Volition and the Novel

...not me upon it...

...In Hardy, who has been accused of fatalism time and again, we watch the fated Jude constantly borne up by the functional belief that he can exert pressure to improve his lot...

...that he might consider Wall Street speculation, for example, or any one of a dozen other entrenched popular practices, as things that didn't "work" at all...

...Let us once pass the preface to morals, and we should have more enduring drama...

...Critics have circled the problem suggestively enough, but they tend to shy off from the central reason mainly because it is obvious...

...We forget them long before we forget The Brothers Karamazov...

...If John Carruthers had come talking of his patterns, which he took from Professor Whitehead, I should have said, "Go back and read Whitehead on the principle of concretion" -which is simply another term for will...

...Have I been overstating the case...

...They can no more eradicate the belief than they can remove the factor of blood pressure...

...Hamlet, for all his Hamletism, at last forced the issue...

...Let us test recent artists in the light of volition...

...isn't it because there is no particular fight in their characters...

...And these people are partly right, but they too fail to cut to the root of the matter...

...There is nothing dynamic about them, for they have no belief in themselves as dynamic factors, with as much ability to alter life as life has ability to alter them...

...They slide around corners, and dodge real issues...

...It has been proved in the past that man is capable of seeking out the "good life" (and let us divest the phrase of connotations that lend themselves to cant...

...The characters of Proust, for example, have lost their functional belief in the will...

...Most of us have lost any urgent belief in the doctrine of the moral responsibility of the individual, and hence we tend to slide along, to postpone and evade decisions...

...Even so damned a person as Dmitri Karamazov has ten times the fight that is inherent in the hero of Blue Voyage...

...They tend to blur...

...Creative writers largely reflect their age...

...The trouble with our fiction is not that our artists are incompetent...

...On the other hand, I have forgotten the mass of stuff that has appeared in the first and second American Caravans, and find in looking them up that the concept of will does not figure in the majority of the stories...

...So does Tess, so does Clem Yeobright...

...We degrade William James, who was a very great man, by using him as an excuse, and therefore poor James finds himself the object of the attack of idealists like Julien Benda...

...And I should have suggested to them that the fault of the novel did not lie with the novelist at all, but in the larger sphere of modern philosophy, with the ideas-or rather the lack of them-that moderns suck in during their formative years...

...It may be wishful thinking, but I have hopes that the belief in the power of choice, in the power to tend toward good or toward evil, as one will, is spreading...

...The uncertainty is there, but the concept of volition, of purpose, remains...

...and- belief came, not because I wanted it to come, but simply through reading old and modern fiction in parallel...

...Their creators may be suberb observers, faithful to the truth as it appears to them, faithful to the characters they see around them, but the books that result are pale...

...Given a society that believes in the will, our novelists will come out of the Dreiserian wilderness, out of the flow-of-sensation or flow-of-behavioristic-pattern responses...

...Everyone of us is inclined in certain respects to be a trimmer, to hedge, to compromise...

...There may be a memorable solidity to Sister Carrie, Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, but they do not capture the imagination, for they drift along the stream of life without any effort to steer their own way...

...Perhaps I have, to the extent that anyone who is forced to use the simplifications that make up our stock of usable terms must overstate any case...

...Dalloways, Monsieur Swanns, Leopold Blooms, MacTeagues, seem curiously lacking in human significance, or have at best a negative significance...

...For given the power of choice we can have dramatic conflict, and given dramatic conflict we can have memorable fiction...

...We know, through the record of literature, through a reading of biography, that man is at least able to exert pressure upon his surroundings, to force an issue...

...They cannot see that the process is one of interaction...

...Storm Jameson suggests the reason as a lack of faith, and then asks faith in what...

...Of course we can't make any hard and fast and sweeping divisions...

...The characters of Elizabeth Bowen, which are very skilfully set before us, are not skilfully kept before us...

...Richard Feverel stood out against his father, and his father stood out against him...

...Others suggest that we have gone altogether too subjective, that in reducing the novel to a flow of shifting sensory phenomena, we have turned our backs on the world as it is...

...But we can say that the balance is in favor of the old...

...they consider themselves pawns of chance, of heredity...

...Mumford calls the "formative powers of the mind"-which, in the last analysis, are moral powers...

...Such books as May Sinclair's Anne Severn and the Fieldings break up and recombine, and yet they are pale...

...They order things differently in the twentieth century, and they ordered them differently in the nineteenth as far as Zola and his followers were concerned...

