The Concept of Individuality and the Hero-artist in C. Bukowski’s Short Stories: Between Modernist and Postmodernist Structure of Feeling

Markovnenkov Dmitriy Viktorovich Postgraduate student of the Department of Foreign Literature, Research assistant of the Research laboratory "The national cultural codes' study of the world literature in the context of intercultural communication", Institute of Philology and Journalism of the National Research Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod 603000, Russia, Nizhny Novgorod region, Nizhny Novgorod, Bolshaya Pokrovskaya str., 37, room 301 gelio123@mail.ru

         British literary critic and philosopher Raymond Williams (1921-1988), analyzing culture as a specific embodiment of various human practices, develops a concept known as the structure of feeling. It first appears in one of Williams' early works, "Preface to film" (1954), in which the author only introduces it into his discourse ^[1]. In later works "The Long Revolution" (1961) ^[2] and "Marxism and Literature" (1977) ^[3] Williams modifies this concept and concretizes it. Thus, according to Williams, through the structure of feeling, it is possible to determine the ways of production, thinking and formation of dominant systems of signification of actual reality in a particular historical epoch. The structure of feeling has visual forms of representation: it manifests itself in language, behavior, clothing, etc. ^{[4, p. 129]}. Williams fills art with a special meaning in this context, which reflects the conscious experience of the subject of his present. In the development of this idea, P. Clements notes that the artist in this case acts as a conductor of the dominant value system in which he is involved ^{[4, p. 2]}. At the same time, he does not just mirror the reality surrounding him, but also expresses his own individuality. It turns out that the artist actualizes and, at the same time, activates historical and social contexts, which, in turn, allows us to identify in artistic works both personal characteristics of the creative personality and general cultural trends inherent in a certain time and place.

            In this sense, the work of the American writer Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) is of interest, whose poems, short stories and novels explore the sphere of art, in particular literature, in search of an object that is able to express the fullness of the experience experienced by the artist at the moment of the creative act. The intermediate results of Bukowski's artistic search are embodied in the famous hero Henry Chinaski, who acts as the author's alter ego. It is obvious that this image, known for its marginality, attributed to the poetic activity of the hero, developing in endless drunkenness and constant contact with women of dubious reputation, does not appear in Bukowski immediately. Henry Chinaski's popularity is gaining on the wave of success of Bukowski's first novel "Post Office", written in 1971, however, before this momentous event, Bukowski is trying to form his authentic style, trying himself in small prose and poetry. Thus, the real debut of Bukowski as a writer becomes 1944, when his story "The Consequences of a wordy rejection slip" ("Aftermatch of a lengthy rejection slip" ^[5]) is published in the magazine "Story", in which the prerequisites for Bukowski's intention are outlined, focused on professional purpose and an authentic image of his own self.

The plot of the story is built around the writer Bukowski, who received another letter from the editorial board of the magazine notifying that his work was not accepted for publication. Thinking about his prospects in writing, the hero goes to a flophouse, where he meets a stranger, whom he takes for an editor who wrote to him about the last refusal.

