BOOKS
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in his view, though he doesn't quite put it that way. "Feminism,
psychoanalysis, phenomenology, structuralism and post-structural–
ism" share "a similarity of mechanism" which deprives the student of
the experience of "the human identity of a book."
If
"the object of the
science of literature is not literature but literariness," then it should
be clear "why modern criticism has got the modern literature it
deserves ." Bayley
is
capable of appreciating distinguished work of a
mind not necessarily congenial to his own, as, for instance, in his
discussion of Todorov.
Human identity, experience, life: they are reality and value
terms in Bayley's critical "discourse" (I would expect a slight shudder
from him in response to my attribution of "discourse" to what he
writes). Poetry is not about poeticity for him (here his quarrel is with
Frank Kermode's
The Sense of An Ending),
but about real things:
" . . . poetry and literature [make] things
more
like things, not less
like them. Wordsworth's poem was about a particular fine morning,
and meeting a leech-gatherer, and joy and dejection and religious
example." Elsewhere he finds support for his view that literature is
about the real in an unexpected place,
in
Milan Kundera's
The
Unbearable Lightness of Being,
which, he claims, "neatly turns the
tables on today's theorists about the novels." Against the prevailing
view of the fictionality of fiction , Kundera shows a direct correlation
between the "thoroughness" of the fictional imagination and its sense
of reality. The trouble with much contemporary fiction, in Bayley's
view, is the lack of conviction in the fictionality of fiction .
There are two apparently disparate impulses at work in
Bayley's discontent with contemporary theoretical discussion. On
the one hand , he finds in the structuralist and poststructuralist
preoccupation with "codes and strategies" a disrespect for "facts and
objects ." (The first essay begins with a quotation from an essay by
Lionel Trilling that appeared in
Partisan Review,
in which Trilling ex–
presses nostalgia for a time when the intellectual had confidence that
"he can
know
something- in what year the Parthenon was begun,
the order of battle at Trafalgar, how Linear B was deciphered .") On
the other hand, Bayley wants to protect the utopian ambition of
literature, its yearning for a counterlife to the actual one in which we
live. One way in which Bayley harmonizes these two impulses is by
insisting on their interdependence, as he does in his admiring discus–
sion of John Jones's
Dostoevsky:
"[Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's] vivid
sense of actual life -
zhivaja shizn
-
would be nothing without their
longing for a new life
-voskresenie-
regeneration and resurrection...
