Ideas and the Novel (2 page)

Their creator’s reluctance to furnish them with identifiable traits that might let us “place” them in real life has curious consequences for the principals of the late novels. These figures, one realizes, must be accepted on faith, as ectoplasms emanating from an entranced author at his desk, in short as ghostly abstractions, pale ideas, which explains, when you come to think of it, the fever of discussion they excite in the other characters. Those by comparison are solid. They have bodies and brains, however employed. Motives are allotted to them, such as plain curiosity (the Assinghams, Henrietta Stackpole) or money greed or sexual hunger (both seem to be working, though sometimes at cross-purposes, in Kate Croy, Morton Densher, Charlotte Stant), motives that give them a foot in the actual world. And if, despite their concerted effort of analysis, the principals they keep wondering over evade definition, if, unlike furniture, they cannot be established as universals standing for a whole class of singulars, Milly and Maggie and Chad remain nonetheless ideas of a sort. That is, ideas, expelled by a majestic butler at the front door, return by another entrance and stand waiting pathetically to be dressed in words.

Before leaving James, hoist—if I am right—by his own petard, I want to ask whether his exclusion of ideas in the sense of mental concepts was connected or not with the exclusion of common factuality. The two are not
necessarily
related. Consider Thomas Love Peacock. There the ordinary stuff of life is swept away to make room for abstract speculation. That, and just that, is the joke. It tickles our funny-bone to meet the denizens of
Nightmare Abbey
—young Scythrop, the heir of the house, and Flosky, who has named his eldest son Emanuel after Kant, and Listless, up from London, complaining that Dante is growing fashionable. Each has his own bats in the belfry; there is a bad smell of midnight oil in the derelict medieval structure, where practical affairs are neglected for the necromancy of “synthetical reasoning.” In hearty, plain-man style (which is partly a simulation), Peacock treats the brain’s sickly products as the end-result of the general disease of modishness for which the remedy would be prolonged exposure to common, garden reality.

But for James, mental concepts, far from being opposed to the ordinariness of laundry lists and drains, seem themselves to have belonged to a lower category of inartistic objects, like the small article of “the commonest domestic use” manufactured by the Newsome family in
The Ambassadors
—I have always guessed that it was a brass safety-pin. But safety-pin or sink-stopper, it could not be mentioned in the text, any more than Milly Theale’s cancer (if that is what it was), or, let us say,
The Origin of Species.
I confess I do not easily see what these tabooed subjects have in common, unless that they were familiar to most people and hence bore the traces of other handling. Yet, though both were in general circulation, a safety-pin is not the same as the idea of natural selection. More likely, James wished his fictions to dwell exclusively on the
piano nobile,
as he conceived it, of social intercourse—neither upstairs in the pent garrets of intellectual labor nor below in the basement and kitchens of domestic toil. And the garret and the basement have a secret sympathy between them of which the
piano nobile
is often unaware. That, at any rate, seems to be the lesson of the greatest fictions, past and present.

What is curious, though, is that ideas are still today felt to be unsightly in the novel, whereas the nether areas—the cloaca—are fully admitted to view. I suppose that the ban on ideas that even now largely prevails, above all in English-speaking countries, is a heritage from modernism in its prim anti-Victorian phase. To Virginia Woolf, for instance, it was not question of what might be brought
into
the novel—sex, the natural functions—but of what should be kept out. In the reaction against the Victorian novel, it was natural that the discursive authors, from Dickens to Meredith and Hardy, should stand in the pillory as warning examples of what was most to be avoided. When the young Eliot complimented James on the fact that no rough bundles of concepts disfigure and coarsen his novels, he at once went on to cite Meredith (“the disciple of Carlyle”) as a bad case of the opposite.

Actually Meredith with his tendency to aphorism was in his own way an experimental writer, which made him exciting to the young. This may have been why he was singled out for rapid disposal. That he went counter to the “stuffy” realist tradition, jested with the time-honored conventions of the form, even gave hints of something like the interior monologue, did not excuse him. In fact he has not lasted, except, I think, for
The Egoist;
the mock-heroic vein, which he worked and overworked, failed to undermine the old structure and became a blind alley. Brio was not enough. In any case, his way with ideas, wavering between persiflage and orotund pronouncement, was too unsteady to maintain a serious weight. His contemporaries seem to have known what he was “about,” but a reader today finds it hard to determine the overall pattern of his thought.

