366
PARTISAN REVIEW
its perspective; when using fictitious characters it expounds an apparently
fictitious thesis. . . . Biography is obedient to the flow of time with a
s~bmission
oddly contemporary with the novel 's attack on chronology. But the novel no
longer tries to wear out its characters as it did in the nineteenth century.
Flaubert knew Madame Bovary better than Faulkner knew Popeye . The
revolution of the novel in no way alters our attitude nor even our feeling
towards man. The biographical novel coincides with the substitution of per–
sonality for character. Anna Karenina is a personality, Pere Goriot is a char–
acter; the Princesse de Cleves is neither: born of a genre now vanished and
to
which the novel was akin-the portrait. What does not exist in our seven–
teenth century literary portraits is the correlation between the individual and
what modifies his individuality, as first propounded by Goethe and then
pushed as far as it would go by Proust in the wake of Meredith. But when
Faulkner syncopates time it is not time that he challenges (he will not wake
up as a child the next morning), it is the story. The writer sets up between
himself and the subject of his biography the same distance that he estab–
lishes between himself and his living contemporaries ; no historical character
is intelligible where the characters of fiction are not intelligible . Unlike
Hinduism and Buddhism, no modern philosophy has worked out a concep–
tion of man that was not to some extent linked to the idea of his continuity.
Never mind where or when reincarnation clll;ims its subjects, since in any
case metempsychosis or deliverance are the fundamental propositions. Because
man is not annihilated by
his
growing planetary consciousness, he questions it.
The Colloquy originated at the same time as this planetary perspective
whose pluralism was in direct opposition to the limited perspectives of the
biographer, the director of the Encyclopedie, the nineteenth century itself.
It
substitutes not another causality but the questioning which causalities and
conditionings much submit to .
In what was the age of the novel let us not see only what can be trans–
lated and easily transmitted. There is a whole world of the novel in which
the Princesse de Cleves lives with Camus'
Etranger
and La Sanseverina with
the heroine of
A Farewell to Arms,
Faulkner with Tolstoy, Balzac with
Dostoevsky (he actually translated
Eugenie Grandet) .
But Balzac's prestige
followed the lead of fashion in Paris or power in London . Whereas the whole
of contemporary literature comes to be in a world as vast as that of
Shakespeare.
The supreme temptation for the philosopher of art, said Paul Valery, is
to discover the laws which will make it possible to know with
absolute cer–
tainty
(and it was ht" who underlined the words) which paintings and sculp-