Bukowski's focus on the figure of the writer appears explicitly already in his first story, which begins with the suppressed reflections of the protagonist about the refusals he received from other magazines at different times: "Usually it was only said: "Sorry, does not quite meet our needs," or: "Sorry, does not quite suit us" ^{[6, p. 21]}. However, despite the fact that this phenomenon is perfectly familiar to the main character, which is emphasized by the adverb "usually" ^{[6, p. 21]} ("usually" ^{[5, p. 2]}), which has a melancholic intonation and indicates the routine of receiving refusals, a new letter, distinguished by its "verbosity" ^{[6, p. 21]} ("lengthy" ^{[5, p. 1]}), resonates in the mind of the hero, as a result of which he plunges into thoughts, thinking about his short creative path and comparing himself with Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson: "I wrote here for only two years. Two short years. It took Hemingway ten years. And Sherwood Anderson was generally published at forty" ^{[6, p. 21]}. The refusal received by the hero becomes a kind of emblem of a turning point in the life of the creator: Bukowski doubts whether he should continue composing, stimulating himself with alcohol and "women with a bad reputation" ^{[6, p. 21]} ("women of ill-fame" ^{[5, p. 1]}). His thoughts are embodied in the metaphysical image of a girl named Millie, with whom he also thinks to break off relations. This image is associated with the motive of creativity, which is important for the whole story and the works of Bukowski, the writer as a whole, which the hero considers as an opportunity to stand out, to declare the uniqueness of his own experience. Therefore, remembering Millie, he begins to talk about art, arguing that America needs a new type of writer: "... But Millie, Millie, we must not forget about art. About Dostoevsky, about Gorky, because Russia, and now America, give an Eastern European <...> America wants shaggy blackness, impractical thoughts and suppressed desires of an Eastern European" ^{[6, p. 22]}. The connection between creativity and the girl is strengthened by the metapoetic utterance of the hero, which consists in a sacrificial rejection of everything familiar and understandable: only through such a radical break will an Eastern European writer be embodied, capable, according to the hero's idea, of realizing something new and original: "But we will have to give up, Millie: cats and figures, from Tchaikovsky's 6th symphony. America needs an Eastern European..." ^{[6, p. 22]}

The narrative closeness of the episodes in which the hero reads editorial refusals and materializes his writer's reflections in Milli is not accidental: their ontological connection is emphasized by their isolation from the rest of the narrative events; they are included in the story as a kind of appendix, an explanation to the experiences of the protagonist. If the refusal itself is given in full, then the passage about Millie is separated by ellipses ("... But Millie, Millie, we must remember art <...> America needs an Eastern European..." ^{[5, p. 2]}) Moreover, both fragments are presented in the present tense, unlike the general narrative, which is fulfilled in the past tense. The editor's letter and the image of Millie embody the hero's preoccupation with the creative act, the problem of the writer's position and the search for an adequate form of conveying his experience in literature.

Bukowski's preoccupation with rejection and thinking about Millie gets its development when the hero finds himself in Millie's apartment with a stranger whom he mistook for an editor. While Millie is trying to distract the "editor", hoping to persuade him to accept Bukowski's stories, the hero, feeling for the letter in his pocket, takes out a crumpled sheet, worn in places of bending, and again thinks about his creative path. He thinks about how difficult it is to share a girl with other men, about the "shaggy blackness" ^{[6, p. 22]} ("fuzzy blackness" ^{[5, p. 2]}), which he was passionate about in college. Faced with a disjointed world, the hero resolves the dilemma by aestheticizing the disintegrating being in the form of his creative identity, and thereby reducing it to his developed marginal narrative: the images are symbolically intertwined in the final sentence of the story, in a synchronous and present-time flow, acting as a guideline to be followed by the young writer Bukowski, and in particular, solving the existential problem of the creator, who is at the crossroads of solutions, set at the beginning of the story: "...though, because I am too much saga of a certain type of person: fuzzy blackness, impractical meditations, and repressed desires" ^{[5, p. 10]} ("... because all I am is the saga of a certain type of people: shaggy blackness, impractical thoughts and suppressed desires" ^{[6, p. 33]}).

The artist-hero is portrayed differently in Bukowski's later short story "Notes on the Life of an Elderly Poet" ("Notes on the life of an aged poet", 1972). As the name implies, the main character appears before us in the status of a famous writer, whose poems, short stories and novels are published and attract the attention of the public. He retrospectively turns to his creative path, tracking how his writing career developed. The beginning of the story is indicative, in which the hero explains what prompted him to sit down at the typewriter: "Labor was killing me <...> I've been writing poems and short stories since I was 35. I decided to die on my own battlefield. I sat down at my typewriter and said: now I am a professional writer" ^{[6, p. 183]}. The intention to engage in writing becomes for the hero a kind of salvation from the same type of work, an opportunity to gain spiritual and physical freedom: "Men – and women – do not like to think. For them, work is the perfect refuge. They are told what to do, how and when. 98 percent of Americans over the age of 21 are working-class walking dead. My body and mind told me that in 3 months I would be the same. I resisted" ^{[6, p. 184]}.

