Edna O'Brien

Some read to laugh, and let it be hoped some still read to cry, so that on finishing "Bleak House" they realize more fully than from any formal education the perversity, torpiddity and mindless callousness of humankind. Some choose to enter the dark chambers of the psyche and reread Dostoyevsky, not so much to feel at home as to become guests to the criminal within themselves. Some like to sample the nausea of life, man's fate reduced to the absurd by writers who curse God, like Samuel Beckett. That author once put it to me that my return to my native land, both in fiction and in person, was to imbibe another dose of disgust. I could not agree, no more than I would agree that absurdity is Beckett's prime agenda. Rather, I would say it is a hectic delirium that inclines toward the profane but always ends on a note of liturgical grace.

Some look for more than one thing, and others like me look for everything. Reading "The Island" by Gustaw Herling of late, I felt an exhilaration that was like the exhilaration of that first moment of being touched and in some way shattered by great prose. I do not remember what that prose was, whether it was Joyce or Chekhov, but it was one or the other because my reading materials was scant.

At that time I owned two books - "The Steppe," by Checkhov, and "Introducing James Joyce," by T.S. Elliot. In those days I tended to identify with the young boy in "The Steppe," separated from his mother and baffled by the grown-ups he was traveling with; but now boy, grown-ups and landscape all have their piercing effect, their fates joined inextricably, like the threads of a tapestry. Likewise with Joyce. I was at that time drawn to the chapter in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" describing the festive Christmas dinner and the (not unusual) Irish eruption when sex-cum-politics, in the person of Parnell, is raised and enmity let loose. Nowadays the "moon gray" wanderings of Anna Livia Plurabellee make my blood run cold. One rereading of a book digs the trench for the next and the next.

Rereading "The Steppe," in its beautiful Everyman edition, I realized that what Checkhov does above all else is address the spiritual gnaw within the reader, and this is a consideration lamentably absent from most fiction today. Indeed, so does Joyce. That Jesuit-denouncing ventriloquist was as religious as they come, not with the religion of dogma or faith but of transubstantiation through words. While depicting the locale so precisely, or the hop of a kidney on a frying pan, he constantly and by a weird escalation of thought transfigures things so that a Paris street "rawly waking" is a Paris street and also one that no mortal will ever tread. He is realist, magic realist and spiritual genie--Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

So what I want most in fiction is the spiritual thrust, the moment or sequence of moments that shifts the boundaries to something larger, familiar and also startling, to the brush with God and nature or the absence of God and nature. Is this the result of a Catholic upbringing, the sensibility inherited from a race steeped in suffering? No. Every Nation has suffered, yet her writers deal differently with the legacy. Brecht gave us a lasting heroine in Mother Courage, a creature who would sacrifice almost anything for cash, and while I admire her worldly pluck I would not make the journey with her frequently. There is a spiritual vacancy, a pragmatism, an absence of psychic shudder.

The Russians, the Poles and the Irish --or, to be precise, some Russians, Poles and Irish --seem to be the least ashamed of and the most atavistic at mapping out a landscape of suffering. In Gustaw Herling's tales, for instance, the gravedigger is never absent from the carnival, and fatality presides like a lodestar. Some might call this masochism, but they would be mistaken. Joyce himself said that one has not lived unless one has conceived of life as a tragedy. Yet his prose has a fierce ebullience, and here we must make the distinction between what tragedy exacts and depression produces, depression spawning an industry of literary knitting.

When Chekhov, that most dissecting of writers, decides to devote 183 pages in "The Duel" to the history of a discontented man whose wife is dying, whose children are neglected and who sexual urges cannot be met, it is not simply a little tale of infidelity; it is the gouging of the human heart, the moral prig as well as the moral dodger in us all, the insatiability of human nature and the little graph of each private fall.

There is a notion nowadays, meretricious as most notions are, that to write of such things is secondary and holds no brief in these apocalyptic times, when war, rape, murder and carnage fill our television screens and our newspapers and haunt our everyday lives to the extent that we send a donation or have a gruesome twist to our nightmares. The fact that one theme should cancel out the other is buncombe.

Loneliness, physical and metaphysical, is stamped on every face I see and surely not appeased by most film and television fare, with its kindergarten psychology, cretinous language and flurry of bullets flying about with the ennui of confetti. Checkhov or any other true artist would indeed write about the war, the rape, the carnage, were he part of it, as for instance Curzio Malaparte so convincingly did in"The Skin," but the imperative must come from within. The inside is where everything, including the first murmur of language, gestates and waits to be born. Sometimes it waits forever.

Let me say that I think the excellence, rigourousness and lucidity of serious journalism surpasses most published fiction. But information is not transcendence and fact not always the touchstone of feeling. We hear a great deal (too much) about politically correct or incorrect material, but we hear nothing when that judgment is transferred to feeling. It has been sent underground, but like one of Kafka's animals it scrapes its way up so that we come upon the work of Gustaw Herling or his fellow Pole Zbigniew Herbert, both of whom , despite untold obstacles, deliver psalms of passion and luminousness.

In the Rainer Werner Fassbinder movie "The Marriage of Maria Braun," Maria tells a man in prison that it is a bad time out in the world for emotion. Why is this? When was it pronounced taboo? Who is to blame? Is it the overweening influence of the chic or a mix of the chic with the serious or the single-line mantra repetition of pop songs, in which sense is subsumed by sound? It is these things and many more, but I also think it is the prevailing ethos of literary criticism, which, especially in England, inclines to the scalping, where the clever bow to the clever, where the merest manifestation of feeling is pilloried and where consideration of language itself is zero. An indication of a country whose horizons have narrowed and with them any visionary or cultural largess. This is more insidious than it might seem. It breaks faith with innocence, refutes the collective imagination and inculcates a literary climate of smugness and provincialism. Within it lies the sick kernel of inferiority that leads only to yobbery.

Literary prizes are another bogy if you think that because Joyce never won the Nobel Prize whereas Yeats did, Yeats was a more important writer. They are indeed different in their sublimity, though I would argue that Joyce stands as the master builder of Irish writing and English writing in this century--a droll aside on the vengeance that history wreaks. Like other truly great writers, Joyce was offhand, albeit totally confident, about his work, and he concluded that the money spent on a copy of " Ulysses" might provide about the same satisfaction as that spent on a pound of chops.

Chops or not, literature is the last banquet between minds. It is true, as Romain Rolland said, that literature is useless against reality while being a great consolation to the individual. But it is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.

Books are the Grail for what is deepest, more mysterious and least expressible within ourselves. They are our soul's skeleton. If we were to forget that, it would prefigure how false and feelingless we could become.