BETWEEN TWO EXTREMES

Three men were arguing over the value of their respective professions, and they were a philosopher, a novelist, and a poet. They existed within the confines of a relative, or atomic, civilization, where each profession was permitted and respected, though none so much as the novelist's. The relative civilization in question was a bourgeois/proletarian one, and although the heyday of novelistic relativity between philosophy and poetry had passed, the novelist's calling was still the most respected of the three, since a novel, even when biased towards poetry, was still relative and thus more relevant to such a civilization than either a work of philosophy or a collection of poems could ever be.

The novelist, a distinctly petty-bourgeois type, was getting the better of the philosopher and the poet, both of whom he despised, though for diametrically opposite reasons. To his way of thinking, the philosopher was essentially an aristocratic anachronism who pertained, in ancestral origin, to an absolute civilization, while the poet, by contrast, was essentially a proletarian anachronism pertaining to - as harbinger of - a transcendental as opposed to a pagan civilization, in which post-atomic rather than pre-atomic values would prevail.

Yes, from the novelist's standpoint there was something decidedly aristocratic about the philosopher and proletarian about the poet, something, in both cases, that connoted with an absolutism inimical to relativity. He was a novelist who leant more towards poetry than aimed to strike a balance between philosophy and poetry - a typically petty-bourgeois novelist. He despised, on principle, his creative predecessors, who, as bourgeois novelists, had aimed for and as often as not struck just such a balance and were accordingly the most relative of novelists. He found there was too much philosophy in such a balance for his liking. Yet even they, he claimed, were less despicable than their predecessors, the grand-bourgeois novelists, whose works leant towards philosophy and were accordingly antithetical in constitution to his own.

No, the grand-bourgeois types were decidedly too close to the aristocracy for his liking! They were virtually philosophers, he was apt to claim in a less than generous mood, whose relativity was rather too proton-biased for petty-bourgeois sensibilities to abide. And sometimes, as he recently found out, they weren't seventeenth- or eighteenth-century figures but ... virtual contemporaries - grand-bourgeois authors living in the twentieth century, compliments of petty-bourgeois relativity! Ah, was there not a kind of grand-bourgeois/bourgeois/petty-bourgeois distinction between, for example, the novels of Aldous Huxley, Anthony Burgess, and Lawrence Durrell? Did one not encounter the entire gamut of novelistic evolution in the respective novels of these three twentieth-century masters? Wasn't it true that whereas Huxley's most representative novels leant down, as it were, towards philosophy and Durrell's most representative novels leant up towards poetry, the most representative novels of Anthony Burgess aimed at and usually struck a balance between the two absolutes in a quintessentially bourgeois relativity?

To be sure, Burgess may, from our novelist's viewpoint, be preferable to Huxley, but he was still one of those novelists whom our hero was obliged to despise for his balanced prose between sub- and supra-atomic extremes. Durrell was the closest to our novelist's poetic predilection, and consequently the one whom he was obliged to regard as an equal, if only on technical grounds. At least Durrell was a petty-bourgeois novelist!

Of course, philosophers and poets had long existed within the respective confines of evolving relative civilization. Philosophers had even existed long before the first of those confines made its appearance in the world, as in ancient Greece, and in such numbers that it was a job to keep track of them all, let alone count them, particularly if one was a man of our novelist's poetic predilection! Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were merely the tip of the pagan iceberg, names with whom everyone who had undergone any schooling were pretty familiar, irrespective of whether or not they had ever studied philosophy. The truest and, some would say, greatest philosophers, however, were the pre-Socratic Greeks, those who could genuinely lay claim to an absolutism the equal of the Stoic aristocrats. Later, as Greek civilization evolved into grand-bourgeois relativity, playwrights arose to dilute the philosophical absolutism of the Greeks and displace philosophy from its throne, a task made easier by certain contemporary philosophers whose decadence is too well-known to warrant comment here.

