...
THE NOVEL AGAIN
195
future-our future, that is- as essentially unchanged: barring dis–
aster, we are in for more of the same, which is to say that we cannot
think of a future at all. No situation could be more subversive of the
novel. Historically the novel came into existence as a major form of
expression at the same time that the idea of the future, a different
and possible human future, began to be realized. One of the endur–
ing generic images of the novel is that of a young man forging madly
ahead, intent upon grasping the newness, the novelty, the novel-ness
that lies before him. When Hegel looked out of
his
window in Jena
and saw Napoleon riding by, he thought he beheld the world-spirit
on horseback; until recently, most novelists have had the same vision,
or believed they did. And though novels end in numberless ways, they
have favored one image consistently. How many novels can we recall
which end with the hero, his back turned to the reader, walking off
into the distance. That distance is of course
his
future, his unrealized
possibilities, and those of the reader and society. No idea has had
greater moral power in modern civilization than the idea of the
fulfillable, earthly future: and its destructive power has been as
wild as its power to create. And no idea has been more substantive
to the modern novel.
It
is a fact which supplies us with one more
reason for regarding
Finnegans Wake
with what amounts to the
anxiety of premonition. It is the first important work of fiction to
expel the future, for it runs in a circle.
Thomas Hardy once confessed to an admirer that
it
doesn't take
very much intelligence to be pessimistic. The temptation to think
or write under the assurance of pessimism is at the present moment
acute- and is on that account to be resisted. Our embattled society
still exists, novelists and critics are alive, and
all
have their appointed
work to do. We live in our own times and cannot foresee the future,
though we are all hostages to it. And our best hope of redemption
still lies in the degree to which we can commit ourselves to the
intelligent assessment of the world we inhabit-whether interested or
disinterested. Only then, I think, can we resume working out those
lines'which will help the future, when it comes, to find its direction.
"That promised land it will not be ours to enter, and we shall die in
the wilderness: but to have desired to enter it, to have saluted it
from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among contempor–
aries; it will certainly be the best title to esteem with posterity."
