Art and For tune
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and does not pretend that it is History or Events or the World but
of consciously literary, elaborately styled fantasy in the manner of,
only a mind thinking and planning-possibly planning our escape.
let us say, Nightwood, which in their own way subscribe to the prin
There is not very much that is actually original in Sartre's theory,
ciples of Sartre's dogmatic realism, for although the conscious
which seems to derive from Flaubert at a not very great remove.
literary intention of the author is always before us, yet style itself
Flaubert himself never could, despite his own theory, keep himself
achieves the claustral effect which Sartre would manage by the
out of his books; we always know who is there by guessing who it is
representation of events.
that is kept out-it makes a great difference just which author is
Mr. Eliot praises the prose of Nightwood for having so much
kept out of a novel, and Flaubert's absence occupies more room
affinity with poetry. This is not a virtue, and I believe that it will
than Sartre's, and is a much more various and impressive thing. And
not be mistaken for a virtue by any novel of the near future which
Flaubert's mind, in or out of his novels, presents itself to us as an
will interest us. The loss of a natural prose, one which has at least
ally-although, as I more and more come to think, the alliance it
a seeming affinity with good common speech, has often been noted.
offers is dangerous.
It seems to me that the observation of the loss has been too com
As for what Sartre calls "the foolish business of storytelling," I
placently made and that its explanations, while ingenious, have had
believe that, so far from giving it up, the novel will have to insist on
the intention of preventing it from being repaired in kind. A prose
it more and more. It is exactly the story that carries what James calls
which approaches poetry has no doubt its own value, but it cannot
"romance," which is what the theologians call "faith," and in the
serve to repair the loss of a straightforward prose, rapid, masculine,
engaged and working literature which Sartre rightly asks for this �s
and committed to events, making its effects not by the single word
an essential element. To know a story when we see one, to know It
or by the phrase but by words properly and naturally massed. I con
for a story, to know that it is not reality itself but that it has clear
ceive that the creation of such a prose should be one of the conscious
and effective relations with reality-this is one of the great disciintentions of any novelist.4
plines of the mind.
And as a corollary to my rejection of poetic prose for the novel, I
In speaking against the ideal of the authorless novel I am not, of
would suggest that the novelist of the next decades will not occupy
course, speaking in behalf of the "personality" of the author conhimself with questions of form. The admitted weakness of the consciously displayed-nothing could be more frivolous-but only in temporary novel, the far greater strength of poetry, the current
behalf of the liberating effects that may be achieved when literature
strong interest in the theory of poetry, have created a situation in
understands itself to be literature and does not identify itself with
which the canons of poetical perfection are quite naturally but too
what it surveys. (This is as intellectually necessary as for science not
to represent itself as a literal picture of the universe.) The authorial
4 The question of prose is as important as that ·of prosody and we never pay
minds that in Tom /ones and Tristram Shandy play with events and
enough attention to it in criticism. I am far from thinking that my brief paragraph
even opens the subject adequately. The example of Joyce has been urged against
the reader in so nearly divine a way become the great and strangely
the little I have just said. It seems to me that whenever the prose of A Portrait of
effective symbols of liberty operating in the world of necessity, and
the Artist becomes what we call poetic, it is in a very false taste; this has been defended as being a dramatic device, an irony against the hero. Ulysses may be taken this is more or less true of all the novelists who contrive and invent.
as making a strong case against my own preference, yet I think that its basic prose,
which is variously manipulated, is not without its affinities with the prose I ask
Yet when I speak in defense of the salutary play of the mind in
for. The medium of Finnegans Wake may, without prejudice, be said to be some·
the controlled fantasy of storytelling I am not defending the works
thing other than prose in any traditional sense; if it should establish a tradition it
will also establish new criteria and problems.