This can never be said of Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy. Nor on the Continent of Hugo, Stendhal, Balzac, even Flaubert, of Manzoni, or any of the Russians except Chekhov, who was relatively taciturn. The talkative, outspoken novelist was evidently the norm and always had been. In America, those who have survived—chiefly Melville and Hawthorne—seldom expressed themselves on topics and issues of the day, and their utterances could be somewhat riddling on the great themes of good and evil. Nevertheless they cannot be charged with unsteadiness, lack of serious purpose. They were sermonizers like their contemporaries in the Old World; it was only that their sermon, like the Book of Revelations, required some decoding; the apocalyptic imagery, as with an allegory, called for interpretation.

In fact the nineteenth-century novel was so evidently an idea-carrier that the component of overt thought in it must have been taken for granted by the reader as an ingredient as predictable as a leavening agent in bread. He came to expect it in his graver fiction, perhaps to count on it, just as he counted on the geographical and social coordinates that gave him his bearings in the opening chapter: the expanse of Egdon Heath at sundown crossed by the solitary reddleman and his cart; the mountain heights of the Lecco district looking down on the lone homeward-bound figure of Don Abbondio. Or “A rather pretty little chaise on springs, such as bachelors, half-pay officers, staff captains, landowners with about a hundred serfs...drive about in, rolled in at the gates of the hotel of the provincial town of N.” Or “About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good fortune to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton.” We are so much in the habit of skipping pages of introductory description and general reflections that interrupt the story that we can scarcely believe that such “blemishes” once gave pleasure, that a novel would have been felt by our ancestors to be a far poorer thing without them. They can be dismissed by the modern reader as “mere” conventions of the genre, but in the old times a novel that lacked them would have been like an opera without an overture, which of course is a convention too.

The function of geographical descriptions—naming of counties, rivers, and so forth—and social topography is to make the reader feel comfortable in the vehicle he has boarded, like passengers in a plane having landmarks below pointed out to them and receiving bulletins from the pilot on altitude and cruising speed. Yet it was not essentially different from the function performed by ideas. Both gave depth and perspective. And the analogy to air travel is illustrative. The briefings supplied by the pilot (“On your left, folks, you’ll see the city of Boston and the Charles River”) are a relic of earlier days of aviation—a mere outworn convention we “put up with” in a contemporary airbus. Scarcely anybody bothers any more to rise in his seat to try to make out the landmark being mentioned—you cannot see anything anyway—the plane is going too fast and the view is obstructed. Besides, who cares? The destination is the point. But if you put yourself back in fancy to the propeller plane, you will see, as with the novel, what has been lost. So intrinsic to the novelistic medium were ideas and other forms of commentary, all tending to “set” the narration in a general scheme, that it would have been impossible in former days to speak of “the novel of ideas.” It would have seemed to be a tautology.

Now the expression is used with such assurance and frequency that I am surprised not to find it in my
Reader’s Guide to Literary Terms,
which is otherwise reasonably current. For example, under “
NOVEL
,” I read: “In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries the novel, as an art form, has reached its fullest development. Concerned with their craft, novelists such as Flaubert, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, E. M. Forster, and Thomas Mann have used various devices to achieve new aesthetic forms within the genre.” I do not know what Flaubert, who died in 1880, is doing there, but the tenor of the list is clear. If the “
NOVEL OF IDEAS
” does not figure as an entry (though “
NOVEL OF THE SOIL
” does), it may be that the authors were not sure what the term covered. I must say that it is not clear to me either, though I sense something derogatory in the usage, as if there were novels and novels of ideas and never the twain shall meet. But rather than attempt to define a term that has never been in my own vocabulary, I shall try to discover what other people mean by it.

Does it mean a novel in which the characters sit around, or pace up and down, enunciating and discussing ideas? Examples would be
The Magic Mountain, Point Counter Point,
in fact all of Huxley’s novels, Sartre’s
Les chemins de la liberté,
Malraux’s
Man’s Fate.
The purest cases would be Peacock—
Headlong Hall, Nightmare Abbey, Crotchet Castle
—if they could be called novels, which I doubt, since they lack a prime requisite—length—and another—involvement of the reader in the characters’ fates. You might also count Flaubert’s unfinished
Bouvard et Pecuchet,
where the joint heroes are busy compiling a Dictionary of Received Ideas, and Santayana’s
The Last Puritan,
by now forgotten. But though the term would seem clearly to apply to the works just mentioned
(The Magic Mountain
being the one everybody remembers best, having read it at nineteen), there are not very many of them and they are rather out of style.

