THE FACT IN FICTION
is always criticized on this score. But a tale almost requires the
appearance of a
deus ex machina
or magic helper. The devil
can appear in person in a tale of Hawthorne's like "Young
Goodman Brown," but not in Hawthorne's novel,
The Scarlet
Letter,
though he may be there in spirit.
The novel does not permit occurrences outside the order
of nature-miracles. Mr. Krook's going up in spontaneous com–
bustion in his junkshop is a queer Punch-and-Judy note in
Bleak House.
Actually, Dickens thought science had found
out that people could explode of their own force, but now it
seems that they can't, that Mr. Krook couldn't; it would
be
all
right in a fantasy or a pantomime but not in a novel. You
remember how in
The Brothers Karamazov
when Father
Zossima dies, his faction (most of the sympathetic characters in
the book) expects a miracle: that his body will stay sweet and
fresh because he died "in the odor of sanctity." But instead
he begins to stink. The stink of Father Zossima is the natural,
generic smell of the novel.
By the same law, a novel cannot be laid in the future, since
the future, until it happens, is outside the order of nature; no
prophecy or cautionary tale like 1984 is a novel. It is the
same with public events in the past that never happened, for
example the mutiny at the end of World War I led by a
Christ-like corporal in Faulkner's
A Fable;
the title is Faulkner's
warning to his readers that this volume, unlike his "regular"
books, is not to be considered a novel but something quite
different. Because the past appears, through recession, to be
outside the order of nature (think how improbable and
ghostly old photographs look), most historical novels, so-called,
are romances, not novels: George Eliot's
Romola
in contrast
to
Middlemarch.
This rule is broken by Tolstoy's
War and
Peace,
a novel if there ever was one, and the reason for this
is that history, as it were, has been purged by Tolstoy's harsh
and critical realism of all "historical" elements-the flummery
of costume, make-up, and accessories and the myths and lies
