CREATIVE EXTREMES

James had loved her passionately as a youth, when they had worked in the same office for a time, but only from a distance, because her love had been bestowed on someone else, a fellow-worker who was either quicker off the romantic mark or just less inhibited than himself. He suffered his unrequited love for her throughout the years following her departure from the firm, and when he also departed to become an apprentice author, his life had grown accustomed to solitary nights and friendless days. Being alone in his lodgings was no great burden on him. On the contrary, it was a logical step from his previous loneliness.

And so he wrote for years, throughout the greater part of each weekday, until the number of typescripts - writing first, typing later - piled up in his room, and his notebooks, in which the works were drafted, grew to fill a large drawer. He considered himself, above all else, a philosopher, a seeker after the Truth, a pioneer of new insights into life and the world. He was too serious-minded to be content with fiction, his solitude and unrequited love not having conditioned him to become an artist in the usual objective sense. He was resigned to philosophy, even when he realized that it was the most intellectually-demanding mode of writing and the least commercially viable. Better to be a philosopher, he thought, than to have remained a clerk. Besides, I'm no ordinary philosopher. More a revolutionary pseudo-philosopher than a traditional type.... Not that he discovered this fact all at once, but only when the time was ripe. A pseudo-philosopher was somehow superior to a genuine, or academic, philosopher, more a man of essence than of appearance, a metaphysician as opposed to a physicist, an original writer rather than 'a chair'. In similar vein, a pseudo-state was somehow superior to a genuine state, a matter of the people rather than either the land or country considered from a nationalist point of view. Pseudo-democracy could likewise be considered superior to genuine democracy, giving maximum representation to the electorate - a qualitative absolutism.

Yes, James Riley realized all this and so much else as, year after year, he scribbled the time away in his single room and noted the progress of his work from a bourgeois relative stage to an early petty-bourgeois relatively absolute stage, and even, in due course, to a late petty-bourgeois absolute stage of creative and ideological integrity. If he had begun as a philosopher or, more correctly, a philosophical novelist and essayist, he had progressed quite some way beyond that point by the time he came to evaluate the ideological/creative status of his various stages of philosophical endeavour. Why, he had recently abandoned even the pseudo-philosophical in his evolution towards a quasi-poetic integrity, a lower phase of his late-stage petty-bourgeois writings, relevant to a new ideology in the form of Social Transcendentalism, which pertained to the future development of a proletarian civilization. Gone were the days when he could take academic philosophy seriously! All that appearance-mongering was not for him. Even the pseudo-philosophical endeavour was now effectively a thing of his past, a passing phase in his evolution to higher things. It always amazed him when he looked back over his early work and noted the intellectual distance between that and his latest work. Was it possible that the same person had written both?

Ah, but even if such a question had to be answered affirmatively, there could be no denying that the persona relevant to each stage of his creative evolution had continuously changed for the better, for more radically extreme positions. The persona was not him, no! But it had developed at his expense and to a degree he scarcely imagined possible. Certainly there were times when he wanted to disown it, to turn away from and abandon it, like an alienated husband about to divorce a petulant wife. Was he not, after all, a petty bourgeois, for whom the comforts of the home were more important than the struggles of the street? He could not deny that fact, even though he was less than confident that he could escape from his persona and return to a more relative style and content. He found it hard to believe that, with the inevitable termination of his quasi-poetic writings in due course, he could return to being a philosophical novelist and literary philosopher. Had he not said everything there was to be said within that context? Besides, wasn't being a philosophical novelist a waste of time these days, an anachronistic grand-bourgeois approach to the novel in an age of petty-bourgeois poetics?

No, philosophical novels weren't for him, not now! His revolutionary urban conditioning would never allow him to return to that level again. Even the poetic novel was beneath him, an early-stage petty-bourgeois art form more suited to the first-half of the twentieth century than to its second. Besides, he had never been a poetic artist but a philosopher and philosophical artist turned pseudo-philosopher and, more recently, quasi-poet, the latter still being a type of philosophical writer, a continuation of his collectivizing tendencies from essayettes at the beginning to a novelette or, rather, medium prose at the end, as a sort of climax. Whereas the artist made progress, over the generations, by evolving from the novel to the poetic novelette and even, in a late petty-bourgeois age, to the poetic short-story, the philosopher made progress by evolving from essays and dialogues to philosophical short prose and the philosophical novelette, attained to a petty-bourgeois status with the abandonment of the older genres for the newer ones, used either collectively or separately. Thus arose the extraordinary paradox that whilst a philosophical novel was a grand-bourgeois approach to literature, an approach more appropriate to a late grand-bourgeois age like the mid-seventeenth century, a philosophical novelette was a petty-bourgeois approach to philosophy, one more relevant to a late petty-bourgeois age like the second-half of the twentieth century. So the contemporary philosopher, or pseudo-philosopher, was effectively a 'novelettist', just as the contemporary artist, or pseudo-artist, was a short-story writer, both of them co-existent with the modern poet, a largely metaphysical and/or experimental creator, the most representative of the age.

