Prose (83 page)

In preparatory school we used to draw diagrams of the “development” of novels on the blackboard. We took for granted that the affairs of a book should grow out of one another; in fact all events which could be explained only by accident or coincidence were rather apologized for, as if they showed some fault in the author. Our diagrams usually rose and fell like so many waves: one alone, a bent line, or possibly a double wave, or, at their subtlest, two waves pursuing each other. This is simplification with a vengeance, of course, but nevertheless the fact that it could be done and would express for us a certain amount of truth about the novel explains somewhat what I have just been saying. I know of no novel which has ever, say, in giving a life history, managed to blur for the reader the childhood of the hero as it would be when he reaches fifty. Joyce's “moocow” is blurred, but blurred at the age at which he beheld it; when the reader reaches the end of the book he is still in possession of, as of a hard fact, Stephen's earliest days.

Some attempt has been made to get around this problem by the kind of novel (Proust's, for example) that picks one moment of observation and shows the whole past in the terminology of that particular moment when the writing is being done. This method achieves, perhaps, the “conformity between the old and the new,” at least one instance of it, but since the conformity itself must be ever-changing, the truth of it, the thing I should like to get at, is the ever-changing expression for it. In conversation we notice how, often, the other person will repeat some word or phrase of ours, perhaps with quite a different meaning, and we in turn will pick up some adjective or adverb of theirs, or even some pun on their words—all unconsciously. This trick of echoes and re-echoes, references and cross-references produces again a kind of “conformity between the old and the new,” and it illustrates fairly well both the situation possible to reveal in the novel and a method of approaching it. The thoughts and symbols which Mrs. Woolf produces over and over again in
The Waves
have an amazing sameness about them. A symbol might remain the same for a lifetime, but surely its implications shift from one thing to another, come and go, always within relation to that particular tone of the present which called it forth. We live in great whispering galleries, constantly vibrating and humming, or we walk through salons lined with mirrors where the reflections between the narrow walls are limitless, and each present moment reaches immediately and directly the past moments, changing them both. If I were to draw any more diagrams of the development of novels, the lines, although again greatly oversimplified, I am afraid would look something like a bramble bush.

II

To requote again: “The existing monuments [read moments] form an ideal order among themselves…” and, “The existing order is complete before the new work arrives…”

Almost, it seems to me, one is born with a perfect sense of generalities. At five years one looks around the dinner table at the cumulative family with as great a sense of recognition and understanding as ever comes later on. There is always an absolute pitch, a perfection to the understanding which may shift, branch out suddenly, or retreat, and yet can never be “improved on.” The existing order is complete; every other is absorbed into it. When you see someone for the first time, in the blank moment just before or during a hand-shake, this knowledge of them slips into the mind and no matter what you may learn of them later this is always the first fact about them: a knowledge of recognition which when compared to the things you may learn later is much the more amazing. The connection between this and my idea of the interplay of influence between present and past may seem at first a little obscure, but in reality the latter depends directly upon it. I can think of the existing moments which make up their “ideal order” as existing first of all as these moments of recognition. From a vacant pinpoint of certainty start out these geometrically accurate lines, star-beams, pricking out the past, or present, or casting ahead into the future.

Cross-references, echoes, cycles, take on in their lowest forms the name of “superstitions,” and an author who wrote a novel filled with such might be called either a primitive or, worse still, a mystic. But I have always felt a certain amount of respect for superstitions and coincidences; the fact that a friend's birthday falls on the same day as my own impresses me; always I am startled when something I have dreamed comes true, or someone I have been thinking of arrives on the scene. I have always looked askance at the theory of irreversibility. The point is: the moments I have spoken of occur so sharply, so minutely that one cannot say whether the recognition comes from the outside or the inside, whether the event or the thought strikes, and spreads its net over past and sometimes future events or thoughts. Over all the novels I can think of the author has waved a little wand of attention, he holds it in one position, whereas within the shiftings produced by the present over the past is this other shifting, rhythmical perhaps, of the moments themselves.

To do justice to one's sense of characters, events, thoughts, I think that not only should they be presented in such a way as to show perpetually changing integration of what has been written with what is being written, but also the
recognition
itself of what is being written must be kept fluid. These recognitions are the eyes of the novel, not placed on the face-side looking ahead, but rather as in certain insects, capable of seeing any side, whichever seems real at the moment.

III

A paper I wrote recently ended with these sentences:

Is it possible that there may be a sort of
experience-time,
or the time pattern in which realities reach us, quite different from the hour after hour, day after day kind? All books still seem bound to this much order, but I have a suspicion that it will go next and writers will discover new beauty in breaking up this most ancient of patterns and rearranging it. If you've seen boys dive after pennies you know how the coins sink shimmering to the bottom at unequal rates, and the diving boys sometimes pick them up halfway down, or even get there before the coins do. Why should the days behind me retreat systematically—Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday—and not any other way? why not Wednesday, Friday, Tuesday, if they seem that way to me? And why should even Gertrude Stein say, “Now then to begin at the
beginning
…”?

