Jerry Zaslove Introduces Wayne Burns’s Theory of the Novel

                                                                         A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from anyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. (Franz Kafka)

                                                                                    Turn truly, honorably to the novel

In all this wild welter, we need some sort of guide. It’s no good inventing Thou Shalt Nots! What then? Turn truly, honorably to the novel, and see wherein you are … alive, and wherein you are dead… in life. To be alive, to be man [and woman] alive, to be whole man [and woman] alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you… Only in the novel are all things given full play, or at least, they may be given full play, when we realize that life itself and not inert safety, is the reason for living. For out of the full play of all things emerges the only thing that is anything, the wholeness of a man, the wholeness of a woman, man alive, and live woman (D.H. Lawrence)

          [In A Panzaic Theory of the Novel, Wayne] Burns has created a theory of the novel that distances the reading of novels from the reading of other forms of writing in order to create more closeness, more intimacy with the inner world of the readers of novels. … The novel… “through ‘vision’ … [c]uts through readers’ ideas and ideals to show them who they are and what they are up against in the real world. In Kafka’s words, it is ‘the axe for the frozen sea inside us.’” [Kafka exemplifies this idea, of being wounded or cut into by the novel, with a dream-like account of his own reading. Imagining himself as a kind of land surveyor striving to take in the immensity of the inner world conjured by what he is reading] Kafka’s “field glasses” begin to focus on the reality of the details and the inner project… [T]his effort, this project [in which Kafka’s “conscience cannot settle down [in which his conscience] receives big wounds… that makes it more sensitive to every twinge,” [is itself the internal, participatory] building of [the] novel (xxxiv).” [It is the cooperative nature of this internal building project shared by author and reader that] … allows the novel to illuminate… the idealistic underbelly of [readers’] attachment to culture. The participatory effort required to “build” the novel, involves readers internalizing the author’s vision, and it is the active integration of this vision which then] cuts through readers’ ideas and ideals to show them who they are and what they are up against in the real world. [In this conception, the novel is finished or “brought to performance” as a “revolutionary aesthetic act” in the relationship between author, work, and reader. Kafka imagines the novel as] the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” For Kafka these words were a primer for an unfinished work, even for an unfinished life” (xxxiv). [Kafka’s image is one of living, suffering process. The work requires the readers’ participation in order to acquire lived meaning. The readers, in turn, require the illumination offered by genuine novels to fully see “who they are and what they are up against in the real world [and in themselves, to the extent that they have unwittingly internalized the self-destroying cultural ideals of this world]” (xxxiv). In A Panzaic Theory of the Novel… [Wayne] Burns sees the novel as a microcosm of the whole of contemporary culture. Releasing the individual from that whole by undercutting it through what he defines as the Panzaic Principle, the novel becomes a revolutionary form of art. The reader will find that the Panzaic Principle is not a system, a symbol, a method, but a way of reading, a way of discovering the self in the making.

In this Introduction I hope to show how much Burns’s thinking about the novel and his unique Panzaic theory have meant to me in my own teaching and writing, to place his work in a context that has affected me over the years. In this way I suppose I am “contextualizing” his work for myself. But this “context” which he himself may not agree with, is what I will call a “mindful” context—one which I have mindfully arranged around the figures and movements that have continued to bring his work to performance for me since I first encountered him in 1960. By “mindfulness” I mean not only care and attention to details but also attention to the person (the reader) being addressed by the novel. Mindfulness is sensitive to remembering what has been lost, what has been forgotten, what has vanished into an extraterritorial place. It is about memory and traces of memory and how, in reading novels, one must excavate memory. It is a way of being scrupulous. … But what, outside of one’s own character and person, might enable one to develop the mindfulness necessary for survival in our mass culture? For Burns it is the novel which alone can do this for us; and this it is which distinguishes A Panzaic Theory of the Novel from other theories of the novel. (x, xi)

The theory of the “Panzaic” is from beginning to end a dialogue—not only with the novel, but with readers as well. It is a dialogue with those who can, as well as with those who cannot or will not understand the novel’s importance to the critical individual able to read what it is saying. Burns has been writing about this Panzaic principle since he began to think about the nature of literature, not as a profession or a career, but as a life project, a life’s work. In Max Weber’s words, intellectual life consists of “callings,” and in Burns’ life there has always been an instinctive calling to find holes in what he calls the System. (xi) Burns knows that we have internal and untapped knowledge based on Panzaic qualities and that this knowledge seems to wait for new novels which will show us how we might resist the destructive forces within our culture. By drawing attention to this instructive dialogue of resistance between readers and novels, Burns aligns himself in his life and in his teaching with those who defend the self and the individual. (xviii)

It is necessary for the future reader to realize that we live in an age of powerful “criticism” that has suppressed voices like this voice of the Panzaic. In a larger sense… the culture, which has moved from a historical market economy to a market society, has endowed itself with the power to remove or silence those voices of critical intelligence which are different because such voices are not marketable in the domains of Literature departments, themselves now become adjuncts to the market society. The suppression has not been deliberate: the death of the novel, a perennial claim during the age of criticism has always sounded the alarm… But readers—who might not be aware of when and how the death of the novel itself became a reality in the name of the New Criticism and its aftermat—must understand that Burns addresses the death of readers. (xiv)

The search for an aesthetic or ethic which would illuminate the individual’s responses to the novel has always been shadowed by the ideal of the canon on the one hand and that of the possibility of a universal method of reading on the other. But Burns says he is not searching for an ethic and his use of Ortega and Lawrence makes that clear. [Instead, Burns views the novel] as a personal project of the intimate and sovereign individual [which] if read properly… resist[s] incorporation into the Orb of the Institutions” (xvi). … Burns knows that we have tacit knowledge based on Panzaic qualities that seem to wait for new novels which show how one might resist the grain of the culture and the management of symbols of myth or form… Burns aligns himself in life and teaching with those who defend the self and the individual. (xviii)

 In A Panzaic Theory of the Novel Burns …clears the air and opens windows to experiencing the novels he discusses… in a discourse [“Socratically questioning what is Panzaic both in the work and hopefully within the reader”] and… thinking through the experiences and feelings of [individual selves’] self-understanding. (xix) [According to Burns, we suffer unknowingly from an] enchantment with the “crystalline orb” of our ideals. [But Burns does not want to turn reading into an exercise in institutional loyalties. He does not claim]—as many contemporary critics have done, from Hillis Miller to Edward Said—that literature ought to have been, and indeed must now be advanced in the name of the Just Cause. [He does not claim that] if the literature doesn’t conform to the Just Cause [if it doesn’t] give us hope for the species, or the underclass, or the subaltern—then literature must be interpreted in such a way that it will give us the ideological commitments and pieties by which we can live. [On the contrary, for Burns it is axiomatic that a reader must follow the novel where it is going—even if this means provisionally suspending the reader’s own cherished beliefs, ideals and causes in the process. (xxi)]               

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Jerry Zaslove