But James Riley - our mysterious subject of intellectual inquiry - didn't exactly fit into any of these late-stage petty-bourgeois patterns; he was neither a contemporary philosopher, artist, nor poet, but a Western outsider, an Irishman of fundamentally catholic descent writing on behalf of a future civilization and in terms which set him radically apart from all those who fitted into contemporary Western civilization, terms uniquely collectivized, as befitting his assumed Messianic status. He had always been something of an outsider in any case, even where love and sex were concerned. Not for him to write philosophical novelettes! His work had to be both anachronistic and revolutionary at the same time, if it wasn't to be mistaken for late petty-bourgeois philosophy. Hence his retention of the aristocratic aphorism, the early grand-bourgeois essayette, the late grand-bourgeois essay, and the bourgeois dialogue in the formal composition of his pseudo-philosophical collectivized literature, early petty-bourgeois short prose and late petty-bourgeois medium/long prose usually bringing the volume to a modernistic climax. Only with his progression to a quasi-poetic collectivized literature did he axe the aphoristic root, thereby symbolically setting his work free from aristocratic moorings. The other genres had stayed relatively in place, defying petty-bourgeois convention.

As for the artists with their novels, he knew he would never become one of them, since he preferred extremes, had an Irish bias, one might say, for the absolute. He would rather become a poet than return to that middle-of-the-road genre more suited to moderate temperaments than his own. Was not the novel a passé genre compared with film, that late petty-bourgeois/early proletarian successor to fictional literature, as much a successor to that as early grand-bourgeois plays had been its predecessor. Films were the truly contemporary 'literature', an extension and transformation of fiction co-existent with modern poetry. However, film - except possibly when conceived in video terms - would not be suited to a proletarian age in a genuinely transcendental civilization. It was an extreme relativity, not a relative absolutism. It signified the abstract climax to a fictional tradition. By contrast, plays signified the concrete beginnings of a fictional tradition, as in Shakespeare, an early grand-bourgeois extreme relativity following-on behind philosophical absolutism, that truly aristocratic mode of intellectual endeavour better suited to the ancient Greeks and Romans than to those fated to develop relative civilization in the Christian West, which has always been primarily a literary civilization, not so much given to philosophic or poetic extremes as finding its golden mean in novel-writing, that quintessentially bourgeois genre - analogous to painting - in between the extreme relativities of plays and films respectively.

But if novels are passé, plays were utterly obsolete and anachronistic by late-stage petty-bourgeois criteria ... as pertaining to the contemporary West, with particular reference to America, the West's principal producer of films. Yet as contemporary Western civilization remains relative, plays are tolerated and continue to be produced, even if they're not particularly admired by the great majority of late twentieth-century people, who are more than likely to favour films, the antithetical equivalent of plays. Indeed, if an antithetical equivalent of Shakespeare were to be named, he could only be a great film producer and/or writer - someone, for example, like Alfred Hitchcock.

But who would be the antithetical equivalent (if one can speak of such a thing where absolute extremes are concerned) to, say, Thales or Phythagoras or Heraclitus? Certainly no contemporary philosopher, even if contemporary philosophy, in the strictly academic sense, is antithetical to ancient philosophy ... to the extent that it entails a critique of language as opposed to a critique of nature, and is therefore relatively artificial. No, the absolute antithesis to such ancient philosophers would only be found in a transcendental civilization, a necessarily poetic absolutism germane to the proletariat. Certainly, one could speak of certain late-stage petty-bourgeois poets as being antithetical to later Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, who were less absolute or more relative, as you prefer, in relation to the earliest philosophers. But only in a transcendental civilization would the absolute antithesis to pagan absolutisms emerge, and it would probably take an abstract anthological form, replacing the individual with the collective, and thus contrasting the collectivized poetic with the individualized philosophic, the essential with the apparent, the One with the Many.

Yes, there poetic endeavour would attain to its climax, transcending intellect. And James Riley, the creator of a quasi-poetic collectivized literature, was intimating of this transcendence on his own collective terms, interpreting life and art for his future followers in order that they could be completely confident in the correctness and inevitability of their creative predilections. The modern Irish were nothing if not poets. Even he had begun his writing career as a poet of unrequited love, the noblest kind of love poetry, he now mused, though he hadn't realized it at the time!