Edwin Frank: Stranger Than Fiction

Review of Edwin Frank's new book Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

Edwin Frank, in Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, offers his personal account of the history of the novel in the last century. Such an account has to be personal, as there are so many possible routes through the available material and so limited a space for designing a book of plausible length. It is a matter of finding what is particularly compelling, or less so, in the writer’s chosen story. A writer engaged in this undertaking may present works of fiction insofar as they are of interest to her one by one, without offering much of a plot for the twentieth-century novel to play out. Frank, in contrast, offers clear hints that he has a very definite story in mind. To begin with, there are, as a reader is sure to notice, the titles of the three long sections of the book: Breaking the Vessels, Scattering the Sparks, and The Withdrawal. These are principal cosmic events as defined by the Kabbalah. God's light was too intense for the created vessels that would receive it and they broke apart, with tiny sparks of light scattered among the creation, suggesting the possibility of, but also the great difficulty of, a return to a higher spiritual level. God’s own self-contraction and withdrawal from most of cosmic space was necessary, according to the Kabbalah, to offer creatures room to develop on their own without being metaphysically overwhelmed by, and absorbed into, the Godhead.

Frank makes a particular historical use of the Kabbalah metaphor. The nineteenth-century novel, so he claims, while it allowed very great tensions between self and society, still assumed the ultimate necessity of a negotiated balance between the two: between the demands on the self arising from its own interior life and the demands on the self arising from the larger social and ethical world in which it was situated. By the end of the nineteenth century, so novelists began to acknowledge, that balance was vanishing and it was unclear how to stitch together the two sides again, if that were at all possible. The discordances and tensions had become too overwhelming to bridge convincingly. While Frank does not mention Hegel, one can see much of the nineteenth century as working through Hegel’s great project: showing how the valued autonomy and authentic interiority of the individual self become empty and arbitrary, an ultimate failure, unless such features are educated through, and expressed in, a life of citizenship with others. That common life will involve the rich social, cultural, and political institutions and practices described in detail in his Philosophy of Right. Hegel is therefore ultimately about reconciling, mediating, and negotiating the self-society contrast and its serious tensions. For Frank, the twentieth-century novel is instead about the way writers respond to the radical failure of any such resolutions and reconciliations. In the experience of the end of the nineteenth century, then of World War I, and then of World War II, we have the collapse, he says, of all the institutions and forms of life that could reliably, except in the most arbitrary manner, guide and support the ethical life of individuals and provide a basis for a worthy aesthetic response to the surrounding world. Thus we have the breaking of the vessels of which the Kabbalah speaks. In Frank’s words: “The old narrative of European civilization, a historical fiction stretching like a great bridge from Greece and Rome and the Renaissance to the modern state, has been blown to smithereens. European history. . . has collapsed on itself and the story that needs to be told now is the story of that collapse, and for that one will need a new kind of novel. . .” If Hegel finds that what we properly mean by the divine is ultimately being incarnated in modern political, social, and cultural institutions, Frank will emphasize the withdrawal of the divine to an ineffable elsewhere, so that writers may be forced to bring together scattered sparks of meaning, fragments of the broken vessels, that one can comprehend only allegorically or symbolically, through pointing to what keeps itself radically absent.

We know that this kind of story is important to Frank because of the rhetorical tone of near worshipful attention that he pays to two of the writers most crucial to his narrative. In an almost novel-like development, Kafka is treated relatively early and then, perhaps surprisingly, Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual becomes the spiritual climax of the book’s plot. Kafka’s work, so says Frank, is “unfinishable, and so may be seen, in the theological terms that haunt all his work, as partaking of the eternal or, contrariwise, as sentenced to perdition.” And: “Kafka is the writer who captured both the euphoria and terror of the century, who saw more than anyone how it was haunted by the questions of the sacred and of justice. . .” Frank’s use here of the terms ‘theological,’ ‘eternal,’ and ‘sacred’ is important to his narrative. Perec seems a peculiar choice, perhaps, because he belongs to the French OuLiPo movement, the Workshop for Potential Literature. This movement used mathematical games and puzzles, constraints on textual formation, and arbitrary construction rules to produce kinds of literature not seen in the past. You might choose to write an entire novel in which the letter e is never found. Or you might list different rooms in a large apartment complex and then determine the order of chapters that describe these rooms by following the order of a knight’s moves across a chessboard, in a pattern such that it manages to land on all the squares. Characters in Perec’s novel have eccentric adventures and strangely arbitrary projects. The leading character plans on painting a series of two hundred watercolors that will then be made into jigsaw puzzles. The painter will solve the resulting puzzles, bring each of them to where the scene was originally painted, and then destroy them, leaving no evidence of their original making. But the puzzle-maker has introduced an unfriendly trick: the final piece in one puzzle is shaped like a W, while the puzzle itself requires an X-shaped piece. Frank is convinced that this apparently frivolous puzzle-making and these constrained rules of construction have a deeper meaning. Perec’s mother was killed at Auschwitz and Frank follows a critic’s suggestion that the W puzzle piece is meant to stand for that unspeakable loss. Turning the W upside down would make an M for mére or mother, but that absence is so profound that it can only be suggested by the failure of that letter to be acknowledged, by the relative emptiness, arbitrariness, and formal obsessiveness of the practices described.

Note how Frank uses something of the language of the Kabbalah, with its breaking of vessels and withdrawn God. The alphabetical letters mentioned in Perec’s novel, he says, “figure a loss that is as absolute and unrepresentable as God.” For Perec, there is “a single unspeakable thing that, in each book, he would find a way not to speak of.” In his book that refuses to use any e, says Frank, the French sound of e is like the sound of eux, or them, so there is here “a kind of private Kabbalistic calculation,” where the setting aside of the e is the suggestion of a certain ‘they’ “having been set aside, having been saved.” The radical unrepresentability of the divine has become the “indescribable death camps” to which the twentieth-century novel must revert, while recognizing that its linguistic, aesthetic, and psychological resources are hopelessly inadequate for representing these. Life A User’s Manual is then able to point to a sublime absence rather than to the aesthetic structures of the legacy of humanism. It becomes sublime itself: “the book of books, a book that seeks to encompass and exhaust all gestures of its precursors and in a sense all possible gestures a book can make.” That pointing to a sublime absence is present as well, says Frank, in Kafka: “In Kafka’s work, symbolism becomes the ongoing pursuit of a meaning that has always moved on.” Kafka presents what clearly offer themselves as allegories, but then he throws away the interpretive key to them and leaves us at a mysterious loss, trying to make sense of patterns that both demand interpretation and seem ever more arbitrary. Kafka’s work, says Frank, “has a purity of conception and of execution, a sublime single-mindedness. . .” that is not found in other writers. Kafka shows us, he continues, that justice must lie radically elsewhere than in the arrangements and accommodations of nineteenth-century and, even more, twentieth-century life and art. (Thus there is a complete rejection of Hegel, as described above. Justice will be present only as a mysterious, unrepresentable absence and actual political and aesthetic practices will be shown to be empty and arbitrary.) Frank’s overall value scheme is shown as well in the way he compliments certain writers whom he strongly favors, as with Robert Musil. The sense of a sublime absence that he values can be assigned to Musil’s work: It is a “via negativa, an apophatic approach to knowledge.” It offers a “continual approximation of what cannot be said.” Musil seems to make “an infinite scaffolding around an unbuildable house.”

