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Self-Identity and Contemporary Literature
By W. Paul Jones

One of the most disturbing aspects of contemporary life is the apparent loss of self-identity in large segments of modern society. It has been the literature of our time, however, that has diagnosed this situation most perceptively, so much so that this literary search for self-identity is uncovering an answer to the difficult problem of the inter-relation of Christianity and literature.

The contrast between the significant literature of our generation and that of the past century is perhaps greater than any other comparable period. This contrast centers around the key question, "Who is man?" The title of one of James Farrell's novels sets the mood of the general nineteenth century answer-The World I Never Made. This literature marking the emergence of the modern novel understood man basically as a socio-political creature.

We see this in Balzac, Dickens, Austin, Thackeray, Stendhal, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Flaubert, but its roots are earlier. In the seventeenth century, The Princess of Cleves¹- portrayed the futility of human passion as it brought man into tragic conflict with society. Dangerous Acquaintances² of the eighteenth century reflected the disintegration of the individual in his conformity to the socially approved strategems of self-interest. In the early nineteenth century, Cousin Bette³ portrayed the new materialism of bourgeois society in all its viciousness.

In the latter nineteenth century, the prophetic critique by Ibsen and Strindberg carried the social realism of Zola to almost universal dimensions.⁴ Lionel Trilling draws this same generalization concerning nineteenth century French literature:

¹ Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves, trans. H. Ashton (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1925).
² Pierre A. F. C. de Laclosa, Dangerous Acquaintances, trans. Richard Aldington (New York: New Directions, 1952).
³ Honore de Balzac, Cousin Bette, trans. Kathleen Raines (New York: Pantheon, 1948).
⁴ For interesting theological analyses of these literary periods, see: Paul Tillich, The Religious Situation, trans. H. R. Niebuhr (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1932), pp. 93-101; Nicolas Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, trans. D. A. Lowrie (New York: Harper & Bros., 1955), pp. 230-250.

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If we try to say what was the characteristic accomplishment of the French novelists of the nineteenth century, we can scarcely help concluding that it was the full, explicit realization of the idea of society as the definite external circumstance, the main condition of the individual life.⁵

With such men as Galsworthy and Huxley in England, and Dreiser, Odet, and Kingsley in America, the general portrait is drawn. The problem was social-that of the innocent individual, motivated by fundamental drives and needs which required social fulfillment, caught in a social environment which thwarted all real satisfaction. The problem was not that of searching for an essential self, for man had not lost his self-identity; this identity was inchoate within him, requiring only the social opportunity for its fulfillment. The problem was preserving the self in its integrity against those social and economic forces that threatened from without.⁶

As this social understanding developed, however, certain of these writers and others saw fuller dimensions to the problem of the self. With such works as Ibsen's Ghosts, continuing to the present with O'Neil's Long Day's Journey into Night, the mysterious depths of the psychic were felt and plumbed. There was a growing premonition that the real dilemma rested in man's ignorance of himself. Indeed, man discovered himself through social intercourse, yet, ironically, this social realm was a facade whereby the self was veiled from itself. Here was the clue to the social dilemma-society threatened the self because the self was a threat to itself.

Arthur Miller expresses both the social and psychological perspectives in Death of a Salesman. Charley voices the social analysis of Willie:

Nobody dast blame this man. You don't understand: Willy was a salesman. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back-that's an earthquake. . . . A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.⁷

⁵ Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self (New York: Viking, 1955), p. 176. Cf. Rebecca West's. appraisal: "The view of life to which the nineteenth century novel was committed was unfavorable to the soliloquy or to any equivalent revelation of the self. The soliloquy supposed that what a man says to himself may be of supreme importance and that he may submit his case to a higher court than resides over the conversations he may have with others. But this supposition cannot be accepted by a writer who thinks that man achieves his positive value only as a member of society..." The Court and the Castle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 165; cf. 197.
⁶ Cf. West, The Court and the Castle, p. 113.
⁷ Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (New York: Bantam Books, 1951), p. 150.

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Despite the motion picture version, Miller answers with Biff: "Charley, the man didn't know who he was." The degree to which this confession may still have a social basis is an ambiguity Miller shares with other American playwrights that make them anachronisms to contemporary drama.

