THE FACT IN FICTION
451
Jane and Eliza:beth, when they are finally married, live thirty
miles apart; Highbury is about a mile from Mr. Knightley's
property. Whenever the chance arises, Jane Austen supplies
a figure. Everything is lucid and perspicuous in her well-charted
world, except the weather, which is often unsettled, and this
fact too is always noted ("The shower was hea:vy but short,
and it had not been over five minutes when ..."). The names
of persons who are never seen in the story, like that of "Miss
King" just now, are dropped as if artlessly to attest the
veracity of the
narrative~inviting
the reader to clothe these
names himself with the common identities of real life.
This air of veracity is very important to the novel. We do
really (I think) expect a novel to be true, not only true to
itself, like a poem or a statue, but true to actual life, which
is
right around the corner, like the figure of "Miss King." We
not only make believe we believe a novel, but we do sub–
stantially believe it, as being continuous with real life, made of
the same stuff, and the presence of fact in fiction, of dates
and times and distances, is a kind of reassurance-a guarantee
of credibility.
If
we read a: novel, say, about conditions in post–
war Germany, we expect it to be an accurate report of condi–
tions in post-war Germany; if we find out that it is not, the
novel is discredited. This is not the case with a play or a poem.
Dante can be wrong in
The Divine Comedy;
it does not matter,
with Shakespeare, tha:t Bohemia has no seacoast, but if Tolstoy
was
all
wrong about the Battle of Borodino or the character of
Napoleon,
War and Peace
would suffer.
The presence of a narrator, writing in the first person,
is
another guarantee of veracity. The narrator is, precisely, an
eye-witness, testifying to the reader that these things really
happened, even though the reader knows of course that they
did not. This is the function of the man called Marlow in
Conrad's books; he is there to promise the reader that these
faraway stories a:re true, and, as if Marlow himself were not
enough, the author appears as a kind of character witness for
