The post-humanities novel

Both Coetzee's Disgrace and Allen Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty can be described as post-humanities novels in that both are about men whose identifications with canonical literary figures (Byron, Henry James) are not simply impractictible and idealist but expose them the more to a debased society. At the level of content, Coetzee is less bleak than Hollinghurst, since his hero David Lurie continues to dabble with his opera about Byron, even if only to express his sense of literary heroicism's failure. But Henry James offers nothing at all to Hollinghurst's hero Nick Guest who has thoroughly prostituted himself to the Thatcherites and is probably about to die. At the level of style it is rather different: Hollinghurst's prose is literary in a mode which includes James in its genealogy while Coetzee writes bare sentences which act out the literary heritage's irrelevance to post-apartheid South Africa.
Of course the concept of the post-humanities art novel, especially one that is evaluating contemporary society as debased, is paradoxical. And it's the paradox of a literature after literature from which they seem to draw their (literary) power.

After progress

Let's say: there once was historical progress and then it stopped. It did so about 1968. Since then the idea of progress continues but not the thing itself. There exist various relations to it: a melancholic one (it is preserved in order to be hated and rejected); a fantasmal one (progress's cessation is denied by imagining its continuation in denial of reality) and a celebratory one (now it's dead we can reinvent non-progessive cosmologies and epistemologies).

Two by Henry James

There are intriguing similarities between Henry James's The Princess Casamassima and 'The Beast in the Jungle.' Both are about young men who are committed to an life-altering future event which will happen in a form and at a time they cannot predict. Hyacinth in The Princess Casamassima has contracted himself to a radical underground organization to carry out a terrorist act when so instructed. John Marcher in 'The Beast' privately and secretly awaits a tremendous experience (an experience which takes the form of a 'law' as he understands it) which will also happen at some moment and in some form that he can't foresee. Both characters gain distinction and singularity by their submission to a major contingency; both attract women by virtue of it. The call to violence is indeed made to Hyacinth, though, having lost his faith in revolutionary politics he commits suicide rather than carrying it out. And Marcher's experience—the Beast in the Jungle—reveals itself in a very unexpected form indeed. He realizes that it is his indifference and selfishness to May Bartram, the woman who has for years shared his secret and loved him, that has marked him out and leapt at him. He has been the "man to whom nothing on earth was to have happened:" his experience is his realizing that at last and too late.
From a certain point of view, these are stories about the possibility of experience (the constructive role of anticipation, choseness and accident in sharpening experience and in shaping individuality: there's a kind of grace at work here). And they are also stories of triumph over what Forster in Howards End called "sameness", even if that triumph, because it makes its home in the pathologies of the imagination, inhabits nullity and flight. From another point of view "The Beast in the Jungle" in particular is about the impossibility of experience when it is thought as a break from the mundane and the expected. It is important that in his Preface to The Soft Side, James talks of Marcher's assessing his experiences as they come to him, and his failure to mark out the one that counts.

My interest in this is focussed on how these fictions might be used to think about the kind of literary criticism (Leavism) that thinks of literature as assessing and expanding the experiental. What these stories tell us: is not that the capacity to have experience belongs to the imagination, whether collectively or individually. Rather the will to experience is unsatisfiable. Even so, that means that there's an important sense in which experience does not belong outside literature itself. To judge experience is to make a literary judgement.

A puzzle

One of the puzzles about life is that the rich and (mainly) comfortable and comforting interior selves that we accumulate as we go on—our memories, our understandings of ourselves, our habits and tastes, our patterns of experience—can be so disconnected from our actions especially at periods of crisis. We can find ourselves acting in ways that don't belong to the person we are. Perhaps moments when real courage is required are the clearest case. Where does that courage come from? Or what has made it disappear? Nothing in our sense of ourselves can answer such questions.