March, 1961
IN BELGRADE, THE OTHER day, an interviewer asked me what book I thought best represented the modern American woman. All I could think of to answer was: Madame Bovary. It occurred to me afterward that I might have named Main Street or Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady. What else? I tried to remember women in American books. Hester Prynne, Daisy Miller, Scott Fitzgerald’s flappers and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, Temple Drake in Sanctuary, Dos Passos’ career women, Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. But since then? It was like leafing through a photograph album and coming, midway, on a sheaf of black, blank pages. Was it possible that for twenty-five years no American woman had had her likeness taken? “Submit a clear recent photo,” as they say in job applications. But there was none, strange as it seemed considering the dominant role women are supposed to play in American life.
So I tried the experiment with men. The result was almost the same. Captain Ahab, Christopher Newman in The American, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Gatsby, Mac and Charley Anderson in Dos Passos, Jason in The Sound and the Fury, Colonel Sutphen in Absalom, Absalom, Flem and Mink Snopes, Studs Lonigan. After that, nothing, no one, except the Catholic priests of J. F. Powers, the bugler Prewitt in From Here to Eternity, and Henderson in Henderson the Rain King.
Someone might see this as a proof of the conformity of American life; there are no people any more, it might be claimed—only human vectors with acceleration and force. But in my experience this is simply not true. There are more people than ever before, at least in the sense of mutations in our national botany, and this is probably due to mobility—cross-fertilization. Take as an example a gangster who was in the slot-machine racket, decided to go straight and became a laundromat king, sent his daughter to Bennington, where she married a poet-in-residence or a professor of modern linguistic philosophy. There are three characters already sketched out in that sentence and all of them brand-new: the father, the daughter, and the son-in-law. Imagine what one of the old writers might have made of the wedding and the reception afterward at the 21 Club. The laundromat king or his equivalent is easy to meet in America; there are hundreds of him. Try teaching in a progressive college and interviewing the students’ parents. And do not pretend that the laundromat king has no “inner life”; he is probably a Sunday painter, who has studied with Hans Hofman in Provincetown. What, for that matter, was the inner life of Monsieur Homais in Madame Bovary? People speak of the lack of tradition or of manners as having a bad effect on the American novel, but the self-made man is a far richer figure, from the novelist’s point of view, than the man of inherited wealth, who is likely to be a mannered shadow.
The relations between parents and children (Turgenev’s great theme) have never been so curious as in America now, where primitivism heads into decadence before it has time to turn around. America is full of Bazarovs but only Turgenev has described them. Nobody, as far as I know, has described an “action” painter, yet nearly everyone has met one. Nobody has done justice to the psychoanalyst, yet nearly everyone has gone to one. And what a wealth of material there is in that virgin field, what variety: the orthodox Freudian, the Horneyite, the Reichian, the Sullivanite (“interpersonal relations”), all the different kinds of revisionists, the lay analyst, the specialist in group analysis, the psychiatric social worker. Social workers themselves have become one of the major forces in American life, the real and absolute administrators of the lives of the poor, yet no one since Sinclair Lewis and Dos Passos has dared write of them, unless you count the young author, John Updike, in The Poorhouse Fair, who presents a single specimen and lays the story in the future. Imagine what Dickens would have done with this new army of beadles and the Mrs. Pardiggles behind them or what he would have done with the modern architect as Pecksniff, with the cant formula “Less is more.” No serious writer since Dos Passos, so far as I know, has had a go at the government official, and the government official has not only multiplied but changed (like the social worker) since Dos Passos’ time, producing many sub-varieties. And what about the foundation executive? Or the “behavioral scientist”? The fact is that the very forces and institutions that are the agents and promoters of conformity in America—bureaucracies public and private and the regimented “schools” and systems of healing and artistic creation—are themselves, through splits and cellular irritation, propagating an array of social types conforming to no previous standard, though when we look for names for them we are driven back, faute de mieux, on the old names: Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp, Bazarov, Mrs. Pardiggle, Babbitt. When Peter Viereck, in a book of nonfiction, wanted to isolate a new kind of conformist intellectual he could think of nothing better to call him than “Babbitt Junior.” It is as though a whole “culture” of plants and organisms had sprung into being and there were no scientists or latter-day Adams to name them.
