Occasional Prose (16 page)

There may be special explanations for each of these cases or there may be one general explanation: the most beautiful parts of the world tend to be the most retarded, the most passed by in the course of modern development. That is why nobody has yet torn down their quaint main streets to make a shopping mall or bulldozed their apple orchards for a plastics factory. Their inhabitants, having been passed by, would be the most resentful and bitter. Maybe. But the facts remain alarming, any way you look at them.

If beauty is good
for
something, then it is a mysterious something that we today cannot put our finger on. Or else it is good for nothing. It is useless. That may be why we are letting it disappear with so little regret. It is an enigma, a perplexity, impossible to fit into the social scheme, tending to gravitate toward people with ugly souls or inviting people with ugly souls to gravitate toward it. The only thing we can think of to do with it, once it is prized from their grasp by taxation, is to install it in museums, thus rendering it, as I have been saying, in many notable instances all but inaccessible, except to those same few who already possess more than their share of it and who are let in to rejoice their eyes during hours when the public is excluded.

When he was Minister of Culture, during de Gaulle’s regime, André Malraux had a nice inspiration. He took some of the Louvre’s twentieth-century statuary and put it in the Tuileries Garden, where every bus rider or motorist or passing pedestrian can look at it, without standing in line or paying admission. Some days, riding or walking by, you notice it. Some days you don’t. It is just as if it belonged to you, in your own apartment, sometimes asking for your complete attention, sometimes not bothering you. A good idea, to get art out of museums, but it would not work with paintings, and has any other Minister of Culture or mere mayor followed it up? Maybe it would make no difference. The link between beauty and civic life has been lost, and Malraux’s statues, not being garden statuary, at first looked pathetic and absurd plumped down on the grass.

As for private ownership, perhaps the modest collections of the last generation are as far as we can decently go. A china tea service, a fine clock, water colors, slag obelisks, some pretty and old chairs. Those things at least did not do Mother or Grandmother any harm, and they may have bettered her, indefinably, like a poor Cretan peasant’s icons or the Roman’s lares and penates. If beauty is a god, and I still think he is, he requires some private service and domestic rituals. The objects we own—I am speaking of people like myself—are generally commemorative. Of an occasion—the day we bought them—or of the friend who brought them back to us, from a trip to Greece, pre-colonel. They are objects of piety, and the little bit of beauty that is in them is valued both for itself and as a souvenir, for the memories that attach. Well, that is how English tourists in the nineteenth century bought Canalettos and Guardis, the way, almost, that we would buy a postcard—as a reminder of mornings or afternoons spent in the city of Venice. We own, my husband and I, a Greek, or, rather, Greco-Sicilian, stone bull and a little Egyptian hawk, both bought in Palermo, one rainy afternoon from an old crippled Yugoslav woman, who had a shop upstairs in her big flat that was three-quarters junkshop and one-quarter museum. I cannot say what they represent to us, beyond themselves, but certainly the temple at Segesta, a wild iris my husband picked for me there, in January, a hawk we saw flying, maybe the local wine Corvo, which means hawk, the biggest rainbow we ever saw, driving through the rain near Enna, like a rainbow in a myth, the lake where Persephone was snatched off to hell, the Emperor Frederick the Second, known as Stupor Mundi, the limping Yugoslav woman,
her
history. ... Well, I am not going to give you my autobiography, but there are bits of it and of our joint history clinging like lichens to the broad-necked stone bull and the little ivory hawk, which always stay together on our library table, placed just so, as a pair. In the particles of beauty we keep around us, that are
ours
, by gift, purchase, or inheritance, as well as in the deposits of memory left by visits to museums and galleries, by walks in the woods or fields, there are rights of ownership, claims; our “collections” belong together, are interconnected, by virtue of their relation with us, and amount to the story of our lives. When we die, the collection they constitute will fall apart; they will go their separate ways, be dispersed, like our bodies.

