Philip Roth was similarly perplexed about the nature of contemporary reality when he published his essay ‘Writing American Fiction’ in the same year ‘Catch 22’ appeared;

the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates; and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.

If he acknowledges that this disjunction between art and contemporary reality exists, Roth reckons the writer has a number of options, not all of them within his own gift:

Þ      enjoy it for the freedom it offers. Chaos is both an opportunity and  threat for the writers and their characters who are able to roll with the punches. Despite Roth’s reservations in this early essay he clearly belongs in this category, being one of the great urban novelists, alternately railing and revelling in the complexities and frustrations thrown up by the chaotic ‘busyness’ of modern life, yet finding his own creatively successful passage through it. Saul Bellow writes well in this vein, as does EL Doctorow and yes, Martin Amis. Oddly, Surrealism and Dada partly belong in this category too;

Þ      he can rise to the challenge and create something from the ruins (as Roth reckons fellow novelist Norman Mailer has managed to do in his unique fusions of autobiography and fiction; likewise the other writers of ‘fictory’, ‘faction’ and other literary hybrids (such as Gore Vidal, Louis de Bernieres, Robert Harris and others) who we’ll be looking at later;

Þ      retreat (aesthetically and/or geographically) into an artistic world of his own making; this self-imposed artistic exile gives the writer some distance from reality where he can maybe get his thoughts together, or wait for times to improve.

Þ      A combination of this alternative with the one above accounts for a good deal of Modernist writing, as well as the existential hero of Ralph Ellison’s superb novel ‘Invisible Man’, who, according to Roth is “alone as a man can be.” [1]

Þ      go mad when the disorder becomes so absurd, he can’t take it any more. Literature is littered with writers and characters  who can no longer build themselves any kind of order as their world disintegrates around them, from King Lear to Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, and the fabulous monster that is Allie Fox in Paul Theroux’s ‘The Mosquito Coast’.

These options will set the scene for the remaining three sections of this section. We’ve now reached the point in the relationship between art and reality where some perceive there’s been a total breakdown. Things can’t get any more disordered than a meaningless absurdity, yet from this point, we’ll be looking at writers who recognize and acknowledge this chaos, but who’ve chosen to do something about it, writers who haven’t been frozen by despair into inactivity (which is the vast majority of them). Because writers are incredibly resilient creatures, despite their frequent self-dramatizing protestations to the contrary. TS Eliot may claim only to have shored up fragments of poetry against his ruins, but ‘The Waste Land’ is one hell of a fragment. You might think he’s being ironic when he writes that -  and, in truth, we’ll probably never find out whether he knew he’d created a great work of literature or whether it was just a flawed attempt to do something. Whatever, the work of those who aren’t just happy to sit back and wallow in ennui can be viewed as just a tad heroic.

So we’ve now plumbed the depths of chaos and the only way is up!

Before we move on to the next section, however, I’d like to draw your attention to two novels of the early 21st century that acknowledge the potential for meaninglessness, but who address the issue in different ways that sum up how the writer can cope with what are essentially the two greatest threats to literature - the fall of language and the perceived gulf between art and reality, both of which aren’t hugely helpful when you’re trying to create any kind of meaning that actually means anything.

In JM Coetzee’s ‘sort-of’ novel ‘Elizabeth Costello’ (which is actually a collection of previously-published articles and meditations), Elizabeth, a novelist, gives a lecture entitled ‘What Is Realism?’ which contains the following observation:

We don’t know and will never know, with certainty, what is going on in [a] story . . . There used to be a time when we knew. We used to believe that when the text said ‘On the table stood a glass of water’, there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we only had to look in the word-mirror of the text  to see them.

But all that has ended. The word-mirror is broken, irreparably it seems . . . The words on the page will no longer stand up and be counted, each proclaiming “I mean what I mean!” The dictionary that used to stand  beside the Bible and the works of Shakespeare above the fireplace, where in pious Roman homes the household gods were kept, has become just one code book among many.

This fall of language has, according to Elizabeth, had an effect on the status of the artist. She feels “less certain” of herself than she would like to. “There used to be a time,” she says, “when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers speaking our parts.” But there is the clear implication in this novel that the crisis of meaning in literature is actually the result of literature shooting itself in the foot - it’s not just a recalcitrant reality ganging up on literature that’s caused the problem - literature itself must shoulder some of the responsibility.

