Dialectic of the Novel

...In other words, he is dealing with the difference between theater and drama, and Pritchett, also, observes that the English novel "has never lived down its early association with the theater, and has always had to wrestle with a picaresque or artificial plot...

...The novelist cannot rely on accepted codes of ethic or religion, but must, instead, invoke the "unexpected authority" of the actual if he is to create "an image of the theoretic form of the soul...

...This distinction between what we should do and what we have to do with explains why Blackmur can refuse Dostoevsky's ethic, religion, and politics, yet can accept his imitation of immediate experience...

...As the essays progress, we gather that the deeper momentum of fiction is not what we call plot or even motive, but "the sum of stresses upon character" resembling the Aristotelian mimesis and mythos, enabling the novelist to break through to a psychology that serves as a formal "apprehension of immediate experience...

...It is an essentially dramatic action, a "mode of the objective imagination" more relevant than plot...

...In speaking of this translation of experience into fictional or theoretic form Blackmur's own cogitated, often intimidating language is like an escarpment we must ascend before understanding his conception that every successful novel is a "mode of the psyche" representing our "life in motion...

...It is a case of art triumphing over life...

...His essays are a high order of feuilleton, having the non-academic tone of a long tradition of British criticism that (Scrutiny and the Leavisites aside) urbanely follows Alexander Pope: "Men must be taught as if you taught them not...

...6.95...

...So also Dostoevsky's requirement that his characters be humiliated before they learn humility is ethically repulsive —indeed, fascist—but dramatically is a "profound aspect of the human scene...

...it absorbs or expels...

...Reviewed by WYLIE SYPHER Author, "Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art," "Baroque to Cubism in Literature and Art" Blackmur once defined criticism as "the formal discourse of an amateur," and one might say that his 11 essays on Dostoevsky and five other novelists are austerely formal discourses while the enlarged collection of V. S. Pritchett's causeries are the informal remarks of an amateur...

...But, says Blackmur, "official society is not meant to understand...

...And à propos of the Kipling revival Pritchett notes that the sahib myth is really very American, being "full of moral words, tribal signs and masonic grips"—a "showy and evasive pose of common sense, in which the average comes out on top" by flattering "average human insensibility by calling it experience...

...If the novelist attains this dialectic, his fiction is not only dramatic but also symbolic...

...Pritchett sees, too, that Beckett's headlong comedy is our version of the Oblomovsituation, making him a "grammarian of solitude" conjugating trifles...

...and leaves the job of understanding to the individual to whom society happens...

...Or Nathanael West pays with his hysteria the price of our sentimental national dream...

...For Blackmur the novel's special psychology is its action, its myth, its theoretic form...

...Thus Pritchett's short reconnaissance flights over a huge fictional terrain lying between Fielding and Montherlant offer a series of sharp observations: how Edith Wharton's "sense of tragedy is linked to a terrifying sense of propriety," how George Eliot's sympathy for Judaism is due to its care for the law, how Richardson sees the world through a keyhole and how his "slowness comes from an excess of examination, not an excess of words...

...But the statement needs qualification both ways, for Blackmur, who seems to make criticism a mystique, is as much an amateur (i.e., a devotee) of literature as Pritchett, and Pritchett writes cursorily on 58 novelists from an angle more formal than Blackmur's (i.e., more conventional, less adventurous...

...When Dmitri faces the court, he encounters an official code of justice...

...it rises from way under the social routines in which it is engaged...

...He quietly corrects the overestimation of D. H. Lawrence, whose irresponsible egoism went wrong whenever he started to argue at the top of his voice...

...As an excessive and fictional paradigm of man parody leaps the gap between life and art: The novelist must parody our humanity in order to find it, for "parody points, terribly, at the reality, as the devil points at God...

...Again and again Blackmur exploits the term momentum to suggest that the novelist must "absorb the problems of the intellect by showing their counterparts in action": the momentum of imaginative energy, the momentum of manners or religion or politics, the equating of disparate momentums in different characters, the momentum or sweep of the whole story...

...Here the novelistic momentum breaks through the mechanism of plot in a dialectic of immediate human experience where patterns cross...

...THE LIVING NOVEL & LATER APPRECIATIONS By V. S. Pritchett Random House...

...Pritchett is anything but speculative...

