BOOKS
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authorial whim, but a way of representing the tension between
triumphant imagination and limited human existence. His is a game
of worlds, not of words.
To condense Alter's argument does a certain injustice to the book's
texture. With extraordinary tact he chooses telling examples and
passages to analyze. And he is a master of a kind of indirect critical
style. A reader can only admire how smoothly he moves up a nicely
graded scale from precise stylistic analysis to observations on the
economy of a whole work
to
divination of the author's governing sense
of human experience. There Alter stops, allowing the authors to speak
his theses for him, so that his argument suffuses the book like a
sensibility. In fact, that argument is already complete in Lukacs's
Theory of the Novel
(1916). Alter does not mention Lukacs, not,
certainly, out of ignorance, but doubtless out of a justified unwilling–
ness to bog down the general reader in the quagmires of Lukacs's
Hegelian prose. I will not repeat Lukacs's criticism of his own
argument, available in the preface to the English translation. And I
find Alter's analyses shrewd and illuminating. I welcome his hints
about socio-historical context-intermittent and aphoristic, to be sure,
but dazzlingly accurate. I feel swept up by his eloquent and vigorous
defense of imagination 's claim
to
the higher, paradoxical truth of
existential realism. At his best, Alter reminds one of Auerbach. But
what disturbs me in the book is its inability
to
escape the ghost
of Leavis-to escape what is modishly but accurately called his
"problematic. "
Like Leavis, Alter feels obliged
to
give the term "novel" some
essential substance or content. It matters relatively little for the struc–
ture of the argument whether that essence is "realism" or "imagina–
tion. " In fact, one turns dialectically into the other. What can possibly
be the source of the critic's strange compulsion to play policeman for a
concept? The other side of this compulsion is to make the definition
prescriptive, to evaluate novels and defend "the novel." Alter begins by
aiming at pluralism and tolerance, but ends up unfair
to
the nine–
teenth century in order
to
rehabilitate the ancie'nts and moderns:
Cervantes's and Nabokov's gain is Balzac's loss. And "imagination"
must dissolve into "existential realism" because the step is so short
from there to "seriousness." But why should the playfulness of liter–
ature provoke these gymnastic fea ts of dialectic to uncover a "higher"
seriousness? The problem, as Heidegger argues, is our domination by a
particular way of thinking about "truth." Since Plato, "Western man"
thinks of truth as correctness in representing things according to