O'Neil's All God's Chillun Got Wings⁸ illustrates this literary transition better. Beginning with the social problem of prejudice, O'Neil plumbs far deeper. Although society forces the Negro man and white woman to flee the country, it is the sub-conscious self that destroys them, erupting inevitably to contort that which it cannot dominate. For this understanding, the problem is not Farrell's "world I never made" but "the self I never knew." This shift from without to within marked a transferring of focus from particular man to man as such. But the thoroughgoing universality of contemporary literature can be understood only in terms of one further step.

Hemingway stands as a transition figure leading to the cosmic dimension characterizing present literary analyses of man. The Sun Also Rises⁹ sets the tone with a beginning quotation from Gertrude Stein: "You are all a lost generation." The Biblical referent elevates his theme above the purely social: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. . . . The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down…. No longer is man, social or individual, the real locus of the problem. The heroine of Farewell to Arms echoes the inchoate awareness of a period that was to create a Camus-"It's just a dirty trick.¹⁰

The cosmic dimension is clear. Hemingway's hero makes it unmistakable:

That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. . . . You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.¹¹

The indefinite "they" now provides the coalescing focus for man's dilemma. Man's identity is found in the relative code of his own

⁸ Eugene O'Neil, All God's Chillun Got Wings, in Nine Plays (New York: Modern Library, 1954), pp. 91-136.
⁹ Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926).
¹⁰ Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929), p. 342.
¹¹ Ibid., p. 18.

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making, living consistently the moments of pleasure to their fullness. Yet there is no thread of continuity for such pearls. Ultimately there is nothing but a blind fate which crushes that which is indiscriminately given. Man is cosmically forsaken.

Hemingway's portrait, however, is not that of mid-century; it is too simplex. None of the inner duplicity of self enters his portrait -the problem has again become external. And yet the response to this externality is totally different. No longer is an externality protested for the sake of correction. It is protest in the name of human integrity, albeit a protest devoid of ultimate meaning. With the disruptions in social and cultural continuity undermining faith in inevitable progress, death became symbolic for the impermanence woven into the very fabric of existence. "This too shall pass" became writ large over even the sensuous satisfaction of one who asked of life only to feel with untempered sensitivity.

With Hemingway the three ingredients characteristic of the contemporary literary conception of the human dilemma had appeared: the growing awareness of the alienation of self from society, the alienation of self from its own being, and the alienation of self from the cosmos. But unlike Hemingway's work, modern literature portrays these three dimensions in dynamic interrelatedness. This new understanding can be sensed best through the problems, which have emerged from these three stages in the literary analysis of the self.

I

One of the key problems has been freedom. In the social stage, it arose in terms of the self as the pawn of society. In the psychological stage, social determinism was seen as not simply external but operative within the depths of the psychic. Faulkner is the master here, conveying in meticulous fashion the determinism of the "blood," the visiting of the "sins" of the fathers on the children unto the third and fourth generation. Faulkner's mysterious concept of the "blood" is a covering term for determinism of time through memory, environment, heredity, self-aggrandizement, idolatry, habit, illusion, and the like, made painfully complex by the fact that external determinism is intertwined with the impotence of the "I" before its unknown self. Joanna Burden, Joe Christmas, Quentin Compson-these are characters obsessed with themselves,

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for the mystery of their existence is the mystery of a self they never knew, and, perhaps, never made.

In the writings of Jean Paul Sartre, the reverse side of the problem of freedom emerges, not so much in terms of limited and unlimited time as limited and unlimited space-not the threat to freedom but the threat of freedom. Freedom and despair are integrally related, for man is condemned to be free. In the end, the supposedly determined characters of No Exit are individuals who have never lived because they refused the agonizing burden of freedom, shielding themselves from responsibility with the pretext of external compulsion. Orestes, in The Flies, incarnates Sartres' analysis. Man is utterly alone, having no self, no valid traditions, laws, or absolute principles of operation, forsaken in an empty and unthinking cosmos, forever severed from the warmth of concern. Man is a speck of potentiality immersed in limitless space, having only the self-imposed responsibility of creating a self according to his own plan, knowing that ultimately nothing will overcome the specter of time as it stalks every action to an inevitable end. Man may be the pawn of determined time, but the specter of total freedom so immobilizes man that even the basis for man's loss of self-identity is lost.

