178
STEVEN MARCUS
in stride, as they take Balzac's royalism or Dostoevsky's pan-Slavism.
At that distant date, when current doctrines and passions will have
receded into history, Kipling's writings might re-emerge, though their
lineaments and proportions will be different from what they seem
today. And although it is safer to reserve judgment, one may speculate
that
Kim
and
Stalky
&
Co.
and
The Jungle Books
will then be
recognized as minor classics of the language. They will, as we say,
receive due recognition as works of art.
Clearly such .an affirmation runs the risk of seeming to look
down on things from Mount Olympus, when in fact we are peering
up at them from the moral sewer that goes by the name of modem
civilization. Detachment so-called is a critical virtue and necessity,
but there is a point at which even detachment attaches. Detached as
he may be, the critic lives in his own time. He is free to deplore and
denounce it, but as a critic he is not free to renounce it or to assert
that its clamors and confusions- unlike the golden clamors of Peri–
clean Greece or the tapestried confusions of Renaissance Italy-are
a mere passing show. He is not free to pontificate against his age by
claiming for another age, past or future, a superior degree of reality.
This is especially true for the critic of the novel, who must faithfully
remind himself that of all the sovereign forms of art, the novel has
been the least "artistic," the most dependent upon its extra-artistic
powers of immediacy, involvement, and appeal. In one sense the
novel may be described as a representation of life in which the loose
ends regularly fail to get tied up. This crude co-extensiveness with
experience is in fact a traditional point of pride for the novelist; it
was a point of pride even for Henry James. In its changing historical
identity, then, the novel can often be seen to gain as a work of art
to the extent that it loses its connection with immediate and topical
experience. And though a similar process takes place in all art and
all forms of literature, the novel probably loses most by
it.
It
loses
most by virtue of its origins, its historical development .and form, and
by virtue of its relation to its audience.
My second point concerns what I have represented as the new
conventions under which both the great novels of the past and current
fiction have come to be read. Briefly we can observe that the last
decade .and a half has witnessed the complete and final domestication
of what was once called the New Criticism. The techniques of close
