Lance Mannion: Susannah and the elders

Has anyone noticed what an arrogant boast is woven into the title of Tom Wolfe's new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons?

It's really a dysphonic and off-putting title, nowhere up to the standards of catchiness set by Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full.

"Madame Bovary, c'est moi," said Flaubert. I am Madame Bovary.

I Am Charlotte Simmons, says Wolfe, but he's not really claiming to be his heroine. He's bragging that as a novelist he's up there with Flaubert.

Wolfe is out on the road selling his new novel the way he sold his last two, by deploring the bad behavior he glamorizes and celebrates in the book.

In I Am Charlotte Simmons Wolfe writes voyeuristically about the lives of college students, he exaggerates the excesses for effect, and he assigns motivations to his characters that are based on his need to deplore what is clearly turning him on. Now he's running around claiming that a fantasy of his own invention is proof that liberals are turning America into a new Gomorrah. The youth of America, Wolfe says cackling like an Inquisitor about to set the match to a particularly succulent young witch, are committing "moral suicide."

Along comes David Brooks to make the point less crassly and with more of a put-on sympathy in the New York Times.

Brooks gets a going over from Matt Yglesias and my new favorite blogger Lindsay Beyerstein. She's my new favorite because she's smart, has an original slant, and has named her site Majikthise, after a character in Douglas Adams' Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Brooks' point is that now that he's read Wolfe's novel he sees more clearly how liberals have brought about the moral decay of the nation. Look at all these college students fucking like rabbits, he says in language more acceptable to the New York Times, what a shame, how awful, and it's all your fault, you nasty blue staters.

Rubbish, says Matt. Chastity and sexual fidelity are morally neutral virtues. Bad men can be faithful to their wives and girlfriends while heroes can be energetic rakes. Worse than rubbish, says Lindsay, because Wolfe and Brooks are up to the old right winger's trick of positing an ethical system that has only one value, chastity, and using it to trap liberals into defending or seeming to defend bad behavior.

Yup.

What also irks me about Brooks and Wolfe is that they are obviously tittilated by the bad behavior they're decrying. Two old men leering at the college girls with their bare belly buttons and tattooed behinds and blaming the girls for giving them erections.

Reminds me of the story of Susannah and the elders.

Wolfe invents a beautiful young woman, strips her naked as often as he can, he and Brooks spy on her while she's naked, then they drag her from her bath, put her on trial before the whole community, and accuse her of being a wanton hussy.

But We Are Not Charlotte Simmons. Charlotte Simmons is a fantasy thunk up by a bad novelist with an ax to grind.

Brooks' argument and Wolfe's sales pitch depend on people taking for granted that Wolfe is not a bad novelist but a very good one.

To accept this, you have to accept Wolfe's theory of what makes a good novel---diligent journalism.

A. Balzac and Dickens were journalists.

B. Balzac and Dickens were great novelists.

C. I am a journalist.

D. I am a great novelist like Balzac and Dickens.

Although Dickens wrote journalism all his career, the amount of reporter's legwork he did for any one of his novels was pretty minimal. He relied on memory and imagination more than on his notebooks and it's interesting to read pieces from The Uncommercial Traveller and then see what Dickens did with them when he drew on them for, say, Our Mutual Friend.

Wolfe has almost no imagination. When his notebooks fail him he steals from trashy movies. Almost nothing he's done the legwork for would show up any differently in a work of non-fiction than they do in his novels, except that in his journalism the actual words and actions of the real people he's writing about don't let him indulge his taste for cheap melodrama. In his novels, Wolfe is unbound (ha ha, Lance). He can go wild.

Balzac Tom Wolfe writes about monsters. There's no real feeling in any of his creations. They are moved by his theory of what moves people, which is: Appetite. They are hungry. Hungry for power. Hungry for sex. Hungry for money. This is defensible as a view of how human beings are. In fact, it's a point that needs to be driven home, because most of us tend to see all human behavior as motivated by ideals, good ideals or bad ones, but still purely spiritual motivations that do not take the body into account at all. We don't take the body's needs or desires into account when we judge ourselves or other people and consequently are quite often blind to our own bad behavior. I want this, but I am a good person, therefore what I want and the reasons I want it must also be good. I watched a friend, a nice person, well-meaning, basically good hearted, destroy someone else's marriage, the whole time telling herself she was behaving well, that she wasn't doing what she was doing, stealing another woman's husband, because she was not that kind of person. What happened, just happened. She couldn't see or wouldn't admit that she was motivated by fear, by sexual desire, by a pure animal selfishness. She had no idea that she or the man she seduced away from his wife could be motivated by anything resembling an appetite. If Balzac wrote about such a woman---and I'm sure he did; he wrote about almost every kind of person there is; I just haven't read all his novels yet---he'd have made something very interesting of her. But Wolfe could make nothing of her but a scheming monster driven by sexual rapaciousness.

What makes Wolfe's characters monsters is that they are moved by one appetite at a time. Balzac's characters are moved by a confusion of appetites, ideas, ideals, and real needs. Balzac's characters actually need money. Wolfe's characters just want it.

Wolfe can compare himself to Dickens and Balzac, but he's ignoring the fact that Dickens' main rivals for the title Champion of the World of Victorian Fiction were Anthony Trollope and George Eliot, who were not journalists, and he's missing the obvious which is that the French writer most like what he says he emulates is Zola, who was far more of a journalist than Balzac and much less of an artist. Still, Zola could teach Wolfe a thing or two. It's not what you put in your notebook, it's what you take out of it to put in your story. And as much as Zola had to tell his audience about the rise of department stores or the way French misers collected their money, what is interesting about his work now (and what was probably of most interest to his audience then) is that he could write sympathetically about what it is like to be a young girl let loose in a department store or what it is like to be a passionate young woman married to a miser.

Even in his journalism, which was wonderful, but especially in his novels, Wolfe has been a writer of what James Joyce would have called improper art.

Proper art, according to Joseph Campbell channelling for Joyce, is static, while improper art is kinetic.

Improper art is kinetic in that it moves the observer either to desire, positive, or to loathe or fear, negative, that object represented. That's clear and simple. Improper art is kinetic, it moves the observer either to desire or to refuse, to fear or hate the object represented.

Proper art moves you to stand still and admire it. To say with awe, Wow, look at that, what a piece of work! Improper art deliberately moves you to run away in disgust at the thing presented or to run out and buy it. Proper art speaks to the soul. Improper art ignites an appetite.

(Campbell doesn't say what Joyce thought of people who have improper reactions to proper art.)

A proper artist then would have you look at Charlotte Simmons and say, My gosh, what a character. What a beautiful portrait. It's human to feel an erotic thrill when Molly Bloom goes into her monologue at the end of Ulysses. But a reader's main reaction is shock. Not a prude's sexual shock. The shock of recognition. The shock of watching an imaginary person come alive before your mind's eye.

Wolfe doesn't achieve this shock with Charlotte or any of his creations. He doesn't even claim to be after it. He's out there bragging that he's trying to create improper art. He wants us to run away in disgust.

But first he wants us to leer and lust after Charlotte.

What he wants is to enlist us in the conspiracy of the elders against Susannah.