Modern Fiction: The Effortless Journey

Upon the great king Solomon there came, at the end of his days, a vast boredom, a weariness deep as the sea, a melancholy made inconsolable by its own lassitude. He saw in the hearts of the sons of men while they live evil and madness, and “after that they go to the dead.” At the end of the path he sensed a time of deathly listlessness, a time when “the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders shall cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened.” This is the road which T. S. Eliot describes in Murder in the Cathedral: “The honor of the effortless journey, to the empty land.…”

This melancholy had not come upon a work-ridden drudge whose fingers had never reached the bright consoling flowers of worldly enjoyment. It had descended upon the richest, wisest man of his day, one whose every earthly whim could be, and was, immediately satisfied. He had savored every delight of the senses with discrimination and sophisticated perceptiveness. He had, in the phrase of Walter Pater almost two millenia later, “burned always with a hard, gemlike flame”—but the promised harvest of “maintained ecstasy” and “success in life” had not been reaped. Instead, he foresaw a condition which takes the greatest imaginations to depict: the death of desire. Both Dante and Milton depict it: the utter deadness, mingled horribly with continued self-consciousness which is the condition of the damned.

From the example of Solomon there radiate many paths of meaning and truth, but the purpose of this writing is specific and twofold: to note briefly the reason why man sets his feet on the road of the effortless journey to an empty land; and to show how certain works of contemporary literature mark a dreadful culmination of the journey.

The cause is easily spotted and quickly named: pride, deadly pride, which seeks, through disobedience, “self-fulfillment.’ The futile quest began with Satan, who “trusted to equal the Most High if he opposed,” and whom “the Almighty Power hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky.” It touched man when he was seduced by the promise that if he and Eve sought a “higher freedom” in rebellion they should “be as gods.” (As W. H. Auden says, this is the only temptation which Satan has ever had to use, for this one always works.) Adam’s motive, writes Francis Bacon (Advancement of Learning, VI, 138), was “not curiosity about Nature’s secrets but the desire for moral omniscience in order that Adam might be a law unto himself.” Even to the pagan Greeks, a pride so overweening as to seek total freedom is a manifest symptom of madness—and whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

For the moment, total rebellion is a heady wine. “O this cheers my soul,” cries Marlowe’s Faustus the moment after he accepts the dark counsel to “try his brains and gain a deity.” Milton shows Adam and Eve after the Fall as “swimming in mirth” as if intoxicated with new wine. Even in a modern work—a very great one—Conrad’s Lord Jim, the theme is still present, for Conrad still wrote within a framework of cosmic, divine order. Jim, abandoning his duty to the sinking ship Patna, saves his skin by leaping into a lifeboat. He decides to live to himself and for himself, and for the moment is exhilerated. As joyously as does Mammon in the “great consult” in hell, he dismisses his former condition of “splendid vassalage” in heaven and seeks his own good, from himself. “If God is dead,” says Dostoevski, “then all things are permitted.” The road of rebellion seems not to lead to the death of desire. There is none to cry “Ichabod!” Rather, the path seems to rise ever upward, shimmering in brightness. Forgotten as if never uttered is the ancient doom: “In the day that thou eatest … thou shalt surely die.”

But just as the plucked flower shows bravely for a day, and then droops and sickens and dies, so rebellious men and angels find that they have set their feet on a dry and rocky road leading to darkness. And they find that they have taken on their shoulders the yoke of a double and insupportable burden: the burden of irrelevance, and the burden of creation. They bear the burden of irrelevance because, so long as two things relate to each other in any way whatsoever, “freedom” is limited by the truth of that relationship; total freedom ends up in total fragmentation. Only in a meaningless jumble of atoms is such false freedom possible, and a sense of total irrelevance in the universe—an incapacity to see how any two things relate to each other—is a condition of total madness. To escape, then, they must try to bear the other insupportable burden, that of creation. Having escaped God’s environment, they must now escape chaos. But this they cannot do, for the power of true creation (the production from within one’s own power and virtue of a new environment in one’s own image) lies in none save God. Strain and twist as he may, the rebel finds that he can invent nothing new. It lies beyond him to imagine a new mode of existence, a new dimension of experience. Thus, hating that from which he has rebelled, he is forced into the humiliating role of imitator—in reverse. If heaven showed order, at least he can show disorder; if there was light in heaven, he can make darkness; if there was the unity of love in heaven, there can be the unity of shared hate in hell. Even in the realm of sensory pleasure, he finds he must continue to use those capacities which are not of his making but of God’s. So, in maddened frustration, he tries to pervert the channels of sense, only to find that misuse produces satiety and the death of desire. And then begins the boredom, the hopelessness, the ennui—the emptiness of Eliot’s hollow men whose dried voices, when they whisper together, are “quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.” The distant echo of the curse, “In the day that thou eatest …”

