Against Interpretation (7 page)

The modern form of the writer’s journal shows a curious evolution if we examine some of its principal exemplars: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Gide, Kafka, and now Pavese. The uninhibited display of egotism devolves into the heroic quest for the cancellation of the self. Pavese has none of Gide’s Protestant sense of his life as a work of art, his respect for his own ambition, his confidence in his own feelings, his love for himself. Nor does he have Kafka’s exquisite commitment without mockery to his own anguish. Pavese, who used the “I” so freely in his novels, usually speaks of himself as “you” in his diaries. He does not describe himself, but addresses himself. He is the ironic, exhortatory, reproachful spectator of himself. The ultimate consequence of such a bracketed view of the self would seem to have been, inevitably, suicide.

The diaries are in effect a long series of self-assessments and self-interrogations. They record nothing of daily life or observed incidents; nor is there any description of family, friends, lovers, colleagues or reaction to public events (as in Gide’s
Journals
). All that satisfies the more conventional expectation of the contents of a writer’s journal (as in Coleridge’s
Notebooks,
and again in Gide’s
Journals
) are the numerous reflections on the general problems of style and literary composition, and the copious notes on the writer’s reading. Pavese was very much a “good European,” though he never travelled outside Italy; the diaries attest that he was at home in all of European literature and thought, and in American writing (in which he was especially interested) as well. Pavese was not simply a novelist but a
uomo di cultura:
poet, novelist, short story writer, literary critic, translator, and editor with one of Italy’s leading publishers (Einaudi). Much space in the diaries is taken up by this writer-as-man-of-letters. There are sensitive and subtle comments on a lifetime of immensely varied reading that ranged from the Rig-Veda, Euripides, and Defoe to Corneille, Vico, Kierkegaard, and Hemingway. But it is not this aspect of the diaries which I am considering here, for it is not this which constitutes the specific interest that writers’ journals hold for a modern audience. It should however be noted that when Pavese discusses his own writing, it is not as the writer of it but rather as a reader or critic. There is no discussion of work-in-progress, or plans and sketches for stories, novels, and poems to be written. The only work discussed is what has been finished. Another notable omission in the diaries is any reflection of Pavese’s involvement in politics—neither his anti-fascist activities, for which he was imprisoned for ten months in 1935, nor his long, ambivalent, and finally disillusioned association with the Communist Party.

It might be said that there are two
personae
in the diary. Pavese the man, and Pavese the critic and reader. Or: Pavese thinking prospectively, and Pavese thinking retrospectively. There is the self-reproachful and self-exhortatory analysis of his feelings and projects; the focus of reflection is on his talents—as a writer, as a lover of women, and as a prospective suicide. Then there is all the retrospective comment: analyses of some of his completed books, and their place in his work; the notes on his reading. Insofar as the “present” of Pavese’s life enters the diaries at all, it is mainly in the form of a consideration of his capabilities and prospects.

Apart from writing, there are two prospects to which Pavese continually recurs. One is the prospect of suicide, which tempted Pavese at least as early as his university years (when two of his close friends killed themselves) and is a theme to be found on almost every page of the diaries. The other is the prospect of romantic love and erotic failure. Pavese shows himself as tormented by a profound sense of sexual inadequacy, which he bulwarked by all sorts of theories about sexual technique, the hopelessness of love, and the sex war. Remarks on the predatoriness, the exploitativeness of women are interspersed with confessions of his own failure to love, or to provide sexual satisfaction. Pavese, who never married, records in the journal the reactions to a number of long affairs and casual sexual experiences, usually at the point when he is expecting trouble or after they actually have failed. The women themselves are never described; the events of the relationship are not even alluded to.

The two themes are intimately connected, as Pavese himself experienced. In the closing months of his life, in the midst of an unhappy affair with an American film star, he writes: “One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love—any love—reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness … Deep, deep down, did I not clutch at this amazing love affair as it flew … to make myself revert to my old thought—my long-standing temptation, to have an excuse for thinking of it again: love and death. This is the hereditary pattern.” Or again, in an ironic vein, Pavese remarks: “It is possible not to think about women, just as one does not think about death.” Women and death never ceased to fascinate Pavese, and with an equal degree of anxiety and morbidity, since his main problem in both cases was whether he would be equal to the occasion.

What Pavese has to say about love is the familiar other side of romantic idealization. Pavese rediscovers, with Stendhal, that love is an essential fiction; it is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. What one takes to be an attachment to another person is unmasked as one more dance of the solitary ego. It is easy to see how this view of love is peculiarly congruent to the modern vocation of the writer. In the Aristotelian tradition of art as imitation, the writer was the medium or vehicle for describing the truth about something outside himself. In the modern tradition (roughly, Rousseau forward) of art as expression, the artist tells the truth about himself. Therefore it was inevitable that a theory of love as an experience or revelation of oneself, deceptively presented as an experience or revelation of the value of a loved person or object, should suggest itself. Love, like art, becomes a medium of self-expression. But because making a woman is not as solitary an act as making a novel or a poem, it is doomed to failure. A prevailing theme of serious literature and cinema today is the failure of love. (When we encounter the opposite statement, as for instance in
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
or in Louis Malle’s film
The Lovers,
we incline to describe it as a “fairy tale.”) Love dies because its birth was an error. However, the error remains a necessary one, so long as one sees the world, in Pavese’s words, as a “jungle of self-interest.” The isolated ego does not cease to suffer. “Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anaesthetic.”

