THE FACT IN FICTION
453
story you find a host of narrators. And you arrive, finally, at
Lolita
and meet Humbert Humbert, telling
his
own story (which
you might not have believed otherwise), having been first
introduced by another narrator, his "editor," who authenti–
cates his manuscript; Humbert himself has been executed.
In
short, you are back with Defoe and
his
"true biographies" of
great criminals who were hanged, back at the birth of the
novel, before it could stand without support.
Even when
it
is most serious, the novel's characteristic tone
is one of gossip and tittletattle. You can hear it in the second
sentence (originally the first sentence) of
Anna Karenina:
"Everything was upset at the Oblonskys." The cook, it seemed,
had left; the underservants had given notice; the mistress was
shut up in her bedroom because the master had been sleeping
with the former French governess. This (I think) is a classic
beginning, and yet some person who had never read .a novel,
coming on those sentences, so full of blunt malice, might con–
clude that Tolstoy was simply a common scandal-monger. The
same might be thought of Dostoevsky, of Flaubert, Stendhal,
and (obviously) of Proust, of the earnest George Eliot and the
lively Jane Austen and the manly Charles Dickens. Most of
these writers were people of high principle; their books, with–
out exception, had a moral, ethical, or educational purpose.
But the voice we overhear in their narratives, if we stop to
listen for a minute, putting aside preconceptions, is the voice
of a neighbor relating the latest gossip. "You will hardly believe
what happened next," the novelists from Jane Austen to Kafka
(yes indeed) seem to be exclaiming. "Wait and I'll tell you."
The whole narrative method of Dostoevsky could be summed up
in those two sentences. In Conrad, more ruminative, there can
be heard the creaking of chairs as the men around the table
settled down to listen to the indefatigable Marlow, who only halts
to wet his whistle: "Pass the bottle." The scandals the novelists
are primed with are the scandals of
a:
village, a town, or a
province-Highbury or Jefferson, Mississippi, or the Province
