208
PARTISAN
REVIEW
fiction of special pleading. We can say of novels in this class that
they only take one person seriously, but then ordinarily very seriously
indeed. Joyce's
Portrait of the Artist
is not only this, but contains it
as a main emphasis. And to mention this remarkable work is to
acknowledge the actual gain in intensity, the real development of
fictional method, which this emphasis embodied. A world is actualized
on one man's senses: not narrated, or held at arm's length, but taken
as it is lived. Joyce showed the magnificent advantages of this method
when in
Ulysses
he actualized a world not through one person but
through three; there are three ways of seeing, three worlds, of Stephen,
Bloom, and Molly, yet the three worlds, as in fact, compose one world,
the whole world of the novel.
Ulysses
does not maintain this balance
throughout; it is mainly in the first third of the book that the essential
composition is done, with the last section as a coda. Yet here was the
realist tradition in a new form, altered in technique but continuous
in experience.
Since
Ulysses,
this achievement has been diluted, as the technique
has
also
been diluted. Cary's
The Horse's Mouth
is an interesting
example, for in it one way of seeing has been isolated, and the world
fitted to that. This analysis is
also
the key to the popular new kind of
novel represented by Amis's
That Uncertain Feeling
and Wain's
Living in the Present.
The paradox of these novels is that on the one
hand they seem the most real kind of contemporary writing - they
were welcomed because they recorded so many actual feelings - and
yet on the other hand their final version of reality is parodic and
farcical. This illustrates the general dilemma: these writers start with
real personal feelings, but to sustain and substantiate them, in their
given form, the world of action in which they operate has to be
pressed, as it were inevitably, towards caricature. To set these feelings
in our actual world, rather than in this world farcically transformed
at crisis, would be in fact to question the feelings, to go on from them
to a very difficult adjustment to reality. Instead of this real tension,
what we get is a phantasy release: swearing on the telephone, giving
a mock-lecture, finding a type-figure on which aggression can be
concentrated. Because these are our liveliest writers, they illustrate
our contemporary difficulty most clearly. The gap between our feel–
ings and our social observation is dangerously wide.
The fiction of special pleading can be seen in its clearest form
