THE TWO FICTIONS
Most cntlcs have se parated fiction not only from poetry but
from the other arts as well. Fiction has been the almost exclusive preserve
of the social-minded and the humanists, presumably because its social
and human values - however stylized - are more explicit. The more
formal
critics have appropriated those arts, like poetry, music, painting.
which seem to depend more on textual qualities, and where questions
of meaning and social implication can be more easily evaded because
no language for talking about them has been developed . The New
Critics, for example, were locked into poetry, a nd when they wandered
into fiction they either talked about the work as though it were a long
poem, as Blackmur did with Dostoevski 's
Th e Iriiot,
or they forgot their
own warnings aga inst the heresies of interpreta tion , as Brooks did in
The
Hidden God.
The dua l citize nship of fi ction, whi ch be longs both to the doma in
of form and of meaning, is one reason why di sc uss ions of a\'ant-gardism in
fiction tend to be one one-sided . The tradi tiona lists point to the na rrow
range and preoccupa tion with form of ad\'a nced writing, whil e the ex–
ponents of new fi ction di smiss the uninspired na tura li sts. The issue is of
course more complex : forma l ad\'a nces a re not a lways textual or lin–
guistic. as in Joyce: they a re sometimes structural. as in Dostoeyski and
Kafka. Even as ea rl y as Sterne th e com'ent iona l na rra ti\'e fo rm and or–
ganiza tion was broken no t for \'e rbal experi men t bu t for rum ina tions
that widened the ra nge of obsc l'\'at ion. T he choice is not, as it is some–
times made out, between T olsto i a nd Bra utiga n, or K a fk a a nd Wouk.
It
is a question of going beyond th e da ted style of many esta blished
novelists, without fa lling into gimlll ic kry a nd empty gestures,
This is the dilemma of fiction today. ), {any younge r writers feel
tha t the ra tional and human ist tradition is dead . I think the obitua ry
is prema ture, but wha t gives it some force is th a t the more inventive
writers a re rej ecting the kind of fiction th a t trades on the most ba na l
values a nd the fa lse sense of order of the huma nist and ra tionalist tradi–
tion by deflating its rhetoric and brea king up its forms, But experiment
with the medium runs up aga inst the limita tions of the medium. Unlike
painting or music, which a re infinitely ma llea ble. there seems to be just
so much you can do with the look of the page, or the sha pe of the
prose, or the structure of the narra tive , without reducing the medium