We have all had the experience of apparently escaping the emotional results of an event, of feeling no joy or sorrow where joy or sorrow was to be expected, and then suddenly having the proper emotion appear several hours or even days later. The experience could not really have been counted chronologically as having taken place, surely, until this emotion belonging to it had been felt. The crises of our lives do not come, I think, accurately dated; they crop up unexpected and out of turn, and somehow or other arrange themselves according to a calendar we cannot control. If, for example, I have a “feeling” that something is going to happen, and it does, then the feeling proper to that experience has come too early—its proper place was afterwards. If I suffer a terrible loss and do not realize it till several years later among different surroundings, then the important fact is not the original loss so much as the circumstance of the new surroundings which succeeded in letting the loss through to my consciousness. It may seem that when a novelist talks
about
such things he is giving them the credit they deserve, but it seems to me that the fact of experience-time can be made of use possibly in its own order, in order to explain the endless hows and whys of incident and character more precisely than before. Again, I do not believe this in any way contradicts my belief in the expression of the constant re-adjustment of the actions within a novel—rather, it only helps to bear it out. Events arriving out of accepted order are nevertheless arriving in their own order, and the process will be just as true, no matter whether 2:4 :: 4:8, or 4:2 :: 8:4.

This is very plainly related to my original conviction that each successive part of a novel should somehow illuminate the preceding parts for us, that the whole should grow together. A belated emotion points back, of course, to whatever caused it, which was experienced in two different ways, each way exerting its own influence, the two seeking to eradicate or supplement each other.

IV

I have been speaking more or less of a new form and some reasons for its existence; now I should like to go on and speak of a particular reason why some modern novels seem unsatisfactory to me. One remove behind the truism that the substance of a piece of writing defines its form, comes a second truism: the author's frame of mind defines the substance. This is a very murky stretch of woods, impossible to get under cultivation in a paper of this length, but there is one small path following naturally from what I have been saying.

A frame of mind is shown in what I think of as “keeping up the front” of a novel—by which I mean not letting the reader see the under side of it. Gertrude Stein keeps up a magnificent front, as terrifying as a crusade of vacant-faced children. Hemingway attempts to do it by putting up a bluff. But some writers, such as Thomas Mann in
The Magic Mountain,
James Joyce in certain sections of
Ulysses,
and often Virginia Woolf, approach one in a series of outriders and sallies with constant returns to headquarters. For example, the chapter in
The Magic Mountain
called an “Excursus on the Sense of Time” is just such a retreat to headquarters. When the author says, “We have introduced these remarks here only because our young Hans Castorp had something like them in mind when, a few days later…” etc., it is as if he were confessing the problem to be a little too difficult. His ideas on
time
cannot be injected into the actual story—the two must be presented side by side and the reader must take one as a chaser, so to speak, for the other. In this book, as in
The Waves
(although it is doing Thomas Mann a great injustice to couple them), it seems often as if we were confronted with sections of a story combined with sections of an essay upon it; the reader must do the work, fuse one with the other. He is let in on the problem either in order that he may realize its difficulties, or as the only way of solving it. The question is still left open. What does Mrs. Woolf's talking
about
flux do if her characters remain as rocks? In some parts of
Ulysses
it seems as if Stephen-Joyce were rather experimenting in thought than expressing the thought through the medium of novel-experiment, although Joyce has probably gone further with this latter work than any other modern author. (Hemingway is so determined to avoid this particular pitfall that he goes to the other extreme. In limiting himself to what he can do in the story and in getting the proper distance between himself and the finished writing he rids himself of problem after problem. He lops them off, refusing to talk about them or to attempt to incorporate them into the substance of his work—until the work reminds us of a hero coming back complacently from the wars in a basket.)

It would seem to me that if a novel is to stand alone all philosophies, theories, etc., pertaining to the author should somehow work themselves out in the actions and the designs within the story. I do not like the habit of asking, “Now where does Mr. So&so tell us what he is trying to do?”—if Mr. So&so has said anything about his intentions after the preface, I think he has been too frank.

V

In a recent little book called
Acting,
by Richard Bolislavsky, rhythm is defined as “the orderly, measurable changes of all the different elements comprised in a work of art—provided that all those changes progressively stimulate the attention of the spectator and lead invariably to the final aim of the artist.” This definition, plain enough when applied, say, to the music of Mozart may seem rather obscure when applied to the loose form of the novel. But just possibly everything I have been saying could be set down under the heading of
rhythm.
The “ideal order,” the relation of present to past in the novel, naturally arises from “the orderly, measurable changes of all the different elements comprised.” And my belief in the peculiar cross-hatchings of events and people also amounts to a feeling for rhythm. A superstition or coincidence, even, is “rhythmical” in that it achieves a motion between two things and a balancing of them. And what is “experience-time” but a more careful, exact method of looking at the materials to be used, and perhaps a means of marshalling them more rhythmically.

Possibly now I have staked claims, so to speak, on a novel-site, and laid out certain measurements which seem to me too important to be overlooked. A general idea of the novel constructed according to these measurements would appear to be something like this: First, a very few primary ideas or facts would suffice, and they could be told immediately. The interest would not lie in watching a “march” through a segment of time, but rather the complete absorption of each item, and the constant re-organization, the constantly maintained order of the whole mass. The process perhaps resembles more than anything the way in which a drop of mercury, a drop to begin with, joins smaller ones to it and grows larger, yet keeps its original form and quality. Coupled with this, would be the maintaining of the “front” of the novel, a stricter feeling that it is a detached form of art, not a conveyor of ideas except in its own structure. By this method, helped possibly by cross-references, re-iterations, and a device built on the idea of experience-time, perhaps the novel could show at work that “perfection of generalities” in its highest sense, a clearer sense of things and people.

1934

NOTES ON THE TEXTS
INDEX

Notes on the Texts