SYMBOLISM AND THE NOVEL
331
by their particular place in society, and by the times they lived in
and the ideas prevalent
in
those times. (That our contemporary
critics choose to regard these characters simply as the product of their
social status is another prejudice that will not stand the historical
test.) The same is true of the novels of Stendhal, Balzac, and Tolstoy.
The particular classical form of the novel which they created and
which has received the rather dubious designation of "realistic" (for
simplicity's sake we shall use the term too) is in a certain sense anti–
symbolic, for it is opposed to the entire class of elements to which the
symbol belongs. The realistic novel owes its origin to rejecting the
paradigms that had for centuries determined literary forms: fable,
legend, myth, and the traditional, typical stories and characters from
the storehouse of world literature that were constantly being re–
worked (i.e., the "archetypes" that have become so popular again
today). The realistic novel is against types, against the changeless
decked out in varying guises, against the authority of the eternal
and the accepted. It is concerned with the individual and idiosyncratic,
that is, the particular in its particular circumstances, with reality as ex–
perienced by the individual as constituting the only genuine version
of reality. The realistic novel is the purest embodiment in literature
of the modern scientific sceptical approach (but how quickly the
"modern" becomes old and passe!) for which only an observed and
mea:sured reality was valid as the raw material for cognition and
creation. Only this kind of reality seemed reliable enough to serve
the novelist as the basis for a portrayal of life. This attitude has little
use for symbols, since a symbol always represents something that
remains to be demonstrated, unless it has already been accepted on
faith.
In its empiricism the classical novel was at one with historio–
graphy, which, just at this time, and setting out from similar intel–
lectual principles, was tremendously enlarging its field of operations
and its horizon. Like historiography, the novel proposed to investigate
and depict the concrete and specific form of reality at a particular
time in a particular place. Hence the historical element, and especially
the element of contemporary history, has an important and indeed
indispensable place in these novels. There is scarcely one of them
that does not establish the historical period of the events within the
first few pages.
«Le
15
mai
1796,
le general Bonaparte tit son entree
