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Despair in Contemporary Fiction
| Article
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11458 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1994 |
5,975 Words |
| Author
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Walter Poznar
Walter Poznar is professor of humanities at Saint Leo College,
Florida. He has published numerous articles on higher
education and literature. |
Pr?is Man in contemporary literature is almost everywhere seen as a tormented creature harassed by society, driven by uncontrollable forces, stripped of his dignity, a pitiful nonentity in a soulless society.
Our modern writers appear unable to create a Pip, an Anna Karenina, a Julien Sorel, because they cannot believe in the assumption on which all great fictional characters were based--that their lives matter, that they are important, that their experiences strengthen and ennoble our sense of life and our capacity to grow and mature in understanding. Unlike Dostoevsky, we no longer believe in the possibility of resurrection, man's ability to share in his own creation.
In the contemporary novel, there is usually either enervating intellectualism or volcanic, pointless rage.
What is most regrettable about the literature of today is its nihilism, which is like a leech that drains novels of their vitality and assurance. Thus, characters become as empty and puerile as Harry Angstrom in John Updike's trilogy, as barren as Pierre Salinger's young people in search of a mystical revelation, as bloodless as Kurt Vonnegut's protagonists.
So it is with relief that we turn from modern nihilism to, for example, the truly monumental pessimism of Schopenhauer or Leopardi. How invigorating to come into contact again with something deeply felt, deeply thought, deeply explored!
Saul Bellow, referring to Herzog (1964), has said: "To me the significant theme is the imprisonment of the individual in a shameful and impotent privacy."1
Doctor Parcival tells George Willard in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio: "Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified."2
Wright Morris wrote in the fifties that "privately, in the depths of our being, we are Huck Finn fleeing from Aunt Sally--publicly we create and promote the very civilization we privately reject."3
Of James Purdy, Gerald Weales wrote: "The assumption is that all of us, in so far as Purdy really has the word on all of us, live in a house divided. For the most part the interior room, the `real' one, the one where we live, is sealed off from the one in which we meet other people, talk to them, desire
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