The uses of bad literature

The idea for this post came when I was reading a Salon column several months ago (which I no longer find unfortunately, and therefore cannot link to) about what books not to bring to the beach with you this summer. It was titled "Worst Books Ever," or something like that, and it naturally got me to thinking about books that I've really, really hated. Which naturally got me to thinking about Olivier Pauvert's Noir. Now, it may be the case that I have hated a book more that Noir, but if so, that happened some time in my distant past, perhaps during my undergraduate years, and I must have blocked the moment from my memory. I hated Noir so much that about half of the way through I seriously considered just throwing it away, which is something I almost never do with a novel, both because I am almost pathologically addicted to plot, of almost any sort, and because I'm such a lazy bastard that when I put a sufficient amount of energy into a book (like, say, reading past the first page) I don't want to think that its all been wasted by not finishing it off. So I kept reading to the end, which fulfilled by expectations by being both as repulsive and banal as I thought it would be.

What makes Noir so bad? Not its prose style: since I read it in translation it wouldn't be fair for me to comment on that aspect of the book. It may be that Pauvert is a master of modern French, though I can't believe anyone this stupid could write lyrically in any language. Not its predictable politics either: progressive denunciations of corporate capitalism and racism are of course nothing new, but that particular sin certainly is not Pauvert's alone. Many other, and better, writers share it, but make up for the failing by being more subtle in their understanding of the human condition, or of interpersonal relationships, or of the nature between reality and artifice. The problem is not even in the overwrought depictions of violence that are a near constant element of the narrative. To be sure, the treatment of violence is something to make most readers queasy, because you get the same sense with Pauvert as you do in a movie like Natural Born Killers: that these depictions are consciously undertaken with an eye toward critique, but unconsciously the artist (Pauvert in one case, Stone in the other) is actually getting off on them, or at least pandering to them.

No, in the end what moves Noir past mediocre or even bad literature into truly terrible literature is the moral incoherence at the center of it. On the one hand, Pauvert clearly wants to be the next Michel Houellebecq, an enfant terrible of letters who shocks the elders but entrances the younger generation with his stylish cynicism. Only he doesn't have Houellebecq's balls, so his targets are all what one would expect of a well-read but not particularly imaginative teenager. Screeds against God, claims about the meaningless of the universe: these are not going to épater anyone at this point. If you want the cultural cachet that comes with transgression, then do something that is actually going to piss people off, like Houellebecq does: make fun of post-60 political pretensions, say something nasty about women, or non-Christian religions, or people of a darker hue. Pauvert can't make himself actually move beyond what would constitute the established boundaries of any conceivable audience for a book like this, so his "scandalous" pronouncements end up as reaffirmations of convention: he's a bourgeoisie in Nietzschean clothing, who wants to combine a 60s flower-child ethos with a nihilistic metaphysics and can't quite figure out (or maybe, can't admit) that the one position makes the other non-sensical. If nothing means anything, then the real hero of Pauvert's tale isn't the poor schlep we've been following through 200-odd pages. It's the amoral capitalist we meet at the end, the guy who's been pulling the strings all along, the one who can look on with equanimity as his wife and children are slaughtered. He's the real ubermensch, the one who's seen through the veil of human weakness (aka morality) that the rest of us use in order to avoid facing up to human existence with genuine courage.

So that's all I'm going to say about Noir (for now). The other part of this post deals with the book I was reading when I read the original essay: Porius, by the modernist Welsh poet and novelist John Cowper Powys. The first thing you should know about Porius, if you're thinking about reading it, is that it is 750 pages long. The second thing you should know is that it is filled with sentences like this: "Even without this new light the upward-spurting flame from the fire tended by the Derwydd would have been in itself sufficient illumination to reveal the pitiful contortion, like that of a child about to cry, that convulsed Llew's face; and her blow was followed by an immediate revulsion of pity, and snatching at his hand, the girl moved straight towards the dirty blanket leanding him gently with her and not forgetting, as her eyes encountered Brochvael's before the curtain closed behind them, to touch her breast with a significant smile, as if to remind her friend of the presence in that warm place of his rag-sheathed dagger." (Just curious. At what point in reading that did you start to wonder about what you were going to make for dinner tonight?)

