realism, reality, and the novel - a symposium on the novel

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Realism, Reality, and the Novel: A Symposium on the Novel Author(s): Bernard Bergonzi, Malcolm Bradbury, Ian Gregor, Barbara Hardy, Frank Kermode,Mark Kinkead-Weekes, David Lodge, Tony Tanner, Paul Turner and Park Honan Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Spring, 1969), pp. 197-211Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344931Accessed: 20-03-2015 02:16 UTC

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Realism, Reality, and the 2Novel

A Symposium on the Novel with Bernard Ber- gonzi, Malcolm Bradbury, Ian Gregor, Barbara Hardy, Frank Kermode, Mark Kinkead-Weekes, David Lodge, Tony Tanner, and Paul Turner.

Report by PARK HONAN

NOVEL invited nine very active British critics of fiction to an informal symposium on "Realism, Reality, and the Novel" at The Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-on- Avon, England, December 7 and 8, 1968. There were no formal papers. The par- ticipants were asked to consider critical problems suggested by the central topic at their first three-hour session, and the present literary situation at a two-hour meeting the next day.

David Lodge launched the symposium by commenting on ten representative critical positions. Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel has aroused "a fundamental uneasiness about the value-implications of his position," as Mr. Lodge pointed out. "By stressing formal realism as the prime characteristic of the novel form he seemed to identify it by something which had neither moral nor aesthetic value. Particularity is meaningless, ultimately. We discover meaning only through anal- ogy and generalization. If Watt is right, the realistic novel poses a special problem for criticism."

The problem posed by Ian Watt's emphasis on "formal realism" has received a wide variety of responses. The most extreme of these is perhaps illustrated by Robert Scholes in The Fabulators-since Scholes seems to concede that realism works against meaning in literature, that the realistic novel has been a mistake, merely a blind alley. Thus he welcomes symptoms that modern novelists are turning back to allegory and romance and giving up realism to the motion picture. "Cinema," Mr. Lodge quoted from The Fabulators, "gives the coup de grace to a dying realism in written fiction. Realism purports-always has purported-to subordinate the words themselves to their referents, the things the words point to. Realism exalts Life and diminishes Art, exalts things and diminishes words. But when it comes to representing things one picture is worth a thousand words, and one motion picture is worth a million. In the face of competition from cinema, fiction must abandon its attempt to 'represent reality' and rely more on the power of words to stimulate the imagination."

The symposium's critics later took this position to task.



NOVELISPRING 1969

FRANK KERMODE: The particular anxiety that crystallizes in this topic about "let's leave all that to the cinema" has been seen before. It is very puritanical. I think a lot of criticism of the modern novel is very puritanical: it is bothered terribly about "truth," about Platonic problems of fiction as being lies. What we seem to be heading for after Scholes and Raimond's La Crise du Roman (a book I first read about in the pages of NOVEL) is very much the new approach which says, "Well, look, it doesn't matter what happens at the diachronic level at all: let's look for structures, let's see what actually gives this thing the kind of truth which even the novelist was unaware of. Therefore, questions of one-to-one correspondence with reality no longer apply. We can talk about any novel in the same sense in which an anthropologist talks about a myth." If we take that line we're liberated wholly from this problem of what realism is and how the horizontal flow of a fiction cor- responds to reality. Because then it doesn't have to correspond at all. It's the verti- cal relationships that become important. Now I look upon this, I must say, with a certain dread. It seems to me a terrible development in some ways, and I'm all for going on being diachronic as long as we possibly can.

MALCOLM BRADBURY: The problem with this is that it assumes you cannot apply the concept of reality to structure, whereas I think you can.

FRANK KERMODE: The real importance of the Scholes viewpoint is that it doesn't allow for the fact that the cinema immediately begins to develop its own rhetorical problems. In other words, there is no substantial difference between words and images.

