V. S. Pritchett
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH FICTION
Mter their long silence
it
is natural to wonder what is
going on in the minds of the English novelists.
Has
another Proust,
cunningly insulated from total war, been
secr~tly
writing all the time?
There was said to be a crisis in the condition of the novel: in the
eight paralyzed years since Munich has that crisis been surmounted
in the course of idleness by unconscious cerebration? Was the war our
psycho-analyst upon whom we successfully transferred the novel's
neurosis? Or do we take up the pen again to be faced by the old
difficulty? What we have meant to convey during the last twenty–
five years by the words 'the future of the novel,' was our doubt
whether tl1e novel had any future at all; a doubt that first arose when
Ulysses
looked like the novel to end all novels, when the first long
narrative films succeeded and the monopoly of the novel came to an
end; but above all when our most talented novelists retired into the
private garden<> of their sensibility and left the world outside to their
inferiors. Since
Sons and Lovers
and
A Passage to India,
have there
been any English novels of the highest rank? A quarter of a century
has passed since these two books were written.
It is doubtful whether a novelist is the best investigator of these
questions. For him 'the novel' is the novels he has not written; and
a guess at the future of the novel will mean for him, the novels
he thinks someone else ought to write:
he
intends · otherwise. The
views of a novelist are hardly more than the steam rising from a
simmering pot. Or more precisely, they are arguments with
his
own
conscience and imagination, clues to his own conflicts. Very wcdl
he knows that themes, tendencies, methods cannot be imposed. Very
doubtfully may they even be self-imposed; any novel he may write
rises from the contention within.
If
he asks for a less esoteric sen–
sibility and for a range altogether wider in the novel, it is because
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