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PARTISAN REVIEW
there to await death in poverty. Casimir recognizes, for the rest,
that the idea of taking a pension from Sophie is a concession to
human weakness, the only concession he will allow himself, with,
from time to time, the dispatch of a blank page in an envelope on
which will be written the name of Sophie. After being indignant,
then disturbed, then melancholy, Sophie finally accepts; everything
takes place as Casimir had foreseen. He dies, at Vilna, of his un–
happy love. The world of the novel has its own logic. A good story
cannot do without the imperturbable continuity which is never in
the situations of real life, but that one finds in the elaboration of
a reverie that takes reality as its point of departure.
If
Gobineau had
gone to Vilna, he would probably have been bored and left, or he
would have managed to make himself comfortable. But Casimir
is a stranger to the need for change and to moments of recovery.
He goes to the extreme, like Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights,
who
wished to go beyond even death and attain Hell itself.
Here is, then, an imaginary world, but a world created by the
correction of the one we know; a world where sorrow can, if it
wishes, last until death, where passions are never sidetracked, where
beings are in the grip of an unchanging idea and are always in each
other's thoughts. Man finally gives himself the form and the pacify–
ing limit that he pursues in vain in his natural condition. The novel
manufactures destiny to order. This is how it competes with creation
and, temporarily, triumphs over death. A detailed analysis of the
most famous novels would show that, in differing perspectives, the
essence of the novel is in this perpetual correction- always going
in the same direction-that the artist gives to his experience. Far
from being moral or purely formal, this correction aims first of
all at unity and in this way translates a metaphysical need. The
novel, at this level, is primarily an exercise of the intelligence in the
service of a nostalgic sensibility in revolt. We can study this search
for unity in the French novel of analysis, and in Melville, Balzac,
Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. But a brief confrontation between the two
efforts that are situated at the opposite extremes of the world of the
novel-the creation of Proust and the American novel of recent
years-will
be
enough for our purposes.