To strengthen his narrative, Frank needs a contrast or foil, a counternarrative that applies a very different value scheme to the history of the twentieth-century novel. He sets up the needed contrast quite transparently. In describing three writers he wishes to praise, he says that “novelists like Perec and Morante and Naipaul now as openly recognize a yearning for sacred fulfillment as their precursors embarked on secular adventure . . .” That sacred/secular contrast becomes central for Frank. Against the theological, the sacred, the apophatic, and the sublime that are highlighted in his favored narrative, and against practices of pointing to an indescribable absence, we have, says Frank, a secular adventure. To be sure we get the point, he repeats on several occasions references to the “secular urgency” and “secular frenzy” of the novel’s mainstream. The Danish novel Lucky Per, by Henrik Pontoppidan, has a leading character that is said by Frank to “embody the spirit of the twentieth-century novel in all its secular frenzy . . .” Per shows what happens with a purely “secular vision of things.” You are left, Frank says, with the pure contingency of a purposeless order of the world or else a radical individual will that arbitrarily imposes itself upon that order. There is no higher spiritual order being realized in and through everyday happenings and communal practices and no sublimely absent order that might give shape to our longings, as in Kafka.

While Frank traces the individual literary voice of the twentieth-century novel back to Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, it is André Gide whom he selects as notably representative of the secular individual voice that has become dominant. He claims that Gide does not even try to honor, in any manner at all, the nineteenth-century balance between the demands on the self of its rich interior life and the demands on the self of a communal ethical order. Gide is “answerable only to himself and/or his art.” Frank continues: “Gide was interested in himself, endlessly interested, and that self was hardly the sort of thing whose claims, sexual or otherwise, could be balanced with those of society.” He will voyage through the world and “engage in the endless process of being himself.” If the reader suspects that there is a degree of moral distaste in Frank’s description here, that suspicion is borne out in Frank’s treatment of Gide’s biography. Typically his biographical treatments of writers in the book are brief and positive, as with Kafka, Perec, and Morante, whom he treats in the loftiest and most respectful of terms. But here he makes sure the reader knows that Gide liked to carry toys and candy to give to the adolescent boys who attracted him. When asked to take care of the much younger son of a family pastor and tutor, when the latter was off at war, Gide, we discover, began a passionate affair with the adolescent. Another French writer, Georges Bernanos, so Frank tells us, has a character modeled after Gide who has “a gift for making anything he talks about fascinating while draining it of meaning.” Gide in Frank’s narrative leads directly to the Lolita of Nabokov, who “once and for all interrupts, short-circuits, the connection between ethics and aesthetics that twentieth--century novelists like H. G. Wells and Musil, even more than their 19th century forebears - who could take it for granted - were desperate to affirm.” (Frank expresses a surprisingly strong respect for the work of Wells.) It is the ethical side of Kafka’s, Perec’s, and Musil’s writings that clearly garners Frank’s strong approval, so a divorce of aesthetic goals from ethical ones will hardly be treated positively. It is notable for him that in Gide’s novel The Immoralist, the main character’s project of developing the truth of his own selfhood leads, we are told, to the death of his wife, an event he does not seem at all guilty about. And readers of Gide, on Frank’s description, can seem forerunners of identity-politics readers; Frank does not appear pleased with them. “They want to read things as unlikely and unusual and self-aware as they take themselves to be. . .”

I go over those quotes regarding Gide because they are important in establishing Frank’s overall narrative, where the ambitious individual lyrical voice of the twentieth-century novel, in its secular and self-obsessed energy, proves very much inferior to works that suggest a theology-style unrepresentability or that suggest the pressure of a mysteriously unnamable sacred or spiritual order on the everyday life of the individual. Frank makes it clear that Gide comes out of a serious Protestant background, as does Per in Pontoppidan’s novel (and as does Hemingway). The individual literary voice of the twentieth-century novel is something of a secular substitute for the Protestant inner voice in its confessional relation with God. Frank wishes to emphasize a further characteristic: Individual subjectivity is treated as heroic in its drive toward self-expression and toward giving its own distinctive shape to experience. He speaks of what “is perhaps the secret at the heart of the twentieth-century novel - that it is devoted above all to affirming and preserving the idea of the heroic.” In treating a novel by Marguerite Yourcenar, he says that she “seeks to imagine the novel, and herself as novelist, out of the lonely dead end of Woolf’s and Hemingway’s heroic and tragic subjectivity.” (Her move here is supposedly achieved merely because the Roman emperor Hadrian whom she writes about is a fully public individual, with large-scale projects of public transformation, not a voice of a privatized subjectivity.) So, the Gide-Hemingway-Woolf-Nabokov line of development is hardly equivalent in value for Frank to the Kafka-Morante-Perec line. The former is a “lonely dead end.” It separates aesthetic achievement too radically from ethical considerations. It is endlessly, obsessively concerned with states of the individual self, apart from proper social demands. In secularizing the Protestant confessional voice, it loses any ties with a theological, supernatural order and ends up with a secular combination of blind, meaningless contingency and arbitrary subjective will. And, so Frank argues further, it is not just morally complacent but also complicit, through its heroism, in the great moral disasters of the twentieth century, which shared something of that sense of heroic subjectivity. In stark contrast, Frank says that Perec’s novel, his clear winner of the fiction laurels for the century, allows the human voice hardly to be heard at all. The lyrical individual literary voice of the twentieth-century novel has nearly vanished in his work. “The death camps showed that there was nothing human beings would stop at doing.” So, the centuries-old humanism that finally expresses itself in the secular individual voice of the twentieth-century novel will appear bankrupt. Far superior for him are those writers who keep the ethical and the aesthetic together. Elsa Morante’s History “tells a story about the countless people, lost to history, that the twentieth century destroyed.” Vasily Grossman, Russian author of Life and Fate, does the same thing and so will W. G. Sebald. All three of these earn Frank’s voluble praise.

There is a related, if less central, contrast in Frank’s account. When his section titles mention the breaking of the vessels and the scattering of the sparks, and when he speaks of Western civilization having been smashed to smithereens, so that only scattered fragments remain, he will favor literary works that emphasize the fragmentary, the arbitrary, the broken, the scattered. Kafka, he says, measures up well through his “determined embrace of the sketchy, the provisional, the terminally inconclusive.” His novels seem to offer a way of their coming together and then they keep defeating that centripetal momentum, so that a sense of a cohesive wholeness never arrives. On the other hand, those three great novels of literary modernism Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, and In Search of Lost Time, are quite different from this on Frank’s narrative. “Some kind of writing that reflected the way things had fallen apart but also stuck them back together, that suggested it was possible to put things together again, was called for.” These three writers still believe ultimately in the possibility of a compelling wholeness that holds together the broken elements of the twentieth century in a convincing manner. In the face of the trials and disasters of the century, they do not express a sense of being overwhelmed by a sublimely terrible and unrepresentable otherness but they are, so he says, “imperturbable.” So in that respect these three come off as inferior to Kafka. (Writing in Hemingway, Frank also claims, “is above all about making – or trying to at least – things whole.”) Wholeness and imperturbability are not desirable qualities in Frank’s Kabbalistic universe, where the vessels remain broken and where quite fragile and tentative attempts at repair are ongoing. Literary gestures that assume the possibility of achieving wholeness must therefore be shallow and illusory. Unlike with his near-worship of Kafka, Frank is unafraid to be seriously critical of Joyce, Mann, and Proust. Perec’s play with linguistic puzzles and spatial games never causes the slightest irritation in him but only gushing identification, yet Joyce’s play with words “can try the reader’s patience - it can seem a product of obsession as much as artistry, especially since one thing Joyce did not always possess was a sense of proportion. . .” Ulysses is “without a discursive or even reflective, much less edifying dimension, the whole dimension of literature that Joyce as good as rips up and throws away.” Joyce is so determined to have his language resist domination by others that he retreats to a free-range subjectivity that is “prolific, unfettered, spendthrift, debauched.” He adds: “Proust and Joyce provide models, but their work can seem as solipsistic as it is suggestive.” Once again, the exalted representatives of the twentieth-century individual literary voice come off as inferior to the unlyrical allegorical wandering in Kafka and to the unlyrical absence of human voice in Perec. (Yet is it convincing that there is no reflective or edifying dimension in Ulysses? I find Bloom inspiring and thrill to his final meeting up with Stephen. Do you truly have a sense, after reading Proust and Joyce, that you are dealing with solipsists, when your world seems to have broadened in such a satisfying manner through that reading? Even if the shape of Frank’s narrative requires certain judgments on his part, we should not accept them without skepticism.)

