Occasional Prose (18 page)

Likewise the tales of Kleist set the marvelous in a historical frame: “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo,” “The Earthquake in Chile,” “Michael Kohlhaas” (which tells about a merchant and horse trader, a real popular leader or rabble-rouser of Luther’s time). Then there is the stranger-than-fiction “The Marquise of O—,” taking a queer old story already known to Montaigne but placing it in the campaign of the French Revolutionary armies in northern Italy, where the Russian Suvorov won a series of initial victories for the allied side and was rewarded with the title “Prince Italysky”—pure musical comedy—by the mad tsar.

In Kleist’s tale, a contested Lombard fort falls to the Russians in a night attack, during the course of which the commandant’s daughter, the widowed Marquise, is saved by a Russian officer from rape by his men and gratefully loses consciousness, but then, nine months later, inexplicably gives birth to a child. She advertises in the newspaper for the father to come forward, and he proves to be none other than her savior, Lt.-Col. Count F—. The tale has a miraculous ring to it on more than one score; not only is a child conceived, as it were, immaculately, in the fury of battle, but Suvorov’s Russians let loose in Italy appear supernatural, outside the order of things, like visitants from space. The uncanniness of the pivotal event is enhanced by the circumstantiality of the narration, which seems dipped in “magic realism” as the logistics of the campaign, the aristocratic command structure, the postings of Count F— (to Constantinople, to Naples, to what is evidently Milan) are duly set forth, like colored pins on a military map.

It was Suvorov who in his younger days, in Russia, in Catherine’s time, had put down the Pugachev revolt, which, twenty-eight years after “The Marquise of O—,” was to figure as the real subject of Pushkin’s tale, or story,
The Captain’s Daughter
. Indeed, the Cossack pretender Pugachev, who called himself Peter III, had some of the characteristics of a Russian Michael Kohlhaas, the protagonist of Kleist’s tale. If Kleist’s tale is deeper, with something in it of a primeval contest, this may reflect the fact that the stubborn Lutheran horse dealer has a grudge against the way the real world is organized.

Both Kleist and Pushkin, insofar as they were Romantics, responded to upheaval, revolt, and counter-revolt, contemporary or “historical,” and to the attendant wandering of peoples. In this literature, it is as though the uprooting, the turning upside down, created by the victories of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic campaigns—whose tremors were felt as far away as the black Haitian empire of Dessalines—had revived a climate of fear similar to that of primitive times, when tales were told in the firelight. No Romantic tale-teller was exactly a revolutionary, but many were drawn by the
infernal
quality of rebellion, by the ferocity, as of devils incarnate, so well evoked by Kleist in “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo,” and even in “The Earthquake in Chile,” where wickedness unbridled is released in the “higher classes” by a natural, non-political disaster.

The Romantic period in northern Europe, following the “time of troubles” brought by Napoleon’s armies, was the highest point of achievement of the modern tale. It may mean something that England, untouched by Napoleonic invasion, has no tales to show from this period—Stevenson came later, and Scott, an antiquarian, cannily used the Border ballad material and the inspiration of the German Romantics to invent a sure-fire genre—the historical novel. In America, possibly in the wake of our own revolution and internal migrations, we had the tales of Hawthorne; we had Melville; we had Poe.
Evangeline
, had Longfellow turned it into prose, might have been an ideal tale: the wanderings of the Acadians, like a Biblical people under sentence of eternal exile, across the face of a new continent—virgin early-American forest scenery. But Longfellow’s hexameters are unsuited to the telling of a tale. Verse in general lacks the requisite flatness of tone, suggestive of the annals of a reign or a parish register, indicated by Kleist’s “(Aus einer alten Chronik)” prefacing “Michael Kohlhaas.”

It is worth noticing that tales flourish in northern countries. The romance, on the other hand, seems to have thrived on the Mediterranean littoral, where its forebears were the epic (above all, the
Odyssey
) and the pastoral. It may be that the deep northern forests and wooden cottage architecture are a reason for the difference—the same difference observable in the linguistic fact that there are no equivalent words in Romance languages for “uncanny,” “weird,” “fell,” “grim,” “grisly,” and so on. The only translations that I have ever seen for any or all of them into French are
étrange
,
inquiétant
,
mystérieux
,
bizarre
.

Walter Benjamin found an affinity between the teller of a tale and the craftsman or artisan: “If one wants to picture these two groups [of story-tellers] through their archaic representatives, one is embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading seaman.” Then, as he tells it, in the Middle Ages an interpenetration of these two archaic types took place through the trade structure. The resident master craftsman and the traveling journeyman worked together in the same room: “If peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university.”

There is surely some truth here, especially as the telling of a tale responded to a rhythm of work—weaving or spinning. It may be more than chance that
Silas Marner
, by that archetypal novelist George Eliot, has the atmosphere of a tale about it: the miser’s heap of gold in the workman’s lonely cottage, the turning bobbin and shuttle, the sinister forest quarry and the skeleton it secretes. The hero, after all, is a hand-loom weaver (like Stifter’s father), solitary and half-demented, toiling at an already archaic craft. There are tale-like elements too, like a fitting under-music, in
The Mill on the Floss
, noticeable in the part played by the river that turns the wheels that grind the grain that nurtures the miller’s family—the familiar River Floss that, slowly becoming unrecognizable, claims the lives of the miller’s children, Maggie and Tom, in a great climactic flood.

If the tale is native to northern countries—I think not only of the German-language Romantics sprung from
Des Knaben Wunderhorn
but of the Danish Isak Dinesen in our own day and her predecessor J. P. Jacobsen, originally a botanist—the novel, on the contrary, is a foreigner. It is remarkable how few German examples there were in the nineteenth century—the great period of the novel elsewhere. A single one is inevitably mentioned: Fontane’s
Effi Briest
. But what else? Not Stirrer’s
Der Nachsommer
. Certainly not
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, even though it shares an epistolary form with
Clarissa Harlowe
, twenty-five years its senior.
Werther
, rich in sentiment, is weak in character. Yet psychology, as it used to be called, is the strong suit of the true novel, which has room to show the growth of relationships between people, just as it has room to show children growing up (
David Copperfield
) and the growth of a tendency in a single human soul (
The Mayor of Casterbridge
). There is no psychology in
Werther
, no observation of a remotely “clinical” kind; if there had been anything resembling detached observation, the book would not have produced a rash of sympathetic suicides.

When the German tale expands, it is likely to turn into a romance, or into what we in English like to call the Gothic novel, though there is nothing Gothic or novelistic about it. Even in the present century, the true novel is rare in the German language.
Buddenbrooks
is the best example but also, more modernist,
The Man Without Qualities
. I find
The Magic Mountain
hard to classify: on its medical, sanatorium side, it is a novel, but then it drifts off into parable and loses its novelistic bearings. The rest of Mann is mostly tales:
Felix Krull
,
Tonio Kröger
,
Death in Venice
, “Mario and the Magician.” His best work, in my view (apart from
Lotte in Weimar
, a delightful novelette), is
Doctor Faustus
, a “big” book that draws on nearly all the varieties of fiction, while avoiding the heavy archness he was inclined to when self-important (think of the Joseph books), to isolate and define the nature of German-ness—a problem posed to him by the National Socialist triumphs, on the one hand, and by the Apollonian figure of Goethe on the other. For his Faustus, Mann found clues and analogies not only in Goethe’s drama and in the magus of legend, but also in Martin Luther, in the émigré Anabaptists, in the history of music, the twelve-tone scale, and in the spirochete of syphilis, all but omnipresent in the life histories of Germanic artists. One clue that escaped Mann’s notice in this congeries of early symptoms of the disease of National Socialism was the fact that I have just alluded to—the strange paucity of novels in the Germanic tongue, a paucity manifest in his own output.

The novel, after all, is the literary form dedicated to the representation of our common world, i.e., not merely the common ordinary world but the world we have in common. The faculty for apprehending it—this world conterminous with each of our separate life experiences and independent sensibilities, this world that lies between us—is, of course, common sense, the faculty we need to serve on juries, assess job offers, judge the character of strangers. ... Common sense, also known as the reality principle, rules the novel, commanding the reader to recognize only events and personalities that do not defy it. A person like Heathcliff flies in the face of common sense, which declares that there are no persons like Heathcliff, no Mr. Rochesters either, whatever authors would fain believe.

