Ideas and the Novel

...T;S...

...but almost in the same breath she notes various major writers who seem to have been impervious to his example...

...In effect, he not only rendered it of all fatty tissue but also lopped off its arms and legs, disembowelled it, drained it of all its human juices, and-to banish any ideological content-cut off its head...

...Just why the goys are confined to playing with images while the likes of Bellow, Malamud, and Philip Roth are free to juggle ideas Miss McCarthy doesn't say...

...If we are moved more by the idea of things than by the things themselves, then there would certainly seem to be a place in fiction for ideas...

...Without ideological content, a novel will invariably leave the withers unwrung...

...To be sure, Miss McCarthy is hardly the first critic to note that when James "purified" the novel and thereby elevated it to a high art form he was actually performing a Procrustean act...

...Ideas and the Novel is a vigorous and forthright little book about a matter of importance to all readers of books...

...Even when she exaggerates the baleful effect of James's example, Miss McCarthy's blade strikes fire, as in this: "He etherealized the novel beyond its wildest dreams and perhaps etherized it as well.'' Concerning the extent of James's influence or legacy, Miss McCarthy seems to be of two minds...

...She simply concludes, rather too hastily and uncon-vincingly, with the assertion that for the novel to be revitalized it will be necessary "to disarm and disorient reviewers and teachers of literature, who, as always, are the reader's main foe.'' If reviewers were given better books to review I daresay they would note the fact, and the pedagogues are generally too abstruse (or obtuse) to have much effect on anyone but themselves...

...As Miss McCarthy puts it, he scraped "his sacred texts clean of the material factor...

...Only in recent years, Miss McCarthy argues in her final chapter, has the "novel of ideas" been sent to Coventry, although dispensation has been granted to the Jewish novel...

...But her assessment of his achievements will certainly ruffle the feathers of devout Jamesians, a sensitive breed (Gallus galhis) given to defending the Old Pretender with tart rejoinders...

...Hegel, at Jena, had called Napoleon "an idea on horseback...

...In truth, James's influence has been slight...

...As one who on occasion has publicly remarked the artful emptiness of James's fictions, I can attest to the decorous wrath of the True Believers...

...After all, novelists still include in their stories all that James barred as extraneous-including the discussion of ideas...

...later, in War and Peace, Tolstoy sought to cut that Idea down to size...

...Using the quotation (intended by Eliot as high praise of The Master) as a motto, or rather counter-motto, for the reflections that follow, Miss McCarthy proceeds to "take exception, not to the truth of Eliot's prouncement (he was right about James), but to the set of lofty assumptions calmly towering behind it...

...If she employs James as a foil and as a point of departure for her discussion of the great nineteenth-century novelists, who without exception considered ideas as being intrinsic to the novelistic medium, she by no means seeks simply to dispose of him or write him off as an odd mutation...

...IDEAS AND THE NOVEL Mary McCarthy / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / $7.95 William H.Nolte Miss McCarthy begins the first of these four brilliant lectures with a delightful quotation guaranteed to make the cognoscenti slap their shanks and leap with joy: "He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it...

...After all, fiction, unlike the visual arts, must feed off mental constructs if it is to have weight in the world or do more than idly entertain...

...I had never quite realized the extent to which such writers as Stendhal, Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Balzac were concerned with ideas, or-in the case of Stendhal and Dostoevsky-with showing the evil effects ideas may have...

...What makes this slender volume worth the price is the simple fact that Miss McCarthy has something important to say about important books and, above all, knows how to say it in a sharp and fresh manner...

...Miss McCarthy is at her best when she shows how Dostoevsky, in The Possessed, was drawn to dangerous ideas "as if to a potent drug,'' or how Stendhal, in The Red and the Black, probably intended Julien Sorel's career as "a wicked analogy with the career of Jesus...

...moreover, his tales are played out "almost exclusively in the realm of the social, mundane by definition.'' He did what no other novelist had done, or even considered doing, before: He turned the novel into an objet d'art-lifeless as a stone and empty as a jug...

...Better reasons for the sad state of contemporary fiction can surely be found...

...In saying that he did this or that to "the novel," she implies that he changed the course of the art form, and changed it for the worse...

...Salient examples come to mind at once: Mann's The Magic Mountain, Mal-raux's Man's Fate, Huxley's Point Counterpoint (indeed all of Huxley), the fiction of Sartre and Iris Murdoch, the highly didactic novels of Solzhe-nitsyn, and many others she does not name...

...Certainly no small achievement since his novels are frequently concerned (in a very general way) with property and money...

...Lawrence, for instance, ended by writing tracts or sermons, which is paradoxical when you consider that Lawrence abhorred the intellect, or "upper story" as he called it...

...Eliot, of course, writing of Henry James...

...Which is to say, in a less anatomical fashion, he cleansed his fictive art of both mind and matter, of the things of this world and of any ideas we might have about those things...

...She also describes the great interest novelists of the period had in Napoleon, not just as Emperor, but as Idea...