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ROGER SHATTUCK
discussed epigraph is taken from the gospel according to Wittgenstein,
misses its opportunity to test the essential meaning and historical validity
of Realism. Instead, Mr. Levin spends his time arguing that the French
novel has declined in the past thirty years.
The Gates of Horn
creates
the illusion of being a definitive work because it traces more deeply
than ever the large outlines of Realism that we began with. To some,
this corroboration may be comforting, but to me it is disturbing.
Another recently published book deals with Realism as a significant
European movement still alive in the twentieth century. George
J.
Becker's
Documents of Modern Literary R ealism
reached me when I
was reading the proofs of this review. The idea of such an anthology
of texts with a long introduction is excellent and could be extended "to
other artistic movements. To have much circulation, however, the
volumes would have to be edited with enough rigor to keep them well
below the 600 pages (at $8.50) collected here. Mr. Becker does well
by literary history-dates, origins, influences, and side-effects. A cursory
reading shows his critical comments and choice of documents are most
revealing on the Russians, from Chernishevsky to socialist realism ; he
yaws badly off course on the French. In his desire to let his texts
"speak for themselves," he produces no one
to
write with much feeling
on Stendhal, and only a few pages out of Taine to represent Balzac.
Mr. Becker, even more than Mr. Levin, speaks for himself only in
matters of details and leaves the big picture alone.
What the nineteenth century needs now, in literature as in politics
and economics, is an intelligent revisionism rather than final summation.
Mr. Levin's own pages convince me, though it is the contrary of his
purpose, that it is a grave error to approach the novel through the
gates of Realism. The term serves to divorce the novel from poetry, and
"reality" from subjectivity. I suggest that the next expeditionary force
entering nineteenth-century literature ponder Taine's neglected theory
of perception and knowledge to which Mr. Levin refers briefly in his
second chapter. "True hallucination," as Taine finally termed it toward
the end of
De l'intelligence,
establishes the visionary nature of even the
most documentary account of the world. Here is base camp.
Roger Shattuck