Another symposium critic added that the cinema reminds one of fictiveness. "Indeed it is increasingly about itself now," Bernard Bergonzi commented. David Lodge felt that modern writers were increasingly aware of the competition of the cinema, but that the cinema must face artistic problems parallel to those of the novelist. "Cinema is now rehandling its own stereotypes, parodying them, trying to achieve a sharper sense of reality-problems the novel has had to go through." Both the cinema and the novel must accommodate themselves to man's continually changing sense of reality and his consequently changing concepts of credibility, the symposium virtually agreed. Subtle changes in concepts of credibility are felt even as one reads two or three works by different writers of the same period. The differences among Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding owe partly to the fact that their concepts of credibility are not alike, Mark Kinkead-Weekes suggested. And yet stereotyped views persist as to what "reality" in literature must be.

TONY TANNER: Reality is always thought to be composed of detail and concretions. People are regarded as being helplessly immersed in a mass of detail. The novelist supposedly comes along and imposes a pattern on this, and then he goes away and people fall back into detail. But it seems to me that the instinct to perceive and form patterns is part of reality. The pattern-discerning instinct is in reality itself.

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PARK HONANIREALISM

It is not only that people are capable of discerning patterns but that they are all- as it were-little metaphysicians. And not only is the novelist a metaphysician, but all of his characters are.

MALCOLM BRADBURY: Pattern then is not merely a matter of form. Patterns, that is to say, involve cultural perceptions.

There is a "universalizing instinct" in people, as Mr. Bradbury put it, and the novelist even as he sets out to write takes account of it as he makes fundamental decisions about his work's narrative structure, its characters, its particular "patterns."

FRANK KERMODE: But what is narrative structure?

BARBARA HARDY: It is the stories you tell in the process of looking ahead, looking back, taking in. Structure is spatial.

BERNARD BERGONZI: A critic such as John Bayley in "Against a New Formalism" is not interested in structure or texture, as far as I can see. He seems very much at odds with what we have been saying so far.

A passage from Bayley in The Critical Quarterly had been quoted at the beginning of the symposium:

For it is the point about the novel that it is interesting; that it is the most direct mode of intercommunication ever envisaged as art; that it is social intercourse by other means. Its unprecedented flux of words is concerned- as Tolstoi said-with questions of how men live and should live.

Bayley's view, David Lodge felt, "tends to blur distinctions between life and art and to encourage various forms of critical intolerance. We are most familiar, perhaps, with this effect in the works of Dr. Leavis and the Scrutiny school. Bay- ley, a critic of a very different temper, rather sweepingly dismisses a great deal of modern fiction because it lacks the Tolstoian confidence in the capacity of art to handle experience in a direct and straightforward way."

Another participant felt that Mr. Bayley's argument was decidedly tautological. "He is saying 'I like Tolstoi because Tolstoi is very likeable.' As far as method goes, what he is saying about Tolstoi could easily be said of C. P. Snow. Snow hopes that everything he is doing will be suffused with human significance. Bayley leaves you with the question of 'Why?' He doesn't differentiate or critically explain."

"What is Bayley trying to register, then ?" "That Tolstoi has a satisfactory or comprehensive view of life." "Well, what is there in Tolstoi that encourages this critical view of him ?"

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NOVELISPRING 1969

TONY TANNER: Tolstoi gives us room for so many ways of reacting, whereas Proust in contrast dwindles down, giving us only one way of reacting. Proust has an en- gorging style with a single consciousness dominating-an aspect of modern literature, incidentally, that some people do not like.

IAN GREGOR: The whole sort of vocabulary that people have used in talking about Tolstoi and life is perhaps unsatisfactory. I don't think in life we feel that we can "co-habit" with every sort of experience.

TONY TANNER: Yet one does co-habit, as it were, with a large number of people. One gets along with them, and yet one is constantly coming up against evidence that they're all experiencing or scanning reality in slightly different ways. Neverthe- less the extraordinary thing is that you can still maintain the social structure more or less-though everybody is experiencing differently. This is one of the things I find riveting in Tolstoi, or in George Eliot, as in parts of Middlemarch.

