THE FACT IN FICTION
447
This fetishism of fact is generally treated as a sort of
disease of realism of which Balzac was the prime clinical exhibit.
But
this is
not the case. You find the splendid sickness in realists
and non-realists alike.
Mob y Dick,
among other things,
is
a
compendium of everything that was to be known about whaling.
The chapters on the whale and on whiteness, which are filled
with curious lore, truths that are "stranger than fiction," inter–
rupt and "slow down" the narrative, like the excursus on paper.
Yet they cannot be taken away (as the excursus on paper cer–
tainly could be) without damaging the novel;
Moby Dick
without these chapters (in the stage and screen versions) is
not
Mob y Dick.
Or think of the long chapter on the Russian
Monk in
The Brothers Karamazov.
Father Zossima
is
about to
enter the scene, and, before introducing him, Dostoevsky simply
stops and writes a history of the role of the elder in Russian
monasticism. In the same way, in
War and Peace,
when Pierre
gets interested in Freemasonry, Tolstoy stops and writes an
account of the Masonic movement, for which he had been
boning up in the library. Everyone who has read
War and
Peace
remembers the Battle of Borodino, the capture and
firing of Moscow, the analysis of the character of Napoleon,
the analysis of the causes of war, and the great chapter on
Freedom and Necessity, all of which are non-fiction and which
constitute the very terrain of the novel; indeed, it could be said
that the real plot of
War and Peace
is
the struggle of the
characters not to be immersed, engulfed, swallowed up by
the landscape of fact and "history" in which they, like all human
beings, have been placed: freedom (the subjective) is in the
fiction, and necessity
is
in the fact. I have already mentioned
the first chapter of
The Charterhouse of Parma
describing
Napoleon's entry into Milan. In
The Magic Mountain,
there
are the famous passages on tuberculosis, recalling Boccaccio's
description of the plague, and the famous chapter on time,
a philosophical excursus like the chapter on whiteness in
Mob)'
Dick
and the chapter on Freedom .and Necessity in Tolstoy
