THE FACT IN FICTION
439
of a free sample-a miniature bottle of wine or a card of
"baby" safety-pins.
Now I am not going to talk about the problems of the
novel in this sense at all but rather to confront the fact that
the writing of a novel has become problematic today. Is it still
possible to write novels-in longhand or on the typewriter,
standing or sitting, on Sundays or weekdays, with or without
an outline? The answer, it seems to me, is certainly not yes
and perhaps, tentatively, no. I mean real novels-not fairy
tales or fables or romances or
contes philosophiques,
and I mean
novels of a high order, like
War and Peace
or
Middlemarch
or
Ulysses
or the novels of Dickens, Dostoevsky or Proust. The
manufacture of second-rate novels, or, rather, of facsimiles of
the novel, is in no state of crisis; nor is there a difficulty in
marketing them, with or without an agent. But almost no writer
in the West of any consequence, let us say since the death of
Thomas Mann, has been able to write a true novel; the excep–
tion is Faulkner, who is now an old man. What was the
last novel, not counting Faulkner, that was written in
our day?
Ulysses? Man's Fate?
Camus's
The Stranger?
Some–
one might say
Lolita,
and perhaps it is a novel, a freak, though,
a sport or wild mutation, which everyone approaches with sus–
picion, as if it were a dangerous conundrum, a Sphinx's riddle.
What do I mean by a "novel"? A prose book of a certain
thickness that tells a story of real life. No one could disagree
with that, and yet many will disagree with much that I am
going to say before I am through, so I shall try to be more
specific. The words "prose" and "real" are crucial to my con–
ception of the novel. The distinctive mark of the novel is its
concern with the actual world, the world of fact, of the verifi–
able, of figures, even, and statistics.
If
I point to Jane Austen,
Dickens, Balzac, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, the Mel–
ville of
Moby Dick,
Proust, the Joyce of
Ulysses,
Dreiser,
Faulkner, it will be admitted that they are all novelists and
that, different as they are from a formal point of view, they