This naming is very important, yet only two names in recent fiction have “stuck”: Gulley Jimson (Joyce Cary) and Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis). Some interest in character is still shown by writers in England, perhaps because it is an island and hence more conscious of itself. But even in England the great national portrait gallery that constituted the English novel is short of new acquisitions. The sense of character began to fade with D. H. Lawrence. After Sons and Lovers, we do not remember figures in Lawrence’s books, except for a few short malicious sketches. There are hardly any people in Virginia Woolf (Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse stands out) or in Forster or Elizabeth Bowen or Henry Green; they exist in Ivy Compton-Burnett but tend to blur together like her titles. Waugh has people, and so had Joyce Cary. You find them in the short stories of V. S. Pritchett and in the satires of Angus Wilson. But the last great creator of character in the English novel was Joyce. It is the same on the Continent. After Proust, a veil is drawn. You can speak of someone as a “regular Madame Verdurin” or a “Charlus,” but from Gide, Sartre, Camus, no names emerge; the register is closed.
The meaning of this seems plain. The novel and the short story have lost interest in the social. Since the social has certainly not lost interest in itself (look at the popularity of such strange mirror-books as The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man, The Exurbanites, The Status Seekers), what has happened must have occurred inside the novel and the short story—a technical or even technological crisis. An impasse has been reached within the art of fiction as a result of progress and experiment. You find a similar impasse in painting, where the portrait can no longer be painted and not because the artists do not know how to draw or get a likeness; they do. But they can no longer see a likeness as a work of art. In one sense, it is ridiculous to speak of progress in the arts (as though modern art were “better” than Rembrandt or Titian); in another sense, there is progress, an internal dynamic such as one finds in the processes of industry or in the biological process of aging. The arts have aged too, and it is impossible for them to “go back,” just as it is impossible to recapture the youth or reinstitute a handicraft economy, like the one Ruskin dreamed of. These things are beyond our control and independent of our will. I, for instance, would like, more than anything else, to write like Tolstoy; I imagine that I still see something resembling the world Tolstoy saw. But my pen or my typewriter simply balks; it “sees” differently from me and records what to me, as a person, are distortions and angularities. Anyone who has read my work will be at a loss to find any connection with Tolstoy; to Tolstoy himself both I and my work would be anathema. I myself might reform, but my work never could; it could never “go straight,” even if I were much more gifted than I am. Most novelists today, I suspect, would like to “go straight”; we are conscious of being twisted when we write. This is the self-consciousness, the squirming, of the form we work in; we are stuck in the phylogenesis of the novel.
The fictional experiments of the twentieth century went in two directions: sensibility and sensation. To speak very broadly, the experiments in the recording of sensibility were made in England (Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen, Forster), and America was the laboratory of sensation (Hemingway and his imitators, Dos Passos, Farrell). The novel of sensibility was feminine, and the novel of sensation was masculine. In Paris, there was a certain meeting and merging: Gertrude Stein (a robust recorder of the data of sensibility) influenced and encouraged Hemingway; Joyce, who experimented in both directions, influenced nearly everyone. The sensibility tendency today is found chiefly in such minor English writers as Henry Green and William Sansom; in America, it is represented by Katharine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Jean Stafford, and Carson McCullers. The masculine novel of sensation, more admired always in Europe than at home, seems to have arrived at the Beat Generation, via Caldwell, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler; its attraction toward violence propelled it naturally toward the crime story. The effect of these two tendencies on the subject matter of the novel was identical. Sensation and sensibility are the poles of each other, and both have the effect of abolishing the social. Sensibility, like violent action, annihilates the sense of character.
Beginning with our own. In violence, we forget who we are, just as we forget who we are when engaged in sheer perception. Immersed in a picture, an effect of light, or a landscape, we forget ourselves; we are “taken out of ourselves”; in the same way, we forget ourselves in the dentist’s chair. We are not conscious of our personality. In sensation, we are all more or less alike. Heat, cold, hunger, thirst, pain are experienced by man, not men. And sensibility is not a refinement of sensation; the sense of blue or green made on our retina is more finely discriminated in an art critic than it is in the average man or the color-blind person, but no useful division, humanly speaking, could be made between those, say, who saw turquoise as green and those who saw it as blue. The retina is not the seat of character. Nor are the sexual organs, even though they differ from person to person. Making love, we are all more alike than we are when we are talking or acting. In the climax of the sexual act, moreover, we forget ourselves; that is commonly felt to be one of its recommendations. Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character. There are no “people” in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, unless possibly the husband, who is impotent. To cite the laundromat king again, the moment of orgasm would not be the best moment for the novelist to seize upon to show his salient traits; on the other hand, to show him in an orgone box (i.e., in the frame of an idea) would be a splendid notion. Similarly, the perambulating sensibility of Mrs. Dalloway, her quivering film of preception, cannot fix for us Mrs. Dalloway as a person; she remains a palpitant organ, like the heroine of a pornographic novel. The character I remember best from Virginia Woolf is Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, a man who lacks the fine perceptions of the others; i.e., from the point of view of sensibility he is impotent, without erectile aesthetic tissue.