DAVID LODGE: There is a nostalgia for this. Yet it would be very difficult for a novelist with equivalent talent to write the same kind of novel today.

TONY TANNER: The novel has gone through various epistemological skepticisms. Setting out to write a novel like Tolstoi today, you would end up writing like C. P. Snow.

"Why can't you do the Tolstoi sort of thing now ?" someone asked.

BERNARD BERGONZI: Because we have no common sense of reality. We are saddled with all kinds of relativistic structures of consciousness. We do not believe in there being one reality "out there" as undoubtedly Tolstoi did.

MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES: What we are getting skeptical about, and it seems to me rightly so, is the possibility of giving a single kind of qualification as to what is "out there."

MALCOLM BRADBURY: We no longer believe in the distinction between what is "out there" and what is "in here." The structuralist argument, for example, is that each man creates his own world.

The symposium agreed that as certainty about any objective reality no longer seems possible and as distinctions between inner and outer realities have broken down, there is much in life-especially in public life-that cannot be represented satisfactorily in fiction any more.

BERNARD BERGONZI: The political life of this country, or what goes on in large cor- porations or large institutions, is virtually outside the novel's territory. It seems

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that C.P. Snow is the only man who can do these subjects-pretty feebly. Some kinds of sociologists, some kinds of journalists can write about them interestingly, but these areas seem completely beyond the grasp of any first-rank novelist.

TONY TANNER: The modern novelist wants to give more play to his own inventive power, and not to duplicate the documentary work of sociology or journalism.

BARBARA HARDY: But have novelists such as Tolstoi or Dickens ever described com- mittees or the civil service in a very "documentary" way?

FRANK KERMODE: American novels do. Those recent ones about the bomb or the next election are exhaustively circumstantial and yet they are unreadable. They don't work because in the end-this is rather cruel-they are so hopelessly out of touch with reality. Public life is now extremely boring. We no longer have people in the civil service sitting around and meditating and having intuitions about what to do next, and so on. They're all just waiting to be replaced by computers. They try to talk like computers as much as possible.

MALCOLM BRADBURY: This is not to say it's not very real.

FRANK KERMODE: No, but one thing I do agree with John Bayley about is that there is a criterion of interest in fiction.

MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES: So when political life really begins to engage the consciousness of your own identity, then you write political novels. One finds good political novels in West African or West Indian literature. These call into question not just fields of public life but the very direct connection between what is happening to a society and what is happening inside "me," and how "I" am to think about "my- self."

BERNARD BERGONZI: Still, why not a novel about Enoch Powell?

FRANK KERMODE: A biography would do it.

TONY TANNER: Yes. If you get very good history and very good biography along with the kind of psychological insights which have become current only in this century-with a whole new vocabulary discussing the typology of people-then, obviously, the novel can't keep on as it was in the nineteenth century.

IAN GREGOR: Presumably it is not just this man-Enoch Powell-and how he came to hold these attitudes that is interesting, but the fact that he is curiously sympto- matic. This is typical of the kind of thing that novels do and that biographies use.

FRANK KERMODE: What would really knock the novel very hard would be a big development in the writing of psycho-biography. That is a real problem.



202 NOVEL|SPRING i969

Unlike most modern biographies, the nouveau roman as in Robbe-Grillet's hands tends to "push the realism of particularity to its ultimate extreme, denying all patterns and all meanings. Its aesthetic is against myth, against pattern," David Lodge said.

MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES: Just perception, perception, perception. Unrelated.'

DAVID LODGE: Yes. The novel has always been a compromise between history and fiction, and now the avant-garde is either pushing in the direction of pure fiction or pure history-in the sense of pure factuality, if you like. We have the non-fiction novel and the fictive novel. Is there anything in this idea, I wonder, that in English literature the only anti-novels are comic novels? We require the serious novel to take reality seriously?

