486
PARTISAN REVIEW
something else besides: it also functions as the
discipline of fiction,
much in the same sense that syllabic structure functions as the
discipline · of verse. This seeming identity of the formal and
substantial means of narrative-prose is due, I think, to the alto·
gether free and open character of the medium, which prevents it
from developing such distinctly technical controls as poetry has
acquired. Hence even the dream, when told in a story, must par·
take of some of the qualities of the 'real.
Whereas the surrealist represents man as immured in dreams,
the naturalist represents him in a continuous waking state of
prosaic daily living, in effect as never dreaming. But both the
surrealist and the naturalist go to extremes in simplifying the
human condition.
J.
M. Synge once said that the artist displays
at once the difficulty and the triumph of his art when picturing
the dreamer leaning out to reality or the man of real life lifted
out of it. "In all the poets," he wrote, and this test is by no means
limited to poetry alone, "the greatest have both these elements,
that is they are supremely engrossed with life, and yet with the
wildness of their fancy they are always passing out of what is
simple and plain."
The old egocentric formula, "Man's fate is his character"
has been altered by the novelists of the naturalist school to read,
"Man's fate is his environment." (Zola, the organizer and cham·
pion of the school, drew his ideas from physiology and medicine,
but in later years his disciples cast the natural sciences aside in
favor of the social sciences.) To the naturalist, human behavior
is a function of its social environment; the individual is the live
register of its qualities; he exists in it as animals exist in nature.*
• Balzac, to whom naturalism is enormously indebted, explains in his preface to
the
Cornedie Humaine
that the idea of that work came to him in consequence of a
"comparison between the human and animal kingdoms." "Does not society," he asks,
"make of man, in accordance with the environment in which he lives and moves, as
many different kinds of man as there are different zoological species? ... There
have, therefore, existed and always will exist social species, just as there are zoological
species."
Zola argues along the same lines: "All things hang together: it is necessary to
start from the .determination of inanimate bodies in order to arrive at the determina–
tion of living beings; and since savants like Claude Bernard demonstrate now that
fixed laws govern the human body, we can easily proclaim . . . the hour in which the
laws of thought and passion
will
be formulated in their turn. A like determination
will govern the stones of the roadway and the brain of man. . . . We have experi–
mental chemistry and medicine and physiology, and later on an experimental novel
It
is an inevitable evolution."
(The Experimental Novel)
