Picked-Up Pieces (49 page)

T
HE
I
NWARD
T
URN OF
N
ARRATIVE
, by Erich Kahler, translated by Richard and Clara Winston. 216 pp. Princeton, 1973.

Erich Kahler, the late literary philosopher and polymath, published some fifteen years ago, in the
Neue Rundschau
, two long essays on the development of narrative technique and perspective which have now been published in the Bollingen series as
The Inward Turn of Narrative
. Kahler’s thesis is more easily stated than grasped. His first sentence proposes “to show the vast changes in the modern novel as the consequence of a process that has been at work throughout the whole history of Western man,” and this process seems simply the development of consciousness: “Literary history will be considered here as an aspect of the history of consciousness.” The “inward turn” of narrative is in fact an outward envelopment, our mental incorporation of more and more of the outer world: “Man constantly draws outer space into his inner space, into an inner space newly created by consciousness. The world is integrated into the ego, into the illuminated self.” This grand one-way process (Kahler speaks of “advancing consciousness” with the confident progressivism of a 19th-century colonialist) finds literary reflection in surprising proportions. Three brisk sentences, and all of primitive narrative sweeps by:

The reader takes this “slowly” on faith, for very rapidly, in Kahler’s exposition, we arrive at Homer and the Old Testament, narratives of pronounced sophistication and “humanness.” Of pre-Homeric tales, the only example discussed is the fragmentary Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, which, though “still entirely within the primal mythic chaos,” does present, in the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, an “impulse to attain humanity”; “in it man is increasingly brought down to earth, is liberated from his primal link with the elemental powers.” More seems meant than demythicization of experience; as the gods recede into a distinctly separate realm, feeling arises out of the “internalization of raw event. By stirring the imagination narration itself—in contradistinction to mere chronicle—provokes feeling.” When we arrive, with Homer, at the threshold of Western literature, the gap between “chronicle” and imaginative “narration” has already been crossed.

What remains, humanness revealed, is relatively a matter of detail, and of increasingly detailed description of masterpieces. With Virgil’s
Aeneid
deliberate artistic construction appears in the epic form. Early in the Christian era, “novelty itself, the novella,” adds to the telling of acts of heroism and martyrdom “the relation of curious incidents, preferably spiced with eroticism.” Then “Christian influence [leaves] a new residue in narrative: deliberate, imposed meaning.” With the Renaissance dawns individual psychology; from Boccaccio on, narration becomes “entirely a psychological process.” The rise of cities generates a sharp contrast between town and nature, burgher and knight; from this contrast arises what Kahler calls “the romantic situation”: on the one hand, the burgher’s illicit impulses and fantasies find embodiment in the obsolete figure of the knight, and, on the other, the “new objectifying awareness of nature” produces sensuous natural description
and a complementary realism in the depiction of social classes. Milieu deepens its substance; “perspectivistic narrative” arrives, somewhat later than perspectivistic painting. Of this “baroque” period’s masterworks—Cervantes’
Don Quixote
, Grimelshausen’s
Simplicissimus
, Rabelais’
Pantagruel
and
Gargantua—Don Quixote
is especially momentous, because it supplies the first fully realized instance of “ascending symbolism”; that is, symbolism which proceeds from an individual instance to supra-individual significance entirely within a human world created by the artist, rather than the “descending symbolism” of the Greeks and Dante, wherein the signification descends upon the individual from a higher reality—a divine or mythic entity. From Cervantes on, the writer builds the symbolic structure out of himself, and the reader extracts it
for
himself. This immense “internalization” achieved, little distance remains to modern narrative. Milton, intending to portray the Christian cosmos, unwittingly dramatizes instead the “vast, immeasurable Abyss” opened to view by the new astronomy, and man’s dreadful, defiant autonomy within it. First-person narratives such as those of Marivaux, Defoe, and Richardson move the narrator’s observation post deeper into the interior of the confessing ego. Eighteenth-century poets, under the influence of deism, for the first time make nature an independent object of observation. As the invention of the microscope opens on the other side of man an infinity as daunting as that revealed through the telescope, Swift, in
Gulliver’s Travels
, rings a number of changes on the theme of relativity and arrives at an absolute condemnation of man. And in
Tristram Shandy
—“an end and a beginning, a harvest and a new sowing”—Sterne, making narrative entirely willful and sequence and time dependent upon the narrator’s whim, so imbues reality “with the patterns, structures, and techniques of consciousness that the creatively working consciousness finds itself face to face with its own image.”

There Kahler ends, having surprised us as much with what he dwells upon as with what he skimps. Even in the sparest summary, the book’s scope and strength of synthesizing vision must be apparent. Many passing
critical felicities adorn the exposition: Milton’s Hell, he says, becomes “almost a colony of paradise”; Pope’s linguistic wit “is constantly overflowing and leaving no room to breathe.” The critic’s essential service of
recommending
is enthusiastically performed; I can hardly wait to read
Clarissa
and
Simplicissimus
. The translators append their regret that Kahler did not live to revise his German articles for publication in English, but the translation reads well, and such imbalances toward the German as exist—conspicuously, the lengthy quotation from the poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes—are rather refreshing. Kahler was unaffectedly erudite in at least three European literatures, and the reader of English can only be pleased by the importance assigned Chaucer, Milton, James Thomson, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne. Amazing how much these Europeans can read into offhand British scribbling!

