MARY McCARTHY
of historians. The time, moreover (his grandfather's day) was
not very remote from Tolstoy's own. When he experimented
with writing a novel about the days of Ivan the Terrible, he
found he could not do it. A borderline case is Stendhal's
The
Charterhouse of Parma,
where actual history (Napoleon's entry
into Milan; the Battle of Waterloo, so much admired by
Tolstoy) is succeeded by mock-history-the spurious history of
Parma, complete with numbered despots, prisons, and paid
assassins, a travesty invented by Stendhal to correspond with
the (literally) travestied Fabrizio in his violet stockings and
with the mock-heroics of this section of the book. The book is
a novel that turns into parody at the moment that history, in
Stendhal's opinion, ceased to make sense and turned into a
parody of the past. That moment was the triumph of reaction
in Europe after 1815.
I ought to make it clear that these distinctions are in no
way pejorative; I do not mean "Novel good, fable bad," merely
"Novel novel; fable fable."
Candide
is not a novel, but to say
so is not a criticism of
Candide.
Indeed, there are certain master–
pieces-Rameau's Nephew,
Gogol's
Dead Souls, The Charter–
house of Parma
itself-so quicksilver in their behavior that it
is impossible to catch them in a category; these are usually
"destructive" books, like
Candide,
where the author's aim is,
among other things, to elude the authorities' grasp. When people
nowadays tell you something is "not a novel," as they are
fond of saying, for instance, about
Dr. Zhivago,
it is always in
a querulous tone, as though someone had tried to put some–
thing over on them, sell them the Empire State Building or
Trajan's Monument or the Palace of Culture, when
they
know
better; they were not born yesterday. That is not my intention;
I am not speaking as an aggrieved consumer of modern liter–
ature (and I admire
Dr. Zhivago
too passionately to demand its
identity papers before I will let it pass); I am only trying to
see why a special kind of literature, a relatively new kind,
what we call the novel, is disappearing from view. To do that,
