PARTISAN REVIEW
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the factories of the barrack-like new industrial towns in the ruined and black–
ended countryside. The work of those writers who ignored this seems to fester
like those lilies in Shakespeare's sonnet "that smell far worse than weeds." Most
of Tennyson is festering lilies. The Victorian novelists, Dickens and George
Eliot, are in some sense more
poetic
than any of the Victorian poets (witness the
opening chapters of
Bleak House),
because they enclose more ofthe underlying
reality and make literature of it.
At the same time when, as has happened in the twentieth century, the
gap between the underlying reality gets too wide, artists are faced by a terrible
dilemma. To immerse themselves in the reality is almost certainly to be de–
stroyed by it, because it is almost totally destructive. The underlying reality of
the first half of the twentieth century has been war and prison camps. But
very few of those writers who have been immersed in these have been able to
make literature out of them. And, though some literature has come out of the
war experience, almost none has come out of the concentration camps. The
consciousness that might have been transformed was extinguished by the
overwhelmingly stifling atmosphere.
For this reason what the twentieth century has mostly provided is litera–
ture written by those who are uninvolved in the underlying reality but who are
in the sensibility reflected in their work
conscious
of it. Consciousness means
being aware of the underlying reality without actually experiencing it and
being extinguished by it. The poets have become the supreme upholders of
consciousness. Sometimes their consciousness of other people's suffering can
become converted into overwhelming private sufferin'g of their own : hence
American "confessional" poetry. In fiction we have a kind of novelist who
moves between two worlds: that of the underlying reality, which he may
actually visit from time to time, like Graham Greene visiting Cuba, Africa and
the Far East, and that of our privileged freedom, which enables him to write
about it. Ernest Hemingway was an outstanding example of this kind ofwriter.
Norman Mailer is a more recent example.
Solzhenitsyn subtitles
The Gulag Archipelago
"An Experiment in Literary
Investigation." He has gone down into this Inferno of the underlying
reality and redeemed it as documentation, reminiscence and ideas for fiction
(sometimes he makes a footnote of some anecdote and remarks that it is
material for a story he has in mind, or which someone else might use.) In his
preface he makes the kind of claim which Dante, returning from the depths
of the human universe might have made, if--as has happened in the Twen–
tieth century--the Inferno were of this world, this life, real, over there, the
other side of the wall:
