MARY McCARTHY
have one thing
in
common: a deep love of fact, of the empiric
element in experience. I am not interested in making a formal
definition of the novel (it is really a very loose affair, a grab–
bag or portmanteau, as someone has said) but in finding its
quidditas
or whatness, the essence or binder that distinguishes
it from other species of prose fiction: the tale, the fable, the
romance. The staple ingredient present in all novels in various
mixtures and proportions but always in fairly heavy dosage is
fact.
If
a criterion is wanted for telling a novel from a fable or
a tale or a romance (or a drama), a simple rule-of-thumb
would be the absence of the supernatural. In fables and fairy
tales, as everyone knows, birds and beasts talk. In novels, they
don't; if you find birds and beasts talking in
a:
book you are
reading you can be sure it is not a novel. That takes care, for
example, of
Animal Farm.
Men in novels may behave like
beasts, but beasts in novels may not behave like men. That takes
care of
Gulliver's Travels,
in case anyone were to mistake it for
a novel. The characters in a novel must obey the laws of nature.
They cannot blow up or fly or rise from the dead, as they
can in plays, and if they talk to the devil, like Ivan Karamazov,
the devil, though he speaks French, is not real like Faust's
Mephistopheles, but a product of Ivan's derangement or fis–
sionization. The devil is a part of Ivan. In the same way, in
Mann's
Dr. Faustus,
the devil is no longer a member of the
cast of characters but resident, you might say, in the fatal
spirochete or syphilis germ.
This
is not a difference in period;
Goethe did not believe in real devils either, but he could put
one on the stage, because the stage accepts devils and even has
a trapdoor ready for them to disappear through, with a flash of
brimstone, just as it used to have a machine, up in the flies, for
the gods to descend from. There are no gods in the novel and no
machinery for them; to speak, even metaphorically, of a
deus
ex machina
in a novel- that is, of the entrance of a provi–
dential figure from above-is to imply a shortcoming; Dickens '
