Aspects of the novel
resolves itself not into formulæ but into the power of the writer to
bounce the reader into accepting what he says--a power which Mr. Lubbock
admits and admires, but locates at the edge of the problem instead of at
the centre. I should put it plumb in the centre. Look how Dickens
bounces us in _Bleak House_. Chapter I of _Bleak House_ is omniscient.
Dickens takes us into the Court of Chancery and rapidly explains all the
people there. In Chapter II he is partially omniscient. We still use his
eyes, but for some unexplained reason they begin to grow weak: he can
explain Sir Leicester Dedlock to us, part of Lady Dedlock but not all,
and nothing of Mr. Tulkinghorn. In Chapter III he is even more
reprehensible: he goes straight across into the dramatic method and
inhabits a young lady, Esther Summerson. "I have a great deal of
difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I
am not clever," pipes up Esther, and continues in this strain with
consistency and competence, so long as she is allowed to hold the pen.
At any moment the author of her being may snatch it from her, and run
about taking notes himself, leaving her seated goodness knows where, and
employed we do not care how. Logically, _Bleak House_ is all to pieces,
but Dickens bounces us, so that we do not mind the shiftings of the view
point.
Critics are more apt to object than readers. Zealous for the novel's
eminence, they are a little too apt to look out for problems that shall
be peculiar to it, and differentiate it from the drama; they feel it
ought to have its own technical troubles before it can be accepted as an
independent art; and since the problem of a point of view certainly is
peculiar to the novel they have rather overstressed it. I do not myself
think it is so important as a proper mixture of characters--a problem
which the dramatist is up against also. And the novelist must bounce us;
that is imperative.
Let us glance at two other examples of a shifting view point.
The eminent French writer, André Gide, has published a novel called
_Les Faux Monnayeurs_[4]--for all its modernity, this novel of Gide's
has one aspect in common with _Bleak House_: it is all to pieces
logically. Sometimes the author is omniscient: he explains everything,
he stands back, "il juge ses personnages"; at other times his
omniscience is partial; yet again he is dramatic, and causes the story
to be told through the diary of one of the characters. There is the same
absence of view point, but whereas in Dickens it was instinctive, in
Gide it is sophisticated; he expatiates too much about the jolts. The
novelist who betrays too much interest in his own method can never be
more than interesting; he has given up the creation of character and
summoned us to help analyse his own mind, and a heavy drop in the
emotional thermometer results. _Les Faux Monnayeurs_ is among the more
interesting of recent works: not among the vital: and greatly as we
shall have to admire it as a fabric we cannot praise it unrestrictedly
now.
For our second example we must again glance at _War and Peace_. Here the
result is vital: we are bounced up and down Russia--omniscient,
semi-omniscient, dramatized here or there as the moment dictates--and at
the end we have accepted it all. Mr. Lubbock does not, it is true: great
as he finds the book, he would find it greater if it had a view point;
he feels Tolstoy has not pulled his full weight. I feel that the rules
of the game of writing are not like this. A novelist can shift his view
point if it comes off, and it came off with Dickens and Tolstoy. Indeed
this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting view
point is a symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge:--I find it
one of the great advantages of the novel-form, and it has a parallel in
our perception of life. We are stupider at some times than others; we
can enter into people's minds occasionally but not always, because our
own minds get tired; and this intermittence lends in the long run
variety and colour to the experiences we receive. A quantity of
novelists, English novelists especially, have behaved like this to the
people in their books: played fast and loose with them, and I cannot see
why they should be censured.
They must be censured if we catch them at it at the time. That is quite
true, and out of it arises another question: may the writer take the
reader into his confidence about his characters? Answer has already been
indicated: better not. It is dangerous, it generally leads to a drop in
the temperature, to intellectual and emotional laxity, and worse still
to facetiousness, and to a friendly invitation to see how the figures
hook up behind. "Doesn't A look nice--she always was my favourite."
"Let's think of why B does that--perhaps there's more in him than meets
the eye--yes, see--he has a heart of gold--having given you this peep at
it I'll pop it back--I don't think he's noticed." "And C--he always was
the mystery man." Intimacy is gained but at the expense of illusion and
nobility. It is like standing a man a drink so that he may not criticize
your opinions. With all respect to Fielding and Thackeray it is
devastating, it is bar-parlour chattiness, and nothing has been more
harmful to the novels of the past. To take your reader into your
confidence about the universe is a different thing. It is not dangerous
for a novelist to draw back from his characters, as Hardy and Conrad do,
and to generalize about the conditions under which he thinks life is
carried on. It is confidences about the individual people that do harm,
and beckon the reader away from the people to an examination of the
novelist's mind. Not much is ever found in it at such a moment, for it
is never in the creative state: the mere process of saying, "Come along,
let's have a chat," has cooled it down.
