Tranquility, slow hours and days, the need to discover, through the imagination, what the world about us contained: this was the first condition of the novel. Curiosity was the second—curiosity about the most knotted as well as the simplest of human activities, communal life, of love and marriage and family and work and fulfillment; poverty and riches, town and countryside, accident and consequence. In the minds of many young people, whole stretches of literature seem to be becoming impossible, closed, and the past is a slow, uncomfortable train ride through scenery erased, villages lost to memory.
If it is really true that there may be a psychological hindrance, rooted in the overturned earth of our daily life, new fiction will itself be written by those altered psyches and will be inevitably accommodating. Yet the form seems more threatened than the other arts by the alterations in sensibility, by the unease of the world, the sense of destiny beyond control and comprehension, by the feeling of borrowed, shortened time and relationships subject to cancellation. The very openness of our life, particularly of sexual life, makes the discoveries of fiction far less striking. Much that was veiled in the past came forth in the novel, in complicated family histories, in love stories.
“The principle of procrastinated rape is said to be the ruling one in all the great bestsellers,” V. S. Pritchett remarks in a discussion of Clarissa. Seduction is now a comedy in which both are laughing. “The tragedy of the bedroom,” as Tolstoy called it, can hardly be said to have been wiped out, like smallpox, and yet the sufferings are, as the scientists would say, being “researched,” and “treated.” Sexual longing, repression are the stuff of irony and comedy. Recently on the stage when Orestes spoke with horror of his obligation to murder his mother the audience helplessly, understandably laughed. The laughter did not have its source in mockery of the anguish of the son or the punishment of the mother. The laughter was a sort of cultural product, compounded of all those explanations, studies of “myth,” the rivers of words of interpretation. Primitive urgings, infinitely analyzed, cannot lead to pity and terror, but to the comedy of a rather over-worked recognition. World horrors have stepped into the bloody shoes of domestic cruelty and private revenge. Art has not yet seemed wide enough to stand for these horrors and the horrors are too vast, we have witnessed them too closely and perhaps too indifferently to see them reduced to symbol.
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“Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling” or “High above his head swung Mrs. Melrose Ape’s travel-worn Packard car, bearing the dust of three continents” or “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in the possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”: these bells ring out, signaling, like lines of poetry. They promise a certain kind of drama, to be explored and developed in a more or less orderly way. They tell us, each differently, of the tone of the inspiration and they promote readiness to surrender the whole of our interest to the special and unique atmosphere of each book. Or remember the poignant opening scenes of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. We see the Griffiths family on a lonely street corner, with their portable organ, singing in the chill night, “How Sweet the Balm of Jesus’s Love.” We feel immediately the depression glumly hanging over the lives, the instincts denied, the promises of life confused. All of this meager and lowering scene prefigures the sensual, worldly longing of the son, Clyde, and seems to prophesy that his hopes will not be fulfilled but doomed.
In most novels of the past, you entered a life, as if you were walking through a door. The ordered and arranged destiny of the characters lay before you, satisfying the desire that life be first of all interesting and then in some way reasonable, shaped. The sense of place, and the personal drama pushing up inside it, became your own birth and death. Those little villages, the cities beyond ready to destroy hopes or to give a complex success: the stories come forth from them naturally and regularly, like the seasons. Jude watching the schoolmaster, Phillotson, set out for Christminster. Lena, in Light in August, thinking “I have come from Alabama, a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.” Paul Dombey, born into death. Every novel was different and yet in most of them, except for some strange mutations, the action accompanied life, as it were, gave a feeling of truth to experience. The plots, the descriptions, the artifice were like vines over a stone wall, a natural and pleasing decoration.
So many of the new conditions of life have altered in the most surprising way our sense of the foundations of character, of motivation, of the importance of place and regions. The provinces have, for many reasons, lost much of their character and the cities are too splintered, shifting, and complex to be understood except in fragments. And yet one wants the fiction of his own day to take some notice of the conflicts and feelings of the time, either to be extensively engaged through the grandeur of design or else to discover some appropriate, deeply telling image or situation that will stand for our concerns and passions.
In the novel, the example of the past, of the great and splendid arc of the fiction of realism can no longer stand as the measure of expectation. What was natural and orderly and pleasing in Victorian fiction does not often give the flavor of our own times, and some of the devices that were formerly acceptable, if not pleasing, are not useful for serious authors. We look back to the past as a sort of novelist’s paradise. Energy gave forth the large production of Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot, and later of James and Conrad and Proust; and there was a like energy in the reader that went out to meet the inspiration of the writers. We are sometimes told that the plots, the sheer interest of the narrative, the structure of theme and variation clearly working itself out, held the audience to these books created by a majestic intelligence and moved by the most profound intentions. But the fact is that the Victorian plots are very perplexing and this is particularly true of the very popular Dickens. The plotting is downright bad and the amazing thing is that so much genuine life managed to connect with the awkward stories.
