'A Kind of Masochism Afoot in Modern Aesthetics'

“Is there a kind of masochism afoot in modern aesthetics whereby the leaden and the dull acquire significance simply because the beaten spirit would seem to claim more seriousness than a more robust struggle with the exigencies of things?” 

This elegantly crafted question, at once aesthetic and moral, is posed by Guy Davenport. I often trip over previously unread, uncollected work by him, some of it more than half a century old. In the Spring 1970 issue of The Hudson Review, Davenport published “C’est Magnifique Mais Ce N’est Pas Daguerre,” a review of eight works of fiction ranging stylistically from Joyce Carol Oates to Robert Coover. The title is a witty play on French Gen. Pierre Bosquet’s comment on the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre” (“It is magnificent, but it is not war”).

 

The passage at the top comes from the section of the review devoted to the Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, which Davenport calls “as dreary, dragging, and dull a novel as the human mind is capable of writing.” I can second that judgment. If one is to read Gombrowicz, stick to the Diaries. Davenport is adept at summary dismissals. He describes The Bamboo Bed by William Eastlake as “tushery end to end.”

 

In the context of Richard Brautigan (whose work in my recollection was read by the same people who took Kahlil Gibran seriously), Davenport writes: “Most of what’s printed in our time is either spiel or bilge.” Yet he’s rather gentle with Brautigan and his once-popular brand of Hippie Lit., and devotes more space to him than to the other writers under review.

 

Davenport is sympathetic to Coover’s Pricksongs & Descants, a story collection much trumpeted by the young English faculty members I knew as an undergraduate. Davenport outlines the postmodern fiction of that time:

 

“The movement in which Mr. Coover can be located would seem to include John Barth (Lost in the Funhouse), Louis Zukofsky (Ferdinand), Donald Barthelme (Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts), Kenneth Gangemi (Olt), and Richard Brautigan. What these share is a sense that fiction is not so much reality’s mirror as its fluoroscope, and that mimesis can tolerate an almost infinite amount of hyperbole.”

 

How well I remember that tiresome dead-end school of fictional bric-a-brac. Briefly, I read them all enthusiastically, until I started growing up and developed a more honest critical sense. A nice irony: I interviewed Robert Coover in 1992 when he was in town to give a reading and hand out awards. He’s a gentleman and I enjoyed our conversation, but when I mentioned that I had visited Guy Davenport and corresponded with him, Coover said, “You mean the essay guy?” He didn’t think much of Davenport’s work.

 

I’ve  saved the best for last. Davenport reviews Oates’ fourth novel, Them (I won't leave the “t” pretentiously lower-case), an early entry in her campaign of inflicting sub-Dreiserian pulp on the reading public. Oates focuses “doggedly on the miserable greyness of life” (not to mention the miserable grayness of her prose). Davenport writes:

“The artist achieves his sincerity by embracing his art rather than his subject. We live in an age capable of accommodating the most strenuous sincerity [that great unacknowledged enemy of art]: the novelist can, like Andy Warhol, record reality and transcribe it unedited. Faced with such efficiency in the naturalistic arts, our mind keeps going back to the fact that Defoe did not even interview Alexander Selkirk in order to write Robinson Crusoe.”