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PARTISAN REVIEW
in novels." By this, one understood that these ideal creatures paid
no attention to the realities of existence. Speaking generally, it has
always been thought that the world of the novel was separate from
that of life, and that the fonner, in embroidering the latter, also
betrayed it. The simplest and most common way of regarding
the novel, as a form of expression, thus consists in viewing it as an
exercise in escape. Common sense is at one with revolutionary
criticism.
But what is one escaping by means of the novel? A reality
judged to be too crushing? Happy people also read novels, and it
is well known that extreme suffering takes away the ta5te for read–
ing. On the other hand, the novelistic universe certainly has less
weight and presence than that other universe in which heings of
flesh assail us unceasingly. By what mystery, however, does Adolphe
seem a personage ,more familiar than Benjamin Constant, and the
Count Mosca more familiar than our professional moralists? Balzac,
one day, cut short a long conversation on politics and the fate of
the world by saying: "And now let's get back to talking about
serious things," meaning that he wanted to talk about his novels.
The unquestionable gravity of the novelistic world, our obstinacy,
indeed, in taking seriously the innumerable myths that the novelistic
genius has proposed to us for two centuries, cannot be adequately
explained by a taste for escape. Certainly, the activity of writing
novels supposes some sort of rejection of the real. But this rejection
is not a simple flight . Should one see in it the movement of retreat
proper to the tender-minded soul who, according to Hegel, creates
for himself, in his disillusion, a factitious world where morality
reigns supreme? The edifying novel, however, falls considerably short
of being great literature; and the best of the rose-colored novels,
Paul et Virginie,
is a saddening work that offers no consolation.
The contradiction is this: man refuses the world as it is, with–
out consenting to escape it completely. In fact, men stick to the
world and, in the immense majority, do not wish to leave it. Far
from always wishing to forget it, they suffer, on the contrary, from
not possessing it enough: strange citizens of the world exiled in
their own country! Except for blazing moments of plenitude, all
reality is unfinished for them. Their acts escape them to merge into
other acts, return to judge them under unfamiliar guises, flow like
