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Literature

The Big Absence

Hemingway, Joyce, Kafka, post-war narrative, up to the American minimalists. A brief panorama of writers marked by the inability to hope, joined later by hopeful moderns

by LUCA DONINELLI

Background
Nineteenth-century culture, the daughter–in its prevailing expression–of the Enlightenment, seems not to have paid much attention to the theme of hope. When this word, “hope,” emerges in the twentieth century, it is, for the most part, banished as an irrational, unscientific, fideistic attitude.

And yet, positivity prevails through the works of more recent writers.

If we wanted to categorize the main positions taken on this theme in the twentieth century, we can identify three strands, and we can give them the names of three great narrators: Hemingway, Joyce, and Kafka.

1) Hemingway is, among all the writers of the last century, the one who best expressed “No” as the ultimate meaning of things. His wonderful stories are full of people who hope, but the course of events obeys a ferocious determinism that, as it unfolds, does not pay the slightest heed to hope. The old fisherman who goes out to sea and sees his marlin devoured by sharks; the waiter who liquidates, by calling it insomnia, the painful anguish, the sense of nothingness that grabs him each night after his café closes; the man who reduces his woman’s abortion to “letting a little air in;” the hurry that dominates everything; life as a constant challenge to Fate, which nonetheless always has the last word–this is Hemingway.

As with all the greats, his desperation, too, is not prejudicial. It is not a preconception. Hope exists; but since death is the meaning of everything, since we-are-for-death, as Heidegger says, then hope is in itself absurd, contradictory. Hope is held out, but only in order to be denied. In the end, one could say that we do not know why it exists. Man’s stubbornness in starting over again after every failure has something of the inexplicable.

2) While Hemingway is the bitter poet of “No,” James Joyce’s work culminates under the banner of “Yes.” But it is a “Yes” that is not born out of acknowledgment of a meaning, but out of acceptance that there is no meaning. The cosmos is not a recognizable reality, the “I” is not an emergent given, a given of awareness and self-awareness emerging within the cosmos. What we call God, that is to say, the All, is nothing more than the amniotic liquid in which we are incessantly submerged: Language. Reality, the world, the “I,” God, are nothing but Language. In Language, we sink into ourselves–but is this depth Language too? It has no justification, it is not born, it has no father or mother. And the only morality, against all moralisms, lies in accepting this law of fluidity and metamorphosis, throwing oneself rapturously into it, and breaking free of the strictures of ethics.

3) Franz Kafka represents, however, a third category, very different from the other two. The feeling of the absurd which imbues his pages does not arise from an ascertained lack of meaning, but from a painful lack of relationship. It is not life that has no meaning; if anything, death has no meaning, since it arbitrarily interrupts a journey that in itself would be full of light.

Witnesses assure us that Kafka was not a gloomy man, much less a desperate one.

Whereas for most of the twentieth century, from Hemingway to Sartre to Singer, death is the key to interpretation, for Kafka, death is not the key to anything. Rather, it is the smokescreen that fogs the mind, causing it to lose every key to interpretation, every philosophy, every ideology. In this, Kafka is more similar to Shakespeare than to the moderns.

The problem arises from the relationship with what should guarantee our safe passage beyond the curtain of death. There is no reason to believe that there is no “beyond,” there is no reason to believe that the architecture of the cosmos does not continue beyond the fog that seems to swallow it up. Besides, many signs come to us from that “beyond,” many useful directions. But these signs never reach the “you.” This is why we say that in Kafka there is a problem of relationship–that is to say, a problem of an embrace, a kiss.

Hope is a category of the intelligence that is born from an embrace, from love. Kafka did not accept desperation as an intellectual argument (which for him did not exist), but he had to come to terms with it in regard to love. For hope is a matter of love.

Today
If I take a look at post-war literature, especially from the 1960s to today, I realize that the negative attitude is stronger in the presence of strong ideological schemes. Ideology, which is a sort of engineering of human happiness and would therefore seem destined to repel any form of negativity in the name of this or that radiant future, turns out to be a garden where the plant of desperation flourishes, to the point of suggesting that the two things go hand in hand, not only from the psychological or philosophical, but also the practical, point of view: it suits ideology that man have no hope. Having no hope is the precondition for being able to participate in the great happiness promised by the ideologues of every latitude.

The man who hopes is a dangerous man, in that he is uncontrollable. He is a man. Man is not an innocuous animal. The problem is that, without hope, he does not know how to do anything but kill, violate, and pollute.