I have been focusing on Frank’s treatment of the works most central to the driving force of his overall narrative. Before continuing my assessment of that narrative, let me mention certain other novels that he has chosen to treat, in order that I may give a somewhat more representative sense of his account. He appears at times to choose books that offer some resistance to, or at least diversion from, the emphasis on a lyrical individual literary voice that he traces to Gide, Proust, Woolf, and Hemingway. He speaks, for example, of the Latin American Boom and the global literature that followed from it as “freeing us from the limits of the lyrical and critical voice associated since Gide with literary fiction and ushering the reader into a new supercollectivity.” That emphasis on a large collective subjectivity, on something of a shared coalition of many writers in a strategic global activity through literature, is seen as an antidote to Gide’s legacy, which Frank typically tends to treat condescendingly. Yet that move away from the individual lyrical voice is also treated with some skepticism by Frank. The Latin American Boom and the international novel it shaped can be seen as “an homogenization of human experience and historical evidence into literary formulae.” The Boom was fueled “by a mixture of revolutionary energy and market-savvy publicity” and was “marked by a sure sense of design and poised exoticism that made it perfect for the psychedelic moment” and “seemed designed to transcend cultural borders and to win the Nobel Prize.” In García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, so Frank claims, the characters have stopped being individuals but are forms of a single man, a single woman, that emerge from and then sink back into the narrative. The shape of the book, he says, is very much musical, in the way the themes emerge and get developed and repeated, and their musical aspect should be thought of as choral, ritual, and liturgical. So, the individual lyrical voice is given up, but in calling the resulting music “liturgical” and “ritual,” Frank seems to be making a contrast, to the detriment of García Márquez, with his own explicitly stated preference for the prophetic in literature (which he associates, naturally, with Kafka).

Regarding D. H. Lawrence, so we learn, Sons and Lovers may follow along with the (Gidean) trend of the individual voice and of an individual emancipation from a larger social order. But in The Rainbow, which Frank seems to praise more fully, that individual perspective is countered in two directions: by the life of the family that offers coherence beyond the self and by a pre-individual, unconscious, somewhat animal element in humanity: an “almost featureless, unindividuated body pushed through time and the elements. . .” In writing her novel Artemisia right after World War II, says Frank, Anna Banti, through investigating a Renaissance female painter about whom very little is known, addresses in a reflective, self-referential style the very idea of treating matters when so very much, not only in Artemisia’s life but in the twentieth century, has been lost and silenced. Banti rejects, says Frank, any notion of determinate identity when so much can never be known, and rejects as well the idea of heroism in art, as she offers a vision of art “that is fully ethical.” Thus she calls into question the features of the individual lyrical literary voice.

Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, on Frank’s account, also questions a European emphasis on the pressures of individuation and on individual agency. The character Okonkwo becomes part of the process of history that renders him null and void, incapable of being responsible for his own happiness and sadness. The novel makes us wonder whether the novel itself is suitable to capturing that earlier tribal world when it is a form of understanding that seems to belong essentially to the new order that is colonizing the globe. V. S. Naipaul, he says, may in his earlier career represent the shaping of an individual voice as part of an emancipation from the cultural weight and narrowness of his upbringing, but toward the end he has returned to Trinidad and finds himself looking especially for communal manifestations of the sacred that, to his regret, are being lost.

While I have said from the start that any history of the twentieth-century novel will be a personal one, with different narrative emphases and different preferences for inclusion, I believe there are serious flaws in Frank’s narrative and that it is worth exploring them. He is so strongly invested in the Kafka-Perec line (with its pointing to a sublimely absent referent), as against the “individual literary voice” line that he assigns to Gide, that he mischaracterizes the latter, vastly underplaying its true literary resources and falling back on caricature. Frank’s account, we will recall, takes the novel of individual literary voice to involve writers who are endlessly interested in themselves instead of in the social world, who let aesthetic goals trump any ethical considerations, and who practice a heroic subjectivity that can be complicit with several dangerous social happenings during the century. In assessing that account, we might begin with the linkage he draws between Gertrude Stein and Hemingway. The key contribution of both, he claims, is to focus, when writing, on the sentence and on the different possibilities of its construction. Stories are then built up out of that primary commitment to the sentence. It is true that Stein performs experiments with sentence construction, but true as well that Hemingway is doing something that seems considerably richer. Frank in some ways acknowledges this point in his descriptions of Hemingway, but then does not allow that recognition to effectively shape his larger account of the century. Stein, so we are shown, experiments with repetitions and variations and with new compositions out of the same small inventory of words. But at least to my ear, these sentences do little work beyond that show of experimentation, which she was cannily able to exploit as somehow the equivalent of Cezanne’s work in painting. Let us listen, in contrast, to the passage that Frank himself picks out of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. “They went up from the beach to a meadow that was soaking wet with dew . . . They went into the woods and followed the trail that led to the logging road that ran back into the hills.” We might turn to a similar, longer passage from The Sun Also Rises: “We came down out of the mountains and through an oak forest, and there were white cattle grazing in the forest. Down below there were grassy plains and clear streams, and then we crossed a stream and went through a gloomy little village, and started to climb again. We climbed up and up and crossed another high Col and turned along it, and the road ran down to the right, and we saw a whole new range of mountains off to the south, all brown and baked-looking and furrowed in strange shapes. . . Then we crossed a wide plain, and there was a big river off on the right shining in the sun from between the line of trees, and a way off you could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the walls of the city, and the great brown cathedral, and the broken skyline of the other churches. In back of the plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across the plain going toward Pamplona.”

Here the repeated sentence rhythms are importantly associated with a rhythmic movement of the individual through physical space that has clear psychological and, we might say, metaphysical connotations. The rhythm of the physical movements forward, as described, and the rhythm of the prose lines suggest the capacity of the individual to sustain its distinctive rhythm of selfhood as it moves through the world. The sentences seem to reflect what philosophers call a phenomenological style: an overall way of shaping one’s experience of the world, of taking in and appropriating the otherness of reality. We find something similar, later in the century, in the work of Cormac McCarthy: “He rode with the sun coppering his face in the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.” (All the Pretty Horses) We have a strong intuition, with Hemingway and McCarthy, that their interest is not especially in an accurate description of the landscape. It is important, rather, that the form, rhythm, and phenomenological style of the sentences seem to be achieved, and to be stoically held, against a deeper pull toward a de-individuating dissolution into underlying oceanic forces.

Something similar happens with the sentences of W. G. Sebald, though these are typically more elaborately structured then Hemingway’s. “And as for myself, on those Sundays in the utterly deserted hotel I would regularly be overcome by such a sense of aimlessness and futility that I would go out, purely in order to preserve an illusion of purpose, and walk about amidst the city’s immense and time-blackened nineteenth-century buildings, with no particular destination in mind. On those wanderings, when winter light flooded the deserted streets and squares for the few rare hours of real daylight, I never ceased to be amazed by the completeness with which anthracite-coloured Manchester. . . displayed the clearly chronic process of its impoverishment and degradation to anyone who cared to see. . . Everything then would appear utterly unreal to me, on those sombre December days when dusk was already falling at three o’clock, when the starlings, which I had previously imagined to be migratory song birds, descended upon the city in dark flocks that must have numbered hundreds of thousands, and, shrieking incessantly, settled close together on the ledges and copings of warehouses for the night.” (The Emigrants)