Solzhenitsyn’s
Cancer Ward,
which belongs to our own time, roughly conforms to the type. Like
The Magic Mountain,
it takes place in a sanatorium, where patients who have come to be cured have little else to do after their treatments and medical examinations than muse and argue. Isolation is crucial to this type of novel: the characters are on an island, out on a limb, either of their own choosing—Peacock’s crotchety castles, Huxley’s grand country house presided over by Mr. Scogan
(Crome Yellow)
—or by force majeure, as in a hospital or a prison (Solzhenitsyn’s
The Third Circle).
Or the island may be moral, self-constituted by a literary clique
(Point Counter Point),
by a group of like-thinking, semi-political Bohemians
(Les chemins de la liberté),
by a cell of revolutionaries
(Man’s Fate)
. What is involved is always a contest of faiths. The debates on the magic mountain between Naphta and Settembrini oppose nihilistic Jesuitry to progressive atheistic humanism but also pan-Germanism to pro-Russian
entente-cordiale
doctrine, prophecies of war to firm belief in peace, repose to work, in other words, you might say, night to day. Beneath the circus-like confrontation of current creeds lies a clash between very ancient faiths. Settembrini is a monist, Naphta a dualist. Settembrini, asked to choose, exalts mind over body: “...within the antithesis of body and mind, the body is the evil, the devilish principle, for the body is nature.” It is like a game of preferences with the aim being self-definition, which no doubt is why young people are dazzled by it.

On a simpler level and without encyclopedic pretensions,
Cancer Ward
presents us with various naive faiths—from faith in Stalin to faith in the healing properties of radioactive gold to faith in the mandrake root—sometimes peacefully coexisting, sometimes at odds with each other. It is natural that in a hospital the belief in a cure, in sovereign remedies, should dominate every mind. It becomes vital to have a theory, and world theories, global diagnoses of the body politic or the human state generally, take on, as though of necessity, an importance not usually accorded them by the healthy. The pressing need to have faith, i.e., grounds for hope, gives an urgency to the abstract disputes of both
The Magic Mountain
and
Cancer Ward.
Here ideas of any and every kind become, as if by contagion, matters of life and death. It is also true that in these narratives no idea can win out over another. Nobody is convinced or persuaded. The excited debates between patients or between doctor and patient end up in the air. Hans Castorp, whose young mind has been the salient contested for by opposing forces, leaves the sanatorium and returns “down below,” to the plains, which should be the level ground of sound, commonplace reality, except for the fact that there he dies as a soldier in the general reasonless catastrophe of the First World War. In
Cancer Ward,
Kostoglotov, too, leaves his sanatorium, having been let out as cured, which should be a happy ending, except for the fact that the cancer ward whose gates close behind him has been a species of sanctuary; he is slated to return to his real down-to-earth life of penal exile. One kind of death sentence, in both cases, has been exchanged for another.

It is not especially uncanny (or no more than any resemblance or twinning) that this pair of novels, so widely separated in space and time, so widely divergent in manner, should match in a number of respects. Sanatorium life is much the same, I suppose, everywhere and always. But sanatorium life, as such, did not dictate the ending; a positive conclusion would have been possible if the novel were only about sickness and recovery. The ending is imposed not by the particular case—cancer ward or tubercular clinic—but by the fact that in general the so-called novel of ideas (at least the kind I have been describing) does not allow of any resolution. Nothing decisive can happen in it; it is a seesaw. Events that do occur in it are simply incidents, sometimes diverting, as in Peacock. A real event, such as the death of Hans Castorp, is reserved for a postscript; it does not belong to the text proper. The same with Kostoglotov’s re-shouldering of his penal identity. We do not see it happen; in fact it may not happen “for good,” since when he goes to register with the NKVD in the town outside the hospital gates, the
Komendant
speaks cheerfully of an amnesty in the offing. But Kostoglotov cannot make himself believe him—he has heard of amnesties before and nothing came of them—and the reader knows no more than he. It is left in suspension, like the arguments between the sick men, which never “get” anywhere.