Fiction Chronicle

I have no statistics on the subject, and there is no room to venture a list here, but I suspect that a substantial number of the best novels we have had this century have explored the same basic relationship. Sexes, motives, backgrounds will vary. The treatment may be overt or elliptical. But in writers otherwise as unalike as E M. Forster and Djuna Barnes, Ronald Firbank and Isaac Babel, D. H. Lawrence and Cocteau, we can find the same obsessive story: a person who is still oblivious (for which, read: heedless, impulsive, amoral, even innocent) is beheld by someone who has fallen into self-consciousness.

Shakespeare was probably the first poet to sketch this relationship when Hamlet watched Fortinbras with despair and self-recrimination. But the reactions can be more personal. Clag-gert hated Billy Budd; Léa doted on Chéri; Lady Chatterley preyed upon her gamekeeper. In each case, though, a born watcher has encountered someone who seems closer to the animal kingdom than the fallen state of human beings. And, in the former’s envy, nostalgia, and compulsion to possess and somehow identify with what he can never be, lies the story. It is usually a tragedy, but in any case, the watcher cannot succeed, and will never be the same again.

RP

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Robert Phelps

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I have no statistics on the subject, and there is no room to venture a list here, but I suspect that a substantial number of the best novels we have had this century have explored the same basic relationship. Sexes, motives, backgrounds will vary. The treatment may be overt or elliptical. But in writers otherwise as unalike as E M. Forster and Djuna Barnes, Ronald Firbank and Isaac Babel, D. H. Lawrence and Cocteau, we can find the same obsessive story: a person who is still oblivious (for which, read: heedless, impulsive, amoral, even innocent) is beheld by someone who has fallen into self-consciousness.

Shakespeare was probably the first poet to sketch this relationship when Hamlet watched Fortinbras with despair and self-recrimination. But the reactions can be more personal. Clag-gert hated Billy Budd; Léa doted on Chéri; Lady Chatterley preyed upon her gamekeeper. In each case, though, a born watcher has encountered someone who seems closer to the animal kingdom than the fallen state of human beings. And, in the former’s envy, nostalgia, and compulsion to possess and somehow identify with what he can never be, lies the story. It is usually a tragedy, but in any case, the watcher cannot succeed, and will never be the same again.