ART AND FORTUNE
I think it will not succeed if it accepts the latest-advanced theory
of the novel, Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of "dogmatic realism." Ac–
cording to the method of this theory, the novel is to be written as if
without an author and without a personal voice and "without the
foolish business of story-telling." The reader is to be subjected to
situations as nearly equivalent as possible to those of life itself; he
is to be prevented from falling out of the book, kept as strictly as
possible within its confines and power by every possible means,
including so literal a means as the closest approximation of fictional
to historical time, for the introduction of large periods of time would
permit him to remember that he is involved in an illusion; he is, in
short, to be made to forget that he is reading a book. We all know
the devices by which the sensations of actual life, such as claustropho–
bia and fatigue, are generated in the reader; and although the novels
which succeed in the use of these devices have had certain good ef–
fects, they have had bad effects too. By good and bad effects I mean,
as Sartre means, good and bad social effects. The banishment of
the author from his books, the stilling of his voice, have but rein–
forced the faceless hostility of the world and have tended to teach
us that we ourselves are not creative agents and that we have no
voice, no tone, no style, no real or significant existence. Surely what
we need is the opposite of this, the opportunity to identify ourselves
with a mind that willingly admits that it
is
a mind and does not pre–
tend that it is History or Events or the World but only a mind thinking
and planning-possibly planning our escape.
There is not very much that is actually original in Sartre's theory,
which seems to derive from Flaubert .at a not very great remove.
Flaubert himself never could, despite
his
own theory, keep himself
out of his books-we always know who is there by guessing who it
is that is kept out: it makes a great difference just which author is
kept out of a novel, and Flaubert's absence occupies more room than
Sartre's, and is a much more various and impressive thing. And
Flaubert's mind, in or out of his novels, presents itself to us as an ally,
although, as I more and more come to think, the alliance it offers
is dangerous.
As
for what Sartre calls "the foolish business of story-telling,"
I believe that, so far from giving it up, the novel will have to insist
on it more and more. It is exactly the story that carries what James
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