In that last passage we see a further aspect of literary voice and style. These can become, in guiding the self’s movements through space, attentive to some larger metaphysical condition of how we are situated in the world. Many readers will recall the last few paragraphs of Joyce’s “The Dead,” where the perspective on a dinner party in Dublin broadens out to include an annihilating snow that is falling more generally on Ireland, on the graves of the dead in the west, and on the dark waters of the Shannon. In Sebald’s description of a Sunday afternoon in Manchester, we have a sense that a picture is being suggested regarding how humans stand relative to a larger universe that does not make them important at all. In Sebald, more than in Hemingway, the careful, rhythmic architecture of the sentences seems to be sustained often against an earlier traumatic experience of loss. For some of Sebald’s characters, the experience of profound loss has to do with the death camps of Europe. For others the trauma is much vaguer and is felt especially in the effort to maintain a style and rhythm of the self against its pull. That effort is demonstrated in the somewhat austere lyricism, compelling form, and beauty of the sentences, while in Frank’s narrative, pointing to a sublime otherness that is absent does not require, indeed resists, those very qualities. (Frank also praises Sebald but does not appear an accurate reader of his work. We are offered by this writer, he says, a range of voices as if one were capturing a set of diverse, fragmented voices coming over a short-wave radio. Yet in their indirect discourse as they repeat the stories of others, Sebald’s narrators employ the same voice, with the same implicit sadness and rhythm, throughout. There is no sense whatever of the short-wave experience. Frank does not wish to admit how very much Sebald is in the tradition of the individual literary voice trying to give a distinctive music and tone to the narrator’s experience of moving through the world.)

Frank, while he is caught at times in his narrative’s pressure to prove, rather unconvincingly, Stein’s genius, is able to see what goes right with Hemingway when his sentences work. “It is writing that works through and exemplifies attention, concentration, precision, and control. It is all about self-awareness. It is all about discipline. It observes the outer and inner worlds with equal care, maintaining a balance that might remind us of the nineteenth-century novel’s balance of the claims of self and society, only this balance is not a prospect or an outcome, but an ongoing challenge: the novel, you could say, has shrunk to sentence after sentence. . .”

It would seem that insights like that into literary style might have motivated Frank away from his talk of “the dead end of Woolf’s and Hemingway’s heroic and tragic subjectivity.” But that characterization is what his overall narrative, with its apparently sublime climax in Perec, requires. The “Gidean” individual lyrical voice, with its origin in the interior voice of radical Protestantism, must come out as inferior in Frank’s plot. In his treatment of Proust as well, Frank offers thoughts that he might well have used to develop a richer concept of the “individual literary voice” tradition. Regarding the room where the narrator is keeping Albertine, Frank says: “that room is the exterior form of The Prisoner’s true subject, which is not love or even jealousy so much as subjectivity itself, the hell of consciousness, the unlimited interior disaster that it is to be a person . . .” The entire seven-volume work, he says, is about learning to be alone, without mother or lover, to own and master your own solitude. Frank adds pessimistically: “. . . To be a person is to be a person apart, alone, unloved.”

Those thoughts about Proust and Hemingway, abetted by those quotes from McCarthy and Sebald, suggest a rather different emphasis in the story of the twentieth-century novel from the one that Frank actually offers. As humans move across history, they face novel pressures on the psyche; drama, poetry, and fiction should help them face up to these in an effective manner. What ways of ordering mental life, of being a self, and of shaping one’s overall experience of the world and of others are likely to be helpful? The twentieth century stands out as a period during which tribal, familial, social, and regional attachments greatly weakened and large numbers of people faced the prospect of living life as urban loners, without the guaranteed social contacts of village social life. With advanced capitalism offering many more possibilities for shaping a life, you had more responsibility for designing your own route through the course of your existence. Without the social matchmakers of village life, many would go for far longer without significant intimate attachments. You would feel the burdens of individuality, of separateness, of making a life your own, and of agency in general, without others to relieve the burden.

Frank’s narrative began with the claim that by the twentieth century the earlier balance between the demands of the interior self and the demands of the larger ethical and social order could not be maintained. On his account, that breakdown resulted in an individual literary voice that was self-obsessed, uninterested in ethical matters, and committed to an heroic self-aggrandizement. (In this context, he never seems to be using ‘heroic’ in a positive manner, just as feminists are not being positive when they define a “heroic masculinism” of the past.) But with just a modicum of greater sympathy, Frank might have shaped a very different narrative. The self-society balance had not only produced great ethical and social pressures on the self. It also offered very great social support for the self, so that one was not typically left as an isolated individual. With the economic and social changes of the twentieth century, that support weakened very considerably. The pressures of aloneness and separateness and of a relatively solitary existence would be stronger and more frequent.

One consequence would be an intensifying of the structure of what psychologists call the process of separation-individuation. Even in traditional societies, one must move from a position of almost symbiotic unity with one’s mother to life as a separate, independent, mature individual. There will be complicated emotions involving attachment, separation, loss, grief, and so forth. Even in those who typically handle such emotions with some success, who form their new family bonds, there will be events in life that allow earlier difficulties and conflicts in the process of separation-individuation to reemerge with considerable power. The entire architecture of what counts as self and what counts as other in one’s mapping of the world can become complicated and ambiguous, given one’s mental activities of identification, projection, idealization, and internalization, where a fertile blurring of self and other may occur. That outcome will be all the more strongly the case for those whose experience of loneliness and solitariness is more prominent. How can one establish a genuine autonomy, a selfhood with reliable boundaries and style, and still be richly open to the happenings of the world and the mental states of others? And most humans will experience quite formidably the burdens of individual agency, of making actions as well as the actual shape of a life truly one’s own and of taking responsibility, even in circumstances provoking shame and guilt.

So, Frank might have treated the individual literary voice that comes out of the divorce of society and self not as selfish, shallowly self-obsessed, and amoral, and as a dead end (that is how he treats Gide), but as contributing to a praiseworthy and ubiquitous project of helping modern human individuals adjust to new conditions of separateness and aloneness. Such a project includes a negotiation between forces encouraging a regressive weakening of individuality and forces encouraging a full assumption of its burdens, and that negotiation will express itself in the ongoing character of the text itself, in the way its style enacts a certain structure of the experiencing self. Proust, then, would offer not just a singular achievement but an overall model for one of the great literary tasks of the twentieth century. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Beckett’s novels and dramas, Updike’s The Centaur, McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, most of Sebald, the poetry of Merrill and Bishop, the fiction of Anne Tyler and Alice Munro, and so forth and so on, could be seen as contributing to this story.

We can learn something further about the alternate story I have in mind if we look at a novel by Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea. Frank made a key point of claiming, regarding Pontoppidan’s character Per, that although Per came from an extremely religious rural family, he represented “the secular vision of things.” This means, continues Frank, that everything that happens is due either to the pure contingency of a purposeless physical universe or to a radical, arbitrary imposing of will by a human subject. Given that claim, it is a bit odd perhaps that Frank does not consider the twentieth-century novel that treats that overall theme with great directness. Sartre called Nausea his contingency project, an attempt to explore a world whose stark meaningless contingency has become massively oppressive to the narrator. Things are simply there and no arrangement of them or sequencing of events has any greater right to be there than any other. At the other pole is Sartre’s existentialist idea that only an arbitrary projecting of value and meaning from out of the subjective realm, ungrounded by any way that matters stand in the world or by any reasons, can express human freedom and responsibility. So Sartre seems a perfect example of what Frank means by the two-fold character of “the secular vision of things.” Of course, for Frank what is missing here, the most consequential absence, is any reference to a sublimely absent realm that brings a theological or sacred dimension, even as absent, to the enterprise, as in Kafka or Perec. Sartre hasn’t any interest in such a dimension. So it appears he is left with the two aspects Frank would assign to him as secular: pure meaningless contingency or a radical projection of a subjective will. But Sartre spends much of Nausea exploring a third alternative. When the owner of a café plays an American jazz-like record, Roquentin, Sartre’s character, finds his great anxiety and nausea diminishing almost to nothing. Unlike with all the items in the world that he has been experiencing, with their thorough contingency, the elements of the music seem to fit together with an inner necessity, a persuasive inevitability in the way the notes follow one another, in the overall form of the piece. Instead of his own pure contingency, which Roquentin sees as a tendency to dissolve into spreading puddles on the café floor, the music has a “steel-like” strength in the way it holds its parts together. In the necessity and integrity of its compelling arrangement, the musical piece is beautiful. In its sustaining of its own inner patterns without external coercion, the music appears to possess a certain autonomy or free self-determination.