Faustus’ eyes jerk upward. Is not the darkness deeper? Is it not peopled with vague shadows? “O whither should I fly?” he cries. And so cries Milton’s Satan: “Which way shall I fly infinite wrath and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; my self am hell.” (We are reminded of the terrible words in Isaiah: “Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming.”) There is only one way for the rebel to fly: inward, ever inward, seeking a foothold on that dwindling island of self originally created by God but now steadily eroded by the waters of dissolution. And that brings us to the revelation in contemporary literature of the deadly end of the rebel’s journey.

It is a truism of modern criticism that the literature of no previous period has showed such intense introspection. “Probably at no other time in the world’s history has the individual been so much occupied with himself,” writes J. Donald Adams of The New York Times Book Review. This is the burden of irrelevance. Lacking any vision of wholeness or harmony in the universe at large, of which man is a part, the modern writer must find his meaning, his morality, his values, his fulfillment within himself. It must be suggested that every tiny thought or physical sensation is of sufficient importance to be written about, talked about, and interpreted in a dozen ways. But as Katherine Mansfield points out, when every detail is presented as of equal importance, it is inevitable that we should conceive of each one as also of equal unimportance. Consequently, the stature of man as shown in the “hero” has shrunk like a withered leaf. No longer Hamlets and Lears but the shuffling Willy Lomans of Arthur Miller (who defines tragedy as the failure of a man to live up to his own image of himself) and the sex-ridden psychopaths of Tennessee Williams; no longer beings created to great estate, germane to God and the universe even though fallen, but biological specimens, collections of cells, blood vessels, and bones with nothing of dignity or worth. Here is the true cosmic irony. Man too great to obey anything has become man the insignificant fragment. “The problem of the 19th century,” says one critic, “was the death of God. That of the 20th is the death of man.” Ours is the age whose faith is summed up by Julian Huxley: Darwin and Freud suffice.

Evidence of the disintegration and degradation of man in the hands of modern writers is so abundant that any selection must be arbitrary. And it must of course be remembered that fine literature continues to be written in our day in almost every genre, but it is writing which continues the traditional order and hierarchy of past ages, whether of Classicism, or Hebraism, or Christianity, those three great strands of the rope of Western civilization. We are speaking here of the peculiar quality of twentieth century writing, that which sets it apart from earlier periods and which shows the culmination of the effortless journey.

Perhaps the disintegration first becomes vivid and distinct when, late in the nineteenth century, the romantic hero-rebel dwindles into the absinthe-scented aesthete. The god of the movement was Baudelaire, whose own ultimate ennui after a life spent in search of sensation grew so intense (as he tells in his Journals) that he greeted with delight the first touch on his brain of the black wings of syphilis-induced madness. It is the time of James Thomson’s “City of Dreadful Night,” the most frighteningly melancholy poem in the language (“Lo, thus, as prostrate, ‘In the dust I write my heart’s deep languor and my soul’s sad tears …’ ”). A few years later it is the time of Dowson, Beardsley, and Wilde—Wilde, who with poignant self-knowledge, quoted Scripture in a poem: “I did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in mine hand, and, lo, I must die.” And it is the time when a minor figure, John Davidson (a suicide at Penzance in 1909), put his finger directly on the Satanic predicament: “For half a century I have survived in a world entirely unfitted for me … and I begin definitely in my Testaments and Tragedies to destroy this unfit world and make it over again in my own image; in my own image because that cannot be transcended” [italics mine].