What literature’s done is strayed too far from representing reality, to the point where it thought it could abandon it altogether.

The bigger the gap between art and reality, the bigger the hole interpretation can rush into, the more interpretations are possible within a text, the more that text is destabilised and the less it means. Literature isn’t simply reactive - it’s proactive too. And in some ways it’s been the agent of its own downfall.

That is the root of Elizabeth’s discomfort, and why she feels that “the bottom has dropped out” of meaning. So Spenser was right when he invented the Bower of Bliss, but in a way he could never have imagined; in actively looking for new ways to represent reality (let’s say in Modernism), literature has revealed an impatience, a dissatisfaction with nature, the status quo, reality, call it what you will, and this impatience has actually contributed to the fragmentation of society certain writers find so distressing. Literature isn’t just the plaything of reality - otherwise it could consider itself a victim with some justification; literature sometime drives forward the ways we perceive reality, and if these new and revolutionary aesthetics have chosen to stress fragmentation, that can and will have consequences not just for the way we look at the world, but the way we read literature too. Literature doesn’t exist in a cultural vacuum. As a writer, you can’t, unless you’re a total hypocrite, believe in the meaning of art and the value of what you’re doing and expect your meaning to have no effect.

So to quote two timeworn proverbs, Elizabeth reckons literature can’t have its cake and eat it; and that it takes two to tango, and reality and literature have, certainly since Kafka’s time, been locked in a dance of death from which her art is suffering the fall-out. And she can offer no solutions. [2]

JM Coetzee writes bloody good books, but they can be just a bit depressing.

The second novel is Peter Carey’s masterful, multi-layered examination of meaning, ‘My Life as a Fake’, in which the opening chapters re-tell the story of Australia’s most notorious cultural hoax - the Ern Malley scandal of 1944. Ern was the fictional creation of a pair of conservative poets, Harold Stewart and James McAuley, who concocted a plan to rubbish Modernism by inventing an undiscovered, diamond-in-the-rough poet, then getting a  left-leaning ‘alternative’ magazine (‘Angry Penguins’) to champion him, at which point they would out him as a fake.

In Carey’s version, the singular hoaxer is Christopher Chubb, a struggling poet who sends his former schoolfriend David Weiss (the editor of a literary journal), the manuscript of poetry by “Bob McCorkle”, whose works of “brutish genius” he publishes - only to be prosecuted for obscenity.

The first point Carey makes, is the complete disjunction of the art world from that of day-to-day life. In the dock, Weiss is cross-examined  by Detective Vogelesang, who clearly isn’t a regular poetry reader. [3] This gives Carey a golden opportunity to engineer a comical confrontation between the literal-minded officer and the poetry editor with his metaphors and meanings.

Then there’s a second theme - the ‘unknowability’ of meaning. The gist of Weiss’s responses to the flat-footed enquiries is that in order to establish what a poem means, you would ultimately have to ask the writer. Which isn’t possible in this case, because according to Chubb’s invented biography  McCorkle has conveniently “died”; as a reader, then, Weiss can’t possibly offer an opinion whether the poem ‘Boult to Marina’ is obscene or not, with its difficult structure and wealth of cross-references to ‘The Tempest’, and parodies of TS Eliot and Herbert Read. It’s just too problematical. So when he refuses to venture an opinion (he “sometimes seemed like a bright but lazy post-graduate hiding behind obfuscation”), the Court reckons he’s being deliberately obstructive. Cue more satire:

Weiss:             The poem starts off with the man examining the body.

Prosecution:             What man?

Weiss:             The man in the poem.

Prosecution:             Where does that come from - examining the body? I don’t see it in the poem.

Weiss:            Each thing he takes up suggests to him the inexplicability of                                     human life.

Prosecution:  Where does it say anything about the inexplicability of human life?

And so on. The representatives of the law cannot grasp that McCorkle has “ripped up history and nailed it back together” so that the “glistening green truth” can’t be glimpsed. Certainly not by judges and attorneys. And not by the  “allegedly esteemed psychologists from the Melbourne Tech” who are subsequently brought in to help establish whether the poetry’s fine art or pornography. All of these people, we are told, “couldn’t read a poem to save their lives.” Because they live outside the temple of art and are far too bourgeois.

