I like fictions that confront and reveal what Harold Bloom calls “the negative sublime,” books like Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, or nearly all of Samuel Beckett’s fiction. Not all authors can sustain exposure to the negative sublime for the length of an entire narrative: it can prove too hard on the writer, and the reader, too. But many books offer epiphanies of a special sort, ones that are not Joyceaan affirmations of life, but instead yield glimpses into the negative sublime that characterizes so much of the twentieth century’s thought and action. I like books in which we catch glimpses of this reversed or inverted sublimity, like in the angriest and most outrageous passages of Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre, or in the ranting monologues of Céline’s crazed and raging fictional alter egos. Here’s a nicely muted epiphany from a novel, A Stranger Still, by the British experimental writer Anna Kavan. The character (she is named Anna Kavan) has decided to leave her job, a decision which brings forth in her a disquieting sense of alienation, and also reveals to her the profound and radical freedom such alienation can offer:
It was as if on this night of her twenty-fifth birthday someone had suddenly called her to account for herself. The sense of unreality had left her, she felt clear-headed as never before. She stood there in absolute honesty, looking into herself. She was suddenly, objectively, aware of the girl Anna Kavan, an individual human being, alive in the world, alone, without support, without obligations, capable of intelligent thought and responsible for her own destiny. For twenty-five years she had existed fortuitously. Her life had unrolled itself haphazard, without definite aim, direction or method. From laziness, from good nature, from thoughtlessness, from indifference, she had drifted into one meaningless situation after another. She had allowed chance external circumstances to control her life. She had relied vaguely for support on something indefinable and non-existent, on something outside herself. There were, she knew, elaborate systems of thought, philosophies and religions, specially designed to provide external support. But as far as she was concerned she knew they were useless, void. She was completely reliant upon herself, completely independent. She shuddered as she realised her utter freedom and the responsibility it implied. With perfect clearness she saw the futility of her past life; saw that it must be changed. She must change everything. Now, at once she must assume control of her existence.
— from Anna Kavan (Helen Ferguson), A Stranger Still (1935)
the evening redness in the west 