but I could never write like that. Maybe I'm too old-fashioned and maybe, for all I know, the fact that I'm a woman has something to do with it. But I could never satisfy myself that I was working properly if my technique was too spontaneous. To me, literature involves struggle and is jolly hard work!"

Moran shook his large round head and sighed in a nasally ironic fashion. Fundamentally, all these bourgeois writers were the same, whatever their sex. They were using brooms while more contemporary people were using vacuum-cleaners. What is more, they elevated their dependence on brooms, and hence manual labour, to an artistic virtue! "You sound like you derive a certain masochistic pleasure from this literary struggle," he duly commented.

"I simply derive pleasure from a job well done," Deirdre admitted in a self-justificatory tone.

"Yes, but your job tends to resemble a representational canvas focusing, in minute detail, upon natural phenomena, whereas mine corresponds to a quite radical expressionist canvas focusing on the inner world," Moran asseverated. "I don't claim to be a literary abstractionist; for such a status would involve the manipulation of a technique far more radical than my own - indeed, would constitute a literature such as we haven't yet seen, in which descriptive or narrative intelligibility was reduced to a bare minimum. But even a literary expressionist or, for that matter, impressionist ... is further up the ladder of literary evolution than a naturalistic representationalist, like you. Literature may, thanks or no thanks to agents and publishers and their commercial requirements, lag behind art and music in technical progress. But that shouldn't preclude one from being as radical as possible, under the circumstances. There has been some evolutionary progress, even since James Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake bordered on literary abstraction."

Deirdre Crowe was unconvinced and looked it. She couldn't understand how a spontaneous approach to literature could possibly constitute progress, not even after what her colleague had told her about needing to use an essential technique to do adequate justice to essential expression. To her, literature was hard work and that was what it would continue to be for as long as it existed. "I can't see how you can possibly deny the value of good, honest, hard labour!" she retorted, defiantly brandishing a half-empty glass of wine in front of Moran's sober face.

"Quite easily," he responded. "One of the most important aspects of evolutionary progress in the world is to make life easier for people, to save them unnecessary struggle and labour. We have lifts to save people the inconvenience of climbing umpteen flights of stairs in tall buildings. We have buses and taxis to save them the inconvenience of having to walk, assuming it were possible, from one part of town to another. We have washing machines to save them the inconvenience of washing clothes by hand. And so on. As life progresses, so the hardships are minimized and the pleasures maximized. Now literature, believe it or not, is no exception to this general rule, since progress entails, amongst other things, that writing should become less of a struggle or hardship for the modern author than it was for his literary forebears. Instead of keeping him the slave of grammatical convention and syntactic elaboration, spontaneity of approach frees the writer (sic.) - for he is more often than not a key-punching utilizer of typewriters and/or word processors these days - from such slavery, and ensures that his vocation won't prove unduly difficult, by which I primarily mean drudge-ridden and unnecessarily complex. The higher the type of writing, the freer from literary hardship the writer will be. For he, too, must profit from the benefits of evolutionary progress in a world tending away from hardship towards greater degrees of ease and comfort. To boast of one's literary struggles is simply to affirm one's comparatively inferior status as a literary masochist - a kind of social dinosaur who probably prefers to write than to type and/or key-in, in any case."

Deirdre felt personally offended by this allusion to herself. But the mentally numbing effects of all the wine she had imbibed, during the trying course of events that evening, precluded her from adequately expressing her offence. Instead she meekly shrugged her shoulders and said: "You may be right, though maybe that's only because I'm incorrigibly masochistic." For a moment he almost felt sorry for her, so downcast did she look. But he was also amused at her expense and couldn't help revealing some of this amusement to her. Again she shrugged her shoulders, and he noticed that they were freckled. "Tell me," she resumed, "would you consider an artist who was ahead of his time superior to one who reflected it?"

Moran hadn't expected such a ponderous question and gently frowned, drawing himself a pace away from her, as though to give himself room in which to think. Finally he replied: "No, I believe an artist should reflect his time and thus remain intelligible to it. Otherwise he runs the risk of becoming completely ostracized and regarded as a crank. One should, I think, take account of what has immediately preceded one in one's particular domain of creative endeavour and then proceed to carry on from there, so that a continuity of progress is maintained. Of course, one won't necessarily get to that level overnight. But once one has got to it, then one is on the way to becoming a master and should be able to extend literary progress quite some way beyond the heights attained by one's immediate predecessors or, at any rate, by those authors whose works especially appealed to one and had some influence on one's own literary development."