Of course, Chubb doesn’t believe any of this guff about “the decay of meaning” - the McCorkle poetry is a parody of modernist verse, in marked contrast to the delicate sestinas and villanelles he usually writes. All this talk of a crisis of language and its attendant posturing is merely a  sentimental romantic conceit that poets use to beat themselves up in public - and as a ploy to deliberately obfuscate their meaning. [4]

Carey’s third theme now comes into play - that art and meaning can be more real than they look. The court proceedings are interrupted by a huge man with wild eyes and black shoulder-length hair who begins hurling abuse at the prosecutor (“you fucking philistine”), and who, it turns out, is none other than Bob McCorkle himself. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Chubb’s creation has actually come to life - or, rather, has assumed a life of his own outside the pages of the poetry. And for the rest of the book, he dominates not just Chubb’s imaginative life, but his actual life as well - at one point even snatching his adopted child.

His artistic creation has become all too real - and Carey seems to be saying that reports of the death of meaning are somewhat premature. Or, perhaps, that the Modernists were right after all - the risen McCorkle messes up Chubb’s conventionally conservative life because that’s what real life’s like - messy and disordered. It’s almost as if an agent of this “fallen” Modernist meaning is taking his revenge on an unbeliever who reckons meaning can be controlled, and who writes twee little chamber verses when his art should be reflecting the confused anger of the lapsed world instead. Or there might be a third wrinkle to the story - that you never know when meaning’s going to leap out of literature and start slapping you around - that the law of unforeseen consequences is the only thing you can be sure of. Or maybe it’s all the above.

And then there are even more wheels within wheels. ‘My Life as a Fake’ has a series of narrators, none of whom are guaranteed to be telling the whole truth. If, indeed, at all. [5] So nothing can be taken for granted. For example, Weiss believes “McCorkle” to be an actor, hired by Chubb to give an added twist to the hoax - and maybe he’s right. It’s difficult to tell. But amid all these Chinese boxes of meaning, the postmodern theme of the novel is never overstated - the theory arises from the story quite naturally. And Chubb does, finally, learn something from what he has done - yes, the truth is “dismembered and shattered”, and all the writer can hope to do is gather up these fragments and do the best he can with them. And if he succeeds (and throughout the book, we’re assured that Chubb’s McCorkle poems are actually excellent pieces of work), he can create something that not only lives, but takes on a meaning of its own. It’s one of the most elegant analyses of Modernist despair I’ve ever come across, which is simultaneously both an acknowledgement and a refutation.

There may be nothing beneath the surface of life, and there may be a million ways disorder masquerades as order. But the writer has to carry on regardless. It’s his duty to rescue meaning from disorder - if he wants to do his job properly. And both Carey and Coetzee have contributed thoughtful dispatches from meaning’s front line, giving grounds for guarded optimism that meaning isn’t the terminal patient it’s sometimes made out to be.

Footnotes:

1. This is not the same as the writers we looked at it the previous section like Hemingway and Auden, the main thrust of whose writing was to create a world of their own based on the real and not a world filtered through a sort of pre-alienated sensibility.

2. Interestingly, the postscript to Coetzee’s novel is a sequel to the Hofmannstahl letter we examined earlier. Cast in the form of a reply from Chandos’s wife to Bacon, it examines whether the “embodiment” of complex meaning is possible.But he should care - it’s just been announced that Coetzee’s won the Nobel Prize for 2003. And good luck to him.

3. Carey doesn’t change the name of the real-life detective in the Ern Malley trial.

4. And the original Ern Malley poems are great fun as parodies of Modernism. This extract from ‘Petit Testament’ is particularly well-observed:

It is something to be at last speaking
Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate
Only to No-Man’s-Land.
Set this down too:
I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,
Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,
Stumbled often, stammered,
But in time the fading voice grows wise
And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence
Traces the inevitable graph
And in conclusion:
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade. I
Who have lived in the shadow that each act
Casts on the next act now emerge
As loyal as the thistle that in session
Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air.