The perplexities, I think, surrounding works of art, the injustice of their uneven distribution among the population, arise from the fact that they are both body and spirit, and whereas with music and poetry, one could say that the spirit predominated, with paintings and sculptures, the corporeal, material form not only predominates but cannot be separated from the spirit, just as with a human creature. To try to divide up fairly is like the Judgment of Solomon. But we have no Solomon, and in the end the true mother, whoever she is, will have to yield up the baby to the false mother and sadly go away.

Aberdeen, Scotland, Spring 1974

Novel, Tale, Romance

I
WANT TO DISTINGUISH
at the outset three types of prose narrative—novel, tale, romance—which are currently thought to be indistinguishable. The only difference most people now recognize among types of fiction is one of length, which can help us tell a short story from a novel and helped (once upon a time) to tell a short story from a short-short story. But I am not going to be dealing in these remarks with short stories as a separate class. Most of them fall under the headings I have just named. They can be divided into 1) abbreviated novels, 2) brief tales, 3) fragmentary romances. If the form has a definite character of its own, I have been unable to determine it.

Nor will I be dealing with the “novella,” which to me is only an affected name for a shortish novel or a longish short story. Originally, in Italian, it was applied to stories or “histories” like those in Boccaccio’s
Decameron
. In French, it became
nouvelle
, as in
Cent nouvelles nouvelles
, where, as in the
Decameron
(though not in the
Heptaméron
of Marguerite de Navarre), the little narratives tended to be licentious. In German, the
Novelle
, thanks to the Romantics, became a genuine form, with naturalization papers; in our time it was favored by Thomas Mann. But in English the word for short novel is “novelette,” which quickly became pejorative, meaning a rather cheap love story and giving rise to the damning adjective “novelettish” before passing out of use altogether. Nobody talks of novelettes any more.

Another class of prose fiction is fable—from the Latin
fabula
, which in turn goes back to an ancient term,
fari
, meaning simply “to speak”—the root, incidentally, of
fatum
, or “fate,” i.e., “what has been spoken.” I shall not be discussing fables either, though they did not go out with Aesop. The obvious contemporary example is
Animal Farm
, but I think
1984
, a cautionary tale, must be a fable too, and William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies
, most of Golding, probably, also
Brave New World
,
A Clockwork Orange
, and quite a lot of science fiction.

Fables, with or without talking animals, are allegories—
allegoria
, the description of one thing under the image of another—and, whatever a novel may be, it is not an allegory. It lives in its own right; its characters are not personifications; their names do not refer to abstract conditions or qualities such as “Pilgrim,” “Everyman,” “Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy,” “Patience.” If a character in a novel is named “Krook,” as in Dickens’s
Bleak House,
this is not shorthand for a dishonest person—never. Mr. Krook with his rag-and-bone shop and his weird cat Lady Jane is something much queerer and more complex than that. And the statement I have just made—“A novel is not an allegory”—can be developed syllogistically, like this: “No novel is an allegory,” “X is an allegory,” “X is not a novel.” Apply it to a specific case: “
1984
is a parable for our times. A parable is a form of allegory. No novel is an allegory. Therefore
1984
is not a novel.” Such little tests can be useful.

Adding to the confusion in this sphere is a tendency of reviewers to read no matter what novel as “a parable for our time”—at best an unctuous pronouncement, evoking the laying on of hands. But to try to read a true novel as an allegory does not deepen the meanings in it; rather the contrary. It leaches out any meaning that is not didactic.

Novel, tale, romance—these are the classes of prose narrative I shall be alluding to, and, before I can comment on some mutations in their current behavior, I shall have to make clear what those classes are or were. Of all these forms the tale is the oldest and maybe the most persistent. Unlike the novel and the romance, it is pre-literate in its beginnings, and something oral still clings to it, however sophisticated it becomes. A tale always has a teller and, around him, an implied circle of listeners, with the suggestion of a campfire. The teller is the guarantor of the tale’s authenticity, which is why he remains present even in late developments of the form such as Conrad’s “Marlow” stories, where the veteran ship’s officer spinning his yarn is more a traditional accessory than a necessity for validating a far-fetched account. We would believe
Lord Jim
, I think, without Marlow’s attestation to the truth of it. But it is Marlow’s voice that reminds us that the story of the young, untried first mate and his instant of cowardice is not a novel but a tale.

