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STEVEN MARCUS
its literature-in the modern world, at least, continuity with the
past is maintained only through the continual rejection of it. "Drive
your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead," writes Blake,
and then "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom"-and
we believe it. There
is,
in other words, no short cut to beatitude;
before the past can be reclaimed it must be repudiated. Whatever
may prevent this process from taking place-whether it be the
scarcity of genius or some convergence of historical or cultural events
or all of these-the failure of creative repudiation entails the failure
of continuity. The present condition of the novel, I believe, can be
roughly described in these terms. Continuity may have been broken–
at the very least it appears to be seriously damaged-and it is
im–
possible to foresee how or when a connection will resume. One
thing that seems clear is that the novel has nearly ceased to give us
what we need: an adequate notion of what it is like to be alive
today, why we are the way we are, and what might be done to
remedy our bad situation.
What has prevented the novel from doing this is a perplexing
question: the causes are obscure and for that very reason it is tempt–
ing to speculate upon them. But my speculations will have to be
unargued, perfunctory, and merely suggestive.
There are, to my knowledge, two major explanations of the
novel's deteriorating state. The first was proposed almost forty years
ago by Ortega y Gasset, and states that with the great nineteenth and
early twentieth century figures the novel fulfilled itself and was thus
exhausted of further possibilities. To offer up the novel as dead of
its own success is an elegant plausibility-like having your baked
funeral meats and eating them too. The second explanation has been
cogently set forth by Mary McCarthy in a recent essay called "The
Fact in Fiction." This argument maintains that the reality of con–
temporary experience is so monstrous and aberrant, and so annihilates
the merely human, that the novel has no way of reducing or ac–
comodating it to a comprehensible vision of life. There is much to
be said for this view, including the curious irony that a century ago
Balzac used similar language to argue an opposite case. Prose, Balzac
wrote, "has no other resource than the actual." But in the modem
world, he continued, "the actual
is
so terrible that in itself -it
is
able
