PARTISAN REVIEW
tiona! question, since the situation is similar in France and England.
The effect of Pritchett's brief essays is not to make revolutionary
interpretations, of which we already have so many, but to restore in–
dividual novels to their proper shapes and sizes, to recover them from
the fragmentation and distortion of excessively analytical conceptualist
criticism. Pritchett lets us see around books as encompassable wholes, as
figures detached from their grounds, and above all as experiences to be
enjoyed. Undramatic and unpolemic,
The Living Novel
nevertheless
permits a comforting inference.
It
makes it possible to believe that the
trouble with the contemporary novel is not the exhaustion of the form
or the absence of new sights and insights to extend the form-there
is certainly a wealth of these in our new moral humanism-but simply
a temporary lack of educated interest among the novelists themselves
in the quality of their medium, in the novel as a mediating element with
characteristics of its own, with insistence, and integrity, and even a
kind of refractoriness, which make it something very different from
a reflecting mirror, or from an open door through which the novelist
and reader can pass to more immediate social and spiritual concerns.
Since Pritchett was interested in good novels generally, and not
merely the best, his sixty or so examples include a number of works
by minor writers-The
Real Charlotte
by Somerville and Ross, or
The
Hole in the Wall
by Arthur Morrison, or
Moonfleet
by Falkner-and a
number of minor works by major writers-like Dostoevsky's
The Eternal
Husband
or Smollett's
Travels Through France and Italy.
And he
includes works which are well kno"Vn in their own countries but not
widely read abroad, like Merimee's
Chr<micle of Charles IX,
Verga's
Mastro-Don Gesualdo,
and Shchedrin's
The Golovlyov Family.
Perhaps
because of the war, no German works are mentioned, which is rather a
pity, because I should
think
many of the minor nineteenth-century Ger–
man writers, like those discussed in E. K. Bennett's book
The Novelle,
would have real value here. What Pritchett is looking for is distinction,
in its most literal sense. He is not trying to abstract out a featureless uni–
versal novel with universal rules, or plot the historical curve of its rise
and fall as a type, but simply to see how the
genus
novel manifests itself
in a wide range of unique instances. This saves him from a good many
logical fallacies, and creates a sense of freedom. What any novel in the
past has been increases our sense of what a novel may be, but in no way
limits or determines the character of any novel that has still to be
written.
Since Pritchett is out to isolate and qualify the unique characteristics
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