Among so-called negative thinkers, there are some who after having had a glimpse of the negative have relapsed into positiveness, and now go out into the world like town criers, to advertise, prescribe and offer for sale their beatific negative wisdom — and of course, a result can quite well be announced through the town crier, just like herring from Holstein … But the genuine subjective existing thinker … is conscious of the negativity of the infinite in existence, and he constantly keeps the wound of the negative open, which in the bodily realm is sometimes the condition for a cure.
Finding the conclusion means giving everything that has gone before a meaning. Simply giving something an end does not mean giving it a meaning, any more than a man's life acquires a meaning by coming to its end. To confuse a conclusion with a mere end is like confusing an apostle and a genius. Why it is so difficult to grasp exactly what novels do, how they work on us, is because novels look innocent, look artless. All they are doing is showing us ourselves in a mirror — or are they? Sartre, engaged in the same pursuit a hundred years later, teased out, with his usual rhetorical brilliance, the implications of Kierkegaard's remarks in a famous passage of La Nausée. I walk down the road, he says, my life is open before me. I do not know what will happen to me, and, if my life so far is anything to go by, nothing will. Even if something dramatic happens, if a car, say, runs me over and kills me, that will not have conferred meaning on a meaningless life, only brought it to an end. But if I open a novel and read in its first pages that the hero is walking down a deserted road I know that this is the beginning of an adventure, of love, perhaps, or espionage, it does not matter, it is an adventure. I feel the comforting thickness of the remainder of the novel between the thumb and index finger of my right hand and I settle back with satisfaction. This, after all, is why I am reading the novel in the first place. Not, as the banal view has it, in order to entertain myself, but to give myself the feeling that meaning exists in the world, even if I have not yet found it. That is the secret power of novels: they look like mirrors held up to the world, but what they are is machines that secrete spurious meaning into the world and so muddy the waters of genuine understanding of the human condition.
When Oliver Twist is taken into the house of the man whose pocket he has been wrongly accused of trying to pick, but who turns out to be surprisingly benevolent towards the wretched orphan, his eye is caught by a portrait hanging on the wall. ‘Are you fond of pictures, dear?’ asks the old housekeeper who is tending him. ‘I don't quite know, ma'am’, says Oliver, without taking his eyes from the canvass, ‘I have seen so few that I hardly know. What a beautiful face that lady's is.’ The housekeeper explains that it is a portrait, but that ‘It's not a likeness of anybody that you or I know, I expect.’ Nevertheless, Oliver is transfixed by it. ‘The eyes’, he says, as puzzled by his own reactions as is the old lady, ‘the eyes look so sorrowful, and where I sit they seem fixed upon me. It makes my heart beat.’ He adds in a low voice, ‘as if it was alive and wanted to speak to me, but couldn't’. If this was a work by Poe we would know that this was a sign of the boy's madness or obsession and that the face in the portrait would turn out to be no-one's but his own. Dickens is altogether more benign. But perhaps that is the wrong way to describe the difference. It is a question of attitude not to life but to narration. Poe seems driven by the need to make it clear that the coincidences in his plots do not spring out of the fabric of the world but only out of the head of his hero/narrator. In Dickens coincidence is that which oils the wheels of the plot. It is preposterous, when one comes to think about it, that the one gentleman the young thieves should pick on in the streets of London the first time they take Oliver with them should turn out to have a portrait of Oliver's aunt (for that is who she is), his dead father's sister, upon his walls, and preposterous that Oliver should immediately feel the affinity through the portrait. But it is necessary for the purpose of Dickens' plot, just as it is necessary that the one house Sikes decides to burgle, miles from London, should also turn out to have direct links with Oliver. Dickens senses this absurdity, and in the closing stages of the book, as the plot unravels, passes the responsibility on to Providence or God: ‘When your brother’, Mr Brownlow tells Monks, ‘was cast in my way by a stronger hand than chance …’ Of course it is nothing of the sort. It is the hands of no-one but Dickens himself that cast Oliver in Mr Brownlow's way. That, however, is something the form he has chosen can never admit. Whether this is merely a small example of bad faith which allows for a profound exploration of character and society, and so a price well worth paying, or whether the cost in terms of repression and falsification is simply too great, is a question each reader has to answer for himself.
Kleist, more aware than Dickens of what is at issue, ends his great novel, Michael Kohlhaas in a way that Poe, had he known of it, would have greatly admired. The eponymous hero, a righteous and law-abiding man, is so incensed at the way the authorities condone a blatant wrong perpetrated against him by an arrogant nobleman that he eventually takes the law into his own hands and ends up fighting the entire system, a fight that can only have one end: his own execution for the murder and pillage he has committed. He does, however, possess a piece of paper given to him by a gypsy woman, on which is written the fate of one of his tormentors, who is watching his execution. The man, moreover, is aware of this and is, we imagine, simply waiting for Kohlhaas's death to appropriate the document.
The Elector called out, ‘Kohlhaas the horse dealer, now that satisfaction has been given you in this wise, you on your side prepare to satisfy His Majesty the Emperor, whose attorney stands right there, for breach of the public peace!’ Taking off his hat and tossing it on the ground, Kohlhaas said he was ready to do so … He had just unknotted his neckerchief and opened his tunic when he gave a quick glance around the circle formed by the crowd and caught sight, a short way off, of the figure that he knew with the blue and white plumes, standing beween two knights whose bodies half hid him from view. Kohlhaas, striding up in front of the man with a suddenness that took his guard by surprise, drew out the capsule, removed the paper, unsealed it and read it through; and looking steadily at the man with the blue and white plumes, in whose breast fond hopes were already beginning to spring, he stuck the paper in his mouth and swallowed it. At this sight the man with the blue and white crest was seized by a fit and fell unconscious to the ground. Kohlhaas, however, while his dismayed companions bent over him and raised him from the ground, turned around to the scaffold where his head fell under the executioner's ax.
Kohlhaas swallowing the piece of paper with his enemy's fate inscribed upon it is Modernism's answer to the Victorian novel. Michael Kohlhaas was published in 1810.
We are now in a position to understand a little better the nature of the anxieties that gripped the writers of our opening examples. What is afflicting Mallarmé, Hofmannstahl, Kafka and Beckett is the sense that they feel impelled to write, this being the only way they know to be true to their own natures, yet at the same time they find that in doing so they are being false to the world — imposing a shape on it and giving it a meaning which it doesn't have — and thus, ultimately, being false to themselves. Their works feel like an interference with the world, as guilt-inducing as the boy's presence in the nut-grove in Wordsworth's poem: lacking proper authority they have strayed into a place where they should not be. Going back to the world of genres is not an option, any more than is a return to the world of the ancien régime. Hence Kafka's horrified confession to Brod: ‘Literature helps me to live, but wouldn't it be truer to say that it furthers this sort of life?’ and his aphorism: ‘In your quarrel with the world, back the world.’ Hence Beckett's talk of ‘being weary of pretending to be able, of being able … of going a little further along a dreary road’. Hence the remark of Adrian Leverkühn, Mann's composer-hero: ‘Why must it seem to me as if almost all, no all the means and contrivances of art are good for parody only?’ In a world of geniuses but not apostles the very idea of a ‘genius’ has become nothing more than a sick joke.