When we say novel we mean--at this moment--not only that which qualifies for the genre formally, but also that which has a specific intouchness with the contemporary world. Modernism is simply another way of saying the same. And the fact that they all become banal is simple that time will outstrip almost every word. That every word applied to timeliness is forced to break with the nature of itself as a word, to fissure internally saying at once 'the now' and the saying of it that must already be past by the time it hits your ears. And so the sundered words pile up behind us, novel, modern, contemporary, futurist. Even Avant-Guard can be difficult to say without an ironic lilt.
And this is part of the forgetting that matters. When I say novel to you know, I mean whatever force that word is capable of or was. I am attempting to communicate it in its force, not its banality. The word has begun to store doubts inside of it even before it shatters. At the point that Charles was writing the word was certainly not yet broken. He had enough faith in it to think it could house his meanings without too damaging a distortion.
To be more precise--and Charles is fairly clear in at least this own respect--distortion is planned into the work as unavoidable. He didn't privilege the form even while relying on it. Unlike his contemporaries he might have been just as willing to come out in the trades, or to print whatever one would want to call his work serially in the San Francisco local he used to work for.
As someone who speaks about the novel and would like to continue to these sorts of stipulation have to be put into order. Genre description must be mobile. Some of the most important things ever to be said about novels were said nearly two thousand years before their advent and likely about the structure of columns on a little Greek ile's premier temple. And out loud. That is to say that what we're really talking about here is much more broad than any one genre. It is much more likely to be an issue of art and how it communicates or can. You can't read, at least I couldn't, Charles and not feel like its life that's at the heart of it. Maybe I mean, you can't read it without feeling like you're living?
Some days spent reading, you lift your head up into the twilight of an already ill lit room and feel as you've just absented yourself from a day of your life. That you cashed it in and disappeared somewhere else. This can be a great sensation if you're in need of escape. Or it can leave you hollow and husked like the shell you is ill fit in this world and shouldn't go get up and feed itself for the sustenance of your body. Either because the other world is better or this one is just damned awful. Charles, however, never elicits this feeling. Living is what I called it. Which means that if you lift your head out of a book and see that the light has waned and you've yet to light a lamp or feed yourself or bathe that this is a glorious sensation. You've been to busy plunging into the world of the human soul, not a vicarious passenger on a picaresque journey through wartime europe but a robust assistante, meticulously attending to the patchwork reconnaissance of life itself in the human and in the world. As coming off of a day of hard physical labour that is satisfying in the union it creates between mind and body both conjoined in the need for rest and sensation of deserving pure and simple. While the reading body is a repose, in these moments, it is not denigrated, but exalted and allowed to rest as in celebration of its continual work. A god at a feast thrown its honor. Invisible for a time but everywhere invoked.
