Of other ages, not more often the language is lost to us than the peculiar meanings the listener gave to that language. We may hear the ripple of the syllables, admire the cadence, hut we do not contribute the same images of the mind that flashed to meet the meaning. Who now shivers at the inference of harm and evil when, in King Lear, the bastard son says he was conceived under the tail of the dragon?
Our Lear can no longer be the gigantic Druid King, fallen like an oak desolate on winter’s heath. He can be only an aged millionaire whose children have taken over the Trust. We must translate into the meanings of our day. Just so, the brave stories of loppings and batterings carried on by some long-dead, more whole-hearted hero are less acceptable than the fluid and hesitating persons of modem novels, narcissi of watery reflection, trembling quicksilver of characters. The chunks of solid human meat with cheerful and aboriginal appetites now do their killing and loving in the fictions of the television screen for the delectation of the more primitive and innocent of our population. The shallow tide of visual entertainment has swept over much of the region once claimed by the novel, while writers advance before it into the mists of the unexplored countries of the mind.
They advance bravely, but in skirmishing parties. There are always lone scouts far ahead of the main body, and of these Dostoevsky, Kafka and Joyce have brought back word that other writers have accepted as true indication of the track to the dark tower of human personality.
L. Kunz in his Theory of the Modern Novel claims that the lowering of the birth rate in white populations has been accompanied by a rise in expressions of vociferous sterility which we find most characteristically in the modern novel. Indeed he regards the Modem Novel, as distinct from the Novel of the Nineteenth Century or the Novel of Social Protest pf the ‘Twenties and ‘Thirties, as not so much the individual’s protest against society as a protest against thwarted sexuality. He compares Dickens, who was sexually potent, socially active, positive and successful, with the many living writers such as Graham Greene, who proffer often unappetizing details of failure and despair yet find that a great number of people read their books, understand them, are willing to pay to read them. We may accept as partly true that for authors novel-writing is a form of substitute sexuality which evokes a response in’ people who are themselves in the same case as the writers whose maladjustments Kunz so lovingly lists. Nor does he even fail to place that same positive Dickens among the Higher Neurotics on whose output of print most literary activity depends.
The demand for novels today among members of our suburban society is greater than ever, but it is a changed demand. What craving does it satisfy, what wants fulfil? Escape from a situation which demands escape? Perhaps. But to a happier condition? From the contents of the modem novel it would not seem so. Why should people with limited leisure choose to read of suicide, failure, despair, corruption?
To talk of an author’s ‘audience’ is nonsense. The author speaks not to a crowd but to One Other who will understand. The more people there are who accept the cloak of the One Other, who are willing to take on the role of confidant, willing to contribute their own stock of memories, images, attitudes, to round out the pattern the author provides, then the greater his success. The failed author today is the outdated provider of sweet romance, because too few people accept it as a Life Illusion, and those who do have found it more effectively presented by films. There will always be some purveyors of out-dated fiction finding Others who will accept their illusions but they are far from the main stream. To read a book means to enter into communication with another man’s mind in a special and secret relationship. There is more privacy today, more loneliness, more social stress. And in this privacy and loneliness the One Other meets the Author.
Take the man who, with the day’s worries on his mind, decides to read a novel. Perhaps he has chosen it because the jacket of the book gives him an idea of what it contains. Will he be interested? As he takes it up and begins to read his attention is flickering, a restless needle on a dial. If he decides to accept the secret the author is confiding to him he becomes still, he goes into a kind of trance and is irritable if aroused. Now he is giving his own interpretations to the author’s secret. He is filling out with scenes from his own experience, busily furnishing the book’s imaginary parlor with his own furniture, providing familiar doors and walls to the suggestion of a house. He is giving as much now as the author was giving in the beginning. It is his imagination that is doing the work.
That is why a book which is technically bad irritates in that it demands too little imaginative effort on the part of the reader. But if the book is just what he feels is dear to his own personality he begins to have an emotional response towards the Author. A little like being in love. Here is the Other. He has assumed the Other’s personality. The relationship has changed. From the Author confiding in the unseen Analyst, pouring out his Life Illusion, there is a point arrived at where the Reader, or Analyst who has been applying his imagination and brainpower to what the author has been saying, begins to reply. It is his tum to take over. It is now his book. He interprets, he injects his own emotions, he slips into this shell of another life like a hermit crab. He has withdrawn his attention from the flat, unpredictable void in which his everyday preoccupations lie scattered, immobile, waiting for him to resume them. He has draped round him another man’s dream.
In Report from the Asylum Carl Solomon relates how he encountered another patient to whom he mumbled amiably, ‘I’m Kirilov’. To which the patient mumbled in reply, ‘I’m Myshkin’. They were both living as characters they had chosen from the novels of Dostoevsky, but whereas Solomon identified himself with the man who commits suicide to prove he has free will, the other had taken on the role of the happier epileptic. Both understood this literary shorthand.
‘Not one of us,’ Solomon relates, ‘would dare assume responsibility for a breach of the unity which each hallucination required.’ If a man wanted to say he was Kirilov then he had described his attitude to life most effectively and the other understood him.