...We have only to look across the fence, to see that authors such as John Herrmann and Josephine Herbst, who have gone the whole way to an uncompromising objectivity are just as pale as the representatives of the flow-of-sensation school of writing...

...Lud-wig Lewisohn's The Island Within, which to my heretical way of thinking should have won a Pulitzer Prize, is still vivid after two years because of Arthur Levy's effort to force himself into a channel that would be morally acceptable to his nature...

...Ahab fought Moby Dick to a decision...

...the heroes of Aeschylus and Sophocles-"neither wholly good, nor wholly bad"-go down before the fate inherent in character, but we do not doubt for a moment that "character" in the Greek sense contains the implication of a will to choose between the good and the bad...

...We cannot forget the informer of Liam O'Flaherty's novel, and the reason we cannot forget him lies in the conflict engendered by his rudimentary moral scruples...

...there is the corollary of conflict...

...Why...

...Gide's The Counterfeiters and L'Ecole des Femmes remain in the mind because of the constant moral rumination that goes on in the minds of the characters...

...We vaguely experience the sense that something vital is lacking in the fiction of our era, and we wonder why...

...yet their lives, whether they be Sister Carries, Mrs...

...let them build the scaffolding for our coming novelists...

...they suffer, but we do not recall their suffering with much vividness precisely because they had no hand in bringing it on...

...there is no shock of battle, nothing to stir us to particular notice beyond the philosophical recognition that they are creatures of an age that has lost its belief in the operation of the will...

...John Carruthers offers the possibility that we are bogged in the materialistic science of the nineteenth century, which would explain Dreiser's strangely mechanical and unreal quality, but he doesn't go far enough when he suggests that novelists ought to think more in terms of patterns breaking up and recombining into further patterns...

...given a good age we should get good fiction...

...they are volitionless people, and they do not kick up enough conflict to set themselves indelibly behind the eyes...

...it lies in the fact that they are surrounded by people who have to a great extent lost their belief in moral discipline, in what Mr...

...If Miss Jameson had come to me and posed her question I should have answered, "We lack faith in the concept of the human being as a responsible moral agent...

...Recent developments, largely outside of fiction, seem to point to a recrudescence of belief in human volition, in the power of the human organism to respond in some measure at least to the challenge to force its own destiny...

...they are machines...

...Like the characters of Aeschylus and Sophocles, like Anna Karenina, like Richard Feverel, like Lady Macbeth, Jude and Tess are affected by belief in the concept of purpose...

...But I believe that a loss of belief in the human being as a moral agent is at the base of the paleness of modern fiction...

...Put it this way if you like: that it is the uncertainty as to whether volition does or does not affect human destiny, played off against human beings who have an intuitive knowledge that it does, which gives the works of Shakespeare, Hardy, Meredith, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky and the Greeks their memorable quality...

...He believed that he shouldn't have told, believed that he had chosen wrong in telling, and was quite willing to think that he must of necessity suffer because his choice had been wrong morally...

...We cannot work up much emotion over machines beyond pitying them for being machines...

...They are simply not dramatic...

...We are pragmatists in the worse sense of the word for, under the aegis of the slogan, "A thing is true if it works," we act without really investigating the problem of what works to our mutual health...

...Dalloway and the Jacob of Jacob's Room, who drift, end by drifting completely out of mind...

...It forced itself upon me...

...We forget that James himself might define "what works" in a highly moral and responsible way...

...Humanly speaking, they are hors concours...

...It is now up to the philosophers...

...but Jude the Obscure is dramatic because the unfortunate hero believes in the will...

...faith in volition, in will...

...Stephen Dedalus remains with us until he gets out of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into the moral swamp of Ulysses...

...VOLITION AND THE NOVEL By JOHN CHAMBERLAIN IN READING the novels of the great Russians (foully maligned when they are called fatalists) or of Victorian England, or in reading the best plays of the Elizabethans or of the Greeks, one is at once struck by their manifest superiority to the fiction of the present day...

...and we can say that the best of modern fiction retains the concept of human volition...

...They are impressed with the necessity of choosing between good and evil...

...Here we have men and women, living, loving, dying and generally repeating the age-old cycle, in this day, just as in any other...

...we can't say that all literature before 1880 is vividly dramatic, and that all this side of that arbitrary date is pale...

...Sherwood Anderson and Conrad Aiken have blurred...

...He is unsuccessful, it is quite true...

...Modern physics, with its impulse to see things in terms of process rather than in differentiated bumps of cause and effect, has at least rehabilitated the will as a working hypothesis...