464
PARTISAN REVIEW
instead shares with the author a constant testing of both fiction and
reality. The novel's true subject, then, is "the disparity between the
structures of the imagination and things as they are." By maintaining
dialectical interplay between fiction and reality, the novel heightens
critical consciousness and thus keeps us from reifying the complex
energies of life into frozen logical or moral categories. Dickens and the
other nineteenth-century realists mistake their fictions for literal truth,
replacing "dialectical self-confrontation" with wish-fulfilment. Their
"realism" is a psychic defense against chaotic or threatening reality, an
attempt to dominate reality illegitimately by believing literally in an
invented fantasy. Alter virtually reproves Dickens and Balzac for a lack
of imaginative courage: "realism" alienates the human freedom of
imagination.
But "realism" returns
to
haunt Alter like a guilty conscience.
Imagination, he notes, can be the instrument of freedom or the snare of
delusion. To restrain this pleasure principle, Alter relocates the ten–
sion between fiction and reality within the narrator's and character's
consciousness of experience. He seems to agree with the view he
attributes
to
Sterne, that our experience is mediated by our own mind,
which is in turn shaped by our culture. "Reality" is a cultural and
mental institution, subject to historical variation. Alter finds "an
experiential realism in Sterne, a metaphysical realism in Diderot, an
epistemological realism in Cervantes, and (one might add) a moral–
intellectual realism in Fielding." The exact definition of these distinc–
tions matters less than their variety: beside them nineteenth-century
"realism" is just one more, in fact a bad faith variety.
Artifice, then, must serve a "purpose"; self-conscious artifice
becomes a super-mimesis, the representation not of ordinary reality,
but of the "spiritual condition of mankind." Imaginative play finds its
limit in "existential realism," the recognition that Death, the Absolute
Master, sets limits to the possibilities of human freedom. The infinity
of imagination plays dialectically off the finitude of narrative form , so
that the novel can represent the tension between the coherence of
artifice and the death and disorder outside artifice. We should be
concerned, Alter says, with death in the novel, not the death of the
novel. Alter has not lined up these terms with much philosophic rigor,
to
be sure: imagination is both the source of coherent form and of the
infinite freedom that transcends fixed form; death sets limits and yet is
grouped with disorder. But Alter's intent is clear: to justify imagina–
tion by claiming for it existential seriousness. Thus, Nabokov is
supreme among modern novelists because his artifice is no mere
