PARTISAN REVIEW
but the organization of society into ideological groups presents a sub–
ject scarcely less absorbing. Ideological society has, it seems to me,
nearly as full a range of passion and nearly as complex a system of
manners as .a society based on social class. Its promise of comedy and
tragedy is enormous; its assurance of relevance is perfect. Dostoevsky
adequately demonstrated this for us, but we never had in this country
a sufficiently complex ideological situation to support it in our own
practice of the novel. We have it now.
This opportunity of the novel clearly leads to its duty. Ideology
is not ideas, ideology is not acquired by thought but by breathing
the haunted .air. The life in ideology, from which none of us can
wholly escape, is a strange submerged life of habit and semi-habit
in which to ideas we attach strong passions but no very clear aware–
ness of the concrete reality of their consequences. To live the life of
ideology with its special form of unconsciousness is to expose oneself
to the risk of becoming an agent of what Kant called "the Radical
Evil," which is "man's inclination to coi-rupt the imperatives of
morality so that they may become a screen for the expression of self–
love."* But the novel is a genre with a very close and, really, a very
simple relation to actuality, to the things we cannot possibly not
know-not if they .are pointed out to us; it is the form in which the
things we cannot possibly not know live side by side with thought
and desire, both in their true and beautiful state or in their corrupt
state; it is the form which provides the perfect criticism of ideas by
attaching them to their appropriate actuality. No less than in its
infancy, and now perhaps with a greater urgency and relevance, the
novel passionately concerns itself with reality, with appearance and
reality.
6
But I must not end on a note so high-it would falsify my pres–
ent intention and my whole feeling about the novel. To speak now of
"duty" and, as I earlier did, of the work the novel may do in the
*
Reinhold Niebuhr,
The Nature and Destiny of Man,
vol. I, p. 120, n.
" 'This evil is radical,' [Kant] declares, 'because it corrupts the very basis of
all maxims.' In analyzing the human capacity for self-deception and its ability
to make the worse appear the better reason for the sake of providing a moral
factade for selfish actions, Kant penetrates into spiritual intricacies and mysteries
to which he seems to remain completely blind in his
Critique of Practical Reason."
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