Critical Revisions

...Can modern sensibility accommodate itself to such a lopsided moral imbalance, wonders Irving, and he concludes, "History makes, history unmakes the novel...

...His generosity of mind is especially evident in these three essays...

...Many critics are scant, not so much in their praise (often cunningly insincere...

...Everyone needs "historical imagination," Irving writes, but, "the mere fact that we need to invoke it testifies to its difficulties...

...One of the most consistent elements in Irving's literary criticism was his effort to do justice to works with which he was not entirely in sympathy, even those repugnant to his own sensibilities...

...Three novels are closely examined here: Defoe's Moll Flanders, James's The Awkward Age, and The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford...

...About Zola and the other writers whose work belongs to naturalism, he says, "Naturalism left a permanent mark upon the modern novel...

...it refused to accept barriers of taste that would ban the ugly and painful...

...They seem impelled by an urgency to comment on something far more important than the content of a writer's work...

...In my own readings of his criticism over the years, I can't recall when he ever yielded to the temptation to interpose himself or his political views between readers and novels and, so to speak, obliterate the novelists—as though reviewing were a clash of arms...

...Eliot's response to a young poet who said to him, "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did...

...Irving writes, "So obscurity as an internal condition needs to be distinguished . . . from obscurity as an intended theme...

...Lawrence, Kipling, Gissing, Sir Walter Scott, Rousseau, and the evanescent "common reader...

...I think of T.S...

...After re-reading Proust that year, he spoke about Remembrance of Things Past with the artlessness and exuberance of a very young reader, one who had been away in a bleak country but who had returned now, and whose response to the writers he valued had stayed receptive, inquiring and fresh...

...They begin quietly with a discussion of minor characters in the novel...

...It is that freshness of vision—or revisioning— that imparts such vigor and limpidity to his last book, A Critic's Notebook...

...I believe Irving would have agreed with Pavese...

...Throughout the Notebook, Irving delivers other such little cuffs of common sense, reminding us that the old and new are inextricably bound together...

...Choice is irrelevant...

...There is more than that...

...For those of us who have lived long enough to experience the malaise induced by a change of era, his words are a corrective to the tendency to slide into angry regret for what is continually, if only partly, lost—yesterday and its fashions of thought and taste...

...In a trenchant argument in "History and the Novel," he analyzes these difficulties in a discussion of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, in which a moral dilemma arises when the SPRING • 1995 • 259 Critical Revisions children of Sir Thomas Bertram begin an amateur theatrical project, a "morally dubious" endeavor, during the time Sir Thomas is visiting his estate in the West Indies worked by slaves...

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...As someone has said, the human mind only recognizes a feeling when it has words for it...

...it has the amplitude and intensity of a great burst of thought...

...But he doubts that obsolescence awaits it as a genre, "since it is precisely the adaptability of the novel, its gift for quick changes in response to historical need, that should enable it to survive...

...Following his thinking journeys, a reader can perceive the struggle, the stretch of his mind to attain stations of clarity, of understanding...

...Irving himself was not only a critic but a writer, as readers of his Notebook will discover in essay after essay where the delight he took in language leaps from the page...

...At the end of an elegiac musing on Proust's great work, Irving speaks: "Art decays like life, and in the end there is only the dust of centuries...

...A story itself eludes final analysis...

...He was not simply sad...

...Eliot replied: "Precisely, and they are what we know...

...one realizes only at the end of a review how much they have disliked a given work) but in genuine receptivity to the novels they judge...

...But he appears to me to share Ortega's view that one of the implications of the word modern is that the pinnacle of possibility has been reached...

...It is invaluable in its analysis of the development of the idea of a self and the changes cultural and social forces have wrought upon that idea...

...RousSPRING • 1995 • 261 Critical Revisions seau to a packed house," ushering in the modern age with "tumult and self-penetrating chaos," Irving says in "The Self in Literature...

...This piece can't yield up its essence in brief quotations...

...they pause for an incisive summation of what has gone before, "Soullessness—that for Dickens is now more terrifying and familiar, the discovery of creatures formed in the image of man but operating as mere functions of the city," and quicken into this conclusion: "Let us say that Dostoevsky is a name we give to the glimpsed desires of the late Dickens...

...and "Five Instances of Characterization," where he engages with literary theorists, quoting one who referred to Jane Austen's Emma Wodehouse as "it...

...They are strongly reasoned but he was not a captive of the past...

...When emotion breaks upon the reader—or the listener—it is because, partly, of the singular way in which words—or notes—are associated...

...Among the company he summons are Gogol, Dostoyevski, Dickens, Defoe, Tolstoy, Proust, Kundera, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Eliot, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, Fielding, Sterne, D.H...

...Irving wanted to comprehend, not to conquer...

...As I read "Tone in Fiction," the concluding essay in A Critic's Notebook, I thought of what Tolstoy wrote in his diary in 1903: "It's time to die and I'm still thinking up things...

...We weigh on the world's scale...

...Irving does not reject modernism or new notions of the study of literature...

...One need only reflect upon the group self, so pervasive a phenomenon of contemporary life, a "self" that swallows all individual variation and difference, into a monolithic assertion of common grievance and resentment, to sense how elastic and fluctuating the very idea of self is...

...but he did see the people of India as vigorous, full of humor and energy, deeply worthy...

...the path is ended...

...The light he casts upon individual writers broadens to illuminate such shadowy places in the territory of writing as the problem of the first-person narrative...

...Irving knew that writers "really have no choice but to entangle themselves in the cultural-political disputes of the time . . . whatever their inclinations toward pure art...

...We are social-political beings whether we wish to be or not...

