402
JOHN BAYLEY
It may be significant that the best essays in
The Writing on the Wall
are on writers whose position seems already given - Nabokov and
Ivy
Compton-Burnett are already in the niches they are likely to occupy
permanently. "A Compton-Burnett is a reliable make ... production is
steady ... turning out Compton-Burnetts as someone might produce ball
bearings. (Dickens produced Dickenses, but Flaubert did not produce
Flauberts.)" On these authors Miss McCarthy does not need to be as–
sessive: with inimitable ease and authority she explains the puzzle and
shows us round. She is less happy when covering a lot of ground.
"Saint-Simon, had he turned to the novel, might have been the
French Fielding, and provided the model for a comic epic in prose."
Taine had concluded that the eighteenth-century French novel waS a
less faithful mirror of
tlie
times than its English equivalent because the
monde
it portrayed was universal and coercive, the sole and exclusive
model of social life. Brooks is concerned to analyze the significance for
French fiction of this doctrine of
ie
M
onde,
and to indicate its capabil–
ities: the tension and concentration of an intric-ate card game
in
which
the rules are known and accepted. In Crebillon, Duclos and above all
in de Laclos's
Les Liaisons Dangereuses,
the will of the
esprit fort
dom–
inates the scene; the audience watches the game - as Miss McCarthy
likes it to do - it does not identify with the players. Brooks points out
the exhilarating revolution that Richardson - closely followed by Rous–
seau - brought about in this claustrophobic world. Diderot, devouring
his beloved Richardson, declared he would "wi!lingly give his life" to
resemble Clarissa, and would "rather be dead" than be like Lovelace.
"Such a reaction," says Brooks, "is utterly different from that provoked
by the distanced, witty, evaluative tone of the novel of worldliness." And
in Richardson we participate not only with the characters but in the
dense contingent mass of object and event that make up their lives,
so that, to quote
Diderot
again, "his pages abound in what may be
called
instantaneous
descriptions and reflections."
In the nineteenth-century novel the
monde
is not to be obeyed but to
be conquered, perhaps transformed; while the powerless ego is no longer
able to draw activity and confidences from the known morale of the
game, but is exposed to all the demoralizing hazards of fantasy and ennui;
the hazards that undo Emma Bovary. This is Professor Bersani's world,
the world
in
which - as he puts it - "we encourage people to be them–
selves." His complex and detailed inquiry into the role of the self in
Balzac, Flaubert, Proust and later novelists is fascinating, and his con–
clusions very largely convincing. He is particularly good on Camus, whose
confusions - arising out of the French inclination to take the language
of their metaphysics very seriously indeed - he reveals with insight and
sympathy.
Bersani is particularly interesting on the
nouveau roman's
attempted
extinguishment of the self, and the self's comeback in ways which Bruce
Morissette has also analyzed in a study of Robbe-Grillet's novels. Most
intellectually premised fiction today is striving to find ways of asserting
or rediscovering the privacy of the self, while the more spontaneom
kind lays the self ever more shamelessly and importunately before us,
longing to confess with Norman Mailer that it was the one that "wet
the floor
in
the men's room," and so forth. Thanks to the modern
