Aspects of the novel
paragraph or dialogue when they have æsthetic value, and refer them to
our enjoyment,--yes, can even telescope them up so that we get them
quicker than we should do if they were recited, just as some people can
look through a musical score quicker than it can be rapped out on the
piano. But the eye is not equally quick at catching a voice. That
opening sentence of _The Antiquary_ has no beauty of sound, yet we
should lose something if it was not read aloud. Our mind would commune
with Walter Scott's silently, and less profitably. The story, besides
saying one thing after another, adds something because of its connection
with a voice.
It does not add much. It does not give us anything as important as the
author's personality. His personality--when he has one--is conveyed
through nobler agencies, such as the characters or the plot or his
comments on life. What the story does do in this particular capacity,
all it can do, is to transform us from readers into listeners, to whom
"a" voice speaks, the voice of the tribal narrator, squatting in the
middle of the cave, and saying one thing after another until the
audience falls asleep among their offal and bones. The story is
primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading
was discovered, and it appeals to what is primitive in us. That is why
we are so unreasonable over the stories we like, and so ready to bully
those who like something else. For instance, I am annoyed when people
laugh at me for loving _The Swiss Family Robinson_, and I hope that I
have annoyed some of you over Scott! You see what I mean. Intolerance is
the atmosphere stories generate. The story is neither moral nor is it
favourable to the understanding of the novel in its other aspects. If we
want to do that we must come out of the cave.
We shall not come out of it yet, but observe already how that other
life--the life by value--presses against the novel from all sides, how
it is ready to fill and indeed distort it, offering it people, plots,
fantasies, views of the universe, anything except this constant "and
then ... and then," which is the sole contribution of our present
inquiry. The life in time is so obviously base and inferior that the
question naturally occurs: cannot the novelist abolish it from his work,
even as the mystic asserts he has abolished it from his experience, and
install its radiant alternative alone?
Well, there is one novelist who has tried to abolish time, and her
failure is instructive: Gertrude Stein. Going much further than Emily
Brontë, Sterne or Proust, Gertrude Stein has smashed up and pulverized
her clock and scattered its fragments over the world like the limbs of
Osiris, and she has done this not from naughtiness but from a noble
motive: she has hoped to emancipate fiction from the tyranny of time and
to express in it the life by values only. She fails, because as soon as
fiction is completely delivered from time it cannot express anything at
all, and in her later writing we can see the slope down which she is
slipping. She wants to abolish this whole aspect of the story, this
sequence in chronology, and my heart goes out to her. She cannot do it
without abolishing the sequence between the sentences. But this is not
effective unless the order of the words in the sentences is also
abolished, which in its turn entails the abolition of the order of the
letters or sounds in the words. And now she is over the precipice. There
is nothing to ridicule in such an experiment as hers. It is much more
important to play about like this than to rewrite the Waverley Novels.
Yet the experiment is doomed to failure. The time-sequence cannot be
destroyed without carrying in its ruin all that should have taken its
place; the novel that would express values only becomes unintelligible
and therefore valueless.
That is why I must ask you to join me in repeating in exactly the right
tone of voice the words with which this lecture opened. Do not say them
vaguely and good-temperedly like a busman: you have not the right. Do
not say them briskly and aggressively like a golfer: you know better.
Say them a little sadly, and you will be correct. Yes--oh, dear,
yes--the novel tells a story.
III
PEOPLE
HAVING discussed the story--that simple and fundamental aspect of the
novel--we can turn to a more interesting topic: the actors. We need not
ask what happened next, but to whom did it happen; the novelist will be
appealing to our intelligence and imagination, not merely to our
curiosity. A new emphasis enters his voice: emphasis upon value.
Since the actors in a story are usually human, it seemed convenient to
entitle this aspect People. Other animals have been introduced, but with
limited success, for we know too little so far about their psychology.
There may be, probably will be, an alteration here in the future,
comparable to the alteration in the novelist's rendering of savages in
the past. The gulf that separates Man Friday from Batouala may be
paralleled by the gulf that will separate Kipling's wolves from their
literary descendants two hundred years hence, and we shall have animals
who are neither symbolic, nor little men disguised, nor as four-legged
tables moving, nor as painted scraps of paper that fly. It is one of the
ways where science may enlarge the novel, by giving it fresh subject
matter. But the help has not been given yet, and until it comes we may
say that the actors in a story are, or pretend to be, human beings.
