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REALISM AND THE NOVEL
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amount to a common history. And while old establishments linger,
and new establishments of a dominating kind are continually insti–
tuted, the breakaway has continually to be made, the personal asser–
tion given form and substance, even to the point where it threatens
to become the whole content of our literature. Since I know the
pressures, I admit the responses, but my case is that we are reaching
deadlock, and that to expore a new definition of realism may be the
way to break out of the deadlock and find a creative direction.
The contemporary novel has both reflected and illuminated the
crisis of our society, and of course we could fall back on the argu–
ment that only a different society could resolve our literary problems.
Yet literature is committed to the detail of known experience, and only
valuable social change would be the same kind of practical and re–
sponsible discipline. We begin by identifying our actual situation, and
the critical point, as I see it, is precisely that separation of the indi–
vidual and society into absolutes, which we have seen reflected
in form. The truly creative effort of our time is the struggle for
relationships, of a whole kind, and it is possible to see this as both
personal and social: the practical learning of
extending
relationships.
Realism, as embodied in its great tradition, is a touchstone in this, for
it shows, in detail, that vital interpenetration, idea into feeling, person
into community, change into settlement, which we need, as growing
points, in our own divided time.
In
the highest realism, society is
seen in fundamentally personal terms, and persons, through relation–
ships, in fundamentally social terms. The integration is controlling,
yet of course it is not to be achieved by an act of will.
If
it comes at
all, it is a creative discovery, and can perhaps only be recorded within
the structure and substance of the realist novel.
Yet, since it is discovery, and not recovery, since nostalgia and
imitation are not only irrelevant, but hindering, any new realism
will be different from the tradition, and will comprehend the discov–
eries in personal realism which are the main twentieth-century
achievement. The point can be put theoretically, in relation to modern
discoveries in perception and communication. The old, naive realism
is in any case dead, for it depended on a theory of natural seeing
which is now impossible. When we thought we had only to open our
eyes to see a common world, we could suppose that realism was a
