THE FACT IN FICTION
455
they are supposed to be "science"; in science, all facts, no
matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality. Among
novelists, it is only Faulkner who does not seem to feel an itch
of dissatisfaction with his sphere, and there .are signs of this
even in him-A
Fable,
for example.
But it is not only that the novelist of today, in "our ex–
panding universe," is embarrassed by the insignificance (or lack
of "significance") of
his
finite world. A greater problem is that
he cannot quite believe in it. That is, the existence of High–
bury or the Province of O. is rendered improbable, unveracious,
by Buchenwald and Auschwitz, the population curve of China,
and the hydrogen bomb. Improbable when "you stop to think";
this is the experience of everybody and not only of the novelist;
if we stop to think for one second, arrested by some newspaper
story or general reflection, our daily life becomes incredible
to us. I remember reading the news of Hiroshima in a little
general store on Cape Cod in Massachusetts and saying to my–
self as I moved up to the counter, "What am I doing buying a
loaf of bread?" The coexistence of the great world and us, when
contemplated, appears impossible.
It works both ways. The other side of the picture is that
Buchenwald and Auschwitz are and were unbelievable, and not
just to the German people, whom we criticize for forgetting
them; we all forget them, as we forget the hydrogen bomb,
because their special quality is to stagger belief. And here is the
dilemma of the novelist, which
is
only a kind of professional
sub-case of the dilemma of everyone: if he writes about his
province, he feels its inverisimilitude; if he tries, on the other
hand, to write about people who make lampshades of human
skin, like the infamous Ilse Koch, he feels still more the in–
verisimilitude of what he is asserting. His love of truth revolts.
And yet this love of truth, ordinary common truth recognizable
to everyone, is the ruling passion of the novel. Putting two and
two together, then, it would seem that the novel, with its com–
mon sense, is of all forms the least adapted to encompass the
