In this post, I’m going to be entirely redundant and cite the topics of two past posts and show where there’s commonality, then get even more redundant and talk about stuff that was the tedium du jour in your first English Lit class. (The nice thing about blogs is that having one both allows you to assume that no one is reading it, and write it as if they and many other important people are.)
The first is something I want to remind you of, and then contrast to what’s coming.
The great project of literature has been to describe the relationship between the individual and society. ^
I’ve mentioned Tom Wolfe on this blog before, as I’ve mentioned William Gibson and William S. Burroughs. What I like about these writers is that they view writing as a means to communicate something which cannot be found elsewhere, which is the experience of learning and how it shapes your soul. They write in the context of the quotation above because this is how humans define our own soul-shaping. We are social creatures who exist in a society, and finding a balance between ourselves and this society is essential.
My first English Lit teacher told me that literature took on three forms. These forms defined the types of struggle in our lives, because struggle is how we find balance between two possible options. Through struggle characters define themselves, because when there’s nothing pressing bearing down on their lives, they tend to do nothing important and take nothing seriously, which makes for very very boring literature. Here are the three forms:
- Humans against humans
- Human against himself/herself
- Human against other humans
- Humans against Nature
- Humans against Society
The really tricky part there is the word “against.” Against doesn’t necessarily mean acts of terrorism. It does mean a jihad, or spirit-quest, to define oneself and where one’s limits are. A good example is the college student offered $5000 to act in a porno film. She’s got debts, she’s worried about the future, and doesn’t that sound easy — instead, she decides she’ll find another way of making money, and ends up owning a business that sells study guides to other struggling students. OK, that’s cheesy literature, but nonetheless, it’s literature.
Thomas Wolfe expands upon this idea with his concept of status. He has said that his books to date are about status, which corresponds to an internalized or externalized form of Nietzschean will to power. Status is social power, or cognitive dissonance internalized and a personal, moral power as we might see in Flannery O’Connor books. (If taken further, this becomes guilt power, and you find that in the execrable Barbara Kingsolver.)
Like most liberal arts students, I’d always looked down my nose at sociology as this kind of bogus science. When I finally had to deal with it in graduate school, I quickly came to the conclusion, which I maintain to this day, that it is, in fact, the queen of the sciences. I won’t get into this, but biology, in my mind, is a subset of sociology, not the other way around.
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Sociology is the big picture. As I say, I have a long involved theory, but I’ll only inflict that if you really want to know. My first great real flash was reading the work of Max Weber, who wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He wrote Class, Caste and Status, and many others, mostly essays. But he’s the one who originated the concept of status as a motivating force in life. It was one of those things that’s under everybody’s nose, but he gave it a name.
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My belief is that everyone, me included — I hate theories that don’t apply to the person who thought up the theory — All people live by what I call “the fiction absolute,” which is a set of values which, if absolute — in other words, God said, “Hey, here are the values,” and you heard the voice clearly — would make not you, yourself, but your group — your status group, whatever that may be comprised of — the best there is. For example, a group of good ol’ boys sitting around a general store in the South, and I’ve been around that a lot, they usually — things can get confused in this era — but they usually are very content to be good ol’ boys. And they’re not only content, but they value that life very, very highly. People who are obviously their superiors — or, in my case, my superiors — military people, politicians, President of the United States, movie stars, whatever — they become types who are really outside of your life. And whatever they’re doing doesn’t matter. Unless they move in the neighborhood, then it creates real problems. It really does. And so that just about everything we do is controlled by that constant need to feel that our status is being kept at a certain level. It doesn’t mean necessarily status climbing. It usually doesn’t mean that. More often it means believing that what you’re doing now, the people you’re with now, the values you have, are the most important.
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When I hit upon the whole concept of status and status absolute and all that, I was convinced that there is a part of the brain that controls this. For example, you can tell when you’re humiliated before you could put it into words. Something goes off. And you haven’t reasoned it all out. It’s just happened. And this has to be neurological in some way.
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Edward O. Wilson is probably the dominant theorist in neuroscience today. He once said in an interview — he probably would never write this as clearly — he said every human brain is born not as a blank slate waiting to be filled in by experience, but as a negative — as in the film, negative in a camera — that is waiting to be dipped into developer fluid. And the idea is, it can be developed well, it can be developed badly, according to the environment. But no matter how it’s developed, you’re not going to get any more than is on that negative at birth. Which, of course, gets into the whole theory of genetics and things like hard-wiring of the brain and so on.
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I do not know who first said this, but one of the principles of neuroscience is that if you took a rock and you threw it, and in mid-flight of that rock you gave it consciousness and the power to reason, that rock would give you, until the day it hit the earth, the most cogent and absolutely ironclad logic as to why he’s going in this direction, and why he hasn’t chosen another direction, and why he’s happy with his choice. ^
This of course stumbles along quite brightly into what they call destiny in the Star Wars movies. Wolfe rejects the external causes, like class and sexuality, that are the main talking points of Marxism and Freudianism, but he stops short of talking about the next level. Arthur Schopenhauer has no such hangup.
“A stone receives from the impulsion of an external cause a certain quantity of motion, by virtue of which it continues to move after that impulse given by the external cause has ceased…Conceive of that stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing that it is endeavouring as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor…would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion, solely because of its own wish. That is human freedom…which consists solely in the fact that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desired has been determined.” ^
Just to keep ourselves confused, let’s return to the statement we started with, which I consider a good mission statement for literature: The great project of literature has been to describe the relationship between the individual and society. I’m going to distill that down further and say The goal of literature is to describe the relationship between the individual and the outside world, because this includes humanity versus nature from our list of three above. We might also have to add on to the end and the relationship between the individual and his/her knowledge of that outside world, so we can accomodate cases when the individual is at war with himself/herself over knowledge, including moral knowledge, that others do not see.
How do we understand this in the face of the kind of biological determinism than Nietzsche and Wolfe talk about? First we have to realize that they are speaking of biological potential and tendencies, which means “free will” is probably not a reality, but “choice” might be, and that even if our choice patterns are predetermined, we can pick the best options available in those patterns. For example if I am biologically predisposed to pick whatever food at lunch has the most cheese, I can opt to pick one with feta and not gouda, get less fat and not die of cancer and so become more biologically successful.
Next we should look at how Wolfeian status effects the three categories of literature. Wolfe’s fiction absolute could be defined as a sense of place, and when that does not exist (the challenge of newcomers of higher status coming to town), the struggle for status could be seen as either a desire for making things happen as his character Charlotte Simmons does, or an impulse to deny the lack of “free will” and invent some other type of status, like fake morality or some personal pretense of the ego as absolute.
- Human fighting to be content with own perceived status.
- Human in denial of lack of free will; cognitive dissonance.
- Human fighting for lack of status in society.
What makes Wolfe’s status so interesting is that it represents not the primal struggle of literature but the human solution to it, which is either fiction absolute or a contentment with life as it has happened (biological determinism) or an impulse to struggle for higher status, whether real (evolutionary) or imagined (social status). It is this re-interpretation of the classic definition of literature that makes me think Tom Wolfe has not only fully understood postmodernism, but transcended it, in the same way William S. Burroughs has done but Thomas Pynchon has not.
[...] I wonder if this is similar to criminals who seem to think they will never get caught for outrageous and frequently transparent schemes. It’s an interesting development to watch, and seems to correlate to what Tom Wolfe calls the fiction absolute. [...]