In a review of my History of Modern Criticism 13 from which certain formulations passed, without explicit reference to my work, into the introduction of his posthumous book, Literatursprnchc t ind Publikum in der latcinischcn Spdtantike lind im Mittelalter [Literary Language and the Public in the late Classical and Middle Ages], 14 and into his English article ‘Vico’s Contribution to Literary Criticism’, 15 Auerbach states most clearly the historistic creed:
Our historistic way of feeling and judging is so deeply rooted in us that we have ceased to be aware of it. We enjoy the art, the poetry and the music of many different peoples and periods with equal preparedness for understanding. ... The variety of periods and civilizations no longer frightens us.... It is true that perspectivistic understanding fails as soon as political interests are at stake; but otherwise, especially in aesthetic matters, our historistic capacity of adaptation to the most various forms of beauty is almost bound-
a See above, pp. 315-32.
Wellek Literary theory, criticism, and history
less But the tendency to forget or to ignore historical perspectivism is
widespread, and it is, especially among literary critics, connected with the prevailing antipathy to philology of the nineteenth-century type, this philology being considered as the embodiment and the result of historicism. Thus, many believe that historicism leads to antiquarian pedantry, to the overevaluation of biographical detail, to complete indifference to the values of the work of art; therefore to a complete lack of categories with which to judge, and finally to arbitrary eclecticism. [But] it is wrong to believe that historical relativism or perspectivism makes us incapable of evaluating and judging the work of art, that it leads to arbitrary eclecticism, and that we need, for judgment, fixed and absolute categories. Historicism is not eclecticism Each
historian (we may also call him, with Vico’s terminology, ‘philologist’) has to undertake this task for himself, since historical relativism has a twofold aspect: it concerns the understanding historian as well as the phenomena to be understood. This is an extreme relativism; but we should not fear it.... The historian does not become incapable of judging; he learns what judging means. Indeed, he will soon cease to judge by abstract and unhistorical categories; he even will cease to search for such categories of judgment. That general human quality, common to the most perfect works of the particular periods, which alone may provide for such categories, can be grasped only in its particular forms, or else as a dialectical process in history; its abstract essence cannot be expressed in exact significant terms. It is from the material itself that he will learn to extract the categories or concepts which he needs for describing and distinguishing the different phenomena. These concepts are not absolute; they are elastic and provisional, changeable with changing history. But they will be sufficient to enable us to discover what the different phenomena mean within their own period, and what they mean within the three thousand years of conscious literary human life we know of; and finally, what they mean to us, here and now. That is judgment enough; it may lead also to some understanding of what is common to all of these phenomena, but it would be difficult to express it otherwise than as a dialectical process in history....
This is an excellent statement, moderately phrased, concrete in its proposals, supported by the authority of a scholar who knew the relevant German tradition and had the experience of working within it. It contains, no doubt, a measure of truth which we all have to recognize, but still it rouses ultimate, insuperable misgivings, a final dissatisfaction with the ‘extreme relativism’ accepted here so resignedly and even complacently. Let me try to sort out some of the problems raised and marshal some answers to this influential point of view. Let me begin at the most abstract level: the assertion of the inevitable conditioning of the historian’s own point of view, the recognition of one’s own limited place in space and time, the relativism elaborated and emphasized by the ‘sociology of knowledge’, particularly by Karl Mannheim in Ideologic und Utopie. 1(j This kind of relativism was and is extremely valuable as a method of investigating the hidden assumptions and biases of the investigator himself. But it surely can serve only as a general warning, as a kind of memento mori. As Isaiah Berlin observes, in a similar context:
Such charges [of subjectiveness or relativity] resemble suggestions, sometimes casually advanced, that life is a dream. We protest that ‘everything’
Wellek Literary theory, criticism, and history
cannot be a dream, for then, with nothing to contrast with dreams, the notion
of a ‘dream' loses all specific reference If everything is subjective or
relative, nothing can be judged to be more so than anything else. If words like ‘subjective' and ‘relative’, ‘prejudiced’ and ‘biased’, are terms not of comparison and contrast—do not imply the possibility of their own opposites, of ‘objective’ (or at least ‘less subjective’) or ‘unbiased’ (or at least ‘less biased’), what meaning have they for us ? 17
The mere recognition of what A. O. Lovejoy has called, with a barbarous word formed on the analogy of the ‘egocentric predicament’, the ‘presenticentric predicament ’ 18 does not get us anywhere: it merely raises the problem of all knowing; it leads only to universal scepticism, to theoretical paralysis. Actually the case of knowledge and even of historical knowledge is not that desperate. There are universal propositions in logic and mathematics such as two plus two equal four, there are universally valid ethical precepts, such, for instance, as that which condemns the massacre of innocent people, and there are many neutral true propositions concerning history and human affairs. There is a difference between the psychology of the investigator, his presumed bias, ideology, perspective, and the logical structure of his propositions. The genesis of a theory does not necessarily invalidate its truth. Men can correct their biases, criticize their presuppositions, rise above their temporal and local limitations, aim at objectivity, arrive at some knowledge and truth. The world may be dark and mysterious, but it is surely not completely unintelligible.
But the problems of literary study need not actually be approached in terms of this very general debate about the relativity of all knowledge or even the special difficulties of all historical knowledge. Literary study differs from historical study in having to deal not with documents but with monuments. A historian has to reconstruct a long-past event on the basis of eye-witness accounts, the literary student, on the other hand, has direct access to his object: the work of art. It is open to inspection whether it was written yesterday or three thousand years ago, while the battle of Marathon and even the battle of the Bulge have passed irrevocably. Only peripherally, in questions which have to do with biography or, say, the reconstruction of the Elizabethan playhouse, does the literary student have to rely on documents. He can examine his object, the work itself; he must understand, interpret, and evaluate it; he must, in short, be a critic in order to be a historian. The political or economic or social historian, no doubt, also selects his facts for their interest or importance, but the literary student is confronted with a special problem of value; his object, the work of art, is not only value-impregnated, but is itself a structure of values. Many attempts have been made to escape the inevitable consequences of this insight, to avoid the necessity not only of selection but of judgment, but all have failed and must, I think, fail unless we want to reduce literary study to a mere listing of books, to annals or a chronicle. There is nothing which can obviate the necessity of critical judgment, the need of aesthetic standards, just as there is nothing which can obviate the need of ethical or logical standards.
One widely used escape door leads nowhere: the assertion that we need not judge, but that we simply need adopt the criteria of the past: that we must re-
Wellek Literary theory, criticism, and history
construct and apply the values of the period we are studying. I shall not merely argue that these standards cannot be reconstructed with certainty, that we are confronted with insurmountable difficulties if we want to be sure what Shakespeare intended by his plays and how he conceived them or what the Elizabethan audience understood by them. There are different schools of scholarship which try to get at this past meaning by different routes: E. E. Stoll believes in reconstructing stage conventions; Miss Tuve appeals to rhetorical training, or liturgical and iconographic traditions; others swear by the authority of the NED; still others, like f. Dover Wilson, think that ‘the door to Shakespeare's workshop stands ajar' when they discover inconsistencies in punctuation or line arrangements from bibliographical evidence. Actually, in reconstructing the critical judgment of the past we appeal only to one criterion: that of contemporary success. But if we examine any literary history in the light of the actual opinions of the past we shall see that we do not admit and cannot admit the standards of the past. When we properly know the views of Englishmen about their contemporary literature, e.g. late in the eighteenth century, we may be in for some suprises: David Hume, for instance, thought Wilkie's Epigoniad comparable to Homer; Nathan Drake thought Cumberland's Calvary greater than Milton's Paradise Lost. Obviously, accepting contemporary evaluation requires our discriminating between a welter of opinions: who valued whom and why and when? Professor Geoffrey Barraclough, in a similar argument against historians who recommend that we should study ‘the things that were important then rather than the things that are important now', advises them to look, for instance, at thirteenth-century chronicles: ‘a dreary recital of miracles, tempests, comets, pestilences, calamities, and other wonderful things ’, 19 Clearly the standards of contemporaries cannot be binding on us, even if we could reconstruct them and find a common lowest denominator among their diversities. Nor can we simply divest ourselves of our individuality or the lessons we have learned from history. Asking us to interpret Hamlet only in terms of what the very hypothetical views of Shakespeare or his audience were is asking us to forget three hundred years of history. It prohibits us to use the insights of a Goethe or Coleridge, it impoverishes a work which has attracted and accumulated meanings in the course of history. But again this history itself, however instructive, cannot be binding on us: its authority is open to the same objections as the authority of the author’s contemporaries. There is simply no way of avoiding judgment by us, by myself. Even the ‘verdict of the ages’ is only the accumulated judgment of other readers, critics, viewers, and even professors. The only truthful and right thing to do is to make this judgment as objective as possible, to do what every scientist and scholar does: to isolate his object, in our case, the literary work of art, to contemplate it intently, to analyse, to interpret, and finally to evaluate it by criteria derived from, verified by, buttressed by, as wide a knowledge, as close an observation, as keen a sensibility, as honest a judgment as we can command.
The old absolutism is untenable: the assumption of one eternal, narrowly defined standard had to be abandoned under ibe impact ol our experience of the wide variety of art, but on the other hand, complete relativism is equally
Wellek Literary theory, criticism, and history
untenable; it leads to paralysing scepticism, to an anarchy of values, to the acceptance of the old vicious maxim: de gestibus non est disputandum. [‘there is no arguing about tastes’]. The kind of period relativism recommended as a solution by Auerbach is no way out: it would split up the concept of art and poetry into innumerable fragments. Relativism in the sense of a denial of all objectivity is refuted by many arguments: by the parallel to ethics and science, by recognition that there are aesthetic as well as ethical imperatives and scientific truths. Our whole society is based on the assumption that we know what is just, and our science on the assumption that we know what is true. Our teaching of literature is actually also based on aesthetic imperatives, even if we feel less definitely bound by them and seem much more hesitant to bring these assumptions out into the open. The disaster of the ‘humanities’ as far as they are concerned with the arts and literature is due to their timidity in making the very same claims which are made in regard to law and truth. Actually we do make these claims when we teach Hamlet or Paradise Lost rather than Grace Metalious or, to name contemporaries of Shakespeare and Milton, Henry Glapthorne or Richard Blackmore. But we do so shamefully, apologetically, hesitatingly. There is, contrary to frequent assertions, a very wide agreement on the great classics: the main canon of literature. There is an insuperable gulf between really great art and very bad art: between say ‘Lycidas’ and a poem on the leading page of the New York Times, between Tolstoy’s Master and Man and a story in True Confessions. Relativists always shirk the issue of thoroughly bad poetry. They like to move in the region of near-great art, where disputes among critics are most frequent, as works are valued for very different reasons. The more complex a work of art, the more diverse the structure of values it embodies, and hence the more difficult its interpretation, the greater the danger of ignoring one or the other aspect. But this does not mean that all interpretations are equally right, that there is no possibility of differentiating between them. There are utterly fantastic interpretations, partial, distorted interpretations. We may argue about Bradley’s or Dover Wilson’s or even Ernest Jones’ interpretation of Hamlet: but we know that Hamlet was no woman in disguise. The concept of adequacy of interpretation leads clearly to the concept of the correctness of judgment. Evaluation grows out of understanding; correct evaluation out of correct understanding. There is a hierarchy of viewpoints implied in the very concept of adequacy of interpretation. Just as there is correct interpretation, at least as an ideal, so there is correct judgment, good judgment. Auerbach’s relativistic argument that nowadays we enjoy the art of all ages and peoples: neolithic cave-paintings, Chinese landscapes, Negro masks, Gregorian chants, etc., should and can be turned against the relativists. It shows that there is a common feature in all art which we recognize today more clearly than in earlier ages. There is a common humanity which makes every art remote in time and place, and originally serving functions quite different from aesthetic contemplation, accessible and enjoyable to us. We have risen above the limitations of tradition Western taste—the parochialism and relativism of such taste—into a realm if not of absolute then of universal art. There is such a realm, and the various historical
Wellek Literary theory, criticism, and history
manifestations are often far less historically limited in character than is assumed by historians interested mainly in making art serve a temporary social purpose and illuminate social history. Some Chinese or ancient Greek love lyrics on basic simple themes are hardly dateable in space or time except for their language. Even Auerbach, in spite of his radical relativism, has to admit ‘some understanding of what is common to all of these phenomena’ and grants that we do not adopt relativism when our political (that is ethical, vital) interests are at stake. Logic, ethics and, I believe, aesthetics cry aloud against a complete historicism which, one should emphasize, in men such as Auerbach, is still shored up by an inherited ideal of humanism and buttressed methodologically by an unconsciously held conceptual framework of grammatical, stylistic and geistesgeschichtlich [history-of-ideas] categories. In such radical versions as, e.g. George Boas’ A Primer for Critics , 20 Bernard Heyl’s New Bearings in Esthetics and Art Criticism , 21 or Wayne Shumaker’s Elements of Critical Theory , 22 the theory leads to a dehumanization of the arts, to a paralysis of criticism, to a surrender of our primary concern for truth. The only way out is a carefully defined and refined absolutism, a recognition that ‘the Absolute is in the relative, though not finally and fully in it’. This was the formula of Ernst Troeltsch, who struggled more than any other historian with the problem of historicism and came to the conclusion that ‘historicism’ must be superseded . 23
We must return to the task of building a literary theory, a system of principles, a theory of values which will necessarily draw on the criticism of concrete works of art and will constantly invoke the assistance of literary history. But the three disciplines are and will remain distinct: history cannot absorb or replace theory, while theory should not even dream of absorbing history. Andre Malraux has spoken eloquently of the imaginary museum, the museum without walls, drawing on a world-wide acquaintance with the plastic arts. Surely in literature we are confronted with the same task as that of the art critic, or at least an analogous task: we can more directly and easily assemble our museum in a library but we are still faced with the walls and barriers of languages and historical forms of languages. Much of our work aims at breaking down these barriers, at demolishing these walls by translations, philological study, editing, comparative literature, or simply imaginative sympathy. Ultimately literature, like the plastic arts, like Malraux’s voices of silence, is a chorus of voices articulate throughout the ages—which asserts man’s defiance of time and destiny, his victory over impermanence, relativity, and history.
