THE FACT IN FICTION
lawyer by a good one, a bad school by a good one, and so on.
Or, to put it another way, it is as though he were launching a
great roomy Noah's Ark with two of each species of creation
aboard. In a single book,
Middlemarch,
George Eliot "covers"
English life and institutions, as found at their median point-a
middling provincial town. The notion of coverage by professions
was taken up, somewhat mechanically, by the American
novelists Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. You can hear it in Dreiser's
titles:
The Titan, The Financier, The Genius, Twelve Men.
Lewis ticked off the housewife
(Main Street),
the realtor
(Babbit)
, the scientist
(Arrowsmith),
the preacher
(Elmer
Gantry),
the social worker
(An'n Vickers),
the retired business
man
(Dodsworth).
A similar census, though of more mobile
social types, is seen in Dos Passos. It is Faulkner, however, the
most "mythic" of recent American novelists, who has docu–
mented a society more completely than any of the realists. Like
Dickens, he has set
himself
the task of
.a
Second Creation.
Yoknapatawpha County (capital, Jefferson), Mississippi, is
presided over by its courthouse
(Requiem for a Nun),
where
its history and vital statistics are on file; we know its popula–
tion of lawyers, storekeepers, business men, farmers, black and
white, and their forbears and how they made or lost their
money; we know its idiots and criminals and maniacs, its
geology and geography, flora and fauna (the Bear of that
story and the cow of
The Hamlet)
; some editions of Faulkner
include a ma:p of Yoknapatawpha County, and a letter ad–
dressed to Faulkner at Jefferson, Mississippi, would almost cer–
tainly reach
him,
although there is no such place.
The more poetic a novel, the more it has the air of being
a factual document. I exaggerate when I say this, but
if
you
think of Faulkner, of
Mob y Dick,
of
Madame Bovary
or Proust,
you will see there is something in it. Joyce's
Ulysses
is a case in
point. There is no doubt that Joyce intended to reconstruct,
almost scientifically, twenty-four hours of a certain day in
Dublin; the book, among other things, is an exercise in
