DECLINE OF NATURALISM
485
depend." This insight is of an elementary nature and scarcely
peculiar to James alone, but it seems that its truth has been lost
on some of our recent catch-as-catch-can innovators in the writing
of fiction.
It is intrinsically from this point of view that one, can criticise
the imitations of Kafka that have been turning up of late (in the
little magazines and in the
New Directions
annuals) as being
one-sided and even inept. Perhaps Kafka is too idiosyncratic a
genius to serve as a model for
others~
but still it is easy to
se~
where his imitators go wrong. It is necessary to say to them: To
know how to take apart the recognizable world is not enough,
is in fact merely a way of letting oneself go and of striving for
originality at all costs. But originality of this sort is nothing
more than a professional mannerism of the avant-garde. The
genuine innovator is always trying to make us actually experience
his creative contradictions. He therefore employs means that are
subtler and more complex:
at the very sarne time that he takes the
world apart
he
puts it together again.
For to proceed otherwise
is to dissipate rather than alter our sense of reality, to weaken
and compromise rather than change in any significant fashion our
feeling of relatedness to the world. After all, what impressed us
m<>st in Kafka is precisely this power of his to achieve a simul–
taneity of contrary effects, to fit .the known into the unknown, the
actual into the mythic and vice versa, to combine within one
framework a conscientiously empirical account of the visibly real
with a dreamlike and magical dissolution of it. In this paradox
lies the pathos of his approach to human existence.
A modern poetess has written that the power of the visible
derives from the invisible; but the reverse of this formula is also
true. Thus the visible and the invisible might be said to stand to
each other in an ironic relation of inner dependence and of mutual
skepticism mixed with solicitude.
It
is a superb form of double–
talk; and if we are accustomed to its exclusion from naturalistic
writing, it is all the more disappointing to find that the newly–
evolved 'fantastic' style of the experimentalists likewise excludes
it. But there is another consideration, of a more formal nature.
It seems to me a profound error to conceive of reality as merely
a species of material that the fiction-writer can either use or dis–
pense with as he sees fit. It is a species of material, of course, and