In Our Mutual Friend the fascination of Podsnap and the Boffins, of the Veneerings and Twemlow has the stone of the plot about a will tied to its ankles. And yet the will and the lawyers and the reappearance of a drowned man hardly do the kind of damage they would nowadays. The Victorian audience knew as much about human nature as any that came after it, but somehow it was able to go along with contrivances and coincidence, with false identities and sudden rescues. No doubt they were a sort of indulgence and we can never be sure that the novel, in that country and time, could have prospered without the cumbersome plots.
It is interesting to compare the self-conscious contemporary use of Victorian plots on the part of Ivy Compton-Burnett. She has said on this subject: “As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life. But I think there are signs that strong things happen, though they do not emerge. I believe it would go ill with many of us, if we were faced by a strong temptation, and I suspect that with some of us it does go ill.” Ivy Compton-Burnett shocks us with her prim use of old plottings because she reverses our expectations. Brother and sister, separated in infancy, later meet, fall in love and marry—and they live happily. Another novel uses the contrivance of a forged or lost will. The wrong person finds the will, makes himself—or was it herself?—the heir, gets the money, and has a splendid, civilized time spending it, all the while guiltless, even though under the eye of the deprived soul for whom the money was intended. The old plots are turned into a complicated comedy, quite austere and demanding, asking, as the earlier books did, intelligence and strength from the reader.
The Russian novel is almost a critique of the English novel. The Russians kept the exuberance, that sense of a large life at hand, eager for the transformation of fiction, of characters significant in meaning and convincing in action, but the Russians were somehow able to get rid of the heavy, mechanical plots and put in their place a simpler, large and more natural development of
incident. Perhaps this tradition provides a useful model for the writers of the present and sets a genuine standard for judgment. And yet there is something dream-like about Moscow and St. Petersburg, life grandly and painfully fixed in its rounds in Tolstoy, nervously elated and magnified in Dostoevsky. The scheme of things still held, even though it was the special grace of the fiction to show how it was bursting apart, falling into ruin and change.
With the Russians there is a grandeur and completeness in single works that the contemporary imagination cannot call upon. Everything seemed to be in waiting, open, wishing to have its story completed, its destiny defined. What seems often to swim up to the surface of our own life, as a paradoxical product of the immensely known, unbearably extended regions of observation, is not largeness and openness, in the fictional sense, but a sense of static mystery, a peculiarly poignant paralysis, a feeling of repetition, and, in the density, of insignificance.
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The last great believer in plot was Freud. He knew only one story—the Oedipal one—but he meant this to touch life at every point from birth to death, to take in existence in a wide, brilliant sweep of illumination. For a time it appeared that Freud by restoring coherence to human motivation and explanation to the action and the feeling might act as a reprieve from the overwhelming mass of raw experience, life, too much of it, coming down upon the imagination like a glacier. Of course Freud changed literature when he changed thought and sensibility, but unabashed psychological contrivances and ready solutions fatigued early, surprisingly.
George Eliot said she wrote out of a belief in “the orderly sequence whereby the seed brings forth a crop of its kind.” And this is the mood, grand and satisfying, of classical fiction. Through a natural determinism, character and action came together, the intermingling of stories and destinies, of cause and effect, of crime and punishment, gave us most of the great novels of the English and European tradition. Environment, moral choice, defects of character, defaults of luck; these could be depended upon to lead to some plausible resolution. The relativism we now feel undermines the centrality of character. It is difficult to create fictional characters without plots by which the character can reveal itself. What will the seed bring forth? Indeed what does the seed itself contain?
Extraordinary belief, mysterious saturation, seized the authors of the past like bouts of hallucination. When The Sound and the Fury was reissued in the 1940s, Faulkner told us of the continuing history of his imaginary characters: Candace, the heroine of a novel published in 1929, had, we were told, vanished in Paris with the German occupation. She was still beautiful. (The map of Yoknapatawpha County was not a jest.) Thomas Hardy’s “philosophy” was almost a part of the vegetation of his English region; it grew along with the fate of his characters, filling the landscape with a piercing melancholy.
In most contemporary fiction, the author would sensibly hesitate to invite such mysteries; and perhaps he could not, even if he wished, will them into being. Instead the mood of the writer is to admit manipulation and design, to exploit the very act of authorship in the midst of the imagined scene. The broken, the episodic, the ironical are whispers from the wings, reminding us not to be swept away, someone is in charge. (Mary McCarthy spoke of this as “ventriloquism.”) A suspicious and cautious approach to the imaginary does not strike one as temporary or merely fashionable. Instead it seems to come from the very center of our view of life and art. Certain societies, such as the Soviet, by their very rigidity, their fear of movement within, somehow lend themselves to the old forms in fiction, as if they had been granted a sort of extension. Dr. Zhivago, an interesting and largely conceived novel, is old-fashioned and we accept it on those terms, the very fixed form of the novel corresponding to the fixed and immovable structure of the Soviet system. Solzhenitsyn, even in the bitterness of his feelings, can contain his contempt within the traditional form, again because of the tyranny that keeps the orderly expectation, cruel though it be, intact.