Notes
1. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York, 1949).
2. I have used the term thus widely in my History of Modern Criticism (New Haven 1955 ).
3 . Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift, xviii, 1930, 1-15, reprinted in Kleine Schriften zur Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte (Heidelberg, 1957), PP- 9-24.
4. Princeton, 1957.
5 - In his very generous review, Mr Frye apparently wished I had done so, cf. Virginia Quarterly, xxxii, 1956, 310-15.
Wellek Literary theory, criticism, and history
6. Cleanth Brooks, Jr. and R. P. Warren, Understanding Poetry; an Anthology for College Students (New York, 1938).
7. ‘Literary Criticism’, in English Institute Essays, 1946 (New York, 1947), pp. 127-58.
8. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago, 1947); A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago, 1952); Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton (Cambridge, Mass., 1957).
9. In William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, 1930), pp. 286 ff.
10. Kenyon Review, xii, 1950, 735-8.
11. Ibid., xx, 1958, 554-91.
12. Carlyle, Works, Centenary edn. (London, 1898-9), Essays, iii, 54-6; Past and Present, p. 46.
13. Romanische Forschungen, Ixii, 1956, 387-97.
14. Bern, 1958.
15. Studia philologica ct letter aria in honor em L. Spitzer, ed. A. G. Hatcher and K. L. Selig (Bern, 1958), pp. 31-7.
16. Bonn, 1929, Eng. trans. London, 1936.
17. Historical Inevitability (Oxford, 1954), p. 61.
18. A. O. Love joy, ‘Present standpoints and past history’, Journal of Philosophy, xxxvi, 1939. 477-89-
19. History in a Changing World (Norman, Oklahoma, 1956), p. 22.
20. Baltimore, 1937 (renamed Wingless Pegasus: A Handbook for Critics, Baltimore, 1950).
21. New Haven, 1943.
22. Berkeley, 1952.
23. Cf. ‘Historiography’ in Hastings’ Encylopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vi (Edinburgh, 1913), 722.
At the end of his book The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), from which the following extract is taken, Wayne Booth (b. 1921) sums up his position thus:
Nothing the writer does can be finally understood in isolation from his effort to make it all accessible to someone else—his peers, himself as imagined reader, his audience. The novel comes into existence as something communicable, and the means of communication are not shameful intrusions unless they are made with shameful ineptitude.
In other words, the art of fiction is essentially persuasive or rhetorical— rhetorical in Booth’s terms being a matter not only of verbal style but also of broader narrative strategies, especially the choice and manipulation of ‘point of view. And if this is granted, it follows that there is no inherent virtue in suppressing the rhetorical possibilities of the novel form, and no inherent wickedness in exploiting them.
In this way Wayne Booth challenged a certain body of critical opinion which, deriving from the precept and practice of Flaubert, James, and other modern masters of fiction, had hardened into a kind of orthodoxy by the ’forties and fifties of this century; an orthodoxy that not only prescribed impersonal, indirect narration for modern fiction, but retrospectively condemned such novelists as Dickens and George Eliot for their authorial omniscience and intrusiveness. Part of Booth’s argument is that absolute ‘objectivity’ in literature is unattainable, and that the literary qualities that we may legitimately denote by the word are not necessarily to be associated with any particular narrative technique. This is the area explored in the following extract which, under the title, General Rules II: “All Authors Should Be Objective’”, constitutes Chapter iii of The Rhetoric of Fiction.
It is arguable that in the course of his book, Professor Booth evinces a prejudice (against the ironic and ambiguous qualities of modern fiction) as extreme and unnecessary as the one he himself exposes. Without doubt, however, he has made all readers more aware of the complex varieties of
narrative technique and greatly extended the available terms for describing them.
Wayne Booth was Professor of English at Earlham College, Indiana, when he published The Rhetoric of Fiction, but has since returned to the University of Chicago, where he himself was educated. The Rhetoric of Fiction is dedicated to R. S. Crane, leader of the Chicago Aristotelian school of criticism (see below, pp. 592-3) to which Booth is clearly indebted.
564
Booth [‘Objectivity ' in fiction]
cross references : 4. Henry James
11. E. M. Forster 29. Mark Schorer 34. Alain Robbe-Grillet
commentary : David Lodge, "The rhetoric of Wayne Booth’,
Critical Survey, iii (1966), 4-6
Wayne Booth, T he Rhetoric of Fiction and the Poetics of Fictions’, Novel, i (1968), 105-17
[‘Objectivity’ in fiction]
‘A novelist’s characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.’ Trollope
The less one feels a thing, the more likely one is to express it as it really is.’ Flaubert
‘An ecstatically happy prose writer ... can’t be moderate or temperate or brief. ... He can’t be detached.... In the wake of anything as large ana consuming as happiness, he necessarily forfeits the much smaller but, for a writer, always ratner exquisite pleasure of appearing on the page serenely sitting on a fence.’ The narrator of J. D. Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction
‘M. de Maupassant is remarkably objective and impersonal, but he would go too far if he were to entertain the belief that he has kept himself out of his books. They speak of him eloquently, even if it only be to tell us how easy ... he has found this impersonality.’ Henry James
‘Now you are, through Maury, expressing your views, of course; but you would do so differently if you were deliberately stating them as your views.’ Maxwell Perkins, in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
A surprising number of writers, even those who have thought of their writing as ‘self-expression’, have sought a freedom from the tyranny of subjectivity, echoing Goethe’s claim that ‘Every healthy effort ... is directed from the inward to the outward world’. 1 From time to time others have risen to defend commitment, engagement, involvement. But, at least until recently, the predominant demand in this century has been for some sort of objectivity.
Like all such terms, however, objectivity is many things. Underlying it and its many synonyms—impersonality, detachment, disinterestedness, neutrality, etc.—we can distinguish at least three separate qualities: neutrality, impartiality, and impassibility .
Booth ['Objectivity ’ in fiction]
Neutrality and the author’s ‘second self’
Objectivity in the author can mean, first, an attitude of neutrality towards all values, an attempt at disinterested reporting of all things good and evil. Like many literary enthusiasms, the passion for neutrality was imported into fiction from the other arts relatively late. Keats was saying in 1818 the kind of thing that novelists began to say only with Flaubert.
The poetical character ... has no character— It lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does not harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. 2
Three decades later Flaubert recommended a similar neutrality to the novelist uho would be a poet. For him the model is the attitude of the scientist. Once we have spent enough time, he says, in ‘treating the human soul with the impartiality which physical scientists show in studying matter, we will have taken an immense step forward’. 3 Art must achieve ‘by a pitiless method, the precision of the physical sciences’. 4
It should be unnecessary here to show that no author can ever attain to this kind of oojectivity. Most of us today would, like Sartre, renounce the analogy with science even if we could admit that science is objective in this sense. What is more, we all know by now that a careful reading of any statement in defence of the artist’s neutrality will reveal commitment; there is always some deeper value in relation to which neutrality is taken to be good. Chekhov, for example, begins bravely enough in defence of neutrality, but he cannot write three sentences without committing himself.
I am afraid of those who look for a tendency between the lines, and who are determined to regard me either as a liberal or as a conservative. I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk, not an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more.... I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for
writers, or for the younger generation. I regard trade-marks and labels as a superstition. 5
Freedom and art are good, then, and superstition bad? Soon he is carried away to a direct repudiation of the plea for ‘indifference’ with which he began. ‘My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom—freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may take’ (p. 63). Again and again he betrays in this way the most passionate kind of commitment to what he often calls objectivity.
The artist should be, not the judge of his characters and their conversations, but only an unbiased witness. I once overheard a desultory conversation about pessimism between two Russians; nothing was solved,—and my business is to report the conversation exactly as I heard it, and let the jury,—that is, the readers, estimate its value. My business is merely to be talented, i.e., to be able ... to illuminate the characters and speak their language (pp. 58-9).
Booth [‘Objectivity’ in fiction]
But ‘illuminate' according to what lights? ‘A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dung-heaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones' (pp. 275-6). We have learned by now to ask of such statements : Is it good to be faithful to what is ‘inherent'? Is it good to include every part of the ‘landscape’? If so, why? According to what scale of values? To repudiate one scale is necessarily to imply another.
It would be a serious mistake, however, to dismiss talk about the author's neutrality simply because of this elementary and understandable confusion between neutrality towards some values and neutrality towards all. Cleansed of the polemical excesses, the attack on subjectivity can be seen to rest on several important insights.
To succeed in writing some kinds of works, some novelists find it necessary to repudiate all intellectual or political causes. Chekhov does not want himself, as artist, to be either liberal or conservative. Flaubert, writing in 1853, claims that even the artist who recognizes the demand to be a ‘triple-thinker', even the artist who recognizes the need for ideas in abundance, ‘must have neither religion, nor country, nor social conviction’. 6
Unlike the claim to complete neutrality, this claim will never be refuted, and it will not suffer from shifts in literary theory or philosophical fashion. Like its opposite, the existentialist claim of Sartre and others that the artist should be totally engage, its validity depends on the kind of novel the author is writing. Some great artists have been committed to the causes of their times, and some have not. Some works seem to be harmed by their burden of commitment (many of Sartre’s own works, for example, in spite of their freedom from authorial comment) and some seem to be able to absorb a great deal of commitment ( The Divine Comedy, Four Quartets, Gulliver’s Travels, [Arthur Koestler’s] Darkness at Noon, [Ignazio Silone’s] Bread and Wine). One can always find examples to prove either side of the case; the test is whether the particular ends of the artist enable him to do something with his commitment, not whether he has it or not.
Everyone is against everyone else’s prejudices and in favour of his own commitment to the truth. All of us would like the novelist somehow to operate on the level of our own passion for truth and right, a passion which by definition is not in the least prejudiced. The argument in favour of neutrality is thus useful in so far as it warns the novelist that he can seldom afford to pour his untransformed biases into his work. The deeper he sees into permanency, the more likely he is to earn the discerning reader's concurrence. The author as he writes should be like the ideal reader described by Hume in ‘The Standard of Taste', who, in order to reduce the distortions produced by prejudice, considers himself as ‘man in general' and forgets, if possible, his ‘individual being’ and his ‘peculiar circumstances'.
To put it in this way, however, is to understate the importance of the author's individuality. As he writes, he creates not simply an ideal, impersonal ‘man in general' but an implied version of ‘himself’ that is different from the implied authors we meet in other men’s works. To some novelists it has seemed, indeed,
Booth ['Objectivity' in fiction]
that they were discovering or creating themselves as they wrote. As Jessamyn West says, it is sometimes ‘only by writing the story that the novelist can discover—not his story—but its writer, the official scribe, so to speak, for that narrative '. 7 Whether we call this implied author an ‘official scribe', or adopt the term recently revived by Kathleen Tillotson—the author's ‘second self’ 8 — it is clear that the picture the reader gets of this presence is one of the author’s most important effects. However impersonal he may try to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner— and of course that official scribe will never be neutral towards all values. Our reactions to his various commitments, secret or overt, will help to determine our response to the work. The reader's role in this relationship I must save for chapter v. Our present problem is the intricate relationship of the so-called real author with his various official versions of himself.
We must say various versions, for regardless of how sincere an author may try to be, his different works will imply different versions, different ideal combinations of norms. Just as one’s personal letters imply different versions of oneself, depending on the differing relationships with each correspondent and the purpose of each letter, so the writer sets himself out with a different air depending on the needs of particular works.
These differences are most evident when the second self is given an overt, speaking role in the story. When Fielding comments, he gives us explicit evidence of a modifying process from work to work; no single version of Fielding emerges from reading the satirical Jonathan Wild, the two great ‘comic epics in prose', Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, and that troublesome hybrid, Amelia. There are many similarities among them, of course; all of the implied authors value benevolence and generosity; all of them deplore self-seeking brutality. In these and many other respects they are indistinguishable from most implied authors of most significant works until our own century. But when we descend from this level of generality to look at the particular ordering of values in each novel, we find great variety. The author of Jonathan Wild is by implication very much concerned with public affairs and with the effects of unchecked ambition on the ‘great men’ who attain to power in the world. If we had only this novel by Fielding, we would infer from it that in his real life he was much more single-mindedly engrossed in his role as magistrate and reformer of public manners than is suggested by the implied author of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones —to say nothing of Shamela (what would we infer about Fielding if he had never written anything but Shamela l). On the other hand, the author who greets us on page one of Amelia has none of that air of facetiousness combined with grand insouciance that we meet from the begiri-ning in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. Suppose that Fielding had never written anything but Amelia, filled as it is with the kind of commentary we find at the beginning:
The various accidents which befell a very worthy couple after their uniting in the state of matrimony will be the subject of the following history. The distresses which they waded through were some of them so exquisite, and the incidents which produced these so extraordinary, that they seemed to
Booth ['Objectivity' in fiction]
require not only the utmost malice, but the utmost invention, which superstition hath ever attributed to Fortune: though whether any such being interfered in the case, or, indeed, whether there be any such being in the universe, is a matter which I by no means presume to determine in the affirmative.
Could we ever infer from this the Fielding of the earlier works? Though the author of Amelia can still indulge in occasional jests and ironies, his general air of sententious solemnity is strictly in keeping with the very special effects proper to the work as a whole. Our picture of him is built, of course, only partly by the narrator's explicit commentary; it is even more derived from the kind of tale he chooses to tell. But the commentary makes explicit for us a relationship which is present in all fiction, but which, in fiction without commentary, may be overlooked.
