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581
of it. In most realists, the seriousness of reality tends to force comic at–
titudes into an intermittent background of interludes when the under–
lings, clowns, fools, and minor characters are permitted to come
forward. A
yme
avoids these characteristic tendencies of the satirist and
the realist by making realism his means and not his end, and at the
same time by making the story itself his center. The reality of his
characters and the truth of their behavior are the beginning, and the
conclusion of all his excursions.
An omnibus review of fiction compels one to general reflections
and revives inexhaustible, irninortal questions and platitudes about the
novel. One is the recurrent scandal or libel that the novel is dead, or dy–
ing, or exhausted as a vital form.
It
may be true that certain forms of
the novel are from time to time exhausted, but one cannot read the new
novels of a given season without perceiving that, far from being dead,
the novel has grown richer and more various, more supple and plentiful
in possibility. And one cannot believe that some kind of novel will not
continue to exist, some new form will not emerge, as long as human
beings have a need to tell each other or to hear about the lights
and the darknesses of experience. Moreover, the effort to criticize
new examples of fiction brings one to a renewed awareness of how
little there is in the history of criticism which is criticism of the novel,
or which can be translated to the criticism of fiction. Most critical writ–
ing about fiction is either the propaganda and justification of a certain
kind of fiction, or it
is
the technical observation and advice of a master
and equally difficult to generalize or transpose. To come upon these
limitations
is
to recognize the way in which criticism has been dominated
for the past thirty years by Eliot's example and by his concentration
upon the criticism of the lyric poem, for the most part. The value of
this criticism is not diminished in itself, but its narrowness becomes
obvious when we see that we cannot move. with ease as critics from
poetry to fiction or, for that matter, from poetry to drama. This is
just what one would expect of a method of criticism which scrutinizes
texture and style so closely and so intensively. Indeed the entire situation
of present-day criticism, which leaps from the abstraction of technique to
the abstraction and extraction of social and intellectual values, suggests
the possibility of new objectives in criticism which will concentrate
directly upon the nature of fiction, avoiding both forms of over–
emphasis.
Delmore Schwartz