One might note helpfully how all those attributes fit into the conceptual system of German philosophy. Hegel claimed that traditional religion uses theological terms to try to capture what are ultimately philosophical concepts. The idea of the divine is properly, for him, the idea of free rational self-determination. The story of history is the story of how that notion becomes realized in various forms of human life. The Christian concept of the Holy Spirit becomes the notion of Geist, the inherent work of gradually embodying the “divine” idea of free self-determination in the human realm. What is crucial for our present account is that all the qualities associated by Sartre-Roquentin with the music in the café would count as qualities indicating the incarnating activity of Geist: internal necessity, inevitability, compelling form, beauty, autonomy. All of these are ways in which the “spiritual” level is realizing itself in the world, according to Hegel. The aesthetic achievement counters the arbitrary contingency of the world without turning to the sacred or the traditionally theological, as Frank would require.

Now we can see perhaps why Sartre-Roquentin’s move here is not available to Frank’s favorite writers, such as Kafka and Perec. Their writing is supposed to be capturing a Kabbalistic breaking of the vessels, scattering of the sparks, and withdrawal of God. One is supposed to be facing a world of brokenness, of collapse, where catastrophic failure, emptiness, and absence are the valued states and an unnamable messianic entry is awaited. So, all those incarnations of Geist must be roundly rejected and undermined as instances of idol worship, blasphemy, and false messianism. As a result, Frank’s story of the twentieth-century novel cannot truly focus on the achievements of aesthetic style that emphasize beauty, inner necessity, compelling form, autonomy, and a convincing musical momentum. But it is very often the case that those achievements are the ones that writers are seeking quite rigorously after, for reasons that mix profound psychological needs and sophisticated aesthetic considerations. So, Frank’s history will not be sensitive to aspects that very many writers care about very much.

There is a further point of interest to Nausea. It is not just that the music itself assumes certain desirable qualities. What is crucial is that by listening to it, and by undergoing a thorough identification with it, Roquentin is able to take on some of those qualities, in a limited manner, as his own. That is the point that Frank misses in his dismissal of the twentieth-century individual literary voice as a self-obsessive, self-aggrandizing dead end, without responsibility to the ethical demands of society. He fails to see how so many writers are like Roquentin. Their experience of very great fragility in the task of self-formation, in the process of separation-individuation, makes them identify with qualities of a literary style that are rather like those that Roquentin found in the music played in the café. It is the complex identifications involved in such an investment in literary style, as a reaction to profound metaphysical fragility, that make the lyrical individual style do the work it does, not some effort at self-aggrandizement. The very integrity and continuation of the individual as a distinctive self seem to be at stake. (One notices this when Hemingway is writing at his best.) Offering support for these experiences of the self seems clearly an ethical undertaking, not simply an aesthetic one.

One might draw a connection here with an interesting intellectual discussion of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin, in a relatively early work, treated the topic of allegory in German baroque drama. Such drama seemed inferior to its Renaissance counterpart. For the latter appears successful at finding metaphors that link the spiritual and natural realms convincingly, as if the spiritual form were necessarily and properly embodied in a particular physical presence, so that this presence might seem an inevitable representation of what it stood for. Baroque drama, in contrast, kept inventing allegorical connections between the spiritual and natural orders in such an infectious multiplicity and profusion that eventually all of these connections appeared ever more arbitrary and random, and as in themselves utterly weak and unconvincing. But that result was not actually a failure, Benjamin argued. Rather, it demonstrated a superior conception of the spiritual order. That order was acknowledged to be so unrepresentable that any representations of it had to be such utter failures and had to appear empty, arbitrary, and unconvincing. A more sublime religious notion was discovered to be at stake, not an aesthetic failure. Frank can easily be seen as following this line in his treatment of Kafka and Perec. With the latter, he might claim, the very mechanical arbitrariness of the construction elements and the puzzle-solving gives a much stronger sense of the fundamental, sublime unrepresentability of what Perec is pointing to but cannot name.

To return to my own account: How might the various investments in individual literary style function? The most important works would offer not so much a pleasing literary style as a sample phenomenology, a rhythm and mode of taking in and shaping experience in a distinctive and general manner, so that one is testing one’s capacity to sustain a rhythm of selfhood with confidence, no matter what is being confronted. Such works are implicitly negotiating an architecture of self and other, not just as this might apply to the text and the particular world it is describing but also as it might apply to how an individual more generally confronts and makes sense of the intimidating otherness of reality. That pressuring otherness will emerge both from the circumstances of one’s present life and from the key psychological formations of a childhood past that are being unconsciously engaged. In the face of severe anxiety about the burden of individuation and the threat of dissolution, of drowning, one wants to establish and secure a style and cadence of sustaining the self, with its own characteristic form, over time. That activity of self-sustaining advance can then be seen, in various glimpses, against a much broader metaphysical background. (As the Hemingway or McCarthy character moves across the landscape, there can be a fertile parallelism of three levels: the taking in of the physical environment as one moves across it, the advance of the lines of text across the page, and the fashioning in the self of an overall architecture for taking in the world as it appears.)

A further worry for the modern self is that as advanced capitalism drastically increases the stimulation, information, advertising, and ideological indoctrination that press upon the self ubiquitously, one will become just a shallow, empty site for the circulation of such cultural items, without anything left that could be called one’s own, that has one’s signature upon it as author. Important pieces of writing can be a kind of training exercise in developing a compelling style of appropriating experiences that can count as distinctively one’s own. Nietzsche held that a key project for the modern self is to engage in practices of redesigning the mental life of the psyche so that its typical activities are more effectively arranged toward a vital excellence of functioning; listening to the right music and reading certain prose would contribute to this process. We might see well-written sentences in the style of one of the excellent writers as like scaffoldings: external supports that aid one in refashioning or solidifying one’s own style and rhythm of taking on experience, of working out an effective architecture of self and other, of handling loss and the experience of metaphysical fragility, of reliving in a more mature fashion one’s longtime project of separation-individuation that began in early childhood. Or one might think of the world of the text as a prosthesis, an artificial adjunct to one’s own mental functioning that allows that functioning to extend its skills and capacities beyond its present weaker, more haphazard ones. Nietzsche would add that certain powerful texts play out in their ongoing line of prose the interaction of what he called the form-giving, experience-shaping, beautifying power of Apollo and the dissolving, de-individuating, regressive powers of Dionysus. One should feel, in the ongoing creation of compelling form that is the text, the deep, appealing pull of forces that would dissolve all forms. The implicit music of the line of written prose, in its cadence and voice and vocal maneuvers, suggests both the melodic individual line in music and the underlying bass that supports it, as a skilled surfer can maneuver beautifully on the crest of a wave only because those oceanic depths have surged up to support him. So a complex negotiation with unconscious forces that underwrite the conscious individual self is occurring all the time as the text moves on. Great writing can be seen as like a hurricane party in a house on the beach, a willingness to face the power of threats to one’s basic individuation because of confidence in the architecture one has constructed in the face of that power. That is why poetry that follows complex poetic forms, as in Merrill, and fiction that offers the beautifully unfolding and demanding structures of Proust’s sentences, can be so appealing. We seem to have a refuge against the chaotic world that would dissolve the self.