The teller, I must add, now and then creeps into the novel, where he does not belong, but he functions there as a sort of Master of Ceremonies (
Don Quixote
) and quickly drops from sight. Whenever he creeps in (and it is important that you note this), even though he invariably appears as an “I,” a first-person singular, he is not the same as the “I” of an autobiographical novel like
David Copperfield
or even of a pseudo-autobiographical romance like
Great Expectations
, whose hero, Pip, though he writes in the first person, is not Dickens himself when younger. The same could be said of
Jane Eyre
, another pseudo-autobiography: the lucky heroine (“Reader, I married him”), despite some points in common, is someone different from Charlotte Brontë, who had no Mr. Rochester in her life. The “I” of the tale, as opposed to the “I” of novel or romance, is never a participant; he is an observer, a witness who comes forward to testify to an event in itself unusual or even unlikely on the face of it. In Conrad’s tales, he may double or even triple, as though to give auditory perspective, like an echo: the author, Joseph Conrad (“I” Number One), hears a story from his old acquaintance Marlow (“I” Number Two), a trustworthy commentator, and it may happen that Marlow, lacking first-hand knowledge of some part of the tale, relates what he has heard from still a third narrator. In principle, you could go on indefinitely, with infinite regression, as in the picture on the old Quaker Oats box.

A strange light on the secret nature of the tale is cast by etymology. “Tale” in French is
conte
, in Italian
conto
, in Spanish
cuento
; in German it is
Erzählung
; in Dutch,
vertelling
. It is clear, to start with, that the Germanic words have a different linguistic root from the Romance-language words. And in most of these Western languages there is a separate word, often a more common one, for a narrative other than a tale: our own “story,” deriving from the Latin for “history”; the French
récit
, German
Bericht
, Dutch
verhaal
, meaning literally “a report.” Now all the words for tale, even though they stem from two independent roots, have to do with counting, with adding up, or directly with the word for number. I will illustrate it in Italian:
conto
= “tale” and also = “bill” (“
II conto, per favore
” in a restaurant);
contare
is “to count” and also “to relate.” Here it is in German:
erzählen
(to tell),
Erzählung
(tale),
Zahl
(number). And Dutch:
vertelling
(to tell),
getal
(number). There is the same thought buried in the English “recount” (“He recounted me a tale”). The teller of a tale, then, is indistinguishable from the teller behind the counter in a bank, who
tells
out your money, rapidly adding.

I find this deeply mysterious. What is it trying to say to us? Conceivably, it only points to a metrical origin of all formal narration: “Tell me not in mournful numbers.” “Meter” / “measure.” Verse, like cloth, is measured in feet. Yet that does not satisfy my curiosity, partly because human speech (the “telling” and “
erzählen
”) cannot have started out as verse but, rather, in grunts related to gestures—of pointing, for example. Perhaps the telling refers, rather, to a need for listing in orderly sequence evident in early narratives, intent on documenting a tradition. “These are the generations of Shem: Shem was an hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood: and Shem lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters. And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years and begat Salah. ...” Or the Homeric catalogues.

In any case it seems to me that the counting, the addition of particulars, implicit in those words for tale in so many different tongues must refer to the piling up of incident, the “And then ... And then?” that E. M. Forster speaks of in
Aspects of the Novel
but that applies in any narration. It applies, I feel, with particular force in the tale, where the anticipation of the listeners is keyed to a spoken narrative in which incidents are doled out, as it were, one after another, like haricot beans, each having equal weight, without the increasing pressure of “building” toward one or more climaxes that is typical of the novel. In a tale we wait to hear what will come next, but the waiting is less suspenseful than it tends to be in the novel; from long practice in listening, we can afford to be patient while our teller counts out the bills that are our due reward.