Saturday, November 29, 2014
of disorder
Nagel and the equivalent characters in Hamsun's other books are “like escaped convicts” writes Woods. I agree so where is the crime?
(Not even what but where?)
Time is after them, police officer Time (they keep trying to evade Time. Nagel stays in bed when he should be up; it's petty), but Isak in Growth is contented at all points of time.
In them all you have a kind of Romantic self-ness: very emotional; they would rather be emotional than comfortable. Not to burn with a hard gemlike, etcetera, but to flutter, or, in Isak's case, to be a Norwegian brand of immovable potato. That secret immobility seems to be the evidence of self-ness in so many books, as I keep noting and noting, even in Joyce, Ulysses flying around the core Bloom, until the unstated question in so much of literature becomes, how much inconsistency will it take to destabilise a person's self-ness; and then there is Clarissa in Clarissa, whose will is an annihilating bomb, but I am not referring to anyone's will, only to the phenomenon that so many writers seem to detect at the heart of everything else in a person; and which may only be, hark, the tentative definition that A.R. Ammons once gave of poetry: "a linguistic correction of disorder" (A Note on Incongruence, 1966).
(I am not sure that the phenomenon is there in Clarissa. I don't think so. I believe that the characters, as they are described, have aspects, the despairing aspect for instance, or the friend aspect, and then will, but not the detached central obduration that I believe I can see depicted by implication in, eg, Hamsun, or by statement in Peake, the isolate apartness that is assumed to exist, no character really isolated in Clarissa but linked constantly with letters so that they are always spoken about: Samuel Richardson not assuming that Clarissa has it, nor assuming that she doesn't have it, but the idea not occurring to him anywhere; the whole notion absent from that book, though do the letters themselves, the mental picture of letters, does that make me think of aspects, aspects, turned towards the reader's face like a set of pages?)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Clarissa is something of a case study in will, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteI guess I can see how the Isak character you describe is a logical, if absurd, place for the earlier Hamsun to move.
It's the most extreme fictional case study of will I think I've ever read. There's Richardson, building up his obstacles; the will comes out in response and it seems like a reasonable will until he begins to take the obstacles away (great ladies think you're ace, Clarissa, and you don't have to live in a brothel any more; your enemies are despised) and the will remains. Now the will is acting like a vortex in the story: everything is revolving around that central point, everything refers back to it, and everybody's actions are ultimately being tested against this will. Lovelace has to lose because his will is too sensible. If he had been as dedicated to rakeishness as Clarissa is to goodness then he would have seduced the daughter at the farmhouse in the first few volumes. (Or did he? I haven't read the book for months. I can remember that he boasted about not doing it.)
DeleteIsak is an interesting one. Hamsun's idea for the revitalisation of Norway was a legion of Isaks.
Is Clarissa the woman who is always running away, and ends up worshiped as a goddess by a primitive tribe?
ReplyDeleteEscape is a central feature of a lot of fiction, now that I think about it. So is the idea of unearthing that immovable, changeless "self." Are these ideas confined to fiction from the European tradition, I wonder? I have no idea. A lot of the 20th-century Japanese fiction I read seems to contain characters who are trying hard to remain within cultural prisons. Or maybe to maintain the illusion that these cultural roles still function. But nobody seems to be breaking out and finding a hard kernel of self.
Everybody worships Clarissa. I don't see any reason why primitive tribes shouldn't get in on the act.
DeleteHa ha ha the both of you. I was thinking of Fugitive Anne.
DeleteFugitive Anne, oh memory. That book must have been less than a quarter the length of Clarissa and still it took me longer to read. A moral fanatic who spends most of her time in a room should not be more exciting than an opera singer pretending to be a magical Aztec in a volcanic tortoise cave but there you go.
DeleteThough that's sideways-pertinent, since one of the things that fascinates me about the self-ness that I'm thinking of, the one in Peake or Powys, is the way it depends so little on physical escape and so much on staying in rooms, or at least inside a hermetic area of interest. You intensify yourself within that cage. Hence Romantic. The irony of the Titus books, and one that I don't believe Peake knew, is that the best way to transcend Gormenghast, is to stay inside Gormenghast.
Allegorically, yes, that is who Clarissa is. For example, the "primitive tribe" is either "18th century readers of novels" or "readers of 18th century novels"; "running away" is some other allegorical substitution that escapes me at the moment. Etc.
ReplyDelete