I have mentioned Nietzsche more than once and see his influence throughout much of twentieth-century intellectual and literary life. While I would not want him to design my political system, he can be quite brilliant regarding the relations among human psychology, aesthetic achievement, and the project of generating individuals whose lives can be worth admiring. It is surely possible that both of the following are true: that a democracy granting equal representation, equal rights, and equal opportunities is the best form of government, and that the leveling forces of modernity produce selves that may be far from admirable, in that they are passive, are usually driven about by shallow, changeable external stimuli, and are without the qualities of character needed to produce activities that are truly worthy of our attention and imitation. Nietzsche at least asks how literature and music might be marshaled in the face of that undesirable outcome.

Frank mentions Nietzsche on a couple of occasions, including a “blond beast” reference and a linkage to Gide’s Immoralist, but that is a typically shallow way of treating Nietzsche that, fortunately, has become less prevalent in recent decades. That mentioning of Nietzsche is of a piece with the superficial, one-sided account he gives of the “individual lyrical voice” line of fiction that he observes over the course of the twentieth century. He represents that line, we saw, by what he sees as an endless self-obsession with one’s own interior processes. But as I have been attempting to demonstrate, working out the possibilities of the individual literary voice, with its rhythm and style and self-sustaining momentum, has to do with the deepest issues regarding what kind of self it is possible to be in today’s world. How can we face the extra pressures today of loneliness, separateness, fundamental loss, highly complex self-other structures, and a metaphysical fragility unsupported by the traditional social systems once available? These tasks are very different from the ones Frank sees in Gide and in the literary voices associated with him in Frank's narrative.

If we recognize this point, then something else Frank says will come off as another serious error. Supporting his account of a great breaking of the vessels, he claims that after the nineteenth century, the old narrative of European civilization from Greece and Rome to the Renaissance and the modern state had collapsed and had been blown to smithereens. Such a claim sets him up for a heroicizing of Perec, whose work takes that collapse for granted. But in fact, the great modernist masterworks remain profoundly depended on, and indebted to, that history. The Waste Land and Ulysses are unreadable without a very detailed knowledge of classical civilization. Jean Cocteau and Sartre offer plays based on the dramas of the ancient Greeks. Freud will appeal to Oedipus. Shakespeare will remain a dominant influence. Suppose we are serious about reflecting about what kind of individual self it is still possible to be, in the face of a more intense and painful experience of the burdens of individuality, of separateness and loss, of being so dominated by cultural pressures that there is nothing left to the sphere of the self. Then we wish to keep as many useful cultural resources as possible. We have to honor the extraordinary psychological and cultural wealth of the Greco-Roman world, of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, of German philosophy and music, of French poetry and fiction, and so on and so on. A Marxist or Protestant iconoclasm that wishes to erase these cultural resources, as fragments of a collapse that are now in empty freefall, is about is foolish a strategy as one can imagine. Yet Frank appears sympathetic to it. When we look at the novel early in the 21st-century, after the history Frank has described, it is interesting that one of the novels honored recently for its great literary power is Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. It is a novel that offers Henry James as a model and seems to ignore the experimentation of the twentieth century, including that associated with Perec. Do Frank’s landmarks tend to become less imposing as we look back?

Roquentin in Nausea looks to the aesthetic realm to find examples of necessity, autonomy, inevitability, and compelling form, as a defense against what he sees as the horrors of the pure arbitrary contingency of everyday existence. Now there are other possible sources of such a defense. One of the strong appeals of enduring aristocratic cultures across history has been their habits and character-building institutions that give something like necessity and beautiful form to the practices of individuals in the culture. This is not, of course, a strict kind of necessity; members see how different ways of behaving are possible. But their rigorous training makes them say that this is how we do things, whatever other ways might be available. Given who we are, those other ways are not truly available to us, nor do we wish them to be. In various circumstances of life, the correct way of behaving in accord with the virtues esteemed by the group will be evident, rather than a matter for Kierkegaardian or existentialist anxious choosing or for hedonist pleasure-seeking. Nietzsche praises the Romans, the Venetian aristocrats, the Andalusian Arabs, the nobles of the French classical age, and others for their harsh discipline, their training of members in a kind of beautiful inevitability of demanding performance and character. Proust obviously begins with a strong devotion to the French aristocratic elite of his time, even as his great novel will show ultimately the thorough decline of that class, until their actions are no longer guided by an aristocratic inevitability of virtuous action. And that is one of the points in reading Proust’s novel. There we see that the compelling forms, extended ritual performances, and beautiful, necessary gestures of the aristocratic class have been displaced onto Proust’s own aesthetic undertaking. Its proportional sentences, ritual unfoldings, and beautiful gestures will have to substitute for the aristocratic gestures that now, with modernity, are going absent. They will have to provide mental training rituals for the individual, as it were, that the larger culture can no longer provide. They will have to contribute to a sense of a confident and compelling style of confronting the challenging experiences that emerge as one maneuvers through life. Proust here is not alone. There will be a perhaps unexpected fondness of twentieth-century writers for the practices of an aristocratic elite that is vanishing or losing their defining characteristics. (See Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.) This will be one more direction of literary fiction that Frank, with his privileged Kafka-to-Perec line of development, will have little sympathy for. The novels of Elsa Morante and Anna Banti will be his Italian choices, not Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard.

Frank’s often negative, somewhat condescending stance toward the individual lyrical-literary voice of the twentieth-century novel appears to have clear parallels with a political stance associated frequently with Marxism. On this narrative, one has to thoroughly denigrate all the institutions and practices associated with parliamentary social-democratic parties and with liberal democracy in general. Only if we see the liberal political space as one of ruin, of empty gestures, and of catastrophic failure will we be open to the possibility of a radical revolutionary transformation and to the possibility of a utopian order thoroughly different from the present one. Adorno and Benjamin of the Frankfurt School argue for such a stance. In a similar manner, we might be persuaded by Frank’s Kafka-to-Perec narrative only if we see the “individual literary voice” alternative, in some respects the analogue to political liberalism, as, in contrast, an empty and shallow failure. Yet on the political side, it remains the case that with all their serious political and ethical flaws, liberal representative democracies have come off far better than Marxist regimes in their achieving of liberty, justice, and happiness, in their overcoming of fundamental moral errors within earlier incarnations, and in their resilience against massive social and economic challenges. We might expect to find, then, looking over the past century and drawing out the political analogy, that the individual literary voice is far richer and more resilient in the resources it offers to individuals and the literary world than Frank is willing to assign to it. Works of literature in this tradition both open individuals to a profound testing of unconscious aspects of individuation and offer rituals for guiding selves through those challenges and for achieving more mature structures of engagement with the pressures of reality.

We might profit once again by looking at Nietzsche. He has frequently been burdened by caricatural pictures of him as narrowly selfish and amoral, in somewhat the way that Frank treats the individual literary voice of the twentieth century. But Nietzsche is clear that his studies of the machinery of his own psyche are not due to his version of what Frank calls Gide’s “endless interest” in himself. Nietzsche engages in a rigorous self-examination, what he sees as like a painful self-vivisection, in order to discover the exact functioning of the often hidden processes that make up human mental life. One result will be the brilliant analyses of On the Genealogy of Morals and The Gay Science and the like. Nietzsche’s self-investigations are not an expression of a low-level narcissism or selfishness but are a working with the immediate material at hand to draw large conclusions about a science of the human psyche, one useful to humanity as a whole. Proust says very much the same thing when discussing his examinations of the human psyche for what he sees as clearly scientific purposes. And the same will apply to so many of the authors who try, across the twentieth century, to use all the various capacities of the individual literary voice to uncover the profound structures of the human psyche in its complex operations.