Since the novelist is himself a human being, there is an affinity
between him and his subject matter which is absent in many other forms
of art. The historian is also linked, though, as we shall see, less
intimately. The painter and sculptor need not be linked: that is to say
they need not represent human beings unless they wish, no more need the
poet, while the musician cannot represent them even if he wishes,
without the help of a programme. The novelist, unlike many of his
colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself
(roughly: niceties shall come later), gives them names and sex, assigns
them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted
commas, and perhaps to behave consistently. These word-masses are his
characters. They do not come thus coldly to his mind, they may be
created in delirious excitement, still, their nature is conditioned by
what he guesses about other people, and about himself, and is further
modified by the other aspects of his work. This last point--the relation
of characters to the other aspects of the novel--will form the subject
of a future enquiry. At present we are occupied with their relation to
actual life. What is the difference between people in a novel and people
like the novelist or like you, or like me, or Queen Victoria?
There is bound to be a difference. If a character in a novel is exactly
like Queen Victoria--not rather like but exactly like--then it actually
is Queen Victoria, and the novel, or all of it that the character
touches, becomes a memoir. A memoir is history, it is based on evidence.
A novel is based on evidence + or − _x_, the unknown quantity being
the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always
modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it
entirely.
The historian deals with actions, and with the characters of men only so
far as he can deduce them from their actions. He is quite as much
concerned with character as the novelist, but he can only know of its
existence when it shows on the surface. If Queen Victoria had not said,
"We are not amused," her neighbours at table would not have known she
was not amused, and her ennui could never have been announced to the
public. She might have frowned, so that they would have deduced her
state from that--looks and gestures are also historical evidence. But if
she remained impassive--what would any one know? The hidden life is, by
definition, hidden. The hidden life that appears in external signs is
hidden no longer, has entered the realm of action. And it is the
function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to
tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to
produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.
The interesting and sensitive French critic, who writes under the name
of Alain, has some helpful if slightly fantastic remarks on this point.
He gets a little out of his depth, but not as much as I feel myself out
of mine, and perhaps together we may move toward the shore. Alain
examines in turn the various forms of æsthetic activity, and coming in
time to the novel (le roman) he asserts that each human being has two
sides, appropriate to history and fiction. All that is observable in a
man--that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as
can be deduced from his actions--falls into the domain of history. But
his romanceful or romantic side (sa partie romanesque ou romantique)
includes "the pure passions, that is to say the dreams, joys, sorrows
and self-communings which politeness or shame prevent him from
mentioning"; and to express this side of human nature is one of the
chief functions of the novel. "What is fictitious in a novel is not so
much the story as the method by which thought develops into action, a
method which never occurs in daily life.... History, with its emphasis
on external causes, is dominated by the notion of fatality, whereas
there is no fatality in the novel; there, everything is founded on human
nature, and the dominating feeling is of an existence where everything
is intentional, even passions and crimes, even misery."[3]
This is perhaps a roundabout way of saying what every British schoolboy
knew, that the historian records whereas the novelist must create.
Still, it is a profitable roundabout, for it brings out the fundamental
difference between people in daily life and people in books. In daily
life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor
complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by
external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and
even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by
the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer
life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than
characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all
about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they
do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual
secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe.
Now let us restate the problem in a more schoolboyish way. You and I are
people. Had not we better glance through the main facts in our own
lives--not in our individual careers but in our make-up as human beings?
Then we shall have something definite to start from.
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and
death. One could increase the number--add breathing for instance--but
these five are the most obvious. Let us briefly ask ourselves what part
they play in our lives, and what in novels. Does the novelist tend to
reproduce them accurately or does he tend to exaggerate, minimize,
ignore, and to exhibit his characters going through processes which are
not the same through which you and I go, though they bear the same
names?
To consider the two strangest first: birth and death; strange because
they are at the same time experiences and not experiences. We only know
of them by report. We were all born, but we cannot remember what it was
like. And death is coming even as birth has come, but, similarly, we do
not know what it is like. Our final experience, like our first, is