Their hats they swam aboone.
O lang lang may their ladies sit,
Wi thair fans into their hand.
Or eir they se Sir Patrick Spens
Cum sailing to the land.
A terse exchange sets the scene and conveys that sense of foreboding which is a central element in these ballads; and then in one extraordinary stanza everything happens: we first see the fastidious Scottish nobles high-stepping to keep their shoes dry as the sea starts to cover the decks (but that bit is not stated, we have already been given all the information we need to imagine it), then a mere two lines are required to describe, from some position outside both human time and space, the whole expedition and the storm as a cosmic play or game, and to present us with the stark image of the noblemen's hats afloat on the water, the only remaining sign of the ship and its occupants. Finally, as in the biblical Song of Deborah, we switch to the wives and mothers waiting for the men to return, but waiting, of course, in vain.
Something of this doublenesss of vision is what we experience at the key moment in both Golding's Pincher Martin and Spark's The Hothouse by the East River: a nightmare has come to an end, and if the end is death, the annihilation of the self, then it is also a blessed release from the effort of having to cling on to a lie. Golding, in his early novels, is adept at making us feel what Jones, talking of Sophocles, described as the envelope of life, the sense that we who were at the centre of this nervous bundle of emotions called the self are made to recognize that there exists a life outside us which is utterly other than us. That recognition is, as in Aeschylus and Sophocles, heart-rending, but it is also, in a strange way, healing.
Nowhere is it more terrible than in the last chapter and a half of The Inheritors. It is now accepted as probable that it was our human ancestors who put paid to Neanderthal Man. Golding, remarkably, explores this transition from the point of view of the Neanderthalers. For the bulk of the book we are with them, in their simplified, innocent world, a world much more akin to that of animals in its reliance on instinct and inability to grasp agency and causality. We are with them, or rather, with a particular group of them, as their world slowly comes to an end, destroyed by the human beings who have, unfortunately for them, started to live at the edges of their territory, and who, unlike them, have mastered the use of the bow and arrow. In retrospect we realise that the very first episode, in which one of the Neanderthalers falls into the water, catches cold and dies, is not a chance event in the life of the group: he falls into the water because the log that used to lie across it has been removed by the ‘new men’. But when, for ten and a half chapters, we have been inside the heads of the Neanderthalers as they slowly succumb, what follows comes as a shock:
The red creature stood on the edge of the terrace and did nothing. The hollow log was a dark spot on the water towards the place where the sun had gone down. The air in the gap was clear and blue and calm. There was no noise at all now except for the fall, for there was no wind and the green sky was clear. The red creature turned to the right and trotted slowly towards the far end of the terrace … It was peering down into the thunderous waters but there was nothing to be seen but the columns of glimmering haze where the water had scooped a bowl out of the rock. It moved faster, broke into a queer loping run that made the head bob up and down and the forearms alternate like the legs of a horse … It put up a hand and scratched under its chinless mouth … The red creature, now grey and blue in the twilight, loped down the slope and dived into the forest … It was a strange creature, smallish and bowed. The legs and thighs were bent and there was a whole thatch of curls on the outside of the legs and the arms … There was no bridge to the nose and the moon-shadow of the jutting brow lay just above the tip. The shadows lay most darkly in the caverns above its cheeks and the eyes were invisible in them. Above this again, the brow was a straight line fledged with hair; and above that there was nothing.
Golding has waited till this point to describe his protagonists from the outside, and the shock is as great as the one produced by Pincher Martin's discovery that there is a congruence between his tooth and his island. For we who have been living and suffering with them are suddenly dragged over to the point of view of the inheritors, the new men, who are set to wipe these red animals from the earth. There is no pathos, no sentimentality. Just the crossover. But it is as powerful as the messenger's speech in Oedipus at Colonus.
The double vision need not be so extreme. A La Recherche is full of little jolts as the fabric of life which envelops us is momentarily felt and we recognise that we are not the centre of the universe. Some of these are extremely painful, cannot perhaps ever be quite got over, as when Marcel's mother will not come up to kiss him goodnight or he understands that his grandmother is truly dead, or that Albertine has left him. Swann, in a similar situation, many years before, had, in the end, shrugged his shoulders and muttered something about having wasted the best years of his life with someone who was not his type. Marcel, more open, more curious, more intelligent, more resilient perhaps, works his way down through the pain until the experience is transformed into the joy of his final understanding of our human condition.
The imitation not of human beings but of an action, said Aristotle; and both Kierkegaard and Jones have enabled us to grasp what that implies. This can help us understand not just Aeschylus and Sophocles, but Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon and Marguerite Duras, those very different writers who came into prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s and were bundled together by clever publishers and lazy journalists into one entity, the nouveau roman. All their major novels deal, in Kierkegaard's terms, with events, not with characters or ethics, with something unfolding which lies beyond our immediate understanding, and certainly beyond that of the protagonists, something they are caught up in rather than the plots devised by traditional novelists. L'Herbe, L'Amante anglaise and Le Voyeur have nothing to do with Greek tragedy except for this central similarity, that they deal with the event seen in its epic dimension and not with plotting or character, though of course it is characters we can relate to who ‘carry’ the action. Consequently endings cease to have the importance that they do in the classic novel; as with Pinget's Passacaille, a field is thoroughly tilled and, when that is done, the work ends. Not that there is no tension in these works, or that we have no urge to turn the pages — just as we watch the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles with rapt attention till the final chorus is done — but that it is a very different experience from wondering whether Orestes and Iphigeneia will succeed in making their escape from Tarsus.
Seeing the art of the twentieth century in the light of the ancient Greek stage can help us to understand many things. Why, for example, Gert Hofmann and Agota Kristof chose to write in the first person plural, or why the attitude of so many artists to the objects they chose to depict changed radically from what it had been in earlier times. Kafka's first diary entry, for example, dated 1910, describes an event and not a person or even a group of people: ‘The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past (Die Zuschauer erstarren, wenn der Zug vorbeifährt).’ Kafka is interested not in the people on the station platform and not in the train but in what-happens-when-the-train-goes-rushing-past. Writing about his 1911 painting of a coffee mill, Duchamp puts it very clearly: ‘Instead of making an objective, figurative coffee-grinding machine, I did a description of the mechanism. You see the cogwheel and you see the turning handle at the top, with an arrow showing the direction in which it turned, so there was the idea of movement.’ The depiction of movement, which is such an obsession with Duchamp and which can be seen to lie behind such early filmic masterpieces as René Clair's Entr'acte and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, is not the result of artists' obsession with the new and faster means of travel appearing at the time, as positivist historians assert; those means of travel, as well as the possibilities of film, rather, help artists return to those older principles of art: the imitation not of character but of action.