&-42
PARTISAN REVIEW
A classically simple solution to the time problem, such as Con–
stant's, can only throw up the bewildering variety of approaches to
it over the past fifty years. The last notable addition to these exper–
imental attempts at new solutions was the redistribution of narrative,
inaugurated by Isherwood and Huxley
in
the '30s. So far, it seems
to me, this treatment has remained too conscious a question of free
manipulation ever to be quite a success. To present the end at the
beginning, to show his charatcers as they will be, before he shows them
as they were, is a noticeable feat on the part of the novelist, but
somehow it is not enough
in
itself. It results in an eloquent disarrange–
ment which needs to be completed by the eloquence of a new ar–
rangement. It still has the quality of a discovery which ought to be
v,aluable, but whose full value remains
to
be discovered-perhaps by
some novelist of the immediate future.
The novelists of a generation earlier had been forced to their
own solutions of the problem of time. It pressed on the more sensitive
among them in a way which had not troubled a Meredith or a
Trollope, not even a Hardy or a James. Perhaps the first complete
break with the self-confident smoothness of the Victorian narrative
tradition was made by E. M. Forster, with the appearance of
The
Longest Journey
in 1908. No debut could have been less deliberately
formidable--or more dismaying for most of the writer's elders and
contemporaries. How well one can understand Henry James's pa–
ternal welcome to a Walpole or a Mackenzie, and his startled, if
polite distaste for a Forster! The former were in the Master's own
tradition,
if
only in so far as they regarded Fiction as a mass of
imaginary stuff which had to undergo endless manipulation into the
sacred shape of a novel. But in Forster the opposite, the alarming,
the almost sacrilegious thing had occurred. Here was not a novelist
manipulating the sense of life into a convenient and elegant shape.
On the contrary, here was someone trying, in all modesty, and with
a childlike perspicacity, to make allowances for life's shapelessness, its
hopeless deficiency of plot. Here was a novel in which things hap–
pened without arrangement or preparation, as they so awkwardly do
in life!
For the Victorian novelist time had been a generously circum–
ambient element, softening the vistas of the past, smoothing off the
