THE LIFE OF THE NOVEL
of individual works, his prose is definitive, metaphoric, and epigrammatic,
with eighteenth-century antitheses but not eighteenth-century abstract–
ness. And just as he rediscovers a great many nearly forgotten books and
makes them sound convincingly readable, so he discovers a great many
fresh conjunctions, like the comparison of Hood's
Miss Kilmansegg and
her Precious Leg
with Zola's
Germinal,
of the death of Smollett's Hawser
Trunnion with the great death scene at the end of
The Possessed,
of
Crane's
Red Badge of Courage
with Erckmann-Chatrian's
Conscript of
1813,
of the childhood memories of Proust and Aksakov. Pritchett brings
these together not to prove influences or establish categories; his method
demands it for a different reason. To define. uniqueness precisely, he
must put a writer's distinctive achievements beside those which most
closely resemble them in some other writer, and then point the dif–
ferences.
Although Pritchett respects the separateness and personality of each
novel as a thing in itself, he goes on, once he has defined its distinctive–
ness, to try similarly to isolate and define the new point in life itself, the
new way of seeing, from which it has sprung, and in this search he uses
both sociological and psychoanalytic insights within their natural limits.
The great writer is of his time because he is sensitive to the "intrinsic
situation" and the new way of feeling and seeing it involves. His knowl–
edge of past literature and of what it has and has not said enables him
to recognize the distinctively and valuably new in his own experience,
and at the same time, since books proceed from books as well as from
life, this knowledge teaches him how to make that newness into art.
The second-rate writer is not of his time, because he repeats what has
already been seen and said. The amateur writer does not know what to
make of what he sees.
The great thing is to be immersed in life, to be committed, to see
fully, and yet to have such respect for the work of art itself that one
permits nothing to enter into it that cannot be subdued to its purpose.
Anatole France was immersed in books rather than life; in his prose
wine and sex take the place of blood and vitality. With the hard-boiled
writers, toughness, "that is to say fear of facing the whole subject, as
Crane faced it, has intervened to make the modern writer's picture purely
visual and inhumane." And yet the character of the vision must not be
allowed to destroy the integrity of the medium. "For the effect of
psychological intuitions and discoveries upon our novel is to make it
reminiscent, autobiographical, plotless." And when plot goes, the isolation
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