Tuesday on the couch with George

  Tuesday on the couch with George  
Or, Apolgia pro ueblogia sua

My friend Rick Dietrich, whom, though he lives less than a block away, I never see unless I walk by his house and he’s looking out the window — he sent this to me. That is, he put it in my mailbox.
     It is an essay by the Hungarian philosopher/literary critic, George Lucács. Why he passed it along to me, marked up as you can see in the picture of one of the pages, I don’t know. But I read it through, not just the underlines and the marks in the margin. I read all of it. 
     It is one of those arguments that you can follow as you read it, but you might not be able to recapitulate it. But I think that the main argument goes something like this: Modern literature, particularly modern fiction, doesn’t work because it doesn’t engage the world. Instead of launching its characters into a changing world, it takes the world as already done (to a crisp). Its characters, for that matter, they are also already done. Everything is fixed, and nothing will change it. The story cannot move from beginning to insight to dénouement. It just sits on the page, though of course, for several pages. Static. The characters are static, and the story is static because the world isn’t evolving but given.
     This doesn’t mean that Musil or Kafka or James Joyce aren’t wonderful writers that can write wonderful descriptions, but it does mean that they do no more than that. The novels and stories are not narratives; they are pictures. Pretty, pretty pictures. They won’t last, Lucács thinks. Or, at least, that’s what I think Lucács thinks. The novels and stories won’t last in the sense that they cannot endure. Lovely as they may be, they don’t tell us anything we don’t already know. (They are about what we already know.)
     When I finish reading the essay, I suppose that my friend is trying to say something to me about The Ambiguities. His putting this in my mailbox suggests he might think that I am making the same mistake that Joyce did in Ulysses, that Musil did in The Man Without Qualities, or that Kafka did in The Castle or “The Metamorphosis.” Would that I was making a mistake as grand as those! But it’s only the same mistake, not nearly as grand. Joyce, Musil, and Kafka do accomplish what they set out to accomplish. I do not. But ...

Friend Rick: Here is my response, such as it is. I write — as weren’t we all instructed? — about what I know. I know my little life in which very little happens, though something does! And I know a little about the little lives around me. I know what we are up to in a world that is changing. I don’t know where we are going, but we are going somewhere, I think. In the meantime, we soldier on. Emphasis on “on.”

 05.24.22