ART AND FORTUNE
ceive that the creation of such a prose should be one of the conscious
intentions of any novelist:*
And as a corollary to my rejection of .poetic prose for the novel,
I would suggest that the novelist of the next decades will not occupy
himself with questions of form. The admitted weakness of the con–
temporary novel, the far greater strength of poetry, the current strong
interest in the theory of poetry have created .a situation in which the
canons of poetical perfection are quite naturally but too literally
applied to the novel. These canons have not so much reinforced as
displaced the formal considerations of Flaubert and James which
have their own dangers but which were at least conceived for the
novel itself. I make every expectable disclaimer of wishing to depre–
ciate form and then go on to say that a conscious preoccupation with
form at the present time is almost certain to lead the novelist-par–
ticularly the young novelist- into limitation. The notions of form
which are at present current among even those who are highly trained
in
literature- let alone among the semi-literary, who are always very
strict about enforcing the advanced ideas of forty years ago--are all
too simple and often seem to come down to nothing more than the
form of the sonata, the return on the circle with appropriate repeti–
tions of theme. For the modem highly trained literary sensibility, form
suggests completeness and the ends tucked in; resolution is seen only
as all contradictions equated, and although form thus understood
has its manifest charm, it will not adequately serve the modem ex–
perience. A story, like the natural course of an emotion, has its own
form and I take it as the sign of our inadequate trust of story and
of our exaggerated interest in sensibility that we have begun to insist
on the precise ordering of the novel.
Then I venture the prediction that the novel of the next decades
will deal in a very explicit way with ideas. The objections to this
*
The question of prose is as important as that of prosody and we never pay
enough attention to it in criticism. I am far from thinking' that my brief para–
graph even opens the subject adequately. The example of Joyce has been urged
against the little I have just said. It seems to me that whenever the prose of
A
Portrait of the Artist
becomes what we call poetic, it is in a very false taste; this
, has been defended as being a dramatic device, an irony against the hero.
Ulysses
may be taken as making a strong case against my own preference, yet I
think that its raw material, which is variously manipulated, is essentially the
prose I ask for. The medium of
Finnegans Wake
may, without prejudice, be
said to be something other than prose in any traditional sense; if it should
establish a tradition it will also establish new criteria and problems.
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