174
MARY Mc:CARTHY
ber figures in Lawrence's books, except for a few short malicious
sketches. There are hardly any people in Virginia Woolf (Mr.
Ramsay in
To the Lighthouse
stands out) or in Forster or
Elizabeth Bowen or Henry Green; they exist in Ivy Compton–
Burnett but tend to blur together like her titles. Waugh has
people, and so had Joyce Cary. You find them in the short
stories of V. S. Pritchett and in the satires of Angus Wilson. But
the last great creator of character in the English novel was
Joyce. It is the same on the Continent. After Proust, a veil
is
drawn. You can speak of someone as a "regular Madame
Verdurin" or a "Charlus," but from Gide, Sartre, Camus, no
names emerge; the register is closed.
The meaning of this seems plain. The novel and the short
story have lost interest in the social. Since the social has cer–
tainly not lost interest in itself (look at the popularity of such
strange mirror-books as
The Lonely Crowd, The Organization
Man, The Exurbanites, The Status Seekers),
what has happened
must have occurred inside the novel and the short story-a tech–
nical or even technological cri:;.is.
An
impasse has been reached
within the art of fiction as a result of progress and experiment.
You find a similar impasse in painting, where the portrait can
no longer be painted and not because the artists do not know
how to draw or get a likeness; they do. But they can no longer
see a likeness as a work of art. In one sense, it is ridiculous to
speak of progress in the arts (as though modem art were "better"
than Rembrandt or Titian) ; in another sense, there
is
progress,
an internal dynamic such as one finds in the processes of industry
or in the biological process of aging. The
arts
have aged too,
and it
is
impossible for them to " go back," just as it
is
impos–
sible to recapture the youth or reinstitute a handicraft economy;
like the one Ruskin dreamed of. These things -are beyond our
control and independent of our will. I, for instance, would -like,
more than anything else, to write like Tolstoy; I imagine that I
still see something resembling the world Tolstoy saw. But my
pen or my typewriter simply balks; it "sees" differently from me