It is a curious fact that we have no terms either for this created 'second self or for our relationship with him. None of our terms for various aspects of the narrator is quite accurate. ‘Persona’, ‘mask’, and ‘narrator’ are sometimes used, but they more commonly refer to the speaker in the work who is after all only one of the elements created by the implied author and who may be separated from him by large ironies. ‘Narrator’ is usually taken to mean the T of a work, but the ‘I’ is seldom if ever identical with the implied image of the artist.
‘Theme’, ‘meaning’, ‘symbolic significance’, ‘theology’, or even ‘ontology’ all these have been used to describe the norms which the reader must apprehend in each work if he is to grasp it adequately. Such terms are useful for some purposes, but they can be misleading because they almost inevitably come to seem like purposes for which the works exist. Though the old-style effort to find the theme or moral has been generally repudiated, the new-style search for the ‘meaning’ which the work ‘communicates’ or ‘symbolizes’ can yield the same kinds of misreading. It is true that both types of search, however clumsily pursued, express a basic need: the reader’s need to know where, in the world of values, he stands—that is, to know where the author wants him to stand. But most works worth reading have so many possible ‘themes’, so many possible mythological or metaphorical or symbolic analogues, that to find any one of them, and to announce it as what the work is for, is to do at best a very small part of the critical task. Our sense of the implied author includes not only the extractable meanings but also the moral and emotional content of each bit of action and suffering of all of the characters. It includes, in short, the intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole; the chief value to which this implied author is committed, regardless of what party his creator belongs to in real life, is that which is expressed by the total form.
Three other terms are sometimes used to name the core of norms and choices which I am calling the implied author. ‘Style’ is sometimes broadly used to cover whatever it is that gives us a sense, from word to word and line to line, that the author sees more deeply and judges more profoundly than his presented characters. But, though style is one of our main sources of insight into the author’s norms, in carrying such strong overtones of the merely verbal the word style excludes our sense of the author’s skill in his choice of character and
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episode and scene and idea. Tone’ is similarly used to refer to the implicit evaluation which the author manages to convey behind his explicit presentation, 9 but it almost inevitably suggests again something limited to the merely verbal; some aspects of the implied author may be inferred through tonal variations, but his major qualities will depend also on the hard facts of action and character in the tale that is told.
Similarly, ‘technique’ has at times been expanded to cover all discernible signs of the author’s artistry. If everyone used ‘technique’ as Mark Schorer does, 10 covering with it almost the entire range of choices made by the author, then it might very well serve our purposes. But it is usually taken for a much narrower matter, and consequently it will not do. We can be satisfied only with a term that is as broad as the work itself but still capable of calling attention to that work as the product of a choosing, evaluating person rather than as a self-existing thing. The ‘implied author’ chooses, consciously or unconsciously, what we read; we infer him as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man; he is the sum of his own choices.
It is only by distinguishing between the author and his implied image that we can avoid pointless and unverifiable talk about such qualities as ‘sincerity’ or ‘seriousness’ in the author. Because Ford Madox Ford thinks of Fielding and Defoe and Thackeray as the unmediated authors of their novels, he must end by condemning them as insincere, since there is every reason to believe that they write ‘passages of virtuous aspirations that were in no way any aspirations of theirs’. 11 Presumably he is relying on external evidences of Fielding’s lack of virtuous aspirations. But we have only the work as evidence for the only kind of sincerity that concerns us: Is the implied author in harmony with himself—that is, are his other choices in harmony with his explicit narrative character? If a narrator who by every trustworthy sign is presented to us as a reliable spokesman for the author professes to believe in values which are never realized in the structure as a whole, we can then talk of an insincere work. A great work establishes the ‘sincerity’ of its implied author, regardless of how grossly the man who created that author may belie in his other forms of conduct the values embodied in his work. For all we know, the only sincere moments of his life may have been lived as he wrote his novel.
What is more, in this distinction between author and implied author we find a middle position between the technical irrelevance of talk about the artist’s objectivity and the harmful error of pretending that an author can allow direct intrusions of his own immediate problems and desires. The great defenders of objectivity were working on an important matter and they knew it. Flaubert is right in saying that Shakespeare does not barge clumsily into his works. We are never plagued with his undigested personal problems. Flaubert is also right in rebuking Louise Colet for writing ‘La Servante’ as a personal attack on Musset, with the personal passion destroying the aesthetic value of the poem (9-10 January 1854). And he is surely right when he forces the hero of the youthful version of The Sentimental Education (1845) to choose between the merely confessional statement and the truly rendered work of art.
But is he right when he claims that we do not know what Shakespeare loved
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or hated? 12 Perhaps—if he means only that we cannot easily tell from the plays whether the man Shakespeare preferred blondes to brunettes or whether he disliked bastards, Jews, or Moors. But the statement is most definitely mistaken if it means that the implied author of Shakespeare’s plays is neutral towards all values. We do know what this Shakespeare loved and hated; it is hard to see how he could have written his plays at all if he had refused to take a strong line on at least one or two of the seven deadly sins. I return in chapter v to the question of beliefs in literature, and I try there to list a few of the values to which Shakespeare is definitely and obviously committed. They are for the most part not personal, idiosyncratic; Shakespeare is thus not recognizably subjective. But they are unmistakable violations of true neutrality; the implied Shakespeare is thoroughly engaged with life, and he does not conceal his judgment on the selfish, the foolish, and the cruel.
Even if all this were denied, it is difficult to see why there should be any necessary connection between neutrality and an absence of commentary. An author might very well use comments to warn the reader against judging. But if I am right in claiming that neutrality is impossible, even the most nearly neutral comment will reveal some sort of commitment.
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.
This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man’s life, detail is always welcome. 13
Nabokov may here have purged his narrator’s voice of all commitments save one, but that one is all-powerful: he believes in the ironic interest—and as it later turns out, the poignancy—of a man’s fated self-destruction. Maintaining the same detached tone, this author can intrude whenever he pleases without violating our conviction that he is as objective as it is humanly possible to be. Describing the villain, he can call him both a ‘dangerous man’ and ‘a very fine artist indeed’ without reducing our confidence in his open-mindedness. But he is not neutral towards all values, and he does not pretend to be.
Impartiality and ‘unfair’ emphasis
The author’s objectivity has also sometimes meant an attitude of impartiality towards his characters. Much of what Flaubert and Chekhov wrote about objectivity is really a plea to the artist not to load the dice, not to take sides unjustly against or for particular characters. Chekhov writes to a friend, ‘I do not 1 venture to ask you to love the gynaecologist and the professor, but I venture to remind you of the justice which for an objective writer is more precious than the air he breathes’ (Letters on the Short Story, p. 78). Sometimes this impartiality is made to sound like universal love or pity or toleration: There is no
one to blame, and should the guilt be traceable, that is the affair of the health
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officers and not of the artist She [your character] may act in any way she
pleases, but the author should be kindly to the fingertips' (pp. 81, 82). Indeed, a very great deal of modern fiction has been written on the assumption, itself a basic commitment to a value, that to understand all is to forgive all. But this assumption is very different from the neutrality described in the first section. Writers who are successful in getting their readers to reserve judgment are not impartial about whether judgment should be reserved. As H. W. Leggett said, almost three decades ago, in a forgotten little classic on the role of what he calls the author's and reader’s ‘code', modern fiction often presents occasions to the reader to ‘observe and refrain from judging ... and a part at least of the reader's satisfaction is due to his consciousness of his own broadmindedness'. 14
In practice, no author ever manages to create a work which shows complete impartiality, whether impartial scorn, like Flaubert in Bouvard et Pecuchet attempting to ‘attack everything’, or impartial forgiveness. Flaubert could sometimes write as if he thought Shakespeare and the Greeks were impartial in a sense they would have been astonished by. ‘The magnificent William sides with no one', and he refused to ‘declaim against usury' in T he Merchant of Venice . 15 But Shakespeare never pretends that Goneril and Regan stand equal with Cordelia before the bar of justice, even though they are judged by the same standard. And in The Merchant of Venice he is so far from impartiality that he can really be accused of employing a double standard at Shylock’s expense, at least in the latter part of the play. Certainly he does not work according to any abstract notion of impartial treatment for all characters. Similarly, the Greek dramatists never pretended that there was no basic distinction between men like Oedipus and Orestes on the one hand, and the fools and knaves on the other. Though they did not deal in ‘blacks and whites', as the popular attack on melodrama goes, they did not reduce all human worth to a grey blur.
Even among characters of equal moral, intellectual, or aesthetic worth, all authors inevitably take sides. A given work will be ‘about’ a character or set of characters. It cannot possibly give equal emphasis to all, regardless of what its author believes about the desirability of fairness. Hamlet is not fair to Claudius. No matter how hard G. Wilson Knight labours to convince us that we have misjudged Claudius, 16 and no matter how willing we are to admit that Claudius' story is potentially as interesting as Hamlet's, this is Hamlet's story, and it cannot do justice to the king. Othello is not fair to Cassio; King Lear is not just to the Duke of Cornwall; Madame Bovary is unfair to almost everyone but Emma; and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man positively maligns everyone but Stephen.
But who cares? The novelist who chooses to tell this story cannot at the same time tell that story; in centring our interest, sympathy, or affection on one character, he inevitably excludes from our interest, sympathy, or affection some other character. Art imitates life in this respect as in so many others; just as in real life I am inevitably unfair to everyone but myself or, at best, my immediate loved ones, so in literature complete impartiality is impossible. Is Ulysses fair to the bourgeois Irish characters that throng about Bloom and Stephen and Molly? We can thank our stars that it is not.
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It is true, nevertheless, that some works are marred by an impression that the author has weighed his characters on dishonest scales. But this impression depends not on whether the author explicitly passes judgment but on whether the judgment he passes seems defensible in the light of the dramatized facts. A clear illustration can be seen in Lady Chatterlcy’s Lover. Lawrence can talk as passionately as the next man about the dangers of partiality: ‘Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.
The modern novel tends to become more and more immoral, as the novelist tends to press his thumb heavier and heavier in the pan: either on the side of love, pure love: or on the side of licentious “freedom ”.’ 17 What he hates, he tells us again and again, is the novel that is merely a ‘treatise’. Though he is more aware than many have been that every novel implies ‘some theory of being, some metaphysic’, he demands that ‘the metaphysic must always subserve the artistic purpose beyond the artist’s conscious aim ’. 18
Though critics of Lady Chatterley’s Lover are agreed on little else, they seem to agree that the novelist has in this work pressed his thumb very heavily indeed in the pan containing his prophetic vision of a love that is neither ‘love, pure love’ nor ‘licentious freedom’, a love that can save us from the destructive forces of civilization. Critics who approve of the position praise the book— but in terms that make clear its courageous exposition of the truth. Critics who think the thesis exaggerated or false may admit to Lawrence’s gift but deplore the injustices he commits in defence of his lovers. But everyone seems to deal with the book in terms of its thesis . 19 Even the critics who feel, with Mark Schorer, that Lawrence managed to make ‘the preacher’ and ‘the poet’ coincide ‘formally’ cannot discuss the book without spending most of their energies on the preachments . 20
Significantly enough the question of Lawrence’s impartiality seems completely unrelated to his choice of technical devices. Whether we accept or reject Lawrence’s vision of a new salvation, our decision is not based on whether he uses this or that form of authorial preachment; objections against Lawrence’s bias have more often dealt with his portrayal of Mellors, the gamekeeper, than with the fact that he allows authorial commentary of various kinds. When Mellors presents at great length his belief that ‘if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly everything would come all right’ (chap, xiv), the panacea may strike us as inadequate to the point of comedy or as an inspiring portrait of a brave new world acomin’, but we will receive little help in our choice by asking whether the beliefs are given in dramatic form. Those of us who reject this side of the book do so finally on the grounds that what Mellors says implies for us a version of D. H. Lawrence that we cannot admire; there is an unbridgeable disparity between the implied author’s proffered salvation and our own views . 21
What we object to, then, is the Lawrence implied by some of the drama, not necessarily the Lawrence given in the commentary. The little disquisition in chapter nine on the powers and limitations of fiction, which a critic has
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deplored as evidence of ‘unsteadiness of control in points of view\ 2 “ really shows Lawrence in very attractive form. Since we recognize the validity of the author’s attack on the conventional fiction that appeals only to the vices of the public, the fiction that is humiliating because it glorifies the most corrupt feelings under the guise of ‘purity’, we grant to the author the superiority of his effort to use the novel to ‘reveal the most secret places of life’. Lawrence’s essential integrity seems to us beyond question after such a passage—at least until we encounter another long-winded outburst by Mellors.
In short, whatever unfairness there is in this book lies at the core of the novel; so long as Lawrence is determined to damn everyone who does not follow Mellors’ way, to labour for surface impartiality would be pointless. If we finish the book with a sense of embarrassment at its special pleading, if we read Mellors’ final pseudobiblical talk of ‘the peace that comes of fucking’ and of his ‘Pentecost, the forked flame between me and you’, with regrets rather than conviction, it is ultimately because no literary technique can conceal from us the confused and pretentious little author who is implied in too many parts of the book. Even our memory of the very different author implied by the better novels—W omen in Love, say—is not enough to redeem the bad portions of this one.
