Wolf Solent

Just back to Brisbane from a week in Auckland, where, along the line, I finished reading John Cowper Powys's Wolf Solent. The novel was something of a success when first published in 1929 and Cowper Powys still has a smallish cult following, but no real place in literary history, especially academic literary history. I read this book first when I was about fifteen and it had a visceral impact on me then: I found its grandiloquence, its intermingling of the cosmic/spiritual with the psychological/erotic imaginatively invasive, queasy making. It doesn't work like that on me anymore, but I can see why it did. It's about a youngish man, Wolf Solent, who is almost wholly committed to his interior life, which is based on his personalised and melodramatised mysticism. He has the capacity to fantasize himself as an agent in a cosmic battle between forces of good and evil. That's where the real of Wolf's life finally is: it matters more to him than relationships and experiences. But the book is about the tension between Wolf's dime-novel mysticism and his relationships with his mother and two women whom he loves, one of whom he is married to. And it turns out that the good-evil mysticism is one one level, something of a mask for a battle between heterosexuality and homosexuality, and on another an expression of Wolf's sensitivity to landscape, nature and place. At the end, he comes to recognise his spiritual interior life as a form of resistance to settling down with a woman, where women represent, both for author and character, the conventional, the petty, the materialistic but not wholly negatively. What's strong about the novel is the way in which its provisional commitment to the mystical, even though it takes a pulpy narrativised form, allows the novel access to modes of characterization where personalities remain undefined, mysterious, suggestive, driven by forces beyond the merely social and even beyond the sexual. A lot has been learned from Lawrence here, and it would be possible to think of the novel as a cross between Women in Love and Charles Williams (another thirties mystical-melodramatic fictionalist, and one who was unbelievably successful in the market place), but it's better than that, just because it can rescue from its critique of mysticism, mysticism's power to enrich experience.

Religion

Is religion a useless concept? Would we be better off without it?
The point is: once we subtract actual faiths or religious practices (Christianity, animism, Judaism....) from it, what's left?
The problem with maintaining the notion 'religion' outside of such institutions of religious practice is that the term becomes available too widely, meaning leaks from it. Pantheism, socialism etc can become thought of as 'religions' in some sense that is stranded between the metaphoric and the literal, and which obsfucates rather than clarifies thought.

Aidan Higgins and the sixties

Balcony of Europe, published in 1972, may be an unusual novel, and not a wholly successful one, but it is revealing about the sixties, and, not less to the point, is an intriguing sign of a literary-historical moment. It's mainly set in beach-culture Spain circa 1968 (just before the onslaught upon those beaches of the Northern European mass leisure industry), and describes a relatively brief affair between an Irish painter (a version of Higgins himself one assumes) and a young American Jewish woman who is married to a slightly older American writer. It's haunted by and dependent on a slew of masculinist modernist texts: Joyce's Portrait of an Artist most obviously, but also Malcolm Lowry, Faulkner, Hemingway, Paul Bowles and so on.
It's beautifully written, and the modernist sentence here begins to move towards autonomy in the direction later taken by Iain Sinclair. That is, the style (the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter) has become detached from any clear cut character-based project: the novel's characters don't come to life as they say, there's no real sense of what kind of person the hero (Dan Ruttles) is, and not much more of Charlotte his sexy, charismatic love object.
Yet it's not as if the gist of an authorial intention isn't apparent: the novel wants to represent this affair against the backdrop of European history (especially the Holocaust and the Cold War under US hegemony) as a kind of passive resistance to the horrors of the twentieth century. And that is where it reveals a mood we can call sixties, since the characters, all somewhat rootless international bohemians, seem to live in an atmosphere of freedom and opportunity, a lack of regard for questions of money and career and respectability, which is at least superficially is bequeathed to them by the cultural modernisms that inhabits them and that they ceaselessly discuss. They have turned an aesthetic commitment to cultural modernism as a form of resistance to bourgeois orthodoxies and norms into hedonistic, self-exploratory adventures in the private sphere (mainly sex but also alcohol and drugs), that is, into lifestyle. They exist, so to say, historically between Le Bateau-Lavoir and Benidorm.
And it's lifestyle's alienation from literary aesthetics that means that the sentence in particular breaks free from meaning and intent at the level of the text itself and that wonderfully crafted sentences, paragraphs, chapters barely invoke the fictional world they purport to describe. So, from another literary-historical perspective, this is écriture produced spontaneously, outside the world of literary theory, and perhaps all the more revealing of the historical forces that tended towards the text-fetish because of that.