Let’s now return to our «model» poet. As soon as he decides that he would rather be a poet than a sociologist or an anthropologist, he renounces the attempt to develop an ad hoc technical language and tries to «poeticize» his discourse on the industrial situation by relying on traditional poetic forms. Within this tradition, he may opt for a more or less commemorative, confessional, or «crepuscular» lyricism; in any case, his discourse will express merely his subjective reaction to the scandal of a dramatic situation which quite eludes him. And it eludes him simply because his language is limited by a tradition of inner confession and is therefore incapable of grasping an ensemble of concrete and objective relationships. And yet, his language is also a result of the situation he is trying to express—the language of a situation which, refusing to confront its problems. has sought refuge in memory and lyricism, thereby transferring the search for change from the object to the subject.
Let’s now assume that a novelist is trying to reproduce the same situation in a language that is apparently related to it, whether it be technical, political, or popular. If he is an anthropologist, he will first list all the relevant forms of communication, which he will then analyze in relation to each other and to the manner in which each is employed.
But if he wants to give the situation and its characteristic language a narrative form, he will have to organize all the elements at his disposal in a narrative progression borrowed from the literary tradition. Having thus seized the language of a situation in which human relationships are distorted, betrayed, and, generally speaking, in a state of continuous crisis, he is led to organize it according to a narrative convention that automatically masks its true fragmentary, dissociated nature with an appearance of continuity and order, which quite thwarts his initial intentions. Of course, this appearance of order is not only false but also inappropriate, since, by right, it belongs to narrative structures meant to express the vision of an orderly universe. The very fact that this order is expressed in terms of a language that is extraneous to the situation constitutes a sort of judgment.
The narrator has committed himself to understanding a situation of alienation but has failed to alienate himself in it. Rather, he has avoided it by resorting to narrative structures that have drawn him away from his object.12 The structure of a traditional narrative can be compared to that of a «tonal» composition in music. Its most extreme example is that of the detective story. Here, everything starts within the context of an established order: a paradigmatic series of ethical relationships rationally administered by the law. Something disrupts this order: a crime. There follows an investigation conducted by a mind (the detective’s), untainted by the disorder that has led to the crime.
From the list of suspects, the detective sorts out those who fit the social and ethical system they inhabit from those who do not. He then classifies the latter according to the extent of their deviation, beginning with those who are only apparently deviant from those who are really so. In other words, he eliminates all the false clues, whose main function is that of keeping the reader in a state of suspense, and, by and by, he discovers the real causes of the crime, and, among his suspects, the one most likely to be affected by them. After which, the culprit is punished and order is reestablished.
Let’s now assume that an author of detective stories, the sort of author who has full confidence in traditional structures (which, at the simplest level, are characteristic of the detective story, but, at a more sophisticated level, are also found in Balzac), decides to describe the situation of a character who works in the stock market.
His actions are not necessarily prompted by the parameters of one particular order; they may be inspired by the ethical parameters of the society in which he lives, or by those of an economy based on free enterprise, or by no parameters other than the irrational oscillations of the market—whether they relate to an actual industrial situation or merely to some financial shift whose dynamics, far from depending on individual decisions, quite transcend them, thereby determining them and alienating (really alienating) all those who are caught in this autonomous circuit of interacting factors. Neither the language of such a character nor his value system depends on any one order or any one psychology.
His behavior with women may be dictated by a particular psychic disorder (he may, for instance, suffer from an Oedipus complex), but in all his other relationships he will be motivated by the objective configuration of the financial situation, in which case there will be no causal relationship between his actions and his unconscious urges. The author of this sort of story will have to deal with a form of dissociation that is characteristic of our times, and that affects our feelings as well as our language and our actions.
He knows that a decision made by his character may not produce the sort of effect that could be predicted by the traditional laws of causality, since the situation from which the character operates may lend his action an altogether different value. Consequently, if the author tries to tell the story of this character according to traditional laws of narrative causality, the character will elude him.
If, instead, he assumes the role of the anthropologist and tries to describe the situation in all its social and economic implications, he will be obliged to provide all sorts of descriptions but will have to leave a conclusive interpretation to a later phase of his research—in other words, he will have to provide all sorts of details for the «model» he intends to depict but will not be able to give any finality to his depiction, as most authors like to do, by enclosing his vision in a formal organization expressing a particular view of reality.
His only other option will be that of describing his character according to the terms of the situation. In other words, he will describe the complexity and imprecision of his character’s relationships, and the nonexistence of his behavioral parameters, by consciously calling into question his own narrative parameters.
How does Joyce deal with contemporary journalism? He cannot, nor does he want to, tell us about it by employing a language that is extraneous to it. So he constructs a whole chapter of Ulysses out of the casual and perfectly insignificant chitchat of a group ofjournalists in an average editorial room. Each fragment of the conversation is appropriately titled and boxed, in the best journalistic fashion and according to a stylistic progression that ranges all the way from the most traditional Victorian headline to the syntactically flawed vernacular of an evening scandalrag.
By so doing, not only does Joyce cover all the possible rhetorical figures of journalese, but he also expresses his opinion of mass media. Since he does not feel he has the right to judge a situation if he remains outside it, he decides to turn the situation into a formal structure and let it speak for itself (revealing itself for what it is). In other words, he alienates himself in the situation by assuming its expressions, its methods. But by giving these expressions and methods a formal structure, he can also elude the situation and control it. In other words, he avoids alienation by turning the situation in which he has alienated himself into a narrative structure. This is a classical example. For a more contemporary example, let’s turn to the cinema, to a movie such as Antonioni’s Eclipse.
Antonioni does not tell us anything about our world and its problems, about a social reality that would interest any movie director eager to express an artistic opinion of our contemporary industrial situation—or, at least, not in so many words. Instead, he shows us two people, a man and a woman, who leave each other for no reason, or out of emotional aridity.
The woman subsequently has an affair with another man, also for no reason and without any emotional commitment. The emotional inertia of the characters and their perfunctory actions are regularly punctuated by the hard and ineluctable presence of objects, which seems to dominate both human relationships and the situation in which these occur. Predictably, the central setting of the movie is the stock market, where fortunes are made and unmade according to no visible logic, for no palpable reason, and with no definite aim. («What happens to all these billions?» the young woman asks a young broker, who readily admits he does not know.
His aggressive manner gives the impression of a strong will in action, but in fact he is a pawn, acted upon by the very situation he is trying to control: he is the perfect example of alienation.) No psychological parameter can explain this situation. It is what it is precisely because nowadays it is impossible to believe in unitary parameters; each individual is fragmented and manipulated by a number of external forces.
Of course, an artist cannot express all this as a judgment because a judgment would require, along with an ethical parameter, the syntax and the grammar of a rational system, the grammar of the traditional movie, in which events follow one another causally. The best solution for