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257
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literally applied to the novel. These canons have not so much rehorses and by means of violence, manners, courage, and death. But inforced as displaced the formal considerations of Flaubert and
I do not understand what Mr. Eliot means when he makes a sharp
James, which have their own dangers but which were at least condistinction between ideas and emotions in literature; I think that ceived for the novel itself. I make every expectable disclaimer of
Plato was right when in The Symposium he represented ideas as
wishing to depreciate form and then go on to say that a conscious
continuous with emotions, both springing from the appetites.
preoccupation with form at the present time is almost certain to lead
It is a prevailing notion that a novel which contains or deals with
the novelist, particularly the young novelist, into limitation. The
ideas is bound to be pallid and abstract and intellectual. As against
notions of form which are at present current among even those
this belief here is an opinion from the great day of the novel: "There
who are highly trained in literature-let alone among the semiare active souls who like rapidity, movement, conciseness, sudden literary, who are always very strict about enforcing the advanced
shocks, action, drama, who avoid discussion, who have little fondideas of forty years ago-are all too simple and often seem to come ness for meditation and take pleasure in results. From such people
down to nothing more than the form of the sonata, the return on
comes what I should call the Literature of Ideas." This odd definithe circle with appropriate repetitions of theme. For the modern tion, whose seeming contradictions we will not pause over, was
highly trained literary sensibility, form suggests completeness and
made by Balzac in the course of his long review of The Charterhouse
the ends tucked in; resolution is seen only as all contradictions
of Parma, and it is Stendhal whom Balzac mentions as the great
equated, and although form thus understood has its manifest charm,
exemplar of the literature of ideas. And we know what ideas
are at
it will not adequately serve the modern experience. A story, like the
work in The Charterhouse and The Red and the Black: they are
natural course of an emotion, has its own form, and I take it as the
the ideas of Rousseau and they are named as such. These ideas are
sign of our inadequate trust of story and of our exaggerated interest
not to be separated from the passions of Julien and Fabrice; they are
in sensibility that we have begun to insist on the precise ordering of
reciprocally expressive of each other. To us it is strange that ideas
the novel.
should be expressed so, and also in terms of prisons and rope
Then I venture the prediction that the novel of the next decades
ladders, pistols and daggers. It should not seem strange, for it is in
will deal in a very explicit way with ideas. The objections to this
the nature of ideas to be so expressed.
will be immediate. Everybody quotes Mr. Eliot's remark about
Yet although these two great examples support much of my view
Henry James having a mind so fine that no idea could violate it,
of the place of ideas in the novel, they do not support all of it. They
which suggests an odd, violent notion of the relation of minds and
make for me the point of the continuity of ideas and emotions, which
ideas, not at all the notion that James himself held; and everybody
in our literary context is forgotten. And they remind us forcibly of
knows the passage in which Mr. Eliot insists on the indifferent conthe ideological nature of institutions and classes. But in Stendhal's nection which Dante and Shakespeare had with the intellectual
novels the ideas, although precisely identified, are chiefly represented
formulations of their respective times. I think I can understandby character and dramatic action, and although this form of repreand sympathetically as well as sociologically-Mr. Eliot's feeling for sentation has of course very high aesthetic advantages, yet I would
a mode of being in which the act and tone of ideation are not domiclaim for the novel the right and the necessity to deal with ideas by nant, just as I can understand something of the admiration which
means other than that of the "objective correlative," to deal with
may be felt for a society such as Yeats celebrated, which expresses
them as directly as it deals with people or terrain or social setting.
its sense of life not by means of words but by means of houses and
There is an obvious social fact which supports this claim. No one
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Art and Fortune
259
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who is in the least aware of our social life today can miss seeing that
toevski adequately demonstrated this for us, but we never had in
ideas have acquired a new kind of place in society. Nowadays every
:his country a s�fficiently complex ideological situation to support it
one is involved in ideas-or, to be more accurate, in ideology. The
m our own practice of the novel. We have it now.
impulse of novelists, which has been much decried, to make their
This
.