These late philosophers and early playwrights weren't averse to sharing the limelight with each other, though they jostled for honours in the Greek Pantheon. For anyone who thinks that Homer, the so-called earliest Greek poet, was really a part of this civilization, particularly in its absolute manifestation, our novelistic hero would have scant sympathy! To his way of thinking, Homer was neither a Greek nor a poet, but a Cretan chronicler of early-Greek history! But that, I suppose, is sadly beside the point. The Greeks, like the Romans, specialized in philosophy, but, unlike their Roman counterparts, they excelled in it. By the time the Romans entered their decadence, philosophy held a place of honour only among the most jaded of aristocrats, the bourgeois populace preferring theatre and that new relativity, the novel, which of course the Christians were to develop and bring to perfection, if by 'perfection' is meant striking a balance between philosophy and poetry - a contention, however, which our novelist wouldn't regard as warranting lasting respect!

Neither, for that matter, does the philosopher, who, breaking out of his shell of stoical reserve, lets it be known that philosophy, too, was developed, if not perfected, by the Christians, both in terms of the Church Fathers and, later, the secular philosophers of the Enlightenment. Indeed, a study of history revealed that each and every civilization, regardless of its geographical confines, required a philosopher of substance behind it in order to formulate the philosophy by which it would eventually live. What Augustine had been to the aristocratic pagan/Catholic civilization of the early-Middle Ages, Aquinas was to the grand-bourgeois Catholic civilization of the Middle Ages-proper. And what Luther had been to the bourgeois Protestant civilization of the late-Middle Ages, Schopenhauer was to the petty-bourgeois Neo-Oriental civilization of the Industrial Age. Needless to say, any future proletarian civilization - if we exempt Marx from such an honour for want of religious credibility - would likewise require its philosophical harbinger to establish the philosophy by which it would live. No civilization sprang from a void but, on the contrary, from the Word, which determined its growth.

So saying, the philosopher relapsed into silence; for he knew that there was no arguing against the justification for a final philosopher, who would usher in a transcendental civilization. That would be a truly absolute classical civilization, beyond the relative classicism of petty-bourgeois Neo-Orientalism and antithetical to the absolute romanticism of aristocratic paganism. The pendulum of religious evolution had swung, when viewed in an absolutist way, from the romantic to the classic via romantic/classic Christian relativities. Catholicism was the end of religious romanticism, Protestantism the beginning of its classicism. But in the relativity of Christian civilization, they existed cheek-by-jowl, as it were, in an uneasy symbiosis at times degenerating into open conflict.

And the same might be said of the grand-bourgeois philosophically-biased novelist and the petty-bourgeois poetically-biased one, not to mention the bourgeois novelist in between, who were each subject to the tensions inherent in a relative civilization, and who reserved their chief critical barbs, when intellectual violence was in the air, for their relativistic opponents rather than for the absolute extremes of philosopher and poet, whom they tended to regard as outsiders.

Nevertheless the poet, who now ventured to speak, insisted that the life-span of relative writing was drawing to a close and assured the novelist that the sands of novelistic time were running out, never to return. The future belonged to himself and his kind, he averred, though they would undergo a transformation from the individual plane of poets to the collective plane of poetic theosophists, and thus exist at a transcendent remove from their creative ancestors. Naturally, philosophy would cease to be written, since, technically speaking, it connoted with the aristocratic, proton side of things and therefore couldn't be tolerated in a post-atomic society, which, of necessity, would pertain to the most classical civilization in transcendent passivity. Only poetic theosophists would exist, and their work would be of an appropriately free-electron order, elevated beyond proton constraint in the absolute freedom of meaningless words, of grammar-free abstractions. That, maintained the poet, was what civilized proletarian writing would be all about and, needless to say, no petty-bourgeois novelist could be relevant to such a civilization. The poetic novel would end with the death of petty-bourgeois civilization, that is to say, with its murder from without. The birth of absolute poetic writing would follow at the appropriate hour, born of an internal proletariat whose destiny was to further proletarian civilization in the wake of what the external proletariats of the world ... in, for example, the film industry ... had destroyed.

All this didn't, of course, sound very pleasant to the poetic novelist's relative ears, though he had to admit that the poet, for all his absolutism, was hardly a direct threat to himself, which was probably just as well, else they might have come to physical strife. Together with the philosopher, the poet was simply an outsider in this relative civilization - more of an outsider, in fact, than poets and philosophers generally were. They couldn't be regarded as enemies, no! Though they could hardly be classified as friends, either. They pertained to a different order, the one beneath, the other above the confines of relative civilization. Only he, the novelist, was truly contemporary, if, in a sense, less so than the filmic barbarians on the proletarian side of bourgeois/proletarian civilization.