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by The Liberal Imagination (pdf)

  for what I have called substantiality is not the only quality that

  lies passive before action and the event. In psychological thought we

  makes a character great. They are few in number and special in

  find a strange concerted effort of regression from psychoanalysis,

  kind; and American fiction has nothing to show like the huge,

  such as the reformulations of the analytical psychology which Dr.

  swarming, substantial population of the European novel, the sub­

  Horney and Dr. Sullivan make in the name of reason and society

  stantiality of which is precisely a product of a class existence. In ficand progress, which are marked by the most astonishing weakness tion, as perhaps in life, the conscious realization of social class, which

  of mind, and which appeal to the liberal intellectual by an exploitais an idea of gr�at power and complexity, easily and quickly protion of the liberal intellectual's fond belief that he suspects "orthoduces intention, passion, thought, and what I am calling subdoxy." Nor really can it be said that Freudian psychology itself has stantiality. The diminution of the reality of class, however so-of late made any significant advances.

  their speech habits are a means by which "extraneous" groups are accepted. Men­

  This weakness of our general intellectual life is reflected in our

  tion of this naturally leads to the question of whether the American attitude toward

  novels. So far as the novel touches social and political questions it

  "minority" groups, particularly Negroes and Jews, is not the equivalent of class

  differentiation. I think it is not, except in a highly modified way. And for the purpermits itself to choose only between a cheery or a sour democraposes of the novel it is not the same thing at all, for two reasons: it involves no tism; it is questionable whether any American novel since Babbitt

  real cultural struggle, no significant conflict of ideals, for the excluded group has

  the same notion of life and the same aspirations as the excluding group, although

  has told us a new thing about our social life. In psychology the novel

  the novelist who attempts the subject naturally uses the tactic of showing that the

  relies either on a mechanical or a clinical use of psychiatry or on the

  excluded group has a different and better ethos; and it is impossible to suppose_ that

  the novelist who chooses this particular subject will be able to muster the satmcal

  insights that were established by the novelists of fifty years ago.

  ambivalence toward both groups which marks the good novel even when it has a

  social parti pris.

  It is not then unreasonable to suppose that we are at the close of

  THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION

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  Art and Fortune

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  a cultural cycle, that the historical circumstances which called forth

  now everyone knows that Thacker�y was wrong, Swift right. The

  the particular intellectual effort in which we once lived and moved

  world and the soul have split open of themselves and are all agape

  and had our being is now at an end, and that the novel as part of

  for our revolted inspection. The simple eye of the camera shows us,

  that effort is as deciduous as the rest.

  at Belsen and Buchenwald, horrors that quite surpass Swift's powers,

  a vision of life turned back to its corrupted elements which is more

  disgusting than any that Shakespeare could contrive, a cannibalism

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  more literal and fantastic than that which Montaigne ascribed to

  But there is an explantion of the death of the novel which is both

  organized society. A characteristic activity of mind is therefore no

  corollary and alternative to this. Consider a main intellectual prelonger needed. Indeed, before what we now know the mind stops; occupation of the period that ends with Freud and begins with

  the great psychological fact of our time which we all observe with

  Swift or with Shakespeare's middle period or with Montaigne-it

  baffled wonder and shame is that there is no possible way of responddoes not matter just where we set the beginning so long as we start ing to Belsen and Buchenwald. The activity of mind fails before the

  with some typical and impressive representation, secular and not reincommunicability of man's suffering.

  ligious, of man's depravity and weakness. Freud said of his own

  This may help to explain the general deterioration of our intheories that they appealed to him as acting, like the theories of tellectual life. It may also help to explain an attitude to our life in

  Darwin and Copernicus, to diminish man's pride, and this intention,

  general. Twenty-five years ago Ortega spoke of the "dehumanizacarried out by means of the discovery and demonstration of man's tion" of modern art. Much of what he said about the nature of

  depravity, has been one of the chief works of the human mind for

  modern art has, by modern art, been proved wrong, or was wrong

  some four hundred years. What the mind was likely to discover in

  even when he said it. But Ortega was right in observing of modern

  this period was by and large much the same thing, yet mind was

  art that it expresses a dislike of holding in the mind the human fact

  always active in the enterprise of discovery; discovery itself was a

  and the human condition, that it shows "a real loathing of living

  kind of joy and sometimes a hope, no matter how great the depravity

  forms and living beings," a disgust with the "rounded and soft

  that was turned up; the activity of the mind was a kind of fortitude.