. oppor�unity of the novel clearly leads to its duty. Ideology
heroes intellectuals of some sort was, however dull it became, perrs not ideas; ideology is not acquired by thought but by br.eathing fectly sound: they wanted people of whom it was clear that ideas
the haunted air. The life in ideology, from which none of us can
were an important condition of their lives. But this limitation to
wholly escape, is a strange submerged life of habit and semihabit in
avowed intellectuals is no longer needed; in our society the simplest
which to ideas we attach strong passions but no very clear awareness
person is involved with ideas. Every person we meet in the course
of the concrete reality of their consequences. To live the life of ideof our daily life, no matter how unlettered he may be, is groping ology with its special form of unconsciousness is to expose 0neself
with sentences toward a sense of his life and his position in it; and
to the risk of becoming an agent of what Kant called "the Radical
he has what almost always goes with an impulse to ideology, a good
Evil,". which is "man's inclination to corrupt the imperatives of
deal of animus and anger. What would so much have pleased the
morality so that they may become a screen for the expression of
social philosophers of an earlier time has come to pass-ideological
self-love." 5 But the novel is a genre with a very close and really a
organization has cut across class organization, generating loyalties
very simple relation to actuality, to the things we cannot possibly
and animosities which are perhaps even more intense than those of
not know-not if they are pointed out to us; it is the form in which
class. The increase of conscious formulation, the increase of a certain
the things we cannot possibly not know live side by side with
kind of consciousness by formulation, makes a fact of modern life
thought and desire, both in their true and beautiful state and in
which is never sufficiently estimated. This is a condition which has
their corrupt state; it is the form which provides the perfect criticism
been long in developing, for it began with ·the movements of reof ideas by attaching them to their appropriate actuality. No less ligious separatism; now politics, and not only politics but the rethan in its infancy, and now perhaps with a greater urgency and quirements of a whole culture, make verbal and articulate the morelevance, the novel passionately concerns itself with reality, with tive of every human act: we eat by reason, copulate by statistics, rear
appearance and reality.
children by rule, and the one impulse we do not regard with critical
caution is that toward ideation, which increasingly becomes a basis
VI
of prestige.
This presents the novel with both an opportunity and a duty.
But I must not
.
_
end on a note so high-it would falsify my present
The opportunity is a subject matter. Social class and the conflicts it
mtent10n and my whole feeling about the novel. To speak now of
produces may not be any longer a compelling subject to the novelist,
"duty" and, as I earlier did, of the work the novel may do in the
but the organization of society into ideological groups presents a subreconstitution and renovation of the will, to formulate a function ject scarcely less absorbing. Ideological society has, it seems to me,
5
.
R inh
<;
?ld Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. r, p. 120: "'This evil
1s rad1
nearly as full a range of passion and nearly as complex a system of
_cal, [Kant] declares, 'because it corrupts the very basis of all maxims.' In
analyzing the human capacity for self-deception and its ability to make the worse
manners as a society based on social class. Its promise of comedy
appear the bette� reaso� �or the s�ke _of providing a moral fa�ade for selfish actions,
Kant penetrates into spmtual intncac1es and mysteries
and tragedy is enormous; its assurance of relevance is perfect. Dos-
> to which he seems to remain
completely blind in his Critique of Practical Reason."
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and a destiny for the novel, is to put it into a compromised position
merely in accordance with some notion of order or beauty, although
where it has been far too long already. The novel was better off
it must be stipulated that this is likely to occur only when what is
when it was more humbly conceived than it is now; the novelist was
manipulated resists enough, the novel being the form whose aesthetic
in a far more advantageous position when his occupation was mismust pay an unusually large and simple respect to its chosen maprized, or when it was estimated by simpler minds than his own, terial. This predominance of fortuitousness in the novel accounts for
when he was nearly alone in his sense of wonder at the possibilities
the roughness of grain, even the coarseness of grain as compared
of his genre, at the great effects it might be made to yield. The novel
with other arts, that runs through it. The novel is, as many have
4. was luckier when it had to compete with the sermon, with works
said of it, the least "artistic" of genres. For this it pays its penalty and
of history, with philosophy and poetry and with the ancient classics,
it has become in part the grave as well as the monument of many
when its social position was in question and like one of its own poor
great spirits who too carelessly have entrusted their talents to it. Yet
or foundling or simple heroes it had to make its way against odds.
the headlong, profuse, often careless quality of the novel, though no
Whatever high intentions it may have had, it was permitted·to stay
doubt wasteful, is an aspect of its bold and immediate grasp on life.
close to its own primitive elements from which it drew power. Be
But from this very sense of its immediacy to life we have come to
lieving this, I do not wish to join in the concerted effort of conovervalue the novel. We have, for example, out of awareness of its temporary criticism to increase the superego of the novel, to conspire
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