THE NOVEL AGAIN
175
Nevertheless, we should recall that the novel has itself regularly
demonstrated its affinities to literary criticism. And as we know, the
novel first exercises its imaginative autonomy in connection with a
question of literary criticism.
Don Quixote
begins, middles, and ends
by asking the primitive, the classical, and the unanswerable critical
question: how for good or bad does literature influence our lives?
This question, though it is seldom asked so baldly, lurks behind a
majority of important critical judgments. It is the only question that
can modify, confuse, or overturn "literary" judgments about general
considerations and excellences, although it cannot be said simply
to take precedence over such judgments. And if we can consider
that the modern novel finds a beginning in this question, then it
might also be seen bringing itself almost to the end over this same
question. It is at the bottom of an incessant debate in Joyce's writ–
ings. I refer not only to the theoretical discussions of literature in
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and
Ulysses
and to the fact
that Stephen and Bloom embody different answers to the question,
but to the style of
Ulysses)
which in part represents a heroic effort
to transcend that question. The virtual hero of
Ulysses
is its style, and
by attempting to equate moral heroism with the heroism of literary
style, Joyce attempted to put the question I have been referring to
aside once and for all, to make it irrelevant.
Ulysses
does not, how–
ever, entirely achieve this.
Finnegans Walee
appears to, on the other
hand; and it may be that, apart from its intrinsic difficulties, readers
continue to be puzzled and disturbed by
Finnegans Wake
because it
is
the first important work of fiction to which the old, primitive
question really seems irrelevant.
One might supply a variety of explanations for these changes
in the way we have come to regard the novel. And we could
demonstrate in detail how they coordinate with recent developments
in the novel itself. For the present, however, I should like to look at
two questions. First, the historical identity of the novel continues to
change in time.
As
the great novels of the nineteenth century recede
from us-and every circumstance of modern society conspires in
accelerating that recession-their character inevitably is modified.
What were once burning questions of dispute
in
the novel no longer
possess what can be called an extra-novelistic dimension. The ideas
of Rousseau as they are dramatized in Stendhal, the problem of the