Ideology pervades literature with its cloud of obfuscation. If we read certain works from the 1960s, for example, those by Sartre or Saul Bellow’s great novel, Herzog, or the works by American writers who are even very different from each other, from Singer to Truman Capote, we realize that, despite their great skill, the themes they treat are very big but never big enough. There is always something unessential that tends to become the last word. Questions like “What will happen to twentieth-century man?” are asked, or “What humanity is possible after the Holocaust?” The answers are equally generic, such as “We are survivors,” “We are the world’s tainted conscience,” and so on. This is followed by a great wave of moralism: the need to cleanse the collective tainted conscience. To my mind, the phenomenon of 1968 can be inscribed in this framework. In a time of strong ideologies, only an equally strong way of thinking, going in the opposite direction, could affirm itself on the aesthetic plane. We usually cite Flannery O’Connor in this context, because one can read deeply in her work the sense of opposition, polemic, and challenge.

Ideology
Narrative in recent years, especially in America, has made the theme of hope a very powerful center of gravity. In the 1980s, for example, so-called “minimalism” became the focus of attention, through the work of writers like Jay McIrney, David Leavitt, and Susan Minot. The novelty of these writers lies in their almost maniacal attention to the apparently secondary aspects of experience (in open polemic with ideologies) and in a particular idea of narrative form, which eliminated the canonical structure (beginning-development-conclusion) in favor of accumulating elements that helped the reader understand a certain situation, only to break it off abruptly, without an “ending,” when the number of these elements was deemed sufficient.

The father of this movement is a short-story writer, Raymond Carver, from Oregon. In the late 1970s, Carver was better known as a writing teacher than a writer, to the point that in some instances his students achieved fame before he did. Carver’s work is bound up with his life. After an early phase characterized by strongly negative stories, he moved little by little, after a terrible illness which he managed to overcome, toward a more relaxed form and an attitude toward his characters in which the strictness that had always marked him was now colored with pity.

The last years of Carver’s life were his most fruitful, “a feast” he himself called it shortly before his death: “A feast, until and even when the doctor told him that, well, there was something not quite right, something growing in his head.” In that “until and even when” is contained all the distance between Carver and ideologies, all his passion for man, a passion that is not petulant, one that, as with Kafka, cannot view death (not even his own death) as an interesting key to interpreting experience in all its factors.

Carver strikes the reader because of the extraordinary positivity that characterizes his work. He has no recipes, he is not openly religious, but the very form of his writings reveals the conviction that experience is not a succession of detached instants that can be recomposed according to outside hypotheses (psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, etc.), but is, by nature, unified, a “whole.” Experience is unified, but the key to reading this unity is certainly not death. Carver does not give it a name, even if we can perceive that the word “religiosity” appeals to him. The doctor who gave him the news of his approaching death said to him, “You are a religious man,” to which he replied, “Not yet, but I intend to be one from now on,” and shook the man’s hand. “From now on,” seems to me, among other things, a profoundly religious expression.

Franzen
In these years, writers are emerging who do not fit into the negative scheme that characterized the twentieth century.

I cite just one case among many, because it is the most prominent, since it is the major literary sensation of the new century and has already been compared, with some justification, to the masterwork that inaugurated the last century, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen is in effect one of the greatest novels written in recent decades, and it deserves special attention. It tells the story of a family, the Lamberts. Married in the 1950s, Alfred and Enid have lived their whole life in a pretentious neighborhood in an ordinary Midwestern city. Now they are growing old, and Al (a former railway engineer) is beginning to show early signs of Parkinson’s disease.

They have three children who now live far away and whose lives, in one way or another, have not turned out well.

It is superfluous to point out that this father occupies the place of God, and that the novel tells the story of his death. Nonetheless, even if this is the outcome, it is not the meaning and the theme of the novel. Its real theme is the need to be happy, to be what we are destined to be.

But history is cruel, and the train of destiny runs off its tracks. Something comes between our desire and the possibility of achieving it. Man feels the need for a correction, he senses the prod toward a new change of direction, but he perceives also that this correction is not in his power. “If I can’t have the real thing,” Enid says, “I don’t want anything.”

Written by a man my age, The Corrections effectively encapsulates, with the force of a classic–this is why the word “masterpiece” is not used lightly–the need to go back to using the tool of narrative with liberty and open-mindedness, without giving in to ideology or philosophies, to investigate man, the hope that movAes him, and the broad circumstances in which his drama takes shape.

This cannot be done, however, if analysis does not give way to pity. For only pity is able to reach where no analysis can go: to the “I,” to the “you.”