126
FRANK KERMODE
McCarthy claims extravagant rights over her work; her puritan vigor
impinges upon liberty of interpretation. It is a liberty which moral
stupidity easily reduces to license, but it is basic to the health of litera–
ture. As usual with honest paradoxologists, she is on the right side of the
question without being quite right.
The same contrariness is evident at any rate in the first of the two
remarkable essays called "The Fact in Fiction" and "Characters in
Fiction." I must say at once that in their force and persuasiveness, as
well as in their intense relevance to the major problems of modern
literature, they are classic performances. The first of them I happened
to hear as a lecture in England; its impetus, the slowly rolling cannon–
ball of its argument, survived a serious misadventure-the speaker, paus–
ing for refreshment, took a mouthful of broken glass-and moved in–
exorably on. The argument, briefly, is that great novels do and all
novels should have a large dosage of fact; the one thing the great
novelists have in common is a love of "the empiric element in experi–
ence." I have abused the word "puritan," so I will say that this point
is made with a Dominican thoroughness; and the impetus of the work
carries the argument through to paradox, Miss McCarthy's habitual
terminus. False representations of reality are damaging to a novel, even
if the writer thinks he is telling the truth: "if Tolstoy was all wrong
about the Battle of Borodino or the character of Napoleon,
War and
Peace
would suffer." Thus Dickens really thought it possible for Krook
to explode; as it wasn't, the misapprehension damages
Bleak House.
Moby
Dick
depends upon the accuracy of its chapters on whaling. As
a matter of fact, I was once told by F. D. Ommaney, who knows all
about whaling, that
Moby
Dick
is
inaccurate compared with
The
Cruise
of the Cachalot.
I believe him, but how can it be true that one has to
know one way or the other before making up one's mind about the
book? On Miss McCarthy's view, the merits of
Moby
Dick
now hang
upon an investigation of Ommaney's remark. There is fanaticism here,
paradox erected into a system, as if by an angry Chesterton, or Shaw
tilting against the doctors. "Real gardens with imaginary toads in them"
is an imperfect account of the novel, however penetrating the observa–
tions on which it is based.
"Characters in Fiction" is less vulnerable, though just as challeng–
ing. In it, and in the recent work of Murdoch, Bayley and W.
J.
Harvey,
one senses the beginnings of a new epoch in the criticism, if not in the!
composition, of novels. I seem to
be
saying for the first time without
qualification that she is right.
If
so, this piece has been too contentious,
and I must add that to disagree with Miss McCarthy at all is to
be
