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PARTISAN REVIEW
biologically from birth-but with sufficient autonomy to shape
their fate.
In such a closed world there is patently no room for the singular,
the unique, for anything in fact which cannot be represented
plausibly as the product of a particular social and historical com·
plex. Of necessity the naturalist must deal with experience almost
exclusively in terms of the broadly typical. He analyses characters
in such a way as to reduce them to standard types. His method of
construction is accretive and enumerative rather than analytical or
narrational; and this is so because the quantitative development
of themes, the massing of detail and specification, serves his pur·
pose best. He builds his structures out of literal fact and precisely
documented circumstance, thus severely limiting the variety of
creative means at the disposal of the artist.
This quasi-scientific approach not only permits but, in theory
at least, actually prescribes a neutral attitude in the sphere of
values. In practice, however, most naturalists are not sufficiently
detached or logical to stay put in such an ultra-objective position.
Their detractors are wrong in denying them a moral content; the
most that can be said is that theirs is strictly functional morality,
bare of any elements of gratuity or transcendence and devoid of
the sense of personal freedom.* Clearly such a perspective allows
for very little self-awareness on the part of characters. It also
removes the possibility of a tragic resolution of experience. The
world of naturalist fiction is much too big, too inert, too hardened
by social habit and material necessity, to allow for that tenacious
self-assertion of the human by means of which tragedy justifies
and ennobles its protagonists. The only grandeur naturalism
knows is the grandeur of its own methodological achievement in
making available a vast inventory of minutely described phe–
nomena, in assembling an enormous quantity of data and arranging
them in a rough figuration of reality.
Les Rougon-Macquart
stands
to this day as the most imposing monument to this achievement.
But in the main it is the pure naturalist-that monstrous
offspring of the logic of a method-that I have been describing
here. Actually no such literary animal exists. Life always triumphs
over methods, over formulas and theories. There is scarcely a
• Chekhov remarks
in
one of his stories that "the sense of personal freedom is the
chief constituent of creative genius."