Sensation and sensibility are at their height in the child; its thin, tender membrane of perception is constantly being stabbed by objects, words, and events that it does not understand. In lieu of understanding, the child “notices.” Think of the first sections of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and of Aunt Dante’s hairbrushes (why was she called Dante?) and the quarrel about Parnell (who was Parnell?) at the Christmas dinner table. Or the beginning of Dr. Zhivago, where the child Yury, taken to his mother’s funeral, looks out the window at the cabbages, wrinkled and blue with cold, in the winter fields. Yury, being a child, cannot comprehend the important event that has happened to him (death), but his eye takes in the shivering cabbages. Everyone experiences something like this in moments of intense grief or public solemnity, such as funerals; feelings, distracted from their real causes, attach themselves arbitrarily to sights, smells, and sounds. But a child passes a good part of his life in this attentive state of detachment.
Now two characteristics of the child are that he cannot act (to any purpose) and he cannot talk (expressively); hence he is outside, dissociated. And it is just this state, of the dissociated outsider, that is at the center of modern literature of sensibility and sensation alike. Camus’ The Stranger or The Outsider begins with the hero’s going to his mother’s deathbed and being unable to summon up the appropriate emotions or phrases.
It is modern but it is not new. The inability to say the appropriate thing or to feel the appropriate thing, combined with a horrible faculty of noticing, is an almost clinical trait in the character of Julien Sorel and in most of the Stendhalian heroes. Tolstoy was a master of the tragicomedy of inappropriate feelings, gestures, and sensations. Take the first chapter of Anna Karenina, where Stepan Oblonsky, who has been unfaithful to his wife with the French governess, finds a foolish smile spreading over his features when she taxes him with it—a smile of all things. He cannot forgive himself that awful, inadvertent smile (he ascribes it to a “reflex”), which causes her to shut herself up in her room and declare that all is over. Vronsky’s toothache, near the end of Anna Karenina, as it were dunce-caps the climax; it is the distracted intrusion of the commonplace into a drama of tragic passion. Anna has killed herself, and Vronsky is on the train, going off to the Serbo-Turkish war as an “heroic volunteer” with a squadron equipped at his own expense; his face is drawn with suffering—and with the ache in his big tooth, which makes it almost impossible for him to speak. But “all at once a different pain, not an ache but an inner trouble, that set his whole being in anguish, made him for an instant forget his toothache.” He has “suddenly remembered her,” as he has last seen her mangled body exposed on a table in the railway shed. And he ceases to feel his toothache and begins to sob. At every station the train is seen off by patriotic society ladies with nosegays for the heroic volunteers, and these flowers, like the toothache, are ridiculous and painful—beside the point.
The point, however, is there, inescapably so (the corpse in the railway shed is more cruelly alive than the toothache), and this is the difference between Tolstoy (Stendhal too) and the fragmented impressionism of twentieth-century literature, where the real world is broken up into disparate painterly images out of focus and therefore hypnotic and trancelike. The world of twentieth-century sensibility, in contrast to that of Tolstoy, is a world in slow motion, a world which, however happy it may seem, is a world of paralyzed grief, in which little irrelevant things, things that do not belong, are noticed or registered on the film of consciousness, exactly as they are at a funeral service or by a bored child in church.
In the modern novel of sensibility the shimmer of consciousness occupies the whole field of vision. Happenings are broken down into tiny discrete sensory impressions, recalling pointillism or the treatment of light in Monet. The novel of sensation is less refined and seemingly more “factual”: “It was hot”; “‘Give me a drink,’ I said.” But these too are the disjecta membra of consciousness passing across a primitive perceptual screen. A child cannot talk, and the modern novel of sensation, like that of sensibility, is almost mute; these rolls of film are silent, with occasional terse flashes of dialogue, like subtitles. The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world. This is precisely the situation of the hero of the novel of sensation; violence becomes a substitute for action. In the novel of sensibility, nothing happens; as people complain, there is no plot.