'Impassibilite
The author’s objectivity can mean, finally, what Flaubert called impassibilite, an unmoved or unimpassioned feeling towards the characters and events of one’s story. Although Flaubert did not maintain the distinction clearly, this quality is distinct from neutrality of judgment about values; an author could be committed to one or another value and still not feel with or against any of his characters. At the same time, it is clearly distinct from impartiality, since the artist could feel a lively hate or love or pity for all of his characters impartially. There seems to be a genuine temperamental difference among authors in the amount of detachment of this kind they find congenial* 3 —somewhat like the difference between actors who ‘feel’ their roles and actors like the heroine of Somerset Maugham’s Theatre, who finds that as soon as she feels a role her power to perform effectively is destroyed. Trollope in his Autobiography describes himself as wandering alone in the woods, crying at the grief of his characters and ‘laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying their joy’. It was perhaps natural that authors like Flaubert should have reacted to a similarly impassioned approach in some of the French romantics by pretending to an equally impassioned rejection of passion.
But this hardly suggests that there is any natural connection between the author’s impassibilite and any one kind of rhetoric or any particular level of achievement. Authors at either extreme of the scale of emotional involvement might write works which were full of highly personal commentary, stories that were altogether ‘told’, or works that were strictly dramatic, strictly ‘shown’.
One sign that there is no connection between the author’s feelings and any
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necessary technique or achieved quality of his work is the fact that we can never securely infer, without external evidence, whether an author has felt his work or written with cold detachment. Did Fielding hate Jonathan Wild or weep for Amelia? Was he personally amused when Parson Adams, on his way to London to sell sermons which Fielding and the reader know to be unmarketable, discovers that he has left them at home?
Saintsbury praised Fielding for his ‘detachment' in Jonathan Wild, presumably because the narrator is maintained throughout as a character who differs obviously and markedly from any real Fielding we could possibly imagine. But is there any reason to suppose that Fielding was less detached from his materials when dealing with the lovable fool Adams than when portraying Wild? We too easily fall into the habit of talking as if the narrator who says, 'O my good readers!' were Fielding, forgetting that for all we know he may have worked as deliberately and with as much detachment in creating the wise, urbane narrator of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones as he did in creating the cynical narrator of Jonathan Wild. What was said above about the relation between the author's own values and the values supported by his second self applies here in precisely the same sense. A great artist can create an implied author who is either detached or involved, depending on the needs of the work in hand.
We see, then, that none of the three major claims to objectivity in the author has any necessary bearing on technical decisions. Though it may be important at a given moment in the history of an art or in the development of a writer to stress the dangers of a misguided commitment, partiality, or emotional involvement, the tendency to connect the author’s objectivity with a required impersonality of technique is quite indefensible.
Subjectivism encouraged by impersonal techniques
Impersonal narration may, in fact, encourage the very subjectivism that it is supposed to cure. The effort to avoid signs of explicit evaluation can be peculiarly dangerous for the author who is fighting to keep himself out of his works. Although it is true that commentary can be a medium for meretricious subjective outpourings, the effort to construct such commentary can, in some authors, create precisely the right kind of wall between the author’s weaker self and the self he must create if his book is to succeed. The art of constructing reliable narrators is largely that of mastering all of oneself in order to project the persona, the second self, that really belongs in the book. And, in laying his cards on the table, an author can discover in himself, and at least then find some chance of combating, the two extremes of subjectivism that have marred some impersonal fiction.
Indiscriminate sympathy or compassion. By giving the impression that judgment is withheld, an author can hide from himself that he is sentimentally involved with his characters, and that he is asking for his reader's sympathies without providing adequate reasons. The older technique of reliable narration, as Q. D. Leavis says, forced the author and reader to remain somewhat distant from even the most sympathetic character. But she finds that often in the
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modem best seller ‘the author has poured his own day-dreams, hot and hot, into dramatic form, without bringing them to any such touchstone as the “good sense, but not common-sense” of a cultivated society: the author is himself—or more usually herself—identified with the leading character, and the reader is invited to share the debauch '. 24
Such sentimentality was of course possible in older forms of fiction. ‘Our hero' could often get away with murder, while his enemies were condemned for minor infractions of the moral code. But the modern author can reject the charge of sentimentality by saying, in effect, ‘Who, me? Not at all. It is the reader's fault if he feels any excessive or unjustified compassion. I didn't say a word. I'm as tight-lipped and unemotional as the next man.’ Such effects are most evident, perhaps, in the worst of the tough-guy school of detective fiction. Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer can, in effect, do no wrong—for those who can stomach him at all. But many of Spillane's readers would drop him immediately if he intruded to make explicit the vicious morality on which enjoyment of the books is based: ‘You may notice, reader, that when Mike Hammer beats up an Anglo-Saxon American he is less brutal than when he beats up a Jew, and that when he beats up a Negro he is most brutal of all. In this way our hero discriminates his punishment according to the racial worth of his victims.' It is wise of Spillane to avoid making such things explicit.
If, as Chekhov said, ‘Subjectivity is an awful thing—even for the reason that it betrays the poor writer hand over fist', we can now see that the kind of subjectivity he deplored is not by any means prevented by the standard devices of so-called objectivity. In what is perhaps a different sense of the word, we can see that even the most rigorously impersonal techniques can betray the poor writer hand over fist. Betrayal for betrayal, there is probably less danger for author and reader in a literature that lays its cards on the table, in a literature that betrays to the poor writer just how poor a thing he has created. Indiscriminate irony. We have no word like sentimentality to cover the opposite fault of the author who allows an all-pervasive, ‘unearned' irony to substitute for an honest discrimination among his materials. The fault is always hard to prove, but most of us have, I suspect, encountered novelists who people their novels with very short heroes because they themselves want to appear tall. The author who maintains his invulnerability by suggesting irony at all points but never holding himself responsible for definition of its limits can be as irresponsible as the writer of best sellers based on naive identification . 25
Henry James talks of Flaubert's ‘two refuges' from the need to look at humanity squarely. One was the exotic, as in Salammbo and The Temptation of Saint Anthony, the ‘getting away from the human' altogether. The other was irony, which enabled him to deal with the human without having to commit himself about it directly. But, James asks, ‘when all was said and done was he absolutely and exclusively condemned to irony?' Might he ‘not after all have fought out his case a little more on the spot?' Coming from James, this is a powerful question. One cannot help feeling, as one reads many of the ‘objective' yet corrosive portraits that have been given us since James, that the author is using irony to protect himself rather than to reveal his subject. If
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the author's characters reveal themselves as fools and knaves when we cast a cold eye upon them, how about the author himself? How would he look if his true opinions were served up cold? Or does he have no opinions?
Like the female novelist satirized by Randall Jarrell, these novelists can show us 'the price of every sin and the value of none'.
Her books were a systematic, detailed, and conclusive condemnation of mankind for being stupid and bad; yet if mankind had been clever and good, what would have become of Gertrude? ... When she met someone who was either good or clever, she looked at him in uneasy antagonism. Yet she need not have been afraid. Clever people always came to seem to her, after a time, bad; good people always came to seem to her, after a time, stupid. She was always able to fail the clever for being bad, the good for being stupid; and if somebody was both clever and good, Gertrude stopped grading. If a voice had said to her, 'Hast thou considered my servant Gottfried Rosenbaum, that there is none like him in Benton, a kind and clever man,' she would have answered; 'I can't stand that Gottfried Rosenbaum .' 26
Subjectivism of these two kinds can ruin a novel; the weaker the novel, on the whole, the more likely we are to be able to make simple and accurate inferences about the real author's problems based on our experience of the implied author. There is this much truth to the demand for objectivity in the author; signs of the real author's untransformed loves and hates are almost always fatal. But clear recognition of this truth cannot lead us to doctrines about technique, and it should not lead us to demand of the author that he eliminate love and hate, and the judgments on which they are based, from his novels. The emotions and judgments of the implied author are, as I hope to show, the very stuff out of which great fiction is made . 27
Notes
1. 'Conversations with Eckerman’, 29 January 1826, trans. John Oxenford, as reprinted in Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. Walter Jackson Bate (New York, 1952), p. 403.
2. Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman (New York, 1939), vii, 129.
3. Correspondence, (12 October 1853) (Paris, 1926-33), iii, 367-8. For some of the citations from Flaubert in what follows I am indebted to the excellent monograph by Marianne Bonwit, Gustave Flaubert et le principe d’impassibilite (Berkeley, Calif., 1950). My distinction among the three forms of objectivity in the author is derived in part from her discussion.
4. Ibid., (12 December 1857), iv, 243.
5. Letters on the Short Story, the Drama and other Literary Topics, selected and edited by Louis S. Friedland (New York, 1924), p. 63.
6. Corr. (26-27 April 1853), iii, 183: '... ne doit avoir ni religion, ni patrie, ni meme aucune conviction sociale...' [‘have neither religion nor fatherland nor any social conviction’].
7. ‘The slave cast out’, in The Living Novel, ed. Granville Hicks (New York, 1937), p. 202. Miss West continues: ‘Writing is a way of playing parts, of trying on masks, of assuming roles, not for fun but out of desperate need, not for the self’s sake but for the writing’s sake. "To make any work of art,” says Elizabeth Sewell, "is to make, or rather to unmake and remake one’s self.”'
8. In her inaugural lecture at the University of London, published as The Tale and the Teller (London, 1959). ‘Writing on George Eliot in 1877, Dowden said that the form
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that most persists in the mind after reading her novels is not any of the characters, but ‘‘one who, if not the real George Eliot, is that second self who writes her books, and lives and speaks through them". The “second self," he goes on, is “more substantial than any mere human personality” and has “fewer reserves": while “behind it, lurks well pleased the veritable historical self secure from impertinent observation and criticism" ’ (p. 22).
9. e.g., Fred B. Millett, Reading Fiction (New York, 1950): ‘This tone, the general feeling which suffuses and surrounds the work, arises ultimately out of the writer’s
attitude toward his subject The subject derives its meaning from the view of life
which the author has taken ' (p. 11).
10. ‘When we speak of technique, then, we speak of nearly everything. For technique is the means by which the writer’s experience, which is his subject matter, compels him to attend to it; technique is the only means he has of discovering, exploring, developing
his subject, of conveying its meaning, and finally of evaluating it Technique in
fiction is, of course, all those obvious forms of it which are usually taken to be the whole of it, and many others' (Technique as Discovery’, Hudson Review, i, Spring, 1948, 67-68). [See above, pp. 387-400].
11. The English Novel (London, 1930), p. 58. See Geoffrey Tillotson, Thackeray the Novelist (Cambridge, 1954), esp. chap, iv, ‘The Content of the Authorial “I”' (pp. 55-70), for a convincing argument that the ‘I’ of Thackeray’s works should be carefully distinguished from Thackeray himself.
12. ‘Qu’est qui me dira, en effet ce que Shakespeare a aime ce qu’il a hai, ce qu’il a senti?' (Corr., i, 386). [‘Who will tell me, in fact, what Shakespeare loved, what he hated and what he felt?’]
13. Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark (New York, 1938), p. 1.
14. W. Leggett, The Idea in Fiction (London, 1934), p. 16.
15. Corr. (2 November 1852), iii, 47; (9 December 1852), 60-2.
16. The Wheel of Fire (rev. edn.; London, 1949), pp. 32-8.
17. ‘Morality and the novel’ (1925), reprinted in Phoenix (London, 1936), pp. 528-9. [See above, pp. 127-31].
18. ‘Study of Thomas Hardy', in Phoenix (London, 1936), as quoted by Allott, Novelists on the Novel (New York, 1959), p. 104.
19. Stanley Kauffman, ‘“Lady Chatterley" at last', The New Republic, 25 May 1959, p. 16, Paul Lauter, Lady C. with Love and Money', The New Leader, 21 September 1959: ‘Lawrence refines the gamekeeper with each revision of the novel, perhaps to make him more acceptable to Connie (and to the reader) as a lover. His finish in the final version, however, is partly a concession to the very society to which he stands opposed. ... What
does make Mellors eligible for salvation? Why cannot Michaelis or Tommy Dukes then enter?' (p. 24).
20. See Schorer’s Introduction to the Grove Press reprint (New York, 1959), esp. pp. 21 ff.
21. See, for example, Colin Welch s attack on the book in ‘Black magic, white lies' Encounter, xvi, February 1961, 75-9: ‘What it preaches is this: that mankind can only be regenerated by freeing itself from the tyranny of the intellect and the soul, from the tyranny of Jesus Christ, and by prostrating itself before its own phallus ...’ (p. 79). Whether one accepts Welch’s charges or the defence of Lawrence by Rebecca West and Richard Hoggart in the following issue of Encounter, it is clear that what is in dispute is Lawrences success in winning us to accept his basic vision; no tinkering with the proportions of telling and showing will make much difference here.
22. Kauffmann, op. cit., p. 16.
23. See Chekhov, Letters, pp. 97-8.
24. Fiction and the Reading Public (London, 1932), p. 236. See also Roger Vailland, ‘La 01 du financier, [ Express (Paris), 12 July >957, pp. ,3, j 5 . Vailland found that he was ready to write de vrais romans’ only when he had ceased to be the hero of his own daydreams. Jen etais completement absent; je m’en suis brusquement apergu; preuve etait done faite que mon reve ne constituait pas un moyen detourne de me rapprocher de la bergere [the heroine of the daydream]’ (p. 14).
