ART AND FORTUNE
which in our literary context is forgotten. And they remind us forcibly
of the ideological nature of institutions and classes. But in Stendhal's
novels the ideas, although precisely identified, are chiefly represented
by character and dramatic action and although this form of represen–
tation has of course very high aesthetic advantages, yet I would
claim for the novel the right and the necessity to deal with ideas by
means other than that of what we have come to call the objective
correlative, to deal with them directly as it deals with people or ter–
rain or social setting.
There is an obvious social fact which supports this claim. No
one who is in the least aware of our social life today can miss seeing
that ideas have acquired a new kind of place in society. Nowadays
everyone is involved in ideas-or, to be more accurate, in ideology.
The impulse of novelists, which has been much decried, to make their
heroes intellectuals of some sort, was, however dull it became, per–
fectly sound: they wanted people of whom it was clear that ideas
were an important condition of their lives. But this limitation to
avowed intellectuals is no longer needed: in our society the simplest
person is involved with ideas. Every person we meet in the course of
our daily life, no matter how unlettered he may be, is groping with
sentences toward a sense of his life and his position in it; and he has
what almost always goes with an impulse to ideology, a good deal
of animus and anger. What would so much have pleased the social
philosophers of an earlier time has come to pass-ideological organ–
ization has cut across class organization, generating loyalties and
animosities which are perhaps even more intense than those of class.
The increase of conscious formulation, the increase of a certain kind
of conciousness by formulation, make a fact of modem life which is
never sufficiently estimated. This is a condition which has been long
in developing, for it began with the movements of religious sepa–
ratism; now politics, and not only politics but the requirements of a
whole culture, make verbal and articulate the motive of every human
act: we eat by reason, copulate by statistics, rear children by rule,
and the one impulse we do not regard with critical caution is that
toward ideation, which increasingly becomes a basis of prestige.
This presents the novel with both an opportunity and a duty.
The opportunity is a subject matter. Social class and the conflicts it
produces may not be any longer a compelling subject to the novelist,
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