A review of Falling Hour by Geoffrey D. Morrison (Coach House Books, 2023)
On many of the Big Questions of literary theory, I’m a centrist, or worse, a waffler. I tend to see both sides, probably to the point of not giving either of them their due. Politically, I’m a socialist, and I do find Marxist literary criticism generative, but I don’t think Marxist literary criticism has anything near the last word on the subject. I even find myself at times sympathizing with their diametrical opposite, the New Critics. To square this circle I tend then to lean heavily on those who forged a path between the two, the Auerbachs, the Fryes, the Kazins, even the Trillings (Lord forgive me)—yes, the liberals, more or less.
Qua socialist, the Big, Big Question, for me, has always been: what is the novel as a political object? What can the novel be, politically? Can the novel be political? If we take the political and moral responsibilities of literature to its extreme, we end up with vulgar socialist realism—perhaps not wholly without its achievements, but hardly useful for the bulk of writers. If we go all the way in the opposite direction and discard any art that can be construed as “didactic” or “ideological”, we lose out not just on Zola, or 20th century partisans like Langston Hughes and Bertolt Brecht, but also, if we’re being honest, and not just using anti-didacticism as a bludgeon against the Left, we lose out on Virgil, Dante, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot—one could go on.
Speaking of Dante, I recently read Geoffrey D. Morrison’s debut novel, Falling Hour (Coach House Books, 2023), the whole point of this post.
Hugh Dalgarno, the narrator, is a working-class, Scottish-born Canadian who “thinks his brain is broken” (from the back cover). He’s wandering around a park in a fictionalized, mid-sized Ontario town, where he’s waiting to meet up with an internet stranger, to whom he intends to sell a picture frame he had found wrapped around a fire hydrant. And he’s losing his mind. At an early point in the novel, Hugh reflects:
Each of my thoughts had lit up the edges of shadowy paths to things I hadn’t thought of yet, things I knew would distress me even more. Midway through the journey of this day I found myself in a forest of archways and colonnades, a Mezquita of twisted design. (35)
The explicit reference to the opening lines of the Inferno invites immediate comparison. The Divine Comedy is, among other things, a Thomistic moral topography of Italian society—a journey through the historical accumulation of social relations within which Dante found himself, told through the story of the Soul’s journey of unification with the Divine. Hugh, similarly, is wrapped up in History, the World, Social Relations.
But unlike fourteenth century Italy, Hugh’s hypermodern 21st century Canada is a land without the rigid moral structure of pre-Reformation Catholic Europe. That’s not to say there’s not a moral viewpoint—but instead of the spiral staircase from Hell to Heaven by way of Purgatory, there’s the multivalent, criss-crossed, topsy-turvy blizzard of History, a constellation of social classes and circumstance that sums to the interconnectedness of everything wrought by the world-historical spread of capitalism over every corner of the globe.
This interconnectedness is not, then, Whitmanesque: Hugh is not the park, not the postmodern concrete surrounding the park, not the songbird, not the leaves of grass. Even if he is connected to all of these things, it is mediated by the system of generalized commodity production. And he’s certainly not Canada, which for Hugh is an offensive, made-up abstraction built on top of a mass of violence. But he is complicit in Canada. Rather than identification, there is unity-in-separation, the interconnected atomization of anonymous global supply chains, complex historical lineages, and personal isolation—at no point does Hugh talk to anyone except the reader, nor does he even encounter another human soul. All he has are the birds, and the leaves of grass, and the park, and the concrete buildings outside of the park, and the flood of history—and his broken brain.
The individuals he reflects on, especially John Keats, are only fully legible for Hugh within definite social classes and relations:
Two hundred miles from Keats in bed at eleven at Wentworth Place are the textile factories of Manchester, the women bent over the masses of power looms, the children crawling under the taut fibres of the spinning mules to gather waste. They have been here since dawn. I hear the rhythmic wooden smack of the looms in operation, feel the fear and the focus of the hurrying women and children. Somewhere the mill owner accumulates capital without doing anything. (22)
History pulses through Hugh in ways it does for us all, whether we know it or not. But he wants to talk about it, a sort of antidote to the commodity fetishism and historical obscurantism for which Karl Marx criticized the major theorists of Political Economy. Speaking of Karl Marx, let’s talk about Karl Marx.
Hugh is a Marxist—although not an active cadre in a Party or other organization, he donates regularly to the Party of Socialist Workers, and his outlook is obviously, outspokenly Marxist. And Morrison, too, is incredibly well-schooled in Marxism. He treats the subject with such careful consideration and sympathy that I find it unlikely that a liberal or reactionary could have written this novel. What does this mean for the reader, or, more grandly, for contemporary literature?
