Reading Note: Wistfulness
From the beginning of the third and final part of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland:
But nobody here holds on to such notions for very long. The rain soon becomes emblematic. The double-deckers lose their elephants’ charm. London is what it is. In spite of a fresh emphasis on architecture and an endless influx of can-do Polish plumbers, in spite, too, of the Manhattanish importance lately attached to coffee and sushi and farmers’ markets, in spite even of the disturbance of 7/7 — a frightening but not a disorienting occurrence, it turns out — Londoners remain in the business of rowing their boats gently down the stream. Unchanged, accordingly, is the general down-the-hatch, who-are-we-fooling lightheartedness that’s aimed at shrinking the significance of our attainments and our doom, and contributes, I’ve speculated, to the bizarrely premature crystallization of lives here, where men and women past the age of forty, in some cases even the age of thirty, may easily be regarded as over the hill and entitled to an essentially retrospective idea of themselves; whereas in New York selfhood’s hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks: that you might have no climbing boots on hand was beside the point. As to what this point actually was, I can only say that it involved wistfulness. An example: one lunchtime, Cardozo, mulling over popping the question to his Worcestershire girlfriend, points out a beautiful woman in the street. “I’ll no longer be able to go up to her and ask her out,” he says, sounding dazed. Plainly the logical response is to inquire of Cardozo exactly when was the last time (a) he asked out a girl on the street, and (b) she said yes, and (c) he and she went on to greater things; and in this way bring home to him that he’s being a dummy. I say no such thing, however. We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one’s life?
I’ve copied out the first couple of sentences for the sake of coherence; the nugget of the passage begins with “As to what this point actually was…” And it’s the last line that sticks and sticks.
The last line sticks so well (the second time around, at least) that it impresses me as the key line in all of Netherland: a novel, I now see, of wistfulness. That’s slight-sounding, I know. Surely wistfulness is one of the more disposable states of mind. Or it was, until Joseph O’Neill argued, in the way of literary argument, that much of life simply doesn’t make any sense without an idea of wistfulness, without a sense of its pervasiveness. At first, I thought that the wistfulness was a masculine thing, but that’s just the accident of Cardozo’s sentimental randiness.
Why is wistfulness a “respectable, serious condition”? My sense is that the novel answers the question, but I reserve defense of the proposition for a later date. I suspect that it has something to do with the sheer fecundity of the cornucopia beneath which privileged men and women of the West live, trying to preserve a durable identity from its ceaseless onslaught of novelty, opportunity and possibility — trying to live, in other words, with difficult facts: that they will know most of the people whom they encounter in life, necessarily, for a little while only, and no more; that yesterday’s vital preoccupations have become today’s alien recollections.