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STEVEN MARCUS
Stendhal and Dostoevsky in this way. We analyse the ideas in
Dostoevsky's novels as if they were images; which is to say that
we
tend to discuss their strictly dramatic function and emphasize their
internal coherence, their symmetry, their configurations of resonance.
We tend less and less to think of these ideas as having an autonomous
existence within the work, or .as directing us toward something beyond
it, as referring to reality in the way that the ideas in Plato or Hegel
or Freud refer to it. At the other end of the spectrum, we find that
even Jane Austen, once the most prosaic and genteel of novelists–
it used to be said of her in the bad old days that she was a novelist
of manners- is now written of as a poet. Much recent criticism of
her novels has to do with just such formal considerations of structure
and imagery, with their techniques of analogy and complex patterns
of irony.
It
is only a matter of time, I suppose, before "the little bit
(two Inches wide ) of Ivory," on which she described herself as
working "with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much
labour," will itself be proposed as a metaphysical conceit to be put
alongside Donne's "bracelet of bright hair about the bone." The
possibilities which will at this point disclose themselves we had better
leave unexplored.
Although these poetic elements exist abundantly in the great
novels of the past, we cannot disregard the fact that it has not been
until recently that they were discovered and placed in the forefront
of critical discussion.
In
fact, both the novel and literary criticism
have recently been going through an analogous development, though
by way of introduction I am describing changes in our critical at–
titude toward the novel before turning to changes within the novel
itself. This analogy is not surprising since the novel and literary
criticism exist in close and reciprocal relation. Historically both forms
have been characterised by their discursiveness, their impulse to
moralize, and their topicality. And throughout their complex and
highly sophisticated development into complex and highly sophisticat–
ed kinds of discourse both the novel and literary criticism continued
to share an insistent concern with the topical and ephemeral, with
the immediate social and cultural situation. The novel customarily
dealt with that situation directly, whereas criticism dealt with its
refracted appearance through literature-which meant that criticism
has taken its direction from the literature of the recent past.