The work of such writers is, for Nietzsche, one aspect of our addressing the great problem of our age: How do we refashion the individual psyche in a healthy manner now that earlier cultural technologies for fashioning the psyche through discipline and training are no longer plausible? Christianity’s technology of psyche-design, the means by which it won the battle of the ancient world, may have had seriously unhealthy aspects as it generated self-lacerating selves, but it did give a very powerful discipline and energy to the self. Now its power is substantially waning, and it can no longer play its earlier cultural role. Aristocratic cultures once had harshly rigorous programs of training their members, but such cultures have also lost their power and vitality with the emergence of modernity. In urban, advanced, diverse societies, there are too many different ways of life possible for there to be a single disciplinary cultural regime that will fashion the human psyche in a suitably rigorous manner. The danger, says Nietzsche frequently, is nihilism. Individuals will emerge who are weak, passive, non-resilient in the face of challenges, faint in their commitments, incapable of self-discipline and excellence, and very easily shaped and manipulated by whatever external forces happen to emerge, since there is only a hollow, insubstantial space remaining on the side of the individual. The game of living a human life will come to seem boring and hardly worth the effort. So the great challenge in modernity, suggests Nietzsche, is that the pressure to fashion selves whose capacities and excellence make the game of being human seem fully worth the effort of playing it now falls on individuals themselves. Literature, continues Nietzsche, is one of the great resources to deploy in that important effort, as we learn to face experiences of aloneness, loss, solitude, and metaphysical fragility. We have to negotiate the complex, shifting borders between self and other, as we try to be both self-determining and fully receptive to reality, a goal made difficult by our having to join the brain patterns of early human childhood with the extremely complicated demands of modern life. The use of literature in these great tasks seems to come into play rather little in Frank’s account of the twentieth-century novel.

There is, I should add, another narrative regarding twentieth-century fiction that would rather thoroughly discredit the particular story I have been offering as an alternative to Frank’s. This narrative has interesting overlaps with Frank’s account, though they are not the same, and it is useful to have a sense of these congruent features. The stances I am curious about arose from what is known generally as poststructuralism in academic literary theory and from postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon that included attitudes toward fiction writing. Again, these two are not the same intellectually but have overlaps relevant to our present debate.

I am happy to grant that for many academics trained in literary theory since 1965 or so, the implicit premises of the case I present against Frank will come off as unusually naïve and notably outdated. I have been speaking of individual selves engaged in a difficult project of self-formation and self-cultivation. Against feelings of metaphysical fragility, of loss of crucial attachments, and of the burdens of separateness and agency, these individuals are trying to form an enduring and self-sustaining shape of subjectivity, a distinctive phenomenological pattern of taking in experience and responding to it, and a confident rhythm and style of selfhood. Both the very long history of biological design of the brain and millennia of cultural training have, on this story, given these individuals a great wealth and depth of mental resources for interacting with the world and with others. Individuals have at their disposal rich patterns of mental activity involved in intending, believing, willing, feeling, meaning, valuing, and so forth. In understanding how meanings come to inhere in our linguistic and cultural artifacts, we have to go back to those intricate patterns of individual mental activity. Practices of self-making, self-discipline, and self-cultivation can lead, if one is fortunate, to achievements that express a real degree of self-mastery and self-determination. Literature and music may aid in such practices.

I could go on, of course, but most readers will recognize the typical features of that account and many readers with training in academic literary theory will understand how very radically it has supposedly been discredited and rejected. The relevant arguments are many, different in kind perhaps but with the same outcome. Virtually all aspects of the picture just presented will be considered illegitimate and illusory. One direction of argument comes from a Marxism or quasi-Marxism that holds that individual selves have virtually no character, identity, or substance of their own but are ideological constructs of the social, economic, and linguistic systems in power. The emptier you make subjectivity on its own, the more space a social revolution will have available to produce a thoroughly new ideological construction that will constitute the sphere of the self. In Fredric Jameson’s version of such an account, the unified, self-determining individual with a distinctive phenomenological style of shaping experience, a self that can be genuinely an agent and author of actions and meanings, was an ideological artifact of high bourgeois capitalism, a very temporary blip on the historical radar. That bourgeois monad is already fragmenting and vanishing under the ubiquitous commodity/advertising culture of late capitalism. This means, says Jameson, that this is the end of unified individuality and of a distinctive personal style. It is the end of the bourgeois and high-modernist experiences of anxiety, alienation, isolation, solitude, and anomie. There is not only a liberation from anxiety about existential fragility, but a liberation from feelings and emotions in general, since, claims Jameson, there is no longer an individual self present to do the feeling. Feelings have become free-floating and impersonal. Selves are just weak collections of shallow, commodified, widely circulating cultural fragments that inhabit for a while the empty spaces of human selves, who have virtually no unity and character of their own. As selves are thoroughly fragmented and links between the different segments are weakened, time and memory become less important as significant human themes.

Others arrive at a similar conclusion through a different route. Paul de Man was one of the architects of what became known as deconstruction. On the account of literature I have been defending, the literary text faces great depth and substantive autonomy in two directions. First, it is trying to bring into view a powerful, self-articulating world that reaches well beyond our ability to capture its subtle patterns and contours, and that in its magnitude shows the fragility of our small efforts on the planet. Second, the literary text is trying to capture the extraordinary depth and intricacy, both conscious and unconscious, of a human subjectivity rooted in biological processes of great power and complexity, processes that shape very many aspects of our intending, willing, meaning, believing, feeling, and so forth. De Man would radically thin out both kinds of depth, that of the world and that of the self, until they nearly vanish. Both world and subjectivity become empty spaces where Language is projecting its own linguistic happenings. Language, on de Man’s story, is not so much a human construction that serves human instrumental purposes. It is a machinery that one should see as ultimately inhuman in its operations. Its material shapes and sounds, in various sequences and associations, keep generating meanings, by its very mechanical, anonymous running, that may have a little to do with the human mental states of the speakers. We are likely to have a certain image such that determinate human mental states impress their intentions and meanings on what have been meaningless sequences of possible signifiers. But according to de Man, Language keeps destabilizing, undermining, multiplying, perverting, and distorting those meanings and intentions. Even worse, Language is the power structure that projects its favored patterns on human mental spaces and generates what only appear to be individual feelings and other mental states, as human meaning and intention are nearly lost or dissolved. When poets are supposedly expressing their painful and difficult mental states, says de Man, what is really happening is that Language is using that system of psychological talk to capture difficulties, tensions, and stresses in its own operations as linguistic. Human feelings supposedly attached to anxious, lonely, conflicted individuals are, then, an ideological illusion. This deconstruction of subjectivity is joined in by Derrida as well. Whenever there seems to be an experience of a vital coming-into-view of the world itself or a coming into substantial presence of the individual’s interior states, those experiences, claims Derrida, are falsely conceived. What is really happening is that Language is being shunted sideways toward other bits of language in an endless deferral. World-presence and self-presence never quite happen. There is no such thing as having one’s mental states and feelings in evidence. Rather, the individual’s intentions, meanings, and feelings are always determined in their identity and content, in part, by linguistic happenings elsewhere that can never be mastered by the speaker or thinker. One can evade the power systems of the culture, Derrida suggests, by a self-deconstructing, self-fragmenting, self-multiplying activity that makes any determinate identity or any determinate experience of the self impossible.

Postmodern literary practice, while for some purposes it needs to be clearly distinguished from academic poststructuralism and quasi-Marxism, contributes to a similar outcome. High modernism, with all its experimentation, still continued one strong commitment of the nineteenth-century novel: a duty to uncover and to present the deep, poorly understood articulations of the world itself and of the psychological lives of individuals. Proust, Joyce, Mann, Eliot, and Lawrence might choose different literary forms but all felt they were like scientists in exploring the actual depth structures of human psychological life. Postmodern writers from 1965 on (sample writers in the US would be Barth, Barthelme, Sukenick, and many others) give up that sense of duty entirely. Just as Language becomes the dominant determining power for de Man and others, so the fictional space for the postmodern writer takes on a position of absolute mastery over the world conveyed. Time and space can be played with in whatever ways that fictional space prefers. Physically impossible events can happen with regularity. Individual characters may operate under whatever arbitrary psychological laws the fiction writer wishes to assign, even if these have little to do with how humans actually behave. So, subjectivity becomes a thin fictional construct with no character of its own that a writer must be faithful to.

