PARTISAN REVIEW
21
think this is a caricature - Not at all. This "either/or" is at the heart
of literary criticism in communist countries at this moment.) At last
I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the un–
ease at writing about "petty personal problems" was to recognize that
nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing
about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains,
pleasures, emotions - and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas
- can't be your alone. The way to deal with the problem of "sub–
jectivity," that shocking business of being preoccupied with the tiny
individual who is at the same time caught up in such an explosion of
terrible and marvelous possibilities, is to see him as a microcosm and
in this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the
personal general, as indeed life always does, transforming a private
experience - or so you think of it when still a child,
"I
am falling
in love,"
"I
am feeling this or that emotion, or thinking that or the
other thought" - into something much larger: growing up is after
all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experi–
ence is what everyone shares.
Another idea was that
if
the book were shaped in the right way,
it would make its own comment about the conventional novel: the
debate about the novel has been going on since the novel was born,
and is not, as one would imagine from reading contemporary aca–
demics, something recent. To put the short novel
Free Women
as
a summary and condensation of all that mass of material, was to say
something about the conventional novel, another way of describing
the dissatisfaction of a writer when something is finished: "How
little I have managed to say of the truth, how little I have caught
of all that complexity; how can this small neat thing be true when
what I experienced was so rough and apparently formless and un–
shaped."
But my major aim was to shape a book which would make its
own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way
it
was
shaped.
As I have said, this was not noticed.
One reason for this is that the book is more in the European
tradition than the English tradition of the novel. Or rather, in the
English tradition as viewed at the moment. The English novel after
