Ideas and the Novel (3 page)

If a secondary character chances to die—for instance, Quarles’ child in
Point Counter Point
—that, too, is an incident, outside the work’s proper concerns; the main characters go on arguing as before. When it occurs in a sanatorium, it is just an episode, figuring in the normal mortality rate; a new patient moves into the bed the next day, and the ripple of concern quickly subsides. The sanatorium is an ideal setting for the discussion novel, for time does not count there. Ideas, though some may age, are indifferent to time. Mann speaks of “the more spacious time conceptions prevalent ‘up here.’ ” That is an effect, of course, of the routine, which makes one day like another. But there is an endlessness, an eternal regularity, in all such novels; the characters slip into their places like habitués of a corner café. The sense of eternity may be represented under other aspects. In André Gide’s
The Counterfeiters,
which I might have included under this heading, Edouard, the chief character, is shown writing a novel in which a facsimile of him is writing a novel, in which, we suppose, still a third figure... The black-hatted Quaker on the Quaker Oats box holding a Quaker Oats box portraying a Quaker holding a Quaker Oats box, getting smaller and smaller in infinite regress. In
Point Counter Point
Huxley borrowed the repeating-decimal device.

Still, when the novel of ideas is spoken of, maybe another type of story is being referred to—a story that does come to some sort of resolution. That is the missionary novel sometimes referred to as a “tract.” On the surface it may look like the kind of novel I have just been trying to analyze, in that it may have the air of a panel discussion, with points of view put forward by several characters speaking in turn and each being allowed equal time. But it soon appears that one speaker is right and the others, though momentarily persuasive, are wrong. I am thinking of D. H. Lawrence.

Of course there are missionary novels that are not novels of ideas, for example,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
It is animated by a strong conviction but, if I remember right, does not “go into” the argument for and against slavery. And there are missionary elements hiding in many tales that pass for thrillers or love stories. In fact it is hard to think of a novel that in some sense does not seek to proselytize. But what I have in mind are books like
Women in Love, Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
where reasoning occupies a large part of the narrative, exerting a leverage that seems to compel the reader’s agreement. The incidents, few or many, press home like gripping illustrations the point being proved. There is something of parable in most of Lawrence’s plots.

In
Kangaroo
we get a powerful example of Lawrence’s method at work. The ideas, fully expounded in long conversations, far from being unresolved, are boldly lived out and tested. The Lawrence figure, Somers, finds certain already held and seductive ideas made flesh for him in the shape of the Australian working-class leader known as Kangaroo. It is an incarnation Somers had never hoped to come upon, sickened as he is by Europe. He is smitten by Kangaroo’s proto-fascist movement and by the wild fresh country of which working men and their virile matey principles seem to be a natural and harmonious part. The infatuation holds for many pages; he is drawn into the movement as a sympathetic foreign observer. He is nearly converted when, rather abruptly, he is startled into closer inspection: Kangaroo, dying, asks for a declaration of Somers’ love, and the sickly plea lets Somers finally see the soft, weak, flabby underside of native fascism. The Australian spell is broken; Somers and his woman leave.

Up to the end, however, an equilibrium of ideas is maintained, so that the conversations remain interesting, by no means one-sided. In Somers, a genuine intellectual process, going from curiosity to attraction to repulsion and disillusionment, is shown with considerable honesty. It is typical of Lawrence at his best that even when Kangaroo and his ideas are rejected, he is not vulgarly “seen through”; something is left for a kind of dry pity and understanding.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover
is surely the most biased of Lawrence’s books. Yet Sir Clifford, Lady Chatterley’s husband, is nonetheless given his say, not too unfairly represented by and large; it is only that he and his entire set of convictions are refuted out of hand by a quiet adversary, Mellors, whose strong point is not words but
performance.
His performance is itself an argument, speaking for a view of natural life and sexuality that is hostile to the intellect. Sir Clifford is no intellectual; he is a retired country gentleman who sometimes writes poetry and short stories. But the weapons he is familiar with and falls back on as a disabled champion of a social order and mild way of life are the weapons his education has taught him to use: received notions and principles.