This problem of freedom posed in terms of time and space assumes even more universal dimensions in Camus' The Plague. A plague walls in a town, leaving the citizens to find whatever meaning they can in the midst of such cosmic oppression. This is the trapped world, but what is plague? Camus' answer is clear-"Just life, no more than that."¹² Here Hemingway's problem is elevated from the personal plane to the universal. The problem is not simply how the self can preserve itself in the face of death. The problem of time in all its complexity enters. While the race is composed of individuals for whom time is frightfully limited, for the race as a whole, time is limitless. Yet if history is simply a sum of men beginning and ending in weary progression an endless cycle of life and death, does not this limitless time of the race render the limited cycle of the individual not only meaningless, but utterly ludicrous? The self to be a self must live for something, must be committed and integrated outside itself. Self-integration in terms of a self which is not yet formed is a contraction, and self-integration through dedication to humanity as such-the one possibility open when cosmic

¹² Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), p. 277.

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oppression becomes overwhelming-becomes severely undermined here as an answer for the human plight.

But to penetrate deeper, this loss in relative time and space of any absolute point around which the self may integrate and halt its frightening introspection is integrally tied to two further contemporary disruptions. The first is the loss of tradition, portrayed in contemporary literature as rooted in two conditions. First, tradition has been undermined by new methodologies and discoveries, primarily those of natural science. Huxley and Orwell, for example, portray graphically the logic of an objective science severed from moral tradition as its guiding rationale. Such portrayals are biting commentaries on the impotence of time-honored traditions any longer to command the allegiance of contemporary man and society.

But even more desperately, man's alienation from tradition emerges in what T. S. Eliot portrays as the dilemma of the broken symbol. It is not that tradition has been lost, but that its meaning has been eaten out from within by the dry-rot of common-place familiarity. So long has ritual, belief, and the grandiose phrase been made a facade for ennui that tradition retains only the power to gloss the cracks within culture, rationalizing impotence into acceptability. "Shape without form, shade without color,/ Paralyzed force, gesture without motion."¹³ His Hollow Men dance in meaningless circle, either to the Lord's Prayer or to a children's rhyme, interspersing the words of each as each in turn is temporarily forgotten. The woman wasting away in her Victorian luxury, or the typist forgetting her impotent fling to the daydreams conjured by the gramophone-all are damned by the same curse. "I had not thought death had undone so many."¹⁴

It is here that the dilemma of contemporary man reaches its bitterest dimensions. The problem of self-identity is that it is no longer regarded as a problem. This is Eliot's "death-in-life"-those who are not even aware of having lost themselves. "Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?" "Where is the life we lost in living?"¹⁵ Faulkner's portraits of the rotting family in the rotting house, shoring up the foundation with refuse as the termites continue their silent work, is a witness to the same stifling loss.

¹³ T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1952), p. 56.
¹⁴ T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays, p. 39.
¹⁵ Ibid., p. 41.

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But for those who are concerned, who know themselves as self alienated within the context of limited and unlimited time and space, the problem centers in the loss of certainty regarding an absolute point of beginning. There is a growing awareness that that which is certain is insignificant, and that which is significant is not certain. After a century of extreme rational self-confidence, reason has been rebuffed from all sides. If logic deals with the static and abiding, it is irrelevant to the fluidity of contemporary life.

II

Such disillusionment is reflected in literature in two ways. The first is through a wholesale critique of reason. This is most extreme in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. As the characters sprawl beneath the blighted tree of life, the slave is ordered to relieve the dreadful monotony of existence. His best trick, Bozo declares, is to think. And at the crack of a whip, there pours forth three script pages of nonsense, fully documented as of the latest edition of Turabian, parroting masterfully what academia calls truth, or do they call it research? Whether this is all that reason is, or what our age has made of it, we are never sure-but the judgment itself is unmistakable.¹⁶

The second expression of the vacuity of reason is more indirect, as in O'Neil's Long Day's Journey into Night. As mother and father take their separate ways to obliteration, Edmund, the doomed tubercular, makes a curious confession. He recalls twice, while working on sailing vessels, an experience of oneness of self with the cosmos. His life had flowed out into another and returned blessed. Behind the facade of life was a depth that could heal; in leaving himself he found himself. But only twice, no more. Yet this peace with self haunted him, and drove him through the morass of life toward something more, he knew not what.¹⁷ Moments as these are sprinkled throughout contemporary literature, echoing a distrust of reason as the final arbiter of essential truth, expressing a yearning for the union of existential and essential selves.