Once these discoveries had been made, however, in the recording of the perceptual field (i.e., of pure subjectivity), the novel could not ignore them; there was no turning back to the objectivity of Tolstoy or the rational demonstrations of Proust. The “objective” novel of Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, and Butor is simply a factual treatment of the data of consciousness, which are presented like clues in a detective story to the events that the reader guesses are taking place. The very notion of character is ruled out. One way, however, remains open to the novelist who is interested in character (which means in human society)—a curious back door. That is the entry found by Joyce in Ulysses, where by a humorous stratagem character is shown, as it were, inside out, from behind the screen of consciousness. The interior monologue every human being conducts with himself, sotto voce, is used to create a dramatic portrait. There is no question but that Mr. Bloom and Molly are characters, quite as much as the characters of Dickens or any of the old novelists—not mere bundles of vagrant sensory impressions but articulated wholes. Their soliloquies are really half of a dialogue—a continuous argument with society, whose answers or objections can be inferred. Mr. Bloom and Molly are pathetically social, gregarious, worldly, and lonely: misunderstood. This sense of being the victim of a misunderstanding dominates Finnegans Wake, where the hero is Everybody—the race itself. Nothing could be more vocal than these books of Joyce: talk, talk, talk. Finnegans Wake is a real babel of voices, from the past, from literature, from the house next door and the street; even the river Liffey chatters. We would know Mr. Bloom anywhere by his voice, the inmost Mr. Bloom; the same with Molly. Joyce was a master mimic of the voice of conscience, and Mr. Bloom and Molly are genuine imitations. This blind artist was the great ventriloquist of the novel. A sustained power of mimicry is the secret of all creators of character; Joyce had it while Virginia Woolf, say, did not. That is why Joyce was able to give shape and body—in short, singularity, definition—to the senseless data of consciousness.
The notion that life is senseless, a tale told by an idiot—the under-theme of twentieth-century literature—is affirmed again by Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury. Yet here, as in Ulysses, characters appear from the mists of their own reveries and sensations: the idiot Benjy, Jason, Dilsey, the Negro cook. And a plot, even, is indicated for the reader to piece together from clues dropped here and there: the story of Caddy and the castration of Benjy and Quentin’s suicide. The materialization of plot and character prove that there is being, after all, beyond the arbitrary flux of existence. Following Joyce and Faulkner, the imitation-from-within became almost standard practice for writers who were impatient with the fragmented impressionist novel and who had assimilated nonetheless some of its techniques. To use the technique of impressionism to create something quite different—a character study—seems the manifest intention of Joyce Cary in The Horse’s Mouth, where the author, as it were, impersonates the eye of Gulley Jimson, an old reprobate painter down on his luck; the dancing, broken surface is only a means, like the muttering of an inner dialogue, to show the man in action, incessantly painting in his mind’s eye as he boozily peregrinates the docks and streets. Something very similar is John Updike’s The Poorhouse Fair, which is seen through the resentful hyperopic eye of an old man sitting on the porch of a county poorhouse. The sign of this kind of writing, the mark of its affiliation with the pure impressionist or stream-of-consciousness novel, is that when you start the book you do not know where you are. It takes you quite a few pages to get your bearings, just as if you were bumping along inside a sack in some fairy story; then you awake to the fact that the consciousness you have been thrust into is named Benjy and is feebleminded or is a criminal old painter with a passion for William Blake’s poetry or a charity patient whose eyesight, owing to the failing muscles of old age, bends and distorts everything in the immediate foreground and can only focus clearly on what is far off. Once you know where you are, you can relax and study your surroundings, though you must watch out for sudden, disorienting jolts and jerks—an indication that the character is in movement, colliding or interacting with objective reality.
