PARTISAN REVIEW
4
At this point we are in the full tide of those desperate percep–
tions of our life which are current nowadays among thinking and
talking people, which, even when we are not thinking and talking,
haunt and control our minds with visions of losses worse than that
of existence-losses of culture, personality, humanness. They sink our
spirits not merely because they are terrible and possible but because
they have become so obvious and cliche as to close for us the pos–
sibility of thought and imagination.
And at this point too we must see that
if
the novel
is
dead or
dying, it is not alone in its mortality. The novel is a kind of summary
and paradigm of our cultural life, which is perhaps why we speak
sooner of its death than of the death of any other form of thought.
It has been, of all literary forms, the most devoted to the celebration
and investigation of the human will; and the will of our society is
dying of its own excess. The religious will, the political will, the
sexual will, the artistic will-each is dying of its own excess. The
novel at its greatest
is
the record of the will acting under the direc–
tion of an idea, often an idea of will itself. All else in the novel
is
but secondary, and those examples which do not deal with the
will
in
action are but secondary in their genre. Sensibility in the novel
is
but notation and documentation of the will
in
action. Again
Don
Quixote
gives us our first instance. In its hero we have the modem
conception of the will in a kind of
wry
ideality. Flaubert said that
Emma Bovary was Quixote's sister, and in her we have the modem
will
in
a kind of corruption. Elizabeth Bennett and Emma Wood–
house and Jane Eyre are similarly related to
all
the Karamazovs, to
Stavrogin and to that Kirillov who was led by awareness of the
will
to assert it ultimately by destroying it in himself with a pistol-shot.
Surely the great work of our time
is
the restoration and the
reconstitution of the will. I know that with some the opinion prevails
that, apart from what very well
may
happen by way of Apocalypse,
what
should
happen is that we advance further and further into
the darkness, seeing to it that the will finally exhausts and expends
itself to the end that we purge our minds of all the old ways of
thought and feeling, giving up
all
hope of ever reconstituting the
1280