What Solomon has to say about what he calls ‘coma’ is even more striking. Carl Solomon underwent treatment in an asylum and was discharged cured after nine months during which he was given shock treatment by means of insulin injections. The shock produced a coma in which he was terrified to find he had no choice of what he dreamt. The nightmares were unpredictable and alien. He asserts that he reached that hinterland of consciousness where the phantasies he experienced were not peculiarly his own but had been ‘left lying about’ by other minds.
The other patients were of the same opinion to an even comical degree. ‘These collective phantasies in which we dreamed each other’s dreams contributed to the terror created by the contact with the flat unpredictable insulin void.’
‘For example: Solomon writes, ‘I am reminded of the day I went into a coma free of crab-lice and emerged thoroughly infested (the sheets are sterilized daily). I caught the lice in somebody else’s coma, since the states of consciousness are concrete and are left lying about the universe even after they have been vacated by the original occupant. And this was so credited by one of my fellow patients that he refused to submit to the needle next clay out of fear of venturing into one of my old comas and infesting himself. He believed that I had lied and that I’d had crabs for some time having caught them in a previous coma.’
And there was the day a young patient, who had given the impression of being virtually illiterate, received his intravenous glucose (one is revived from a deep coma in this manner) and then gave ample evidence that he had become thoroughly acquainted with the works of Jacob Boehme in the course of his coma.
What the young patient may have become acquainted with was less ‘the works of Jacob Boehme’ than the states of consciousness about which Jacob Boehme wrote, for that extraordinary mystic was a far traveller in the ‘flat unpredictable void’ of the unconscious from which more timid men shudder back. The dark tower to which Childe Roland came is just as likely, if not far more likely, to loom up, rather than the walls of some heaven glowing with jasper and chrysoprase.
The literary lunatic was in a peculiar position in that he had accepted in print already ‘comas’ that fitted him, other men’s consciousness in the form of books into which he was quite willing to slip because the nightmares they contained were acceptable.
For those of us acquainted with Kafka an indentification with K became inevitable. Slowly however the identification with K and similar characters came to imply far more than we Kafkians had ever dreamed. We knew it to he true that we had been abducted for the most absurd reasons: for spending hours at a time in the family shower, for plotting to kill a soldier, for hurling refuse at a lecture. And in this particular the text had been followed quite literally. The need for a revision of the Kafkian perspective arose, however, when the bureaucracy suddenly revealed itself as benevolent. We had not been dragged to a vacant lot and murdered, but had been dragged to a Garden of Earthly Delights and had there been fed. (There were exceptions and there is a certain small percentage of fatalities resulting from shock, making the parallel of grace even more obvious).
Aldous Huxley would claim that the visions these men found unpleasant were due to their illness and that a normal person in the same visionary state would have found them not terrifying but blissful, that the No Man’s Land which lies beyond our normal experience and what we find there depends on the state of those who wander that way. The evil or sick man will find nightmares, and the man in a state of tranquillity only that beatitude he takes with him. Even the foot soldiers of literature are now beginning to penetrate, in what is cautiously called ‘science fiction’, into the theories of time and the unconscious.
Carl Solomon no longer wanders into other men’s comas under the shock of insulin injections. Cured, he is once more at liberty to sit by his own fireside and take up another man’s coma, enter into it and find either the nightmare or the Garden of Earthly Delights which it promises. A book, too, can be unpredictable, but the reader is free to come out of it when he wishes.
If literature at the moment is wandering into this witch’s heath where other stages of consciousness are to be found than those normal and acceptable to human beings, it must be for some good reason. Have our suburban conditions of living produced a race in which there is an ever-growing proportion of neurotics who crave the kind of experience that fits them, even if the experience is in the form of a novel? Is the reading of our modem literature in some strange way therapeutic, providing, in miniature, a form of shock treatment in which memory’ and immediate cognizance of reality are lost for a time? This is not more than half an explanation. There are always other factors, though Report from the Asylum does provide us with a hint about modern man and the literature he accepts as suitable to his condition.
How can we now know what elegant states of mind accompanied the Etruscan smile or if it was from a modern ‘coma’ that the oracle of Apollo spoke from the crack in the sulphurous mountain?
‘Tis mute, the voice that spoke of old on high Dodona’s mountain,
When winds were in the oakenshaws and all the cauldrons tolled.
To her thunderous echoes and mysteries our minds no longer respond. But we find instead that our literature, the great expression of man’s unconscious as well as his conscious intentions, is out mapping Childe Roland’s track.
We have our nightmares saddled for the journey. No outer space is stranger, no whirl of electrons more fiery and exquisite than the discoveries that lie before us.
We have our nightmares saddled for the journey. No outer space is stranger, no whirl of electrons more fiery and exquisite than the discoveries that lie before us.
One day our language, too, will be primitive to unborn men who will fail to understand what we meant by the ‘unconscious’, as we wonder at the tail of the dragon. For each age has its own life illusions; to each the sweet fall of its own language.
Kylie Tennant (1912 – 1988) was an Australian novelist, playwright, short-story writer, critic, biographer, and historian.