[ I was completely absent from it; I suddenly noticed it; the proof was thus given that my dream was not a roundabout way to bring me close to my shepherdess.’l
25. See May Sarton, ‘The shield of irony’. The Nation, 14 April 1956, pp. 314-16.
Booth ['Objectivity ' in fiction]
26. Pictures from an Institution (New York, 1954), P- 134*
27. Mauriac discusses this complex problem brilliantly in Le Romancier et ses personages (Paris, 1933), esp. pp. 142-3: “Derriere le roman le plus objectif, s’il s’agit d’une belle oeuvre, d’une grande oeuvre, se dissimule toujours ce drame vecu du romancier, cette lutte individuelle avec ses demons et avec ses sphinx. Mais peut-etre est-ce precisement la reussite du genie que rien de ce drame personnel ne se trahisse au dehors. Le mot fameux de Flaubert: “Mme Bovary, e’est moi-meme,” est tres comprehensible,—il faut seulement prendre le temps d’y reflechir, tant a premiere vue l’auteur d’un pareil livre y parait etre pen mele. C’est que Madame Bovary est un chef-d’oeuvre,—e'est-a-dire une oeuvre qui forme bloc et qui s’impose comme un tout, comme un monde separe de celui qui l’a cree. C'est dans la mesure ou notre oeuvre est imparfaite qu’a travers les fissures se trahit l’ame tourmente de son miserable auteur/
[‘Behind the most objective novel, if it is a work of beauty, a great work, is always concealed the lived drama of the novelist, that individual struggle with his demons and his sphinx. But perhaps it is precisely the achievement of the genius that nothing of this personal drama is overtly betrayed. The famous saying of Flaubert, “Madame Bovary is me” is very comprehensible—only one must take time to think about it, so little, at first sight, does the author of such a book seem to be involved in it. Madame Bovary is a masterpiece—that is to say, a work which forms a whole and imposes itself as a whole, as a world separate from that of its creator. It is to the extent that our work is imperfect that through its cracks is revealed the tormented soul of its miserable author.’]
Raymond Williams (b. 1921) was bom and brought up in the Welsh border country, where his father was a railway signalman. From Abergavenny Grammar School he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, and after service in World War II he became a tutor in adult education at Oxford University. In 1961 he was elected Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, where he is now University Reader in Drama. Raymond Williams has not concealed the fact that his personal experience of moving, via education, up through the English class system, has shaped his intellectual commitment to the idea of a common culture; and he has dealt with this experience directly in two novels, Border Country (i960) and Second Generation (1964). He has also been one of the leading theoreticians of the British New Left after World War II, editing May Day Manifesto in 1968. By his own account Marx and F. R. Leavis were the major intellectual influences upon Williams, and he has combined and modified them in a way which many postwar British literary intellectuals have found deeply appealing. Williams's insistence that all significant human activity is communal is clearly Marxist in derivation, but by seeking, in life and art, a reconciliation of the claims of the individual and society, rather than a subordination of one to another, he retains some of the values of liberal humanism. Like Leavis's, Williams's critical approach to literature assumes a close connection between art and life, and fans out into a general concern with the quality of both in modem industrial societies. Whereas Leavis and Scrutiny espoused an elitist concept of culture, however, and were invariably hostile and negative in dealing with the mass media, Williams has been more patiently objective in analysing such phenomena and more concerned to look for points of possible growth and benevolent change in contemporary culture. In this respect his work has often been linked with that of Richard Hoggart, author of The Uses of Literacy (1957) (see above, pp. 488-96.) In the Foreword to Culture and Society 2780-1950 (1958), Williams wrote: ‘We live in an expanding culture, yet we spend much of our energy regretting the fact, rather than seeking to understand its nature and conditions.' Williams sought that understanding in Culture and Society by.a historical analysis of the cultural debate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and more speculatively in The Long Revolution (1961). These books, which work on the frontiers of literature, sociology, history, and philosophy, are probably his best known works. He is also the author of Drama From Ibsen to Eliot
(2952), Modern Tragedy (1965) and The English Novel From Dickens to Lawrence (1970).
580
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‘Realism and the Contemporary English Novel’ is chapter 7 of The Long Revolution, and is reprinted here from the Pelican edition of 1965, to which Williams added the footnotes.
CROSS references: 7. Virgina Woolf
10. D. H. Lawrence 25. Erich Auerbach 35. Georg Lukacs 42. Wayne Booth
commentary : E. P. Thompson, The Long Revolution’, New Left
Review, May-June, pp. 24-33, July-August pp. 34-9 (1961)
Realism and the contemporary novel
The centenary of ‘realism’ as an English critical term occurred but was not celebrated in 1956. Its history, in this hundred years, has been so vast, so complicated, and so bitter that any celebration would in fact have turned into a brawl. Yet realism is not an object, to be identified, pinned down, and appropriated. It is, rather, a way of describing certain methods and attitudes, and the descriptions, quite naturally, have varied, in the ordinary exchange and development of experience. Recently, I have been reconsidering these descriptions, as a possible way of defining and generalizing certain personal observations on the methods and substance of contemporary fiction. I now propose to set down: first, the existing variations in ‘realism’ as a descriptive term; second, my own view of the ways in which the modern novel has developed; third, a possible new meaning of realism.
There has, from the beginning, been a simple technical use of ‘realism’, to describe the precision and vividness of a rendering in art of some observed detail. In fact, as we shall see, this apparently simple use involves all the later complexities, but it seemed, initially, sufficiently accurate to distinguish one technique from others: realism as opposed to idealization or caricature. But, also from the beginning, this technical sense was flanked by a reference to content: certain kinds of subject were seen as realism, again by contrast with different kinds. The most ordinary definition was in terms of an ordinary, contemporary, everyday reality, as opposed to traditionally heroic, romantic, or legendary subjects. In the period since the Renaissance, the advocacy and support of this ‘ordinary, everyday, contemporary reality’ have been normally associated with the rising middle class, the bourgeoisie. Such material was
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called ‘domestic’ and ‘bourgeois’ before it was called ‘realistic’, and the connections are clear. In literature the domestic drama and, above all, the novel, both developing in early eighteenth-century England with the rise of an independent middle class, have been the main vehicles of this new consciousness. Yet, when the ‘realist’ description arrived, a further development was taking place, both in content and in attitudes to it. A common adjective used with ‘realism’ was ‘startling’, and, within the mainstream of ‘ordinary, contemporary, everyday reality’ a particular current of attention to the unpleasant, the exposed, the sordid could be distinguished. Realism thus appeared as in part a revolt against the ordinary bourgeois view of the world; the realists were making a further selection of ordinary material which the majority of bourgeois artists preferred to ignore. Thus ‘realism’, as a watchword, passed over to the progressive and revolutionary movements.
This history is paralleled in the development of ‘naturalism’, which again had a simple technical sense, to describe a particular method of art, but which underwent the characteristic broadening to ‘ordinary, everyday reality’ and then, in particular relation to Zola, became the banner of a revolutionary school—what the Daily News in 1881 called ‘that unnecessarily faithful portrayal of offensive incidents’.
Thus, entwined with technical descriptions, there were in the nineteenth-century meanings doctrinal affiliations. The most positive was Strindberg’s definition of naturalism as the exclusion of God: naturalism as opposed to supernaturalism, according to the philosophical precedents. Already, however, before the end of the century, and with increasing clarity in our own, ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’ were separated: naturalism in art was reserved to the simple technical reference, while realism, though retaining elements of this, was used to describe subjects and attitudes to subjects.
The main twentieth-century development has been curious. In the West, alongside the received uses, a use of ‘realism’ in the sense of ‘fidelity to psychological reality’ has been widely evident, the point being made that we can be convinced of the reality of an experience, of its essential realism, by many different kinds of artistic method, and with no necessary restriction of subject-matter to the ordinary, the contemporary, and the everyday. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, the earlier definitions of realism have been maintained and extended, and the elements of ‘socialist realism', as defined, may enable us to see the tradition more clearly. There are four of these elements: narodnost, tipichnost, ideinost, and partiinost. Narodnost is in effect technical, though also an expression of spirit: the requirement of popular simplicity and traditional clarity, as opposed to the difficulties of ‘formalism’. Ideinost and partiinost refer to the ideological content and partisan affiliations of such realism, and just as narodnost is a restatement of an ordinary technical meaning of realism, so ideinost and partiinost are developments of the ideological and revolutionary attitudes already described. There is a perfectly simple sense in which ‘socialist realism’ can be distinguished from ‘bourgeois realism’, in relation to these changes in ideology and affiliation. Much Western popular literature is in fact ‘bourgeois realism’, with its own versions of ideinost and partiinost, and
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with its ordinary adherence to narodnost. It is in relation to the fourth element, tipichnost, that the problem broadens.
Engels defined 'realism’ as ‘typical characters in typical situations’, which would pass in a quite ordinary sense, but which in this case has behind it the body of Marxist thinking. Tipichnost is a development of this definition, which radically affects the whole question of realism. For the ‘typical’, Soviet theorists tell us, ‘must not be confused with that which is frequently encountered’; the truly typical is based on ‘comprehension of the laws and perspectives of future social development’. Without now considering the application of this, in the particular case of Soviet literature (the critical touchstone, here, is the excellence of Scholokhov, in Tikhii Don and Virgin Soil Upturned, as against the external pattern of Alexei Tolstoy’s Road to Calvary), we can see that the concept of tipichnost alters ‘realism’ from its sense of the direct reproduction of observed reality: ‘realism’ becomes, instead, a principled and organized selection. If ‘typical’ is understood as the most deeply characteristic human experience, in an individual or in a society (and clearly Marxists think of it as this, in relation to their own deepest beliefs), then it is clearly not far from the developed sense of the ‘convincingly real’ criterion, now commonplace in the West in relation to works of many kinds, both realist and non-realist in technique. And it is not our business to pick from the complex story the one use that we favour, the one true ‘realism’. Rather, we must receive the actual meanings, distinguish and clarify them, and see which, if any, may be useful in describing our actual responses to literature.
The major tradition of European fiction, in the nineteenth century, is commonly described as a tradition of ‘realism’, and it is equally assumed that, in the West at any rate, this particular tradition has ended. The realistic novel, it was said recently, went out with the hansom cab. Yet it is not at all easy, at first sight, to see what in practice this means. For clearly, in the overwhelming majority of modern novels, including those novels we continue to regard as literature, the ordinary criteria of realism still hold. It is not only that there is still a concentration on contemporary themes; in many ways elements of ordinary everyday experience are more evident in the modem novel than in the nineteenth-century novel, through the disappearance of certain taboos. Certainly nobody will complain of the modern novel that it lacks those startling or offensive elements which it was one of the purposes of the term ‘realism’ to describe. Most description is still realistic, in the sense that describing the object as it actually appears is a principle few novelists would dissent from. What we usually say is that the realistic novel has been replaced by the ‘psychological novel’, and it is obviously true that the direct study of certain states of consciousness, certain newly apprehended psychological states, has been a primary modem feature. Yet realism as an intention, in the description of these states, has not been widely abandoned. Is it merely that ‘everyday, ordinary reality’ is now differently conceived, and that new techniques have been developed to describe this new kind of reality, but still with wholly realistic intentions? The questions are obviously very difficult, but one way of approaching an answer to them may be to take this ordinary belief that we have abandoned (developed
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beyond) the realistic novel, and to set beside it my own feeling that there is a formal gap in modern fiction, which makes it incapable of expressing one kind of experience, a kind of experience which I find particularly important and for which, in my mind, the word 'realism' keeps suggesting itself.
Now the novel is not so much a literary form as a whole literature in itself. Within its wide boundaries, there is room for almost every kind of contemporary writing. Great harm is done to the tradition of fiction, and to the necessary critical discussion of it, if ‘the novel’ is equated with any one kind of prose work. It was such a wrong equation which made Tolstoy say of War and Peace: ‘it is not a novel'. A form which in fact includes M iddlemarch and Auto da Fe, Winhering Heights and Huckleberry Finn , The Rainbow and The Magic Mountain, is indeed, as I have said, more like a whole literature. In drawing attention to what seems to me now a formal gap, I of course do not mean that this whole vast form should be directed to filling it. But because it is like a whole literature, any formal gap in the novel seems particularly important.
When I think of the realist tradition in fiction, I think of the kind of novel which creates and judges the quality of a whole way of life in terms of the qualities of persons. The balance involved in this achievement is perhaps the most important thing about it. It looks at first sight so general a thing, the sort of thing most novels do. It is what War and Peace does; what Middlemarch does; what The Rainbow does. Yet the distinction of this kind is that it offers a valuing of a whole way of life, a society that is larger than any of the individuals composing it, and at the same time valuing creations of human beings who, while belonging to and affected by and helping to define this way of life, are also, in their own terms, absolute ends in themselves. Neither element, neither the society nor the individual, is there as a priority. The society is not a background against which the personal relationships are studied, nor are the individuals merely illustrations of aspects of the way of life. Every aspect of personal life is radically affected by the quality of the general life, yet the general life is seen at its most important in completely personal terms. We attend with our whole senses to every aspect of the general life, yet the centre of value is always in the individual human person—not any one isolated person, but the many persons who are the reality of the general life. Tolstoy and George Eliot, in particular, often said, in much these terms, that it was this view they were trying to realize.
Within this realist tradition, there are of course wide variations of degree of success, but such a viewpoint, a particular apprehension of a relation between individuals and society, may be seen as a mode. It must be remembered that this viewpoint was itself the product of maturity; the history of the novel from the eighteenth century is essentially an exploration towards this position, with many preliminary failures. The eighteenth-century novel is formally most like our own, under comparable pressures and uncertainties, and it was in the deepening understanding of the relations between individuals and societies that the form actually matured. When it is put to me that the realist tradition has broken down, it is this mature viewpoint that I see as having been lost, under new pressures of particular experience. I do not mean that it is, or should be, tied to any
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particular style. The kind of realistic (or as we now say, naturalistic) description that ‘went out with the hansom cab’ is in no way essential to it; it was even, perhaps, in writers like Bennett, a substitute for it. Such a vision is not realized by detailed stocktaking descriptions of shops or back-parlours or station waiting-rooms. These may be used, as elements of the action, but they are not this essential realism. If they are put in, for the sake of description as such, they may in fact destroy the balance that is the essence of this method; they may, for example, transfer attention from the people to the things. It was actually this very feeling, that in this kind of fully-furnished novel everything was present but actual individual life, that led, in the 1920s, to the disrepute of ‘realism’. The extreme reaction was in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, where all the furniture, and even the physical bodies, have gone out of the window, and we are left with voices and feelings, voices in the air—an equally damaging unbalance, as we can now see. It may indeed be possible to write the history of the modern novel in terms of a polarization of styles, object-realist and subject-impressionist, but the more essential polarization, which has mainly occurred since 1900, is the division of the realist novel, which had created the substance and quality of a way of life in terms of the substance and qualities of persons, into two separate traditions, the ‘social’ novel and the ‘personal’ novel. In the social novel there may be accurate observation and description of the general life, the aggregation; in the personal novel there may be accurate observation and description of persons, the units. But each lacks a dimension, for the way of life is neither aggregation nor unit, but a whole indivisible process.