...He writes, ". . . no matter how many things criticism can tell us about a work of literature— a good many—it may finally be unable to explain its essential quality...

...His pleasure in anecdotes and jokes, in meditative conversations about literature returned, although there was a new kind of quiet in him and a strain of melancholy, the permanent memento of those who have spent months being taught pain and the body's helplessness...

...Style and tone in fiction, academic novels and those he calls "punitive," farce and the self, history and the novel, are some of its many subjects...

...Wit and rigor inform his observations on the making of literature in the sections titled "Characters: Are They Like People...

...It is enough that they are possible...

...In the last weeks of his life, Irving, too, was thinking up things...

...In "Characters Out of Characters," there is an illuminating analysis of the master-servant theme, beginning with the plays of Plautus and taking in, along the way, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Jim and Huck, Sam Weller, and Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist, and pausing to note the way in which "American whites have delighted in plays about 'rhythmic blacks' while at the same time basking in the knowledge that tomorrow the natural blessings of tyranny will be reinstated...

...The function of literary criticism is not to rip novels out of their time and subject them to the withering dismissals of the upstart present...

...And the traditions of yesterday are challenged, always, by literary revolution...

...It does not honor fully enough the life-hungers, the lifecapacities of the oppressed...

...Speaking from the viewpoint of a novelist and poet, the Italian Cesare Pavese said in his diary: "A work of art is successful only when, for the artist himself, it has a certain element of mystery...

...And yet...

...This last is from "Obscurity in the Novel," and it bears upon the risk novelists run that the I of a story can become a phantom, a disembodied voice, not a character...

...How Are Characters Conceived...

...Still, he knew that real people who read about characters in a novel become more real to themselves...

...In his beautiful piece on Kipling's Kim, he writes, "One great flaw in the reforming passion is that in its eagerness to remedy social wrongs it tends to neglect, certainly to undervalue, the experience of those whose lives it wishes to improve...

...Into this vague region, the most gifted and intrepid critic is not likely to venture...

...He was open to new seeing...

...he was a man, as it were, interrupted in mid-sentence...

...The fly, "a wretched little creature," buzzes "its way through some of the great Russian novels...

...I wondered if he had in mind the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gassett's aphorism, "People in a novel need not be like real ones...

...Whether he is discussing Sterne's artifice or James's stylized speech, Irving is mindful that a writer's choice of words cannot be undone from the meaning they convey any more than notes of music can be severed from the composition they form...

...How are we to explain that in the pages of this apologist for imperialism, the masses of India seem more alive and autonomous than in the pages of writers claiming political correctness...

...His spirits revived, and he went back to work...

...Always respectful of ordinary life, Irving says, ". . . the fly is ingrained in common human experience, always the firmest basis for a literary symbol...

...He says about James Joyce that he was "not only a novelist but a writer for whom the play of language has a value apart from the rhythm of the story...

...He escaped moribundity...

...Although my own, probably inordinate fondness for The Good Soldier, and my impatience with the ambiguities I found in The Awkward Age, were not substantially changed, my perception of them was enlarged by the acuity of Irving's insight...

...In one of the "Five Comments" on Tolstoy, "The Russian Fly," there is such charm...

...Here, Irving's wry humor found a subject equal to it...

...He remarks that its weakness can be "a confinement of vision that results, so to say, in the world collapsing into the narrator's voice...

...Yet as I read these pieces, I felt they held the promise of further revelation, just as the novels we have read and loved when we were young reveal new depths, new facets, when we return to them years later...

...For a while, free of the grim paraphernalia of doctoring and hospitals, he gained shelter...

...I speak of Irving's "last" book, meaning his final book...

...He defines it as a distillation of "a culture's sentiments and norms...

...Still, he is philosophical...

...In a graceful examination of Chek260 • DISSENT Critical Revisions hov's short story "In the Cart," he talks of the "writer's spirit...

...He remarks, "Only those over 50 and a few undergraduates, I suspect, still love the novel," though he reminds his readers in a discussion of writers of "anti-novel" novels (Robbe-Grillet, Grombrowicz, Barthelme, Kundera) that "the old nestles in the new—how else could either be defined...

...But "where James's obscurity forms the very matter of perception, becoming thereby a lucid theme, lighting up the obscurity that inheres in the life of men and women," the other two novels, for all their interest and art, are murky at the center, that is, in the writers themselves...

...Irving was certainly a political man but he was measured, and in a large sense civil, where literature was concerned...

...And he does judge some of the new criticism as inexpungibly dreary, a skeletal hand restraining the eagerness of the "naive" reader...

...He poses the question: "How does that one word, `taste,' contain . . . contradictory meanings— immutable discernments and momentary fashions...

...Now Kipling, it is true, did not see India as particularly oppressed, and I am as ready as the next liberal or radical to deplore this failure...

...In his reflections on the naturalistic novel, in particular the novels of Zola, Irving takes up the matter of taste, more often than not a red flag for anyone who has even the most remote interest in contemporary culture...

...In "Dickens: Three Notes," there are several pages on Little Dorrit...

...He answers "It does . . . in the brilliantly perverse way language has of exhibiting ambiguities of thought...

...Irving was an explorer...

...It is eloquent...

...Saint Augustine confessed to God...

...These morsels spark and jump with news, with the flash of discovery...

...It declared all experience to be the writer's province...

...In his introduction, Irving's son, Nicholas, writes that his father characterized these essays and notes as shtiklakh, "from the Yiddish for `little pieces' or 'morsels.' " Yet each of these "little pieces" is the issue of decades of reflection, and they echo larger themes of which they are, perhaps, the essence...