The supernatural and English fiction Book

Cavaliero's book is an occasionally academic and dry but very useful review of what he chooses to define variously as the supernatural, the paranormal and the preternatural in English fiction.

Like the sound donnish figure that he is, he implicitly privileges the supernatural as the numinous in literature over the attempts (as he seems to see it) of those who want to give you a good jolt or who see magic as just undiscovered science - but it has to be said that his own use of language is hardly inspiring when he moves beyond his judgements on particular authors to a consideration of theory.

This is what they might call a solid performance and there is serious value to be gained from it - if only the introduction of new names to the non-specialist in literary studies. He has made me want to read Charles Williams. He brings out of the closet a number of women authors like Phyllis Paul who have been long and probably (on his evidence) unfairly neglected. One of his more charming qualities is his evident search in the highways and byways of literature for the neglected author who deals with his preoccupations and who deserves recognition. He appears to be the most generous of men and even his negative assessments are expressed with understanding.

When I can compare his account of authors that I have read, he is sound. He is excellent on the Gothic classics like Melmoth the Wanderer, on Kipling and on Peter Ackroyd's 'Hawksmoor', for example - but also on many others. He is persuasive in getting us to reconsider the worth of such authors as the Scots fantasist George Macdonald. There are, in the bulk of the book, wise judgements on many writers even if he often gets carried away in believing that his audience is as well read as he is - a little more background as he launched into his opinions might have been useful on occasions.

So, why the doubts? It is partly his prose style when he is not enthused by an author. The accumulation of precise adjectives is not an aid to understanding. There are many sentences with three of four latin-derived adjectives that could easily have been lost for the sake of flow or redrafted to communicate more effectively to those who us who do not have a seat at at High Table.

But the main problem for me was that the thesis of a supernatural theme that is embedded in the English fictional tradition, and the attempt to privilege this over the shock of the preternatural or the hermetic, while plausible enough, seemed forced. Something constantly nagged at the back of the head - is this a truth or a convenient fiction to tell a tale? Was Cavaliero unintentionally mimicking fictional modes to tell us about fiction by creating a narrative that was useful rather than wholly true? Was he selecting for effect to tell that tale?

It is also never made precisely clear what the thesis is - it is more suggested than stated when the book is taken in the round. One's suspicion is that Cavaliero was trying to position the unique qualities of the English novel and short story in relation to debates on meaning in continental philosophy which he understood well enough but was not entirely comfortable with. There is a sense of a man trying to be generous to the oik invited to his table by history.

The book reads like a reaching out to continental obscurities to see if English common sense can find a middle way. The net result is something which is undoubtedly from a man of great perspicacity and learning, and of fine judgement, but the parts (the excellent analyses of particular writers and the sub-thematic chapters) are vastly superior to the over-written theory and overview that encloses those parts.

This, in the end, remains on the book shelf as a reference text and as a collection of judgements that has inspired me to look afresh at some writers, to see some things in a different light and to seek out (if the texts are available) apparently minor or neglected writers with something to say. In this he has done a great service.

However, the overall impression I get is that he has discovered the numinous underlying the art of fiction in a way that begs the question what in his academic culture stops him from seeing it self-evidenced not only in his specialty but in all attempts to communicate an incommunicable reality through art. Is this book just a foot-note to the philosophy of art and literature or is it trying to tell us something about English culture, whatever that may be, at a time of anxiety for liberal England?

It is true that sometimes the English novel does not attempt to describe the world or entertain but tries to trigger an awareness of another imaginative reality, one that acts as metaphor for what we know exists as 'felt' but which can only be described elliptically or by metaphor or allegory.

There is no superiority of meaning in this latter mode because it always fails. It only ever appears to succeed because it mistakes the evocation of a feeling with the knowing of that unknowable 'other reality' that is the subject of many different evocations - art, the sublime in nature, fiction, dream, ritual and so on. It is so momentary (if life-changing) that is precisely comparable to the entertainment which is different only in allowing life to go on. Graham Greene (who handled well if briefly by Cavaliero) would refer to some books as 'entertainments' but perhaps all fiction is entertainment.