We now commonly make this distinction between ‘social’ and ‘personal’ novels; indeed in one way we take this distinction of interest for granted. By looking at some examples, the substantial issue may be made clear. There are now two main kinds of ‘social’ novel. There is, first, the descriptive social novel, the documentary. This creates, as priority, a general way of life, a particular social or working community. Within this, of course, are characters, sometimes quite carefully drawn. But what we say about such novels is that if we want to know about life in a mining town, or in a university, or on a merchant ship, or on a patrol in Burma, this is the book. In fact, many novels of this kind are valuable; the good documentary is usually interesting. It is right that novels of this kind should go on being written, and with the greatest possible variety of setting. Yet the dimension that we miss is obvious : the characters are miners, dons, soldiers first; illustrations of the way of life. It is not the emphasis I have been trying to describe, in which the persons are of absolute interest in themselves, and are yet seen as parts of a whole way of living. Of all current kinds of novel, this kind, at its best, is apparently nearest to what I am calling the realist novel, but the crucial distinction is quite apparent in reading: the social-descriptive function is in fact the shaping priority.
A very lively kind of social novel, quite different from this, is now significantly popular. The tenor, here, is not description, but the finding and materialization of a formula about society. A particular pattern is abstracted, from the sum of social experience, and a society is created from this pattern. The simplest examples are in the field of the future-story, where the ‘future’ device (usually
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only a device, for nearly always it is obviously contemporary society that is being written about; indeed this is becoming the main way of writing about social experience) removes the ordinary tension between the selected pattern and normal observation. Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451, are powerful social fiction, in which a pattern taken from contemporary society is materialized, as a whole, in another time or place. Other examples are Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, and nearly all serious ‘science fiction’. Most of these are written to resemble realistic novels, and operate in the same essential terms. Most of them contain, fundamentally, a conception of the relation between individuals and society; ordinarily a virtuous individual, or small personal group, against a vile society. The action, normally, is a release of tensions in this personal-social complex, but I say release, and not working-out, because ordinarily the device subtly alters the tensions, places them in a preselected light, so that it is not so much that they are explored but indulged. The experience of isolation, of alienation, and of self-exile is an important part of the contemporary structure of feeling, and any contemporary realist novel would have come to real terms with it. (It is ironic, incidentally, that it was come to terms with, and worked to a resolution very different from the contemporary formula of ‘exile versus masses; stalemate’, at several points in the realist tradition, notably in Crime and Punishment and, through Bezukhov, in War and Peace.) Our formula novels are lively, because they are about lively social feelings, but the obvious dimension they lack is that of a substantial society and correspondingly substantial persons . 1 For the common life is an abstraction, and the personal lives are defined by their function in the formula.
The ‘realist’ novel divided into the ‘social’ and the ‘personal’, and the ‘social novel’, in our time, has further divided into social documentary and social formula. It is true that examples of these kinds can be found from earlier periods, but they were never, as now, the modes. The same point holds for the ‘personal novel’, and its corresponding division into documentary and formula. Some of the best novels of our time are those which describe, carefully and subtly, selected personal relationships. These are often very like parts of the realist novel as described, and there is a certain continuity of method and substance. Forster’s A Passage to India is a good example, with traces of the older balance still clearly visible, yet belonging, in a high place, in this divided kind, because of elements in the Indian society of the novel which romanticize the actual society to the needs of certain of the characters. This is quite common in this form: a society, a general way of living, is apparently there, but is in fact often a highly personalized landscape, to clarify or frame an individual portrait, rather than a country within which the individuals arc actually contained. Graham Greene’s social settings are obvious examples: his Brighton, West Africa, Mexico and Indo-China have major elements in common which relate not to their actual ways of life but to the needs of his characters and of his own emotional pattern. When this is frankly and absolutely done, as in Kafka, there is at least no confusion; but ordinarily, with a surface of realism, there is merely the familiar unbalance. There is a lack of dimension similar to that in the social descriptive novel, but in a different direction. There the characters were aspects of the
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society; here the society is an aspect of the characters. The balance we remember is that in which both the general way of life and the individual persons are seen as there and absolute.
Of course, in many personal novels, often very good in their own terms, the general way of life does not appear even in this partial guise, but as a simple backcloth, of shopping and the outbreak of war and buses and odd minor characters from another social class. Society is outside the people, though at times, even violently, it breaks in on them. Now of course, where there is deliberate selection, deliberate concentration, such personal novels are valuable, since there is a vast field of significant experience, of a directly personal kind, which can be excitingly explored. But it seems to me that for every case of conscious selection (as in Proust, say, where the concentration is entirely justified and yet produces, obliquely, a master-portrait of a general way of life) there are perhaps a thousand cases where the restriction is simply a failure of consciousness, a failure to realize the extent to which the substance of a general way of life actively affects the closest personal experience. Of course if, to these writers, society has become the dull abstract thing of the social novel at its worst, it is not surprising that they do not see why it should concern them. They insist on the people as people first, and not as social units, and they are quite right to do so. What is missing, however, is that element of common substance which again and again the great realists seemed able to apprehend. Within the small group, personality is valued, but outside the group it is nothing. We are people, one sometimes hears between the lines; to us these things are important; but the strange case of the Virginia Woolf ‘charwoman’ or ‘village woman’, with the sudden icy drop in the normally warm sensibility, symbolizes a common limitation. And this is not only social exclusiveness or snobbery, though it can be diagnosed in such ways, but also a failure to realize the nature of the general social element in our own lives. We are people (such novels say), people, just like that; the rest is the world or society or politics or something, dull things that are written about in the newspapers. But in fact we are people and people within a society: that whole view was at the centre of the realist novel.
In spite of its limitations, the personal-descriptive novel is often a substantial achievement, but the tendencies evident in it seem increasingly to be breaking it down into the other personal kind, the novel of the personal formula. Here, as in the novel of social formula, a particular pattern is abstracted from the sum of experience, and not now societies, but human individuals, are created from the pattern. This has been the method of powerful and in its own terms valid fiction, but it seems to me to be rapidly creating a new mode, the fiction of special pleading. We can say of novels in this class that they take only one person seriously, but then ordinarily very seriously indeed. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist is not only this, but contains it as a main emphasis. And to mention this remarkable work is to acknowledge the actual gain in intensity, the real development of fictional method, which this emphasis embodied. A world is actualized on one man’s senses: not narrated, or held at arm’s length, but taken as it is lived. Joyce showed the magnificent advantages of this method when in Ulysses he actualized a world not through one person but through three; there
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are three ways of seeing, three worlds, of Stephen, Bloom, and Molly, yet the three worlds, as in fact, compose one world, the whole world of the novel. Ulysses does not maintain this balance throughout; it is mainly in the first third of the book that the essential composition is done, with the last section as a coda. Yet here was the realist tradition in a new form, altered in technique but continuous in experience.
Since Ulysses, this achievement has been diluted, as the technique has also been diluted. Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth is an interesting example, for in it one way of seeing has been isolated, and the world fitted to that. This analysis is also the key to the popular new kind of novel represented by Amis’s That Uncertain Feeling and Wain’s Living in the Present. The paradox of these novels is that on the one hand they seem the most real kind of contemporary writing— they were welcomed because they recorded so many actual feelings—and yet on the other hand their final version of reality is parodic and farcical. This illustrates the general dilemma: these writers start with real personal feelings, but to sustain and substantiate them, in their given form, the world of action in which they operate has to be pressed, as it were inevitably, towards caricature. (This was also the process of Dickens, at the limits of what he could openly see or state, and caricature and sentimentality are in this sense opposite sides of the same coin, used to avoid the real negotiation .) 2 To set these feelings in our actual world, rather than in this world farcically transformed at crisis, would be in fact to question the feelings, to go on from them to a very difficult questioning of reality. Instead of this real tension, what we get is a fantasy release: swearing on the telephone, giving a mock-lecture, finding a type-figure on which aggression can be concentrated. Because these are our liveliest writers, they illustrate our contemporary difficulty most clearly. The gap between our feelings and our social observation is dangerously wide.
The fiction of special pleading can be seen in its clearest form in those many contemporary novels which, taking one person’s feelings and needs as absolute, create other persons in these sole terms. This flourishes in the significantly popular first-person narrative, which is normally used simply for this end. Huckleberry Finn, in its middle sections, creates a general reality within which the personal narrative gains breadth. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye has a saving irony, yet lacks this other dimension, a limitation increasingly obvious as the novel proceeds. Braine’s Room at the Top breaks down altogether, because there is no other reality to refer to; we are left with the familiar interaction of crudity and self-pity, a negative moral gesture at best. Compare, for example, Carson McCullers’ Member of the Wedding, which has its realist dimension, and in which the reality of personal feeling, growing into fantasy, interacts at the necessary tension with the world in which the feelings must be lived out. Or again, on the opposite side, there is Sagan’s Bon jour Tristesse, where the persons are presented almost objectively, but are then made to act in accordance with the fantasy of the central character. A comparison of McCullers and Sagan is the comparison of realism and its breakdown. And it is the breakdown, unfortunately, of which we have most examples; the first-person narrative, on which so much technical brilliance has been lavished, is now ordinarily the
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mechanism of rationalizing this breakdown The fiction of special pleading extends, however, into novels still formally resembling the realist kind. In [Elizabeth] Bowen’s Heat of the Day, for example, the persons exist primarily as elements in the central character’s emotional landscape, and are never seen or valued in any other terms, though there is no first-person narrative, and there is even some careful descriptive realism, to make the special pleading less stark. As it is now developing, the personal novel ends by denying the majority of persons. The reality of society is excluded, and this leads, inevitably, in the end, to the exclusion of all but a very few individual people. It is not surprising, in these circumstances, that so much of the personal feeling described should be in fact the experience of breakdown.
I offer this fourfold classification—social description, social formula, personal description, personal formula—as a way of beginning a general analysis of the contemporary novel, and of defining, by contrast, the realist tradition which, in various ways, these kinds have replaced. The question now is whether these kinds correspond to some altered reality, leaving the older tradition as really irrelevant as the hansom cab, or whether they are in fact the symptoms of some very deep crisis in experience, which throws up these talented works yet persists, unexplored, and leaves us essentially dissatisfied. I would certainly not say that the abandonment of the realist balance is in some way wilful; that these waiters are deliberately turning away from a great tradition, with the perversity that many puzzled readers assign to them. The crisis, as I see it, is too deep for any simple, blaming explanation. But what then is the crisis, in its general nature?
There are certain immediate clarifying factors. The realist novel needs, obviously, a genuine community: a community of persons linked not merely by one kind of relationship—work or friendship or family—but many, interlocking kinds. It is obviously difficult, in the twentieth century, to find a community of this sort. Where Middlemarch is a complex of personal, family and working relationships, and draws its whole strength from their interaction in an indivisible process, the links between persons in most contemporary novels are relatively single, temporary, discontinuous. And this was a change in society, at least in that part of society most nearly available to most novelists, before it was a change in literary form. Again, related to this, but affected by other powerful factors, the characteristic experience of our century is that of asserting and preserving an individuality (again like much eighteenth-century experience), as compared with the characteristic nineteenth-century experience of finding a place and making a settlement. The ordinary Victorian novel ends, as every parodist knows, with a series of settlements, of new engagements and formal relationships, whereas the ordinary twentieth-century novel ends with a man going away on his own, having extricated himself from a dominating situation, and found himself in so doing. Again, this actually happened, before it became a common literary pattern. In a time of great change, this kind of extrication and discovery was a necessary and valuable movement; the recorded individual histories amount to a common history. And while old establishments linger, and new establishments of a dominating kind are continually instituted,
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the breakaway has continually to be made, the personal assertion given form and substance, even to the point where it threatens to become the whole content of our literature. Since I know the pressures, I admit the responses, but my case is that we are reaching deadlock, and that to explore a new definition of realism may be the way to break out of the deadlock and find a creative direction.
The contemporary novel has both reflected and illuminated the crisis of our society, and of course we could fall back on the argument that only a different society could resolve our literary problems. Yet literature is committed to the detail of known experience, and any valuable social change would be the same kind of practical and responsible discipline. We begin by identifying our actual situation, and the critical point, as I see it, is precisely that separation of the individual and society into absolutes, which we have seen reflected in form. The truly creative effort of our time is the struggle for relationships, of a whole kind, and it is possible to see this as both personal and social: the practical learning of extending relationships. Realism, as embodied in its great tradition, is a touchstone in this, for it shows, in detail, that vital interpenetration, idea into feeling, person into community, change into settlement, which we need, as growing points, in our own divided time, fn the highest realism, society is seen in fundamentally personal terms, and persons, through relationships, in fundamentally social terms. The integration is controlling, yet of course it is not to be achieved by an act of will. If it comes at all, it is a creative discovery, and can perhaps only be recorded within the structures and substance of the realist novel.
