Aspects of the novel
and thin. This, as far as I can make out, is the flaw running through
Hardy's novels: he has emphasized causality more strongly than his
medium permits. As a poet and prophet and visualizer George Meredith is
nothing by his side--just a suburban roarer--but Meredith did know what
the novel could stand, where the plot could dun the characters for a
contribution, where it must let them function as they liked. And the
moral--well, I see no moral, because the work of Hardy is my home and
that of Meredith cannot be: still the moral from the point of these
lectures is again unfavourable to Aristotle. In the novel, all human
happiness and misery does not take the form of action, it seeks means of
expression other than through the plot, it must not be rigidly
canalized.
In the losing battle that the plot fights with the characters, it often
takes a cowardly revenge. Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This
is because the plot requires to be wound up. Why is this necessary? Why
is there not a convention which allows a novelist to stop as soon as he
feels muddled or bored? Alas, he has to round things off, and usually
the characters go dead while he is at work, and our final impression of
them is through deadness. _The Vicar of Wakefield_ is in this way a
typical novel, so clever and fresh in the first half, up to the painting
of the family group with Mrs. Primrose as Venus, and then so wooden and
imbecile. Incidents and people that occurred at first for their own sake
now have to contribute to the dénouement. In the end even the author
feels he is being a little foolish. "Nor can I go on," he says, "without
a reflection on those accidental meetings which, though they happen
every day, seldom excite our surprise but upon some extraordinary
occasion." Goldsmith is of course a light-weight, but most novels do
fail here--there is this disastrous standstill while logic takes over
the command from flesh and blood. If it was not for death and marriage
I do not know how the average novelist would conclude. Death and
marriage are almost his only connection between his characters and his
plot, and the reader is more ready to meet him here, and take a bookish
view of them, provided they occur later on in the book: the writer, poor
fellow, must be allowed to finish up somehow, he has his living to get
like any one else, so no wonder that nothing is heard but hammering and
screwing.
This--as far as one can generalize--is the inherent defect of novels:
they go off at the end: and there are two explanations of it: firstly,
failure of pep, which threatens the novelist like all workers: and
secondly, the difficulty which we have been discussing. The characters
have been getting out of hand, laying foundations and declining to build
on them afterwards, and now the novelist has to labour personally, in
order that the job may be done to time. He pretends that the characters
are acting for him. He keeps mentioning their names and using inverted
commas. But the characters are gone or dead.
The plot, then, is the novel in its logical intellectual aspect: it
requires mystery, but the mysteries are solved later on: the reader may
be moving about in worlds unrealized, but the novelist has no
misgivings. He is competent, poised above his work, throwing a beam of
light here, popping on a cap of invisibility there, and (qua plot-maker)
continually negotiating with himself qua character-monger as to the best
effect to be produced. He plans his book beforehand: or anyhow he stands
above it, his interest in cause and effect give him an air of
predetermination.
And now we must ask ourselves whether the framework thus produced is the
best possible for a novel. After all, why has a novel to be planned?
Cannot it grow? Why need it close, as a play closes? Cannot it open out?
Instead of standing above his work and controlling it, cannot the
novelist throw himself into it and be carried along to some goal that he
does not foresee? The plot is exciting and may be beautiful, yet is it
not a fetich, borrowed from the drama, from the spatial limitations of
the stage? Cannot fiction devise a framework that is not so logical yet
more suitable to its genius?
Modern writers say that it can, and we will now examine a recent
example--a violent onslaught on the plot as we have defined it: a
constructive attempt to put something in the place of the plot.
I have already mentioned the novel in question: _Les Faux Monnayeurs_ by
André Gide. It contains within its covers both the methods. Gide has
also published the diary he kept while he was writing the novel, and
there is no reason why he should not publish in the future the
impressions he had when rereading both the diary and the novel, and in
the future-perfect a still more final synthesis in which the diary, the
novel, and his impressions of both will interact. He is indeed a little
more solemn than an author should be about the whole caboodle, but
regarded as a caboodle it is excessively interesting, and repays careful
study by critics.
We have, in the first place, a plot in _Les Faux Monnayeurs_ of the
logical objective type that we have been considering--a plot, or rather
fragments of plots. The main fragment concerns a young man called
Olivier--a charming, touching and lovable character, who misses
happiness, and then recovers it after an excellently contrived
dénouement; confers it also; this fragment has a wonderful radiance and
"lives," if I may use so coarse a word, it is a successful creation on
familiar lines. But it is by no means the centre of the book. No more
are the other logical fragments--that which concerns Georges, Olivier's
schoolboy brother, who passes false coin, and is instrumental in driving
a fellow-pupil to suicide. (Gide gives us his sources for all this in
his diary, he got the idea of Georges from a boy whom he caught trying
to steal a book off a stall, the gang of coiners were caught at Rouen,
and the suicide of children took place at Clermont-Ferrand, etc.)
Neither Olivier, nor Georges, nor Vincent a third brother, nor Bernard
their friend is the centre of the book. We come nearer to it in Edouard.