A further consequence of this modern belief in the fictional nature of erotic attachment is a new self-conscious aquiescence in the inevitable attractiveness of unrequited love. As love is an emotion felt by the solitary ego and mistakenly projected outward, the impregnability of the beloved’s ego exercises a hypnotic attraction for the romantic imagination. The lure of unrequited love lies in the identity of what Pavese calls “perfect behavior” and a strong, absolutely isolated, indifferent ego. “Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference,” Pavese writes in his diary in 1940. “Perhaps that is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference; she represents ‘style,’ the fascination of ‘class,’ all that is desirable.”

Many of Pavese’s remarks on love seem like a case history supporting the thesis of Denis de Rougemont and other historians of the Western imagination who have traced the evolution of the Western image of sexual love since Tristan and Isolde as a “romantic agony,” a death-wish. But the striking rhetorical enmeshment of the terms “writing,” “sex,” and “suicide” in Pavese’s diaries indicates that this sensibility in its modern form is more complex. Rougemont’s thesis may throw light on the Western overvaluation of love, but not on the modern pessimism about it: the view that love, and sensual fulfillment, are hopeless projects. Rougemont might well have used Pavese’s own words: “Love is the cheapest of religions.”

My own view is that the modern cult of love is not part of the story of a Christian heresy (Gnostic, Manichean, Catharist), as Rougemont suggests, but expresses the central and peculiarly modern preoccupation of the loss of feeling. To wish to cultivate “the art of looking at ourselves as though we were characters in one of our novels … as the way to put ourselves in a position to think constructively and reap the benefits” reveals Pavese speaking hopefully about a situation of self-alienation which elsewhere in the diaries is a subject of continual sorrow. For “life begins in the body,” as Pavese observes in another entry; and he continually gives voice to the reproach which the body makes to the mind. If civilization may be defined as that stage of human life at which, objectively, the body becomes a problem, then our moment of civilization may be described as that stage at which we are subjectively aware of, and feel trapped by, this problem. Now we aspire to the life of the body and we reject the ascetic traditions of Judaism and Christianity, but we are still confined in the generalized sensibility which that religious tradition bequeathed us. Hence we complain; we are resigned and detached; we complain. Pavese’s continual prayers for the strength to lead a life of rigorous seclusion and solitude (“The only heroic rule is to be alone, alone, alone”) are entirely of a piece with his repeated complaints about his inability to feel. (See, for example, his remarks on his absence of feeling when his best friend, Leone Ginzburg, eminent professor and Resistance leader, was tortured to death by the fascists in 1940.) Here is where the modern cult of love enters: it is the main way in which we test ourselves for strength of feeling, and find ourselves deficient.

Everyone knows that we have a different, much more emphatic view of love between the sexes than the ancient Greeks and the Orientals, and that the modern view of love is an extension of the spirit of Christianity, in however attenuated and secularized a form. But the cult of love is not, as Rougemont claims, a Christian
heresy.
Christianity is, from its inception (Paul), the romantic religion. The cult of love in the West is an aspect of the cult of suffering—suffering as the supreme token of seriousness (the paradigm of the Cross). We do not find among the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and the Orientals the same value placed on love because we do not find there the same positive value placed on suffering. Suffering was not the hallmark of seriousness; rather, seriousness was measured by one’s ability to evade or transcend the penalty of suffering, by one’s ability to achieve tranquillity and equilibrium. In contrast, the sensibility we have inherited identifies spirituality and seriousness with turbulence, suffering, passion. For two thousand years, among Christians and Jews, it has been spiritually fashionable to be in pain. Thus it is not love which we overvalue, but suffering—more precisely, the spiritual merits and benefits of suffering.

The modern contribution to this Christian sensibility has been to discover the making of works of art and the venture of sexual love as the two most exquisite sources of suffering. It is this that we look for in a writer’s diary, and which Pavese provides in disquieting abundance.

[
1962
]

Simone Weil

T
HE
culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. Mostly it is a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering—rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer’s words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his works to the elder statesman of German letters “on the knees of his heart”—the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist’s plays and tales were mined—is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, most of Goethe is a classroom bore. In the same way, such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us precisely because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction.

Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Thus I do not mean to decry a fashion, but to underscore the motive behind the contemporary taste for the extreme in art and thought. All that is necessary is that we not be hypocritical, that we recognize why we read and admire writers like Simone Weil. I cannot believe that more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books and essays really share her ideas. Nor is it necessary—necessary to share Simone Weil’s anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church, or accept her gnostic theology of divine absence, or espouse her ideals of body denial, or concur in her violently unfair hatred of Roman civilization and the Jews. Similarly, with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; most of their modern admirers could not, and do not embrace their ideas. We read writers of such scathing originality for their personal authority, for the example of their seriousness, for their manifest willingness to sacrifice themselves for their truths, and—only piecemeal—for their “views.” As the corrupt Alcibiades followed Socrates, unable and unwilling to change his own life, but moved, enriched, and full of love, so the sensitive modern reader pays his respect to a level of spiritual reality which is not, could not, be his own.