Yet, since it is discovery, and not recovery, since nostalgia and imitation are not only irrelevant but hindering, any new realism will be different from the tradition, and will comprehend the discoveries in personal realism which are the main twentieth-century achievement. The point can be put theoretically, in relation to modern discoveries in perception and communication. The old, naive realism is in any case dead, for it depended on a theory of natural seeing which is now impossible. When we thought we had only to open our eyes to see a common world, we could suppose that realism was a simple recording process, from which any deviation was voluntary. We know now that we literally create the world we see, and that this human creation—a discovery of how we can live in the material world we inhabit—is necessarily dynamic and active; the old static realism of the passive observer is merely a hardened convention. When it was first discovered that man lives through his perceptual world, which is a human interpretation of the material world outside him, this was thought to be a basis for the rejection of realism; only a personal vision was possible. But art is more than perception; it is a particular kind of active response, and a part of all human communication. Reality, in our terms, is that which human beings make common, by work or language. Thus, in the very acts of perception and communication, this practical interaction of what is personally seen, interpreted and organized and what can be socially recognized, known and formed is richly and subtly manifested. It is very difficult to grasp this fundamental interaction, but here, undoubtedly, is the clue we seek, not only in our thinking about
Williams Realism and the contemporary novel
personal vision and social communication, but also in our thinking about the individual and society. The individual inherits an evolved brain, which gives him his common human basis. He learns to see, through this inheritance, and through the forms which his culture teaches. But, since the learning is active, and since the world he is watching is changing and being changed, new acts of perception, interpretation, and organization are not only possible but deeply necessary. This is human growth, in personal terms, but the essential growth is in the interaction which then can occur, in the individual’s effort to communicate what he has learned, to match it with known reality and by work and language to make a new reality. Reality is continually established, by common effort, and art is one of the highest forms of this process. Yet the tension can be great, in the necessarily difficult struggle to establish reality, and many kinds of failure and breakdown are possible. It seems to me that in a period of exceptional growth, as ours has been and will continue to be, the tension will be exceptionally high, and certain kinds of failure and breakdown may become characteristic. The recording of creative effort, to explore such breakdowns, is not always easy to distinguish from the simple, often rawly exciting exploitation of breakdown. Or else there is a turning away, into known forms, which remind us of previously learned realities and seek, by this reminder, to establish probability of a kind. Thus the tension can either be lowered, as in the ordinary social novel, or played on, as in the ordinary personal novel. Either result is a departure from realism, in the sense that I am offering. For realism is precisely this living tension, achieved in a communicable form. Whether this is seen as a problem of the individual in society, or as a problem of the offered description and the known description, the creative challenge is similar. The achievement of realism is a continual achievement of balance, and the ordinary absence of balance, in the forms of the contemporary novel, can be seen as both a warning and a challenge. It is certain that any effort to achieve a contemporary balance will be complex and difficult, but the effort is necessary, a new realism is necessary, if we are to remain creative.
Notes
1. Irving Howe thought I was asking for something which by definition this form could not offer. I see his point, but I do not find it easy to accept that kind of formalist approach; surely the form itself and what ‘by definition’ it ‘cannot do', must submit to be criticised from a general position in experience. I agree with Mr Howe so often that I am sorry to have to insist.
2. As it stands, this is too limiting on Dickens. I have discussed the significance of his way of seeing people, as a literary method necessarily correspondent to a particular and critical vision of life and society, in ‘Social criticism in Dickens’, Critical Quarterly, Autumn 1964.
In 1935 R. S. Crane (1886-1967) published an essay, ‘History versus Criticism in the University Study of Literature’, which was enthusiastically welcomed by John Crowe Ransom in his article ‘Criticism Inc/ (see above, pp. 227-39). Ransom clearly saw Crane as potentially a valuable ally of the American New Critics in their efforts, over the next two decades, to direct English Studies away from traditional literary scholarship towards evaluative and analytical criticism. Crane and his associates at the University of Chicago, however, had ideas of their own about the way criticism should develop. As Crane himself commented much later, they soon began to have misgivings about two aspects of the New Criticism:
One was the fact that, despite the great flourishing of practical criticism, there were few signs that this was moving beyond the rather narrow set of ideas and interests which the critics of the thirties had derived from Eliot, Hulme and Richards, or had taken over from the psycho-analysis, analytical
psychology and cultural anthropology of the first years of the century
The other thing was the striking effect of unscholarly improvisation that characterized much of the literary theorizing of the period from Richards on —as if none of the essential problems of literature had ever been discussed before or any important light thrown on them in more than a score of centuries during which literature had been an object of critical attention.
This quotation comes from R. S. Crane’s Preface to the abridged 1957 edition of Critics and Criticism: ancient and modern (Chicago, 1952), which he edited. This large collection of essays by Crane, Richard McKeon, Elder Olson, and others, was a kind of counterblast to R. D. Stallman’s Neocritical anthology. Critiques and Essays in Criticism 1920-1948 (New York, 1949). The Chicago critics attacked the narrowness of the New Critics’ criteria, and advocated a more pluralistic and inductive approach to literary criticism. They suggested that the Poetics of Aristotle might be developed into, or serve as the model for, an inclusive critical system; hence these critics are usually referred to as the ‘Chicago neo-Aristotelians’.
‘The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the History of Ideas’ does not explicitly invoke the Poetics, but it does exemplify the Aristotelian virtues of lucidity, logic, and scrupulous attention to evidence in critical discourse which Crane and his associates admired and emulated. It also makes clear that Crane’s position was quite different from Ransom’s in ‘Criticism Inc.’—Crane being unsympathetic not to the historical approach to literature as such, but to interpretation based on dubious, inexact, and over-confident historical hypotheses.
592
Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas
R. S. Crane taught at the University of Chicago from 1924 until his death, though he was visiting professor at many other American universities. He was Emeritus Professor at Chicago from 1951. His Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto were published as The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto, 1953), The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the History of Ideas’ is reprinted here from The Idea of the Humanities and other essays critical and historical (Chicago, 1967). It was first published in Reason and the Imagination: Essays in the History of Ideas, 1600-1800 (1962) ed. Joseph Mazzeo, and was originally a paper read to the Annual Conference of Non-Professorial University Teachers of English at Oxford, 1959.
cross references: 18. John Crowe Ransom
32. C. S. Lewis
38. Norman O. Brown
commentary : W. K. Wimsatt, Jnr., The Chicago critics: The
fallacy of the neoclassic species’, in The Verbal Icon (Lexington, Ky., 1954)
Wayne Booth, Introduction to The Idea of the Humanities and other essays critical and historical by R. S. Crane (Chicago, 1967)
The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos,
and the history of ideas
I shall be concerned in this essay with two ways of using the history of ideas— or, in the case of the first of them, as I shall argue, misusing it—in the historical interpretation of literary works. The particular issue I have in mind is forced on one in an unusually clearcut manner, I think, by what has been said of the ‘Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms’ in the criticism of the past few decades; and for this reason, and also because I wish to add a theory of my own about Swift’s satirical argument in that work to the theories now current, I base the discussion that follows almost exclusively on it.
With a very few exceptions (the latest being George Sherburn) 1 since the 1920s, and especially since the later 1930s, writers on the fourth Voyage have been mainly dominated by a single preoccupation. 2 They have sought to correct the misunderstanding of Swift’s purpose in the Voyage which had vitiated, in their
Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas
opinion, most earlier criticism of it and, in particular, to defend Swift from the charge of all-out misanthropy that had been levelled against him so often in the past—by Thackeray, a for example, but many others also—on the strength of Gulliver’s wholesale identification of men with the Yahoos and his unqualified worship of the Houyhnhnms.
It is easy to see what this task would require them to do. It would require them to show that what Gulliver is made to say about human nature in the Voyage, which is certainly misanthropic enough, and what Swift wanted his readers to believe about human nature are, in certain crucial respects at any rate, two different and incompatible things. It would require them, that is, to draw a clear line between what is both Swift and Gulliver and what is only Gulliver in a text in which Gulliver alone is allowed to speak to us.
The resulting new interpretations have differed considerably in emphasis and detail from critic to critic, but they have been generally in accord on the follow-ing propositions: The attitudes of Swift and his hero do indeed coincide up to a certain point, it being true for Swift no less than for Gulliver that men in the mass are teirifyingly close to the Yahoos in disposition and behaviour, and true for both of them also that the Houyhnhnms are in some of their qualities— their abhorrence of falsehood, for instance—proper models for human emulation. That, however, is about as far as the agreement goes: it is to Gulliver alone and not to Swift that we must impute the radical pessimism of the final chapters— it is he and not Swift who reduces men literally to Yahoos; it is he and not Swift who despairs of men because they cannot or will not lead the wholly rational life of the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver, in other words, is only in part a reliable spokesman for his creator’s satire; he is also, and decisively at the end, one of the targets of that satire—a character designed to convince us, through his obviously infatuated actions, of the absurdity both of any view of man’s nature that denies the capacity of at least some men for rational and virtuous conduct, however limited this capacity may be, and of any view of the best existence for man that makes it consist in talcing ‘reason alone’ as a guide. What, in short, Swift offers us, as the ultimate moral of the Voyage, is a compromise between these extiemist opinions of Gulliver: human nature, he is saying, is bad enough, but it is not altogether hopeless; reason is a good thing, but a life of pure reason is no desirable end for man.
Now it is evident that however appealing this interpretation may be to those who want to think well of Swift and to rescue him from his nineteenth-century maligners, it is not a merely obvious exegesis of the ‘Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms’, or one that most common readers, past or present, have spontaneously arrived at. It is not an exegesis, either, that goes at all comfortably with that famous letter of Swift’s in 1725 in which he told Pope that his chief aim was to vex the world rather than divert it’ and that he never would have peace of mind until ‘all honest men' were of his opinion. For there is noth-ing particularly vexing in the at least partly reassuring moral now being
«In his The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, William Makepeace Thackeray described Swift in Book Four of Gulliver’s Travels as ‘a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against mankind'.
Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas
attributed to the Voyage or anything which ‘honest men’ in 1726 would have had much hesitation in accepting. And again, although we must surely agree that there is a significant difference between Gulliver and Swift, why must we suppose that the difference has to be one of basic doctrine? Why could it not be simply the difference between a person who has just discovered a deeply disturbing truth about man and is consequently, like Socrates’ prisoner in the myth of the cave, a considerably upset and one who, like Socrates himself, has known this truth all along and can therefore write of his hero’s discovery of it calmly and with humour?
I introduce these points here not as decisive objections to the new interpretation but rather as signs that it is not the kind of interpretation which (in Johnson’s phrase), upon its first production, must be acknowledged to be just. Confirmatory arguments are plainly needed; and a consideration of the arguments that have in fact been offered in support of it will bring us rather quickly to the special problem I wish to discuss.
A good deal has been made, to begin with, of what are thought to be clear indications in the Voyage itself that Swift wanted his readers to take a much more critical view than Gulliver does of ‘the virtues and ideas of those exalted Houyhnhnms’ and a much less negative view of human possibilities. If he had designed the Houyhnhnms to be for us what they are for Gulliver, namely, the ‘perfection of nature’ and hence an acceptable standard for judging of man, he would surely, it is argued, have endowed them with more humanly engaging qualities than they have; he would surely not have created them as the ‘remote, unsympathetic, and in the end profoundly unsatisfying’ creatures so many of his readers nowadays find them to be. We must therefore see in Gulliver’s worship of the rational horses a plain evidence of the extremist error into which he has fallen. And similarly, if Swift had expected us to go the whole way with Gulliver in his identification of men with the Yahoos, he would hardly have depicted the human characters in his story—especially the admirable Portuguese captain, Don Pedro de Mendez, and his crew—in the conspicuously favourable light in which they appear to us. They are bound to strike us as notable exceptions to the despairing estimate of ‘human kind’ to which Gulliver has been led by his Houyhnhnm master; and we can only conclude that Gulliver’s failure to look upon them as other than Yahoos, whom at best he can only ‘tolerate’, is meant as still another sign to us of the false extremism of his attitude.
All this looks at first sight convincing—until we begin to think of other possible intentions that Swift might have had in the Voyage with which these signs would be equally compatible. Suppose, that his primary purpose was indeed to ‘vex the world’ by administering as severe a shock as he could to the cherished belief that man is par excellence a ‘rational creature’, and suppose that he chose to do this, in part at least, by forcing his readers to dwell on the unbridgeable gap between what is involved in being a truly ‘rational creature’ and what not only the worse but also the better sort of men actually are. It is plain what he
a Plato, Republic Book VII. Socrates here compares man’s apprehension of reality to a prisoner who perceives only shadows cast upon the wall of his cave.
Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas
would have had to do in working out such a design. He would have had to give to his wholly rational beings precisely those ‘unhuman’ characteristics that have been noted, to their disadvantage, in the Houyhnhnms; to have made them creatures such as we would normally like or sympathize with would have been to destroy their value as a transcendent standard of comparison. And it would have been no less essential to introduce characters, like Don Pedro, or, for that matter, Gulliver himself, who, in terms of ordinary human judgments, would impress us as unmistakably good; otherwise he would have exempted too many of his readers from the shock to their pride in being men which, on this hypothesis, he was trying to produce. He would have had to do, in short, all those things in the Voyage that have been taken as indications of a purpose very different from the one I am now supposing, and much less misanthropic. Clearly, then, some other kind of proof is needed than these ambiguous internal signs before the current view of Swift's meaning can be thought of as more than one possibility among other competing ones.
A good many defenders of this view, especially during the past decade, have attempted to supply such proof by relating the Voyage to its presumed background in the intellectual and religious concerns of Swift and his age; and it is their manner of doing this—of using hypotheses based on the history of ideas in the determination of their author’s meaning—that I want to examine in what immediately follows.