Lawrence’s hatred of the intellect, of the “upper story” (there is maybe a class prejudice here), is strange, certainly, in a man who himself lived almost wholly for ideas. The fact that they were his own made the difference apparently; he had hammered them out for himself. They were not quite so much his own as he thought, one must add. Was he unconscious of being one of a number of writers who disliked and distrusted the intellect, who, like him, held it responsible for most of the ills of modern civilization? He showed no awareness of such a fellowship, just as he showed no awareness of a paradox underlying the whole position, that is, that without the intellect and its system-making bent neither he nor his fellow-thinkers would have been able to carry out their mission of teaching at all. His insistence on blood and instinct as superior to brain was a mental construct incapable of proof except on the mental level.

Yet if his ideas, true or false, have stayed with us, if he was a novelist of ideas in my second, missionary, sense to whom we can still listen—the only one, probably—this must be because he was an artist as well as a cogent, programmatic mind, in other words, because he makes us feel as we read those novels that there is
something
in what he says. But while despising the intellect, he would not have liked the name “artist” either. For him it would have been six of one and half a dozen of the other—who could measure which was the less effete? He was unable to get along with any of his own kind, really, and could only associate, finally, with people who shared his ideas, which was bound to mean in practice people who consented to have no ideas of their own.

His life was a near-tragedy, and his self-infection, quite early, with concepts—which, when he took them for absolutes, made him quarrelsome—shared responsibility with his bad lungs. But if he had not been fevered, he might not have taken to the stump, and we might never have had these burning novels or, if you wish, tracts. Far more than the discussion novels with their eternal seesaw, they are truly novels of ideas. Without ideas none of them, after
Sons and Lovers,
could even palely exist. If you cut out Naphta and Settembrini, and the author’s musings on time,
The Magic Mountain
will still hold up as a story of a sort. The equivalent cannot be argued of
Aaron’s Rod,
say. I am not sure whether this makes Lawrence better or worse than Mann; at any rate it makes him special. At the same time, surprisingly, it links him with the old novelists, to whom I shall turn next. If you are going to voice explicit ideas in a novel, evidently this requires a spokesman, and I shall begin by discussing the spokesman.

2

A
S I WAS SAYING
, if you are going to voice ideas in a novel, plainly you will need a spokesman. In the traditional novel such semi-official figures are familiar to us and, on the whole, welcome. We quickly learn to recognize which of the characters will be a stand-in for the author, that is, which one we can trust as appointed representative with full powers to comment on what is happening and draw the necessary conclusions. There is nothing wrong with this; events in life seldom speak for themselves. Whether it is world events that confront us or local skulduggery—an ecological scandal or somebody running off with a friend’s wife—we frequently want somebody to explain them to us, sketch in the background, suggest where our sympathies should lie. There is no reason we should be worse off in a novel, as long as the novel is assumed to have some reasonably close connection with our immediate life or a life we are acquainted with through reading and report.

The novel in its classic period—the nineteenth century—took on that burden without protest. Protest only began to be heard toward the end of the century, when the novel, aggrieved by how much it had been expected to carry on its increasingly slender shoulders, made the first motions toward emancipation. Up until James, the novelist had been a quite willing authority figure, a parent, aunt, in Tolstoy’s case a Dutch uncle. The popular novelist (and there was no other kind, the art novel not having been discovered) was looked up to as an authority on all sorts of matters: medicine, religion, capital punishment, the right relation between the sexes. If the role was uncongenial or momentarily wearisome, he had the resort of the short story or the tale to turn to, neither of which carried such heavy responsibilities to the common life.

Lawrence was the last Westerner, probably, to accept the burden of being a universal authority, though there is some evidence of it in Norman Mailer. A clear sign, if one were needed, of Lawrence’s willingness for the job is the presence of spokesmen—Rawdon Lilly, Somers, Birkin, Mellors—in his novels, and Mailer, too, has his mouthpieces. Lawrence makes an occasional, unconvincing attempt to disguise the spokesman or to split him into two. In the nineteenth century there is no pretense of that sort; the author has not yet learned to be embarrassed by the device, which came to be regarded as crude, though in reality, as usually happens with cover-ups, the disguises are cruder.

