202
PARTISAN REVIEW
The major tradition of European fiction, in the nineteenth
century, is commonly described as a tradition of "realism," and it
is equally assumed that, in the West at any rate,
this
particular tra–
dition has ended. The realistic novel, it was said recently, went out
with the hansom cab. Yet it
is
not at all easy, at first sight, to see
what in practice this means. For clearly, in the overwhelming ma–
jority of modem novels, including those novels we continue to regard
as literature, the ordinary criteria of realism still hold.
It
is
not only
that there is still a concentration on contemporary themes; in many
ways elements of ordinary everyday experience are more evident
in
the modem novel than in the nineteenth- century novel, through the
disappearance of certain taboos. Certainly nobody will complain of
the modem novel that it lacks those startling or offensive elements
which it was one of the purposes of the term "realism" to describe.
Most description is still realistic, in the sense that describing the
object as it actually appears is a principle few novelists would dissent
from. What we usually say
is
that the realistic novel has been replaced
by the "psychological novel," and it is obviously true that the direct
study of certain states of consciousness, certain newly apprehended
psychological states, has been a primary modern feature. Yet realism
as an intention, in the description of these states, has not been widely
abandoned. Is it merely that "everyday, ordinary reality" is now
differently conceived, and that new techniques have been developed
to describe this new kind of reality, but still with wholly realistic in–
tentions? The questions are obviously very difficult, but one way of
approaching an answer to them may be to take this ordinary belief
that we have abandoned (developed beyond) the realistic novel, and
to set beside it my own feeling that there is a formal gap in modern
fiction, which makes it incapable of expressing one kind of experience,
a kind of experience which I find particularly important and for
which, in my mind, the word "realism" keeps suggesting itself.
Now the novel is not so much a literary form as a whole litera–
ture in itself. Within its wide boundaries, there is room for almost
every kind of contemporary writing. Great harm is done to the
tradition of fiction, and to the necessary critical discussion of it, if
"the novel"
is
equated with anyone kind of prose work. It was such
a wrong equation which made Tolstoy say of
War and Peace:
"it
is
not a novel." A form which in fact includes
Middlemarch
.and