They have been fairly well agreed on these three points: in the first place, that Swift’s main design in the Voyage was to uphold what they describe as the traditional and orthodox conception of human nature, classical and Christian alike, that 'recognizes in man an inseparable complex of good and evil’, reason and passion, spiritual soul and animal body; secondly, that he conceived the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos, primarily at least, as allegorical embodiments of these two parts of man’s constitution taken in abstraction the one from the other; and thirdly, that he developed his defence of the orthodox view by directing his satire against those contemporary doctrines, on the one hand, that tended to exalt the Houyhnhnm side of man in forgetfulness of how Yahoo-like man really is, and those doctrines, on the other hand, that tended to see man only as a Yahoo in forgetfulness of his Houyhnhnm possibilities, limited though these are. All this has been more or less common doctrine among critics of the Voyage at least since Ernest Bernbaum in 1920; there has been rather less agreement on the identity of the contemporary movements of ideas which Swift had in view as objects of attack. It was usual in the earlier phases of the discussion to say simply, as Bernbaum does, that he was thinking, at the one extreme, of the ‘sentimental optimism’ of writers like Shaftesbury and, at the other, of the pessimism or cynicism of writers like Hobbes and Mandeville. Since then, however, other identifications have been added to the list, as relevant especially to his conception of the Houyhnhnms; we have been told, thus, that he ‘obviously’ intended to embody in the principles and mode of life of these creatures, along with certain admittedly admirable qualities, the rationalistic errors of the neo-Stoics, the Cartesians, and the deists—some or all of these, depending upon the critic.
Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas
Now if we could feel sure that what was in Swift's mind when he conceived the fourth Voyage is even approximately represented by these statements, we should have little reason for not going along with the interpretation of his design they have been used to support. For if he was indeed engaged in vindicating the ‘Christian humanist' view of human nature against those contemporary extremists who made either too much or too little of man's capacity for reason and virtue, the current view of Gulliver as partly a vehicle and partly an object of the satire is surely correct. Everything depends, therefore, on how much relevance to what he was trying to do in the Voyage this particular historical hypothesis can be shown to have.
Its proponents have offered it as relevant beyond reasonable doubt; which suggests to me that some special assumptions about the application of intellectual history to the exegesis of literary works must be involved here. For they would find it difficult, I think, to justify their confidence in terms merely of the ordinary canons of proof in this as well as other historical fields.
They can indeed show that the hypothesis is a possible one, in the sense that it is consistent with some of the things we know about Swift apart from the Voyage. We know that he was a humanistically educated Anglican divine, with traditionalist inclinations in many matters; that he looked upon man’s nature as deeply corrupted by the Fall but thought that self-love and the passions could be made, with the help of religion, to yield a positive though limited kind of virtue; that he held reason in high esteem as a God-given possession of man but distrusted any exclusive reliance on it in practice or belief, ridiculing the Stoics and Cartesians and making war on the deists; and that he tended, especially in his political writings, to find the useful truth in a medium between extremes. A man of whom these things can be said might very well have conceived the ‘Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms' in the terms in which, on the present theory, Swift is supposed to have conceived it. And beyond this, it is possible to point to various characteristics in the Voyage itself which, if the hypothesis is correct, can be interpreted as likely consequences of it. If Swift had in fact intended to symbolize, in the sustained opposition of Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, the deep division and conflict within man between his rational and his animal natures, he would undoubtedly have depicted these two sets of creatures, in essentials at least, much as they are depicted in the text (although this would hardly account for his choice of horses as symbols of rationality). So too with the supposition that we were meant to see in the Houyhnhnms, among other things, a powerful reminder of how inadequate and dangerous, for weak and sinful human nature, is any such one-sided exaltation of reason as was being inculcated at the time by the deists, the neo-Stoics, and the Cartesians: it would not be surprising, if that were actually Swift’s intention, to find Gulliver saying of ‘those exalted quadrupeds', as he does, that they consider ‘reason alone sufficient to govern a rational creature', that they neither affirm nor deny anything of which they are not certain, and that they keep their passions under firm control, practise ‘universal friendship and benevolence', and are immune to fear of death and grief for the death of others.
Now all this is to the good, to the extent at least that without such considera-
Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas
tions as these about both Swift and the fourth Voyage there would be no reason for entertaining the hypothesis at all. But can we say anything more than this —so long, that is, as we judge the question by the ordinary standards of historical criticism? In other words, do the considerations I have just summarized tend in any decisive way to establish the hypothesis as fact? The answer must surely be that they do not, and for the simple reason that they are all meicly positive and favouring considerations, such as can almost always be adduced in suppoit of almost any hypothesis in scholarship or common life, how-evel ^relevant or false it may turn out to be. It is a basic maxim of scholarly ciiticism, therefoie, that the probability of a given hypothesis is proportionate not to our ability to substantiate it by confirmatory evidence (although there obviously must be confirmatory evidence) but to our inability—after serious trial—to rule it out in favour of some other hypothesis that would explain moie completely and simply the particulars it is concerned with. We have to start, in short, with the assumption that our hypothesis may very well be false and then permit ourselves to look upon it as fact only when, having impartially considered all the counter-possibilities we can think of, we find disbelief in it more difficult to maintain than belief. This is a rule which few of us consistently live up to (otherwise we would not publish as much as we do); but there are varying degrees of departure from it; and I can see few signs that its requirements aie even approximated in the current historical discussions of the fourth Voyage. It would be a different matter if these critics had been able to show statements by Swift himself about Gulliver's Travels that defy reasonable interpretation except as references to the particular issues and doctrines which the hypothesis supposes were in his mind when he wrote the Voyage. But they have not succeeded in doing this; and they have given no attention at all to the possibility that there were other traditions of thought about human nature in Swifts time (I can thing of one such, as will appear later) with which he can be shown to have been familiar—traditions which they ought to have considered and then, if possible, excluded as irrelevant before their hypothesis can be said, on ordinary scholarly grounds, to be confirmed.
What then are the special assumptions about interpretative method on which, in view of all this, their confidence must be presumed to rest? Their problem has naturally led them, as it would any historian, to make propositions about bwffts thought apart from Gulliver and about the thought of Swift’s age: what is distinctive is the character of these propositions and the use they are put to in the interpretation of the Voyage. In the eyes of the ordinary historian of ideas inquiring into the intellectual antecedents and constituents of this work, the thought of Swift as expressed in his other writings is simply an aggregate of particular statements and arguments, some of which may well turn out to be relevant to an understanding of its meaning; for any of them, however, this is merely a possibility to be tested, not a presumption to be argued from. It is the same, too with the thought of Swift’s age: this, again, in the eyes of the ordinary historian, is nothing more determinate than the sum of things that were being written in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, from varying points of view and in varying traditions of analysis, on the general
Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas
theme of human nature. Some of these, once more, may well be relevant to the argument developed in the Voyage, but the historian can know what they are only after an unprejudiced inquiry that presupposes no prior limitation of the ideas Swift might have been influenced by or have felt impelled to attack in constructing it. For the ordinary historian, in short, the fact that the 'Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms' was written by Swift at a particular moment in the general history of thought about man has only this methodological significance: that it defines the region in which he may most hopefully look for the intellectual stimuli and materials that helped to shape the Voyage; it gives him, so to speak, his working reading list; it can never tell him—only an independent analysis of the Voyage can do that—how to use the list.
That the critics we are concerned with have taken a different view of the matter from this is suggested by the title of the book in which the current historical theory of Swift's intentions in the Voyage is argued most fully and ingeniously—Kathleen Williams' Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise . For to think of a period in intellectual history in this way—as the age of something or other, where the something or other is designated by an abstract term like 'compromise'—is obviously no longer to consider it as an indefinite aggregate of happenings; it is to consider it rather as a definite system of happenings something like the plot of a novel in which a great many diverse characters and episodes are unified, more or less completely, by a principal action or theme. It is to assume, moreover, not only that the historian can determine what was the central problem, the basic conflict or tension, the dominant world view of a century or generation, either in general or in some particular department of thought, but that he can legitimately use his formula for this as a confirmatory premise in arguing the meanings and causes of individual works produced in that age. It is to suppose that there is a kind of probative force in his preferred formula for the period which can confer a priori a privileged if not unique relevance upon one particular hypothesis about a given work of that period as against other hypotheses that are less easily brought imder the terms of the formula, so that little more is required by way of further proof than a demonstration, which is never hard to give, that the work makes sense when it is 'read' as the hypothesis dictates.
These are, I think, the basic assumptions which underlie most of the recent historical discussions of the fourth Voyage and which go far towards explaining the confidence their authors have felt in the correctness of their conclusions. It would be hard, otherwise, to understand why they should think it important to introduce propositions about what was central and unifying in the moral thought of Swift's age; the reason must be that they have hoped, by so doing, to establish some kind of antecedent limitation on the intentions he could be expected to have had in writing the Voyage. And that, indeed, is the almost unavoidable effect of the argument for any reader who closes his mind, momentarily, to the nature of the pre-suppositions on which it rests. For suppose we agree with these critics that the dominant and most significant issue in the moral speculation of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was a conflict between the three fundamentally different views of man’s nature repre-
Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas
sented by the orthodox ‘classical-Christian' dualism in the middle and, at opposite extremes, the newer doctrines of the rationalists and benevolists on the one side and of the materialists and cynics on the other. Since this is presented as an exhaustive scheme of classification, it will be easy for us to believe that the view of man asserted in the Voyage must have been one of these three. And then suppose we agree to think of Swift as a man predisposed by his humanist education and his convictions as an Anglican divine to adhere to the traditional and compromising view as against either of the modern extremists. It will be difficult for us now to avoid believing that the ‘Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms' was therefore more probably than not an assertion of this middle view against its contemporary enemies, and it will be harder than it would be without such an argument from the age to the author to the work, to resist any interpretations of its details that may be necessary to make them accord with that theory of Swift's intentions.
This is likely to be our reaction, at any rate, until we reflect on the peculiar character of the argument we have been persuaded to go along with. There are many arguments like it in the writings of modern critics and historians of ideas in other fields (those who have interpreted Shakespeare in the light of ‘the Elizabethan world picture', for instance); but they all betray, I think, a fundamental confusion in method. The objection is not that they rest on a false conception of historical periods. There is nothing intrinsically illegitimate in the mode of historical writing that organizes the intellectual happenings of different ages in terms of their controlling ‘climates of opinion', dominant tendencies, or ruling oppositions of attitude or belief; and the results of such synthesizing efforts are sometimes as in A. O. Lovejoy, for example—illuminating in a high degree. The objection is rather to the further assumption, clearly implicit in these arguments, that the unifying principles of histories of this type have something like the force of empirically established universal laws, and can therefore be used as guarantees of the probable correctness of any interpretations of individual writings that bring the writings into harmony with their requirements. That this is sheer illusion can be easily seen if we consider what these principles really amount to. Some of them amount simply to assertions that there was a tendency among the writers of a particular time to concentrate on such and such problems and to solve them in such and such ways. There is no implication here that this trend affected all writers or any individual writer at all times: whether a given work of the age did or did not conform to the trend remains therefore an open question, to be answered only by independent inquiry unbiased by the merely statistical probabilities affirmed in the historian's generalization. But there are also principles of a rather different sort, among which we must include, I think, the formula of Swift's critics for the dominant conflict about human nature in his time. These are best described as dialectical constructs, since they organize the doctrinal facts they refer to by imposing on them abstract schemes of logical relationships among ideas which may or may not be identical with any of the various classifications and oppositions of doctrines influential at the time. Thus our critics characterization of Swift's age and of Swift himself as a part of that age derives its apparent exhaustiveness from a pattern of general terms—
Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas
the concept of ‘Christian humanism’ and the two contraries of this—which these critics clearly owe to the ethical and historical speculations of Irving Babbitt and his schools Now it may be that this scheme represents accurately enough the distinctions Swift had in mind when he conceived the fourth Voyage; but that would be something of a coincidence, and it is just as reasonable to suppose that he may have been thinking quite outside the particular framework of notions which this retrospective scheme provides. We must conclude, then, that this whole way of using the history of ideas in literary interpretation is misconceived. From the generalizations and schematisms of the synthesizing historians we can very often get suggestions for new working hypotheses with which to approach the exegesis of individual works. What we cannot get from them is any assurance whatever that any of these hypotheses are more likely to be correct than any others that we have hit upon without their aid.
I should now like to invite the reader’s criticism, in the light of what I have been saying, on another view of the intellectual background and import of the fourth Voyage (or a considerable part of it at least) which I shall attempt to argue on the basis merely of ordinary historical evidence, independently of any general postulates about Swift or his age.
II
Whatever else may be true of the Voyage, it will doubtless be agreed that one question is kept uppermost in it from the beginning, for both Gulliver and the reader. This is the question of what sort of animal man, as a species, really is; and the point of departure in the argument is the answer to this question which Gulliver brings with him into Flouyhnhnmland and which is also, we are reminded more than once, the answer which men in general tend, complacently, to give to it. Neither he nor they have any doubt that only man, among ‘sensitive’ creatures, can be properly called ‘rational’; all the rest—whether wild or tame, detestable or, like that ‘most comely and generous’ animal, the horse, the reverse of that—being merely ‘brutes’, not ‘endued with reason’. The central issue, in other words, is primarily one of definition: is man, or is he not, correctly defined as a ‘rational creature’? It is significant that Gulliver’s misanthropy at the end is not the result of any increase in his knowledge of human beings in the concrete over what he has had before; it is he after all who expounds to his Houyhnhnm master all those melancholy facts about men’s ‘actions and passions’ that play so large a part in their conversations; he has known these facts all along, and has still been able to call himself a ‘lover of mankind’. The thing that changes his love into antipathy is the recognition that is now forced upon him that these facts are wholly incompatible with the formula for man’s nature which he has hitherto taken for granted—are compatible, indeed, only with a formula, infinitely more humiliating to human pride, which pushes man nearly if not quite over to the opposite pole of the animal world.