The problem of uncertainty has still another aspect. A confession in Par Lagerkvist's The Man Without a Soul is revealing: "Per-

¹⁶ Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), pp. 28-30.
¹⁷ Eugene O'Neil, Long Day's Journey into Night (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), pp. 152-154.

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haps there is a meaning in it [life]. . . . I would like so much to believe that."¹⁸ Lagerkvist is a novelist obsessed by two things-cosmic indifference and the desperate ruthlessness in the depth of man, and second, the figure of the crucified Christ. To believe in the latter would be to resolve the former. His Barabbas is a spectator at the crucifixion and empty tomb, but he is caught in the agonizing tension of the world as it is and as it might be for faith. Barabbas alternates between near confession of faith to blasphemy by deed, never able to reach stability through a constant decision. In the end, dying on a cross, his words parallel Christ's-"To thee I deliver up my soul."¹⁹ But that toward which he stares is the starless black, that which may be either a veil or the black of utter nothingness.

In a world which acknowledges no absolute center, man, cut asunder from the stability of reason or certain tradition, is doomed to the horror of "absolute uncertainty." Even this expression is ironic, for the certainty of uncertainty is unavailable. Barabbas is an unbeliever with a belief. Lagerkvist's own self-appraisal makes the desperate circle complete - I am "a believer without a belief, a religious atheist. "²⁰

We can see in all this where the basis of cosmic alienation is increasingly being found-in the self. To be a self, a total, fulfilled being, man needs an integrity which requires faith with cosmic implications. For self-identity, belief is unavoidable, yet that which undermines this possibility is not simply social alienation, or even cosmic indifference. The difficulty is a cosmic alienation which is integrally related to man's self-alienation, to his own impotent will, Man's problem, though cosmic, is man.

Here we are at the heart of the contemporary literary analysis. The three stages of social, self, and cosmic alienation have become a complex-all three form man's problem, and no honest analysis or solution is possible if they are severed. It is Franz Kafka who represents best the manner in which this complex is being understood in contemporary literature. With a brilliantly symbolic style, Kafka portrays man's dilemma with the power of a parable. In The Trial, the respectable banker Joseph K. is "arrested" one morning, in ef-

¹⁸ Par Lagerkvist, The Man Without a Soul, in Scandinavian Plays of the Twentieth Century, Third Series, trans. Henry Alexander and Llewellyn Jones (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 114.
¹⁹ Par Lagerkvist, Barabbas, trans. Alan Blair (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 180.
²⁰ Quoted in E. O, Johannesson, "Lagerkvist and the Art of Rebellion," Scandinavian Studies, 30: 19 (1958).

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fect by the question "Why?"²¹ What possible sense can the endless round of common-place routine have before the question of ultimate, real meaning? "K" tries to shake off this "arrest" in the sweet lethargy of the status quo. But the arrest will not let him go, not in the sense that he is forced to do anything, but once the ultimate question of WHY dawns in its fullness, "K" cannot let it rest. His relations with others are strained to the point of complete alienation. Obsessed with the search for meaning, he cannot understand all the others who do not sense the seriousness of this struggle. Others, in turn, cannot understand him, for he is indifferent to the rewards that bourgeoisie respectability bestows. Increasingly "K" comes to realize that it is "K" that he does not know. He is a divided creature whose only hope for fulfillment, completeness, self-acceptance, depends on a solution to the problem of cosmic alienation. In this understanding of the problem, Kafka speaks for most of the significant writers of our time-Camus, Faulkner, Sartre, Lagerkvist, Eliot, Bernanos, Mauriac. Cosmic alienation is the ground for man's social and self-alienation.

Contemporary literature, however, is not content with analysis but is intent on prognosis. There is no need to indicate more than the direction which these alternative answers are taking, for our task is to generalize concerning them. The first is "existential agnosticism," represented by Kafka and Lagerkvist. Such writers are agnostic concerning the nature of cosmic alienation, as to whether man stands before a Cosmic Creator Judge, impersonal law, or non-being. Yet this is not traditional agnosticism, for even in the absence of answers the questions cannot be set aside if man is to be a man. The search is its own justification. The question "Who is man?" is raised existentially in all its cosmic implications, but the "ultimate concern" of these writers resides in the problem itself.

