PARTISAN
REVIEW
581
book by Sharon Spencer talks about a very large group of modern
novelists, many of them unfamiliar in this country, as if they had the
coherence of a school.
Space, Time and Structure in the i\1odern Novel
begins with a quote from Anais Nin's
The Novel of the Future:
"It is
a curious anomaly that we listen to jazz, we look at modern paintings,
we live in modern houses of modern design, we travel in jet planes,
yet we continue to read novels written in a tempo and style which is
not of our time and not related to any of these influences." There is
no shortage of a renewed fiction, as Spencer's book amply demonstrates,
and many of its examples have already gained a wide audience. The
phenomenon of which Nin speaks is no longer a "curious anomaly" –
it is simply a function of the economics of the publishing industry and
a lagging criticism. Given the situation, the initial virtue of the Spen–
cer book is its choice of subject.
It
responds to necessity. Fiction is one
of the ways we have of creating ourselves and the lives we lead. We
speak of a new fictive tradition as if it exists because we need to.
The first thing tha t must be said about the new tradition of the
novel is that it's not modern. The modern is now a period - both an
era and an end of something.
It
implies 1939, the New York World's
Fair, the Trylon and Perisphere. The modern behaved as if a new age
were due tomorrow, and as if it were it, the final goal of progress.
Here in tomorrowland we have a more tragic sense of things. We know
there's no such thing as progress, that a new age may be a worse
one, and that since the future brings no redemption, we better look
to the present. In consequence the new tradition makes itself felt as
a presence rather than a development. In&tead of a linear sequence of
historical influences it seems a network of interconnections revealed
to our particular point of view. Like Eliot's view of tradition, it would
resemble a reservoir rather than a highway project, a reservoir that is
ahistorical, international and multilingual. Our curriculum would prob–
ably start with
Don Quixote,
in which we would note the split between
the pragmatic and the fantastic, the empirical and the imaginative, the
objective and the subjective, between meaning and feeling, finally, rep–
resented by Sancho and the Don. We would then use this split to il–
lustrate the old novel's inception
in
a schizophrenia of the word and we
would show how the realism descending from Sancho required an
initial depoeticization. From here we would move to Rabelais as an
example of how such dissociations in fiction can be avoided through the
unity of a style that treats creation in both its senses as "all the same
river." From Rabelais we might go almost anywhere - to encyclopedic
multiplicity unified by wordplay in
Fillllegans Wake ,
OI"
to Sterne via
