Winter Comes for the Unexamined Life
What can I possibly find to fail to examine today? It is time to transgress another border and show that nothing is beyond the pale, nothing.
The Victorian moment, I understand, has gone out of the world. It was a curious moment, but then, all of them must be. Something about ours, if you think of it, will also be preserved and prove, at least, curious. The curiously promiscuous and obsessed nature of our age will surely be remarked by others. In our age every propriety has been offended. At least the effect of such a transgression—the effect, that is, it was meant to elicit—has been worn out. Perhaps we can hope the practice will die out and eventually wear away.
I mention the Victorian moment because I am reading Wilkie Collins. I was trying to think of a proper description of how the moment struck me, at least from what the novel provides. I think it was a moment characterized by extravagance. The moment was less disciplined than the subsequent, it was emotionally more uninhibited, not concerned with a mask of knowing. It was more vivid in its drama. It was more expansive and less willing to be certain. There was nowhere the self-conscious tight hold of the twentieth century.
Of course, it could just be Wilkie Collins. My knowledge is limited. We only have the books, the music, the art and other artifacts, and my exposure to them can be considered limited. Still, I think individual peculiarities are not as evident to the uninitiated, and so they would not clutter up my view. When one first goes to Mexico one notices how mexican all the Mexicans look; one also sees them all alike: they look the same. Generalizing is perhaps something the uninitiated may attempt with greater success than particularizing. This, at least, is my rationale.
Perhaps the Victorian age is extravagant with a decadent profusion.
I have trouble reading some modern novels. The trouble is that the awareness of the characters into which these novels sink seems like nothing so much as the awareness of insects—insects whose consciousness has risen to one which is for humans degrading. The awareness is alimentary, reproductive, social in a narcissistic way, and generally devoid of anything spiritual, anything higher. It is mostly predatory or simply pathetic. I like Ian McEwan for making fun of it successfully.
Mostly predatory or simply pathetic: there is a certain limited range of modern alternatives that the Victorians, for all their excess, did not have to endure. They had a range of possibility and the shades of nuance which allowed them to still be delicate. Delicacy in modern writing must be difficult because, it seems to me, it is rare.
I think Robert Penn Warren wrote delicately. I also think Faulkner was capable of it. I think it is for this reason Weaver made bleak pronouncements about the audience such writing could hope for. Flannery O’Connor understood this. Whether she might have written delicately is another matter, I am pretty sure she did not write delicately—and to good effect!
And now we do not live in an age where comprehensive explanations or ordered systems of thought find eager reception. These entire explanations do not appeal to us because we believe in their limitations more than anything else. We are not willing to attempt to explain reality in terms we cannot accept, and nowadays reality is too great and diffuse for us. If it has not grown, it certainly has become more mysterious, or confusing. In our day, being eclectic is a greater honesty than being loyal.
Their drama, Victorian life as they experience it, could be more dry, I think as I listen to the book. To tell the same thing I would want to be more dry. But it would not be Victorian, and to convert it and refuse the Victorian way of telling it would be to miss something touching on essential.
So why could not I write a Victorian novel? I am asking what makes me something else than a Victorian. The question is: what is different besides the chronological date? It is that I reject the meanings? Is it that their force, which seems inadequate, is not sufficiently delicate for my perceptions? I do not think it is delicacy which makes me resist the practice of their extravagance. I could never be so delicate, but the question is not a question of ability, it is a question of finding the characteristic of an age. They are sincere, but had I their powers I could never put things in their way while remaining sincere.
Where does the difference lie?
It seems a satisfactory explanation to me to say the apprehending moderns wanted to constrain the vital Victorian excess. We, in turn, are apprehensive—perhaps that is not quite the word. We do not approve the project and more than mistrust it; we dismiss it and begin anew with more meager and more fragmentary considerations. We are, however reduced, still more self-conscious than the Victorian chaps were.
