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which no individual can reach.
But although it is more pleasant
to talk of success, I would like
first to name some of the ways
by which novelists evade the pos–
sibilities of their art. They con–
struct a mannered style of arbi–
trary perspectives, with the inten–
tion that neither they nor their
readers will be obliged to venture
into the huge mystery of personal–
ity. The aim is simple:
If
you
restrict your world, then the world
is reduced in size and manageable.
Hide what is difficult; trim what
does not fit ; make it neat. The
great novelist is committed to a
world without horizons, mani–
fested first of all by a large and
lyric sense for his heroes. The me–
diocre or tertiary writer limits and
limits and limits, and so we have,
sometimes overlapping, the follow–
ing contemporary types:
The Forthright Brutes:
Ernest
Hemingway and imitators. They
are bewitched boys, newly discov–
ering verbs and nouns, physical
sensation,
zip-pow-wham
of
weather, drink, sex, war, bulls.
They are too scared of what goes
on inside an intelligence, inside a
memory, inside a group of people
to be able to face these matters ex–
cept by smashing physical symbols
like fists across the page. Some–
times they have sensitive nerves
in their fists, but the nerve end–
ings are stunned before making
contact with the complex congeries
of will and desire within.
Hemingway's resolution of the
necessary tension of conception in
fiction can be examined in the
light of the traditional philosophi–
cal concept of Universals and Par–
ticulars. In one tradition "reality"
is defined by abstract forms out–
side time, and the specific ever–
changing events of our world are
flickering shadows through fire on
the wall of the cave, imperfect im–
itations of the ideal forms. In the
other tradition, it is these par–
ticular events which are "real,"
and general statements are inac–
curate, merely useful summaries of
the only knowable reality-the fact
in the here and now. The terms
"Idealism" and "Materialism" are
approximate, somewhat misleading
labels for these opposing world
views.
The novel as a form is obvi–
ously empirical, working toward
whatever large statements it has
to offer about men in society, love,
death, ambition, and so on,
through specific instances of
a
man,
a
love,
a
death,
an
ambition,
a specific society in a specific time
and place. Not merely in general
approach, but in method also the
novelist tends to be empirical. He
does not say, "She was beautiful."
He describes a particular lovely
creature with all her lovely attach–
ments and gadgets, and then leaves
us with one of the formal sum–
maries which are part of the read–
er's active participation in a fic–
tion: "Wow! Beautiful!" The
novelist seeks what T. S. Eliot has
called, in a famous phrase,_-the