In the classic novel, the spokesman may be the hero or heroine, but more rarely than became the custom later. In
Anna Karenina,
he is Levin, the name being pointedly derived from Tolstoy’s own Christian name, Lev or Lyov. In
War and Peace,
there is no delegated spokesman; Pierre is too young and bumbling, and Prince Andrei is morally and spiritually too old, a case of
fin de race
—mention of his “small white hands” occurs too emphatically not to be a signal of disapproval. Instead, throughout
War and Peace,
Tolstoy speaks in his own voice: in the marvelous chapters on Napoleon, on the old fox, Kutuzov, on the battle of Borodino, on the multiple causes of wars; also in the terse parentheses concerning the uses of medicine, the mysterious undercurrents in the life of the Russian peasantry; finally in the Second Epilogue beginning “History is the life of nations and of humanity,” which sets out in simple style the general conclusions on history, free will, and determinism a thoughtful reader will want to derive from all the events he has witnessed. The Second Epilogue is a kind of teaching instrument intended to sharpen the reader’s understanding of the limits between the knowable and the unknowable. Tolstoy, as spokesman here, is uncompromisingly agnostic, except in the moral sphere: we have no way of inferring First Causes; we can only be sure about very small, almost minute, acts of our own, such as our freedom (assuming no physical impairment) to raise an arm in an empty room. Similarly, as readers, we can be sure that Natasha’s going to the opera was the proximate cause of her moral fall; yet it is doubtful that she had any clear choice in the matter: a decision major in its consequences slipped by her without announcing itself as pregnant with causality.

When Tolstoy in
War and Peace
speaks to us of all these matters in his own voice, he is resorting to a method that goes back to the infancy of the novel, that of the omniscient narrator. His practice in
Anna Karenina,
published a bit later, was different, as we know. I doubt that to his mind this represented a technical advance; it seems likely that he used the method that appeared most suitable to the material he was going to treat. Odd as that sounds to us today, he regarded himself as a rebel against the tyranny of conventional forms, announcing in an afterword to
War and Peace
that the book was not a novel, even less a poem, still less a historical chronicle. It was “what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed.”

In eighteenth-century England, an author, e.g., Fielding, was commonly his own spokesman. A radical break in the tradition came with the epistolary novel, and this may explain the popularity of Richardson among the avant-garde of our own century. In the nineteenth century, practice varied. With George Eliot, there was a sort of division of labor. In
Middlemarch
she speaks now and again in her own deeply earnest voice, now and again through Dorothea Brooke, although with Dorothea it is less a matter of homiletic thought than of “right” feeling. George Eliot has another voice, though, quite different from her customary organ tones; it harks back to the eighteenth century and is dry, pungent, short-spoken, as when she suggests of Lydgate, not unsympathetically, that his otherwise fine character was “a little spotted with commonness.” We have been advised by the curt phrase what to expect. The wonderful word “spotted,” suggesting a case of measles—an ordinary, non-fatal disease—sticks, fatally for Mr. Lydgate, in the mind. She uses that third voice rather sparingly, but whenever it speaks, we hear judgment in it and are warned to pay attention.

In French nineteenth-century fiction, as one might expect, the division of labor between authors and characters was on the whole stricter. To the author speaking in his own voice was reserved the right of comment and general statement. Among the great luminaries jealous of place and prerogative, each a
roi soleil
outshining his
dramatis personae,
pre-eminence in this respect as in others goes to Victor Hugo. That god-like seer, mage, and prophet could not delegate authority to any of his mortals. The self-educated Jean Valjean, the poor babes Marius and Cosette,
le petit Gavroche
—street urchin playing Mercury—all those
misérables
who make up the wronged part of humanity must be spoken
for
by an advocate, standing protectively between them and us. You have something very similar in Manzoni, though with less pomp and circumstance: a kind of tender paternalism toward the humble—Lucia and Renzo but also the wretched parish priest, Don Abbondio.