Coming Back to the Beginning

...For Unamuno-and for that other modern Hispanist Jorge Luis Borges-the great inspirer is Cervantes, whose brilliant devices appeared almost to have exhausted the possibilities of the novel form in the very act of creating it...

...How, Sartre wondered in his early, existentialist days, could the possibility of human freedom be explored in a story, since characters, by definition, have no freedom...

...Still, because of his discriminate sense of past renewals and recoveries, Alter is not pessimistic about the literary future...

...Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen introduced a period of triumphant moral and social realism...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor of English, Columbia University Jacques, in Denis Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist, applies his philosophy with lucid finality...

...The wit of Tristram Shandy does not deny the facts of illness and death that overshadow that novel...

...Readers should be no more shocked at being given alternative endings to The French Lieutenant's Woman than they are at being given alternative plans for a college course or a trip to Venice...

...If they decide to reenter history and in a new way, Alter concludes, they will surely find that the current stage of acute self-consciousness, instead of exhausting literature's resources, has in fact expanded them...

...The very word "fiction"-"made up," "feigned"-seems to give the game away...

...The reason, says Alter, was history...

...Only in our time, with Borges in the lead, have writers outdone Cervantes in the interplay of illusion and reality, history and fantasy, signs and significance...

...In Partial Magic, one of the best of recent comprehensive works on fiction, Robert Alter discusses the increasing self-consciousness of current novels, dramatized in the books themselves by what sometimes seems a totally self-destructive method...

...To be sure, narrative play can degrade or trivialize, as it does in John Barth's Chimera...

...Since Hegel, he says, we have been aware of the strong element of negation in all thought and action...

...Often they shared with readers a belief in their characters not as artificial or imagined constructs, but as autonomous beings who acted from a necessity beyond the author's conscious making and revealed truths about human nature never before exposed...

...Asked why his brother and a friend went to Lisbon, he replies, "To seek an earthquake which could not take place without them, be crushed, swallowed up, burnt...

...as it was written Above...

...In the 20th century, however, the situation shifted again, albeit unevenly and incompletely...

...Plans, proposals and hypotheses are in one sense unreal, fictions...

...Joseph Frank developed this point in an essay on Crime and Punishment not mentioned in Partial Magic, but consistent with Alter's views...

...A key phrase in Partial Magic comes from the title of Patricia Merivales article, "The Flaunting of Artifice in Nabokov and Borges...

...What will happen next, of course, depends on "real" history, not on experiments in literary technique...

...Then, for a century and a half such paroxysms of self-consciousness ceased...

...in France by Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Zola...

...He recalls Miguel de Unamuno's little-known novel Mist, published in 1914, where the main character, upon learning that the author has planned to have him die, seeks out Unamuno at his Salamanca residence to argue against this decision "on the level both of plot and of ontological discourse...

...But writers have rarely played a passive role, even though some of their current negations seem close to total surrender...

...This is said in a novel, but it could equally well be said of novels...

...Sometimes, as with Balzac, their own ambitions were Napoleonic in scope...

...Sterne went to such parodistic and speculative extremes in his play with time, form and states of consciousness that on reading the book one might suppose the English novel had become suicidal less than 20 years after Richardson and Fielding had established it...

...Finally, Alter observes, negation and nihilism need not lead to nullity and silence...

...In Don Quixote, the hero even comes across a copy of Don Quixote in a bookstore...

...A sharp distinction between fiction and reality, he suggests, can be a way of giving each its due...

...The imagined world became intolerably constrictive, as in Beckett, or a waking nightmare the dreamer could not change, explain, or escape from, as in Pynchon...

...Nonetheless, as reactions to what now is, they are powerful forces in transforming the present into something else, into what now is not...

...Alienated from society and history, some novelists turned solipsistic in their preoccupation with individual consciousness...

...Yet, as Alter argues, to keep readers reminded that words, rather than being transparent windows opening out on reality, are the instruments of various frequently conflicting modes of dealing with it, is actually to increase meaning...

...Nabokov is the heir of the pre-World War I Russian formalists, who demanded of imaginative literature a deliberate flaunting of artifice, not only in character and plot, but in syntax, symbolism, diction, even typography...

...This self-consciousness, Alter shows, is traditional...

...They, in turn, thought the purest example of a novel was Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy...

...Alter is also responding to John Barth's 1967 essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," in which Barth-whose masters are Beckett and Borges-asks how novelists, who appear to be reaching a dead end technically and philosophically, can turn the situation against itself "to accomplish new human work...

...In Melville's Confidence Man, Alter already sees an anticipation of our present post-modern "ecriture blanche, the literature that denies its own possibility of existence, pointing toward silence through cunning stratagems of language...

...Fictional characters and events are formed for each other, and determined in every detail by what the author chooses to write from "Above...

...Writers' thoughts turned, though never entirely, from the medium to the message...

...Nor do the delusions of assassination in Pale Fire cancel the violence of Nabokov's father's heroic death...

...So can pointless language games...

...During the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era vast changes affected the consciousness of individuals in every social rank, and novelists were provided with so much to say-as secretaries, judges, or transformers of life-that the irreality of fiction was no longer an opportunity for them...

...In their own country they were followed by Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot...

...in Russia by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy...

...Creative thought is hypothetical thought, and fiction is one form of it...