For almost all men, the concepts of Heaven and happiness are inseparable. Nonetheless, in the final decade of the nineteenth century, Butler conceived of a Heaven in which everything was slightly frustrating (since no one can tolerate total contentment) and a comparable Hell lacking all unpleasant stimuli except those which prevent sleep. Around 1902, Bernard Shaw installed in Hell the illusions of eros, self-denial, glory, and pure undying love; in Heaven, the comprehension of reality (Man and Superman, act 3). Weatherhead is a mediocre and almost nonexistent writer, stimulated by pious readings, but he intuits that the direct pursuit of a pure and perpetual happiness is no less laughable on the other side of death than on this side. He writes: “The highest form of joy that we have conceived as Heaven is the experience of serving, that is, a fulfilling and voluntary participation in the work of Christ. This can occur among other spirits, perhaps in other worlds; perhaps we can help save our own.” In another chapter he asserts: “Heaven’s pain is intense, but the more we have evolved in this world, the more we can share in the other the life of God. The life of God is painful. In his heart are all the sins and suffering of the world. As long as there remains a single sinner in the universe, there will be no happi ness in Heaven.” (Origen, predicating a final reconciliation of the Creator with all creatures, including the devil, had already dreamed that dream.)
I do not know what the reader will think of such semi-theosophical conjectures. Catholics (read: Argentine Catholics) believe in an ultraterrestrial world, but I have noticed that they are not interested in it. With me the opposite occurs: I am interested but I do not believe.
[19431 [SJL]
Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel
Around 1882, Stevenson observed that the adventure story was regarded as an object of scorn by the British reading public, who believed that the ability to write a novel without a plot, or with an infinitesimal, atrophied plot, was a mark of skill. In The Dehumanization of Art (1925), José Ortega y Gasset, seeking the reason for that scorn, said, “I doubt very much whether an adventure that will interest our superior sensibility can be invented today” (p. 96), and added that such an invention was “practically impossible” (p. 97). On other pages, on almost all the other pages, he upheld the cause of the “psychological” novel and asserted that the pleasure to be derived from adventure stories was nonexistent or puerile. That was undoubtedly the prevailing opinion of 1882, 1925, and even 1940. Some writers (among whom I am happy to include Adolfo Bioy Casares) believe they have a right to disagree. The following, briefly, are the reasons why.
The first of these (I shall neither emphasize nor attenuate the fact that it is a paradox) has to do with the intrinsic form of the adventure story. The typical psychological novel is formless. The Russians and their disciples have demonstrated, tediously, that no one is impossible: happy suicides, benevolent murderers, lovers who adore each other to the point of separation, informers who act out of fervor or humility. . . . In the end such complete freedom is tantamount to chaos. But the psychological novel would also be a “realistic” novel, and have us forget that it is a verbal artifice, for it uses each vain precision (or each languid obscurity) as a new proof of verisimilitude. There are pages, there are chapters in Marcel Proust that are unacceptable as inventions, and we unwittingly resign ourselves to them as we resign ourselves to the insipidity and the emptiness of each day. The adventure story, on the other hand, does not propose to be a transcription of reality: it is an artificial object, no part of which lacks justification. It must have a rigid plot if it is not to succumb to the mere sequential variety of The Golden Ass, the seven voyages of Sinbad, or the Quixote.
I have given one reason of an intellectual sort; there are others of an empirical nature. We hear sad murmurs that our century lacks the ability to devise interesting plots; no one attempts to prove that if this century has any ascendancy over the preceding ones it lies in the quality of its plots. Stevenson is more passionate, more diverse, more lucid, perhaps more de serving of our unqualified friendship than is Chesterton, but his plots are inferior. De Quincey plunged deep into labyrinths on his nights of meticulously detailed horror, but he did not coin his impression of “unutterable and self-repeating infinities” in fables comparable to Kafka’s. Ortega y Gasset was right when he said that Balzac’s “psychology” does not satisfy us; the same thing could be said of his plots. Shakespeare and Cervantes were both delighted by the antinomian idea of a girl who, without losing her beauty, could be taken for a man; but we find that idea unconvincing now. I believe I am free from every superstition of modernity, of any illusion that yesterday differs intimately from today or will differ from tomorrow; but I maintain that during no other era have there been novels with such admirable plots as The Turn of the Screw, The Trial, Le Voyageur sur Ia terre, and the one you are about to read, which was written in Buenos Aires by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Detective stories-another popular genre in this century that cannot invent plots-tell of mysterious events that are later explained and justified by reasonable facts. In this book, Adolfo Bioy Casares easily solves a prob lem that is perhaps more difficult. The odyssey of marvels he unfolds seems to have no possible explanation other than hallucination or symbolism, and he uses a single fantastic, but not supernatural, postulate to decipher it. My fear of making premature or partial revelations restrains me from examining the plot and the wealth of delicate wisdom in its execution. Let me say only that Bioy renews in literature a concept that was refuted by St. Augustine and Origen, studied by Louis Auguste Blanqui, and expressed in memorable cadences by Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore . . .
In Spanish, works of reasoned imagination are infrequent and even very rare. The classicists employed allegory, the exaggerations of satire, and sometimes simple verbal incoherence. The only recent works of this type I remember are a story in Las fuerzas extranas and one by Santiago Dabove: now unjustly forgotten. The Invention of Morel (the title alludes filially to another island inventor, Moreau) brings a new genre to our land and our language.
I have discussed with the author the details of his plot; I have reread it; it seems to me neither imprecise nor hyperbolic to classify it as perfect.
[1940] [SJL]
Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
In the winter of 1851, Melville published Moby-Dick, the infinite novel that brought about his fame. Page by page, the story grows until it takes on the dimensions of the cosmos: at the beginning the reader might consider the subject to be the miserable life of whale harpooners; then, that the subject is the madness of Captain Ahab, bent on pursuing and destroying the white whale; finally, that the whale and Ahab and the pursuit which exhausts the oceans of the planet are symbols and mirrors of the universe. To insinuate that the book is symbolic, Melville declares emphatically that it is not and that no one should “scout at Moby-Dick as a monstrous fable or, still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory” (chap. 45). The usual connotation of the word allegory seems to have confused the critics; they all prefer to limit themselves to a moral interpretation of the work. Thus, E. M. Forster (Aspects of the Novel, chap. 7) summarizes the spiritual theme as, more or less, the following: “a battle against evil conducted too long or in the wrong way.”
I agree, but the symbol of the whale is less apt to suggest that the cosmos is evil than to suggest its vast inhumanity, its beastly or enigmatic stupidity. In some of his stories, Chesterton compares the atheists’ universe to a centerless labyrinth. Such is the universe of Moby-Dick: a cosmos (a chaos) not only perceptibly malignant as the Gnostics had intuited, but also irrational, like the cosmos in the hexameters of Lucretius.
Moby-Dick is written in a romantic dialect of English, a vehement dialect that alternates or conjugates the techniques of Shakespeare, Thomas De Quincey, Browne, and Ca
rlyle; “Bartleby,” in a calm and evenly jocular language deliberately applied to an atrocious subject, seems to foreshadow Kafka. There is, however, a secret and central affinity between both fictions. Ahab’s monomania troubles and finally destroys all the men on board; Bartleby’s candid nihilism contaminates his companions and even the stolid gentleman who tells his tale and endorses his imaginary tasks. It is as if Melville had written, “It’s enough for one man to be irrational for others and the universe itself to be so as well.” Universal history prolifically confirms that terror.
“Bartleby” belongs to the volume entitled The Piazza Tales (New York and London, 1896). About another story in the book, John Freeman observed that it would not be fully understood until Joseph Conrad published certain analogous pieces almost a half-century later; I would observe that Kafka’s work casts a curious ulterior light on “Bartleby.” Melville’s story defines a genre which, around 1919, Franz Kafka would reinvent and further explore: the fantasies of behavior and feelings or, as they are now wrongly called, psychological tales. As it is, the first pages of “Bartleby” are not anticipations of Kafka but rather allude to or repeat Dickens. . . . In 1849, Melville published Mardi, an impenetrable and almost unreadable novel, but one with an essential plot that prefigures the obsessions and the mechanism of The Castle, The Trial, and Amerika: the subject is an infinite chase on an infinite sea.
I have stated Melville’s affinities with other writers. But this is not to demean his achievements: I am following one of the laws of description or definition, that of relating the unknown to the known. Melville’s greatness is unquestionable, but his glory is recent. Melville died in 1891; twenty years after his death the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica considers him a mere chronicler of sea life; Lang and George Saintsbury, in 1922 and 1914, entirely ignore him in their histories of English literature. Later, he was defended by Lawrence of Arabia and D. H. Lawrence, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford. In 1921, Raymond Weaver published the first American monograph, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic; John Freeman, in 1926, the critical biography Herman Melville.
Vast populations, towering cities, erroneous and clamorous publicity, have conspired to make unknown great men one of America’s traditions. Edgar Allan Poe was one of these; so was Melville.
[1944] [SJL]
Henry James, The Abasement of the Northmores
Son of the Swedenborgian convert of the same name and brother of the famous psychiatrist who founded pragmatism, Henry James was born in New York on April 15, 1843. The father wanted his sons to be cosmopolitan—citizens of the world in the Stoic sense of the word—and he provided for their education in England, France, Geneva, and Rome. In 1860, Henry returned to America, where he undertook and abandoned a vague study of law. In 1864, he dedicated himself to literature, with growing self-denial, lucidity, and happiness. Beginning in 1869, he lived in London and in Sussex. His later trips to America were occasional and never went beyond New England. In July 1915, he adopted British citizenship because he understood that the moral duty of his country was to declare war on Germany. He died February 28, 1916. “Now, at last, that distinguished thing, death,” he said in his dying hour.
