‘The Running Tap Casts A Static Shadow’

… both life and sense,

Fancy and understanding, whence the soul

Reason receives, and reason is her being,

Discursive, or intuitive; discourse

Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours,

Differing but in degree, of kind the same.

(John Milton, ‘Paradise Lost’, Book V).

Anthony Burgess wrote a series of brilliant comic novels concerning the adventures of one F. X. Enderby, poet, of whom he said that he ‘may be taken as the last dogged individualist, the quiet rebel who lives in all of us, affirming the creative impulse, even to no useful end, and doing little good to the world, at least doing no harm. is moderately ambiguous, and so are its sequels. The poems he writes have their own ambiguities.’

Burgess was a modernist writer, perhaps a postmodernist one, there is certainly a challenge to assessing the significance and meaning of his ambiguities, or of his literary experiments; our traditional critical implements and our method of applying them are barely up to the task.

And so a literature that challenges us requires a theoretical approach that is also challenging, and since the representation of mental processes in the affirmation of the creative impulse constitute an important area of Burgess’s field of experimentation, the acute analysis of certain mental processes offered by the philosopher Henri Bergson’s intuitive method can perhaps enable us to state more clearly the qualities we intuit in Burgess’s experimental writings.

Bergson distinguishes between intuition and analysis by examining the two methods by which we come to know a character whose adventures are portrayed in a novel. After Burgess has portrayed his hero through his speech and behaviour we feel we understand him, but this knowledge is superficial and unreliable unless we Enderby and experience his feelings and drives. Having seen him from the inside, (having been ‘Inside Mr Enderby’, the title of the first novel in the series), we have a grasp of his unique nature and are able to recognize what he has in common with other people, what may be known of him, through descriptions, symbols and analysis.

As Bergson wrote:

‘The author may multiply the traits of his hero’s character, may make him speak and act as much as he pleases, but all this can never be equivalent to the simple and indivisible feeling which I should experience if I were able for an instant to identify myself with the person of the hero himself’.

The novels, like any great works of art, reveal something of reality, be it a new metaphor, or a new type of character, or a new myth; a feature of reality that was once nameless is now identified, and we continue to recognize it, as we do with Don Quixote, Don Juan, Falstaff, Hamlet, and now Enderby the poet, who ‘lives in all of us’, that is, they are recognizable types of character, or aspects of all our characters, for which no other name for them is available. Burgess makes plain to us what he has seen in reality, having freed himself from the usual way of looking at things, particularly with regard to our dynamic, as opposed to static, inner life.

To quote from F. X. Enderby himself (sorry, I seem to be back with the ‘speaking stones’ theme again, (see previous post), this is accidental, I don’t know why it recurs, maybe this could be a subject for a dissertation, the talking rocks trope in religion, culture and the arts:

‘Caution caution’, the rocks proclaim,

The dear departed, the weeping widow

Will meet you in the core of flame:

The running tap casts a static shadow.

The intuitive method is a philosophical attitude that is opposed to the conceptualization of reality that impedes its ceaseless flow, that is to say, it presents durational flow methodically, without directing it through the channels of reason and analysis. Burgess immerses himself, with a tremendous effort of the imagination, into Enderby’s consciousness, ceasing to have any point of view of his own. This effort of the imagination, in Bergson’s terminology, is ‘intuition’. Enderby is conceived as a process of ceaseless becoming, within a medium of real duration.

This, at least, is how I envisage Bergsonian theory of intuition being applied in a critical analysis of a literary work. But it has to be said that the novels are a comic portrait of the artist as a dyspepsic, middle aged minor poet with lousy interpersonal skills, (hence I identify with him, though substitute ‘philosopher’ for ‘poet’). And though they do engage with the subjects of freedom, religion, sex, the poetic impulse, and time, through the course of the novels Enderby does not change, rather, he becomes more and more fixed in himself. Romanticized clichés about poetry and its creators are undermined, his life is sordid, he writes his poetry in the lavatory, his bathtub serves as storage for his poetry, mice nibbling away at the paper… and out of this emerges Enderby’s poetic impulse, …why that is so is something of a mystery, but there seems to be at bottom, so to speak, a faith in art for art’s sake.

As Bergson wrote in his treatise ‘On Laughter’:

‘Could reality come into direct contact with sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves, probably art would be useless, or rather we should all be artists, for then our soul would continually vibrate in perfect accord with nature. Our eyes, aided by memory, would carve out in space and fix in time the most inimitable of pictures’.

So despite the obvious difficulties, I persevere in my efforts to try and see if Bergsonian intuition is just the challenging theory that would serve in the analysis of a challenging literature. In the meantime, I recommend the Enderby novels, ‘Inside Mr. Enderby’, ‘Enderby Outside’, ‘The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby’s End’, ‘Enderby’s Dark Lady, or No End to Enderby’, and something by Henri Bergson, perhaps ‘The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics’.