The reader, here, as in Ulysses, is restricted to a narrow field of vision or to several narrow fields in succession. Now something comparable happens in recent books that, on the surface, seem to owe very little to the stream-of-consciousness tradition and to take no interest in the mechanics of perception or the field of vision as such. I mean such books as Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, The Catcher in the Rye, Lolita, and two of my own novels, The Groves of Academe and A Charmed Life. These books are impersonations, ventriloquial acts; the author, like some prankster on the telephone, is speaking in an assumed voice—high or deep, hollow or falsetto, but in any case not his own. He is imitating the voice of Augie or of Holden Caulfield and the book is written in Augie’s or Holden’s “style.” The style is the man (or the boy), and the author, pretending to be Augie or Holden or Humbert Humbert, remains “in character” throughout the book, unless he shifts to another style, that is, to another character. These books, in short, are dramatic monologues or series of dramatic monologues. The reader, tuned in, is left in no doubt as to where he is physically, and yet in many of these books he finds himself puzzled by the very vocal consciousness he has entered: is it good or bad, impartial or biased? Can it be trusted as Huck Finn or Marcel or David Copperfield could be trusted? He senses the author, cramped inside the character like a contortionist in a box, and suspects (often rightly) some trick. In short, it is not all straight shooting, as it was with the old novelists.
This is not a defect, yet it points to the defects of the method, which can be summed up as a lack of straightforwardness. There is something burglarious about these silent entries into a private and alien consciousness. Or so I feel when I do it myself. It is exhilarating but not altogether honest to make believe I am a devious red-haired man professor with bad breath and bits of toilet paper on his face, to talk under my breath his sibilant, vindictive thought-language and draw his pale lips tightly across my teeth. “So this is how the world looks to a man like that!” I can say to myself, awestruck, and so, I expect, John Updike, twenty-five years old, must have felt when he discovered what it felt like to be an old pauper with loosened eye-muscles sitting on a poorhouse porch. But I cannot know, really, what it feels like to be a vindictive man professor, any more than a young man can know what it is to be an old man or Faulkner can know what it is to be a feeble-minded adult who has had his balls cut off. All fictions, of course, are impersonations, but it seems to me somehow less dubious to impersonate the outside of a person, say Mrs. Micawber with her mysterious “I will never leave Mr. Micawber,” than to claim to know what it feels like to be Mrs. Micawber. These impersonations, moreover, are laborious; to come at a character circuitously, by a tour de force, means spending great and sometimes disproportionate pains on the method of entry. I read somewhere that Salinger spent ten years writing The Catcher in the Rye; that was eight years too long. Granted, the book is a feat, but it compels admiration more as a feat than as a novel, like the performance of a one-armed violinist or any other curiosity. This could not be said of Huckleberry Firm; Mark Twain’s imitation of Huck’s language is never, so to speak, the drawing card. In the cases of Salinger, Updike, myself, one wonders whether the care expended on the mechanics of the imitation, on getting the right detail, vocabulary, and so on, does not constitute a kind of advertisement for the author, eliciting such responses as “Think of the work that went into it!” or “Imagine a twenty-five-year-old being able to take off an old man like that!” One is reminded of certain young actors whose trademark is doing character parts, or, vice versa, of certain old actresses whose draw can be summed up in the sentence “You would never guess she was sixty.”
Yet you might say that it was a fine thing for a well-paid writer in his twenties to know from the inside what it was like to be an aged charity patient. Very democratic. True, and this is a real incentive for the novelist of the twentieth century. The old authors identified with the hero or the heroine, a sympathetic figure whose dreams and desires resembled the author’s own. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” said Flaubert, and no doubt there was quite a lot of Madame Bovary in him or of him in Madame Bovary. Allowing for the differences of circumstance and intellect, he could have been Emma Bovary; the stretch of imagination to encompass her circumstances and her intellect was a great step, of course, in the democratization of the novel, and the naturalists, English and French, pushed further in this direction, with their studies of servant girls, factory operatives, and of the submerged poor in general. Even James tried it with his poor little anarchist, Hyacinthe Robinson. Yet here, as in Flaubert, there is still the idea of a hero or a heroine—mute inglorious Cinderellas who never went to the ball; what separates the author from the hero or the heroine is fate or social destiny. Their souls are not alien. But for the writer today (the writer who has any interest in character) it has become almost obligatory not merely to traverse social barriers but to invade the privacy of a soul so foreign or so foetal as to seem beyond grasp. Take Ulysses. Molly Bloom is not a soulmate of Joyce’s or a sister under the skin. She is as far removed from Joyce as you could get and still remain human—the antipodes. Mr. Bloom is closer, but he is not Joyce as he might have been if he were Jewish, an advertising canvasser, and married to Molly. He is an independent, sovereign world to which Joyce has managed to gain access. There is no doctrine of “sympathies” or a-touch-of-nature-makes-the-whole-world-kin underlying Ulysses. Or underlying The Sound and the Fury, where Faulkner explores the inner life of the mental defective Benjy—his own, you might say, diametrical opposite. Much of modern literature might be defined as the search for one’s own diametrical opposite, which is then used as the point-of-view. The parallel would be if Dickens had tried to write David Copperfield from within the sensibility of Uriah Heep or Oliver Twist through the impressions of Fagin.