A particular version of the postmodern is offered by Jean-François Lyotard. Postmodernism in the arts, notably in painting, so he claims, has moved beyond the goals of traditional humanism. It is no longer restricted to ideas that can be revealed or expressed through our human faculties of imagination and sensibility, as in all previous art. Rather, ideas are being searched for and pointed to that are not merely novel but that are in a strong sense unrepresentable: our human capacities for representation just are not adequate for the job. So art is moving in an inhuman, sublime direction. It will no longer do its work in a symbiotic coalition with individual human projects directed toward, and full of anxieties about, self-formation, separation-individuation, self-determination, and the like. The linkage of art to such projects has been broken.

I have been surveying thoughts that emerge from rather different intellectual frameworks, but they tend toward the same conclusion. Call it the death of subjectivity; the deconstruction of the individual self; the collapse of the autonomous individual of high bourgeois capitalism; the thorough undermining of the stance of an individual self positioning itself in a compelling manner in a larger universe not designed for it; the downfall of any hope of achieving what is properly one’s own, of attaining any genuine degree of self-determination. The space of the self, it is claimed, is always being thoroughly determined by the pressures of systems that one has little awareness of, as if we were ventriloquist dummies unaware of the larger systems speaking through us. Very many of the findings of the academic and cultural worlds, whatever their intellectual foundation, have contributed to such results. It will be very clear, to any reader of the present piece, that the case I have made against Frank’s narrative of the twentieth-century novel requires precisely the conceptions of the individual self that are thus being brought under a severe overall attack. So, while Frank may not attach himself to particular poststructuralist or postmodern programs, he can use them as allies in his demeaning, devaluing attitude toward the individual, lyrical-literary, heroic-tragic voice of subjectivity, insofar as that voice is central to the twentieth-century novel. Lyotard’s linkage of a postmodern sublime to unrepresentability should also please him.

I believe, in contrast, that the attacks on the status of individual subjectivity from Marxist, poststructuralist, postmodern, and deconstructivist frameworks are, to an overwhelming degree, intellectually unconvincing. Making that argument would take another essay entirely, but I might suggest the shape of it here. Those frameworks propose a radically thinned-out world and a radically thinned-out subjectivity as the nearly blank slates upon which ideological, linguistic, and social structures are projected. So both reality itself and the individual experiencer end up as ideological or social constructs, with little substance that they might have on their own. Such a result is highly desirable for those, including academics, who wish to present themselves as endorsing thoroughly revolutionary change. For if one changes the social, linguistic, and ideological frameworks of the society, then one has thereby automatically changed the nature of reality itself and of individual selves. As much as possible of what has traditionally been taken to belong to the sphere of the individual experiencer must be shown to be a very temporary historical blip, an artifact of social construction, during the brief era of high capitalism.

But if we step back just a bit, that entire way of thinking appears implausible. The world around us has been developing its deep and subtle patterns and articulations for billions of years before we arrived on the scene; it is the farthest thing from an ideological or linguistic construct. The physical shapes of language and the happenings of mental life can count as a meaningful in the first place only insofar as they are, in general, fairly accurate registrations of that eminently robust world. When we worry about global warming and a potential destruction of the planet, we are worried about our interference in a rich set of processes that have been going on without us for a long time. Simply changing the way we talk will not produce a different planet as a new ideological construct. And something similar is the case for individual subjectivity. A few hundred thousand years of human evolution and, before that, a few hundred thousand years of primate evolution mean that humans have extraordinarily rich and potent mental resources, both hardware and software, for facing, and getting along in, the natural and social worlds. Individual experiencers have exceedingly rich phenomenologies for taking in the pressures of reality. They have powerful resources for developing complex sets of beliefs and intentions, for learning to work through crucial human attachments and separations, for shaping an individual life that is both competitive and cooperative with others, for finding satisfaction in displays of mastery and independence, and for mixing cognitive perceptions and emotive moods in complex understandings. Of course, culture makes a very great difference as it works on that biological givenness. Once cultures become socially complicated and economically developed, once they offer many diverse pathways for shaping a life and for situating members in a range of quite different social groupings, then far greater pressure will fall on individuals and their anxieties about living a particular life will increase. But this is not a matter of a tiny blip of high capitalism that is already vanishing. Once societies attain a certain level of complexity, diversity, reflection, and non-coercive opportunity, individuals will experience metaphysical fragility, solitude, worries about one’s value to others, and the guilt and shame of individual agency. There will be satisfaction in achieving a distinctive identity, an individual continuity, and a self-sustaining style, so that there is a compelling shape to one’s individual life as well as character traits that one can count, through self-discipline, as one’s own and as the source of one’s actions. When it comes to the operations of mental life, there is far more continuity between us and the ancient Greeks, or even between us and the ancient hunter-gatherers, than the hypothesis about ideological, linguistic, and social construction allows for.

To understand the near unanimity of the academic literary-theory frameworks, in their severe denigration and devaluing of individual subjectivity, one has to understand something of the sociology of the academic humanities of that era. There was little interest in tough-minded analysis and assessment of whatever arguments were offered, in terms of the strength of their inference patterns and the like. There was little interest in a rigorous weighing of evidence, so long as one ended up with the ideologically favored positions. There was little curiosity about exploring alternative explanations and accounts. There was very little loyalty to practices of objectivity and impartiality. Such activities, it was thought, belonged to tired, old Enlightenment practices and the goal was precisely to discredit those practices. Instead, there was strategic maneuvering on the game board of an academic strategy game. Winning moves were those that most thoroughly contested and negated the practices of humanism and of the Enlightenment, the two sources of the modern humanities. Any theory was rewarded that drastically reduced the role of the humanistic individual experiencer and its project of self-formation and self-determination, in favor of linguistic, socioeconomic, and ideological systems that kept undermining and discrediting the space of the individual. There was a kind of competition to see who could be the most anti-humanist. When de Man claimed that various poems were not about the ordinary human expression of hard-to-articulate human mental states, but were about the operations of a non-human linguistic machinery reflecting on its own linguistic tensions, the very outlandishness of the claim caused others to believe it, in spite of its severe implausibility. Sideways agreement with one’s fellow academics on ideological issues became far more important than testing beliefs against evidence regarding how the world actually worked.

So, my own view is that academic literary theory from 1965 up until fairly recent times is so intellectually bankrupt, down to its roots, that it cannot be used in support of Frank’s narrative of the twentieth-century novel and against my own. Nevertheless, it is surely true that the development of the traits, achievements, and cultural centrality of the individual experiencer requires a certain level of cultural reinforcement. One can imagine a claim that cultural happenings today might encourage a certain thought: that all the very bad arguments and outlandish stances of the academic theorists might actually have had a bit of predictive power. Consider the acknowledgment that very many, in an era of cell phones, are having their attention spans drastically reduced. Consider the power of social networks to take over and control, to a powerful microlevel degree, the precise sequence of one’s mental states. Consider the willingness of many to hand over their thinking processors to AI programs. Consider the way ideas circulate like shallow commodities and viral memes, with little interference from a distinctive and self-sustaining character on the part of the individual. Perhaps individual subjectivity is indeed rapidly being dissolved, devalued, and discredited so that it can no longer engage in the “humanist” activities my account requires it to. But why should we let academic training go along with such outcomes instead of resisting them? Perhaps the role of the novel in handling loss, solitude, and metaphysical fragility, in working on subtle aspects of one’s architecture of self and others, should be emphasized by educational training if we wish to give students the resources they will need to face the challenge of living a human life. Perhaps literary training should aid in achieving what levels of self-unity, self-determination, and self-mastery are actually possible, instead of going along with social and cultural forces that undermine individuality. Isn’t Frank’s narrative condescending and dismissive toward aspects of the novel that we ought to be warmly supporting?