"And who would they be in your case?" Deirdre asked, focusing rather larger than usual eyes on her fellow-writer.

"Principally those authors, like Henry Miller, Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose works generally correspond to the kind of religio-philosophical integrity sympathetic to my own bent," Moran replied. "Artists, as you know, come in various categories, so one can't be influenced by them all. One simply carries on from where certain others left off, along a path congenial to one's temperamental bias. I've gone some way beyond those artists now, including Huxley, who was the most influential on my own literary development. Even his late work is something I'm obliged to look down on from a greater height."

"And what about James Joyce - do you look down on his late work, too?" Deirdre wanted to know, almost petulantly.

"Yes, but for a different reason," Moran confessed, frowning. "Less because I've gone beyond it than because his work pertains to a category of writing that I've always spurned as being inferior to what reflects a religio-philosophical bent. Joyce wasn't an essential writer but an apparent one. He was more of a pure artist than, say, Huxley, and consequently he corresponds to the traditional category of novelist in a way which Huxley rarely if ever did. He may have taken the development of that kind of writing further than any of his contemporaries. But he remained, till the end, an artist in the traditional, i.e. apparent, sense, and therefore corresponded to a literary social realist rather than to a transcendentalist. Incidentally, one of Roland Barthe's best essays concerns a distinction between 'authors' and 'writers', which may loosely be interpreted as applying to artists and philosophers respectively. Our age, contends Barthes, is transitional between 'authors' and 'writers', being insufficiently advanced, as yet, to be content with only the latter. And I have to agree with him. The traditional type of writer, i.e. 'author', finds broad support among the semi-literate masses and various sections of the political establishment, who prefer his crude fictions to the more subtle truths of the revolutionary author, i.e. 'writer' in Barthe's sense of the word. Consequently the latter isn't generally enabled to support himself, on account of the democratic limitations of the age, and so he's also obliged, as a rule, to be an 'author'. Yet a time must come when only 'writers' will exist, and these men won't stem from Joyce, nor from his latter-day descendants, but from the religio-philosophical categories of 'author/writer' like Miller, Hesse, Huxley, Sartre, and me. It won't be necessary for the future 'writer' to also be an 'author', nor, alternatively, a professor, like Barthes, since the public will respond to his writings with sufficient enthusiasm to enable him to dedicate himself more exclusively to them. Thus, to return to the traditional dichotomy between artist and philosopher, one might say that literary evolution will culminate in the philosopher, the highest type of writer, whose work will be the most essential, and hence truth-orientated. Exactly when that future epoch will come, I don't pretend to know. But at least we're creeping towards it. Or, at any rate, some of us are!"

Deirdre Crowe blushed in self-deprecatory acknowledgement of the fact that she wasn't among the 'some' to which Moran was evidently alluding, and vaguely agreed with a concessionary grunt. "Yet, presumably, one shouldn't jump the gun, as it were, but take the progress of higher literature in its rightful stride?" she remarked.

"Correct," he agreed, smiling. "Even if one can anticipate what the highest stage of literary development will be, as I believe I for one can. For to jump the gun, as you crudely put it, would be to sever connections with the age and place one's work way beyond public reach. Unfortunately that wouldn't guarantee one an income, even if, by any chance, one could find a publisher for one's precociously futuristic work. No, if we're to end with a multilingual abstraction in collectivistic terms, we must first of all pass through the intermediate stages, including the impressionist/expressionist stage at which the bulk of my work is currently to be found, in conformity with the continuity of literary progress. Even my work, with its fairly spontaneous impressionistic technique placed at the service of an essential content, is too radical for most people, a majority of whom are perfectly content to wade through the illusory fictions of the latest adventure story, thriller, or romance ... in thrall to a sort of literary philistinism. However, that is only to be expected. For while the higher writer may be of his time in relation to his professional forebears and contemporaries, he will always be a little ahead of the general public. If this were not so, he wouldn't be producing genuine literature."

"But presumably only what I produce, is that it?" Deirdre objected.

Moran was about to say 'Yes' when he decided it would be more tactful simply to pour some more wine into her glass, since it had once again become empty. She might not be the best of writers, but she didn't have a bad figure, all things considered, and he was beginning to wonder whether a night spent in bed with her wouldn't prove more fruitful than an evening spent discussing literature, freckles or no freckles? If he couldn't teach her to improve her literary style, he might at least be able to learn a thing or two from her body which could be used to metaphysical advantage in some future projects. Yes, indeed he might!