Difficulty alone (though it always exercises a charm) does not explain the appeal of such enterprises for modern writers. There is something else—a desire to comprehend, which seems to be growing stronger as the world itself becomes more incomprehensible and dubious. The older writers, when they sought their characters from among the poor and the obscure, assumed that there was a common humanity and were concerned to show this. But it is that very assumption that is being tested, tried out, by the writers of today when they start examining their own opposites. I will give an illustration from my own work to show what I mean, rather than presume to speak for others.
When I first had the idea of the book called The Groves of Academe, it presented itself as a plot with a single character at the center. An unsavory but intelligent professor who teaches modern literature in an experimental college is told that his contract will not be renewed for reasons not specified but because in fact he is a trouble-maker; whereupon, he proceeds to demonstrate his ability to make trouble by launching a demagogic campaign for reappointment, claiming that he is being dismissed for having been a Communist and parading himself as the victim of a witch-hunt. This claim is totally false, but it is successful, for he has gauged very well the atmosphere of a liberal college during the period of anti-Communist hysteria that reached a climax in Senator McCarthy. No one in that liberal college stops to inquire whether he has really been a Communist because everyone is too preoccupied with defending his right to have been one and still remain a teacher; even the college president, knowing (who better?) that politics has nothing to do with the professor’s being dropped from the faculty, yields as a professional liberal to this blackmail. Now the normal way of telling this story would be from the outside or from the point of view of one of the professor’s sympathizers. But I found I had no interest in telling it that way; to me, the interest lay in trying to see it from the professor’s point of view and mouthing it in the clichés and the hissing jargon of his vocabulary. That is, I wanted to know just how it felt to be raging inside the skin of a Henry Mulcahy and to learn how, among other things, he arrived at a sense of self-justification and triumphant injury that allowed him, as though he had been issued a license, to use any means to promote his personal cause, how he manipulated and combined an awareness of his own undesirability with the modern myth of the superior man hated and envied by mediocrity. To do this, naturally, I had to use every bit of Mulcahy there was in me, and there was not very much: I am not a paranoid, nor a liar, nor consumed with hatred, nor a man, for that matter. But this very fact was the stimulus. If I could understand Mulcahy, if I could make myself be Mulcahy, it would get me closer to the mystery, say, of Hitler and of all the baleful demagogic figures of modern society whom I could not imagine being. There was no thought of “Tout comprendre, c’est pardonner” or of offering a master-key to public events like Darkness at Noon. What I was after was something much more simple, naïve, and childlike: the satisfaction of the curiosity we all feel when we read in the paper of some crime we cannot imagine committing, like the case of the man who insured his mother-in-law at the airport and then planted a bomb in the plane she was taking. Certain crimes, certain characters, in their impudence or awfulness, have the power of making us feel bornés, and in a sense I wanted to tiptoe into the interior of Mulcahy like a peasant coming into a palace. The question was the same as between the peasant and the king: did we belong to the same species or not? The book is not an answer, but an experiment, an assaying.
There is an element of the private game, even of the private joke, in this kind of writing—a secret and comic relation between the author and his character. An arcane laughter, too infernal for the reader to hear, quietly shakes such books; the points, the palpable hits (inspired turns of phrases, trouvailles of vocabulary) may altogether escape the reader’s notice. Indeed, it sometimes happens that the reader is quite unaware of what the author is doing and complains that the style is full of clichés, when that, precisely, is the point. Or the glee of the hidden author may produce uncanny noises, such as the giggle or whinny overheard sometimes in Lolita testifying to who-knows-what indecorous relations between the author and Humbert Humbert. Joyce salted his work with private jokes, hints, and references that no one but he could be expected to enjoy, yet with Joyce it added to the savor. Lesser writers (or at least I) find themselves constrained by the naturalistic requirements of the method, the duty to keep a straight face, stay in character, speak in an assumed voice, hollow or falsetto, as though in a game that has gone on too long and that no one knows how to stop. There are moments when one would like to drop the pretense of being Mulcahy and go on with the business of the novel.