The definitive edition of his works covers thirty-five volumes edited meticulously by himself. The principal part of that scrupulous accumulation consists of stories and novels. It also includes a biography of Hawthorne, whom he always admired, and critical studies of Turgenev and Flaubert, close friends of his. He had little regard for Zola and, for complex reasons, Ibsen. He protected Wells, who corresponded ungratefully. He was the best man at Kipling’s wedding. The complete works comprise studies of a most diverse nature: the art of narrative, the discovery of as yet unexplored themes, literary life as a subject, indirect narrative techniques, evil and the dead, the risks and virtues of improvisation, the supernatural, the course of time, the need to be interesting, the limits that the illustrator must impose upon himself so as not to compete with the text, the unacceptability of dialect, point of view, the first-person narration, reading aloud, the rep resentation of unspecified evil, the American exiled in Europe, man exiled in the universe. . . . These analyses, duly organized in a volume, would form an enlightening rhetoric.
He presented several comedies on the London stage, which were greeted with hisses and Bernard Shaw’s respectful disapproval. He was never popular; the English critics offered him a careless and frigid glory that usually excluded the effort of reading him.
“The biographies of James,” Ludwig Lewisohn wrote, “are more significant for what they omit than for what they contain.”
I have visited some literatures of the East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic anthology of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James. The writers I have enumerated are, from the first line, amazing; the universe postulated by their pages is almost professionally unreal; James, before revealing what he is, a resigned and ironic inhabitant of Hell, runs the risk of appearing to be no more than a mundane novelist, less colorful than others. As we begin to read him, we are annoyed by some ambiguities, some superficial features; after a few pages we realize that those deliberate faults enrich the book. Of course, we are not dealing here with that pure vagueness of the Symbolists, whose imprecisions, by eluding meaning, can mean anything. We are dealing with the voluntary omission of a part of the novel, which al lows us to interpret it in one way or another; both premeditated by the author, both defined. Thus we shall never know, in “The Lesson of the Master,” if the advice given to the disciple is or is not treacherous; if, in “The Turn of the Screw,” the children are victims or agents of the ghosts which in turn could be demons; in “The Sacred Fount,” which of the ladies who pretend to investigate the mystery of Gilbert Long is the protagonist of that mystery; in “The Abasement of the Northmores,” the final destiny of Mrs. Hope’s project. I want to point out another problem of this delicate story of revenge: the intrinsic merits or demerits of Warren Hope, whom we have met only through his wife’s eyes.
James has been accused of resorting to melodrama; this is because the facts, to him, merely exaggerate or emphasize the plot. Thus, in The American, Madame Belleregarde’s crime is incredible in itself, but acceptable as a sign of the corruption of an ancient family. Thus, in that story titled “The Death of the Lion,” the demise of the hero and the senseless loss of the manuscript are merely metaphors which declare the indifference of those who pretend to admire him. Paradoxically, James is not a psychological novelist. The situations in his books do not emerge from his characters; the characters have been fabricated to justify the situations. With Meredith, the opposite occurs.
There are many critical studies of James. One may consult Rebecca West’s monograph (Henry James, 1916); The Craft of Fiction (1921) by Percy Lubbock; the special issue of Hound and Horn corresponding to the months April-May 1934; The Destructive Element (1935) by Stephen Spender; and the passionate article by Graham Greene in the collective work, The English Novelists (1936). That article ends with these words: “Henry James, as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.”
[1945] [SJL]
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men
The ways of God are inscrutable. Toward the end of 1839, Thomas Carlyle perused Edward William Lane’s decorous version of The Thousand and One Nights; the narrations struck him as “obvious lies,” but he approved of the many pious commentaries that adorn them. His reading led him to meditate on the bucolic tribes of Arabia who obscurely idolized wells and stars until a red-bearded man awoke them with the tremendous news that there is no god but God and drove them into a battle that has not yet ended and whose limits were the Pyrenees and the Ganges. What, Carlyle wondered, would have become of the Arabs if Mohammed had not existed? Such was the origin of the six lectures that make up this boo
k.
Despite the impetuous tone and the reliance on hyperbole and metaphor, On Heroes and Hero-worship is a theory of history. Carlyle was in the habit of continually rethinking this issue; in 1830, he hinted that history is an impossible discipline, for there is no event that is not the offspring of all prior events, and the partial but indispensable cause of all future events, and therefore, “Narrative is linear, Action is solid.” In 1833, he declared that universal history is a Divine Scripture82 which all men must decipher and write, and in which they are written. A year later, in Sartor Resartus, he repeated that universal history is a gospel, and added, in the chapter entitled “Center of Indifference,” that Great Men are the true sacred texts and that “your numerous talented men and your innumerable untalented men” are mere commentaries, glosses, annotations, Targums and sermons.
Although the form of this book is at times of an almost baroque complexity, the hypothesis it espouses is very simple. The first paragraph of the first lecture states it fully and vigorously. Here are the words: