Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (16 page)

Intimacy can also be faked, or misused, or misunderstood. Contrary to expectations, it does not automatically accompany the use of the first-person voice: plenty of people, including literary characters, do not know themselves well enough to reveal their intimate natures. Nor will its appearance necessarily involve prurient or ugly details, though an intimate tone is certainly better at dealing with that side of life than the grand manner is. Intimacy doesn’t have to peer into anyone’s well-kept secrets to be deserving of the name. But it does need to give us a sense that we have seen the inside of
something
, and that something needs to strike us as real.

If grandeur gains its power by lifting us above or behind the scenery of daily life, intimacy derives its strength by focusing on that very dailiness. It cares about the ordinary, the routine, the unattended to. It takes another look, a closer look, at the things we knew but had forgotten about, and in place of grandeur’s panoramic or telescopic view, it gives us, not the microscopic examination—because that would be too reduced, too divorced from the human in the other direction—but the personal, knowing glance that passes between one set of eyes and another when wordless understanding takes place.

Intimacy in literature can also be wordless, but it relies on language to set it up. The intimacy may dwell in the words of the characters, as in that birthday exchange between Antony and Cleopatra, or it may be carried by the narrator’s voice; especially in the novel, it often does both. The novel is by definition an intimate form, with its prolonged private communion between reader and writer, its almost magical capacity to penetrate other minds (a magic that we have learned, over the centuries, to take for granted). But even novels can aim primarily at grandeur. And most good novels will combine at least some degree of grandeur—in their complicated architectural structure, say, or in their contemplative, reflective language—with the intimacy that is their more natural function.

Perhaps by now it is beginning to occur to you that my terms have their antecedents in other opposing pairs. What I am calling grandeur could be connected with tragedy, idealism, the sublime, the godlike. Intimacy could then be made to correspond with comedy, realism, the quotidian, and the earthily human. But does this alignment really work? You can already see that although the pairs may at first seem to divide up in an orderly fashion, they actually, when bunched together, overflow their respective containers. For instance, comedy and realism needn’t have a lot to do with each other (Zola amply proves that, with his bleak views of the underside of Parisian life), while the sublime can occur in all sorts of dark, low, earthy places (as it does in the Indian slums of Rohinton Mistry’s
A Fine Balance
, or the Australian outback of David Malouf’s
The Great World
). So there is something wrong with the old terms, or maybe just with the way they’ve been used. Literature does not lend itself to being corralled, and these older labels have come down to us largely as material for constructing fences.

Most readers don’t, in any case, categorize literature as they read. They enter into the individual work and follow the path it leads them on. I propose to do something like that now, scrutinizing the different approaches taken by a few grandly intimate (or intimately grand) works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. But first, let me ask a basic question: Why do we even
want
a work of literature to be grand or intimate? Why not just settle for having things their normal size? Why do we need the sudden and vehement contrast in scale?

It’s easier to show this with intimacy, because that is something we think we all desire. But regular life, as it happens, is constructed in a way that makes true intimacy difficult. We do not like to tell uncomfortable truths to other people we know, even the people we are close to. We do not like to see inside the minds of people when they are thinking their most horrifying thoughts (and even the most normal people think horrifying thoughts at times). We prefer, quite often, to skate along on the surface—not because we are superficial, but because we just need to get through life, and observing every moment to its utmost is no way to do that. It takes a literary work, sometimes, to force us to peer closely at human behavior, to consider slowly and seriously why people act the way they do, toward each other and toward themselves. Perhaps this is why so many of Freud’s sources were works of literature: he knew that he could most easily locate intimate truths in the pages of fiction and fantasy, in Sophocles’ wrenching Oedipus story and in Shakespeare’s emotionally complicated plays.

But having looked at ordinary human behavior in this minute fashion, we then need some reassurance that life is not all a matter of gut-searing honesty bubbling to the surface, or selfishness, blind desire, and secret wishes motivating what appear to be normal interchanges. We want the truth, but we also want it made beautiful—not in a way that falsifies the truth, but in a way that makes us able to accept it, by allowing us to see its messiness as part of some larger order. That, I think, is where the grandeur of literature comes in. It makes us believe, despite our practical experience to the contrary, in the superhuman capacities of human beings; it gives us a sense that our species can sometimes transcend life’s randomness. We all need to feel this at times, even (or especially) the irreligious among us. Literary grandeur gives us something to admire, something that seems larger than just our petty selves, and admiration is a feeling we cannot live without, however much we may think we can.

*   *   *

The canvas need not be large to support the panoramic or telescopic vision. A tiny lyric poem can combine the grand with the intimate in a way that is as effective (if not, obviously, as prolonged) as a full-scale play or novel. Take, for example, two of the poets I mentioned earlier in this book, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The intimacy of their tone is self-evident. In reading them, we hear ourselves addressed from so close a distance that we hardly even seem to be a “you” to these speakers—more like a second, interior “I.”

And yet the material these poems deal with is so powerful, so stirring, that a sense of grandeur enters in. “The Soul selects her own Society— / Then shuts the Door” begins one of Dickinson’s most memorable twelve-line poems. You can almost hear the door shutting, in the abrupt two-beat line that follows the more leisurely four- or five-beat opening. It is through the action of closing out the world—firmly, rhythmically, precisely—that Dickinson lifts her poems up to the level at which we seem to be gaining access to more than just ourselves. More than just
her
self too: there is something profoundly impersonal about Dickinson’s Soul. At the same time, the voice in which it is transmitted to us remains idiosyncratic, recognizable. The distinction between personal and impersonal falls away.

The poets in whom I clearly discern the transcendence I am calling “grandeur” are for the most part authors with a religious streak. Strangely, their religiosity does not put me off; it’s as if the poetry itself manages to explain religion to me, or make spiritual belief palatable, or at least lend it a meaning I can grasp with my secular mind. And sometimes their poems even address the exact idea I’m blindly groping toward here—the way in which the grand and the intimate can coexist, so that each is manifested in the other. Here, for instance, is Hopkins on this very subject:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

    As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

    Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

    Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

    Selves—goes itself;
myself
it speaks and spells,

Crying
Whát I dó is me: for that I came
.

I say móre: the just man justices;

    Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—

    Chríst. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

    To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

The language itself is grand, with its tolling alliterations and internal rhymes—proof in itself, it would seem, that each thing can find “tongue to fling out broad its name.” This is onomatopoeia raised to a philosophical level: the words sound not just like their alluded-to natural noises, but like the embodiment of the poem’s central idea, the notion that each “deals out that being indoors each one dwells.” It is also grammar stretched nearly to its breaking point. Odd inversions abound. The word “Selves,” in the seventh line, actually functions as a verb before it retreats into a pair of echoing pronouns. Meanwhile, the play back and forth between “I” and “Christ,” “God” and “myself” is so fraught and strenuous that the profession of deep faith almost verges on blasphemy. We and the dragonflies exist because God made us, yes, but He is only visible through our faces and their wings and everything else in nature. Everyman is Christ, and every self—even inhuman selves, even
insentient
selves, like stones and bells—has something divine about it. This, I feel, is a religion one can live with. (Though apparently the Church fathers of the poet’s own time felt otherwise: they instructed Hopkins to stop publishing his strange poetry and he, as a good Jesuit priest, obeyed.)

Religious grandeur, or grandeur that draws on religious principles, naturally takes a different form in the novel. Consider
The Brothers Karamazov
. All of Dostoyevsky’s works are tinged to some degree with religious belief, even where, as in a character like
Crime and Punishment
’s murderous Raskolnikov or
Demons
’ rule-defying Stavrogin, it takes the form of a willful resistance to belief. But in
The Brothers Karamazov
Christianity takes center stage from the very beginning of the book. When we first meet Alyosha, the youngest and by far the most saintly of the three brothers, he is living at a monastery, trying to determine whether the religious life is the right one for him. He also seems to be searching for hidden truths that he hopes may lie behind the ugliness of daily life. (As the motherless child of the boorish Fyodor Karamazov, not to mention the sibling of the violent-tempered Dmitri and the cold, calculating Ivan, Alyosha has more reasons than most for finding it ugly.)

This is a novel in which the family members have conversations like:

“Alyoshka, is there a God?”

“There is.”

“And is there immortality, Ivan? At least some kind, at least a little, a teeny-tiny one?”

“There is no immortality either.”

“Not of any kind?”

“Not of any kind.”

“Complete zero? Or is there something? Maybe there’s some kind of something? At least not nothing!”

“Complete zero.”

“Alyoshka, is there immortality?”

“There is.”

“Both God and immortality?”

“Both God and immortality. Immortality is in God.”

“Hm. More likely Ivan is right…”

It is a novel in which the entirety of Book VI, amounting to more than fifty pages of text, is devoted to a summary of the life and teachings of Father Zosima, Alyosha’s revered instructor. And it is also the novel in which one whole chapter, a frequently excerpted chapter called “The Grand Inquisitor,” consists of a strange, fable-like digression about the nature and intensity of faith in the sixteenth century. That this story-within-a-story is actually a “poem” made up and recited by the irreligious Ivan only complicates the novel’s many-layered complexity and ambiguity.

Still, even the bits of dialogue I’ve quoted above suggest how an intimate, individually inflected tone can be intermingled with these grand topics. In contrast to, say, Shakespeare’s characters—or even Henry James’s—Dostoyevsky’s people speak, for the most part, in mundane language. They repeat themselves and stumble over phrases and get things wrong and change their minds midstream. And the oddest thing is that even Dostoyevsky’s
narrator
speaks to us in this personal, slightly bumbling manner. “Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of a landowner from our district, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov,” the novel begins,

well known in his day (and still remembered among us) because of his dark and tragic death, which happened exactly thirteen years ago and which I shall speak of in its proper place. For the moment I will only say of this “landowner” (as we used to call him, though for all his life he hardly ever lived on his estate) that he was a strange type, yet one rather frequently met with, precisely the type of man who is not only worthless and depraved but muddleheaded as well—one of those muddleheaded people who still handle their own little business deals quite skillfully, if nothing else.

This narrator flits in and out of the story, occasionally reminding us of his presence, more often hiding in the woodwork, and at times conveying to us extremely private scenes at which he couldn’t possibly have been present if he is indeed, as he purports to be, a real person from “our district” and not a disembodied, all-seeing author. I have not yet decided, even for myself, what effect this narrator has on the relative grandeur or intimacy of Dostoyevsky’s tales (for he is there in some of the other novels too, in
Demons
and
The Idiot
and perhaps in others I haven’t yet read). Does his decidedly human and often inept presence make the novel more graspable by turning it into a kind of conversation between him and us? Or does the fact that his views are so partial and conscribed paradoxically allow the whole work to transcend itself, giving us the feeling that the tale is bigger than its teller, more complicated than he could ever understand?
Both
, I want to say, if that is not too evasive; and even then I am not sure that these two options cover all the ground.

This linguistic intimacy, significant as it is, is not the only kind Dostoyevsky practices. The points at which
The Brothers Karamazov
moves closest to us—indeed, grabs us by the throat and practically squeezes the life out of us—tend to be moments where plot is used to sound the depths of personality. These events, most of them sidelines to the major progress of the story, occur to and among the characters, allowing us to see how they respond to each other, or rather, how they actually
become
themselves in reaction to each other, so that our knowledge of them, like their own knowledge of themselves, is unexpected, sudden, and conditional.