The second position is that of "nihilism." Here too the problem of self-identity is existentially real, yet the "search" is given no justifying ground. Such a position verges on self-contradiction, for suicide rather than literary communication seems the most consistent action. Beckett stands closest to this position, spewing vindictives against a non-existent Deity for having the audacity not to exist. In Waiting for Godot, Beckett ruthlessly undermines all hope, reducing

²¹ The universality of contemporary literature is well illustrated by Kafka's omission of all particulars, even to the naming of the "hero" by the common letter "K." Tennessee Williams' original scene indication for Camino Real is indicative: "Any time, any place, any where."

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to absurdity those who await a deliverance which is never forthcoming. Tillich once said that what keeps some writers from the abyss which can bring faith is a Narcissus-like fascination with the literary portrait of their own despair. His observation is to the point here.

The third answer is "naturalistic humanism," represented by Faulkner and Steinbeck. Throughout Faulkner's work walk the characters of nature, of the soil, who endure and prevail in their oneness With the élan vital, the natural forces of evolution-call them what you will. They suffer at the hands of the men of fate, those who live in the past, futilely shoring against the inevitability of time the rootless ideals of past or dream. Yet these men of fate will destroy each other or will be crushed by the inevitability they oppose. The men of nature will endure, nay, prevail.

It is with the positions of "atheistic existentialism," represented by Sartre, and "agnostic humanism," portrayed by Camus, that the key to contemporary explorations for solution to the problem of self identity is to be found. Both men see the priority of the problem of cosmic alienation. Sartre puts it clearly. If God exists, man possesses a specific essence which must be fulfilled if selfhood is to be attained-essence would precede existence.²² But since there is no God, man has no pre-determined essence to realize. The solution to the problem of self-identity thus rests in the individual's assumption of God's task of creating essence, living consistently one's choice of essence. Thereby essence and existence are made one-this is self-fulfillment.

Camus, however, is far less certain about the cosmic issue. It would seem that cosmic powers, personal or impersonal, torture and destroy the very life they ground. But here is the important point -has man an essence? Camus' affirmative reply gives him affinity with Kafka. The tragedy of "K's" "death like a dog" depends on whether or not "K" has lived like a dog. There is nothing tragic in the dog-like death of a dog. For Kafka, only in searching with utter intensity for cosmic meaning does one's death become a silent protest which "will outlive him."²³ In effect, this is the affirmation that man is such that ultimate meaninglessness is a travesty upon his essential being-existence in ignorance, uncertainty, despair, and death, is an affront which is inherently self-contradictory. This is the foun-

²² Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Meridian, 1956), p. 290. Cf. Sartre, The Flies, in No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage Bks., 1956), pp. 119-124.
²³ Kafka, The Trial (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), p. 288.

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dation for man's eternal search-although all else may undercut hope in ultimate meaning, man's essential being defies any such certain conclusion.

So with Camus. Suffering, evil, death-the plague that is life-is a blasphemy against human integrity. It should not be, not because of what man thinks, but because of what man is essentially. Camus' answer is self-consistency in the face of cosmic agnosticism. Man's integrity can be actualized only in defiance of those powers which seek to destroy it. Even though man's fight may be only the endless rolling of Sisyphus' stone, it has existential validity, for in corporate rebellion man attains an integrity which renders cosmic indifference a travesty. When Camus' character affirms, "What interests me is being a man," we have testimony to an innate human essence which is a sort of miracle in the midst of existence as it is. ²⁴

