THE
NOVEL AGAIN
la9
as historian, biographer, and sociologist: he was an explorer
in
the
terra incognita
of modem society. And
his
fantastic reports on life
among the cannibals-whether these were the very rich or the very
poor, the criminal or the insane, the blessed or the damned, the
physically beautiful or the spiritually lame, halt, and blind-these
reports were read with what amounted to infant credulity. For the
novelist's fantasy of truth corresponded to the reader's fantasy of
vicarious liberation. When Flaubert said,
((Madame BovaTY,
c'
est
moi,"
he affirmed not only an essential condition of the novelist'.
relation to
his
work, but one of the reader's relation to the novel as
well. Finally, the novel was read for the largest moral and spiritual
reasons. Lawrence once said that he wrote because he wanted "folk–
English folk-to alter, and have more sense." And many folk read
the novel in order to alter their lives. This is the most modem of
demands made upon the novel-a demand for nothing less than
salvation. And as such it is no less excessive and impossible than
the demand made during the nineteenth century that the novel in–
clude within its purpose the reformation of society. Absurd and
excessive as they are, these demands at least recognized the fact that
we and our civilization unquestionably need saving. And so long as
the novel was able to embody such demands, to envisage a life beyond
our present condition of mortal terror and blank
dismay~ven
to
the extremity of an apocalypse, if there was hope of being purified
in the destruction---so long could it be assured of its own perpetua–
tion and its readers' fanatic loyalty.
This seems not to have happened, as we all know.
If
it
is
true
that even the habit of novel-reading is becoming attenuated, then it
may be inferred that this
is
a response to what the novel has not been
able to do. For readers today to maintain a living connection with
Proust and Gide and Mann and Joyce and Fitzgerald, with all the
figures who fifteen or twenty years ago were still current in their
own right, there will have to be more novelists who are capable of
keeping that connection alive. I do not mean novelists who write
like Lawrence or Kafka or Joyce, or write novels like theirs; the
kind of novelist I have in mind would in some sense reject the great
moderns, just as the great modems rejected their nineteenth century
predecessors. The paradox that only through the opposition of
&enerations can civilization advance seems
to
hold true for its
art,
