Paul Lynch on the writers who have influenced him the most

Consider for a moment William Faulkner’s classic novel, As I Lay Dying, and its profound simplicity. There is a house on a hill. There is a storm and a flood. There is a death and a burial. Before her demise we meet Addie Bundren dying in bed while her son Cash saws and planes her coffin ‘right under the window’. The bewildered paterfamilias Anse sits on the porch rubbing his knees. The buzzards ‘hang in soaring circles’ and it’s fixing to rain like end days. Despite this, two of his sons, Jewel and Darl, make a trip into town to earn three dollars, and miss the death of their mother. The misfortunes tumble one into the other as Addie’s final request to be buried in Jefferson goes terribly awry. 

Faulkner relates these events in a torrent of voices, each one a discrete universe locked into their own way of being. They move through the world forever at odds with each other, devoured by grief, pride, rage, deceit, bewilderment and stupidity. The world of As I Lay Dying is archetypical in its clarity – life, death, nature and cosmos – and yet the sentences probe reality to its very limits, pushing past the known and the visible into the plane of the metaphysical. This is Faulkner’s grand statement about the human condition.  

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster wrote of the ‘prophetic novelist’ whose theme is the universe, ‘or something universal’, whose strangeness of song ‘is bound to give us a shock’. In such fiction, he wrote, ‘the characters and situations always stand for more than themselves; infinity attends them; though yet they remain individuals they expand to embrace it and summon it to embrace them’. Forster saw Melville, Dostoyevsky, Lawrence and Bronte as the ideal prophetic novelists, though he misread Hardy and Conrad, and missed Faulkner entirely.  

Consider the following passage from Conrad’s Typhoon where the boatswain, in the midst of a shipwrecking storm, drops into a coal bunker, blind within darkness, then proceeds to the hold packed with Chinese ‘coolies’ returning home after years away doing hard labour. As the ship is tossed, the men have been thrown into a sprawl of limbs and belongings, their sea chests smashed open, and in the darkness of the hull, within a ship in the midst of a typhoon upon an abyssal ocean, the men tear at each other to retrieve their silver dollars. Now hold that layered image in your mind, a metaphysical Matryoshka of startling complexity. Throughout his fiction, Conrad displays an unsurpassed ability for crafting an image that conveys a profound truth about humankind.

For some time, though, I have been troubled by a sense that modern fiction has been letting go the threads to a deeper conversation espoused by cosmic realism. The philosopher John Gray reminds us that, ‘if science serves the demand for knowledge, religion serves the need for meaning’. But when the enlightenment banished the idea of God, the need for meaning found a home in literature. The highest wisdom can be found in the classics and a line of thought began in the 19th century that sought to sound the depths of our modern alienation.  

You can hear it in Melville’s Bartleby, who declares, ‘I would prefer not to’, after being overcome by acedia, the torpor that overcomes one’s spirit upon the discovery that life no longer has meaning. It is there in Dostoyevsky’s Underground man, who struggles with the good, who finds he cannot raise his consciousness in a moral vacuum, succumbing to self-loathing, hatred and despair. Conrad was troubled, too, and continued the conversation in Heart of Darkness. The Kurtz we find up-river has assumed the role of Nietzsche’s over-man and elevated himself to demigod. He has seized upon the absolute freedom afforded to man by an empty universe. But the freedom in which everything is permitted is no freedom at all and the source of Kurtz’s horror is that he has seen all the way into the abyss of man’s degradation. In Kurtz, the prophet Conrad saw clearly the totalitarianism that was to come. 

Writers grappled with the soul of humankind well into the mid-twentieth century until Beckett, wailing and gnashing his teeth, drove it into the ground in language that became a dead-end of absurdism and despair. The loss of the soul was deemed an intractable problem and the passions of today’s writers have been absorbed by the abundant problems of society. 

According to Google, usage of the word acedia peaked in the 1950s. The reading public, too, lost interest in a fiction that confronted the problem of our essential condition. The question of meaning that lies at the heart of our modern alienation remains as a background hum in a few serious writers, while few would dare go balls to the wall as McCarthy does in The Road – think about the transmission of the highest good between father and son within a void universe, a cosmic image if ever there was one.