I’m not sure exactly what it would mean for a novel to be “a Marxist novel,” and I don’t have an easy answer as to what a novel can do, politically. I do think a novel can depict or embody political commitment. And a novel can certainly provoke political thought in the reader, or even under certain circumstances advance a political argument—I know my politics were enriched by reading The Dispossessed, for instance. I think a novel, like any other work of art, can reveal political truths about the world. I think Falling Hour does all of these things.
All that being said, I want you to indulge me for a moment and consider art, or literature, as a discrete practice in an Aristotelian sense—it has a “good” unto itself, an internal logic driving to some end that cannot be reduced to the ends of any other practice. If literature as a practice only had merit insofar as its “good” was oriented towards political “good,” or religious, or moral, or any other, there would be no use for literature. It would be more effective to simply produce propaganda. I don’t think this is the case. I think literature, and art, is an aesthetic practice that has an end, or ends, unto itself. I think that end is hard to define precisely—whether it’s the representation of reality, or human truth, I think it’s there.
If art is broadly interested in human truth, and I believe it is, it would be arbitrary to exclude the political from that realm. The political is an integral part of human experience, just as much as individual psychology or interpersonal relationships; this should not be controversial. Perhaps the 19th century English novel has conditioned us to think of the novel in terms of bourgeois individualism. I don’t want to push on that point too hard, but I think it’s a factor.
I don’t think art, or literature, or the novel, can be reduced to politics, or any other dimension of human experience, but by that same token I think it would be unwise, or deceptive, to believe that a novel cannot or should not embody political or ideological commitment, or that doing so would necessarily diminish its artistic value. If we accept the latter, again, I think we lose the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost—we might even lose everything.
Political commitment in literature is not new—neither is Marxist or communist political commitment. We have, again, Hughes and Brecht. We also have Nanni Ballestrini, Luther Blissett/Wu Ming, Ursula Le Guin. But I think we’re on new ground here, by necessity—this is, after all, a new historical period. And I am by no means an expert, or even have passing knowledge of the breadth of contemporary literature, but I think Morrison is attempting to answer this question—what is the novel, politically—in an original fashion. He blends the personal and political, the contemporary and the historical, in a way that drives a narrative through-line and also works quite well as a formal experiment—we’ve seen all the reviews describing, not inaccurately, the digressionary, meandering aspects of this novel as “Sebaldian.”
I love Sebald and Sebaldianism as much as the next, but I think it would be reductionist to stop there. If the novel is Sebaldian, it’s also Marxian, Proustian, Woolfian, Faulknerian—the weight of history, the flood of memory, time dilation, the complexities of inner psychology, the history of all hitherto existing society as the history of class struggles—it’s all there. And no, it’s not modernist pastiche. It’s contemporary, it engages with Online, with the post-2008 Economy, with the social, cultural, and political questions that haunt millennials across the Anglosphere, and not in a hamfisted way.
I believe one thesis of Falling Hour—and not a minor one—is said by the narrator himself:
…you may think you are arguing only about matters of the heart and of fathers and sons but you are really also arguing about the history of nations and the common ruin of the contending classes. (93)
Hugh reveals the profound truth of the dialectical (sorry) interpenetration of the personal and the political, the historical and the contemporary, of everything. A man who thinks his brain may be broken wanders around a park; a man, whether or not he consents to it, who finds himself caught in the tide of Canadian settlerism, Scottish Calvinism, the class and racial animosity of Important British Writers, the shifting of tectonic plates, the crisis of the climate, existence, everything.
But, topsy-turvy the world of Falling Hour may be, in the end there is an up and a down. Hugh does ascend:
…outside in the now-silent park the fact that I was flying did not immediately frighten me this time. It was just the endorphins. And as the concrete cubes below me now truly began to look more and more like the shadowy forms of dice, just barely visible in the mingled lights of the street lamps, the windows, and what must certainly be the moon, rising or risen or invisible but sending light away somehow like a myth in secret… (215)
Hugh continues to ascend until he reaches “wherever it is I am now” (216). It may not be heaven—it feels a lot more like limbo, shrouded in obscurity and ambivalence, illuminated by the moon, but evidently not by the fullness of the all-consuming Divine Light from which none can hide. Hugh has no Beatrice to tell him that
You are not on the earth as you believe;
but lightning, flying from its own abode,
is less swift than you are, returning home.
(Paradiso, Canto I, 91-93, Mandelbaum trans.)
Wherever he is now, there is no signpost to tell him, “you are home.” But let’s hope, for Hugh’s sake, that he is at least no longer in “Canada.”