The Analysis of Modern Fiction

...no one believed more fully in the distinctive qualities of fiction...

...Does a point of view come from a general disposition toward current realities...

...Whatever these statements may mean, they have gained a general assent, even though most people are not quite sure to what they have agreed...

...And where does one draw the line between fullness and quality of specification...

...One way of putting the question is this: at what point in a novelist's work can he be said to give his sense of universal human nature an adequate context of specific setting...

...When criticism stays with its formal concerns, the novel appears to have no especial relevance to the history of culture or to any other of the various "histories" to which critics often eagerly apply in their efforts to link literature with its milieu...

...the judgment of poetry has undergone several revisions, and each time a form of literary history has come from it...

...No one had a better sense of critical values...

...and his context is not James', but his own...

...but, somehow and somewhere (and I am not sure just where or why this happens) fiction suggests or promotes larger issues concerning the life of man (his moral, religious being) which technique does not altogether help us to see...

...What Miss Gordon seems at times to be saying is this: we do need to be "sophisticated" about reading fiction (that is, it doesn't merely entertain or comfort tired minds, and it must overcome taboos), and our sense of it does involve our being aware of technique, method, the ways in which the "quality of the mind of the producer" is formally realized...

...This unfortunate beginning ought not to obscure the fact that Miss Gordon is a solid student of her art...

...However high its quality, the "mind of the producer" invariably takes on the cast of the world in which it is forced to live or chooses to live, or at least to the imagined convention of that world...

...The truth is that James' influence on modern criticism, great and salutary as it has been, has suffered in no small way from the defects of its virtues...

...It is possible of course to see a novel exclusively in terms of its component parts, but one always has the feeling that something very important has been sacrificed to the act of criticism...

...There must be a way of resolving them...

...He may be a rather casually and comically inept observer, or he may be a vigorously assertive victim, of circumstance...

...When it is we shall, to use just one example, be sure of what Faulkner has in common with Hawthorne but also of what is specifically in Faulkner that Hawthorne could not have had or even thought of having...

...at least, in her choice of title and in her appeals to a "commonly seen good sense" she tries to rescue the criticism of fiction from the unpleasant notion that it requires more than good sense...

...there is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth . . . than that of the perfect dependence of the 'moral' sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it...

...In this sense Zabel, from the start convinced that "The true object of criticism is the work of art itself," is able to explore modern fiction from a fresh and a less inhibited point of view...

...Indeed, she tries to make the study of fiction a very intelligent game...

...The real development in the criticism of modern fiction has scarcely begun...

...and, by going beyond it, it also points to the dissatisfaction with that view...

...While adhering sensibly to the generalities James so wisely offered, we must also intelligently change our angle of vision as the things we see change in the perspective from which they may best be seen...

...Students of the novel have emphasized James' analyses of his own writing...

...They are especially brought to mind by the recent publication of two books on the novel: a re-issue of Percy Lubbock's immensely important book, The Craft of Fiction (originally published in 1921) and Caroline Gordon's How to Read a Novel (both of them Viking...

...James knew almost instinctively the dangers the too ambitious novelist might encounter...

...The problems raised at any given time by the special nature of milieu inevitably require revisions in the way we view technique...

...Which is not to say that the hero has disappeared...

...The key to both criticisms is the Jamesian remark concerning the dependence of a work of art upon "the amount of felt life concerned in producing it...

...But he was only halfway independent of their conventional barriers to total understanding of the art of fiction...

...But the novel eludes, or at best it submits awkwardly to the finely ground lens of formal analysis...

...The "air of reality" has its own hazards of meaning: when is a novel convincingly "real...

...I find How to Read a Novel a most revealing document in the history of criticism: it pushes the suggestiveness of the Jamesian view as far as she thinks it can go...

...this is what several recent critics, including Sean O'Faolain (The Vanishing Hero), have been fond of saying...

...He could tell us what was bad advice, he could even generalize attractively about what was needed...

...Most of our modern novelists are inclined to think that an indiscriminate abundance of detail will easily make up for whatever failure of sensibility they may have...

...and no one looked with greater concentration at the formal necessities of the novel...

...But his applications to that fiction suffer as much from his too narrow view of the art as his style suffers from what at times almost seems a parody of "the master's...

...and in a majority of instances he could put his finger on the unresolved or only half-resolved problems of his contemporaries...

...Lubbock's book is handsomely introduced by Mark Schorer: "Without Lubbock's respect for the artist in the novelist, the loose form of the novel would have floundered on for how many years without the prestige that, as a form of art, it had always deserved...

