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Philosophy in Literature: a Survey of the Novel of Ideas

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Philosophy in Literature: a Survey of the Novel of Ideas PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE A Survey of the Novel of Ideas by John L. Bell PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE Contents Introduction I. Political Novels ZAMYATIN HUXLEY ORWELL KOESTLER II. German Philosphical Fiction MANN BROCH CANETTI MUSIL HESSE KAFKA III. Russian Philosophical Novels TURGENEV DOSTOEVSKY TOLSTOY IV. French Philosophical Fiction VOLTAIRE HUYSMANS BALZAC BARBUSSE SARTRE DE BEAUVOIR CAMUS PEREC V. Philosophical Fiction in Italian, Portuguese and Spanish BORGES PESSOA SARAMAGO CALVINO VI. English and American Philosophical Fiction MARY SHELLEY STEVENSON PEACOCK WILDE CONRAD CHESTERTON MYERS GREENE LONDON HAMMETT HIGHSMITH 2 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE VII. Science Fiction WELLS ČAPEK STAPLEDON DICK LEM BALLARD CLARKE SILVERBERG BENFORD SPINRAD BESTER TENN LEIBER GALOUYE HEINLEIN DEUTSCH SHERRED KUTTNER KNIGHT POHL Recommended Reading 3 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE Introduction ACCORDING TO THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, the novel is "a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length, in which characters and actions representative of the real life of past or present times are portrayed in a plot of greater or less complexity.” An important characteristic of the novel is that its plot should capture the reader’s interest and induce what Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief.” It is this feature of the novel to which Graham Greene calls attention in subtitling certain of his works "entertainments". The writer of fiction may seek also to employ the narrative form of the novel (or short story) to convey a particular philosophical or social outlook to the reader. One way of doing this is to have a sympathetic character state the author’s opinions, or an absurd one express views which the author repudiates. Thus the insistence of the Dr. Pangloss character in Voltaire’s Candide that "all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds’—even when confronted with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary— is clearly intended as a satire on what Voltaire took to be the shallow optimism of Leibniz and his followers. The novelist may also choose to communicate a philosophical outlook not simply through the device of bald assertion, but through the subtler, and yet at the same time more realistic means of provoking selected characters to respond to “objective” situations tailored to embody that outlook. In Patricia Highsmith's 4 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE novels, for instance, the characters are placed in circumstances, often of their own making, in which they are impelled to act, occasionally with violence, and yet somehow avoid having to answer for their misdeeds. In Highsmith’s world, individual human beings act in accordance with their own immediate ends, through local causation as it were, but in the larger society randomness prevails. The novels and, especially, the short stories of Cornell Woolrich convey quite a different view of the nature of society, for, as in Greek tragedy, Woolrich’s characters are doomed from the start, their futile actions no more effective than the struggles of a fly trapped in a spider's web. In fact we know from Woolrich’s biography that his view of the world was irremediably pessimistic: for him human life was a mockery, an interval of meaningless anxiety and pain between birth and death. A different sort of pessimism concerning the human predicament—bleak, but tinged with romanticism—is to be found in the novels of the early 20th century Russian writer Mikhail Artsybashev. In his Breaking Point of 1913 he created what may be termed without exaggeration the "ultimate" Russian novel. Set in a grim Siberian village, extreme depression induces most of its principal characters to commit suicide. This fate is shared even by the "student" character whose role it is to represent optimism and belief in social progress: given all that has gone before, it seems inevitable that one turns the last page of the book to find that he has hanged himself in despair at the futility of it all. Artsybashev's pessimism (along with that of many Russian writers of the period) is traceable to the failure of the uprising of 1905, and the consequent stagnation of the process of social reform in Russia. 5 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE In this book we shall discuss works of this kind, philosophical novels, novels of ideas, or, more broadly, philosophical fiction1, in which philosophical, social, ethical, or scientific ideas play a significant role. We shall accordingly be concerned with might be called philosophy in literature; This is to be distinguished from philosophy of literature. (How much can turn on a simple preposition!) In the latter, literature itself is taken as the object of philosophical investigation, just as in the philosophy of science, of mathematics, of art, of music, etc. Philosophy in literature, by contrast, treats individual literary works as vehicles for the expression of philosophical (or other) ideas. If philosophical writings are themselves regarded as literary works, then such an approach would necessarily have to include the philosophical texts themselves. The works of Plato, Lucretius, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – philosophers who were also masters of literary style - are normally classified as “literature.” Works by less “literary” philosophers such as Aristotle, Leibniz, and Kant are usually excluded. Notwithstanding Stanislaw Lem’s remark that “once it is no longer assented to, a philosophy automatically becomes fantastic literature,” it is unlikely that the works of Hegel, say, will ever be read in the same way as one reads a novel. There is, in truth, no precise definition of the philosophical novel or novel of ideas. But all of the following novels, discussed in this book, would surely qualify as philosophical: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Honoré de Balzac's La Peau de Chagrin, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor and Notes from Underground, Albert Camus's L'Étranger, Elias 1 While the philosophical novel is the principal topic of this book, we shall also discuss selected short stories which clearly merit the description “philosophical”. 6 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE Canetti's Auto-da-Fé, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Jack London's The Sea-Wolf, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Joris-Karl Huysmans's À Rebours, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, Yevgeni Zamyatin's We, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Karel Čapek's War with the Newts, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Hermann Broch's The Unknown Quantity and The Sleepwalkers, Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, and L. H. Myers’s The Near and the Far. The works of Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges are immediately identifiable as philosophical fiction. Th genre of science fiction is also a rich source of philosophical novels and short stories. All of these will be discussed in this book. For lack of a better principle of organization, the novels and short fictions discussed in this book have been for the most part assembled in accordance with the language in which they were written. The only concessions to genre are made in the first and last chapters, which are devoted to political novels and science fiction, respectively. 7 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE 8 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE I. Political Novels THE POLITICAL NOVELS WE SHALL DISCUSS are essentially descriptions of dystopias, societies which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, are “imaginary place[s] or condition[s] in which everything is as bad as possible”—even though the denizens of such societies may be unaware of just how bad things are. We begin with the Russian writer Yevgeni Zamyatin (1884-1937). He had been a member of the Bolshevik party in his youth and was imprisoned, and later exiled, after the abortive Russian uprising of 1905. Having left the Bolsheviks before the 1917 revolution, his independent and critical attitude to the new regime caused him to fall into disfavour with its authorities, and as a result he left Russia for good in 1931. Zamyatin had a Manichaean view of the world, seeing existence as an eternal struggle between the forces of energy and entropy, life and death, the Many and the One. This philosophy had a pronounced influence on his artistic outlook: In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one form and one philosophy. 9 PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE A great enthusiast for the revolutionary and the fantastic, Zamyatin rejected realism in literature as an outworn, reactionary form incapable of meeting the demands of a time when both science and revolution had exploded the solid, familiar world. In an essay of 1923 he remarks: Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. Zamyatin’s anti-utopian novel We, written in 1920, remained unpublished in Russia until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. George Orwell had read this novel and its influence can be seen in his Nineteen Eighty-four. The action of We is set in the society of the twenty-sixth century, known as the Single State2. The citizens of the Single State are brought up to behave like machines and have lost their individuality so completely as to be identified only as numbers. They live in glass houses (We was written before the invention of television), so enabling the political police – the "Guardians" – to supervise them more easily. They all wear identical uniforms, and a human being is commonly referred to as "a number" or "a unif.” They live on synthetic food, and their usual recreation is to parade in fours to the accompaniment of the anthem of the Single State blaring through loudspeakers.
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