Ideas and the Novel (11 page)

Though he is not a religious believer and despises ordinary conventions, he differs from a Raskolnikov in that he would not consider for an instant violating the moral law in order to benefit humanity. In fact this is precisely what estranges him from the Radical politicians he encounters, who have easy consciences in such matters, accepting with a wink the prospect of violence—a little rough-and-tumble—for the ultimate good of defeating the Tory. Felix would never commit a murder, even in the abstract, turning it over in his mind as a theory. Yet in reality it happens to him to kill a man and to be tried and sentenced for it, though his intention was to halt a riot and the blow he struck was not meant to be mortal. Thus he joins the ranks of principled heroes of nineteenth-century fiction who end up on the wrong side of the law: Jean Valjean, Julien Sorel, Raskolnikov, Nekhludov in
Resurrection,
who joins the woman he has wronged—the prostitute Maslova—in the convict gang traveling to Siberia. No reflection, however, precedes the decision that leads Felix unintentionally to take a man’s life; an impulse, rather, rooted in his nature, sends him to try to head off the riotous working men who will only damage their cause and other people’s property by a drunken spree of violence. In the style of so many other nineteenth-century “new men,” he has proudly announced “I am a man of this generation,” but what we find in his actions is a simple old-fashioned boy any mother could be proud of—a testimonial to right training.

“If there’s anything our people want convincing of,” he tells Esther Lyon when she comes to see him in prison, “it is, that there’s some dignity and happiness for a man other than changing his station.” (By “our people” he means his own class, the working people, not the English nation, I assume.) Of course there is some truth in what he says, but it is a truth that discourages political action. Felix seems to be totally immune to his century, as though he had been vaccinated against the bug of equality. The novel, which ends with him out of jail and happily married (there is even a little Felix), has a lengthy appendix called “Address to Working Men.” There the author imagines Felix expounding his political philosophy to a working-class audience: “Now the only safe way by which society can be steadily improved...is not by any attempt to do away directly with existing class distinctions and advantages, as if everybody would have the same sort of work, or lead the same sort of life...but by the turning of Class Interests into Class Functions or duties.” One is grateful for the knowledge that the address
is
imaginary, with the audience’s reaction mercifully
un
imagined.

Despite all her learning and her capacious intelligence, ideas for George Eliot are wholesome moral reflections; she does not seem to have suspected that they could possibly be anything but “improving.” Tolerance was her great virtue as a novelist; she always seeks to widen, to make common to all, emotions in her characters’ bosoms that the reader might be inclined to spurn any intimacy with. I take an example at random from
Middlemarch,
where the pious banker Bulstrode, obliged to face his conscience, at once begins to dodge. “If this be hypocrisy,” the author writes, “it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all. ...” The effect of such reminders, page after page, is broadening: we are all made of the same stuff, we have to acknowledge. And, side by side with the injunction to look in the mirror, a general cure is suggested whose name is unselfishness. This is the single thought urged on us by her novels. It is stated explicitly over and over and driven home by telling examples. Mr. Casaubon is selfish, Rosamond Vincy is selfish, her brother Fred is selfish, Tom Tulliver is selfish, Harold Transome is selfish, Esther Lyon starts out to be selfish but is saved in time by Felix Holt. On the other side of the ledger, Maggie Tulliver is unselfish, Mary Garth is unselfish, the Dissenting minister Rufus Lyon is a pillar of unselfishness, Dorothea Brooke is headstrong yet capable of self-sacrifice.

The limitations of this urgent central idea may explain why George Eliot’s “good” characters are so unconvincing, even when she tries, as with Felix Holt and Will Ladislaw, to give them a rough edge that might make them complicated to know socially. Her selfish characters are far more persuasive since we are forced to recognize ourselves—or part of ourselves—in them. Thus the virtue of tolerance we are called on to exercise by this writer at her fullest and best has no work to do with the characters we are instructed to admire and to imitate. If George Eliot fails, even in
Middlemarch,
to be a very great writer, this, I think, is because of an intellectual deficiency. The division of central characters into self-seeking and non-self-seeking is inadequate as a key to understanding. In
Felix Holt,
for example, it tells us nothing about the Radicalism that is presumably the subject of the story, and what we get is something strangely like a less ponderous, more charming
Romola,
in costumes of the post-Reform Bill period.