To return to the question of character. What do we mean when we say there are “real people” in a book? If you examine the works of Jane Austen, who, everyone agrees, was a creator of characters, you will find that the “real people” in her books are not so often the heroes and heroines as the minor characters: Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mr. Collins, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Lady Bertram, poor Miss Bates, Emma’s friend Harriet, the timorous and valetudinarian Mr. Woodhouse. These beings are much more thoroughly and wonderfully themselves than the heroes and heroines are able to be; the reason for this is, I think, that they are comic.
Or turn to Ulysses. Who would deny that Stephen Dedalus, a straight character, seems less “real” than Mr. Bloom and Molly, less “real” than his father, Mr. Dedalus? In what does this “reality” consist? In the incorrigibility and changelessness of the figure. Villains may reform, heroes and heroines may learn their lesson, like Emma or Elizabeth or Mr. Darcy, or grow into the author, like Stephen Dedalus and David Copperfield, but a Lady Catherine de Bourgh or a Molly Bloom or a Mr. Dedalus, regardless of resolutions, cannot reform or change, cannot be other than they are. Falstaff is a species of eternity; that is why the Hostess’ description of his death is so poignantly sad, far sadder than the pretty death of Ophelia, for Falstaff, according to the laws of his creation, should not die. This was Queen Elizabeth’s opinion too when she demanded his resurrection and Shakespeare obliged with The Merry Wives of Windsor. “Mortal men, mortal men,” Falstaff sighs speciously, but he himself is an immortal, an everlasting, like Mr. and Mrs. Micawber who, when last heard of, were still going strong in Australia. The same with Mrs. Gamp, Pecksniff, Stepan Oblonsky, Monsieur Homais, Stepan Trofimovitch, old Karamazov. Real characterization, I think, is seldom accomplished outside of comedy or without the fixative of comedy; the stubborn pride of Mr. Darcy, the prejudice of Elizabeth, the headstrongness of Emma. A comic character, contrary to accepted belief, is likely to be more complicated and enigmatic than a hero or a heroine, fuller of surprises and turnabouts; Mr. Micawber, for instance, can find the most unexpected ways of being himself; so can Mr. Woodhouse or the Master of the Marshalsea. It is a sort of resourcefulness.
What we recognize as reality in these figures is their implacable resistance to change; they are what perdures or remains—the monoliths or plinths of the world. Pierre in War and Peace seems more real than Levin, his opposite number in Anna Karenina. This is because Pierre is fat—fat and awkward and wears a funny-looking green civilian hat at the Battle of Borodino, like a sign of his irreducible innocent stoutness. Thanks to a streak of cruelty or sarcastic sharpness in Tolstoy, most of his heroes and heroines are not spared a satirical glance that picks out their weak points: Vronsky’s bald spot, Prince Andrei’s small white hands, the heavy step of the Princess Marya. They live as characters because Tolstoy is always conscious of their limitations, just as he is with his comic figures; he does not forget that Anna is a society woman and Vronsky a smart cavalry officer—types that in real life he disapproved of and even detested.
The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me. This capacity to learn is the prerogative of the hero or the heroine: Prince Hal as opposed to Falstaff. The principle of growth in human beings is as real, of course (though possibly not so common), as the principle of eternity or inertia represented by the comic; it is the subjective as opposed to the objective. When we identify ourselves with the hero of a story, we are following him with all our hopes, i.e., with our subjective conviction of human freedom; on the comic characters we look with despair, in which, though, there is a queer kind of admiration—we really, I believe, admire the comic characters more than we do the hero or the heroine, because of their obstinate power to do-it-again, combined with a total lack of self-consciousness or shame. But it is the hero or the heroine whose fate we feel suspense for, whom we blush for when they make a mistake; we put ourselves in their place from the very first pages, from the minute we make their acquaintance. We do not have to know the hero or the heroine to be on their side; not even a name is necessary. We are pulling for them if they are called “K.” or “he.” This mechanism of identification with the hero is very odd and seems to rest, almost, on lack of knowledge. If a book or story begins, “He took the train that night,” we are surer that “he” is the hero (i.e., our temporary double) than if it begins, “Richard Coles took the five forty-five Thursday night.” Or “Count Karenin seated himself in a first-class carriage on the Moscow-Petersburg express.” We would wait to hear more about this “Richard Cole” or “Count Karenin” before depositing our sympathies with him. This throws an interesting light on the question of character.