MALCOLM BRADBURY: The problem is that there are two kinds of anti-novel. One is the kind which can set up a comic situation because it regards skeptically something which has been taken for granted. It is an anti-novel because it dismantles something that used to be there. And there is that kind of anti-novel-it seems to me typically French-which is basically involved with a philosophical or aesthetic premise. It creates this particular world of expectations with no relation whatsoever to any other world.

DAVID LODGE: There is nothing like it in English, is there?

PARK HONAN: We say the English anti-novel is comic because most English novels are comic. But don't we find the anti-novel element in Gissing and perhaps particu- larly in George Moore, as in Esther Waters? Moore is saying you have not told the story of the maid-servant the way it really is, and this is the way it is. There is little or no humor in that novel.

IAN GREGOR: Why do you think it is an anti-novel?

PARK HONAN: Because it is giving the lie to previous novels.

FRANK KERMODE: Aren't the Goncourts anti-novelists then?

PARK HONAN: I think so. Much the same might be said for the Goncourts and Zola.

TONY TANNER: If we get a majority of novelists as anti-novelists, we are going to have to reverse our terms!

1"This seems somewhat exaggerated; Lodge's statement is true, but there is a difference between the aesthetic and the performance."-F. K.



PARK HONANIREALISM

FRANK KERMODE: It's a cyclical movement: anti-novelists become novelists.

TONY TANNER: I can't recognize this distinction as being very fixed. C. P. Snow then is an anti-novelist.

MALCOLM BRADBURY: But I think there is a distinction here. The novel by its very progression persistently produces anti-novels. One generation's realism is the next generation's romanticism: therefore you have a new realism and therefore a new anti-novel. But there is something which is more explicitly an anti-novel. It is not just a violation of a system of conventions but a total violation of the form as such as it seems to accrue. Ulysses, Tristram Shandy, the French anti-novels, and John Barth are certainly in this category.

TONY TANNER: But Fielding and George Eliot are not-even though they are making it very clear what they are doing.

DAVID LODGE: Fielding draws attention to his own artistry whereas George Eliot draws attention to her own truthfulness.

BARBARA HARDY: They are also criticizing previous modes of fiction. I would have thought they were anti-novelists who knew they were anti-novelists, whereas perhaps Virginia Woolf is an anti-novelist who didn't know she was.

DAVID LODGE: The process seems to be one of bringing fiction in a closer relation- ship each time to the generally shared assumptions about reality and the culture. Fielding is an exception. By not attempting to make that kind of adjustment, by rather increasing the distance between fiction and reality, by saying to Richardson, "This is a naive notion you have about trying to imitate life"-he is a kick-back against the process. This results in the otherwise unaccountable phenomenon that sometimes fiction seems to go backwards-like Post-war British fiction, which is more conventionally realistic than "Twenties" fiction.

IAN GREGOR: Don't we have in-built in our sense of fiction an idea of "progress" in a curious way?

DAVID LODGE: Many classic novelists took this evolutionary view, as James did. I think it is something we wouldn't accept any more.

IAN GREGOR: Well, I believe we think of novels and their development in a rather different way than we think about plays and poems. However untrue this way of viewing them is, it persists. The remark, "After Proust the novel changes," or the notion that we are able to see nineteenth-century novelists fumbling toward things which twentieth-century novelists are to make plain, is common enough. These thoughts don't occur when we talk about poetry.

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NOVELJSPRING 1969

BERNARD BERGONZI: There is a strongly evolutionist view about the novel built into our criticism which we struggle against.

The symposium went on to consider generic differences between novels in different literatures.

FRANK KERMODE: Why is it that nobody in England has written a story even re- motely like Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"? It's very curious. There is almost a racial differentiation between some kinds of fiction. How does one ex-

plain it?

TONY TANNER: I think this would lead into problems of language, problems of schema and genre, the state of society, even the geography that American novelists have to deal with. The novel reflects these very immediately.