Dickens knew that an idea can be dangerous. Unlike George Eliot, he was familiar with the hold of abstractions on human flesh and blood; it is not surprising that Dostoievsky read him with eagerness and perhaps learned from him. Still, the incubus or succuba preying on Dickens’ people is usually nothing clearly identifiable as a theory or concise program. The great case to the contrary is Mr. Gradgrind in
Hard Times.
From almost the first page, we see how the utilitarian doctrines that have taken possession of his brain are blighting the natural life of his family, how they wither any hope of instruction in the model school he has set up in Coketown. Here he is, in the schoolroom, lecturing the schoolmaster. “Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. ...Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts. This is the principle upon which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle upon which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!” Then: “Girl number twenty...Give me your definition of a horse.” Sissy Jupe is too frightened to say anything. “Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!”

Mr. Gradgrind’s close friend and business associate is Mr. Bounderby, who has his own
idée fixe
and global explanation, “The turtle soup and the gold spoon. And the venison.” It is apparent that these two upholders of the social order are mad, just as mad as the terrorists of
The Possessed.
The reader is meant to understand that Gradgrind and Bounderby are dangerously insane and that at the same time they are perfectly normal, that is, that many other people share the maniacal ideas they express. Bounderby is a wicked bounder, but Gradgrind is not altogether a bad man—a philanthropist, even, according to his lights; he actually has
girls
in his school.

It seems odd at first glance that the idea that has got hold of Mr. Gradgrind should be named by him “Facts.” The nature of an idea, surely, is to be abstract, i.e., the polar opposite of the concrete, of the plurality of facts, living and dead, each different from the next, that the world consists of. But we soon understand that Mr. Gradgrind’s facts are peculiar, not like the ones we know. Here is a definition of a horse, given by a boy pupil, that he is able to commend: “Quadruped. Gramnivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisors. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in the mouth.” This sounds like the idea of a horse rather than the fact of a horse. It is as though a drawer labeled “Horse” containing miscellaneous pieces of information, dried and filleted for better storage, had been obediently opened in the filing-cabinet that constitutes the star pupil’s mind. The dehydrated facts Mr. Gradgrind favors add up to a flesh-less abstraction—horse in general.

The reason for this curious taste of his is evident in his character: he insists on being in control. And here something of importance for my subject emerges. Ideas are utilitarian. They have a purpose. They are formed in consciousness with a regulatory aim, which is to gain control of the swarming minutiae of experience, give them order and direction. That is Mr. Gradgrind to a T. He believes in education and the extension of knowledge. He wants to see laws formulated for every department of life that will push back the ever-shrinking areas of ignorance, light up dark corners with modern illumination, keep the streets of the mind patrolled. In the interests of thoroughgoing enlightenment, he has forbidden the reading of “idle story-books” in his house. “Idle imagination,” he and Bounderby have concluded, is the chief obstacle to the establishment of reason’s rule in the young.

Well, it is natural that he should be hostile to novels and natural, in turn, that the novel should be hostile to him, even when it happens that he is not a bad man and means well. If we take Mr. Gradgrind as representing in caricatural form not just his own utilitarian school of thinking (based, after all, on the greatest good of the greatest number) but the mental faculty that is continuously active in formulating ideas, laws, generalizations, then we can look on the novel, which is wedded to minutiae, as his sworn enemy. All art, of course, objects to the continuously active Mr. Gradgrind, but the novel is best armed to do battle with him in that it appears to have one foot in his camp because of the mass of particulars, resembling his “Facts,” that it mobilizes for its own purposes.

But it is a strange conflict, with long truces, and often looks like a mere family quarrel. I mean that the novelist’s effort—any artist’s effort—to impose shape and form on that mass of particulars while maintaining their distinctness has something in common with the mind’s will to absolute rule through the synthesizing process. They are similar but they are not the same. The artist’s concern (and especially, I should say, the novelist’s) must be to save the particulars at all costs, even at the sacrifice of the perfection of the design. An idea cannot have loose ends, but a novel, I almost think, needs them. Nevertheless, there is enough in common for the novelist to feel, like Dostoievsky, the attraction of ideas while taking up arms against them—most often with the weapons of mockery.

We tend to suppose that most novelists take the field against particular ideas, like Dickens in
Hard Times,
that only a few—say, Tolstoy and Lawrence—show an innate angry suspicion of ideas per se, as though the tender living tissue in their care needed protection from the rampaging will to abstraction. Yet even in celebrated victories over specific sets of ideas (Voltaire’s disposal of Leibnitz in the person of Dr. Pangloss—“If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?”—Orwell’s disposal of Stalinism—“All animals are equal but some are more equal than others”), there is a certain overkill, as though the work were being enjoyed for its own sake. I believe this is always the case, that the tension is always there, except where the novelist has never felt the fascination of ideas, and this, until our own time, has been rare.