The witness of Archibald MacLeish is akin. J. B. cries out, "God does not love, He is."²⁵ Sarah replies, "But we do, that is the miracle of it all. "²⁶ Miracle, perhaps, but certainly enigma-that man is capable of self-less love in an indifferent cosmos, of human warmth in the midst of cosmic coldness, of loyalty despite cosmic disloyalty. "Blow on these coals," MacLeish suggests, "and we'll see by and by. " 27 See what? This is the question which he leaves unanswered for the audience and for himself. But the direction of such searching is akin to Unamuno's literary method-"by probing deeply the character of man belonging to a time and place, one can discover what is universal and common to all. . . ."²⁸ To the degree that these literary analyses are discovering the universal in man, to that degree is Sartre's atheistic certainty challenged. If it be true that man is limited, not simply as with Sartre by a common situation confronting man, but by an innate, interior structure, form, essential vitality, then the search for self-identity is at the same time the clue in the search for cosmic meaning. Sartre is right-theism is an affirmation of human essence. But the reverse is no less true. The discovery of human essence is an affirmation of an ontological Godman relation-God is implied by the fact of human nature.

²⁴ Camus, The Plague, p. 231. Cf. Par Lagerkvist, The Sibyl, trans. Naomi Walford (New York: Random House, 1958), pp. 112-113,152.
²⁵ Archibald MacLeish, J. B. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1956), p. 152.
²⁶ Ibid.
²⁷ Ibid., p, 153.
²⁸ Miguel De Unamuno, Three Exemplary Novels, trans. Angel Flores (New York: Grove Press, 1956), p. 17.

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III

This growing awareness accounts in part for the tremendous contemporary interest in the novels of Dostoevsky, perhaps the greatest Christian novelist. Two questions obsessed Dostoevsky. The first is identical with the protests of many contemporary writers-in the presence of suffering and evil, can man live with God? But the corollary is even more basic-can man live without God? That is, is man so formed that either God exists or man must create Him in order to be a self? Dostoevsky traces the universal interior logic of man's existence, to exhibit partly in Crime and Punishment and definitively in The Brothers Karamazov a human essence for which the only options are the self-destructive man-God, or self-fulfillment through the God-man. It is Dostoevsky's second question which is now beginning to emerge in contemporary literature, more felt, however, than clearly realized. This literary wrestling with the problem of human essence is illustrated by the title of Luigi Pirandello's play, Six Characters in Search of an Author. Whatever this play may mean, the suggestion is that man's life is so molded, essentially drawn, as it were, that the playwright-character analogy seems somehow to apply.

If this is true, an answer is beginning to emerge not only to the question of self-identity, but to the human point of contact for the Christian witness. Herein lies the key to the underlying relation between Christianity and literature. Whether one is a Barthian Protestant or a Thomistic Catholic, he affirms an essential analogy between man and God. Although Classical Protestantism insists that man's essential self cannot be known without Jesus Christ, the resulting understanding is not unlike the Thomist definition of man as a composite of form and potency, driven by an impetus for actuality. Freedom cannot change the fact of this God-given form. The essential form of an acorn is oak-tree ness, and even if freedom were given to an acorn, its choice of maple-tree ness would produce only stunted oak-tree ness. Freedom is the capacity to fulfill essence or to deny it, not to replace it. In the Fall, man rejected his essence by striving to become what he was not-in trying to become more than a man, he became less than a man.²⁹ Cosmic alienation, one's alienation from God, means inevitably an alienation of one's existence from his essential nature.

²⁹ This awareness is powerfully portrayed from a Renaissance perspective in Christopher Marlowe's The Tragic History of Doctor Faustus (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950).

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St. Augustine stated this perceptively-"Lord, Thou hast made us for Thyself, and we are restless until we find our rest in Thee." Despite man's doings, he cannot remove his essential being, his "ought ness," which is love-fulfillment in God. He is a split creature, yearning for his other half, ultimately crying out for his Alpha and Omega. Kierkegaard's irony is profound-"To strive to become what one already is: who would take the pains to waste his time on such a trifle?"³⁰ Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death brilliantly analyzes sin as despair, all forms of which are rooted in man's refusal to accept his essence, to become what the self is."³¹

Reinhold Niebuhr, reworking Kierkegaard, further clarifies this condition. Anxiety, man's natural state, is the precondition of both sin and fulfillment. Negatively, anxiety is the threat to self-identity that tempts man to self-alienation through self-idolatry, the life of essential pretense. Positively, anxiety is the becoming of identity, the tension of actuality and essence which is the process of self fulfillment."³² In the early stages of contemporary literature, anxiety as the threat to self-identity was portrayed in all its ramifications; increasingly, we are suggesting, this second aspect of anxiety is emerging as the key to solution. This need not mean that the secular artist has the instruments of "salvation" in his art, but that the Christian artist can be loyal to his creative calling while bringing to completion the insights of contemporary literature.