FRANK KERMODE: It is not simply a matter of satisfying different needs within a culture because we can all see that that is a great story.

TONY TANNER: American literature relies on symbols. Quite clearly and unasham- edly their novelists try to set up a symbol-system. They don't do it deviously, as an English novelist might try to slip in a symbol here and there, but are actually trying to create a system. Some American novelists say they are more interested in abstractions and patterns than particulars and details. Obviously they have felt a greater need to find abstract patterns, some sort of coherent symbol-systems which will enable them to chart this extraordinary thing called American experience. English writers feel more stable within the given signs.

PARK HONAN: I wonder if part of the question of the way in which novels are written doesn't depend on early education? Hawthorne's stories are very closely asso- ciated with the symbolizing processes in the Bible, the Old Testament.

MALCOLM BRADBURY: Given this to be true, how do you explain the fact that so many nineteenth-century American novels were published first in England and had to make their way with English reviewers? Or that American literary taste was largely created by English literary taste? I would say that what created the difference was the status of language in American culture. We can't write now even as we did twenty years ago. English writers still manage to believe, whether they are right or not, that there is a public written language.

TONY TANNER: American novelists feel they have got to invent a different language. Burroughs is a symptom of this paranoia they have about the media having completely debased language in its capacity to make any significant public communication. They have got to use the same words. But they had better use them very differently! So you get this extraordinary acrobatics with language. The American novelist wants to make it clear that he is not using language like the media, whereas there is still an available shared language here.

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FRANK KERMODE: But the American novelists who score most heavily are not Hawkes and Burroughs but Mailer and Bellow. For all his extraordinary fertility, Bellow writes an ecriture.

TONY TANNER: Bellow is in danger. There is a whole new generation who think he has succumbed to the slightly schmaltzy language of the media. Mailer is saved by a kind of Jacobean or extreme quality inside his language-he kicks it around every- where!-so it's stamped with Mailer all over it!

FRANK KERMODE: It's still within a common rhetoric.

BERNARD BERGONZI: But even with Bellow, as in Herzog, there is a higher or more consistent degree of verbal inventiveness than in practically any contemporary British novelist.

DAVID LODGE: There has to be a public language to communicate at all. It's a question of tone, isn't it? When I read most American novelists they seem to be rather battering me over the head, flexing their verbal muscles, and so on. All the linguistic energy going on is designed to impress you and works for a very powerful rhetoric. The English writer, though, is trying to get you into a conversation and starting to work on you rhetorically without your knowing it. I want to go back to the American novel a moment. It seems to me that neither Hawthorne nor Melville really comes off in the end. They are great unfinished torsos-and this has something to do with their relation to realism and their attempt to find a language. I would say that Twain is the first American novelist who breaks free of the pull of Europe and finds a genuinely American idiom which expresses genuine American experience. With Hawthorne or Melville you get a half-successful attempt to com- bine realistic and symbolic modes that you get much later in European fiction.

TONY TANNER: I am surprised. To say that Melville is "unfinished" implies that you have some kind of notion about what the finished Melville would be. Why can't Moby Dick be "mixed"? You are imposing European schema on American novels.

BERNARD BERGONZI: There is a kind of intimidation here that really worries me. No Englishman can ever criticize an American novel!

TONY TANNER: What is "completion"? Is Dickens "complete"?

DAVID LODGE: What I really mean is "internally inconsistent."

MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES: Moby Dick is concerned with a very factual world, but the more you look at facts in it the more mystery they reveal. The whole book is about contradictions. The author must say that for truth's sake he must not pretend to know what he cannot know. The "completion" seems to me a completion of an inquiry into the nature of authorship.

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NOVEL|SPRING 1969

PARK HONAN: It uses great masses or blocks of matter which don't seem fully in- tegrated when we look in a close formal way but which nonetheless have a great fi- nal effect.