I said just now that the novelist’s concern must be to save the particulars, and perhaps this needs a little explanation. Even when he shows vast social forces in motion (like Victor Hugo or Manzoni or Tolstoy), the novelist’s care is for individual destinies, and it seems to be proper to the novel that they should be small destinies. Not the kings and noble men of the tragic theatre or the witty bloods of comedy but Renzo and Lucia, Tess, Jude, Stephen Blackpool, Felix and Esther, Cosette. None of these poor sparrows “fits” into the overall social framework, and if they have a place in a larger scheme, it can only be God’s, which is unknowable. “The President of the Immortals had finished his sport with Tess.” Now this habit of concern for the small predisposes the novelist to distrust generalization, i.e., to champion Dobbin against the gramnivorous quadruped. The position, however, is not simple. As we have seen, there appears to be an affinity between Ideas and facts, both Mr. Gradgrind’s kind and the other, that is, between the lofty and the very small, as though in the novel they grew together, like the red rose and the green briar in the ballad.

Besides, in the past, if the novelist’s mission to teach and improve inclined him to Mr. Gradgrind’s side, his common sense—a highly necessary faculty for the novelist, which I have neglected to mention until now—and his powers of observation led him to despair of
any
recipes for improvement or else to fall back, like George Eliot, on simple housewifely stand-bys: Forget Self and Think of Others.

Today there is no longer a dilemma. Ideas are held not to belong in the novel; in the art of fiction we have progressed beyond such simplicities. The doctrine of progress in the arts is a hard doctrine, imposing itself even on those who are fervent non-believers. The artist is an imitative beast, and, being of my place and time, I cannot philosophize in a novel in the good old way, any more than I can write “We mortals.” A novel that has ideas in it stamps itself as dated; there is no escape from that law.

For a time, about twenty years ago, it looked as if there could be a compromise. Though an author of standing knew better than to put explicit ideas in his novels, they could be there implicitly, and the reader was allowed—as a student, even encouraged—to take them out. “What are Golding’s ideas in
The Lord of the Flies?”
“Is there a Manichean split in Faulkner’s
The Wild Palms?”
Today all that is quite impermissible. What the author may not put in, the reader may not take out. There must be nothing said or hinted that is remotely subject to paraphrase. In the place of ideas, images still rule the roost, and Balzac’s distinction between the
roman idée
and the
roman imagé
appears to have been prophetic, though his order of preference is reversed.

Nevertheless, there are a few back doors left through which ideas may be spirited in, and some talented authors have found them. One brilliant example was furnished by J. G. Farrell in
The Siege of Krishnapur,
a novel teeming with ideas that is set in India at the time of the Sepoy Mutiny and has an exciting plot as well. Farrell’s motto might have been stated thus: If because of ideas and other unfashionable components your novel is going to seem dated, don’t be alarmed—date it.
The Singapore Grip
— Farrell’s last novel; he was drowned this past summer—carries the principle on to the fall of Singapore in the Second World War: ideas, characters, and setting have a distinct period flavor, that is, they are as solid as furniture and without any touch of camp. A more recent novel, John Updike’s
The Coup,
performs a rather similar feat, moving back, as it were, in time via geography: a “developing” African country bristles with ideas, mainly in the head of its hero, a Western-educated native dictator who finishes, still reflective, in exile in the south of France. There was also Alison Lurie’s
Only Children,
set in the late thirties with the ideas and life-styles of the period. In the U.S.A., a special license has always been granted to the Jewish novel, which is free to juggle ideas in full view of the public; Bellow, Malamud, Philip Roth still avail themselves of the right, which is never conceded to us goys. In concluding, I might mention an unusual solution to the problem. This was Robert Pirsig’s
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
an American story of a cross-country trip with philosophical interludes—one of the chief characters was named Phaedrus. Pirsig’s device was simple; he refrained, probably at a financial sacrifice, from calling his book a novel, and it was listed as a nonfiction title. If the novel is to be revitalized, maybe more such emergency strategies will have to be employed to disarm and disorient reviewers and teachers of literature, who, as always, are the reader’s main foe.