...She has learned all that James has had to teach...

...These problems are always with us, perhaps chiefly because James didn't bother to solve them, or didn't see the necessity of their solution...

...What constitutes a "solid" or convincing reality...

...Apparently we may answer all of these questions by referring speculatively to the novelist himself, who, if his mind is of the right "quality," will give the effect of a sufficient "amount of felt life...

...if the novelist attempts to make him so, distortion almost inevitably follows...

...Much writing about the modern novel has the appearance of having chosen an intricate maze through which the mind precisely moves but with no real desire to find its way out of it...

...but when he tried to specify, he left us with such fine-sounding but exasperatingly elusive remarks as these: ". . . the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me the supreme virtue of a novel...

...There is an imbalance in criticism...

...Perhaps the answer to our feeling of dissatisfaction with Miss Gordon's book is to be found in still another Viking publication, Morton Zabel's Craft and Character in Modern Fiction, a redoing of a number of reviews, essays, and prefaces, but for the most part also a solid line of critical investigation...

...The real question concerning the value of Miss Gordon's book is one she herself raises: at what point do questions of technique become larger questions—of morality, for example, or "moral vision," or of insight into contemporary religious malaises and their effect upon choices of imagery and symbol...

...the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...

...Her chapters maneuver effectively the principal terms of James' criticism into shrewd operations...

...Are problems of technique translatable into issues of social behavior...

...An artist feels life in terms of certain demands made upon him and certain permissions given him by his milieu...

...Some rather crude beginnings have been made in the attempt to define— perhaps more importantly, to assert —the "modern novel...

...In other words, the strategy of the book's title is to suggest that "anyone can" who only learns to recognize "how to...

...For these latter the great temptation is to endow a trivial subject matter with a surplusage of symbols, or perhaps to spin a web of subtleties from a thread so fine as to be almost invisible...

...And, beyond the "amount of felt life," we need to speculate about the kinds and qualities and intensities of feeling according to which "life" is measured and contained within art...

...Its hero cannot be the "central intelligence" of James...

...To persist in it requires satisfactory answers to the questions James' failures have left...

...The hero is still there, but his is not always a "central vision...

...it is essentially that of F. R. Leavis' book, The Great Tradition...

...The Craft of Fiction has always seemed to me to carry Jamesian criticism in its narrowest sense as far as it can be carried...

...In many respects the ambiguities of Henry James' criticism remain to plague us...

...It is obvious that both Leavis and Zabel have a quite different notion from James regarding the nature and quality of "felt life," but this is to the good if only because it rescues the phrase from its Nineteenth Century origins and brings it fully into the Twentieth...

...He is "more Jamesian than James," as Schorer says, and he is therefore much concerned to bring the principles of James' criticism into the world of chiefly Nineteenth Century fiction...

...But we are always left with the risks of application: method, technique, the allocation of point of view, the fineness of medium through which the truth is communicated, and so on...

...Quite aside from the fact of his "finely adjusted instrument" for detecting the qualities of man's present condition, he must give his representation of the world the sense of his having seen it in context...

...while these are enduringly fine, they are also the product of a limited kind of intellectual experience...

...Miss Gordon is not so narrowly limited...

...For, in spite of James' care to bring all aesthetic concerns back to questions of art, of method, specifically to the question of how he had managed in his fiction, the ambiguities residing in such phrases as "air of reality," "quality of mind," and "amount of felt life" remain...

...they will have to be resolved before we can be sure of the role of fiction in the total pattern of modern literature...

...I feel sure that the history of the modern novel will some day be written in terms of what may best be described as a union of universal suppositions (similar to those James had) with a clear and shrewd sense of particular qualities and perspectives of contemporary truth...

...Novels have been subjected to many close analyses, but criticism of the novel has yielded no satisfactory "full views" of its places and its function in literary history...

...It is a novel of either violence or tension (which is violence suspended, or a condition in which violence is expected though not necessarily achieved...

...Zabel's guiding assumption is not new, though it is not merely imitative of its source...

...some others are too afraid to admit the special character of the world scene as it qualifies their status as novelists...

...When Miss Gordon tries to discuss these questions, she either is vague about them or departs altogether from her frame of technical discussion, to make statements that have almost nothing to do with it...

...Going beyond that question a bit, when we read a novel, by what means do we determine either an inadequacy of moral intelligence or a failure of "specification" in it...