PARTISAN REVIEW
its body. It is impious, being critical of existent social realities, and
it has the effect of lessening their degree of reality. The social reality
upon which it has its most devastating effect is, of course, that of
class. And class itself is a social fact which, whenever it is brought
into question, has itself a remarkable intimacy with metaphysics and
the theory of knowledge-! have suggested how for Shakespeare any
derangement of social classes seems always to imply a derangement
of the senses in madness or dream, some elaborate joke about the
nature of reality. This great joke is the matter of the book which
we acknowledge as the ancestor of the modem novel,
Don Quixote;
and indeed no great novel exists which does not have this joke at
its very heart.
In the essay to which I refer I
.also
said that, in dealing with the
questions of illusion and reality which were raised by the ideas of
money and class, the novel characteristically relied upon an exhaustive
exploitation of manners. Although I tried to give a sufficiently strong
and complicated meaning to the word
manners,
I gather that my
merely having used the word, or perhaps my having used it in a con–
text which questioned certain political assumptions of a pious sort,
has led to the belief that I am interested to establish a new genteel
tradition in criticism and fiction. Where misunderstanding serves
others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood;
yet to guard as well as I can against this imputation, I will not only
say that the greatest exploitation of manners ever made is the
Iliad
but also that
The Possessed
and
Studs Lonigan
are works whose con–
cern with manners is of their very essence.
To these characteristics of the novel-the interest in illusion
and reality as generated by class and money, this interest expressed
by the observation of manners-we must add the unabashed interest
in ideas. From its very beginning the novel made
books
the objects
of its regard. Nowadays we are inclined to see the appearance of a
literary fact in a novel as the sign of its "intellectuality" and special–
ness of appeal, and even as a sign of decadence. But Joyce's solemn
hterary discussions in
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
or
his literary play in the later works, or Proust's critical excursions,
are in the direct line of
Don Quixote
and
Tom ]ones,
which are
works of literary criticism before they are anything else. The Germans
had a useful name for a certain kind of novel which they called
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