FICTION CHRONICLE
175
The dramatic novel, the one which by largely implicit means
seeks to relate time and idea, time and fate, which reveals the most
widely separated actions as radically bound to a single center, is a
crucial instance at present for any debate about the continued exist–
ence of the novelist's art. At one extreme, you have the cheesy
'classicism of the detective story, where purity of form is exactly
equivalent to poverty of imagination; at the other, the grand peri–
peties and recognitions of tragedy. The conduct of this business,
when it is brought into intimate relation with a certain realism of
tone
and detail, as in the novel it must
be,
is invariably risky; we
seem to watch great ingenuity struggling to defeat itself, and our
admiration for the superb predestinations of the design is brought
into conflict with our feelings that real people do not behave in this
way, that real people could not possibly be related in these hidden
and devious ways, etc. A crucial instance, as I say-because it puts
any assertions a:bout form right where they ought to be, in relation
to assertions about destiny. The beauty which is sought is, to my
mind, the greatest beauty of all, that to be derived from a closed
situation apart from the world and thus comparable to the world:
the parable of composition itself as the law of nature. So it is, for
instance, in
The Tempest,
which, like Mr. Humes' book, takes
place on a magic island.
1
At the same time, owing to the novelist's concern for "realism,"
that is, for a convincing triviality in the manners and details, the
execution of this design is often attended by absurdities.
Mr. Humes' parable is essentially, I think, a grand one: the
explosive island, stored (by Negroes regarded as expendable) with
the powers of death, commanded by the insane and sexually im–
potent superego, who is in turn advised by a subordinate representa–
tive of intellect and art (helpless, kindly, cynical) ; the young man
Sulgrave, brought in as bewildered and hurt mediator between the
cold, white, punitive authority and the black, enslaved power (the
Negroes and the explosives) -all this is compelling and convincing
in the implacable simplicity of its relations and the inevitable, driv-
1.
cr.
also William Golding's
Lord of the Plies.