Next, the hero tells about his experience of public readings, about interaction with the public and other writers. From this story it is possible to isolate the established view of the hero-Bukowski on literature, which is radically different from the ideas of the hero from the story "The Consequences of a wordy refusal". Thus, the "aged poet" ^{[6, p. 170]} ("aged poet" ^{[5, p. 121]}) focuses on the pragmatic side of creativity, on the "everyday life" of the writer, as if intentionally inscribing the life of the creator into the mechanics that he encountered at work. The hero tells in detail about the earning procedures, how the fee is paid, and what to do if the writer is ignored by magazines. The commercial factor is also wedged into the metapoetic reasoning of the hero: "We scream when we are supposed to yawn. That’s the point. There’s simply not enough. We want a new contract" ^{[5, p. 127]} ("We yell when we are supposed to yawn. That's the point. Simply put, it's not enough for us. We want a new agreement" ^{[6, p. 193]}). It turns out that in the hero's view, writing is inseparable from the physical needs associated with elementary survival. In this case, writing, the ability to create is the only way to ensure one's own survival, to protect one's mind and body, and all sorts of arguments about the poet's higher purpose, about creativity as such, is, as the hero himself notes, nothing more than "chatter" ^{[6, p. 193]} ("talking" ^{[5, p. 127]}), therefore, the whole story told by him is only a moment of mental relaxation that happened to him during a work break.

Comparing the early and late stories of Charles Bukowski, one can trace how the modernist and postmodern structures of feeling are expressed through the image of the hero-artist and his creative practices. So, it is important for the hero of the story "The Consequences of a wordy refusal" to distance himself from the external, trivial context that is presented in the characters of the second row: neighbors in a flophouse, Millie's mistress, an insurance agent, whom the hero first takes for an editor. It turns out that Millie, fickle in her feelings, refusals received from magazines, drunk and loud neighbors, an insurance agent is a social world that represses art, which does not accept an "Eastern European writer." Hence the escape of the hero in the finale: "I ran to my room like the devil himself..." ^{[6, p. 33]}; hence his thoughts about "shaggy blackness" ^{[6, p. 22]} ("fuzzy blackness" ^{[5, p. 2]}), as a transcendent sphere being in which he can annihilate an unpleasant external reality for him. As Habermas notes, modernist creators in general tended to appeal to such unknown spheres. As artists, they could survive this metaphysical transition, while "representatives of a society based on discipline, morality and strict attachment to their social function," in short, the bourgeois, were unable to penetrate into such transcendent areas of reality, because this step requires a radical rejection of everything that what they are attached to ^{[7, p. 4]}. This is the capitulation of the outside world that we see in the story: the works of the protagonist are not accepted in magazines because they do not meet universal artistic quality standards, his neighbors in the flophouse lack a sense of style and determination in their creative attempts, so they continue to hold on to their work in a shipbuilding company, the insurance agent does not understand classical music, and Millie can't share his creative experiences with the hero. Moreover, in the planned distance of the hero from the external context, the elite consciousness of the modernist artist is traced, for whom art becomes not just an activity, but a way of existence and perception of reality, a way of life. It is the conscious understanding of this fact, as T. Eagleton notes, that creates the dichotomy of high and low, elite and mass, refined and banal, typical of modernism ^{[8, p. 165]}. The modernist artist has an advantage in this situation, because his intention comes from the inner, creative, original. In fact, this attitude reveals itself in the famous formula "art as life" ("art as life"), developed by the English writer-aesthete O. Wilde ^{[4, p. 13]}. In the case of the hero-Bukowski, this simultaneously emphasizes his peculiarity against the background of his American colleagues-contemporaries ("America is tired of Browns and Smiths" ^{[6, p. 33]}) and creates the tragedy of the situation in which the hero-artist is forced to distance himself from everyday life, which does not accept him.