  forms of living bodies"; and that together with this revulsion, or

  Then too there was reassurance in the resistance that was offered

  expressed by it, we find a disgust with history and society and the

  to the assaults of mind upon the strong texture of the social fayade

  state. Human life as an aesthetic object can perhaps no longer comof humanity. That part of the mind which delights in discovery was mand our best attention; the day seems to have gone when the

  permitted its delight by the margin that existed between speculation

  artist who dealt in representation could catch our interest almost by

  and proof; had the mind been able fully to prove what it believed, it

  the mere listing of the ordinary details of human existence; and the

  would have fainted and failed before its own demonstration, but so

  most extreme and complex of human dilemmas now surely seem to

  strongly entrenched were the forces of respectable optimism and the

  many to have lost their power to engage us. This seems to be supbelief in human and social goodness that the demonstration could ported by evidence from those arts for which a conscious exaltation

  never be finally established but had to be attempted over and over

  of humanistic values is stock-in-trade-I mean advertising and our

  again. Now, however, the old margin no longer exists; the fa�ade

  middling novels, which, almost in the degree that they celebrate the

  is down; society's resistance to the discovery of depravity has ceased;

  human, falsify and abstract it; in the very business of expressing

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  adoration of the rounded and soft forms of living bodies they expose

  constitution of the will. I know that with some the opinion prevails

  the disgust which they really feel.

  that, apart from what very well may happen by way of Apocalypse,

  what should happen is that we advance farther and farther into the

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  darkness, seeing to it that the will finally exhausts and expends itself

  to the end that we purge our minds of all the old ways of thought

  At this point we are in the full tide of those desperate perceptions

  and feeling, giving up all hope of ever reconstituting the great

  of our life which are current nowadays among thinking and talkformer will of humanism, which, as they imply, has brought us to ing people, which even when we are not thinking and talking haunt

  this pass. One must always listen when this opinion is offered in

  and control our minds with visions of losses worse than that of

  true passion. But for the vision and ideal of apocalyptic renovation

  existence-losses of civilization, personality, humanness. They sink

  one must be either a particular kind of moral genius with an attachour spirits not merely because they are terrible and possible but ment to life that goes beyond attachment to any particular form of

  because they have become so obvious and cliche that they seem to

  life--D. H. Lawrence was such a genius-or a person deficient in

  close for us the possibility of thought and imagination.

  attachment to life in any of its forms. Most of us are neither one

  And at this point too we must see that if the novel is dead or

  nor the other, and our notions of renovation and reconstitution are

  dying, it is not alone in its mortality. The novel is a kind of sumsocial and pragmatic and in the literal sense of the word conservamary and paradigm of our cultural life, which is perhaps why we tive. To the restoration and reconstitution of the will thus underspeak sooner of its death than of the death of any other form of stood the novelistic intelligence is most apt.

  thought. It has been of all literary forms the most devoted to the

  When I try to say on what grounds I hold this belief, my mind

  celebration and investigation of the human will; and the will of our

  turns to a passage in Henry James's preface to The American. James

  society is dying of its own excess. The religious will, the political

  has raised the question of "reality" and "romance," and he remarks

  will, the sexual will, the artistic will-each is dying of its own excess.

  that "of the men of largest resounding imagination before the hu­

  The novel at its greatest is the record of the will acting under the

  man scene, of Scott, of Balzac, even of the coarse, comprehensive,

  direction of an idea, often an idea of will itself. All else in the novel

  prodigious Zola, we feel, I think, that the reflexion toward either

  is but secondary, and those examples which do not deal with the

  quarter has never taken place"; they have never, that is, exclusively

  will in action are but secondary in their genre. Sensibility in the

  committed themselves either to "reality" or to "romance" but have

  novel is but notation and documentation of the will in action. Again

  maintained an equal commerce with both. And this, James goes

  Don Quixote gives us our first instance. In its hero we have the

  on to say, is the secret of their power with us. Then follows an

  modern conception of the will in a kind of wry ideality. Flaubert

  attempt to distinguish between "reality" and "romance," which desaid that Emma Bovary was Quixote's sister, and in her we have fines "reality" as "the things we cannot possibly not know," and

  the modern will in a kind of corruption. Elizabeth Bennet and

  then gives us this sentence: "The romantic stands ... for the things

  Emma Woodhouse and Jane Eyre are similarly related to all the

  that, with all the facilities in the world, all the wealth and all the

  Karamazovs, to Stavrogin, and to that Kirillov who was led by

  courage and all the wit and all the adventure, we never can directly

  awareness of the will to assert it ultimately by destroying it in himknow; the things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit self with a pistol shot.

  of thought and desire."