Cavaliero's judgements as literary critic are commonsensical and useful within the English tradition that he serves but he is not a philosopher. Like the uncanny, the supernatural requires either a mere description in the context of the feelings of men and women in society (i.e. what is its purpose or its contingent meaning or its utility) or it requires deep critical analysis at a much more profound existential level.

The general description here of the novel as a way station to the profound falls between these stools and is unsatisfying as a result - there is some slightly creepy and conservative moral imperative hidden in such an approach that stops the immediacy of feeling at one end or the disturbing business of serious analysis at the other. It is as if the writer wants us to admire the spiritual - but at a reserved distance - and not get too close to questioning things that might pull the rug out from under the whole liberal arts project and return it to the status of various forms of passing the time. This book falls into the trap of English moderation but also implies an unconscious self-serving quality in the liberal elite by which it privileges its own values.

It is, in fact, rare that a good book confuses this critic. This one did and not because I am stupid. It confused because it speaks, if not to itself, then to a very small community of scholars and intellectuals who may be worryingly out of touch with anything but their own culture. This was written over fifteen years ago but the crisis of high liberal culture (despite the election of high liberals as Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister) deepens. The culture of our high universities may still be that of a 'precious tradition' of the 'liberal arts' - a tradition that could do with some questioning, given that the public purse (mostly) pays for it. And the 'tuition fees' debate is really a final power struggle between those who want to retain that high culture at the expense of the demotic tide and those who are happy to see it begin to melt down in favour of new forms of investigation and learning.

The underlying attitude of the high liberal tradition is wonderfully encapsulated in the quotation from Henry Tilney, Jane Austen's character in 'Northanger Abbey' that Cavaliero reproduces:-

"What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your understanding, your own sense of the probable, your observations of what is passing round you - Does our education prepare us for such atrocities?"

Replace the English with the fashionable preference for the global and remove the Christian as a modern embarrassment and this could be the mentality of the Browne Report ... and of most ways of seeing on which our flailing liberal democracy is based.

To his credit, Cavaliero, in noting this expression of the default position of the pragmatic and rational English elite, the materialistic view of a nation of merchants and pirates, tries to escape from it by giving some credence to the spiritual aspirations of many of its writers. There is a clue perhaps to his own frustrations hidden away in a note (3) to the Epilogue, a 'hiding away' that symbolises the embarrassment caused to the Englishmen by matters dionysiac or transcendental:

" A good deal of contemporary literary criticism reflects the working conditions of university teachers, whose professional lives revolve around seminars and academic conferences in an atmosphere of economic competition that requires the publication of books and articles for purposes of tenure and promotion. Such an atmosphere is scarcely conducive to the consideration of matters imaginative and transcendental."

Er, yes ... precisely ... fifteen years ago, the dons wanted to be relieved of economic constraints. Higher tuition fees for Oxbridge might just crack that problem for a while - or at least buy some time until retirement. Contemporary liberal arts education has been degenerating into a position between that where a certain sort of economy could concentrate idle intellectual pleasures on the (relative) few and one where the economy permitted everyone to pursue idle intellectual pleasures because they had the leisure and networks to do so. The elite Government of Cameron and Clegg. not without a nod from the preceding New Labour Administration, is quite definitely trying to turn the clock back a little ...

Enough of the class or rather institutional politics. In fact, I found that I quite liked Cavaliero - he is understanding of the gay sensibility and of the woman's point of view, there is a yearning for the opportunity to be transcendent, there is his understanding that the love of the preternatural is an expression of genuine social fears - and I appreciated his passing on of the fruits of his reading to an oik like me. In these senses, he is the best of the liberal tradition ...

But perhaps this is my problem with the book - it is just too English and reasonable, a nice little corrective designed perhaps to show that we English have a soul alongside our sceptical materialism and our obsessive concern with social form, both imbued by our grammar and public schools, perhaps a not-very-threatening, rather dispirited and miserable soul but a soul nevertheless ...