PARTISAN REVIEW
calls "romance," which is what the theologians call "faith," and in
the engaged and working literature which Sartre rightly asks for this
is an essential element. To know a story when we see one, to know
it
for
a story, to know that it is not reality itself but that it has clear
and effective relations with reality- this is one of the great disciplines
of the mind.
In speaking against the ideal of the authorless novel I am not,
of course, speaking in behalf of the "personality" of the author con–
sciously displayed- nothing could be more frivolous- but only in
behalf of the liberating effects that may be achieved when literature
understands itself to be literature and does not identify itself with what
it surveys. (This is as intellectually necessary as for science not to
represent itself as a literal picture of the universe.) The authorial
minds that in
Tom jones
and
Tristram Shandy
play with events and
the reader in so nearly divine a way become the great and strangely
effective symbols of liberty operating in the world of necessity, and
this is more or less true of all the novelists who
contrive
and
invent.
Yet when I speak in defense of the salutary play of the mind
in the controlled fantasy of story-telling I am not defending the works
of consciously literary, elaborately styled fantasy in the manner of,
let us say,
Nightwood,
which in their own way subscribe to the prin–
ciples of Sartre's dogmatic realism, for although the conscious literary
intention of the author is always before us, yet style itself achieves
the claustra! effect which Sartre would manage by the representation
of events.
Mr. Eliot praises the prose of
Nightwood
for having so much
affinity with poetry. This is not a virtue, and I believe that it will
not be mistaken for a virtue by any novel of the near future which
will interest us. The loss of a natural prose, one which has at least a
seeming affinity with good common speech, has often been noted. It
seems to me that the observation of the loss has been too com–
placently made and that its explanations, while ingenious, have had
the intention of preventing it from being repaired in kind. A prose
which approaches poetry has no doubt its own value, but it cannot
serve to repair the loss of a straightforward prose, rapid, masculine
and committed to events, making its effects not by the single word
or by the phrase but by words properly and naturally massed. I con-
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