The End of the Novel of Love

By VIVIAN GORNICK
Beacon Press
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CHAPTER ONE  

In a thousand novels of love-in-the-Western-world the progress of feeling between a woman of intelligence and a man of will is charted through a struggle that concludes itself when the woman--at last--melts into romantic longing and the deeper need for union. There are, however, a handful of remarkable novels written late in the last century and early in this one--among them Daniel Deronda, The House of Mirth, Diana of the Crossways, Mrs. Dalloway--where, at the exact moment the woman should melt, her heart unexpectedly hardens. Just at this place where give is required, some flat cold inner remove seems to overtake the female protagonist. In the eyes of the world she becomes opaque ("unnatural" she is called), but we, the privileged readers, know what is happening. The woman has taken a long look down the road of her future. What she sees repels. She cannot "imagine" herself in what lies ahead. Unable to imagine herself, she now thinks she cannot act the part. She will no longer be able to make the motions. The marriage will be a charade. In that moment of clear sight sentimental love, for her, becomes a thing of the past. Which is not to say the marriage will not take place; half the time it will. It is only to say that in these novels this is the point at which the story begins. 

The response of these intelligent fictional women--Gwendolen Harleth, Lily Bart, Diana Warwick, Clarissa Dalloway--to the prospect of married love goes against the grain. Not only because we all know that love is the most formative experience a human being can have and marriage, any marriage, at least in its beginnings, reminds one of its promise, but also because the idea that a woman, any woman, could really want anything other than to be safely settled in the world with a husband has, until very recently, been unthinkable.

So what is it with Gwendolen, Lily, Clarissa, and Diana? 

In Daniel Deronda George Eliot pits the beautiful Gwendolen Harleth (shrewd, vain, ambitious, hungry for a place in the world) against Henleigh Grandcourt, the aristocrat who wishes to marry her, apparently setting in motion the classic struggle between a woman and a man who are evenly matched: in this case both cold, smart, and determined. In the bargain, Gwendolen seems malicious: she taunts and manipulates the arrogant lord as if the exercise of sexual power in and of itself is a necessary plesure. But slowly, steadily--it takes Eliot 200 pages to get them married--we are moved deeper inside Gwendolen and we see that her behavior is meant to be off-putting. She is desperate to keep the action going, delay the moment of decision. We see that she is buying time. She dreads marriage. "It was not," Eliot observes of her, "that she wished to damage men, it was only that she wished not to be damaged by them."

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All Time is Unredeemable

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                              But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

T.S. Eliot

In the Knowledge Derived from Experience.

There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
but all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

EAST COKER
(No. 2 of 'Four Quartets')

T.S. Eliot

Sometimes Fate is like a Small Sandstorm

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."

— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore) 

This has  also been used in the scintillating trailer of Innaritu's forthcoming  movie 'Biutiful'.Javier Bardem's power packed role in this movie has already fetched him the best actor at Cannes

Mario Vargas Llosa : Peruvian Humour Unveiled

I just finished Mario Vargas Llosa's 'Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter'. It was a rambling piece of work. A novel which had a innovative narrative technique with eclectic array of soap opera like short stories without a clear end. The main story which is a sort of  semi autobiographical  is about the love affair between Mario with his 'distant' Aunt (Julia) who is 14 years older to him. There is no second distinct story rather we find dozens of different soap opera style fascinating stories. These amusing stories are manufactured by a cranky somewhat brilliant scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho. This  Bolivian scriptwriter's piquant radio plays is the unique part of the novel . The novel alternates between  Mario's real life narrative and Camacho's soap opera plays.  Camacho's intriguing different short stories are quite fascinating like a superb soap opera but at the end of the novel the stories get jumbled up and intertwined in the most absurd ways and in most cases leading to the  sudden annihilation of many characters due to some natural catastrophe. 

The sharp funny moments that dominate the narrative makes the novel quite a real fun to read. This would be one of the most funniest fascinating novels that I have read. The others like this which would come to my mind are Kundera's ' TheLast Waltz' ;V S Naipaul's 'The House of Mr. Biswas' and definitely Marquez's 'Hundred Years of Solitude' and also Rushdie's 'Midnights Children'. In terms of humour I think it stands among these masterpieces.

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Art of Fiction

Mario Vargas Llosa got the 2010 Nobel prize for literature for “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”. He is a fantastic writer. I recently  read his "Feast of the Goat". Reading the book I thought that the  brilliant inter temporal and non-linear narrative structure that we see in Alejandro González Iñárritu's movies can be inspired by Llosa. In the interspersed use of time we can see Faulkner' influence who was one of  Llosa's favourite authors

I recently read his quite interesting article that he wrote long back in New York Times in 1984 'The art of fiction'. Some insightful marvelous excerpts that I found are -

 "In fact, novels do lie - they can't help doing so - but that's only one part of the story. The other is that, throgh lying, they express a cruious truth, which can only be expressed in a veiled and concealed fasion, masquerading as what it is not. This statement has the ring of gibberish. But actually it's quite simple. Men are not content with their lot and nearly all - rich or poor, brilliant or mediocre, famous or obscure - would like to have a life different from the one they lead. To (cunningly) appease this appetite, fiction was born. It is written and read to provide human beings with lives they're unresigned to not having. The germ of every novel contains an element of non-resignation and desire."

