376
PARTISAN REVIEW
novel, is not confined to fiction. In itself fiction has no particular colors. The
relationship between a character and its novel has changed since 1840 almost
as much as novels themselves. The character of Fabrice belonged to a story
and to his author's talent. His original relationship with the story is replaced
by his relationship with the author, just as the atmosphere of Milan in 1796,
of Waterloo, of the little courts of Italy, have been rubbed out by
Stendhal's universe . The road along which that famous mirror is carried by
Mozartian masks does not run through 1820 Italy but through the Italy of
Henri Beyle. It is an arbitrary and musical place, and the characters are im–
mersed in it, impregnated by a timeless past, a pure creation of memory. If
we turned the
Chartreuse
into a modern film we would lose the Italy of the
past, not withstanding the director's talent, the atmosphere that no film can
reproduce; you might as well try to reconstruct a still life by Cezanne with
real fruits. But why should this be so? ...
One can no more confine the character in a novel to his biography than
a novel to its plot. The cinema attempts to find equivalents for every ele–
ment in the novel and even for the plot. Assembling these elements does
not make the film equal to the novel, the gap between them and it is as
great as that between the novel and real life . These films stand condemned,
sooner or later _Like those taken from
The Brothers Karamazov
and
Moby
Dick,
from Balzac and Victor Hugo . Sometimes a great novel has been
adapted with respectful fidelity. So what do we miss in the best film of
Anna
Karenina
when we compare it with the novel? Tolstoy . How can we fail to
apply this epigraph to him: "Vengeance is mine , saith the Lord?" Moving
pictures of a love story are not enough to give the novel its eternal resonance.
The real Tolstoy is what you cannot transpose when everything has been
transposed.
Anna Karenina
is indivisible....
To see the specific and deliberate character of all creative fiction set out
clearly we have only to take any novel and compare it with the story that
comes closest
to
it; the life story of a patient told by his psychoanalyse: The
day will come when it will be as odd to think of the novel as an imitation of
real life as it is now to regard painting as an imitation of real sights....
Literature is beyond melody and narration, just as painting is beyond
harmony and subject. But the "constellation" and the elusive, far from
transcending metamorphosis are its main purpose, in literature as in paint–
ing. We cannot separate an important work from its metamorphosis, a
Night- Watch
independent from what the centuries that followed believed
they were seeing. It only exists within the framework of a dialogue, and it