To Kahler’s generosity of spirit and shared learning, reservations must attach apologetically, like limpets to the back of a sleeping walrus. But
The Inward Turn of Narrative
in its sweep describes a bigger circle than it seems to fill. If we are to examine the evolution—the inward turn—of narrative, then we need to grasp primordial narrative at some point deeper than the Gilgamesh epic, which Dr. Albert Lord, in his class in Oral Epic Tradition, used to classify with the “sophisticated” specimens of epic form. Ancient though the Babylonian fragments are, they represent the end of a development whose earlier stages have analogues in the tales collected by anthropology. The world does not (as Kahler implies) age all in one piece; Stone Age cultures survive to this day, and among them the scholar might find clues to the embryology of this mysterious art called narration. Kahler considers a series of forms without searching out the question of
function
. Why do we harken to stories? What instinct do they arouse and satisfy? What is
happening
between writer and reader? Is the tribal tale-teller in the same relation to his audience as James Joyce to his? Are a medieval allegory, a dirty joke, and a Chekhov short story any more similar
in intent
than an icon, a comic book, and a Cézanne? Kahler does touch upon the issue of audience, provocatively but briefly:

The progression from “naïve” to “weightier,” from “unsubtle” to “ideal,” is not so much demonstrated as assumed. Indeed, an almost blithe assumption of progress pervades the book. Repeatedly, Kahler has to explain away some Hellenic anticipation of a post-Renaissance “advance”: “The art of classical antiquity often came to the verge of modern achievements—but stopped short at certain limits. Developmental processes do not proceed in a straight line. Rather, they occur in waves, or, if we prefer a three-dimensional image, in ever-widening spirals.” But art moves, surely, as often by regression and setting-aside as by any kind of accumulation. Hemingway and Pound said
no
to the elaborate genteel art prevailing around them; Cervantes, Fielding, even Jane Austen began with parody, in a spirit of deflation. Kahler instinctively sees human progress as the dethroning of the gods: “Man has liberated himself from his primordial entanglement with mythic powers.” The two-thousand-year episode of Christendom, then, lies rather athwart his synopsis. The narratives of the Middle Ages rate less than a paragraph. Whereas Malraux, in his
Voices of Silence
, persuades us that the portal statuary of Chartres and Rheims expressed something missing from the blank-faced marbles of Greece and Rome, the best Kahler can make of Christian influence on narrative is the “residue” that remains once stories are “freed from their didactic purposes.” Milton’s conscious purposes (and the overt deism of the nature poets) are brushed aside as transitional illusions: “This wide-ranging epic was inherently contradictory and uncontrolled, a transitional opus expressing the rift that had developed between science and Biblical orthodoxy.”

In a footnote, Kahler criticizes Erich Auerbach’s
Mimesis
for its “fundamental error in assuming that reality is a stable thing, always the same for all ages and persons,” and adds that “different writers have merely approached it in different ways. In fact, the reality of any given period is the product of struggling and advancing consciousness.” But Kahler’s attempt to formulate his sensation that reality is constantly expanding, and literature with it, produces labored prose:

What does this say but that things are all mixed up? Auerbach’s stately and relatively static series of panels, each treating in great detail a lengthy quotation from successive literary epochs, manages not only to register a more sensitive impression of each masterpiece but to convey the feel of evolutionary movement more convincingly than Kahler. For what
is
“advancing consciousness”? Aristotle carried as many pieces of baggage, as many thoughts and facts, in his inner space as any modern savant. True, most of his baggage is now considered nonsense, but so will our baggage be. Does consciousness advance or merely shift its ground? What of the worlds of lore and observation lost to urban civilization? The Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, and the Bedouins as many for camel dung; is not the great poetry of snow and camel dung certainly behind us? How many of the three and a half billion persons living now, on the very frontier of the advance of consciousness, have appropriated more of the real world to their inner space than, say, a Carolingian serf? To most American housewives, electricity is as magical as mana to a Polynesian. The present young generation, steeped in technology, shows an astonishing willingness to live by astrology and diabolism, not to mention hallucinogens and Krishna. Are the fundamentals of human existence amid the wonders and menaces of advanced industrialism much different from the situation of Cro-Magnon man amid the wonders and menaces of untamed nature? All of recorded history has occurred in too brief a span for any evolutionary change; we confront life with the brains of cavemen. A mother suckles us; a joy of the senses crystallizes; alien shapes loom to block our desires; some desires are granted satisfaction; most are not; we age; we die. How has the drama of European cultural history, played on a little forestage of a continent by
a cast of characters that was never more than a fraction of the population of the world, affected any of this? More specifically, how does modern narrative, of which
Tristram Shandy
in its self-conscious self-pleasing may be taken as the first instance, change “reality”? Picasso and Pollock turn up on fabric designs, but what happens to the modern masters of narrative? Indeed, the penetration of art into men’s lives would seem, by some equation Kahler never suspects, proportional to the strength of its alliance with religion. Compared to the age of the cathedrals, we live remote from our art. Religion and technology are alike at least in that both attempt to cope directly with the pain of our existence: the first by offering us a supernatural consolation, and the second by dealing with our diseases and difficulties piecemeal. In comparison, modern art offers only distraction, sublimation, and a kind of empathy with the mental and spiritual aristocrats who are artists. The “patterns, structures, and techniques of consciousness” are of little profit to the run of men, and as overpopulation and diminishing natural resources reduce the margin of play in the world, refined literary art may be squeezed out even from the colleges.