According to the introduction to the story, Powys considered Porius--essentially a retelling of the Arthurian legend with the historical novel genre--as his magnum opus. He worked on it for over fifteen years. This explains, it does not excuse, his inability to edit either the story or his prose. The American publisher he sent it to, Simon and Shuster, mailed it back with the comment, " over-written and undicepherable," which is not an unfair description of a great deal of the book. At the beginning of the story is a Tolstoyan list of characters, in unpronounceable Welsh rather than unpronounceable Russian. Many of them--Medrawd, Gwennydd, Myrddin Wyllt--are Powys' Welsh versions of more common English names--Mordred, Guiniverre, Merlin respectively--a fact I didn't cotton onto until I was about two-thirds of the way through. Also, it was so complicated moving back and forth from the text to the initial cast of characters that I eventually just gave up. He creates a whole new word, cavorseniargize. Despite the fact that it plays a fairly important role in conveying the personality of the main character, after finishing the book I am still at a loss as to describe what the word means, or even how it might sound if spoken.

Nor are these complications the only major problem with the book. Perhaps more damaging, in the end, is Powys' anachronistic depiction of his main characters. They are not, despite the setting and plot, Romanized Britons of fifth century AD. Rather, they are twentieth-century English bohemians: intensely concerned with their personal feelings and subjective reactions to events. They are people of the text, not of an oral culture which surely would have been the actual historical context of the people who inhabited Wales in the year 499.

And yet, having said all of this, if someone were to ask me if I would recommend this book, and if that person were someone I respected, I would almost certainly say yes, for a least two reasons. First, because of the way that Powys both understands and is able to communicate a relationship between human experience and the world that it seems to me we have lost, and that is essential to regain if we are to avoid eventually destroying ourselves or our descendants. In reviews he is often compared to Garcia Marquez and the magical realists, but these comparisons seem to me to fundamentally miss the point. In Powys' history, nothing happens that, strictly speaking, could not be accepted by any modern materialist: even when characters see instances of supposed magic, it is generally conceded that there is at least the possibility they are only being fooled by their minds, or the angle of the sun on a rock. The closest I can get to labeling Powys' universe is to call it one of realistic mysticism. He does not so much accept miracles and spirits as to see through the veil of ordinary reality into something deeper, more beautiful, more wild. His "super-naturalism" is exactly that: part of the natural world but at the same time superseding it. Beyond it, more of it. His trees, his rivers, his animals, his humans: they are themselves and more than themselves. They are at one and the same time both the copies of the Idea, and the Idea itself.

The other valuable aspect of the book is Powys' critique of Christianity. Speaking as a Christian believer, it is a relief to find someone who can actually articulate an intelligent challenge to the faith, in distinction to metaphysical midgets like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. To be sure, the author loads the dice: all his Christian characters are dogmatic bullies or neurotic gits. But that's fair enough, in a way: Chesterton loads the dice too. While the main characters' briefs again Christianity are historically unconvincing, as philosophical arguments they at least make a sympathetic and persuasive case against the Christian worldview, on the only intelligent grounds, which are not epistemological but moral.

And then, finally, I came to be more sympathetic even to Powys' crazy prose style. At least, I managed to produce a hypothesis that did not simply chalk things up to incompetence. What Powys might have been trying to do, I think, is to craft a prose that paralleled the oral poetry of the original oral sources, with their overloaded physical descriptions and characterizations. It didn't work in the end because oral narrative does not really translate that well into textual narrative. What works in the one medium does not work in the other. But perhaps Powys might be given credit for an heroic, and necessarily doomed, attempt.

I once heard that Louis L'Amour had claimed never to have read a bad book, which I thought was about as dumb a thing as I would expect Louis L'Amour to say. But maybe a case can be be made that there are no worthless books. Some, like Noir, they can help illuminate just why a set of ideas (in Pauvert's case, certain fascistic tendencies on the modern left) are incoherent. Others, like Porius, have a great deal of value despite some very obvious faults, and in the end may have more of an impact upon those who read than much more skillful tales.