Common sense (Sancho Panza) may be the same as traditional wisdom, the wisdom of the species. This faculty inheres in all of us, just as the golden theorem of Pythagoras, once demonstrated, is ineluctable for every brain; it was greatly valued by Tolstoy as a moral dowsing rod within everybody’s reach. It is how a mere child, like Natasha, is able to distinguish good from evil, just as well as, in fact better than, men and women of the world. Common sense tells you the way things
are
, rather than the way your covetous ego or prehensile will would like them to be. And the sparsity of novels, the great carriers of the reality principle, may help to explain German defenselessness in the face of National Socialism, which—to us, incredibly—was not recognized by most Germans as a monstrosity until Hitler had perished in his bunker.

Even today German writers of fiction persist in the traditions of the tale and the romance. Günter Grass is the clearest case.
The Tin Drum
is too prolix to be a tale, though it has some earmarks of the type—the dwarf hero and his magic drum, for instance—but the general effect, it strikes me, is of something more like a plebeian romance, with multiple adventures though without love interest. Some of his later fictions—
The Flounder
, for instance—are closer to the pure tale. The German tale, unlike those of other languages, has found it hard to separate from the fairy story, especially the
Märchen
with animals in the place of characters: I think of Mann’s
The Holy Sinner
, in which the hero, an early Christian saint, turns into a hedgehog.

It is obvious that these categories of mine cannot be hard and fast. And it may be that there are some fictions that will not fit into any of them, even with some letting out of the seams or determined squeezing. Leaving aside the hopeless conundrum of
Gulliver
, what is one to say of the picaresque novel—
Moll Flanders
or Nashe’s
The Unfortunate Traveler?
Is there any reason in these cases, beyond habit, to have recourse to the term “novel” at all? The best reason, I suppose, is the extensive, all-but-encyclopedic accounts they contain of social types and class shadings. And along with that you find an extraordinary, non-poetical language, a prose that is the quintessence of the prosaic. Without the picaresque, the classic novel ran the risk of being “gentrified.”

Even when fictions resist being classified in these traditional drawers marked “Novel,” “Romance,” “Tale,” the effort to see them typologically is productive. It is more enlightening to look on
Dr. Zhivago
as a prolonged tale of journeys and transformations, death and resurrection, forests and bandit-like figures, than to treat it as a novel and expect it to make novelistic sense, like all those earnest reviewers who complained that it was implausible and had too many coincidences. ... It is not a novelist’s assessment of the Bolshevik Revolution (Solzhenitsyn’s
August 1914
and its sequels, by contrast, are precisely that); it is a terrifying and beautiful tale set in the still pioneer geography of the vast Russian terrain against the wild and shifting scenery of revolt and revolution. Reviewers sought to “relate” it to Tolstoy, but the vital relation (as often happens with the tale) is to non-fiction, above all, to Aksakov and his exquisite recollections in
Family Chronicle
and
Years of Childhood
, of the Orenburg region in the Urals (Pugachev territory, by the way) and of an arduous pioneer railroad trip of the whole family to Siberia.

The least useful procedure is to assume that any fiction of a certain length is a novel or that a novelist of standing, say Hardy—exception made for the occasional short story—could sire only novels. Or that a habitual teller of tales—say Conrad—could sire only tales. In fact, as I see it,
Nostromo
and
Under Western Eyes
do not belong to the same family as
Lord Jim
, “The Secret Sharer” or “Heart of Darkness.” Similarly for Hardy:
The Mayor of Casterbridge
and
Jude the Obscure
(novels), ought to be distinguished from
The Return of the Native
and
Far From the Madding Crowd
(tales). The problem is where to put
Tess
. The important role played by Nature, Tess’s insistent misfortunes, the cruel tricks of coincidence, her wanderings and execution suggest a tale; yet arguing against that are the social pretensions of the Durbeyfields, the “psychology,” so finely analyzed, of Angel Clare, not to mention the implicit critique of the industrialization process as it touches English agriculture.