What is meant is this. The novel, from its beginning, has been humanistic-man is its subject, and its domain is human existence. If the only Divine activity is that of miraculous intervention, defying the internal logic of the individual, the vocation of the novelist is forever closed to the Christian. A novel of character contortion is a self-contradiction. A deus ex machina is Christian propaganda in novel form.

But as both contemporary literature and Christian theology suggest, Divine activity is more complex. As Augustine declares, if man had been successful in his rebellion against God, man would have faded from existence, for all exists solely by the sustaining power of God. We must conclude, Augustine insists, that God sus-

³⁰ Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. D. F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), p. 208.
³¹ Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), esp. 17-42,
³² Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951), 1, esp, 167-203.

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tains man in his restlessness, his insatiability, his frustration, that in knowing the consequences of pride, man might be drawn by the forgiving grace of God. It is here that Pascal's confession becomes meaningful-"I should never have found Thee had Thou not first sought me out, frustrating all my ways." This we may call the dark side of grace. It is not the grace which intervenes, but the grace which abides, which sustains human essence, that will not permit man to rest content with non-existence, with a divided and false self.

Perhaps only the eyes of faith can detect this ultimate meaning of human frustration. Yet the Christian must insist that such Divine workings are not an intrusion upon the internal logic of existence but are the fuller dimensions of that very logic itself. This method of the Christian writer is true to the vocation of the novelist-the search for cosmic meaning through an exploration of the existential logic of human essence.

Such an understanding is profoundly documented by the so-called "Catholic Renascence" in contemporary literature, led by Francois Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Graham Greene. Mauriac speaks for them-"a literature of edification falsifies life," but "to depict man in all his misery is to unmask the abyss opened, in the modern world, by God's absence."³³ The phrase "God's absence" is misleading. The world they portray is one in which the presence of God is unrecognized.

In Mauriac's The Desert of Love, a father and a son both lust for the same woman, Maria Cross, as the instrument of fulfillment. With masterful strokes Mauriac exposes the ultimate frustration of human love. Life is a desert, for man bums with an agonizing need which can never be humanly satisfied. Every human possibility turns out to be a locked door leading nowhere. Mauriac intervenes to underline his meaning-"There can be no hope for either one of them, for father or for son, unless, before they died, He should reveal Himself who, unknown to them, had drawn and summoned from the depths of their beings this burning bitter tide."³⁴ Here is the dark side of grace. There is ultimate meaning behind man's self-inflicted frustration portrayed so graphically by contemporary secular writers. Through the very structure of

³³ Francois Mauriac, Therese, trans. Gerald Hopkins (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1947), cover statement. Cf. Mauriac, God and Mannon (London: Sheed & Ward, 1946), p. 59.
³⁴ Francois Mauriac, The Desert of Love, trans. Gerald Hopkins (New York: Bantam Books, 1951), p. 182. Cf. Rebecca West's comments on Shakespeare as a religious writer: The Court and the Castle, p. 71.

258 - Self-Identity and Contemporary Literature

one's being, God attempts to lead man through the path of suffering to the moment of self-knowledge, the unification of existence and essence which is redemption. Immediately one recalls Camus' "method": "'Who taught you all this, doctor?' The reply came promptly: 'Suffering.'"³⁵ That man must ever rebel against suffering and yet obtain his dignity through suffering was the enigma that Camus was unable to resolve.

This Christian resolution is far from unique to Roman Catholicism, for it is Augustinian rather than Thomistic. Nor does it permit only the portrayal of negative grace. As Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest displays, the portrayal of life from the perspective of negative grace exhibits the light side of grace as the fulfillment of the internal logic of existence."³⁶ In the unity of Divine activity rests the unity of the total man, redeemed from social and self-alienation through the dialogue which is cosmic restoration.

This is the Christian point of contact for modern literature. This is the Christian answer to the literary search for self-identity. This is the foundation for the vocation of the Christian novelist.

³⁵ Camus, The Plague, p. 118.
³⁶ Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1954), Bernanos' last sentence contains the whole thrust of the novel: "Does it matter? Grace is everywhere."