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PARTISAN ·REVIEW
stances, that so much of the personal feeling described should be in
fact the experience of breakdown.
I offer this fourfold classification - social description, social
formula, personal description, personal formula - as a way of be–
ginning a general analysis of the contemporary novel, and of defining,
by contrast, the realist tradition which, in various ways, these kinds
have replaced. The question now is whether these kinds correspond
to some altered reality, leaving the older tradition as really irrelevant
as the hansom cab, or whether they are in fact the symptoms of some
very deep crisis in experience, which throws up these talented works
yet persists, unexplored, and leaves us essentially dissatisfied. I
would certainly not say that the abandonment of the realist balance
is in some way willful; that these writers are deliberately turning away
from a great tradition, with the perversity that many puzzled readers
assign to them. The crisis, as I see it, is too deep for any simple, blam–
ing explanation. But what then is this crisis, in its general nature?
There are certain immediate clarifying factors. The realist novel
needs, obviously, a genuine community: a community of persons
linked not merely by one kind of relationship - work, friendship,
family - but by many, interlocking kinds. It is obviously difficult, in
the twentieth century, to find a community of this sort. Where
Middlemarch
is a complex of personal, family and working relation–
ships, and draws its whole strength from their interaction in an indi–
visible process, the links between persons in most contemporary novels
are relatively single, temporary, discontinuous. And this was .a change
in society, at least in that 'part of society most nearly available to most
novelists, before it was
a.
change in literary form. Again, related to
this, but affected by other powerful factors,the characteristic experi–
ence of our century is that of asserting and preserving an individuality,
as compared with the characteristic earlier experience of finding a
place and ma.king a settlement. The ordinary Victorian novel ends, as
every parodist knows, with a series of settlements, of new engagements
and formal relationships, whereas the ordinary twentieth-century novel
ends with a man going away on his own, having extricated himself
from a dominating situation, and found himself
in
so doing. Again,
this actually happened, before it became a common literary pattern.
In a time of great change, this kind of extrication and discovery was
a necessary and valuable movement; the recorded individual histories