"Real life flows without pause, lacks order, is chaotic, each story merging with all stories and hence never having a beginning or ending. Life in a work of fiction is a simulation in which that dizzying disorder achieves order, organization, cause and effect, beginning and end."

"Fiction betrays life, sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally, encapsulating it in a weft of words that reduce it in scale and place it within the reader's reach. Thus the reader can judge it, understand it and, above all, live it with an impunity not granted him in real life."

"At the heart of all fictional work there burns a protest. Their authors created them since they were unable to live them, and their readers (and believers) encounter in these phantom creatures the faces and adventures needed to enhance their own lives. That is the truth expressed by the lies in fiction - the lies that we ourselves are, thelies that console us and make up for our longings and frustrations. How trustworthy then is the testimony of a novel on the very society that produced it? Were those men really that way? They were, in the sense that that was how they wanted to be, how they envisioned themselves loving, suffering and rejoicing. Those lies do not document their lives but rather their driving demons - the dreams that intoxicated them and made the lives they led more tolerable. An era is not populated merely by flesh and blood creatures, but also by the phantom creatures into which they are transformed in order to break the barriers that confine them."

Dostoevesky : The Great Seer

There are great works and greater works of fiction but not close to that of Kafka, Camus and Dostoevesky. The work by these triplets are experiences that not all can undergo as it makes one to reflect in a way that may crack the moribund cosy fragile structure in which we all seem to survive. This is the reason that these works are not for 'faint hearted' people as these sort of works makes one  to reflect and the narrative exudes the experience into the reader providing some sort of unease. As Dostoevesky said "It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word." Einstein had once said that "Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss". What is in the narration of Dostoevesky that it spellbinds thinking people across the spectrum. An evolutionary experience is not necessarily joyful but it may be the pathway to 'real joy'. Peaks are reached through arduous and exhausting paths and reading Dostevesky one also reaches the peak of novel writing. A great  work of art has the characteristic of closing the gap between the seer and the object of art,  or in other words the concept portrayed by the  artist  would be an experience in itself for the observer . This is what we can experience in Dostoevesky's Crime and Punishment.
 
The story revolves around the crime of double murder committed by the main protagonist Roskolnikov and then its ramifications. While reading the novel we can experience in the most acute way the near full experience of crime and we are sucked into the psyche of Roskolnikov who commits the crime. The narration is such that we also experience the inner working of the capillaries of the criminal and after the novel is complete we may feel our self as an exhausted  person who was also part of the event. Crime and Punishment cannot be just characterized as a psychological thriller but this a work comprising of astonishing  philosophical undertones. As in any great novel characters are just not individuals rather they are metaphors in large scheme of things. Roskolnikov portrays here the disenchanted bright youth which undergoes unwarranted crime due to the distorted and malaised society in which he lives. "Roskol' niki were sort of gnostic groups who protested against the church and adhered to old rituals opposing the present established authorities. In Crime and Punishment Roskolnikov also is the disenchanted 'youth'  with the socialist and reformist undercurrents prevalent in his society. He finds his own solution to resolve his problems. His 'Napoleonic'  solution for his miseries is based on the premise that if  unworthy people are eliminated for the betterment of a brighter person than the crime is not a crime but a just act and beneficial for the overall society.

"I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound... to eliminate the dozen or hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity. But it does not follow from that that Newton had a right to murder people left and right to steal every day in the market. Then, I remember, I maintain in my article that all... well, legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all without exception criminals, from the very fat that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short of bloodshed either, if that bloodshed - often of innocent persons fighting bravely in the defense of ancient law - were of use to their cause. It's remarkable in fact, that the majority indeed, of these benefactors and leaders of humanity were guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals - more or less, of course. Otherwise it's hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to retain in the common rut is what they can't submit to, from their very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it. The common people preserve and populate the world, the extraordinary move the world and lead it to its goal...."


But Dostoevesky in Crime and Punishment shows that there are exterior laws that bring order and a crime committed gets penance through suffering of the soul and the act of redemption would lead the person to a 'gradual renewal, his gradual rebirth, his gradual transformation from one world to another , of his growing acquaintance with a new,hitherto complete unknown reality' . The other major protagonist in the novel is  Sonya (or "Sofya" meaning "wisdom" in Greek ) is sort of alter ego of Roskolnikov and she shows him the way to redemption. She undergoes suffering  throughout the novel and she provides the courage and wisdom to Roskolnikov to achieve redemption through penance. He loves her with a reverential attitude, "I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity."..."They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life. They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other."

It is not easy for a novice like me to analyze thoroughly a complex novel such as this. But it is always pleasure trying to understand the work of such great masters as Dostoevesky who is considered more as a prophet than a novelist.