Turning to the story "Notes of an elderly Poet", we are already talking about postmodern culture, in which, according to Groys, art is inherently connected with society, with social conventions and "public communications" ^{[9, pp. 72-73]}, that is, with what the culture of modernism rejected. In the story, this tendency is observed in the character of the hero's reflections on creativity. If, in the situation of the first story, the hero-Bukowski sees creative practices as "impractical reflections" ^{[6, p. 122]} ("impractical meditations" ^{[5, p. 2]}) and "suppressed desires" ^{[6, p. 122]} ("repressed desires" ^{[5, p. 2]}), then in the situation of the second story, the hero perceives writing as an activity tightly inscribed in the pragmatics and everyday life. In fact, writing stories for him is a kind of profession, a job more attractive to him than "stupid mechanistic work" ^{[6, p. 170]} ("rote, dull work" ^{[5, p. 121]}), which "killed" him ^{[6, p. 170]} ("killing" ^{[5, p. 121]}). As a result, writing becomes an opportunity for the hero to feel freer, as well as to continue to provide for his needs, receiving royalties for publications and public appearances. For this reason, the hero plunges into arguments about earnings, strategies for conducting a dialogue with magazines, critics and other writers. This traces the postmodern reduction of the values of modernist aesthetics: in the late story, the hero-Bukowski perceives writing not as a specific practice, but as an ordinary activity performed on the principle of wage labor. In the case of the first story, the hero appeals to creativity as a vocation, a practice that allows him to realize his identity outside of the generally accepted, uniform and standardized.

The interaction of the hero-artist with pornographic magazines is also noteworthy in the story "Notes on the Life of an elderly poet", as it reflects the development of the entertainment industry, which gradually subordinates art. With the increasing power of capital, creativity turns into a continuous, conveyor process, as the hero describes it, "getting drunk to hell and writing on" ^{[6, p. 189]}; if we speak in the language of Benjamin, the hero records the extraction of aura from a work of art, which is why production is transformed into reproduction ^{[9, p. 26]}.

Finally, the postmodern structure of feeling is enclosed in the form of a story, which is represented, according to its title, by notes, which is opposed to the first story, in which the hero deduces a more integral type of representation of his own narrative: "I am too much a saga of a certain person ..." ^{[5, p. 10]} ("I am a saga a certain type of people" ^{[6, p. 33]}) Noteworthy in the second story is an explicit indication that the notes belong to an "elderly poet" ^{[6, p. 183]} ("aged poet" ^{[5, p. 121]}), which creates another contrast to modernist discourse. The notes of the hero-Bukowski are a postmodern view of the modernist portrait of the artist, which is distinguished by the heterogeneity of genre registers and inconsistent narrative lines. Using the principle of notes, the hero turns the story into a transitional, unfinished, unedited form, thereby appropriating the modernist attitude to being done, and, accordingly, reducing it to a ready-made. However, if in modernism this principle "exposes the mechanism" of writing, which allows the artist, according to Sartre, "to realize his own creation" ^{[10, p. 45]}, then in postmodernism this principle becomes just one of the techniques that the artist moves from one context to another. In Bukowski's first story, the hero is obsessed with his style, while in the second story, the hero uses the conversation about style as one of the discourses.

It follows from this that modernist aesthetics, inextricably linked with the invention of new canons and conventions, forms a personal, individual style, which Bukowski tries to express in his first story "The Consequences of a Wordy Refusal", drawing a type of Eastern European writer unique to American reality; in turn, in the cultural logic of postmodernism, as shown by Bukowski's later story "Notes of an elderly poet", individuality "dies", and with it the ideas of a "unique self" and "personal identity" are subjected to the process of disintegration ^{[12, p. 293]}. Being under the pressure of consumer capitalism, the artist is forced to duplicate and reproduce ready-made forms, which turns creativity, as the protagonist of the second story notes, into "defeat" ^{[6, p. 193]} ("defeat" ^{[5, p. 127]}), and only the opportunity to replace hard physical work with writing poems and short stories, it allows us to perceive this "defeat" ^{[6, p. 193]} ("defeat" ^{[5, p. 127]}) as a personal "victory" ^{[6, p. 193]} ("victory" ^{[6, p. 127]}), which, however, does not contribute to overcoming the ontological sense of uniformity of production.