TONY TANNER: He gathers together every possible definition and description of a whale that's ever been, and what he shows is that you can never catch a live whale. You can only have a dead whale. One needs that much of the book for this really to come across as a profound epistemological experience.

PARK HONAN: There are models for it. One doesn't feel that Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is "complete." Any time you have an anatomy element you don't, if you're really honest, ever get to the end of it because you can't fully anatomize anything. There is an anatomy element in Moby Dick.

DAVID LODGE: I would accept this. Ulysses is a kind of anatomy, too. It is open- ended. I would take as a model of what I am objecting to in American literature Billy Budd, for instance, which seems to be unfruitfully ambiguous and to openly reveal confusion in the author's mind. This is revealed in formal features such as the fact that there is an omniscient narrator who refuses, when it's convenient to him, to be omniscient. He is reliable at one time; he refuses to be reliable at another.

MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES: He refuses to allow people to talk for themselves. There is so little dramatization. When he gets to a crucial thing you need to know, he won't tell you.

MALCOLM BRADBURY: But Billy Budd is about the inaccessibility of any one single public register. It is written in at least three linguistic registers.

FRANK KERMODE: Can you make up a moral judgment about an author, saying, what he tells us is that there is an ambiguity in his mind which he didn't bother to resolve and this makes him a weak character? Is that right, David?

DAVID LODGE: I would say you can deduce a confusion of consciousness in the author from the formal confusion of the story.

FRANK KERMODE: Why do you want to go back and say, this confusion reflects another confusion which interests me more?

DAVID LODGE: How do you distinguish good confusion from bad confusion? I suppose I just perform the usual somersault by which we associate works of art with human sources-and therefore what we say about them reflects upon their authors.

MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES: It is the novelist who is most firmly convinced of a duty to tell the truth, I think, who is going to be most critical in recording the contradictions of his fictional attempt to do so.

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TONY TANNER: Contradictions are going on all the time in novels. In Billy Budd you can see Melville investing a great deal of poetry in Billy Budd, and investing a great deal of rational understanding in Captain Vere, who stands for forms, for the ship, the necessary limits and orders. There is a recognition of the fact that these two things cannot co-habit. You can say Melville is "confused" only because he is convinced life is made up of intolerable contradictions. That becomes part of his vision. Billy Budd is pellucidly clear because Melville lays out all of these opposi- tions and contradictions in it.

The symposium critics agreed that it is critically unwise or impractical to consider novels as perfectly self-contained entities or as disconnected from their authors and dates of composition.

MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES: The work cannot be autonomous, however much we would like to pretend it is.

TONY TANNER: Postscript to the New Criticism!

BERNARD BERGONZI: Someone wrote it, you see. You come back to that.

TONY TANNER: Do we expect verdicts from novels? A great many novels are about how men live, but they may end with all kinds of question marks and bewilderment and pain. Answers to "how men should live" could be the most intolerable kind of doctrinaire moralism in a novel.

BERNARD BERGONZI: I suppose that most of the great novelists have had some idea of how men should live.

TONY TANNER: Yes, but when the novelist realizes how variously men live he may not feel it is for him to say how they should.

IAN GREGOR: It would be very difficult, though, for you to find a novel in which there was not present even some sort of ghost of this.

TONY TANNER: O.K. How should men live? Like Billy Budd or Captain Vere? No verdict. Is Melville confused or is he being as clear as he can?

FRANK KERMODE: It is a clear expression of mixed feelings, isn't it? Most books are just that, in fact. If they come out very simple, we don't like them, do we? We say this is propaganda.

IAN GREGOR: I don't know that that is awfully fair. I don't think you're doing jus- tice to "how men should live." This doesn't necessarily translate itself out into a flat didacticism. You get this pretty strongly from Jane Austen, don't you-how people should live?

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FRANK KERMODE: She had some odd notions. She thought Mansfield Park was about ordination.2

IAN GREGOR: At any rate, I think Billy Budd is an exception. Usually involved in "how men live" is "how men should live."

