ART AND FORTUNE
may be that we are interested in any art only just so long as it is in
process of search, that what moves us is the mysterious energy of
quest. At a certain point in the development of a genre, the prac–
titioner looks hack and sees all that has been done by others before
him and knows that no ordinary effort can surpass or even match it;
ordinary effort can only repeat. It is at this point that, as Ortega
says, we get the isolated extraordinary effort which transcends the
tradition and brings it to an end. This, no doubt, is what people mean
when they speak of Joyce and Proust bringing the novel to its grave.
Here is the case, as strongly as I can put it, for the idea that
a genre can exhaust itself simply by following the laws of its own
development. As an explanation of the death of the novel it does not
sufficiently exfoliate or sufficiently connect with the world. It can
by no means be ignored but of itself it cannot give an adequate
answer to our question.
2
So we must now regard the novel as an art form contrived to
do a certain kind of work, its existence conditioned by the nature
of that work. In a recent essay* I undertook to say what the work
of the novel was-1 said that it was the investigation of reality and
illusion. Of course the novel does not differ in this from all other
highly developed literary forms; it differs, however, in· at least one
significant respect-that it deals with reality and illusion in rela–
tion to questions of social class, which, in relatively recent times,
are bound up with money.
In Western civilization the idea of money exercises a great fas–
cination-it is the fascination of an actual thing which has attained
a metaphysical ideality, or of a metaphysical entity which has attained
actual existence. Spirits and ghosts are beings in such a middling state
of existence; and money is both real and not real, like a spook. We
invented money and we use it, yet we cannot either understand its
laws or control its actions. It has a life of its own which it properly
should not have-Karl Marx speaks with a kind of horror of its
indecent power to reproduce, as if, he says, love were working m
· *
"Manners, Morals and the Novel,"
Kenyon Review,
Winter, 1948.
1273