Edouard is a novelist. He bears the same relation to Gide as Clissold
does to Wells. I dare not be more precise. Like Gide, he keeps a diary,
like Gide he is writing a book called _Les Faux Monnayeurs_, and like
Clissold he is disavowed. Edouard's diary is printed in full. It begins
before the plot-fragments, continues during them, and forms the bulk of
Gide's book. Edouard is not just a chronicler. He is an actor too;
indeed it is he who rescues Olivier and is rescued by him; we leave
those two in happiness.
But that is still not the centre. The nearest to the centre lies in a
discussion about the art of the novel. Edouard is holding forth to
Bernard his secretary and some friends. He has said (what we all accept
as commonplace) that truth in life and truth in a novel are not
identical, and then he goes on to say that he wants to write a book
which shall include both sorts of truth.
"And what is its subject?" asked Sophroniska.
"There is none," said Edouard sharply. "My novel has no subject. No
doubt that sounds foolish. Let us say, if you prefer, that it will not
have 'a' subject.... 'A slice of life,' the naturalistic school used to
say. The mistake that school made was always to cut its slice in the
same direction, always lengthwise, in the direction of time. Why not cut
it up and down? Or across? As for me, I don't want to cut it at all. You
see what I mean. I want to put everything into my novel and not snip off
my material either here or there. I have been working for a year, and
there is nothing I haven't put in: all I see, all I know, all I can
learn from other people's lives and my own."
"My poor man, you will bore your readers to death," cried Layra, unable
to restrain her mirth.
"Not at all. To get my effect, I am inventing, as my central character,
a novelist, and the subject of my book will be the struggle between what
reality offers him and what he tries to make of the offer."
"Have you planned out this book?" asked Sophroniska, trying to keep
grave.
"Of course not."
"Why 'of course'?"
"For a book of this type any plan would be unsuitable. The whole of it
would go wrong if I decided any detail ahead. I am waiting for reality
to dictate to me."
"But I thought you wanted to get away from reality."
"My novelist wants to get away, but I keep pulling him back. To tell the
truth, this is my subject: the struggle between facts as proposed by
reality, and the ideal reality."
"Do tell us the name of this book," said Laura, in despair.
"Very well. Tell it them, Bernard."
"_Les Faux Monnayeurs_" said Bernard. "And now will you please tell us
who these faux monnayeurs are."
"I haven't the least idea."
Bernard and Laura looked at each other and then at Sophroniska. There
was the sound of a deep sigh.
The fact was that ideas about money, depreciation, inflation, forgery,
etc., had gradually invaded Edouard's book--just as theories of clothing
invade _Sartor Resartus_ and even assume the functions of characters.
"Has any of you ever had hold of a false coin?" he asked after a pause.
"Imagine a ten-franc piece, gold, false. It is actually worth a couple
of sous, but it will remain worth ten francs until it is found out.
Suppose I begin with the idea that----"
"But why begin with an idea?" burst out Bernard, who was by now in a
state of exasperation. "Why not begin with a fact? If you introduce the
fact properly, the idea will follow of itself. If I was writing your
_Faux Monnayeurs_ I should begin with a piece of false money, with the
ten-franc piece you were speaking of, and here it is!"
So saying, Bernard pulled a ten-franc piece out of his pocket and flung
it on the table.
"There," he remarked. "It rings all right. I got it this morning from
the grocer. It's worth more than a couple of sous, as it's coated in
gold, but it's actually made of glass. It will become quite transparent
in time. No--don't rub it--you're going to spoil my false coin."
Edouard had taken it and was examining it with the utmost attention.
"How did the grocer get it?"
"He doesn't know. He passed it on me for a joke, and then enlightened
me, being a decent fellow. He let me have it for five francs. I thought
that, since you were writing _Les Faux Monnayeurs_, you ought to see
what false money is like, so I got it to show you. Now that you have
looked at it, give it me back. I am sorry to see that reality has no
interest for you."
"Yes," said Edouard: "it interests me, but it puts me out."
"That's a pity," remarked Bernard.[5]
This passage is the centre of the book. It contains the old thesis of
truth in life versus truth in art, and illustrates it very neatly by the
arrival of an actual false coin. What is new in it is the attempt to
combine the two truths, the proposal that writers should mix themselves
up in their material and be rolled over and over by it; they should not
try to subdue any longer, they should hope to be subdued, to be carried
away. As for a plot--to pot with the plot, break it up, boil it down.
Let there be those "formidable erosions of contour" of which Nietzsche
speaks. All that is prearranged is false.
Another distinguished critic has agreed with Gide--that old lady in the
anecdote who was accused by her nieces of being illogical. For some time
she could not be brought to understand what logic was, and when she
grasped its true nature she was not so much angry as contemptuous.
"Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!" she exclaimed. "How can I tell
what I think till I see what I say?" Her nieces, educated young women,
thought that she was passée; she was really more up to date than they
were.