FRANK KERMODE: Aren't there crucial passages in George Eliot which are deliber- ately ambiguous in tone? I am just trying to find something that is like Billy Budd in this respect. The drowning in Daniel Deronda? The sexuality of Casaubon?

BARBARA HARDY: How ambiguous? I think Wuthering Heights is like Billy Budd.

MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES: Yes, a good comparison: two kinds of novel fighting in between one set of covers, and each pulling the other. A word like "love" pulls the whole discourse of Wuthering Heights in two different directions.

PARK HONAN: Do you find this sort of thing happening in the romance, even very simple pre-novel romances? The reader recognizes they are not like reality and yet they have some validity and attraction in themselves. You have perhaps the same thing that is going on in Wuthering Heights: the reader's consciousness of reality being this way, and having some good in it, and romance being another way, and the reader coming to the conclusion that things should be still a third way. What I am getting at is the intriguing question of why men were satisfied for so long without the novel. Didn't one get this same kind of complexity in a sense created by the very simplicity of other forms of literature?

BARBARA HARDY: You get it in Shakespeare, don't you, as in Billy Budd and Wuther- ing Heights?

PAUL TURNER: It brings us back to John Bayley again, doesn't it? I mean the novel is just a form of communication from one person to his readers. And what the novelist has to communicate will depend on the sort of person he is. This entirely un- dercuts the whole question of realism or reality-as we've already undercut it now -because we are talking about expressing in a novel a muddled sense of a view about life. All the novelist is really saying in every case is: this is vaguely what things seem to amount to to me. It may or may not be muddled. But he never, I should have thought, stops to say, "Am I being realistic?" or "Am I duplicating reality?" He is saying, "From my point of view," isn't he?

TONY TANNER: I would agree. And what he can effect by this is a kind of redistribution of our sympathies, but not necessarily more than that. It seems to me if you

a "It has subsequently been maintained in a T. L. S. letter that this is a canard based on a misinterpretation of one of J. A.'s letters."-F. K.

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PARK HONANIREALISM

do that you do a great deal. It is not necessarily a procuring of certain verdicts on modes of living; an extension of sympathy and understanding is much more important.

BERNARD BERGONZI: It has a lot to do with how men should live. It's not precisely the question of presenting verdicts. All of the directing of feelings and sympathies towards one kind of life and away from another kind of life, in a novel, is involved.

TONY TANNER: I meant by "redistribution of sympathies" understanding forms of life which hitherto one had rather casually considered as axiomatically alien. One experience of reading a novel is to be made to understand a whole different way of seeing and experiencing and registering.

FRANK KERMODE: This still doesn't answer the question of why write a novel in order to achieve that particular end. What you're really saying is that this is how things seem to me when I find out how things seem to be by writing a novel-which is a very different thing from just attempting straightforwardly to say how things seem to you. No one would ever think of making up a fiction [in the form of a novel] in order, simply, to say how things seem to him. It is a very complicated thing to do.

PAUL TURNER: No, I think the making up of fiction is the most simple and deriva- tive form of intercommunication. You tell people stories.

DAVID LODGE: It's only a certain kind of novelist-perhaps what Forster calls the prophetic novelist-who wants to call your attention to areas of experience you don't know about or wants to say this is how it seems to me. Many novelists want to evoke something which they have a faith exists in the audience.

At the beginning of the symposium's second session, Bernard Bergonzi pointed out that whereas British novelists typically focus upon character, and British critics and readers "like reading about people," American novelists have never gone in for character in quite the same way. The "mythic beings" of Melville are representative of what they seem to aim for. To be sure, in this century the shared sense of what character is seems to be evaporating. Robbe-Grillet and other nouveau novelists dismiss the "rubbish of the nineteenth-century realistic tradition." John Hawkes is sweepingly getting rid of "plot, atmosphere, and character," one symposium critic wistfully suggested. The American comic apocalyptic school-John Barth, Burroughs, Pynchon, and Heller, for example-seems satisfied with two- dimensional figures reminiscent of simple drawings in episodic comic strips. Though one tradition behind them is essentially Continental and British, from Can- dide through Peacock to early Huxley, Waugh, and Henry Green, contemporary British novelists do not participate in this movement. In America Nathanael West may be a key influence.