  Surely the great work of our time is the restoration and the re-

  The sentence is perhaps not wholly perspicuous, yet, if I under-

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  stand it at all, it points to the essential moral nature of the novel.

  It is the element of what James calls "romance," this operative

  Julien Sorel eventually acquired all the facilities in the world; he

  reality of thought and desire, which, in the novel, exists side by side

  used "all the wealth and all the courage and all the wit and all the

  with the things "we cannot possibly not know," that suggests to

  adventure" to gain the things that are to be gained by their means;

  me the novel's reconstitutive and renovating power.

  what he gained was ashes in his mouth. But what in the end he

  gained came to him in prison not by means of the "facilities" but

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  through the beautiful circuit of thought and desire, and it impelled

  him to make his great speech to the Besan�on jury in which he

  If there is any ground for my belief that the novel can, by reason

  threw away his life; his happiness and his heroism came, I think,

  of one of its traditional elements, do something in the work of

  from his will having exhausted all that part of itself which naturally

  reconstituting and renovating the will, there may be some point

  turns to the inferior objects offered by the social world and from

  in trying to say under what particular circumstances of its own

  its having learned to exist in the strength of its own knowledge of its

  nature and action it may best succeed.

  thought and desire. I have said that awareness of the will in its

  I think it will not succeed if it accepts the latest-advanced theory

  beautiful circuit of thought and desire was the peculiar property of

  of the novel, Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of "dogmatic realism." Acthe novel, yet in point of fact we find it long before the novel came cording to the method of this theory, the novel is to be written as if

  into existence and in a place where it always surprises us, in the In­

  without an author and without a personal voice and "without the

  ferno, at the meetings of Dante with Paolo and Francesca, with

  foolish business of storytelling." The reader is to be subjected to

  Brunetto Latini and with Ulysses, the souls who keep the energy of

  situations as nearly equivalent as possible to those of life itself; he

  thought and desire alive and who are therefore forever loved howis to be prevented from falling out of the book, kept as strictly as ever damned. For James the objects of this peculiarly human energy

  possible within its confines and power by e
very possible means, even

  go by the name of "romance." The word is a risky one and therefore

  by so literal a means as the closest approximation of fictional to hisit is necessary to say that it does not stand for the unknowable, for torical time, for the introduction of large periods of time would

  what is vulgarly called "the ideal," let alone for that which is pleasant

  permit the reader to remember that he is involved in an illusion; he

  and charming because far off. It stands for the world of unfolding

  is, in short, to be made to forget that he is reading a book. We all

  possibility, for that which, when brought to actuality, is powerfully

  know the devices by which the sensations of actual life, such as

  operative. It is thus a synonym for the will in its creative aspect,

  claustrophobia and fatigue, are generated in the reader; and alespecially in its aspect of moral creativeness, as it subjects itself to though the novels which succeed in the use of these devices have

  criticism and conceives for itself new states of being. The novel has

  had certain good effects, they have had bad effects too. By good

  had a long dream of virtue in which the will, while never abating its

  and bad effects I mean, as Sartre means, good and bad social effects.

  strength and activity, learns to refuse to exercise itself upon the un­

  The banishment of the author from his books, the stilling of his

  worthy objects with which the social world tempts it, and either

  voice, have but reinforced the faceless hostility of the world and

  conceives its own right objects or becomes content with its own

  have tended to teach us that we ourselves are not creative agents

  sense of its potential force-which is why so many novels give us,

  and that we have no voice, no tone, no style, no significant existence.

  before their end, some representation, often crude enough, of the

  Surely what we need is the opposite of this, the opportunity to idenwill unbroken but in stasis.

  tify ourselves with a mind that willingly admits that it is a mind

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