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The art of the past presents itself to us as a consensus, and although we know that history is not just and many worthy things have disappeared we nevertheless gratefully accept the claims of the tradition. We accept it because there is much joy to be found in those things that have given joy before. The individual greets the consensus each time as a discovery, a surprise that can transform life. But what can we ask of fiction today? Can we ask that it present interesting and significant characters who reveal their natures by means of a plausible and satisfying plot? It does not appear that we can set any such standard. We are left with only one demand: that a work be interesting.
Television and the press, and also the “press” of life and population, of reduced privacy, make every day an enormous number of persons known to everyone else. Whatever the day brings forth is quickly, like the loaves and fishes, multiplied for the thousands and the millions. Each person assigns, to the quick and superficial knowledge he is given, his own idea of motivation, of meaning. He writes the story as it comes to him, turning over the possibilities in his mind about candidate and criminal, the celebrity and the merely accidental personal life cast up before the public. With so much “reality” seen in its dramatic moment, the products of the imagination fail often to measure up in excitement, even in “reality.”
It is not surprising that much recent American imaginative writing comes to us as a fact of personal or national history, dressed up and arranged, but still a record of lived experience, taking its origin outside the entirely “made up.” (William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner and the recent works of Norman Mailer come to mind.) The interest rests not only in the creation of the seemingly true, but in the creative rendering of the actual, the re-constructed, the twice-told life. The assurance of reality acts as a release to the creative spirit. It is also a re-assurance to the reader, suspending his disbelief. The singular and personal is offered as a substitute for the unlimited perils of the imaginary, that over-crowded continent still without paths or frontiers. Consistency and motivation need not be questioned. The person in this kind of literature is no more required to have the arbitrary order of art than is the person on television or in the news. Existence is not questioned and one asks only that the person be interesting and in that way the actual rendering, the details of the art, assume again a grand importance, something like the language in poetry.
If the stories that are acted out for us every day are more extraordinary than the controlled imagination could permit itself, we could say that it was always thus. The great difference is that the dramas of real life were not known to so many until this age of technology. An existence, teasing and mysterious, lived out under public scrutiny is a sort of novel. The story of the Kennedy family is a novel on the grand scale, so strange and tragic that it is almost “unconvincing.” It is difficult for fiction to compete with the aesthetic satisfactions of the actual. Buried in our minds is the demand that fiction give us not the story of life itself, but the key to the mystery. It must tell us what we do not know, find the unexpressed, give us the clue to the meaning of Malcolm X or President Johnson or Aaron Burr—and even the clue to the whole nation itself. This knowledge lies hidden like a nut in its shell. In the past it has revealed itself in myth and symbol, in the image and the fable, in those miraculous constructions of the imagination that burst out of their concreteness to stand for the world itself.
But the truth is that we cannot sensibly make that kind of demand on fiction, on the living imagination. The vastness of sensation and experience, of history and knowledge, limits us, sends us back to the small as a relief from the incomprehensible. Ironic modesty and refusal, the disorganized personal, the colorful actual may at least offer authenticity. If we are not sure about character, suspicious of too clean and plausible structures, uncomfortably aware of the breaks in the chain of cause and effect, fiction, in its classical outlines, will naturally be under painful strain. Great characters and plots are not forthcoming.
Erich Au
erbach in Mimesis sees the fragmentation of contemporary fiction in dark and despairing terms. Writing about Virginia Woolf and other authors who “dissolve reality into multiple and multivalent reflections of consciousness” Auerbach finds the new technique “a mirror of the decline of our world.” Works such as Joyce’s Ulysses are surrounded by an atmosphere of doom and leave the reader “with an impression of helplessness.” Auerbach feels a sense of aching personal bereavement and writes that in the fiction of broken consciousness “there is hatred of culture and civilization brought out by means of the subtlest stylistic devices which culture and civilization have developed, and often a radical and fanatical urge to destroy.”
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As we from another decade look back to the explosions and destructions of Joyce and others, we think with another sadness, beyond Auerbach’s, that so much more was standing for the authors he mentions than for those writing now. In the midst of the mock-heroic, characterization and plot survived, and above all there existed the possibility of a grand conception, a dedication to art, the sacred fount, the willingness literally to give up one’s life to creation, as we can perhaps say Joyce and Virginia Woolf gave up their lives. Fiction, the novel, is a fairly recent form. It was born for death because we live in a direct, and yet obscure relation to society. Just now the bourgeois period of the novel would seem to be ending. It is possible that earlier fiction, perhaps something like Moll Flanders is nearer to our possibilities than Trollope or Hardy. Tristram Shandy may be a more usable model than The Scarlet Letter.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 22