Our comments on human beings must now come to an end. They may take
fuller shape when we come to discuss the plot.
[Footnote 4: Translated by Dorothy Bussy as _The Counterfeiters_
(Knopf).]
V
THE PLOT
"CHARACTER," says Aristotle, "gives us qualities, but it is in
actions--what we do--that we are happy or the reverse." We have already
decided that Aristotle is wrong and now we must face the consequences of
disagreeing with him. "All human happiness and misery," says Aristotle,
"take the form of action." We know better. We believe that happiness and
misery exist in the secret life, which each of us leads privately and to
which (in his characters) the novelist has access. And by the secret
life we mean the life for which there is no external evidence, not, as
is vulgarly supposed, that which is revealed by a chance word or a sigh.
A chance word or sigh are just as much evidence as a speech or a murder:
the life they reveal ceases to be secret and enters the realm of action.
There is, however, no occasion to be hard on Aristotle. He had read few
novels and no modern ones--the _Odyssey_ but not _Ulysses_--he was by
temperament apathetic to secrecy, and indeed regarded the human mind as
a sort of tub from which everything can finally be extracted; and when
he wrote the words quoted above he had in view the drama, where no doubt
they hold true. In the drama all human happiness and misery does and
must take the form of action. Otherwise its existence remains unknown,
and this is the great difference between the drama and the novel.
The speciality of the novel is that the writer can talk about his
characters as well as through them or can arrange for us to listen when
they talk to themselves. He has access to self-communings, and from that
level he can descend even deeper and peer into the subconscious. A man
does not talk to himself quite truly--not even to himself; the happiness
or misery that he secretly feels proceed from causes that he cannot
quite explain, because as soon as he raises them to the level of the
explicable they lose their native quality. The novelist has a real pull
here. He can show the subconscious short-circuiting straight into action
(the dramatist can do this too); he can also show it in its relation to
soliloquy. He commands all the secret life, and he must not be robbed of
this privilege. "How did the writer know that?" it is sometimes said.
"What's his standpoint? He is not being consistent, he's shifting his
point of view from the limited to the omniscient, and now he's edging
back again." Questions like these have too much the atmosphere of the
law courts about them. All that matters to the reader is whether the
shifting of attitude and the secret life are convincing, whether it is
_πιθανόν_ in fact, and with his favourite word ringing in his
ears Aristotle may retire.
However, he leaves us in some confusion, for what, with this enlargement
of human nature, is going to become of the plot? In most literary works
there are two elements: human individuals, whom we have recently
discussed, and the element vaguely called art. Art we have also dallied
with, but with a very low form of it: the story: the chopped-off length
of the tapeworm of time. Now we arrive at a much higher aspect: the
plot, and the plot, instead of finding human beings more or less cut to
its requirements, as they are in the drama, finds them enormous, shadowy
and intractable, and three-quarters hidden like an iceberg. In vain it
points out to these unwieldy creatures the advantages of the triple
process of complication, crisis, and solution so persuasively expounded
by Aristotle. A few of them rise and comply, and a novel which ought to
have been a play is the result. But there is no general response. They
want to sit apart and brood or something, and the plot (whom I here
visualize as a sort of higher government official) is concerned at their
lack of public spirit: "This will not do," it seems to say.
"Individualism is a most valuable quality; indeed my own position
depends upon individuals; I have always admitted as much freely.
Nevertheless there are certain limits, and those limits are being
overstepped. Characters must not brood too long, they must not waste
time running up and down ladders in their own insides, they must
contribute, or higher interests will be jeopardised." How well one knows
that phrase, "a contribution to the plot"! It is accorded, and of
necessity, by the people in a drama: how necessary is it in a novel?
Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events
arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events,
the emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen
died," is a story. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is
a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality
overshadows it. Or again: "The queen died, no one knew why, until it was
discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king." This is
a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It
suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far away from the story as its
limitations will allow. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a
story we say "and then?" If it is in a plot we ask "why?" That is the
fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel. A plot
cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave men or to a tyrannical
sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be
kept awake by "and then--and then----" They can only supply curiosity.
But a plot demands intelligence and memory also.
Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have
noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly
always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom. The man who
begins by asking you how many brothers and sisters you have, is never a