...The logic of parody gives dramatic meaning to the trial in which the peasants find Dmitri Karamazov guilty even if he did not kill, for the peasants instinctively know that "the innocence of the scapegoat is sometimes a terrible enlargement of our individual experience of guilt...

...No prose has fewer redundancies...

...Without formulating any theory of the novel, Blackmur supposes that the novelist is frustrated unless he can employ a "new and distinctive psychology" for presenting his characters' changing relations to society...

...There Pritchett drops the matter without attempting to study the full psychic momentum with which Blackmur is concerned —the momentum that enables Tolstoy, Joyce, Flaubert, Mann, and especially Dostoevsky to present dramatically the ambiguities or "counterpositions" in experiences unapproachable by mere plot...

...This fictional psychology fills the dark void between guilt and innocence, since the human condition in its full dramatic sense "is a condition where all are guilty and none are guilty...

...Pritchett likes Trollope and even Bennett for their normalcy, which is now so repellent, coolly stating that "the highest traditions of our narrative literature" derive from "the worldliness...

...For instance, he takes Conrad's irony as perverse "because it is a personal irony and does not always lie in the nature of the events he describes," perhaps since "exile—the fact of being uncommitted—is at the bottom of Conrad's triumphs and his failures...

...In fact, Blackmur devotes some of his best pages to the strange thesis that whenever art is a critique of human experience it must parody, as Dostoevsky and Mann parodied the human being in the persons of the Karamazovs and Adrian Leverkuehn...

...By contrast, Blackmur, dealing with only the modern spirit, explores the "cellarage of action" and our abnormal sense of guilt which imposes upon Mann and Dostoevsky the task of readjusting the novelist's art to his ethic, his religion, his politics: And there is an inevitable gap between his art and his life—the gap where fictional imagination works...

...Blackmur sees that Dostoevsky's Christianity is "always on the point of disclosing itself as a matrix of disorder," yet this dangerous, violent Christianity is redeemed by the novelist's art: "I think," Blackmur states, "the poetic or novelistic conception is a greater source of its strength than any 'merely' religious consideration, and further it is the novelistic force which gives poetic justice to the religious...

...When Charles Bovary gives Emma a small drink of curaçao, she drains it—then with her head thrown back as she pouts, she extends her tongue until she is able to lick, drop by drop, the bottom of the glass...

...When he turns to Dostoevsky, Blackmur describes this fictional psychology as being "not just a contrivance of the novelist, not motive (or the conflict of motives) at the level of plot...

...The monstrous formlessness of Dostoevsky provides the wide range of human options that have been excluded, Blackmur thinks, from our most talented contemporary novels, which have matured in form faster than in fictional imagination, thus depriving themselves of the new psychologies that he calls speculative...

...In spite of certain essays superficial almost to a point of triviality, Pritchett has the faculty of saying modestly and casually acute things about an enormous range of novelists who come under his momentary attention...

...467 pp...

...for me every good novel is a speculation—a theoretic form, a fresh psychology —a speculation in myth which reaches into the driving psyche...

...By his pitiless irresponsibility the parodist creates his theoretic form of life which, as artist, is his supreme act of responsibility...

...The novel is always theoretic in the sense that it is artifice, for "the arts take no action and do not seek directly to change the world...

...If Pritchett cannot compete with Lukács on the historical and realistic novel, he nevertheless sees Balzac's novels as buyers' catalogs and Scott's as the collectible antique...

...These contradictions create an action where "the patterns are about to cross" in an area that "occupies the relation between the hero and his world...

...it is the created motive which is the positive achievement of literary art...

...Constantly Blackmur is trying to get behind the mechanics of events in order to analyze the novel's "dialectic of incarnation...

...In one of his finer phrases Blackmur finds that art must come short exactly because "it does not tell you what to do but what you have to do with...

...Speculation," Blackmur says, "is endless...

...Emma's tongue reaches into the bottom of that glass with a momentum that only the novel can have...

...Pritchett's 27 later appreciations, like the reprinted earlier ones, are in the introductory, accessible vein of the reviewer who does not speculate, like Blackmur, how the novelist, as novelist, "gives theoretic form to life" by means of a dramatic imagination...

...the curiosity, the plainness, the tolerance, the irony, the comeliness of the 18th century...

...This kind of action "sends the mind astretch on far questions that have to do with the relation of the individual to his society," filling the gap between public and private life by "the process of the experience itself" and "what goes on between the idea and the reality...