But in the turn-of-the-century writers there lingers a faint beauty, overripe and sometimes corrupt, but suggesting that there has once been a fresh garden. In our own time almost every flower has rotted. The final writhing efforts to avoid the death of desire are all too clearly seen in Norman Mailer, James Jones, Mickey Spillane, Gerald Tesch, Jack Kerouac, and scores of others. It is with their perversions and barbarities in mind that Edmund Fuller writes in the April 26, 1958, issue of The Saturday Review: “It can be a somber and terrifying thing to contemplate man’s full measure of freedom and responsibility, and both his nearness to and alienation from his Creator God.” Only in our own day do we see eminent critics hailing as “modern and progressive” a literature which exhibits self-induced madness and cosmic disgust. These terms—madness and disgust—are not accusations cast at the modern cults; they are words used by the cults themselves. Writes Henri Barranger in Le Centaure: “Surrealism now aims at a condition which will be in no way inferior to mental derangement” (“Surrealism in 1931”). The entire “Dadaist” movement deliberately sought insanity, with its mink-lined teacups, its “pictures” consisting of a blank piece of canvas containing one tiny dot just off center, its “dramas” consisting of characters speaking inaudibly in diving helmets, its “objets d’art” such as the replica of a human eyeball swinging frantically on a metronome, its “poems” consisting of the alphabet spoken in the normal order, its “art exhibits” such as the solemn unveiling of a spot-lighted toilet seat, its shrieks of maniacal laughter and howls of defiance and despair. (The “beatniks” are rather enfeebled offspring of the Dadaists, but of them one does not so much ask “whence come these fiends” as “what meaneth this bleating of sheep in mine ears.”)

The symptom of disgust, the depiction of man as a repulsive blob, is the easiest of all to illustrate from contemporary writing. Limitations of space preclude even a partial catalogue. Two typical examples must serve. First, just to set the tone, the words of Wyndham Lewis in Blast three decades ago: “Men have a loathesome deformity called Self, affliction got through indiscriminate rubbing against their fellows: Social excrescence.… Only one operation can cure it: the suicide’s knife.”

And second, the works of the widely-hailed Samuel Beckett, an Irishman now living in France, author of the popular off-beat play Waiting for Godot. (Presumably Godot is God; he never comes.) In an astonishing, appalling trilogy, Buckett depicts human beings so far degenerated and corrupted that only the tiniest flicker of self-consciousness remains in the biological blob. Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable leave nothing more to be said. Man’s little drama, starring himself, is over. The name of his star is called Wormwood. Molloy, partially deaf and blind, victim to unnamed diseases, crippled, tries to cross a dark forest to get home to his mother. (A poignant homesickness pervades many sensitive modern novels.) The reader never knows what happens to him, but he never gets home. Malone in the second novel is even worse off, for he can only lie in bed and scrawl words with a pencil stub, reaching for objects with a crooked stick. He occasionally sees a hand reach in and place a dish near him or take one away, but he does not know where he is or why. Part of the time the place clearly is an insane asylum. He wishes only to be “neither hot nor cold any more.” (For the reader sensitive to rhythm, the background is haunted by the words, “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more.”) Malone is driven frantic by a “vast continual buzzing” in his ears, and is ultimately beaten to death by an asylum attendant. But worst of all is the “I” of The Unnamable, one of the most horrifying novels ever put on paper. Armless, legless, almost blind and deaf, “I” lives in a huge jar, head protruding from a neck-fitting cap at the top, his limbless trunk imbedded in fouled sawdust. Occasionally the owner of the restaurant in front of which the jar is placed comes out and throws an old piece of canvas over his head when it snows. The book ends: “Where I am I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

And so the great adventure ends. From glorious rebel, to ecstatic sensualist, to bored worldling, to frantic pervert, to hideous blob. Truly, he that diggeth a pit shall fall into it. The reader of much modern fiction is inescapably reminded of King Lear’s revulsion after looking at man as pure biology: “There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.” But we find a better sweetener than the apothecary’s perfumes in Solomon himself, for although he trod the effortless journey a great way, he did not, by the grace of God, complete it. He sought “acceptable words, … even words of truth”—and he found them: “Fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” And perhaps, being wise, he remembered Samuel: “Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.”

Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.

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