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PARTISAN REVIEW
incompetence is genuine, as well as being a principal device. Perhaps
not even Flaubert wrote with more desperate difficulty. The root of
Sterne's peculiarity, as of Firbank's in this century, was that he could
not really cope with the time dimension at all, just as certain painters
never come to terms with the third dimension of space. The result,
in either art, is a degree of decorative flatness which, in Firbank,
for instance, is as mannered and as effective as it is in Beardsley.
The immense labor of Sterne's particular artifice results in the
most naturally talkative book in the world, even if the talk could
only be Sterne's. The confirmed talker takes no account of time. Time
was an object of terror to a sick and aging Yorick, and his novel
might be called an attempt to talk time out of his mind altogether.
As
for Firbank, who could only cope with time in terms of sudden
accidents or equally sudden gaps, one need hardly wonder
if
the
deficiency was accidental or deliberate. The charm of his novels is
that time simply isn't there, except as a conjectural and capricious
element kept in hiding; just as the charm of a Japanese woodcut is
that the third dimension is there and not there, half suggested by
the two dimensions in which the artist works, but never infallibly
indicated by any observed rules of perspective. Firbank's Mrs. Shame–
foot, in
Vainglory,
is his Madame Bovary, and her life consists of one
motive and one event. She aspires to immortality in the form of a
stained-glass window. Having chosen her Cathedral, she plies the
Bishop and the Canon in turn for permission to install it, in vain.
In desperation, she summons the Devil. He refuses to come. Then,
between chapter and chapter, the Event occurs: "Ever since it fell,
she has been going about in such heavens of joy! "- a tower of the
Cathedral has fallen . Now all is easy. A window in the new tower
will be welcome. She is installed, and retires to the beatification of
studying her own image in glass.
Firbank's solution to the time problem is only one of many
which novelists in this century have had to discover for themselves.
Evidently it is no longer the simple convention, observed almost un–
consciously, which it was a hundred years ago. Even in the nineteenth
century, it was only a Tolstoy who could present with absolute con–
viction the changes wrought in a character by a generation of time.
The characters in Stendhal remain a constant, even when they have
his own inexhaustible supply of youthful energy and resource. The