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210 NOVELJSPRING 1969

BARBARA HARDY: Balso Snell is the most moral kind of pop novel. Pynchon's V is somewhat similar. Burroughs, on the other hand, seems to dismember character because he hates the human object.

TONY TANNER: Burroughs is the extreme American nightmare, giving images which show all the ways in which the human animal is vulnerable. Yet his characters become abstractions.

FRANK KERMODE: The disappearance of the "old stable ego of character" in the end has to do with the nature of an industrial epoch. The old stable ego of character belongs to a particular stage in the history of the bourgeoisie. Dickens accepted it. Now we're rejecting it.

MALCOLM BRADBURY: Yes, a sociological explanation is necessary....

Ian Gregor pointed out that two contradictory meanings are involved in "the disappearance of character"-on the one hand, characters brilliantly conceived as being in a state of dissolution, and on the other, character itself disappearing. We can generalize too easily when using the phrase in its latter meaning, the symposium concurred. Frank Kermode noted that Americans like Updike, Salinger, and Mala- mud are still creating total characters.

MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES: We may have to redefine "character." But after all something has to go in its place. A novel with no concept of character is impossible, meaningless.

FRANK KERMODE: The character problem is related to the problem of causality. They are necessary to each other, aren't they? The myth of causality is going out.

Another symposium critic suggested that we have this process in Ulysses, where there is no authorial voice, rather little sense of causality, and characters are seen in a state of disintegrating flux.

DAVID LODGE: Do all or most major writers go through a cycle, from realism toward abstraction and stylization? Admittedly some seem to move in the reverse direction.

MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES: There seem to be contending pulls in the novelist's de-

veloping imagination. There is a dialectic. Iris Murdoch or Angus Wilson oscillate on the scale.

Frank Kermode mentioned the problem of a "feed-back" influence on novelists from critics and criticism. In the U.S.A., "the critics and novelists actually live together on the same campuses."



PARK HONAN|REALISM 211

MALCOLM BRADBURY: But in England the debate between critics and novelists is not taken very seriously. The kind of pieces that I write about fiction, for example, are not polemics or descriptions for the kind of novels I write. Nor is David Lodge's Language of Fiction at all a description of his novels.

FRANK KERMODE: This is partly because of James and Eliot, and partly because of the absurd claims of autonomy in criticism. There is no real debate about the novel in England. Novelists don't want to find out what the critics are saying. We have a Raymond Mortimerish contempt for dons in this country.

PAUL TURNER: Surely there is something faintly comic in all this? The novelist is writing for different people, for a much larger public than the critic is, I should think.

DAVID LODGE: I am admittedly schizophrenic in my novel-writing and my criticism. Criticism is necessarily very self-conscious. If I tried to make them marry up all the time, I'd destroy them both.

IAN GREGOR: But how do you explain the almost complete lack of experimenta- tion in the British novel now?

MALCOLM BRADBURY: The British novelist himself is less confident now about his audience, his own role, his language. New novels seem timidly technical. The latest Amis novel is merely a scared Lucky Jim.

DAVID LODGE: The thriller and the pornographic novel allow scope for experi- mentation that the great tradition doesn't allow you.

IAN GREGOR: Ah, but no one ever thinks he is writing a traditional novel. If there has been a failure of nerve in writing novels, I must say there has been a great up- surge of confidence in writing about novels!

FRANK KERMODE: We ought to be writing a book called "The Fiction of Criti- cism" ....



realism, reality, and the novel - a symposium on the novel

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