In the modern novel there is little suspense. No one reads Ulysses or Finnegans Wake or The Sound and the Fury or Mrs. Dalloway for the sake of the story, to find out what is going to happen to the hero or the heroine. The chief plot interest in these books is to try to find out what happened before the book started: what was in that letter the chicken scratched up? what had Earwicker done in Phoenix Park? why does Benjy get so excited every time he is taken near the golf course? what is biting Stephen (“agenbite of inwit”)? who, really, has been Clarissa Dalloway? The absence of suspense means that the cord of identification between the reader and the hero has deliberately been cut. Or put it a different way: the reader, as I have said, wakes up in a foreign consciousness, a bundle of impressions, not knowing where he is. The first reaction is a mild panic, an attack of claustrophobia; far from the reader’s identifying, say, with Stephen at the outset of Ulysses, his whole wish is to fight his way out of Stephen into the open world, in order to discover where Stephen is and what is going on. And even when these fears have been quieted (Stephen is in a tower; he lives with Buck Mulligan, a medical student; his mother has just died), new fears surge up and always of a locative character, so that the reader is put in the position of a perpetual outsider, hearing what Stephen hears, seeing what Stephen sees but failing to get the drift often, asking bewildered questions: “Where am I?” “Who is talking?” “What’s up?” An anxiety about location (the prime clinical symptom in the reader of the modern novel) precludes interest in direction; in any case, the end is foreordained: nothing can happen to Stephen but to become Joyce. Stephen is neither subject nor object, neither hero nor comedian, but the bombarded center of a perceptual all-out attack; in this sense, Ulysses is a scientific study in the logistics of personality. In the laboratory of the modern novel, the author qua author (not qua character) is the spot-lit master-figure. And in science the only hero can be the white-coated scientist; the rest is data. The difference can be felt by a comparison with Proust. Proust’s Marcel is still a hero, followed by the reader with suspense, to learn what will happen with his grandmother, what will happen with Gilberte, what will happen with Albertine—something more can happen to him than to become Proust. Marcel is a pure subject, despite the attention he pays to studying and analyzing his reactions; if the book is, in part, a reconstruction of anterior events, it is Marcel himself, not just the reader, who is trying to find out what actually took place before the book started, and this quest for certainty is itself a hero’s goal.
In the old novels, there was a continual fluctuating play between the hero and the “characters,” that is, between the world as we feel it to be subjectively and the world as we know it as observers. As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story. We cannot believe that it is finished, that we are “finished,” even though we may say so; we expect another chapter, another installment, tomorrow or next week. In moments of despair, we look on ourselves leadenly as objects; we see ourselves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even be driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the “knowledge,” seems sufficiently final. Our view of others, on the contrary, cannot but be objective and therefore tinged with a sad sense of comedy. Others are to us like the “characters” of fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable—unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves, of the principio individuationis. But it is just this principle that we cannot see in ourselves. What is happening in modern literature is a peculiar reversal of roles: we try to show the object as subject and the subject as object. That is, can I be inside Professor Mulcahy and outside me? The answer is I cannot; no one can. There can only be one subject, ourselves, one hero or heroine. The existentialist paradox—that we are subjects for ourselves and objects for others—cannot be resolved by technical virtuosity. The best efforts, far from mastering the conundrum, merely result in the creation of characters—Benjy, Jason, Molly, Mr. Bloom, and so on—who are more or less “successful” in exactly the old sense, more or less “realized,” concrete, objectively existent. Choirs of such characters make up the modern novel. What has been lost, however, in the continuing experiment is the power of the author to speak in his own voice or through the undisguised voice of an alter ego, the hero, at once a known and an unknown, a bearer of human freedom. It would seem, moreover, that there was a kind of symbiosis between the hero and the “characters,” that you could not have the one without the others or the others without the one. The loss of the hero upset a balance of nature in the novel, and the languishing of the “characters” followed. Certainly the common world that lies between the contemporary reader and the contemporary author remains unexplored, almost undescribed, just as queer and empty a place as Dickens’ world would be if he had spent eight years recording the impressions of Fagin or the sensory data received by Uriah Heep in the slithery course of a morning’s walk.
This is the substance of a talk or talks given in Yugoslavia and England in the winter of 1960.